Introduction

Negative (or “alchemical”)  inquiry performs real work.

It doesn’t usually include information or data. It doesn’t nail down a lasting conceptual framework. Nor does it describe how to apply knowledge in a rational effort to solve problems. Nor does it solely analyze a problem into parts, or propose hypotheses, or pontificate opinion.

These elements of thinking play subordinate roles in a negative inquiry. But they are all positively oriented elements by themselves.

Negative inquiry exposes and deletes falsified knowledge, and re-synthesizes what remains by default in a suggestive, rather than conclusive manner.

After deletion, what remains are a multiplicity of vantage points and questions, which had been suppressed under a positive or dogmatic framework.

A multiplicity of divergent vantage points is more insightful than answers or conclusions, because conclusions put an end to learning. This is similar to a brain-storming state of mind, which invites every perspective to the table.

These vantage points are often in contradiction with one another. In a positive enquiry, differences are perceived as obstacles to consensus, which need to be eliminated. This leads to conflict between advocates of different points of view. Ironically, the intentional pursuit of consensus leads to a battle for the supremacy of a singular conclusion. This eventually subdues divergent visions once again under a new dogma, diminishing the range of questions to matters of crisis management or framework preservation.

But when the inquiry is founded on the negative realization that an infinite universe can have no final framework, only ever more nuanced ones, then contradictory vantage points are no longer obstacles, but insights.

This transforms contradiction into paradox.

A paradox is an invitation to include and transcend the differences in a wider framework. It’s no longer an internecine battle between different ideas, but a more patient consideration of all the points in a Medicine wheel, allowing a larger framework to consolidate by merely sitting with difference. This results in an almost accidental consensus of spirit and vision. But without any conclusive (or battle-hardened) framework.

In other words, a negative inquiry (which is essentially Bohmian dialogue) presumes an infinitely open universe, where new frameworks are merely insights or ever larger overview perspectives, but never final answers.

Whereas, a positive inquiry – one that aims for a conclusive answer – presumes a knowable or closed universe, which generates conflict between competing answers.

Therefore, a negative inquiry is learning without end. It’s more like a performance of a new way of being, rather than an exercise in over-thinking. It’s like a dance between neither this, nor that and both this and that.

And this perpetual performance (or practice) of uncertainty or “suspension” awakens a sleeping potential of the human brain, which is to change the world at the root level of perception, where – as David Bohm phrased it — “a change in meaning is a change in being.”

The Bewitching Magic of Language

Alchemical writing isn’t the kind of performance that postulates a divide between performer and spectator. This isn’t a “show”, in other words. These aren’t “merely words”. Here the power of words transforms the world directly, not as a means to an end.

This power isn’t found in explanation, description, analysis or metaphysical proposition.

Those are ways of using language as a conjecture that usually strains towards dead certainty.

Words have only a mechanical power in that direction. They can inform, instruct, deceive, indoctrinate, and over-power intelligence with the bells and whistles of extraordinary intellect, leaving us “convinced” of a particular vision.

If this form of linguistic intelligence becomes dominant, it seeks to eliminate questions by answering them. It craves perfection in a closed universe. And in this way, it begins to resemble machine intelligence.

So, an answer craved too single-mindedly or conclusively becomes a kind of bewitchment, which dulls the intelligence and makes us dependent on an external frame or authority for guidance.

The bewitching power of words requires a mixture of one-sided stories, white lies, transparencies of illusion that cling to the surface of reality like mental cataracts, dulling our perception, and a pinch of real insights. In the cauldron of an essay, this mixture hypnotizes the intelligence into a limited infinity (or demiurgic trap) that presents itself as “all there is to the world.” We become trapped in an infinite simulation of an open universe.

The confidence this generates in a reader is a secret dependency on the authoritarian magician. And it makes us afraid to ask any questions that might topple the diseased order to which we end up clinging for identity and stability.

The Healing Magic of Words

But words also have a neglected “healing” power to reverse these charms. This is the power to dissolve the illusion of perfect knowledge, which has even partially perverted an open-minded science into a search for machine perfection and has corrupted theory into a vehicle for seeking certainty.

Language that negates these illusions triggers a wholly new way of seeing and being. By negating the assumption that anything can be known conclusively, it removes our fear of uncertainty, restoring mystery and wonder in our relationship to the unfathomable world. It provides an immunity to indoctrination.

In other words, the healing power of words doesn’t lie in concepts and other intellectual formulations that we are forced to believe or disbelieve. It lies in breaking down these calloused structures. Words used in this way can release the human spirit that had been trapped in a circular cage of thinking, which it mistook for reality.

By realizing the nature of a confusion, a fusion of dichotomies is performed. By becoming alert to imbalance, balance is restored.

The Absence of Certainty Isn’t an Absence of Form

But these realizations must find some material form (in paper, for instance). Otherwise, the deletions of assumption (which are insights) won’t reach into daily life. They would remain only passing flashes of perspective that don’t translate into a new way of being. The immaterial insight must reach a material ground to re-fuse the confusion.

Language is the sacred twilit zone between the material and the immaterial worlds – a semi-material form, which can become imbued with transformative virtue (or conversely imbued with machine logic that tends towards domination and control).

The page (the subtle mud of language) can preserve both the corrupt imprints of a machine mind coiling towards dead certainty; and it can preserve a spiraling dance of dis-enchantment.

And anyone tending, attending or giving attention to a healing performance participates in the ceremony of healing and is transformed by the page’s embedded virtue. In a healing direction, there is no separation between writer and reader: both are performers. Both conjure from the semi-material rhythms and shapes of words a new vision that alters our bearing towards the material and immaterial world, which leaves no dependency on an expert for guidance; only brothers and sisters resonating together and awakening from the cultural spell.

Performance Is Not a Show

But many presume that performances are merely attempts to attract attention or admiration. That’s because most performances are no longer transformative. No old forms of meaning are broken down, and no new forms are synthesized if we’re merely showing off.

But when one’s own chaos demands resolution in a larger order, then performance becomes an alchemical transmutation of disorder. Then a chaos is consumed in a cosmic fire, which simultaneously gives material expression to a new order from the ashes of the old.

Performance is mainly subtractive, in removing blinders from our eyes. The forms that follow the subtraction are theatrical or playful presentations of emerging possibilities. They remain in fluid suspension, and don’t become rigidly conclusive. That is, negation isn’t the rigid elimination of a capacity to synthesize (or posit) ideas, plans, images, Selves and other stories that are necessary. Nor is it a prohibition on using machine intelligence, for that matter.

It merely refers to the elimination of that central assumption of positive knowledge, which makes us vulnerable to the bewitchment of machine intelligence (which is performance as only show). And this elimination provides creative space to look at things in a more prismatic manner, from all angles of the Medicine Wheel, without getting stuck in one spoke or another, as if it were positive knowledge of the nature of something, and not merely a staged performance of reality, a map not the territory.

But in this space cleared of certainty, we lose the gullible conviction that we can get to the bottom of this unfathomable world. And this dissolves the craving to do so, which provides immunity from singular perspectives, which is bewitchment.

This is My Problem

I know this, because it’s my own machine mind I’m confronting. I can pull these perspectives from the ether, but am I listening? I notice that a little jolt of fear triggers each thought, from morning till night. At first, that’s not fun to notice, because it wobbles the carefully preserved consensus reality of “who I am.” It makes me feel like a hypocrite.

But this hypocrisy quickly becomes the most interesting thing I’ve ever confronted. To notice one’s automatic nature is to become astonished and stirred to life. It feels like a false transparency of myself is being painfully peeled from an unknown reality.

So, this is a self-inquiry, not a lecture, although I attempt to organize what I am discovering so that you can understand what is otherwise – without this form-finding work – an interior chaos. I share this so that you and I will know we’re not alone in this madhouse. We are fellow prisoners, cutting free our chained minds.

In this performance, I’m deciphering the engineered entrails of this self-centric machine, this writer’s life. He is reading this, too, even as he writes. He is appalled by himself, and then amused, and then edified.

I am a rich source of study. The “I” is always a rich source, because identity is the central cauldron of the positive illusion. The page preserves the ceremony of turning towards this Self as an anonymous object. It provides perspective on “the Self” as a machine copy of a real being, not the reality of any of us.

The Self is an enchantment (a predator’s trap), in which a genuine being is caught. We can tell each other this now. Nobody would listen to such an outrage only a few years ago. We were too convinced of ourselves. But the revelations of Epstein also herald the revelations of our own private falsehood.

This is real work. My real life depends on dissolving the predatorial trap, and so does yours. We are secretly inseparable.

Everything can change all at once for all of us in the same way everything in a room can look different all at once with the flicking of a single switch. The color changes, the room brightens, the furniture of thought reveals itself. A fundamental alteration in the assumption that sets the tone of color can make visible a way to live that was not visible before.

The performance here is a metabolization of the writer’s own bewitchment, which is not merely personal, but systemic (yours too).

Peeling the Transparency of Pretense from the Real

Fake forms obscure authentic forms everywhere we look. There’s a fake version plastered over everything real in life. It’s as if our eyes have been covered by many layers of transparency. And each fake layer has to be peeled from our vision, until a reality emerges that is not static and fake, but active and undeniably real.

Even “balance” is obscured by fake balance. What we call a balanced human being is often just a person so set in their ways that nothing can affect them. Nothing can throw them off, and nothing can stir them to life either. Thus, callousness becomes a fake version of toughness. And brutality becomes a fake form of bravery.

And the real meaning of performance has been made invisible by a fake overlay of “show”.

And peeling away the false layers from the real is tremendously unpleasant. Nobody wants to notice the fake qualities of the things we’ve become dependent upon for identity.

So, the amateur performer (who is sincere) is forced to realize that whatever we do will likely remain invisible. It will be obscured behind false conceptions of what is happening, which almost nobody wants to question. In isolation, none of us are keen to shove the curtain aside and join the dance, because that will mean facing our own pain of self-deletion (the deletion of who we think we are).

Language performs this healing work by deleting the false transparencies of ourselves. This performance isn’t a search for meaning. It is meaning (truth and beauty) breaking down the walls of false and ugly knowledge; peeling the false transparency of self from the mystery of our being.

And if we wish to avoid the commodified trap of becoming “known” to others (and to ourselves), we will have to reject the false public persona, before we become trapped in it, and embrace the status of a random nobody, an anonymous amateur.

But this person will no longer be a spectator. And this person will lose their fear of the abyss of shape-shifting transformations, which is death. And this person will find themselves in an open-ended world, which can never be solved or lead to a settled identity.

And the emptiness that used to scare us then becomes a space to play.

And it is a quieter form of language that triggers this change in orientation; a language that performs an act of deletion, releasing the caged spirit.

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Post-script: Two things

Just found this discussion between Sheldrake and Vernon that feels relevant to this essay:

https://youtu.be/NnDYLLHHyJ0?si=ALCdHTtfc-WiIAtP