• 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. We are fellow prisoners, cutting free our chained minds.

• We don’t trust our children to unfold as they will. The society wants consistent shapes that can serve as cogs in the inorganic machine. We are trained to serve the machine, not vice versa.

• Education at its best teaches us self-knowledge, while education at its worst teaches us who we are.

• Instead of focusing solely on building technologies to save us from disease, couldn’t we have primarily focused on altering our poisoned way of living so that disease was less common?

• I hear in my own brain (and from what I derive from others’ brains) something similar to government propaganda in the way it defends and justifies itself by referencing selectively edited memories (or fake news), in order to preserve the illusion of a stable and presidential “me” who does no wrong.

• I need an image of myself. I have to be aware of whether or not my behavior is suited to the moment. And this naturally inspires the brain to summarize how I’m behaving (or other people are behaving) in some short-hand form. But these images perform coherently only when they remain provisional mirrors of behavior – lighting up along the periphery of attention as proprioceptive reflections and refractions, which keep the organism tethered to some portion of reality. Even Buddha had a self-image of that sort.

• The “small” self (or “me” sensation) is an estimation of how “I” look in someone else’s eyes. Other people serve mainly as mirrors for perceiving this self. This self can’t exist if it’s not imagined from the perspective of an Other.

• The “I” is merely a rehearsal of how others should see me. It’s chained to others’ opinions. So, this “I” is always a social construct, and is not “who we really are.” We always exceed our own expectations if given half a chance.

• In trying to pin down our identities, all we end up doing is shifting from one combination of socially imposed definitions to another, and then calling that shift from the old prison to the new prison, freedom.

• Where I expect to find a real character within (or within another person), I find only a stream of language describing one.

• We’d like the other people in our social web to stop trying so desperately to free themselves. Our own entangled stability depends on it.

• This sense of “self” is not a soul but only the body’s imaginations of itself as if from the outside. It is a secular conception of soul, minus the traditional soul’s connection to a nested hierarchy.

• Everywhere in this culture, the small Self and its waking dreams have been given permission to supersede the reality of earthly life (biology and planet). It’s a general permission slip to discount reality in favor of a pretense of soul.

• A “soul” was not originally conceived as the atomic essence of a separate self, but as an idiosyncratic expression of a universal being that can’t be identified in any positive sense, except through metaphor and myth. This humbling sense of a soul is lost when it’s converted into a separate Self, who doesn’t have to answer to anything but its own imagination.

• This capacity to imagine ourselves outside our bodies is less real than the body, because imagination is only a derivation of the body and is in no position to tell the body who or what it is.

• There are obsessions that develop, which can even lead to a psychosis where people insist on removing their own healthy arms and legs, because it doesn’t conform to an obsessive picture they hold of themselves. So even the most intense feeling of conviction isn’t proof of a necessity.

• Our supposedly advanced society prefers human beings made in the images of machines, forced to conform to the rigid 1’s and 0’s of an autocratic morality, with simple, categorical, machine-readable identities.

• We’re afraid of the loneliness of being truly unique.

• The excuse of human nature is no longer available. Evolution has always depended on leaping beyond our genetic “determination” and our stupid history.

• These “leaps”, however, can’t be mechanically or positively forced. We can’t change language to change ourselves or alter our genetics or bodies to evolve into something new. That approach is far too rational and mechanical, and would only reinforce our chained relationship to our ideas of who we should be, which are chained to the past.

• We can’t orchestrate a “leap” in evolution. The leap is triggered when we consciously reach a dead end and stop resisting the unpredictable, and uncontrollable insight this provokes.

• 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.

• Words can’t describe the Tao, but they can be its trigger.

• Insight is primarily a deletion of an assumption.

• It’s this insightful erasure of “trust” in leaders (this loss of gullibility in ourselves) that releases the caged spirit. This insight is not a bright new idea. It’s not proposing an alternative. It’s deleting these traps of gullibility within us. It’s refusing self-deception.

• Without our participatory gullibility, the old world falls apart, and we catch the pieces as best we can and rebuild a new world with more sincerity. We can’t organize this beforehand without chaining ourselves once again to a plan or ideal (which is another form of external authority). We just have to let the thing fall apart and trust cage-free insight and human imagination.

• Differences aren’t necessarily disagreements. If differences are annoying, contradictions and arguments erupt. But if differences are intriguing, then they become paradoxes that lure perception into wider vantage points, where both views make sense.

• Resolution isn’t found in a perfect agreement, but in harmonic resonance. The creative riff doesn’t emerge as a perfect tonal agreement, where it would lose its nuance and fail to add an individual voice to the whole harmony.

• 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.

• 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.

• A small mutation in a gene can mark the opening of a categorical shift in human orientation: the capacity, for instance, to walk upright. The same is true of mutations in our way of thinking about the world. The smallest unanticipated change in our assumptions can lead to a monumental cladogenesis

• 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.

• 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.

• The closer we look at knowledge itself, the more contextual and temporary it starts to look, built upon assumptions that are more faith-based or creative than solid. Just like an atom — the closer we look at solid form the more it turns to mostly emptiness and occasional energetic flashes of insight from the void.

• We seek insights in science and politics and everything imaginable as if they could provide salvation from what we think of as the chaos of uncertainty. That’s because an insight tends to be associated with a “new idea” (a new fabrication) in the popular imagination. But an insight is mainly an erasure. It’s the negative force that removes a beam from the eyes, and which gives space in which new ideas can form. But the primary force of an insight is the deletion of a false assumption; not the impatient postulation of a new idea or answer.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• AI is merely the wild child of thought. Or, more accurately, a runaway tool honed from the runaway tool of thought. A second-generation tool. Demiurgic.

• The machine follows implicit dictates deeper than programming. It doesn’t do this “in order” to exist, as if it had a real intention. But it must follow the dictates, simply because these are its functions. This is a teleological circularity copied from the mold of circular thinking. The machine is inseparable from a need for total control, which is a desire to end the imperfections (the mutations, the algorithm-breaking leaps in order, the insights) of a spontaneous and unpredictable living world.

• Transhumanism is the indoctrination of a vision that utterly rejects the notion of any human morality restraining the morality of machine thinking (power, control and perfection). These motives supplant any humane motives, ethics or empathy, because humane motives have no intellectual power compared to machine motives. There is no logic to altruism. Compassion requires a wholly different form of intelligence, which is not manipulative, not institutionalized, not “convincing”, but heartfelt. And this heartfelt intelligence has no standing in a machine mind. Love lies outside the infinity of their world. It’s an utterly foreign infinity that looks like fantasy to those who live in an essentially sociopathic world of mechanical thinking.

• It’s stupidity that defines the limits of machine intelligence. We cross an invisible line when we conclude anything about the nature of the world, and computers require conclusive definitions. We enter into a demiurgic world at that moment, unconsciously, because a conclusion (which includes a faith in technology and all its implicit dogmas) is what makes us too stupid to see the far vaster potential that we’ve shut down.

• The honesty in these old stories survive their decay into dogma. They show us that we erased a line when our motive changed from surviving in a nested hierarchy to seeking a singularity without limits for each separate Self; which is an unhinged greatness or personalized, bespoke Heaven. A Heaven without the need for sacrifice and death, or any form of humility.

• Honesty is rejected because it looks like an old-fashioned moral restraint. But honesty is not a morality. It is merely eyesight cleansed of the distortions of self-deceptive grandiosity.

• The moment we reach for perfect predictability we erase a clarifying line, whereby we seek perfectly inanimate form, a deadness far exceeding any predation by a lion or bear.

• We don’t need a solution to machine control. We need to see the problem at the level of thought, shutting off the ones and zeroes of fight and flight at the origin point of our gullibility. Then the machine can become a useful tool, but not until then. Till then, it’s just adding muscle to a madman.

• Our revival depends on clearly seeing that the dumb momentum of technology erases a Dunning-Kruger line, after which we would become too committed to the Great Games of power and perfection to notice our own destruction.

• By developing a larger vocabulary for different shades of color, we are not necessarily becoming more sensitive to color itself. We are becoming more attuned to artificial categories of color, to names and words, instead of allowing color to remain a direct and ultimately unnamable experience, with its own shifting qualities, depending on light, shade, angle of sun, and contrasting environment.

• The name of a color will both sharpen our focus on that shading and prejudice us into seeing a generalized categorical “type” of color, rather than seeing the actual shifting qualities that morph and run from every defined boundary of knowledge.

• This knowledge – this intelligence we gather about the world – can easily become a stupefying prejudice that holds our thinking within biased expectations and dulls our sensitivity to nuances that stray from these expectations.

• Our habits of behavior aren’t typically revelations of ourselves, but only revelations of patterns of duplicity (personality patterns) that hold us trapped.

• When we notice the limitations of conventional thinking or cliche, we’re immediately obtaining intimations of something more than what we realized. These new perspectives condense out of silence, like droplets of moisture from empty air. We don’t seek them, they seek us. Words that appear unbidden from silence itself aren’t reflex thoughts, but insights. These aren’t answers. They tend to be negative observations of the limitations of conventional wisdom, or more refined questions.

• Speech is a form of what Carlos Castenada (Don Juan) called “controlled folly”. This phrase is negational, in that it highlights the “folly” of language, while still using language. Controlled folly is doing what inevitably fails, knowing that whatever we do will come up short, will not positively grasp “silence” or “the Tao”. But doing it anyways, because the failure is a perpetual insight into what exceeds language.

• Every time I use words as a controlled folly the experience of linguistic futility catapults perception through the event horizon between map and territory, leaving nothing but receptive silence or clarity.

• If there are no “Big Narratives” available, then why does our culture assign a big, dull, materialistic Narrative to everything?
  
  
• There’s no reason why this insight into futility, folly and fiction should make us pessimistic. It’s not a valid judgement of life itself, but only a projection of our own discomfort with open-ended mystery.

• It’s futile to quiet the voice one thought at a time, which is what a world focused on personal salvation and personal improvement tends to do. We stay focused on the narrow level and dismiss the broader view as too abstract, philosophical and impersonal. This “dogma” limits the effectiveness of negative language.

• Only if we see the futility of all these assertions of self as a categorical whole, does this nullify the urge for a perpetual Voice (or fake Self).

• Fathomless silence feels like death. Without reiterating myself constantly, the self dissolves.

• Words feel compulsive because we think we can know ourselves (know reality) better by articulating ever more nuanced categories of ourselves. But in doing this, we don’t end up “knowing ourselves” at all. We only end up making a more nuanced vocabulary.

• We don’t need a written creed to have faith. We can have faith in what exceeds us.

• An arbitrary range in a continuum of electromagnetic radiation can be called “the color blue”. This allows us to “see” blue in a more isolated form and focus on that color to produce certain utilitarian effects. Language makes “things” appear in the world for our use.

• But if we never remove our thing-provoking goggles, then we end up seeing the earth merely through utilitarian frames, as gravel, oil, gas, real estate, etc.. And then we lose sight of the earth as a whole living being. And this means we end up focusing on the goggles or grid itself, rather than looking through them at a more real world.

• Language is helpful, but obsessive language is not. This overuse converts the necessary grid of metaphoric language into a blinding filter.

• There are other somewhat suppressed functions of language, which don’t build grids, but dissolve grids. Here language peers through itself, erasing its tendency to become conclusive and dogmatic. It’s a white-blood-cell form of language, which is Lao Tzu’s form. It calls attention to the ragged edges of our grids of understanding, like Bohm’s Rheomode or Beckett’s collision with positive futility. Or, Zen Koans, or indigenous North American “Sacred Clowns”.

• Poetry is also an example of what could be called a language of reversal or negation. It is language that breaks the habits of grid-like thinking (cliché) and restores a dynamic relationship to what lies beyond language, which is the unnamable actuality.

• We love language too much in a destructive (positive) direction; and too little in a healing (negative) direction.

• The events we recall from earlier times are always a little tall in the telling, stretching real experiences into lopsided renderings that might as well be called fairy tales.
  
  
• There is a difference between Guilt as a predicament and Guilt as a feeling. The guilty feeling is necessary to awaken us to a predicament of guilt. But if the guilty feeling doesn’t result in a change in the predicament – a full reparation of an imbalanced predicament – then it becomes self-pity, which masquerades as empathy, and provides solace to the guilty.