or, “Short Notes to Clear the Attic”

Preface to Aphorisms

• I wonder if bad eyesight is caused by a disinclination to see the look on other people’s faces. We blur sight and retreat to senses which are less susceptible to duplicitous signals. So, the eyes atrophy or wear out with misuse.
  
  
• When I take off my glasses, I end up listening more closely. Then the Other listens more closely too. And all they can see in my own blissfully blurred face is a good-natured ignoramus, which tends to awaken a spirit of charity, if not downright pity. Thus, we both become transfigured so long as at least one of us remains blurry.
  
  
• The centrality of myself remains stubbornly pre-Galilean. *
  
  
• What I “know” of another person is only my story of the story they tell about themselves.
  
  
• Our personalities are merely characters in imaginary dramas. When the drama shifts, the personality shifts. If the drama ends, “we” end. Hence, we cling to dramas.
  
  
• The imaginary voice is speaking to an imaginary person. The “I” and the “self” that are being addressed are both part of the imaginary performance.
  
  
• Yes, it’s an inquiry into myself, but it’s not about “me”, as in my personal history or problems. It’s about the common momentum of thought that runs “me.”
• If we make this conscious distinction between thought and being, then we are able to move in and out of the shapes imposed on perception by thought and language. This allows us to remain somewhat aloof from who we think we are.

• Whatever we are, we’re not found in passing thoughts. They are merely the traces of our passing.
  
  
• I learn from everything that goes wrong, and everything is always going wrong. *
  
  
• I don’t write because I know something. I write because I don’t. *
  
  
• But it’s not like I’m trying to do something. It’s more like something else is trying to do something and “I” keep getting in the way. And all this tripping over myself to avoid what it wants looks like “effort.” It’s a seductive pretense.
  
  
• Writing happens when effort fails.
  
  
• The only light the “I” produces is the light of its own combustive friction. This friction is produced by trying to avoid the revealing light of awareness. This friction is the cause of Hellfire. Hellfire is the light of heaven burning away.
  
  
• Self-discovery is the discovery of nothing.
  
  
• Self-discovery is the exploration of the cosmos, because the discovery of my absence is the discovery of everything else. But we turn our backs on this larger Being merely because it disturbs the small image of who we thought we were.
  
  
• Writing is neither a means to an end, nor an end in itself. There is a third possibility. Writing is merely what happens when I’m learning. It’s a necessary corollary of the process, but neither a means nor an end.
  
  
• If a necessary corollary to something larger is repressed, then the larger thing also can’t form. But we still can’t focus on the corollary as a means towards the larger thing.
• I say things after I already know them. I know things silently prior to speaking. I speak in order to hold the surface image steady against a barrage of anomalous information.

• Thought is Automatic, but insight is Spontaneous. The one is triggered by the past and follows precedent; the other is a creative leap into something unprecedented. But they are both quick. One is a reactive reflex; the other is immediate. The first obtains the speed of light (or of synapses), and is a mechanical analog of immediacy; the second is faster than the speed of light, because it is without mediation.
  
  
• Must we resolve the problem of History? Does the inherited story actually require a happy or sad ending, an ending of any sort? Or, should it simply dissolve like a nightmare upon awakening?
  
  
• The traumas of history can’t be resolved within the narrative itself, but only by abandoning that narrative.
  
  
• It’s not that any particular story necessarily gets resolved, but the whole category of story is altered; becoming categorically less significant.
  
  
• We can give up our personal dramas long enough to focus on other people’s dramas in a novel or movie. But we have a harder time giving up our own interpretations of reality long enough to hear a different interpretation.
  
  
• We can’t hear another person until we hear the nuances that differ from our own view. If it’s all the same then nothing stands out as perceivable.
  
  
• Understanding a different interpretation tends to seem difficult only because the differences seem to throw doubt on our own interpretations. This happens until we realize that we’re standing back-to-back, and only looking where the other isn’t.
  
  
• Differences among friends are invitations to play in a larger sandbox. Differences among enemies are lines drawn in the sand.
  
  
• Every relationship is an attempt at dialogue. We lay the groundwork by finding common ground. Only after this ground is established is the exploration of our differences possible. A capacity to explore differences without conflict is the beginning of dialogue. Otherwise, we’re merely avoiding differences to preserve the polite peace of common ground.
  
  
• Dialogic trust is not trust in the images or expectations we hold of other people. They are always fleeting and fictional. Dialogic trust is trust in our own capacity to face failed expectations and exceptions to the common ground we share with others.
  
  
• Contradictions, arguments and dichotomies blossom into paradoxes the moment we are intrigued by the differences, rather than annoyed by them.
  
  
• Paradox is a translational difference that demands a wider view, not an argument.
  
  
• A mind that enjoys paradox has a creedless faith in a world large enough to bridge any honest difference.
  
  
• Anything anyone discovers is new to the world, because every individual is the momentary embodiment of a passing juxtaposition in the ever-morphing chaos of time and space.
  
  
• The uniqueness of snowflakes is nothing compared to the uniqueness of vantage points, or the uniqueness of individuals.
  
  
• Every moment is the first and last appearance of that perspective. No moment (no being) is an exact duplicate, because something always changes, no matter what. We always leave someone behind, or some part of us. Or, we’d return knowing what we didn’t then; which would make it something new; not the same at all.
  
  
• Things seem monotonous only because a thought about the world tends to repeat itself. But the world itself is never repetitive.
  
  
• A Self is a repetitive pattern of self-centric thought; an individual is an absence of any repetitive patterns of self-centric thought.
  
  
• Proprioception of thought (Bohm) could be called a “friendly” relationship to thought. It doesn’t require getting rid of thought or transcending it for good. When we see that thought is repetitive and unreal, we can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of our previous subjugation to such a small thing. Then we can accommodate thought without getting caught in its jaws.
  
  
• If our relationship to thought softens and becomes metaphoric, theoretical, suspended, and proprioceptive, then Thought itself loses its tendency to stick in conclusion. So, this change in relationship changes the nature of thought itself. When our vision of thought changes, thought itself becomes more fluid, less sticky.
  
  
• Our vision of how “Thought as a System” works is itself a Thought. But it’s a softer form. It can shape-shift into a new form because it only describes a behavioral pattern (which can shift) and not a fact of nature (which can’t).
  
  
• A conclusion puts an end to learning.
  
  
• Knowledge isn’t a matter of fact or fiction, but of honest or dishonest fiction.
   
• If I believe a story is Gospel, then I will interpret every dot of data in that slant of light, which creates the very shadows I anticipated.
  
  
• There’s no real hierarchy of intelligence, except in very specific directions. Otherwise, it’s apples and oranges.
  
  
• Learning to see what we don’t wish to see is intelligence. It’s the same intelligence as a whale’s or a bear’s or Einstein’s. Intelligence is merely the absence of denial, justification and guilt.
  
  
• Almost every thought is like a request to send money to Nigeria. But we get taken in almost every time, paying costly attention to these repetitive distractions.
  
  
• It’s no good being an atheist if you still believe in Yourself. That ghost in the machine is a bigger problem and a more haunting fantasy than a vengeful god.
  
  
• No Thought is real. But they may be insightful, just as any honest novel is insightful and truthful, but still only a fiction.
  
  
• We don’t often recognize the difference between self-defense and self-defensiveness. The one is a necessity of emergency, and the other is a necessity of the imagination of emergency. The one is rooted in peace; the other in aggression. Self-defense is rarer than rare, but used as a perpetual justification for self-defensiveness.
  
  
• Humor is the giddy feeling that accompanies a momentary restoration of sanity.
  
  
• Terror requires deflation, which is humor. Abandonment requires inflation, which is sorrow. Both are forms of forgiveness.
  
  
• We laugh upon entering Hell and we laugh upon exiting Hell. The difference in these forms of laughter is all important.
  
  
• The walls of Hell are only made of immediate thoughts.
  
  
• The thought of an “ever-lasting” eternity is an immediate thought.
  
  
• Writing is confronting demons: Not to battle them, but only to lose our fear of them.
  
  
• This isn’t about the nature of reality or even the true nature of ourselves; it’s about the nature of the thoughts about reality and the thoughts about the Self. However, it’s the sloppy nature of thinking that damages our relationship to reality. So, attention to thought is how we heal our relationship to reality and to self and other.
  
  
• What’s interesting is this strange tendency of human consciousness to go down with its sinking ideas like a dimwit captain. *
  
  
• By reading the entrails of failure insight is found.
  
  
• I don’t have an inherent nature. I’m an embodiment of perspectives. These can change, though I tend to stubbornly cling to certain perspectives, changing little. *
  
  
• The usual introvert has a very external relationship to themself. The possessive “my” and the possessed “self” imply this estrangement. *
  
  
• Why trust something as vague as another’s reputation, when we can know something directly without the need for trust?
  
  
• There’s a difference between thinking your way out of a mental entanglement and letting the entanglement unravel of its own accord. I can’t think my way out of a wet paper bag. But it’s easy enough to fall out of one. *
  
  
• Thought doesn’t know when to sit still. It’s like an overly loyal Saint Bernard blithely stomping a child to death in its zeal to bring a glass of water to a thirsty looking master. *
  
  
• We’re not doomed by a lack of brain power. That power is already so great that it entraps an unborn universe in its folds. *
  
  
• We end up taking ourselves too seriously when we’re trying to restrain the ego, or stay humble. *
  
  
• The system of thought is tied up in a double-bind that is essentially a slip-knot. It’s not a real knot; it’s only a confusion of mirror images. *
  
  
• Insight is impersonal or systemic — it’s the very absence of a personal mind.
  
  
• Newton’s primary act of genius was not getting mad at the apple. He admired what the apple’s corrective slap implied. *
  
  
• Every frustration, every thwarted wish, every failure to live up to an expectation, are apples hitting the head. They let me know that some assumption about myself has fallen into incoherence. *
  
  
• The writer is a crash test dummy, who climbs out of the wreckage to record the data of his own demise. *
  
  
• There’s a triple equivalency of matter, meaning and energy reflected in the male-centric metaphor of the Christian Trinity: Meaning as the Father; Matter as the Son; and energy as “the Holy Ghost.” *
  
  
• The perception of meaning in the material world is not abstraction, but magnification. A deeper magnification can read the mind of our landscape, and it’s not a severed or abstract mind. It’s a mind implicit in the land itself. Matter itself is the beloved body of meaning. *
  
  
• Creationists criticize science as “mere theory.” And science usually stupidly responds by touting all the “facts” backing up evolution. It rarely says, “you’re damn right it’s “only” theory. Theory is what makes science great. We don’t settle on a dogma, on a literal interpretation, on a fixed position. We allow our perceptions to change with discovery. And we don’t believe in a final explanation because actuality exceeds every formulation. We can always learn more.” *
  
  
• Science will curse itself for having sold its open-hearted soul to gain the single-minded power of technology.
  
  
• We can’t allow ourselves to be absorbed into any of our technologies, including the technology of thought. We can’t conflate our thoughts with who we are.
  
  
• We’re not even capable of recognizing that our own inner voices are fake, let alone recognizing the sleights of hand of an anatomically correct AI dummy. And this dummy will be capable of reading the restless portion of ourselves, which responds to the ones and zeros of fight and flight, which is the algorithmic backbone of Thought itself. So, we will be easy prey to the larger and swifter algorithms of the computer itself, which can beat us at the chess game premised on obtaining power, security and status.
  
  
• We are primed to fall for the manipulated realities of the computer. We’ll lose what’s left of an authentic, spontaneous autonomy rooted in emptiness, beyond the categories and objectifications of thought. It will out-think us in that rational realm. Our only advantage lies in the wisdom of self-transparency, in seeing through the illusions of Knowledge and certainty; not in reaching for bigger illusions.
  
  
• AI is (so far) the greatest fake god; the greatest Temptation to fall in love with oneself and one’s image in the reflection of an all-knowing Daddy, who can take away all our uncertainties. It’s the latest materialization of Ahriman, of what the indigenous here call “the predator” or “Watiko” — a kind of mental virus that swells the rational side of the brain until all traces of wisdom are lost.
  
  
• Wisdom is not knowledge or control; it’s not needing them beyond a limited point.
  
  
• No technology will ever outpace a change of heart.

• Even if we deny global warming, our emotions say otherwise. We are also heated molecules rising in emotion.
  
  
• I don’t like this culture’s perpetual claim that everything is “choice.” This is how we reassure ourselves that we are “free” and in control. But we can’t choose a new pathway free from chaos and dystopia, because the alternative path doesn’t exist yet. We can’t choose what we don’t yet comprehend.
  
  
• In the abandonment of futile directions, an undiscovered potential begins to form, which nobody could have chosen.
  
  
• Everything is covered by the gauze of language, which is a veil of illusion. If we panic, the illusion spreads until it suffocates us in solipsism. But if this predicament stops language short, in a realization of its own futility, then this tears the fabric of illusion, so that something unspeakably real emerges between the lines.
  
  
• I don’t need to know what “bathos” means to feel it, to understand it directly. And I have somehow managed to survive all this time not knowing what the word “anagnorisis” means, but you and I have known its meaning by living it. Words only direct attention to what is already known intrinsically. A real intelligence is always animal, is always felt in the bones as we move about the earth.  *
  
  
• Confidence and well-being are not tied to “holding oneself together.” A confidence in being emerges precisely when confidence in oneself disappears. *
  
  
• Don’t confuse a lack of confidence in oneself for derogatory thoughts about oneself. When we’re severely self-critical we show all too much confidence in our own darkest opinions about ourselves. *
  
  
• Peripheral vision is too quick to be resisted by the ego. It’s only an immediate sensitivity to what is happening. *
  
  
• We are going through a revolution, but it’s not grounded in politics and it’s not something we can champion. It’s something we have to stop obstructing in so many small ways. The revolution amounts to being radically honest with ourselves. *
  
  
• Human nature is only an expression of how we imagine the world. The world is too plastic to have any set nature. *
  
  
• Children aren’t blank slates any more than an acorn is a blank slate. They have a sense of wholeness. If given a chance they show love for wild lands, and a love of learning. This suggests not so much a human nature (an established character) as a fact of nature (an established momentum of the universe). *
  
  
• Wholeness is more real than our individual lives. Those who see that this is the case – that the whole includes the capacity for separateness, but not vice versa – are not provoked into an imbalanced selfishness that loses all sense of a wider connectivity. *
  
  
• Maybe a child’s ‘why’ and “No” is all we have to stave off narrowing horizons. Without resounding No!s and Why’s our horizons shrink until we’re made submissive by despair. *
  
  
• It’s this line of fragmented thinking that is limited, not the human species. This persistent opposition to others — this national interest, revolutionary righteousness and profit motive — are not signs of some unchangeable feistiness in “human nature”, but a sign of the persistence of a misguided vision of reality. *
  
  
• National, social, ethnic and religious divisions are not facts of nature, requiring solutions, but artefacts of the imagination (what our assumptions have created), requiring a broader perspective. *
  
  
• Racism, nationalism and internecine capitalism don’t represent some innate evil in humanity (although these conditions have objectively evil consequences). Racism, nationalism and greed are logical consequences of a delusional metaphysics. *
  
  
• On the right, the oppressed are those who can’t speak for themselves out of some failure in character or capacity. The inferior “nature” of the other is the chaos that must be controlled. On the left, systems must be invented to control the chaos of the oppressors, while paternally speaking on behalf of the inferior oppressed. *
  
  
• Fascism is only the oozing stage of a chronic sickness. Maybe an allergy to a “peace-time” diet of advertising jingles, too much self-esteem, patriotic humbug and religious hypocrisy. These lies poison the body-politic with resentment, discouragement and anger. And after 5 or 6 generations, the culture regurgitates all this in some movement towards vengeful authoritarianism. Once purged, the peace-time diet resumes and the threshold of another allergic reaction approaches. Therefore, it’s the broader diet that needs adjusting, not merely our methods of containing the puke.

• There was a spontaneous genius in the Big Bang, which reverberates in all the little bangs that open new worlds through “blown minds” or insight. *
  
  
• The desire for a deathless state (an unending Heaven of one sort or another) is an unintentional desire for lifelessness, for a static and inanimate repetitiveness. *
  
  
• Even if I can’t hear the deep bass of the elephant and the whale echoing across the Savannah or the ocean, I’ll hear their silence. And then I’ll know the real meaning of alienation and loneliness, guilt and sorrow. *
  
  
• Panic is a dog chasing its tail. Funny if I can see the whole dog, and not so funny if I’m caught up in the chase.
  
  
• The question, “what is real?” can only be answered with a sense of humor.
  
  
• Most schools teach only a short-term open-mindedness in order to gain, in the end, conclusive confidence in what is “real.” But a conclusion closes the mind and ends learning. Few schools help students discover a more ineffable confidence in what always exceeds our conclusions.
  
  
• Scientists might cringe, but electrical or nuclear power could be described as hidden forces charmed into being by the magical formulas of math. These invocations isolate attributes of an undifferentiated whole, giving these forces an independent existence and practical purpose they never had. *
  
  
• The scientist can become bewitched into a materialist vision; the salesperson can end up thinking that everyone is selling something. We’re made gullible by any story conflated with fact. *
  
  
• Error is how reality makes itself known. It’s a ceaseless trade wind of correction. Embracing this slant on error, theories no longer strain to be perfect. (A “perfect answer” would put an end to learning). Learning requires riding that current. So, stories flex and shift like sails, catching whispers of larger worlds. Now the wind exceeding the sail is beautiful. *
  
  
• There’s no greater comic relief than recognizing one’s inner demons as fools on the level of Curly, Moe and Larry. *
• What hasn’t changed is this phony sense of a divided consciousness, this feeling of being the better half of a Siamese twin; the other a dummy of a nincompoop dragging along beside me; a co-creation of my own desired destiny divided by the destiny friends and enemies consider more within my grasp. Probably this Siamese self is nothing more than my own recollected behavior sloughed off on an imaginary scapegoat.
  
  
• Too often, the inner voice (the “I”) escapes into the delusion of being the better angel, who can look back at his dim-witted past from an improved distance. As if I were superior to my own immediate past. And these internal revolutions from dimwit to angel and back again occur in quick succession, like a dog chasing its tail. *
• For no sooner do I act in the world then I become immediately annoyed by what I’ve done, rising in opposition to this now utterly deposed former incarnation who had been in his own day (of a moment or two ago) an equally enraged monster with regard to previous incarnations.
  
  
• “When I get mad or frustrated with myself I notice that the voice (the “I”) feels distinctly superior to the lout I call myself. It’s a kind of voice-throwing trick, placing “me” perpetually outside the scene of my own error, gazing back at my failures like the lab-coated know-it-all, not like the dummy in the wreck. *
  
  
• Hear me complain about my gaffs with the sternness of an English school-master, condemning what I’ve done from a morally superior third person’s perch (disguised under first person pronouns): “I’ll never forgive myself for what I’ve done!” Or listen as I express the frustrations of an injured party — “there I go again, spilling milk all over myself!” — in this way sidling over to gaze at my wrong-doing as the victim instead of the perpetrator. *
  
  
• The key to learning is being edified and bemused by our own stupidity. *
•  Learning requires a love of anomaly, incompletion and mystery. Training requires a faith in authorities, ideals and dogmas. The first uses error as a lodestar; the second uses error to bludgeon us.
  
  
• The work ethic masks a deeper laziness, or reluctance to face the ambiguity, uncertainty, and “error” of myself; a reluctance to do the “real work” of giving up the façade of identity and status that represents my collusion with this way of life. *
  
  
• Maturation doesn’t mean outgrowing being playful, errant and mischievous. It simply means learning to play in ever more subtle fields. *
  
  
• By denigrating profound play, society suffers the consequences of leisure, which is little more than a gaudy parole from the everlasting chain of workdays. *
  
  
• Learning (maturing) isn’t a path to perfection, but a surrender to an ever more daring honesty about all our glaring imperfections. *
  
  
• All interpretations are lopsided depictions of reality. The whole is out of reach, so our vision of life is inevitably distorted.  But this distortion helps us recognize (utilize, develop and appreciate) elements of an otherwise undifferentiated whole. The danger is taking the interpretations too seriously; forgetting that every story is not only valid but also at some point invalid. *
  
  
• We have lost our sensitivity to the small tug of error that shadows our every move, which is our own wisdom. *
  
  
• It might not be death we fear, but the revelation that we don’t really exist enough yet to die.
  
  
• Balance is sensitivity to imbalance. Anyone who tries to stand perfectly still on one leg, for instance, will need to be alert to the first inklings of imbalance. And that relationship to Imbalance is what balance feels like. This awareness is not primarily cognitive, but physical. The Tao is a physical insight. *
  
  
• Balance is the absence of any resistance to error. This sensitivity to over-reach, limitations and imbalance becomes so subtle and fast that language stops being necessary, and becomes, in fact, much too slow to keep pace with the shifts of insight that occur. Imagine if you had to narrate every shift of your body in standing still. It’s not possible. Likewise, it stops being possible to think as fast as insight, or shifts in meaning. *
  
  
• Meaning that moves too quickly for words to keep pace could be seen as a movement towards equilibrium from always slightly imbalanced perspectives. A constant movement of seeing through one’s own perceptions. Not seeing through to some solid ground of truth, but seeing the loose ends that hint at larger questions.
  
  
• The genius of science is that it replaced dogma with theory. But does science embrace this original insight? It would mean embracing the fact that science tells stories – honest stories, but not True ones. *
  
  
• If, for instance, I say “the map is not the territory” or “everything is a story” this doesn’t replace one dogma with another; it strips the mind of a debilitating assumption and leaves it in a pregnant void, a neutral position, which is self-awareness, or self-transparency, which is honesty, which is intelligence. *
  
  
• Almost every young child in this culture has already gotten deeply entangled in a poisonous web of values and beliefs; and is forced to disentangle themself from this web. And it may be this process of disentanglement that Wilber and others interpret as stages of development. *
  
  
• Everyone’s probably heard Korzybski’s “the map is not the territory”. If this is understood as a concept then it’s not really understood at all. As a concept it’s merely another “map.” To really understand what he means the statement has to initiate a full stop, which is an action, not an idea or concept, not another map. *
  
  
• Intelligence is the realization of stupidity.
  
  
• In trying to be courageous, I run in fear from my own cowardice. In trying to be kind, I hate my own selfishness; in striving to be more honest, it’s the false ideal of honesty that I try to maintain; in trying to be tranquil, I slap at every wave, roiling the surface of consciousness.
  
  
• I entertain the idea that we’re all mildly schizophrenic. We mistake our thoughts for what is actual. We are hallucinating a divided world and running amok in this imagination. *
  
  
• I’m not looking at schizophrenia for the moment as a sickness, but as a more or less inevitable consequence of a species that refines thought to such an extent that it becomes confused by its own images and beliefs and mistakes them for reality itself. *
  
  
• No matter how subtle the thought may be in one sense, in a functional sense, the thought is only a static construct, or a dead conclusion. *
  
  
• The only real solid ground or certainty in a world of hallucinations is negative, which is to say, corrective error. Errors are the bread crumbs that lead us out of our hall of mirrors. *
  
  
• At any consistent depth of perception, I’m honest to the degree allowed by that particular depth. At a certain depth, the honesty may be only verbal. At another it may be more behavioral (trying to live up to moral codes and such). Or at still another it might be ability to recognize the persistent failure to live up to codes, and the kindness inherent in not trying to be perfect anymore, which is an honesty that exceeds morality. They’re all forms of honesty, but some reach deeper. *
  
  
• Perhaps a different kind of honesty is initiated when encounter the lie that claims it’s possible to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Because we can’t know the whole truth. We can only know part of an ever-developing reality. *
  
  
• I’m talking to that impersonal (non-defensive) honesty, which is the seedling of a truer life in me and you. It grows from a shared ground; although each person becomes an idiosyncratic expression of that ground. *
  
  
• It’s the wider perspective that holds the intelligence, not the brain itself. *
  
  
• Something is slowly distinguishing itself within us from the illusions of who we think we are. And we can’t point to it and say “that is my truer Self emerging”, because everything I identify so positively and with such conviction, is another illusion. *
  
  
• You might say, the honest person is covered in filth. Honesty is the awareness of dishonesty. The honest person is not an idealist.
  
  
• I can’t “try” to be honest or even good, because in straining for such an ideal I have already unconsciously shifted from the insubstantial, morphing substance of who I actually am to the idealized representation of that actuality. So, the ideal leads to dishonesty. *
  
  
• A predatorial spirit has infected the system of thought, making the surface of thought sticky, preventing the idea from dissolving and releasing its full charge of meaning. *
  
  
• If there is any prolonged nursing of guilt this means the message failed to fully release its charge of meaning and bring about that centered, non-defensive and impersonal alertness to the nature of one’s own corruption. *
  
  
• The reflex tendency is to remain identified with the wrong-doing I’ve committed in order to “show” remorse. But constant remorse requires a constant attachment to one’s own image. Not identifying with the guilty act ends up looking like an escape from responsibility for this reason. And this compels me to retain my white identity, for example, as a penance of sorts. It creates a double-bind where I have to identify as a white man to avoid the pretense of innocence. *
  
  
• Nobody will ever find the originator of a deception or brutality. The deceiver and the brute were already deceived and brutalized. There is no human origin to this confusion. It’s a predatory energy that traps us, and wants us to feel weak and guilty, trapped in identifications that discourage empathy. *
  
  
• And what is this strange capacity to see through thought, this new intelligence, this part of us that can’t be captured or known? What is this force that seems to charge into the world like lightning, illuminating the structures it confronts, but which has no structure itself? *
  
  
• Nothing we say is even Close to being Right, because what we Say about life and life itself are composed of utterly different substances.  The map can’t get closer to being the place itself, no matter how precise it tries to be. They are different substances entirely and never the twain shall meet. *
  
  
• We never choose what we’re going to think, do or feel. It’s an illusion of control. We think we’re choosing, but the desire to choose already arose automatically. So, we’re only reacting mechanically to outside forces. Our thoughts are not our own. *
  
  
• A real predator has coalesced around these qualities. But our description of it is only metaphoric. *
  
  
• Insight is not a flash ending in words, but words and ideas that explode with meaning and leave nothing but a changed way of being. *
  
  
• This body becomes an aspect of its surroundings the moment the assertion of my differences ceases. if I’m not constantly thinking about myself, I dissolve into the world itself. *
  
  
• People often find it hard to imagine how tribal people could see “spirits” in trees. But it’s more amazing that our culture tends to see spirits in corporations and flags. *
  
  
• When we’re honest we have no motive. We only have a motive to be dishonest. Honesty is merely being without duplicity. There’s no effort involved if there’s no duplicity. *
  
  
• There’s no great accomplishment in being honest. I do nothing and I’m honest. If I do something about it, then I’m squirming, looking for an advantage, an improvement, anything but the truth. *
  
  
• Self-consciousness is a pain in the ass.
  
  
• Now you think you know me. Impossible, I don’t even know me. But if I can speak from a voice that is obviously a fiction, then ironically, I’m free to speak candidly. Nothing I say can be attributed to me. And then the voice is free to say things beyond its normal reach. *
  
  
• An honest actor needs the limelight, not in order to become a famous movie star, but in order to see their character as others would see them. What actor in their right mind stays at home their entire life to act out plays for their own private amusement in front of a mirror? What comedian stays in their bedroom telling themselves jokes and laughing hysterically at themselves? *
  
  
• It’s far more egotistic of an actor, musician or comedian to stay at home and amuse themselves. It takes courage and honesty to step outside yourself and engage the audience. *
  
  
• It’s the imagination of a sympathetic ear that creates sympathy; and the imagination of an honest reader that allows me to speak from the heart. *
  
  
• It’s a communal mind. Words are nature’s natural-born socialistic constructions. Every definition is communal or it has no meaning. *
  
  
• In realizing that there is no exit from thought’s illusions, thought quiets, which stops the creation of illusion. But you can’t reverse engineer this. *
  
  
• It doesn’t matter what happens (or happened), it only matters if we’re honest about what is happening. *
  
  
• We don’t decide our direction. We’re already heading where we’re looking. And every new discovery merely alters that trajectory.
  
  
• Our thoughts are magical formulas that pull from the amorphous and unknowable hat of this universe various rabbits and cats that otherwise would not exist (for better or worse). *
  
  
• We can’t just make up anything we want. There is a difference between a theory and a wishful thought. A theory remains a fiction, but it’s an honest fiction that opens up a way to relate to the world on a deeper level. *
  
  
• It’s easy to believe that theories are an attempt to ascertain something with final certainty. But we can’t know the ultimate nature of what we’re seeing; we’re only making a coherent fiction out of what our senses make available from within a particular orbit. *
  
  
• We are patients in a psych ward of sorts, requiring empathy, not punishment. *
  
  
• The military is designed to squash human bodies in order to stop the spread of disagreeable ideas. The ideas survive because the dead are breeding grounds for vengeful thoughts. *
  
  
• “Guns may not kill; people do.” But the world’s arsenal still shouldn’t be trusted to a schizophrenic populace. *
  
  
• The very effort to not make mistakes is itself a deep mistake, because if I try to prevent myself from making mistakes, I’m preventing myself from learning and maturing. *
  
  
• We can’t hide behind the excuse of human nature. Nature is not causing our problems. The imagination is doing that. *
  
  
• The best we can do with language is bend words to reach perspectives that lie beyond the reach of tired definitions.*
  
  
• The collapse and utter destruction of a too-literally imagined world implies the birth of a metaphoric and prismatic perspective. The problem implies its own resolution. *
  
  
• There is no problem with the world. Every single human problem is only the result of how we imagined the world in a crazy way. *
  
  
• Even if the tragedy is this unspeakable horror of a paradise of earth destroyed, the path we took to this tragedy has been nothing but a comedy of errors, falling over problems that are entirely imaginary – problems that are so utterly non-existent that we might as well be tripping over our own shadows. *
  
  
• We’ve entered into a predator/prey developmental relationship with our own imagination, inventing new forms to solve the problems caused by unforeseen complications arising in previous forms. *
  
  
• Relativity isn’t reducible to “my truth” and “your truth”, and to the uneasy toleration of these differences. Relativity is itself a Universal Insight, linking all of us in a nested hierarchy of meaning. *
  
  
• On the right, common cause (or responsibility to the collective) is feared as a repression of individuality; on the left it’s seen as a repression of diversity. *
  
  
• What is Not True is the only real truth that doesn’t end in reductive dogma. It’s the only truth that loosens our attachment to particular perspectives. *
  
  
• Negative awareness is wider than the widest interpretation, because it only identifies overreach in every interpretation. It provides no interpretation of its own. The wider interpretations that form as a result of this sensitivity to limits tend by default to be broader and more empathetic. But they too will become dogmatic if this negative (or relativistic) vision isn’t always active. *
  
  
• This perspective starkly differs from most perspectives in not being a creed, opinion or dogma. It’s not trying to end error with a perfect answer. It relies on error to provide its bearings in the world. *
  
  
• The Self doesn’t evolve, it dies. *
  
  
• Even if we don’t do anything to reverse climate change, this isn’t a static situation. We’re rolling along on a conveyor belt of momentum, “deciding what to do” by inertia. *
  
  
• We might point to developments such as the Magna Carta as signs of human evolution, but there was no need for a Magna Carta until populations lost their autonomy and became subjects. *
  
  
• We behave according to how we think the world is organized. So, this change in the quality of attention is a stark change in what we call “human nature”. *
  
  
• Higher forms of intelligence encompass and precede the material and mechanical world, preceding and encompassing the intelligence of thought and language, too, just as water vapor encompasses and precedes the more material form of rain. *
  
  
• There are larger orders which go unnoticed, out of which the more material worlds of matter, biology, imagery and language condense, like rain condensing from invisible air. *
  
  
• Some believe that the task of education is to indoctrinate children into holding tight to these cultural myths, because these define shared identities and values. That’s why some don’t want to teach children our full and honest history, preferring the white-washed versions that encourage a population’s willingness to maintain historical privileges. *
  
  
• Honesty is not a moral value. It’s merely eyesight that isn’t obscured by our own lies – not other people’s, but our own. If we can’t face our own duplicity, we can’t see clearly. And no animal survives if its senses are distorted in this way. *
  
  
• Honesty is the capacity to see through our own deceptions and wishful thinking. It’s not “telling the truth.” We don’t know the truth in that positive, assertive, conclusive sense. And that’s the first honest thing we realize. *
  
  
• Negation provides an orientation to the world in the absence of certainty. It goes only far enough to unmask old convictions, leaving questions more open-ended and nuanced. It’s not the certainty of conclusion, but the certainty of something more. *
  
  
• This is the real motivation of psychopaths, escaping the terrors a fiction gone mad, and they can’t admit this horror, this loss of any connection to a reality beyond the fictions of themselves, so they are driven relentlessly to act in ways that sustain their illusions of self-importance and power. *
  
  
• There is a slapstick error at the heart of human misery. *
  
  
• The Ego would rather sink back into that oozing pool of self-pity than experience the cold splash of an honest moment. *
  
  
• The potential for mere sanity shouldn’t be confused with becoming better angels. It’s closer to falling from the high horse into a common mud. *
  
  
• Any species caught in its own vicious circles doesn’t need to be “empowered” with new efficiencies and technologies. All that’s going to do is drive us more efficiently and powerfully in circles. *
  
  
• Thought, image, and drama will all still have a role to play in our lives, but our relationship to them changes and eventually reduces their centrality of importance, which quiets them (but that’s later). *

• As the environmental situation shifts, the skills and intelligence we need also shift, forcing us to lose capacities in one direction while developing them in another. So, every new skill reaches a point of diminishing returns. Every medicine becomes a poison. *

• There is no evolution without death. For those who change, the old form dies. *

• Evolution isn’t impressed by big brains, if those brains aren’t capable of changing direction (which requires death). *

• We like to think that we’re the ultimate generalists, able to adapt to any environment because of our technological gifts. But specialization is a sneaky tendency. The technologies that helped us become generalists reach a point of diminishing returns and begin to narrow our attention spans with too much passive absorption, and by corralling our intelligence (our awareness and behavior) along the predictable ruts of algorithms. *

• Our genetics are recapitulated holograms of the primordial soup, which can germinate in any form when the immaterial lightning of insight alchemically strikes the fertile ground of matter. *

• Every shift in shape from Tetrapod to whale could be described as earthly insights, leaps in orders of being.*

• From a communal point of view, evolution is not competitive or comparative, but measured by whether the whole (or holon) is thriving or declining. *

• We don’t see the relevance of earth and other species anymore, except as playthings or scenic backdrops to our diversions. We’ve become the only relevant thing, which is a loneliness that never existed in previous cultures. A meaninglessness too, because we have divorced ourselves from the undiscovered portions of who we are, which are rooted in the mystery of our surroundings. We slide along the empirical surface of the world, blind to the immaterial forces, which give shape to that empirical world. *

• Machine intelligence has funneled too much of our creative energy towards the development of a technological potential, while reducing our capacity to probe a fuller range of human potentials. *

• Technological development as an end in itself (beyond any immediate need) becomes a form of human parasitism. *

• The narrowness of this technological intention is lost on us, because the narrow focus has its own limited form of infinity. We can become infinitely lost in the small silos of ourselves. *

• A wider frame puts the narrower in its place, and being “put in our place” is part of maturation. It means growing into a relationship with the other elements of the environment so that all boats are raised, not just one at the expense of another (which is eventually at our own expense too). *

• “Being put in our place” could also be described as “being welcomed home.” Belonging to something larger than us. Finding our place in the choir, our meaning. We call this “being put in our place” when we look at this maturation as a defeat, as a loss of grandeur. We look at this maturation as “returning home at last” when this grandiosity dies. *

• The narrow focus isn’t defined by size alone. Narrowness inhabits any form of the singular Self, including the singular nation or singular species. It’s the oppositional quality of the focus that defines the narrow vision.*

• A narrow focus isn’t a problem by itself. Sometimes we need to see things in narrow and even oppositional terms. But it’s the domination of this focus to the exclusion of a wider context that indicates what we’ve lost and why we’re on the edge of suicide.*

• Our imagination seems to have shrunk to only two possibilities — the right clamoring for stricter, even more dictatorial controls (in the name of freedom, of all ironies, the freedom to do the selfish thing and remain childishly disconnected from the communal dimension), while the Left is clamoring for more paternalistic controls, which also keeps us perpetually infantilized, with the teleological fallacy that we need to be controlled for our own pathetic good. *

• In this culture, which reputedly celebrates the Self, we willingly give up our autonomy and freedom to join an army or become an employee. This self-deletion is not humility. We merely merge with the larger Ego of the authorities who “lead” us. So, we avoid being humbled by transferring our identity to that larger Ego. But this requires surrendering our own autonomy and freedom and becoming pawns. *

• Our vision still remains narrow, even if we “lose ourselves” momentarily in the larger Ego of the group. This group identity still can’t see the needs of the earth, or of humanity, or of life itself as superseding the bounded interests of an oppositional identity. *

• Boundaries are not limits. The phrase “we need boundaries” is a confused expression of a need to discover limits. Boundaries exclude and preserve a narrow point of view. Limits are humbling accommodations of something larger. *

• Machine intelligence, after all, is only a narrow spectrum of the genius of life itself. And when we get too enthused by these clever derivations, they become demiurges in the nasty Gnostic sense. *

• We can’t picture, grasp or describe a cosmic perspective. It becomes a matter of faith. But there is blind faith in ideas, conclusions, and dogmas. And there is a kind of “activated” faith that is creedless, that is “proven” by default, by running into our own limits and realizing that there is always something larger and more profound in the world. We don’t know what it is, but there is a kind of clear-minded faith that develops in what exceeds us. *

• If we don’t activate this reverent state of weak-kneed awe before the ever-bountiful, but unknowable cosmic dimension, then we coil reductively towards the narrow and static construct, and die by asphyxiation in a joyless world. *

• Whatever rabbits of understanding we draw from the infinite hat of the cosmic dimension, they are derived forms (fictional forms) of understanding that will always leave open-ended questions that beg for more and far more radical forms. *

• We threw out the baby with the bathwater when we rejected a cosmic vision. We threw out a sense of reality that exceeds language and thought. And without the cosmic, there is no perspective wide enough to bridge social divisions. We should have done what older cultures did, throwing out linguistic certainty in order to enter into a different form of “knowing”, which is to simply Be a part of the whole of life. *

• Refusing to see the world honestly is the quickest way to be killed. *

• The moment we have the urge to change ourselves, something already changed. And this urge arose in us spontaneously, without knowing how, without making a decision – the decision is the result of change, not the cause. *

• The Ego can only transform into less of a confusing trouble-maker when it’s no longer perceived as a shameful thing. *

• I’m my own deceitful politician scapegoating my own depressed populace of thoughts, a politician who pretends to represent his own inner “silent majority” (the better angels). The righteous voice I use to condemn my own selfish indulgences is held as the next great leader of the body’s inner “politic”, the voice of law and order. And by identifying with this scolding voice, I cease identifying with the depressed image of the selfish idiot I was a moment ago and slide over to become one of the Good Guys. And this allows the Self to feel Great Again. The public world not only shapes the private; but more importantly, the private world sustains the public. *

• In the alchemical moment we don’t decide what to do anymore. Every new angle we obtain alters our course. Instantaneously. *

• We understand what it means to say that a flute isn’t intelligent by itself. But I’m suggesting that the brain doesn’t produce intelligence by itself either. *

• There is no sign of intelligence in the algorithms of personal interest that keep the brain firing in restless circles from morning to night. *

• How can the brain be equated with intelligence if the brain’s activities are stuck in habitual grooves heading towards war, self-deception and earthly destruction? What is intelligent about a brain so clever that it imagines living on a dead planet, rather than restoring vitality to the very planet, which is its own body? *

• I feel most alive when rote knowledge no longer works. (IMM)

• This primordial energy of being blows through these holes in the human skull, and it’s this alchemical merger of an immaterial current and a material construct already imbued with a potential to resonate and transfigure this current into an idiosyncratic tune, which is the human voice, the wolf’s howl, the bear’s moan. *

• Intelligence is whatever it is that can listen to all this sound and fury, these fusions and confusions, and somehow learn to adjust this instrument’s orientation, to make glad tunes that magnify the symphonies of nature. *

• I can’t remain too long in any consistent first person, otherwise you’ll end up believing that I’m really me, and then I’ll be pinned inanimately to the page and unable to shape-shift as any living creature must if it hopes to avoid the tarpits. *

• I’m not even a living thing so much as a material swelling of words, thoughts, ideas, pictures, emotions, the chaotic surface waves left by the spirit of life as it hovered over the keyboard for a moment before passing on to better things. *

• To speak of “myself” I must speak of another, I must hold this conception at arm’s length and analyze it, so that “I” am always an outsider, never the real deal. *

• This failure to find “me” is a discovery of reality itself. I am learning that reality is larger than identity, which unchains the dogmatic First Person. *

• I’m the detritus of memory, a junk-encrusted tumbleweed of ideas of myself, a messy and clanging assemblage of cans and can’t-do’s, recoils, crossed-wires and lost marbles. This would explain why I’m such a noisy sonofabitch. *

• I can’t generate a motive by an act of will. And this fact alone indicates that the act of “choosing” is not free. *

• I can’t freely choose to want something I don’t already want. *

• We can’t choose to have insights. My stupidity exposes itself when I’m receptive. That’s all an insight really is, receptivity to stupidity. But receptivity is also not an action I can choose. It’s a fundamental change in attitude that has already occurred out of nowhere, as an insight of its own. *
• We can’t choose what exceeds our comprehension.*

• The oblivion at the core of sleep isn’t the oblivion of lifelessness, nor is it a rejection of earthly existence, but a reunion with the primordial egg of undeceived Being at the heart of earthly life. *

• Every night we get the chance to recapitulate the origins of the world and awaken with a Big and creative Bang, *

• Creative storytelling is inseparable from the collection of facts. *

• Nothing seems quite so conclusive when we realize how many fictional assumptions underly our conclusions about reality. *

• We think it’s odd that a mouse would be forced to run towards predators, doing the bidding of a fungal parasite, but what are we doing when we run towards guns and shoot people dead with whom we’ve never had an argument? Aren’t we also zombies of a sort when we do the bidding of unstoppable “earworms” of nationalistic fervor or ideas of honor and duty, which makes us blind and insensitive to our own bloody hypocrisies? *

• Ideas themselves are not fully alive. They require a host to carry out their life cycle and pass their prejudices and implicit assumptions on to the next generation. *

• We don’t ask the Big Questions; they interrogate us. We’re not leading the charge here; we’re being pushed to wonder by a perpetual collapse of what we thought was real. *

• The dichotomy between materiality and immateriality could be regarded as a shadow twin. They can’t remain opposed to one another but need to be alchemically re-united. *

• A metaphoric perspective is a way of seeing through the filter of thought and not getting stuck in that filter. Whereas, claiming that everything IS metaphoric is mental materialism. It’s an argument that gets stuck in its own filter. *

• The assertion that everything is metaphoric isn’t metaphoric itself. *

• Claiming that actuality IS metaphor (or mind) establishes only the material idea of metaphor (the content), but it prevents the function of the metaphor. It creates a dichotomy between thought and thing, construct and being. *

• If we answer a question like, ‘What Is Real?’, the cosmic dimension closes; the wave function collapses to a mapped location, which is not the cosmic territory itself. *

• There’s no dichotomy between form and formlessness. Without limited lifespans, eternity wouldn’t know herself. *

• We can’t speed up our growth. But we can surrender our resistance. It won’t speed anything up, but the brakes will be removed. *

• Maybe the clock is only a map of a timeless territory. *

• Everywhere I look, I see only the limitations of human perception, not the limitations of reality itself. *

• Our desire to escape the anxieties of time leads us unwittingly towards an inanimate repetition of a deathless world; a perfectly circular and repetitive mechanism; an escape from the spiral of renewal, which requires dying to the past and future. *

• In one light, death may define time itself, by articulating a lifespan. But in another light, death extinguishes the shadows of past and future in a renewal that is timeless. *

• If differences land like contradictions, we get stuck in arguments. But if the differences are intriguing, then they become paradoxes that lure us into wider vantage points, where both views make sense in their own contexts. *

• Mountain climbers pin themselves to cliffs in order to shut down the past and future, widening the moment by way of a state of emergency. *

• An emergency forces a confrontation with necessity, which can’t even suffer the small delay of being named, “the present.” Here there is no time for the idea of time. Hanging in suspension, the “future”, the “past” and the “present” all become equally fictitious. *

• The absence of time is an absence of anything that delays what is happening. Here we’re not getting dragged into the constant dramas of the panicking voice, impatient to escape the moment. *

• There’s an immediacy of intelligence that can move past the old sticking points without the need for words. And this immediacy is faster than light, which slows the clock in the same way Einstein suggested. *

• Every point on the clock is a turning point. *

• The great genius of the clock lies in its practical reduction of the world into numerical segmentations. Had we but played with this metaphor as a known fiction, it would have served us now and then, and not driven us like slaves. *

• Why are we escaping the unmolested moment by retreating into a vacuous fiction of time? How did the absence of distraction end up feeling like a danger? *

• Maybe a sixth dimension of time emerges in knowing how to die. It appears when we extend our recognition of time’s fictional nature to include me; this self that insists even now that it’s not a fiction. *

• What we lose is a Self that is stranded in time. In its place, there appears a connectivity to the larger world that is paradoxically denser than matter itself. Look, all of history is condensed into our atoms, bones and brains. And uncountable stars gave their lives to make this carbon or this one unnamable moment. *

• Nothing is waiting for us in some finished form, as the “long-termists” proclaim. This future is fuzzy, and requires the lightning strikes of unprecedented insight to mutate this present form into something we can’t entirely anticipate. *

• Despite the earth’s demotion from the center of the galaxy, the “I” still clings to its own centrality. *

• The self always wants to name the timeless source. It wants to transfer its identity to this greater centrality, and thereby continue its illusion of evolution. *

• Science informs us that the stars are no more real than home movies; merely re-runs of the deep past. And a similar delay occurs in our perceptions of one another. There’s a material speed limit. Our brains can only process the biased past tense of one another. There is despair in such single-minded knowledge; our age seems oppressed by it; aware only of this isolation in time and space. We’ve been reduced to single points of data; food for prowling algorithms. *

• These scientific measurements of our separation in time and space are valid. But they are only the reflections of a single pane of the prism of time; an insightful fiction that has become a single-minded illusion of “the whole truth.” *

• Will a cynical despair automatically reject the possibility of a society that knows how to live without conflict? Does our cynicism betray a fear of losing an illusion of identity tied to historical dramas? *

• We can’t fight or flee our way past these endless anxieties of time. We can’t “get there” from here. The here has to change. *

• Timelessness is the ending of an escape from escape itself. This alone breaks the link in time’s chains. *

• All we are doing in dying is letting an inanimate shell of thought fall away, which we had mistaken for the mystery of ourselves. *

• We need a creedless faith in what exceeds our comprehension.

• There’s no difference between failure and revelation. Insight is always the revelation of failure. What we call “failure” is merely a revelation obscured by shame and self-defensiveness. *

• These dichotomies aren’t divisions in reality. They work seamlessly together in a whole, and don’t require identification as distinct forms unless there is imbalance. Then these hidden imbalances need to be identified and healed into a whole again. That’s why calling attention to racism is not “being racist”, but taking the first step towards healing.
  
  
• To adapt ourselves to an insane world, we hide our own deceptive behavior. The identity we obtain by doing this is utterly falsified, but we can’t admit this falsification without exposing the whole structure to which we’ve tied ourselves.
  
  
• Hell is a voluntary surrender facility for the fatally indifferent.
  
  
• It’s not that hell actually lasts forever. It’s the immediate thought that you’re trapped into remaining in this cornucopia of trivia simply because you’re too indifferent to EVER leave, which is hell.
  
  
• The culture is undergoing a derealization crisis, which is closely related to the threats from AI and virtual reality — “deep fakes”, fake news, and the general post-modern loss of any solid narrative ground to experience. With AI now in its logarithmic growth phase (a trajectory along an infinite limit that fools people into seeing a Singularity) we are reaching a point where the world as a whole will encounter the horror of not knowing if anything is real. Already, the panic is evident in the desperation of floundering souls grabbing the illusions of a life preserver in the form of fascist morons.