Category: Notes

Revelation and Revolution

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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.

America, Israel and Russia are (or are rapidly approaching) failed states. They are all undergoing revelations — revelations of corruption (Epstein (i.e., Trump, Clinton, etc. etc.), ICE, Musk, The Supreme Courtiers, the justifications of genocide and conquest, etc.).

The ones controlling the machinery of state are being revealed as frauds, sociopaths, rapists and traitors. Hence the controllers and those who identify with them, self-defensively call these revelations “fake news”. In resistance to revelation, they threaten the world with revolution.

Violent revolution and government control are partnering in an attempt to deny revelation. This started as a refusal to see our own failures (the white-washing of history, etc). It continued as a reactive projection of those failures onto “enemies” that have been created by our own reactive behavior.

If we repress revelation we end in a failed state.

The repression of revelation would lead to a volcanic eruption of Hell itself; a terrorizing and heartbreaking failure for every living being. But revelation itself is a cleansing of the eyes, and the dissolution of the illusions of Hell.

This is why our better angels embrace revelations, while our reactive devils see these only as failures, and escape from these “failures” into violent revolution and government control — two expressions of the same repressive force.

A Quick Theory of Hell

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What if there are areas of Hell where the inhabitants think they are happy? At least, at first.

There, the inhabitants merely suffer perpetual stasis. But this stasis becomes so unbearable after a while that many end up seeking the easy change of a worsening situation to relieve them of the monotony.

And then they get tired of making things harder and join one of the various Societies for the Betterment of Hell. But almost nobody shows up after a while, because the meetings are too monotonous, too many parliamentarian procedures, and nothing ever improves.

So, Hell’s society bounces between two rather mild extremes – the temporary excitements of a worsening self-made crisis and an exhausted return to static monotony.

On a personal level, nobody suffers too much. The nick-nack shelf hangs almost perfectly balanced. Things only roll off now and then. Or maybe you have a low-grade migraine that comes and goes every day. And aspirins are in short supply. (Dope too; the marijuana fields keep getting attacked by new fungi). But there’s also no great suffering at any given moment. (After all, it’s only the “thought” of never-ending migraines that begins to wear you down).

Or, perhaps upon entering hell, you’re given a perpetual membership in Hulu or Amazon Prime or Youtube. Seems nice at first.

But then the prospect of spending the next 5 million years watching re-runs of The Office trends badly. (Also, notice that the “Prospect” of 5 million years occurs to someone as an immediate thought. That’s all it takes to lose heart; you don’t have to wait 5 million years. Hell is an immediate thought).

Also, what makes this hell really hellish is that everyone is free to leave. All they have to do is change their habits. But it’s too much trouble to leave hell; there’s always another youtube short to watch.

Hell is a voluntary surrender facility for the fatally indifferent.

Again, 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.

What eventually drives most of the inhabitants to lower and darker levels of Hell (making room for newcomers) is that immediate but unbearable knowledge of their own freedom to leave. The skies remain too blue here, the trees too green, the flight of the vulture still too serene, to ever let them forget this otherwise passing thought.

A Hidden Optimism: Going On from the Last Essay

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In the last essay I seemed to compare people to primordial mud. Of course, I wrote it as a comedy, which is to say, the entire essay is excessively optimistic about people, and is only making a generously indulged joke on behalf of a gifted species at the verge of developing into a new form of life and intelligence. But if people approach it pessimistically (I don’t see how they can, given the parameters of my essays in general), then it would be received as ridicule. But I was writing this in resonance with Beckett’s approach. He also tempts people to read him pessimistically. But everything he wrote was a double-entendre. A different kind of humor is revealed when you discover his hidden optimism.

These essays presume several optimistic things (and I don’t expect agreement and I’m not looking for debate, only the willingness to entertain the angle of vision as long as it lasts):

1) that human beings are troubled, but gifted animals; and

2) That human beings are at the verge of realizing a new form of intelligence, a new way of being.

Hence, the metaphor of a primordial awakening.

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The Secret Harmony of Knowing Nothing

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Certain experiences defy description. That is, the tacitly accepted stories that define reality are sometimes undermined by anomalous events.

Tacitly accepted stories are everywhere. They are as omnipresent as water to a fish, holding us in place, and often similarly invisible. That’s because we tend to accept the stories into which we were born as if they weren’t stories, but perfectly accurate descriptions of reality. Some (see footnote Number 1 below) believe that this is necessary, and that the task of education is to indoctrinate children into holding tight to these stories, because these stories 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. To some, the underlying story or philosophy (indoctrination) that drives them is the belief that “it’s a dog-eat-dog world”, a matter of might making right. And this tautology justifies the lies of omission and elision that hold the culture’s narrative in place. They say, see, every other culture does this too, so why should we give up our story and make ourselves weaker than the others?

So honesty becomes a dangerous thing. And this is why reflecting on things “philosophically” (which is merely being honest about the hidden philosophies driving us) is “not interesting” to most people. They don’t want to disturb the surface images that define their world. They’ve learned to fear reality, and conflate their own lives with the surface reflections they diligently (as good children) learned to embody, and this philosophy is called “being practical.”

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Notes on the Difference Between Closed and Open Views of Evolution: or why machine intelligence will fail (for earthly life)

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Mandala One-Syllable Golden Wheel, Japan
Mandala One-Syllable Golden Wheel, Japan by The Metropolitan Museum of Art is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Careful how you move. The beginning is always treacherous. Here the pattern is established. The ink dries fast.

I don’t even know yet whom I’m addressing or what I am, but already a momentum has been established in these notes, an artificial destiny of sorts that I can’t trust entirely, nor will I try to dissipate this cloud of uncertainty by framing it prematurely. Something is evolving here that can’t be shaped intentionally, but which is nevertheless shaped by how honestly I attend its birth. So what pushes the evolution towards a beginning, middle and end?

The beginning is found in these clouds of uncertainty, ghosts of ideas dissipating before they take clear shape, pareidolic in nature, the dust of thought suspended in the oblique light of a dawning concern, over-heated in some ways, to be sure, the Brownian Motion of listless thoughts resolving into more heated currents of desire and fear, the twisting smoke from the cooling coal of a brain, shrapnel from the Big Bang, recapitulating the evolution that had no destiny either, perhaps, and like spilled ink pouring out of a black hole, something forms, and then it looks inevitable, but it never was.

Language is my morning cup of acid. The psychedelics of language turning this perfectly transparent day into an opaque mass that can be molded into a figurine through which I see the reflection of a mind emerging as if it were destiny. Read More »

Technical Note on Why the Last Essay Isn’t Really About Writing

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Maybe what I’m really after in speaking of an imaginary “you” and “Me” is a rapport with these persistent thoughts of self and other, these imaginary beings that occupy center stage in life. I’m not interested in being a writer, it’s not my career. But in looking at the dishonesty of thought honestly I’m dealing with a communal mess. And part of the resolution of a communal mess will necessarily involve communication of this sort.

Writing provides the opportunity for an elongated span of attention on these matters.  But it’s not the only way to approach all this. So it’s not about writing, it’s about the communal movement of thought. In any communicative case (speaking, fighting, using sign language, doing math) the same issue looms that I was trying to contend with — what to do about the self-image that insists on acting like a middle-man at all times, even poking its ugly little head between two embracing lovers more often than not in the form of anxieties and worries. This spoiled brat of thought has to be the center of attention and is constantly driven by insecurities, because it is by nature a deception, a projection posing as a reality.

So the question tends to be, how do I look at thought honestly knowing full well that a fictitious “I” or “me” will inevitably intrude on the scene demanding to play a central role?

There are a million ways to handle this and all have been tried in these essays, with varying effects. The one is to do what is being done in this paragraph, which is to refuse to use personal language and speak from the third person’s perch.

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Quick Footnote to A Fly Fable

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Not that A Fly Fable should be read literally, but my brother found these two interesting articles on animal intelligence that shows yet again that fiction has no chance of keeping pace with reality.

Bee-Brained: Inside the Mind of a Bee

Three mind-blowing facts about the minds of bees and flies: 1) lonely flies get drunk; 2) bees are optimistic or pessimistic based on life experience; and 3) flies and bees have sleep patterns reminiscent of REM and Deep sleep stages

Canine Exceptionalism: Trainers working with dogs every day have documented extraordinary talents and skills. Will science ever catch up?

Dogs are a hell of a lot smarter than we imagined. Same goes for Everything, including plants.

Spiders too.

What Trees Know that We’ve Forgotten

Two Notes: David Bohm and Negative Knowledge

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Listen starting at about Minute 14:30, here:

Here’s the key quote, which is a perfect summary of what I meant by 1) Negative Knowledge and 2) the positive movement of thought, which can result in a swing towards Literalism and all the vicious circles this confusion and self-deception inevitably generates; or it can swing towards a swifter, metaphoric mentality, as long as negative awareness keeps the positive aspects of thought in check (not controlled, but stripped of self-deception perhaps):

Bohm: “… in physics you could use a measuring instrument in 2 ways, the positive and the negative. Like an electric current, you can measure. You can measure the current by the swing of the instrument. Or you can use it in what is called the Wheatstone Bridge, where the reading you look for is a null reading; a null reading indicates harmony or balance of the 2 sides as it were. So if you are using the instrument negatively, then the non-functioning of the instrument is the sign that it is working right. Could we say the brain may have used thought positively to make an image of the world… K: which is the function of thought … B: …One of the functions of thought. The other function of thought is negative, which is to indicate non-harmony….”

I have no memory of Bohm saying this, but it obviously made an impact because the entire Negative Geography project is based on that very observation above. Interesting to me, and worth noting as a matter of record.

2nd Note:Read More »

Science, Religion and the Pathless Land

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Justin picture 3
Painting by Justin Adair

Kant described that “pathless land” (that “negative geography”) as a freedom to speak for oneself, trusting one’s own intelligence. And this implied that science at its best recognizes that its theories remain shadows on Plato’s cave. At its best science is attentive to deviations from what is believed to be real. And not in the way Karl Popper conceived of falsification, which is still reductive in its quest for a perfect theory. But rather, at its best science remains alert to what is “false in the true, and true in the false”, as Krishnamurti phrased it.

Creationists have an especially hard time with this. A mentality alert to anomalies in what is true and false doesn’t have a vested interest in defending its stories. The theories of science are not weak because they’re perpetually changing. They’re intended as provisional sketches of a universe wildly erring from anything we imagine. Or as the physicist Hans-Peter Dürr phrased it, “Science also speaks only in parables.”Read More »