Category: Notes

Concluding Note on “Future Determining Past”

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The entrapment implied in “the past constantly determining the future” is broken by realizing that the so-called future (this new Now) can even more freely and open-endedly determine (or utterly abolish) the past and all its pains and sorrows.

Take war, for instance (please). It’s nothing but a delusional chain of cause and effect (aggression and counter-aggression), each claiming the other started the chain.

But a chain of events has no real beginning or end, because it starts and stops in the present imagination. We can always imagine a new cause. But what we haven’t tried to do very often is stop re-imagining an outdated and deadly past. That’s because we’re afraid of the quiet absence of our dramas (and our Selves) more than war and misery itself.

In other words, a chain of events is based on the belief that the past causes the future — some ill deed by another person or group “forces us” to act in retaliation. And this retaliatory act justifies the righteousness and vengefulness of the ones retaliated upon, and vice-versa, ad infinitum. Therefore, we chain ourselves to the past and then measure our progress by how much effort we put into pulling on the chain.

But if we understand that “the future determines the past”, then we see that what we do now (in the so-called “present”) forms the chain (or breaks the chain). The past has nothing to do with it, because the past and future don’t really exist except in our imagination of them in the “present”. So, every retaliation is in fact the originating aggression.

And if we wanted to break the chain of aggression, we can only do it now, by refusing to do the bidding of the past and walking away from the chains of aggression. But we don’t want to change the past, because it preserves the mirror enemy which gives us our illusion of identity. So “the future determines the past” is a very under-used human potential for immediate and drastic change.

And this applies even to the smaller, mind-forged chains of our personal history and self-images. Whatever we did in the past that makes us feel compelled or trapped into being a certain kind of person or perceiving ourselves as a victim or noble sufferer, or wretch, or mundane same old, same old, it is the past that is “causing” us to be this way. And at every single mundane moment of the day and night, we pick up those chains from the past and reattach them to ourselves and then yank in misery.

We want to believe that only the past can determine the future, because it gives us an excuse to wallow in a familiar old Self and keep the empty spaciousness of life itself — the infinite freedom — as far away as possible.

All of it is a dream world reasserting itself over and over again without cause, because it’s all happening Now.

The solution to human misery has always been close at hand. But we reject it simply because the past is a comforting illusion to those who are afraid of the emptiness and silence and peace of not being anybody in particular — losing all that history of misery we’ve come to cherish. This rejection of that loss is suicide, but it’s not polite to mention reality among fellow sleepwalkers. They toss and turn violently in their sleep whenever you mention it.

A Homemade Double-Slit Experiment, Or, How About We All Do Something Utterly Unimaginable (and Perhaps Uncalled for) and Collectively Jump Free from Our Selves (Which is a Title Almost as Long as the Essay Itself)?

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The next sentence took 40 hears to write, but casual readers may only find it long-winded and incomprehensible (even this very “I” itself may feel this way after all is said and done): The human brain’s eye can perform its own double-slit experiment, as the undifferentiated light of a lively and unlocatable universal intelligence hits the receiver of the brain, causing it to quiver and hum in resonance, and produce the reflected light of awareness, which shines out through these two holes in the head, landing on this white page as small particles of “me” consciousness (each sense of “me” a separate thought or projection or dream), each of which define themselves by contrast to all the other dots of “me”; while simultaneously landing on the page as a continuous wave of identity, (yet another thought , projection or dream), but this one forming a narrative line of an imaginary “I” which connects as many of the imaginary dots of “me” as possible, so that this “I” appears to speak as if it were gazing at itself from a third person’s perch, as if it were a real soul, and not merely a virtual reality.

In this culture, the human voice is obliged to speak as if it were real. It has to claim this wavelike “I” as if it were real. Therefore, I become the center of this little world and all these little “me’s” orbit the “I” as different qualities of itself. And in this way, a philosophy of life has been formed, which nobody recognizes as a philosophy because they think it is only reality itself.

What if one wanted to cut through this crapola and speak as a real human being?

Well, the first step would be to recognize the fictional nature of oneself and not be bothered by it. It would mean not feeling lost or frightened by the immensity of our own emptiness, the bottomless pit of oneself and others. It would mean recognizing the waves and particles of “oneself” as a play of the universe itself. Not that one can identify with the universe and call oneself God. That would be another dotty illusion of a wavey gravy hallucination. But merely come to terms with the truer reality of not being able to pin down a gosh darn thing and finding a sense of humor in all this. Free to play in these particles and waves like a dolphin. Free, also, to be “someone” for a moment — anyone, which is the gift of empathy. Or even free to play a role now and then, but only to the extent that they are practical and circumstantial necessities, not confining definitions. And otherwise relaxing into the sustained and expansive mystery of our surroundings. And finding it all downright miraculous, astonishing, infinitely inviting, creative and beautiful. And stop hallucinating a hellhole and living out this preposterous nightmare of personal and cultural drama.

To stick with the theme of “jumping“, what if we jumped free even from ourselves? Nothing would befuddle the demons of the world more than a human rebellion of this sort at this time and place. They’d fade into nothingness themselves.

If anything, maybe we ARE that nothingness. Let’s stop trying to be someone. We’re emptiness itself. (That’s a negative enough definition to leave us open-ended). Emptiness is good. It’s our domain, not the domain of demons. Demons live in confined spaces. That’s not who we are, that’s only who they fooled us into being.

I go into this far more deeply and soberly in the essay “What Is Self-Knowledge” (one of my best)

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Post-Script: Found this snippet from Tilopa’s “Mahamudra Teaching to Naropa” – Kagyu Lineage:

Although space has been designated empty, in reality it is inexpressible. Although the nature of mind is called clear light, it’s every description is baseless verbal fiction. The mind’s original nature is like space — it pervades and embraces all things

“The Future Determines the Past”

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I’ve vaguely heard in passing the phrase, “the future determines the past.” I believe it came from Youtube titles referencing something from the theoretical edge of physics. But on Youtube, the phrase sometimes serves as esoteric click-bait, producing the mild effect of psychedelic incense, as if it were a wisdom too lofty for daily life.

“Esoteric” essentially means knowledge reserved for a select few. So, it’s a snobby concept. In reality (let’s call it), the “esoteric” is usually just a framework wider than the familiar, until it becomes familiar.

There’s nothing esoteric about the phrase, “the future determines the past.”

This is merely the reverse side of a more familiar illusion of “time.” The past determines the future as much as the future determines the past. Because both past and future are illusory, and both lose their meaning in a timeless awareness, which can’t even be called “the present” (because even “the present moment” is only an illusion of time passing).

So, while it’s easy and familiar to imagine that our actions in the fleeting present (which immediately becomes the past) determine our situation in the future (which means the past determines the future), it’s also possible to see that the future (a later “present moment”) redefines the significance of past events.

For instance, if I’m behaving like a miserable, selfish idiot and someone comes up to me and says, “you’re behaving like a selfish, miserable jerk!” what is the significance of this encounter?

Well, if I go on to live a life brooding with rage at that person, and drink myself into an even more miserable state of selfishness, then the encounter will be significant only as an excuse for becoming even more miserable.

But if I go on to live a life brooding with rage at that person and then wake up one morning and realize that he or she was right, and sober up and face myself squarely, changing my life, then that encounter is significant as a turning point.

What I do in the so-called “future” therefore determines the past.

And this is true at every moment, because there is no real past, present or future, but only an open-ended timelessness that includes all three as abstract derivations.

Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”: A Rake-Handle/Head Collision Sentence by Sentence

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Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song) that changed how you see the world?
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Have you ever accidentally meditated? The key word here is “accidentally” — as in strolling through a peaceful garden and being suddenly clobbered on the forehead by a rake-handle. Instant karma: Instantaneously encountering the consequences of your own unconscious behavior.

This slapstick experience is a kind of split-second meditation. Action and consequence, mindlessness and its inevitable manifestations, are too instantaneously linked to leave any time for an aggrieved imagination of my “self” to erupt and blame the rake, as mindless thought tends to do.

In the instant of the collision, one either gives up the ghostly illusion of one’s own dignified self and laughs at the idiotic nature of existence, sans “me”, or stays trapped in the skull running in circles in search of an escape from the echoing sounds of one’s own circular running.

You know the experience of the internal voice and its endless chatter.

This is the experience of reading Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable.” Either you are transformed in fits of gut-wrenching laughter by these collisions with your own stupidity, or you will have no idea what I’m talking about and will hate the book and never finish it.

And don’t be fooled by the word “meditation.” Although it’s an accurate description of the experience of reading Beckett’s trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable), it’s also misleading in some of the term’s popular guises. By “meditation” here I don’t mean trying to remain peacefully aloof, or sitting cross-legged until one’s eyes cross in pain, or struggling to not struggle.

I mean something that a typical Subject will never Verbalize. No subject, no verb, no observer, no thing observed, no effort, no expectations of peace, but something that stops the little “me” short and reveals the farce of this me’s incessantly noisy reincarnations as “better angels” — these efforts to escape its own noisy disappointments. By meditation, I mean suddenly coming face to face with this ongoing monologue of self-centered thoughts racing across the skull and tripping over themselves in slapstick futility.

The laughter that erupted from “this reading body” (I couldn’t call it “me” at that point) was like a volcanic explosion that changed the geography of this small life. Every sentence gymnastically tripped over itself in mental slapstick, like a literary Charlie Chaplin, landing with sprained expectations, and then blaming the previous sentences for the faults of the present turn of phrase, ad infinitum, like the head of a dog blaming its tail-end for spinning in circles — thereby multiplying the number of reincarnations — each “me” seeking an escape from the “me” of the immediate past.

It was a revelation of reality. It was the most honest thing I’d ever encountered.

Because what I encountered on the page was exactly what I encountered in my own head, albeit in a less raucous, gritty, sublime, and breathtakingly — delicately — insightful manner of speaking. I couldn’t breathe from laughing. There was no time between each sentence to feel idiotic and self-conscious, only space enough for the giddy relief of surrendering to one’s own reflected stupidity, forgiving myself in the absence of time’s excuses.

It was a meditation no less abrupt and unexpected than a rake handle to the forehead.

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

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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 »