What Is Self Knowledge?

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[The Pari Center plans to publish this in January, 2027].

1) Self-knowledge as a positive list of characteristics


How do I know myself?

I begin by knowing myself as an objective list of characteristics: Likes, dislikes, opinions, habits, values, skills, professions, political orientations, and every other quality imaginable.

I also know myself reluctantly as a list of shadow characteristics, which others often perceive first: impatience, clumsiness, self-obsessions, talking to myself even when others are in the room, a hypocritical love of boxing, etc.

There’s a necessity for these differently sourced lists of self-knowledge. If I don’t notice a tendency to be selfish, lazy, thoughtless, you name it, then self-knowledge is distorted in the preservation of an illusion.

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

If I’m rolling an issue over and over again in my mind (as I tend to do), then some image of myself must have been made to wobble from its pedestal. Even if I’m self-righteously convinced of my own innocence, the emotional and mental energy dedicated to preserving this image indicates a wobble.

The voice is like a press-secretary and press corps rolled into one. And I hardly notice the exhaustion this causes, because it’s standard practice in this culture: conversing with non-existent people in order to convince imaginary people that this list of qualities remains accurate and impeccable.

Or, call it an effective air-defense system that shoots down any speck of honest evidence undermining the falsely idealized Self it claims to be.

But now and then some honest revelation hits home despite this diligence. And the accidental surrender to reality generates a soft breeze of sanity, which cleanses the air momentarily from the fumes of bullshit that the brain produced during the course of the day.

But almost immediately I’ll start downplaying the impact of this moment of truth, trying to steady the wobble or clean up the damage to the fallen icon. And I’ll employ a clever tactic to do this — acknowledging a portion of the exposed corruption by saying something like, “I wasn’t being myself” or “that’s not who I really am”.

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A Ramble on How Too Much Identity and Too Little Self-Knowledge Contributes to our Collective Suicide: Preface to the Essay, “What Is Self-Knowledge?”  

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Seen from Mars, it’s as if human beings as a whole don’t care if they themselves survive (or if other species are allowed to live).

Is this mass suicide?

An indifference to our own collective fate is spreading, even among people who are still devoted to their families. The indifference is justified as a form of realism. If we’re heading towards destruction then realism, they say, is accepting our fate (knowing all living things eventually die anyways).

Indifference to life and death itself is being conflated with realism.

And death as a natural completion of a life-cycle is being conflated with a premature murder/suicide of one another and millions of other species.

This isn’t a realistic or mature regard for life and death, but the very attitude of a person who has resigned themselves to giving up on a complete life and committing suicide before maturation. This “realism” is the suicidal impulse itself.

After all, what are the direct means by which we are prematurely killing ourselves? We’re denying the effects of climate change, indulging in fascism and allowing AI to gain total possession of our minds, and suck the marrow out of life itself, to name just three.

These are the self-destructive behaviors of an immature species, an adolescent species, who has set fire to the house, locked itself in its virtual room, and then climbed into bed to watch a movie with the dog. And when a brother bursts into the room, shouting “fire!”, the adolescent mocks him for his overzealous concern, saying, “calm down and be realistic: we’re all going to die eventually anyways.”

Denial, indulgence and apathy are the justifications for what’s happening, not the mature acceptance of life and death. There is a reason why we make a distinction between murder and natural causes.

I believe it is realistic to say that we are killing ourselves and murdering one another.

But it’s not realistic to accept this situation as inevitable.

Therefore, I’d like to suggest that it’s this lack of self-knowledge, this refusal to self-reflect, learn, change and die naturally to who we are, which is the problem. Suicide and murder are not the acceptance of death, but its denial. We would rather be consumed in a fire we started than give up the illusions of ourselves and allow who we thought we were to die naturally.

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The Two-Edged Sword of Thought and Action; On the Nature of Humor and Sorrow

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Recently, my wife and I drove past a house way out in the country, where 8 chickens were held in a cage that would be small for one. This was just after learning that the killings in Gaza were continuing under the radar; and Trump had just bombed another 20 fishermen for no reason. And Ms. Good had been murdered.

Our efforts to save the chickens became a surrogate attempt to put an end to all that pain and sorrow. In other words, it was futile. We could do nothing but contemplate a midnight raid, which would have caused the poor, ignorant woman in the shack to lose her mind. Because in some strange way she loved the chickens, or thought she did, and had raised them from eggs, she said. And there was nothing the sheriff or the animal welfare department could do under current laws; and we had no place to bring the chickens even if we stole them.

And after contemplating the possibility of losing my mind over an issue that was so small in comparison to what is happening in the broader world, I had to accept the pain. I had to admit that there is no possibility of separating the pain of life from the love of life. And that we live in a world that must always teeter between hell and heaven. And that we have to find a way to move through this border land without sinking into pits of despair or indulging in a transcendence too high for our tears to reach the earth.

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The Real Revolution Hasn’t Started Yet

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“…something that wants to rise and shake itself free” (William Carlos Williams)


I had a fairly disconcerting experience when I was a 9th grade spectator at our school’s varsity basketball game. It was a rural school, Kindergarten through 12th in the same building. Maybe 30 kids per grade, so we knew pretty much everyone, or so I thought. But as I was watching the game, one of the players, maybe two years old than myself, a member of our church, our mothers were friends, became instantly unrecognizable.

I lost the flow of the game and became hypnotically focused on this one person. It’s probably a widespread phenomenon. It’s what some call “wordnesia.” Except in this case, it’s not the word that looks suddenly mispelled or inexplicable or weird, but a human being. Someone I knew on the periphery.

And even if it’s common, I want to magnify the moment, because there’s something almost pleasantly psychedelic about the experience, and also significant in some way that otherwise I ignore.

At any rate, I had this Wordnesia experience of a person when I was in 9th grade. I tried to juggle the knowledge of his “familiarity” with his sudden alien strangeness. His bearing no longer conformed to anyone recognizable. But I was also noticing him for the first time. Noticing the discrepancy between the mask of confidence he was trying to wear (the identity he was trying to present), my interpretation of his projected identity, and the unfamiliar reality of himself, which I’d never noticed until that moment.

And the alien feeling spread to the entire gymnasium. My hometown crowd, all familiar faces, looked like they were all struggling with masks. It was as if the known character of each person was peeling from their bodies, revealing a routine pretense, which was their public persona, which also revealed something of the real human being struggling with fear and doubt.

I don’t know if that’s how I would have interpreted at the time. But I’m doing so now, because I recollect a feeling of dislocation, and alien strangement in myself, when I looked around the gym. It was like a contagious form of wordnesia, or so I feared.

In the disjointed chaos of the moment (and I think it was a close game, so the energy of the crowd was high-strung, I started to notice the chaos of myself more than anything else, because the isolation turned me inwards, where I found nothing but a bundle of herky jerky movements that I vaguely but not gladly recognized as myself.

I tried to snap out of this alternate reality, but it stuck around for a long half-hour and then perhaps a milder version never fully dissipated the rest of my life. At any rate, thereafter I became even more self-conscious, more herky-jerky, and felt more like a fraud who didn’t know how to stop being a fraud.

But at the same time – and this is far more important – the effect was not one of haughty disdain for myself or others, but an unprecedented feeling of sorrow for the real human beings I’d never noticed before. Beneath the smiles and cheers they looked sad or tired.

This self-ennobling observation can’t be fully corroborated. But I do (I insist) feeling oddly sad in the midst of this somewhat pleasant natural high.

Sheer forgetfulness may have been the accidental drug, but it did seem to open a glimpse into more subtle realities simmering beneath the surface presentation; beneath the scripts that often trap us into being people we weren’t meant to be. Where familiarity once was, now bewildered human forms could be discerned. The vague outline of a soul writhing in a spider’s web or a cocoon, depending on whether they would emerge or not.

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Aphorisms, V.3

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  • 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. *
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Aphorisms, V.2

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  • 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. *
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Aphorisms (or Short Notes to Clear the Attic), Volume 1

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  • 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.
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Preface to “Aphorisms”

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I’m a little embarrassed to title something “Aphorisms”, because it seems a little too pretentious and presumptuous. But I recently overheard 30 seconds of a book review of some philosopher’s book of aphorisms as I was walking past a radio. And the reviewer noted that aphorisms tend towards concision (obviously) and humor. And that’s the combination I need.

And when I started scanning through what I already wrote, I realized that I might be able to distill the essence of all these words to a nub, or many little nubs. And when I started throwing them in a list, I noticed that there’s a natural ebb and flow to the nubs. And with a little rough tweaking here and there, and the addition of a few new nubs, the ebbs and flows take on a certain rhythm and direction, without the need for a unifying voice or any tiresomely self-conscious Self, such as the one who is speaking now.

Admittedly, these nubs, ebbs and flows still came out to 37 pages, which doesn’t seem too concise after all. But that’s 6,129 fewer pages than the essays in total. So, count yourselves lucky.

I broke them into three “volumes” (so far). And I’ll post one every few days. I allowed some similar observations to sneak into each volume, because the different contexts add enough nuance to justify the repetition.

So, the whole thing ends up forming something in between an essay and a disjointed list of one-liners. They were fun to compile, tweak and expand. So, I hope they are fun to read.

I’m not sure this ends up “better” or “worse”, but it’s different. And as a different “approach” (an almost headless approach, trusting the connective tissue to form on its own, trusting it to make more sense than the sum of individual observations) it cuts out the middleman (“me”), and hones in on some of the essential insights that might otherwise get lost in the verbose flow of narrative. (I mean, I can’t picture too many people who actually read all this stuff. So, this is like digging up a few of the potatoes that probably got lost in the bed).

So, maybe it’s both better and worse, because these “nubs” also miss more subtle narrative themes that are only possible within the more long-winded essays (which includes this preface).

And now there’s the possibility of a hybrid form of essay, which I might try later.

I should note that any hyperlinked asterisks lead to the essay where the aphorism (or something similar) can be found in its natural habitat.

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.