Tag: Collapse

Insight As the Deletion of Positive Knowledge, and How that Heals the World

negativegeography2 Comments

It’s not my “knowledge” that I’m sharing, but my encounters with absences of knowledge.

That’s how I can remain so confident even though I don’t really know anything. I know what I can’t know, but that’s an eye-opening kind of knowledge, because it dissolves conclusion and reopens the field of inquiry.

After all, if I focus on most of the rote knowledge I “know” it begins to turn foggy and evaporate into immaterial assumptions. Just like an atom — the closer I look at a material form the more it turns to emptiness and occasional energetic flashes from the void.

This generates a greater sensitivity to the disintegrating edges of knowledge, which is eye-opening.

At present, most don’t tend to question Knowledge itself (or examine its fabricated nature). We tend to see through our certainties only in flashes. So, at irregular intervals, holes in the fabric (in the yarns) are pierced here and there by insights. And at present, we seem compelled to re-connect these holes (or dots), in order to restore our confidence in the fabrications and blanket assumptions to which we still cling for security.

But by now, the yarns that filter our vision are patchwork quilts with ragged and disintegrating edges. After each tear in our belief systems, we have rushed to repair the damage. And now all the patches – all the efforts to hide contradictions, hypocrisies and white lies as a way of extending the life of the yarn – are disintegrating faster than they can be repaired.

For many, this can induce a panic at the loss of certainty, and the exposure of an emptiness in our own fabrications of identity. So, some are intent on restoring the “greatness” of the old fabric in some regressive revolution.

Or – and this is even more difficult to notice – some will discern just enough holes in the fabric to propose an entirely new yarn that would resolve some of these problems. Perhaps socialism (my preference, given the alternatives), or religion, or communism or fascism or a new capitalism, or a panopticonic AI state run by a self-described elite hiding in some redwood groves in northern California.

These are all attempts to re-engineer a better fabric of perception to cover the emptiness behind all these best-laid plans.

Maybe what we’re experiencing is no more confusing than what a caterpillar experiences as its cocoon deteriorates. But we’re like caterpillars who keep re-building the disintegrating cocoon of Thought (of rational planning and top-down control) that has (arguably) served us so well in our development till now.

But insights are damaging to any fabric of belief woven too tightly. And we are resisting the insights that would break down these cocoons.

An insight tends to be associated with a “new idea” (a new fabrication). But an insight is mainly an erasure. It’s the negative force that removes a beam from the eyes (which allows new thoughts to form).

But we’ve never had a sufficient insight into the fabric of thought itself; only into particular forms of that fabric. So, we have focused on weaving together new narratives of social organization as a corrective. But so long as we fall for the delusion that thought can be perfected, this amounts to pulling the wool back over our eyes with a new and inevitably beam-imbedded yarn.

So, what is an insight if it isn’t used to fill the hole with a new idea?

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Why the Restoration of the Prism Is Not a Matter of Will

negativegeography1 Comment

How do we restore the prismatic flow to human culture without forcing it, without imposing our will from the top down?

The personal lens has mainly become psychotic in this culture, blocking access to wider views. And if we learn to change without force on a narrow or personal level – without introducing this divisive top-down mentality when we’re alone — then there is no other obstacle to a communal and cosmic clarity.

So what I write about are the aspects of a new vision that are wavering for me personally. I’m nothing if not inconsistent. But I’m learning things from these wavering encounters with sanity, more specifically from these failures to retain sanity. Every failure reveals the nature of the madness. (One thing I learn is it’s not “my mind”. The system of thought is a shared system of tracks for trains of thought. So whatever I learn about this situation on a personal level is applicable to everyone else (and vice versa, what you learn)). And writing is one way for a span of attention to widen enough to discover the underlying system of switches (so to speak), which keep the personal trains of thought circling on a narrow gauge, falling for the delusion that they’re running on an isolated system of tracks. And this attention repairs or alters those switches, releasing this human energy from that self-centric circularity and allowing the human (shared) mind to rediscover a wider fluidity of movement between the narrow, the mid-range and the long views.

This is important: In this particular fiction I’m writing (and every essay is a fiction) the personal point of view represents no independent being. It’s a story from the microscopic point of view. Here, likewise, the communal lens is a story from the shared, communal point of view. And the cosmic lens is a little different (as I tried to show in Part IV, “What Is Radically New”).  We need cosmic stories (myths and theories), but not as a primary point of access to the cosmic. The cosmic is mainly contacted by negation (by the realization that all of our myths and theories are cartoons of “something more” that can never be known in any conclusive sense). The cosmic lens can only be accessed when we’re in a non-Literal or metaphoric state of mind, whereby the Self is also felt as a cartoon depiction of something beyond the reach of knowledge. In other words, the Self here is not seen as an actual source of this life, but only as a cartoon representation of the whole from a microscopic perspective.


We Don’t Change by Trying to Change (there’s no top-down change)

We don’t change by trying to change. (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 reason a “decision to change” sometimes seems to help arouse energy is because the “decision to change” is a kind of microscopic myth or creed that gives us an illusion of something we can trust as a crutch.

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