Tag: Growth

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?

Read More »

Life, Death and Extinction

negativegeography7 Comments

I can’t understand the relationship (if any) between progress, growth and evolution. They’re entangled, but not equivalent.

The importance of this question will become clear – it’s not an academic issue, but a matter of life, death and extinction.

Let’s just play with this a moment.

(By the way, I refuse to “get to the point”. That’s because everything we “know” only describes a particular spectrum or color or frequency of the issue. We discover as many meaningful angles as possible by spinning the prism of perception around the issue (and around and around). This form of learning doesn’t tend towards conclusion (or points), but is constantly shifting its orientation as we learn, without end. I do this in honor of the Haudenosaunee, on whose land I live. Talking around a subject until there is consensus by communion, not by force).

If pressed, most historians would probably agree that evolution is not equivalent to progress, improvement, advancement or any other comparative terms in any conclusive sense. We might say that a new species is better adapted to a particular niche, but outside that niche the species would no longer qualify as more advanced.

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.

This balanced lateral movement of development and decline is part of evolution. So evolution can’t be conflated with improvement or progress alone. Something needs to die in order for something new to emerge (See “Giving Up and Going On”). This is why we resist change, the half-felt realization that one way or another, if we change, we’ll stop being who we thought we were. Of course, we could also project our identity into the new form of humanity that might emerge and come away feeling optimistic. But the projection of personal identity may be the very quality that the new species drops in order to enter into a wider relationship with the world. So who we think we are ends here one way or another.

When notions of evolution tie themselves too closely to notions of continual advancement we forget to watch for signs of death and decline. Evolution isn’t impressed by big brains, if those brains aren’t capable of changing direction (which requires death). So let’s distinguish extinction from death. There is no evolution without death. For those who change, the old form dies. But extinction is when the old form is entirely eliminated, and no new form crawls out of the tarpit in its place. Extinction is the absence of life and death.Read More »