Tag: Insight

The Title of the Previous Essay

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Three Riders Fall their Mounts by themet is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

Intro:

Anything with the title, “How that Heals the World”, is likely to be read as a spiritual promissory note.

Taken in the context of this inquiry, however, no such positive promise is possible. And yet, the promissory phrase is intentional.

And although it will turn away the more discerning noses of potential readers, the title stands, because it is precisely this misdirection in the word “healing”, which creates the necessary bathos or humorous fall in expectations, which unlocks the meaning of the essay.

Or, rather, that expectation gets shattered during the course of all these essays; not broken down into the mirror opposite of “healing”, which would merely be a competing concept, such as “harming”. But it shatters my own bloated and self-important understanding of what it means to heal. And this turns the essay itself into a kind of medicine. (At least for me).


This Reversal of Expectations Requires a Good Soaking in Bathos

I use the word “bathos” even though it’s uncommon enough to require a definition. But a long definition will miss the Point. The Point needs to be sharpened into a singular sound.

Bathos: “an abrupt, often unintended, and ludicrous descent from a lofty, serious, or emotional tone to the commonplace or trivial. It functions as a form of unintentional anticlimax, frequently producing a comical or disappointing effect.” (Merriam Webster)

“Bathos”:  The sound falls off the tongue as if from lofty literary heights; as if falling from a high horse, and landing with a hard “Baa” that knocks the wind out of the generous reader. And then the echoing thud of “Thosss” immediately follows; which further fades into the soft aftermath of that S stretching into white noise.

And then, the mildly concussed brain flashes with fragmentary allusions to the contradictory nature of this experience. In the one ear, there’s an allusion to the saying, “he sure took a bath on that deal”. In the other ear, I claim to experience the baptism of a new meaning, the splashing S sound washing away the various motes and beams of delusional expectation.

So, the word “healing” in the title was used bathetically, as an intentional misdirection. And also, as a mild reiteration of the more drenching bathos found in the essay posted last week, titled “Original Negative Geography….”

The humor of that essay (and the humorous point of all of them) is functional, not frivolous.

Because, the “solution” or “healing” here only amounts to giving up the search for an anti-dote beyond noticing the absurdity itself. Until this absurdity is met directly as a preposterous fact, we never give up the busy chase; and our brains trip over themselves from morning to night looking for an exit from its own chaotic search for an exit.

Or, as an old Zenn saying has it: It’s as if we’re “riding an ox in search of an ox.”  

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

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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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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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Practicing a Prismatic Approach on the Matter/Mind Dilemma: Wheels Within Wheels

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I’ll dare to state this as a Negative Truth: Any transition from a lower level of being to a higher order isn’t rooted in the lower order.

An order emerges that exceeds the previous level. But not just exceeds it in power and mass, but in kind. A wholly different organization somehow leaps out of a previous organization without precedent. This lower order can’t give birth to something utterly new without a leap from nothing. So mind doesn’t appear to be a product of matter.

The so-called “new physics” seems to agree. They view the world starting with an infinite potential of information (a form of mind), which precedes the explosion of energy, which condensed into matter. What they’re suggesting is that Mind is the starting point. And Mind is the source of energy, which condenses into matter.

But let’s ask the question anyways: Can matter be responsible for mind?

Is it possible that it is and it isn’t, depending, as always, on context? Is this relationship like a wheel that can be spun in both directions when needed? If we look at the universe as starting with an explosion of energy, we will watch that energy coalesce into matter, which grows in complexity until it produces brains and minds. From there, we’ll also see a secondary wheel spinning in reverse, whereby minds generate energy, and energy is interest, is curiosity, is motivation to re-form matter into tools and computers?

Our mistake might lie in assuming that the wheel only spins in one direction, or starts at the same place. Or is operating on only one level at a time. What if matter, mind and energy are three phases of the same ungraspable movement, spinning in all imaginable ways in any context, wheels within wheels?Read More »

Post-Modernism as a Depersonalization/Derealization Crisis

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Between the idea
And the Reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

From “The Hollow Men,” by TS Eliot

I notice that I share a fundamental starting assumption with post-modernism – the realization that everything is a story, and the impossibility of obtaining “positive certainty” about the full nature of anything.

Even the factual things people do manage to measure with precision are already fictional distinctions premised on limited assumptions. We imagine different ways of separating and measuring what is otherwise an infinite but unrealized potential, the so-called Void.

And I understand (but don’t share) their tendency to make no distinction between thought and thing, because the “thing” is also a thought. Everything we know is put together by narrative – it’s all a fiction. Peering through the post-modern lens, everything, in other words, is just language. From this angle there is no reality beyond language, or no meaning beyond what language ascribes.

There is insight here, but there is also a very subtle blunder. It’s the same one I made as a teenager when I fell into a depersonalization/derealization crisis, which is a terrifying physical and psychological conviction that nothing is real.

Here’s what this post-modern insight misses: If all conclusive meaning (Truth or Reality) is fictional, then this information itself – this negative discovery – is an example of an insight that is non-fictional, non-linguistic. “Truth” doesn’t disappear, but changes at this juncture from positive certainty to negative discovery. Truth changes shape but doesn’t disappear.

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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 »

A New World Is Only a New Mind

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I’m picturing a mostly unconscious human being – a mind occupied all day by video games, food, sex, drink, and sleep. Or I could picture a corporate executive who has utterly surrendered to the sociopathic profit motive, perhaps somebody at Shell who has helped to bury the science on climate change. Or even myself more often than I care to admit – my thoughts like mice constantly scurrying to the higher end of a perpetually sinking ship.

But it’s all the same state of mind in one fundamental way at least – a mind perpetually busy trying to outrun itself, trying not to notice the unfathomed compulsion that keeps it busy. In this state of mind (if there aren’t sufficient distractions available) the tendency is to feel subjected to thought, tossed and turned by thought. To avoid the sensation of drowning in this tumult, an inner director, a thinker in charge, a focus of Self, is created, which seems to be a retroactive gloss that thought itself compulsively places over its own shenanigans to retain an illusion of order and control. But in this state of mind there is only a running script (though ad libbed) in which this fantasy of a director (a Me playing the starring role) ends up organizing what is still only a compulsive escape from its own unfathomed turmoil.

I need to emphasize this distinction between people and the habits of thought that hold them captive, otherwise I fall into the common misconception that people who think and do ugly, evil things are inherently (in their blood and bones) ugly and evil, and not merely ill with thought. If I blame the person — even my own starring Self — too much (and I often do) I become susceptible to the illness itself, willing to injure that person just to stop the ridiculous ideas driving them (or me). Then the distinction between these dimensions of life (between the actual human being and the thoughts driving them, between territory and map) is lost, and then I’m driven by the unfathomed compulsions of thought, and capable of ugly, evil things.

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We Are Like Squid: The Gift of Shape-Shifting

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“He explained that [shamans] see infant human beings as strange, luminous balls of energy covered from the top to the bottom with a glowing coat, something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly over their cocoon of energy.

He said that glowing coat of awareness was what the predators consumed, and that when a human being reached adulthood, all that was left of that glowing coat of awareness was a narrow fringe that went from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permitted mankind to continue living, but only barely.

As if I were in a dream, I heard don Juan explaining that, to his knowledge, man was the only species that had the glowing coat of awareness outside that luminous cocoon.

Therefore, he became easy prey for an awareness of a different order; such as the heavy awareness of the predator. He then made the most damaging statement he had made so far. He said that this narrow fringe of awareness was the epicenter of self-reflection where man was irremediably caught. By playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion.

They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our pseudo-concerns.”

Carlos Castaneda — “Active Side of Infinity”


A prismatic perspective changes the nature of a conversation. When we realize that thought is not actual, but fictional, then answers, and the deceptions necessary to defend those answers, both go extinct. They become archaeological artefacts of a world that has ceased to exist.

We stop trying to compete to be right the moment we realize that nothing we say is right.

In fact, nothing we say is even Close to being Right, because what we Say about life and life itself are composed of utterly different substances.  The map can’t get closer to being the place itself, no matter how precise it tries to be. They are different substances entirely and never the twain shall meet.

But in this case, we’re making maps of a world that becomes more complex and profound as we learn. So beliefs are essentially out of date and primitive the moment they’re formed.

Out of date if they’re proposed as answers, that is. But they become more profound as metaphors – freer to experiment with angles and stories, because we’ve discarded the burden of being right. So we’re no longer being pressed into working towards a singular conclusion.

And then discussions stop being debates over who is right. We stop acting like prosecutors of one another. We stop trying to undermine an “opponent’s” point of view, because it would be self-limiting. So argument dies and questions become subtle requests for directions to the vantage points being discussed, because every new metaphor adds interest and color to everything.

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