Tag: Thought

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.

The Rebellion Starts Here

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Time to summarize where the series on freedom has gone up till now.

The only concern of these essays is the restoration of the earth’s health.

But how can something as pathetic as an essay contribute to the healing of the earth? The same way any other action performed whole-heartedly contributes, the same way any white blood cell encountering a virus contributes to the healing of the whole population: By realizing and metabolizing the world’s poisons as they circulate within this holograph of the whole, called me. By being an example of healing, by facing my diseased self honestly, allowing the old patterns of identification to die, as they should have died thousands of years ago, before the disease suppurated.

Honesty is the painful act of healing. It’s also the most rebellious act one can undertake in a deceitful world.

This isn’t about learning to play the violin while the world burns. None of these essays are about personal advancement or personal adjustments to a world in its death throes. Those concerns make me sick. I mean “sick” as an accurate metaphor, because the world’s sickness is rooted in a frame of mind that is selfish and short-sighted. We are heading towards extinction from too much personal concern.

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Toxoplasma Mindii: Ideas As Zombie Parasites

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Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need for true ideas. There aren’t any” (Nisargadatta)

Thought tends to run us (ala David Bohm), but it’s such a convincing hallucination that we’re the ones choosing what we think. But usually, we’re just repeating fragments of ideas that have come to us from others, from one-sided, patriotically-distorted historical education, Youtube, echoing chat groups, books, unconscious habits of response in parents and teachers that presume certain “facts” about life (absorbing these philosophies unconsciously). Etc.

How are we supposed to have an idea of our own in this rubble-strewn flood of information? How can we pick and choose what is right or wrong when our basis of decision making also comes from this chaotic flood?

Ironically, we’re not lucid until our thoughts are recognized as a cultural dream into which we were born. We awaken by realizing we’re asleep.

The irony is that real individuality only happens when I realize that thought has carried me away, that beliefs ran me from one blind conviction to another, like cordyceps (the zombie-ant fungus).

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Integrating Mind and Matter: A Playfull Hypothesis

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The following hypothesis won’t be correct, but only at best insightful. From where I stumble through life, no human knowledge will ever be free of distortion, because we can’t pin down the nature of a morphing and multi-dimensional infinity. Therefore, I don’t want to construct a stable theory of reality. I’m offering a playful metaphysics instead, a suggestive cartoon (cartoonish in comparison to the dynamic world), a caricature that exaggerates certain features of reality that more conventional stories and theories have tended to downplay by exaggerating other features.

Metaphysical trips such as this are only built for the short haul. My exaggerated intention is to remove a dogmatic beam from the field of perception. Call it a cultural floater that is blinding us to wider potentials. What I’m doing feels practical, not academic.

Also, I’d like the reader to realize that these essays are not rationally planned. At this point in the essay I’m only pursuing a metaphor that now and then crystallized over the past few months. So I write my way deeper into this vague sense of a vaster formulation hiding in the fog of my own ignorance. I want you to know this, because this is an exploratory journey into the wilderness of ignorance, and I want you to ride along as it unfolds, not as a spectator reading a conclusive script.

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Problem and Resolution: Why Optimism Is Not Necessarily Personal

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Anything and everything, depending on how one sees it, is a marvel or a hindrance, an all or a nothing, a path or a problem (Fernando Pessoa)

Preface: I think the essay “Optimistic Despair” does a better job in this direction. But they do approach the same topic a little differently. It might be helpful to understand that I’m talking about problem solving in general, but also specifically how problem-solving relates to our entanglement in Thought, which is a problem that many people don’t even recognize as a problem. 

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Why are problems sometimes interesting and sometimes frustrating?

I think if we’re too focused on obtaining a solution, a way past a problem, then the persistence of the problem can lead to despair and frustration. But if the problem itself is interesting, if its persistence is seen as the unfoldment of a mystery, then the problem is something we’re enjoying and we’re not merely trying to get rid of the problem.

When it comes to the “problem of Literalism” — which is the problem of thought, of being confused by our projections, as humanity has tended to be — the “solution” to the problem of Literalism is so rare that it either gets dismissed outright as an impossibility, or it tends to get labeled as “enlightenment” or “grace” or some other pedestaled conjecture, which are various forms of escape from the problem itself.

Most reasonable people will try to avoid tackling a problem that almost nobody in history has resolved, such as Literalism. From this personal angle, their hope of resolution is squashed immediately by realizing that almost nobody has ever solved this problem of thought, so why should they? Who are they to imagine that the solution is within reach? To avoid embarrassing delusions of grandeur and inevitable failure a seemingly humbler response would be to ignore the problem.

But this reaction is premised on the desire to get past the problem, rather than enjoy the problem.

But reasonable people don’t enjoy the problem. If they can’t get past it, they don’t want to consider it.

The problem is, we can’t enjoy a problem if we don’t recognize a possibility of resolution. But if we focus too much on resolving a problem, then we’re trying to get past the problem too ambitiously, which means we don’t enjoy the problem, which means the problem never resolves!

So most reasonable people get stuck between these two poles, hoisted on a double-bind that not only blocks any further interest but also wears them out.Read More »

“That’s the Show, Waiting for the Show”: The Mysterious “Subject” that Hides in the Shadow of Attention

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Some might think I’m dawdling over preliminaries. Like I’m endlessly adjusting my coat and tie, but never actually going out on stage and performing anything. All backstage banter.

That’s not wrong. In these essays the subject itself is backstage banter – the behind-the-scenes mumbling in our own heads.

It’s very hard to find anyone raring to talk about the way we frame reality back there. It throws unpleasant light on our habits of denial, repression and justification, which keep us consistent if nothing else. So this subject is almost inherently “uninteresting” to anyone who considers themselves already sane.

Thankfully I don’t. And neither do some of you. However, you’re almost unlocatable as a group. No demographic defines you. So I’m not even addressing you directly. I feel like we’re sitting side-by-side under a tree together, sharing a slightly psychoactive substance. What we have in common is the willingness (I suppose) to recognize a certain insanity in ourselves and not push the subject aside as a dull complacency. We’re willing to see our condition as abnormal, which is a surprising relief. Because if this way of life isn’t “normal”, then we can begin healing. Otherwise it’s just a condition defining us in some conclusive sense. I guess I’d rather be considered insane than evil.Read More »

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 »

Preface to the Essay “The Stupidity of Greatness and the Absurdity of Conflict”

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I’m tempted to apologize for the difficulty of the next essay. There are too many links between seemingly unrelated and perhaps even initially uninteresting or irrelevant ideas. For instance, there are links between the potential for abrupt psychological shifts, self-generated extinction, relativity and evolution. I don’t operate by rationally trying to link these disparate issues. An amorphous lump of loose ends (a chaos hiding an implicit order) involving these various issues grows into an uncomfortable tumor of churning thought. And it’s only when I sit down to write (or contrariwise, if I stumble into an alert and wordless frame of mind) that this amorphous conglomerate of disjointed issues begins to unravel and sort itself out into a more orderly arrangement.

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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 »

A Non-Dogmatic Structure of Thinking

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The Buddha Gate

I wanted to write because I needed to bring some order to the swirling fog of my own experience. Not a belief system that pins thought down too tightly, but a lattice of sorts it can safely grow, so it knows its place and doesn’t keep sprawling chaotically like Kudzu over every aspect of life, drowning out the world in this relentless voice, which is perpetual self-deception.

It’s not easy to look for the source of this restlessness. It’s easier to find a job or some other way of occupying our thoughts at a safe level of magnification. It’s easier to focus on the practical necessities of navigating this crazy highway of life, a perpetual state of semi-emergency that becomes routine, but a tenuous routine that can’t afford to be interrupted by larger questions about the underlying infrastructure of belief we’re riding upon. Accept the crazy beliefs, the nationalism, the war-state, the cut-throat economic system, the values and goals this emergency approach to life forces on us — accept all that at face value and call our subjugation to this mad system of thought “a practical approach.”

(By the way, some people like to say that they’re not philosophers. Still, we’re all running on vast infrastructures of metaphysics unconsciously, in the same way that anyone driving on an interstate is unconsciously following the infrastructure of road-building ideas. We may not consciously reflect on why we’re heading in this or that direction as we exit onto overpasses and circular entrances to a highway, but our lives are following patterns of an infrastructure of belief nevertheless. So we may not be capable of understanding the descriptions of these philosophies, but they’re still under-girding the way we live).

The restlessness is the same for me, but the practical approach wasn’t helpful. And leaving behind the highway metaphor, the practical approach constructs a solid floor to everyday life, and all the restless energy of a constantly swirling brain gets kept in the crawlspace. Then it becomes a taboo or “simply uninteresting and pointless” to look beneath the floorboards at one’s own churning mind. And this is a clever tactic if all you want from life is the kind of happiness that remains circumscribed by a repressed turmoil. And what goes missing in life isn’t missed, because nobody misses what they don’t notice.

But still they compensate themselves for everything that gets left out by making an art out of the minutiae of life, appreciating the “little things” as you would admire a knick-knack shelf, but always remembering that what’s important are the practical necessities of maintaining this bubble of unconscious repression wherein happiness can reign. In fact, the rule is, don’t indulge in any larger questions, which tend to pry open the floor boards and release all sorts of religious and political demons that ruin dinner parties. 

Now and then, of course, a few pressing questions and confusions nevertheless erupt from the floorboards and circle the brain in repetitive patterns all night like giant mosquitos. And until a distraction is found (a way to nail the boards down again), the person is forced to see themselves as powerless victims of these escaped thoughts. And this reinforces the conviction that our own turmoil is something external to us, a fact of nature that can’t change. That’s one of the strongest nails keeping the flooring in place: we’re helpless victims of our own brains, so ignore the brain and just focus on this nice little space we’ve created.

If any readers have made it this far then they also probably can’t ignore the racket from beneath the flooring any more than I can. The pursuit of happiness begins to feel like a shallow sitcom, devoid of all real adventure and danger. 

So you and I (the nervous ones essentially) couldn’t follow their lead and rest comfortably while the floor kept popping and creaking all day. Every belief that was designed to nail down those loose boards — whether it was religious or patriotic or careerist beliefs —  included the same taboo against questioning the framing, which made them feel deceptive.Read More »