Like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem stands as a monument demarcating the limits of rational thought. It stands there at the edge of the cliff of the mind. The theorem boils down to showing that a rational system of thought can either be consistent but incomplete or complete but inconsistent. Think about it like this. If you try to keep your room clean, you will always have something untidy to clean. But if you accept your whole room as it is, it will be disorganized. If you try to be consistent in your cleaning, your attempts will be incomplete. If you try to be complete in your approach to cleaning, your room will be inconsistently organized.

Usually, we stress out about consistency and get slothful in completeness. Consistency makes us feel like we are under something, like we have to obey something. Completeness makes us feel calm and at ease. And we oscillate between panicking over our shortcomings and being apathetic in general. When our responsibilities are nagging us, we rise up from slumber in a hurry, and then give up from the exhaustion. This is how the unhealthy work-life cycle goes, the rat race as they call it. We run in circles from consistent incompleteness into complete inconsistency and back again. When we become frustrated at our incomplete consistencies, we give up on consistency and choose completeness. But when the inconsistency becomes problematic, we return to the consistency model, not knowing how to be consistent and inconsistent. We go between resenting our limitations, our bodies, ourselves for not performing as we are expected, and then resenting the pressure, the expectation to perform and the rational process that produced the stress.

Let’s call the first approach the rational paradigm and the second approach the irrational paradigm. The rational paradigm minds being imperfect. The irrational paradigm minds trying to be perfect. The rational says, you should complete your objectives. The irrational says, you should be complete in your errors. It’s a vicious cycle. So how do we transcend it?

Well, they do not have to be a cycle that we are stuck between. Really, they’re produced by layers in our consciousness that are active whether or not we are aware of it. For one, the perfection we strive for through consistency is achieved through completeness. Think about how someone can stress and strive to perform perfectly at work, doing everything they are told, impressing their boss, trying to act good to customers, but they go home and fret all night because they felt like a failure the whole time. They resent their coworker who isn’t the most active employee but is relaxed, friendly, flexible, dependable. Even when they fail, they are honest and learn from it. This drives a rationalist paradigm person crazy. What they want to do is brought to fruition in the irrationalist paradigm worker. Their completeness doesn’t need to be consistent all the time to be good. They are good enough because they aren’t measuring everything all the time. Their ideals are evolving, they aren’t static rational entities they have to live up to. However, by that same token the irrationalist worker doesn’t get to achieve everything right away. They make more mistakes. Yet they aren’t at odds with themself. They have freedom without perfect performance. They find peace in the perfection of time, for they learn from their mistakes. The rational is always fighting against time, and for that commitment to unreality, they are stressed. But time is money.

You might say that it is good to have an irrational perspective and a rational method, an intuitive mindset behind active reasoning. That you should treat this world as an illusion, a falsity, and that there is no other way to experience life other than this tension. And if you do experience freedom from that tension, it’s otherworldly, impractical, etc. But really, it’s not that being holistic and artistic is the goal of the irrational perspective. The irrational paradigm can be impractical or it can be the trans-temporal fulfillment of the rational paradigm. So, if you understand inconsistent completeness as the fulfilment of the perfection desired by the rational paradigm, then you can jump from the rational paradigm to the irrational without letting go of your desire for fruition. Some would say that this maintains the grasping that is unhealthy, and that desire itself should be let go of, completely. However, what in life is actually that clearcut? And what is wrong with desire in the first place? If your desire is to avoid pain and suffering, then you should cease from existence altogether, stop feeling, becoming psychotically tranquil in your meditation. But if your desire is to resolve pain and suffering, then you should follow existence to its logical end, and see what is there. Well in that case, you actually experience the tranquility of differentiating between the particular and the general, not the body and the mind or the irrational and the rational. There is peace that the general way can feel that the particular cannot and vice versa. By looking at your circumstances as broadly as possible, you can transcend the anxiety of this or that expectation without giving up the expectation. For the stresses of daily life are only some of the stories that flow through our world. Most stories have only a tangential relationship to you, if even that. Most of the anxiety we feel comes from being locked into this or that story, as if it were the whole world, and our perspective gets clouded and hyperfocused. We don’t need to give up on this or that thing stressing us, we need to locate it in a broader context. That’s the solution. You don’t need to give up looking or focusing, you need to give up only focusing. Peace comes through the periphery, achievement comes through focus.

There is much more I’d like to say on this, and most of it I have been struggling to figure out how to say. Many people disagree with me. Yet I understand their perspectives and they do not see mine. Who is more likely to be correct in a disagreement if one person has already understood the other’s point of view but this is not reciprocated?


November 29, 2020
San Luis Obispo