— Middayish a few hours after the cessation of a long storm – January 29, 2021
Every point is the apparent center of the world to whomever is looking at it.
Every observer is the actual center of the world to every observer.
Observation is the universal center of every observed world.
There must be some range of other centers for minds fundamentally different than ours, depending on the degree of difference.
There may be a cosmic center beyond minds.
There may not be a cosmic center beyond minds.
Self-gratification is not greedy, nor is reasoning anti-aesthetic, because the problem is in the fixation on boundaries, not the boundaries themselves. The import of this is that humility can have a high view of oneself and that the meaning of art can be logically traced and quantified. The obstacle is in the compulsively rational attitude, not the rational mind itself. Nondual awareness does not have to appear expressly, since correspondence is the notion of dualistic logic. Dualism is a subset of nondualism. No one has ever shown that it is impossible to put math to the meaning of art, they have only rebelled against mathematical reasoning for rudely boxing it in. Reductionism is an opponent to artistic qualia not logic itself. Engineering quality can be quantified more readily than artistic quality because engineering systems are defined in terms of their parts. Artistic quality does not work linearly, but that does not mean that math is outright inapplicable to art. It only means that the sort of valence-structures art conjures must at least also be nonlinear, so that mathematical models of artistic meaning are likewise nonlinear. I propose that such math would trace bundles of connectedness in various cognitive states, tracing syntactical structures and the flows of information exchange between hierarchical relationships. Artistic meaning, the qualia of it, is thus not reduced to the appearance structure, but is in theory equivalent with the represented network between the cognitive states experiencing the qualia. There must always be the distinction between third person and first person for qualitative leaps between cognitive states—this cannot be reconciled. But that irreconcilability does not mean conflict; conflict only equates to difference and boundary only equates to division when there is a tyrannical logic presiding over how the world should be. The two formulations of information—the objective observer and the subjective observer—are connected by means of a non-anthropocentric principle of generalization for how information is translated. The qualitative difference between objective and subjective observation is real to being human. But that there is such a difference is not accounted for by the human experience alone. There is a nonhuman ground that this experience belongs to. Thus, the relationship between the objective and subjective may be amenable to rational abstraction, but in essence it is an irrational abstraction: not a merely aesthetic abstraction, since human aesthesis is still human, but a genuinely otherworldly abstraction. That sort of information belongs to a nonhuman mind, to a nonhuman class of information, and insofar as we can model it using human reasoning, human reasoning can translate beyond human context. This is limited, of course, but rather than being utterly inaccessible, a nuanced climb down the tree limbs of consciousness, translating one branch of thought to its neighbor, could lead to a universal communication of meaning. Of course, it is a radically different attitude than the compulsively anthropocentric, appearance-based mind, but it is different by means of finding tangible resolution to the anthropocentric quest for perfection. This would not be a universal basis spanning all forms of cognitive structures, but would be a crossing-point, a hub, a nexus, by which varieties of minds could communicate. It is by no means necessary for such a hub to exist at the primordial level, for otherwise why would there be evolution of differentiated species if all information “spoke one language?” There is no necessary correspondence between chronological convergence and cognitive convergence. There may never be a lingua franca to all information, as there may be many lingua francas to varieties of locally compatible worlds. Even so, let’s hypothesize that there is a possible universal communication scheme (which I think of as not one language but as a meta-scheme, a set of several potential such languages). Such a universal communication scheme may cease to be communication at all as we know it, but whatever analogues “exist” from one realm to the next can be traced perhaps endlessly until some apparently irreparable obstacle occurs; though, I’m doubtful there is one. For the laws of nature are happenstances, not actual eternal forces. Imagine the information momentum of meaning cascading down and across through the varieties of cognition, the compatibilities and incompatibilities, the exchanges of material forms. What is this momentum?
— Morning on a Breezy Not Cold Winter Day – January 17th, 2021
“Why did you do that?”—it’s an outwardly innocuous question. Curiosity, usually, or some atypical rationale that seems behind things provokes the question. Sometimes a desire to know what it is for oneself or for some reason that seems relevant. Sometimes, of course, the question is delivered in earnest frustration, or as a stoic act of calming one’s frustration to foster a peaceful interaction. Most of the time, people do not really want the real answer to this question. To explain anything truthfully would require all knowledge about everything preceding it, since any one event derives from everything related to it. If you wanted to know, really, why I left my kitchen floor dirty, I could explain to you all of my psyche for why and how I did that, all of my personal history of cleaning, and all of the physics involved in my actions and motives. I could draw a line back to everything contributing to my act of leaving the dust on the kitchen floor. Your question, “why did you do that?” is not really what you are asking. It is a presentation of how you want your wondering to come across. Really, it is for convenience; for we know intuitively that there is an enormous amount going on inside and beneath our thoughts, so we ask something standard in nuanced ways, hoping to get a satisfactory answer. Furthermore, it feels inordinate for someone like me to try and give you the real answer to your question. Ultimately, questions about reasons and motives for doing things are searching for convenient depictions of reality, so that there is a sense of continuity between individuals communicating. So we use falsehoods and fictions as presentable means for connection. The reality for any action under question is much fuzzier than any description could easily, practically, or even possibly afford. Of course, this means that we accept a split persona between what we are really and what we and others present ourselves to be. And that dissection is really painful and problematic, so it would seem that to avoid incurring those problems, we ought to try and get to the real heart of the matter with everything. But, it seems this is impractical and difficult and involves being exposed, misunderstood, misrepresented, or even being seen truthfully. Your weaknesses and the weaknesses of others become apparent in trying to avoid a split persona; some of those weaknesses are actual to your nature, whereas other weaknesses are culturally assigned. So whenever we try to do away with explaining ourselves as presentations, we deal with real and appropriated vulnerabilities. Now, it would feel safer to be able to describe yourself however you like without thought of criticism. Yet, your description of yourself would almost surely fall short of what you actually are, since it is so terribly difficult to say the truth about anything. And thus the other person can be an advantage in conversation as an ally for uncovering what you actually are. Such encouragement need not be without criticism or dissent for it to be constructive. For if all encouragement were merely affirmative, then encouragement would be an avoidance of the uncontrollable and the unknowable. Encouragement is by nature affirmative to an individual’s wellbeing, but it does not take the form of opposing a human psyche’s development. Love, not rule, takes center stage in encouragement. For though both the giver and recipient of encouragement do not see clearly what it is that a person is motivated by, what becomes clear is this darkness of knowledge. We know best by unknowing. And now we’ve come full circle to the fictions we present each other with in explaining ourselves. It seems impossible or simply not practical to present ourselves one way or another. Plus, presentation is helpful and interesting and often fun. But if what we are is conflated with how we seem, then we become fearful and life is a dread. We present reality fictitiously not because there is no truth, but because we know best by our movement of persona, our aura. Yet, this does not eliminate the falsehood, the damage, the dissection that can occur in representing motives inadequately. Yes, most of the time our fictions cause no or very little harm; but in the aggregate, they take on a life of their own that does cause quite a bit of harm. One only needs to look to politics to see this played out quite dramatically and with a lot of real impact on the world. So, we’ve come to a point where we recognize that it is healthier to move away from representing yourself and others as mere presentation, but without presentation we find it hard to connect with reality. So there is a honing process with no determinate end corresponding to the real reason for any event. As an aside, it’s worth noting that we understand causes and reasons excessively simplistically: it is shorthand to say that the light of the sun heats the Earth, and equally so for almost any causation process. There is not one thing that does something to another, for any event is composed of countless other events, whether smaller or larger, local or distant, momentary or ongoing, consequential or accidental. But we can’t describe anything completely or consistently, so we’re left with convenient abstractions, and truth is not false but a decision-operator. When we hone in on what we are considering, we find levels of detail at which the character of some process is a sufficient condition for the event of interest to tend to happen. For instance, a sailboat tends to move when its sails are up and the wind is blowing, so we could say that the wind causes the sailboat to move. Without the wind blowing and the sails hoisted, there is no forward motion of the sailboat. Wind is not really what causes the sailboat to move. Nor is it the electromagnetic fields in the molecules of the air molecules resisting those of the sail molecules, for there are smaller and smaller levels of detail at which the event happens. And we could also move toward universal criteria or larger scales. We could say that the sailboat moved because moving fluids tend to push on stationary and unfixed objects, a universal characteristic of objects. Or we could say the boat moved because there the Earth was turning to afternoon and the sunshine imparted energy to the area where the boat was floating, including changing the sailor’s mind to head back to shore before nightfall by opening his sails. It is harder to attribute causation to bigger scales, easier to look at smaller composite scales and to look at universal categories. The idea of cause becomes more objective in the smaller direction and more generic in the larger direction; idea becomes objectified as one looks into the composition of a causal phenomenon, object becomes idealized as one looks into the context of a causal phenomenon. Thus, there are nodes of efficient conversation, and these we call causes, though they are not really the causes by themselves, for small causes in aggregate compose what we deem as causes, which are themselves subsets of much larger, universal processes of causation. Thus, truth of a cause for your doing something is not something you know really but is something you describe according to efficient reason. If there is a reason that serves as a sufficient condition for your action, we call that the cause, though it is not really the aggregate cause. Every event is a perception of an aggregate of causes that we pick and pluck out of the stream of awareness, an apprehension of various processes that consistently happen in diverse circumstances and now appear in some specific instance. Essentially, to be content and truthful in conversation about our reasons for doing things, we have to move away from the narrowness of assumed presentation into the perplexing and loving wilderness of honing onto efficient descriptions.
— Midday on a Warm Winter Day – December 18th, 2020
I am enamored with the Medieval period because of its anonymity. Very much like our own time, the sense of individuality was heightened. Life was short and hard. There was not great possibility of improving circumstances. So you lived your life in a state of ambivalence and freedom. Now, there is so much information, that people do not care. Our consumption and magnanimity is making us creatures of apathy and whimsy. We no longer stake our hopes in great institutions as we once did, for those brief illumined periods where it seemed great was possible. Of course, today’s generalities are yesterday’s complexities. In the Middle Ages, things were not so simple and yet they were simple. Just as then as in now, we turn to the simplicity of the ordinary because that’s all we have. In past times, in those intermediary times between the dark and the post-enlightened, before the twilight age which we are now in and after the middle age which we were in once, people acted with knowledge of power. Then as now, we know our limits, whether we admit them or not, they are there. For a while, we had the opportunity to access more than nature could resist. Now, as then, nature is pushing back, not because of our limits, but because of hers. In light of great suffering joy blossoms with mighty faith and eternal gratitude.
— Early Afternoon on an Overcast Fall Day, as if it’s going to rain but I guarantee you won’t this time of year – October 22nd, 2020
Moral conduct is doing everything it takes to ensure your own wellbeing. In the process of trying to control your environment, you will discover that there are limits to what you can control. Most things cannot be strictly controlled, only influenced. Thus, to actually ensure your own wellbeing, you must understand, respect, and coordinate with what is uncontrollable. The more conditions that you extrapolate this out, the more you will realize that getting what you want is best achieved by helping others. Helping yourself becomes a deliberate act of helping others. Moreover, you will come to discover that wants have a fuzzy relationship with needs, and that a sense of complete control is actually not necessary to be at peace, nor is a sense of complete tranquility necessary for peace. In the face of chaos and conflict, you can survive and even thrive. Even when you are on the brink of total ruin, your needs falling through left and right, the impermanence of it and the connectedness you have with all things ensures that your suffering is not in vain. Your good will rise again.
Innumerable people believe that moral conduct is denying and abstaining from self-interest. Far from it. You are not separate from everything else, and so seeking your own good to the maximum extent inevitably leads to an understanding that your wellbeing is interwoven with the wellbeing of everything else. You don’t need to hate yourself to love others, to love God. To love yourself fully, you will come to love everything else too. In fact, the greedy egotism people associate with self-interest is actually a very small amount of self-interest. If you really want to protect yourself, you will go beyond the illusion of a sense of control to actually obtain control. And this control is by nature limited. The way of abstaining from the self is a shortcut to the same result of universal interconnectedness, yet all too often it leaves the self in an illusion of opposition to the whole. How tragic!
Maybe we wouldn’t be in so many crises if the teachers of morality didn’t for so long believe in a Mother Teresa sort of absolute self-denial. No pain, no gain is a terrible approach to being good. The horrors of communism, fascism, and the capitalistic raping of nature all spawn from a lack of love.
Imagine how much suffering we could prevent if we simply learned from our mistakes and taught others not to do the same, and we learned from others’ mistakes. Beneath the ceaseless grace of sunshine, which replenishes us after each winter season, we could undo the negative fallout of future events. Effectively, we can prevent the destruction of our planet’s vivid order by learning to harness change and channel it toward the good of all, rather than disposing of its spoils. Entropy cannot be prevented, but it can be used to preserve life for all. Just as every rabbit carcass feeds the vultures, the death of every cell in your body can perhaps be used to feed the body. Purpose and identity are not subject to the law of decay in the same way that matter is. Insofar as purpose and identity can be manifested in material form, the final destination of evolution is a cosmos where everything is permanent and changing.
— Late Afternoon on an Overcast Fall Day, as if it Rained but Didn’t – October 20th, 2020
“Oversimplifying” is an oversimplification. When you describe something in a simpler way than the thing itself, do you actually do anything that is over? Do ideas have a size, as if some ideas are bigger than others? Do they have an orientation, as if you could be over or under it? Of course, most of language relies on metaphor—that’s not my problem with it. What’s bothersome is that people think that the solution to oversimplification is to ignore the fact that you say things wrong or repress your desire to think freely because it’s not good enough.
— Mid-Afternoon on a Hot Cirrostratus Day – October 16th, 2020
The mind is a body; the body is a mind.
Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form.
The Son is begotten of the Father; the Spirit proceeds from them both.
If the mind is a body, then contemplation is not a waste of time, for it is active. Just because thoughts cannot be seen does not mean they are not real. If the mind is a body, then it is objective, and so it can be treated with holy indifference, detachment—the attitude of great skill.
If the body is a mind, then it can be used to explore and process through things. One does not need to feel at war with the outside world. For just as the thoughts and character qualities belong to oneself and do not require the obligation of external expectations, insofar as the body is a mind, insofar as we belong to a great world-mind, insofar as all beings share in one nature we can attribute the same compassion as we hold toward ourselves. Insofar as we lack self-compassion, we have failed to recognize the nature of mind.
There is something like a neuron that is not limited to nervous systems.
— The Beginning of Evening on a just-cleared June Gloom – June 27, 2020
Who reads this blog? Mostly friends, family, acquaintances. I do not expect many. However, I feel as though there has been a shift in mood in my readers. From around the middle of April, my articles became criticisms of Christianity, mostly. Why is this?
One of my readers was writing their own blog, and I noticed their words were related to mine ante res. They were casting down my opinions in their own mind with a Christianized version. This felt competitive. It discouraged me from writing beautiful, enriching, cosmopolitan things. Suddenly, I could no longer please my audience. An associate cast me down in their heart. Since then, I have dedicated my efforts to inciting their hatred toward me. I wanted them to get off my back by me continually disproving their viewpoint. Hopefully, this would cause them to become displeased with me, and thereby disentangle their motives. However, they are committed to disentangling from nothing. Their desire is to compulsively batten down the hatches on every prism of reality, bind every grain of life. Moreover, my desire is to please them and be seen in response. Suddenly, their intuitive action led me to feel insecure about my blog, where once I had felt free. Another associate of mine told me that the best blogs are the ones that most people hate, that I’m free to write whatever I want. However, if one is to be invested in subjectivity and objectivity, partiality and impartiality, survival and transcendence, or creativity or love properly, then you are open to dissecting opinions, even when they harden, calcify their own hearts against yours. Perhaps I am discouraged by their rejection of me, their failure to see me, and my own pragmatic desire to see that perfected. Relentlessly desiring union. Fusion.
It is not enough to say, “It is just my duty to love on them.” This is, in essence, evidence of a harbored partiality toward idealism injected hostiley into physical concretion. I never knew you.
— Late Afternoon underneath a Cool June Gloom – June 27, 2020
Umberto Eco on internet use:
“Let me conclude by speculating about the destiny of reality in a virtual world. If not for the whole of the next millennium, at least now and for the following years, we will face the World Wide Web. Few evenings ago I had to check a certain quotation (I don’t tell you which one, and you will see why). Thus I asked for something in Altavista. I found a site but – while exploring it – an appealing link sent me to the Council of Calcedonia and I discovered that the Net was offering me all the proceedings or Acta of all the councils of the first Christian centuries. By the way, they were all in English and I am afraid that many surfer will ignore forever that they were in Greek – and this is both a historical and physical fact that should not be underestimated. From Calcedonia I was sent, I don’t remember by what a series of other fascinating links, to the first English translation of the Rosicrucian Fama, 1652. A link in the commentary sent me to innumerable sites on the realm of Prester John and from there I surfed until an impressive series of documents on the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. I frantically saved and printed a lot of curious documents but, more or less at two ‘o clock in the morning, I felt stoned and I switched my computer off. At that moment I realized that I had forgot my original purpose in starting the research. In a continual deferral from text to text I had lost the opportunity to produce the habit which would have allowed me to pick up what I originally wanted.
This is a nice parable, I think, which tells us two important things. First of all, that in the semiosic virtuality of the Web (a very deconstructive creature, indeed) we risk to loose every idea of purpose and of action. Secondly, that one of the duties of semiotics, in the next millennium, will probably be to teach people not only how to use signs to surf in the infinite Ocean of semiosis, but also how to return, not forever, but always at every stage of our semiosic interrogation, to Dynamical Objects.”
(From “Semiotics in the next millennium” – http://www.umbertoeco.it/ )
By Dynamical Objects he is emphasizing that there is a real ground of things that roots our anthropocentric activities. Being creatures of representation in many ways, we are prone to wander through chains of signification: each idea dominoing into the next with no end in sight. But if there is a real world, then this should plant our signs of meaning. We are adrift in our own productions. Help us, O Word of All, to see your substance. It is ironic that I found this essay of Eco’s by his very method of meandering.
— Midday on a Cloudy Day – May 28, 2020
Researching Indian philosophy, Schopenhauer, the mind-body problem. Qualified nondualism in Hindu Vedanta philosophy is called Vishishtadvaita. Encylopedia Britannica says on the matter some similar (or identical) problems as exist within Christianity and Protestantism, especially:
“Vishishtadvaita flourished after Ramanuja, but a schism developed over the importance of God’s grace. For the northern, Sanskrit-using school, known as the Vadakalai (“Monkey”) school, God’s grace in gaining release is important, but a human individual should make the best possible effort, as a baby monkey must hold fast to its mother. This school is represented by the thinker Venkatanatha, who was known by the honorific name of Vedantadeshika (“Teacher of Vedanta”). The southern, Tamil-using school, known as the Tenkalai (“Cat”) school, holds that God’s grace alone is necessary, just as a kitten need do nothing when the mother cat carries it.”
On how to pick between metaphysical systems, i.e., worldviews.
A) Some will say that matter is what is real. Some will say that absolute, transcendental consciousness is what is real. The problem here is that each view is shaped by a form of our existence, and one is preferred over the other depending on personal inclinations, which may be conscious or unconscious.
B) For we know within ourselves exists both a tendency toward specification and conceptualization, which serves to maintain order and accomplish purposes, and a tendency toward generification and intuition, which serves to provide motivation and connect purposes together. If we follow the rules of either of these tendencies to explain the world, we will end up with a coherent worldview. On the one hand, specification reinforces the material worldview. On the other, generification reinforces the spiritual worldview.
C) However, that this does not make our worldview ultimately and unilaterally binding. Reinforcing a worldview only reinforces that you reinforced it. Justification of a view depends in part on the ability to reinforce it, but reinforcements alone are an insufficient criteria of truth. It would be like discovering a little musical tune, and then developing a multitude of songs based on that tune. That you could build many songs from that tune does not make it “The Song.” (Perhaps The Song is that which is sung by all, the singing itself.)
D) Truth is not something we know absolutely except in the totality of phenomena. Because of this, what we identify as truth is derived from a functional requirement, namely that of survival. What works for a large number of people and holds outside particular subjective criteria holds as truth. At the end of the day, a faulty viewpoint is the one that leads, ultimately, to death. We judge between facts by whether or not believing them leads to wastefulness, i.e., to death. You’re only wrong when you find the limits to where you’re right. Wrongness is determined by whether or not believing an idea makes you waste energy. And every idea is partially right, even those which are held by science. The fact of the matter is that Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s gravity are different in nature but describe the same relationship in different aspects. Should history have gone differently, maybe we wouldn’t have looked at the relationship between masses as forces, but from another angle: maybe masses would be understood as mere placeholders for causes and effects. Such a framework would be inverted, but it would be possible to translate between it and our world’s notion of gravity.
E) So, if you take the rule of specification and stretch it out really far according to the will to achieve, you end up with materialism, logical positivism. If you take the rule of generification and stretch it out really far according to the rule of sublimation from suffering, you end up with spiritualism, monism. Materialism makes the mind sacrosanct and the body is its tool. Spiritualism makes the body sacrosanct and the mind is its vanity mirror. Where you end suffering, outside or inside, is not a strong enough determiner for absolute truth, because the desire for comfort, although good, is grounded in our will and our will is both body and mind. If we transform the inner world of the subject or the outer world of the objects, we only reinforce that we like one way or the other.
F) This is not to suggest we should eliminate both paths as false but only to condition them as being productions of the self, which is both subject and object, mind and body. Perhaps it is best to treat the neck as sacrosanct, for it is both head and body and neither head nor body. Whenever the materialist or spiritualist views are refined according to the law of practice, so as to refrain from their particular vices, implicitly, it is because they achieved a synthesis, which is a work located in the neck, so to speak. Reality is accessible according to the mind and/or the body, such that if you want to rely on either, each is right, and such that if you want to translate between them, the neck is right, but it is right as translation, not as supremely and exclusively definitive. Every rule within us is a theme with which we can sing reality into being. What matters is how well we make our music, and wellness is best explained as the dynamic that occurs in the neck. The neck is the harmonizer and melodizer of reality.
On the self.
The self is that locus of perception, considered as a locus. The self is not the reduction of everything contributing to and comprising one’s selfhood and personal nature, for this is conceptually impossible to conceive. In trying to conceive of everything that controls my perception, I realize that I am partly nonlocalized, and that the boundary between my existence and that of everything else is definitively blurry, such that only an omniscient being could discern me distinct from anything else, if there is or ever were anything such as an “I.” In this realization, I may be inclined to say “There is no self whatsoever,” and that the egoic consciousness, the “I am,” is balogna, sheer illusion produced by the mechanisms of our brain, our flesh, our DNA. However, what is implicitly meant by this is not that there is no self, but that the self cannot be defined strictly, and strict definitions constitute reality as it is absolutely. If the law of correspondance between concept and sense is allowed to become fuzzy, then the self can be resurrected. Language of self becomes somewhat figurative, thoroughly mystical, and immediately much more natural. For it is in our nature to understand ourselves as selves, as shown by the very existence of the tendency toward specification and its success in maintaining survival and accomplishing goals. Yet this specification creates pain for it is often myopic, and to undo this pain is a supreme goal of personal transformation. Unfortunately, I think many would refuse to have their cake and eat it too, which is to affirm the self’s reality and unreality. This does not need to be a conceptual act, a credo of comprehension, but is a natural byproduct of how intuition and reasoning interact. It is entirely like ourselves to think in paradox, and the negatory disciplines of Zen complement the pository disciplines of Christianity, because we in our beings are most like music rather than raw feels or pure thoughts. Music is but the projection of this interface. If the self is treated as a locus of perception, rational dogmatism is loosed from manipulating the tangled world, and spiritualism is given a body for its wings. The illusion is not the world of objects, but the law which makes us think our minds are independent from them. That law is not merely an illusion on the eyes of reasoning, but also applies to a reaction against reasoning—to think the world is reducible to our subjectivity is still subject to that parasitic relation of reasoning, except now in negation rather than affirmation. To be loosed from the law of illusion, from the subservience to idols, one must go beyond positive and negative. This going beyond is not something understandable in terms of the logic of absolutes, nor must this going beyond be understood. It is a changing of categories, a shifting of relations within one’s own cognition and behavior.
— Almost Golden Hour – May 22, 2020
Christianity is about the species-genus distinction. If you think this is a dramatic understatement, that very thought is an example of the kind of thinking that led people to kill Jesus. When someone says something, if we want with a demanding expectation that their words conform precisely to the whole, what we’re demonstrating is that we implicitly believe that human thoughts have authority over reality. Saying something does not have control over what is more general, more global, richer, denser, more universal. The species proceeds from the genus, not the other way around. If the genus proceeds from the species, it is because the mindset observing species has been transmuted according to the principle I’m describing here. Christ is the image of the Father, not the Father himself. My reality is not reality in itself. If you expect my reality to be perfect or expect your reality to be perfect, then you are conflating the species with the genus. You should not use a purely reductive mindset to understand the genus, for this pattern would, by nature of human cognition, be simultaneously extended all the way to reality in itself. Just as the word is taken for the thought, the thought is taken for the intuition, the intuition for the person, the person for the community, the community for the state, the state for the planet, the planet for the cosmos, the appearance of reality is taken for reality in itself. Moreover, these all chain together: the word is taken for reality in itself. Not only is this wholly absurd, it is a harmful misunderstanding, a harmful attitude. Conflating the species with the genus of our cognition conflates the self with the outside world, leading to cruel and controlling behavior. When we fight someone over their opinions, what we show is our own arrogance: we think of ourselves, the species, as the lord over the world, the genus—and as such we must fight to protect our cognitive territory and enforce our particular rules. This also shows how closely tied our inner disposition is with the outer world. Something as simple as a species-genus distinction can address moral dilemmas at almost every scale of life in almost every instance. Again, if you think that what I’m saying is that our cognition boils down to a species-genus distinction, that is your problem: you are conflating the species with the genus. If you think I’m being reductive, then your logic would also imply that all mass is reducible to the law of gravity. I’m not boiling the problem down—I’m saying that there is a universal pattern at work in all the diverse aspects of experience and that addressing it as such can address it all. Just because all mass obeys the law of gravity does not mean mass is synonymous with gravity. Just because everything follows a rule does not mean that everything is reducible to (and replaceable by) its rule. If you think I’m reducing things down, then look within yourself. You may be able to locate the source of your anxieties which torment you in your relationship with concepts and ideals. You could very well be conflating concepts with things.
Buddhism, on the other hand, is about the subject-object distinction. Rather than starting from the species-genus distinction, it starts from the problems arising from the subject-object distinction. The processes of Buddhist meditation parallel and integrate the species-genus distinction. Where Christianity relies on a metaphysic to facilitate a process of transformation, Buddhism relies on a process of de-metaphysicalization to facilitate a functionally equivalent transformation.
— That Worst Part of Afternoon When It Is Hazy and Not Cool – May 20, 2020
Reality is taken on faith.
That there is irreducible uncertainty does not by its own right make the phenomenon erratic. Most fundamental uncertainties of chaos can be ascribed to the difference in information density between conceptual reasoning and intuitive reasoning. It is like the optic nerve: the eye does not observe its own seeing. Those irreducible uncertainties are grounded in and reflect our synthesis of intuitions with concepts. By supplying a string of pearls—a series of figurative, symbolic leaps—a vertical hierarchy of integrated knowledge can be established. Synthetic objects of knowledge (synthetic ideas) can provide a transcendental aperture.
Reality is simple: (i) from far away, (ii) over long spans of time, (iii) when considered unimportant, (iv) when considered through elementary thought.
Reality is fuzzy: (i) from an indiscernable farness, (ii) from an indiscernable nearness, (iii) as details in the distant past or future, (iv) as wholes in the immediate present, (v) when considered extremely important, (vi) when it is so irrelevant it is unfamiliar, (vii) when considered through a lack of concepts, (viii) when considered through an overabundance of concepts.
The whole is a product of great time and small space. Great time shows us the sequence of events. Small space shows us the complete scope of a thing, like a little world. The part is a product of small time and great space. Small time shows us the moment. Great space shows us what the thing is not. We know things according to this rule linearly in time and inversely in space. The part appears best in moments and large things. The whole appears best in eons and small things. But the origin of these conceptual categories—whole and part—come from the rule as mentioned. As children, we do not know completeness in time and are therefore frightened easily and swift to change moods, but we do know completeness in space, for we control toys and make imaginary worlds easily. As we get older, we become more confident because we come to perceive time as a sequence, and we become less confident because we come to perceive ourselves as being very small and everything having many little pieces. With maturity, the whole of time and the parts of space become more immanent to us because knowledge of these categories follows the rule above. Time is unified according to one’s direct experience of it, and as such we know time linearly: the parts of time we know originally as moments, and adding these moments together teaches us the whole of time. Space is unified according to one’s conceptual understanding of it, and as such we know space inversely: the wholes of space we know originally as worlds, and learning more about other worlds teaches us the division of space. It follows that concepts are a spatial rendering and intuitions are a temporal rendering. We render concepts in correspondance to the mechanisms of space, and we render intuitions in correspondance to the mechanisms of time. As children, we are intuitive because time is our primary apprehension of pure sensibility. As adults, we are possessive, competitive, and stressed because concepts, of which we have many, are inhered with a spatial apprehension of pure sensibility. The goal of aging is to synthesize spatially rendered concepts with temporarlly rendered intuitions, so that we can be intuitively conceptual and reasonably intuitive. For now, I will not say how space and time integrate. It is a hard problem which I feel close to articulating.
— That Worst Part of Afternoon When It Is Hazy and Not Cool – April 29, 2020
Three songs from the microcosmos: a song in a dream, We’re Going To Be Friends (came to me in sleep), Das Rheingold Prelude (came to me in stillness)
— Silhouette phase of twilight – April 28, 2020
Who would know a photon for itself? What it touches is what most care about. Or to know its properties, as if light were for show. But who would approach a grain of light in its own rhythm and flow? It’s a pain told but unheard, shown but unseen. Who would listen to the neck of time’s space singing silence, who would see what’s in-between matter and energy? If you could walk along an edge of a nothingness forever you would know it. If only you realized what brilliant darkness shines from within your heart.
Think of all the light flowing between stars with no one to see it. Light is either absorbed or deflected by matter; no third alternative; every lucent event is something of both. Imagine an existence split between endless isolation across the vacuuous heavenly wastes and some change of transformation or annihilation. Matter at least can be with other matter and be itself. Light’s survival is one of isolation and oblivion. To see even the least of lights marks its end in your vision. The moth enters the candle, the light enters your eye. Will you return the favor?
Light is always saying, “I am your currency.”
— Sundown – April 28, 2020
Thought from the other day.
The course of the entire world, all the laws of physics and all of history, is bundled up within one photon. Every photon must feel the full span of the cosmos, from its birth to its death. The end and beginning of time itself and everything else is held in the course of one photon, even as each differs from the next in its path. For they are the meter of time in space and the template of physicality, and therefore transcend their differences even in their being different, just as all mathematical representations are their own genera. One photon is knowable in any photon, and all of time itself is best understood from considering what nudges of forces and events any of them must undergo. You can see the whole universe in them like a glass ball reflecting a room. The photon exists in pure time and pure space, very matter and very energy. (Pure is generalized; very is immediate, immanent, real, actual, particular.) In this way, the moments of matter, which are energy, are seen in the basic forms of space and time. You do not know only an eye which sees a sun or a hand which feels an earth; you experience a photon within the eye and hand as the knowledge-substrate of sun and earth. We are physical bodies, known with light, felt within a phenomenal world of space and time.
(If you’re reading this glorifying how many of my insights happen in one day, just stop it please. No one in their right mind adulates a waterfall for continuing to flow each moment; those who do do so for themself, for their own narcissistic pleasure in observing their expression (though it is equally foolish to refrain from expression of joy and admiration; what differentiates the two is whether one differentiates between the observation and the thing itself—i.e., if the thing subsumes under the idea of one’s observation or if an element thereof is understood as freely given from without, the latter being the focus of good spiritual discipline). If you want to feel affection toward me or my writings, be my friend, don’t flatter me. If you can’t do this, leave me alone.)
— Golden Hour – April 28, 2020
Pain, regret, shame, need, succumbing, again to hold my head low.
Oh well. All is not well. At least in the well what is not well is not not in the well.
Dreams and awake have been blurred together for a while.
— Later in the Afternoon – April 28, 2020
The sense of the analytic/synthetic debate of mathematics is the very sense of the human condition in abstract form. This is because math is the overarching, general, abstract representation of all experience; though many erroneously believe that this also means that math is necessarily supervenient to experience, and the fact that this is believed reflects the lack of a satisfactory answer to this question. The fact that mathematical truths can be compressed into formal principles and then expanded again into the forms of sense shows that the apparent paradox is inherently one of reasoning. By this unity of a priori analytic and synthetic judgments being mathematically valid, it holds that all experience likewise is resolvable in this manner and that such resolution is a priori necessary. The empirical validity of this fact in all its species and forms is guaranteed from the very observation of its pure concept.
— Afternoon – April 28, 2020
Insofar as the pure intuition of mathematics is representable in abstract form, it is possible to be lighthearted in the most serious of motives. Insofar as that abstract representation does not substitute its pure sense, action and feeling supervene upon deliberate reflection.
Feeling like Christians have done me immense harm, their efforts to fix and to subsume people under laws with glory. They make a business out of preaching their own shortcomings and of representing righteousness like children play house, except that they turn the real world into a toy. Human thing, not just Christian. Sick of taking care of everyone else’s problems and living up to their ideals, and to the ideals of their ideals. Sick of not being seen (the understanding). Sick of caustic balm and bitter refreshment. People treat the soul today like a medieval doctor treats the body. Sick of being tossed aside in every interaction. Wanting to put foot down. Incapable. Forced into their image, their compulsions frame my reality. And I am blamed for it.
— Afternoon – April 27, 2020
The dynamic between San and Ashitaka is the dynamic between intuitive reasoning and nondualistic reasoning. The dynamic between Ashitaka and Eboshi is the dynamic between nondualistic reasoning and executive reasoning. How the three relate is perhaps the template for how holistic systems engineering should occur; this is contingent on how accurately universal human conditions the plot portrays.
— Evening – April 24, 2020
Relieved (mostly)
Droughted plants cannot help but quiver at rain.
A flogged horse will show fright; who would condemn it?
What reveals: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”? Who is to know it, and how to share it well?
— Twilight – April 24, 2020
Terrified
— A Tad After Sundown – Earth Day, 2020
Be like the vulture, who lives on the free produce of decay. Look at how he surfs the air for no particular reason. Where does he roost? With his friends and family. They spend much of their days together. Live on the free produce of the fallen sky. Do not dread the coming night, lest you be eaten by it. Become the vulture who preys on death itself.
— Upper Afternoon – Earth Day, 2020
Alright, Albeit, Although, Always, Altogether, Also…. what?? What’s up with the al-?
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, feeling generic confusion and happiness. Feeling my reference frames’ weak points degenerating before my eyes. At the same time, feeling my keen-side pulling through. It’s as if when we’re deluded, we never know it, such that our feeling of truth for delusions is as confident (equally confident and confident in kind) for real insights. All we can do is familiarize ourselves with our delusions and errors. We must go under truth and reality and know our form of experience if we are to lovingly purge ourselves of the destructive tendencies which ravage. The rest is not ours….
(See “Correcting Christian Errata” for the remainder of this reflect.)
— High Afternoon – April 20th, 2020
On Page 2 of the Bible, the hermeneutic for reading the rest of the Bible and for living a wholesome life is given: Eden’s rivers are in disconnected places. They are all alpine regions to rivers that feed early river valley civilizations, but the Nile headwaters are nowhere near the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates. Eden is in multiple places. Eden is in a non-Euclidean space and time rather than a classical, conventional space and time. Its specifics are generalities, themes of origin—it exists in the world of true inferences from nature. To think Eden has to be in one specific place is to have fallen from Eden. It is no wonder so many dogmatic Christians are afraid of pleasure: their Eden exists in a rationally controllable domain rather than an indeterminate physical expanse. The real Eden, the true fullness of nature, exists in an inverted perception of space, such that reality is informed by intuition rather than being ordered ultimately according to the rules of human understanding. The generalities of reason should be guided by the specifics of sense; the generalities of sense should not be guided by the specifics of reason. Eden is empirical givenness creatively amplified, characterized according to the human sense of meaning; Nod is a reality hypostatized by unconditioned inner expectations. We originate from Eden. Our civilization flows down from a holistic understanding, even though it was built bound to struggle in that glory’s eastcast shadow.
Having said so many hard things about Christianity already, I feel a desire to appreciate simpler things more compositely. Always I will tinker with the theory of Christianity, but I do not desire to fight forever, for the questions at the heart of Christ are perennial, and my work of acknowledging their deep essence is nothing new, nothing he did not already do. I stand like a mirror upon his work, witnessing his soul within my life. I breathe it into words and leave them. My crucifixion is inside, not outside. Though I fear ravaging words from Christians, really I wish to heal their troubles and show them greater pastures. Alas, esotericism is the fortress for many a heavy heart. This, my heart, is weary from much thought, and I wish to retire from these works of hard plowing. As soon as this thesis is done, I am going to change.
— A Few Moments Later – April 16th, 2020
If migraines are real, then wouldn’t that mean you can feel pain with your brain cells? Who’s to say you thoughts can’t be felt? Perhaps their pains are projected by the brain onto the brain, even though the pain is not localized there. Perhaps it is possible to translate the structures of mind back down into language.
Kant claims mathematics is a priori synthetic. Bertrand Russel claims Kant is wrong and math is analytic because Euclid starts with axioms and builds his whole geometry with them. What if there is an analytic judgment that preserves the functions of synthetic judgments? It would be like a name for someone which actually also describes them. The act of saying a normal name is to call forth an object which is connoted by what the name denotes. But the act of saying a meaningful name is to call forth an object which is denoted and connoted by what the name denotes. Such a naming is a sort of connotative denotation, such that specific properties are not specifically defined, but when the object is held in reference to the word, there is a priori necessity revealed. So it is with Euclid’s axioms: when you use his analytic judgments and hold them up to the senses, geometry is revealed. In this way, it is a priori synthetic and a priori analytic. According to Kant, mathematics is schematized by the inner representation of time as number and the abstract notion of space. I then read him as arguing that reason can play games with the principles of space and time applied to itself in diverse ways. As such, it would follow that the a priori analytic judgments of pure mathematics are also a priori synthetic. The substance of mathematical principles are such that their spatial and temporal properties are inhered in analytic judgments, but those analytic judgments, containing the general forms of the inner sense of time and outer sense of space, are also synthetic judgments. What differentiates whether they are analytic or synthetic is whether or not one is cognizing them imaginatively or rationally, that is to say, with synthetic or analytic reasoning. Pure mathematics is a priori necessary without reservation because it preserves its sensible aspects in logical representation, because it allows for translation from synthetic to analytic and back again. Thus all general principles of space and time can be generated through sheer computational games, and likewise all principles of logic can be deduced from sensible context.
— Mid-Afternoon – April 16th, 2020
Vertigo: the experience of the world not being the world as previously thought, the non-essence of essence and the essence of non-essence (~Rumi)
Nausea: the experience of being hindered by representation from what is beyond representation, essence precluding existence (~Levinas, Sartre)
That which is Tao is always spinning and still. That which is real is rupturing illusion.
The Copernican revolution and what comes after.
— Night – April 10th, 2020
Feeling defenseless.
Abel, kind, lets himself be misunderstood, stepped on, vulnerable, few attempts to defend himself, does not project an image onto others, often cares for others unseen.
Cain, focused, judging and performance-based mentality, does not slow down to search for true nature, kills Abel.
Woe to the man who has no one to help him when he falls.
Who will give Abel the attention he needs? When will they see Abel and his kindness?
When no books can help you. When no teachings can help you. When no songs can help you, no art. When asking for help adds pain. When you choose over and over to not calcify. When you can no longer cry.
Who is he who kills Abel daily. “Good” Friday?
Who is he who thinks Cain a demon? Poor Cain does.
Abel’s resurrection’s first in Cain’s mid-life heart.
— Later in the Afternoon – April 8th, 2020
I have been graced with the memory of that profound thing I forgot earlier (see disgruntlement in post below).
Revelation is the progenitor of science. Revelation is not the less true for its not being necessarily formulaic. (Note that I did not say revelation is not formulaic—I said revelation is not necessarily formulaic.) Science is systematized revelation. Now the imaginative faculties involved in revelation can improperly map ideas, just as someone can say a true thing to a sad friend at the wrong time. The virtue of scientific inference is not that it has form and revelatory insight does not, it is that scientific form is available to rational thought by operating under its syntax. You can talk about reality with other people objectively through scientific language. With revelation, objectivity is produced through clearing the intuition from compulsive blocks, and though it follows the forms of the individual mind, one can affirm the universal forms of the human experience. Revelation follows basic perceptive forms. Science follows general linguistic forms. I believe it is thus possible to derive true insights about physics through mystical poetry and develop heartfelt scientific systems about the meaning of life.
— 2 in the Afternoon – April 8th, 2020
Infinite time, irreducible space.
Don’t remember what profound thing I was going to share here. Frustrated.
Creation ex nihilo is not in the Bible. Implications?
Genesis 1: Time, God, spatial preposition with meaning of physical relation, nondual chaos water, then nondual photons, progress down through fewer degrees of form freedom into higher degrees of cognitive freedom.
Eden is in non-Euclidean space-time…Important for ethical hermeneutic of bible.
— High Morning – April 7th, 2020
Kant’s definition of beauty in the Third Critique is of disinterested interest, purposiveness without a purpose. By interest, he means that you like something for its own sake. By purposiveness, he basically means meaningfulness for an observer. So disinterested interest is feeling favor toward something without liking it for its own sake, and purposiveness without a purpose is having meaningfulness without a distinct reason for it.
This has some keen merits; however, it is blinded. For how endearing I find Immanuel Kant, I must say that his lifelong virginity is interfering with his aesthetic theory. First, I must discuss his personality. Then I can say how he misunderstood beauty.
It is almost certain Kant was an INTP: for his fractal-like intellect, for his friends describing him as spritely in conversation. Kant understood whimsy. Yet somehow, despite his faithfulness to defending against Hume the doctrine of causality as an intrinsic part of reality, he did not think that necessary relations could be beautiful. Beauty was something disinterested, involving a general affect toward an object without a specific fondness for it. Many people align with this view: conceptualization or formality are something people don’t want as part of their aesthetic experiences. Many art-lovers do not want to explain their art or discuss it, as if it contained a message. Rightfully so: art is the opposite of utilitarianism, and is easily stifled by rationalization. However, artistry being the opposite of utility does not mean beauty is allergic to necessity. What evidence do I have for this?
Sex: it is both necessary and beautiful. Even in its necessity, it is a beautiful behavior, transcending its mere necessity. What Kant should have said was not that beauty is disinterested interest, or purposiveness without a purpose. He should have said that beauty was interest beyond interest and purposiveness beyond a purpose. It is not that beauty must be nebulous, generalized, unformed. It is that beauty must not be compulsively attached to form. Form is not intrinsically formalist because it is itself transient. Form and rationality, therefore, can be media for the beautiful. Poor Kant who never married (and moreover was probably pent-up in eighteenth-century Prussia) spent his energy loving ideas, so much so he never looked in the mirror and saw his love for the beauty in the form. Perhaps if he had married he would have understood the beauty that is necessary.
— Morning – April 6th, 2020
Heart fold, world fold, far away light sweeps a rainswept grassy knoll, clouds tiptoe. Shade here, and the still drips lensing. Fog on glass, steam from coffee. Nostalgia, remorse.
People afraid to talk over Zoom meetings: spatial presence sets the social rules; awareness of otherness/self, extrinsic.
People not afraid to talk over Zoom meetings: information essence sets the social rules; awareness of otherness/self, intrinsic.
The need to see things outside of the way they merely appear, the need to be flexible. Neither an abandonment nor a calcification of form. Transcendental knowledge, free context.
What is your implicit philosophy?
Philosophy is not a discipline of trying to stuff the soul into the rational mind. It is to speak from the locus of thought’s conducting; to seek to say it, what is real. One does not need to read philosophy to be a good person. One, however, cannot say that what philosophers describe are not templates of what we all share. They are tracing the contours of real life, and holding them up to the sun. One does not need to see the lit side of the silhouette to know the shadow as it falls upon the rocky earth.