Letter to a friend about Free-Will

June 5th, 2023

I watched the video. A brilliant YouTube film. Thanks for sharing it.

See: https://youtu.be/2_BTVN68-ZA

Someone brilliant, maybe Einstein, said that you cannot solve a problem using the same methods that were employed to create the problem. The implication being that we need a new POV in order to resolve the problem. This question of Free Will is a lot like that.

We are the ones who’ve created the conceptual divisions between Body and Mind and between Conscious and Unconscious. And we’ve created them because our minds and our reasoning are simple. We cannot see existence moving interconnected and seamlessly all at once.

But in truth, we human beings are not functionally divided into the divisions we’ve artificially created. We are evolved biological beings. Functionally, we are one thing. My foot is as much a part of me as my memories of childhood or my next desire for an ice-cream.

The self-aware part of us is the observer of our experiences most of the time. This is just as the narrator in the video said.

It is an illusion that our self-awareness (the ‘observer’) suffers that it is is the decider in most cases.

But I stress that while we are just deluded observers most of the time, this is not the case all the time. Sometimes the self-aware part of us does get to be the decider.

Think of yourself as a vertical assembly of parts. Think that this assembly came together over vast periods of time through the processes of biological evolution.

When decisions that concern your biological self need to be made, they are dealt with by the appropriate level of your assembly.

If you suffer a burn, the signal goes directly to your spinal cord. And the spinal cord send bacl signals directing the muscles in the affected area to MOVE now to end the problem. None of this involves the brain. It becomes aware of the event after-the-fact. But, it has the illusion that it played a part.

If you become hungry, motivations to end the problem begin to arise. And the biological unit you are, as as whole, takes action to quell the hunger. Again, the self-aware part of you observes all this, suffers the illusion that is was the ‘decider’ and then it takes credit for the decision to eat.

But sometimes, things collide and in order to resolve what to do, information has to be passed up to a higher level.

You want to go and see your mother. But your car is not working. You can take the bus but now you have to find and read the bus schedule to see if the bus departure times will work for you. And then there’s the issue of buying a fare – do you have enough money?

These decisions are not going to get automatically made by any of the layers of your assembly lower than your self-aware self. These sorts of problems have to be pushed up the stack to the level of your biological being that is best prepared to deal with them.

Your self-aware mind can reason about them, it can imagine and hypothesize about them and it can call up memories relevant to them. All of this will take place in your self-awareness; as will your decision about what to do. The decision will usually arise from an abstract consideration of the facts.

Of course, such decisions do not take place in a state of pure isolation. Your emotional desire to see your mother is speaking there. Your tiredness when you consider the duration of the journey is speaking there. Your calculations about how much money you have are also speaking there.

And sometimes, the emotions will weigh in so heavy that they drive the decision. And sometimes the tiredness is so profound that it becomes the controlling factor. But also, sometimes, it is just the mental juggling of the various pieces within your self-awareness that leads you to a rational, considered decision.

In the video, he talked about how reading a book can affect us and thus it can change the future decisions we make. So, was that an act of Free Will?

I’d say that this is ‘either-or’ reasoning again. It is not one or the other. It is an all seamless interplay – we affect existence and existence affects us.

The biological brain evolved in animals so they could better track what’s happening outside of them. So that they could process the incoming information and then make decisions that benefit our own specific survival.

As evolution has moved along and animals have gotten ever more complex, because of survival of the fitness pressures, so animal brains have gotten smarter. And this wasn’t just random. It was driven by maximizing the survival potential of the animals involved.

Self-awareness developed because it provided survival capabilities that didn’t exist before.

It is not coincidence that we human beings have utterly taken over the planet. This newest evolved capability of ours for self-awareness is the most powerful adaptation nature has ever come up with.

But our self-awareness is a very problematic thing as well.

It suffers under the illusion that it is the sole decider (Free-Will). And it is like putting a Magnum 44 in the hands of a toddler. All the evidence gathering all around us is that we are not using our self-awareness very well at all.

26Mar23 – another letter to a friend excerpt

March 26th, 2023

We are, as evolved animals, highly driven by our desire to survive. And that desire relates directly to why we want to reduce or eliminate ambiguity.  We want to know what’s going on.  Because ‘knowing’ means we are more likely to survive.  And that was deeply significant back in harsher evolutionary times.

We are evolutionarily driven to ‘know’.  We are driven to think that we have, or can obtain, actionable answers to the questions that confront us.  

But, if we look at our real situation in this existence, that desire is a heavy, if not an impossible, load to carry.  

The fact is that we are recently evolved semi-smart biological monkey-like creatures who have only existed, as we are now, for about 200,000 years.  

And the planet has been around for nearly 3.5 billion years.  

And this universe has been around for approximately 13 billion years old.

So, we’ve just barely arrived here in this existence and we find ourselves, with our limited minds, gazing out at an existences which is vastly more complex than we are even remotely capable of understanding.  

And yet, here we are, driven by our biological survival urges to try and understand it all and come up with actionable answers.

It would be quite funny, except for the fact that we take ourselves so seriously.

—–

My friend, I admire your incessant yearning to ‘understand’.  But I do not think it is within our possible grasp to be able to come to any final answers about the mysteries around us.

As an illustration of our inadequacy consider how often we employ the simplistic ‘Either-Or’ logic tool.  

How often do we try to divide and conquer the world around us with it?  

We say, ‘It is either this or it is that.’  

We say, ‘It is either Dual or it is Non-Dual.’  

We say, ‘We either have Absolute Free-Will or everything is Deterministic and we have no agency at all.’

Instead, the reality around us is much better understood by seeing it through the Both/And lens.

It isn’t this or that – it is both.  It is all moving, together, seamlessly (as John Troy likes to say).  

It is only our limited human minds that feel the need to break existence into separate nameable pieces in order to try to make sense of it.

So, we strain and we struggle to solve the big questions about existence and Free-Will and Duality and such things because our evolutionary heritage makes us anxious when we feel that we do not understand.  

Not understanding the situation in earlier evolutionary times was often a death sentence.

We want simple, actionable answers and we think that if we have them, then peace will descend upon us and life will be good.

But it is impossible.

There’s a lot we can understand.  But ‘everything’ is not among them.   

And, no matter how much we do understand, ‘everything’ will not be among them.

Accepting this reality gives us an entirely new way of proceeding.

Know that the more you understand, the more you will be able to understand how little you know.

Know that the more you understand about yourself and existence, the greater peace you will experience.   But the peace will not come from having final answers.  It will come from a deep acceptance of the fact that there is no end to the road.

Think of yourself as a frame moving forward through time.   New things occur everyday and they enter your frame as experiences and new understandings.  Everyday, if you pull the summation lever down, you will have a new ‘best’ idea of what you understand up until now.  

But know that it will be new and different sum again tomorrow.  There is no end to it.  Going with this and saying ‘yes’ to it is the best way – because it is a reflection of how things are.  Things are, from our very limited POV, always growing, expanding, changing and evolving.  The urge to come up with final answers is NOT our friend.  It is driven by evolutionary fear.

If you live or if you die.  If you never understand another new thing or if you understand 10,000 new things, it doesn’t matter to existence.  It just is.  The only one who cares is you.   And the only thing you have of any real value is the time you still have left between this moment and when you die.  

Don’t decide how it is, open yourself to new understandings, move into future and into experiences that get more and more interesting as you go and give up thinking it has to ‘do’ something, mean something, achieve something or anything else.  It just is as it is.  Say ‘yes’ to it and enjoy it.

230130 – Agency

January 30th, 2023

Agency

The idea that we do not have agency is a hard one to pick apart. Especially, when we’ve heard that the universe is all one thing and that the deterministic laws of the universe apply everywhere.

But, it isn’t so.

Sometimes energy, when it is in excess, can be used to build up organization and structure faster than the Second Law can tear it down. Life, itself, is a clear example of this. And we are not short of energy here on Earth where it rains down from our sun.

In general, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that energy will dissipate as we work towards the heat death of the universe. But in specific situations, for a time, the reverse can happen, locally. To see this in action, consider the case of self-replicating molecules, which are very specific and rare arrangements of matter. Self-replicating molecules can avoid the degradation’s of the Second Law if they do these things:

  • Harvest the energy necessary to drive the reaction
  • Access the materials necessary build the new replicant
  • Remain in the necessary environment conditions such as temperature and pH

Once the self-replication process starts, it continues indefinitely; so long as the required conditions continue to be met. Self-Replicating Molecules were the first crack in the edifice of Determinism. I.e., the fact that self-replicating molecules can avoid the degradation of the Second Law and thus maintain ordered structures; insulated from deterministic forces. Once self-replication is underway, it is not a static thing which just repeats itself over and over.

Rather, competition among the replicants, changing conditions and selection processes will naturally occur among the replicators. And it is during these events that significant changes and improvements can occur. And these changes and improvements, in turn, can open up new, additional possibility spaces.

The net effect of these processes of change is a constant improvement of function. I.e., the replicants get better at withstanding the degradation’s of the Second Law. This is an example of Non-Fragility. I.e., a process that does not merely withstand shocks but actually improves because of them.

The early self-replicating molecules are strongly thought to have evolved into biology as we know it today. The causal link seem obvious because biological life-forms are just more complex forms of self-replicators. Exactly how self-replicating molecules transitioned to become biological self-replicators is not known. Nick Lane, a British Biochemist, has written some excellent books which speculate about the possible transition pathways from self-replicating molecules to the earliest cellular life forms. Take a look if you’d like to delve deeper into this topic.

See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vital_Question
and
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58999183-transformer

From here forward in this essay, we are going to take it as a given that biological self-replication evolved from the earlier molecular self-replication. So all references hereinafter to replication or self-replication will now be biological references.

What we’ve described about self-replication doesn’t seem particularly complicated. But the significance of this emergent property is simply impossible to over emphasize.

It is the core mechanism of all biological evolution and life. And so long as energy, materials and suitable conditions remain available, replication will continue.

But the most significant advances in self-replication come about, in general, through increased complexity.

Why?

Because additional complexity often serves as the spawning ground for new capabilities. And new capabilities, by their very nature, open up new possibility spaces of their own.

Consider the fish that learned to breath and crawled out of the sea to find the empty continents waiting. The feathered dinosaurs that learned to fly and found untouched aerial niches waiting to exploit. And the animals which developed warm bloodedness and found new territories and climates to occupy. Increasing complexity and the opening of new possibility spaces go inevitably together.

Here’s an image depicting the advance of self-replicating biological life forms over the past 3.5 billion years. Consider all the niches and possibility spaces that were opened over this time. And consider also that all this occurred because a small self-replicating molecule, came together by chance long ago and used excess energy to insulate itself from the inanimate degradation’s of the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

https://evogeneao.s3.amazonaws.com/images/tree_of_life/tree-of-life_2000.png

The chart clearly shows that animate nature has figured how to get around the degradation’s of The Second Law of Thermodynamics.

As life spread and opened up new niches and became more and more complex, the competition among life forms for energy, resources and optimal conditions became ever more intense. We humans are animals and we are arguably the most complex creatures on the planet.

Let’s focus on the animal branches of the tree of life and follow along. Early on animals evolved to have three types of cells. Inner cells, which form the food passage (the gut), outer cells, which separate the animal from the outside world (the skin) and specialized nervous system cells which are responsible for collecting and transmitting information throughout the animal.

Animals move. And thus their external situations changes frequently. Therefore, having information about the external environment obviously has survival value. And this is what animal nervous systems evolved to do.

As animal life evolved from worms > fish > amphibians > reptiles > birds > animals, their problem solving abilities and strategies can be seen to be improving and much of this was due to their nervous system advances.

They advanced through a whole series of new and more complex adaptations; including reactions, instincts, memory, developing the several senses, creating an internal mental model of the external reality, emotions, reasoning, homeostatic mechanisms and many other capabilities.

Each of these new capabilities improved on what proceeded them. And each was added as an overlay to the previous solutions; rather than replacing them. This is an important distinction, so hang onto it.

One very important thing that was increasing was intelligence. Intelligence is what we call an animal’s ever increasing ability to solve harder and harder problems so it can survive and to propagate. The increase in intelligence and nervous system capabilities went hand-in-hand.

Problem solving in the beginning was pretty simply. See food, go get it. See danger, run away. But soon things got more complicated and meta decisions became necessary.

What if you see food and danger at the same time? Remember the jokes about asking a computer an impossible question and watching it grind to a halt as it tried to answer the question?

Animals with simple instinctual reactions would have faced that problem. And so, meta processing would have evolved to deal with it.

And then there’s the idea that as problems of survival get harder and harder to predict, the optimal solution strategies have to get more and more generalized to keep up.

Consider that if you don’t know where a threat is coming from, it does you little good to have a set of stock instinctual responses to draw from. It is far better, to evaluate the situation without preconceptions and then form an appropriate response as a result of the evaluation.

Rudimentary forms of awareness would have been appearing as these adaptations unfolded.

Awareness is, functionally, a meta-level mental space in which new and unexpected situations are evaluated.

Picture awareness as making use of previous mental capabilities. It draws on memory to retrieve the past in order to predict the future. It observes the internal mental models of the external reality held in the mind. It employs reasoning to consider the relationships between causes and effects. In short, it draws on as many of other capabilities as are appropriate in order to make an appropriate high level decision.

But awareness doesn’t know it is aware. It is just looking outwards.

Self-awareness appears when the mind’s memory model of external reality is improved to include a representation of ‘me’; the viewer of the model.

A model which now contains ‘me’, the viewer, is more functional than one which does not. As an adaptation, an awareness that is aware of itself isn’t just a bit more powerful. It is, in fact, one of the most powerful (and problematic) evolutionary adaptations that have ever occurred.

At every step along the way, from the simplest self-replicating molecule until the self-aware ‘you’ which sits there reading this sentence, the degradation’s of the Second Law of Thermodynamics have been held off by an ever greater array of sophisticated evolutionary adaptations which began as increasingly sophisticated variations in inorganic chemistry and advanced until they transitioned into the simplest forms of biological life.

And then, once expressing themselves as biology, these adaptations advanced again from bacteria thorough the entire tree of life until they attained the level of self-aware minds able to regard their own awareness and existence.

So, where is agency in all of this, you say?

It is all Agency writ large.

Agency: Intentional actions undertaken for the express purpose of allowing the entity performing the actions to survive. This is local agency. Agency concerned about the replicating unit. But agency none-the-less.

Perhaps, you are thinking that it is all still mechanical? Just the result of neurons firing as they have been long-trained to do and no one is really at home deciding anything?

Here are three very short stories to consider:

  1. Your finger touches a hot stove. The pain signals travel from the finger to the spinal cord. And signals are immediately returned from the spinal cord directing the arm muscles to move your finger away. The pain signals also move up the spinal cord into the brain. And the subjective experience of the brain is to believe that it ordered the finger to move.
  2. You feel a tinge of hunger and you turn and look at the cookie on the plate beside you. You feel that you want it and reach out to take it. The hunger signals arose from far down in your old brain and was experienced in your awareness. The decision to take the cookie feels like it was your brain’s decision. But scientist tell us that they can see the decision firing in your neurons well before you think you’ve decided to take the cookie. Regardless, your experience is that you were aware of and orchestrated the entire thing; from the recognition of hunger, to the decision that you wanted it and then onto the movement to take it.
  3. You have a bus schedule in your hand. You know you need to be in Pasadena by 2:30 pm. You study the table to see when you’ll need to leave home in order to catch the bus that will get you there a bit before 2:30 pm. As you work all this out and decide which bus to take, there are no anticipatory neural firings in play. Indeed, how could any of the systems outside of your awareness know what to do? Perhaps, some will fire at the end of your decision-making process when the decision is filed in your memory by processes below your awareness.

In the first story, older parts of your nervous system have acted to move your finger from the source of danger, Your conscious awareness believes it orchestrated the process but clearly this is an illusion.

In the second, your brain definitely felt that it played a significant part in the play but preemptive neural firings probably played the larger part in the cookie’s demise.

And, finally, in the last story, it is clear that the bus schedule is only going to get worked out by your agency considering, investigating and understanding the problem. And then deciding on a solution. Where is there any room on all of this for preemptive neural firings to help?

We humans like to think things are ‘this way or that’. We favor a simple ‘either-or’ constructions.

But reality isn’t necessarily like that. In fact reality is under no obligations to make itself simple enough for us to understand it.

Reality tends to favor a ‘both/and’ approach where things are all moving together in an incomprehensibly complex dance.

Agency has been with us in a slowly morphing form from the very first self-replicating molecules until we held the bus schedule in our hand.

And when self-awareness finally dawned for us, agency was finally able to see itself.

The issue of preemptive neural firings has come up a lot when folks talk about agency. If we can see preemptive neural firings then agency is not really happening, they say.

Well, this assumes that we are just self-aware beings. But we are much more than that.

We are everything that happened in the three stories – not just the self-aware being that dominates the last story.

It was said that “self-awareness may be the most powerful (and problematic) evolutionary adaptation that has ever occurred.” This was referring to a huge blind spot in us.

The aware mind and the self-aware mind are simply newer adaptations layered atop all that went before. They are not replacements.

220824 – Meetup Group sample discussion

August 24th, 2022

I run two Meetup discussion groups. One is a local group for people living in or near Christchurch, New Zealand, where I live. The other is a global group intended for people outside of Christchurch. These Meetup Groups can be found here:

www.meetup.com/christchurch-existentialist-discussion-group/

www.meetup.com/existentialism-discussion-group-international/

Below is a post-meeting comment/discussion regarding a recent meeting. I’m sharing to see if readers here might find this sort of thing of interest. If so, then please consider joining. But, before you do, please carefully read the group’s mission statement to ensure your intents are compatible with ours.

===================
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. They provides a good opening to render much that was obscure in last night’s discussion into a clearer light.

From here on I’m going to refer to Existentialism using a big ‘E’ to prevent excessive typing. I’ll toss in other acronyms as I go along, if they seem helpful.

First, our group is called the “E Discussion Group”. But, that doesn’t imply that everything we discuss is part of, or a reflection of, E theory.

One definition of ‘E‘ I read just now on-line says:

“A philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will.”

I would also add that Es perceive existence as having no apparent meaning. And that, as a consequence of this, they then grapple with how to accommodate themselves to the situation. I.e., how to cope with Existential Angst.

So, I think we laid a fair bit of stuff on the doorstep of E last night. Stuff that didn’t properly belong there.

So, as I conceive it, E says nothing about whether life and consciousness are good or bad and whether they should be preserved or not. E doesn’t care if we survive here or not. All such is irrelevant from the POV of E because E’s central observation is the apparent meaninglessness of everything.

I liked that someone made the point that ‘existence precedes essence’.

——

Now I’m turning this discussion away from E and into a general discussion.

So, here we are on a small planet somewhere out in the middle of the vastness. We are recently evolved semi-smart monkey-like creatures (RESSMLC) and, by many appearances, we’re well on our way to trashing the only planet/biosphere we have and causing a major reset to ourselves and the other life-forms here.

Existence doesn’t care. It is for me, hard to imagine that existence even knows we’re here.

So, we’re very much in our own self-created mess. And our discussion centered upon how to understand our situation and what, if anything, can be effectively be done about the mess.

We discussed authoritarian (A) vs. democratic (D) governments in relationship to our problem. Some would say that A governments are inherently more effective at getting all the ducks marching in the same direction. But A’s take away too much of our personal freedom to be worth their addition efficiency. Or, as someone said, would life be worth living if we did get humanity into a viable Steady-State Balance with the Planet’s Biosphere (SSBPB) but then we had to live here without any personal freedoms?

The question of getting into a SSBPB and how we govern ourselves are independent issues.

The first issue is utterly stark (unless we hold an optimistic view; such a Logan does). Either we achieve a SSBPB or we suffer a massive an unnecessary planet-wide reset.

The 2nd issue of how we should govern ourselves is much harder to discern or to discuss effectively.

Why? Because we are discussing ourselves. We are the RESSMLC. We do not understand ourselves very well at all.

We discussed benevolent dictatorships and perfectly balanced and fair democracies – as if these ideas were plausible.

I submit that our inherent human natures, shaped as they are by our evolutionary heritages, makes such ideas laughable. Few of our species have risen above simply acting out our biological imperatives to go forth and breed and consume.

The world, as we see it now, with all the various forms of governments, wars and injustices is simply a reflection of how we are now in the aggregate.

We are making progress, as evidenced by the rule-of-law, human rights, democracies and the various personalized and institutionalized forms of compassion we have implemented. But least we get too dazzled by these signs of progress, we only need look around and see how very much of the world is still struggling in darkness.

One said:

“Holding political power is immoral because it necessarily strips the authenticity of individuals by threat of violence or violence itself, and it is this immorality that we must contend with in our actions day to day. The only way to minimize this immorality is through democratic means, spreading political power out and making a more egalitarian society.”

I love this. In the best of possible futures, I see this. Such a system holds the greater good for all of us up as a goal to be manifested.

But I temper my enthusiasm with the observation that to achieve such systems, the implementors will have to intentionally and consciously transcend their own unconscious evolutionarily derived human natures. And, if they implement such systems. they will have to make laws and exert intentional legal force to hold the new structures against the onslaughts of those who still want to have things their own way. Those who want political power, the power of excessive riches, the power to rule over others and the power to insist that their personal views and needs should transcend the greater good for all of us. It will be a very long time before such people go away.

And, in the mean time, the clocks are ticking away as the train we are all on travels steadily toward the brink of a massive global reset.

(See: https://samadhisoft.com/philosophy-index/the-train-ride-to-hell-theory/)

We are, most of us, just Nero fiddling while the fires are gathering in Rome.

——

So, as I’m wont to do, I bring us back to considering what we can change and what we cannot change.

And I bring us back to considering that at the end of all our struggles, what most of us are seeking, in so very many different ways, is a sense of subjective peace for ourselves here in this unfathomable world we find ourselves in.

The only treasure you really have are the years still left to you between now and when you die.

Focus on what you can change and simply accept the rest as it is.

And with what you can change, seek your own subjective peace and self-understanding. That’s not a self-serving as it might sound.

Increasing your own subjective peace inevitably renders you more porous to the others around you. And if your actions make others unhappy, then your newly porous nature will open you to feel what they feel. And any subjective peace you have will lessen as theirs does.

220823 – Letter to an American Friend

August 23rd, 2022

It all sounds like really down the rabbit hole stuff to me.  The world, undoubtedly, is in a terrible mess.  But explanations, such as your paper offered, are not going to help.  They just increase the social tensions.

I had my fourth Covid jab yesterday.  Free, painless, no teeth have fallen out, IQ has not (apparently) dropped.  

If I was still in the USA, I’d be very worried at the rising tide of Republican conservatism.  A tide that threatens to overthrow American democracy as you and I have always known it.  We even have bits of it here in New Zealand.  People who want to swarm into under attended local boards and get onto them with the explicitly stated goal of making the system ungovernable.   

All these motions to resist the governance of the democratic states will, IHMO, simply result in a conversion that ushers in authoritarian states much as when Mussolini rose to power with Fascism.  Then choice did truly disappear.  Santis and/or Trump at the top of an U.S. authoritarian pyramid of consolidated power?   I don’t think I want to be there.

Democracy is a terrible system.  But, as Winston Churchill said, it is the best one we’ve got.  

Consider your options to continue being the edgy, art-centered, always wants to see the alternate POV person that you are.  And consider your chances of being able to do that under any authoritarian government.

American democracy is a fucking mess with unbridled Capitalism simply and insidiously running away, year by year, with more and more of the wealth.  

But balance and Capitalism can work together – if the system is structured to be intentional about it.  And if the public culture supports a balance between egalitarian and Capitalistic  notions.

Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland have such systems.  Rather than going off to Palm Springs, I think you should take six months and go and immerse yourself in Nordic culture.  

Trying to appreciate what’s possible from within the silo of Americana is like looking through a telescope backwards.

America is insular and inward looking.  I know – I lived there most of my life.  

I’ve read that only 13% of Americans have passports.  

As a typical American looking out, it is easy to imagine that America is the center jewel of all existence.  And that all the other poor struggling countries are just ‘pretending’ to be real places.   

Read some books, Buddy.  Get out of the silo in an effort to break your American hypnosis.  Go sit in European cafes and coffee shops and philosophize with folks there.   You have the money, you have the intelligence.  Break out of your increasingly personal ‘fortress mentality’ in which you constantly imagine ‘they’ are closing in on your freedoms.

Simply shed your patterns and ego defenses and go and intentionally re-invent yourself.  Trust yourself to survive.  Trust yourself to drop your assumptions and trust that you will be able to see the truth when it is standing in front of you.

I’ve jumped ship several times in this life and re-invented myself.  And each time I ended up better off than I was.  You can either hunker down like a hedgehog or you can fly like a bird.  Either way, the experiences you’ll have will largely be the product of the courage you bring to the table.  And for fuck’s sake – you’ve got nothing to lose.  None of us, NONE, are getting out of here alive.  So there’s nothing really to survive and protect against.

Travel.  And wherever you are, look up the expats there.  They are all new and from other places.  They want to talk and socialize, they want to discuss politics, they want to feel a sense of flexible, moveable community.  Go Salsa across Europe –  you have the skills.

Stop sending me fucking paranoid missives from down at the bottom of some American silo.   I’ve been there and I’ve been many places and I don’t believe they are anything other than local cultural illusions.

When you’ve sat in Olso, Lisbon, Copenhagen or Amsterdam for six months, send me a note and I’ll come and join you for a few beers and we can talk about how the world looks then.   And I guarantee you that America will look FAR DIFFERENT looking in from the outside than it does looking out from the inside.

Many years ago, you came to my apartment in Long Beach when I was on the brink of turning my life upside down.  You told me a story about the “Sword of no sword” and in those days you were a pirate – the way you lived.  I loved your courage and your example.   You said then that one of the reasons you liked me was that “I owned myself”.

Well, let me  return the favor (and I mean this sincerely).  Break the molds you are in, my friend.  They are not serving you.  They are just driving you further into America-centric silos of distrust.  Meditate on the fact that you have nothing to lose.  You have money, you have time, you have health and all you need to do is rip off the bandages and defenses and go out on a mind-freeing walkabout outside of America.

I absolutely stone-cold promise you that you will scare the fuck out of yourself and feel alive like you have probably not felt in a long time.

Fondly,

Dennis

Note to a friend – 220816

August 16th, 2022

Have you ever thought that it is us, the thinkers, who tend to insist that things have to be ‘this way’ or ‘that way’?

It is undeniable that everything is part of the one. But it is equally undeniable that the one manifests as the many.

Our tendency to make things ‘this way’ or ‘that way’ draws us into feeling we have to choose. It is uncomfortable that it should be both at once.

The relevance of ‘the many’ is, perhaps, that we could not be having the conversation if only the unity was manifest.

Because our awareness of the one-ness generally comes long after our ‘impossible to avoid immersion’ in the many, we then tend to think that the later realization is the better or more profound one.

People have discovered (via drugs, meditation or just serendipity) that there is a state of thoughtlessness that can merge them into the one-ness.

Some of these folks think that the one-ness is far superior. And they spend the rest of their lives seeking to end any and all engagements with thought.

I don’t think so. They both exist. Two sides of the same coin. When I need my mind, I turn it on. When nothing is pressing me to figure it out, I shut it off. Both states are mine at will. I assign neither the superior roll.

So, all that you said about Dream States leaves me feeling that you’ve decided that only the one-ness is real and the many is simply illusion.

I liked what you said about “…the mind gets identified as the dreamt character….”. So true. Here in the world of the many, we do tend to believe we are a unique and special “I”. We believe in a personal self. And this personal self defends itself with the ego.

All that can be dropped as clarity comes. And what remains, in the many, is a biological thing, a bit of the existence, that is aware and looking out.

If I had any small criticism about all that you wrote here, it would be to avoid the Either-Or trap. It is all true – both sides, both views. Don’t get too lost in the idea that it is all a meaningless dream. Avoid trying to see it as one way or the other. Flow into and out of all points of view.

You have a beautiful mind and POV. The way forward is always to embrace more and more – even as we understand less and less. As soon as someone drives a stake into the ground and says, “This is it”, step away. The road is endless and ever deepens.

Letter to a friend May 2022

May 13th, 2022

My friend,

I am sorry to hear that.

You know, unless you are counting on reincarnation and additional lives, all you really have is your life now?  

There’s nothing more valuable. That is, if you, in fact, experience your life as having value.

If you are sure, however, that you are making the very best use of the time you have left, then good.  
But if not, then regret at the end is a terrible thing.

Many people work and work and wear themselves out trying to ensure that they have ‘enough’ and that everything is arranged perfectly.  They save and save so that their savings are always maximized.  Somehow, they imagine that all this preparation and saving will serve to help delay the arrival of mortality.

But, nothing, other than careful attention to our health, can actually stave off mortality.  And even then, the results are only temporary.

For many of us, failing health catches up with us and all of our preparations are meaningless.  
None of the things we’ve stock-piled can change our mortality.  

All the money we saved to use to do enjoyable things with when we retire, it all now gets spent on futile and expensive efforts to preserve what little failing health we still have.   

And in the end, we realize all we ever really had of value was just the time that we had left in our lives. 

It is unlikely that you will ever be in better health than you are now, that you will have better strength or better intelligence than you have now.  These days now, literally, are the best days of the rest of your life.  It all goes downhill from here as your days keep passing.

Saving more money or getting ‘everything arranged just so’ will not changes these facts.

At some point, before it is too late, you should give yourself permission to be the a little girl you once were and allow yourself to take immediate pleasure in your life.  

 Of course, you can and should make provisions for your son.  But, he is like a little paper boat with a bright, burning candle set in it.  You gave him life, you raised him and you love him.  But it is, and always was going to be, his life.  His to lead.

And once you’ve done what you can to push his little boat off into the stream of life, what about you?
Will you work 24/7/365 until one day you die?   Everyone gathers and says, “What a good hard working woman she was.”

And then you are gone, your house is emptied and most of what you collected is scattered to the wind.

And your boy loves and misses you but he moves on with his life, as it was always destined that he should.

As the Poet Kahlil Gibran says, 

Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself… You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow…”

Just some philosophical thoughts and advice from a friend of yours.   

Stop and reflect, my friend.  If you continue as you are now, you will arrive exactly where you are going.

 Or you can cup the years you have left like sweet water to your lips and drink it as you like.  You can do the things you always thought ‘someday’ about.  Someday is now and time can only grow shorter.

Fondly,

Dennis

The Mystical

May 2nd, 2022

My objection to the mystical is not an absolute thing. Not a black or white thing. Given my increasing perception that all of existence is a mystery, it would be quite disingenuous of me to say what is within and without the fold.

And, in truth, there’s a lot in my life and subjective perceptions that I would call mystical.

My objection isn’t that the mystical doesn’t exist. My objection is that once a person integrates mystical elements into the fabric of their explanations and understandings of their life and existence, their feet quickly lift off from the ground.

Try to see my POV by looking through this lens:

I avoid all beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, and wishes. I do this on the theory that all of these are, in essence, simply ways of me trying to negotiate, shape, negate or pretend that the qualities of naked reality are anything other than just what they are. Imagine now that I am quite successful at avoiding all of that. Does this mean nothing mystical happens in my life?

No, far from it.Many things continue to happen in my life that seem quite mysterious and mystical to me. But I do not build my understandings and explanations upon them. I do not build dependencies upon them. I do not engage in ‘quid-pro-quo’ reasoning about them.They just are part of the mystery of existence I experience without judgement.

Imagine two men: One man is good because he believes that if he is good, he will get rewards in this life or in heaven. The other is good simply because he believes that doing good is right in-and-of-itself and needs no other reason or justification for doing it.

Perhaps my point is beginning to come clear?

I eschew the beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, and wishes because they all seem like negotiations with an implacable reality that has no notion of negotiation. And I avoid incorporating any of my mystical experiences into the fabric of my explanations and understandings of my life because I do not want to engage in quid-pro-quo reasoning about them. I just want to see existence as clearly as I can and to do what I do because I think it is right in-and-of-itself.

I trust, or I bet my life (very much the same thing, I think), that everything else will take care of itself. And I trust, that if I eschew any sort of negotiations via beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, and wishes, then I am optimizing my ability to see ‘what is’ with greater and greater clarity. And I harbor no preconceptions about where this deeper and deeper seeing will take me. Because holding any preconception takes me back into the loop of confusion that arises when we engage in beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, and wishes.

Having said all of that, I will repeat what you’ve often heard me say. “I am one of the luckiest people I have ever known in my life and I have no idea why this is so.” Nor do I wonder or allow myself to conjecture why it is so. It just is. It just is what it is and I give deep thanks everyday that I am so blessed.

I truly feel that my life is blessed and I feel great joy that I have this perception. It is a central wellspring in my life. Tomorrow, it may all change. So be it. I just want to see it ‘as it is’ without any negotiating crutches and without any quid-pro-quo reasoning about why it is.

I engage in no reasoning that involves mystical elements. They are mystical. And, by definition, I think that places them beyond reason.

Rather, I focus on the illusions that block me from seeing more clearly. I focus on identifying my beliefs and understanding why, psychologically, I might emotionally prefer to hold such beliefs – rather than choosing to just see things as they are.

My rationality is not designed to quash the mystical from my life. It is designed to see the truth of how things are, as much as I can. And, if the mystical continues to bless me, then that is sweet.

You kidded me about if there is or is not a “God”?

I have no idea. And I don’t think I’m going to ever going to be capable of deciding such a thing either – except by faith. And that takes me back, again, into the beliefs, biases, hopes, fears, and wishes loop.

I’ve got no business in that loop if I want to see clearly. The unknowable fact of whether there is or there is not a God, simply doesn’t come into my concerns.

The Ultimate Reality

May 2nd, 2022

I have to confess that I do not see the “ultimate reality” or “naked reality”. And I haven’t a hope of doing so.

But then I’m not claiming to. That was never the point.

Our experiences and our narratives, are a moving frame; a frame that is advancing through time. A frame in which the contents inevitably change as experiences are experienced and as understandings develop, deepen or are transcended.

As the saying goes, no one can put their foot into the same river twice.

Consider:

Many of us who, have looked at a bias held by another, will have thought, ‘This person is being partially blinded by this bias.’ I.e., they are not seeing the world around them as clearly as they might.

I’ve told the story several times about walking into a psych lecture in university. The subject was Freud’s Defense Mechanisms. 45 minutes later, I walked out and saw a changed world around me.

Experiences and insights inevitably push at us to absorb them. After all, we live in an existence wherein change is said to be the only constant. Change presses upon us; whether we open our arms to it or not.

Change changes us. The contents of our moving frame changes. What we are experiencing changes because the contents of our frame have changed.

And, yes, our experience is all still undoubtedly subjective.

There is no question of pulling the curtain away and seeing the “ultimate reality” or “naked reality”. That was never the point.

But the person who transcends a partially blinding bias will see what is there to be seen more clearly without the distortion.

And thus it is with all beliefs, religions, biases, opinions, hopes and fears; to name a few of our sources of distortion.

Each distortion we diminish lets us see a bit more clearly. Each moves us some immeasurable distance closer to the unobtainable ultimate. Each new thing we learn changes the contents of the frame and alters the view.

If the mutability of the moving frame that our experiences arise from is grasped, then the possibility of influencing what the frame is fed can be conceived.

Choosing to try to diminish all the beliefs, opinions, biases, hopes and fears from within a frame seems likely to increasingly clarify the frame’s perception of the reality around it.

It is a road that promises new vistas for the frame without ever a hint of a promise of the road’s end.

After trying many other things, I’ve found that this is the thing that I find the most intriguing.

The Need for Meaning

May 2nd, 2022

This ‘need’ for meaning in our lives shapes so very much of how we perceive the world.

The first thing I would say about this is that for the vast majority of the human race, I would never consider trying to deny them the sustenance of believing that there is a meaning for their life.

But for those few of us out here in the hinterlands thrashing in the bushes, I’d say that we should consider why we humans feel such a thirst for meaning.

We are as clearly the product of the evolution that shaped us.

We are, at this late stage of evolution on this planet, intelligent self-aware creatures.

And the evolution, that we are the products of, has honed us, and the survival of all creatures, upon our ability to reliably detect and understand what is going on around us in the environment; as the optimum way to ensure survival and propagation.

So, we are hard-wired to incessantly try to understand what we are seeing when we look out at the world.

And it is from this trying to understand that arises a terrible cognitive dissonance.

Having manifested self-awareness and the inevitable and concurrent sense of personhood that accompanies self-awareness, the observation that we appear to just live and then die deeply offends our sense of personhood, presence and continuity.

“I am, and I can see that I am, and then … I’m not?” Why, why, why?

Even today, with all of our biological knowledge, the central point of Dawkins’ book, “The Selfish Gene”, eludes us.

“You mean it is not all about me and my sense of persistent personhood?”

In the deeper stages of Zen Buddhism, and other meditative and introspective practices, it is often seen that our egos and our sense of personhood are illusions.

Everything is change. We come, things happen and we go. So it is.

Only the illusionary sense of personhood, and the associated automatically arising defensive barrier, the ego, resist the simple evidence of our transience.

So, in the face of this terrible cognitive dissonance, we dream up religions to ‘explain’ things and to comfort ourselves that our person-hoods are not really just transient patterns.

The book, “The Worm at the Core”, by Sheldon Solomon discusses all of this quite nicely.

If our need for ‘meaning’ drives us to construct religions that we believe in to comfort ourselves, then I can only group this phenomenon into the same basket with the other distortions which stand between us and increased clarity.