Taking Things Away

Taking things away. To recognize you no longer need certain things eases life. Self-denial also often grows power, forces you onto other more self-sufficient paths. Take exercise. You do not require a gym. You do not require weights at home. The body itself can be lifted and pressed and stretched and pulled. A man once trained for the marathon at the Olympics by running in place in his room while outside a war raged in the streets.

The discipline of taking things away begins with objects and physical things. Prison life teaches this discipline in a profound way. But this extends next to ideas. One realizes he cannot attain the Good. One realizes he cannot define the Good. He cannot see its border with the Non Good. So many borders seem to exist which must be taken away. When the borders have been taken away so our the things. The things did not exist. The things were unnecessary. Though the things are very necessary to those who would exercise control over a man. The things as objects of desire, cars and toys and homes, as well as those things of fame and being Good (or seen by others as good?) are taken away.
The Tao is then the man. The man is Heaven. The man is no longer a branch but the trunk. He is no longer a man, the individual branch. The individual is no more.

THE SELF, THE INDIVIDUAL, SEEMS TO BE THE ONE THING WE ARE SURE OF HAVING ITS BORDERS. BUT THE BORDERS ARE NOT THAT ASSURED AFTER ALL.

The border between a man as individual and others is the last border. The individual is the last thing to be taken away.

So much seeks to make a man an individual, to set his borders: HE feels pain and pleasure. HE has desires and that which repulses him. HE is looked at and given a number by the State and by his bank; a password only he knows for his Gmail account; HE is made out to be uniquely that combination of characteristics. A special snowflake to appear once and never again, for his lifetime is just his and no other's.

But there is much that crosses these borders of a man. He shares his life with others who came before him and who may come after him and he thinks of these others; He is visited in dreams; he can remember and forget and he cannot control what he remembers and forgets. Even his pleasure and pain is not his own for when he is in pain his mother may hurt to see him. His pleasure may inspire another. See how the smiling man makes the others smile. See how the yawning man makes others sleepy. Where would be the border between men if one's pain and pleasure, one's fatigue and joy can be shared so easily? Our these feelings really one's own then?

You say man has a birth and a death. That a life has a span. But what do we say of a man remembered by other men? Has he not lived on in memory? No that is not the man you say. But what of my memories of myself? Am I not that man if even I am the man doing the remembering? If I am not that man, than why cannot another man remember me in the same way? What is being remembered? What then is memory if memory is separate from a man? Where is the border?

A man is a contested place; a contested dream. A place pulling and receding. His borders are never clear and only through his words can he say there are borders--can he say he is a man, an individual.
Self-awareness is the highest forgetfulness. In recognizing a self man forgets the Way.

Communication.

To be exemplary is to communicate.

Nihilism

"God is dead" and with it the erosion of the Christian godhead. The science that displaced it now is under attack by Left (biology) and Right (climate change, evolution...) and with it will go the second godhead -- the one that replaced the old God.

The corporate state requires legibility and the newest god will be the individual, to curate himself as a divinity. To make of himself his own idol on the approved platforms of legibility: facebook, instagram, etc. It will be a competition of idols as every individual seeks his "likes"

It is the new paganism and it is as shallow as a marketing pitch. The tendency to nihilism going forward will be likely more pronounced.

Reason itself will be broken by worship of the virtual individual. In the virtual world the laws of science and paths of Reason do not hold true. The virtual individual can be his own god. The real world will be beset by nihilism.

Monotheism carries a seed of its own destruction. A single god is more fragile than a panoply of divinities.

The State seeks to become the godhead, as do the corporations (Bezos). The path to this divinity is through a subjugation made possible by legibility. To be watched over and "nudged" to action by the State; a gentle slavery. The corporate state is like the Zeus to the citizens who conceive themselves as individual divinities.

THE TELOS AS ESSENTIAL TO WESTERN GODHEAD. The godhead must exist across narrative time. Some features of the godhead still abide: democracy (as derived from notions of equality born of Christianity). But the definition of equality is being challenged (both its practical/social manifestations in human interaction as well as biologically). Equality of outcome threatens to upend the traditionally defined equality, to place it suddenly on unsteady foundations. It is perhaps similar to Galileos formulations (some speculations entirely) that began to unsteady Scripture and begin the "death of God." In their emphasis on equality and redefinition of it, these young radicals threaten to overturn foundations of democracy and biology thought unassailable by prior generations.

The "I"

The "I" is a place in the world. A realm. A land with its own unique features. "I" exists in space and in time -- IT IS SPACE AND TIME.

A toothache is felt pain. Pain is not something that I HAVE. That grammar confuses the philospher into attributing pain to someTHING. The "I" is not a thing, but a place in the world. It is a place ever-changing.

The "I" extends out to what is familiar and somewhat familiar and not at all familiar. The "I" is a lineage over time and into the future (perhaps). "I" can remember. "I" can forget.

"I" feel pain from a toothache. "I" also feel pain when my mother dies. The philosophers say one pain is internal the other externally caused. The grammar again is confusing and causes books to be written and bad ideas to be made.

Is it possible for others to share this place called "I"? It would seem that in empathy for "my" pain someone else could share this place with me. Then, these places of "I" overlap. Take the example of the death of a child and the pain felt by the mother and father. THEY SHARE A PLACE OF PAIN.

The dangers of the "I" as conceived philosophically are behaviorism and solipsism.

Personality vs. Identity

Identity as a marketing category for product placement; or as a designation for the State. Identity is how men make themselves visible to the panopticon. The panopticon is both corporate and state run -- technology is where the two take account and analyze a population.

Men identify themselves with brands and products (corporate designations) and by skin color, occupation, gender, etc (state class and group designations). Men are skilled in self-identification from a palate of categories offered to them by the corporate state.

Skillfullness is the enemy of personality. One is skilled at a recognized method. One learns the skill and practices it just as others practice it. One aspires to a base level ability with that skill. Personality arises from the nimbus, the opaque wild. Personality is how men are unique and remain invisible to a panopticon. But men are no longer unique. They seek to group themselves, which was the corporate and state desire for them all along.

If there is to be a global state, it will be a virtual one. It will not be operated by statesman as we have known them historically, but by technologists-- wizards of virtual reality; a cabal of master programmers. The virtual world can reject laws and freedoms and rights established in the actual world.

The virtual world will offer carefully curated dreams of identity in place of the nimbus. For his identity man will relinquish those aspects of his personality that resist quantification until he has lost his personality altogether. He will become a member of a variety of different groups, each which practice a methodological identity. To stray from that identity or challenge it will result in ostracization.

There will be many who are denied access to the virtual world altogether. Yet by their resistance to the categories of identity these deplorables will have a chance at personality.

Language is the Origin of Consciousness

Rough notes to be reworked later.....

The way was silent for a very long time.

There were no words for it.

There were grunts and moans and faces that made expressions; the eyes told men much.

Men made their way together before the word.

Then one day a man had a word. But he did not yet have someone to understand it.

When he had someone to understand his word, what that word referred to was made clear and stood clearly in the world. It was a thing. And the thing was separate and alone.

There was great use to this and more men learned the first word. There were more words then. And more things. The world was separating out into a place of things.

Projects could be accomplished much easier in this world of things. Men worked together more easily in the world of things. The words were magic.

He who made the new words found the new things, and the new ways to do things. He was keeper of the magic.

The words grew in number and complexity. There were even words that related words to other words.

...

Consciousness is man examining himself with words. Making of himself a thing separated from the world.

...

The great advance in the technology of language was writing. It allowed for a higher order of word making. This is turn allowed for a higher order of man describing himself with words. Man became his own exquisite thing. His advances in language made him otherworldly, broken entirely from the world. This is consciousness as it stands today. Man has become his writing technology.

Man even describes himself with other technologies as metaphors. The consciousness he created with words he now relates to a computer program. 

Notes on Predicting the Future

The necessity of vast generalization to live with lots of complexity, globalized information. This has obscured the specific connections between things, so that specifics are disregarded for the generalized. Indeed, vast systems discount particular specific instances as anecdotal, as anomalous. But it is not at the level of the general that men are most comfortable, but at the specific, the anecdotal. 

My predictions of the future begin with specific observations in areas I have developed a refined expertise in. They began with a practical base, with observations on the road of other drivers, predicting what they would do next based upon cues taken quickly from their driving. I could see things from my truck before they were going to happen. I could move to lanes that would avoid the potential danger of accident.

But there is another higher order of prediction, based on cues that are not as easily observable. In trucking I found I would sometimes FEEL as though I needed to change lanes or to stay in a particular lane. Then some miles ahead something would be moving slowly in that lane, or some danger would present itself. What had I seen to predict this? What was the nature of this feeling?

The second question I have a better sense of answering. The feeling comes as a kind of voice. Not an internal voice like talking to myself, and this is why I call it a feeling, though it is perhaps better called a felt voice.

Consciousness is the seeing of oneself in the world. It is an ability and a perspective but is often misused. Unfortunately, it has been cited as an accessway to truth and to knowledge when coupled with a language influenced by writing (written, non-pictographic language changed spoken language). The conscious person is best realized in abstract talk, unrelated to the natural world.

What would be the use of consciousness? Perhaps as a fail safe for when emotions overrun and blind and inhibit or misguide action in the world. Consciousness then would be a way to clear up obstacles to a return to enlightened non-thinking in the world. Consciousness as a way to stop oneself from making excessive emotional judgements. 

But consciousness explored as a pathway to deeper truth is person/individual making and world destroying.

In predicting the future I cannot do it when consciously trying to do it. When I insert myself through thinking I make false predictions. 

There is more revealed to the unconscious than to conscious thought. The feeling that you are being watched and you turn and see that you are being watched comes from the same place as the seeing of the future.

Perhaps "prediction" is the wrong word to describe what is happening. One feels the future. A seeing brought about through unconscious feeling. To let the conscious self and person and individual go is to allow a knowing of the world impossible through (self) conscious, logical thought based upon the technology of (abstract / non-pictographic) written words.

The technologies humans have more recently created encourage consciousness, encourage the privileging of personhood and individuality. These technologies further the distance between humans and the natural world (the other animals). The path of what humans call "progress" is towards the technological enhancing of individual consciousness.

"The Burial" by Varlam Shalamov

a translation by Maxim Botkin

In the new year I found a home.
A place to die without tears alone.
Its door does not close,
Thick with ice forever froze.

In this house a white mist spreads,
through the walls it blows,
settling near my bed,
it licks at my toes.

A brick is my candlestick,
and as the night nears,
from it the candlelight flicks,
and shadows and vestiges appear.

Yet in no way do I seem dead,
I still eat and drink,
Thus I shake my head,
For what am I alive, I think.

At last one morning it was said,
over our shared, frozen bread:
Perhaps it is a kind of dead,
that to the earth cannot be fed.

Ammonal into the rock we hammer it,
the gravedigger's rite.
The fuse is then lit,
on the mining dynamite.

Without clothes, without underwear,
Into this hole I disappear,
Bony and stripped bare,
There is no other grave here.

Not dirt, only handfuls of stone,
Flies about my face.
Anxious days, bitter nights alone
The circle unbroken in this place.

         *   *   *

With verses this sincere,
I can start a fire,
turning to ash all men near,
to be spread about this mire.

Yet, when I am no longer cold,
These lines I am unable to behold.

But should another
biting snowstorm break out,
with that cold that smothers
and lingers about

I will again in that blizzard dire
with these lines rekindle a fire.

         *   *   *

With this triumph at my side,
in spite of any bear or fox,
with my bicycle I ride,
along this highway of rocks.

Here, for a stenographer of the land
a story in clay and sand:
a suicide note
forgotten, yet close at hand.

Buried in these roadside ruts,
anywhere geologic pits were cut.
All of us, who could not speak out
who's mouths were kept shut ...

But who to read these hieroglyphs,
some Champollion yet unknown,
To decipher these voiceless myths,
To hear their human moan.