INDEPENDENCE & HOMOGENEITY

June 8th, 2020

Envision a typical group of friends, the archetypal group of friends.  What are they like?  As individuals, how do they decide if they are going to do something or not? 

Within any group, there is a tendency toward homogeneity.  There is a quality of ‘sameness’ that everyone gravitates towards in order to take part in the experience of belonging to a group.  Much of this is just efficiency.  It’s easier to abide by the methods that a whole bunch of other people have figured out.  If it works for so many others, than surely it must work for me, or so goes the thinking.  Regardless of how well a method or a system adopted by the group works, it’s often easier to just go along with it as opposed to starting with a blank slate and attempting to reinvent a better wheel.

When an individual has an idea about something they’d like to do, the first thing such a person usually does is to bounce the idea off the rest of the group.  Everyone chimes in with their opinion, and all together the effect of this has more to do with how the idea effects the group rather than how it might fare for the individual.  Groups become convinced of their own wisdom by virtue of the fact that there’s agreement or consensus about something.  If everyone thinks it’s a bad idea, than it’s probably a bad idea.  But again, this is a reflection of the group as it’s own unit, and how it might be affected by the idea of the individual.  It’s possible that any idea that is overly beneficial for the individual threatens the cohesiveness of the group.  The group as a unit includes that individual, and if that individual has a good idea that might somehow takes them away from the group, the group can have a negative reaction to that idea, though it is often presented in a different guise, one tailored to convince the individual.

From an individual standpoint, this is where solitude can be used as a powerful tool.  Divorced from the proximity of other perspectives and their opinions, one is forced to consider deeply their own ideas. 

In solitude one has to interrogate their own ideas for value, to interrogate their own self for a desire to pursue that idea, to test how flimsy or strong that desire is, and to match it against values to determine how important the idea is regardless of desire.

The opinion of others can often be a poison and a pollution due to the latent forces that produce it.  Certainly a mindful and compassionate person might be able to give honest and helpful feedback, but your average individual is not so pure of mind and intention. 

Many and most are riddled with faults, weaknesses and insecurities that thwart and warp their genuine intentions to be helpful.  Groups most certainly fall victim to the very same mechanics.

Though this pollution of feedback does not necessarily mean it cannot be useful.  But if we have not properly vetted our ideas in solitude with the range of optics we can bring to it alone, then our own stance on the subject does not have proper footing.  A lack of introspection leaves us vulnerable to be easily influenced by others: our good idea can be dismissed cringingly by someone who reacts quickly, or our bad idea can be superficially propped up by an enthusiastic friend.  In each circumstance, there is no thorough vetting, only a search for someone else to do the thoughtful work.

Independent thought requires first and foremost, independence from others.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: STREAMING

June 7th, 2020

for Sharon, who wanted a story with a stream in it.

Lucilius was sitting on a rock poised in the middle of a stream.  He’d traversed a haphazard path of smaller rocks that jutted out in the water, leading from the short sandy bank, gnarled with curling tree roots.  Lucilius adjusted himself, finding that the rock was most comfortable looking upstream.  He rested, taking in the place.  Threads of water, weaving in living patterns upon the surface gently flowed toward him.  It was as though he were moving forward, propelled through the water, and during moments of delightful illusion, he couldn’t tell if it were the water moving or himself.  It was as good as any place to sit in meditation.  He closed his eyes, and in darkness, the sound of the water dabbling along the land’s ragged edge drifted to him, then the softer splicket of water folding in upon itself, and then finally below it, the low resonance of so much moving across the earth.

Upon that rock, Lucilius spread his mind out against the world to let it dissolve against his experience.  Thoughts materialized in that otherworldly film, as though laid against experience, but he merely watched them without eyes, as though they were sounds drifting up from the water, arriving, and flowing across his mind, and moving on.  One such thought was the realization that all thoughts, sensations, realizations themselves were arriving to push and carve the mind.  Lucilius opened his eyes to look again at the water moving around him.  Everywhere, the water was carving it’s own bed, shaping the way it would carve again in the next moment.  Rocks rounded, and sediment stirred in gentle tumult, moving like thought through a stream of water and time.

Lucilius closed his eyes again, smiling at that perpetual want of the mind, to grasp, to hang on to each and every little thing - that touch of the mind instantly casting pieces of life into things of the past, cast back, looking back, fossilizing the moment in memory, already crumbling.  He breathed deeply and let go of all attempt to grasp at it, and sunk deeply into the present.

Time then smiled upon Lucilius, bowing deeply to the handsome trick, and then it left Lucilius to be in peace.  The water of the small stream continued to make it’s bed, carving and burrowing the shape of it’s movement into the earth, the earth itself just a slower stream of movement.

Days past without touching Lucilius.  Months carved away with their passing until they became years, and the years, gently moving the tumult of days slowly rounded the decades and centuries, until eons were born.

When Lucilius opened his eyes again, he found that the small stream had left for him his island of rock, and had carved deeply and widely around it.  Lucilius now sat upon a stone tower in the middle of a canyon.  He could see far below the stream that had become a river stretch off to the horizon from where it came.

He could no longer hear the movement of the water, now seeing only its grand shape. And it in, he sensed something.  He followed the vision of the dark water, looking down off the edge of the tower, and then slowly he turned to look behind himself. 

He witnessed in a curious and terrible awe as the river extended past, and there behind him it continued to change, lifting, as though separating from the page of reality, the water transforming, snapping to new shapes, like letters or magnets suddenly pulled with immense force into new positions, immortalizing them.  The water, and the stream itself became words and data, bifurcating out of the only existence Lucilius could know.  And from there it continued to stream, forming itself in a perfect memory before moving on to pages and into eyes, and into speakers, and into ears where it then continues to stream in the minds that contemplate these words.

LOOKING FOR LUCK

June 6th, 2020

Have you run out of luck?  Or have you just stopped looking for it?

What is luck?  Or rather, what exactly is a lucky occurrence?  Some boon or benefit has come our way.  Perhaps we’ve won some money, or there is a parking space exactly where we need one, or the boss is later to work than we are.

In each of these, and indeed in most lucky circumstances, the luck hinges on some sort of resource that has suddenly opened up to us.  The money we’ve won can be used to buy that thing we’ve always wanted, that parking space is a resource in terms of the time it saves us in order to look for another spot.

Luck, has less to do with some perfect alignment of factors than it has to do with resourcefulness.  When the chance resource at hand is obvious, we call it lucky, and when we can’t see anything at hand that can fulfill our need, we call ourselves unlucky. 

On top of this, there is a culture of feeling lucky or unlucky, and regarding one’s self as such.

Are you a lucky person?

What makes this the case?

There seems to be this eerie occurrence of people becoming lucky when they start to believe they are lucky.  Is this some sort of divine alignment?  It’s certainly easy and perhaps even tempting to think so, but there is a far simpler, pragmatic and easy solution to this little quandary.

People who regard themselves as lucky are more resourceful because they start looking at everything as a potential resource - a potential avenue where luck is looking to pour into life.  This simple shift in perspective raises a person’s agency because they automatically have more tools at hand in terms of potential resources than the person who is already convinced that the resources aren’t at hand.

Would you look for something if you were certain it wasn’t there?  Of course not.  And this is exactly how the unlucky person regards their circumstances.

The lucky person simply abandons such certainty and thinks: well maybe there’s something here to work with.  And that’s all it takes: to simply look around at one’s circumstances in terms of what it has on offer to be utilized, transformed, tinkered with and combined into a way forward.

What’s lucky isn’t the circumstance at hand.  It’s quite literally the perspective that is lucky, and the circumstance simply looks different when we use this perspective.

BIRTH OF BELIEF

June 5th, 2020

This episode is dedicated To Sam McRoberts who contributed to these thoughts in conversation.  Sam is a bestselling author of Screw The Zoo and expert in SEO.  You can connect with Sam on Twitter @Sams_Antics

Do facts require belief?  Do we believe in facts because they are true, or are facts beyond the need for belief by virtue of the fact that they are undeniable, confirmed aspects of reality?

Is it possible for someone to admit something is a fact but also claim that they don’t believe in it?  Or is this a contradiction?

The connection between fact and belief is not straight forward.  The space between these two words and the way these concepts interact is contradictory and problematic.

The untested assumption ossifies into belief. 

When the process of approximating towards a more accurate, more nuanced answer ceases, the assumption becomes stagnant in the mind.  But if we still operate on that faulty assumption, that is, if our actions are still taken in accordance to an untested assumption, then does it remain an assumption?  Or does that unproven premise harden in some way?

An assumption is defined, after all, as: a thing that is accepted as true without proof.

So what do we call an assumption that is taken very seriously?  A listed synonym for the word assumption is belief.

And this is a fair definition of what a belief is: a thing accepted as true without proof.  That thing of course, is a bit more cherished than any plain old assumptions.  No one ever talks about their cherished assumptions.  But cherished beliefs are the pride and joy of many pontificating people.

An untested assumption ossifies into belief when our emotional attachment to that assumption is strong enough to override any challenge of evidence to prove that assumption wrong.

This is a dangerous process, one that deliberately abandons verifiable truth due to feelings.  Why this can become so dangerous is because reality does not operate within the preferences of our beliefs.  The forces that be coldly play out, and if our feelings and by extension, our beliefs are at odds with the way things play out, we can be left in extremely disadvantageous positions.  To ignore reality is to make an enemy of it, one that will not return boon nor benefit without the sacrifice of the beliefs which fuel such disregard.

To understand better reality, we are best served by a process that we fear the most: a process that treats our cherished beliefs with impartial, and even brutal challenge.  It raises the question: why hold on to something at such a cost?  Is it for the actual assumption, or does it have more to do with the feeling we associate with the belief?  If the emotional resonance of the belief were suddenly removed, if one were suddenly able to examine the points of their beliefs without a single shred of positive feeling, nor negative feeling, would such beliefs still be convincing? 

No one feels anything particularly negative nor positive about gravity, and yet reality plays a very convincing hand to ensure we all believe in gravity, despite our inability to thoroughly explain it.

Many of us expect this to operate in reverse.  We expect beliefs that lack evidence to bend and shape reality.  The disadvantageous position often arises when reality has taken a shape so different from the one imagined by our beliefs that the consequences are physically impossible to ignore.  We do ourselves a great service by engaging in the painful process of examining our beliefs ruthlessly, fine-tuning them, or abandoning them for better assumptions, a process that slowly brings us closer to the way things really are.

SCOPE

June 4th, 2020

The context we take into consideration is like the form of the question we ask.  The context determines and limits what we can understand about a situation, just as the answer to a question is helpful in direct proportion to the question being asked.

Either it be the situation we are trying to assess, or the answer we are searching for, the question arises either consciously or implicitly:

What is the scope being considered?

Another way of phrasing this is: how zoomed in or zoomed out are we?

A telescope is useless when trying to investigate the shape of bacteria, and it’s likewise foolish to try and investigate the form of galaxies with a microscope, but it’s quite easy in both cases to think you’re using the right instrument.

With questions, we need only ask: is this the right question?

With situations, we often do the same, by asking: is there more to it than this?

If something about the situation seems fishy, it may be that the context is bigger than we realize – there are more variables at play than we can see or access and they are influencing the situation in ways that seem invisible or magical.  This sort of thing happens all the time deliberately in movies, especially mysteries and thrillers, when the ‘larger picture’ finally emerges.  The context of the story suddenly changes, and we experience a sense of surprise as we realize how a bunch of things are actually connected – made obvious by a different scope, a new context.

With only one available context, it’s easy to have a gut reaction – an emotional response, and charge ahead with just that.  But zooming in and zooming out creates a variety of responses.  What seems like an appropriate response on one level might have terrible repercussions in a context larger than what we are considering, a larger context that naturally subsumes our situation.  Then the variable of our actions has the potential to extend beyond our considerations, ricocheting through the entire scope of possibility.  This is both encouraging, in that we probably have more effect than we realize, and also discouraging: our efforts rarely land exactly as planned.

Being careful about the context requires a careful consideration of the larger context and the whole scope in which we exist.