STAR GAZING

November 19th, 2018

If we close our eyes for a moment and concentrate on the sensations of the hand, we can probably discern the sensations of the separate fingers, the thumb as separate from the ring finger, but if we concentrate on the hand generally, it’s not too difficult for the whole sensation of the hand to dissolve into a cloud of feeling. 

We can do this with the whole body.  Perhaps there’s a particularly bright discomfort in the back from sitting or standing too long, or a recent paper cut or stubbed toe is lighting up.  Again, as with the hand, if we try to focus on the entire sensation of the body, it’s not difficult for the whole light show to resolve into cloud.

From the standpoint of neurobiology, we can define different sensing mechanisms that are responsible for this.  In the skin, for instance, there are tiny little cells, like mechanical gadgets in some cases that are responsible for a feeling of pressure against the skin, or stretching, or even heat.  The presence of any of phenomena trigger these cells that then fire off signals to the brain to indicate what is going on.  Even when nothing in particular seems to be going on, such mechanisms are still firing and communicating with the brain.

An interesting aspect of this whole system is that it is not evenly distributed.  We do not have nearly as many of these sensing cells in the skin of the thigh as we do in our hands.  We can experience this directly when we close our eyes and concentrate on the sensations we are feeling.  The hands seem to be far more active and dense than the thighs, and yet the hands are much smaller.

One benefit of exploring in this exercise is simply to notice how arbitrary the naming of certain things can be.  The word ‘finger’ is of little consequence to an infant who has just figured out how to use such a limb effectively.

All of this has much in common with star gazing.

Since we have had eyes that can look up, we have been seeing a giant cloud of tiny lights up in the clear skies.

And yet, no matter the culture nor place on earth, we have, without knowing what those lights are, ascribed all sorts of shapes and stories to the stars.

The stars did not decide on the constellations, we did.  And their connection and relation is completely arbitrary. 

And yet.

We can get lost in an idea of some thing’s identity and lose touch with it’s nature in terms of basic reality.  This is akin to being obsessed about the constellation and completely forgetting about the stars.

Imagine for a moment zooming through the cosmos to some other neighboring solar system and gazing at the same stars that make up our constellations here on earth.  Depending on exactly where we zoom off to, it is possible to see the exact same stars.  We would be observing the same part of reality.  And yet, would we be able to pick out the same constellations?  Not at all.  The identity of a constellation is directly related to our perspective and the angle and position of that perspective.

Positioning here, is essential.

Juxtapose for a moment these two situations:

Two people on some news show talking about politics.  They awkwardly attempt to talk towards each other while still facing the camera. 

And this situation.

Someone trying to point out a star to a friend.  Such a person brings a friend in close, their faces next to each other in an attempt to try and have that friend occupy the same space.  Such a person will probably even move a little, so the friend can occupy the exact place they were, and then recalibrate how they are pointing at the sky to account for the shift in position.

Notice the ways in which the second situation is full of generosity.  The friend is willing to change position, to come closer to the physical perspective in order to see and understand.  And the friend trying to point out that star is willing to give up their own position somewhat in order to make room.  Both are willing to get closer to one another.

It’s often pointed out that people are easily brought together when they have a common enemy.  They give up facing off at one another in order to stand next to one another in the face of an enemy.

But what this often reiterated strategy of bringing people together really describes is a change in positioning.  An enemy is not necessarily required, just some common object of focus.

We can go back to the exercise at the beginning, close our eyes, concentrate on the cloud of sensation that we ascribe to our hand, and then simply rotate our hand.  Our relationship to what we think of as ‘hand’ has changed a little bit, we feel it a bit differently, but this does not really change the hand at all, just our relationship to it.  In this case, the constellation disappears, but it’s still the same stars.

Whatever constellation we wish to ascribe to the new relationship is still arbitrary.  Concentrating on the constellation more than the basic reality of seeing stars, is the trap of identity.

This episode references Episode 157: Conquer or Concur?, and Episode 17: The Identity Danger.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: OBSTACLE HUNTER

November 18th, 2018

When Lucilius was middle aged he came to the realization that he had lost something integral to what it means to be alive.  This realization had snuck up on him gradually and when he fully realized what sort of thought had been creeping up on him, he stopped doing everything he had going on and walked to a park every morning and spent the days contemplating what exactly it was that he had lost.

After several days he felt as though he was circling the answer and getting ever closer.  And just as he felt as though the words to perfectly describe the object of his search were bubbling up in his mind, a small dust devil gathered in the park and stirred the autumn leaves into a small whirlwind.   He watched the leaves rise and then tighten into the circular column of wind.  He followed the narrowing width of the column down to the bottom and noticed that not a single leaf occupied that bottom spot on the ground where one could imagine it being torn apart.  The leaves simply rustled in a tighter circle, tumbling around on the ground.

Lucilius realized in that moment that he had likewise been circling with his thoughts and as close he might get, he was never going to get at the center of it.  The whirlwind he was watching slowly dissipated, dropping leaves as it lost power.

Lucilius decided to approach what was going on from a different angle.  Instead of trying to think his way to some sort of solution that he imagined might exist, he decided to recreate his youth, and instantly dreams of a big adventure across many lands popped into his mind.  But just as quickly, the idea lost it’s luster.  Would such an adventure just be a distraction he wondered?  He thought about the adventures he’d had throughout his life and asked himself if there was some sort of thread that ran through them, binding them together in their combined usefulness.  It was not the epic landscapes, nor the foreign food, nor sounds of different places, not necessarily even the people, though these are all touted as such important aspects of such adventures.  Lucilius did not deny them their value, but there was something else, more elemental that he was looking for, the thread that has come lose and pulled smoothly from who he now found he was.

A young mother, tired and moving slow followed as her toddler doddled out into the grassy park stippled with rusted leaves.  The child tripped, fell and paused, contemplating what had happened before scrunching face and letting out a howl.  The mother, who had just sat on a bench let her face momentarily fall into her hand so she could rub her eyes before she got up and walked over to the child.   

Lucilius got up and walked away.  The next day he boarded a plane and flew to an arid part of the world.  On the edge of a vast desert, he purchased a truck.  It took some strange negotiating, but he made sure that he was sold a truck with many issues.  He drove the truck to a local hardware store and bought some jugs of water and a completely random assortment of tools, paying no mind to the sort that might be needed by such a problem truck.

And then he drove off into the evening desert.  It wasn’t two hours into the hottest part of the next day when the truck broke down.

Lucilius got out and looked around.  There was nothing in sight save for magnificent plateaus standing like lone bricks taken from the sky.  There was no help and Lucilius had brought no way to communicate with anyone else.

With sweat running down his face, he unloaded his box of tools and popped the hood.  He looked at the dizzying complexity of the mechanics in front of him and felt a sense of panic overwhelm him with anxiety.

He looked around again at the empty vastness and then remembered why he’d come to this place.  Astonished that he’s nearly completely forgot, he burst out laughing, alone in the middle of nowhere.  He smiled, wondering how he might get out of this mess, and opened the box of tools.  He pulled out a gardening shovel and laughed again, remembering how mindlessly he had tossed things into the shopping cart.

With sun and wide sky above him, he took in the hot air and smiled. 

“Well old boy,” he said.  “You got yourself in this mess, you can get yourself out, so let’s figure out how you’re gonna do it.”

Lucilius got to work, slowly guiding the lost thread back.

TAKE IT TO THE MIN

November 17th, 2018

Usually we hear about taking it to the max.  Turn the volume up to eleven, go the extra mile, just one more drink, do one more push up, just one more bite.  Just one more pair of shoes or gadget.  Just one more Netflix episode.

It would be easy to just label ourselves as consumers, often mindless in the act of consuming, and shake a finger at this culture of consumerism, but like any generality, this misses nuances that begin to erode such a label.

We would be better described as filters of experience.  We are like combs that are passing through all the various versions of reality that we can muster.  Perhaps we are organizing it, or perhaps like a combine harvester for farming; we are trying to separate the fruit from the straw in order to level-up our current reality to a more interesting and expansive one.

Unfortunately it seems that the long time we spent without abundance dictates in evolutionary biology that we have feedback mechanisms in our brain, mostly attached to dopamine production that has us geared towards taking it to the max when it comes to things we find pleasurable, like food, sex and rock and roll.  Oh and drugs of course.

The opiate crisis, the obesity epidemic, and the ubiquity of internet pornography might simply be described as the result of a dopamine mechanism that is still calibrated to much leaner environment when such abundance was not available.  Our systems were in equilibrium in those earlier leaner times and now that we’ve changed the environment, our systems don’t respond ideally because they are not calibrated for such ripe resources.  This is essentially what evolutionary biology seeks to explore.

While the dopamine cycle might win a majority when it comes to dictating human behavior, it does not dictate all human behavior.

That dopamine cycle is part of an older part of the brain if we view the brain in terms of evolutionary development.

Our newer hardware, the neocortex is where our executive function mostly resides, and it’s this part of the brain where we as humans can do a truly remarkable thing: we can learn something conceptually, understand it’s full ramifications without actually experiencing them, and then override our older systems, such as the dopamine cycle and change our behavior to gain a greater understanding and experience of reality.

To put it simply, we might be hardwired to take it to the max, but we can run any new program we want, thus allowing us to take it to the minimum.  That is if doing so makes sense.

Take for example the case of Angus Barbieri.  In 1965 Angus weighed 456 pounds, and in that same year he decided he was sick of being so heavy.  So, under doctor supervision, he went on a fast.  The doctors recommended a short fast, but Angus really took it to the minimum.  He fasted for 382 days and lost 276 pounds.  He took vitamins and drank tea, coffee and sparkling water, but other than that, he did not eat. 

Just remember that fact next time you hear yourself say “I’m starving!” or when you hear someone else say it.  If you have the resources to read this post or listen to this episode, then it’s simply not true.  The human body has powers that are unfortunately rarely tapped in our comfortable modern society.

The benefits of fasting have been known in the scientific community for decades and recent research is only adding robustness to this old knowledge. 

It does well to think about it this way:  If you knew you were going to lose 90% of the possessions in your home tomorrow, what would you safeguard today?  This is essentially what the body does when there’s no food available.  It holds on to the essentials, making them stronger and more robust and then… literally…. cuts the fat.

William James once wrote, “We learn most about a thing when we view it under a microscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form.”

Exaggerated form is the key phrase here.  The extremes are where things literally reveal the breadth of their existence.  If you run for as long as you can today, that’s potentially useful information.  Funny enough though, if you do so, you’ll be able to run farther tomorrow, and extend your own personal extreme.

Sitting in silence for one minute might feel chaotic and unbearable, but do it enough times and gradually the experience changes. 

This is another way to take it to the minimum.  Those who meditate daily are trying to do essentially that.  Take the mind down to a current minimum of activity.  For reasons beyond the scope here, it clearly has a lot of long term benefit.

Another example is a sort of lifestyle exercise that the ancient Stoics used to practice and recommend.  Seneca would for several days a month eat the plainest food, wear the simplest clothing and sleep on the floor.  Though he was one of the wealthiest men of his time, he found great benefit in this practice because it kept him perpetually prepared for potential disaster.  If he woke up one day and found that he’d somehow lost all of his wealth, the experience of living on bare essentials would not be a shock, and so his mind was protected from panic, distress and chaos in this way.

Risk is a very strange concept in our cultural mind these days.  Somehow, in the same cultural breath, we say that improvement and innovation requires taking risk, and yet we constantly look for safe, risk-averse options.

The mistake is thinking that this is an either/or situation.  We love either/or’s because for whatever reason we love taking a side, perhaps it helps with establishing some kind of identity.  Straddling categories seems to be difficult even though this is generally where the most interesting and beneficial experiences arise from.

We can ask about our behaviors and habits, what should we try to take to the max and what would be interesting to take to the minimum?

To loosely quote Brian Koppelman and David Levien: the only person more capable than a man with infinite resources is someone with nothing to lose.

Taking one’s self to the minimum can make one invincible to things that annoy, frustrate and panic other people, granting you clarity to see the next best step when everyone else is caught up in their own idea of what’s happening.

FAUX AUTEUR PHANTOM

November 16th, 2018

Let’s try a little experiment together. 

What is the next thought that you are going to have? Purple Elephant.

Of course in this case, the sudden mention of purple elephant almost certainly invoked a strange and unexpected image in your mind.  Perhaps a different thought or two was capable of sneaking in before hearing the words ‘purple elephant’.

But this is the forceful example of the experiment.  And it exhibits the fact that we are not really in control, nor can we well predict what sensory inputs are going to arise as objects in consciousness – plainly speaking, we can’t really be all that sure about what we are going to experience.

This is likewise true for our internal life.  Let’s try the experiment again, but with a less intrusive twist. 

What exactly are you going to think after your current thought and after that thought, and the following one?

Whatever thoughts occurred during this small space of time, can you look back at them and honestly claim that you authored them in some sort of predetermined way?  We might be able to claim that actions that we take in the real world are predetermined based on a swirling crescendo of related thoughts contemplating that action, but can we claim that kind of predeterminedness about the thoughts themselves?  Where exactly would this predetermining take place?

Suddenly unanswerable questions about free will and destiny and fate start cropping up in potentially very controversial and unsettling ways.  But this is not really the point of the exercise.

The hope here is simply to engage in the act of noticing one’s own thoughts.  Undoubtedly, millions of people, potentially billions have passed through time on earth without ever having this experience.

The first undeniably powerful gift of this act is that it can also be applied to emotions that are arising in our experience.  It’s been said many times before that the angry mind that notices it’s anger ceases to be so angry.  This act is the virtuous compliment to the often touted direction for compassion to ‘put yourself in someone else’s shoes.’  This act of noticing your own thought is in effect taking you out of your own shoes. 

Let’s put this in more pragmatic terms.  Imagine for a moment that someone is filming you.  Now imagine that every time you get really angry, the feed of that camera gets suddenly rerouted into your eyes so all that you see is yourself getting angry in the larger context of whatever room or situation you are in.  Extremely few people would not be self-consciously effected by the embarrassment of such a perspective.

As Winston Churchill once apparently said, ‘a man is about as big as the things that make him angry.”

Imagining this camera filming our anger is almost always guaranteed to put the object of our anger into proper focus, into a proper context, revealing it to be fairly petty.

The act of noticing one’s thoughts and emotions in this way is effectively like building an internal camera that we have focused on the actions, emotions and thoughts we see our self having or experiencing.  Such a self-referential remove allows our executive brain to have more input on which thoughts we’d like to see propagate again, which emotions should perhaps not be entertained so faithfully and which actions had the best impact on the reality we are experiencing.

This is in essence a first vital step towards mindful wisdom.  Wisdom has been defined in many ways both simple and complex, but if we regard just one here and claim that wisdom is simply not making the same mistake again, this mindful ability to notice what we are doing instantly raises the probability that when we are making a mistake again, we will be able to notice it and stop ourselves from continuing in such Rut-like behavior.

Whether there is some kind of indivisible self that is the auteur of our experience or if it is merely a phantom that is helpful to imagine, or some kind of self-referencing that cancels out the necessity of some faux phantom, doesn’t matter.  We would do best to consider useful questions that we can actually make productive strides with, such as, would efforts to notice what I’m thinking or feeling or doing be beneficial to my wellbeing and the wellbeing of those around me?  Regardless of the curious and potentially eerie paths of thought such practice might open up, the answer is without a doubt a resounding yes.

This episode of Tinkered Thinking self-references a larger context of Tinkered Thinking’s current complete cannon by specifically referencing Episode 125: Rut, Episode 35: You are not All of You, and Episode 23: Pause.

UNUSED GIFT

November 15th, 2018

The experience of giving advice that is either rebuffed or simply never taken seriously enough to be translated into action on the part of another person is nearly ubiquitous.  It is uncanny how we can listen to a friend’s plight and feel like we can understand and see the solution so clearly.  And yet, any advice we might give is so casually dismissed, it’s as though that friend is already familiar with the idea, as though it’s already been deeply considered.

Does this mean we are giving poor advice?  Or does it have more to do with our friend’s relationship to potential solutions?

It is far easier to simply complain and lap up any potential sympathy on offer with our mind’s little cat tongue.  This feeds that short term system of pleasure.  It’s enjoyable for only as long as it lasts, like a donut.

Can we think back for a moment and look over all the advice that’s been on offer through out our life and find anything that we now wish we’d taken to heart?  Most likely, the answer is yes.  It was an instance where someone caring gave us a gift.  One that we tossed aside and never used, and now that enough time has passed, it might not even be possible to use anymore.

The marketer or entrepreneur is faced with a similar dilemma.  Such a person is looking to give a kind of gift to the world, to strangers who may or may not use such a gift.

The marketer or entrepreneur has the similar choice of playing into those short term desires, or proffering a solution that requires effort, imagination and action.

Facebook and Instagram, for instance, while they seem to be ‘free’ actually charge a huge fee with regards to time and attention.  To illustrate this, just think about all the time someone spends scrolling some sort of feed during the day, multiply that number of hours by 365 and then by the minimum wage.  In the United States the minimum wage is $7.25.  According to one source, the average time spent on social media during a given day in 2017 was 135 minutes.  If you do the math, remembering that people take part in their social media job 7 days a week, this comes to just under Six Thousand Dollars.    Essentially, at a bare minimum, this is one way to see what platforms like Facebook and Instagram are charging.

These platforms work so well because they play into our short term system of pleasure – it’s a kind of instapleasure tactic that informs the structure and user interface of these products.  They are the equivalent of a friend who never offers any constructive feedback, but simply gives into our base desire when we feel the need to complain.

The other sort of marketer and entrepreneur, who wishes to give a useful gift that risks being unused faces a harder challenge.  Without those instapleasure tactics, it’s difficult to get people to listen long enough to understand what might be on offer.  Such is the case with the complaining friend.  Emotions are at the wheel in that situation.  Just think for a moment how many times a friend has really paused and grown quiet at the proffer of some piece of advice.  More likely, the advice was met with an immediate response beginning with the all-too-often ‘Yea, but….’.  This is not the mark of thoughtful engagement, it’s emotional reaction, pure and simple.  It may be couched in reasonable sounding language, but the mere quickness is a guideline for recognizing the difference between someone who is riding an emotion and someone who is thoughtfully trying to discover a solution.

Just as time functions as an important guideline in the short term, it is the most useful tactic in the long term. 

The marketer or entrepreneur who is looking for the quick turn around on investment, is more likely to feel like a sore loser when things don’t pan out the way they hoped.  Individuals on the quest for such a quick turn around on investment are more likely to build things that use our instapleasure system in order to get what they want.  Tactic and result have a fishy similarity here.

Conversely, the marketer or entrepreneur who seeks to make a good change that does not rely on the instapleasure systems within people may be less inclined to feel like a sore loser when things don’t pan out immediately.  Someone who is willing to have skin in the long game, is somewhat like the loving parent who is continually gives unused advice.  How feeble would the concepts of love and friendship be if we felt like sore losers every single time someone didn’t take our suggestion?

Considering the monstrous size of the global problems that are looming to face our species, we might do well to consider for a moment looking at the whole of humanity as a family.  This might be laughably unrealistic, but has there ever been a moment in previous human history when we have had a bigger opportunity to be connected across the globe?  No.  And while such a fact does not automatically make us a family, the technology that makes such a fact possible is certainly a practical step in this direction.

While much of the internet is currently geared towards hijacking our older, more volatile and instinctual impulses, we must remember that it is still evolving.  The number of people who have stopped using facebook, for example, is an interesting micro-event in this evolution.  In the future, we might look back and view the quick adoption and spread of these platforms in the same way we view a bad relationship that began in a hot and fast way.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.  But the consequences slowly revealed themselves, and in the absence of some new instapleasure, perhaps our quieter, more thoughtful selves decided to pause and contemplate some real changes, some new actions, and better behavior.

We might for example, opt to go to a quieter corner of the internet, where we are challenged to think, to pause and to grow, instead of engaging in that frenzied scroll.  Or perhaps there’s a product that might actually improve our lives that we reconsider.  A book, or a meditation service, or an online course.  While the internet is technically 25+ years old, not everyone got on at the same time, and it may be fair to say that the internet and it’s evolving platforms are still experiencing the volatile ups and downs of a sort of puberty. 

While it seems unlikely looking at the internet’s short past, it is possible that it might settle into a far more thoughtful medium.  Such a thing might sound absurd, since there will always be shit kickers to stir the pot, but what if some clever person unleashes a new algorithm on the internet that begins to organize influences?  Bringing the trolls into check and highlighting the quieter spaces?

Perhaps not, but the people who were smart enough to tap into the instapleasure tendency of our limbic system may grow bored of such an easy game.  Appealing to the executive cortex isn’t just more challenging, but it expands the options infinitely since we can curiously contemplate things far beyond the reach of our impulsive limbic system.

Regardless, those quiet gardeners who are curating better spaces and creating better things need only continue.  The internet as a whole may not mature to that level of thoughtfulness, but individuals do, and will continue to do so, enabling those thoughtful spaces required to reconsider unused gifts.