A LUCILIUS PARABLE: THE VICE OF ADVICE

February 13th, 2022

Lucilius ducked out of the sunshine into the cool darkness. His eyes adjusted to the bar, dark as a cave. He needed to sit and think, and the place was empty. A bartender with rolled sleeves and designed skin was polishing an end of the bar and looked up. He nodded at Lucilius and Lucilius walked over and took his seat.

“Something to drink? Eat?”

“Just a drink?"

“What would you like?”

Lucilius shrugged. “You decide.”

“Sweet? Sour? Herbal? Bitter? Any combination? Anything off limits?”

Lucilius considered the fresh question. “Well I feel like I just had some bitter medicine, and -ha- I guess I’m feeling a little sour. Does that work for you?”

The bartender nodded, slowly turning away, surveying the ingredients he had to work with. Lucilius watched mindlessly as the barman exercised his slick techniques, the fine attention to detail, the precision and accuracy. Within a few moments, a chilled coupe was placed before Lucilius, filled as if with a liquid gold. Lucilius had never seen anything like it before. He took a sip.

“Well?” The barman asked.

“It’s fantastic, what is it?”

The barman shrugged. “Custom, on the spot.”

Lucilius was impressed. “Do you just remember all the custom drinks you whip up like this?”

The barman wore an uneasy look, tilting his head from side to side as he thought about it.

“Some of them, I should write more of them down to be honest.”

“Well you should definitely write this one down.” Lucilius took another sip. “I needed this.”

“You said something about bitter medicine?” The bartender prompted, curiously.

Lucilius sighed. “Yea, I don’t know. Not sure what to do. I guess you could say I have two mentors, and they both tell me completely opposite things.”

“Like advice?”

“Yea. I have a sense about what I want to do, and what I think I can accomplish, but I just spoke to one of these guys, and I simply hated all the advice he had to give.”

“And the other one?”

Lucilius shrugged. “More open-ended. Never any solid ‘do this’ or ‘do that’. More my style to be honest.”

“So this mentor who gave you bad advice: what didn’t you like?"

Lucilius puffed out his breath. “Yea, well I could go on and on about that. He wants me to specialize, and I see that as pigeon-holing myself. And all his advice is geared at an eventual outcome that I actually don’t even want.”

“Does he know that?”

“Nah, well, I don’t know. He doesn’t think what I want is realistic. He basically gives me advice to try and turn me into him.”

The barman laughed. “Let me ask you this: of these two mentors, which one is happier?”

Lucilius’ eyebrows shot up as he considered the question. “Well, that’s an interesting way of looking at it.”

He took another sip of his drink as the barman continued, “And of the two, has either been down the path you actually want to go down?”

Lucilius was even more impressed. He snorted a laugh.

“Same guy for both questions?” The barman asked.

Lucilius laughed. “Actually, yea.”

The barman smiled faintly and walked away to attend to someone else who had just sat at the bar. Lucilius meditated over the issue, newly lit by the barman’s questions, as he enjoyed the drink. He realized how strange it is that someone’s advice could be so disappointing to hear - that it could cause such discomfort and almost anger. Was it a sign of a reality that had to be faced? Or is such a genuine reaction a sign to avoid following such advice?

Lucilius pondered as he relaxed. The barman returned. “Another?”

“Sure,” Lucilius said confidently.  “Another one of - uh, what should we call it?”

The bartender looked off into space for a moment. “The Vice of Advice.”

Lucilius laughed. “Did you just think of that?”

The barman nodded with a faint but proud smile as he scooped up ice and began preparing another drink.

“Oh, one thing,” the barman said.

“What’s that?”

“Well, now I have to be guilty of this vice and offer some advice.”

“I’m all ears,” Lucilius said.

“The one who gave you bad advice?”

“Yea?”

“Make sure you thank him for it.”

Lucilius gave the barman a quizzical look and the barman shrugged.

“No matter how much you don’t like what he said, he’s still trying to help.”

SCOPE OF INFLUENCE

February 12th, 2022

Everyone has a tremendous potential when it comes to improving the daily lives of those around us. This is because, for most people, our family and friends represent our sphere of influence. The leader of a country, for example, has a much different sphere of influence - one that usually extends to millions if not billions of people. But this is the exceptionally rare exception…

A crucial ingredient for anxiety and helplessness is when our information diet is drastically out of sync with our scope of influence. News stations run 24 hours a day, and feeds on Facebook and Twitter update every few seconds, enabling a bombardment of information with wildly varying scopes. In one moment we can be nervous about the morose mood of a small child in the same room, and the next we can be anxious over impending war a half a world away. Our influence only extends to one of these items, but harnessing electricity for instant communication has vastly expanded the potential scope of information we can consume.

Given the simplicity of description here, it might seem that the prescription is to strap horse blinders to the mind and focus solely on one’s sphere of influence. And for sprints of learning and work, this is likely excellent advice. Most things outside of our scope of influence are merely distractions, the ramifications of which won’t matter in a decade, if not days or hours. So as a simple default, yes, drilling down on the things we can influence is the best thing to do.

But, doing so without stopping to occasionally look around can lead to being horribly stranded in an unfruitful direction of life. Take for instance someone who shutters themself away in a secluded cabin with a particular piece of technology. Perhaps a computer before the internet was created, and this person becomes a true master with all it’s capabilities, and then inevitably when such a person returns to society, they discover that their chosen technology is long out of date, and the mastery is completely useless. 

So while the overwhelming majority of our time and attention is best directed toward the things we can control, and the fields where we have legitimate agency, it’s vital to look up and look around every once in a while to make sure that the details of one’s aims within a scope of influence still make sense in a larger framework.

Problem is, the reverse is true. We spend the majority of our time looking around at a whole bunch of far-off things that don’t matter a single hoot, and very little time doing meaningful work that unlocks the potential for improvement within our scope of influence.

COHERENCE DRIVE

February 10th, 2022

Dedicated to Micle, connect with him on twitter @MicleMihai

Looking at the etymology of the word ‘coherent’ it means for two things to stick together. A contradiction feels uncomfortable because two things are being squished together that don’t belong together because they don’t make sense together. Coherence arises when things that make sense together, stick together. Or in the case of human thought and speech, it’s when we place words and ideas in a sensible order.

But at what level do we run our validation test for what a ‘sensible order’ is? For example, there are plenty of nonsensical sentences that make grammatical sense. Take for instance this one:

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Grammatically there is nothing wrong with the sentence. But as to what sort of coherent thought it’s meant to inspire - that’s another question. How can something sleep furiously? Let alone an idea? And how can it be colorless and green?

So taking the simple concept of a sentence, there’s at least two lenses through which we can judge coherence. There’s grammar and syntax, and then there’s actual meaning, which is what we’re usually concerned with. Interestingly, we can have sentences that make sense which are not grammatically sound, so it may seem that syntax and grammar are perhaps arbitrary - but this of course depends on which ruler we are using to judge coherence!

Let’s zoom out from the single sentence and examine the following two sentences as a pair:

The following sentence is false.

The previous sentence is true.

Each sentence is sensible on its own - not just grammatically but semantically. However, when paired, we have a sly contradiction which is anything but easy to resolve. But the point here is to illuminate another level where coherence can be determined. If we zoom into each sentence, we have coherence. If we zoom out, suddenly coherence is destroyed. Unless of course we are using syntax and grammar as our ruler, then coherence is maintained. So again, it depends on the ruler we use to judge coherence.

This process of zoom can continue outward, to paragraphs, pages, chapters, and whole shelves of books and bookcases.

And then of course we can jump out of the world of words and thoughts and examine the galaxy of action. One particularly old proverb pops up: Actions speak louder than words.

What’s interesting is that much of an individual’s behavior is consistent and coherent, but with many people, that coherent behavior isn’t coherent when placed in conjunction with the words such a person says. Actions speak louder than words because it’s a person’s actions that are more likely to effect the world, not their words.

Another axiom needs to be mentioned here: Walk the Talk. Which simply means, do what you say you will, or: make sure your words and your actions are coherent.

Imagine a person who has virtually perfect coherence between all the things they say, and also with all the things they do. What sort of person emerges in the mind? Is this an angry person? A depressed person? Hopeless? Or is it easy to imagine this person as calm - at peace?

Now we perhaps get to why coherence has any value or attraction. What does it mean to be a coherent person, with a coherent message and coherent actions?

While every person operates with some level and contamination of contradiction, the desire and drive for coherence is simple: it’s authentic and genuine, and most importantly: it’s the one thing that inspires trust, because honesty operates on rails of coherence.

It’s impossible to trust someone who has little or no coherence, no matter which level we are talking. Generally, with people comfortable with lying, there’s coherence in the words they say, but the coherent reality they spin up with words is totally incoherent when mapped against their actions on a long enough timeline.

As a species, our one true superpower is our ability to cooperate - especially as strangers, and in order for this to occur, there has to be a significant amount of trust, or, coherence. A desire and drive to be coherent inspires trust in others, raising our communal power of cooperation, further increasing that we’ll be able to help each other achieve the sort of tomorrow that all parties are hoping to make a reality.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GLITCH REPORT

February 6th, 2022

Lucilius was walking down a city street. The sky was bright up in bands between the towering building and he wore a faint smile, pleased with the course of his day. He was enjoying the round flow of his thoughts, circling on the day’s events, fantasizing about the good that would come in days to follow when something caught his eye.

There was movement like a stutter across the street. At first it felt like something had been thrown, or a startled bird had jolted into the motion, but when he looked he stopped. At first he couldn’t make sense of it. And then he thought perhaps it was some sort of advertisement. But there was no frame, no projection.

He slowly walked into the street, crossing it, and as he neared the far side, his disbelief grew stronger. His thoughts ricocheted frantically for an answer, an explanation. But nothing about what he was seeing made sense. He walked right up to it, bewildered by the fact that no one else even seemed to notice.

Before him was an ordinary man, dressed in a suit, a phone clasped to one ear, taking a step forward. But when his foot hit the ground, he was instantly transported half a step back, as though he’d sprung back in reverse. But his motion backwards was instant, and each time he took his step forward, he was launched backwards.

Lucilius slowly walked around the jolting man. It was not a projection. There was no screen, and when Lucilius reached out to the man his hand was catapulted away at an extraordinary speed as the man jolted in reverse.

Lucilius looked around. Absolutely no one seemed to be interested in the bizarre phenomenon. He reached out to someone walking by.

“Do you see this?”

A woman was taken aback for a moment by Lucilius’ question, then she looked in the direction he was indicating and then just smiled at him as though he’d said something amusing and then she continued on her way.

He took out his phone and opened up the camera, switched it to video and trained the tiny digital portal on the man. He took a video, slowly walking around the man as his existence toggled between forward and reverse.

Lucilius watched the video to make sure it had rendered, and also noticed the time. He was running late.

He looked back up. What could he possibly do, he wondered. But he was late and simply had to move on. So he started walking again down the street, looking back over his shoulder every few seconds to get one last look at the man trapped in that moment of time, infinitely repeating.

He ended up posting the video online. Over the next day it got a few hundred views, some appreciation and comments. The first one asked how many cameras he used in his set up. Another one simply said ‘cute’ and another referenced a movie. 

How futile, he thought as he walked back to the spot the following day. Trying to post something like this online, of course it’s going to look staged or generated.

When he arrived at the same place he was dumbfounded to find the man was gone. What had he really expected? He sat at cafe across the street and sat watching the place where the man had been, and then he watched the video over and over again, confused, wondering what it meant, with the proof right there in the tiny screen.

SHEDDING JOY

February 5th, 2022

An important aspect of a meditation practice is developing the ability to render joy irrelevant. This may likely strike many as odd, counter-intuitive, and perhaps downright wrong. Render joy irrelevant? Isn’t the point of meditation to increase one’s wellbeing? Surely that isn’t achieved by getting rid of the good? Or is it?

Some people laugh at funerals. And for nearly the complete majority of such people, it’s not because something is funny. The thing is, the neural infrastructure that communicates an act of laughing is also the same set of rails upon which crying runs. When overcome with sadness, sometimes the signal gets misinterpreted, and someone laughs. This is also why getting tickled often starts with laughter but can quickly lead to crying.

Point is, the mind and body have a suite of pathways upon which our emotions run and through which such emotions effect our body and through which our body effects our mind.

If meditation can be said to have a practical goal, or if there’s a skill that one can reasonably attain through the practice, it’s an ability to find and maintain a hold on ground zero. This is a kind of baseline existence where consciousness is neutral, and where thoughts and emotions aren’t so all encompassing, enthralling and intoxicating. Thoughts and emotions are held as objects of meditation, and for the practiced meditator, it can seem that such things are more observed than they are experienced. The experience of these things begin to acquire a kind of toggle that slides along the spectrum deciding how much we identify with the particular thought or emotion. This can be incredibly valuable for things like anger. Being able to hold the emotion of anger and the thoughts it inspires at arms length - so to speak- and decide consciously how much this aspect of consciousness should influence our next set of actions becomes a superpower for the person previously rendered a slave to their anger.

Emotions, like colors have their compliments, and the experience of each in the set can be startlingly similar. Take for instance these pairs of words: anxious vs. eager, nervous vs. excited. Each pair pretty much points at the same experience when we think about the sensations that occur in the body. But in each pair there is a negative version and a positive version, much how a sensation of great sadness can cause laughter.

The ability to consciously shed joy in a session of meditation is no different than an ability and an opportunity to practice shedding something like anger. They are both emotions, they are both alterations of consciousness, and being able to return to ground zero - to a neutral state of consciousness means being able to abandon joy in just the same way we seek the ability to abandon anger.