MENTAL DESTINATION

May 15th, 2021

It doesn’t matter where in the world the travel destination is, if a person doesn’t bring along an ability to be at peace, they won’t find it, not matter how sunny and wonderful the beach or how sacred and quiet the cathedral. Wherever we go, we bring along the capacity for experience.

The image of the pilgrim has the modern equivalent of the vacationer, as if it’s not possible to finally relax and have a good time until the destination is reached.  For the pilgrim, it was some religious experience that exists somewhere else, hence the need for the pilgrimage.

The disappointed pilgrim is just like the person who complains no matter how good the view nor how good the beach side mojitos.  There is nothing special about the destination that can change who we are capable of being.  The campy and cute twist here would be that it’s the journey not the destination, but that provides little help - no matter how glorious business class is, the journey on an airplane isn’t anymore suited for any kind of spiritual or mental growth than any other form of movement.

What’s missing is the framework of a mental journey, and mental destinations as being completely separate from the physical geography where we live or wish to visit.  The entire journey and destination is possible without ever moving, the whole thing exists within each person.  The physical world is a bit of a red herring in this respect.  We race around it chasing something that we carry along the entire time.  It’s a bit like ripping apart your house looking for some lost item when all along, it’s just in your pocket.

But imagine for a moment if you simply didn’t know exactly what it was you were looking for, but you knew there was something to find.  It could be easy and very understandable to look around the house, or the globe for the matter, for something that isn’t physical, but mental.  There’s little popular thought given to this notion of a mental destination, as represented by a mental state, and yet we are constantly chasing and cycling back to familiar stopping ground in terms of mental destination, be it having a glass of wine or being with someone in particular, or even taking a particular psychedelic.  We might instead think of the mind as a process, like a song that has lots of repetition but which can reach new crescendos never before experienced.

It usually requires some kind of life altering experience to achieve one of those new crescendos, unless, the volume on the whole song is regularly adjusted to be lower.  Without so much mental noise, even a normal day can sound like something new and fresh - because it is.  As much as the days repeat, they are unique - just in the same way life altering experiences are unique.  The difference is how much attention we pay, and what kind of attention.  With training, the mind can sink into the geography of time as we move through it, grasping the ordinary and the everyday in order to hoist itself to new heights.

BALANCE FALLACY

May 14th, 2021

Balance tends to mean homeostasis, but it’s used in places where we definitely don’t want homeostasis.  

Take for instance a fitness goal.  Often it’s lose weight, get leaner and perhaps gain muscle.  But how many people are likely to reward a workout with a meal that is less than ideal when taking into account those fitness goals.  We refer to this as being balanced.  I did something good, and for whatever puritanical reason, it now deserves a reward.  But it’s like taking a step forward in order to take a step back.  Balance I achieved alright, but what that means is a whole bunch of effort to ensure that nothing changes.  Goals aren’t reached and ultimately the workout seems like it’s not working out.

What we need to move forward in imbalance.  It’s a bit like when you find yourself falling forward, because perhaps you’ve just tripped, and in order to save yourself, you’ll run forward, usually awkwardly, but as quickly as you can.  The imbalance creates the need for speed.  Homeostasis quite literally gets us nowhere.

Achieving a calorie deficit, or rearranging nutritional ratios to create a deficit of carbohydrates or sugar are all a type of imbalance when juxtaposed to the diet which is or was the status quo.  The table will only tilt if we knock one of the legs out, and the same goes for most progress.  All effort is probably just a short break from being lazy.  The experience of being lazy is a kind of homeostasis: things are good enough, so why do anything?  It’s only when something about good enough is taken away, and things cease to be ok that we actually get going.  For a disciplined person, this can actually be a feeling around inactivity.  We can cultivate a kind of restless need to be doing something, similar to how some people can’t stand silence and must always have company, be it a real person, or some music, or the blathering TV in the background.

Balance as it’s commonly recommended is a fallacy, a regression to laziness and an underscored sense that things are just fine and need not change.  When in fact, in many areas, we need an imbalance to get the needle moving in a better direction.

A METAPHOR OF PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIENCE

May 13th, 2021

We each have a repetitive narrative that plays in our mind, reinforcing our own personal idea of who we are, what the world is like and what to think about the people around us.  This is like an audiobook that is constantly playing in the background, and every morning after waking up, it starts up again on repeat.  From this constant remembrance of what we think the world and ourselves to be, our behavior flows.  We do things in accord with who we currently think ourselves to be.  Change that idea of who you are and it can change the behavior you find yourself doing.

Another way of thinking about this narrative is to think of a pond.  Every pond or lack is bordered by the land surrounding it, and the shape of this land can take infinite shapes, and as a result the sort of waves or ripples that we might see across the surface of this pond is highly impacted by the shape of the coast.  Waves and ripples bounce and refract in certain ways depending on the shape of the coast they hit.  The hard border of land dictates that in normal circumstances, the rhythms of water is going to continuously cascade in a particular and repeated way.

Now imagine a giant rock is dropped in the middle of this pond.  A wave of sufficient strength can result to push out against the land and change the shape of the pond, and ultimately, the sort of music that plays across it’s surface in the form of ripples and waves.  This rock is the equivalent of a significant psychological experience, like the death of a loved one, falling in love, or having a sufficiently powerful psychedelic experience.  All of these unsettle the mind in ways that create a doorway or a freedom that can afford a new way of living, behaving and perspective.

The most accessible and controllable of such experiences is the psychedelic experience, oddly enough.  We cannot predict nor know when we might fall in love or when someone might unexpectedly die.  But we can, however consciously explore and decide upon the possibility of taking a strong psychedelic.  For years such an experience has been cooped up in the realm of hippies having fun.  But during the last few years it’s been making it’s way into serious mainstream study.  

The rock in the pond is a valid analogy, a strong psychedelic shakes up the mind, affording the near guarantee of a radically new perspective.  But a better analogy is to think of a tool, like a hammer.  It’s possible to have fun with a hammer in a casual and innocuously destructive way, like taking a few swings at an old TV that’s getting thrown out.  It’s fun, and that hammer is definitely being used, but anyone can walk away from that bit of physical exertion and think little of it.  This is the ‘party’ form of psychedelic use, though nothing may actually be destroyed, it’s just incidental of the hammer that it can be used in that sort of fun way.  The hammer, however, can be used in highly constructive ways: you can take apart a part of your house and rebuild it anew, better and improved if that hammer is used with skill.  But this is the ‘skill’ that most people don’t associate with psychedelics.  This skill is in the sense set and setting, of intention and integration for the experience.  These are all terms that are currently being developed in the research surrounding psychedelics, and in premodern times, such things were incapsulated by the ritual that surrounded such experiences.  

In terms of the pond image, the water and it’s rippled movement reflects the pattern of our neuronal firing, while the shape of land around the pond reflects the actual hardware of our brain, the placement and connection of those neurons in relation to one another.  When a substantial psychological experience occurs, that pattern of neuronal firing changes substantially.  Our neurons essentially play a different song, to a different beat…. For a time.  Eventually and usually the hard reality of our physical brain exerts its influence and for the most part we return to our regularly scheduled audiobook of who we think we are and what we think of the world.  There is, however, a brief time when the radical departure in thinking and subjective experience, as created by a radically different pattern of neuronal firing creates the opportunity for new behavior.  This can be like ‘getting out of your own way’, escaping the cage of your own mind for a while and doing something.  The actual doing, the physical behavior rooted in the body is a potential key for hardwiring a temporary positive change to make it permanent.j. Actual behavior, as downstream from a brief change in neuronal patterns can then refract back at the actual physical brain and get that brain to change it’s configuration, if only slightly, but enough to save the change.

None of this is proven of course, it’s just an elaborate image and metaphor in order to think about the brain and the mind, their link and how we might be able to consciously change the two for a better life.

ENJOYING MISERY

May 12th, 2021

There are endless dimensions to the human experience, and each comes with it’s own set of conscious variables: how we perceive, appreciate, resist or welcome what is happening.  It’s easy to appreciate a beautiful sunny day when well rested  and with little stress plaguing the mind.  But what about the miserable day, is it impossible to appreciate by definition, or is there a pocket of perspective we can sneak into that can grant a grateful smile upon even our own misery?

A completely happy go-lucky life would be no life at all.  Some common sense logic might parrot the axiom that the sweet is never as sweet without the bitter, but what about appreciating the bitter for what it is, independent of what sweet might have been or might still be?

The darker depths of life are still an experience, one that when placed next to the possibility of having no experience at all may be infinitely sweet.  There are of course miseries that make no experience sound like a reprieve to be dangerously lusted after.  Such desires forsake all possibility of a different and better future, one that might reframe and recast the light on such experiences within memory and find immense gratitude for such dark experiences.

True heartbreak, whether it be over a lover gone or a family member lost is simply proof that the love was a real and genuine experience - it can be an debilitating proof of past authenticity.

It’s a strange hypocrisy that we can enjoy an intense and sad drama at the movies, but fail to translate that same kind of appreciation to the dark vagaries of our own life.

With absolutely all experience, the key is whether or not we embrace it or not.  Absolutely everything, be it happiness, or exquisite physical pain is brought into perspective with an ability to embrace what is happening.  Once that commitment occurs, there’s a certain facility that becomes available regarding how we can hold that experience in our sphere of consciousness.  An embrace enables an ability to hold, and by embracing experience we can learn to hold any experience at just the right angle so that no matter how dark it gets, we can still get it to gleam.

USEFUL FRIPPERY

May 11th, 2021

By definition, frippery, or decoration is not useful, at least not directly.  But a thoughtful bit of frippery can be very effective.  Frippery is defined as specifically showy or unnecessary decoration.  The negative connotation is a bit ironic: isn’t all decoration by definition showy and unnecessary?  Unless perhaps there is a difference between first order effects and second and third order effects.

Switching gears for a moment, think about the fact that many languages apply a gender to nouns.  The gender often doesn’t even make sense when there is an opportunity to categorize things as male or female or neuter.  So what’s the reason?  In information theory, the reason why there isn this arbitrary identifier to nouns is to help with transfer fidelity.  For instance let’s say you didn’t hear the noun clearly when someone was speaking, but you did hear the article correctly which usually conveys the gender.  That gendered article would help you figure out exactly which word was being said.  Here’s an example.  In French the word for sea, or ocean and the word for mayor are homophones.  They sound identical.  But the word for ocean is feminine and the word for mayor is masculine.  Granted, in this case the context would likely be more powerful for determining exactly which noun was intended, but the gendered article which is often seen as a useless pain by students everywhere does carry some informational power.

To return to the more traditional form of frippery, which is often in the visual sense, the utility isn’t direct, but indirect: it often allows a viewer to understand a great deal about the attention paid to detail.  Arbitrary detail is still detail which requires some thought and effort, and this is what it conveys: the level of thought and effort that a creator was willing and able to put in.  Such frippery indicates: if someone was willing to pay attention to these useless details, then it’s likely they also pay attention to the useful and very important details.

This natural and intuitive logic can be inverted to subversive use.  A product or service can seem legitimate because someone has done a good job with the tasteful frippery that accompanies serious endeavours that care about communicating these sorts of things and still all the while, that product or service could be a scam.  This results in an interesting phenomenon that is painfully obvious on a platform like Instagram: people are faking lives far beyond their actual means to try and bootstrap their way into that sort of life via the leverage that comes with a large audience, which is more easily procured by broadcasting a lavish lifestyle.  It’s ‘fake it till you make it’ in the most superficial way imaginable. 

This brings up the issue of priorities.  While trying to build something, what should be the priority?  Details in the way something looks?  Or details in the way something works?  One is clearly more important.  If something doesn’t work than it’s literally useless, but that doesn’t make this a binary choice of importance.  Making something that works perfectly but doesn’t look like it works is a recipe for crickets, meaning, if the project doesn’t effectively signal to a potential audience what it does and how well it does it, then that audience may end up being no audience at all.