"The Coronation" and The Importance of Being Non-Dualistic

This was my first exposure to Charles Eisenstein.  I am impressed. In an article about the pandemic he talks about our War on Death:

The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

If you can get out of the mental habits of separation, it alters your ethical stance:

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. 

Instead of seeking your scapegoat, you search for hard-to-express (actually impossible to express in words) harmonies.

This ties a few ideas together I have been thinking about for a while.  First, enemies are legible to the centralized systems of modernity.  Second, if you don't tamp down your desires, real compassion is impossible -- because you will always fall for the trick of a scapegoat narrative [1 -- READ THIS NOTE].  And how do you tamp down desires?  Words don't do the process justice ("Dao called dao is not the eternal dao"), but it involves breaking down separation and living in a world of wonder.

Another way to look at it is the question of dosage.  Once you go past a minimum effective dose you risk other parts of system, including the most important ones: Gaia and Soul.  Everything in too much extreme can become its opposite.  This is also something Eisenstein realizes:

. . . we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

BE SURE TO READ THE FOOTNOTE!  IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT FOR YOUR SOUL.

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[1] This point is embedded several places in the Daodejing.  For me, however, the full flower of understanding came later, when I read the following passage from the Mundaka Upanishad, translated by Eknath Easwaran:

Beyond the reach of words and works is he [the deepest, best Self], but not beyond the reach of a pure heart freed from the sway of the senses.  (pg 193).

The era of social media provides ample demonstration that one of these strongest senses is that of social proof.  Only in spaces where your heart is freed of that, and other greeds and lusts, can you get to real compassion.  Study deeply the careers of your fellow humans and you will see that words and works alone cannot get you there.  It is a process inside of you, working on the spiritual equivalent of muscle memory.  And when you don't work on it, you will fall back to lines of separation.  And when you fall back to separation, your compassion will leave and you will find scapegoats.  You will demand sacrifices.

The real test of a person's compassion is if they can want good things for those whom they see as living an unattractive life.

State of Play: U.S. and Globe

Another Reddit thread, lightly edited.

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My heart grieves to think how many more people are likely going to be thrown into the situation [tent cities].

I now don't think basic income is going to happen in the US. Rather, some kind of food delivery is about as far as I see it going -- soylent here we come. If I ever do some writing about it, I think I'll call it manna.

All these tent cities in such near proximity to tech workers shows me that is a quality of life they are willing to see other people live in. I was such a hardcore doomer even just a few years ago that I thought starvation for others was A-OK to these people as well, but the more I think about it, that's pretty rare. Trump has kids in cages, but the story isn't that they are starved to death, or executed.

It seems like a consortium of a few billionaires could fund a delivery mechanism for the manna. Giving someone a house, however, brings down property values, so will never do it.

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A reply:

I think I read somewhere we have like more vacant houses than homeless people (and elsewhere, that if you put people into a home, they might actually take care of it and keep it from falling apart). There's this link https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/3/20993251/san-francisco-bay-area-vacant-homes-per-homeless-count about the Bay area, for example. In other words the problem of shelter, at least, is artificial. I imagine the food supply stateside at least is another artificial problem. And so on.

I really wonder how much is actually fixable via redistribution and how much isn't. Both stateside and globally. Like if there's actually enough to go around, in a way that it can be spread around, or not, and what stands in the way of that. Not that such is an easy undertaking or endeavor but...


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My response:

I use the distinction of wandism/probablism in my thinking a lot.

I'm pretty sure that in the US we have built enough. If we radically changed zoning laws over the top of people engaging in NIMBY activism to protect property values, we could make this work -- 1/4 of the energy use, everyone with at least a flophouse, healthcare in line with, say, Costa Rica. But that requires a magic wand. In all probability, we are a people too trapped in stories of separate individuals and our only community orientation being the delusional, cultist expectation of ever-appreciating assets. We will distort all realities -- violently, if we have to -- to make assets that don't obey the gravity that is regression to the mean.

Globally, I think most other cultures can move more gracefully through a future of energy descent. We are starting to give the rest of the world a demonstration of what not to do. The UK has become our stupid lapdog, but other than that policy makers in other nations are starting to take notice. China moved 300 million people into a experiment to copy and paste our brand of capitalism, down to a monstrous housing bubble and more college graduates than jobs that you need college graduates for, but that still leaves one billion peasants. I believe they'll be able to re-tool much better than US, not even counting the bonus inflows they will get if and when they become the last great power standing. India might start looking a lot better to the global community. It is said that India is very good at moving people out of absolute poverty, but very bad at moving people up the next few dollars-a-day. Well, that might be all the planet has to give. . . the Kerala model is probably a best case scenario.

Round Up #27

Aphorisms/Shorts
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It would seem most successful entrepreneurs are people who don't think the rules apply to them and then in fact that turned out to be right long enough to build enough capital to either eventually comply with or change the rules.

We just accept at the level of truism that the internet contains "the sum total of all information," but if this is true why do most of the best blogs consistently import knowledge from books into the internet?

A while back my wife and I saw the most recent version of Emma.  It brought back to mind the terrible character of Frank Churchill.  But Frank Churchill shows the default, normalized behavior found on any remotely popular section of the internet, so much so that I don't know if it is even possible to explain to them what is wrong with how Churchill acts.  The classics bring my grief to the surface.

In these debauched times, the ability to read an unassigned book is potent signal of the tenderness, openness, and meta-cognition that is necessary (but not sufficient) to understand anything important.

To put a positive spin on the last quote, the test wouldn't work so well if our times weren't so debauched, decadent.

Also related.  I know somehow I'm the one who would seem rude by saying "I want to gauge if this conversation is worth continuing, so please tell me about some of the books you've read in the last six months."  Better to avoid situations where I even need to ask.

Many of those with an avid interest in collapse don't seem to understand that there is more to life than whatever ends up killing you.

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Links and Research
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So France has the highest per capita consumption of whisky in the world.  This really doesn't fit to stereotype, but that's why we keep learning.

. . .  Further interesting things down this line: India consumes the most total whisky.  BUT 85% of the population doesn't drink, and so the U.S. has a larger population of drinkers.  THEREFORE the Indian drinking population out-drinks the U.S. drinking population in whisky, but the billion people in India who don't drink drag the per capita numbers way down.

Speaking of alcohol, I wondered if was used as a drug in vision quests.  It would appear this was true at least for the Iroquois.

"Granola Shotgun" has a beautiful piece that performs the near-impossible and combines deep-felt empathy for an individual elder while at the same time exposing how her story shows the cracks in the systems Boomers are going to try to rely on.

I'm going to also guess the women in this piece is the one who expressed in another piece that a van-dwelling nomad who worked as a tech professional was cheating the system. Her position was treated with grace there as well.  Johnny S. sure does have a lot of tact.

I'm calling it quits on adding to my list of art from Reddit that deals with our Covid-19 shelter-in-place world. It is an interesting snap-shot of a moment and a gestalt.

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YouTube and Podcasts
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Data visualization to make primes and approximations of pi . . . stunning.  The video finishes with a brief, inspiring statement about the importance of mathematical play.

I got interested in stretching and used the search term "science of stretching."

• First video mentions some of the basics of what happens in a stretch, however  . . . 
• Second video shows how the benefits claimed are incorrect.
• This podcast has an interview with a researcher who agrees. 
• Apparently acupuncture isn't total bullshit. It has to do with moving connective tissue to get muscle stretches. 

Van Gogh Flow

Beth and I once visited my friend Nat in Brooklyn for a week.  While there, Beth and I took a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Images completely flattened to 2D -- whether images on a screen or a print -- cannot do justice to the large pieces they have of Monet and Van Gogh.  With paintings of a sufficient size, the tiny involuntary moments of your eyes (called saccades) can give the work a dynamic quality, which can be used by a master artist to great effect (even affect).  Beth's favorite was a Monet that featured water.  In the painting-as-experience the water moved around but with the harmony and shimmer of a perfect day.  Golly, just imagine . . . a perfect day, captured forever [1].

I, however, was moved most by Van Gogh.  Afterward, I told Nat that perceiving a Van Gogh in real life felt like a walk in Nature (mind, I don't mean to say that every time I go outside I feel this way, just when I am really grooving).  Putting this into words is difficult -- and that's why we need visual arts...  But to put in a good word for language, visual pieces of the scale I am writing about, like all complex experiences, would have to picked up and physically moved to each perceiver, which is unwieldy in best case scenarios, but in practice usually impossible.   Thus we need writing.  Though writers are often left saying "it's more complex than I'm making it sound" or "I can't put this into words" at least we writers can make those gestures.  A bad picture, or even a print of a great picture, leaves the impression that it contains all there is.  Language can connect concepts and can warn us of the unseen (or of the existence of the unseeable, or even the unwriteable, unthinkable, unfeelable (perhaps), etc).

Again, a Van Gogh perceived live is an experience beyond my ability to reduce.  There are lots of those kinds of experience, but not all of them remind me of a great walk, so to try to explain further I want to invoke a concept, an imperfect tool [2].  The concept is flow.  Van Gogh  -- Live! -- gives flow.  You can get an outline of the flow from a print, but the experience live is the kind that breaks the lines of separation, through non-linear movement.  Most people who describe breaking separations talk about moving past "dualism," but I don't like that phrase because I don't just see Two; I see many, many parts liable to break down and flow into each other.

So how is that like time spent in Nature?  Please imagine --  or better yet, try -- the following experiment: just look at any segment of nature and see how long it can stay unchanged, without any movement.  (Or, if you have practice with imagination and empathy, you can just ask the nature-segment-which-I-don't-want-to-call-an-object).  Many things will move right before you, even at human time-frames.  The bird will fly, the blade of grass will bend to the wind.  Develop your patience a bit and you can watch a cloud formation unfold.  And with each level of greater patience, memory, and ability to see connections, more and more will change.  For me, Van Gogh invokes that flow.  Find it in Van Gogh, find it in Nature, find it with the aid of substances, if you must.  I just want you to find it and then we can talk some important truths.

Ego-death?  I don't know much about that.  I know that I can take the totally sober (though perhaps deeply neuro-atypical) ability to trace flows and their ability to break separations and apply it to myself.  That breath I just took -- borrowed oxygen and carbon, only borrowed, and then given back.  It seems preferable, at least more gentle, to give them back as breaths later on, but one way or another, I will be giving them back.  Perhaps the understanding that people return breath requires a culture with scientific knowledge, but even there I am not so sure.  But I am sure all humans have had at least the opportunity to see "liquid in/ liquid out."  Substance in, and substance out. . . Then plants can grow in that substance.  However you want to look at it, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything you can keep. . . but only if you are open to seeing that truth.  You can learn to see what is bigger than you, but instead of feeling small because of it, you can, and should, feel intertwined.

I close with the Van Gogh painting First Steps, after Millet 1890. [backup]  The interplay of painting and my soul brought tears.  It's still all about flow, but now it includes a little human and the harmony with caregivers.  I have seen no more beautiful image of human life.  I bought a print in the gift shop.  It is a reminder of a deep aesthetic experience.  And if I ever have children, that print will go in the nursery. Update: and it did.



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[1] I wonder if virtual reality will ever render a copy with high enough resolution to give the effect.  I  imagine the technology could be there one day, but will it ever fit the design philosophy of those with the means of mass distribution?  In our weird times, the important thing is to not pretend it's there until it is.  Many people have deprived themselves of real Quality and driven themselves crazy by the lack.  Eco-therapy is real.

[2] Aren't all tools imperfect?  If they weren't, someone would own a God-stick, or a Marvel-style cube or gauntlet, or what-have-you.

Infestations, Interesting and Boring

"All art is infested by other art."  He had this as a sign on the wall.  It was hand-written in marker on cut poster-board.  I am not sure whether or not he had the attribution, but just I looked it up today and found it was by Leo Steinberg [1]

We are social beings and we exist in a historical context, even down to being carried away in contemporary movements of memes [2] and shifting emphasis.  To achieve excellence, we must gather much.  On the other hand, if you spend all your time with other art, even if it's just art better than what you can do, you don't have time to create your own.  And the benefit to feeling alive through experiencing the edge of creation is of profound importance.  If I can be happy and still create (or vice versa) then I have won . . . existence.

Back to the handwritten sign: These types of decorations as non-decoration are common enough for male teachers, especially at the high school level.  His entire instructional method was lecture.  You may think that is my criticism of him; it is not.  Rather, it is that he lectured poorly. Not only that, but that he lectured poorly on purpose.

My proof is that he had two stories from his life that he shared with the class,  but the only way he'd tell them was if someone said "tell us the ____ story" by name.  This meant that someone who had heard the story before had told someone in the class to ask him about it.  See, it was an ego-trip, you dig?

In the telling of these two stories, he showed the fundamentals of a good communicator:  facial expressions, set ups, punchlines, expressing the doings and states of mind of interesting people.  The stories were excellent.  But none of these abilities were used in teaching literature.  For that, his job, he read in a monotone off notes that were turning yellow with age, showing no desire to breath life into any text, or make any of it human. I mean he had great things to work with -- Hamlet, Hesse's Damien, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gardener's Grendel, the Death of a Salesman, and Waiting for Godot.

So why did he do this?  In part it was to keep his class sizes small, which I got on good information from another teacher who I worked with later on.  Also, it enabled his two stories to stand out so much that they achieved legendary status.  But really, I think the biggest factor is that he got off on the notion that he was smarter than everyone else.  If eyes were glazed over or students fell asleep, it just went to show how much greater his ability to take on the higher realm of abstractions was.  Holy shit, I just remember I took his philosophy course as well, and that in that course he stated that was a Platonist [3].  Now that I remember I took more than one course with him, I think that I might have heard at least one of his two good stories more than once.

. . . I'm now going to undermine my own humor a bit.  I've taught, and I would hate to read an essay like this from a former student of mine.  So I want to give the man his due.  He had once expressed the idea that he thought people learned best from their own reading, and that what was particularly beneficial about going to college was access to a good library.  The pacing of his reading assignments stacks up favorably in light of the watered-down education students are now receiving.  He taught in a way that was emotionally sustainable for him and was professional in all his interactions with students.  In conclusion, I received no harm from taking his classes and would gladly have a conversation with him if we ever happened to cross paths again.

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[1] This lead to me reading up about Mr. Steinberg.  Doing so lead to this gem:

Steinberg took an informal approach to criticism, sometimes using a first-person narrative in his essays, which personalized the experience of art for readers. This was in juxtaposition to many formalist critics at the time, such as Clement Greenberg, who were known to be resolute in their writing.

This goes to show that the "objectivity" pose in criticism was something constructed out of a historical moment, and one that was not really all that long ago.  As a quick summary, the arts developed physics envy as modernity was ramping up.  Then the sentiment was hardened into rules and procedures during academia's metastatic growth, which in turn was a subset of the Great Cultural Suicide after the Great Oil War, aka World War II. No "I" meant no ethos, which fit in just fine with the systems that were growing in power and seeking to defend themselves.  Mistakes were made, indeed.


[2] Be aware that meme was well-defined when it was coined in Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene.
This article summarizes it as "an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" and furthermore includes this explanation:

Dawkins explains how an "internet meme" is a hijacking of the original idea and that instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, they are altered deliberately by human creativity. Unlike with genes (and Dawkins' original meaning of "meme"), there is no attempt at accuracy of copying; internet memes are deliberately altered.

This brings up an interesting question.  Do we make efforts to defend that meaning or do we let the word semantically drift along it's merry way as over-repetition of images, mostly from -- but sometimes creating -- pop-culture?  I am left fascinated with these kinds of fights. And if you never fight for anything, you cede all of natural language to fools.  (Note to self: keep working at math. Even if you remain laughably inadequate, at least you can operate inside of truth).

[3] I think that "holy shit" actually works  on a pretty significant level here.  We defecate because we are embodied.  Human bodies experiencing the world are what took the time to pen literature and even philosophy.  I don't think there's supposed to be pooping in the Platonic realm, at least not in the reading presented in that survey class. 

In/Out and Western Civilization

Built off a response to this post.

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I)

Has anyone here dropped out without any regrets? Did anyone drop out, then later drop back in?

I went out, in, out, in, and am back out again. I was trying to get back in, even had done one interview (not the job I wanted, but I thought I'd get practice) and then the world shut down. It might be better to call what I do "mini retirement" with occasional goldbricking. I think that doing "out" well is a skill. I'm a lot better at it here on the third try than I was the first one.

Being "in" and happy AND true to my ethics is the harder skill for me. I haven't gotten the balances right since my times of grief which started my first sabbatical. It's not just that the creature comforts are better out than in -- god, I love a nap in the middle of the day or having a large uninterrupted time to read, write, or just think, and I love these things much, much more than paying for entertainment or traveling -- the real problem is one of meaning. I think better when I'm out.  More pages added to the journal, more reading gets done.

II)

Western civilization is not just some kind of toxic prison that destroys the world to make rich people even richer. It's my home.

I guess it just depends on what you mean by "Western civilization." To quote some anonymous writer

I live on the margins of society, but that is a voluntary choice, because that is where the interesting things happen.

The things I like after the post world war II cultural suicide are those things on the margins, always while they stay on the cutting-edge of creation rather than the moment they become co-opted within branding and consumption (also see). I would characterize the dominate thrust of Western civilization here in 2020 precisely as a toxic prison to make rich people even richer. I can't emphasis enough that people should check out Gerbner's work on cultivation theory. Very little of this was first-order malice from 1945-2008; instead we saw the emergent properties of a culture focused on growth, over-optimization, and debt -- frankly a culture of greed. Only when the myths that made system go were exposed around 2008 did open malice begin to gain traction. Enter the alt-right.

My home is harvesting the good out of the shards of culture and community:

• I love old, beautiful things from a time when it was possible to make for a community, before the times of distrust (no really, look into cultivation theory and mean world syndrome).
• I love my weirdos, but at some distance. They often lack social skills.
• Bougie people with social skills have their place. I like a face-to-face interaction with someone who is pleasant. Heck, I married one.

Is that really western civilization at this point? In terms of time spent, western civilization is mostly netflix and social media feeds. In terms of politics and economics, it is whatever 0.1% of the wealthiest people want it to be. In terms of research, it is bogged down in a replication crisis (my opinion being that this has something to do with the distortions of needing to serve the 0.1%).