From Buber’s Between Man and Man:

Sometimes I hear it said that every I and Thou is only superficial, deep down word and response cease to exist, there is only the one primal being unconfronted by another. We should plunge into the silent unity, but for the rest leave its relativity to the life to be lived, instead of imposing on it this absolutized I and absolutized Thou with their dialogue.

Now from my own unforgettable experience I know well that there is a state in which the bonds of the personal nature of life seem to have fallen away from us and we experience an undivided unity. But I do not know — what the soul willingly imagines and indeed is bound to imagine (mine too once did it) — that in this I had attained to a union with the primal being or the godhead. That is an exaggeration no longer permitted to the responsible understanding. Responsibly — that is, as a man holding his ground before reality — I can elicit from those experiences only that in them I reached an undifferentiable unity of myself without form or content. I may call this an original pre-biographical unity and suppose that it is hidden unchanged beneath all biographical change, all development and complication of the soul. Nevertheless, in the honest and sober account of the responsible understanding this unity is nothing but the unity of this soul of mine, whose “ground” I have reached, so much so, beneath all formations and contents, that my spirit has no choice but to understand it as the groundless. But the basic unity of my own soul is certainly beyond the reach of all the multiplicity it has hitherto received from life, though not in the least beyond individuation, or the multiplicity of all the souls in the world of which it is one — existing but once, single, unique, irreducible, this creaturely one: one of the human souls and not the “soul of the All”; a defined and particular being and not “Being”; the creaturely basic unity of a creature, bound to God as in the instant before release the creature is to the creator spiritus, not bound to God as the creature to the creator spiritus in the moment of release.

The unity of his own self is not distinguishable in the man’s feeling from unity in general. For he who in the act or event of absorption is sunk beneath the realm of all multiplicity that holds sway in the soul cannot experience the cessation of multiplicity except as unity itself. That is, he experiences the cessation of his own multiplicity as the cessation of mutuality, as revealed or fulfilled absence of otherness. The being which has become one can no longer understand itself on this side of individuation nor indeed on this side of I and Thou. For to the border experience of the soul “one” must apparently mean the same as “the One”.

But in the actuality of lived life the man in such a moment is not above but beneath the creaturely situation, which is mightier and truer than all ecstasies. He is not above but beneath dialogue. He is not nearer the God who is hidden above I and Thou, and he is farther from the God who is turned to men and who gives himself as the I to a Thou and the Thou to an I, than that other who in prayer and service and life does not step out of the position of confrontation and awaits no wordless unity, except that which perhaps bodily death discloses.

Nevertheless, even he who lives the life of dialogue knows a lived unity: the unity of life, as that which once truly won is no more torn by any changes, not ripped asunder into the everyday creaturely life and the “deified” exalted hours; the unity of unbroken, raptureless perseverance in concreteness, in which the word is heard and a stammering answer dared.

Meditating on Yeats’ “Second Coming”.

It is often assumed (by skeptical natures) that “passionate intensity” is what defines “the worst” and that “lack of conviction” is the prescription to  cure it.

This in fact is a state of severe imbalance. The best must rediscover their passion — but a complex one that reaches beyond the biological and psychological self without losing them. The center must hold as the gyre opens.

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The synthesis of self and other resolves in such a way that the terms of the antitheses become authenticity and address.

If the 17th-18th centuries exalted perception, and the 19th-20th centuries exalted conception, can we agree in the 21st-22nd centuries to exalt tranception?

It’s very important to note the fact that whenever we lose the capacity to interpret reality according to the norms we’ve been taught, what we experience is not a net loss but a gain. Beneath all our knowledge and habitual perception is something fascinating and good, though terrifying.

Psychedelic: ORIGIN 1950s: formed irregularly from Greek psukhe ‘breath, life, soul.’ +  delos ‘clear, manifest’ + –ic .

Psychedelic art reminds a mind that “all the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”

Many people out there — more than you think — inhabit private worlds stocked with behaving automatons. Some of these automatons refuse to behave in an orderly and comprehensible manner. You may have been an automaton to one of these people at some point.

If such a person finds your behavior unintelligible, he (rarely is it a she) will impose intelligibility.

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Powerful solipsists make rules to enforce their solipsism.

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Some rules exist for the sake of the individual.

Some rules exist for the sake of the group.

Some rules exist for the sake of the institution.

Some rules exist for the sake of the ruler.

But most rules exist for the sake of staving off anxieties, or for annihilating perplexities.

Continue reading Annihilation by question →

It’s not enough to find common ground and stand on that. Common ground is a nice way to say “the lowest common denominator”.

Finding common ground is a means to relating specifically to what is not common — to going beyond ourselves and participating in something supra-individual.

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The belief that people must explicitly agree on all matters of importance is very arbitrary and strange.

What if our ears and our eyes behaved that way?

Eye: “A trumpet is shiny and metalic!”

Ear: “No, it is piercing and bright.”

Eye: “I don’t know what you mean by piercing, but I do agree it is bright.”

Ear: “And brilliant!”

Eye: “Yes. Agreed: a trumpet is bright and brilliant.”

The more important the matter, the more our agreements are merely apparent.

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What matters is not the sameness of our beliefs but the compatibility of the beliefs.

The ear perceives a sound and the eye perceives an image, and common sense conceives a trumpet.

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Perceive: from Latin percipere ‘seize, understand,’ from per– ‘entirely’ + capere ‘take.’

Conceive: from Latin concipere, from com– ‘together’ + capere ‘take.’

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One intuition perceives one meaning in a situation and another intuition perceives a different meaning. Reason takes them together as a concept.

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Affirming what we are: recognition. Affirming what we are not: blessing.

“Works of art are indeed always products of being in danger, of having gone to the very end in an experience, to where man can go no further.”

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The resolutely independent run the risk of complete solitude.

In solitude, a person shares so little reality with others that the background of reality stays visible. To put it another way: chaos blindness is lost.

The unavoidable remnant of shared reality doesn’t matter. A solitary person is often contemptuous of “mere” facts. What matters is the sense we add to our senses: that by which a fact is significant; a sign of what can only be known obliquely by sign.

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Intellectual solitude is solitary confinement in plain sight. Only the terribleness of the condition can be observed. The condition itself is invisible because the condition is invisibility.

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One perspective cannot be observed from another.

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Some independent minds give up on mutual understanding. They learn to content themselves with leaving deep impressions on the senseless senses of others: memory depth-bombs that go off in the event that understanding ever becomes possible. This is why poets fuck with people.

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Some minds have triggered chain reactions lasting millennia.

An explosion in the chain can ignite more fire or snuff a spark.

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One technique for extinguishing a forest fire is to drop dynamite on it. The explosion consumes all available oxygen and the fire instantly starves. (Most rebirths are stillbirths.)

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Catch only what you’ve thrown yourself, all is
mere skill and little gain;
but when you’re suddenly the catcher of a ball
thrown by an eternal partner
with an accurate and measured swing
towards you, to your centre, in an arch
from the great bridge building of God:
why catching then becomes a power —
not yours, a world’s.

Peter Schmidt quotes:

“One of the functions of art is to offer a more desirable reality; a model as it were, of another style of existence with its own pace and its own cultural reference.”

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“If you have an extraordinary problem don’t try to solve it in the ordinary way.”

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“Journeys down unexpected paths are difficult to retrace.”

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“If I believe in the ideas of people who think I am stupid, then I am stupid.”

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Industry: late 15c., “cleverness, skill,” from Old French. industrie, from Latin industria “diligence,” fem. of industrius “industrious, diligent,” used as a noun, from early Latin indostruus “diligent,” from indu “in, within” + stem of struere “to build” (see structure).

Structure: mid-15c., “action or process of building or construction,” from Latin structura “a fitting together, adjustment, building,” from structus, pp. of struere “to pile, build, assemble,” related to strues “heap,” from Proto-Indo-European stere– “to spread, extend, stretch out” (cf. Sanskrit. strnoti “strews, throws down;” Avestan star– “to spread out, stretch out;” Greek stronymi “strew,” stroma “bedding, mattress,” sternon “breast, breastbone;” Latin sternere “to stretch, extend;” Old Church Slavonic stira, streti “spread,” strama “district;” Russian stroji “order;” Gothic straujan, Old High German strouwen, Old English streowian “to sprinkle, strew;” Old English streon “strain,” streaw “straw, that which is scattered;” Old High German stirna “forehead,” strala “arrow, lightning bolt;” Old Irish fo-sernaim “spread out,” srath “a wide river valley;” Welsh srat “plain”). Meaning “that which is constructed, a building or edifice” is from 1610s. Structured “organized so as to produce results” is from 1959.

(The Online Etymology Dictionary is a treasure.)

Fake taboo-busters like Lady Gaga play right into the hands of puritans.

It is in the best interests of puritans to draw as much attention as possible to sins of the flesh. These fiery motes are easily seen by dull eyes, they’re distractingly sparkly, they dance in the air entertainingly, and also have a claim to practical danger, because they really can start household fires.

The real beam in America’s eye, however — the real problem puritans are invested in missing — is that we exalt industry above every other love, including the love of our children, and of our future.

And we don’t even love industry. We just serve it. We serve it unconditionally. Despite our nominal denominations, industry is our god and our true religion. Industry is the irrational root of all other values, and we will not look directly at its face, much less question it.

Continue reading Why puritans love to hate sex →

When we unthinkingly project a simplistic dichotomy of objectivity versus subjectivity on our life experiences, we make real insight much more difficult than it ought to be.

Obviously, a researcher doesn’t want to rely entirely on subjectivity. The entire purpose of research is to challenge our own subjective assumptions, prejudices and habitual interpretations with facts that help us to better ways of thinking.

But to counter the neglect or denial of reality with strict objectivity — that is to work exclusively with empirical observation and logical construction of conclusions — is not only unnecessary, it involves a denial of another kind of reality, and is perhaps just as damaging as reckless ignorant intuition.

Fact is, no matter how firmly we try to ground our theories in hard fact, the theories are not derived purely and exclusively from those facts. Something is always added, and it is only this addition that places the facts in meaningful relation. We are always intuiting patterns of some kind — often unconsciously — and these intuitions guide both our perceptions and our actions. To behave as if this is not happening is to turn a blind eye to precisely what we are trying to catch sight of.

The dialectical synthesis of these two extreme positions is to take from objectivity its attentive respect for reality, and to take from subjectivity its capacity to intuit patterns, and to combine them in a reciprocal process of informing one’s intuition, and then scrupulously testing one’s intuitions against observed reality.

The formula is “leap forward; scrutinize backwards.”

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One other thing that badly needs saying: Research is the disciplined pursuit of learning from people. The researcher sometimes must help research participants teach effectively. All the elaborate techniques researchers use in the field and in analysis must serve the purpose of effective teaching and learning. Unfortunately, often the techniques are used for the opposite purpose. Research can also be designed in a way that prevents certain kinds of learning — and this is roughly proportional to how structured the research is. Unstructured in-context interviews are limited only by what can be said and shown. A structured survey limits what can be said to A or B or C.

The same is true of workshop exercises. Highly structured exercises impose a pre-existent schema on what can be learned, and discourages and prevents the development of some possibilities.

The most sophisticated technique at the researcher’s disposal is conversation.

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Temple Grandin, despite her autism, has learned to interact with people. Her technique involves careful observation of behaviors, subsequent recognizing patterns, then responding to the patterns strategically. The responses are tested against the expected result. She interacts with human behavior as a physicist interacts with the behaviors of matter.

Most non-autistic people — “neurotypicals” as Grandin calls them — are equipped with an intuitive sense that guides us and makes it possible to interact without all the conscious observation and rational interpretation, and strategic response. We just know what to do, and do it. Of course, this can be taken to an extreme, and the glare of our innate sense of meaning can distract us from detecting clues pointing to other forms of meaning (such as those Grandin keyed into which helped her understand the experience of livestock in slaughterhouses).

Businesses tend to manage themselves in such a way as to make themselves collectively autistic. They blind, silence and paralyze intuition on principle — then try to add it back late in the process through marketing and advertising.

In the middle ages priests could intimidate the laity with their complex theological arguments — spoken in Latin — and their knowledge of elaborate rituals to be performed at particular times according to a complicated church calendar.

Today we laugh at all this priestly nonsense, and instead put our trust in experts who intimidate the shit out of us with complex concepts spoken in specialized jargon and mathematical formulas, who have mastered elaborate techniques for performing their professional functions orchestrated in intricately complicated project plans.

Every age has its shibboleths of authority, and it rarely occurs to anyone to question the basis of the authority. They just hear something mystifying and scary and decide to retreat from confrontation out of fear of looking ignorant. But ignorant of what? If we are ignorant of inconsequential bullshit running around in self-referential circles, who cares about knowing it?

The trick is calling bullshit on the whole thing, and demanding to see the fruits. What does all this quantification of angels dancing on heads of pins amount to?

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The most socially intelligent people I know would not be able to sell you on their social skills, if they were forced to do so by the normal methods of establishing credibility in the business world. They wouldn’t be able to outline their techniques for putting people at ease, promoting harmony, making everyone feel included and valued, for making people feel good about who they are. Nor could they create an action plan to take a group of individuals from feeling so-so to ecstatically happy, with set milestones where progress can be measured and with a fixed outcome of a particular level of well-being and pre-defined perceptions of themselves and the group.

If someone were to interrogate one of these socially intelligent people on how they would meet these very reasonable expectations and demand answers on their techniques, their success metrics, their high- and low-level plan. They would look like they didn’t know what they were doing.

Fact is, the interrogator would be the one who did not know what he was doing — but nobody would notice.

This happens constantly — and nobody notices.

This is what is fucking up our world.

This is how most decisions are made in the business world — and the larger the organization the more this is the case. Increasingly in education and also in government, decisions are made in this way, because we think business knows the best way to get results. When we when we apply businessy techniques and get really shitty results, it doesn’t occur to us to question the techniques themselves.

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We don’t know how to think about intuition, tacit knowledge, tacit know-how, aesthetics, or moral values. We subject them all to the same idiotic kind of interrogation, never inquiring into the legitimacy of the interrogation.

Then we wonder why, with all our fantastic quantitative analytic tools, with our amazing technical sophistication, with all our training and expertise we can’t seem to improve our lives.

It’s because, despite all our factual and technical mastery we don’t pay attention to 90% of our experience because we don’t know how to win it intellectual legitimacy — and this is in fact, precisely the part of our experience that matters. It is the cornerstone of our flourishing.

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There’s incredibly little correlation between shibbolethic fluency and the capacity to win real results. It’s time we start judging trees by the fruit, and not on the pedigree of the seed, or the soil, or the cultivation technique. Further own tongues should serve as witnesses. Devices that measure the chemical composition of substances will not do.

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A quote to meditate on: “Blessed are those who possess taste, even though it be bad taste! — And not only blessed: one can be wise, too, only by virtue of this quality; which is why the Greeks, who were very subtle in such things, designated the wise man with a word that signifies the man of taste, and called wisdom, artistic and practical as well as theoretical and intellectual, simply ‘taste’ (sophia).”

When a person stays above a conflict in can mean any number of things. It can mean that someone is an outsider and can safely ignore it. Or it can mean that though he is involved he does not have anything important to lose. Or that he is unable to understand or influence the outcome of the conflict, and is resigned to living with the outcome, whatever it is. Or that he can see that the conflict is inconsequential, and that its outcome will affect nothing (which is often a pose of those who actually do not understand a conflict). Or that he already knows the outcome, and knows the conflict is irrelevant. Or that the outcome will ultimately be decided by himself, because he hold the power to impose his will.

Yet, none of these are really “above”. They’re either removed from the conflict, or passively involved in it, or actively involved but in a position to prevail.

To be above a conflict, a person must see the limited validity of all sides of a conflict, which means to understand the full rightness of each position and the sense in which each position is not right enough. In other words, being “above the fray” is a function of dialectical thought. However, because people who have never thought dialectically and lack awareness of the possibility of dialectical resolution as well as the experience of this dialectical depth and height (which is simply a position one takes along the dimension of depth that permits an exteriorized, synoptic survey-view of things understood from the inside), the expression is leveled down along with other similar formulas such as “overcoming” (which becomes a synonym for defeating) and “getting over” things (which means simply getting accustomed to or distracted from a problem), or having “deep knowledge” (which means simply very thorough and detailed factual and practical knowledge in some area).

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To test someone’s depth, don’t look for quantity of information, but capacity for grasping a situation in terms of multiple perspectives and possibilities.

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A physicist can have vast knowledge of his subject, and incredible mastery of the concepts and methods, yet have no depth of knowledge at all. A freshmen physics student who is unable to perform in the lab or answer many basic physics questions might have very sparse and flawed knowledge of physics, yet possess deeper understanding of science than many professional scientists, by virtue of his liberation from naive realism.

When an object encounters against an impenetrable barrier, it tends to compress into it, and then expand against it. It is possible that the very best scientific laborers are the most shallow, but thorough and disciplined thinkers. It might be that the best revolutionary scientists are the ones who were the greatest dupes and suffered the most dramatic disillusionment in respect to naive realism.

When given a gift, accept the gift and do not steal it.

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To take possession of the object of the gift as if it were merely a transfer of property, is to betray the spirit of gift-giving.

A gift is an exchange of humanity. The object is only the medium of exchange. The object is essential, but the object is not the essence.

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Some people when offered a service, prefer to steal the labor, and then pay for the labor with money. The labor is bought, but the goodwill is not.

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Many wealthy people look out on a world in which everything can be bought, and whatever cannot be bought is nonexistent. They go into deep debt in ways they refuse to understand and react angrily when they default.

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The theft of a gift leaves a distinctive empty feeling that is hard to speak about.

In casual conversation, in business transactions, in love — it happens all the time.

We suffer from it and inflict it incessantly.

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Money is a conventional fiction used by societies for the purposes of distribution of resources. When the fiction stops serving its purpose, it’s time to get real.