To be heard in noisy times, don’t yell louder, whisper weirder.
All posts by anomalogue
Hieroglyphia
When I was first taught how to draw, the first lesson was showing us how us to slow down, attend closely and really see, instead of merely looking (as most of us do most of the time).
What is meant by this distinction between seeing and looking?
Looking is visually scanning our environment and categorizing whatever is identified in the visual field. It is seeing-as, where the seeing is discarded and the “as” is kept. Seeing is suspending the “as” and preventing it from occluding what is there to see if we slow down and pay close attention.
How did we effect this shift? We were taught the method of blind contour drawing. The teacher set an object before the class to draw. It was sometimes a pile of cloth, or a gourd, or a cow skull — something visually complex.
We were told to pick a part of the object to draw — a part with an irregular edge. We were directed to move our eyes slowly along the edge of the form, and as we moved our eyes, we moved our pencils. Like seismograph needles, as our eyes traced the object and followed its contour, registering each minute bump, pit and arch with both eye and hand.
We were told to pay no attention to what we drew. Once we placed the pencil point in the center of the sheet, we were not even supposed to look down at the paper.
At first, we were anxious. We knew we were producing atrocious drawings, and that nobody would even recognize what we were drawing, and we were right.
But this was not about making good drawings. It was about effecting the shift from looking to seeing. The activity caused us to become deeply absorbed in the object we observed. The absorption sidelined our speech. As we gained the ability to see the unique particulars of our object, and disintermediated our seeing from language, we gradually lost the ability to speak. After class, it would take fifteen or thirty minutes to shift back into the wordworld.
This is what it takes to draw what we see instead of writing what we are taught to re-cognize, categorize and scribe in memory when we move around in the world scanning for relevance. The world is there to see and — once we learn how — we can actually see it when we choose to stop looking for a moment.
We cannot see all the time. Even artists don’t see all the time, and they sometimes choose to focus their absorbed seeing, not on the world, but on the artifact they are crafting. But the originality of the artistic vision is rooted in the actual seeing.
An artist who only gets better at looking and scribing what they recognize will not draw a seen eye, but instead will only scribe a conventional hieroglyphs of an eye in a conventional hieroglyph of a face on a conventional hieroglyph of a person, in a world of conventional hieroglyphs, populated by conventional hieroglyphs, furnished with conventional hieroglyphs.
Artists who see might acquire new habits of looking and scribing. But when they scribe an eye, it is a hieroglyph of an eye they themselves observed. It is an eye as they, themselves, have come to see them. Their style reflects their own original experience of seeing.
As a young adult, I learned the art of spiritual blind contour drawing, an art known as Vipassana.
Instead of sight, the absorbing perception of Vipassana is feeling. Vipassana is a tracing of the contours of sensation on and within the body.
Through this art, I learned some direct and extremely disturbing lessons about existence. We are not who we think we are. Our thoughts are not what our thoughts claim to be.
Our thing incessantly recognizes and scribes whatever it looks at, and whatever it cannot look at it does not see. In other words, we think and think and talk and talk and read and read — and rarely slow down or stop to intuit. We fail to register the myriad nameless, unique particulars of which reality is composed. We skim for the categories and toss out the rest.
We are speed readers of the wordworld, re-generating the same thoughts by the same interpretation and logic we we trained to use long ago before we were even conscious. We see hieroglyphs, we write hieroglyphs, we speak hieroglyphs, we inhabit hieroglyphs. We are hieroglyphs.
We will remain imprisoned in hieroglyphia until we learn to see, hear, feel, smell, taste, touch and, most of all, intuit for ourselves.
On halos
If you know what to intuit for, the world is infused with halos of every possible tone. As with light, the gamut of intuitions trail off into the analogue of inperceivable nothingness of infravisible infrared and ultravisible ultraviolet. Intuitions, though, trail off into inconceivable nothingness of infraintelligible sub-ipseity and ultraintelligible super-alterity.
Or try another anomalogy: Just as layers of cool air and hot air produce shimmering mirages over sun-heated ground, halos are intuitive ripples that form at the boundaries of enworldments. Halos are opalescent membranes separating differing universe-sized modes of givenness — differing everythings, differing “ontologies”. But these everythings overlap, or, better, interlap. Each everything coincides, shares its objects in divine commonality. So boundaries or membranes are not spatial or even temporal, but intuitive, which is also a dimension.
If time is “reality’s way of keeping everything from happening right now,” and space is “reality’s way of keeping everything from happening right here,” intuition is “reality’s way of keeping everything from happening to me.”
Space is strangely nebulous; it constricts and expands for us. Sometimes it is a point as small as a subatomic particle, but sometimes it expands to embrace galaxies. Time is strangely nebulous. Sometimes it is focused on this exact instant, but usually time is roving about anticipating and recalling, constricting and expanding, stretching to an imagined moment of origin or terminus. Self is strangely nebulous. Sometimes it is one tiny, simple spark of consciousness — an intuition — but usually it is inter-blending with fellow intuitions, harmoniously or cacophonously, somehow creating a richer more complex sense of self. But self is also intuition, much as sparks unite as flames and flames unite as fire. The self roves across a field of moving intuitions who are sometimes I and sometimes excommunicated from I. And sometimes the I expands beyond the confines of the body. Sometimes the self moved by forces beyond itself, yet this movement seems voluntary. Self is also dimensional, containing the other dimensions as all dimensions do, by definition. Time contains space and self. Space contains time and self. Self contains time and space. Present I, present here, present now — our existential coordinate is the center of All, but everytime, everywhere and everyone is the center of All. “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” …whose circumference is irreducibly nebulous.
To intuit halos is the precise analogue to intuiting spans of time and depths of space.
Artifacts from enworldmants beyond our own bear halos. Halos of benevolence, halos of sublimity, halos of uncanniness, halos of dread — halos of every tone in intuition’s infinitely variegated palate (sic).
These artifact were engendered elsewhere, belong elsewhere, promise elsewhere and — if one allows it, they can effect elsewhere.
Halos are and must be purely intuitive — the spiritual response of the unique within a self encountering the unique beyond the self. Halos defy prefabricated language. If we wish to name the types of halos we would have to assign each one its own proper name.
A genuinely haloed artifact carries the potential of reenworldment, and we intuit this.
But to actualize the potential — the promise — we must brave the perplexity of disenworldment.
If we are attentive every halo is permeated by dread. Sublimity is what gives halos their brilliance. Pure sublimity is blindingly brilliant.
Art intentionally intensifies halos to the furthest point of bearability.
Consumer entertainmentment mutes halos to their dimmest — to unthreatening, playful novelty.
Love, love is a verb
I suppose I could call it a capacity and desire to participate in a transcendent We — and I probably should do that, since the word “love” has been emptied of metaphysical significance and consequently, reduced to an emotional state, all-too-easily confused with infatuation or lust. (Infatuation is only a prelude to love; lust is its miscarriage.)
But if we are able to restore to love its open-edged metaphysical significance, speaking of the Judaic tradition as a religion of love — or as a series of religions of love — can inter-illuminate both love and religion.
I, Polycentric
One of “my” older, stranger and truer insights is this: Being is essentially polycentric. I believe this insight was conveyed to me by S. N. Goenka through his ten day Vipassana courses, but I learned it in a way that was not recognizably “taught” — at least, not recognizable until decades later.
The insight began as a realization that we ourselves are composite beings, a community of intelligences, which I called “homunculi”. The homunculi that make each of us up might self-organize into any number of political orders. A person’s soul might be harmonious and all-inclusive. Or it might be arranged hierarchically with some homunculi leading and others following. Or it might be of two minds, locked in a civil war of mood swings and self-sabotage. Or it might be sheer anarchy.
And the people with whom we associate can change our inner politics. We might find that some homunculi in ourselves are friendlier with and more loyal to certain homunculi in other people, than with other homunculi in ourselves. This is why we feel like a different person in the presence of certain others that we love or hate, or who has some strangely oppressive or inspiring effect on us. And these changes others have on us can estrange us from other people in our lives. Jealousy becomes far more credible when we realize how much we change under the influence of love of different people.
So how can it be that we feel like one person one moment and another the next, yet still feel as if we are and have always been the same person? I would say that it is for the same reason that a chord feels like a single sound despite being multiple overlaid notes, or a complex musical passage feels like a phrase despite its chordal, timbral, rhythmic multiplicity. Except instead of its being a complex object of perception, it is a complex perceiving subject.
Later, some extraordinary life events made me aware that each of us is not only constituted of homunculi but each person is, in a sense, a homunculus who participates intuitively in transcendent persons larger than ourselves. The ethnomethods that guide our social behavior and enable us to understand the behaviors of others and mske our behaviors understandable to them… our built environments and the artifacts we manufacture to furnish our semi-artificial worlds… our language and our repertoires of concepts — these are all participation in being greater than ourselves. We are organs of unknown beings whose being we only intuit. We are regulated by spiritual hormones that we do not know how to explain or control.
We explain these mysteries away with vague language. We understand or don’t understand this and that. We don’t understand, until suddenly “get it” and now we do understand. We are attracted or repelled by beauty or ugliness . We feel moods, vibes, gut sense…
We focus so much on what we know how to say and what we know how to count and calculate — and sometimes only these things for which we can account seem real to us. But really, the opposite is true: the intuitions, the felt unsayables, the immediate experience that cannot be recorded in memory and recalled — only the meager word-shells and a few impressions, negative space where positives ones pressed — these are what is closest and realest.
All the rest — all the words that can be word processed or numbers and formulas that can be locked spreadsheet cells or database records — these are abstracted from these concrete particulars.
When we lose intuition for anything but the symbols we use — which are themselves symbols of… of what? — we become numb to the real. We become alienated, animated processes. We are still participants of a sort, or at least parts — but we lose agency and intellect. We become socially passive and unconscious and perhaps believe this is the only possibility of social existence.
Listen carefully to the testimony of those who claim we are all socially determined — to those who want to wake you up to this supposed fact of the human condition — and realize they are speaking of life as they know it.
But understand: this is only one way to live, and it is not the only way. Alienated being knows only alienated being.
Human being is a kind of being which is chosen and cultivated.
Choose humanity. Try to feel your life, feel your truth, feel your enworldment, feel the world of which you are a part. These things can neither be said nor counted because they are real.
Thriceborn
Nearly everyone knows everything, and nearly none know nothing. So nearly none can reknow everything.
Of those few who do reknow everything, almost none reknow nothing.
Yet, everyone speaks knowingly of infinity.
Common sense
Most of the time, when we say “common sense”, assuming we bother meaning something precise by our words, we mean one of two things: the sense of things we all (should) have in common, or the sense of things common people (should) have. Conversely, lacking common sense is failing to understand what is self-evident to everyone else, or it is being oblivious to what is obvious to common people.
However common sense has another less common meaning. Common sense can mean that sense of things that emerges from the coordination and convergence of all our senses. We intuit that our senses are each different modes of access to a world common to all — a multi-sensory world which transcends any single sense. What we see, we can also hear, smell, taste, touch — and interact with.
If we experience life with all our senses, and account for the full experience instead of just what we see or hear, that gives us something much truer than a truth based only on reflecting on what we see or what we hear. We develop a common sense understanding triangulated, quadrangulated, sextangulated, myriadangulated, and endowed with parallactic depth.
I just read that intuition is the spiritual sense of touch, and that gnosis is the spiritual sense of hearing.
I think we can only know this is true if we can understand what is meant by this analogy.
And I think we can only know what is meant by this analogy if we exercise sensory common sense.
And with this, intuition and gnosis become intrinsic to a deeper common sense.
Ideologies prey on people whose primary experience of the world is spectatorial. Ideology is founded on hearsay and look-see, and absence of direct participation. They look out at a world of televised images seen from a distance. They hear or read reports about things that happen elsewhere and compare them to other things they have heard or read about.
Ideology projects a world of word and image that is consumed and thought about and talked about in a pre-formatted way. Repeatedly consuming these ideologically formatted images and reports, and performing the ideology’s approved actions, thoughts and feelings gradually reformats the consumer in conformity with the ideology.
Ideologies render those caught up in their closed autonomous logics, numb and deaf to reality.
Is truth constructed?
Ideological truth is constructed.
Common sense truth, however, is instaurated in unceasing collaboration with the inexhaustible.
WordPress, R.I.P.
WordPress has completed its long pivot and has finally fully transformed itself into a website design tool. It is no longer optimized for writing. It is designed to assemble media elements into engaging, immersive digital experiences, or something.
The upshot is I can no use it and absorb myself in my writing. The legacy text editor has been fully retired. The block editor is now non-optional, at least if you use the WordPress app. And the online editor is extremely broken. The block editor layout causes weird typos (for instance, I constantly hit underline when I mean to hit delete). When you tap on a word in a different text block, the whole thing lurches upward, and instead of the word you were trying to select, the word below it is selected. And it is now entirely impossible to cut multiple paragraphs. Everything conspires to distract and frustrate.
WordPress is no longer a tool I can use. Even right now, writing this little diatribe, I am having one problem after another. I can hardly get this out. It is depressing.
I loved WordPress.
I also loved Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop.
I loved MacOS, iOS and I loved Apple.
A new alienated generation of designers now dominates UX. One by one these alienated incompetents are destroying designs that I once loved and relied upon. These tools were part of me — extensions of my own being. My intuitive bond with these tools has been severed. I experience it as amputation. It is deeply personal. It is betrayal.
Alienated people cannot design intuitive systems, because alienated people do not even know what intuition is. To them intuition is just arbitrary mental habit, which can be retrained. With enough repetition and drill, just about anything can be made familiar, intuitive and true.
When one is fully alienated, this seems absolutely true, and, without any contrasting experience of intuition with which this alienation can be compared, it is impossible to know or even conceive otherwise. Where conception ends, imagination ends.
Things can be better. Things will be better. Whether we live to experience it, or die from alienation is the real question.
Intuition versus alienation
Intuition is direct response to experience, unmediated by language.
Confusingly, though, our most spontaneous utterances and immediate responses to language are also intuitive.
When we say “experience-near” this means using words that directly refer to intuited experience. We can use and understand experience-near language intuitively. We do not need to use words to help us use other words. We simply speak, and what we say means what we mean to convey.
Language becomes unintuitive when speaking or understanding requires long intermediating chains of language. We must speak to ourselves inwardly about our speech, and pick our words carefully, word by word. With each layer of meta-talk, the connection between word and experience grows more remote and attenuated. This is what is meant by “experience-distant.”
Destruction of intuition is alienation — from the world, from others, and from oneself. It begins with over-reliance on experience-distant language. Alienation is complete when the experience-distant language detaches from its alleged object and begins to refer only to itself.
In alienation, whatever one experiences is subjected to elaborate interpretive processing and explained in theoretical language. We psychoanalyze ourselves, explain our biological brain states, interrogate our power relations, theorize on how our social conditioning might be distorting our perceptions snd feelings, speculate how we might be perceived by others, and so on, before simply experiencing what we might otherwise experience. Our intuitions are diffused among many fragmentary notions, or redirected into one compulsive direction, away from one’s immediate or thinly mediated experience.
Same with actions. One no longer interacts directly and wordlessly with objects in ones environment. One no longer picks up a pen and writes, or picks up a knife and cuts. One must anticipate, set goals and plan before acting. One must recall directions and then follow them. One must ask what the next best move is, pick it, then execute it. And at each step one must document the move, to provide transparency. The more a person’s actions are of this kind, the less intuitive contact with the world one has. One’s intuitive connection is primarily with one’s own instruction set. There is no craft, just foresight and execution.
Same with speech and interactions among people. Speaking becomes a risky endeavor. People must carefully consider and select every word or gesture before using it. Words become dangerous things to be handled with thick gloves, carefully assembled and inspected unit by unit before any sentence is delivered. Beliefs are charged with extreme moral significance. Asserting the truth of some facts makes one a good person, where denying their truth, or wrongly asserting the truth of false opinions makes one a bad person. We must constantly reassure one another where we stand, and wherever possible demonstrate our true belief of true beliefs.
But personal beliefs are viewed as constructs — conventions acquired through habit, shaped by social conditioning. Beliefs should never be left to personal judgment, but rather determined by ethical experts who can calculate the effects of various beliefs upon society, and select beliefs capable of generating maximum justice for those who most need and deserve it. Bad beliefs are beliefs left to organic distortion or intuition, which, more likely than not, serve only one group or one person.
With sufficient degree and duration of alienation, a person can be made to lose all direct connection with self, with others, with reality beyond one’s alienated language.
And sadly, one cannot avoid alienation from the alienated. In alienated times, those with functioning intuitions must find one another, offer one another refuge, commune with one’s ancestors — and recommit to future generations beyond this human void.
The key is to develop experience-near language that does full justice to the wordless realities we intuit in our midst.
We intuit energies, tones, vibrations around us and emanating from others and concentrated in certain places and objects. What can we do with them, when we intuit them and speak of them in such nebulous language? Nothing. And that is why the alienated world approves of leaving them in such a wispy, flaky, woo-woo state. Belief in energies and vibes has very little pragmatic consequence.
But these realities of which we are unable to speak are the most consequential. They move mountains.
We do not know how to think and speak and share the most crucial realities of our lives. Our language is optimized to physics and technological manipulation. So we talk about our brains and hormones and social conditioning when what really concerns us are our minds, our hearts and our place in the world.
We have it all everted.
Things can and must be otherwise.
Service design initiation
I am starting a class on online course creation this month. The class is project-based, centering around the design and implementation of an actual online course.
My class project will be an initiation into the enworldment of service design.
By enworldment, I mean the practical-experiential manifestation of an understanding, which causes a person to approach, perceive, understand, respond to and attempt to change the world in some distinct way. (Enworldment is close enough in meaning to “worldview” or “lifeworld” that for most purposes it can be used interchangeably.) *
The course is not meant to be a philosophy of service design, but a series of exercises to effect a shift that causes service design problems to become conspicuously visible as what they are: service design problems.
Currently, under the mainstream corporate enworldment, most service design problems, if noticed at all, are understood in other terms (such as technology problems or management challenges) and are addressed in ways that fail to resolve them, or make them worse.
For a variety of reasons, I have it in for the corporate enworldment, and its failure to detect and respond to service design problems is the least of them. The main problem with the corporate enworldment is the alienating, intuition-paralyzing, depressive effect it has on the majority of people who subscribe to it.
People who believe they hate capitalism don’t really hate capitalism as an economic system, but rather this corporate enworldment’s mode of capitalism. Frankly, if we were to establish socialism today, we would establish it under this same hellish enworldment, while losing many of the tempering effects of the market, and end up with something at least as soulless, oppressive and violent as the Stalinist or Maoist systems. Today’s youth are some of the most thoroughly alienated people I have ever met, and they suffer from political Dunning-Kruger of the profoundest kind that makes them believe they have the answer when they can’t even hear the question. If they do not grow out of their social childishness before they take full control of our society, mass suffering is inevitable. I am sorry, but this is the truth.
I despise the corporate enworldment, too. The only thing I despise more is the anticapitalist two-in-one political enworldment that opposes it — proggism and its complement, alt-rightism. They each think they are the opposite of the other, but they are just the vessels and veins of a single bad-blood pumping circulatory system.
I know that commerce can be conducted in myriad ways within a capitalist system, and one of the better ways is service design. I would like it to become the universal enworldment in the domain of business, and to see all the bean-counters, systems engineers, product managers, perception manipulators, strategic planners and so on, to find their proper places within it, not over it, as they are today.
There is a lot of interest in service design right now. Most people try to do service design within the corporate enworldment, which causes it to be far more complicated and ugly than it could be if it were practiced under a more suitable enworldment. I hope this online course might inspire people to approach business — and life — in a radically different, much better way.
NOTE * : Here is an outtake from an earlier version of this post, where I was attempting to shed more light on enworldment:
“I’ll restate this same idea religiously. Why not? : An enworldment is the way the world manifests to us when we approach it in some particular faith. So when employees of corporations experience their work lives in that dull, weary, anxious, workaday way we describe as “corporate”, that is an enworldment. And any product of corporate life also belongs to that enworldment and it bears a corporate aura — more like a smell — of phoniness, impersonality or insincerity and artificiality. Art aspires to the opposite. An artist with his own enworldment produces artifacts experienced as art, ideally bearing a genuine, intensely personal, otherworldly aura — also known as a halo. Most aspiring artists have absolutely no idea of enworldment, and just try to craft interesting-looking stuff that seems to suggest something provocative or mysterious. Most art does not even manage to be bad art. It is just the idle play of people who’d like to bear an artist’s aura, but who are too timid, pain-averse and unimaginative to diverge from the popular enworldment with its moral norms of norming the abnormal and conventional wisdom of deconstructing convention, playing around with materials in hopes something novel will emerge.)”
Faith, doctrine and sheer bullshit
Faith is not the same as doctrine.
Faith is a way of believing: faith is subject.
Doctrine is what is believed: doctrine is object.
Faith is not the degree of certainty in a belief. Faith is not quantitative.
Faith is the quality of belief, the particular way a belief is conceived.
If a doctrine is conceived by the believer in a way that spontaneously produces clarity, affirmation and action, that conception is faithful to the doctrine, and certainty naturally follow.
If a doctrine is conceived by the believer in a way that fails to produces clarity, affirmation and action, that conception is misconceived and is not faithful to the doctrine. And if the believer tries to will certainty into existence, anyway, that believer believes in bad faith and becomes self-alienated.
As the self-alienation intensifies over time, as it must, the false certainty demands more and more effort and detects threats in more and more sources. The self-alienation metastasizes into general reality-alienation. The alienated being is forced to retreat further and further into delusion and further and further away from what seems unsafe, unjust and unreasonable to them — safe, just and reasonable meaning, of course, harmonious with their own tyrannical, impracticable, imagined ideal. The self-alienated ideologue becomes so brittle the entire world must be terrorized and coerced into conformity with its ideological notions, which become more and more ludicrous from the outside. And, most of all, this ludicrous exterior must never, ever be comically reflected back to believer. Reality itself is offensive, especially the reality of how ridiculous the believer has become.
We can change our beliefs, but to do so we must, in the best faith, change our faith.
And this does mean experimenting with possibilities, that is, entertaining them. We observe how we, ourselves, respond to “what if?” propositions, and really notice if we find ourselves persuaded by the pragmatic consequences.
We ask ourselves, perhaps by invitation, “What if there no such thing as extreme virtue — that virtue is essentially moderate? What if virtue is always at the mean, somewhere between vices of deficiency and vices of excess? Which means too much of any good thing — too much empathy, too much equality, too much honesty, too much love, even — becomes vicious? What then?”
Or “Maybe progress is not progress toward perfection or toward any good, but, rather, progress away from misery and cruelty of various kinds? What then?”
Or “What if justice is not an absolute, but rather an ever-changing agreement between each and all, and that any one person or any one group, however benevolent, who exalts themselves above their fellows as judges of absolute justice becomes a tyrant — the epitome of injustice? What then?”
Or “What if liberal democracy is essentially contentious, and any attempt to purify it of conflict or to force it into harmony is an existential threat to liberal democratic life? What then?”
Or “What if every villain of history believes they are on the right side of history — and that if you, yourself, were such a villain you would passionately pursue a perverse justice, in total belief of your own righteousness, just like the villains before you? What then?
Or “What if that dichotomy of mind versus matter is just a weird artifact of human being, and that metaphysical reality is both, neither and infinitely more? What if materialism and idealism are both anthropomorphisms, at best stations on the way to real relationship with divine infinitude? What then?”
Or “What if infinity is qualitative, not quantitative? What then?”
Or “What if we are no more capable of doubting what we cannot doubt than we are believing what we cannot believe? What then?”
Or, finally, “What if truth has little or nothing to do with correspondence with reality, but rather with the fitness of a set of beliefs with a particular kind of life? And that correspondence theories of truth are no longer fit for the kinds of lives most of us are living today? What then? — Or! Or what if the opposite is true — that abandoning our incorrect but useful correspondence theory of truth destroys our ability to live?
And so on.
Asking such questions — assuming we can authentically ask them — and meeting these questions with an authentic response is the key to changes of heart, soul and strength — of metanoia — of saying “hineini” in new, better ways. When we respond, if we are observant, we will feel the implications of the possibility reverberating through the world as we’ve known it, ringing true or false, full or hollow, cramped or grand, dissonant or harmonious.
Sometimes, if we persevere in our asking and responding, something inconceivably weird happens. An entertained possibility crystalizes into actuality. New relationships, concepts, analogies, meanings ripple across our past, present and future, rearticulating time, space and being, tearing and restitching the fabric of history and the storyline we’ve woven through it with our own life. The world re-enworlds itself and we find ourselves standing in a remade place as reborn newborns.
This is how it actually happens when it happens. Beliefs change with a change of faith.
But falsifying your beliefs in this or that doctrine — or arduously retraining your thinking to better conform to the doctrine that you have come to assume ought to be true — this will never get you there. It will only infect you with worsening bad faith. It will make you profoundly and ridiculously full of shit.
The Reformed Bully
One day, as the world’s most terrifying playground bully was applying an atomic super-wedgie to one of his favorite victims, he had a profound change of heart.
He looked at the miserable face of the poor kid he held aloft by the elastic of his tighty-whities.
Then he looked the sadistic faces of his jeering comrades.
He was overwhelmed with disgust at himself, and those who found pleasure in bullying the helpless.
He immediately released the kid he was tormenting and turned on his laughing comrades.
“What are we doing? This is WRONG!”
To everyone’s surprise, the bully grasped the waistband of his own underwear, and yanked until his eyes teared up with pain and emotion.
He then lunged violently at his shocked comrades.
“You, also, will do this work!”
With the assistance of his former victims, the ex-bully inflicted some of the most brutal and heartfelt wedgies anyone had ever seen.
The tables were now turned. With the ex-bully’s energetic assistance, the former victims were now destroying waistbands across the playground and in the school bathrooms. The tormented now had their chance to torment their tormenters.
The reformed ex-bully calculated that the former tormenters had approximately five years of suffering before them before fairness would be achieved.
He found deep gratification using his strength to restore justice to the playground. Soon equity would be achieved — all because of his heroic rejection of bullying.
Ventriloquist of reality
When you try to become the ventriloquist of reality, it is you who becomes the dummy.
Polycenter yourself
You are not the only center of the universe. Polycenter yourself.
Experiencing infinitude
1.
When we are young we are full of potential. We feel immeasurable future before us and we overflow with hope.
When we are older, after living most of a lifetime, looking back on the one narrow path we actually followed through these possibilities, we might feel bitter.
Was all that possibility an illusion doomed to be dispelled by actuality?
No: That possibility was real. We thought we were anticipating our own personal biographies, but now, our maturity reveals it for what it was: In truth, we were savoring the infinitude of God.
This ambient eternity was not over the horizon, but rather, was the sky and air of our lives. And it is still there around us and, if we choose, we continue to breathe it.
Possibilities are valuable whether they are actualized or not.
2.
Human nature is apocalyptic. Every generation feels it in their bones that they are the last generation. And in a sense, they are right. Each generation is the end of existence as they know it.
But this is no reason to surrender to despair. This is just one way we experience our own mortality. When we die, everything as we know it disappears with us. The universe loses one of its universes, even as another infant universe pre-experiences its genesis, or some grace-struck soul is reborn mid-life, ex nihilo.
Nothing is okay, and that is okay.
3.
The hope of potential is the experience of God’s infinitude, filtered through our own finitude.
The hopelessness of apocalypse is the experience of our own finitude, but if we look deeper into the nothingness, we can feel the back-glow of infinitude behind it.
We do not have to be bitter.
4.
Rabbi Simcha Bunim taught: “Keep two pieces of paper in your pocket at all times. On one: ‘I am a speck of dust,’ and on the other : ‘The world was created for me.’”
Against caremongers
Here’s the thing: Most people who care very intensely and noisily about this thing or that care much less about the object of their intense, noisy caring than 1) the activity of intensely, noisily caring, and 2) the fact they they are a good person who cares intensely about important things.
But it is possible to stop caring about caring and about being a sincere, good person.
“Oh no! Will this turn me into a cynical nihilist?” you might ask.
No, it will free you to figure out what you actually care about.
And that knowing what you actually, for real care about allows you to work for what you actually, for real care about, instead of being a loud, hyped-up, bullshit caremonger.
Of course, insincere, inauthentic people who prize sincerity and authenticity get pissed off if they suspect you can see direct through them. So, unless there is a good reason to, don’t confront them. But don’t play along, either. Armor yourself with etiquette.
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Etiquette is not fake. Etiquette is formal.
Etiquette is not faking how you feel. It conceals how you feel by replacing self-expressive speech and action with proper speech and action.
Etiquette keeps the social peace by keeping our inner selves inward and our outer selves inoffensive.
Anyone who tries to pry under etiquette, demanding access to our real selves deserves to be politely rebuffed. That is impolite.
Anyone who ignores the rebuffing, and persists in prying and pushing and otherwise fucking around with our real selves and our real beliefs and our real values, deserves to be impolitely rebuffed. Because that is disrespectful.
And if that does not work — if they refuse to desist — they deserve to be resisted forcefully.
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So, if you want to be good, just do the right thing, and leave your feelings out of it. Do the right thing politely until you cannot be polite, anymore.
Few people deserve intimacy, and you alone are the judge of that.
Reserve your authenticity for people who aspire to authentic authenticity.
Authenticity is for the authentic.
Mutuality is for the mutual.
Equality is for the equal.
Have a good day.
Sermon on the Distributed God
There is a plurality of ways to be a pluralist, and pluralism is prepared to accept the pragmatic consequences of this truth by acknowledging that apparent contradictions to any given truth, even the truth of pluralism, does not imply falsehood.
Pseudopluralism believes that its view on pluralism is the only valid form of pluralism, and sees any contradiction to its own form of pluralism as false and anti-pluralist and something a pluralist should suppress through responsible use of overpowering force.
This is one variant of an ancient and universal trap: of merely knowing, or worse, saying, when we are summoned to act and to be.
Each of us is a divine spark of the immanent Distributed God.
Pluralism is the acknowledgment that our finite efforts to conceive reality from our various points in the divine body will necessarily differ, just as we feel different sensations in different points in our own bodies. Sparks within sparks. Speck-size sparks; flame-size sparks; inferno-size sparks, sun-size sparks, galaxy-size sparks. Sparks seen close-up, sparks seen on the horizon, sparks floating on the surface of the azure sky and sparks set in the depths of darkness.
Each spark regards the others as if through the eye of the one and only God. The Golden Rule urges us to know that we are merely participants in a transcendent one and only God, and we are surrounded by innumerable fellow-participants, fellow sparks. We are all centers of the universe.
Borges:
In one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trismegistus, the twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered this formula which future generations would not forget: ‘God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.‘
Here we can see the ethical dimension of pluralism — an attitude of mutuality toward our fellow-I — who, from our own perspective, is Thou — and actions of reciprocity. The principle of reciprocity — which must not be confused with a rule, because rules determine actions, but principles determine rules — goes by the misnomer “the Golden Rule.” The Golden Principle is a test for any action, and it iterative asks — that is, it interrogates — every action. It asks “By what principle is this action justified?” Then, “Would you accept that principle?” Then it asks, “By what principle is this principle justified? Would you accept that principle?” and this questioning iterates until the test fails, or it terminates at the root of this principle, which requires us to involve our neighbor, our Thou, as ourselves, as fellow participants in a We.
The Golden Principle can be restated as: Thou shalt codesign.
The Jewish tradition, in which the Jesus was a participant of supreme genius, has always approached God as community in covenant. He understood and taught that the Golden Principle — to respect and love Thou as I — is precisely the same principle of loving God with our entire being — not just with our theological minds, not only with our overflowing hearts, not only with our serving strength — but will all of ourselves, integrated and whole and in communion with our fellows in a network of I-Thous, woven into a jewelled Indra’s Net, who can never been seen from outside, despite all appearances. Indra’s Net is woven of first-person. The refractions of first-persons within first-persons is the scintillation of these jewels.
Martin Buber:
To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude.
The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks.
The primary words are not isolated words, but combined words.
The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.
The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.
Hence the I of man is also twofold.
For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It.
Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.
Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.
Primary words are spoken from the being.
If Thou is said, the I of the combination I-Thou is said along with it.
If It is said the I of the combination I-It is said along with it.
The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.
The primary word I-It can never be spoken with the whole being.
To make the leap from monocentric “I am one with God, and coextensive with God” to polycentric “I am a participant in God, and I am entirely of God and nothing but God, while God infinitely exceeds my finite being” is also to say “My participation in God is inseparable from my participation with my fellow I, as they are also of God, and participants in God’s being.”
To oppose God, the world and other people is to render God finite and deny his very infinite essence. And we all do it every minute of every day. Each moment it is an infinite challenge to overcome this natural sin, and it is to this challenge we are summoned. “Where are you?” To which we respond “Hineini“: within Thou who is, am, will be. And to this we say “Amen.”
We are called to radical pluricentrism within the Distributed God.
To know and say it epistemologically: pluralism.
To do it ethically: codesign by the Golden Principle.
To be it ontologically: be a polycentric participant in the Distributed God.
This is my religion. It is Judaism. It is all religion. It is All, or at least one way to situate within All.
I am trying to convey this to anyone with the hope to know better, the will to receive new givens, the ears to hear, the eyes to see, the space of an open outspiraling heart.
I am not trying to convey it to those who do not want it, and that is most people, especially those who say “pluralism!” or related words like “diversity!” or “equity!” or “inclusion!” Two millennia ago, a radical Jew said “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” The kingdom, of course, Malchut, Shekinah, is the enworldment of participation in the Distributed God.
All too often we believe beliefs as a counterfeit for a faith of being and doing and receiving givens.
Last point: Participate first with participants.
You cannot play Uno with one who will only play Solitaire.
But the more people are playing, the more the hesitant will feel compelled to join, and joining is its own kind of persuasion. With games, too — with games, especially — the medium is the message. And what isn’t a game? (Language games. Ethnomethodic games.)
Remember: Persuade the persuadable first.
Starting with the obstinate, focusing on the obstinate, is obstinacy.
Belief as anti-faith
Beliefs can be a defense against faith.
Do not be fooled: “True believers” are not the faithful.
Casual accepters of truths lack faith.
Fervent believers in the Truth try to grip faith and cannot. They fear faith and hate it.
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If you cannot live up to a principle, believe in it instead.
Protected: Mutuality ethic
Alcatraz Tour
Once the wife of a former inmate to Alcatraz decided to take a tour of the prison so she could better understand what he’d gone through in his two decades of imprisonment.
She walked through the stone corridors, ate a snack in the mess hall, and even experienced the cold clank of the iron door closing behind her as she was shut up in a cell for a few minutes to contemplate the horror of confinement in a nine-by-five-by-seven foot space.
Afterwards, she reflected with her husband on her experience. “It was really quite interesting. Maybe next time you will agree to go with me, so we can experience it together.”