Category Archives: Philosophy

Intentional focus

Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Religion

In phenomenology, all consciousness is understood to be consciousness of something. We call this something the intentional object.

But must this something be an object?

By object, I do not even mean physical object. I mean forms of every kind. Objective forms are, in fact, primarily conceptual, even when we perceive them as material.

(This points to why I enjoy provoking folks who call themselves “materialists” and call them idealists who traffic in ideas about matter — without ever encountering matter herself.)

Supraformal and infraformal realities can be intended, and intended in quite different ways than objects. But most of us, apparently, only know how to intend objectively, and this is not only intellectually limiting — it is intellectually crippling. It makes religion impossible.

A better word might be “intentional focus”.

Thambos

Philosophy

A footnote from Hadot’s book on Plotinus: “Thambos designates a kind of ‘sacred terror which one feels at the approach of a person or object charged with supernatural force’…”

I’m researching and actually finding books about ancient Greece’s repertoire of words designating responses to transcendence.

Again, my friend Jokin’s Basque saying comes to mind: “What has a name is real.”

Conversely, what lacks a name, lacks reality. At least for the good residents of Wordworld, where people feel happiness and sadness and anger and, now, trauma.

The view from the Tilt-a-Whirl

Philosophy

A dust storm gains visibility from the debris it picks up and sets in motion. The mass in motion makes it real. From without, it is a dark, chaotic and destructive object, tossing and trampling the land, ruining whatever blocks its path. But from its own wildly whirling standpoint, the world is already spinning out of control. Everywhere it looks it sees violent power, careening and smashing everything.

Nobody goes to a carnival just to stand and look at the rides. To really experience the carnival, climb into the Tilt-a-Whirl and watch what happens to the whole world around you. Now it is obvious who hurtles through space. It is the observers who think they stand on solid ground.

Ptolemy. Galileo. Einstein.

Whirl

Philosophy

There truly is no point in arguing into a closed epistemic-moral-logical circle, especially when that circle touches neither ground nor sky but just swirls about in mid-air.

At this middling height and depth, nothing is anchored enough to arrest its motion.

And its motion is all it is, however much it seems to turn on its revolutionary objects.

Argument feeds its force and gives it new material to pick up and wind into its own forms, now bound up in its own twisted objectivity.

We just have to wait for it to stop whirling and to waft apart… vapid… dissipated… dead air.

Barbell

Philosophy

My boss reminded me of a drawing I used to use a lot 15 or so years ago. I called it the barbell, and it looked like this.

I would draw it very differently today. But there is a truth in it. Our exchanges with one another, whether communications, services or products, are only the foreground to a relationship.

That relationship has a continuity to it, and today I would call that continuous relationship a real being that transcends each person in the relationship. It is a collective soul — an egregore.

We can psychologically reduce that being and chop it into bits and stuff the bits into mindstuff  within physical brains. When we do that we gain control over it. We can manage it and measure it. We can buy and sell it, and that’s great. Or we can turn it over to a government for equitable distribution., and that’s also great.

But we lose something when we do that. Because it is entirely possible to understand the world in ways that do better justice to what we actually experience when we relate to one another and participate in beings that we know transcend us. It does better justice to our moral insights and experiences of awe, beauty and love.

This understanding does better justice to scientific and technological practices and understandings than scientific and technological understandings and practices can do to it. But none of this can be explained in scientific and technological terms.

Taking this latter road makes all the difference. Everything changes because one’s own everything has changed.

Kill the giants

Philosophy

According to Wikipedia the expression “standing on the shoulders of giants” originated with William of Conches:

The ancients had only the books which they themselves wrote, but we have all their books and moreover all those which have been written from the beginning until our time.… Hence we are like a dwarf perched on the shoulders of a giant. The former sees further than the giant, not because of his own stature, but because of the stature of his bearer. Similarly, we [moderns] see more than the ancients, because our writings, modest as they are, are added to their great works.

I was going to say that the dwarfs despise the giants for being so short and lowly, but I think that adds little to the original text.

So, yeah, what William of Conches said: we all intellectually, and in some ways morally, perch upon the shoulders of giants.

But it is important to recognize that our perch gives us much more than an expansive view of the objects around us. Our height also gives us a lofty subjectivity — a subjectivity who not only sees and knows, but also judges and feels from a height.

We lose something crucial when we naively assume that this altitude is our natural birthright. When height is all we have ever known, it is easy to take for granted the layers upon layers of understanding that have raised us further and further above barbarity.

We cannot imagine how life might be at lower elevations. We are incapable of imagining ourselves as possible selves born in barbarous times and conditions. We confuse the peaceful, sensitive, reasonable second-natures instilled in the nursery with primordial nature herself.

Even without civilization, we think, we would have had the virtues, attitudes and understandings essential to who we are.

We keep the gifts of civilization, but lose all gratitude. We steal the gifts of our ancestors.

But we go from ingratitude to depravity when we start blaming the giants for the heights we have not yet reached, when we see the giants beneath us not as a tower lifting us up but iron chains holding us down. We think that if we untether ourselves from the bloody dirt around the giants’ feet, we will float up to the utopian heaven where we belong.

So we punch down, kick down, drop heavy rocks, pour molten lead and buckets of acid on the past. Once the giants are dead to us, their accomplishments forgotten, their teachings unlearned, the chains will corrode, dissolve and vanish into oblivion. Finally, we are free.

Spiritual prosopagnosia

Philosophy

Materialists suffer from spriritual prosopagnosia.

Prosopagnosiacs cannot recognize faces, so they are unable to identify the same person in different settings.

To someone who can recognize faces, it is immediately obvious when the same person is doing different acts. To a prosopagnosiac, determining whether a person doing an act on different days requires an elaborate process of observation and reasoning.

Spiritual prosopagnosiacs cannot recognize the same soul in different contexts.

Materialists believe only in material reality, so they can’t recognize that the same soul across multiple acts for the simple reason that, to them, souls aren’t real. Souls are a quaint way to characterize minds. And minds are epiphenomena of brains.

So if you can’t point to some continuous material entity, or continuous network of entities, that causes something, there is no real responsible being . There is only an image, projection, confusion or propagandistic notion on the part of the person seeing it.

A spiritual prosopagnosiac cannot recognize individual souls, and are unable to tell when an intimate has changed souls on them, as sometimes happens, and is no longer faithful to them. Same brain means same person. Being unfaithful is something a person’s body does. If the body hasn’t been unfaithful, then everything is the same.

But things become impossible if a collective psyche — an egregore — is behind various public events. This requires a process of observation and reasoning so elaborate that it borders on impossible. And for a materialist, that kind of impossibility is strong evidence, if not proof, of nonexistence. They dissolve delusions with rigor.

Prosopagnosia is rare, so prosopagnosiacs tend to recognize their condition. Not so with spiritual prosopagnosiacs. They are, in fact, participants in a collective soul that imparts spiritual prosopagnosia on its participants.

I’d write more but my invisible elephant needs to be taken out for his daily walk.

Hymn to Ayin

Judaism, Philosophy, Religion

To our finite minds, the infinite appears as nothingness. It is out of this nothingness that creation proceeds ex nihilo. The shimmering halo of creation — its crown, its Keter — is sometimes called Ayin.

This is the living, pregnant nothingness from which epiphanies come, by which we know Ayin and the Absolute One. Creation itself was epiphany. Creation continues, for each of us, in the renewal of epiphany.

This nothingness must never be confused with the dead, hopeless nonexistence into which all past, present and future love, joy and light is sucked and annihilated — the nothingness of nihilism.

Ex nihilo, the from-nothing.

Ad nihilo, the to-nothing.

One places a shimmering halo around our heads, radiating beyond mind, into being and beyond it.

The other places a light-sucking antihalo inside our skulls, made of pure weight, which drops itself through the heart, through the gut, and falls interminably into a fathomless pit beneath belowness. If you have ever felt depression, you will recognize this.

For creatures like us, nothingness is inseparable from everythingness. And in some respects the everythingness is what hides nothingness from us.

We know everything — past, present and future — only by our way of knowing.

A depressed or nihilistic way of knowing produces a depressing, hopeless, meaningless, nihilistic understanding of everything. The past, even a past one experienced firsthand as happy, is now revealed as delusional bullshit happiness, or doomed happiness or groundless happiness. And similarly the future is drained of hope and meaning. Everything will come to nothing.

A depressed self takes a depressing reality as given.

A depressed self sees no meaning, joy, happiness or (if we are honest) love, and concludes that this absence of evidence of value is evidence of absence of value.

Nihilism is the bad faith of depression, that drowns everything in an omniscience of cynicism.

Nihilism sees bullshit wherever it looks. But nihilism sees with an evil eye. It is nihilism that is bullshit.

The everpresent possibility of epiphany annihilates nihilism and repairs awareness of infinity in nothingness. We relearn the vision of the invisible, the being within Ayin.

When an epiphany comes, we are overwhelmed. Everything changes. The epiphany overflows the present, and saturates our memories and anticipations with new meaning. What we now mean when we say “everything” is different from what we meant prior to the epiphany. It is by this epiphany that we understand even our old understanding, and this means to forget how things were, unless we carefully preserve before and after, in order to compare them, and catch sight of the oblivion into which the before slips and from which the after emerges. This comparison teaches something crucial that could be called the transformation of everythings.

We realize, suddenly, meaning can irrupt into everything at any moment. And this irruption of meaning is always and necessarily inconceivable until the moment of epiphany. We cannot conceive or perceive its arrival because its arrival is itself the capacity to conceive or perceive. And because this possibility is always inconceivable and imperceptible, the apparent nonexistence of hope in hopelessness, the apparent absence of all meaning in meaninglessness, the apparent nonexistence of divinity in atheism — these are illusions. They mistake absolutely, mistaking infinity for zero. They mistake Ayin for dead nonexistence.

If the epiphany of inexhaustible epiphany comes to you ex nihilo — and it might arrive at any moment, especially if you open your hands and invite it — nihilism is behind you. You are now and forever an exnihilist.

Atheists are right: God, in fact, does not exist.

But atheists are not right enough: God is existence itself, and the source of existence beyond being.

Relativists are right: There is no absolute objective truth.

But relativists are not right enough: There is truth of the Absolute, which is not objective, nor subjective, but both and neither.

Disbelieve in God if you have no God to believe in.

Disbelieve forcefully, thoroughly, clearly, profoundly, nobly.

But try to understand: the object of your noblest disbelief is not God.

You can suspend final disbelief. This is your birthright.

The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, ‘He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,’ is never appeased.

The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, ‘He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,’ is easily pacified.

Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.

“Most people never realize that all of us here shall one day perish. But those who do realize that truth settle their quarrels peacefully.”

— Dhammapada

Shun evil and do good, seek peace and pursue it.

— Psalm 34:15

May God bless you and keep you.

May God look kindly upon you, and be gracious to you.

May God reach out to you in tenderness, and give you peace.

— the Priestly Blessing

Walk good.

— everyday Jamaican blessing

Metaskepticism

Philosophy, Politics

It is time for the unexamined tacit assumptions behind skepticism to be examined and challenged. Early in his career C. S. Peirce showed the way.

Skepticism assumes a sort of tabula rasa of belief, a default blank canvas upon which we can freely posit beliefs. But this blankness is sheer philosophical fiction. Truth is, we all have many beliefs that we are unable to disbelieve, even as we disingenuously formulate theoretical doubts:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. …

A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

To put it bluntly, a great many skeptics refuse to take their own real practical beliefs seriously. They argue frivolously, paying no attention at all to what they take to be real in their own practical lives.

For this kind of skeptic, philosophy is a delightful recreation — a diversion — that does not touch on real life in any significant way — conceptual concoction play, unencumbered by any obligation or consequence. And this would be fine if they would confine themselves to their conceptual playrooms.

But this is where fun-time skepticism shows its dark underside. The replacement notions constructed to replace skeptically refuted actual beliefs are seductive, and inevitably become fanatical fantastical politics — ideologies — which leak out from the private study, into the classroom, and, from there, into the offices and cubicles of the practical world.

These conceptual concoctions and theories and formulas are highly brittle, and vulnerable to reality. (Nietzsche says “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.“). Ideologues must defend themselves, most of all, from genuine belief of those who are stubbornly loyal to the givens of reality.

Dishonesty becomes the cost of membership in this kind of movement — dishonesty or total self-alienation, where the partisan sincerely no longer knows what they believe or disbelieve, due to habitual self-doubt and terror at being exposed as biased or prejudiced, and is ready to conform to those who seem credible. But whose judgment seems credible to such self-alienated judgment? They say, “so it seems to me, but how can I know given the unreliability of my own perceptions and understandings? Things are never as they seem. So I should trust the best and brightest around me…” But these best and brightest are also self-alienated. The blind lead the blind into ideological ruts, where war is peace, freedom is slavery, power is weakness, truth is false, up is down, left is right, conventionality is revolution, superficiality is radical, openly sociopathic totalitarians are freedom fighters and those who defend themselves from Nazi are the new Nazis.

The famous universal acid of skepticism does not only dissolve beliefs. It also dissolves persons. And before we get all armchair Buddhist, and pat ourselves on the head for thinking non-self, anatta, this acid dissolves our relationship with reality beyond form and beyond being. Nothing could be less Buddhist than addiction to recreational deconstruction.

This kind of habitual skepticism in fact enlists us in Heidegger’s famous anonymous public, the They. It makes us an intuitionless, de-centered, unselfed political unit. It makes us, in Nietzsche’s words, a zero: “What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –”

The spell of skepticism, however, is broken if we become honest with ourselves, and recognize that we do have an implicit faith behind our professed beliefs.

This faith is as given as any other reality. We cannot freely invent it any more than we can freely invent the physical world around us. This faith is actual — we reveal it through our actions, which are based on what we assume is real and true.

To articulate this actual faith is to be philosophically honest. To hold a faith that wishes to express its actual beliefs — a faith that wishes to be honest about itself — is a good faith.

To invent beliefs that are not actual — that we would not bet our lives in, if it came down to it, is to be philosophically dishonest. A faith that needs this kind of dishonesty is a bad faith.

All we can really do with our faiths and the beliefs our faith articulates is question them and test them. Through this process, I have changed my own faith. And when my faith changed, the beliefs I articulate change. — But not before!

Consequential philosophy is not always, or even often, delightful. It is not something we do only for fun, and prance away from when it gets unpleasant or tragic. It is as different from recreational philosophistry as scientific investigation is from fiction writing. And if we abandon our hard questions as soon as the going gets unpleasant, it doesn’t even gain the depth of literary fiction — it is just easy conceptual entertainment that is easy precisely because it reinforces the habits of the status quo, however “daring” it pretends to be. And the status quo today is frivolous skepticism, and of course, frivolous cynicism toward anyone who believes anything substantial.

What are some things I know are true?

I’ve been listing them a lot lately, but I’ll list them again:

  • Morality is real and it matters. We know there is better and worse, and we are both guilty and ashamed when we do or are what is worse.
  • There is an absolute. Certainty about the absolute seems impossible, but we know that this absolute determines the truth and falsehood of our “constructions”.
  • The absolute transcends our understanding. When we equate reality with our beliefs about it, we know that this is an immoral and false denial of the absolute. (Metaphysics is something that must be overcome? Says who? Show me a skeptic who is skeptical about automatic anti-metaphysics!)
  • The Golden Rule is universally binding. At its most radical, the Golden Rule means that we must treat our fellow I’s as equal, and approach them with the dignity every I deserves.
  • How we treat others and how we approach the Absolute are inextricably bound. Exercise of the Golden Rule is our most reliable method for approaching the Absolute. If we take the faiths of others around us seriously, and exchange teaching and learning with our fellows, we increase our actual certainty through improvement of our own faith and the faith we share with those around us.

These are things I cannot currently doubt. And, more, I believe in my heart that we must not pretend to doubt them, or even make an effort to overcome belief in them. I will not trample on them with boots of any kind, whether muddy boots of cynicism, shiny jackboots of ideology, or antigravity boots of alienated skepticism.

Poetizing Poesis

Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

This morning I read Graham Holston-Barbeque’s “Poetizing Poesis: Concatenating the Impenetrably Imagistic and the Impenetrably Technical by Use of Colons in every Title of Every Scholarly Paper from the Nineteen Eighties to the Present”.

It is by far the most compelling argument for Post-Colonism I have read.

Progressing beyond progress

Biography, Esoterism, Philosophy, Spiral

One place where progressivism has a grip on me is the mania for originality.

We moderns compete to be the first to discover or invent or create some novelty or another, so we can get credit for progressing our society to wherever it is headed.

I am possessed almost entirely by this competitive urgency, and its unexamined goal of unconditional forwardness toward wherever we have not yet arrived. Almost entirely, but not entirely. I am slipping a razor’s edge of question into this precious fissure to see if I can crack it wider. Perhaps if I can wedge it in far enough to get some leverage, I’ll be able to pry it open and get out.

The essential difference between a paradox and a contradiction is depth and shallowness. Contradictions point at pointlessness. Paradoxes point to heights and depths in hierarchies of being.

Why do we think it is better to deny better and worse? How can we think this?

Mystical topology

Esoterism, Everso, Metaphysics, Philosophy

When we apprehend realities that transcend our comprehension, and find that our minds cannot find objective edges around which a concept may be gripped, we can ignore these realities into oblivion and see them as dead nonexistence. Or we may accept them as living nothingness — divine ground — and attempt to relate ourselves within them in ways that compulsively reduce all realities to objective terms. That is, we can take part in what involves and surpasses objectivity: we participate in being to whom we are subject — in life in whom we are organ. And when we do so knowingly we assuage the apprehension of incomprehensibility in a new kind of awareness of being within being — a knowing we might call suprehension. The old insult “his reach exceeds his grasp” loses its sting. Is it really so bad to have a capacity to touch without grabbing? Everso.

Beyond contemporary mysticism

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

Contemporary mysticism, like all contemporary popular thought, reserves all conceptual clarity and precision for material reality alone. Mysticism is a misty, nebulous remainder, hovering above and glowing behind material reality — an opalescent swirl of vague hopes, of insinuated meaning, of faint underwritings of morality.

I have chosen to distribute my own clarity and precision more broadly — across infraformal material, formal psychic, and supraformal spiritual realities. This choice is informed both by my everyday experiences working among humans and nonhumans as a designer, and by my mornings spent reflecting on these experiences and on my past reflections — integrating, clarifying, iterating.

We all need this expanded clarity, but we cannot even articulate the need, precisely because of our truncated clarity. We have optimized our understandings to account for physical phenomena, but we wave away the immediate matters at the heart of our lives — love, beauty, meaning, relatedness, belonging — as someday-to-be-explained epiphenomena.

We placed the particle at the center of our persons, and set these human matters in orbit around it. And now we must do the most complex calculations of epicycles within epicycles before we can calculate why our families matter to us more than life itself.

Last night Jack asked for the musical instrument “you blow into”. I didn’t know what he meant. Each wrong guess made him more visibly desperate. So we went to the instrument box and started rummaging. We found a pitch pipe tuner, and he was able to say that “it is like that.”. When we found the harmonica, his relief was instant and total. It was obvious, though, that most of his pain and subsequent relief had more to do with his need to communicate than with his need for the harmonica. The two needs were bound up together and compounded exponentially.

When a toddler begins to melt down we sometimes say “use your words.” This does two things. First, it teaches them to begin with communicating their needs before expressing their frustration. But second, the very act of communicating calms and stabilizes them.

Imagine a world where adults feel inexpressible frustration at having their most fundamental human needs unmet, but are, at the same time, unable to articulate their needs and account for why those needs matter.

A toddler with mysterious, inarticulate, unmet needs throws himself to the floor and screams and kicks and demands Froot Loops. An adult with mysterious, inarticulate, unmet needs riots in the streets and makes political demands.

We must rethink our metaphysics. At the very least, our civilizational survival depends upon it.

Design and form

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Everso, Philosophy

We can speak of objective truth, but if we speak of objective reality, we reveal a fundamental metaphysical misconception. Objectivity is “real” only as a subjective phenomenon.

If we say “objective truth” while meaning “absolute truth”, we reveal two fundamental misconceptions. The first, of course, is the erroneous belief just mentioned, that reality is itself objective. The second is that absolute truth is an objective truth.

If we deny the existence of absolute truth, what we probably mean is half true. The true half of the meaning is that there is no absolute objective truth. But the untrue implication lurking behind the truth is that truth is essentially and necessarily objective. This is a philosophical limitation that can be overcome.

To overcome objectivist confinement, we must learn to think supraformal and infraformal truth.

Designers, especially, already know how to engage supraformal and infraformal realities in purely intuitive practice. But when pressed to explain or justify our way of working, our concepts and language mystify rather than clarify.

When designers try to be faithful to what we do, we bungle it — confusing and alienating nondesigners. So often we “translate” what we do to objective business language, and call it “design thinking”. But the stubbornly non-objective truth of design is lost in translation. In trying to represent design objectively, we misrepresent, misdirect, and mislead — offering only an illusion of comprehension and mastery. These nondesigners then share their “expertise” with other nondesigners. (Lesson #1: Everyone is a designer!) They found programs, institutions, consultancies, and whatnot, until we have a whole industry of nondesigner design experts. None of them ever actually design, and if they did, they would quickly discover that their theories and wise words — so compelling to executives, academics and writers — are useless to designers designing real artifacts. But of course, this is no argument against their expertise.

Much harder is clarity faithful to the reality of designing. But this requires us to “open the hand of thought”. We must allow some fundamental and unexamined beliefs about reality and truth to drop from our grip, and invite new ones to alight in their place.

Good metaphysics

Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

I prefer to build out my mysticism, as well as my scientific understandings, from everyday given reality, which Husserl called the lifeworld.

When we proceed this way, carefully preserving the links between what we experience directly in the lifeworld, toward what we gradually recognize as not-yet-known, possibly unknowable in principle, and (at the very least) inexhaustibly re-knowable, we develop an understanding of planes of reality beyond the world of intuitive effective action and the world(s) of constructible-destructible truth(s).

Let those with the sensibilities to conceive what this means make sense of it.

Some folks want to take these transcendent truths (metaphysics) that seem for all the world to explain manifest truth (the lifeworld) and treat them as an adequate substitute for it. “We are in the lifeworld, but not of it.” (The scientistic metaphysicians are just as bad as any other in their need to escape the reality of life. “What do I care what happens in this paltry here and now, to me and my loved ones, as long as the youuuuuuniverse keeps cranking out novelties?”)

Others (correctly) see in this kind of metaphysicry a lame attempt to escape the lifeworld, and (incorrectly) dismiss all metaphysics as escapism.

Good metaphysics never sever these worlds from one another. The ladder stands firmly on the earth and penetrates the roof of heaven, so that truth may circulate between.

If we practice good metaphysics, resisting the impulse to chop the ladder at the knee or neck, our lifeworld transforms. Reality is given to us differently. This is what is meant by revelation. Revelation is not a secret message about reality whispered into a guru’s ear; it is a disclosure of reality to our common sensibility.

I fear I will never transcend Nietzsche.

Transformation of Things

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Taoism

Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.

Chuang Chou did not know whether he was Chuang Chou or the butterfly.

But the butterfly had no doubts, which means he had certainty.

Therefore, it was the butterfly who dreamt Chuang Chou.

This is the logic of ideological butterflies, who cannot conceive how anyone might disagree with them.

Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.

What is meant by the Transformation of Things?

Most of us spend our lives flitting and fluttering through existence, conforming to norms, nonconforming and dissenting within the acceptable norm-supporting range. As long as we cooperate, we remain who we’ve become within a world that is simply what it is. Today’s world, though, is universally acknowledged to be socially constructed, distorted by cognitive biases and shot through with blind spots.

But very, very few people think to question the rock-solid critical metaworld behind the constructed world, and to wonder if that critical metaworld is not just as constructed, blind and corrupt.

And this is the sublime joke: the critical metaworld, not the “constructed world”, is the world where everyone actually lives today. That alleged constructed world, the object of critique, is just a decoy. (Same with self. Most folks who “do the work” of self-scrutiny, scrutinize a decoy self. The critical metaself evades notice and operates behind the scenes with one hundred times the bias, blindness and self-serving logic as the decoy identities it so theatrically renounces.)

Today, when everyone seems to have learned to “question everything” fewer people than ever before actually question anything real. They don’t even notice the critical metaworld from which “the world” is questioned, critiqued and challenged — which cloaks and protects it from all question, critique or challenge.

If you do manage to find the critical metaworld, though, and if you do choose to interrogate it, you will find that this metaworld dissolves under scrutiny.

When it dissolves, deeply weird things happen to you. But those weird things manifest as changes to the given world — so weird they make magic seem mundane and paltry in comparison. Everything and every thing transforms in the most inconceivably uncanny way.

Now we have a before and an after. Before we had only lack of doubt. Now we have profound doubts.

Between after and before there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.