From the Ordinary to the Miraculous and Back

There are the laws of nature, and then there are the laws of Nature.

The distinction is clearly a matter of the physical things that are constrained by Newton’s propositions, and things that are not. For instance, there is some vertical aspect of us that is not limited by such mechanistic laws. I am not going down the quantum realm, for that is all together another matter in the microcosm of the physical world. Nor do I want to walk down in to the new-age vortex.

Instead, I am making the point there are times when the metaphysical and physical touch. I can’t make sense of it, but I know it’s Real. 

Call it miracles, if you’d like. The fact we exist is a miracle in itself. God does not even exist, for He just is. For something to exist, it means there is a beginning and an end. Maybe our souls are eternal, but there had to be a beginning somewhere: even if we are a particular expression of the Universal Spirit.

Frithjof Schuon said, “If the divine Principle is transcendent in relation to the world while at the same time em­bracing it within its unique substance, then miracles must occur; the celestial must sometimes break through into the terrestrial, and the center must appear like a flash of lightning on the periphery; to take an example from the physical realm, inert matter is of little worth, but gold and diamonds cannot fail to appear within it.”

The gold and diamonds sometimes appears in serendipitous events or in happenings that are not so coincidental. 

A friend of mine got me to read the Magus of Strovolos by Kyriacos C. Markides, about Stylianos Atteshlis (a.k.a. Daskalos), a 20th-century Christian mystic and healer who lived in the town of Strovolos, Cyprus. Although rooted in Christian Orthodoxy, he would go rogue with his skills of clairvoyance, exomatosis (willfully abandoning one's body), and expansion. Here he would heal people and materialize/dematerialize objects by working “from the highest dimensions and descend through the lower levels until you reach the gross material plane.”

Unlike most healers, he saw himself no more than a conduit for the Absolute (the Source of his miracles). 

Still, I enjoyed the stories of his healings and the insights around other dimensions: meeting people on psychic planes with a silver cord means they live within the gross material plane; the most difficult healing method is expansion, “namely bringing the entire body of the patient within my consciousness and working from within”; and the importance of the etheric double that keeps the three bodies (physical, psychic, noetic) of man alive and linked to one another. I want to believe all of it.

In another book I’m in the midst of, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy, the author, Jonah Goldberg, has his own version of the Miracle. Goldberg notes that “Around the year 1700, in a corner of the Eurasian landmass, humanity stumbled into a new way of organizing society and thinking about the world. It didn’t seem obvious, but it was as if the great parade of humanity had started walking through a portal to a different world.” Up until that point, we didn’t generate a lot of wealth, innovation, or civilization. Then something converged. 

His version of miracle is less supernatural, but spectacular nevertheless. Were we nudged in some way or did we just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps?

The bottom line is miracles are all abound. It seems there’s a “transitional space” where we play in, and that the boundaries between nature and Nature may be more porous after all. If you’re closed off to it, then it’s just one thing after another. If you’re open to it, the miraculous can be in moments or all-at-once.  

But the point of a miracle is not to prove anything, other than to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and the ordinary in the extraordinary.

Not Faking It and Making It

On a recent listen to an interview with Christopher Wallis, a scholar-practitioner of Tantric Shaivism, I was drawn to the distinction he made on spiritual growth verses realization. He sees it like putting the cart before the horse (or the self before the Self). I'm sure the resonance I have around this point is based on my own transgressions in this area. For instance, all this "seeking" with blogs, books, practices, and teachers can inflate the personality at the cost of knowing one's true personhood. I can feel exalted about my experiences and knowledge, but all that will do is get entitlement and pride to sneak in.

Wallis says: 

“What most people think of spiritual development is a kind of retooling and rejiggering of their personality; or a reconditioning of themselves according to whatever spiritual narrative they've bought into. I think this is ultimately counterproductive and dangerously so, because if you develop an effective spiritual ego that's all shiny and everybody praises and strokes you, you have so much less reason to wake up out of your ego structure than you did before. So to go about things back to front is not only a waste of time but you can actually end up digging yourself a much deeper hole and the exact thing that you started out interested in [to realize Truth] becomes almost impossible in this lifetime.”

Not in this lifetime?! How dare you?!

But thankfully, I'm aware of this and I'm constantly keeping my gnostic and intellectual curiosity in check. In that, my intention around reading and blogging is more so that God can read and write to me. I am staying with what I love, because what I love is what I can be. And since I don't golf, why not read spiritual books and blogs? Moreover, I believe the metaphysical pointers matter so we don't lose sight of where the realizations are taking us.

Yet, we never want to jump ahead of ourselves. Instead, this will just develop more concepts around what we believe it means to be a Self-realized person. This is a constant re-prioritization of undoing, where we are unhooking our entanglements of the mind.

We need to be utterly naked in every moment to what is, while falling in love with the whole of it. In turn, the recognition of the solid ground we are rooted in will allow for real growth to emerge.

Backwards and Onwards

John Henry Newman said, “we walk to Heaven backwards.”

What he meant by this could be seen from a couple angles. First, we can only rest in the deeper nature of our innocence when we commune with the Divine. That requires us to step back from grasping on to the contents of our mind. It is almost like a falling back away from the conditional world while we become more rooted in an unconditional (heavenly) absolute.

The walk backwards could also mean the re-cognition of first principles. While there are no permanent outcomes, there are permanent values. Sometimes we need to go backward to go forward, and with this I believe Newman was espousing the value of (heavenly) tradition.

There are two countervailing impulses of human history: Arcadianism and Eutopianism. The view of Arcadia holds that everything was perfect in the beginning, such as the Biblical Eden, and that all corruption is the result of man's fall from original innocence. The project of Arcadianism then is to return everything to its original state, reverse the effects of the fall, and shed all of the accretions of the fallen world. We see this with traditionalists, eco-radicals, Romantics, perennialists, some eastern religions, etc.

The Eutopian view asserts that the situation was not ideal in the beginning, and that our focus must be on man's progress. The goal is therefore to build the Great City of Zion. The City of God is subsumed into the City of Man. We see this with modernists, evolutionists, Hegelians, some Judeo-Christian movements, etc.

As with most things, the truth is more nuanced than either of these impulses. We can’t resolve these tensions, but maybe we can inhabit them.

While things were probably never pristine by any stretch of the imagination assuming we could take a ride on the wayback machine, the sense of original purity is not to be dismissed. It points us to the deep feeling-sense that something is not quite right today. The real issue is when we compensate that vertical loss for some horizontal gain towards progress. We reject the transcendence for some false good to be immanentized in the world. But the sad truth is such a transformation can never be completed in history, but only in ourselves.

I believe evolution and progress should be seen more as man's progress towards Godliness. Man's salvation/liberation/sanctification is individual, happening to one person at a time, and constitutes a metamorphosis of the person into a more mature, God-like entity. Natural selection and civilized advancements are not the key factors here. The evolution of mankind as a species and life on Earth at large, in which natural selection and man-made advancements plays its real role, has to be understood in light of building up the City of God, a city fit for gods to inhabit.

Maybe we need to walk backwards first.

Freely Willing and Chilling

I’ve always found the materialist position on free will amusing, because to believe in just the material you could not concede that there was an immaterial element to the person making decisions — whether we call it the soul or whatever mediates the natural to the supernatural.  Yet, neuroscience and psychology have come up with some evidence that we are not so free, so maybe it is us more “woo-woo” types who need to (unfreely) make concessions.

I enjoyed Alfred Mele’s book Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will, because he doesn’t go down any “woo-woo” tracks as to what makes free will possible, but instead offers a lucid and decisive refutation to the recent evidence that attempts to undermine it.

Perhaps the best known evidence against free will comes from the experiments conducted by neurobiologist Benjamin Libet. Participants were asked to flex a wrist whenever they felt like doing so, and then to report on when they had become consciously aware of the urge to flex it while being wired to an EEG machine. The results found that that the activity in the motor cortex would begin an average of 300 milliseconds before the participant had a conscious sense of the willing to flex the wrist. So from the materialist view, this proves their case. If free will requires that conscious willing to do something is the cause of doing it, then we don’t act so freely.

Mele posits that there are issues with Libet’s approach: (1) we have no evidence that the specific kind of neural activity really is sufficient for flexing; and (2) the approach is quite artificial since it does not take account for active deliberation by participants.

Moreover, there is some nuance to the idea of free will, and as to whether or not we have it depends on what we mean by free will, and more importantly, where are we coming from? 

Mele admits the following definition raises the bar too high: “(1) Having free will requires making conscious choices that are entirely independent of preceding brain activity, and (2) Having free will requires being absolutely unconstrained by genetics and environment (including the situations in which we find ourselves).”

If you take that as the straw-man argument, then yes, you have to concede that we are soul-less mammals. But truthfully, we can see our actions as being more fluid, in that, we are pre-consciously making choices in each moment as to where we place our attention to act, and consciously deliberating more complex choices during other times. We are both conditioned and unconditioned, with mixed motivations in respects to many of the behaviors we enact.

Again, where are we coming from? There is also the possibility of coming from not our will, but God’s will. There is no “do-er” and yet we individually align to fulfill actions not necessarily of our own making. This is where it gets most interesting, and while Mele does not dare explore such terrain, it makes the contrast of “thy will be done” and “Thy will be done” all the more compelling.

Meditation Made Me Sick

Meditating on emptiness 
Spilled tea on the zabuton 
Cup not as empty as I thought 

~Richard Arthure

I’ve been a serious meditator for over a decade now, and it hasn’t always been easy. The monkey mind is only part of it. During my first week-long retreat I had sort of a meltdown due to some challenging energetic discomfort. I literally felt like I had a severe headache outside of my head for days. For a few years thereafter, my head would wobble uncontrollably (a.k.a. kriyas) during my practice. I would feel my right heal involuntarily raise up if I was seated in a chair. I was continually prone to such “kundalini” experiences due to metabolic imbalances in my energy system. Moreover, I needed to purify a less-than-mature ego that was not ready to give up its tendencies.

In recent years, I have gradually come to see an easing into practice where the relationship to experience is more accepting. At times, I still encounter a mind full of agitation, over-intellectualism, and desire. Yet, I look forward to practice now. 

Moreover, I have redefined why I practice. In the past I did it more to find some life-changing “awakening” experience and enduring happiness. Now, I practice to cultivate my relationship to be with God, so that I can better relationally become in the world. It’s less about me, where the practice and being are one in the same.

Still, there are always places where we can go awry in spiritual practice. I recently came across a blog post by David Brazier on Meditation Sickness. He says, “Meditation sicknesses are states that can come about as a result of meditation, generally meditation that has, in effect, been practised with an unsound motivation.” 

Many techniques and teachings of meditation, albeit popular these days, are metaphysically lazy. There seems to be little motivation to meditate beyond physiological and psychological benefits. For some, this may be adequate. But for the rest, we are losing sight of the relational potentials we can have to the transcendent and immanent Source to become more whole(y).

This also reminds me of what Frithjof Schuon says about Realizationism: “A pernicious error that must be pointed out here -- one which seems to be axiomatic with the false gurus of East and West -- is what could be designated by the term 'Realizationism': it is claimed that only 'realization' counts and that 'theory' is nothing, as if man were not a thinking being and as if he could undertake anything whatsoever without knowing where he was going.”

For those of us who can lose sight of knowing where we are going, here are the sicknesses pointed out by Brazier:

1. Unsustainable infatuation: The practitioner falls in love with the practice in an unsustainable way that in due course often leads to an equally sudden rejection or loss of faith.
2. Pursuit of visions and emotional high: The practitioner pursues the practice primarily in a quest for visionary or psychodelic experiences and is endlessly looking for such novelties.
3. Attachment to heavenly states: The practitioner makes some progress and attains to one of the higher dhyanas and becomes strongly attached to it, wanting only to dwell there.
4. Emptiness disease: The practitioner, having had an insight into emptiness loses all sense of purpose or direction. At an extreme this can become a kind of psychopathy.
5. Self-inflation: The practitioner believes him or herself to be enlightened and in possession of super-normal abilities in a way that leads to recklessness or abuse of others.
6. Reactivation of extreme ego states: Meditation can trigger neurotic or psychotic symptoms in persons already so predisposed.
7. Loss of connection with instinct: The practitioner may become so detached from bodily processes that he or she loses the ability to respond naturally to somatic messages.
8. Accidie: The practitioner becomes weary of spirit and can see no point in the practice or in any other activity.

If You're Chasing Your Tail, You Better Make Sure It's Not a Fat One

Despite the title, this post is not referring to the recent passing of my feline friend. Fat and thin tails are related to probabilistic expectations that anchors Nassim Taleb's work. I just finished his book, and want to unpack some of his core ideas. Besides, we know most actions have risks, so better sometimes to know what we don't know.

I particularly enjoy Taleb's polemical discourse on IYI's (Intellectual, Yet Idiot) or folks who don't know what they don't know. Living in Boston and having access to many academic and intellectual circles, I've always intuited a stink among certain fairly smart individuals. It seemingly manifests itself in a sort of compartimentalization, where the brain is firing on all cylinders in a couple areas and taking a nap in all the others (including the heart at times). It seems there are some who are a little too wet behind their closed ears.

I've seen people talk about think tanks or firms collectively with many years of experience. But let's say someone says their firm has 40 years of experience; that could mean they have 20 post-grads each with a couple years to their resume verses a couple seasoned professionals with at least 20 years of work-life. Who would you rather trust? Taleb notes, and it would seem to me also, that “adding people without fundamental insights does not sum up to insight.” 

Taleb believes good, long times are on the side of rationality: “fragility is the expert, hence time and survival.” But IYI's like to stay close to home. They are usually good at first-order thinking, but not second-order thinking. They can reason to some extent, but because they compartimentalize so many of their ideas they can't see the complex whole. In other words, “the higher the number of possible interactions, ... the more disproportionally difficult it is to understand the macro from the micro, the general from the simple units.” Although they arrogantly try, usually through some reductive foibles.

That does not mean time always brings in wisdom to IYI's, but wisdom is rare without the ebbs and flows of life. Or as David Bentley Hart says: “Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.” Many young people lack both epistemic humility and life exposure. Many older people can also lack both if they never got their boots on the ground and their hearts out in the open.

And then there's the issue of too much time for one life. Taleb says, “If humans were immortals, they would go extinct from an accident, or from a gradual buildup of misfitness.” It seems we have an optimal shelf-life where our genetic changes can benefit future generations for adaptability. Beyond that, we would be crusty curmudgeons afraid to cross the street.  

Life is always about risk, but hopefully not ruin. Taking risks allows for wisdom to ensue, but the question remains what risks are too much: 

Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one. (Taleb)

Taleb explains that thin-tailed risks are ergodic: meaning, the statistical expectation for a collection of players is similar to a single player over time. Yet, there are many risks that can look good collectively, but may create havoc on the individual if he/she is at the game long enough. (Yes, flying is less risky compared to many other forms of transportation, but overtime if you're flying a lot, it just takes that one hungover pilot to ruin your life.)

Let's say you're in a position in power, and making a bet on something you're doing where the odds of something catastrophic is low, but should it happen it can create mass ruin (listen up wall street, AI developers, politicians). Maybe you should have skin in the game yourself. Maybe you should be following the Silver Rule: do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. Maybe you should resign and move to a tropical island.

Yet, most IYI's have an entitled sense to act on their "expertise" and usually make a mess of things for the sake of perception. In their view, adding something new (e.g. policies, technologies, etc) is always going to look sexier than removing something. But we can never know all the interactions that will result in an action, so sometimes we can do better with subtraction (via negativa) than addition (via positiva).

All in all, the world is far too complex for IYI's on top to be making decisions that will inconsequentially impact those of us on the ground. Fine for thin-tailed risks, but not if you're going to ruin my (and everyone else's) party. So if you're in a position of influence, better the outcomes will be if you're not externalizing the risks to others and have skin in that game yourself.

When the beard (or hair) is black, heed the reasoning, but ignore the conclusion. When the beard is gray, consider both reasoning and conclusion. When the beard is white, skip the reasoning, but mind the conclusion. — Nassim Taleb

Bobo

With deep sadness, I had to say goodbye and put down my best feline friend, Bobo, on Friday due to abrupt kidney failure. He was magisterial, fierce, gentle, sweet, and always a great companion. In his younger years, being an indoor/outdoor cat, he would often bring me a rodent as a gift. I didn't always appreciate waking up to a dead mouse in my apartment, but I understood he was acting out his nature. (I even had an ex-girlfriend who placed an ultimatum on me as to whether she or the cat stays due to these episodes. He stayed and she eventually left.) He stopped this activity a few years back, but then suddenly decided to bring me an unprecendented three mice over one evening a couple weeks ago. I now realize this was his last hurrah and gifting to me. Of course, he gave me so much more than I could have ever offered him.

At this moment, the loss has quite an intensity to it as I sit with it. It's not like I haven't experienced the loss of loved ones or relationships. But the unconditional love from a pet is quite unique, as many have expressed. I recently heard someone say grief is love that has no place to go. I would add that it's a love that has no place to go in this existence. The earthly relationship is severed. But through the suffering, I can sense how the love can be transformed beyond the form to an essence that stays. I am enriched by the experience I had with Bobo, which I would not trade in for a moment even in my grief. As Taleb says, “Love without sacrifice is like theft.”

Bobo will be remembered for so much: how he curled around my leg as I meditated, his love for rubbing his face against mine, the times he would follow me around outside, and the way he initially found me more than I went looking for him. He really was unique as far as cats go. He often acted like a dog in some ways. And in others ways, he was very much a descendant of rich feline genes. His dignified appearance and soulful like eyes gave him a regal presence. Even as illness and age crept upon him, he allowed his youthful zeal to give in to a wise solidity that was at times ineffable. We were deeply connected in that ineffability, and I very much look forward to reconnecting with him in the light.

Bobo, 2004 — 2018

Keeping Us On Our Toes

“A God you cannot comprehend is a God you cannot manipulate.” – Carl McColman

I’m in the midst of reading Carl McColman’s great book, The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality. And it is essential, in that although it's grounded in Christianity, it could apply to most esoteric traditions. We all know about paradoxes when it comes to the spiritual path, but why do they exist?

After a while, it becomes obvious that Truth shows up differently at the depth/height/breadth/length we see it. In other words, we can stand somewhere locally until we realize that another perspective may be on point. And the more perspectives we hold, the more challenging it is to traverse horizontally. We now have to step on the ladder and alter our vista to a nonlocal space.

And God wouldn’t want it any other way. He/She ;) likes to keep us on our toes. That is why no religious institution, spiritual path, or guide/teacher/guru has it all figured out. If you consider any of the paradoxes listed below, you’ll be able to point out how a particular person, community, or belief system emphasizes one over the other. No one can dance of the razor’s edge perfectly, and that’s why God can never be expressed perfectly in the world. 

From the relative plane, these paradoxes can make you feel schizo since they can't be reconciled. As such, “Christ does not resolve paradox; he simply transcends it.” Only you can decide to let go along for the ride.

McColman poignantly notes, “God tries to keep you on your toes not because he has a twisted sense of humor and wants you to feel uncomfortable, but because he knows that the best antidote for taking yourself (and your religion) too seriously is to fill your faith with all sorts of apparent contradictions. Sooner or later, you just have to throw up your hands and say: "Okay, God, I give up. There's no figuring you out." At that point, God comes to you "as a little child," laughs in your face, and says: "That's okay, I love you anyway! Let's go play!"”

Here are some of the tensions McColman comes up with that we can inhabit in that play (the only thing I would add is some of these paradoxes may have an asymmetric relationship where one side takes precedence over the other as one would be necessary for the other to exist; such as, a transcendent God is necessary for an immanent God to exist since creation came after that which creates). ...

Mysticism is the quest for God. You cannot seek God unless God has found you.
Mysticism is about experience. Mysticism cannot be limited to experience.
God is immanent. God is transcendent.
Mysticism involves significant, life-transforming events and changes in consciousness. A mystical experience may seem as insignificant as the Butterfly Effect.
You can do nothing to "earn" the mystical life. If you are passive, you will be thwarting the action of the Holy Spirit.
Mysticism is the "flight of the alone to the Alone." Christ is present "where two or three are gathered" in his name.
God is One. God is a Holy Trinity.
Christ is fully human. Christ is fully divine.
Seek the light. Embrace the dark.
Take delight in God. Accept even suffering.
God is all-merciful. God is uncompromising in his justice.
Seek holiness. Practice hospitality.
Plumb deeply the Christian tradition. Embrace all positive wisdom.
Love God's creation. Do not love the world.
Humankind is sinful. Humankind is invited to participate in union with God.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Perfect love casts out fear.
Place your hope in the future when you will find conscious union with God. Live in the present moment; that's the only place you'll ever find God.
Live by faith. Live the truth.
Authentic Christian mysticism conforms to Biblical and church teaching. Mysticism is following spiritual vision to greater freedom.
Pray methodically. Prayer cannot be reduced to a method.
Become like little children. Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind.
God is Father. God is Mother. God transcends gender.
Mysticism is an intellectual pursuit. True mysticism is mostly about the heart.
The mystical life is like climbing a mountain; it's a lifelong journey to reach the place God is calling you. There's nothing separating you from the love of God-right here, right now.
The Ultimate Mystery is silent. Part of being a mystic is trying to express the ineffable through words.
Heaven is a gift freely given. Hell awaits those who reject divine love.

When Tolerance Runs Amok

The conventional wisdom is there is always a fear of mob rule (or tyranny of the majority). But in truth, it doesn’t take much to tip the scales. Yes, we’ve all heard about the tipping point, but why is this so and where can it become a bigger issue in our tribal ethos?

Taleb’s book is all about nonlinear dynamics and the asymmetries that can shake things up from an uncompromising minority. He remarks, “Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of intolerance.” 

Case in point, Taleb notes that if there's one Orthodox Jew or Sunni Salafi in a community, they will require the local market to carry kosher/halal foods. In some cases, it's just easier for companies to meet this criteria for all its products assuming costs are reasonable. As such, most soft drinks are kosher. The tolerant are just fine with drinking kosher.

At times, these asymmetric dynamics can tip the scales for more significant change. In the case of the civil rights movement, it was a minority group of people who would be peacefully intolerant of injustice toward Black Americans. Yet, the “sad news is that one person looking at mankind as an aggregate may mistakenly believe that humans are spontaneously becoming more moral, better, and more gentle, with better breath, when this applies to only a small proportion of mankind.” It would seem it's always more challenging to tip the scales toward goodness than the inverse.

In most situations, it is the intolerant person with crappy values who can more successfully take things down many notches even if not supported by the majority. That’s why it’s good to stay away from toxic people. They’ll always suck the air out of a room faster than the healthy folks can keep things inflated. In our current cultural climate, where we see a sort of dug-in tribalism with intolerance toward each other side, it would seem things can get fairly dicey in our “open” system. 

The underlying premise of democracy in the civil sense is to tolerate the freedom individuals have to manifest their essence (as long as it doesn’t impede on other people to manifest their essence and as long as it doesn’t allow such manifestations to run amok into utter chaos). So in other words, we need an ordered freedom where such ideas and activities are tolerated in such a way that it doesn’t negate freedom.

This is harder than it looks. The Founding Fathers sided on liberty, but knew that religion was a critical piece in keeping things in place. But not just any religion, but one that was legally tolerant of other practices of religion while offering a coherent organizing principle that freedom could hang off of.

In a time when a secular, tribal ethos leads the way, what standards do we use to measure good or bad values that could emerge from freedom? In D. C. Schindler’s Freedom from Reality, he mentions several criteria as to what he would consider to be diabolical values (or values that divide) that should be avoided if…

1. the diabolical presents a deceptive image that substitutes for reality;
2. it is characterized by an essential negativity;
3. it renders appearance more decisive than reality, and indeed, better than reality according to the measure of convenience and efficiency;
4. it has a supra-individual dimension that is nevertheless impersonal: that is, it tends to take the form of an essentially self-referential system;
5. it is "soulless" in the sense of lacking an animating principle of unity; and
6. it is essentially self-destructive.

We will never have liberalism perfected; so maybe the best we can hope for is pluralism with a unifying center that tolerates the least diabolical values for a society. And I'd add that unifying center ideally offer some depth (soul) to the span (diversity of people and ideas).  

Otherwise, the self-destructive nature of diabolical tolerance will undermine freedom itself. And when you throw nonlinear dynamics into the mix, it makes it clear that we can screw things up all too easily.

Earth will never be a paradise, but it could perhaps be prevented from approaching closer and closer to being a cheap imitation of Hell. — Dávila

Choking Humanity (A Rant)

I recently saw a sweet documentary at IFFBoston about Fred Rogers. Say what you want about Mr. Rogers, but he was a bodhisattva or modern day saint. I didn’t appreciate it as a child, but I when I saw the clips of the unusual pacing of his show, it stunned me that he was able to get away with what he did. 

Mr. Rogers would spend the first ten minutes just changing his shoes and putting on a sweater, feeding his fish, and dabbling around his television studio home while having a quiet conversation with you. It was as if he just wanted to allow for something extraordinary in the ordinary. His silence, presence, and being were given room to unfold within a child’s imagination and intuition.  

Most children could probably see how genuine and decent he was. Even if you can’t articulate or confirm it at that age, you somehow knew it.

Turn the clock ahead thirty or forty years, and now we live in a world that requires us to quantitatively confirm it before we can know it. We’ve been subsumed under legal formalism, standardized tests, red tape, metrics, algorithms, social media, and augmented reality devices. Humanity has been outsourced! 

It’s like an unhealthy cognitive dissonance has taken over, where we aren’t allowed to trust our imagination and intuition in a wholesome sense.

Have you ever noticed how much chattering goes on with the media these days trying to tell what is true, but just about all of it is useless noise? It’s as if they’re afraid to give us any space to think and contemplate for ourselves. It’s brought me to the point where I can barely watch any news shows these days. Now I’ve become one of those older people yearning for simpler times of less is more. 

The Aphorist would say Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas. Just because you can say it more cleverly and more often, doesn’t make it more True. In the end, it just goes down and out like bad sushi.

Nassim Taleb bluntly talks about how his bullshit detector is way overly sensitive to the “intellectual professional” these days. Scientism has taken over good, old fashioned wisdom. We are no longer allowed to trust tradition or grandma's advise. Yet, “Replacing the "natural," that is age-old, processes that have survived trillions of high-dimensional stressors with something in a "peer-reviewed" journal that may not survive replication or statistical scrutiny is neither science nor good practice.”

So maybe we needed to leave simplicity behind to justify the salaries for these talking heads. And “when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication.”

Mr. Rogers was not concerned with perception or sophistication. In fact, he was as uncool as you could get during those decades he broadcasted his low-fi show.

Yet, we got to see decency and goodness in a person. And today, we can't seem to point to that very often. Or we need some talking head or algorithm to tell us otherwise.