A LUCILIUS PARABLE: NO TIME IS NOW

January 23rd, 2022

Lucilius felt a pressure on one of his shoulders, but it slid off. Some clatter in the room filled his ears and then a new pressure on the thigh. Two pressures. A wavering tone and gurgle accompanied the clatter, and the lobe of his ear tightened, squeezed.

The breath filled his lungs, and he felt the cool ether of it slide through the channels of his face and neck, down into his chest.

But weight pushed down on his chest, as his shoulders wavered askance. His scalp pinched in a thousand small places as his hair yanked at the skin.

The breath flowed out from him, as another crash ricocheted from another part of the room.

His hair yanked in a different place and the weight on his tilted shoulders nearly pulled him off balance, but the muscles of his torso were strong from recent work, and it was easy to hold his posture.

A pull clamped around his neck, but again, the muscles of his back were solid, and his gentle posture easily supported the strange weight.

His breathe filled him once more, as a stray thought about the patterns and colors and events of yesterday filled his mind. He smiled slightly as he released the thought.

A piercing pitch sliced into his ear, but Lucilius remained as he was, simply sitting and breathing.

The tiny ding of a bell sounded and Lucilius opened his eyes. He looked down, and sitting in his lap was a little boy - a toddler, naked aside from a diaper, covered in marker.  The toddler looked up at Lucilius and a big smile filled his little face and his round eyes.

“HI!”, announced the little boy.

PRAYER & SIMULATION

January 20th, 2022

Not too long ago there was a fantastic post on the birdie site that was about someone having a fantastic year. When asked what was different, the short conversation was posted: apparently this person had decided to think of the world and their life as the matrix - as in the movie, or rather, to think of all existence as a simulation and a game.

William James, the father of American psychology did something similar. When he was in his late twenties he had a mental breakdown, depressed that unlike his siblings and his father, he’d yet to find his way in life. This was despite an incredibly varied education replete with incredible experiences. As a kind of ultimatum, he made a deal with himself regarding his depression: he would live one more year believing that he had full control over his destiny, and if nothing changed during the course of that year, then he would give himself the ultimate reprieve and end his life. Lucky for him, and anyone who has read his work, the ultimatum worked, and the mere belief that he might have more of an effect on his life did in fact create the effect he was looking for.

The way we look at our reality is everything. It hampers, hinders or expands our agency in the world. Believing or feeling you are powerless goes a long way to rendering someone powerless and ineffective. Believe the opposite and suddenly the dominoes of reality seem lined up at each or your finger tips, their terminations ginger at the threshold of your goals and dreams.

One of the conclusions of Williams James’ seminal work The Varieties of Religious Experience is that prayer really does seem to work. He makes no claim about how it works, be it divine intervention or some other mechanism, he simply records observations and results.

The Divine aside, this makes sense. The psychology of the praying person is far different from the one who does not pray, regardless of divine status or involvement. We can also say something similar about the person who feels powerless compared to the individual who decides to regard existence as a simulation and a game that can be altered, learned and in some sense: won.

Be it prayer or simulation theory, there are simply more effective ways of regarding and conceptualizing one’s reality. This isn’t a particularly interesting or subtle point. It’s more effective to think of reality as one that has gravity as opposed to one that doesn’t. The subtle and profound change isn’t so much the exact nature of how we conceive of reality, but how we conceive of our relationship to that reality. The reality of the devout and praying person is far different than the reality of someone who believes they exist within a simulation. But the relationship each has with such realities is startlingly similar. Both maintain a sense of agency, a  voice that doesn’t go unheard, and most importantly, an infinite and eternal opportunity for changing one’s particular situation in that reality.

THE FUTURE OF OUR FUTURE

January 19th, 2022

It’s not uncommon to think back to some earlier part of life and wish that somehow, we could impart all that we know now, curious as to how much different - and presumably better - life would turn out.

How much stranger to think of some future time when we wish the same thing about our current moment. What might our futures selves wish we knew now to steer our lives in better directions. Perhaps the pieces of the puzzle are already before us, and it’s merely an incident of perspective, a narrowing due to focus that obligates better directions from our current view?

It’s one thing to look back and simply wish we could give a past self a winning combination of lottery numbers. It’s quite another thing to wish a past self could simply see how the pieces of the puzzle at the time could fit together in better ways. In retrospect, everything is obvious, so given the pieces we have today, what will look obvious when looking back in five years or ten?  What combination of facts and circumstances is piling up against destiny that seems invisible now?

A favorite line in this realm is when someone says “not in my lifetime!”, when pertaining to some prediction about the future, be it self driving cars or some machine that can speak in a manner more loving than anyone we’ve ever known.

And yet time has a funny way of flying by, and the future so many imagine to be a part of time beyond their own life may get here far sooner than many expect.  Forces and technologies compound like invisible puzzle pieces, clicking into place far faster than we might imagine a present set of circumstances capable of evolving.

Planning for the future might require imagining it arriving far sooner than expected.

LOGIC BY ASSOCIATION

January 18th, 2022

The transitive law of equality states that if A = B, and B = C, then A is equal to C. This is pretty simple and self-apparent. But in many cases, a lazy string of thoughts perverts the pattern of this transitive law. The key to the transitive law of equality is the concept of an equal sign. It indicates that two things are exactly alike in the way in question - with math it’s just about always a quantity of some kind. 4 is equal to 4, always.

 

The ideal of strict equality is impractical outside of the world of mathematics, and yet people still import the transitive law of equality to make sense of the world. But without the dependable symmetries and equalities of numbers, the equal sign in the transitive law blurs, leaving the door of thinking ajar to pollution.

 

Instead of equality, the next best thing is used, and this is literally the next best thing. To couch it -ridiculously- in the land of numbers, we might ask: which is more closely equal to the number four? 738 or 5?

 

Well the real answer to this question is neither. Neither 738 nor 5 are equal to the number 4. But this isn’t how the modern person will answer the question. The words ‘more closely’ in the original question make it seem like there’s a lot of wiggle room, and that we need only determine which number is more like 4. But equal as a quality is unique. It’s a bit like a specific time and date. We might have a January 18th each year, but January 18th of this year is certainly no where near a perfect replication of January 18th of last year. There is merely an association vaguely related to the angle of the sun’s rays as they hit the planet, and the position of the planet in its journey around the sun. But it’s absurd to think that the two separate days are equal in any way.

 

Yet this is exactly what occurs in much of human thought. A is kind of like B, and B is kind of like C, so A and C must be pretty much the same exact thing. This isn’t logic at all. It’s mere association. This logic by association is the logic of tribal thinking. It’s form of heuristic where long history has somehow ingrained it in our thinking that it’s safe to assume that if a person is associated with one thing in particular, that they are likely inline with all other associations that fall in line without the one particular thing.

 

Heuristics, like stereotypes, exist for a reason: more often than not, the assumption that flows from the heuristic or stereotype is actually correct. The number of times when the assumption does not flow in the correct direction is small enough relative to being correct that this sort of thinking has survived evolutionary pressures.  And since it works more often than not, and it saves time, there’s little reason to delve in deeper beyond what simple associative conclusions arise.

 

As our species devises and partakes in increasingly complex ways of cooperating and conglomerating, the success of such heuristics may decay more and more, but the important thing to note regardless of how our collaborations evolve is that a reliance on such logic by association is always fraught with a very real possibility of being totally and completely incorrect.

 

It’s this heuristic that allows us to ‘jump to conclusions’ so to speak. But jumping to a conclusion is also the fastest way to being incorrect.

 

As the world speeds up, and time whizzes past faster with age, the need to slow our knee-jerk reaction to grab at the quickest conclusion becomes all the more pertinent. As time increases, the likelihood we encounter a situation where our heuristics fail increases, making our default thinking less and less reliable with time.

 

 

THE HOSPITALITY OF CONVERSATION

January 17th, 2022

The welcomed guest wants for nothing. Needs are anticipated, and desires are sought to be met. Whether it be a luxury hotel, an upscale restaurant, or dinner at the house of a loving friend, the entire goal of hospitality is to make a person feel as though they are cared for, and in order for this to happen, a guest must be understood.

 

A host who seems oblivious to our needs, our wants, our desires - this sort of crass oversight makes a person feel invisible, insignificant and not worth much care. We seek to leave and probably never return, with always a ready story about why no one else should go.

 

Hospitality, or its lack is reflected in all the ways that people interact, whether it be at work, between friends or family, or between strangers. How hospitable we are willing and able to be towards others says everything about our own ability, and nothing about our guest. The simplest proxy for hospitality outside of actual hosting is conversation.

 

Do we welcome the perspective of another into our own mind with the same willingness, enthusiasm and care we do when we welcome them into our home? Or do we keep the door locked with a megaphone clasped in the mouth of a window to simply broadcast our own perspective?

 

Is there an effort to try and understand the perspective of another, on it’s own terms, to the point where we might be able to anticipate the very next sentence we might here?

 

 

Or are we constantly bewitched by an inability to figure out who is hosting who? But I’m sharing my perspective. Shouldn’t my point of view get a little more hospitality?  All I’m getting is disagreement and more and more evidence that no one is really listening to anything I’m saying.  Good conversation, like good hosting doesn’t seek to show off a view point, but looks to see how comfortably and naturally our own mind can host the perspective of another.  The decor and substance of our own ideas need not be spewed about like an unkept house, but organized, tidy and prepared in order to have the best chance of welcoming the ideas of another, comfortably. And why? Not so that our own perspective can be superseded by some kind of invader, but so that our own mind might grow enriched by a growing relationship between our own perspective and the ideas of another.

 

It’s a delicious irony of human relations that we’ll go to such gaudy and expensive effort to put together a scrumptious gathering only to spoil it with conversation that’s about as hospitable as a loaded gun. Hospitality in such a case begins to look like its opposite: a trap complete with attractive lure and cornered assault. 

 

But it’s the mark of a feeble perspective that cannot host, explore and consume ideas radically different from its own composition. One might imagine the ultimate perspective, the most hospitable one, in which all other perspectives makes sense - a context so vast that it can resolve the seeming contradictions between radically different points of view. Nothing is more hospitable than a space that has a place for everything.  And perhaps it’s this sort of image we hint at when we talk about open and closed mindedness.