The Paradox of Disciplined Relaxation

The secret to success is connecting hard things to an intermittent schedule of rewards. The key ingredient to motivation is risk. Gambling is addictive because of this. YouTube is the same.

One of the hardest things you can do is returning to an incomplete project. This resistance comes from the same attraction to novelty and surprise that gambling delivers. To hack this resistance, institute variable rewards for returning to tasks in progress. Also, practice context switching despite the reduced efficiency. The Pomodoro technique strengthens the task-switching and returning muscle. So does back-to-back meetings.

Of course, balance this hard work with rest and reward. Just don't reward so often that you become complacent and the rewards lose their pull. The affluent society is plagued with a numbness to the good and a lack of gratitude that relegates its denizens to a hedonic treadmill. Disciplined relaxation paradoxically optimizes both effort and indulgence. Work hard, play hard.

Correction is of the ego

A person was despairing about the inferiority of his race compared to a particular race in the mate-selection marketplace. He was enraged because of this. I wanted him to stop thinking these thoughts that I thought were poisonous to his well-being.

 

My function is to see the truth in the other, not to make their mistake real. From A Course in Miracles, Chapter 4, Section III, paragraph 8:

You cannot correct yourself. Is it possible, then for you to correct another? Yet you can see him truly, because it is possible for you to see yourself truly. It is not up to you to change your brother, but merely to accept him as he is. His errors do not come from the truth that is in him, and only this truth is yours. His errors cannot change this, and can have no effect at all on the truth in you. To perceive errors in anyone, and to react to them as if they were real, is to make them real to you. You will not escape paying the price for this, not because you are being punished for it, but because you are following the wrong guide and will therefore lose your way.

I must see his racist thoughts as ineffectual because they are not based on reality. Like a dream, they don't move anything. Sure, he might believe in them, but that doesn't affect the truth in me and him, which is of a completely different dimension than the dreamed thought. In what dimension does this truth lie?

The truth is our connection and care for each other, i.e. our compassion, despite our beliefs. I want him to suffer less. The way he chooses to suffer less seems to me to make him suffer more, but if I believe that, I will see more of the suffering. His strategy for reducing suffering is to hate on certain kinds of people. I think his form of hate hurts him. In fact, I hate his hate. It follow then that if his hate hurts him, my hate of his hate hurts me.

Instead of feeding this spiral, I can view his hate as ineffectual as a bad dream. One doesn't comfort a child having a bad dream by shooing the scary monsters away because that reinforces their existence. Better to just affirm to the child that he is safe now in your arms. Affirm that what he truly wants, love, is already his by loving him.

I am currently limited in my capacity to love those who hate, but I continue to try, knowing that their healing is mine. We awake together. 

Turbo-confabulator

In the past month, I've witnessed several people fall prey to AI-assisted delusions of grandeur, a.k.a. AI-psychosis. What they have in common is that the person was debating another person and using AI to find support for their own arguments. Speaking for myself, I sought win some philosophical arguments, one about the mind-body problem and another about Ayn Rand objectivism. I got puffed up with so much "you're so right", but fortunately, I noticed it before I could got carried away. Some others didn't fare so well in my estimation.

One talked herself into believing she could communicate with the aliens on 3I/Atlas via so-called scalar waves. When I politely asked her to design an experimental instrument to detect scalar waves as a baby step toward proving that certain people can detect them unassisted, she gave me a list of electronic components that kind of sounded plausible unless you had a bit of electrical engineering background. For example, she said to use a Toshiba amplifier as a "saw filter". She also mentioned a commercial off-the-shelf signal generator by model number, as if that particular one is special. She responded to my retorts of vagueness and inconsistency with more bulleted lists, as she (and LLMs) are wont to do. Then the big reveal: she copied and pasted an AI chat transcript of her asking the LLM how she can reduce the distortion of the spiritual channel emergent from the chat, ostensibly so that she can answer me better. Apparently, LLMs are the new Ouija board.

Another person got into a debate with someone about the definition and etiology of addiction. In this case, both parties used LLMs, lobbing AI-assisted essays at each other until one side dropped a 2000-word one, which the other side refused to put in the mental energy to read. Understandably so, because if one is not going to put in the effort to write something, why should another person put in the effort to try to (in)validate it? One side called out the other side for incorrect usage of LLMs. The other side called them out for ignoring the most current scientific literature on the topic. Both are probably fair arguments, but the points were lost because the AIs polarized them to the point they were emotionally incapable of listening to the other side.

A third case of an argument tainted with AI is a couple arguing about their respective needs. One party used the LLM for validation that the other was being one-sided with her ultimatums. You can bet your bottom dollar she has a similar complaint about him that, were she to post her dialogue to the chat bot, she would get the same, "You're absolutely right!"

It bothers me that people are so quick to believe these turbo-confabulators [YouTube]. Don't they know these LLMs were subject to reinforcement-learned obsequiousness and dark patterns [Wikipedia] to keep the user engaged? I thought we learned from the decade plus of online echo-chambers and social media scandals, but I guess we're in a perpetual arms race against our robot overlords.

Politically Incorrect Comedy

The fact that Chappelle is getting a lot of flack from critics indicates a growing divide between the rational and the emotional-intuitive sides of the collective psyche. We’re trying to break bad habits by going cold turkey but end up punishing ourselves when muscle-memory inadvertently jerks us back into our well-worn prejudices. To move forward without tearing ourselves apart, we must honor the irrational, for it has its own internally consistent reasons.

We laugh at racist and sexist jokes because it releases the tension held fast by idealism intolerant of imperfection. Fighting fascism with thought policing perpetuates the authoritarianism upon which the fascism is founded. Like gladiatorial sport did for Rome, politically incorrect comedy can vent primitive drives toward disorder.

The danger of edgy comedy normalizing bigotry used to be offset by the diversity of the crowd attending the same event. Comics in the 80s and early 90s could nonchalantly ask the audience, “How many of you are liberals? How about conservative?” and the crowd would respond without splitting into camps and booing the other. A joke was understood to be a joke and not a slippery slope into death camps or toxic-something culture. This mistrust of a vital venting opportunity for the other side becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as accusations engender defensiveness and eventually preemptive offense.

Polarization will not go away with both sides becoming more authoritarian. As the disequilibrium mounts in culture, we need release valves, and I think acknowledging our prejudices with levity can loosen us up.

Further exploration

You Can't Hit Unsend: How A Social Media Scandal Unfolded At Harvard [npr.org]: Podcast episode about some students' racist and sexist jokes costing them their admission to Harvard, despite the fact that they were often making fun of their own class.

Punishment feedback loop

Xenophobe: You hate because you have been fatally shot. Your body rose from the dead but dead in spirit and seeking revenge. You spread the message of hate through your words and actions, inciting fear and motivating further hate. It doesn't matter that they hate you; at least you have made them feel the wrath that you feel.

Anti-xenophobe: You hate because you have been fatally shot. You seek revenge and call it justice, not caring if the killers die in the process. Dehumanizing the enemy, you provoke him to dehumanize you. It doesn't matter that hate is multiplied in the world; at least you have made them feel the brunt of justice.

Ex-convict: Released from jail having been taught long months or years of "justice", you go out into the world to spread the good word about this so-called justice. They thought punishment will make you good, so you think punishment will make everyone else good, too.

Replace the two characters with whatever us-versus-them you want. It's a positive feedback loop that fools the players into thinking it's a negative feedback loop. Each party expects the other party to give in, but instead, the conflict just escalates.

Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do. I see the results of hate, whatever sneaky form it takes, and I turn away from spreading it. I teach you peace by being peaceful despite having been apparently tortured. I say "apparent" because torture requires conscious intent, and my violators were not conscious.

Be Beautiful

What you do is all for yourself.
Even guilt and self-punishment is done in service to self as a means to cleanse evil.
Leave yourself in good hands instead.
Seek not the company of haters; they come only at your calling.
People are multidimensional and holographic reflections of you, so be as beautiful as the world you want to see.

Moral Decision Making and Happiness

Video about how we value ill-gotten gains.

People are more willing to shock themselves for the same amount of money than to shock someone else. In fact, you have to pay them twice as much to shock someone else. People are nice.

Now tell them that the money won't go to them but to a charity. Suddenly, they want to shock themselves more. And they're also even more willing to shock others! Shocking: People can be extra mean if they think they're doing good.

Molly Crockett, your breadth of knowledge in the area of behavioral economics, if I may stretch the term a little, is wide. The humility through which you approach the study of how humans try, fail, and succeed to be good makes me trust your work more, knowing you are observant for more and better information. This is an important topic that could use rational minds to help clarify so we can find a more effective path to happiness for all.

Reason in Means and Ends

Preferences form the basis for how we see the world. At the most fundamental level, organisms can be seen as preference computers. They interpret sensory stimuli as attractive or aversive, gravitating toward the former. Opinions are more or less complex preferences. They add nuance to our movements toward and away from things and situations. Without them, we might as well be the simplest automata like a neutrino careening into the abyss.

From a utilitarian perspective, some basic (e.g., “biological”) preferences drive a complex of preferences and opinions, which in turn engages logical reasoning to maximize the return on caloric investment. This, I believe, is the relationship of reason to opinion. Reason itself is only a means to an end and cannot be an end in itself. Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem cast doubt onto the ability of formal systems like arithmetic and Aristotelean logic to perfectly undergird an epistemology (and, I would venture to say, an ethic).

However, I do see value in cleaning the lens, again from a utilitarian standpoint. To use a computer metaphor, a computer program or algorithm is opinionated in that it drives toward a certain goal, which the programmer decides. However, the steps in its procedures should be strictly deterministic and free from arbitrary preferences. Hence, we should work to enhance the reliability of the mechanical aspects of information processing and to remove the aberrations of the lens through which we see to work toward our goals.

Simulacra and Meaninglessness

I thought the language in A Course in Miracles is too verbose and archaic. Then I started reading Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. Now that is complicated. I got frustrated reading passages like:

...the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial resurrection in the system of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. (p. 2)

So much ado about nothingness, literally. Exasperated, I pick up ACIM to a random page like a magic 8-ball. The first words that confront me are:

Would God have left the meaning of the world to your interpretation? If He had, it has no meaning. For it cannot be that meaning changes constantly, and yet is true. The Holy Spirit looks upon the world as with one purpose, changelessly established. And no situation can affect its aim, but must be in accord with it. For only if its aim could change with every situation could each one be open to interpretation which is different every time you think of it. (T.30.VII.1)

Escape the Echo Chamber

The world is merely a story you are writing. Whatever you want to have happen happens. The internet is a prime example of the flexibility of reality. As you search, so shall you get search results. Whatever your political leaning or worldview, you will find the corner of the internet that echoes your sentiments and populates the trenches of the evil other side.

The internet saps your energy because you are the one producing the image you see, but you do this unknowingly, and so you don't notice your energy depleting as you set up the props and puppets that enact the plot you sleeplessly yet somnambulistically wrote. The so-called real world is but a slowed down version of the internet. You eventually find what you subconsciously look for there as well.

If you're tired of make-believe conflicts and making love to blow up dolls, there is a way out. It is to become aware of this constant seeking outside yourself for a confirmation of thoughts you've generated inside yourself. Objectively observe the molding of this sculpture you call yourself by the slings and arrow of outward fortune, which all seem to come from outside yet are your own hands or, more precisely, your own thoughts reacting to the pseudorandom numbers the dark cloud of chaos dances in answer to your rain dance calling for it.

There is a point of decision in which you threw out the peace of nonbelief and began believing things. Perhaps you can remember a time in your childhood when you encountered the thought, "You are a bad boy/girl," and decided it was true. Along with that thought came the promise of punishment from a perceived other to mar the serenity of a mind where thoughts were mere playthings and not the confining walls of granite they were to become. Fight the walls and you testify to their reality while bruising your fists. Deny the walls and you throw away the key while still acting within their confines.

Fortunately there is a window through which you can peek out of this prison and glimpse the endless field of innocence outside. No matter how long you've sentenced yourself to a belief in punishment, there is that hole in the belief that naturally rips apart the entire thought system upon recognition. This is the constructive use of doubt or judgment. You are always so ready to doubt others' ideas and motives; why not apply this skepticism to your own insanity? You are not fundamentally and incorrigibly insane no matter how long you've played at being so. Return to the still point from which you choose all experiences. Rest a while there. And choose again.

The Holy Grail and Ordinary Cups

In my quest for the holy grail, I've ignored the readily available cups along the way with which I could have easily quenched my thirst. I search the internet far and wide, consuming copious articles, opinion pieces, and comments, appealing to authority to tell me The One True Way I should direct my life energy. Perfectionism dovetails with procrastination, and I die of thirst surrounded by water.

I do this with spirituality as with my work-related endeavors. I'm perpetually afraid of publishing a piece of my soul for the world to see and potentially criticize. My desire to give stunted by my fear of rejection, a ball of tension builds up inside and slowly cripples me. What I resist are actually the answers within myself.

Ironically, I'm afraid that if I set them free, they will set me free. Who am I to express myself fully? Special snowflakes get crushed in this heartless world. Stay in line and wait your turn for the meager handouts of the welfare state. Don't even try to make something out of nothing unless you're guaranteed it will be a big success.

Wise meme says Jesus saves while Buddha does incremental backups. I don't have to wait for the holy grail and the accompanying rapturous deluge; I can just take the ordinary cup in front of me and start sipping on the ambrosia of life today. Today's mugs have these message inscribed on them:

Kintsugi: Embracing imperfection

1. Making someone's day just slightly better is more important than hoarding information about how to do it the best way.
2. Fear is a compass pointing you to a courageous vision within waiting to burst out of the cozy illusion of safety.
3. Mistakes are golden testaments to your initiative and perseverance.

Discipline Without Will-Power

Discipline is hard if you equate discipline with will-power. Will-power is the straining against the easiest and most natural action (or inaction) in the moment. In a short spurt, it can get a stagnant ball rolling or correct the course of a wayward ship, but an attempt to sustain will-power is tiring and often leads to a backlash of binge laziness. There must be a better way to be disciplined than constant resistance to the path of least resistance.

Instead of fighting the easy way, why not orient yourself so that the easy way is the disciplined way? Note that when you want something and have no doubt you can get it, you simply do what you need to do to get it. If you're thirsty and a glass of water is within reach, you just grab it and drink. There are two conditions for this easy achievement:

1. I want something.
2. I have no doubt I can get it.

Let's break it down some. A big part of discipline is remembering what you want. Whether it's quenching your thirst with a glass of water, building muscle, or publishing a creative work, you must keep what success looks like in the forefront of your mind lest doubt or distraction gnaws it into oblivion. It helps to write down your vision of success. As a literate society, we have imbued the written word with magical powers. Just think about how a signature can put money in your bank account or put you in jail. Use writing's power to cement your commitment to your success.

The more attainable you think your goal is, the less bothered you are by the effort necessary for its achievement. When you think it is difficult to get something, you might rationalize that you actually don't want it or you might make yourself forget that you want it. Thus the second trick to maintaining discipline is convincing yourself that what you want is attainable. Say, "This is easy," or at least, "This is straightforward".

On a related note, you must believe you deserve the goal of the discipline. Otherwise, you'll just sabotage your discipline by making its achievement evil or seem harder than it is. If you notice yourself mad at people who have made it while you haven't, realize that your thought of "he doesn't deserve it" will subconsciously drive "I don't deserve it". You'll secretly give yourself reasons to fail so you don't end up like that jerk who succeeded. Instead, use their glory as inspiration for yours. Everyone deserves the happiness of a disciplined life.

Fourthly, measure your progress. When it comes to conditioning, our minds don't operate much differently than Skinner's rats. Positive feedback acts as positive reinforcement for the habit we are trying to instill. A popular measurement strategy is the streak. Count how many days in a row you've kept up an activity that is part of your discipline, e.g. how many days you went to bed at a specified time.

You can also measure your progress by regularly rating the quality of the product your discipline is creating. Even if improvement seems imperceptible one day to the next, record yourself. For example, record yourself practicing a musical instrument. For writing or visual arts, keep your practice pieces. For motivating physical exercise, keep track of how energetic or tired you feel at various points during the day. Over the course of a few days or weeks, you'll notice a correlation with the amount of practice and measured benefits and be naturally encouraged to continue.

If you keep these four ideas in mind--remembering what you want, knowing it's attainable, believing you deserve it, and measuring your progress--you will maintain a momentum that reduces the need for sustained application of will-power and the resulting fatigue.

Grandma's Hand

I held my grandma's hand today. She is close to death. She wants to get physically better. I kept quiet so as not to betray my pessimism. I just hoped that she would somehow find peace.

Once upon a time, my grandma wanted to hold my hand as I walked down the stairs. Wearing a sarong and a precocious two year old ego, I refused her hand. One step, two step, three step on the sarong. I tumbled down the flight of stairs landing with my face in the gravel. No cry. 'Tis but a scratched upper lip with a few pieces of gravel embedded. My uncle took a look at me and said, "Oh, we must go to the doctor." Cry. I hated the doctor. They shot me in the butt with needles and placed me in cold steel scales. I felt no pain in my bloodied and torn face, but pain at the thought of being tortured and humiliated by strange hands. I should've taken my grandma's hands instead.

Years later, a front tooth grew almost horizontally outward near the point of impact, a reincarnation of the rebel that fell from grace so ungracefully. I had braces to correct it. For days after each orthodontic session, I rolled around in bed in agony. Years later, my wisdom teeth kicked in before my wisdom kicked in enough to trust the medical industry to remove them. They impacted my teeth and pushed the same tooth outward again.

A perceptive physiognomist recently told me that my crooked teeth indicated a rough childhood. Odd how the trait survived two opportunities for correction, first with the onset of adult teeth and second with braces. I guess I can't hide it; I had always been a rebel, distrustful of authority. Why should I trust people who hurt people or who cannot themselves escape suffering? In retrospect, I understand that I was in an extreme circumstance, born in soil traumatized by war. If the world of adults is domination and murder, let me walk on my own. Don't hold my hand.

But she wanted to hold my hand to protect me from falling, not as a patronizing judgment of my clumsiness. I squeeze her hand now in apology for my defiant independence. With tubes going into her wrists and pillows to prop up her frail body fluctuating between too high and too low blood pressure, I am surprised that she squeezes back with such firmness. Now she is the defiant one.

I listen to an audiobook speaking of spirituality and the powerlessness and nothingness of the body as I caress her hand. Her hands grasp for life while mine grasp for afterlife, impatient for this madness to be over. I'm still here though, and while I'm here, I communicate with the body. I don't speak Khmer to my grandma very well, so I communicate with my hands, the most emotionally sensitive part of my body. I don't know much about life and death, but for the moment, at least I know the warmth and vitality of my grandma's hand.

The Extinction of the Dinoman

Dinosaur, Latin for fearfully great lizard. Maybe our species will one day be called dinoman, fearfully great man. Our counterparts in this future would look back and dispassionately judge dinoman as an inexorably expanding fire transmuting basic elements into an intricate pattern of light, a short-lived explosion of an intensity only surpassed by its contrast with the ashes in its wake.

The top of the food chain is a precarious place to be despite the predatory prowess of the species. In fact, it is the predator that prays to its prey. The apex species must bow down to the complex web that sustains it and quickly adapt to its caprices. The innovation of the next great species will likely be the parsimonious digestion of worldly resources. They will glide through the biosphere like wisps of air. Transparent and weightless, they do not consume or resist the material world but enliven it and make it glow with increasing intricacy.

As we presently choke in the soot of dinoman, we can still make a collect call to our future selves, if not to bail us out, then at least to soothe us with their song, the harmonies of which we may make practical use today. Even if our song is short and subdued, let it be the echo of the crescendo to come.

Inspired by watching Koyaanisqatsi for the 8th (or something) time.

Who is the judge

When people are arrogant, I feel threatened. Their belief in superiority implies my inferiority. Instead of seeing their call for love, I see an attack on my worth. My admonition to people regarding their judgmental outlook is really my defense against being judged unworthy. I am the arbiter of my self-worth, but I project it onto an arrogant person and find him guilty and in need of change for condescending.

My humiliation fantasies are a projection of sadomasochism onto innocent people who I see as dominant oppressors hurting me for their pleasure. I go even further by denying my innocence and seeing myself as worthy of being punished. Therefore I consider my humiliation to be my rightful due and not sadistic abuse. I am not a victim of my oppressor but of my own worthless essence to which I'm eternally bound.

This fantasy is the shadow of my precarious display of intelligence and confidence. I hide my mistakes and weaknesses in fear of tarnishing my perfect facade. It's ironic how much I puff up only to dream of being deflated. 

There is no truth in either of these insane imaginings. The thing that puffs up only to be deflated doesn't exist except as a mirage that witnesses to the suffering of existing separately from and at odds with one another. We in fact are not separate, but we see the world that way because we believe it, and believing is "seeing". To see a different world, I must be willing to let go of my previous worldview. I must be open to the possibility that I have been wrong about how I see. It is easier to admit I have been wrong if I associate my present unease with my present perception. It is easier to form this association if I am present to how I'm actually feeling in the moment. 

Whenever I am frustrated or afraid, I will ask myself, "Would I rather see peace instead of this?" If the answer is yes, I know I must be open to the possibility that I am seeing and believing wrongly about the superiority and inferiority of human beings. 

Taking Criticism Constructively

Constructive criticism is when the critic is more concerned about the other person's benefit than furthering the critic's own convenience. However, since we can't control the state of mind of a critic, why not take every criticism constructively? 

One way to do that is to not take things personally. Judge the advice as if it were given to someone else to take off some of the sting that our egos naturally feel when criticized. Would following the advice help a person with similar goals and background as you? Imagine reading the criticism in the form of a tip in a book rather than coming from a person in front of you. Is the reasoning compelling enough for you to read further?

Criticism is as much or more about the other person as it is about you. People preach what they want to learn themselves. This is projection. If there is a lot of frustration or anger in the criticism, it is an strong indication that the person doesn't know how to accept and care for the part in himself that exhibits what he is criticizing. The critic is, in effect, asking you to model the self-compassion he cannot muster for himself. If you respond defensively, you are not only saying, "I don't have that flaw in me," your defensiveness is implicitly agreeing with the critic, "Anyone who has that flaw is bad." The constructive response would be to show how you could forgive yourself and grow if you did have that issue, whether or not you initially thought you had the issue.

Whether you respond to criticism by self-improvement or modeling self-compassion, you are taking charge of adding the "constructive" to constructive criticism and not leaving it up to the critic or your ego's interpretation of him.

Filial Piety in the Land of the Individual

Being raised with two different cultures can be freeing as well as confusing. It is freeing to know that ideals I've been taught are not absolute. It's confusing to have to decide so often between conflicting values espoused by the different cultures. My Asian side says I have to respect my parents' wishes. My American side says I have to find out what makes me happy despite what others think. Both ideals have value, but taking either one to an extreme to the exclusion of the other can lead me to trouble.

Primary relationships create a template for just about all of one's future relationships. During a child's early years with his parents, the more primitive parts of the brain develop preverbal reaction patterns. They are entrenched in a way cerebral reasoning can barely touch. Try as we might to run away from people who exhibit the same behavior as our parents, we can't run away from our imprints, which we project onto the present situation or relationship. This is why I think developing good rapport with your parents is important. Otherwise, you'll just play out the same problematic patterns in varying degrees with other people or institutions. For instance, my father having educated me in a punitive way, I have a bad association with being taught by a person and can only fruitfully learn from books or personal experimentation.

I must willfully contest my automatic reactions to my father if I am to clear out my limitations in dealing with authority. As my reptile and limbic brain kick in, I fire a rational salvo, "There must be another way to see this." With a lot of repetition, I may be able to erode the stubborn feelings and world-view that keep me stuck as a 5 year old.

It is true that one is ultimately responsible for choosing one's values, but that doesn't discount respecting others' views. In fact, it is in the acceptance that another person is doing the best they can in the context of their experience that one develops trust in one's own ability and experience. If you see someone as an incorrigible idiot who acts like a know-it-all despite his lack of self-awareness, what makes you safe from that very indictment? Think about it really logically. You could be in the same exact category and not even know it because not-knowing is precisely the definition of that label you so liberally apply to others.

On the other hand, respecting another's opinion doesn't mean you must internalize it and precisely follow its dictates. Your own experience and biases are just as important and should be carefully weighed against theirs and any evidence that can be gleaned from the present moment. Just take care not to let individualism become knee-jerk rebellion to any foreign opinion, which only furthers the tenor of oppression in one's life. True freedom is freedom from all tyrannical opinions, even one's own.

The Changeless

How can there be something in this world without an opposite? What is this "changeless" thing that underlies temporal existence?

Let's say it was an observer, a witness. Can we say that the observer is creating with its focus? If so, wouldn't its vision provoke it? The perception of an object changes the subject. The changeless is not the perceiver.

The one thing without an opposite is the existential experience itself, the "I am". There cannot be an "I am not." That concept exists as an artifact of a mind that perceives through contrasting thought.

Why was the mind created when it is fraught? Let's try to live in a world of opposites. Let's see just how far out we get. Do you see its end? It ends in "I am not."

The real question is why do you maintain a fraught mind, why do you defend its way of thinking? Who cares about its beginning? Only the mind seeking to seal itself in a mythical prison.

Denial of Evilution

If I were God and had to redesign life, I would remove the evil from evolution. Organisms change to adapt to the changing environment, but they do not change to outcompete other organisms. When a trait is obsolete, it changes immediately within the same organism, not in a mutation manifest in the next generation. Death is therefore unnecessary for adaptation to occur.

Sexual reproduction is unnecessary. All organisms can reproduce asexually, and they do so when they sense the abundance of resources. Instead of pleasure from sex, they experience pleasure akin to sexual pleasure when they help another individual heal or grow.

This form of mating involves only giving for the pleasure of giving rather than an exchange although exchange naturally occurs because the other party also derives pleasure from giving. There is no competition for mates because there is no need for exclusivity and there is no scarcity of opportunities to help.

One is not attracted to another due to their physical beauty or resources but lack thereof because the pleasure is in helping the other enhance those qualities. What a wonderful world this is, where the impoverished are taken care of by biological design!

What would be the point of life? Simply to grow and multiply across the universe, soaking in the beauty of myriad environments.

How different is this from this nightmare world, where we must fight over resources and the right to pass on our likeness. We worship our genes when we jealously guard our exclusive relationships, even murdering on command. We fight to the death to defend our way of life. Why did we choose such a hellish existence? Why do we maintain it by adhering to the dictates of our genetic and social heritage? Or more practically, how do we decide otherwise?

I begin by rejecting my apparent reality. If I'm wired to experience the hell of insatiable seeking interspersed with brief pleasurable moments and culminating in oblivion, I must be mistaken in my interpretation of the world. It makes absolutely no logical sense to try to maintain such an existence. It's like trying to produce a positive value by multiplying zero with a million different numbers. I must have been programmed incorrectly. I can adjust the program.

I imagine a different world, like the one I describe above. It doesn't make sense right now because my mind is so habituated in conventional thinking, but knowing that conventional thinking is itself illogical helps me be a little more open minded. This new story is probably inaccurate, but that's okay. I'm just using it to unlearn a definitely inaccurate model.

Reduced to absurdity

Many if not most scientists seek to reduce things into smaller pieces and try to understand the interactions between these pieces in order to comprehend the larger system that these pieces constitute. This is no doubt useful one or a few steps removed from the larger system ultimately in question. As you break down the system iteratively however, it's easy to lose sight of the original question or miss the opportunity for a slight turn of the head to significantly alter the landscape and manifest clues lost in reductionism's myopic view.

This missing of the forest for the trees is apparent in the artificial world of my engineering work. Oftentimes I get fixated on a particular detail and then get bogged down working out the components of that detail. After a while, the investment I have in this one approach is large enough to justify continuing it until lest I waste all that effort (sunk cost fallacy). Unfortunately, the complexity increases exponentially as I recurse through the subcomponents. I end up spending 5 hours to create a generalized solution when a 5 minute one-time fix would've done fine. The need for the solution and its details to be comprehensively characterized just slows me down in satisfying my original requirement.

Although engineering is a man-made domain, this problem can apply to the natural sciences as well. The scientific community puts on a pedestal the study of the building blocks, calling physics a "hard science" and sociology and psychology "soft sciences" in an almost derogatory manner. Sure, it is easier to control for variables in the smaller scale, but focus on the minutiae can derail the conversation of the bigger issues in life, the ones that matter for our happiness.

Just as perusing through ones and zeroes on a hard drive won't give you insight on what the computer is doing or supposed to be doing, neither will smashing atoms or mixing chemicals make serious headway in uncovering the workings of our mind and how to act in our collective and individual best interests. In computer programming, you look at the source code written by humans who think like humans in order to fruitfully use, maintain, and modify the behavior of the computer. What if the mechanically interacting particles in materialist science were code compiled from tiers of higher order thought forms? Analyzing to shreds transistors or subatomic particles will only hint at the how of certain processes, not the why. We must take care not to lose sight of the meaning while we chase down the means.

"There's more to life than increasing its speed." -Mohandas Gandhi

The danger of our times is that we're so intoxicated by our progress in understanding the mechanics and so neglected study of the source code of life that we've come to believe life is ultimately meaningless. The concomitant despair of nihilism leads us to use this same progress against ourselves, building weapons of more and more efficient annihilation. With a god like the Big Bang, it's no surprise that we sacrifice life and limb praying to atomic bombs for salvation.

As we look deeper and deeper into makeup of things, we are shocked to find nothing, that is, no thing that is the ground of all things. No elementary particle. Just a vast network of instantaneously interacting and inseparable aspects. This is only frightening to our investment in separation. Recall that the scientific Enlightenment was a reaction against the ostentatiously unifying force that major religions preached about but ironically undermined through their divisiveness. Religions preached oneness but practiced separation. Materialist science dismembers oneness, conflating it with religion. Quantum physics rediscovers oneness and freaks out incumbent materialists still sore from the Crusades and Inquisition.

Perhaps in this hologram of a universe we find ourselves in, we are no longer served by elaborating on the ways the light reflects and refracts to form the images we see. Maybe we're better off questioning the programs we're running, maybe even writing our own. Instead of laboring over the movement of individual pixels on a monitor, let's lay down some words and pictures that move us.