August
Imagine a river, indefintiely wide and indefinitely long.
Along the riverbed are rocks that cause various flows, whirlpools, standing water. If a rock is added, moved, or taken away, the flow, and therefore entire picture of the river taken at any one time, changes.
There are areas in the river that flow quickly. There is a buildup of energy that eventually moves around the rocks, but this does not make the rocks obstacles – it merely changes the way the river becomes.
This riverbed and the river together represent reality as it is created. The rocks represent abstractions. They are necessary for the river to be and to flow, but change the flow of the river in fundamental ways.
The flow of the river is the power process. It will form loops, pools, etc. We could take any one point in the river, and reference it as an actualizer; an abstraction of this sort would make the river appear unique from the perspective of that point in the river.
The river believes in the rocks, and its goals are defined by them. As it flows, it may create more abstractions, move ones that were there, or wear away and those that have been sitting there for a long time.
The river, being indefinitely long, has no perceivable end. If the river could abstract itself (have an ego), it may create abstractions around the end of its journey in order to maintain its desire to flow. If it did not have a downward path to follow, it would not flow – it must feel as if there is an end, or at least motivation, in order to move. If there were no riverbed, the river would not exist.
The point of this analogy is to illustrate that the abstractions and rituals that the we create and use are necessary, and non-arbitrary. A great many of them are in place when you are born, and many of those are required for you to have been born and have a consciousness in the first place. It is important to not treat the idea of abstractions as bad – a pitfall that many proponents of relativism fall into, that I like to call “mere-ism”. This is a practice of using reason to attack abstractions as “merely” abstractions to destroy the ones that you don’t agree with, all the while supplanting your own abstractions in their place. It is practiced by many existentialists and post-modern deconstructionists.
It should also be illustrated that the river is both in the riverbed and creating it at the same time. They are inseperable, and if inseperable, one does not exist without the other and can be treated as one. If we could get out of it, we wouldn’t want to; we are it.
Abstractions are necessary and non-arbitrary – without them, there would be no reality. There are always reasons why they have been made, and those reasons are precieved in the values that people express.
August
This world is the will to power–and nothing besides! – Nietzsche
What is real? What is reality? How can I answer that in a few short paragraphs?
Reality is the continuous, inter-subjective expression of a process. That process is a system of disequilibrium (power) and the actions that use that power (actualization). It could be called the power-process, or Nietzche’s “Will to Power”. The power process is “happening”, and Reality is a by-product, a side-effect, of that happening.
Actualizers, or realized abstractions (reference points) of actualization, experience this process as Desire. It can also be said, therefore, that Reality is an expression of Desire. The process of using power through actions, as expressed by actualizers, becomes the satisfaction of Desire. All actualizers can be said to “want” this, because it is contained in their definition and is tautologous.
It is important to separate ends from desires or Desire. Creation is a by-product of desire, so in a backwards way we seek to create because of Desire. But it is not the creations themselves that are desired, it is the opportunity (power and ability) to create that is desired. That’s why we commonly experience “stuff” as not being satisfying. Money doesn’t buy happiness and all that.
We do not seek satisfied desires. We seek the satisfaction of Desire.
But we don’t want to sit around desiring all the time either – we want to go through the process of satisfying it. Think about hunger and food. You clearly don’t want to sit around being hungry all the time. However, when you eat, you aren’t eating in order to experience being full – being full isn’t very satsifying after a relatively short time. You eat because you enjoy satisfying hunger.
Every action, thought, or expression of truth is driven by the Satisfaction of Desire. From this, Reality becomes.
I’ll eventually talk about humans as actualizers and the meaning of the “soul”. There’s a lot more to talk about in terms of reference points and abstractions and information. But to summarize all that for its application here, because every actualizer, even if it is self-realized, is a unique reference point, its experience of Desire is entirely subjective. The satisfaction of desire is the only value that holds across the subjective/objective barrier – it’s the only thing we can all “agree” on, because we’re all doing it, all the time. We express our experience of subjective desires as Values.
This realization of values will let us segue into the Ethics portion of the philosophy, but I’ll save that for another post.
August
Ideas are connected. For example: spirituality tends to exist to help humans deal with the fear of death. The fear of death spills over into other areas of life as a fear of impermanence, or a fear of change. The fear of impermanence then filters up into nearly every ritual we perform, every interaction that we have, and every attempt at philosophy that we make. The fear of death makes our ego process constantly desperate to be reassured: “But surely I will not die, right?”. This puts the fear in every statement of or about truth that we make.
It is so potent that we have changed the meaning of truth to imply that things that are true are always true (or perhaps better, that if they aren’t always true then they aren’t really true). The Ego wants them to be that way so that it can resolve its fear of death. That is also the reason why people react so violently to when their paradigm is threatened, even if they end up changing it later. You can see this effect in almost everything, but particularly in spirituality and sexual relationships. It is so deep that we demand permanence from others, and get upset when they change.
People assume that truth exists in some tangible, permanent, knowable fashion. All we really have are abstractions based on realizations. These abstractions are either useful in the satisfaction of desire, or they aren’t. The ones that aren’t are refined or ditched by process. This happens in the expression of Desire, and what process is all about. When the Ego reifies (i.e., treats itself as truth and permanent) itself, however, its fear of impermanence overrides the process of refining abstractions that don’t work.
Two people can have access to the same data and create different abstractions that explain relationships in that data. The only comparison that can really be made between the two is how they apply to the satisfaction of desire.
As will be explained in other posts, this is not to say that reality isn’t “real”, or that it is “unknowable” (to say that everything is unknowable is to eliminate the meaning of the word “know”). Truth not implying permanence simply means that to say something is true is not to say that it is necessarily true or always true.
It means that, when you use the verb “is”, you are describing (or can only describe) a process, not a state. This is the very nature of the verb, but our fear of impermanence tries to use it to reify abstractions as processes.
To put this, as the discussion of actions and rationality, in the context of the philosophy I want, this is more than just something that must be begrudgingly accepted. I celebrate impermanence.
August
Symbolism is useful to me. It’s for that reason that I appreciate symbolic tools like the Tarot. Not as a divination tool necessarily – I have a special appreciation for the story of the Fool’s Journey. I see it as a great story of an actualizer’s journey through self-realization.
I have two Tarot card tattoos (with my own symbolism added) on each of my arms. The right arm is the Fool – the start of the journey. The left arm is the 19th card, the Moon. This card has special meaning for me for several reasons (in particular, of the moon as a cyclic symbol), but I chose it as the partner to my other tattoo specifically to mark the day when I realized that it was “okay” to reject reason.
Modern philosophy hit its peak with the Enlightenment (a term coined by Immanuel Kant). In summary, it was a quite earnest call to reject blind authority and use one’s own understanding. He wrote a paper to that effect. It was a beautiful call to arms for the age of reason and the enlightened man.
And hey, it worked. Logic, reason, and science has given us some great stuff. They are all useful rituals (science, done correctly, is perhaps the best ritual realized in a long time). The mistake I made, and for lack of a better abstraction, the mistake that philosophy made, was to presume that rational analysis worked because that’s the way things are. That there were reasons we do things, and that those reasons were causes and those causes could be discovered.
The problem I see with this use of reason is that it mistakes abstraction for action, and then applies that abstraction onto people. It assumes that decisions are either rational or irrational (one in a long line of false dichotomies), and further, that rational decisions are good and irrational ones bad.
I realize that people and decisions are irrational. And I mean this in the clearest sense of the word. For an example of what I am talking about, let’s talk about the number “Pi”, which is pretty important to almost everything we do. It is considered an “irrational” number because it never resolves, but is endlessly calculable. But what is it? It’s the ratio of a circle’s radius to its circumference. It’s irrational because it is not actually that ratio; the ratio is incalculable. But circles are still circles aren’t they? It’s not like circles are “wrong” or “bad” just because the ratio of their radius to circumference is incalculable.
But we apply this to people – why? Actions and people (that is, actualizers) are irrational. All that means is that they are complete in a way we cannot talk about by rationalizing them. When action occurs, it occurs because of an incalculable sum of information, inputs, and variables that boil, bubble, and happen. They have nothing to do with rationality – they are, for lack of a better term, arational. They are outside the bounds and context of reason to the point where it is no longer useful to use the same tools (rationalization) to describe them. We cannot expect them to be rational, and when we do, we mistake abstraction for process and accomplish little more than wheel-spinning. At least, that is, if your goal is to be without fear, or hate, and to actualize. Applying rationalization to people and actions is a great way to cut yourself off from them for the express purpose of dismissing their values and supplanting your own – which makes it no wonder why we’re told that we must act rationally.
The key here is this: we make decisions based on far more information (contextual, historical, emotional) than what is seen when someone else considers our actions rational or not. Since we can’t see all this information, particularly in others, we are quick to judge those actions as “not-rational”. The irony here is that we’re correct, but it doesn’t imply that the actions were wrong or bad. The totality of the information contained in an action simply cannot be rationalized. This makes the irrational more than correct, but something that can be celebrated.
August
I use words in ways that are defined differently than what may be understood upon first read. Here are some of them:
- Process – Anything capable of the verb “to be”. Literally, a “being”. A process is stateless. Things that aren’t processes are abstractions and cannot “be”. Alternatively, I use capital-P Process to refer to the power process or to actualization in the universal sense.
- Abstraction – Artifacts of reality that are created during the Process.
- Realize – From the etymological root “to make real”. Rather than being a process of discovery, I use the term to mean a process of creation. To realize is to create abstractions – if the abstraction is useful, then it is true.
- Reality – If realization is creation, then Reality is what is created.
- Actualization – The process of Desire being satisfied. To point out an instance of this process is to realize an actualizer. To realize yourself as an actualizer is the Ego ritual or Ego story.
- Arational – A term I’ve coined to dispel the negative connotations of “irrational”. It means “outside of/irrelevant to the rational”.
- Ethics – From the etymological root “Ethos”, meaning “way”. Ethics are a system of protocols used during a personhood interaction.
- Morals – The system of Ethics used when treating oneself as a person.
- Desire – The drive to become. This could be made synonymous with Nietzsche’s “Will to Power”, which is a seeking of opportunity (power) in order to go through the process of satisfaction of desire.
- Satisfaction of Desire – The process of using power (i.e., potential or disequilibrium). Generally seen as towards an Ends, but it should be noted that the actual achieving of the Ends is not the goal – it is a side effect of the Satisfaction of Desire.
- Person – Actualizers that are capable and in the process of communicating their desires, and that are capable and in the process of understanding desires. Note that this can be self-referential. To be in the person process in relation to oneself is to be sentient.
- Hate – I refer to hate as an action. “To hate” is to dismiss one half of the person process (above) – that is, to be capable but unwilling to understand the desires of an actualizer. Note that this can be self-referential – to hate yourself is to be unwilling to understand your desires.
- Reify – “To make as a king”. Treating an abstraction as a process is to reify it.
- Ends – Reified desires. This means treating desires as things that can be reached rather than processes. Ends tend to be produced while performing the satisfaction of desires, but they are not desires themselves.
- Truth – Any abstraction useful (that is, works pragmatically) when engaging in the satisfaction of desires.
- Ritual – Any particular tool for creating abstractions and acting upon them.
- Ego Death – A useful ritual that seems to deconstruct the Ego Story. It seems like getting “outside” the Ego but I doubt that actually happens. Most “enlightenment” rituals are based around Ego Death.