Land
of the invisible chalkboard
I remember a scene from a dream I once had, in which I was attempting to write the word ‘Education’ on a chalkboard. I was puzzled because as I was writing the word, the letters previous to the one I was writing would begin to morph and dissolve, such that I had to keep going back to a previous letter, and re-inscribing it, and couldn’t get to the end of the word. At first I was annoyed, and tried applying more pressure, as if this would somehow make the writing ‘stick’. Eventually, however, I realized this wasn’t working and became puzzled. I finally adopted a different strategy, where I would quickly sketch and return to previous letters in a pattern. This didn’t work either. Yet each step was crucial for me to experience and have a meaning beyond what I can here reveal. What I can say is that now, in hindsight, it’s very clear what was happening: Although the scene, the players, the chalk and the chalkboard could all be sustained, something required to generate the entire event was drawing on resources that would otherwise be involved in languaging. Why is it that only the written language liquefied and morphed? Of course, it is possible that the answer is even more interesting and takes the form of a metacomment where the dream is, in effect, announcing the liquidity of identity, and educating me through my relationship with the act of inscription...
Consider the power of the tokens we create — imaginal maps
of relational symmetries whose functions lead us to credential identity, names and
qualities — which coalesce into ideas. Many of these ideas are mere stipulations, and a goodly portion of these become the lenses through which we comprehend and evaluate experience. A significant portion of this activity involves words, usually words from a single language. Without them, we are
animals — at best. With them, we acquire capacities no other creature we can find possess: we can evolve via comprehension and testing, rather than merely through genetics, and we accomplish this with prostheses, the most fundamental of which — the key to acquiring all others — is language.
We are taught that this process, properly and attentively pursued, results in expertise — a sort of incomparable excellence of awareness. This is dangerously imprecise. What it results in, for the vast majority of us, is a shockingly reductive and entirely insufficient relationship with ourselves, our world, and experience in general. Although this is not the necessary outcome, that it is the common one is not difficult to prove. One need only watch a child as (s)he talks and gestures enthusiastically about a new being or circumstance in her experience. Yet once an adult has ‘named’ and ‘explained’ this new relational element, the inquisitiveness and enthusiasm often depart, sometimes completely. Fascination is, at least in part, a kind of not-knowing, and when others intervene, supplying us with their purported expertise, the heart of the actual relational experience is often sacrificed upon the altar of knowledge. Other outcomes are possible, and some children even manage to sustain their fascinations well beyond the application of expertise. Some of them will be prodigies — but why are these the exceptions?
Taught to refer to authorized lexicons before we can credential our own
experiences and understandings as ‘valid’, we are robbed of the potential
to explore any other form of relationship with knowledge or learning
— in general. We are not authors, nor even actors — we
are only ‘allowed’ to be readers of maps foisted on us by the circumstances of relative enlightenment or idiocy in the place(s) where we
grow and come to know what it means to be alive in a human world.
We are rarely encouraged or empowered to question whether these maps are good, fictitious,
predatory, omnicidal — the basic and constant pressures of our
local culture and necessary survival activity make this extremely
unlikely, if not openly punishable.
Behind this masquerade lies a miraculous ability — as a species
we somehow learned to employ our awareness in in a game of applying imaginal separations. Long ago, during an adventure more amazing than anything we’ve
preserved stories of — our distant ancestors found something like magic string that exists in another dimension — a ‘connectivity
dimension’, inside us — and the string allows us to separate,
group, name and imaginally manipulate figurines of things,
beings and events.
This skill allows us to craft
elaborately self-referenced vehicles of memory and comparison from
modern and previous moments of relational experience. The problem
is that it’s an inherently reductive game — and our habits with it hide this feature of its nature adeptly — on
purpose. It’s also founded in fiction — a very
‘pure’ form of fiction which by its nature grants precedence
to separation and distinction before exploring generality or unity.
Though this ‘appears to be a requirement’ for representational
intelligence, it isn’t — and this single error has been
the most devastating and costly of our problems throughout all of
human history. Reverse this error, and many of the gremlins inhabiting our ways of knowing will vanish.
Where did this strange string come from? How did we learn to separate
and sustain imaginal figures — and why didn’t any other
species pick up a similar skill? Some of the directions in which the answers lie are likely to be surprising.
I think our species got hold of this potential before we were sufficiently
prepared to support it, and in this early intercourse
we got trapped in a decidedly unkind and probably unnecessary
cul-de-sac of intelligence. For thousands of years, we’ve
told stories about what holds us back and why we cannot resolve the
elemental matters of our sources, our purpose, and the origins in our own consciousness of
those momentums which destroy all that is wise and beautiful about
life and mind.
Yet even with all the stories we possess, most of the important ones
have not yet been told — and many which have been told have
become confused in the tangles of time and translation. Beyond those we know and outside those which are new lie many which have been forgotten for so
long that should they be accurately re-membered... we may well find
ourselves in possession of a way of learning-in-unity so profound
that it will enable us to justify the suffering and complexity of
human history itself — a dream so amazing few have dared to contemplate it.
o : O : o
Masker - Aid
Down at its roots, the peculiar stuff we humans call intelligence
is actually akin to a bizarre, virus-like
chain-letter based in doll transactions. What we think of as intelligence is somewhat like the foam on top of the roiling streams of sensory data — the integrative symmetries get abstracted, one adds the magical ingredient of localized sentient awareness, and suddenly the inchoate universe transforms into endless domains of profoundly meaningful relationships.
Our caches of names, identities, qualities and values have to
be formally conserved and regenerated into our experience, moment-to-moment,
in order to be sustained at all. Stop and think about that carefully for a moment. The amount of energy required to sustain these transports and
participants grows
exponentially as our cognitive terrain fills with tokens and representations
of fictive relaters, relations, avenues of comparison, tasks and seeming ‘opportunities’.
Each doll we add to the collection reflects uniquely upon all of the other dolls, and the outcome is an impossibly sophisticated (ever-more sophisticated, moment to moment) relational network of cached tokens and their connections with other tokens and symmetries of tokens. We don’t recognize this because we’re habitually sustaining it by common agreement and habit — and there’s
no known or obvious way to step aside from these momentums long
enough to survey them from a new vantage.
Can you imagine the energy requirements of such a system? Effectively, they are logarithmic, and thus arch toward infinity rather quickly once a certain order of complexity is established. If you ever wondered where the profound learning abilities of your childhood and your incredible imaginal capacities went — here’s the most promising answer.
As we acquire tokens and methods of arranging them, we must practice these into both memory and awareness. This process produces echoes, and these ‘children’
demand further sustenance as well as the ‘clothing’ of
our attention and effort. Soon, we find ourselves immersed in a explosively self-elaborating tree-like structure whose desire for growth is as insatiable
as it is phenomenal. What emerges is a virulent form of cognitive disease, where the incept of a single token leads to the necessity of crafting a hundred, which soon
leads to a variety of intractable problems such as the production and maintenance of housing for
this endlessly self-aggrandizing possession. The foundations of our sentience are enslaved by these necessities of maintenance.
Sustaining, tracking and defending these explosively-growing
lexicons from change becomes our primary activity, while invention,
experiential contact with the sources of intelligence, and novel approaches to understanding
languish. As we ‘mature’, most of us experience a surprising disappearance of the vital imaginative capacities which were the hallmark of our childhood. We believe this is evidence of growth — but I suspect it is evidence of something more like trauma.
All of this should lead us to a suspicious response to the
common appearance and explosive multiplication of objects in our modern cultures which are
in fact reductive hypostases of living relations or beings.
How many beings are killed or displaced so that we can have millions of tchotchkes? While humans freeze outside, our cars and dolls have warm places to ‘sleep’?
We are dying of these errors in the physical dimension as a species, but something similar is happening in the invisible cognitive and relational ecosystems inside is. As we proceed with the largely commerce-and-industry-driven erasure of the living libraries of Earth, our cognitive equilibrium and hopes of well-being are being annihilated. These ‘libraries of life’ are the very living
source of our intelligence, and when they are stressed or erased,
we immediately embody and magnify these effects in our cultural and
personal experience, as well as our bodies and minds — generally
without realizing this has anything to do with the ambient status
of our species, our planet, or our intelligence. Strangely, the terrifying result is that we attack our sources more severely, with less provocation, in an ever-broadening horizon of aggressive misapprehension of the very basis of identity: organism.
o : O : o
Unexpectedly, it is neither knowledge nor our nature which are
in error, per se, but instead the subtle peculiarities of the methods and modes of representational consciousness with which we are familiar
— the character and features of our approach to relation itself.
My hope is to demonstrate
that there are ways out of these traps we’ve not yet explored,
and some of them are immediately accessible once the general shapes
of the problems involved are understood.
There are many ways of knowing (and forms of memorial conservation)
which are nothing like those we are aware of and practice culturally, and some of these were familiar to our ancestors — their distant horizontal relations can be witnessed at play in the animal kingdom even in our own time.
Although the
peculiar and specific modes of cognitive relation we are taught are aggressive, tyrannical,
reductive and intrinsically conflicted, with the slight adjustment of a few
of their root elements, a universe of new potentials arises
instantly to our experience and access. The primary obstacle standing in the way of this revolutionary moment is the habit (and incredible
biocognitive
cost) of conserving and defending cached tokens of definition and comparison — which
are entirely fictional.
It is unnecessary
to
eliminate our relationships with caching or lexicons, we do not need to discard language or formal knowledge — but we do need
to radically modify our willingness to credential these dimensions, and the techniques we employ when engaged in their use. Additionally, we must remake our relationship with knowledge in a likeness more true to our actual nature — a nature so shockingly profound that the sum of human stories cannot compare to it.
I believe we shall together retrieve an intrinsic way of learning which magnifies itself explosively
in small groups of intimately unified explorers, and which depends
for its existence upon the possession of a generally accurate model of the ladder of circumstances
and events which led to our differentiation from animals: the ladder
across which our species traveled away from what we might consider
‘pure animalian intelligence’ toward a specific polarity
of representational consciousness. It was not the travel that was
bad, but the timing, and the destination — which led to the magnification
of the problems and threats inherent in our modern ways of knowing.
Somehow, understanding the key events or phases in this ladder can result in an intra-reflective
change in the way we relate with lexicons in general. Properly accomplished, this change
causes an explosion of learning-prodigy in any who experience it,
regardless of one’s seeming prowess or ignorance. And every
experience of this is entirely personal and unique — just as
the experience of any group will be.
o : O : o
The elemental character of living awareness in an animal complex enough
to be capable of sustaining imaginal figures in relational consciousness is
like fast-flowing water — it will naturally resist the formation
of static ‘particulate structures’ of any sort, rapidly
eroding anything erected unless the structure can be ‘practiced’
into common experience. Thus it is that our species found ways to
‘re-signal’ with extrinsic tokens as a precursor to the
complex representational consciousness of which our modern cultures
are but a tiny and impoverished instance of the potentials of. We probably used ‘external caches’ as memory before we had developed the internal faculty. But
this regeneration of tokens has extreme dangers, and deadly costs
— particularly in the dimensions of communication, active sensing,
and cognition in general.
The term representation parses down to ‘re-presenting’
— and it is this game of ‘practicing’ into accessible memory that leads to the ability to re-present — the common
‘re-encountering’ we may recall from games of ‘peek
a boo’ as a child was actually a playful analog of this learning process. This playful and often rhythmic triggering of the experience of recognition, stimulates the child in a variety of ways, some of which pertain to brain and cognitive development.
In our representational mode, we learn ourselves and our potentials
primarily through imaginal reflections of relations with
objects, persons, environment and circumstance — each of which
function as prompts for social and personal ‘synchronization’ which regenerate peculiar kinds and forms of emoto-cognitive behaviors, including those that are practiced into memory — but we respond most intensely to signals from other humans, particular those representing authorities or groups.
Long before our ancestors evinced internal analogs, much if not all
of what we call ‘intelligence’ and ‘memory’
was probably based upon the long conservative elaboration of a single
skill: the re-presentation of often initially fuzzy isomorphic (shape-oriented)
relationships in awareness and experience. Emotional intimacy, gained through our experience of tightly-knit social groups, granted unique
dimensions of momentum to this already rapidly expanding tree. The
majority of the earliest games of knowing depended on various modes
of tokenizing partial symmetries for later reference (as in the case
of a name or idea) or use (as in the case of tokens, hard machines,
or tools). Most of these ways of acting began with what we call games. I would not be surprised if the earliest cultural transmissions of representational precursors occurred from youths to adults, rather than the other way around, as we might modernly suspect.
With time, adventure and experience, our species came to use extrinsic (physical), imaginal, and
emotional caches for a variety of purposes,
and most of them closely linked with a process of ‘re-minding’
and later ‘re-membering’. These habits of regenerative
relation led onward to formal representation and modern human consciousness.
The story of this appears to be lost in time, but in fact —
it is written in every human hand.
o : O : o
M(itochondrial) E(ve) and Y(-chromosomal) A(dam) = Me + Ya
