Ran Prieur

October 18.

2019-10-18T18:40:53Z

October 18. Some feedback from the last post. First, some pessimism about the present society, a great 2018 blog post, There is Trouble in River City. The author uses two sources from the 1800's, Washington Irving's descriptions of two contrasting river towns, and Thomas Carlyle on "pig philosophy", to show how money can corrupt the human spirit, and how the thrill of material progress ends in malaise. I love this bit:

Irving had taken a steamboat up the Mississippi from New Orleans, had stopped at one of the "serene and dilapidated villages" that "border the rivers of ancient Louisiana," and had been there beguiled by the strangely joyous life of the tatterdemalion Creoles.

And a reader comment with some optimism about our species:

There are people who are trying to... evolve humanity on a spiritual level. Some call this the "5D reality" and some call it crystalline gateways, lol. Some major hoogey moogey there. But in my own meditations, it seems to resonate with the idea that we are capable of switching timelines, changing tracks, weaving in new threads entirely. I get the idea that the gods really love that shit. It feels GOOD. I think that's why we're still around.

Now that I'm re-integrated in the human world, I have a product recommendation and a sports highlight. My new favorite shoe, when I'm not wearing Vibram FiveFingers, is the Camper Peu Cami. It's not quite as low-profile as the Vivo Barefoot, but it's shaped even more like an actual human foot, and it's very stylish.

And check out this move by a player on my local soccer team, Brianna Alger making a defender fall down without even touching the ball.

October 16.

2019-10-16T16:20:05Z

October 16. Bad News for the Highly Intelligent. Like a lot of studies of supposedly intelligent people, they just look at members of Mensa, which is not the same thing. Still, the results are extreme: double the anxiety disorders, and triple the environmental allergies of the general population. They speculate that more intelligent people are more overexcitable. Or...

Depressed People See the World More Realistically. The evidence from studies is not conclusive, but depressive realism fits my personal experience. I used to be happier, until three things made me smarter. First, I've been in enough car crashes now that I understand that driving is extremely dangerous and we should all be terrified every minute that we're doing it. Second, I've become a lot more aware of subtext in conversation, and now the social world feels like a minefield.

Third, I've heard that psychedelic drugs cure depression, and maybe I just need to take bigger doses, but the reason I'm suddenly cynical about humanity, is that last week I took LSD and walked up the river trail out of town. Every time I do it, it's pretty much the best day I've ever had, and I understand that every blade of grass is more impressive than the combined works of humanity. And then I have to go back to the human world and default human cognition, and it's awful. This song describes it perfectly.

Don't worry, I'm not considering suicide. I believe that fate has plans for me, and if I quit, I'll have to start over. But when I think about my own death, the main thing I feel is relief. Then when I think about it more carefully, I don't actually want to die, I just want to have no responsibilities.

Don't we all -- and that's not normal. It's because our society is in full-on decline. I remember in third grade when they taught us the word "responsibility", and I was immediately suspicious. Only now can I explain why: Responsibility is a social tool to maintain the inertia of activities that at one time someone felt like doing, but now nobody does.

October 14.

2019-10-14T14:00:21Z

October 14. I don't know why, but lately I haven't been feeling smart on Mondays. So I'll just mention two bits from that Mike Snider talk. First, that his years of searching...

revealed this whole show we call life, and the universe in which it appears, to all be imagination, if looked upon as something other than myself. If I look upon it as myself then all of it is real.

That's a new idea to me. I mean, a lot of people say the self is an illusion, or the physical world is an illusion, but I've never heard anyone say these illusions are directly linked. It reminds me of an image I saw years ago, I forget where, that turned the observing eye inside out. Instead of putting the world on the outside, and your mind on the inside, looking out of your head through your eyes, this drawing put the physical world on the inside of a circle, and outside the circle is consciousness or God, and the circle has a bunch of tiny holes. Those holes seem to be you and me looking out at the world, when really it's pure consciousness looking into it, from different perspectives.

The second bit is related to the popular idea of "enlightenment", something I've been skeptical of for a while. The idea is just too pretty and tidy, and I figure it's just a simplified way of talking about a lot of different ways to improve one's emotional health or spiritual understanding, with no clear place to draw a line.

But Snider has a great metaphor for how a clear line could be crossed. He says it's like one of those magic eye images, where at first you just see a bunch of meaningless dots, and then suddenly you figure out the right way to look at it, and you see a shape. And once you know how to shift your perspective in that way, it becomes easy.

October 11.

2019-10-11T23:30:07Z

October 11. Posted to the subreddit, a good summary of Matthew Crawford's book The World Beyond Your Head.

I read the book a few years ago, and I've written about it a couple times. From 2015: "The trend in technology is to make practical things boring and idiot proof, so they don't attract our attention but without our attention they still barely work. Meanwhile, entertainment and advertisements are being skillfully engineered to demand our attention." And from 2018, "...increasingly complex gadgets that are supposed to be our magical servants, but in practice, when they malfunction, or when their unseen handlers exploit us, we are powerless, because the gadgets are too complex for us to tinker with or even understand."

Right now I'm feeling really cynical about the whole human project. From a materialist perspective, where all life is accidental, humans are just a really big accident, far too unstable to find any equilibrium with the rest of life. And from a spiritual perspective, where there's only one Consciousness playing games with itself, I think it's just about burned out on being human.

By the way, on the subject of spiritual perspectives, thanks Mark for sending this 2017 recording, The Hillbilly Sutra. It's a two hour talk by Mike Snider, better known as a banjo player than a spiritual teacher. But this is the most impressive spoken word recording I've ever heard. Usually when I listen to someone talking, I use the settings on YouTube or VLC to speed it up so I can get through the chatter to the interesting ideas. But with Snider, I actually slow it down so I can transcribe stuff like this:

Consciousness is the all. Besides it there is no other. So we are putting anything and everything under this umbrella. This is why I use the term absolute consciousness. This term refers to my beingness, and the selfsame beingness of not only myself but the singular all-encompassing and all-inclusive void beingness or intelligence of everything.
...
It's radiating from you right now, as you, right here in this moment. It is effulgent, visceral, radiant, and absolutely void of any objectivity or subjectivity whatsoever.

October 9.

2019-10-09T21:10:24Z

October 9. Two comments on unknown knowns. From Voidgenesis on the subreddit:

This made me recall personal experiences of learning to play piano. My conscious awareness was mostly located in my dominant right hand. As I became more skilled and the left hand got involved it was as if someone else was controlling it much of the time. That in turn reminded me of all the neurobiology research showing that the mind is not a coherent construction, but composed of many different modules competing for access to the central self aware part (or frantic confabulator depending on your perspective). If attention is a neurological illusion then it tints the whole original conceptual framework.

And from Matt over email:

Perhaps the reason no one challenged your claim that attention can home in on something without us knowing it, is that people intuitively grasp how attention is more cloud-like than laser-like.

We can be thinking about an anxiety-inducing project at work, have a song stuck in our head, briefly be annoyed at another person on the train, and have a memory surface all within the space of seconds. It's easy to fail to realize that a part of our mind began replaying a song it heard from someone's smartphone before we boarded the train. We may suddenly wonder why we're thinking about so-and-so from college only to trace the memory to the fact that we've been replaying a song internally. We may or may not know why the song entered our thoughts at all.

If there's any activity that can be said to cause the most suffering, I'd say it's this: thinking about something without clearly knowing that you're thinking about it or knowing the negative effects that's having on your body.

October 7.

2019-10-07T19:50:30Z

October 7. A few more thoughts on attention. First, I was surprised that no one challenged me on category 2, "where your attention is, and you don't know it." How is that even possible? Isn't that the definition of attention, that whatever your attention is on, you know it? Maybe it's like "Yeah, when I'm focusing on that thing, I'm aware of it, but I didn't notice I was focusing on it that much."

I'm also thinking about the metaphor of fish not being aware of water. When I first heard that, it seemed profound. Since then, in some circles, it's become a cliche, and the usual interpretation is that the aware-of-water are better than the unaware-of-water. But notice, the best known presentation of the metaphor is probably by David Foster Wallace, who killed himself.

Taking it literally, an actual fish would have no reason to be aware of water, and becoming aware of water would add an unhelpful cognitive burden. Taking another shot at what I wrote last week: maybe the recent surge in depression and anxiety is caused by the cultural trend of assuming that more awareness is always better, and now we're struggling with conscious awareness of too many things that are better handled subconsciously -- or even mishandled.

October 4.

2019-10-04T16:20:45Z

October 4. First, some loose ends from this week's posts. From Monday, two links on fame. Homo Narrativus and the Trouble with Fame argues "that fame has much less to do with intrinsic quality than we believe it does, and much more to do with the characteristics of the people among whom fame spreads." And The Myth of Commoditized Excellence is about how movements start with good ideas, but to grow beyond a certain level of popularity, they have to be polished down to bullshit.

And Mark writes, "Your Oct 2 post is probably the best you've ever written." That's interesting, because almost all my other posts have been written straight to a computer screen, sober, and my Oct 2 post was written longhand on two puffs of good weed. Unfortunately, cannabis only buffs my creativity for a couple days after a break, and then the high becomes less illuminating and more numbing, until I take another break. Of course everyone's brain is different, but I wonder how many everyday stoners, or non-users, would benefit from a schedule of 1-3 days on and 2-5 days off.

For the weekend I just want to recommend a film. I saw it back in 1995 when it came out, and this week I rewatched it. If you like the story "The Yellow Wallpaper", and if you've ever made it through a Tarkovsky film, check out Todd Haynes' Safe. It's long and slow, with a similar story updated to 1980's California: an affluent housewife (Julianne Moore) gets a mystery illness, but instead of going into a creepy bedroom, she goes to a new age retreat center.

The ending is carefully ambiguous, and we never get a clear answer about what's wrong with her or whether she'll recover. And the atmosphere is a lot like a horror movie, except that every character is trying to be nice, and the horrifying thing is the alienation of modern life.

October 2.

2019-10-02T14:00:37Z

October 2. Continuing on the subject of attention, this subreddit thread has helped clarify my thinking, and now I can define four categories: 1) where your attention is, and you know it; 2) where your attention is, and you don't know it; 3) where your attention is not, but you know it could go there; 4) where your attention is not, and you don't know it can go there.

This is a lot like Donald Rumsfeld's speech about knowns and unknowns. He was talking in the context of war, and information technology has put us in the biggest attention war of all time. We are fighting for four things: to see, to not see, to be seen, and to not be seen. Turn the TV to the game, mute that ad, look at my tweet, and don't track me Google.

There's a lot to be said about being seen and not being seen, but I want to focus on seeing and not seeing -- especially not seeing. This is the age of raising awareness, and it's gone so far that we're overwhelmed. Our ancestors could have not imagined how many demands we have on our attention, or how hard it is to choose among them.

I think this is why some people are pushing back against mindfulness. The last thing we want is even more shit we're supposed to be paying attention to. But the way I see it, the mind is like a web browser, and mindfulness is like changing your preferences. It's difficult, but it's an investment: by giving some attention to your own filter, you can learn to filter more stuff out, and free up some attention for whatever you decide is important.