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"Look at the sunset from the sun's point of view."
- Steven Wright
October 26. So after the last post, I got several emails about animals using drugs, like these. But the guy in the video isn't arguing that animals never use drugs, just that their motivations are different than ours. He might be wrong, but I still believe that humans have lost something that wild animals have, and good drugs can temporarily bring it back.
Now I want to take another angle, and look at cultural judgments about right and wrong reasons for using substances to change yourself. The video could be interpreted as having this subtext: animals are good because they use drugs only for practical reasons; humans are bad because we use them to feel good.
I've seen this judgment made explicitly in an anecdote about two people who did the same psychedelic, and met the same entity. The first one says to the entity, I'm seeking spiritual understanding, and gets rewarded; the second one says, I just want to get high, and gets punished.
But that's not the only way we draw the line. Consider steroids, where we think it's bad for athletes to use them for a practical upgrade, but it's okay to use them for certain medical conditions. In this case, the rule is: there's a human baseline, and it's good to use drugs to get up to that baseline, but not above it.
This is also how we think about psychiatric drugs: making yourself normal is responsible use; making yourself unusual is abuse.
Alex suggests a more interesting distinction:
These animals, as well as indigenous humans, tend to use these substances to feel more, not less. It's a running toward, not from.
Personally, I'm always trying to feel more. I mean, I avoid pain, but if it happens, I want to face the pain raw. And if I'm already feeling good, then I want to see the light behind the world, to be reminded of the potential bliss of existence. For me, this line from the Tao Te Ching is totally about drugs: "Use the bright light, but return to the dim light."
October 24. I have no ideas this week, but I just made a comment on this YouTube video that was posted to the subreddit, Why Do Humans Like to Get High? The guy argues that we are the only animal that uses drugs to feel good. I don't know if he's right, but if he is, I think it's because the way that drugs make us feel good, wild animals already feel that way, all the time. Some of the other comments say basically the same thing, like "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
Related, also linked from the subreddit, a dense essay about Capitalism as enchantment. The idea is, the age of reason did not snuff out the belief in "mysterious, incalculable forces that ruled and animated the cosmos," but shifted that style of thinking away from nature and religion, and toward money.
And some fun stuff for the weekend. I've been getting more into board games lately, playing three-spirit solo games of Spirit Island, and Wingspan with friends. This video, Feudum Complete Rules + Setup, is absolutely jaw-dropping in three ways: its impeccable production values, its sooooothing vibe, and the ridiculous complexity of the game.
Finally, something I've never heard before, a Led Zeppelin cover that's better than the original: Cato Salsa Experience and The Thing with Joe McPhee - Whole Lotta Love
October 21. Bunch o' links, starting with one from the subreddit, To make laziness work for you, put some effort into it. It's a rumination around the issues of laziness, idleness, and boredom, and the main idea is that it's good to be less busy and appreciate it. There's even a bit about free will, which reminds me of the time Leigh Ann and I were driving past some wind turbines, which were barely moving, and she said, "Those windmills are lazy!" Maybe we're more like wind turbines than we think: our motivation seems to come from inside us, when really it comes from our environment, and how well it fits us.
Related, Dominic sends this Hacker News comment thread about Coffee is Hard, a thoughtful essay about making an 80's style quest game about mundane daily activities. The idea is, tedious chores are a big part of life, and we should learn to enjoy them, but that enjoyment depends on not being in a hurry.
Some pessimism about technology, first from Scientific American, We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe. And another Hacker News thread, this one about plummeting computer literacy, as the user interfaces on our devices are polished down to contain less and less about how computers actually work. I remember when you would download a "program". Now they call it an "app". A program is something that lets you tell your computer what to do. An app is something that lets your computer tell you what to do.
And some optimism about food. Flour power: meet the bread heads baking a better loaf. It starts with growing wheat varieties that are not optimized for industrial efficiency. A wheat field with a wide gene pool has lower yields, but it's more robust against disease and weather, and the wheat tastes better. Then there are ways of milling the wheat and making the bread, that work the same way, trading efficiency for quality.
And this article is definitely overstating its case, but it argues that vat-grown protein is getting so good, so fast, that animal farming is going to collapse.
An article about the emotions of animals, and the growing acceptance that they're a lot like us: Can a Cat Have an Existential Crisis?
And Mark sends a link to Buddha at the Gas Pump, a YouTube channel of "conversations with spiritually awakening people."
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
September 30. Continuing from last week, over on the subreddit I got some surprising pushback from an idea I thought was non-controversial: that it's better to ground yourself in your own stream of experience, than in how (you think) other people see you. So I probably need to explain myself better.
I see my role, as a writer, as reaching out into the unknown, looking for ideas that maybe nobody has had yet, or that nobody has put into words, and whatever I find, I put it out and see what happens. If people like it, that's great; if they don't like it, that's still okay. But what I don't want to do, is figure out what people want, and give it to them.
This subject reminds me of this essay from 2016, Confessions of a Failed Self-Help Guru. It starts with an anecdote about Deepak Chopra, getting ready for a presentation, asking if his pants make him look fat. The point is, no matter how enlightened your intentions are, that's what happens if you go down the road of grounding yourself in how other people see you.
Lately I've been thinking about fame. It started when I read about how Haruki Murakami reverse engineered his fiction for the American literary market, and that's why we've all heard of him and not other Japanese authors who are more creative. William James identified two opposing human drives, one toward surprise and one toward recognition. Fame is all about fit with social machinery that feeds recognition.
Now I'm thinking about popular music, and how much better it was for a few decades in the late 20th century. It's not that one generation was more creative, but that the mass culture became receptive to surprise, so that wild and raw music, which is always around, briefly became popular and influential, before slipping back into obscurity.
September 25. Quick loose end from the last post. Instead of talking about two different definitions of the self, it would have been more clear to talk about two different things that the word "self" points to. (That seems to be common for important words, that they point to different things and we don't notice.) I don't want to call them the true self and the false self -- that feels pompous. But I will say that it's a stronger position to define yourself in terms of your moment-to-moment experience, than to define yourself in terms of how other people see you.
One more link on the subject of attention: To Pay Attention, the Brain Uses Filters, Not a Spotlight
Moving on, a smart and very depressing article, Public Opinion in Authoritarian States. The main idea: "for many of the most effective authoritarian systems, controlling the thoughts of the ruled is secondary to shaping social cleavages in the population."
Then it goes on to explain how ordinary humans do not choose their political positions out of rational thinking or even self-interest, but for social reasons: they want to believe the same stuff as their in-group, and the opposite of their out-group. And even in a supposed democracy, the ruling interests understand this and use it to control us.
Finally, going into the weekend with something happy, The Village That Turns Bombs Into Spoons.
September 23. So the other day, after writing about pain, I started wondering about boredom. What exactly is it? Is it the opposite of pain, or another kind of pain?
Then I started thinking about attention again, and came up with this: boredom is the absence of anything that earns your attention; pain is the presence of something that demands your attention without earning it. So having to listen to your boring uncle at a family dinner is not actually boredom, but pain.
Now I'm thinking about attention as a dimension of power — or really two dimensions. Power can force you to give attention you don't want to give, like ads, and it can give you attention you don't want, like surveillance. I chose technological examples because high tech is the new frontier for the abuse of power. Old-fashioned abuses of power, like groping, are really uncool now.
Then I'm thinking, those two dimensions of attention can also make two different definitions of the self. I've written before about the "not that" meditation, where you ask yourself, "What am I?" And whatever answer you come up with, you keep saying "not that" and looking deeper. The deepest I can get is that I am an experiencing perspective, and on top of that I have a stream of actual experiences, and on top of that, expectations and desires about where the stream is going.
The other definition of the self, you can see developing in little kids, when they take great pleasure in hiding and popping out. "Where did she go? There she is!" They're learning to see the self as an object in other people's streams of experience.
This is not a new idea, and I'm not sure where I'm going with it. I just think it's strange that a concept as important as the self, which we think we understand, can have two attention-based definitions that don't overlap.
September 19. A reader wants me to say more about anxiety and depression being disorders of attention. Of course that's not all they are — sometimes there's actual brain damage. But I think a lot of us can go a long way toward mental health, just by practicing different habits of where and how we turn our attention.
Lately I've made some progress on managing anxiety, with a practice that I call expanding into pain. Every self-help guru will tell you, expansion is good and contraction is bad. What they don't tell you is what exact thing you're expanding, because it's really hard to explain. Another thing they don't tell you is that expansion feels terrible. If it felt good, we wouldn't have to be told to do it.
But for me, the pain is the key to the practice. I usually do it in the morning, when I'm still lying in bed, making the mental transition from the world of dreams to the world of earthly responsibilities. I'll be thinking about something that feels bad, and the practice is, never mind the thing, focus on the feeling, and amp it up, as strong as I can, as long as I can.
I'm sure a brain scan would reveal some action in the amygdala or wherever, but what it feels like, is that the world is made of needles and knives, and I'm expanding my astral body into them. I've started to call it my morning stretch. And after doing it enough, it becomes like a muscle that I can flex at will.
So if I'm out in the world, in some anxiety-causing situation (typically driving, which is so dangerous that if your attention lapses for half a second it can ruin your life) I can expand into it, and it's like the martial arts move, where someone throws a punch, and you move toward the punch, so that it hits you before it builds up any power.
Or it's like, anxiety is paying interest on pain, but if you catch it in time, you only have to pay the principal.