Reading a technical text can be a shameless activity, which can undermine learning.

As long as the words flow through your mind without causing too much friction, they can create the illusion of understanding.

It is alluring in the moment but ultimately insufficient, because to know is to be anchored in something justifiable and verifiable. Presumably the person who wrote it is anchored in that way, but are they transmitting their anchor to you? Could you have written the text?

If that seems like a high bar, remember that the meaning isn’t in the words, like a spell that needs to be repeated to work its magic. The meaning is in the movement of the mind.

First it moves like a builder to construct a conceptual-emotional landscape. And then, within that landscape, it moves like a dancer, moved by relations, attraction and tension.

What drives these movements has a feel to it. Squinting at a pile of parts that don’t quite fit together yet. Finally resolving a puzzle in a moment of insight.

Sense-making is a dynamic activity. The words are just the interface.

If we get stuck in a reading flow, desiring to finish a text perhaps, chances are that the inner movement they denote evades us and all we get is a sense of sense. But its not ours, it’s theirs. It’s like we are watching a dance from a distance, not as a fellow dancer, but as a spectator.

There is no shame in watching. But imagine it’s you on that stage in their place. Do you feel the weight of it, the risk of failure, but also the freedom, the truthful lightness of the movement?

There are two types of confidence: loud and calm.

Loud confidence has words, evidence, experience, stories, testimonials, successes, feedback to point at, to stand on, to lift it up high enough that it can assert itself.

Calm confidence may or may not have any of those things, but it’s still there in the moment regardless, as a powerful, positive attitude towards doing what needs to be done, with joy.

Loud confidence pushes you to do more, aim higher, convince “them” so you can convince yourself.

Calm confidence finds its power in the gaps between witnessing momentum building and moving along swiftly as it unfolds its potential.

Loud confidence gets attached to plans and ideas, produces fear and disappointment when they don’t work out, pushes through, not because it’s right, but to avoid facing failure.

Calm confidence remains flexible no matter what, gives moments of reflection and reconsideration space to breathe, lets go of what has turned out to be false.

Loud confidence has its place. It speaks the language of thought and committed action. It knows how to steer a group that needs someone to follow.

Calm confidence is there to catch you when you wake up from a dream that has outlived its use. On to the next one, why not, but with more lucid eyes.

There is something surreal that happens when we leave a structured social context behind that we’ve been part of for at least a few years. The roles that determined the position and status of individuals dissolve. Looking back, the special significance we assigned to this or that person seems like a dream we’ve woken up from. “I guess they were just ordinary humans after all.”

Imagine living with that awareness at all times, a clear recognition of the constructedness of social structures. Imagine being lucid in all these dream-like structures we traverse, unavoidable as our participation in them may be.

(more…)

Yesterday I was thinking again about truth as state of consciousness vs. objective truth and I remembered an idea that I don’t know anymore who to attribute to: in our contemplation of reality, we shouldn’t forget that we are also it — our mental constructions and their properties are real in the sense of immediately occurring without requiring external verification.

The idea of needing external verification before taking the step from subjective to objective rests on the premise that we are separate from reality and we need to work our way towards it by making guesses and in doing so systematically discovering constraints on what we can lead ourselves to accepting as true.

I’m not sure the assumption of separation is justified when considering something as intimate and immediate as mathematical objects. Unlike the laws of physics, which depend on external verification, when a mathematical object is instantiated in the mind, it is direct evidence of its own possibility.

(more…)

I must have been around the age of six when I asked my parents, “Are we really just atoms? Is this [gestures broadly at subjective experience] what happens when atoms are put together in the right way?”

That question is pretty close to what I would consider the Ultimate Question, so it’s not surprising that I was dissatisfied with the answer my parents gave, but more on that later.

Why is that question hard to answer? And, while we’re at it thinking about questions and answers: What does it mean to have an answer to a question, any question, in general?

(more…)

It’s those fleeting moments that draw us back in. “I just had it. Now I’ve lost it again. How did I get there? How do I get back?”

(more…)

What is it that people seek when they want to feel “high”, maybe in the context of a party?

Certain drugs are meant to help with getting into a blissful state. After taking them, you go through a “come-up” and after a while you can feel yourself “coming down” so you might redose to stay “up”.

Why all the quotation marks? Because I’m trying to draw your attention to the mental image those terms bring up, a feeling of being somewhere high up.

It’s not a particularly stable state we are meant to imagine, is it?

Surely the only way you could get up there is by some sort of magic? And the only way to stay there must be by some magic as well?

(more…)

Do you know the feeling when you are experiencing a moment of beauty, maybe a sunset or a musical performance, and your face tenses up a bit and it feels like you might cry? Not everyone does, but for those of us who do, I wondered what it is that’s happening in such moments.

I think there’s a combination of things that differentiate people who experience the progression from attention to tension to feeling the need for a release from people who don’t:

1. the ability to make detailed differentiations
2. constructive mental approximation
3. clinging.

(more…)

freedom has its walls
pressing in on me
with opportunity.

i crack the window
open to breathe,
allow myself to forget,
then remember:

i’ve made it cozy in here
so i can lean and
stretch out and
roll around and
bump into things that
deserve my attention.

they do, don’t they?

my skin awakens tingly
with readiness,
for anything really.

anything now.

Die Farben, die in meiner Wahrnehmung leuchten, das Blau des Himmels, das Grün der Blätter, wenn ich meinen Sinn darauf richte, weiß ich, dass wir das gleiche sehen, dasselbe Blau, dasselbe Grün, denselben Klang der Vögel. Im Bewusstsein sind wir gleich. Nur das Feld der Ideen und wie sie so unabdingbar auf uns einwirken trennt unsere Welten. Kräfte, die unsere Körper bewegen, hinterlassen ihre Spuren an uns, in uns — Wände und Decken, die Wärme geben und Schutz, Türen und Fenster, durch die wir uns trauen zu schauen, zu treten, Luft, die wir einatmen zum Laufen, zum Ruhen — jeden Tag führen wir die Geschichte fort, die uns formt, als könnte sich nie etwas ändern in diesem Spiel, als hätten wir vergessen, dass es eine Rolle ist, die wir einnehmen, eine gewichtige zwar, keine beliebige, aber eine Rolle doch. Das Bühnenbild gibt Orientierung, sagt, was wir zu fühlen haben. Wir merken kaum, dass, wenn wir schauen und die Farben ins uns zum Leuchten bringen, wir es sind, die hinter dem Vorhang sitzen. Wir alle.

The following is a twitter thread I wrote on May 17, 2022. I thought it deserved its own proper post. It’s not exactly easy to read, so if you find it interesting, but you struggle to make sense of it, please comment, start a conversation with me, and I’ll be happy to say more.

(more…)

The shape of a thought is not the same as the shape of the words on a page. And therein lies the risk when working with any medium creatively.

Any medium — language, wood, fabric, or lines, sounds and shapes — has a way of guiding your hand, your mind, to make you do with it what’s known to be done with it, to continue along lines explored before.

Creativity is an unruly force. It can sometimes be channeled like running water through a hose, but it can also starve and die if you try to tame it too much.

Last weekend I went to a zoo, not because I wanted to see animals, but because I wanted to look at the zoo itself, this artificial environment that had been created to contain life. It was obvious that the pelicans didn’t grasp that their wings had been clipped. Their attempted behaviors seemed unaffected. Next to them and above in the trees, local herons displayed the power of their freedom, flying and nesting and all the while chatting. It’s not the air that made them fly, or their wings, it’s their life.

Expression is not derived from a medium, it’s a force moved through a medium by life.

And yet, when we sit down to see what patterns may pour themselves onto a page or into a space, what takes over all too often is the boring snoring of the pouring itself, because life has gotten used to its cage, it’s asleep, it needs rest, it needs space, it needs to remember that

it’s safe
to come out
and play.