The Nature of the Veil

I am beginning to think that the root of the problem of the self — the problem of the Maya, of the illusionary and unfulfilling nature of life for some of us — is the issue of false knowledge. It’s the problem of ‘I KNOW’.
The illusion is the false knowledge. That’s why it’s so impenetrable and so present, so everywhere…it is a consequence of the self, of the limited nature of subjective experience.
We, as human beings, have to ‘know’ in order to move through life. We have to form beliefs about what is. There isn’t a way around it.

The Information Problem

We depend upon many sources of information for the knowledge we acquire, and the most fundamental knowledge came from our parents and our friends when we were very young.
They teach us what to think, who to associate with, what to believe about death, what to believe about sex. They teach us what love is and isn’t, what the value of life is, what the value of ourselves is.
We accept these beliefs early, and we internalize them. We don’t ‘know’ them in the way we know that gravity pulls things to the ground: the average child raised in a racist household doesn’t ‘know’ that people of color are inferior, but he believes it all the same, when he is young.

In the same way, you ‘know’ how certain members of society — authorities, women, Southerners, goths, jocks — will react in certain conditions. They are opinions, but they’re a special kind of opinion that doesn’t know itself for what it is: the place where we make a mistake is where we substitute a second-hand opinion for a truth.
If you believe from an early age that the wealthy are necessarily selfish and greedy, isn’t that limiting to yourself? Doesn’t it discourage you from pursuing money yourself, because of your unspoken and absolute belief in its corrupting influence and ‘the type of person’ that pursues it, which doesn’t fit in with ‘who’ you ‘are’?
Isn’t it better to give these opinions only the power due to them, and to determine for oneself, as fairly as possible, what the truth is?

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Problem

Using the example above, what would happen if an individual with this extreme view about wealth were to win the lottery?
Now, for no good reason at all, he has a dilemma. He has self-created the dilemma with his false knowledge about what rich people are ‘like’. Now, for no good reason, he may not know how to act.
On one hand he might give the money away rather thoughtlessly, in order to uphold his self-image, and devalue it unnecessarily. What could have done real good for himself or others is aimlessly discarded to demonstrate where money stands in relation to that individual.
On the other hand, he may keep the money and instead use this false knowledge to allow himself to become the exact sort of demeaning, greedy, self-interested ass he always swore rich people were. And why?

The self-fulfilling prophecy is that views both positive and negative can be acted upon, on the basis of false knowledge, and therefore perpetuate an essential untruth because of a failure to self-examine the view. Now the next guy thinks that rich people are assholes, do you see?
I think that this, this net of false knowledge, is the Maya, the illusionary web of crap that holds us all captive to ourselves (and the opinions of others).

The Value Problem

To continue the example…money is just money. Like anything else, it’s just a goddamn thing in the world, whose value varies from individual to individual; money itself is a powerful symbol because of the consensual value of it. It is something everyone wants, and therefore something that a lot of people have a lot of opinions about, true and false. Life, sex, food, money…they have consensual value, and therefore great power as cultural symbols. We are taught early and constantly that all these things are important, and disagreeing with that usually indicates a profound break from society.

Society — our parents, our friends, the media, our religion — tells us what value to give to things. There are things that society tells you to value — like health, money, status and sex — that may cause a tension or conflict within the self if the values conflict.
Sartre, unsurprisingly perhaps, said ‘Hell is other people’, and in this sense that’s very true.

I was once told that ‘if you want to control something, you have to understand it…and if you refuse to accept the truth of it, you will never understand it’.
The important thing, then, to avoid the illusionary nature of life and gain a more complete understanding and freedom…is to know the difference between what you know and what you just think.
It’s easy enough to think that all religious Southerners are somehow stupid, but if one lives in NYC and has never seen a religious Southerner outside of TV, then what the hell is he opining for, to be blunt about it? He doesn’t know, so why claim to?
Well, because it’s an us-vs-them thing. It underlines the fact that he, being neither Southern nor religious (presumably), is not stupid.
Great, huh.

On the matter of TV, or any media really, it hasn’t done anything to us we didn’t make it do. TV does perpetuate false knowledge, but that isn’t unilateral….I give a lot of shit to television, but in the long run it may actually help challenge false knowledge, given that people give enough of a shit to find out what’s true and what isn’t.

In the long and the short of it, conflicting ‘facts’ are important to sort out, even if it doesn’t seem important. Why else was it so important that Jesse Owens, a black man, won four gold medals in front of Adolf Hitler? Because Hitler was working with a fat basket of false knowledge, and the truth speaks for itself.

Inversus Universalis

My thoughts are unruly; imaginary hallucinations threaten at the naked edge of logic. Of all the things that come and go, these few unconnected presences never leave me; the ghosts are here, the staring insensate dead, and the noble and singular presence as well, present always.

I am at a crisis point once more, as all my efforts to reach a solace and a middle ground have failed; I fly from pole to pole, unable to harness the horror of this energy and build reason…something coherent!…out of this tangled and perfectly ordered mandala of the inexplicable.

This is what it’s like to go crazy; I know why crazy people go on about fucking nonsense now.

I used to hang out with a kid named Jason, during the time I still visited the coffeeshop on a regular basis. Jason was deeply schizophrenic, and refused to take medication: whenever we saw each other I’d get him a mocha and we’d talk. He was amazing, I was both fascinated and humbled by the guy.
“Rumpelstiltskin was just a word,” he said to me one day. “…it was just a word she used to turn the straw into gold.”

Now, on some level that makes sense: it’s just that the ordered end result of the original abstract is all fucked up. It still makes sense and it still takes origin from the same abstract, but the shit at the edges starts to get unusual and ‘bizarre’. I thought there was surprising wisdom in what Jason sometimes had to say, although it seemed it was just the koan-like nature of what he said maybe, the white noise of nonsense on which wisdom seems to fall best.
Either way, he awed me.

Now, I think that the process of going mad, of losing touch with reality, is more like a preoccupation with abstracts of less and less cohesion. As chaos in the concepts increases, the sense of order disintegrates, giving way to new vistas of meaning with each new reflection of the abstract; you start to see connections in places you never did before.
The important thing is to keep pruning and judging all connections: blatant craziness like thinking the aliens are talking to you through the TV is the result of failing to cogitate percieved causal relationships. I’m pretty fucking sure I’m going some species of crazy, but I’m trying very hard not to slip and fall.

There is an order to this. I don’t know ‘what’ it is, if it’s an abstraction of time or cause and effect or perceptual time or what. But it’s been very helpful to me so far in visualizing this concept, so what the hell.

Chaos and order relate to one another in the order of a whirlpool, flowing continually outward.
In the center is the chaos, antithetical to life, destitute of order and form; nothing exists here, but it is the nursery of existence.
Where the progress flows outward, it becomes ordered, and then static, and then grows brittle and falls away to be reclaimed.

Now, this is madness, right? It’s nonsense. My problem is that my language is failing me here, I wax as poetic as I can to get words around the abstract and it comes out more straw than gold.

Quantum Glyphs and Uncle Fred’s Vacation

From Wikipedia’s ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ listing:

When, how and whether any barrier is crossed between a microscopic quantum world of superposed particles and a macroscopic world of large,non-superposed objects is one of the major interpretational problems of quantum mechanics.

Scientists who are studying quanta (the smallest possible particles of existence) have a dilemma.
Tiny particles seem to obey a different set of laws than what we are familiar with in the end result, or the ‘everyday’ world.
We know, for sure, that these incredibly tiny particles can do things like:

• Be two things at once
• Know, instantly and without communication, what is going on anywhere else in the universe at any given time
  (in other words, all is one)
• React to the expectations or even to the act of being observed.

In other words,to use a word that would probably make any physicist strangle me, way down at the bottom, everything behaves like magic. Particles do things that large objects can’t do: I can’t be two things at once, trees that fall in the forest fall regardless of observation or being heard. The koans are impossibilities in ‘the real world’ as we understand it, and the scientists are having trouble locating the ‘magic point’ at which the microscopic becomes the macroscopic.

Well, this is what I think:

Quantum mechanics deals with the lowest possible ‘thing’ that the world is. It describes the energy and the matter of these teeny things, this bottom-level process.
Perhaps, though, quanta are comparable to machine code.

An example of machine code:
00000 1001110 LOAD 11110
00001 10110100 STOR 10100
00010 10011110 LOAD 11110
00011 11010100 ADD 10100
00101 00000000 HALT

Just nonsense. Alien and incomprehensible as we look at it. This is quanta.

When we use a computer (when we deal with the world), we don’t see the machine code taking place. Quantum particles do truly insane things, they leap in and out of reality, they bip around and take on lovely, snowflake-like patterns, then are gone in an instant. We don’t see this, all we see if Uncle Fred talking about last week’s fishing trip. We are dealing with the upper-level manifestation of the code: there is a compiler here, and it’s making code into reality.

The code IS the program. You can’t forget this. The limitations of the code are the limitations of the program.
Two things must happen to a computer language before it can be used by you and I. It has to be compiled, or it has to be interpreted.
I don’t know what is ‘compiling’ reality. I am convinced that there is such an action in nature, because frankly there IS a divider between quantum reality and physical reality. Something is making that into this. It’s what I meant by the ‘printer head’.
However, we — our brains, our sense organs — are partially responsible, it seems, for interpretation. We see, the wave function collapses, and the cat is dead. The program has run.

Even the way we think is like this. At the lowest level, our thoughts are composed of scary, thumping abstracts. HOT. COLD. GOOD. BAD. This is the action of the lower brain, the rhomboencephalon, the hindbrain: we share this part of our brains with reptiles. It is very old, has instinct and memory from the earliest days of our race coded inside it, and controls those things that have to do with the dirty details of life. It’s our devil, that hindbrain, you know. That’s where Cthulu and Satan live. Right back there with the sex and the violence.

At the higher level, the cerebral cortex, our thoughts are coherent. They acknowledge time, space, energy and mass. They have meaning according to the real world, partially through direct observation and partially through interaction with the hind- and mid-brain. It’s not COLD BAD, it’s ‘I was out in the snow today, and I’m uncomfortably chilly, so I’m gonna go in for a while’. Vastly de-compressed, individuated. All is no longer one at the higher levels.