Apologia of the weak grip

Lost.

Mindlessly staring at the window. Munching a biscuit, the sweetness hitting the side of my mouth. An afternoon like any other. Just when the sun starts to come down. Shadows becoming sinuous silhouettes, everything acquiring an aspect of liquid transiency as sunset approaches.

It came to me like a blaze of light, looking at the patterns of the waves on the Hudson. Shiny lozenges, a checkered tablecloth continuously perturbated by an array of sails and motorboats independently progressing towards their own goal. Chaotic, yet so harmonious in its development, so logically constructed to still appear as a whole, a continuous entity reacting to life above and below.

Does it remain like this if I don't look.

Can I grasp it, understand it's behavior. Penetrate it, absorb it.

Oh, how foolish, but I try. And the pointy eyes focus, zoom in, look into it. Make sense, how it moves, how it goes. And every time I feel I am mastering a piece of it, here a new pattern comes, smaller, nested into the larger systems, almost fractal in nature. Should I go deeper, look closer, how long before another pattern emerges, how long until the signal is so large that it transforms into chaos, too much for my limited inquiry to grasp.

How deep does it go, does it stop at one point, at any point.

I can't hold it. Limited by the discreteness of my dissection capability.

And so, I relax it, zoom out, look at it as a whole. Again, it acquires a general feeling of yes, that make sense. Let me tell you, even something greater than that. A sense that is true, and good, and beautiful in its harmonious development. All shines in glory, a carpet of diamonds, dancing and singing overlapping melodies. Colors mingle and vibrate. The variations coming from the wakes cut across emerging like solos. Violins, Cellos, Tubas that expand on the baseline rhythm pervading that fabric. And again, here another pattern comes in, generated outside my field of vision, that perturbates, and completely overrides my acquired understanding, I zoom out, to regain control, investigate on the source, but I reach escape velocity, as I zoom out, it is again too much to absorb.

I lose contact with it, searching for the upper limit. Quickly losing reference of my own self. Lost into a whole so large that becomes nothingness.

I am lost into nothing

As I recollect myself into the boundaries of my own body and mind, I reckon the truth and the bitter taste it brings with her. Everything make sense only in a very, limited cone of space time and, even within that, it is so easily perturbated that does it make sense to call it order?

A bubble, indeed.

A small, comfortable corner of existence, where I can call what is on top, what is bottom, to a certain extent turn around and feel still strong enough to not tumble down, meeting the eyes, the hands, the skin of those who define me, within the constraints of the hard matter and the somewhat slightly larger, fuzzier boundaries of abstract thought.

Don’t go there too lightly

A step too far, and I’m lost again.

It sucks to be lost.

Yet, how come I cannot hold myself not doing that? How is that I always am possessed by this spirit of search, looking for the next step outside of the boundary?

Almost thirsty for the sense of terror of moving in the unknown?

Monsters lurk in the shadows, treasuries buried in the dark

I believe there are two explanations to this. The first one is physical, the second transcendent.

The Zone

We are constantly assailed by two great intellectual dangers.

The first one is the dull, grey Boredom, the sludge that entrenches us in our car commute, while again listening to the new song that is the same as the last ten songs, everything is plain, shallow, already seen. In autopilot. Is it a life worth living?

The second one, is the harsh, red Anxiety, that burning clutch that asphyxiate the breath and holds the eyes on the ground, uncapable to raise them and look at the future, what shape it has?

In the middle, there we have it. The sweet green pastures of the zone of Proximal Development. Let us make no mistake, it’s still a mountain hike. Work is expected to come back home safe from there, but at least when we’re there we’re not completely lost. There’s at least a trail to follow, even if just lightly marked, and somewhat familiar features all around.

We constantly try to jump, from the boredom realm up above, trying to escape the flatness of existence and sip to the cup of glory, trying to expand, just for the sake of escaping the grip of the couch. Sometimes though, we jump so high, and just like Icarus, we fly too close to the sun, and blinded in red sight we lose track. Losing path creates anxiety, all becomes blurred and confused, no clear line of sight or reference point, so we lose altitude.

And there back again in the Zone.

That is the place where we can challenge ourselves and still hold it together, sweating, but slowly learning to operate those wings. Become pilots.

Until autopilot kicks in, again, a little further on the right.

That happens.

It happens in the sense that truly happens, it’s the cycle in which our existence bleeds. The most apt among us make it an art of staying always there. In the zone. Some of them have a true talent, and their natural gift allows them to float along that scary diagonal, ever climbing, shedding their skin along the way as many times is needed. Those are our Eärendils, our brightest stars.

Those who are destined to greatness. Those who will become the guiding glare in the night horizon. Shining a light of inspiration for us, earthlings, that there is more than ground to live off, and that the possibility of the journey towards a higher self exists.

Hail Eärendil, brightest of angels, over Middle-earth to men sent

But how? How can we follow the path that leads there? I think there are hints everywhere. I collected a few, maybe useful, and pieced them together. It was to my great surprise, that all of them, scattered along the path I came from, naturally merged in a concept that seemed to encompass all of them in a meaningful framework: Purposeful attention.

Life happens at you, until the moment you choose to happen in life.

And to happen in life requires a constant flow of conscious energy to what is us and what is our environment. That’s a monstrous amount of energy over there. Consciousness is not our natural state. That’s the superpower that came with the neocortical expansion of the brain. Our natural state is, in fact, unconsciousness. The comfortable numbness resting in the womb of the Mother. To be conscious implies effort, constant, and of course, generally it sucks significantly, since it makes us come to term to the harshness of the world, and our inevitable shortfalls.

But wait a second. There’s something there.

To be conscious, to be truly conscious, is to pay purposeful, inquisitive attention. That is the magic spell that uncovers patterns hidden in the fabric of reality, understand connections, and elaborating the comprehension that allows us to project ourselves in simulated instances of reality and extrapolating what happens if some of the variables participating to that pattern are slightly altered.

That’s another spell that we shall not talk about today

We can apply that to the world and conquer it. That is how our ancestors concluded that to maximize their caloric intake, they’d better be downwind, and transform the elastic energy stored in wood and flax into kinetic one. Bring down that elk.

But the true differentiating application, is to apply it to ourselves. Enter in connection with our lived life, establish the ritual of recollecting our mistakes and our wins, relive them, embody them again and again. Investigate the true nature of the event in which we participated and untie the knot, rediscover its ends.

It works, but it does not work just as an intellectual effort. No, I believe that to be effective it needs to be an actual re-lived experience. We must bring with us the emotional and sensational component together with the cold intellectual one.

This is a fundamental truth that has been enshrined in the traditional elements of the cultures of all the world. To make an example, the ritual prayers in the Christian world serve pretty much that purpose. Prayers before eating or before sleeping are a good example. The act of calling God into the equation has the trigger to activate on one hand truthfulness, because we can’t fool the big Guy, but also to project ourselves and our purpose towards the highest spirit of perfection and activate the emotional component that allows us the truly relive the reasons we are there, embody the experience that unlocks understanding.

To a degraded extent, the catholic practice of confession has the same purpose, we don’t have God as counterpart but rather a faceless being that is interpreting God to make it more tangible to us. If we dissect out the power component that comes from the human relationship that is implied in the act, declaring aloud our sins in the most truthful and honest way is the same mechanism of purposeful self-attention I am describing. And it survived all these centuries because it works in creating better human beings.

Arjuna Said: “I wish to know the true nature […] of relinquishment”

The blessed lord Krishna said: “[…] The abandonment of the fruit of all action the wise calls relinquishment. […] These actions should be done without attachment and desire for reward. This, O Partha, is my definite and final judgement.

Baghavad Gita, Chapter 18

The Hindus also uncovered it. Even though they gave it a slightly negative connotation, given the more metaphysical ground on which they stand. It is somewhat linked to the Karmic laws. As we act we generate karma, karma is generated by willful reflection translating into action, it attaches to us, becomes part of us. From our western perspective we could say that is the phenotype of our own soul, fundamental to characterize existence. Instead, they hate it because it entrenches us into samsara, chaining us to the eternal wheel of life, death and suffering that is the terrestrial existence.

The only way to release ourselves from karma is to act relinquishing the intention of actions.¹ This contains an important intuition about the doctrine we are talking about, during the relived experience, we must be inquisitive but not judgmental. It is done, it is the past, there is no way in which it can be changed. It’s useless to struggle much about it, on the contrary we should treat it as a gift of knowledge to claim agency on our future. We poked reality and received back information hinting on its nature. The moral imperative is to learn from it.

Back to the ritual. It’s simple, declare our sins, relive them, understand what made us miss the mark, again and again. Be in that room, even if it is painful. On the contrary, the more pain it evokes, the more time we spend there. Let us not shy away from it. Let us Embrace it. Train the muscle we have sitting in the skull. Let ourselves be possessed by childlike curiosity. And, as any good training routine, let us leave it at rest. The time it takes for the brain to form pathways is always the right one, as long as it takes. Let our inner machinery do the magic. When the time has come, we will find ourselves automatically behaving in a different way from the past and we’ll be like: “I see what is happening here”.

I see what is happening here

The Story of Us

I had a vision once.

A bonfire at the center of the camp. Armed men with long spears around it. Guarding its light against the danger of the night. They are tall. The grip on the spears is firm, their expression somber and serious, their shadows casted long on the ground, flickering with the blaze behind them. Their shoulders warmed by the irradiating flame; their face tickled by the cold wind of the night.

Slightly further out from them, a young girl sits on the ground, her arms around the knee close to her chest, her cheek resting on it. She looks at the flames. And a sense of restlessness starts assaulting her. The flame stutters and flickers. Slowly reducing its warming power. The guards don’t realize that is happening. They are too close to the warmth, they are not giving attention behind their shoulders, rather the best of them are scouting for dangers in front of them, and some of them are just basking in comfort.

The young girl stands up and turns away from the circle of light. She needs a piece of wood to ensure that the fire is properly fed and strong enough to withstand the night’s chill wind. She gets close to the boundary of the camp. The light is almost gone, colors are dim, shapes fuzzy. All has acquired a dark, scary tone. She sighs as she steps outside of the boundary of the camp, beginning her search. She turns to the left and to the right. Two other younglings, animated by her same spirit have stepped out of the boundaries as well.

She moves forwards into the dark forest.

The silence is deep. The obscurity is thick. Every once in a while, a crackling sound reaches her triggering a jump scare. But she still moves forward. As the trees increase in density, she sees glowing eyes appear and slowly disappear, sometimes to her left, other times to her right, up, then down. Her heart races. She would be better be safe back at the camp. But she makes another step forward. Her legs trembling, almost crippled by fear.

And there it happens.

The foot catches an obstacle, she trips falling on her elbows onto the wet ground. The leaves of the forest almost catch life, and start to whirlwind upwards, a chilling stream of cold air runs over her, howling a sinister pitch.

Eyes. Eyes open in front of her. Yellow eyes, malicious eyes. They are on the branches, they are everywhere. They don’t blink.

Her elbows hurt; she feels the excoriated skin shedding some drop of blood. She looks at the hallow column of forest in which she fell, upholstered by these evil eyes, she can almost feel their appetite.

She sits, contemplating for a moment the fear grappling her. She could stay here and freeze forever. It would not take much more time to end it. Relieve herself of this pain. The moment in which the first of those eyes show also their teeth.

Her hand touches the fallen branch on which she tripped. And the memory comes back.

The reason she’s here. The purpose of this pain.

She grabs the branch, she turns back. She starts running towards the camp. Behind her chaos ensues, but it slowly fades away as she accelerates. Towards the glow she can start to feel little bit further ahead of her.

She leaves the woods. To her left another child is also returning, has something in the hands. She turns to the right but doesn’t see anybody else.

She moves forward, approaching the speared guards. The other child has a faster pace, reaches the guards before her. The guards look at what the child has brought. It’s a piece of dark, wet, rotten wood. Worms and molds have colonized it. They move towards the hands of the child that bears it. The guards start having expressions of disgust, one with a swift slash of the bottom of the spear throws the piece of wood away from the hands of the child, away from them, away from the fire. The child cries. Moves away, the hands getting darker, tainted.

She is scared. Again. Scared of the guards. Scared of violent rejection, or maybe just simple rejection.

She raises the branch towards one of them. Other two get closer to observe.

The piece of wood is gnarled and twisted. But dry. And solid.

The guards take that from her hands, look at them more closely.

One nods, another as well. The center one turns and throws it in the fire.

The fire dims as the branch warms up, then it ignites. And the flame blazes high and higher. Warm and warmer.

The girl takes a few steps back. She sits down again, exhausted, and sighs in relief.

I thought about this vision. I think it has meaning.

The fire is the kernel of our culture. The things most sacred. It shines a bright light on our lives, detailing order among the chaos of the night. It’s the warmth that stabilizes our existence, anchored on our core values.

The guards are the conservative spirit. They recognize the value that the fire enshrines, they protect it at the cost of their lives. They are the gatekeepers, armed priests, accepting or denying what becomes part of it and what not.

That is necessary, so necessary, because that fire is a living thing, it needs to be fed good food, continuously, to let its blaze nourished so it can cast away the shadows of chaos.

The children are the progressive spirit, they have the innate instinct to realize when the flame is getting weaker and they have the courage to heed the call to adventure into the unknown, outside the boundaries of the camp, entrench deeply and challenge the forces of chaos, to scout for the gold, tear from the grip of the wild darkness that piece of knowledge that has the potential to revivify culture.

Such a dangerous and divine task. The heroes that go in the belly of the dragon and bring back the gem. Those who push us afar at the potential cost of their soul and sanity. Dancing on the border of madness. Who has the strength and luck of not being lost forever in the unknown territory? Who has the courage to leave the safe warmth of the fire? The necessary sacrifice, for the sustenance of the structural integrity of our existence.

The negotiation is the key process, where the divine children share their newfound knowledge with the priests. Here the magic needs to happen, who has the wisdom to understand what is good and what is bad? What is worth encapsulating in our core and what must be rejected as dangerous heresy? That is the dialogue on which the process of progress hinges, both at a personal and a societal level. If this dialogue is dysfunctional, we are left either starving our inner fire, or feeding it so much garbage to suffocate it under toxic ashes.

I can’t help being possessed by those images. This is the way I am. This is the way you are. This is the story of us.

It is the primal story. It is the story that gives the drive towards Truth.

Truth, the state of greater harmony of our soul with the whole or reality.

Now, while a reasonable case can be made that Truth is in itself unattainable at this level of existence, we cannot discount in any way that this fundamental drive towards it exists in the human spirit.

This is not yet the place and time to discuss why is it there² but, as we accept its existence, we can easily postulate that as we continuously miss the mark in our clumsy attempts, we can at least try to live in that sweet spot, the fragile equilibrium that is to be Right. Reaching, at least for some brief moments, a bounded truth, a status that maximizes our understanding of reality and matches it with ideas that allow building from its abstractions in a highly congruent degree with it.

Imagine the dopamine release when it happens.

To claim it, we need to understand the boundaries of our represented model of the world and master flexibly the harsh discipline of interpreting the territory from the map.

Yes, it’s hard to be Right, if we get there once and then stop, don’t evolve, don’t upgrade our map, or fail to find new ways of reading it, we will be eventually wrong, because everything moves, everything evolves continuosly. That’s just the way it is.

To search for Truth is to continually be moving, to continually push further, adapt to the patterns the world throws our way, and it’s always uncomfortable because it’s a battle that goes, eventually, about knocking down every place of comfort we build around us to give sense to our existence.

The earlier we understand it, and the earlier we are ready to embrace the divine child spirit, let it roam, and accept the dangers that come with it, but still courageously let it go, trustful that anything will be fine in the end, and no matter the pain, it’ll come back with the piece we miss to make it make sense, then yes, we may finally be on the path of Eärendil.

1. This may seem a tendency to slip back into unconsciousness, which is indeed very close to the eastern conception of Nirvana and Liberation but let us not anchor too much to this conclusion since we are missing from the reasoning the fundamental concepts of Hindu metaphysical understanding of reality, which would steer the conversation in another direction.

2. I will come back to this, I have to come back to this. It is all linked. All of it.