The Twins

How curious these two;
Similar in so many ways,
Yet different as nights are from days.
But they were bonded.

Sister and brother; fraternal by all means —
Four years separated them, but the twinship lived on.
The kindship lived on,
The friendship lived on

Openness, trust, transparency, and loyalty.
Ride or die shit a blood pact like two convicts,
Trapped in a box but trusted to survive,
The love of the other kept the other so alive.

When he met success he promised she would thrive
Even if he had to sacrifice a chapter of his life
That is promise that he carried deep inside
And knew the type of power he could tap just through this pride.

Connected, through blood and air
They recognized each other.
Needs and wants etched as clearly as digital fonts
They protected one another.

The Principles of Dogma

Dogma, as defined by Webster, is an official system of principles on tenets concerning faith, morals, behavior etc. While dogma is generally ascribed to large institutions such as churches or governmental organizations, I see these entities as nothing more than aggregations of humans and they are thus eventualities of human interaction. Dogma is a curious phenomena that arises when humans begin to congregate, as individual interpretations of life begin to compete for legislative space, over acts of “standardization” are enacted as attempts to streamline and keep peace.

Isolative cognition (IC) is a term I have come to use for the areas of cognition we access when making decisions within a cognitive bias. IC is a term that for many may be hard to conceptualize, one would have to be familiar with cognitive bias and additionally be able to pinpoint their biases in order to have any deep understanding of them. To merely see the blind spots in another’s thought process is hardly educational, it isn’t until the same scrutiny is applied to the individual that any substantive progress is made.

A society is more than just the sum of its parts, humans, because human interplay creates additional phenomena that are shared by one another. Things begin to emerge which are not related to any particular part, but as a nascent eventuality of interaction as a whole. These emergences are many, laws, rules, normative behaviors, ethics, and so forth. From these emergences come standardized rules of engagement, education, and principles of contributive behavior which try to facilitate an individual’s healthy integration into the whole of the body of society.

The problem is, humans, as explicitly stated ad nauseum on this site, are free moral agents and complex systems of probabilistic functions, thus one understanding of rules and principles may not be shared by the rest. However, in order to establish a cogent, sustainable society there must be normalities in place to govern interaction. Thus, dogma is born.

However, this complex interplay of human activities does not end there; just as man is governed by his or her need for structure, he is simultaneously governed by the cosmic forces of balance. If structure is emergent and instability must also come to the fore; one cannot exist without the other, this is the nature of being human.

Thus, IC becomes problematic as people identify with one set of rules or the other without taking account the essential antithetical principles of human nature. We MUST have balance, if there is evil then good will abound; if there is good than evil will abound.

Dogma, especially in larger, and by nature more complex societies, is rarely a cooperative process. In order to offset the cumbersome structure of a large populace, such intermediaries such as representative democracies and electoral processes begin to emerge. Dogma the evolves into a game of political intrigues, with a representative sometimes operative on behalf of his constituents, sometimes on behalf of his wealthy donors, sometimes on behalf of his own self interest, and usually in a complex admixture of all three. Factor in psychological warfare, conceptually related topics of psychological warfare and class oppression, in tandem with nationalism and a cadre of other -ism’s and one can see just how complex this dogmatic process can become.

Isolative cognition is the most destructive when a relatively informed person begins to sit atop their soapbox. Armed with a large amount of information, but exposed by anemic analytical processes, they skew such concepts like “dogma” as evil, unnatural, or unnecessary. They fail to view their own systematic beliefs of what is and isn’t, their own wishes for clarity, their own dreams of uniformity as forms of dogma. In their bias, they see with such vivacity a clear and concise version of what is, they often times supplement these positions with fervor and passion, mistake their ability to garner respect and persuade as self-evident truths of their moral uprightness, and mislead themselves to think that they are different from the society they hail from.

One must understand, to be informed does not mean to know; unless one is questioning the principles of knowledge — if one can ever know anything — their thought processes are exercises in insanity: repeating a dead process over and over again expecting different results.

How does one overcome IC, cognitive biases, or “philosophical suicide”, if I may borrow the phrase from Albert Camus, you ask? Is it by doggedly sticking to some theoretical objective truth and denying your impulses? Hardly. As discussed, that would contradict man’s existence as a paradox. Although we should actively seek objectivity, the only way life can make any cogent sense is through the eyes of individual experience; to deny that would be deny the human experience, a highly unlikely and virtually impossible process when dealing with a large society.

Instead, people should take their subjective opinions and test them to the hilt. They should understand their particular mental frameworks or schemata and actively seek to undo them. How? One method is to find your oppositional stance and do everything you can to agree with them. My preferred method is to zoom as far out as I can, philosophically speaking, and try to see the connections that I couldn’t from my limited mental vantage point. Another is to see the world as unreal and detach yourself from it, allowing the world to play out as a drama which you passively observe.

You can see why few people achieve philosophical freedom. All of these practices require an admission that the self is unimportant, that your views on life, God, death, humans — everything — are quite frankly useless and you must do everything you can to reconnect to some experience that you cannot readily explain.

So although I may disagree with much of the dogma of this world, I understand it and I understand the necessary, the naturalness of it. It is an organic process to keep things more or less in peace, to keep people with dispositions against investigative thought in a state of relevance, and to allow the globe to keep turning.

bryce

The Enlightened Way: Detachment

The Fallacy of Human Experience

We are an obscure planet in an obscure solar system on a distal arm of a massive yet obscure galaxy in an infinitely expanding universe.

Lets take a moment to reflect deeply on that fact. Your life is indeed a rat race of obligations, expectations, and interactions, some of which are more contentious than others, but in the grand scheme of things, you are absolutely miniscule. You are a piece of a larger cosmic production and whether you believe in a Divine being or not, this production is governed by rules and principles that supersede any day to day obligation you may feel.

In my opinion, people spend far too much time obsessing over themselves and over the human experience in general. Its seems that people are consumed with propinquity; things that are close must be of greater importance, however, its this mindset that constantly drives our world to brink of destruction. We are imbalanced in our understanding of existence and this causes us to become disoriented.

I cannot diminish the importance of human variation in expressing life. I cannot say that it is always prudent or plausible for people to disregard their natural proclivities and simply gaze at the stars. There are those among us that are susceptible to emotion variation, others who are susceptible to devices of the mind, and others, yet, who fall prey to the destructions of idle hands. The list goes on and on. We are all fundamentally different beings who place priorities on however we have come to develop.

But, this does not mean that the evident chaos of our world is necessary. It may be natural; since we are so varied as entities it only makes sense that impasses and divergence lead to complexity and persistent discord, however, that naturalness does not necessitate existence. We can, through cultivated thought and a stillness of spirit, begin to forge a prototype of a world at peace.

My proposition, to all of those developed enough to cast away pointless ego, is to realize that you are insignificant. Your opinions, your developments, your convictions are intrinsically worthless. Yes, you may, through the vehicle of reality, exert force on the natural world, but a compulsion to do so is resolutely futile. I am not promoting nihilism either! Man should be freed be this notion. You may choose to focus intensely on yourself and create an illusion of significance, but to do so really causes no greater benefit.

The anger that we feel when we are slighted, the frustrations we feel when things don’t go our way, the sadness we feel upon unrequited love are all examples of how our experiences can obfuscate an enduring peace that is possible.

This philosophy may seem radical, but it is the same equanimity of mind that is promoted by the Christian and Hindu faiths. Christianity says to cast your cares on The Lord for He is in control. He is big and you are small. Ecclesiastes even says to make your words unto God few because He exists so high above you. His supreme holiness renders your specifics obsolete. Hindu, especially that taught within Kriya Yoga, see that life is cosmic production and we can either choose to consume the delusion, MAYA, or we can choose to step away from it and enjoy the drama ourselves.

If you have no spiritual pathway to speak or you are an atheist, this changes nothing. The sheer immensity of the universe, the fact that there are stellar objects billions and billions of times larger and brighter than our sun whose light we can see now was produced several hundred million years ago should inspire the same humbling awe that an adherent to faith has for God.

When I am honest with myself, I don’t care about race relations, human rights, animal rights, politics, religion, business, or the economy. Although I am a black, Christian, business owner who votes independent, these are all negligible in my contemplations of being alive. I take very, very few things personal, I hold no grudges, I harbor no obsessive thoughts about this or that. I spend time marveling at the wonders of being alive and the intricate processes necessary to bring me to every nascent moment.

Up until recently, I needed people to think like me and I wanted synchronicity of thought. My conception of Objective Truth meant that deviations or interpretations from some ineluctable concepts were useless and eventualities of flawed beings. While this may be the case, I have learned to step outside of the tempestuous dimensions of human affairs and consider things of superior strata. I am no yogi or sage, but a young man who values things that endure.

Momentary human expression is micro and subject to wild variations per the dynamics of those involved, yet the massive universe, the creation of the Supreme Being Himself rages on in every direction until infinitude. I can never see my oscillations, as real and proximal as they are to me, as anything of consequence. I may feel fear, feel anger, feel depression, but these are passing fancies and I am quickly resolved.

Alien

Stark juxtaposition, wondrous tableau,
The activation of his mind’s eye turns his life into a show,
He multilaterally exists inside and out,
As he is aware that he is a stranger in his own land.

What creature is a man that becomes aware of his Self?
He who climbs the mountains of sentience,
He who ascends to the summit of existence,
Leaving behind all hopes of illusory normalcy.

Perspicuity, high functioning acuity,
Assuredly has created for his mind fluidity,
Evulsed from the realms of illusions,
His conscious goes into collusion

A fusion with his spirit, he mimics deliquesence,
The essence of his presence reveals extant elegance,
He no longer blends in to picture, his quiddity far too puissant,
His very steps on this earth bring him to the step of the Elysian.

Stop Making Stupid People Famous

I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge my desire to be “famous” someday. By fame I am alluding to the phenomenon of being widely known and quite frankly, my field of practice is made more effective by social awareness. Hell, my company is called VB ICON, a not so subtle descriptor of what I set out to do on a daily basis: create icons and by proxy become an icon myself…

I just like every other human being suffer from cognitive biases that directly affect how I see the world and thus how I behave within it. There are dozens of cognitive biases ranging from self serving biases to curse of knowledge biases, one needs only to fire up Wikipedia to see just how messed up our psyches are.

During the last few weeks, I have been presenting my readers my views on the illusory nature of reality; I have essentially deconstructed the notion of reality as concrete and have offered a much more plastic view of “life”. I have a problem myself though, I am deluded just like the rest of us into believing the products of my confusion. For millennia, societies were governed by the laws of metaphysics sometimes called natural laws, which were by nature highly qualitative and generally disseminated through the church or some other spiritual governing body. We were the consumers of superstition and hearsay and consumed by the nature of oracular knowledge. Then came science…

Science has been the formalized study of all things. It has been man’s way of standardizing the known universe and consequently creating a standard for discovering the unknown parts of the universe. Whether that be psychological, biological, or physical (the work of physicists), the nature of all these fields of study have remained rather consistent: sober, rigorous study of content.

However, metaphysics has still persisted, mostly borne on wings of uneducated, undisciplined minds and what has been the result is a cornucopia of existential views, a world in which layers of interpretation have replaced structured dogma and the consumption of information for the purpose of validating said perceived views.

The similarity between times of olde and this current era are an interesting foray into the persisting nature of humanity: we still look to figures of authority to guide our views. However, in a world in which interpretation and variance are the norm, the amount of “authorities” on subjects is startling.

Stop Making Stupid People Famous

Our societies have always enjoyed entertainment. The Greeks had plays. The baroque periods were noted by their concerts and art. Upon these entertainment media, those talented few that commanded the attention of enthralled audiences began to exert influence over the masses.

This has been amplified to the nth degree by our technology laden culture. We have had more “influential” figures rise and fall in the last decade than probably the previous thousand years combined. The insidious part is that the influence of the individual, be it a musical artist, businessperson, or actor transcends the boundaries of their famed craft: people begin looking to them as authorities on everything.

This is fine when you have a celebrity who is somewhat informed, but it becomes laughable when a profane buffoon becomes a wildly followed “philosopher” of religion, politics, or scholastic pursuits. Their image is easily recognizable by the masses and with that social inertia they are able to affect the minds of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, with a few strokes of the keyboard or a guest appearance.

The cause of this ties back to the second and third paragraphs of this post, metaphysics and the human mind. While we are indeed governed by rational logic, we are the inheritors of a broken world whose existence is hinged upon collective agreements. I have portrayed collective agreements as something completely imaginary and easily removed, but the contrary is quite true. Reality, or collective agreements among people, is among the most powerful, albeit vacuous, force known to us currently. Reality is based upon what is plausible and plausibility is all most of us need to make a decision. The resulting outcomes may be highly arbitrary, but to the individual thinker and up the chain to a regional or national populace, this becomes 100% concrete.

I suffer from many cognitive biases, character flaws, the most potent being a private superiority complex, egocentric biases, illusions of asymmetry biases, and a general rejection of the world as fundamentally flawed and concordantly futile. As such, I spend most of my days abrogating conventional logic citing it as the workings of delusional minds and attempting to create alternate realities that I believe are superior. This of course is a fallacious task as I am also inherently flawed and thus whatever I generate will reflect my own biases and delusions, not unlike the world I fight against.

Celebrities often times suffer from the same delusions of grandeur as I do. They are no more qualified to speak on matters of “reality”, yet the world devours their insights as fundamentally worth more, regardless of how fallacious that conclusion may be. As beings who are as incorporeal as we are flesh and bone, social inertia operates similar to the principles of gravity. The more aware people are of you or your belief systems, the more potent they become in the world.

Logical.

We are all imperfect creatures, so we end up looking to creatures that are albeit imperfect, but much more “successful” than ourselves and subsequently ascribe to them features of goodness encompassing their being, this is known as the “halo effect”. For a person like me, haughty, equally delusional, and petulant, I cannot willingly follow an imperfect person and I don’t care what they’ve accomplished. Unless that individual is personally helping me, as in giving me access to whatever empire they’ve managed to create, their existence — and transitively success — has very little to no effect on me.

The trappings of an extremely arrogant individual, but there is something to be said about the way I view things. If we were all to adopt a stripped down version of this, how many “celebrities” would be influential? Hypothetical, I know, but an interesting notion nonetheless. If we all stopped worshipping the effigies of these people who care nothing about us, who aren’t any better than us, and happen to be the benefactors of good timing and flat out luck, would we be able to better process information?

My humble petition for this world is that we stop venerating fools for their entertainment value. Although entertainment is necessary for a human to healthily flourish, you cannot give buffoons additional access to social currency. What I am asking for is effectively impossible because it would require a unitary mindset and a slew of other agreements that are just not likely to occur in our or any of our successors lifetimes. Snooki was recently paid tens of thousands of dollars to speak at Rutgers University. People vehemently swear by the unscrupulous rantings and ravings of Rihanna. They crave the “love” between Jay-Z and Beyonce or applaud the disgusting antics of the Perez Hilton’s of the world. Financiers cling desperately the words of Jon Hilsenrath and shake in prepubescent anxiety for the declaration the royal seed…

I discuss the halo effect a little more later in this post, but let me key you in on another interesting phenomenon of celebrity worship: its very existence compounds itself. A woman who would be someone attractive as a non-celebrity is adored for her beauty as a celebrity. A man who is a decent businessman, is lauded for his commercial acumen as a celebrity. And so on.

We are influenced so easily and the sad part is that most of us have the best of intentions. We are not willingly ignorant or trying to propagate social stupidity, but the composition of our cognitive faculties are complex.

One painful observation of my approach is how can one really call another stupid in a world which is imaginary anyway? If things are intrinsically illusory, infinitely plastic, and all matters of interpretation on highly qualitative subjects are equally valid, then how can I call another stupid without citing my own clear cut hypocrisy? Humans are creating the world we live in, one that is mostly devoid of universal truths, so are you, bryce, implying that there is some arbitrary hierarchy to existential contribution?

Yes, I am an elitist, consummate hypocrite, and victim of my own delusions of perfection.

This post has many holes in it. I take many liberalities and make many assumptions based on my own interpretation of life. It is this very same human flaw that has led us to praise some of the dumbest people of all time: choice. What I believe to be buffoonery of the most despicable kind happens to be the pedestal on which someone else worships. I radically dislike Obama’s administration, yet others swear by it. I believe in the diminution of race for the sake of creating real social equality, yet I am painfully aware of the struggles of being black.

All of these idiosyncrasies multiplied across an entire nation (and globe) create the uncomfortable world that we live in now. Illusory yet partially concrete, scientific yet still metaphysically oriented, with leaders that range from competent to idiotic. We thrive in the interstice that I call “somethingness”. Our world is more than nothing, yet not quite right.

So, welcome to the world. All you idea entrepreneurs, you social activists need to start understanding the nature of the world as you implement your 21st century amendments. Human nature, what I tend to discuss, is static, unchanging, spiritual; human condition is highly variable, unreal, and consequently imperfect.

The reconciliation of these two worlds is the epitome of enlightenment, but how exactly we get there is anyone’s guess.

bryce

The Other Side Of Racism: The Worst of Black Folk

My day job for the last year or so has been working as a consultant in one of the most ethnically diverse school districts in America. The students in our program are underrepresented minorities that are at the most risk of being inundated by a broken system. However, the system itself is wildly apathetic and caters to a select few that can nimbly navigate its oppressive jaws. The misconception that our system unconditionally favors whites is one of the most egregious errors in American discourse, it is an incorrect portrayal. There are plenty of whites that bear the brunt of disenfranchisement and injustice that one would need only to travel to Appalachia to witness. No, injustice effects us all and as the honorable Dr. King so eloquently stated, an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere.

I came across an article today that expressed perfectly the dilemma that exists with regards to race relations in this country. I have been prodding and pecking at it for the last few months, but this read sparked the illumination I needed to fully explain my stance on the subject. I have long been regaling about racism using perception as a basis for its fallibility, but the more recalcitrant aspect of it is that not all members of a race contribute to perceptions of racism or ill advised racial positions.

The article “The Worst of White Folks” found here, written by a brilliant essayist named Kiese Laymon, describes the lessons he learned growing up about race. He gets to a point in the piece where he begins talking about the a concept he calls worst of white folks.. The worst of white folk represent the absolute bigotry that has been the body of the monster blacks have been fighting against for years. They’re the ones that didn’t hire us, they wouldn’t let their kids marry us, they wouldn’t admit us to their schools, they call us lazy for needing social welfare aid and so forth. These worst of white folks are the epitome of the system that chronically oppresses.

However, who can pinpoint a white person of that nature?

Where are the worst of white folk? Are they the elitist class that manipulate the banking industry, politics, or the economy? Are they the neighbor next door? Sometimes. As with all people, the human mind is able to transition from one set of cognitive conditions to the next as rapidly as the next. The worst of white folks is more spirit, more of an incorporeal force, than it is blood and bone human beings. It comes across through passivity and through aggression, it is masked by what the individual believes are good-hearted intentions.

The truth is, many of our friends have at times been the worst of white folk; they have embodied the very system that we have all striven to topple.

The tough reality? Many of us blacks have been the worst of black folk in abject retaliation.

A very good friend and client of mine recently sat down and told me the story about his father’s high school years. His father, a white man, was the recipient of one worst sentences in history: he was sent to East Palo Alto High School during integration.

For those of you familiar with the Bay Area, EPA is no place to fuck with. To my SoCal people, think Watts or South Central. That means my friend’s father was sent to the equivalent of Locke High or LA Washington as the height of racial turmoil.

What proceeded were ruthless beatings, ceaseless racial slurs, and the translation of 100 years of systematic oppression on to an effigy of white culture. He was the scapegoat and he was sacrificed daily to the gods of frustration, inequality, and survival.

To this day, he is a staunch racist. He abhors blacks. Who can blame him?

But those who abused him were the worst of black folk. Would any of us commit such heinous crimes against an innocent man? Perhaps not, but the spirit of revenge has passed through all of us from at one point. Are all the people who require government assistance worthless deadbeats that mooch off a system that oppressed their grandmothers and grandfathers? No, but the spirit of entitlement has touched us all. Are all of us gang bangers and criminally inclined? No, but each of us has considered doing what we have to do as a community with little to no resources.

We have all been the vehicle for the “worst of black folk” spirit.

This all fuels the endless conversation about indemnification and necessities for equality, when we are in fact all guilty.

I will not delude myself or my readers by believing there are easy solutions to these predicaments. This motto of this blog is “pondering the absolute, ambiguous, and admirable”. I merely want people think think outside of their traditional comfort zones; to stop see their opinions as absolute rationale and begin viewing the globe in a more objective fashion.

I will be honest, I am hypocritical about a lot of things, especially pertaining race and race relations. I am pained by the loss of a young black man at the hands of a white man. I am pained by an black being sent to jail by a bigoted police officer. I know that it happens to all cultures, but I, having personally experienced the bigotry against blacks, know the humiliation.

Nevertheless, I am required as a human being to elevate myself above paradigms.

bryce

Equanimity

The peace of dawn,
Quickly gives way to the despairs of twilight,
The nightmarish ghouls of expectancy and obligation,
Snap eagerly at the wayfarers heels.

O Divine, how does one commune with you?
How do I, mere mortal, find your chambers?
Wherefore art thou silent?
Maniacal is my petition, sane man turned violent.

My mind knows no peace,
The outer heavens offer no satiation,
The inner parts knows no calm,
Providence tests my fallible patience.

Deus ex machina,
Where will I find stability in times of storm?
Where will I find understanding when virulent tempests
Sway me like reeds in the wind?

Beloved journeyman, know that your thoughts are futility,
Answers are fleeting like winter’s flakes,
Pertinent, relevant in the depths of frost,
But forgotten memories come the eve’s of spring.

Humanity is full of craft,
Praise be to the Most High for blessing us with such machination,
Find your own peace,
Proclaim to no man that you know Truth.

Truth flees from intelligence,
Like oil from water,
Exigent hubris, meets even quicker destruction,
As his structures topple during intense trial.

O Divine, Absolute, Almighty,
I know you are capable, but are you willing,
Give a man a shilling let him eat an hour,
Give a man a lesson let him feast in confusion all his days.

Enlightenment

Nothing has to be, yet everything is. There is no absolution, only concretion created out of agreement. Nothing you or I think to be true is inexorable, we are all agents of arbitration, we make things real because we want them to be or we learned them to be, not because they are.

Heavy, no?

In the present moment, overwhelmed by information and blinded by our own biases — be they emotional, pride driven, or just ignorance — people struggle to make intelligible decisions. Pure objectivity may be the ultimate goal, but it is untenable to believe that humans in our current evolutionary state could abscond our need for personal content and are, for better or worse, shackled to our own interpretations. Thus the present presents a kind of catch-22, a damned if you do, damned if you don’t dilemma in which most people just throw up their hands to ‘fate’, ‘chance’, or ‘moral agency’.

I have a few individuals that I greatly respect, namely Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen, and Peter Drucker. My affinity for Drucker comes from the subject of his professional work which valued people rather the classical economic stances which look at raw data and numbers. Porter, Christensen, and Drucker all pivot heavily on the qualitative aspects of business, but Drucker takes it to a whole new level.

Drucker was consumed by how people work; his contribution to academia centered around strategic management and understanding the relationships between human beings.

I, too, am consumed by human interaction and it has honestly become the crux of my inquiry into the nature of existence. I can be rather antagonistic in my search for understanding; I often times find myself disenchanted and rather repulsed by the world around me.

Yet, I must journey on.

For me, everything begins with man. Man is the conductor of this realm; that is to say that human beings are the ultimate medium in this existence. We are acted upon by spiritual, mental, and emotional factors amongst others. Through this perceptible form, our body and mind, we are interacting with countless forces, processing innumerable data packets, and trying to make decisions all the while.

The intractable problem of understanding humanity has become nothing short of my Gordian knot. (The Gordian knot is a Phrygian myth in which an extremely complicated knot was tied by King Gordias’ son King Midas shortly after Gordias was declared sovereign). For centuries we have been applying the Alexandrian method of untying such difficult knots; when Alexander the Great came to Gordium he found himself unable to find the ends of the knot to untie it, so he simply sliced it with his sword and declared the problem solved. Ostensibly, this is a solution, but it hardly enlightens anyone.

As I work to find the ends of my Gordian knot, the understanding of people, I find myself including more and more dimensions during my analyses. This is the reason I talk about things such as time or love or God, because they are all instrumental in understanding how we interact.

As children we are taught that things have a highly level of concretion, we were presented with facts and absolutes, nothing was deemed interpretative. However, as you get older and hopefully more wiser, you realize the only things in life are interpretations, that all you know to be true are mere guesses by various members of society embraced by you. After this realization, religion tends to be the first to go, very little of it is provable and it has been wielded for millennia as a means of control and structuring, therefore, any trust in it is undermined. Slowly but surely other layers of reality that you’ve accepted as truth begin peel away and you’re left with nothing but your own ignorance and possible confusion (translation: anger).

My goal as a human is to make as much sense of this whole thing as I possibly can. This is an undertaking that has, of course, been the central goal of scores of thinkers before me and continues to be the central goal of many alive and kicking right now.

As I see many of the lost and confused souls I grew up with beginning to starting families still as lost and confused as ever, I see why the world has always been and why it will continually persist as inexorably flawed. The “Truth” is obscured by interpretation and there is never a point in a person’s life when they “figure it out”. Outside of religion, there are few places where one can even go to find the purported “truth”. So we simply take our metaphorical swords to the problems of life and declare them solved. The net effect is that we remain blind, we remain lost, we remain just as inept as we were as children, yet now free moral agency permits us more “responsibility” (translation: certainty). Adults tend to rely on their “experience” as their proof of validity, but any well thought out inquiry will render even the most absolute of individuals utterly idiotic.

No where is this more apparent than in corporate America, a place where rules and regulations dictate every aspect of life from 9AM-5PM (and sometimes everything in between). Moreover, executives swear by the rules and regulations as “the way things are” or “the way things ought to be”. Yet, all of us know that the corporate workplace is a breeding ground for ineptitude and inefficiency, where the dollar reigns supreme and individuality is a third class concept exacerbating the impotency of corporate anything. So every generation creates their “new and improved” version of the workplace, tinkering with the cultural inputs to facilitate a better system. But, the problem goes back to the fact that most of us don’t know what the fuck we’re doing, there are too many interpretations, too many egos, too many best guesses, and the new incarnations of corporate culture wind up being just as inadequate as its predecessors.

The real problem? Corporate means many combined into a unified group. That group must be able to create some harmony, but that is just unlikely. In choosing which way is “right” someone gets marginalized, the ultimate result is that compromises are made and fundamental humanity is forced out.

My passion is life is being right. I love to be right. However, this passion will never be achieved because right and wrong are illusions (we’re talking best practice, not ethics or morals). So I daily face off against an invincible foe, trying to find perfection, the ever elusive philosopher’s stone, which will turn this banal reality of human imperfection, compromise, and antinomy into some higher evolved reality. I know that it will never happen, but that is still my obsession.

So I question all things, I make decisions, I make mistakes, I meditate on decisions and mistakes, I attempt to make better decisions. What do I realize?

That we are all doing the exact same thing.

We are all just trying to get along in this thing called life, we just happen to be in such close proximity to one another that we are compelled to compare this practice to that. We are compelled to find a better way, compelled to have our methodology reign supreme. We are compelled to have our voice heard because we are slaves to factors and elements that we do not understand. We are the very incarnation of antimony, hopelessly bound to individuality yet shackled to our need to be part of a larger group. This makes our very nature unstable, unsustainable, predictably inefficient and prone to change.

Every change is still guesswork, thus, continuing the cycle ad infinitum.

Perhaps our far future progeny will be able to address these inconsistencies in our nature and create some semblance of social harmony. Until then we are our own greatest champions and single greatest enemies. Until we all understand the plasticity of life, that nothing is for certain, nothing is absolute, and anything that is declared to be is nothing more than aggregate agreement, we will persist as a hopelessly lost people. We are Janus, many faced, attempting to reconcile our incomprehensible complexity.

bryce

Success vs Failure: Your Mind

The world is finally catching on to the fact that the mind is the new frontier for virtually all commerce. As ephemeral things such as brand loyalty, employee-employer dynamics, gender roles, and race constructs morph and bend, more and more managers & strategists have had to apply traditonally unconventional knowledge to solve new problems in the 21st century. VB ICON likes to believe that it is on the forefront of one of these new paradigms, but the fact remains that a new zeitgeist has descended upon us…

The mind is the new mine.

As some of you who follow my blog, you may remember that I break up the human existential condition into 5 parts: Mind, Body, Heart, Soul, and Spirit. This is an offshoot from the conventional Christian breakdown which has only the Flesh (body), Soul, and Spirit. I add in the Heart and Mind because they have qualities which I believe can be observed and dealt with separate from the other components and this expanded construct has also led to several of the cathartic realizations I’ve had over the last year and a half. Although each component complements and affects the others, they maintain what I believe to be very distinct differences which, once understood, can lead a person to greater enlightenment and a bump down the path of self actualization.

What is the mind? I am not going to venture into an ontological debate about where the mind exists because quite frankly my answer involves multiple dimensions and a whole slew of esoteric, theoretical components that aren’t my main focus tonight. So I will simply say this about the mind: it is the conscious. It is the place where all neutral information goes to be considered and meditated on. The brain, the physical component of the mind, is simply a computer which receives and sends out signals, whereas the mind interprets those signals for the purpose of creating perspectives and opinions. Using inductive reasoning, one can see how the mind is affected by the other components of existence… The spirit, which some may call the conscience, offers positive uplifting information. The body simply seeks maximum, short term pleasure. The heart offers undifferentiated emotion, skewing the interpretation off things this way and that. The soul though, for me, is rather neutral; its manifestation will be comprised of how the individual mixes the other components.

The mind is then an extremely interesting component. As the wellspring of conscious thought, the mind is the seat of practical intelligence. The mind is exceptionally malleable, prone to changes as one ages or gains more information. The mind is where we create our biases and our subjectivities, it is literally the site of our views on life. In our conscious we look at ourselves and assess such things as self worth or self efficacy. Our mind is generally the vehicle through we engage in introspection or an evaluation of the effectiveness of all our components working together. Therefore the mind is an extremely instrumental place. I mean it is the faculty through which we express our conditional free will; I say conditional because all of us are bound by something. Nevertheless, the mind is the progenitor of action and therefore something that we should all vigorously strive to understand.

As aforementioned, our mind is defined by an intricate latticework of predispositions and biases. These arise from experience, childhood development, parental relations, and natural personality propensities. However, most of us are unaware and will vehemently deny that we have success crippling biases. Why? Because many of these biases lurk deep within our subconscious and are very comfortable places where we tend to hide our insecurities or general ignorance. Thus the mind becomes bogged down by useless information that only serves to hinder us and never actually bring anyone forward. This is why so many women will make the conscious decision to stay with an abusive man or why a person who hates their job will be paralyzed with fear to pursue alternative careers. These same deeply embedded neuroses lead people to constantly blame others for their shortcomings or only accept limited responsibility. Under these hindered mental conditions you find those who complain, those who judge, those who lash out in insecurity, and a myriad of other observable symptoms.

Sound like anyone you know? Perhaps maybe yourself?

Those who are not currently doing what they’d like to be doing or passionately pursuing some goal are living in failure. This does not mean that they are failure, but instead are living in a state of failure. These people have allowed their circumstances to define them and have acquiesced to the torrential current of life and simply quit. They had kids, got married, got fired, had too many bills and just began surviving. They really stopped believing in the dream. I know you’ve heard shit like this before, but really its true. Those who achieve, those who truly accomplish in life are those who refuse to bow down to the relentless pressure of life; they instead fight back with a pressure that overpowers life’s obstacles. They are objective about their struggles, not blaming others or blaming the economy, but instead shouldering the blame then coming up with a practical solution. They sacrifice every goddamn drop of energy they have. Why? Why are these people so resilient? Because they believe in whatever it is they are trying to achieve.

Here’s how it all works. The mind is a remote control and the game is being alive. We are all nothing more than self fulfilling prophecies with chance, luck, some Providence and occasional misfortune peppered in. When the mind believes in a goal, obstacles become minor inconveniences, its simply shifts gears and maneuvers around them. Thus those who achieve seem to have some upper edge, some superior intellect or unfair assistance helping them, when in fact they are simply those that align with a goal. Now here’s the kicker, we are all believing in something, even those not achieving their aspirations. Most of us have programmed our minds to accept life as subpar, we think God is punishing us, or Jesus wants us to learn a lesson. We think that maybe it wasn’t our “destiny” or God’s will for us to be the lawyer, doctor, or CEO we once envisioned. That is all nonsense. Utter nonsense.

Your mind will act on the physical because your mind controls your actions. Your actions control your opportunities because the harder you work the more fertility for opportunity you generate. Mate that with wisdom, prayer, meditation, and an acute eye for analysis and you suddenly have people who are “successful”. They aren’t special or more talented; by thinking and acting they allowed their prophecies to be self fulfilled.

This is the most important lesson as we look towards a shaky future. Geopolitics are uneasy and the world is poised to go through a very uncomfortable transition, it is imperative that those who are ripe begin to get their minds right for success. This is not New Age thought, most of these principles can be found in virtually every culture, Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Asiatic, and Sub-Asiatic all have versions of this simple core principle. YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK.

If you think you are shit, you will commit actions which prove you are shit. If you think you are a 24 year old CEO, you will act in ways that prove and eventually realize you are a 24 year old CEO. The physical realm is an eventuality of all the intangible realms and right now the mental is one primed for investment.

bryce

Thoughts III: The Thought Spectrum

Your thoughts are like energy levels or states of matter. See at one end of the spectrum there’s solids. Low energy and low movement by molecules. The next phase is liquid, more movement and more energy. Then gas and plasma. Even more energy and movement respectively. Now as a substance changes from states to state, does thr substance’s molecular form change?

No it does not.

Whether water is ice, liquid, or water vapor its molecular formula is still H20 and that is not going to change. Thoughts are very, very similar. See the thought spectrum ranges from faith, to uncertainty, to disbelief with of course a variety of subphases in the between. Thoughts can go through phase changes, which if uncontrolled can cause the thinker to experience different things some good and some bad. Just think about the benefits of ice, liquid water, and water vapor… None of them are better than the other in totality, for they each have specific purposes and can be harnessed for different utilities.

Faith is something we are all born with. Think about a child between the ages of 0 months to about 8 years old, they wake up not knowing about how they’ll be clothed or what they’ll eat but just know that things take care of themselves. God has meted out to all of us a measure of faith which is the purest form of all active thought. Now faith isn’t all spiritual. Faith is simply believing in a formula and its subsequent outcome. Faith is saying “I’m going to study for this test because positive study habits provide better test results.” Its creating an solution and going through the equation knowing that it will work. Faith is a great place to be because it allows us to utilize virtually all of our potential.

Uncertainty is the nest phase. Uncertainty occurs when we see that life isn’t necessarily as easy as we viewed before. Its the awkward phase in life. Its your first run in with an unreliable person or your first break up. Its waking up on Christmas morning to no toys because your parents couldn’t afford them. Its losing a close family member to a disease. Its the rational reaction to “life isn’t fair” and “shit happens”. No longer are you quick to assume that life works on your behalf and things don’t always work out. Where faith can sometimes be naïve, uncertainty is the “eye opening” experience.

Disbelief is chronic exposure to the elements that incite uncertainty. These thoughts are “pessimistic”, caustic, and critical. They challenge the status quo and see simply results. Many empiricists are disbelievers, because until a thing can produce a thing of its own, that thing is unviable. Disbelief is the response to many breakups and fake friends. Its being homeless at 13 and 16. Being picked on or being hungry. Its being racially marginalized for decades and seeing every white person as the enemy. Its distrusting the government because they are all crooks and duplicitous. Disbelief has a hard time believing there is a God, especially a transcendent God who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Disbelief can barely find love because its stuck to its past etc.

The overwhelming majority of my thoughts leaned to disbelief for the last 6 years. As I experienced more disappointment more of my thoughts phase shifted down to disbelief. My uncertainty began when I got to California. I was a spoiled kid from the suburbs of Oklahoma, cast into the urban jungle that is east Inglewood. I had many nights with little to no food, a decade straight of underwhelming Christmases even though my dad worked hard, heartbreaks, and insecurity. By the time I entered high school I simply wanted to survive, Darwinism, and I phase shifted even more each year in to a callous, unbelieving prick.

Here’s the beauty though. Cancer cells are nothing but normal cells gone rogue. They phase shift into something malignant, like faith to disbelief. However, if one can apply the appropriate mental treatment, one can get back to the original phase, faith.

And what is faith plus experience? Wisdom. Being a child is in fact naïve and expected manna to fall from the sky is idiocy. However, taking all the pain and disappointment you’ve experienced and still believing in God’s triumph in your life inspires wisdom. If you can simply grasp the concept that you live in a limitless system created with limits, you can begin to move mountains. Mankind, especially when they allow their spirit to lead their mind possess infinite potential. When paired with a belief that you will succeed at something, like say a marriage or a business or a career choice, you create a mental and spiritual picture which becomes currency to this earth.

Equate in patience with the reduction of pride, then you allow more room for progress.

So here’s the formula:
1) Faith (belief in the success of something) + Experience (that which has shaped your perception/perspective) = Wisdom.
2) Wisdom + Patience (knowing God has a timetable superior to yours) – Pride (or obstructive ego) = Progress
3) Faith —–> Progress by way of Respecting the process (whatever method you have prayed, meditated, or thought excessively about)

Allow your thoughts to get back to faith. Even if you aren’t necessarily God fearing, understand that faith in something promotes the mind to fall in love with something. When you do find your psyche enamored with a goal or concept you will be more prone to discovering a way of accomplishing that. Disbelief and uncertainty cloud pure intent behind fear, pain, and doubt. They are like having a Plan B and C because you can never fully commit to plan A. COMMIT TO PLAN A AND PLAN B AND C NO LONGER ARE IMPORTANT.

Remember that faith is a hope for better things to come, even if that means things aren’t perfect as you work to that place. Faith is an obsession with betterment, a blanket of peace in time of turmoil, and verification in time of harvest.

Keep your thoughts in line with faith and watch your life turn around.

FKJR