Faith Beats Logic

I started on a journey the summer before my junior year of college. That was the year I started asking God for wisdom. 

My junior year I transferred to a different university on a basketball scholarship. Within 72 hours of arriving, I was doing two-a-day’s in an unfamiliar place with complete strangers. The only bonds I had were with my best friend who would leave to get back with her abusive ex boyfriend two weeks later and my teammate who had thrown me an alley oop during my recruitment trip.

I had started praying for wisdom about three weeks before.

In my backpack I carried a book by Mike Murdock The Wisdom Commentary, which I read vociferously. I studied that text as closely as I could, often times reading a passage at 5:47AM before heading to a grueling practice. 

During that year, I would learn things about my resiliency that I didn’t think possible. I struggled. I suffered. I conned and stole to feed myself. I was on a grind that I couldn’t fathom.

I fondly referred to it as my “incubation” year. In Christian mysticism, especially esoterica that references the Prophets of the Old Testament, one can find references about places that God would take these holy men to in order to consecrate them for a life of service to His wisdom. They were generally caves. Incubation sites were places where God would speak to men in visions and the necessarily rugged terrain and paltry circumstances forced them to act upon faith.

I was inspired. 

My journey to wisdom, however, had only just begun.

Upon my return to my original university, I was faced with a predicament. I was no longer on scholarship, but required to saddle on astronomical amounts of debt to fund my education. I had little more than faith to go off of.

I prayed even more. 

Graduation represented a curious junction. While I knew implicitly that I was shit out of luck, I found myself sitting on the couch of a former associate and eventual business partner and best friend, planning a business that would revolutionze the stultified American corporate system.

More prayer. 

As my work waned, bills soared, and mistakes tripled, I found myself next to desolation facing threatened law suits involving failed business projects, Sallie Mae blowing up my phone, and the only place to lay my head being my parent’s couch that wasn’t long enough to found my entire six foot five frame. 

I prayed several times a day. 

I have always had an unrelenting curiosity regarding the human condition. I found most matters of business — interaction in general — trivial unless it specifically addressed the concerns and dynamics involving two humans. I found myself asking people, “what does it mean to be human,” and being more interested in how they physiologically and emotionally responded to the problem, rather than the answer itself. More and more I probed the minds of my students, their intentions, their schema — there construction of the world in toto until I couldn’t stand the lack of veracity in my actions.

There had to be answers. My prayers abruptly changed. 

In July of 2014, I took a Commuter Express bus to the psychology offices of Michelle K. Conover begging for a chance to learn about the emergent structures of brain activity. I had spent the prior seven months studying physics concepts like relativity and quantum theory, neuroscience, and mathematical formulations. I would sit on the same couch I woke up and fell asleep upon for 10 or more hours, getting up only to use the restroom, get a snack, or go to Long Beach to teach young men about the material I was ingesting. When I met Dr. Conover, my world changed.

More prayer. Mostly to not get sued for my temerity during my years of entrepreneurship.

The more I consumed the information in the hallowed tomes I had access to in the clinic, the less my mind was focused on faith and its legitimacy. I found my lexicon changing ever so slightly from the nebulous constructs of destiny and purpose to the concrete concepts of executive functioning and verbal fluency. Science was representing the end-all be-all to my questions of existence…

By February of this year, I was at odds at most of the ideas I had held dear since childhood. Gone were the days of ambiguity — my focus was squarely on the activity of the nervous system. 

The more efficient I became in the process of scientific inquiry, the more I began to recognize the idiosyncrasies of life as Homo sapiens — curiosity mounted exponentially. 

My curiosity led me to a vista that I can never turn back from:

The constancy of life.

Science is, singularly, the most misunderstood concept in contemporary society. Unlike religion or religio-philosophic frameworks, science answers very few questions. The goal of science is not to elucidate objecctive phenomena in the universe, but to extricate itself from the bounds set on it by being bound by the limits of humanity. 

Science, taken in its entirety, is much more a verb than it is a subject. It is action oriented — thus it is only as powerful as the parameters set on it by the agents of inquiry.

The peculiar nature of science and humans is that science elucidates the mechanisms by which science is set by said humans. It is the purest form of regressive recursion because it requires that the agent, the human, frame a question in the nature of its own framing. The science of science and humans requires subject matter and subsequent actions to be formed from the same wellspring: that of the mind.

Those who argue that Faith is greater than Logic have tapped into a fallacy that is only half right. More apropos would be the conjecture that faith exculpates one from the tyranny of validation and verification making decision making a hugely more efficient cognitive process. Rather than being bogged down by the particulars of logicial consistency, predictive accuracy, and indepedent verity, faith leverages the power of biological resilience to render an internal narrative that favors survival.

This is huge.

Notice that I have not denounced nor decried faith. This is because rather than attacking it as being ontologically invalid, I have instead seen this mental phenomena as an evolutionary marvel.

I am a semantic nihilist meaning that I do not believe in “meaning” outside of the mental architecture unique to every person. The rich psychological worlds we existe within are instantiated in development as words, phrases, and everntually ideas. Stated plainly: meaning means nothing without the words we use in our inner mental lifes. 

Words are the mind’s currency for purchasing and leveraging the deluge of information pouring in from the senses. Meaning, and rightly so, emerges from the unique interaction between innate structure (neural networks orchestrated by proteins) and the environment that a human finds themselves within.

The immediate precipitate of these premises is that the mind will create a story in which its survival is a probabilistically raised.

This is neither right nor wrong. Right and wrong, also being relative structures, must be couched within the context of the mind of the individual doing the discerning. The processes by which we decide right and wrong are mentalistic ones; that is, they are result of the exact same brain attempting to construct a narrrative based upon the physiological responses, emotions and feelings, that shoot up into conscious awareness as conviction.

Faith and empirical study are two sides of the exact same coin. They are mediated by significantly different neural substrates, undoubtedly, but they can be treated as siblings. 

Your nervous system is not just that which you are aware of. It is a compositional miracle of nonconscious  and conscious program buzzing about predicting, testing, and learning about the environments it finds itself immerse in. Further more, it is communicating with itself about the internal world of the being it animates and informs. 

Science is not in the business of causing anyone to believe anything. Science is a process of creating compelling evidence upon which the thinking agent experiences feelings.

Faith is not superior to logic. They serve two different purposes for the exact same goal: survival. Again, this does nothing to the structure of faith. Faith serves a purpose — especially when that faith is being questioned via the processes of science.

For those that trumpet that faith trumps logic, my question is, “what is your definition of logic?” More often than not, the worm on the end of the line begins to squirm as they answer the question using faulty logic. Humans creat their own version of realitythat exists as a subsystem within a syestem. There are no avenues that lead a human to functioning intrinsically outside of the capacities of a human.

What most people delude themselves into thinking is that they possess an objective rendering of the universe, when they actually have is a mental, word-laden world within which the narrative creaties its own internal consistency. 

People create worlds that answer themselves by invoking themselves. 

Rather than saying that faith supersedes logic, the words most people are grasping at, but lack the technical ability to explain, is that their definition of faith is anemic and they are willing to let the universe do its thing. There is no shame in that. Probabilistically speaking, chances are good. 

When humans begin to acknowledge and embrace the processes and limitations of human ability, then turn their modes of inquiry into that limitation, they will appreciate the semantic construction of reality AND the humans within it. The semantic construction of reality does nothing to invalidate the robustness of personal conviction, but instead explains it in terms that speak to the functionality of the individual themselves. 

Moreover, cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics have done a great deal to show that our word structures are associated with many other word structures. This is where the danger lies because as one is contructing their inner narrative, the words they choose to instantiate their reality might be attached to other implicit associations, rendering a reality that replete with ignorance, bigotry, and inaccuracy. 

Taking your rendering of reality and seeing it as an absolute is the first step to ignorance. Faith, like that I had my junior year, has valid, protective purpose.

I simply implore you to research the difference.

  

Simulacra

Every once in a while, I will get the urge to write about something that the regular person not stuck in the infinitude of philosophical query can relate to.

This post is partially such.

All around this great country, black men are being murdered. Our economy has already been hijacked. An openly bigoted, toupee touting, multibillionaire is a frontrunner for one of the two political parties that have legitimate power in this nation. A new juggernaut has topped the hip-hop world; however, he is the quintessence of the opposite of what hip-hop supposedly has stood for since its inception.

Fake is real. Real is hidden. Absurdity is fact. Fact is interpretation. What is hidden is fodder for all manner of conversation, erudite and idiotic…

I have begun rereading Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and his prescience is striking. While his style of writing can be maddeningly complicated — sometimes necessarily so, the circularity of his prose is part of the mystery of the human condition — his notional position that signs and symbols replaced what was once real hits a very relevant chord.

Western society is an almost entirely pure simulation.

Guys, I struggle with a lot of concepts on a daily basis (the major reason my writing output has dropped drastically) and even at this moment, I feel my head swimming in a less than uniform soup; the complexity of this life is far more than my mishmash of neurons can grapple with before collapsing under the weight of their own perceived self-importance.

But let me try my damnedest to make sense of what I’m attempting to make sense of. Simulation, in this context, points to the mind-contorting non reality that is most easily illustrated by phenomena like “reality” TV, which isn’t real at all. The Kardashian’s are famous for the reason of being famous. In a simulation of this nature, or hyperreality ala Baudrillard, there does not need to be any real claim to profundity; things simply exist through the fact that they exist. Once a concept is lodged into the collective psyche and instantiated through words that imitate concretion, those things miraculously exist.

Through the circularity of speech, certain concepts are born…

Poof.

But why do we have simulation in the first place? If we are living in a reality, then why aren’t things just real in the simplistic sense?

Here I have to call upon my favorite psychologist, Julian Jaynes, and his theory of bicameralism in the brain. Jaynes’ theory is that earlier anatomically modern humans (AMH) probably hallucinated authoritative voices given the wiring of their brains at that point in evolution. In order to “conjure” up the voices towers, ziggurats, and idols were kept in major public areas and houses. On the towers one could find writing that would be a constant proclamation of what the citizens of a city or village should be doing. The idols themselves, often times figurines of past kings or heads of households, may have also caused powerful authoritative hallucinations that laid the foundation for social control mechanisms. These triggers ensured that the hallucinations would persist and maintain social control. 

(I urge you to read the theory in the fullness, as I am only skimming and leaving a lot of detail out.)

As bicameralism gave way to subjective consciousness, making decisions no longer required the authoritarian hallucinations often ascribed to God or gods, but now remained solely the domain of consciousness. Jaynes’ contends that the slow process of breaking down is poignantly illustrated in the often morose laments in the Psalms, where God does not ”speak” and seems to have abandoned man altogether.

Our mentalities — better yet, the mechanisms underlying mentation — changed.

However, in a culture, social control must still be maintained. While we may now be privy to these richly subjective, inner lives we must still be able to form communities where some cohesion is established.

In my working hypothesis, this is exactly what has occurred through the increased sophistication of signs and symbols.

When contemplating how the brain gives rise to purposeful behavior, information streaming in from the senses is not simply taken in and turned into some mental framework. Instead, these streams are seamlessly integrated and various functions at all levels of neuronal activity contribute to processing the information. Emotionality is a huge part of this process as emotions help us “weigh” one set of data against another. From here, its a very small gap to a conversation about interpretation, which is the fertile ground where signs and symbols plants their seeds.

In a system where interpretation is possible, weights can be assigned to different streams of information and many different responses are possible. The organism capable of this wide spectrum of interaction improves its chances of survival as it can better handle novel stimuli and adapt to environments with speed and efficiency.

Humans are a social species and our exchanges occur through communicative strategies, verbal and nonverbal. The brain is constantly updating its version of reality and every single impulse that reaches the nervous system causes a miniature change that hopefully improves survival at some later point in time. The brain renders representations of reality and predicts what behaviors might bring about positive or negative results based on that model.

With models being our means of mentation, it should come as no surprise that signs and symbols hold such sway over us. A sign can represent a myriad of meanings which can then be additional worked upon by individuals or collectives. The brain, using representations, takes an additional representation — a secondary representation, as it were — where even more purposeful information can be applied.

What does this mean? From an argument of social control mechanisms, this allows additional structures — authority and hope, for example — to be projected and acted upon.

An illustration is in order.

Drake has recently ascended the Mount Olympus of urban entertainment. This would a feat in and of itself if I was’t Drake we were discussing. In a culture that values authenticity, machismo, and a willingness to do whatever it takes, Drake falls short on virtually every scale. He was accused of not writing some of his own content, allegations he never disputed; he has become the banner holder for every emotional suburbanite the nation wide; and his willingness to conquer the game has been more through pusillanimous skirmishes and TMZ articles than any sort of nipping in the bud typed behavior reminiscent of prior scions of rap.

So how has this happened?

The first thing to consider is that hip hop might have been founded upon these precepts, but that in no way, shape, or form made them the only symbols of authority in the game. The almighty dollar, the mother of all social controls, has played a serious part in the evolution of the culture. Drake is more of a brand than a rapper and he appeals to a wider a wider audience, giving them the hardcore images of hip hop’s roots with a juvenile emotionality that accompanies the ennui of suburban America. 

What I am driving at is that while a select set of people honor the value of what hip hop used to be, these symbols have already been operated upon and replaced by more powerful symbols in a social setting. This is the power of symbols over actual physical contents: they can replace each other, even mean the same thing without much effort.

Drake allows many more minds to integrate the images associated with hip hop without the unsightly side effects of its perceived anger. He gets to be the emotionally down trodden mobster wannabe on a mission to liberate unappreciated women.

Its brilliant.

Drake, Disneyland, reality TV, fiat currency — they have no real value and thus, their value is astronomical. It is conjured out of thin air by the powers that be. With enough persistence and awareness, even the most egregious affront can be accepted with open arms.

Here is the dirty truth, though…

The human condition, its mental representations, its reliance on interpretational vehicles driving purposeful behavior — all of it — thrive exclusively on signs and symbols. Nothing that the human intuits is actually real in the sense that it is immutable. The very idea that most of our knowledge is interpretation of a few basic physical principles underlies the issues at hand.

We deal exclusively in signs and symbols and we always have. It is how we have evolved to this point! With more complicated societies, the mechanisms for maintaining social order have multiplied as well. From the beginning we created stories, envisioned archetypal roles, and created concepts that helped us explain the reality our mental faculties supplied our conscious (or pre-conscious) minds. It is facile to believe that we ever dealt with “real”.

That is the most frustrating part of this entire charade, is it not? Real is exactly what it is, right!? As I said earlier, real is real… Right?!

With words, gestures, and physical contact, every concept has a universe full of meaning that can be operated upon ad infinitum within a particular culture. So while I agree with Baudrillard, I don’t think we have ever dealt with anything besides simulations. The moment a word or gesture had to represent a term, we were thrust along a trajectory of representation that supports far more complex structures than the physical environment can.

That is the point to communicating! Its what makes our language robust! The ability to communicate a universe of meaning through one word, symbol, or image. So while the Kardashians may not do anything “real”, their plastic life can easily be projected upon as millions of women wish for the fortune, clothes, and life of luxury to be their said reality. They allow for a representation, a series of symbols or images, to take hold in the nervous systems of others!

The simulation has simply grown more complex!

One last bit… The insidious side of symbols, especially those being discussed from within the organisms apprehending and acting upon them, is that where they begin and end poses a headache for any researcher, clinician, or philosophaster. Thus, conflation becomes a huge problem. Conflation, the mixing of symbols, makes conversations about causation and predicted effects virtually impossible. If one person’s representation of reality takes certain streams of information and weighs them heavily, they will have a hard time communicating with someone who weighs other streams heavily. Impossibility of Multilaterality is a fancy term meaning it is impossible to understand another’s position if you cannot achieve common ground. This doesn’t mean that the conversation won’t be efficacious, but that the effect of that conversation will more than likely harm others. Take any political conversation — the result of ideological differences leads to total government shut down, loss of programs, or defamations of character.

There is beauty in this post and I hope you recognize it. To see your mental life as “real” is the first step to absorbing signs and symbols willy nilly and fall into conflationary traps. Instead, one should welcome all images as probabilistic representations, valid in their construction and potentially avenues to follow for some result, but not the end-all, be-all. While the meanings of things, like those referenced with Drake or Kardashian family, may seem like distasteful infarcts against pure concept, there is no such thing as pure concept although some might come arbitrarily close in the eyes of someone else.

That is the majesty of the human condition!

bryce

Soul Mates

Do I believe in soul mates? No.

Do I believe that out of seven billion humans encircling the globe, God or some primordial intelligence bequeathed to each and every one of us a single human whose presence somehow completes us in a transcendental way? No.

Do I believe that there is some woman out there, chilling on the coast of Morocco, sipping Island Paradise’s from a hollowed-out coconut waiting to embrace me in some cathartic ending scene to an epic of rejection-turned-self-discovery?

No.

But, then again, this paints a very limited picture of what a “soul-mate” could be.

Recently, I have begun to become more accepting of uncertainty and complexity. Better stated, I have finally started to make sense of what comprises said complexity and come up with a rational, categorical approach to understanding humans and how they respond to their environment. I have deserted most preternatural explanations for things in favor of what could be considered materialism or physicalism, but only because I have come to terms with the realization that the physical world is more than capable of producing rhapsodic experiences without calling upon extrasensory or supernatural phenomena.

By fitting the so-called supernatural or paranormal within a material framework, the centralizing faculty becomes the nervous system. Rather than discussing the soul, spirit, or any phantasmagoric extension of human consciousness, I choose to contemplate what can be probed and tested independently, namely the brain and its peripheral apparatuses.

The unusual thing is that the nervous system, treated fairly, behaves much like a spiritualistic recounting of the soul. It longs for purpose, importance, attention, positive reinforcement and so forth…

Here is a thought experiment for you. Imagine someone who does not know you personally, perhaps they’ve only heard of you through shared associates or relatives, telling everyone they know that you are not capable of making money. You lack quality financial insight and your ideas are infantile. Imagine they get amongst people that think like them and denigrate your abilities and ascribe to you qualities that just aren’t accurate.

How would you feel? Offended? Frustrated? Disrespected?

This is the common experience with someone that has taken the time to explore the nervous system in all its splendor. Stripped of the illusion that words and imprecise concepts create, one sees that the nervous system is highly capable of exhibiting any of the quixotic, ecstatic, or fantastic experiences we in the human condition. Moreover, physicists and philosophers alike have played with beautiful equations and algorithms to link the human body back to the universe in ways that stretch the imagination.

Take a look at David Bohm’s Implicate Order…

I digress.

When one looks at the human and chooses to do away with fuzzy interpretations, one increases the probability of reasoning along the lines I lay out in this post. The brain, the CPU of our nervous system, employs a melange of biological mechanisms that render to us what we know to be reality. Moments of intense joy or intense pain can be mapped and studied and regardless if we understand every minutiae, it is a safe bet that the brain’s handling of information gives rise to our mental life.

Rage, sorrow, passion — whatever — are us operating as information processors in a massive, massive deluge of data.

To many, this simply will not do. It is far too “inhuman”, too “detached”, or too dismissive of the powerful moments that pass through our lives. Our “come to Jesus moment” or kissing our love for the first time cannot be the result of three pounds of electrified jelly with strings coming out of it. Factor this position with a belief in something bigger than we and a physical explanation of the human in the universe is untenable. “Sorry, Bryce…” they say, “God cannot be a dead, cold physical universe.”

My feelings beg otherwise.

I am not here to argue theology, but I will make mention that the Universe is certainly not dead and while cold in certain places, it is intensely hot in others. The theme of the universe is balance on a staggeringly large bases.

Just like dismissing the nervous system as incapable of amazing experiences, seeing the universe as cold or dead is a grave dishonor to the wonderful macrocosm we find ourselves in.

So, what then, Bryce? You started out this post speaking of soul-mates and somehow managed to interject physics, math, and cosmology into the conversation. What the hell does any of this have to do with finding love?

Everything.

The glue that binds us together, intra- and inter-, is our ability to put symbols, words, and signs to our mental lives. We are actively ascertaining the worlds within and without and the patterns that are used are those of vocal or visual cues. Words or grunts for vocal, facial configurations or hand gestures for visual. The words you are using give rise to to complex concepts you adopt and these mental representations will give rise to subsequent physical behavior.

Your words are everything. Your words are your reality. Choosing one set of concepts over another can literally mean success or demise. If you adhere to a set of beliefs or a set of practices that don’t accurately reflect the world around you, you may cause yourself to become inadvertently frustrated.

The most decried locations in the world are places where various cultures and ideas confront each other (think Babylon, Los Angeles, or NYC). In a strictly controlled social environment, the noise of individual opinion can be mostly dealt with or weeded out and promptly forgotten. However, in heterogenous locales, words, concepts, and meanings conflate into partial representations and fragmented ideas and cohesive traditions are stripped of their original potency.

As cohesion breaks down, the predictability promised by something like a God-ordained soul mate decimates. One is confronted with alternate potentialities and without a flexible framework, things could be bleak.

With a world as intermingled as our own, if your notion of a soul-mate is a predestined, pre-ordinated, pre-selected, magical being selected by Someone preceding the universe, with whom you will experience some type of rhapsodic bliss with, you could be setting yourself up for disappointment or ultimate failure.

Here is another consideration. I do not believe in completely free will; ergo, I do not believe in free will. Human brain function often resembles chaotic systems which are formally determined (no free will), but unpredictable given the complexity of the system. We are apt to do things in particular ways and while that specific content cannot be completely predicted, probability gives options of high likelihood. What this means for this discussion is that biological makeup constrains options and experiences constrain them even more, making some of us susceptible to matters of the heart and others not so susceptible.

Where one person might not ever believe in a soul mate and never find one because of it, another might not believe in a soul mate and accidentally stumble upon someone magnificent. The inverse is true as well. Someone may actively believe in soul mates and stumble upon someone that sets them on fire, while another may fervently believe in soul mates and become a spinster.

This is because we are a whole lot more than what we believe. We have personalities, idiosyncrasies, habits, and skill sets that interact in statistically causal ways on our environment.

We are walking balls of chance aided by consciousness, whose purpose is to make superior choices in the face of novel stimuli.

My own make up perfectly summarizes my experiences: I spent years trying to clone my parents because of my insecurities that became complicated by my charisma and ambition. I was gifted at creating fantasy worlds and by creating a make-believe, perfect partner I constructed a mental extension I could hold on to and never face reality with. I did not know how to face my own demons — demons that negatively affected how I chose the women I dealt with and the reactions I had towards them — and I inadvertently created disappointment after disappointment.

While I held on tight to the notion that my “soul-mate” existed, the real reason was because I had a deep void within me that I needed to address and fill.

Hindsight is 20/20: at the time I had no idea that I was swearing by and acting upon a mental construct out of sheer, distorted desire. I sincerely believed in what I believed. It was a perfect orchestra of fuzzy concepts: heart, spirit, soul, mates, God, and miraculous plans. To hell with the data that flew in the face of my perfectly articulated belief system. With beautiful words I had erected quite the monument to passion.

In short, I, bryce, do not believe in soul mates. This doesn’t mean they don’t exist, it means there isn’t enough evidence in their favor and my wholehearted belief in them a decade ago had more to do with immaturity than whimsy. If you do happen to fancy the notion of soul mates, this is not an indictment against you. I invite you to question yourself deeply, but if you still happen to fall in that camp, more power to you.

This post is not all doom and gloom, however. While I may not be beholden to frameworks that find strength solely upon desire and misplaced categorization, I do believe there are people out there that bring out something or some things in us unlike others. There is a woman or man that can increase your happiness, while decreasing your stress, with much more potency than others. He or she can make you a better father, friend, coworker, athlete — whatever — and you will experience legitimate happiness.

The trick is, like me, you have to do some soul (irony, I know) searching in order to gain a better understanding of who you are. Happiness cannot be given, only activated from within yourself. Sometimes, that searching requires you to try, get your ass handed to you, then learn from that pain. Sometimes it requires you being the victim; sometimes you’ll be the culprit.

No, I do not revel in the notion of a consecrated woman who will preternaturally aid me in my life journey; but I have no issue believing that there is a woman or women that I could share in happiness with. I use plural not because I’m an advocate of polyamory, but because there is no reason to believe that there’s only one person that can bring you a level of happiness above the rest. Even the slightest statistical treatment would reveal that many, many people could bring you the kind of happiness we dream of and if someone reaches you and brings you past that threshold, then you are cooking.

If you are happy with yourself and someone comes into your life that shares and eventually co-creates that happiness, what does it matter if he or she is “The One”? They are the one that is there and you are happy. Stop feeling the need to fabricate additional concepts to serve as a crutch for your commitment. If you love someone and they love you, you are soul mates by default.

No other explanation, natural or supernatural, is needed.

bryce

Unmasking The Matrix

What if things weren’t as they appeared? What if the history we were told, the ideas that we were taught, and the norms we were instructed to follow were mere distortions? What if society was no more than a cleverly concocted scheme used to pull the wool over our “true” eyes?

Well, all of these are true.

Things are not as they appear; history and social norms are distortions, and society is a cleverly concocted scheme. However, there doesn’t need to be a shadow elite or a corrupt government to facilitate these skew.

One has to look no further than their own brain.

Steven Novella, a neurologist at Yale’s School of Medicine offered a quote that summarizes the workings of the brain beautifully:

When someone looks at me and earnestly says, “I know what I saw,” I am fond of saying, “No you don’t.”

You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under.

Ouch.

In Dr. Louis Cozolino’s book, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, he talks about the widely misunderstood phenomena of how the brain actually becomes conscious of information. Most of us know that there is a wealth of information that exists beneath the consciousness, that is information that one isn’t aware of; however, that there are processes beneath the conscious escape most. That is, all of the information that eventually reaches your conscious mind, that part of the brain that you know and are well aware of, has already been processed and treated by the processes preceding conscious thought.

Thusly, you do operate under distortions; namely, your own.

Your reality is not the reality; it is consistently skewed towards the narrative that you are operating under. That narrative is your underlying beliefs, preferences, and hidden feelings operating on an unconscious level.

Now, society, as I have proclaimed over and over on this blog, is little more than a dyadic relationship between individual and collective. Society is a summation of interactions with culture coming about as an emergent property. The nature vs. nurture debate has long since been deemed a superficial argument since it is clear that both are involved in a human being’s development. Thus, as humans form societies as a means of evolutionary resilience, societies form humans in a process of necessary cohesion. In order for societies to remain together, a common set of rules must be established so that behavior is graded against an impersonal and impartial rubric…

However, human sociality is anything but impersonal and impartial and this leads to the distorted notion that it negatively brainwashes.

Let me be very, very clear: brainwashing is real and there have been plenty of documented attempts at system wide influences by the government. However, much of the rationale behind brainwashing is evolutionarily consistent with maximized social cohesion and moral interpretation. Morality is actually hardwired into us through the insular cortex amongst other regions (nature); however, it is society, mainly culture, that modulates what one group of people find acceptable or morally reprehensible.

The conversation of free will, much like the nature vs. nurture debate, has become rather anachronistic in modern scientific circles as well. Although we are hardwired in ways that create the substrate for our behavior, we all vary as to what is necessary to stimulate certain responses. Moreover, as one develops, one’s experiences shape them one way or another and learning can cause variations on schemata. Thus, one is bound by their brain physiology and propensity given brain circuitry, however, there exist many degrees of freedom within that framework allowing for myriad behaviors.

Everything that is is the result of life as an algorithm and its mode of transfer and transcription, DNA. Your genes have built you in a particular way and you will behave in a particular way. Additionally, the life algorithm has one goal: to continue to live and out of this process it is likely the brains came to develop. Brains were able to better modulate homeostatic optimality and conscious brains increased this process all the more. One interpretation sees our jump in evolution as being facilitated by language. Language not only allowed us to grow as a social species, but instigated the brain to become even more complex and able to generate inner images and reflect on these modalities.

The “matrix” is not an external imposition, but instead a physical reality of one’s own brain processes. However, Darwinism is still about survival of the fittest and you can damn well be sure there are those that operate to gain a disproportionate amount of power and influence. We are all very aware of these people and they are the closest thing to a secret society as one can imagine.

It is imperative then, that one, once cognizant of these described processes act in a manner which promotes life. Instead of seeing the ignorance of many misguided religions, political regimes, and social agendas and responding with further divisive ignorance, one must get in the habit of realizing these structures are as natural as language. They are supported by our physical morphology; to grant them some external agency, some mystery, “evil” connotation is a sin of ignorance. Ignorance can be cured. To persist in ignorance is stupidity. Stupidity is much more resilient.

The way to usher in a society that harmonizes all of the naturally occurring brain structures and is aligned with life on this planet is to, as objectively as possible, audit the stimuli entering one’s conscious mind, keeping in mind that this information has already been tainted by one’s disposition, beliefs, and preferences. With this in mind, one can begin to alter how their un- and non-conscious apparatus judge information. Racism can be reversed, but only after one opens themselves to processing information different. This is a long and difficult journey.

Our conscious apparatus is an evolutionary gift that allows us to vastly accelerate the course of evolutionary progression. Although our genes give us certain allotted abilities and interests, we can take those batons and run with them unlike any other species on this Earth.

Instead of wasting one’s time fighting external ghosts and blaming “systems” for one’s plight, perhaps its time to turn inward and reflect then turn outward and reflect on the totality of humanity and in turn, life. The system is only as good as its constituents and if you are playing the blame game, you are perpetuating the same bigotry, asymmetry, and division as those you which to overturn.

Speak the language of universality or you will simply be contributing to the problem.

bryce

The Mutable Reality

My current pursuits, both theoretically and experimentally, involve untangling the enigma that is ‘reality’. I am a firm believer in the primacy of the social environment as the actuator of thoughts, therefore, I have come to grips that much of my obsession over what is and what isn’t stems from my conservative Christian background. My parents were never the Bible thumping, closed-minded sort, however, I was socialized into believing a very rigid framework of physical life; although our explicit belief in the supernatural added a metaphysical dynamism that is still extant today.

When asking, “what is reality?”, it captures perfectly the essence of cognitive dissonance. Dissonance is best described as ‘friction’ that arises when two thoughts are in opposition to one another. For instance, many married couples experience extreme dissonance when the wishes of their mother or father go against the wishes of their spouse. To hold these oppositional cognitions in the mind causes discomfort which naturally leads a person to think or do something in response as a means to reduce this discomfort. Such actions may be to shut down completely, become emotional or even detached, and eventually try their hardest to avoid the topic altogether.

To ponder reality is to test the precipices of sanity. The principles of relativity tell us that spacetime is the substrate in which we all sit within depressions caused by the massive objects around us such as the earth, sun, moon and so forth. This substrate, the fabric of reality, seems so diaphonous, so thin, yet, it is obstreperous to the point of statistical impossibility. On a mental level, to consider what consists of reality is to contemplate factors that have affected us at every point and these constant stimuli are the hardest to consciously detect; they’ve been hardwired into us as “real”. On a physical level, intense scrutiny of this fabric at microscopic levels yields a world of ‘quantum foam’ or intractable probability. Its almost as if the fabric itself works to keep us from truly understanding it.

I personally believe that much of the problems trying to find truth is that so many of us hold on to the idea that there is an interfaceable, absolute truth somewhere deep beneath the folds of existence. While this may or may not be true, another question comes to the surface. If there is some all-pervasive truth, how would we be able to find it in the first place? We interface life through our conscious projection of ourselves. This conscious awareness is purely abstract, taking the abstractions of life and processing them into some cogent application. This implies a very subtle understanding of limit, a true paradox that seems to be a cardinal underpinning of reality. Although abstractions are infinitely malleable, they are usually limited by the faculty perceiving them. In layman’s terms, although the mind my be able to conceive and create an incalculable degree of input information, the output information is still limited to that mind’s specifications.

Thus, reality does become the progeny of the mind; perception does indeed become reality from this vantage point. However, given that cognition is merely the computation of computations, an infinitely recurring sequence of recursions, one can say that perception is not reality either. If a mind is capable of infinite creation then its finite emanation does not constitute the whole of its abilities. Your perception is the finite expression of what you believe is, but that is not the end all for a faculty that possesses outsized ability.

Nothing must be, yet everything is.

What can be said, then? George Orwell introduced a concept in his famous book 1984 that revolutionized the way that many think. It is a concept I have discussed on this blog, doublethink. Doublethink is the ability to hold two opposing concepts in one’s mind and believe them both. For those acute readers, you should be thinking back on the cognitive dissonance described earlier in this article. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort and most people do things to resolve this discomfort. I, as well as former theoretical physicist, David Bohm, and current dean of Rotman Business School at University of Toronto, Roger Martin, believe that the answer to the struggles between cognitive finitude and infinitude lie in one’s ability to thrive in that dissonance. That is, you take no sides, you favor no opinions, and you consider as much of the information available with equal curiousity.

Nothing must be, implies that in and of themselves, nothing on this earth must be anything. Nature and the cosmos thrived for billions of years before us and will thrive for billions more years after. The only intrinsic concept in the entire universe of existence is the fabric itself that gives rise to all phenomena; beyond that, everything is a derivation, an arbitrary meaning, created by the conscious being observing it. Yet everything is, implies that as conscious beings, we will create these meanings and this process of understanding is critical to the fitness of our species.

However, the truly perceptive minds will not try to make an absolute meaning; they are aware of the universal paradox besetting their mind. The Lemniscate Theory, a philosophical axiom, states that we are infinite beings living within the confines of the finite. We exist asymptotically to life, death, and certain physical constants (which may or may not change as we evolve). Thus, one must accept and embrace the tendency to become rigid, along with the necessity to be flexible. One must be willing to adopt the principles of doublethink, to accept and reject, to no accept and not reject, any and everything, including one’s own experience and concept of self. The reason that most of us have a hard time understanding the subtleties of reality is because we have grown fond of our own minds, we’ve fallen in love with our own experiential data, disregarding the phenomena of others.

There are epistemological and ontological questions abounding endlessly, of course; however, these imply a sense of absolution, something that may or may not actually be interfaceable with our current conscious set up. This sets up a perfect explanation for our species; a sort of fractal explosion of expression… As this system proliferates, we exist as discrete identities sharing relevancies on various levels which could, in theory, be mapped out and analyzed. But even that analysis would be subject to analysis and so on, ad infinitum.

To contemplate the conception of reality is a beautiful process of growth. A common misnomer is that dialogue directly means communication between two people. Actually, the root words are, dia, which is “through”, and logos, the word. In other words, dialogue is discovering a meaning through the words. A dialogue can occur within one’s self or within a larger group. Many of these ideas were made clear to me through David Bohm’s, On Dialogue, however, I had begun developing a proto-understanding throughout the last few years.

Reality is about seeing one’s self in all dynamics and contexts; an individual and a collective; subjective and objective; linear and nonlinear. By contemplating these oppositional pairs as dyads, one begins to see just how reality is constructed; more pointedly, one begins to see why the world is the way that it is.

Pondering reality brings one to the edge of current conscious understanding and it chomps at the bit for whatever is next, if there is. An articulated journey into one’s construction of reality begins to fashion together a coherent framework, even if one is aware that the way they think effects it. Getting an accurate read on reality is not unlike Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, where one can only get a partial measurement of a quantum system. If you accurately measure position, you cannot accurately measure velocity and vice versa. One cannot accurately ponder reality without affecting one or more variables; this may be frustrating to some, but my admonition is to consider why that is frustrating. By questioning the processes by which you react and respond to this expression of life, you come to understand this whole thing just a little bit better.

Life, reality, is an infinitely variating construct. Not unlike the descriptions of God within religious groups, life is both infinitely complex and infinitely simple. Thus, it can and will mutate. Its derivations can be mutated; they should be mutated. People should play with the expression of life as whimsically as sport or art; its meant to be stretched and contracted, probed and scrutinized. However, one should not consider it abstract or absolute; it is a fractal, a fractional dimension, which perfectly occupies both. It becomes self-evident then collapses into pure theory only to reemerge at some other point as concrete again.

Let your reality be free.

bryce

Psychosoma

The shifting sands of time, chance, and meaning,
The seeming, importance of the present moment,
Spoken from the words of one whose foment,
May it may not be the truth.

After all, what is “the truth”?
Shall we foray into epistemic’s?
Or perhaps venture that The Truth is indeed endemic,
To the systemic thinker, unplugged from the veiled matrix?

When we speak of this and that,
With conviction of that or this,
When we arbitrarily create meanings behind things unexperienced,
How delirious must we actually be?

How serious do they actually think;
Quite serious if you’re asking me,
The feeling or the tasking of The,
Organization of this world as some sort of cogent…

Yet, we are not agents of linear eventuality,
There is no systematically available actuality,
The actuality is one’s semi-principality,
Or autonomy over one’s self.

Even that is shoddy.

For in this body, this avatar, all things and no things are possibilities,
And there is a time for all things,
For war and peace, for coarse and fleece,

And we are all sheep and wolves and lambs and lions,
We are sinner and we are Zion’s,
Progeny of probably all modes of possibly partial potentiality.

Meaning is ascribed and attributed by the subject,
The object of our inquiry worked upon by forces seen and unseen,
What does it mean that inevitably this or most certainly that?
Human dealings are anathema to exact.

So in the spirit of anti-absolution,
The very statement that no things are concrete,
Renders them in constant continuum between you and me,
Nothing is absolute, this color me infinitely abstract.

And in the infinitude of possible ways we may collude,
We are all precisely culpable.

bryce

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

Embracing Your Struggle

In your youth struggle is your job.

It is your occupation and you should very well give the entirety of your effort to it.

The gripe a preceding generation always has with its successor is that they are too headstrong; the kids think they know better because they have calculated and adjusted for the errors of their parents. One of the prevailing mantras of parenthood is to raise your kids to be better than yourself; a mantra that like so many idiosyncrasies in verbal communication veils some difficult truths to swallow.

There are many problems endemic to human interaction but it is my belief that chief among them — and I’m not using that with creative license, I do indeed mean chief — is our persistent belief that life is linear. We spend a significant portion of our time trying to creative predictable results with education, legislature, religion, politics and the like, that we start to put our independent beliefs above the veritable panoply of interpretation that exists adjacent and opposite to us.

In order to gain peace with the world we must learn to get over ourselves. A task much easier said than done.

Our generation has experienced things that no other group on earth ever has and as much as we herald that in our communicative channels, I do not believe many understand the gravity of that. We are a more informed cohort, but we are not necessarily any more advanced than those before us. We may have more opportunities than those before us, but that doesn’t mean that those opportunities come without a fight. The conditions of human experience have changed, but the nature, as always, remains aberrantly persistent.

We believe that wisdom can be bought or expedited because we have learned from those who toiled in the decades before we were even thought of. This precludes us from ever truly understanding what youth is about. To add consternation to chaos, our parents do not have clear understandings either; they may possess a tacit, learned understanding, but to translate that into meaningful terms is lost on many people.

So young people go through these early years trying to forge their way into a system, only to be indelibly whittled down by inevitability.

You MUST struggle now. That is your job.

You cannot look to particular conditions, those are meaningless in the eyes of objective reality. You cannot say, “I’m going to change corporate America by starting my own business”, that is a clear contradiction. It is not until you struggle and learn why corporate America is fucked that you stand even a shadow of a chance of any meaningful reform.

The struggle of learning is the constant because it reflects the nature of humanity. No one can deny that the specifics of our culture and ancient Egypt were different, however, an adept eye can see that the generalities, the larger scope of human expression is unyielding. If we focus only on the micro then we remain in our delusion, fighting wars of ego and redundancy while swearing we are making changes.

The worst thing that can happen to a young person is that they find success early. They will self destruct because it is a commonplace tendency for humans to grow complacent and rigid when they think their system of operations works. They will more than likely create even more egregious errors than their predecessors; they’re actions will be identical, however the ever increasingly scrutiny by society mixed with the greater abundance of information will amplify their ignobility.

You must sit in your struggle and confront it daily. You must soak in its astringent acids everyday for it will burn completely the useless necrotic tissue of youthful ignorance. The skin will rejuvenate and instead of coming back as it was or simply coming back thicker, it will be tailor made for the life you have chosen. You won’t just be tougher because certain situations don’t call for ubiquitous toughness; you will be dynamic.

The dynamism is the calling card of the elite thinker, the knower that traverses the land as adroit observer.

What you think you know, what I think I know is of no consequence to the life force that animates us. What you feel or what convicts you is a fly to a whale; not only is it inconsequential, it exists in a completely different medium. The dimension of wisdom and the dimension of opinion do not exist on the same plane; you must divorce yourself from yourself.

In your struggle, you must employ all of your wit, all of your faith, and all of your deepest stratagems to unlock the secrets of your own existence. Whether you call upon a higher power or not, there are secrets that are only revealed after one has suffered to gain them. That suffering is your sacrifice, it is your toll to a realm that moves superior to our own.

Do not pray for your struggle to end; pray for you to outmatch your struggle. Pray for the skill to outwit your obstacles and outperform your rivals. Match that skill against all the things you have learned falling down and getting back up and then, only then, will you taste the delicacy of wisdom.

We all believe that the opposite side of struggle is some earthly success. That my struggle ends when I get paid or my struggle ends when I get married to the person of my dreams. But those will be ripped from your hands if you have not filled yourself with the thoughts of wisdom. Proverbs 8:11 says it best

“For wisdom is better than rubies and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared unto it.

It goes on to say in verses 17-18:

“I love them that love me: and those that seek me early shall find me.
Riches and honor are with me; yea, durable riches and righteousness.

Wisdom is the opposite of struggle, not some expression of success. Wisdom is success. Some people say wisdom is knowing what to do with the information you receive; I don’t care how one defines it, I just know that when they get there they act differently. Many people believe they are wise, yet, their actions are foolish. That is not to say that wise people don’t make mistakes, but their actions taken as a whole will be different.

In closing, Balthasar Gracian famously said in his Art of Worldly Wisdom that one should, “think with the few and speak with the many.” What one should see is that, yes, there will be those that are incapable of wisdom, but the more invidious aspect is that even those that are “wise” will find themselves at odds with one another. Wisdom, especially that of this world, is an infinite a realm of consideration as that of folly, to engage others is dangerous to your own progression.

Thus, the conditions change, but the nature of man remains the same; tribalized, divided, and perennially conquerable.

But all that matter is conquering one’s struggle.

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.

Valentine

There aren’t enough trumpets for me to play
My sweet song of desire upon;
I won’t be made a liar anon,
These instruments fail me in my time of need.

This time I’m freed,
Liberated by the words she speaks,
Every time she peaks,
I feel as though I’ve somehow touched the heavens summit.

Her name, I will hum it, sing it, bring it,
To the masses as a token of how I once was broken,
Yet, mended I stand before them unbended,
Because I befriended this daughter of heaven.

Let my voice rise like leaven,
So that I may proclaim her name, Angel,
Winged messenger from the throne room of the Almighty,
Rightly, I’m so glad you find me, acceptable;

To bear your love and to bear your cross,
It once seemed that our love was star-crossed,
And we almost crossed out each other’s name,
I’m so happy such a shame wasn’t claimed,

Since I would’ve been to blame,
Yet, we inevitably remained, persisted, and refrained,
From retreat and so my treat is the purest of delicacies.
Thank you for the gift of you and me.