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

Is Social Media “Real” ?

Taking a brief break from the atmospheric realms of abstract thought, I turn my attention to some unsettling notions brewing on the timelines of my various online presences. The notion at first glance seems tenable, “social media isn’t real.” I mean this follows, right? Social media is remote and, by that account distant, phenomena which really has no true force on one’s life, right? Right?

This is a problem that can be approached from a couple different ways, but lets first take a moment to question what constitutes real. What is reality? A few posts ago I discussed this very subject and its something that continues to drive me in my private meditations. For the sake of conversation, lets consider reality, “receiving, interpreting, and organizing stimuli.” The process of living in a reality is taking the sensory and extrasensory (if you believe in such things) stimuli and organizing them in a way which creates stability. The brain processes stimuli and through its complex processes a mental state is derived.

This places social media square in the realm of “real.” Why? Because social media presences are nothing more than the virtual manifestation of someone’s thoughts. Whether parody or genuine expression, the processes that bring one to type out a message and send it to the public realm are incarnations of will.

The argument against social media is that it is all entertainment, much like a movie or a TV show. This, again, is myopic. Entertainment, even those things which are acted out, are still “real.” The scenarios may be artificial drama, but they still interact with the audience in a very real sensory way. In the domain of day to day reality, much of what one sees is not artificial drama, but actual interaction between two people.

Moreover, by the account of social-media-as-real naysayers, none of what one sees in life is actually real. Or more precisely, everything is real and unreal simultaneously. This is because one cannot know for sure the intentions or motivations of others, but this does not preclude them from experiencing very real physiological or psychical effects. One cannot say for sure what is dramatized and what is “true,” but these domains overlap one another.

What is real to one person may be unreal to another. Who is right and who is wrong?

Social media is another means of communication; therefore, one should account all the going’s on in their text messages as unreal. Last I checked, people were expressing genuine emotions and mental content, even if that content was somewhat shrouded in the ambiguous haze of intentionality. But intentionality, well, complex multi-intetionality, if I may, could be ascribed to one’s own household. There are many interactions within one’s own house where the complexity of behavior boils down to the complexity of intention; does one then relegate the actions taken by their mother as unreal?

So, is social media real? Of course it is and of course it is not. It causes real psychical responses and transitively, real physiological responses. It isn’t strictly the pursuit of fabricated drama; although, as aforementioned, complex multi-intentionality does play a role. It is a variation of the innumerable abstractions humans manipulate in order to express the complexity of their existence. Thus, it is neither real nor unreal and it is both simultaneously. For those dissatisfied with this ambiguous answer, a more precise response would be that there is no need for “real” or “unreal.” These are merely abstract concepts with no consistent validity outside the realms of one’s own mind; but this is the stumbling block of humanness.

We are unable to receive, integrate, and organize data in a way that is consistent between individuals. We may have some superficial relevancies, but as we probe deeper and deeper into the nature of expression, the interpretations become more and more disparate. Physiologically speaking, our brains may be very similar, but they have many dissimilarities which lay the physical foundation for our mental differences.

Much of our objective “reality,” the shared day to day experience we call society, is driven by things ignorant discarded as “unreal.” The better question to ask one’s self is what can truly be understood and what is doomed to be the fodder of interpretation.

bryce

Chaos: What Is Reality?

I do not treat this blog as an academic source nor do I claim it to be rigorous in an academic sense; however, I do intend for it to be intellectually rigorous by the virtue of the content discussed.

The beginning of understanding is to create the frameworks to attract understanding.

As von Foerster pointed out decades ago, cognition can be thought of as a computation of computations. Although the layman may deeply contemplate ‘what’ he thinks an advanced method of introspection to consider ‘how’ one thinks and to subsequently realize that ‘thinking’ is actually ‘thinking about thinking’. This recursion is a bit difficult to understand outright, but with heavy consideration it eventually begins to make sense.

Another way of explaining it is as a dialectical process between ‘how’ and ‘what’. Its easy to understand that how you think about something sets up what you come to think. If someone asks you how to win a basketball game and your answer is “to score more points”, then you will probably approach the game of basketball as an offensive minded coach or player. The recursion begins when you consider that an offensive minded player feels that he must score more points to win a game. Now the ‘what’, being offensive minded, gives way to the ‘how’, scoring more points. If that player begins to achieve success through this process, he will go on to create a philosophy or way of thinking that continually uses these two premises as complements.

When discussing what constitutes reality responses both sophisticated and naive abound endlessly. As someone with more of a penchant for the social sciences I tend to set up a game theoretical perspective which places myself as an observer on a higher level. Here’s why. The discussion of reality is, in my opinion, not unlike the propositions in absurdism: to find a meaning in life is pointless given the sheer preponderance of information.

To find a rational answer is not a matter of objective possibility, but rather one of current human possibility; humans cannot transcend this invisible boundary of subjectivity and are thus relegated to the parameters of their own subjectively experienced realities.

Ergo, I tend to study “what is reality” by studying what others perceive to be reality, rendering myself a higher order player in any game theoretical system. I am observing the observations of others, creating a concurrent recursion which hopes to entangle the recursions intrinsic to other’s thought processes.

My issue with humans are that we are driven by processes that we are aware of and processes that we are not aware of. Even the most rigorous logician or theoretician is driven by anomalous processes deep within his or her own psyche; we come together to create a larger body of knowledge through such “wisdom of the crowd” processes as peer-reviews and research symposiums, but time and time again history has shown us that we can still be wrong. We are still governed by a myriad of social, developmental, and unknown factors which cause us to think in particular recursive patterns. 60 years ago we believed that neurons were coded one for one with sensory neurons leading to some higher-ordered grandmother neuron. This was widely accepted as fact until it was discovered that there were simply not enough neurons to accept this theory.

Much of our cognition is intuitional; we cannot fully explain through available linguistic methods what we truly believe, yet, we act out our lives according to these beliefs. Arbitrary worlds become institutional opposites as the principles of intuitional thought come against empirical thought and human cognition rushes to fulfill the intrigues of that system. To make matters even more complicated, we are all partially straddling various worlds or institutions; we believe in the rigor or academic pursuit, yet, cling to the notions of a Supreme Being. We cannot fully enumerate why we believe in soul mates; however, we stick close to our beliefs in constitutional processes.

Just a few examples.

When you break down and talk to individuals their beliefs are so real to them; their considerations about reality are so real to them. Even if they do acknowledge some uncertain about the veracity of their opinions, there is always the facile, “thats just the way I see things” clause; a statement that is anathema to the pursuit of empirical truth.

In my higher ordered vantage point, I try my hardest to hold on to as many views about reality as possible. I do not place primacy on intuitional or empirical methods because both are equally necessary. This creates considerable dissonance, obviously, and this dissonance has driven me to cognitive places that I can only precariously explain. Even when I believe that I am on to something it only takes a brief conversation or a cursory experiment to render a theory only partially effective.

It seems to me that life is much like the strange attractors discovered by mathematician Edward Lorenz discussed in chaos theory. The “butterfly effect” describes a nonlinear dynamical system which never fully repeats itself; this effect looks graphically like the wings of a butterfly. Life is neither deterministic nor is it indeterministic, but is simply a confluence of both. However, the overwhelmingly complicated aspect of it is that society, the social construct of reality, is created, legitimized, and maintained by billions of humans which are in and of themselves nonlinear beings.

Much of the world’s confusion is displayed by simply comparing two humans. Only partial agreements, partial agreements, ambiguous goals, many biases, salient and hidden motivators… The list goes on.

As all of us work through our individual confusion (creating “real-life” effects in the process), we set up the emergent structures of the societies around us. Reality becomes a partially natural, partially human superstructure with infinite malleability and infinite dimension, but an individual only has minimal control over that at any given moment (unless they move socially upward and garner more power).

Thus, reality is a self-evident, self-sustaining, self-motivating “program” of sorts; its basic rules are constituted by certain physical and biological probabilities and any higher ordered rules are arbitrations put forth by any being able to contemplate himself or herself (cognition = computation of computations).

This doesn’t seem applicable to everyday reality at first and thats exactly my point. Everyday reality is the confluence of everyone’s individualized, subjective understanding of “reality’, to break those rules requires an ingenuity and a persistence that requires a particular kind of mental recursion to do. One must deconstruct their notion of what is and isn’t in order to reconstruct what they would like it to be. Certain structures of society are simply insurmountable, others are treacherous due to the social rules around them, but, this illuminates not cosmic mandates or supernatural commandments, but simply the continued interaction of human, biological, and physical factors.

When I stand back at this higher-ordered game theoretical perspective, this whole process of life is a veritable madhouse of cognition. He thinks this and she thinks that; I feel that this and they feel that that. The opportunity to create any study is available to any conscious being at any moment and the opportunity to create any meaning about anything is also made available.

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

I Found Love

Nothing is anything, yet everything must be. Everything that you think you know is nothing and nothing is truly ever known.

In my last post, I explained the love I feel towards the woman that holds my heart; this new experience is nothing short of exotic for me, I am enthralled and infinitely perplexed about what to do. Most of the time there are just no words that can really capture what I’m experiencing.

And thats okay.

This need to explain ourselves alludes to the human propensity to believe we “know” anything at all. Our conscious space believes that everything can be subordinated into 3 or 4 dimensional space, that all occurrences and phenomena can be reduced to intelligible responses. The very nature of academia is to create “super linearity” or bullet proof agreements that overcome the nasty little quirks of individual sentience; it is the pursuit of fabricating a network of knowledge which cannot be disproven, can point to better futures for all men, which help explain the complex world around us.

This is why I have always been a fan of academia; academically rigorous courses or pursuits required discipline, creativity, and a mind that can grasp multivariable concepts for the sake of synthesis.

However, lately I’ve been more focused on another synthesis: the blending of esoterica, hidden knowledge, with exoterica, common knowledge, which most of academia falls under.

I have found myself asking this question over and over again: What is it that I am trying to get? Get in this instance means everything from the literal attaining or “getting something” and its mental counterpart, understanding. I have been drilling myself with this question for a little over a year, pushing my cognitive faculties to brink trying to understand what it is I’m trying to accomplish with my limited time here. I immediately went to my tendencies as a person, what do I tend to like, what do I tend to dislike, as sources of my partially submerged, intended trajectory.

That’s when it began hitting me: I want every aspect of my life to be a testament to excellence.

I tend to deconstruct the arguments of others because I feel that few people go through the process of understanding understanding the way that I have. Most of us, especially the brilliant few, are those who can make sense of created information, never really questioning what created it or how it got to us. We engage in all the -ologies without taking the time to ask why. Why are we doing this? Why do our sciences and liberal arts change so frequently? What is underpinning our cognition on individual and aggregate levels?

Why are we?!

Many people ask “how did we get here” or “what made us”. But those to me are inferior to understanding the why of humanity. Throughout recorded history, we have made the same mistakes over and over, have made the same victories over and over, and each version of this performance has been seen as misstep or progression.

My internals beg to differ. There is no misstep, no progression. Really there is nothing and that nothing creates a vacuum for everything to have purpose. It is a drama — a production of sorts — with the major parameters being time and choice.

It is so easy to look back in time and say what the Greeks or Songhai empires did right or wrong, but that same simple lens will be applied to our time now but our descendants in the future! Our right now is plagued by chance and the innumerable factors that are active in our every moment.

For this reason, I have made esoterica and exoterica equal in importance; one cannot exist on secret knowledge and still expect to play a normal role in society nor can one indulge only on common knowledge and expect to be better than mediocre.

Why am I in love?

Angela is everything that I want and need and many things that I never even knew existed. She is the incarnation of known-knowns, known-unknowns, and unknown-unknowns, things that you don’t know that you don’t know. She is my complimentary star in a binary system of deep intimacy and the very thought of her sends chills, physically and nonphysically, through my being. I don’t lust after her, I long for her, and when I’m near her I try to drink in her essence, she is a most intoxicating brew.

Does she piss me off? Yes. Does she make me feel like I’m the greatest man on earth? Yes.

Common knowledge says that no love is perfect, there will be ups and downs. Secret knowledge explains the linkage between two beings, without the crutches of science or art. They are two sides of the same coin; they give the thinker dexterity in whatever arena he or she may find themselves.

Yet, even these assertions are nothing more than fallacy, as I am attempting to explain the inexplicable with words and agreements. Love, in its purest esoteric form, is harmonizing. It is not felt. It isn’t even known. It is a pervasive experience of multilateral harmony.

Sure, science can come along as say, “hey, the sensation of love triggers x and y occurs”, but ask anyone who has ever been in love and that explanation is nothing short of a laughing stock. Creating linearity, a inter-faceable agreement, or system of thought for something that transcends the “whats” of life is impossible. This is why I am consumed by the “why”.

Why are we?

My love for Angela is the truest thing I have ever sensed and I will never try to teach someone how to love like we do; love is far too personal, far too close to home for me to delude myself into that type of thinking. What I can translate is the “why” we work, the “why” we overcame rather tremendous odds, the “why” we are able to have the connection we have despite the undoubtable trickery we’ve navigated. I can’t even explain to you the “what”, only the why.

Angela and I have created meaning and creating meaning is the most human activity that most humans do not understand. We all do it constantly, the moment you begin thinking about something, whether you’re for it or against it, is the moment you’ve established a meaning that thing has for you. Nothing is anything, yet everything must be; that “must be” is the process of creating a meaning. Nothing intrinsically matters, not even life itself, yet whatever you choose to let matter must bow to your will. That is the power of the conscious mind, that is the purest explanation of perception, the choosing of data to form your understanding of the world around you.

Well, if all I have to do is think something, then why is everything I want not occurring? Okay, Bryce, you’re in love but I’m not, how is that fair? My bills need to be paid and I am actively thinking about money/starting a business/working extra hard, but I’m still broke, how is that fair?

First off, fairness doesn’t exist. Second of all, the universe, God, Jesus — whatever force you believe powers the framework of existing — is hands down THE MOST fair vehicle known to the senses. The reason you have not received love or money or that scholarship or that promotion is because those things are controlled by the wills of other people as well. Everything that operates within the system is simultaneously controlled by the perceptions and wills of another person, so the key isn’t trying to pry things out of people’s hands, but to pry people out. Get them to align with what you want; strive for influence, not things.

Slight digression: love is different, but operates on the same principles. You cannot exercise influence and get someone to love you, that is the mistake most powerful men make; the women may love the money, the lifestyle you give them, but still have no feelings of adoration towards that man. The way to get love is, as cliche as it sounds, to love one’s self. Self love gives a person a certain radiance and all humans are attracted to that kind of light. If you want to find the truest of love, you must love yourself in the truest of ways, only then will you discover YOUR path to the person that can share in your completeness. So in a sense, you are still playing for influence, but instead of influencing others, your first target is yourself.

Okay, Bryce, how do I do that? Influencing others? Influencing myself? How in the hell does this help me? Well that, dear readers, is how I make a living, I’d be more than happy to work with you on a one on one basis.

Take home: this life is virtual, it bends to the human that is experiencing it. Most of us, unfortunately, remain ignorant to our ability to design and create, instead we focus on the mundane aspects of being a citizen: going to work, going to school, taking care of our families, paying bills, obeying the law. We rarely make influential decisions. Its easy to stick to the conventions of academia or the diluted knowledge of the world’s religions; those are simplistic ways to live a comfortable life. You create nothing, you follow the rules, you have ups and you have downs. Bada-bing. Bada-boom.

Well, I don’t view the world this way. I can’t view it this way. If I can fall in love with a woman as amazing as Angela and create a business as amazing as VB ICON, why would I not want to continue creating meaning to this vacuous universe? If one can choose to accept the meaning told them by others or simply create a tailored, enriching meaning for themselves, why would anyone choose the former? Nothing is anything because what I believe it to be may not be what you believe it to be. And thats okay. Hell, that’s great.

Get into the mode of inquiring about the “why’s”, for those are a wealth of understanding for those that receive (or create) answers. Understand that the agreements among men are not the end all, nor are agreements within yourself; in order to dexterously navigate through this life you must balance, precariously might I add, both of these worlds. Individuation is important and cooperation is important, neither are mutually exclusive, and neither matter without the other. A pure individual is a cancer and a pure cooperator is a mindless robot.

Create meaning, folks. Question everything, after all what you think you know is only partially true today and even less so tomorrow. Each day presents one with the opportunity to let go of everything they thought yesterday and create something anew all over again. THAT my friends has become my meaning of life and with it I intend to win as much as I can until I am no more.

bryce

The Secret: Accessing the Hyperreal

Cruising at about 30 miles per hour on a metal contraption high above Northwestern Long Beach, a highly theoretical and amorphous conversation ensues between two young philosophers. The subject, cognition and super-cognition in multivariable hyperspace, draws both speakers’ deepest thoughts about discrete creation of existence, how individuals become authors and coauthors of what we have come to term as life. The setting is unusual, both men draw curious stares from other passengers as the enthralling discourse weaves and tumbles through all manner of hypothetical thought. All the while, the young thinkers trek on, hoping to tap a mysterious power, known only to few humans throughout recorded history.

The last 3 months of my life have been absolutely surreal; no other word can really describe it. Surreality is not good or bad, it is indeed both, an admixture that feels like one is living in an extremely vivid dream. In this timeframe, my failures have led to threats of lawsuits, many an uneasy email/text message exchange, and other moments of unwavering discomfort. My successes have led to great nights on the town with friends, extraordinary progress as a business owner & consultant, and opportunities that are so tantalizing I sometimes forget that only months ago I was operating on a dollar and a dream (minus the dollar).

What changed? My prayer life.

I don’t pray like a traditional Christian; I am not a traditional Christian. I meditate on deep considerations of the Universe, I contemplate a Creator who could make that all possible. I ponder the true makeup of my religion’s interdimensional liaison, the man we have come to call Christ. When I open my lips to make praise or utter supplication, I do it from a place of extreme humility, and extreme non-humanity. My foundation is not to make utterance to Christ as a man, but as a spirit who has also has a physical emanation.

Extant expression is ubiquitous in this world, as all of us are alive. Being alive, being able to express life, is comprised of several factors that can be lumped into two arenas that I have spent many blog posts enumerating: linearity and nonlinearity. Linearity is an agreement between two or more people in an effort to produce predictable outcomes, whereas nonlinearity is the individualized state of man which produces no predictable or only partially predictable results. Most of the physical realm, what we have come to term as reality, are attempts at creating linearity. We as individuals in larger social structures must come to agree with one another in order to coexist harmoniously; yet, the components of those linear attempts are nonlinear bodies, humans, whose overly complex nature creates the ambiguous, ever-changing world that we are all doing our best to navigate.

As my business partner and I engaged each other in one of our philosophical discourses, the effects of my meditative practices became readily apparent. We, two nonlinear beings, began experiencing each other from a true platform of expression, a place where no agreement was necessary because it superseded the very consciousnesses that perceive and analyze information. Thus, our nonlinearity simply melted into this higher ordered thought and we became aligned with what I can only call energies that occurred in this exotic place.

Linearity is only as pure, strong, or capable as the nonlinear components that comprise it’s ability to construct.

Where my friend and I got to needed no construction, its pillars were more mathematically perfect than the greatest Palladian structures and its ground was fertile for true extant thought.

I had been entering — perhaps a better word would be foraying — into this world, what I call hyperreality, more and more as of recent. I can only describe it as being a place of intense focus, where the very world around you seems converge on a single point, a potent thought, that permeates one’s entire being. With a thought that potent, the conscious and subconscious, mind and spirit, become attuned and a single person can create a multo-entity agreement within themselves.

Fuck.

Thats some heavy stuff, no?

See, the world is consumed with figuring out the “secrets” and “shortcuts” to this and that. We want to know what is the “secret” to success, what is the “fastest way” to wealth, and what is the “secret” to happiness. We are looking to creating a linear system which has no flaws! That, unfortunately, is impossible; remember, a linear agreement is only as effective or good as the nonlinear components agreeing upon it and since no human is perfect in his physical or even conscious expression, any linearity we create will be inexorably flawed. The secondary reason that no “system” can be created, no secret uttered, no shortcut fabricated, is because as nonlinear beings interacting with one another, there are infinity plus infinity variables interacting at any given moment, which leads to more and more unpredictable outcomes, the very essence of nonlinearity. In other words, what works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. There can be no cohesive, universal, “secret” process or application.

THERE IS NO SECRET

So how, then, does one create the necessary traction to accomplish anything? How do we “win” at this game called life.

While there is no secret, there is a way that one can maximize their time here on this physical plane. Creating an agreement with one’s self. This was the lesson that was revealed to me by my friend during our conversation. Most of us are at war with ourselves; our mind wants on thing, our heart wants another, and our spirit is all but muted during a typical day. Reality, or at least our perception of what is occurring around us, poses the greatest threat to success. Reality is mundane and its prosaicness becomes rarely sensed as being important or of any particular value. Reality will drive you quickly into mediocrity as it is comprised as an average of linearities around you. Therefore, reality is blah. It comes and goes. Its unpredictable, yet you are taught from birth strategies to mitigate risk and capitalize on opportunity. Go to college, get a job, get married, pay your bills by working hard.

All of those taken become the very basis for losing at life.

Humans are unique. We are amalgams of spirit and flesh. How is it that we think we can create systems and all thrive within them? How is it that we think we can all agree and all will flourish? How is it that we make incongruous projections about the future without understanding what is currently going on or even worse, how humans tends to react to things?

College, marriage, working hard are not inherently wrong nor are they inherently right, is it up to the person to agree mentally, spiritually, and physically as to whether they are right for them!

How does one discern what is right or wrong? When one actively seeks out the supermundane, the ‘higher realm’, they are in fact setting themselves up for alignment. There is no systematic way to “getting there”, as every person will find themselves traversing a slightly different road to this manner of enlightenment. My tip is to meditate by sitting in absolute silence while thinking one thought. That thought can be anything from considering the magnitude of the universe to pondering that you yourself are a universe. The depth and complexity of your inner world is a wellspring of fuel for enlightenment.

As you ponder the implicit and explicit complexities of the universe(s), you will naturally begin to see yourself as a citizen of all known and unknown realities, infinitely large and infinitesimally small; you will be a formless, dimensionless being which has a subordinated expression in the physical world. You will see the unreality of the physical world and be drawn to the pervasive “real” framework of the invisible dimensions. This will create the beginnings of “inner linearity”.

Inner agreement.

Inner peace.

One might say, “bryce, are you not laying out a secret? What you’re proposing, is this not a system of thought that leads to predictable results?” I have no response to that because to validate or invalidate that statement would be to breathe life into that belief. Accessing the hyperreal has one frustrating aspect to it, the hyperreal has no concept of time. Some people will die before they experience a full immersion. Some will never make it. Some will try to make it work so that they can pay a bill on Tuesday and will cast it down as too imprecise, too ineffectual if that bill is not paid. Hyperreality is not about creating a system to win in a consciously perceived world, but instead having the consciously perceived world be subordinated to the hyperreal. Its about discovering true dimensionless thought, not turning that dimensionless thought into profit. The profits will come, but how those profits will manifest physically is not for me to say.

You will begin seeing this world with different eyes, my friend. Eyes that actually see, not passively view. No longer will it be “go to college to be successful”, but you will understand that college is a cultural agreement and with it comes rewards, but those rewards are not automatic as the extent of this agreement cannot accommodate supply and demand nor the intrinsic confusion of 18-22 year olds. College is set up as a catapult into professionalism, yet professionalism is a linear agreement with a series of components. These types of greater understandings increase the value of your time and efforts in college or in the work force; they increase your influence over your surroundings and the people in it.

It opens the universe to you and opens you to the universe.

Revelations: Life, The Canvas

Life is an amalgamation of images, shadows, and derivations of solids. Everything we hold to be real is subject to change, for change is the only thing promised.

Our four dimensional world (with the fourth dimension being time), is virtually inexplicable by human terms. When we communicate we attempt to create consistent explanations and logic, however, existence offers no such simplicity. Every affirmation will be accompanied by a cluster of contradictions and those will be further muddied by the interpretations of each individual.

The key is in then changing the way one views being alive.

For a very long time I absolutely hated it here. I wasn’t unhappy or selfish enough to seriously contemplate suicide, but I was certainly disillusioned enough to consider inappropriate modes of escape. The problem is that when I was younger I was taught a very concrete way of living dominated by Christian morals and views but as I got older I was relentlessly reminded that life is anything but concrete. It is purely diaphanous, volatile, and subject to a complex mélange of variables which may or may not be affecting outcomes at any given moment. I found myself sinking more and more into abject hatred of this entire realm and all its inhabitants, to me everyone here — including myself — was outrageously delusional with no possible remedy to be found.

However, out of this bleak outlook on being, I have begun creating some semblance of existential freedom. I have slowly begun liberating myself from the inefficient postures taken by a world so confused. It is out of this slow emancipation that I have begun maximizing my efficiency across the board, as a business owner, as a friend etc. The plasticity of existence means that one, through very delicate and persistent means, can begin to rewrite the rules on how to be here.

When you see the world as a hodgepodge of illusions, you are better able to manipulate those illusions for your greater good (and hopefully the greater good for humanity by proxy).

Lets take a quick look at love. In this day and age deception is more prevalent than dedication. We are like the Greek economic crisis where one person doesn’t pay his taxes because he believes that his neighbor isn’t. So many of us harbor these intense reservoirs of distrust that we end up hurting all of those who are around us who are simply acting along the same parameters that we are. Thus, young men cheat on young women, young women play games with other young men, and the vicious cycle of nonsense continues.

But imagine, seeing the world as a canvas in which you could choose to love wholeheartedly. Imagine taking all of the distrust you feel and reworking it into something else. Imagine being able to understand the fucked up aspects of this dimension and still being able to continue on as the virtuous man or woman you know you could be?

Excuses cannot be made under this plastic view of existence, no one can be to blame for your missteps. It places responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the individual.

My best friend laid out a very interesting point to me the other day as he was explaining a conversation he recently had with an inquisitive young woman:

You could take all the skill, talent, basketball IQ, and footwork of Michael Jordan and put it into another person and they still would never become MJ. Why? Because none of them possess his mind. They do not possess the unique life experiences that molded him into an ultra-competitive workaholic that refused to accept failure. Mind you I am not saying the individual wouldn’t be as good as or even better than Jordan, I’m saying they would never be him. The mind controls everything.

The mind. The mind. The mind! All learned individuals very quickly figure out this ineluctable quiddity of human existence. Without venturing into a pedantic ontological discussion of mind vs. matter, I just want to emphasize the importance of mind-stuff. For most of us our mental acuity is inchoate and unfortunately remains in this nascent phase for the majority of our time here. We believe that matter is irrefragable truth and we approach society from those same suppositions. Thus the rigidity that I learned as a child serves as illusory stumbling block across the board. We believe in corporate cultures and racial partialities and all matter of “convention”. Creativity becomes less expansive, ambition is replaced by the need to please others, and before we know it we are inundated by what we think is real.

My humble request: do no be fooled to believe that life is anything but a persistently blank canvas. The human mind and spirit are the brushes and artistic implements, daily you can create masterpieces. You can change the world — truly.

But be warned, you are free to choose, free to create, but you are never free from the consequences of your choices. There are no excuses for the Awareness I am trying to initiate you into. You must choose and pursue all strategies to maximize the results of your choice, that is the path to fulfillment.

bryce

Living Your Life For Someone Else

My posts revolve around two central themes: existence and love. These have been very important concepts to me mostly because of my upbringing, I was raised in a staunch Christian home by two people who have enjoyed a ridiculously successful marriage by any standards. Thus, as I got older I challenged the existential offerings of traditional religion while reflecting on what exactly made my parents tick…

If you ask my parents they will tell you their marriage is not always sunshine and butterflies. They will also tell you about the dark moments and the intermittent pain suffered. Such is life right? I will give you the secret to Samuel and Marcel Brown’s bond: God. More precisely: an objective cause that forces subjectivity into something more manageable. See, life is two-tiered:\, the first tier being the ego and the second tier being the corporate which I have been referring to as nonlinear and linear respectively the last few weeks. As I have enumerated in several previous posts, trying to reconcile the opinions of two nonlinear beings is virtually impossible, however, attempts are made and take form as education, religion, politics and so on.

There is a shortcut to the linearization of humans and that is the discovery of an objective cause or objective purpose, which subjugates the self to a higher cause that many can associate with. This is the purpose behind “corporate culture” or “mottos” in the army. It is the very same reason that you go through boot camp prior to entering our armed forces, by giving you a supreme purpose to your struggles, you begin forging bonds of similitude with your fellow kinsmen and a homogeneity is created.

Love inspires different faculties, yet works essentially the same way. By attaching two people to an objective third purpose, that bond becomes almost impervious to attacks. That bond is strengthened infinitely when that purpose is something Divine, an unyielding, unchanging conviction that this person is your soulmate as decreed by God.

Most people these days live on exceptionally superficial levels (usually by deluding themselves to believe they are “deep”), thus their love lives are flaccid and without passion or are marred by mundane, run-of-the-mill connections. This, for me at least, is another example of the linear/nonlinear dichotomy I’ve been preaching these last couple months. Until you are able to anchor yourselves to something that is truly unchanging (so not your “feelings” or “emotions”), your relationships will constantly be at risk for total implosion.

This leads me to my purpose for this post. As a young man, I am a very, very rare breed amongst my brethren. I take my relationships very seriously, perhaps too seriously, and I focus all of my attention on the one person who at that present time has my heart. I truly long for a lifetime bond between myself and that ONE woman, simply based on this statement: living your life for someone else.

I am a man. I am a breadwinner, warrior, soldier, captain, leader. It has been driven into my very psyche to provide and protect for my wife. My wife deserves the best man in me, every moment that we are together and even more so when we are apart. She deserves a man that carries her on his shoulders as if the ground were hot lava. In the same spirit, I deserve a woman who is my prayer warrior, my nurturer, my ground wire, my confidant, and my friend. Because this a partnership we should both depend on one another as if our lives were intertwined, for the simple fact that they are.

With those things as our framework, the foundation should go back to my earlier discussion on objective purpose. For myself and my wife, it will be our firm belief in God as our guiding hand thus effectively solidifying our bond.

To live your life for someone else is to relinquish the ego and to see yourself as dependent on your significant other, why else be with them? Why waste your life with someone who you feel you could be without. Do not listen to these philosophasters and idiots on television who will tell you to maintain your independence while trying to find true love, that is the antithesis of true love. You must give in, man and woman, with every ounce of you to your partner. They are your bondsman your bondswoman, they are your armor bearer, they possess the very keys to your innermost parts.

Anything else and you do not have the trappings of real love and I personally believe your relationship is in jeopardy. Even if you do last, I can almost guarantee that infidelity, dissatisfaction, and turmoil are frequent visitors to the both of you.

Living your life for someone else is to become a servant to the person that means the most to you in the entire known universe. Second only to God Himself, your significant other is the pinnacle of creation for you and everyday should be 24 hours of creating the world for you to enjoy with them, a way of thinking that surpasses the understanding of most young people.

I earnest importune all my readers to think about these things while you are out dating and falling in love. I guarantee you that these components, finding an objective purpose and living for that other person will add years to the vitality and fulfillment of your relationships.

bryce

Letters to My Love VI

Sunlight filters through the apartment window,
Dawn’s glow as I slightly reposition my elbow,
For hours my arms have held you tightly,
For on my honor I protect you nightly,
Knightly I fight for thee,
Now as night gives into the wee,
Moments of immature morning,
And I take these instants to get to sorting…

17.
We met when we were 17.
Immediately she was my heaven’s queen,
I was a projection,
skating through dimension’s sheen…

I am on quantum landscape.
Fringe science as I shift between two worlds.
I peer down at your halo,
Your image is transfigured,
I am transfixed, how could a mere man resist,
My fingers upon your wrist I willfully enter your dreamscape,
Never before did I imagine dreams came
True.
Enlightened consciousness between I and you.

Reality, Be True

It’s really real,
It’s really happening — no it’s not.
It’s really important,
It risks a shattering — no it doesn’t.
Flattering how time & space
Perceived through the eyes of dual natured creatures,
Gives rise to absolute features,
Yet absolution is as fleeting as the complexity it tries to unravel,
How unnatural the illusion of “real”.
Real is what you make of it,
Illusion for the sake of it.
Fulfillment what you take from it.