Perception is emptiness, and form is texture, and texture is form and emptiness.
So it was said in the previous post. And what this means is that texture is the causal nexus, for to be empty is be capable of being subjected to causality, and to be a form is to be capable of participating in that causality, to have agency. So in this way we can say that all perception makes causality implicit to itself, in that it is a receiver, and to be a receiver is to be empty. But as we have likened perception to water, we have demonstrated that perception itself is a texture, that emptiness itself is a form. We do not ever experience "nothing," and just having "nothing" somewhere makes no guarantee that there will be perception. The absence of texture is yet a texture, like a point on a line with the distance of 1, is yet a point, measurable relative to that distance (0.1, 0.2, 0.3). So we have to correct the earlier commentary about the zero-point. The center is not a zero-point, but a half-point. It's better described as the binary of the binary vector. Seen in this way, from this simplest geometric figure of the line, centrality and binary are mutually enforcing concepts. It's a center, perhaps-- again, we're revising Jungian dialectic-- that establishes a binary, rather than a binary establishing a new center. Before centrality, however, its the notion of a quantity that establishes this idea.
This might indeed, revise the notion of absence as we worked with it in the previous post. Rather than seeing absence as no-thing, in a dichotomy of thing and no-thing, rather, the no-thing is what separates elements of the thing from the thing. The no-thing is a half-thing, a dividing thing, which is not a thing in itself, which is coherent with the nature of empty space, which separates forms in space. But then again that no-thing is a thing, in that it is part of a thing. And this part of a thing is constitutive to the thing.
[[takes a drive, thinks about it some more]]
I've realized what the problem is-- although "perception is emptiness, form is texture, texture is form and emptiness" is fascinating and we've really simplified our conception of how causality, space, and perception interact-- I mean, it made a gnarly rock chorus-- we created a problem with our philosophy of presence/absence and valuation by way of making a mistake. The mistake was the conflation of emptiness with absence, with non-form. And here we're perhaps in a position to offer a radical new solution to the problem of noumena and phenomena. The difference between emptiness and form is that between simplicity and complexity, not between zero and one. In other words, its the difference between unity and plurality, which are united in both being ways in which we consider the gestalt, as oneness, as infinity.
We consider the whole, as the sum of all possible factors, and also as unity. As unity it is simple, and as plurality it is complex. And this contemplation of the whole is the essence of what perception is. This may be the origin of arithmetic in the brain? The idea of a complexified unit-- which images the plurality of agencies which intercede on a event-form, and which emerge from an event-form, in the network of infinite causality. But those agencies all converge, and then diverge, within the unitary event form.
Likewise-- and we never used the word "transparency," yet-- but the water that is our perception, and this form/emptiness shit -- well, it's all very like Coca-Cola Buddhist-- but the problem is, that's a melodramatic gloss. Our original idea of absence being mere non-existence, and existence making no comparison and therein finding value still holds. But this represents what perception has been relegated to, to the phenomenal, or it relegates the world to the phenomenal. The noumenal is either perception or the thing-in-itself, et cetera. Most often however, perception is phenomenal; that's how science thinks of these things today. Consciousness, and life, are accidents of matter, aberrations.
However-- the transparency of perception is a factor of simplicity, not absence, as is evidenced by the transparency of water, or mirrors. Empty space does not actually exist, it is just less complex with form than space that is full. In this way we are back to-- or I'm back to, since I never got into it much on this blog yet-- vibration. In a body of water, if the water is cloudy, or has ripples on it, it is less reflective of images and less capable of being vibrated mechanically. Water absorbs and demonstrates both electromagnetic and material vibration. We see both kind of waveforms in water. No water is absolutely still, but the reason that "Still waters run deep," which is completely different from that stupid aphorism, is because the more still it is, and un-occluded, mechanically unmoving and as transparent as possible, with no other substances moving through it-- the water is not moving, and nothing is moving through the water-- the simpler the water, the more can be shown/heard within it.
This is my theory of intelligence/perception, which are now no longer separate. A complex representation of the perceived, which we would call intelligent, is the result of the simplicity and transparency of perception. The simplicity and complexity of intelligence go hand in hand, much as does the singularity and plurality of the gestalt. This is like saying-- music can be heard if there is silence, but that silence is really just a slow waveform, in which the music resonates.
This might throw a bone to an idea of "complexes" -- especially as interfering with perception, the way a psychological illness would weaken the sensitivity of someone to the outside world, so to speak. Not sure I'm ready to call it an illness but here goes my theory. A complex perception makes a simple perceived, and a simple perception makes a complex perceived. As an everyday thing, this is obvious; when we are mentally distracted, we do not notice our surroundings as much. I am applying this principle to a much wider field. That in general, a chronic seeming lack of observation, sensitivity, numbness, which we may grow frustrated with and call "stupid," and say nasty things about in someone, or just feel condescending, and disrespectful towards, is a sign of a complex psyche/mind, which draws attention away from the outside world. This I believe is rather kind to the monsters among us, or even the non-monstrous in a monstrous moment that we all have. When we have a lot going on, we are not particularly engaged with things. This also coheres with the idea of how gifted brains, they tend not to be "big brains," but contracted brains, like muscles their function is expedient and there is not a surplus of room, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Or Occam's Razor, and why that principle suggests the image of an inventor or scientist who turns themselves inside out before settling upon a simple answer which was in front of their face the whole time.
A few weeks ago, prior to this blog, I concocted a "complexity theory of perception" which was that the world was the way it was because we saw it to a certain degree of complexity, and that whatever explanations, or art, our mind could afford our perception would be vindicated or valued by the correspondence to this immersive degree of complexity that nature, as we are able to know it, has. Where it comes to visual or aural acuity-- and possibly even intellectual acuity but I haven't figured that out yet-- now we can say that the complexity we are able to see or hear is a consequence of our simplicity. If our eardrum and our eye could be taken to a greater degree of transparency, purity, stillness, we would see and hear more. Music does not interrupt quiet, it is built, in so much as (or, to the degree that) it is intelligible, upon a slow wave. The slower the surrounding wave, called perception, the more recognizable the more complex waveforms.
Now, the other thing I struggled with as regards the psychedelic aphorism is we've thought in terms of perception and form, but we've left out agency. Or rather, we've associated agency with form, with the form side of form, while the "empty" side of form is its being subject to agency. Now we know that it is simplicity which is capable of being subject to agency, and it is complexity which is agency. Every object is a unity, which makes it subject to plurality, and every object, for its existing in plurality, has a plural impact. The way I thought this through is akin to what was thought earlier-- that our mind only commands us into doing something by way of instruction, by way of expanding on visual perception's authenticity in a conceptual realm of logic. The only way we do what our mind does not believe is through violence. However. The other thing that must be said is that delusion is very powerful, maybe more powerful than violence. You can make people do what you want by controlling their beliefs, it's that simple. And you do that with lies. And a philosopher, or a human being, can believe things that are false, very easily, without any conspiracy or conman. To believe is not the same as to have faith. Faith is not to believe, but to wish to believe, to will yourself into believing. Belief is when you're convinced. Belief can be true or false knowledge, and it could be something we have an unconscious inkling about one way or the other. But a belief is what we do not know but believe in, and faith is what we do not know, do not believe, but will ourselves to believe, through trust. For example, I could believe something that is true, but I don't know it yet, unbeknownst to me; and I could have faith in something, which I don't know or believe as a set reality, but I do so in a spirit of trust. Trust would seem to be of the essence of faith, what makes it psychologically possible.
Anyway, that's a whole lot about how the mind constructs a reality, and how that influences agency, in a way that may not be so true, but has levels of knowledge, belief, and faith in the mix.
Now we think about visual perception in conjunction with our agency, what we see is that visual perception sculpts our agency. I am driving in a car in the left lane towards an intersection, and there is a left-hand turning land next to me free of cars, and a right lane on my other side, which has cars leading all the way up to the light. As I approach the green light, I have an agency which is sculpted by this perception of the world around me, in that I have two realistic choices: go straight through the light or turn left. I could drive recklessly if I were to try to fit my way into the right lane at the speed I am going, because I might have to slow to a crawl, and then somebody hits me, et cetera. It's "possible" I could get in the right lane and turn right at this intersection, but not advisable, for the decision's unimportance outweighs its risk. All this visual information is taken in, and informs my set of possible choices. My agency is like the propulsive car, a vector moving forward on a one-dimensional line, but with respect to the plurality of space, its my perception of the driving situation that steers the wheel. In this way perception specifies the agency, like the ten thousand things of plurality intersecting upon the event-form, which then sponsors another ten thousand things, then becomes a cause for an inconceivable amount of effects. It is a cultural illusion that leaders, of whatever discipline, are more important figures than everyday people. Every event that happens, from the smallest to the biggest, is cause for innumerable things, as it itself is caused by innumerable things. Causality is plurality. What leaders do influence, and participate in and represent, is the mind, is the common construct of knowledge, beliefs, and faiths. And everywhere we look is the notion of authority, of authorship, of one thing being a cause upon which all things depend, a fixed center instead of a mobile center. It is a good thing the center will not hold, and that these kinds of things fall apart. There is no problem with the notion of a leader, who is elected by a plurality and whom is cause for plurality, but the problem resides in the denial that we are not all democratically elected leaders in the same way, in the privileging of certain individuals as more unities than others. Every unity is in this network of pluralities, all of which are themselves unities, with the same cause-and-effect relationship.
There is one form of privilege we can give to people, however, which results from our above remarks on what makes a monster a monster, and the simplicity of complex perception. This privilege is however separate from the question of agency, of effectuality, of authority/election, which is just a human right which no one can take away, as it is fact of nature, beyond culture. It is the same privilege we give to being over non-being, and it is (in a provisional way as always) expressed in this notion of intelligence as the result of a simplification of psychic contents, that the evil and ignorance people are capable of is a consequence of their own interior complexities, rather than their interior simplicities or stupidities, as we might be inclined to say when we're furious at them. Thus has us eliminate a hateful, fascistic view of human intelligence and an elitism as regards "the masses" and rather has us explain that the limits of intelligence as they concern the outside world represent the lack of a complex understanding on account of the presence of a complex self-absorption, which is not meant here as an expression of narcissism. It is sort of like that bullshit Jung says about artists (which Freud basically said also, though with sexual sublimation being the intended meaning); that a parasite leeches off their juju and makes them devoted to creation. Creation has nothing to do with this issue, or rather, it has something much more positive to do with this issue, because both Jung and Freud insist on an antiquated separation from an artist's activities and the matter of agency and causality in general.
There may not be as much difference between the neurotic and the psychotic as was before considered, they may be just two poles of the same thing: neurology and psychology being intertwined, one merely being more grounded in the sensory reality and the other involving a flight into imaginary reality. The cause and the effect are the same. A complex cognitive evaluation of memories, which can be merely inwardness that compromises outwardness, or inwardness that utterly demolishes outwardness. It is a vibration that creates an interferogram with exterior perception. Thus, the benefits of meditation can be explained in terms of the willed procedure of lowering vibrational state in order to encourage this psychic simplicity, a sort of somatic method at what is an intellectual process, like smiling until you think happy thoughts, not to sound disparaging, or taking drugs and alcohol which are taken to influence mental activity. Or drinking coffee, having a cigarette, eating certain foods, sexual activity, et cetera. None of these things can change the way we think about our memories and our lives except temporarily, but a sustained practice of them will indeed lastingly effect mental operations. The mind deserves some censure, for it is a distorted mirror and its methods can mislead just as well as they lead; however, this does not change the fact that our psychology is a facet of its functioning. The problem with an exclusively intellectual method is that it seems bound to make complex what is simple, as in the case of "overthinking it," or, predisposing us to a prejudiced view of things, when consulting with a wide variety of methods of intellectualization-- including dreams, and creativity-- would seem to diversify our approach on a problem. Working within one "medium" has seemed to lead me to a dead end after a sustained effort, because you reach certain limits within the terms you're fixed on in dealing with the problem. Thus, rather than my censoring non-intellectual methods at psychological development, I am encouraging a pluralistic method, with the understanding that psychological development is intellectual development, in the end, because it is the nature of our cognitive patterns as regards our memory and daily lives that creates our mental situation, and this is a complex adaptation with a simple answer.
As evidenced by our dreams, cognition takes a imaginative form. And this could be called unconscious psychic development, obviously. However inasmuch as we have a choice in the matter of how we approach ourselves and our problems, it must be acknowledged that psychic development is a matter of cognition, of the movement of images or words in our psyche. And thus any kind of education of our art of movement-- somatic, chemical, artistic, intellectual, you name it-- is a legitimate and potentially rich and edifying experience. But the goal of cognitive process is its improvement, and how it is improved can only be measured by way of its adaptation to the perceived world which includes the self, and this is what I call the capacity for a complex perception, which is dependent on the simplicity of perception, which is dependent on the reduction, not the elimination, of personal concerns. This echoes a passage in Jung as regards the collective unconscious, but where I depart from him is in his trivializing personal wish-conflicts, and his mystification of what remains a personal experience of encountering the world. It is not a matter of eradicating these wish-conflicts into "absence," but of simplifying them. And this is no easy task. How is anything simplified? How does an anxietized, disturbed and polluted water-body of perception becomes still?
One answer, among many, probably, is simply in encountering the complex in the outside world, which embraces a pressure, to be sure, since that outer complexity is more than our inner complexity can bear. I am not sure of this however, for it could be argued that psychic complexity is more repressed than reduced by these methods. But actually I believe I have hit on something like the answer-- and the psychological purpose of education-- in the idea of problem-solving. Our own psychic problems trigger unpleasant emotions which distract us from actually fruitfully thinking about them, and changing the way we habitually approach them. It is like "beliefs"-- they are habitual, not grounded. Because they are "feeling-toned complexes," they are difficult to approach, like radioactive material, or a driving situation when one is stressed out, etc. When we approach a crossword puzzle, or a chess game, or a video game, we are never completely uninvolved from the psychic trauma that causes us pain but we are able to encounter paradigms relevant to it which are found in an unrelated realm in which we can maintain a contemplative, stoic calm. Where the issue of fear and desire is involved, so often linked to sexuality, death, self-esteem, love, friendship, family, aspirations, and so on, cognitive development may come to a standstill, and perhaps a "talking cure" is not much good, nor would cognitive-behavioral therapy, which either attempts catharsis, or to re-program the nature of mind by an aggressive and mechanistic encounter with core beliefs. Rather displacement may be the solution, as it is for people who work in clean rooms or in hazmat suits. Taking on a personal problem is picking up a hot potato without a glove. One would not want to "intellectualize" the problem either, making a direct confrontation with it only to repress its emotional charge, and prescribe thoughts about it accordingly which are not genuine, which only design the repression of that charge. Neither a cold or hot, or forceful direct confrontation is advised for a toxicity, which -- for polluting/disrupting those transparent/still waters of perception, compromises any kind of direct confrontation. A simplification of emotionally complex psychic material may only be able to be most fruitfully achieved through problem-solving on unrelated problems, which links this advisement to the notion of a plurality of methods. By this subterfuge, one influences cognition in such a way that it springs back towards the psychic complexity, and mutates our sense for it. This is like alchemical projection, but carried far more broadly than alchemy, far more broadly than science, to general problem-solving, to any process that is bound to sophisticate our cognition. The sophistication of our cognition results in the simplification of our psychic complex; and again, this could be something entirely different from the process of intellectualizing. This could be working with images, machines, bodies, and so on, on and on, so many ways to solve problems that are not connected with what most bothers us. It also stands to reason that the less involved something is from what bothers us, it is possible that we may achieve the most possible psychic development. Hence, "repression" is ambiguous. For what is repression in this scheme is solely the situation of failing to address problems. Things may hide in plain sight, and staring a problem right in the face can be the surest way of doing nothing about it, for it paralyzes us with its emotional charge, for which we are cognitively ill-equipped. Or, we do the same impractical thing we have continued to do which has resulted in no improvement, because within the medium of the problem, we are stuck on fixed ideas and methods.
It would remain to be seen however how this displacement, which aims to condense complex problems into simple answers, without emotional distraction, springs back to influence the psychic complexity, which interferes with our perception. Perhaps there is no springing back, there is just returning to the psychic complexity, a re-confrontation, after methods have been evolved elsewhere. So we sophisticate our problem-solving in a fresh, uninvolved milieu, and then we return to a direct confrontation in which we apply these new methods towards the simplification of the psychic complexity. This, incidentally, would describe something like art and science to me. Because a scientific process tends to be detached, cool, calm, collected, a contemplative process, much as this very writing. An aesthetic process tends to be emotionally centralized, in which we speak out of the most important things to us. It is not a problem-solving process, art, but an expressive process. Thus -- and I will have to think later about how this can be used to explain my own history -- perhaps we cannot solve problems with art, or we can only solve them when our art is either frivolous or impersonal, or more liberally put, we can solve problems with art when the emotions are not so big that we cannot wrangle them. Because art puts us in touch with the core emotional rhythms of our mind.
Now what I have described here is exactly the relationship between perception and agency I was beginning to describe, where science is perception, and art's creation is agency. Something can bore or depress us, maybe, for the reason that it does nothing to sophisticate our cognition, or for the reason that it is related to something that brings us back to something hurtful, or both. Agency, our choice, is directed by perception. In this way the empty, the simple, the thing that is acted-on, is also an effect. And it is through this that we understand that perception is cause-and-effect in the same way that the world is, is "form and emptiness." Because the "manifold of perception" is also the causality acting upon it, which designs agency, which directs agency towards a course. Agency is not free of perception, it is dependent on it. And the relative quality of this decision is derived from the amount of information taken in, not as a matter of prolonged education, but in the moment, and the amount of information taken in is complexified in relation to the simplicity of information digested internally, and it is this complex information taken into simple perception that permits a simple answer, a simple agency, with a complex result, which is complexly reactive, and thus adaptive to that same extent. So, for example, a creation which takes in less information, embodies less about the nature of the world, and indeed, exists more precariously within it.
A narcissistic psyche seems like a good survivor, doesn't it. But really, they are the epitome of a "cultural" rather than "natural" figure, which means, ephemeral. This kind of "culture" is a direct emblem of psychological complexity that speaks in simplistic evaluations. A complex evaluation of nature results from simple psychology, from the eye of a needle that receives ten thousand threads of causality through which ten thousand threads of causality may be drawn through. A principal human fear is that ineffectuality; to be effectual, one has to be causal, one has to be a recipient to be a sender. And one cannot be a recipient if they are stuck on reading their own letters, if they are effectively illiterate where it comes to those letters, because those letters unleash uncontrollable negative emotions. Finally, we advise therapy: to displace, and to solve in a ellipsis, that is the meaning of a "development" section in sonata form, with respect to psychic development. This is the whole meaning of science in psychological terms, displacement. And then to return. And we advise creation, art, agency, choice, action: like I Ching, to create one must receive. The depth of creation is the depth of reception and that depth ... (grinds teeth again) derives from still water. Still the weather.
And what then is Joke Science? Perhaps the realization that all science is therapy, all science is a displacement from our real human problems, and the punchline is that returning collision of what Zen we practice upon our observations of what we are uninvested in upon what we are invested in.
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