Since this should be a quiet week, I managed to sleep in for a while Sunday – making it all the way to 6 AM whereupon I awoke from an amazing dream.
As in a few other dreams in the past, I was in a school of some kind and what was being explained was the human tendency to attempt reduction of everything to numbers.
As was explained, in ancient times humans were not really connected – right brain and left brain – and thus “consciousness” was not really as we think of it today.
Rather, it was as if you were thinking in one half of your brain while occasional “outbursts” from the other half of the brain were often “heard” as the “voice of God.”
Over time, and Julian Jaynes covers this well in the “Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”
Essentially, argues Jaynes, we used to think in a much more schizophrenic sort of way (*per this Wikipedia note):
“According to Jaynes, ancient people in the bicameral state of mind would have experienced the world in a manner that has some similarities to that of a schizophrenic. Rather than making conscious evaluations in novel or unexpected situations, the person would hallucinate a voice or “god” giving admonitory advice or commands and obey without question: one would not be at all conscious of one’s own thought processes per se. Research into “command hallucinations” that often direct the behavior of those labeled schizophrenic, as well as other voice hearers, supports Jaynes’s predictions.”
As my “dream class” went along I was presented with a vision that seemed to answer one of those “questions unasked that vex us.” Why was there not more history to mathematics?
At the thought, the dream scene shifted and somewhere in the Middle East, a crew working on construction of some kind would discover a set of ancient tiles. These would reveal the prior existence of a “conjugate language.”
A what? This was strange to me.
It was explained that in human evolution there have been numerous “splits” in the past and that it is possible (even likely) that another branch of human civilization had stumbled on the foundations of mathematics and had run with it, but in a “conjugate” way. Our current path is bipolar and extremmist.
The “rationalists” of Western reductionism like to boil everything down to a number. The more decimal points after it, the better the number. As a result, we are in many ways at war – with ourselves.We can never get enough decimal points.
This is because some folks think with the arty, poetic, color-oriented right brain, or we are left-brain predominate and and as such clutch at formulae and numbers where the greater the precision, the better we believe we are.
But these tiles – which I doubt will ever be found being possible dream state residue – raise the idea that there is a third way of being that a lot of people have, but hold b ack from discussing.
The middle (or conjugate) brain function looks at art, science, math, poetry, and everything from either hemisphere of the brain and applies a universal encoding and weighting system to it. This evolves detachment and a much different “way of being.”
I may be sensitive to the idea of hidden encoding perhaps because of the work of Chris Tyreman and the team at The Chronicle Project which uses an “error correction system” in ancient Hebrew to return a different (than traditional) translation of the Old Testament.
This “middle/conjugate way” make sense because without more balance, we humans are far too easily unbalanced as evidenced by the current outbreak of irrational polarization around politics USA.
Seriously: Men depend on women and women depend of men…that’s just how humans operated for several millennia. So for one half of the equation to into F-bomb spewing criminals, with their violent protest Saturday seemed the height of folly and delusion orf people who lost touch with the Middle Way..
It is clear to even a 7-th grader that Donald Trump can not overturn women’s rights and that anyone who believes this lacks an understanding of “process.” See our recent Millennial’s Missing Manual chapter on [keyword: process].
Laws are not made by the President, but rather by Congress. When a law says “You will do this within a range of X to Y” then that’s what the executive must do. There is some latitude but the MBT (man before Trump) went outside event those margins.
I’ve seen plenty of women fall in with bad men. And now, they have fallen in with bad and/or stupid women, as well.
Hallelujah! Total equality is here!!! Yippee!
Sadly, while the newslets are telling us “More than 200 arrested at Trump inauguration” the ratio of women to me who will face felony riot charges seems conspicuously missing.
How can we judge criminal equality without numbers? Sheesh!
Vulgarity ran rampant, even death threats,. As Elaine and I watched with horror at the reversion to “one side of the head extremist thinking” that was easily played by forces behind the scenes.
As the dream reached its conclusion, there was some discourse on what the “language and rules of thought” would be for this lost “middle language” between the two brains.
Think of it as “math done with poetry” much like a savory Zen Koan.
“Starts with sufficiency…” was a lecture point. “Then Objectives.”
What was presented was the idea that in its free-running state, neither the right nor left brain would do anything but go to useless extremes.
The right brain would make the reddest red colors, the loudest possible notes, and the most emotive possible poetry. This while the right side would strive for incomprehensible complexity, calculations to a billion decimal points, and so on.
As we return to the schism that Jayne writes of, people are inclined to “hear the voice of God” in their heads, except it’s not God. It’s plain, everyday Modern Insanity.
In the middle, the role of the conjugate brain is to moderate the discussion. To ask the question “What is sufficiency?” “What do we seek?”
To the right brain the Middle asks “What is red enough?” To the left brain, “How many decimal points are meaningful?”
It was suggested on waking that I take this along with me, back to the other side of the veil of sleep and kick it around out here. It was a class I didn’t want to wake from..
The beauty of humans at their best is that we can, under ideal circumstances, operate from either extreme of right brain or left. But in almost all circumstances, a middle-state manager ruling by the language of sufficiency, judgment, optimism, rightness (harmony), and with respect for the One Force behind it all, leads to an optimized human.
A fair bit of Sunday was spent with these thoughts rattling around in my head.
But then, as I was doing so, an article in the UK Express flipped by in a Nostracodeus software run. “Scientists use mathematical calculations to PROVE the existence of God…”
Well, I’ll be damned, I thought. Until that headline I was worried that the runaway left brain crowd would have forgotten the challenge of the late mathematician Kurt Gödel. Unable to find “God’s numbers” they might dismiss it entirely. Yet there it is.
On the right side of the brain the high peaks of emotion and art have already made something of a case. And this weekend a spectacle.
When we watched crazy behaviors at the DC demonstrations, I asked myself: Who are these people who have lost the Great Middle?
That one vexes me even now.
Perhaps related to the “missing middle” these days?
What We Sometimes Forget: True Believers
The revelation that the Women’s March was largely another George Soros put-up – with more than 50 ‘partners’ of the march being linked to him, reminded me of this from philosopher Eric Hoffer’s comments on mass movements and who gets sucked into them:
“When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separateness, as is the case with those who are members of a compact tribe, church, party, etcetera, are not accessible to boredom. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence. Pleasure-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives.
Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives.
Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle-aged women at the birth of mass movements. Even in the case of Islam and the Nazi movement, which frowned upon feminine activity outside the home, we find women of a certain type playing an important role in the early stage of their type playing an important role in the early stage of their development. Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity (a new name). The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning. Hitler made full use of “the society ladies thirsting for adventure, sick of their empty lives, no longer getting a ‘kick’ out of love affairs.”
So too, it could be argued, run the modern mass movements like the carefully orchestrated anti-Trump hysteria. Reminds me of the Beatles Hysteria in 1964, lol.
If I were a betting man, I’d guess Soros has read Hoffer. I’d double-down on him reading Lenin.
On the other hand, I don’t think Madonna has a clue.
As Peter Pan had “the lost boys” Madonna et al led the “lost girls.”
Pappa Don’t Preach De.t: A Talk With the Socialist Daughter
As luck would have it, one of my daughters marched in the Women’s Day March in Seattle.
She informed me she marched because Donald Trump was a “racist.”
Needless to say, I was taken aback: “He is? How so?” I wanted to hear her side of it.
“He hates Mexicans.”
“No dearest daughter, he does not.
What he hates the border being open. Let your father ask a question: When you leave to go to work in the morning, do you lock your apartment?”
“Well, yes….”
“Daughter the Mexican Border is America’s front door. Donald Trump wants it locked. If someone wants to come in they can knock on the door at any border crossing… When you go to work Monday if you lock your front door, aren’t you too a racist?”
“I have to go now dad, you have dementia and I can’t talk to you.”
She was gone before I could tell her the REAL (not the media ript Soros/HC) Women’s Day is March 8 and this weekend’s event was was two-bit would-be revolutionaries looking for an excuse to keep dividing America. Sadly, they do this too well; pimped as they are by the bitter media.
Oh, well, so much for moving to the PNW to be closer to the kids.
Vladimir Lenin would be proud of all of his modern converts.
I (and we) am not.
Write when you get rich,
I think most of the leftists realize that their candidate of the last 8 years went wily nily with the law and did about what he wanted, ( well maybe pell mell not wily nily), and now they are faced with the same rules being applied to them. Scary huh lefties ??
Let me guess…she is also the one you are so proud of for buying a used Prius?…Sheeesh…
nailed it
Daughter Dearest, possibly suffers from career frustration, dissociative disorder,and other youthful maturation hurdles. In other words what we all went through when growing up. One day, oh one day, dad will turn out to be one of the smartest men she knows.
Sorry to hear about your dearest daughter’s confusion. I hope the PNW event was less than eventful.
I run into this mantra(Trump is whatever) too many times at my local university. They are so far to the left of the island I’m surprised it hasn’t tipped over. They say the same thing without any substantiation, other than “it’s obvious”.
Yesterday I bought gas in a depressed part of town and a black man came up to me. His first words were “I’m NOT asking for money”. It turned out that he’d hurt his back helping someone push a car out of the road and wanted a ride several blocks back to his apartment. He could barely walk. Needless to say, I obliged, and we had a great talk on current politics – about the same as this article.
You have it backwards concerning adding states…the huge nation state is a thing of the past. The US needs to be broken up not increased in size.
Californians are already way ahead of you:
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/01/21/opinion-california-independence-yes-we-can/?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Twitter&utm_term=Autofeed
“Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle-aged women at the birth of mass movements.” Funny, that you post this. I had run accidentally into the demonstration in NYC and I so agree that SEXUAL frustration maybe the real seed of all so-called revolutions. I observed that most of the demonstrators had NO attraction to their opposite sex. How do persons deal with themselves when they perceive “to be not good looking?” Seriously!!
15 years I took care of my long twice widowed mother with dementia who preferred drink to doctors who killed her with surgery and today, alone it seems I am with physical aversions to drink and a slew of refused medical must haves, feeling a forgetfulness that my be dementia….ha ha ha, my broke a and ss
It makes a difference what part of your brain is used to do math. The visual cortex is the most powerful part of our brains. It is possible to get used to doing math with the visual cortex. This is the thought behind math manipulatives. One company that makes such kits of colored rectangles and squares has a kit that allows people to solve quadratic equations visually. After teaching quadratics to my son, I found that I no longer needed the colored rectangles, and can solve quadratics in my head just by imagining what the rectangles would look like.
Thank you. Just . . . thank you.
This is the bullet we dodged by not installing Hildebeast.
The female organizer of the parade is a pro-sharia law person, AND has ties to Hamas. As a female myself, I cannot understand why anyone would follow this crap. Manson following made equal sense. If a male of white European wanted to whack off female body parts, an outcry of epic proportions would ensue.
thanks for the laugh, my 15yr. old daughter old holds same brain washed opinion. I too am suffering from dementia also…I spent all day at hospital, cath lab ,, got invited back for tripple bipass tuesday am. really need that laugh, AFTER THIS DAY, I believe as Chris t. does,people playing with the books…I hope his goes to #1.. George, i am glad you are telling things the way they are; keep going givem both barrels…I will let you know if I get any divine messages, when I come back from the dead God willing;
thanks
Sorry about your daughter, George. I don’t have children, but I’m pretty much on the outs with a majority of my long-time women friends, and family members, too. Seems folks just cannot see how much they have always been played, and now it’s in overdrive.
I realized quite a number of years ago that my right brain is quite as capable of talking to me as is my left, it just uses pictures instead of symbols. (I suppose an argument could be made that pictures are a form of symbols, but not where I’m headed with this. It’s right/pictures, left/words-numbers.)
There have been times when I have wracked my left brain trying to remember where I’d put something, all in vain. Then I realized my right brain knew exactly where whatever I wanted was and was trying to tell me, in pictures instead of words. All I had to do was clear a still space for the pictures to flow into, and ask “Where did I put this-or-that?” Sure enough, a picture would form of exactly the surroundings where the object had been when I’d left it, and I could go and retrieve it. Believe me, my right brain was very, very smug the first time it showed me that. Maybe it’s a form of reverse schizophrenia, lol.
Getting back to sprouts for a moment, I usually sprout lentils, organic preferably. They’re cheap, store easily, and can be eaten for several days, through several stages of growth. When I first decided sprouts were an all-around Good Thing To Have in case of a food emergency, I bought a varied supply of vacuum-packed sprouting seeds, which I’ll have to ask my right brain about, eventually, since I’ve lost track of them during the last two moves. The thing about lentils is, you can’t grow your own, the yield is just too pitiful. I have no idea how they manage to survive as a food crop, just due to the amount of land it must take to provide even a pound of them.
I ordered one of the sprouters you chose as well, just to see if it works better than a mason jar. It’s taking forever to get here; I think the shipping warehouse must be overseas.
WOW! A VERY productive Sunday for you!
First off, the women’s march against Trump, and the vulgar and incoherent diatribes involved in it, are the kind of things that have always made me feel extremely embarrassed to be female. Long, long ago I attempted to join the feminist movement. At the time I had no psychological toolkit to deal with the loudmouth, self-righteous, drama-queen zealots, who usually ruled the meetings. I still don’t. I just avoid them and the whole women’s ‘movement’.
During those years I had trained my left brain to be in serious lock-down mode over the right brain. Star Trek’s Mr. Spock was my idol. Literally. You do remember that the Vulcans did NOT lack emotion? They went totally logic-based to conquer their extremely powerful emotions and bring peace to their world.
I attempted to live like a Vulcan for many years. The human brain however, will leak through stuff from the cut-off right/emotional side. And, similar to the Jaynes model, the left brain tries to justify the emotional impulses with logic.
I eventually realized that the Vulcan model was not working for me. It was like being a man in some respects — seemingly all logic and reason and above the mushy stuff, yet secretly being ruled by the emotional/unconscious impulses that were not being given full light of mind recognition.
There is one aspect of female biology that finally helped me make peace with being female. The Corpus Callosum. The bundle of nerve fibers that connects the left and right sides of the brain. It has been touted as being larger/shaped differently in females which gives females an advantage over males in speed of connection between the hemispheres. (There is now considerable debate over size difference of the Corpus Callosum between the sexes. But whether it is the CC, or some other factor of brain difference due to relative hormone balance or unknown factors, maybe oxytocin level, I find that women really do have a much easier time than men integrating the left and right brains). The Corpus Callosum (or some other factor of female brain biology) appears to me to confer a dramatically higher ability than in men, to find “the middle way”, especially at mid-life when the hormones decline.
So, why don’t we hear more of this? Well, maybe because it is usually the most extremely polarized who make the most noise and get heard — and thus SOUND like they represent a majority. AND….. the middle way doesn’t make a big fuss — it just goes about living.
Now speaking directly to some points in your essay……
” math done with poetry” and “conjugate language” — it’s called Sacred Geometry, and also music. Also, there have been alphabets that could represent both number and letter — ask Chris Tyreman, I’m sure he knows.
“middle/conjugate way” — look up the Heartmath technique — rapidly brings a peaceful attention to the heart/soul and can balance the overly rational mind. PS — great technique for men — the other guys won’t notice a thing — won’t think you are going all fuzzy-wuzzy on them.
“there is a third way of being that a lot of people have, but hold back from discussing”. Umm, yes — know that one well. I don’t need drugs. Well, except caffeine. Those doors people try to open with drugs…. my doors never had a lock in the first place. I had to create locks and barricades by becoming like Mr. Spock to keep those doors closed. It got me through school in great shape. We have discussed this before, you and I, that having just the right dose of genetics from the pool of mental illnesses of schizophrenia, depression, bi-polar, and borderline personality disorder can confer amazing levels of creativity. That, and a good dose of childhood trauma created by the BPD parent (I was afraid for my life many times) bring out survival and learning strategies that can truly bring “the genie out of the bottle”. Eventually — if you survive.
I survived. I’m still repairing the damage to my physical health from childhood trauma, and I’m just a little younger than you.
Back to “the third way”. One of the strongest general perceptions that came through those doors I tried so hard to close, was that of the connectedness of everything. Even living through a childhood with a frequent physical threat, and constant emotional attack from a parent, could not totally close off a diffuse sense of spiritual connection to…. let’s just call it “The Great Spirit”. (I was not raised in a religion and the Amerindian concept was a ‘best fit’ to what I felt).
In my 20’s the Spock persona began to show cracks, and the stuff behind those locked doors began to leak through in poetry that ‘wrote itself through me’. Poems of several stanzas, completely rhymed and metered, would show up unexpectedly, and I would just have to grab pencil and paper and write them down. Coleridge needed opium dreams to do the same thing with “Xanadu”. I was on nothing but coffee. The poetry was mostly of a spiritual nature, and quite beautiful, but the process frightened me. Whatever was happening was way, way bigger than I was, and I knew enough about the crazy genes in my bloodline to be very afraid.
Fast forward 30+ years through Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, failed marriage, low-level, low-pay jobs, and years of care-taking the parent that threatened to kill me, to a couple of years ago when a favorite blogger suggested reading Hemingway for his clear communication style. I got a copy of “The Old Man and the Sea” and read it. Subsequently, I had the thought, “What would the story look like if I wrote it?” That thought sort of ‘hung in the air’ for a few days. Suddenly, one day, movie sequences started playing in my head, very much like you describe your process of writing fiction. You see the movie and write down what is happening. Initially, the ‘movie’ bore no resemblance to the Hemingway story, until the protagonist moved to the coast and took up a subsistence-level occupation harvesting a beautiful and delectable creature from the sea.
Since that first kickstart of story writing, the meat and potatoes of four thought-provoking novellas has shown up in movie form. Now that I know this can probably continue, I need to learn the craft of fiction and learn plot, and story arc, and character development. Whereas the poetry was linear line by line dictation, these stories come in chunks that I need to string together. I also need a newer computer and programs so I that can publish the stories to Kindle. Poetry does not make any money unless you can put it to music, and I never had any musical talent show up. Stories can make money, and I can embed the poems in the stories.
It took a long damn time to develop the inner strength and emotional balance to know which inner door to open, and how far to open it. I hope I have a lot of years ahead to see where this fiction writing process leads me. This is the most fun I have had in a very long time.
All 3 of my adult children are liberals. One of them marched in her city. Thankfully, she didn’t put a vulva hat on and make it on TV. :/
They think that we’re wrong-headed, stupid, racist, you name it. In spite of upbringing, in the end, the public schools/university won.
Left = good. Family, if not left, = bad.
You’re not alone.
“In the middle, the role of the conjugate brain is to moderate the discussion. To ask the question “What is sufficiency?” “What do we seek?””
So you had a Tao dream?
Read Lao Tzu. Sounds very similar to me.