The Great Shadow
Part 1 | The Dire Hypothesis
Head bent back against the twilight, arms in motion upward, an arc of flame constrained by the thinnest skin of the paper, radiating heat and warm light through its tender container, I release this communication toward the unknown, tracing its movement as it meets invisible atmospheric currents, up and out, disappearing from my view, but not from the world.
And I think of you.
I wonder at your disposition toward it, toward me. I wonder that you have come upon it at all.
I remind myself that so often the communicator, the sender, means harm toward the receiver. Maybe not 'means' exactly, for people tend to find ways to think of themselves as good people. "I'm a good person!" And to mean harm is to not be a 'good person' unless that person is a child molester or terrorist. So they will not feel themselves to have meant harm. Nonetheless, the effect will have been harm, and what more can we do at some point given the complexity of every situation of communication than to read the effect as the purpose.
So I remind myself to treat you with love in this activity, to fill this communication with earthen-lead, fields filled with blooming wildflowers, face rubbing, buried in blankets love. Radical love.
I remind myself to live in radical love toward you. I dream myself through ritualistic oath toward this radical love toward you. I will live in a love which recognizes that existence washes over us all in its terrible beauty, volcanic, oceanic, devastating like a tsunami or the collision of a moon and a planet. We all live in the midst of such devastation, even if it is the plodding ageing of our dying cells as our bodies inexorably become more decrepit. Ours is slow devastation punctuated by occasional calamitous spontaneous magnificent devastation.
And in the midst of such devastation we are all fleeing creatures, running mouths agape, terror driven, death-eyed, stumbling over each other, forgetting each other's existence. Mad fleeing creatures all, we humans, we beasts of earth.
I, however, will make choice, if such a thing is possible even in an approximation, I will set my life's course with an eye toward the horizon of playing the lunatic halting amidst the chaos to find the serenity of the vile creature who steals a moment's peace amidst that chaos. And in choosing this, I choose a love which reaches through it, connecting my head and my feet like the stretches of a tree, roots grounded deep, leaves scraping sky.
To love radically I must then be suspicious of violence, and, secondarily, be of the utmost suspicion of dwelling on violence. If violence is done, it should be swift, graceful, with the heaviest heart, and with a whispered prayer to the life whose sustenance requires it. For there should beno violence which does not sustain, even enhance, life.
My life's activities have bent toward a path which would appear at first to be far away from violence. I work to create communities in which healing is the guiding principle. In this work, however, I have had earthen, conrete, flesh and blood experiences with what it means that violence is at times required to pursue healing creation.
Nature is brutal. Energetic-material existence, which subsumes nature in the categorial analysis, is brutal. Volcanos, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, the dessert sun, a driving rain, erosion, bleaching, whole-globe temperature increase. Birth, abandonment, rape, battle, parasitism, disease, ageing, being murdered, being devoured.
Existence is brutal. And human life follows its innate nature into such brutality.
The creation of something which is not brutal, which heals those parts of the world it touches, the careful building of something which holds at bay the inherent decay and erosion of existence for those who stand behind it for a moment, whether people or communities or non-human animals or a forested mountain top, the creation of such a thing is as close to a miracle as existence ever comes. It is a mitzvah, a joy, a blessing, something to be celebrated and cherished.
It is also something which we should know will never last, but which is worth preserving for however long we are able. And this preservation can require violence. For someone must push back the encroaching violence of nature and existence itself, must create the area of protection in the world in which the healing can happen. That pushing, that insistence on a boundary beyond which evil and decay will not pass, is a force, a violence, and it is most violent when it is most salient and effective.
I am a person whose life's activities have bent away from violence. Yet I find myself writing these words knowing that my intention is do a kind of violence with them. To you.
You see, this work, if effective, will be a form of violence. Not a physical violence, though I can imagine different forms of physical violence which might emanate from it. And you may one day as well envision such kinetic activities in the world stemming from the writing and reading of these words which has occurred here. Is is a kind of psychological violence.
For what reason would there be for me to press forth this communication into the world toward you but for it to land upon you and change you, for it to become part of you and grow into you? I labor to push this toward you because I seek to change you.
I must admit this, I am trying to change you. I prostrate myself in confession, I seek to change you, to alter your understanding of the world.
I want to be clear, I am no alien, no abnormality. Communications issuing forth toward you from every corner of existence are done with the purpose of changing you, of reaching into your skull and shaking, stirring that gray matter to alter its contents. It may be that the communicator does not realize this is their intention, but what more can we do at some point given the complexity of every situation of communication than to read the effect as the purpose. And my purpose is no different, it is to change you.
Perhaps, though, there is one difference. I remind myself that my purpose is violent, and I lay this before you at the outset of this work. I remind myseld that we should never seek to change other people, to reach into their skulls and shake around the contents therein, unless we do so with the greatest care and forethought we can build up from within ourselves. To engage in the rearrangement of someone's mind is a most responsibility, though from the time we were born we were surrounded by the communicative eminations of fellow humans who took it as anythingn but, who treated it flippantly.
For it is the state of the world, and this is will serve as perhaps one of the most prominent themes of this first volume of my work, that it is a constant state of affairs that humans seek to change the minds of their fellow humans with little or no thought, throwing viruses of change outoward in their direction with little thought or discernment.
The change in your mind I seek is to sew doubt in your ways of understanding the world
The folk ways of knowing are riddled with problems
The scientific way of knowing are riddled with problems
The Great Shadow is a problem which infests both of them
The change is urgently needed due to the possibility that the dire hypothesis is an accurate description of reality
Part 2 | First Education | Critique of Common Sense
Sensory Data Coming Online in the Womb
In my time, it is not clear when we first begin to hear the sounds of life from within our mother's body, but at some point very early in our lives we are hearing and seeing, touching, tasting and smelling. It is quite possible, then, that some of these senses begin to operate prior to our birth.
What is likely is that during the process of our very early development, the bundle of cells that will become us goes from something not resembling the kind of sensory experience that we experience as fully formed humans to something that resembles this experience, a system of information intake, a feedback loop of activity whereby we our bodies themselves act as probes of the world outside of themselves and compel themselves to take different stances towards the world, to change stance, based on the information they have taken in. This may be a key moment, a monumental step in each of our individual journeys of biological development. Or it may be that the pattern of information intake and decision making is always built into the cellular structure in some sense.
In any event, we go from not taking information in and processing it to taking information in and processing it.
During this brief span of time in which I find myself forever prisoner, frozen as in amber, of the most self-righteously confident storehouses of official scientific knowledge make few claims of knowing when we people first begin to hear the sounds of life and existence which surround our tiny, fragile bodies. We cane guess that this moment happens or most of us when we are in our mothers' bodies, that our first auditory perceptions are from within her body. We can guess that there is some moment when the nervous system begins firing in a new way along novel conduits previously laid out according to the genetic blueprint, that it becomes activated, active, crackling with the first of what we will later come to understand as our sensory data. Our senses one moment not firing, the next firing, crackling...
From this moment of deep encasement in the bodies of our biological mothers onward, our existence is characterized by some degree of transmission of information from what will eventually become our sensory organs, our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, all to our brain. From this moment forward our brain is a processing machine for that data and in a new way we have become acted upon by the outside world, by the environment.
We we mean, then, by "the environment" which acts upon us is every part of the physical world which might impress itself upon these sensory organs and, thereby, prompt the transmission of such sensory data to our brains for some amount of processing.
There is some degree to which the complexity of this system -- the human body -- is elided by this description. For example, the processing of sensory data likely begins at the sensory organs and continues through every phase of transmission to the processing brain. However, so much processing occurs in the brain that thinking of the brain as the primary site of processing is a useful simplification. Further, the sensory data being transmitted to our brain for processing also includes data from within our bodies. Relying on a model in which the body is hermetically sealed from the environment and in which all sensory data is being generated by interaction of the body with the environment is useful to such a degree that it is worth using, which remembering that like all models it is ultimately incomplete.
Building of the Personality Like a Stalactite
From the time before our birth, then, the processor of our brain is receiving this sensory data, these inputs, performing computations of some sort upon them, the data and creating outputs. Some of the outputs are to other parts of the body -- see your mother's face, and smile, coo. Other times, the brain's response will be to pass the data through without acting upon it at all, essentially forgetting the experience in the most biologically fundamental of ways.
Importantly, at other moments the brain takes this data and updated its own structure in reaction to it, thereby changing the nature of the brain's very programming and how it will act in response to other stimulus data in the future. A child touches a hot iron and recoils, having burned herself. She does not repeat the action because new pathways of processing have quickly, forcefully been forged in her brain. A child, as she grows, experiences increasingly negative reaction feedback from the adults around her to asking for her pacifier. Eventually, there is a final time when she asks for the baby toy, and she never does it again from then on. New pathways of processing have slowly, inexorably been forged in her brain.
Both of the examples demonstrate that in an abstract sense, this process whereby the child's brain is updated is a form of learning. This updating of the programming of the brain may be learning in its most stripped down biological form. The second example, however, is where I wish to linger. For it is a hypothesis of mine that the form of learning to which it gestures is the one that is far more common and frequent and that, essentially, composes the large majority of learning that goes into the construction of our personalities.
The neurological feedback mechanism kicks in at some point in time inside our mothers' bodies, and from that moment on, sensory data is being transmitted to the brain for processing (or excluded from such transmission, which is its own type of processing). From that moment on, impactful experiences can leave deep etchings in the brain's structure. Also, the repetition of the similar stimulus types are slowly carving new structures. We learn, our brains change in their programming, our personalities form and emerge, like stalactites. Layers of stimulus reaction build over hundreds, thousands of moments of stimulus. Most of the moments that make us who we are are imperceptible as such. They are ordinary, mundane. But the mundanities of life, the ordinary moments, repeat, they repeat frequently. And in so doing, they etch themselves into our brains which were once like stones mined from the quarry.
Communications from Other Humans are Key Environmental Experiences
Building an understand of a complex system of activity in the world, which is what the human mind is, can lead us through winding paths of analysis. We have now made our way through the description of some initial building blocks, some analytical tools. While these descriptions may have felt dry, devoid of that burst of novel flavor which can often keep us engaging with a subject, we are now ready to taste the dish we are preparing.
For there is a kind of environmental impact upon the human brain which rises to such a place of influence in the construction of that galactically complex system that it perhaps eclipses all other kinds of environmental impacts -- the communications of other humans, their words, their actions in our presence, their tones, their bodily movements.
We are in constant dialogue with the humans around us. There is dialogue in the most classic sense of the word, words exchanged, things said. There is also the dialogue of looks and bodily activity. What we say and do towards each other captivates us like few other environmental impacts.
For other humans are a key ingredient of the environment which impacts us. Most of us are around other humans much of the day. To live in solitude for great amounts of time is a rare experience. We live in our home dwellings with other humans. We go out into the world and spend our days and nights away from our dwellings with other humans. When we work, we work with other humans.
Even in the present age in which the electronic technologies of media communication have enabled us to interact with humans who are neither in our immediate spatial or temporal vicinity, the key to the interactions are that we are interacting with other humans. When we engage with social media, it is with other humans we engage. When we absorb videos or television, we are engaging with the humans who constructed the programs. Reading a book, we are engaging with the humans who wrote and constructed the book.