#modes of thinking

[old-johncave]

It's like... I might just be able to express all my core philosophy in this one blog by the end of the year.

Then maybe I can get down to fucking business and write the novels, plays, and scripts that've been increasingly plaguing my mind!

[zorays]

3 Ways Gamification Improves Sales Performance

Goofing off can give a salesperson a bad rap. But what if gamification in sales could actually aid in productivity and innovation? Here, we examine research from Harvard Business Review about why making time for gamification in sales may be the best thing an organization can do to bolster sales performance. [sc name=”ad”] Gameplay can simulate real-life experiences Well, maybe not Final…

View On WordPress

[digging-holes-in-the-river]

From David Abram, Becoming Animal (via Facebook):

Our intelligence struggles to think its way out of the mirrored labyrinth, but the actual exit is to be found only by turning aside, now and then, from the churning of thought, dropping beneath the spell of inner speech to listen into the wordless silence. Only by frequenting that depth, again and again, can our ears begin to remember the many voices that inhabit that silence, the swooping songs and purring rhythms and antler-smooth movements that articulate themselves in the eloquent realm beyond the words. Only thus do we remember ourselves to the deeper field of intelligence, to the windblown thinking that is not ours, upon which all our thoughts depend.

[lacigolana]

On the other hand, I’ve often felt like a lot of things made perfect sense to me, even though other people might find them incomprehensible.  This is especially the case with surrealist art and movies, with dreams, and with other people’s weird beliefs and inexplicable experiences.  Also with mental illness, or the sort of extreme emotions / symbolic thinking that you get during physically grueling or life-threatening situations.

Some examples are the lyrics to “Mercy Seat”, or Pink Floyd’s The Wall the movie, or Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, or even Pan’s Labyrinth, depending on your interpretation of the film.  What I’m alluding to is the way that... real experiences seem to blend themselves with symbolic ones, and mythological narratives get overlaid on real events.

I picked “Mercy Seat” because it seems like such a perfect example of this phenomenon.  The narrator thinks a lot about Jesus on the cross, and that myth becomes analogically bound to his own experience of waiting for the electric chair, and the two completely blend themselves in his mind, so that you get lyrics like:

In Heaven His throne is made of gold The ark of his Testament is stowed A throne from which I'm told All history does unfold. It's made of wood and wire And my body is on fire And God is never far away.

(It’s such a good song.  I highly recommend listening if you’ve never heard it.)

So anyway, yeah, that stuff always makes perfect sense to me, and I never seem to have trouble understanding it when it appears in art or literatures.  In some cases, like “Mercy Seat”, I’m able to clearly verbalize the meaning, while in other cases, like mythology, dreams, or surrealist art, I get a clear feeling that this makes sense, and it means something, but I would be hard-pressed to articulate what.

The more I study symbolism and comparative mythology, the more I find myself able to explain myths, dreams, and surrealism aloud.  But there are still many stories that elude my explicit conscious understanding, and I’m sure that even for things where I can point and say “look, an example of water symbolism” or “look, a dying-and-rising god”, there are parts that I’m only grasping at an intuitive level and haven’t managed to comprehend rationally.

But yeah, regardless of whether I can articulate what something means, surrealist art pretty much always gives me a sense of “that makes sense” or at least “that means something and my mind is doing something, processing the meaning, even if I don’t quite understand what”.

[lacigolana]

I think, in my life, I have experienced two reasons for being unafraid of death.

One is when I have such a strong feeling of purpose that it’s more important than life.  I feel part of something greater, part of a community or a set of values, to the point where I am willing to die for that thing.

The other is when I have no sense of purpose whatsoever.  Nothing in my life matters, I’m not here for anything.  There’s nothing I need to complete, nothing I need to accomplish.  It doesn’t matter if I die, since what is there to lose?  During that feeling of freedom, I tend to forget the past and the future and the narrative of my life, and lose myself in the eternity of the Now. 

(Although, I think during that feeling, I might still turn down an opportunity to die because I loved someone so much and didn’t want to hurt them by leaving.  I think love is a feeling that can easily coexist with that mental state.  I still wouldn’t be afraid, and I still wouldn’t have a purpose, or be thinking about the past and the future.  My desire to live would manifest as an intensity of love and a strong wanting, as if all those abstract notions of purpose didn’t need to exist because they had been compiled down into a pure feeling.)

[lacigolana]

Loss of Self (part v)

I’ve called this experience a “loss of self” (and not, say, a “shift in priorities”) because it really did feel like my self was changing.  It felt like I was a different person from week to week inhabiting the same body.

A lot of this revolved around... accepting technology vs. rejecting it.  And accepting modern life vs. rejecting it and trying to return to the primordial forest.  I felt that... different activities evoked entirely different mindsets, different ways of experiencing the world.  That if I studied cognitive science it would put me into an abstract mode of thinking that would make it hard to experience the beauty of nature.  And if I spent a lot of time outside working with my hands, then it would put me in a frame of mind where I couldn’t think in terms of abstractions.

And... I think this is somewhat true; I think different places and activities do evoke different modes of thinking, and that hunter-gatherers probably thought way less abstractly than we do now.  But I think it was a mistake to believe that I needed to choose one or the other, and stick to it for good.  I think it’s possible for my life to contain both, and for me to go back and forth between the two states of mind.

But anyway, during this time, I would decide one day that I wanted to study cognitive science, and so I’d feel like I needed to rejoin modern life and commit myself to a modern way of thinking, once and for all.  And then, another day, I’d decide I wanted to live in nature and work with my hands, and so I’d have to give up modern life forever.  It felt like I was choosing between two different people that I wanted to be.

So anyway, during the period where my priorities were constantly shifting, it felt like I didn’t have a consistent self, that I couldn’t hold onto my self for any length of time.  That my personality and phenomenological experience was changing in a fundamental way along with my priorities (even though, from the outside, it probably looked like I stayed the same).

[untiltheseashallfreethem]

Hey @krwks​, is there a reason that your askbox is turned off?  There are so many comments that I’ve wanted to send you over the months, but I haven’t been able to.

I mean, I could just reblog your posts to comment on them, but I’m pretty selective about what I post here.  Like, I’m deliberately not using tumblr as medium for casual conversation, and I don’t join into most threads, even when I might have something to say.  My tumblr is more intended as a sort of... collage?... reflecting my life philosophy, interests, and particular aesthetic.  And I have thoughts on almost every topic, so if I reblogged every conversation here to comment on it, then my tumblr would become a reflection of everyone else’s interests, rather than a reflection of what matters to me.

Fortunately, though, I do have comments on your artwork that are relevant to the themes of this blog!

I have to say, when you first started posting your art, I didn’t understand it at all.  It all just looked like a bunch of childish fingerpainting, and it didn’t evoke any aesthetic reaction besides “ugh”.  I kept trying to figure out why you made art like that, and all I could come up with was uncharitable explanations.  Like, that your paintings didn’t really mean anything, and you were just doing it for status.

I no longer believe this of you, but I do think there are people in this world who make art purely for status.  Like, ime, there’s a few different mindsets one can have while making art.  One is “there’s something I really want to express to the world; let me see if I can convey that particular message, or evoke that particular emotional/mental/aesthetic response”.  And that mindset can actually lead to creativity.  But I think a lot of people start out with this really abstract mindset of “I want to Make Art” or “I want to Be Artistic”, and then they ask “what counts as art?” and they look at what other people are doing and imitate that.  And that’s what I mean by making art purely for status; they’re not trying to communicate anything; they’re just making art for the sake of being an artist.

Anyway, I didn’t think this was what you were doing.  Like, I know you’ve written about getting caught up in mindless status games in the past, but given your interest in surrealism, drugs, and strange mental states, and given how many interesting things you have to say about the world in general, it seemed highly unlikely that you had nothing to communicate artistically, and were just doing it to “be an artist”.

But I still had no idea what you were doing.

And then I got really surprised, because all of a sudden, your artistic style dramatically changed.  Like, I remember being really taken aback by this painting, because it was dramatically different than anything you’d posted in the past.  First of all, it no longer looked like fingerpaint.  (Since you’ve talked about art school, maybe this was just an increase in technical skill?)  But also, this was the first one of your paintings that evoked any kind of emotional response for me.  And I actually found it really powerful!  The face looks like an apparition of power in an overwhelmingly chaotic subway station.  And the facial expression conveys a distinct personality.  Like, not some otherworldly godlike power, or a beatific vision of peace and oneness with the universe, but... a very powerful human being.  Like an arrogant young sorcerer.  Someone at risk of turning to the dark side (whether or not he realizes it), although he hasn’t irrevocably gone down that path quite yet.  There’s still time.

I have no idea if that’s what you were intending with that painting.  But the point is, I actually felt like it was expressing something, unlike your previous paintings, which I’d found totally uninterpretable.

The impression I’ve gotten, from all your recent work (and from the themes of your blog), is that you’re trying to convey an altered state of perception.  Like, the face in that painting looked like it could have been apophenia, like it had suddenly resolved out of the chaos of the subway wall.  This one is my favorite; it gives me a sense of the kind of perceptual glitches one might experience, if one encountered something utterly beyond human perception.  (Or maybe it’s conveying what drugs are like; I’ve never done drugs so I wouldn’t know.)

Anyway, those are my comments.  I’m sorry if any of this comes across as excessively harsh!  Please know that I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t respect you.

[untiltheseashallfreethem]

Oh man, check out this email that past-me (late 2009) wrote and (very thankfully) never sent.  I’m putting it under a readmore because long.

I was talking to Justin the other day about symbolism in art (The Fountain in particular) and came to some interesting realizations about the subconscious mind.  Feel free not to read this email if you don't care, but since you are a philosopher and a poet, I figured the discussion might interest you. We were talking about why people find art pretentious, and what "pretentious" means in the first place.  For instance, a whole lot of people consider The Fountain pretentious, and I think it's because The Fountain is a story told entirely in symbolism.  I personally find symbolism to be an extremely powerful means of communication, since symbols are the language of the unconscious mind.  By using symbols rather than direct communication, the artist can bypass the conscious mind altogether and send messages directly to the subconscious mind.  The subconscious mind is then the part of the mind which processes the story and deduces what's going on; thus the meaning and the plot can percolate up into the conscious mind, leading to a sudden conscious realization that requires no direct explanation nor laborious conscious deduction.  I call this subconscious inference: the subconscious uses clues given by the movie to infer what is going on, then the conscious mind comes to a sudden, powerful realization based on these inferences that have been happening at a deeper layer. Because you find The Fountain to be an extremely powerful film, I'm going to assume that you're using subconscious inference when you watch it.  However, I find that most people don't watch The Fountain this way.  Most people either don't have any idea what's going on in the film (they think it's about a guy who lives for 1000 years and eventually becomes a spaceman) or they understand exactly what Aronofsky is trying to convey, but they say "What's the point?  He could have told that story in five minutes without bothering to make a whole film out of it.  And why did he use all that stupid symbolism when he could have just told the story directly?"  (I've known some extremely intelligent people to have the latter viewpoint.) That latter group of people tend to find The Fountain pretentious.  To them, Aronofsky is telling a simple story, but unnecessarily obfuscating it with symbolism.  In thinking about why this is the case, I've come to the conclusion that most people do not have a very strong connection between the conscious and subconscious minds.  In fact, I think a lot of people are blocking out their subconscious minds.   The group of people who completely don't understand the Fountain are usually what our society would consider "normal people".  They aren't intellectuals, try not to think about things too much, and spend most of their time seeking out mindless entertainment in the form of TV shows and American comedies as well as thoughtless social interaction.  They exist at a cultural rather than individual level; they are completely a product of pop culture and spend as little time having their own individual thoughts and ideas as possible.  Thinking about things differently from other people would make them weird, and the last thing they want to be is weird.  (This description is a charicature but I'm sure you get the idea.)  These people do not appreciate art because they don't understand it.  Art speaks to the subconscious, but these people do not allow art to penetrate their subconscious at all.  Because they don't like admitting that art has some meaning that they do not grasp, they call people who do enjoy art "pretentious" - they are only pretending to understand/enjoy this nonsensical, stupid art because it makes them seem smarter. The group of people who understand The Fountain but find it entirely pointless are the stereotypical intellectuals.  Their existence occurs entirely in the intellect, i.e. the conscious mind.  They take pride in thinking about things a lot, and in understanding things consciously.  They think so loudly about everything that the chatter of their conscious minds drowns out anything their subconsciouses are trying to say.  To them, symbolism is something to "figure out" consciously, and so they focus their conscious efforts on figuring out what the different symbols mean.  Many of them find The Fountain pretentious because they feel like it could have told the entire story without any of the symbolism, and that the symbolism is just an attempt at "being artistic".  Also, some of them enjoy The Fountain because they can understand and discuss the symbols with their other intellectual friends at a very conscious level; these are the people who are typically considered pretentious themselves. It should be noted I would actually consider some art pretentious.   Specifically, I'd consider a lot of modern art pretentious because it's "meta-art", making an intellectual comment on the state of the world of art, and trying to define what could be considered art; I imagine a lot of the people who make this kind of art, which is to be interpreted intellectually rather than emotionally/subconsciously, do not have a very good connection to their emotions or their subconscious, and do not understand art at anything but an intellectual level. Anyway, the conclusion I've come to from all of this discussion is that artists, true artists I mean, use symbolism because it speaks directly to the subconscious; these people are artists precisely because of their connection with the subconscious mind, and their ability to communicate with others at a subconscious level rather than a conscious, intellectual one.  This is true of true composers as well; powerful music causes emotional/subconscious understanding.