Dialogic Exploration (FI#5)

 What is the relation between collective knowledge and personal ingenuity?
In a recent interview Ido Portal said that there is immense power in collective knowledge. A fighter could train by himself in perfection for 20 years today and not even come close to today's modern MMA fighters. 

What we are driven by, are goals. Sports aren't really competitions, they are potpourris of human potential. Given certain constraints, which organisms creativity is able to reach further, and develop more brilliantly. The goal is constraint. While there is a saying that says constraints drive creativity - I would go further and claim that perhaps the constraint is creativity. Without a container for pure potentiality it is just meaningless perfection.

How is that discussion relevant to my life as an ordinary human? I realise that we are molten perfection molding ourselves through how we move through life. Not as a romanticization or abstraction, but as fact. What is it that shapes how I live? The simple answer my brain jumps to is awarenss, but I say that without looking into the ramifications of what such a claim might imply. 

Awareness is shaping how I move through life. So it arbitrarily becomes an objective to maximize. That does not quite seem to capture it. What is the goal awareness is moving towards? Is it truth, is it perfection in a platonic sense?

An over reliance on collective knowledge makes us fragile. It leaves us with no ground to stand upon, when we face the real world. The map we have, is not what we created. It does not then correspond to our lived experience and we do not know where it came from. It gets jumbled up in the epistemic debt of abstractions which feel meaningless to us. It is like looking through a codebase and having no documentation. 

That is in fact a good metaphor for life. We have access to our own operating system all the time, and we can literally change code in our kernels. Yet the behaviour of the system itself is only revealed in interaction with other agents. But this does not even capture reality fully because it places the subjectivity purely into the environment. 

An interplay is always involved, between imperfect egos. 

The slave master dialectic gets insipid. In having totally dominated the slave the master becomes callous. He forgets the view into the world the slave gave him.

A much more appropriate relation between two people, a freer relation between them is a relation of two dancers, of two sportsmen. Sometimes, someone becomes the slave, sometimes someone becomes the master and in this dance the freshness of the relation is maintained. 

How is a serious person to relate to others in their movement through life? What is this seriousness that cannot be laughed upon? No, for any attempt at seriousness can be laughed upon. Yet how is one to intelligently maneouver the bouts of intensity and clarity?

Also, what is my relation to other people? To collective knowledge and societal convention? Culture exists so that the goodness in people can flower. But who decides this goodness? With culture there are the easy paths of the contrarian or the conformist. An apathetic disagreement or agreement. But in calling the culture the 'big other' we can posit again the dance instead of a slave master dialectic. What is necessary is not to become the servant of the big other, of Moloch and to always affirm its truth. Nor is it feasible to become a heathen for the sake of being a heathen. What is necessary is an authentic expression, of bucking the norms when necessary, taking what is true with gratitude for those who came before you in other cases. We are making culture as we live, and this dance is our life. 

The next question that opens itself up is, how am I to get good at this dance. My movements are blocky and rigid and there is no flow to them. Since this can get a bit convoluted, I seek to answer an easier question first. 

How am I to get better at X? X= anything. 

Why do you want to get better? Is it for freedom, or is it for power? That is not the genuine question here. The question is for you to enquire into it yourself. And the sincerity of your truth will determine how far you go. 

When I sincerely put this question to myself, there is already something acting on me. My desire itself is working through me. The sincerity of my truth decides how many barriers to the transformative potential may be destroyed. 

The next question, if I am not rushing into it is what is creating these barriers? To my genuine desire? Perhaps these barriers are the construct of my ego. The chaff of what has remained through the experiences of my life. Without these blockades to my perception, my desires would eat me alive, In the sincerity they demanded of me.

But that is the point. The work is already happening through you. And it is not possible to rush it, because the rushing is already insincere. The 'work' being a skillful assasination of all that is false and insincere about you, using a beautiful metaphor given by Ido. Does this imply there is something we are evolving towards? Improving towards? That is again an insincere question, an intellectual abstraction. Perhaps there really is nothing that we are improving towards, it is a cyclic game for the understanding of oneself. Instead of one day, the game being over we will continue this life having moments of beauty where an illusion of suffering was destroyed. 

The desire for Nirvana is itself insincere, when such beauty already abounds. He who can kiss a joy as it flees, is in the garden already. 

Namaste.