(General content note: A lot of my thinking has really changed since the old days of this blog. There’s some weird, mean, and polemic stuff in there.)
[New? Start here: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/articles/]
So things have been quiet around here. I’m working on a full-length (actual clean prose) book that overlaps but is not identical to the project on this blog. I don’t want to quite pin down the book project, yet, but, it’s ideally intended for a more general audience, and I’m hoping that just reading the book will be an (ethically consented) life-trajectory-altering, psychoactive intervention. Or, at least, that’s what I want versions of the book to iterate on. I’m going to leave that psychoactive intervention vague, for now:
The prose on this blog, terse and cryptic as it is, comes out to around 50,000 words. The average self-help book is something like 30,000-50,000 words. (A novel is like 80,000-100,000 words, for reference.) I’ve been specifying the rhetorical and pedagogical goals for my book, and that specification alone is 10,000 words as of yesterday and no end is in sight. So, yeah, I’m not even going to try to boil that down into a descriptive paragraph or sentence, just yet.
Unless I do some sort of brilliant coordinate transformation on my maps, which I’m trying to do but not expecting any miracles, there’s no way I’m going to compress all my rhetorical and pedagogical goals into a single, punchy book that hits the reader like a freight train. Good enough, low dimensional projections are hard.
Anyway, that’s why things have been quiet around here. I’ve been rereading some key books (hint, hint) and taking notes. I liked this quote from Herbert Demmin’s Ghosts of Consciousness:
[…] Wilber refers to the next stage above and inclusive of Formal Operations as Vision-Logic (VL). Wilber says that VL reflects one’s ability to look within the mind and operate on the rationality of Formal Operations itself. As a result, one is beginning to differentiate from rationality and can now integrate or embrace (and not just be) the mind.
Wilber (1995) indicates that where the rationality of Formal Operational Thought entails the ability to generate all possible perspectives (as reflected by thoughts that can stand for anything and be manipulated in the mental world space), VL adds them up in a totality. Where Formal Operational Thought establishes relationships, VL establishes networks of those relationships. He says VL can freely express itself in single ideas, but its most characteristic movement is mass ideation, a system or totality of truth seeing at a single view. Such vision or panoramic logic apprehends a mass network of ideas, how they influence each other, and how they interrelate. It represents a higher order synthesizing capacity of making connections, relating truths, coordinating ideas, and integrating concepts. Wilber says it is dialectical, nonlinear, and weaves together incompatible notions into a new and higher whole, their partiality negated but their positive contributions preserved. (pp. 111)
Finally, if you’re new to this blog. Here’s a nice, curated sequence:
- https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/cutesy-diagrams-and-mindfucking/
- https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/spiritual-stuff/
- https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/sorting-through-inner-activity/
- https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/08/11/muscles-you-didnt-know-you-had/
- http://lesswrong.com/lw/hc8/developmental_thinking_shoutout_to_cfar/
- https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/how-to-do-foregroundbackground-meditation/
- https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/what-rationality-actually-looks-like-from-the-inside-4500-words/
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