Interested Pig

What is a flock? Take away the birds and it is nothing. Replace all the birds with other bird sand the flock is the same. The flock is nothing more a label for a continual divergence and convergence to an undefinable idealisation.

What is a bird in the flock? it has wings, a beak, feathers. It moves, it flaps it wings. A bird is also a label, a continual convergence and divergence to an undefinable idealisation.

And what about Alex, a bird who flies in the flock? Well Alex changes over time, he is born, grows and loses feathers, his cells are constantly replaced. Even Alex is a label for a continual divergence and convergence to an undefinable idealisation.

The flock is no more than a hierarchy of interconnected inseparable essences. As it is an intuitive ordering of a singular confusion.

And what of the words by which I communicate this. It can be written or printed on paper, temporarily pixelated on a screen, misspelled, or spoken in uncountable accents. It is made of phonemes which are structured by meaningless letters that are nonexistent in Mandarin. 

Once again I find what I hierarchy of essences. Language is no more than a grasped ordering of a singular confusion.

Birds, words can and always myself exist simultaneously in my experience therefore experience is ultimately an intuition of essences in a singular confusion. Confusion sits a the top of the hierarchy of intuitive essences.

I find that annoying and repulsive. I rally against this because it doesn’t make sense, for if confusion reigns then the essence  of intuition cannot be consistent. Intuition makes sense of a moment of confusion. All meaning I intuit or feel is unique to the moment.

I have written the essence of this conclusion many times from multiple perspectives using a variety of descriptive labels. I struggle against confusion to find consistency but when I believe I have a consistent view an inconsistency emerges. 

I usually like to round on something comfortable like this “However intuition is the best model of a moment of confusion. It suggests a best path of following the intuition of the most informative interpretation of confusion which we call being fully present in the present.” But such action no longer provides the comfort it once did. I just feel anxiety at its crumbling into certain uncertainty. Once a convergence now a divergence. My blog posts follow the behaviour described here of infinitely approaching an undefinable idealisation. It is an intuitive belief of the benefit of being fully in the moment, but to be true to myself this feels a little fanciful. My blogs have been a process of railing against an on going subconscious acknowledgement that there is nothing but confusion.

What is a bird? it has wings, a beak, feathers, but there is no actual idealised bird. A bird is an idealised architecture, not a reality. It is a subjectively categorised.

And what about Alex the Parrot? Well Alex changes over time, he is born, grows and loses feathers, his cells are constantly replaced. Even Alex is a subjective categorisation, not a reality.

I choose how I perceive a world based on imperfect categorisation, a world that fundamentally cannot be ordered. My rational, intuitive and instinctive leanings guide me in an ultimately and fundamentally a disordered Universe. Consciously, subconsciously and unconsciously I pragmatically make sense of a meaningless world.

Meaning then is personal not Universal. It is sense-making but these are not idealised truths. Things only have the essence by which I assign to them. 

A pragmatic existence which is apparently meaningless one is an absurd paradox.  However it seems I am enslaved to make sense of it. 

Yet I am not necessarily facing existential anxiety, rather I may be in the process of mourning the death of reason. So what is reason? It seems to be a mental process of forecasting because when I stare into the face of my anxiety it source is the feeling of being lost without it.

A boxing match is a dance of reciprocity: each movement is shaped by the ongoing dialogue between fighters. Your “freedom” to land that knockout blow was determined by the relational field in which you operated. The isolated individual—the exclusive self—has no pure freedom; it’s bound up in relationship.

Now imagine shifting your identity from the isolated agent to the match itself—an inclusive self that embraces the entire field of play. This inclusive self isn’t “in relation to” anything, because it already contains everything. It’s unbound and therefore free. In principle, it can realise any possibility—though some outcomes may be more likely than others.

The exclusive self doesn’t live in the moment. It is the boxer who feels the success of the KO even before the punch is thrown. It is not unbounded possibility it is a singularity derived through mental calculation of effects from causes. It allows the inclusive self to address future possibilities as if they were in the present - yet it is the inclusive self that picks. 

This might sound abstract or self-referential even, but many athletes describe peak performance in exactly these terms: they “let go of the ego” (the exclusive self) and fully inhabit the unfolding moment (the inclusive self). In that state they access the full range of possibilities available right now. Their greatest “victories” become not trophies but fleeting instants in the ongoing development of training harmony between body, mind, opponent, and environment.

We tend to see ourselves as the exclusive self. As such we feel like programmes of recurrence. If ‘this’ do ‘that’ - deterministic choosing. We perceive ourselves as utilitarian computers coldly calculating through inductive reasoning from idealised forms. By contrast, when we recognise the exclusive self as just a mechanism within the inclusive self we see we are both the programmer and the programme. 

Consider the self as the totality of awareness - a container for all experiences - thought, feeling and environment. In this self everything’s’ behaviour controls everything else’s’ behaviour including the ‘singular’ self. Only the self, perceived as whole, determines its behaviour.