Religion, The Shadows, Ways Of Knowing

Taming the Ego

Religion is not Spirituality. Might be considered a companion piece to Science is not Technology.

People talk about their “lizard brains” and “monkey minds” as though those are the same things, namely these unasked for voices that draw us into behaviours that make us feel that we “weren’t ourselves”. In a very real way, though, those are different, and we would be well-advised to learn to deal with them in different ways. The Lizard Brain is the most “primitive” part of the mind… that is to say that it developed earliest and is most concerned with root survival. This is the part of the brain that runs the involuntary parts of our bodies, keeps us breathing, our hearts beating, and our systems functioning. It is also the part that triggers the “flight-or-fight” response, the heightened sense of awareness and agitation that evolved to keep us alive but now functions to keep us in a constant state of anxiety. This part of the mind has three main goals: get enough to eat, don’t get eaten, make babies. It is the root of our “baser” instincts, operating (literally) at the base of the brain. Anger, lust, hunger, fear. Out of control impulses, the kind of terror that induces nausea (even in the face of something as routine as walking into the office). Fight or flight.

The “Monkey Mind”, on the other hand, refers to the operations that developed out of becoming social animals, ones who stayed around to raise the babies they made, and increasingly lived in groups. These parts of the mind are devoted to looking outside ourselves, concerned with status, position, how other people perceive us, whether our social standing is threatened. In a very real way, though, the Monkey Mind sits on top of the Lizard Brain. These concerns are more sophisticated ways of dealing with the underlying fears and drives: get enough to eat, don’t get eaten, make babies. They refocus our energies on the ways in which we can enhance our chances of taking care of those drives, but they do them in social ways. The monkey mind is concerned with connection, power, dominance, and ingratiation. “Oh, I will never be lovable!” “What do you think he meant when he said that?” Anything about political machinations… Monkey.

And then, we have the neo-cortex. Oooh. Ahhh. That’s what makes us human, dontcha know? Rational thought, presiding over all those lower brain parts. Abstraction, pondering, hypothesizing, reasoning. Also justification, explanation, lying.

There’s a level of consciousness that has been observed in chimpanzees that manifests like this: When a chimpanzee spies a particularly tasty piece of fruit, sometimes he shares it with everybody. That is the “cultural” solution that ensures social stability. But sometimes he sees the piece of fruit, and looks around to see whether anybody is looking, and then if he has been seen, he *pretends that nothing is happening*. This is a complex state of mind… he not only sees himself being seen, but he also knows that the other ape, looking at him, will notice that he has noticed something. (“I know that you know that I know…”) So he dissembles. Deceives. Lies.

Don’t let them tell you that human beings are the only ones who…

But there is something more. There is something in us that can hear the voices in our heads, can hear how absurd they are, can work with them, corral them, placate, question, nurture, diffuse and defuse them. This is (depending on your story) the watcher, the true self, concsiousness, pure being, the heart… the number of ways of talking about it are innumerable. After years of exploration, my best understanding of The Religions in their various mystical traditions is that they are paths to listening, ways to still the voices long enough to hear that which lies beneath. In their more rules-based guises, these provide, rather than paths to the deeper self, direct strictures to deal with the voices, without having to address them directly.

If you look at the mystical, direct, immanent teachings across a wide range of religious traditions, you see the same things arising again and again. We develop practices to help the individual work with the voices, to limit the ways in which the ego gets around us, to limit the ammunition that it has in its arsenal. We choose particular restrictions on our sexuality to prevent the ego from seeking sexual proof of its existence and attraction. We make rules about meditation practice because there is good evidence (through the thousands of years) that inward-looking spiritual practices give us good ways to work with and see the illusion of the ego. We make rules against violence because it is ineffective. It doesn’t even have to be “wrong”; it simply doesn’t work if what we are seeking is an enlightened society. Or we develop highly specialized forms of violence (martial arts) in which it is a necessary component, but the ego is asked to step aside by years of conditioning and practice. In all these cases, though, the rules are transmitted from one generation of teachers to the next generation of learners in the capacity of seeking self-discipline. SELF. These are practices for working with one’s OWN ego.

But the ego as an entity is a sneaky thing. It reasserts itself in the most subtle of ways as a person (especially the student of a master) takes on the teaching role and assumes responsibility for the practices and development of his/her students. Then the practices become, rather than freely taken on sets of restrictions, rules that we attempt to assert on the people around us. As it evolves, and takes on the role of an institutional religion, the practices are asserted as tools of control even on the unwilling, and those who follow different sets of practices. In this way, the institution of religion, by taking on the responsibility for involuntary participants, does more to jeopardize these people. No longer free to find their own way to spirit, they are reduced in a lifetime to attempting to maintain a modicum of agency. It equally pushes the oppressors away from this form of development, away from the teachings of the original teacher, and thus another round of the emergence of mystical practices is necessary.

The other thing that we must remind ourselves of here is that these are practices. In the same way as a musician must practice, the student of the mystical tradition, committed to finding the divine in themself must work with the voices. Meditation, learning to disidentify, learning to find the inner control to steer thoughts, to override ego-driven fears and drives, to make choices in each instant… these rely on having chosen to practice, not having been forced to. Just as a student who learns to play under the domination of a parent may become technically competent, if they never make the choice for themselves, they will not choose to remain so. They can learn to follow the rules as a game without making the necessary internal changes. This leaves them ripe for failure, for abuse of their positions, as they can become quite successful in an institutional setting by following the rules and developing theoretical knowledge of the system, without having internalized its teachings. The position of spiritual leader is enticing, to have followers, to be lauded and placed on a pedestal… how many have fallen because they fell to the more subtle machinations of the ego, “decided” not to follow their own rules, or became so obsessed with imposing them on others that they betrayed their own deepest principles?

What we must learn is that, not only can we not do the practice for other people, we can’t even tell them which practices to follow. In being egoless, we can offer our own practices as possible paths to the divine, but it is not our job to make other people follow them. We cannot save other people’s souls; in fact, in attempting to, we almost certainly jeopardize our own.

There is a paradox here, because I am (in essence) telling you how to behave to save yourself, and telling you that you cannot tell others how to behave themselves. Here is how I resolve this. I am not trying to convince you that this is correct. If you are committed to saving other’s souls (even mine) and you determine to use force to do so, I cannot stop you. You can take over our shared spaces, create laws that impose your practices on my life and my body, and congratulate yourself on your certainty. But I assure you (according to my path), I am still closer to that consciousness by practicing non-violence.

A caution to the screaming preacher: If you are taking responsibility for the lives of the entire North American population, your ego is so enormous that it has learned to identify with the bodies of hundreds of millions of people. Getting from there to heaven is going to be an Eye of the Needle kind of situation.

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Religion, Storytelling, The Big Three, The Shadows, Truth, Ways Of Knowing

Perceiving Deep Order, or “Does God Exist?”

It depends what you mean by “god”. It depends what you mean by “exist”.

This is really The Question, isn’t it?

Is there a right answer to all this messy “life” stuff? And is there somebody out there, sitting in judgement, waiting to see whether I (in the midst of an infinite number possible wrong answers) stumble upon it? Is there guidance, or are we just drifting through the universe making meaning as we go?

Proposition 1: God does exist

In one sense of the word “exist”, I can argue logically not only for the existence of God, but of a god who has the power to shape reality… and it is this: There exist persistent pattern(s) in the universe that have colonized our minds and structured our societies. Because we attribute “ultimate cause” to these patterns, they have tremendous power. These gods exist the same way that corporations exist… as structures that have sway over people’s actions, to which they devote their skills and talents, and for the persistence of which they are willing to make great sacrifice. For some reason, the New Atheists, while siding so vehemently with reason and scepticism, use appallingly sloppy arguments, and the question of the existence of god(s) slides over rapidly into the question of whether religion is a constructive or destructive force in our social organization. In this debate, the question of “God” is deferred or considered a closed question by both sides, and the entire argument becomes about the particular claims of a particular religion.

We, who live in the realm of ideas, like to think that we consider two measures of truth. One is correspondence, or how well the ideas correspond to observed “reality” (that is, the phenomenal world). The second is coherence, or how internally consistent a complete set of ideas is. Despite the claims of their true believers, religions tend not to hold up well under either of these rubrics. I’m not, however, about to sweep them away with that. Because they do provide something important which is frequently neglected by those of us who are dedicated to “rational” pursuits. Let us add two more measures of “truth” that people use implicitly: comfort and context.

When Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses, he didn’t mean that it made them stupid. He meant that it provided them with an illusion that allowed them to continue to function in the face of massive injustice and structural suffering. He did call for them to throw off this illusion and unite against the structures, which didn’t work out so well. (I believe that they (we) are unlikely to, for very good reasons related to comfort, context, and identity formation, but that’s another topic.)

What Marx’s analysis points at is the “purpose” of this kind of god, or at least at the mechanisms for its long term persistence and constant re-emergence.

We each need a set of stories that provide context and comfort for wherever we find ourselves in these arcane structures. We ask “why” a lot, particularly about our suffering. Structural analysis has some compelling answers, but tends to leave us, as agents, pretty much subject to the whims of the systems in power unless we can figure out how to recruit many thousands of other agents to act in concert with us. It tends not to give us many tools to cope with the extreme difficulty of getting the many thousands of other agents to stop working on whatever they are working on and work on what we have determined to be the root cause. And when we fail (as we often do), it frequently places the weight of that failure on us as individuals. (Can you say activist burn-out? Nihilism? Despair? Any of these sound familiar?) And that’s if we did have access to education in political science, cultural theory, or sociology at the post-secondary level. Most people, even with an education, are navigating a thorny and hostile world with a much emptier meaning-making tool box.

We Need Meaning Because…

How can I put this?

Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people.

We are insignificantly tiny in a universe that is vast. But in our own lives, we are all that there is.

We want to believe that there is meaning, so that we can maintain an illusion of control. We need to believe that there is something we can do to affect change, so we can feel that we are not so much dust in the wind. We want there to be something, some justice, some deep order that will make up for this.

Religion steps up to these problems with two aspects hugely in its favour:

1) The claim that the Lord works in mysterious ways, and/or, Karma, and/or There is an ordering principle to the universe that is just, but we cannot perceive/conceive of that form of justice. (see above)

AND

2) Its most challenging truth-claims can only be tested by dying.

Where we (non-adherents) fail in this conversation is when we fail to recognize that religion is a social technology. It is afforded special status in our culture due to its claim to having access to ultimate cause. But it is not truly (in my model) a separate category of knowledge. It is, however, a category of knowledge that provides particular answers that must be addressed by anything that wishes to supplant it. Nihilism is a crappy substitute. So is any set of answers that logically mean, “Your life sucks, nobody cares, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Suck it up, buttercup.” Yet that’s what a lot of us are offering.

Proposition 2: God does not exist

This is the world I was raised in, the world of the rational sceptic. This is a world in which the level of cognitive dissonance necessary to maintain belief in an all-knowing, all-just, all-loving god is impossible in the face of the banality of evil and the observed indifference of planetary forces. Forces build up in the rocks beneath the ocean, the earth shifts to relieve the tension, and 160,000 people die. We suffer because we suffer. We exist because we exist. “Why?” is not a meaningful question, except in terms of proximate cause.

Let us consider the non-existence of deep order as one of a category of explanations that accept mystery, something uncontemplateable.

The question of the existence of god(s) takes place on the phenomenal level, when it is, in truth, a noumenal question. Facing the problems of suffering, natural disasters, and evil, we attempt to choose among the following possible explanations.

  1. There is an ordering principle (god/purpose/ultimate meaning) and…
    1. it is indifferent or
    2. we are too small to be noticed or
    3. it is giving us what we “need” for our personal development or
    4. we have complete control over it but lack the consciousness to exert that control or
    5. its purpose is completely beyond our ken and
    6. the suffering we experience is for some greater good. OR
  2. There is no ordering principle; the only meaning in the universe is what we impose. Or, rather, there is an ordering principle, but it is laid out in the governing laws and does not mean anything.

All we have as data to distinguish among these explanations is our experience of the phenomenal world. Despite constant declarations of certainty from all directions, the question of ultimate cause has not been resolved.

Proposition 3: Not Knowing

To conjugate the negation of the verb “To know”:

I don’t know.
You don’t know.
We don’t know.

Doubt is an active process. Not knowing is a state of being.

I don’t know. When the world around me demands certainty, and my existential angst seeks succour.

I don’t know. Confronting the lack of a coherent, comprehensive, correspondent meta narrative that also provides comfort and context is an act of bravery.

What if it is this: agnosticism is not intellectually or spiritually lazy. It is honest. (What if?)

Proposition 4: God does exist (2)

In another sense, I can argue for a completely different sort of god. There is a verse in the Bhagavad Gita in which Krishna, having come to Arjuna in a moment of crisis, reveals himself in all his glory. He must first loan Arjuna his own capacities of perception so that he can endure the moment. I described it to my son thus: “Imagine suddenly being aware of the deep vastness of the universe, knowing every moment of star birth and death, every moment of living ecstasy, every moment of anger, suffering, agony, hatred, everything that ever was, is, or shall be.” His eyes became very large. “And Arjuna, faced with the overwhelming scale of reality, is-ness, said, ‘No, no! I changed my mind. You were right, it is too much!'”

When I was in India, the morning of Diwali in 2012, standing in the field outside the kitchen with my sweet, hot, milky tea in a stainless steel cup with no handle, wrapped in a blanket against the cooling November mornings, I watched the sun rise over the foothills of the Himalayas. I watched the growing disc until the light became unbearable and I had to look away. And this verse of the Gita came to mind. That evening, I watched from a distance as Swami Veda performed the sacrifices (milk and ghee) at the shrines. I watched him bring his very tired, very ill body out into the world to be the hope of this community, and I wept. And into my mind this time sprang the words, “We cannot look upon the face of God, so he gives us one another.”

At other moments, I have cast my eyes skywards, begging for things to be different. For the world to be kinder, for people to be more loving, for world peace and prosperity, for a sane relationship with technology. And the words came these times, “I only have your hands to work through.” That is, not my hands, but ours. If we want to move our world towards a god of love and compassion, we are the ones who have to make the change in ourselves. The gods that appear in the world are the ones we manifest.

This is still a universe that will eat us, and is perhaps still indifferent, at least on its vast scales, but it is one with which we can connect and communicate locally. It is a universe that is conscious because we are conscious**. It is a universe that suffers because we suffer. And it is a universe that desires great beauty because we desire great beauty.

It is probably disingenuous to call this “god”, but when I use deistic language (which I do), this is what I mean.

Proposition 5: It is not a relevant question

The Buddha refused to discuss metaphysical issues. They were not part of the practice, and their pursuit distracted one from the true goal of awakening.

I read this, and I had no idea what it meant. And then one day, I was in the middle of a conversation over lunch, and it all became clear. For a moment at least.

When we are in the present, truly in non-duality, it does not matter. The existence or non-existence of a creator, or a grand purpose, or divinity, is not relevant to the process of waking up. He was saying, in some sense, “I gave you the system. Work the system. Stop asking questions outside the system. They’re distracting you.”

As you can see, I haven’t gotten there yet.


Note: I do not mean the material realm. I include mystical experiences in the realm of phenomena. The gravest error I see scientists commit is to dismiss phenomena because either they have not experienced them directly, or because they cannot conceive of a mechanism. Mystical practices purport to provide a means of disintermediation between the self and the noumenal… they posit or narrate interpretations of a phenomenal realm that exists “closer” to the field/noumena. A large fraction of scientific investigation into consciousness relies on observations of the brain in such altered states, which at least has gotten us to the point of being able to acknowledge that these are real, physical phenomena. (As are hallucinations, so let us not mistake certainty for knowledge.) It is equally an error to mistake “mechanism” for “cause”. These mental states correspond to physical phenomenon, but it does not follow that the physical phenomenon causes the perception of reality.

** Our consciousness is sufficient for there to be a conscious universe. It is not necessary. Also, the fact that we are conscious does not prove that other parts of the universe are not. All I am really claiming is that a) I am conscious. b) Therefore the universe is conscious. See also: At least some of the universe wants to know why it is here, at least some of the time.
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Uncategorized, Ways Of Knowing

Identity: Math and Myth

What does it mean to have an identity?

If you don’t look too closely, you might think that you can simply adopt a set of labels, slap them on yourself, and go forth into the world as a sequence of nouns. But that’s not how it works in practice. And socially constructed reality is all about how things work in practice.

Who Gets To Decide?

What kind of thing are you?

When put that bluntly, this is clearly a rude question, yet it is one that we are asked and ask of others moment by moment, all day long. As we wander the world, we project our models upon the surfaces of the people we encounter, classifying, scripting, assigning roles. One of my meditation teachers highlighted this beautifully when he said, “Now, everybody look around the room, and if you see anybody about whom you have no opinion, raise your hand.” We all looked around, dutifully, and started to laugh.

Identity Theory – The “Is A” Construction

I am a mother.

This is one of the overriding identities in our culture. It puts enormous constraints on my life, both real and imagined. Or rather, it places constraints upon my expected actions, some of which are comforting and I accept, and some of which are imposed from outside and are not relevant to my capacity as a mother. “Mother”, although it is, in principle, a word that describes a particular familial relationship, is freighted with more baggage than any seven letters are due.

This is a math-like identity, one that I have previously considered using the more innocuous barber paradox. In mathematics, the identity operator is one which says A = B, or A is exactly identical to B, or logically A is B.

Seonaid is a Mother. Seonaid = Mother.

It does not follow, however, unless you are one of those three people in the world, that Mother = Seonaid. And thus, the analogy breaks down. Mathematically, A = B implies that B = A.

Yet effectively, that’s how it works in the mind on the run. Not only do we apply our existing maps to the people we encounter, each individual becomes the representative of the whole category, a sort of involuntary synecdoche.

It’s even worse than attempting to use labels to define our selves, because in that moment we see not a complex multi-faceted human but only the single label. What is worse in many cases, we have defined the other as nothing more than a not-us (whatever “us” is most salient in that moment). It is an appallingly bad model of the world.

And it is what our minds work with as their default, navigating the system moment by moment.

This is what is meant by “objectification”. It actually has nothing to do with sex. It is the process of turning an agent with moral positions and independent existence into an object in your own story. That person is no longer a person, they are a thing to be moved around according to the laws of your own existence. (1) They become, not who they really are in the world, not another small piece of a conscious universe, but merely the identity you have projected upon them. (2)

Identity Theory (B) – The “Is a Member of” Construction

Functionally, most identity discussions are more analogous to set theory. We assume that there is a valid identity to which somebody could, in principle, belong. And then, the “fun” starts. Because once the identity is established as a valid category, the question of who is, and is not a member begins. (Spoiler: It’s not much fun.)

Are you a Writer Flow Chart

Chuck Wendig tells us how to find out if we’re writers.

This is a pretty simple example, right? Are you a writer becomes the simple question, “Do you write?” Excellent.

But let us consider how many people would disagree with this. That “Do you get paid to write?” side would be considered by many to be the estimate of the “real” writer. Sometimes, they would restrict it to people who write books. Or novels. Or short stories. Not poems (poets) and certainly not mere blogs. (3)

Let us consider a model of this type of identity that considers the process by which the identity is defined. That is, how do we know whether somebody belongs to a particular group of somebodies?

I was thinking about using a “real life” example… I’m tempted to write about feminism, but that conversation always gets derailed. It will get its own post for derailing, on the off chance than anybody ever notices my work. For the purposes of this discussion, let us create a new category… Foopy. (4)

In principle, as I pointed out in The Problem of Naming, the goal is to divide the world neatly in two. Some people are in Foopy (p ∈ F), and all the other people are not contained in the Foopy category (p ∉ F). Clearly not everybody belongs in the Foopy category, or there would be no need for the division.

Let’s also say that there are advantages and disadvantages to being a member of the Foopy category. Maybe they have a particular flair, and access to some neat bands, and generally seem to have a good time. They like one another, and enjoy thinking of themselves as Foopy. But perhaps (to some non-members) they’re oddly dressed and loud and therefore tend not to get hired except as baristas at particularly fancy coffee shops (owned by other Foopy people).

(These people may, in fact, be Foopy. I think I want to become Foopy… but I could never carry it off.)

Apparently they are wearing Swants. If you, too, wish to join them but need a tutorial on how to make such a garment from an old sweater, they have kindly provided one.

Stay with me. This is a serious conversation about how identity policing works. Sociology happening here!

So, there are people who clearly identify as Foopy, and there are people who adamantly do not. But then, there are some others, who might want to be considered Foopy, but either they aren’t sure, or the other Foopy people aren’t sure, or the not-Foopy people aren’t sure… and the boundaries, and particularly the fuzziness of the boundaries, becomes evident. (See how hard it is not to use the “Is a” construction? I’ve edited this five times, and I still can’t come up with a natural language approach that doesn’t sound contrived and exclude using Foopy as an adjective.)

Individual or Political Social Mobility

This is intended to be a trivial case, since I invented the Foopy people. There is (as far as I know) no existing category of people who are limited by social constraints to live out their years as (if they are successful) coffee shop owners and (if they are unsuccessful) baristas. Not only that, but there is nothing intrinsic about this group of people that sets them apart from others. In principle, they could simply dress differently and change what music they listen to and cease to be a member of F. (More about that later.)

But let us posit that somehow Foopiness was maintained as a stable identity for a period of generations. Let us also posit that, because of general expectations around this socially constructed identity, social mobility, intermarriage, musical comfort etc. that they came to form a recognizable Culture. And let us further suppose that one of their children, having been raised wearing Swants, wanted to don a different outfit and pursue another line of work. Would they be permitted to? By their parents and/or the other members of their tribe? By people hiring outside the community? What would be the barriers? What strategies could they employ? What might be used against them? Conversely, is it possible, by means of learning and changing one’s way of being, to become a member of the Foopys? What actually defines membership or non-membership?

These are not academic questions; they are questions of practical importance upon which people’s lives depend.

Now, policing happens in both directions, and from both sides. There are power moves which push people into identities that they don’t accept, and also to exclude them from identities with which they are attempting to become affiliated. I’ve come up with seven “moves” to be made in this situation, depending on the position of the actor, but there may be more. Let us be clear: each of these is undertaken by an agent.  They may be purporting to speak on behalf of some identity, but at this point, I am considering the ways in which individuals interact at these boundaries. I will address collective outcomes later. Probably in another post, given how very long this has become. (I also have examples of each of these, but I don’t want to get into the details Right Now.)

Subject = S Individual whose membership is in question
Member = M Member of the culture who is generally accepted by other members of the category
Outside = O non-member of the culture whose outsider status is generally non-ambiguous according to both members and non members

Outsider Strategies

  1. Excluded identity. Perhaps the most aggressive means of identity policing is the outright refusal by an outsider to accept the existence of the category.
  2. Pathologized identity. Perhaps the category is accepted, but it is constructed as a problem to be solved, rather than a valid way of being in the world.
  3. Enforced identity. The category is imposed on all individuals having some set of key features, whether they self-identify as a member of the category, or whether it is relevant to the current situation.

Member Strategies

  1. Circling the Elephants: attempts to exclude subjects from membership in an identity from the inside.
  2. Big tent (or maybe Borg): Attempts to assimilate and claim anybody who might possibly be members of the category, and also to universalize the category. The statement is, in effect, that “this is the proper identity for all members of the defined class to adopt”, whether they agree or not. It is related to “enforced identity” as it is an imposition of an identity, rather than the adoption of one.

Subject Strategies

  1. Claiming identity due to a felt affinity. There is not necessarily an external characteristic that draws this person into a particular group, but a desire to be accepted as such either by members of the group, or by the broader society.
  2. Refusing/distancing oneself from some other identity which may be imposed by either members or outsiders using the above moves.

Rather than attempting to define the rightness and wrongness of these approaches, let us restrict ourselves to considering each a strategy for negotiating structures, which comes with particular consequences. (5) It also gives us a generalized path into the notion of privilege, because the ability to police somebody’s membership in a category which either guarantees or restricts their access to the necessities of life is part of the the knowledge/power phenomenon to which Foucault was referring.

Identity Theory (C) – Identity as Performance

One of the criticisms of postmodernism makes reference to the “playfulness” of identity, because of the ways that it ignores the very real structural problems addressed above. People’s lives depend upon their affiliations. A socially isolated human being is a human being who isn’t going to last very long. And playing your role as assigned (we perceive) is key to gaining support from the other members of an identity group. It really matters who accepts you as “one of them”, and that means that you need to be able to follow the rules of what it looks like to be “one of them”. This is where myth comes in: the stories that we tell about it what it means to be a member of an identifiable group effectively defines the group. This is more obviously true where there is no intrinsic (biological, readable) characteristic around which the identity is formed, but the policing of gender expression should provide an immediate suggestion that there is more to it than that. Biologically female people are expected to perform “femininity”, which is equated with particular ways of walking, moving, dressing, thinking, entire ways of being. The precise nature of these gendered behaviours are culturally dependent and localized, but the construction of masculine and feminine roles along biological lines is a repeated cultural form.

(To be continued… because otherwise I’ll never publish this.)


1. OK, sometimes it has something to do with sex.
2. The same thing is happening in the other direction at the same time but that doesn’t mean you came into this as two equal agents, because different stories have different power.
3. Thanks, Chuck Wendig, by the way, for validating my existence. Sometimes, it really does help to have a complete stranger tell you that you’re not delusional.
4. Maybe this particular example could be fun.
5. This is foundational for my broader theory on the interaction of individual mappings. Please don’t take it as a claim that there is no moral differentiation or that each of these strategies is “equally valid”. They may all be effective in maintaining or negotiating structures, but the impacts of the structures so maintained cannot be considered morally neutral. Or at least they can’t in this particular theory. But the point now is to figure out how they work, not their impacts.

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Magic, Religion, The Big Three, The Shadows, Truth, Uncategorized, Uncertainty, Ways Of Knowing

Problems of Translation

Physicists speak math. When they want to communicate clearly with one another, it looks a lot like this:

Maxwell's equations

Maxwell’s Equations. This is how light works. Also microwave ovens and cell phones. Basically.

It’s tight. It’s clear. It’s unambiguous (as long as you know how to read the symbols). It’s also completely unlike how most people communicate.

Much of the coursework in physics education programs involves simply learning to read this set of arcane symbols, because they are powerful beyond words. Literally. The manipulation of these symbols, when it becomes second nature, allows people to derive and arrive at conclusions that are valid representations of the world, to which they could not have arrived through the use of “mere” language, with all its ambiguities. (Oh, language friends, don’t jump all over me. It’s in quotes for a reason. I’ll get there.)

(Since I started writing this, The Atlantic pointed it out, but let’s pretend that it’s an original thought, since I’ve been ruminating on this post for about a year and a half, and without it, the rest of the argument falls apart.)

Math is what I call a field language… that is, it (potentially) describes not just the phenomenal world, but the reality that lies beneath. The equations and functions we write down and ponder describe something inherent about the universe. Light waves always propagated in ways consistent with the rules described above. Planets always moved in elliptical orbits in which the swept out area was a constant. We do not impose order on these systems, we learn to describe what is already there in precise terms. This is science. We seek means of describing the field, That Which Is and the rules that govern it, by observing the phenomena, That Which We Can Observe. If I replace a 2 with a 3 in one of my equations, it doesn’t change how the universe works; it just means that I’m wrong about it. I don’t have to believe it for it to be true.

This should be compared with social constructions of reality. These are systems that exist in the universe, but only so long as people agree to them. They wind up being local systems of order, not universals. The locally constructed reality is more like a landscape, or a profile of what plants and animals are in the area, than it is a valid construction of the universe as a whole. It’s a real thing that must be navigated and explained, but there is an aspect of it in which everybody agrees to act as if substituting a 3 for a 2 changes the way the world works. It does, but it changes not the way that light propagates, but the way that we expect people to behave when considering how light propagates. We are collectively, for want of a better word, wrong. But we have plenty of evidence that we (collectively) prefer to defend the socially constructed reality than to acknowledge the collective error.

***

Many of our difficulties arise from the attempt to use phenomenal languages to describe the noumenal. Language simply hasn’t evolved for that. It is a way that we make explicit our experience of the phenomenal world, including our internal states. I realized this (I’m afraid) by overhearing conversations. Almost everything we say to one another is essentially orientation. “This person is like this. I found this good thing to eat. Did you hear that new band?” Or requests for orientation, “What do you think he meant when he said that? Where’s the best place to get a new bed? How do you renegotiate a mortgage?” We wander through the world on a constant sonar mission: Ping, ping, ping… this is what I perceive. What do you perceive? (variously calibrated to accept or reject feedback!) But we get hung up on our internal states. “How does that feel? How does that feel? How does that feel?”

Science gets hung up on these places that we lack the language to describe, and the tools to probe. It is stuck asking such precise questions as, “What part of the brain lights up when you do this?” Which simply doesn’t address the key question, “What is it like to be a person having this experience?” The language that people use to bring their inner space out into the world is imprecise, inaccurate, misleading, and can be completely dishonest. Yet we are the sorts of creaters who need to bring the Other into resonance with the Self so that we can share the experience. There is a communal aspect to experience; each of us as individuals trying to bridge the space between us and the other.

This is where art comes into it… I suspect that art and poetry are also field languages, things which penetrate consciousness to describe what lies beneath. Maybe not with the precision of math, but it doesn’t mean that the perception is inaccurate… it means that the description is incomplete, given the limitations of language, and the resonance it attempts to call forth is (perhaps) damped as a result. When I consider the process of making poetry, I consider it an attempt to capture ephemeral, implicit realizations about the nature of reality and place them into the realm of the explicit… And as I considered my own process I realized that when I pick a word that has ambiguous meaning, it is intentional. The ambiguity is part of the poem, so that it operates on many different layers at the same time. Our sacred texts, in all our various religions, were written in this poetic method, so when we attempt to translate them, we wind up with such awkward illuminations as, “All dharmas are empty… in this case, dharmas refer to phenomenon, rather than to the Buddha’s teachings.” How do we know that? In the mind of the poet, in the speaking of the field that comes through the heart sutra, if it is like other poetry (and we have no reason to believe that it isn’t), “dharmas” has all its meanings at the same time… dharma is the teachings, and the phenomenon, and the essence of each thing, and right action. It is all the meanings of dharma simultaneously. That’s the power of a sutra. That’s why the yoga sutras have, like, 4 words per line, but the illuminations are dozens (or hundreds) of pages long.

Let us consider the world of “spiritual practice” and the nigh-impossibility of communicating these experiences to people who haven’t… um… experienced them. We know, for example, that intense emotions have a tendency to reinforce the conditioned self, so we try to figure out ways to reduce them. Yet for so many people, the intense emotion of self-loathing leads to spiritual bypassing, refusing to deal with the emotions as they arise, as “good spiritual people don’t have these problems”, and it doesn’t work. Again. Because we don’t have a way to explicitly talk about shades of emotions, alignment, finding our way through consciousness gradients that include so many shadow emotions.

It’s the problem that I’m having right now. How do I write down the surfaces and flows of energy that I see/feel when I can’t write down the equations for them? How do I explain the visceral difference between all the various shades of pleasure, some of which have the character of letting myself bounce off reality, and some of which feel completely aligned? How do I explain my experience of the reduction of emotional “charge” without it sounding like I’ve just become numb?

So we teach, and we practice, and we practice, and we teach the practices… murmuring, “And as you feel your way back into alignment in this asana, take a moment to be curious about how you feel about the pose. Just notice, and then let it go.” And you hope that people have read their sutras, understand that the self they bring to the mat (or the cushion, or the ritual space) is the same self they bring to the office (or the classroom, or the dinner table) and the work on the mat illuminates the sutras. That the sutras are self-illuminating, as long as the practices are undertaken.

And I find myself yearning for the clarity of mathematics.

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Local “Reality”

Socially constructed reality has a physical existence in the world, but it is self-referential, and does not necessarily reflect any deeper reality. That is to say, it can be internally consistent (coherent) without making reference to the observed larger world in which it resides (correspondence). Yet it also creates the conditions which agents must navigate within its local area of effect.

It would be (is) a mistake to attempt to counter locally self-referential systems with facts without first understanding what role the existing system plays in those whose actions are dedicated to its preservation. George Kelly pointed out that, no matter how badly an individual’s construct diverges from observed reality, it is a real phenomenon which must be explained. (See Kelly, 1955). If we can consider any particular socially constructed reality to comprise an ‘identity’, then the ‘reality’ is the aggregate of the story lines held by the members that constitute the ‘identity’ in question. Thus, the same question arises: what benefits does this system of beliefs provide for the people who hold it?

The locally constructed reality (not necessarily within a particular physical space, but within the boundaries of the belief system) may purport to explain ultimate reality, but it generally does so by excluding information that contradicts. The set of beliefs about what to do with contradicting information provides a set of technologies for dealing with cognitive dissonance, the discomfort that comes about when individuals attempt to incorporate new information in their personal constructs.  Beliefs about the world that allow you to simplify it and deal with only a locally considered set of information are an advantage. These beliefs come to generate a semi-permeable barrier around a constructed reality, in which reference to external factors is only permitted under particular conditions. That is to say, they operate as a conservative force to preserve the local ‘reality’.

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My Most Radical Claim

Magic is real. It is not a matter of bending reality to your will; it is a process of aligning your will with reality.

The first step in making magic is to find your way down into awareness, the still point at the centre that knows exactly “where you are”. In the same way that you have a sense of how your body is oriented in physical space, you are equipped with senses that align you with reality. With what IS. From that place, you can move.

You can move in ways that are aligned with The World As It Is. Clear perception of the world (or at least about the local part with which you are interacting) means that you will interact with it in effective ways, that you will be able to impact it to evolve in the directions you want it to. It is as if your awareness were water, and suddenly you were able to feel your way along the pass between two hills when you had been trying to climb them.

This is magic.

We can’t perceive the mechanisms in a double-blind study, so our scientific discourse, that which equates accurate models with reality, demands that we deny its existence. (This is a poor model of science, by the way. More on that later. In another post.) And thus we give up the power of consciousness, intent, perception, intuition… and rely instead on thinking and reasoning in situations in which they are completely inadequate. It is as if we, lacking a complete model of our senses of balance, relied instead on our rational minds for walking. Doubted that other people could walk. Or tried to guide our food intake with books…

But western thought has spent the last 200 years (or thereabouts) trying to prove the non-existence of the broader field… even after the discovery of quantum mechanics 100 years ago. Current “scientific” explorations into consciousness follow the same pattern, presuming that consciousness is an emergent property of matter, wrestling ever more with the old Cartesian duality: how can matter bring into being something that is non-matter? (To which I pose the question: where does music of a symphony reside? But, I digress.)

But I think they’ve put Descartes in front of the horse. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.) Because they’ve bypassed the more core question:  does form, in fact, precede consciousness, or does consciousness precede form?

Ever it was, ever shall it be?

These are not new questions; they are the stuff of which the ancient Indian and Greek texts are made. What is this consciousness thing? How do we know we are here? Is there a god?

I have become convinced that we (western scientists) are asking the wrong question. We have misdefined consciousness, confusing it with mind, the burbling bits on the surface, and self-awareness, the bits of consciousness focused on the separate experience of the self-in-body. The definitions in the academic texts slip and slide, sometimes even claiming that consciousness itself is an illusion. There is no ghost in the machine, or maybe there is no machine. So let me put this to you: the man who wrote my quantum mechanics text book has dedicated his life to the study of unity consciousness. After 20 years of trying to reconcile the materialist worldview with everything else I have experienced, I am also convinced. We have it backwards, and the yogic sages have known it for a hundred generations: mind is an emergent property of consciousness, not the other way around.

The universe is not composed of inert billiard balls. This insistence on radical materialism ignores the last 100 years of physics.

In a very real sense, the particles of which we are composed “know” where they are. They interact with their surrounding environments, “broadcasting” their own information “electron! electron! electron!” (Or, more correctly, “potential for electron!”) In fact, they and their surrounding environments are completely intertwined, co-evolving in constant communication. So it’s not just “electron”, but “electron bound to 14 other electrons, all grouped together with a clump of protons and neutrons” (or “Hi. I’m part of a phosphorous atom.”) They’re not communicating with words any more than an maple tree letting the surrounding maples know it’s under attack by caterpillars, but to claim that they are not communicating is absurd. It doesn’t have to be intentional, but they are moving (through space-time) and leaving traces in the field in their wake. Now there are subatomic ripples. Now there are pheromones. Now there are words. Now there are dots on a screen forming words, sharing ideas, calling across the void. “This is where I am. This is where I am.”

All these techniques of working with mind are designed to bring mind (conditioned patterns) into alignment with consciousness (direct perception). Here arises consciousness, moment by moment, perceiving, but the closest part of the phenomenal world (the body/mind) overwhelms our perceptions. But we can learn to perceive through the local field to orient ourselves in time/space/field.

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The Conditioned Self and Enlightenment

What we experience as our “self” (the talking blah-blah identity part) is a bundle of beliefs and stories we have learned about the world. Some of those are verbal and we can articulate them, although they tend to be sweeping generalizations (1)… But they are also stored in our bodies, in the reactivity of our digestive systems, the tension in our shoulders, our tendency to fold up our chests and breathe shallowly when avoiding conflict, or to puff up when feeling pugilistic. These reactions are our belief systems at work; it is a measure of how subtle they are that people are hard-pressed to answer their therapist’s or partner’s questions about what is going on in their heads and bodies.

What does it mean to claim that “I exist”? There is a (moderately) self-aware pattern in the universe that is time-evolving and has a partial record of the phenomenal world with which it has interacted. We mark the beginning of (this particular) process variously at conception, emergence of awareness, or birth, and we anticipate that it will “end” with death.

The interaction of this pattern with the phenomenal world starts with the flow of chemical through the mother’s body during gestation. “We” are constructed from the phenomenal world, but the instructions for how that takes place are chemically encoded information. Here “we” are, being phenomena, yet playing out the patterns encoded at all these different scales of time and space. The phenomenal world gives us glimpses into these patterns, nothing more.

It turns out to be vitally important, this conditioned self, because our social patterns emerge from the interactions of these conditioned selves… and each person experiences their stories as their “Self”… thus, we are more attached (literally) to those stories than to the outside World of which they are a representation. They are embedded in our cells, embodied.

This is what people are talking about when they say, “You don’t experience the world, you only experience your projections of it.” That is, you cannot interact with the world directly; your interactions are mediated by the conditioned self that inhabits your body. That is to say, phenomena arise, and the conditioned self places them in whatever is the closest box… if your conditioning seeks threats, you interpret people’s actions as threats, for example.

What we experience as self most frequently is this bundle of meanings we have made up, ad hoc, from whatever materials we have to hand. It is not reality; it is a map of reality with inputs limited to what we have gleaned from the (vast) stream of knowledge over the course of our limited life spans. The standard by which it rises or falls is merely its local effectiveness. Wilderness survival skill will get you nowhere in the Metropolitan Opera. Likewise, the ability to tease out a grain of truth by poring over primary source materials will not serve you if the task is fighting a chemical fire.

What is more, the social skills required in each of these situations are not transferable. It’s not a question of mere technical skills; it’s a question of figuring out “the lay of the land”. Who’s *really* in charge? How do things get done around here? How do we determine authority? How do masculinity and femininity play out here? What do we value?

The answers to these questions are almost never made explicit. Each individual who comes into the situation is expected to “feel them out”, using the map they brought with them. The risk of getting wrong the real structures of power are ostracism, withholding of access to resources (even those necessary to do your job) or even violence and harassment.

It is no accident that we use tactile and mapping metaphors here… I’m wanting to get at something very specific, and it is this: those cultural stories and our experiences interacting with them are written right into the cellular structures of our bodies. We do not (cannot) encounter new situations and think our way through; we have to do it by feel. They go by too quickly to solve them with cognitive effort.

ALL knowledge is embodied. By which I mean to say, “we” (culturally) cannot reasonably claim to “know” something that is only written down. If it is not stored in a mind (that is, something with reflexive properties) it cannot be reasonably considered knowledge.

And all knowledge, stored in the body, is experienced at some level as a part of “self”. These stored stories/maps of the universe are the most immediate experience of our consciousnesses, our local field. The local field claims to be the universe, complete, and demands that mismatches are resolved by changing the world outside. Only reluctantly does it permit itself to be modified in ways that erase existing conceptions. We cling tenaciously to these stories, because they have kept us alive so far, but also because we think they are all that we are.

Let us consider the bare possibility of something more. The mystical traditions offer us this: if you see through, truly, the limited (partial, local) nature of the socially constructed self, it becomes possible to navigate each moment by feel, to recognize the singular nature of each moment as it coms upon you. Enlightenment promises us that we can discard the map and engage the terrain directly.


1. See what I did there?

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Meaning is Not a Luxury

I feel silly even pointing out that one of the major debates in higher education is the employment skills vs. liberal studies question. But it is best to introduce your topic clearly, so let us be clear: this is what I’m referring to when I say that meaning is not a luxury. As I have said in other chapters (posts), human beings are obligate meaning-makers. We will attribute significance to anything… the socks we were wearing the day we won the Big Game, a bird flying overhead, the music that comes on the radio the morning after our lover leaves us… it is involuntary, as natural as breathing. In fact, this tendency to narrate our experience (to turn each moment into a story with causes, interpretations, characters and narrative structures) is what is usually meant when people talk about consciousness. (This is by no means an adequate definition of consciousness, but it is the aspect of experience I want to talk about in this particular exploration.)

Let us posit that the purpose of education is to bring the next generation into a view of reality that is more sophisticated (validated?) than that which can be found by simply staggering through the world making sense all willy-nilly. (I’m very fond of that phrase.) In this case, the fact that we *have* found many valid ways of working in the world is important. The goal of professional education is to replicate practitioners, ideally with just enough variation that the entire field covered  by the profession is maintained, and the boundaries at the edges are expanded. There needs to be some core body of knowledge that is shared so that people holding a professional identity are able to say whether or not some other person who claims that identity does, in fact, have a credible claim to it. Still, it’s not that a doctor is a doctor is a doctor. It is certainly not true that all social historians are interchangeable. Learning how to think like a (insert your field here) is not a process of learning the core body and repeating. We (the creative and/or professional classes) are not machines into which knowledge can be poured for preservation. We involuntarily process whatever we are given through the filters of our preconceptions, the field of our conditioned minds.

Here is the tension: the meaning arises, whether we (as educators) intend it or not. By allowing the conversation to lean so heavily towards the idea that meaning is a luxury, by accepting that we can indulge our search for a meaningful life only after we have learned to replicate some practical skill that will be compensated by our culture, we are, in fact, communicating the meaning we have made.

We absolve ourselves of moral agency in exchange for the practical contingencies of feeding and sheltering ourselves. We accept the goal of status, because without it, we lack access to the basic necessities of life. We maintain unjust structures because we continue to benefit from them, we see no alternatives, and we have no time to question, rebuild and change the world.

This is meaning. It’s just not intentional.

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Primacy of Reason, Primacy of Text

We have lived for generations with a particular idea of an educated human being as the highest ideal, with a particular type of education being exemplary. The “best” meaning is that which has been most thought through, and the most clearly articulated in writing. To be human is to think, to think is to reason, to reason is to argue, to argue is to write, to write is to participate. Thus it is proven. QED. This is why our “best”  writers are frequently called “our best minds”, whereas our best visual artists are rarely termed so. The production of reasoned text is the mark of an educated person in our culture. Those who are incapable of participating in the Great Conversation in this way are left out of it completely, a Subaltern who may speak  [pdf], but to whom nobody will listen. It is not to be voiceless that is to be entirely abandoned by the privileged; it is to be textless.

What a profound system of neglect! It leaves deep meaning, one of the principle drives of humanity, open only to the most skilled at the manipulation of this one technology, leaving “the masses” in a sere intellectual landscape, stripped even of the balm of religion. This is no way to run a culture, holding people hostage to their fear of shunning by keeping the achievement of beauty, meaning, and belonging ever just beyond reach.

Reason, although a capacity of the human mind, is not the entirety of human experience. “The” human is not the unencumbered male of the species with adequate resources to permit a retreat to the life of the mind. There cannot be the human narrative, except the quest for meaning that must start from wherever the agent comes into the world. An honest search for Truth must encompass and value the narratives of the elderly, the young, and the mentally ill… the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginal… the sum of human experience, not the skimming of the meaning of those who have the most status.

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The Big Three, Truth, Ways Of Knowing

The Problem of Naming

“This is a Blarg,” said my partner, placing his glass of wine in the middle of the table.

We were at a friend’s house late in the evening, on a rare vacation without our children. The conversation had taken a turn, as they frequently do in my world, for the philosophical. We had a moment of replaying our undergraduate days.

“What does it mean to name something?” he asked.

We stared at the glass. We were moderately too impaired to do the question justice, having just returned from a family wedding and having thus spent the evening drowning the emotional weight. It was a mellow conversation, no beer-sloshing involved. We came, as we usually do, to no conclusions, having  gone round and round the conversation of what makes a chair a chair so many times over the years, we see no further angles to be explored.

Later, he said, “Could somebody hand me a blarg?” and he was handed a tumbler full of water. He did not object. “So, we agree in principle that it was the glass itself, and not the wineglass or the glass of wine to which you were referring?” “I guess so,” he said, and we went onto other topics.

But the next day, the question reasserted itself in my mind. What does it mean to name something? What does it mean to name something?

Naming Something: creating categories where none existed

Mathematical philosophers are keen on a set of problems that are broadly classified as paradoxes.

These are, in essence, statements about the world which *seem* reasonable on the surface, but which, when examined more closely, result in absurd or impossible conclusions.

Suppose, for example, that there exists a village which has a rule that says, “All men who do not shave themselves are shaved by the barber.” (1) The question that exposes the (extremely famous) paradox is, “Who shaves the barber?” (If he shaves himself, he is not supposed to be shaved by the barber… but he is. etc.) (If you simply must see the detailed proof of the intractability of the contradiction, it’s on youtube… with animation!)

Not to discount the mathematical truth of the paradox, the linguistic example exposes a completely different issue with our thinking… which is to propose that, in becoming a barber, the man acquires a different essential nature. The problem is with the use of the verb “to be”, which functions as an identity operator. In this formulation, “The Barber” is now always a barber, whether he is in the midst of barbering or not. His being is now that of A Barber. In this moment of naming, we divided the world in two, and we created a problem (of maintaining that division) where previously none existed.

New Names, New Rules

Even if you, like me, now wish to dismiss this paradox as arising from a rule too stupid to be considered (more on that later), let us sit with it for just a while longer…

For some reason, this village concerns itself with the regulation of shaving behaviours. Perhaps it is a public health concern, perhaps there is some stricture regarding it as a pleasurable activity.  Maybe a powerful barber cartel runs the political system at the national level. Whatever the underlying cause, men are not permitted to go ’round shaving one another all willy-nilly. It also seems clear that a man cannot become The Barber simply by offering to shave his friend’s face, as there is, apparently, only one in the village. There must be some process by which a man makes the transition from not-Barber to Barber, or by which Barber-ness is conveyed.

Before the rule was written, there were (presumably) just men who shaved or didn’t as they saw fit. Their neighbours may have looked askance at their hairy faces, but they didn’t have the force of law to do anything about it. There may even have been people willing to provide shaves for other people, and they may not even all have been men.

But all that changes with the creation of a formal category (role) called The Barber.

Now the village requires an entirely new set of processes. They require

  • a means of selecting The Barber
  • a way of enforcing shaving requirements
  • regulations regarding frequency of shaving and/or maximum permissible stubbliness
  • some means of preventing illicit and/or black-market barbering

A whole new world of social control is opened up by this requirement.

Look. Let’s be honest. It is a dumb rule. The “paradox” only arises because of the presence of an unnecessary condition in the definition of barber/not barber. If the barber were simply defined as “The person who shaves other people”, without that strange and unnatural exclusive or, there would be no paradox. If we defined barbering as a process, not an identity, he could shave himself quite happily, because barbering would only occur in the moment of relationship with the other. Any number of possible formulations resolve the practical problem… because no conflict exists in fact. The tension arises purely as an artefact of our incorrectly described (and thus prescribed) reality.

But here’s the thing: we try to live our lives according to equally dumb and contradictory rules all the time. This is the nature of the policed identity, which tells you what you can and cannot do based not upon your abilities or your interests, but upon some category to which you have been assigned. Or which has been assigned to you.

For now, before we get deeper into the problem of identity, let us rest here (possibly sipping at our blargs of wine) in the world of the regulated, perplexed, and hairy barber, not because it is realistic, but because it is unlikely to turn the ire of the world upon us.

Unless there really is a secret barber cartel.


1. This is the statement as I first encountered it, and it seems a perfectly natural way of expressing a rule. More recent iterations seem to be mainly of the form, “The barber shaves those, and only those, who do not shave themselves.” Which I can’t imagine any non-mathematician uttering in casual conversation.

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