[May 27 2012 - From a Facebook Note]
Because I have been watching things get worse instead of better. People who should know better pursue paths personally which make them and others around them stressful, while advocating, voting, and buying things and buying ideas for the wrong reasons. Mostly being thrown from one story to another. The stories we tell each person. The stories we "know" about everything we see, which our education, enculturation, and emotional attachments obligate us to. Our day to day understanding of the human world teaches us to be the character who should play our part. What the stories are don't matter. Regardless of anything else they are doing, the stories cannot address the real problems. The main problem. People are sleepwalking, from one story to another. They glance at their calendar once in a while, to see if they need to see the dentist, and wondering when it will all be over.
In other words, if you fix the wrong problem, you make things worse, because crazy sleepwalking storytellers and story "livers" are strutting around, now unburdened with something which was holding them back. Now however slightly unburdened, they can wreak more havoc on a grander scale without having any real idea of what they are doing; not knowing as individuals, and of course not knowing as a whole. The flaw in the whole concept of "written language consciousness" is that there IS no larger consciousness. Written language magnifies the importance of the past, and shrinks the importance of the presence of each living individual.
I see a lot of people who try to convince others with logic that they are right, and I honestly have never seen this approach actually work. Wait let me count again...no never. Even for myself, it is not the logic in the presentation that will convince me. And it's not logic for anyone watching. What is conventional is to be convinced by confidence, and especially confidence in people who you socially trust, agree with, or respect on the subject at hand. If listening to the speech, you can hear confidence in the delivery. If a video, you can see facial expressions of confidence, and body sense. For myself, I will be moved if I can integrate the ideas expressed into my own understanding of the world. Either way, logic is a false prophet, only compelling if you already believe.
But none of this matters, because no one is disagreeing with the whole idea of basing our identity, on an idea about a character with our name. An identity based on written language and the narratives we've heard, narratives we've been told, and others we've made up. So I'm writing this. I'm teaching this. I'm saying sit back, and notice that it is your supposedly "unconscious" mind, a deep emotional gestalt each moment with a trillion nuances. That is what makes "Text consciousness" possible. The intellect, Text consciousness is a grapefruit size device driver, compared with the mind which is the virtual size of New York city. To identify only with the story about ourselves, and not more on the actually living human being, is simply, (and strangely) irrational.
Written language consciousness embodied in our own minds, and written language traces scattered across the internet, crammed into pages in libraries, schools, and homes everywhere on earth, has no body, and has no mind. It has no spirit. It has no embodiment. It has no reality. It is a make-believe consciousness, the way a stuffed animal is a make-believe animal. It represents an idea which we hope may comfort a child for the night, so we don't have to hold that child ourselves.
We're used to getting different narratives, which often do comfort that child for a night or two. I have no narrative of comfort. I'm here to point out to all the children that the Teddy bears are not alive, and aren't even bears. I'm here to suggest that you don't need them, the metaphoric Teddy bear. Further the longer you keep giving them to children, and cuddling with them yourself, the more suffering you are ensuring, generation to generation.
If we think life is about finding and sticking to a set of specific narratives, then we have identified our self as just a character in someone else's story.
Trace - (As used by Jacques Derrida.) The physical representation of a word or symbol. Also, any juxtaposition of physical elements, coincidental or deliberate, which may trigger the recognition of a word, symbol, or narrative.
Text - Narrative recognized in units of sentences by a speaker of a Written Language.
Vortext - Exactly everything which is not Text.
Intellect - The "Text Device Driver" which translates Text into Emotional meaning, the "Musical" meaning. The "Emotional" meaning. The Intellect operates in short term memory and is embodied by the textual narrative which runs through our "conscious" mind all the time, and which we associated with a character we know as a person with our name.
Reading - The act of recognizing and repeating words, signs, and symbols which evoke a text narrative in the intellect of the reader. This narrative invokes a more subtle and nuanced feeling from the Large Mind Consciousness. "Reading" should be understood as the repeating of words in the reader's mind after seeing, hearing, feeling, or even thinking of or being reminded of a narrative.
Writing - The act of creating a trace in the world from an intellectual (Text) narrative. A series of sentences formed by intellectually interpreting a meaningful feeling. The inverse of reading.
Discourse - All reading and writing take place in the context of a discourse. The reader has an idea of the source of any text they are reading (even if it is vague, and later found to be wrong). The writer has an idea of the audience addressed (even if is vague, and later found to be wrong). It is generally the case that in every discourse there are at least four subjects. Who the writer is, who they think they are writing to, who the reader is, and who they think the writer is. The context of the narrative, therefore the meaning, exists within a subject, and cannot in itself be transferred.Discourse is the structure used by the intellect to create context for all text narratives, which includes the experience of communications with real, composite, or imagined subject characters. The Discourse is the relationship of meaning between the self and the others. Note that the "other" is not another person, but the idea of an other person in the Intellect. It is through the lens-like intermediacy of the discourse, that the resulting understood "Emotional" meaning will be delivered to the Large Mind Consciousness. Though stories dominate our short term memory (some 20 seconds or so) text must be translated to its emotional essence to be remembered in long term memory.
Written Language - Any language like English which has a dictionary and authoritative grammar defining what is or is not proper usage. Emphasizing the Written aspect of the language, regardless of personal literacy, To distinguish from whatever was language-like before writing of any kind was used. Virtually all languages in use today have the common feature of being writing based, where the history of the language gives a vocabulary which is already seemingly meaningful, outside of any person consciously recalling that meaning. As a social tool, this sort of language processing in the mind changes fundamentally the identity of the individual. But with every tool a consciousness gains, it loses a skill. Our birthright as humans means we can set aside this tool, and regain the recognition of what we had as a child, the Large Mind Consciousness which makes all the rest possible. We cannot reasonably abandon written language, but we can put it in perspective. When we understand how our intellect operates, the other tools which make it possible can distinguished and accessed directly.
Large Mind Consciousness - Everything else "Human Consciousness" is doing, other than processing text. Sense consciousness. Sense Memories. Memories of all kinds. Body feelings. Organ consciousness. Immune system. Breathing consciousness. Music Consciousness. Physical coordinations. Geometrical consciousness of your immediate surroundings. Subtle intuitions. If the Intellect, which does all that written language processing, is the size of a grapefruit, then the Large Mind Consciousness which makes that grapefruit possible is the size of New York City. I might also refer to this as "Core Human Consciousness" to differentiate it from "Core Consciousness" at the most fundamental level of physicality.
We live in the stories we tell ourself about ourself. It is the kind of living that is a running commentary on the actions of a character with your name living in relation to a world of stories. It feels as if, as we grow up, we are learning "how the world is" story by story. Radio, TV, school, movies, FaceBook, over time, the impression we tend to get is that there is this world. It seems "real", it seems important. I know all these stories about it. And oh yeah, you're one of umpteen billion people, and you need money to live. Good luck. Welcome to the 21st Century, Human. You get a birth certificate stapled to your ass, and sent out the door, with the responsibility of filing all the paperwork associated with that biological unit you seem to live in, down to the death certificate.
Why do we live in these stories? In short, everyone else around us does, and well, we feel STUPID to not go along. I mean look how many there are, who seem to believe? Who am I to doubt? And that's the problem there... whether you believe or not, you may never notice that there is more to living than believing or disbelieving. It is as if I have to weigh in, at least in my mind, to how I feel about all the statements about the world I hear. Each moment, the intellectual engine looks at the world, "I" hear another sentence (literally or implied), and I have a comment on it. The hearing and commenting balance me, in my understanding of the world. My understanding of myself exists on my horizon of possible ways I could be, compared against my own idea of some understood yet absent mind of media-consciousness. I represent it to myself all the time, to know where I feel drawn to "believe" or "disbelieve".
Step back using Text-Vortext analysis. The media-consciousness is a text narrative in itself. It is a character I make up implicitly in order to understand this general background narrative on the world. It is a mode of thinking that every person can put on, in order to understand the communication it receives from "general news" sources. Text only exists in people's imagination, therefore each person has a personal model of the world. Our personal world is a set of interlocking stories, relating to stories we know and/or believe, which we learned at some time, but now repeat back to ourselves when we encounter situations where we need to know what to do, including what to say when asked about things we believe in a variety of different situations. It is also integral to our own understanding of our personal social status with the people we are with, and that we see in the news. There are other narratives, which are more personal. Stories that only a group of friends may know. Childhood friends. School friends. Bowling leagues, Church, Temple, Mosque. Each context has certain ways of using language. Each discourse is between you, and your idea about the discourse that narrative is a part of.
Within these stories are characters. The Main character is yourself. Knowing Text/Vortet, we see the distinction between the direct knowing of self and world, where all reading is reading Vortext. As a species, we learned to read signs of Vortext. Signs which were not created to be signs, rather they were simple traces of life, love, and geography. We evolved the cognition to be so subtly aware of our environment that we could build fire, make tools, domesticate other species, hunt large animals, all without a written language. Each person knew they were responsible for learning the signs, the subtle Vortext all around them. Each paleolithic individual knew implicitly they were responsible for knowing everything anyone knows about the world, as a matter of life and death. There were no experts, just survivors.
Reading Text is fundamentally different than Reading Vortext, In fact the better, as individuals and as a culture, we get at reading Text, the worse we get at reading Vortext.
This world, the one which seems in our own conception of it, to reward itself for being the one and only world. The Media-Real world. The existent, important, and defacto dominant power in people's emotional understanding of themselves, is the beliefs they grow up into, fed by the media, sometimes through a lens of "Family Values" but let's be real. Kids today, practically anywhere in the world, are finding the common ground of each other. which must be actively questioned and re-accessed. The feeling of the one real world of stories is more powerful than any specific story. If one only knows what is in the language one has been taught, then they have already necessarily come to take certain things to be true.
Belief is, in fact, irrelevant and mostly distracting or misleading. Here I am talking specifically about believing stories or specific narratives as true, without understanding in what way and in what sense they are "True".
Discourse is the lens through which narratives are understood. Each Text instance which is repeated in the intellectual conscious mind ripples from the words into the meaning through the gate of discourse. What I mean by discourse is a conversation (one-time or ongoing) between a specific subject, and subject characters that a person understands they are interacting with, over a lifetime.
"Subject Character" is a notion I find myself forced to distinguish in order to specifically situate the poles of a discourse. If the basic model of a discourse is a person's conversation with some other, then the context of the current communication is the discourse embodied by the person's memory of the past communications with that same other. To look closer at what the communication consists of, let's separate the reading (and hearing) from the writing (and speaking). First, at the beginning of the communication, the "subject character" of the other will be identified, which underlies the discourse which is implicitly presenting the meaning of the communication to the understanding of the person.
To tease this apart further, the discourse consists not just of an intellectual model of this particular other person (or group of people, or some general category of many or all people in general) but also of the implicit relationship of the self of that person to the other end of the discourse. The idea of themselves which they live by (whether they are explicitly aware of this or not) is contained in each discourse, as well as having a relation to some internal discourse, where this idea of themselves is creating and reading comments from itself, to itself as a means (if a misleading one) to consciously converse with themselves. In the internal discourse, it is meaningful to see that ones parents, friends, teachers, heroes, etc are the sources of the words which, in their absence, our mind supplies what we think they would say.
Writing (and speaking) bring the discourse consciousness to mind as they choose an other subject character to address, and a subject matter which the person's own subject consciousness feels needs to be brought up with the audience. These two things come together. We think of something we want to say conjoined with thinking of who we want to say it to, along with the means we have to say it.
What I mean is, before telephones existed, I would not think of calling someone to ask if they were busy that evening for dinner. I would rather, with a similar thought, walk to their house and ask them in person. Today, I may think of a FaceBook status I want to post, and would pick one which would be appropriate, maybe funny, maybe enlightening, to many different friends and acquaintances of mine on FaceBook, representing a huge number of distinct yet related ongoing discourses.
To back up a little bit, and seeing a language consciousness swimming in a sea of discourses, each of which is changed by each communication related to the discourse, and further discourses which you didn't think were going to receive a specific communication may get it anyway. (for example, I may be keeping something secret from some people, so my discourse with them includes knowing that they do not know something which I do. If I later find out that they did know that thing, I would have to re-evaluate all of the communication I remembered, and reassess the discourse retroactively to where I think I knew what they knew.
In this way, the discourse becomes the way in which the mind makes models of the world. At least the social world. The intellect grows into understanding language through an unfolding process of self-awareness, seen through layers of discourse between the discursive self and the specific and generalized others.
Consciousness is a subject's awareness of the world. The world may be real or imaginary, either way a consciousness is required for there to be an experience of world, and world is required to give content to the experience of consciousness. They are two sides of the same coin.
Consciousness is necessarily special, because by definition everything else we do is done while we are consciousness, through our conscious facilities. This includes a wide range of sensory apparatus, limbs with many degrees of freedom, and memory of all sorts of mental and physical tasks, always at the ready to serve us when we are conscious. Human consciousness is a rich field of potential for detailed observation, careful manipulation, and subtle comprehension.
However, Human consciousness, and any and all other consciousness is built on the simplest consciousness. Consciousness itself is a unity of conscious experience. Without denying all the benefits which the sophisticated human consciousness gives us, we have access within our awareness to a fundamental consciousness. There is a deep, pure threshold of existence which whatever "We" are shares with everything else which exists. Really exists, in the electrons which we can't pass our hand through, because this existing thing is there. We benefit from the trillions of cells which are part of us, and communicate through our nervous system, into a new whole which is a single human consciousness. Yet the experience of the whole is coherent with the consciousness of each neuron. Human mind processing is taking the complex environment and reducing it down to a consciousness in space, moving in time, conscious of an inside (my coherent form) and my outside (everything I know to be outside of me, which I judge to be distances in space and time from me. Being conscious at all gives us a way of seeing in the simplest way, through first and foremost the unity of the consciousness.
The simplest consciousness, let's say an atom, also has an inside, and an outside. It also has a position in three dimensions of space, and one of time. Now, imagining myself the central consciousness in a hydrogen nucleus, I would live and be aware of a very limited set of circumstances ... but it is essential to see the acts of consciousness which are being performed by the hydrogen atom have a direct bearing on understanding the essential nature of consciousness, and from there, how everything works.
This examination of the root of consciousness, regardless of what narratives may be generated, must always be explored by the individual consciousness at a level deeper than narratives can be meaningful. It is only within your specific consciousness that what makes narratives meaningful to you can be understood.
Am I being clear enough that I am not writing these words to answer great deep questions for you? I am trying to steer you on the right track, because language, stories, narratives, and other beliefs will all tend to steer you into a belief, or a disbelief (which amount to the same thing, misleading)
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[Continuing 2 days later:]
A Narrative is a linear set of words. When the words are on paper, in a computer, or even spoken, then the trace of the words embodies the narrative. In order for the narrative to be meaningful, in the sense that there is someone who now associates the traces of that narrative with a meaning in their intellectual facility, then a the narrative must be read. In their mind as the words are recognized and repeated by the intellect, they are understood and induce a non-textual emotional relevance to the reader. The meaning of the read narrative is seen through the lens of the appropriate discourse, and the text is thus "understood".
So the text is not the pigment or the paper. It is not the bits on the computer. It is not the sounds of the voice. The text only exists with a specific meaning within a single person's mind. The importance of this cannot be overstated. The words themselves have no set or specific abstract meaning. If they seem to, then you are mistaking a narrative trace for meaningful text. Text exists only in the imagination of the reader.
Writing is an inverse process, but it is again a mental exercise that results in traces being produced. The process is the result of a matching non-textual, emotional posture towards the current state of a specific discourse with the emotional will to change that discourse, in whatever way the writer's mind feels is appropriate. The production of text is a necessary stage, and that which the intellect accomplishes, and then passes the text to the body in the appropriate way of making the trace (through a pen, a keyboard, chalkboard, voice, or however the words are to be expressed).
In short, even when people read the same words, the discourse through which they understand it will always be distinct, because discourses are personal psychological structures. So the meaning of those words are always understood in the context of a specific person. Narratives are routinely understood to mean the same thing to many or even all people, because readers are often using their internal understanding of what "all" people would understand. It is still a personal discourse including a character which an individual is envisioning as how "all people" would understand those words. This doesn't change the fact the fact that the meaningful text and any emotional state it evokes is completely and inevitably personal to a specific reader.