The Experience of Clarity

Intelligence often requires not thinking too much about something. You can’t compensate inadequate information with more deliberation.

There is more that we cannot know than we can even estimate. Yet in the experience, everything outside of what we know is just one thing . Thus, our confidence.

Cognitive accuracy with adequate power is infinitely greater than power without cognitive accuracy. 1,000 x 0 = 0

* Wisdom arrives from finishing with a conclusion whose premises you never started, thus ending with experience. * Finding your inherited assumptions corrected by reality is having your mind converted from the false to the genuine, an increase in value measured by your abject disappointment.

There is more in the repetition that appears like intelligence than there is pure intelligence within the human apparatus. Not everyone really understands how much of the arbitrary had to come together and persist for ’two plus two’ to make perfect sense.

There is a certain mentality that seeks to finish precisely what it can’t start … because it can’t start. It resists futility with its progress in detaching the narrative.

In how many cases is not fighting a loss of control?   More than timidity can accept. *   If it is proven and withstands fearless scrutiny, it is science.   If it is disproven, it is a myth. If it is disproven but still widely accepted it is a religion.   * The goal is to live your life without disappointment, but disappointment is your teacher. A disappointment.

When you have to do something out of mere respect it costs you some of that respect.

Too much of “the past” arrives from a “ future” which we unconsciously need as ballast to our ever-present imbalance.

Of two who were sold a false map, it is the one who sees the world with greater clarity that is confused first.

"Oh, Stoic. So, cattle are superior to humans for their inability to resent the wealth of their butchers?   Not every unshakable mind is worth something and no excellent thought arrived without a past struggle. How did you get here if not to prevail over your inherited struggle?"

It is as much as we know and we think it is more than it is: thought is only the shadow of our total circumstance.   When the shadow coaxes the smallest elements in the circumstance, over time and through repetition, to manipulate the circumstance, then you manipulate the shadow. As a final step, one seeks to nudge circumstance in such a way that the correspondence between thought and circumstance is perfect, and there is no shadow to believe in itself: it sees all that is. Much less than one thought it would be, but much more than that shadow.

Everyone confuses a smooth and enduring narrative with clarity.   Custom glazes over the eyes with assumptions that endure unchecked to the point that even inherited truth is not understood, as the mere reflex of expectations goes down that same unobstructed path. It would have been better to have held the wrong narrative about the underlying reality. At least then in the ensuing accident one would have had the chance to learn.

You don't even know how bad your good can be, or how good, bad can be. Nature stinks and makes use of the stink; Most of all, nature confuses, and leaves you wiser. Nature is no friend, she offers no consolation for naiveté, no reprieve from critical error, not even a symmetry -- in type or degree -- in the exchange of "love" for "love."   You must love wisdom to love life.  

It is easier to feel confident about a “central” principle which the mind has not circumscribed with broad experience and penetrating observation.   And it is easier to doubt those principles one has circumscribed, given that we are more aware of the seamless experience of exclusive categories of knowledge. Let us set aside the word, “difficult” here, as being too light.   It is almost impossible to achieve the necessary: to choose self-doubt and insecurity over the pleasure of confidence.

Obstacles to the Obstacles: Insights arrive to overcome irritations and obstacles.  Yet too many obstacles to insight disappear with inculcation and repetition-blindness for us to cast suspicion on our own clarity. Thus, as we age, clarity becomes a sensation where the more that is stolen from it, the less suspicion it has of a theft.   Perversely, we believe clarity increases because, in comfort’s inability to perceive obstacles to insight , we become confident. And w e actually believe that clarity decreases because of comfort’s sensitivity to an obstacle, precisely the point of contact with our heretofore hidden reality.

* When we experience, “Truth,” what we mean is a pool which increases or decreases in volume according to a calm backed by our aerobic capacity, and this should not be confused with the greater number of experiences or facts, which despite their indisputable contribution, are nonetheless irrelevant for their being inaccessible to the natural flow of our expression.   If we are not experiencing “Truth,” it is because petty little reality has interrupted our flowing narrative. * The experience we think of as “clarity” requires a good deal of common sense.   It goes a long way in obscuring any precise observation that would upset habitual thought.

Public ambition is difficult. You have to make a few very sensible decisions early on and then live with them for the rest of your life.   Knowledge works the other way around. You make many decisions, not all of them sensible, and then if knowledge is your living, the errors grow through you as experience reveals them, like seeds sprouting in farmland.

8 Experience is a recession from presumption to reality. We trade the sheen on Truth for the forced recognition of our dependence upon condition, for the hardness of being aware. If our truths had been stronger, pride would have prevailed over awareness of ignorance and we would not be .  

In sales, walkaway power is pricing power. And walkaway power is leveraged by the power of having an available alternative. To what degree of power does self-interest hold the intellect?   Does the intellect have an alternative?   Or, is it already the alternative ?   If either self-interest or clarity of thought should find a distinction between them, an exclusive choice, who would pay the higher price?   ... who would follow whom? For a human to become more than his animality he must not only achieve the clarity that spies the difference but in having spied that difference accept that the animal has not evolved to accommodate this clarity, but that it has evolved to accommodate its rank, and that in over-crowding, everyone finds his health if there is an alternate ladder possible within his condition.   For a very few, clarity of thought constitutes in itself their projection of rank, precisely feeling it by having defined the difference between this s...

Not knowing may be my inability, but if it is truly unknowable, then knowing would have been my disability.   As the odds go, what passive ignorance prevents or destroys is not more than what an active error can do. One should not underestimate acknowledged ignorance. It is one of the most difficult achievements whose rarity exists in inverse proportion to its maximum availability and ease.

1 Only the naive would think that rationalism were the same as mechanism.   Lacking exprience they continue to intellectualize nuances where simple levers would have elevated potential, shoved the entire cognitive apparatus into a “new dimension,” the reflection on which would have been simpler but the power of the intellect now so much sharper that nuance no longer robbed opportunity but presented it. 3 I betray the god of clarity only with the effort to record its realization, but I also prove it in the same act. I step away from it , turn, and bow.

When the intellect inflates its considerable Ego with its pride in fearless honesty, the awareness of a dominance-projector soon humbles it with cruel simplicity.

2 An insight is not completely inevitable, but we would say that it is probable.   An inner tension, made up of pooling energy and past frustration, has formed within, overnight, and as one enters the various contexts of the day something animal in one is alert and hunting, involuntarily, for opportunities to snag oneself on a jagged edge, pull, and snap the tension. If one is too busy, it does not happen.   It will wait in line behind a host of other postponed releases. One has been sick, or busy, and then finally there is room enough for calm, into which one litters countless splinters as if they were so many accidents ... a feeling of spontaneity, as past the jagged edges are no longer present.

There are thinkers who are not quite right, but which are consistently not quite right. They have a fundamental orientation from which they bounce off and where only the completed expression is poorly aimed.   It is as if their aim were inverted, sent through smoke, ricocheting off of a solid surface one could not see except in the stray outcomes.   These incomplete insights and the gaps between them are necessary and provident.   To the degree that it is a perfect and accurate truth it is a mind-trap in the corner of one’s being. The not-quite-right have wisely left in the gaps for the sake of their own accelerated progress, not to mention ours.   Potential grows only with exercise, and wisdom is made from the experience, not the description of one . The opportunity to fill in the gaps does more toward the fulfilling of one’s potential than any third-party description whose exhaustive defense leaves one without a means of exercise. Can it be called perfect...

The Experience of Clarity 1       Confusion 2 Even at the highest level of correspondence, two would know that their understanding lies beneath the symbols used, and preceding their own reaction to words as stimuli.   They must first have been educated by experience.   The symbols would have to be deconstructed with great care to get around their own distinct conditioning to seemingly identical stimuli.   To confirm each other’s view they would alter the stimuli — the words — and thus a third person listening to such a perfect correspondence would himself experience not only confusion but would have the evidence of constant probing, testing, rephrasing, and re-organizing, all of which are typical signs of confusion and a lack of correspondence.   The difference is that each of the two had begun with — I am — diagramming from there, the behavioral wires that manipulated an illusion of mind and even others’ min...