The Experience of Clarity

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.