Artful Equilibrium
Refining our movement through reality; synchronizing the map with the territory; navigating via an artful equilibrium
Crux of Consciousness
The Greeks had once posited that geometry is something inherent in nature, not just a framework we use in describing the natural world.
The further we study our knowable universe, the more this seems true with many other concepts — aesthetics and symmetry, evolution and continuity, unity and complexity.
Thus, our personification of reality isn’t always a trivially poetic practice. Sometimes it’s simply a testament to the fact that we’re a reflection of that which had created us.
But when we look at the ways by which we move through space and time, we’re quick to isolate our own human experience from everything else around us, simply because we seem to have one thing that we can’t really identify throughout the rest of our knowable reality: consciousness.
And so we justifiably develop something of a grandiosity complex with respect to our position and movement as a human species, either/both on an individual or on a collective level.
In some lights, we see that our consciousness can actually trump the relativity-dependent nature of our universe; from other angles yet, we see that our creativity and curiosity mean something special when it comes to the human journey relative to the universe that hosts it.
While justified, this comes with a dangerous caveat — we start to defy the laws that bind the natural world. We begin to see that, due to our intelligent and self-aware state of being, we’re not wholly subjected to the same rules that govern everything.
And while this is both the cause and effect of our mounting success as a species, it’s also the undisputable source of our discontent, for it can function as a dangerous existential misstep in over-thinking the human process next to the countless universal processes around it.
We can begin to resist the natural flow of reality; we can try to outlast the impermanence of our existence; we can wrestle constantly with manipulating forces outside of our control.
To do so is necessary but also problematic, and the way we define our movement and our journey through reality — from start to finish — culminates along every step from past to present to future.
What we begin to see, then, is that the right kind of movement is required, one that’s aware and anticipatory of the cycles around, and one that appreciates the objective and dynamic state of nature — a movement of artful equilibrium.
Fluid Prescience
At a certain point, we have to lean into the fact that we’re provided the indescribable ability to understand and anticipate our movements relative to the cycles around us. Our consciousness affords us the opportunity to do this.
All organisms, really, are privileged to some variation of this opportunity, whereby they evolve in perpetuity through either mistake, adaptability or pure chance.
But our consciousness takes it to another level, whereby we can predict — with wickedly imaginative foresight (at least relative to us) — the outcomes of certain processes around us. These outcomes don’t have to be immediate or even all that consequential; they can be far off in the distance, they can be multifarious or interdependent.
We can evolve ourselves while also influencing, or at least leveraging, the structure(s) of processes that we interact with.
And our consciousness does this through the ordering of reality — through seemingly reversing the entropic flows of our universe.
But why?
It denotes another fundamental purpose to our sentient capacity: not to just order reality, but to master it (at the risk of sounding dramatic); we can even rephrase that to say something along the line of refining our ability to maneuver through events, space, and time.
And at the added risk of over-thinking something that should remain pretty simple and organic, it’s worth considering the context of our creative purpose: to drive to be and do better, to progress, to grow more complex and to, ultimately, evolve.
The fundamental reason by which we evolve is because we’re able to understand such cycles; ergo, the better we can predict outcomes, the more fluidly we can move through an extremely fluid reality, and the more we can ultimately secure our continued evolution.
And the faster, or maybe, the more beautifully we can arrive at our ultimate destinations. Because it’s not necessarily about efficiency or speed — it’s about what means most, and the way to ensure the most meaningful outcome for ourselves is to move with predictive anticipation through the tides of life.
The Observer Defect
“Since space and time are reduced to the subjective role of the elements of the language a particular observer uses for his or her description of natural phenomena, each observer will describe the phenomena in a different way”
— Fritjof Capra
Our subjective positioning in reality is the sharpest of double edged swords.
While it affords us the potential to instill meaning into every ordinance of our existence, it also skews the nature of things.
We’re left grasping, either at theories or concepts, ideologies and philosophies, with no telling how they’ll jive with our ultimate destination points.
We’re also left trying to sort out the discrepancies between our desires for an existence that’s wholly different from the actual nature of reality — an existence that’s permanent, static, non-chaotic in a universe that’s dynamic and ever-changing, actively interweaving events through time.
And so we try to navigate this process by flowing through the weaves in such a way that creates the best story possible, riding our subjectivity towards the right perspectives while managing the right expectations and making the right decisions along the way to arrive at the most ideal and meaningful outcomes.
It’s a big task and we all fail at this task incessantly, but these failures themselves function as a necessary contrast in the overall pattern and the end result — which is all that matters.
Like with anything, scars and imperfections are especially alluring and signify a kind of complexity or depth. We achieve these imperfections and earn these scars from our dance with change — from the ceaseless mutation and transformation of all things, each time teaching us some kind of new lesson and each time prompting us to adapt and adjust our maneuverability as needed.
And while we may not know which ways we’d subsequently like to go, or much of the exactitude with regards to our trajectory, we can generalize a few elements of the final destination we seek: whether it’s an echoing legacy, a transcendence of materialism or biology, maybe some form of socio-economic fulfilment.
And so foresight plays a pivotal role in the whole enterprise, neither immediate nor distant but paradoxically both, via the style of our movement that should seem more prescient than preset, and more effective than efficient.
In other words, the peaks and valleys are unavoidable — it’s our navigation that we should focus on. When all goes wrong, we should take issue with the map, not the territory; when all goes right, we should appreciate the symbiotic nature of both.
Artful Equilibrium
From a perspective of our conscious movement, there’s a massive difference between doing and being.
Much of reality doesn’t seem to have the privilege of being able to over-think this dichotomy into absurdity the way we do.
It’s far too easy for us to become too heavily encamped in one over the other: either hyper-fixated on productivity that we don’t have time to enjoy the little elements of existence in between tasks or so lax that we don’t do anything worthwhile amidst an ever-mounting sense of worthlessness.
Our capacity for sentient consciousness muddles the water — it prompts us to do more than simply process and procreate while also affording us the potential to revere and appreciate.
Moreover, it skews our ability to moderate, regulate, conserve, and exist in variable forms of homeostatic equilibrium — something of an apparent necessity when looking at the forms and functions of everything else around us.
And so we become lost in the abstract struggles between being and doing; somehow condemning ourselves for over-analyzing and under-performing, despite the requirement of such actions. We drift through the noise of reality, trying to pick up the right signals and trying not to exert wasted energy over the wrong ones.
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” — William James
But in the context of our movement through space and time relative to everything else around us, the artful execution of this dichotomy — doing and being — plays a big role.
Equilibrium, like with anything, seems to be a/the key.
Such homeostasis seems to be something of a golden common-denominator throughout just about anything: to equalize as much as to evolve.
Whether we want to consider it a pacing of will, an ode to moderation or a managing of expectation, all it really boils down to is being artful in the approach; in being attuned to all the cycles in the right ways; in filtering all noise in the most ideal of methods.
And no other term best describes this dynamic but artfulness — of a person or action — clever, skillful, typically in a crafty or cunning way. Anticipatory, predictive, prescient.
Thus, with regards to our navigation through this phantasmagorical existence, it can be said that artfulness, achieved via our predictive capacity and our awareness of all the cycles around us, is one of the best means of which we should seek to to arrive at whatever destinations we deem most meaningful.
“Life is a dance. The purpose of thought is to organize reality. The purpose of consciousness is to appreciate it.”
