Everything Happens
Life emerges from intimacy and opportunity. This has (nearly) nothing to do with reasons. Except that we are addicted to inventing and living them out… as if they were real.
Someone whose mind and work I admire ( and in whom I have some well-founded trust ) was artfully debunking a truism on his facebook wall last night ( 03.10.2014).
To wit:
“Few cliches offend me or bore me more than "All religions seek the same thing; each one is just a different path up the same mountain, all leading to the same peak." In no manner is this true; no manner at all.”
I enthusiastically concur.
And in the spirit of his gesture, I will say this about another cliché, too often *foisted upon us at inopportune moments:
“Everything happens for a reason.”
Really? Actually, no.
This is nearly as absurd as another famous fatuosity:
“It’s just your imagination”
My own intelligence feels the necessity of immediate combat with whoever champions such baldergash for an obvious reason: theirs was just involved, (and in a sense, failing, miserably) in producing that string of words, and in noticing a pattern, recognizing the opportunity to garble our minds, understanding words at all… and so on.
In short, ‘Imagination is just about everything’.
So defaming it with language like this is an abjectly stupid thing to do.
Now, there are times when someone is having a fantasy and presuming it to be real, and there are good ways to indicate this—but trivializing one of the central bases of mind and awareness with the term ‘just’ or ‘merely’ is simply wrong. It begets stupidity by encouraging us to ‘feel superior to’ one of the fundamental sources of apprehension, insight, understanding, creativity… and, indeed, prodigy. How can you be superior to that from which superiority must descend?
I object. And more. I attack.
But back to reasons. Life is strange stuff, and when you get really close to it, and become intimate with just how unthinkable it is underneath our common conveniences of speech, well, you are first going to experience a sense of awe. If you don’t, you can be fairly certain you are moving away from truth and clear conception, rather than approaching it. Then you are going to notice other interesting features. Things like the fact that, a bit like a dream, life changes — dramatically, when you begin to have anything like a clearer sense of its nature(s).
There are certain modes of curious approach that, like the strange question in a dream that at once reveals that you are dreaming and fails to eject you, result in the astonishing experiences we associate with the term lucidity.
In fact, I will take this moment to ask you one of my own favorite questions. As those of us who have had the experience of realizing we are dreaming may recall, there are senses and questions that one can arouse within the experience that will offer us the opportunity to become lucid within the experience. There is no precise set of rules for this, because, like lives or moments, dreams are not composed of rules (which are, indeed skeletal representations of aspects of experience or ‘reality’). Plainly, the relationship of dreaming to rules is bizarre. The obvious question that comes to mind, however, is a relatively familiar one:
“Am I dreaming?”
This question is usually preceded by the suspicion that ‘something is strange or amiss here’.
I remember, as an example, a scene where I was apparently in the office of a gas station, and was attempting for reasons unknown to write the word ‘Knowledge’ on a chalkboard. Disturbingly, by the time I got anywhere near the ‘w”, the previous letters began to at once morph into spaghetti and also fade. I attempted to remedy this by applying greater pressure as if the pressure would result in greater formal longevity!
Dreaming is, as they say, ‘a gas’.
But here’s the question: suppose that waking life is, as Edgar Allen Poe once prophesied, ‘a dream within a dream’? In such a case, what species of question might have the same effect in waking reality… that ‘am I dreaming?’ sometimes elicits within a dream?
In simpler terms: what question(s) could lead us directly into an experience of waking lucidity?
And, before I go on… what is the source of light in dreams?
Now, I feel I will be remiss if I do not here address the first question briefly, yet indirectly. Life is vastly stranger than the sum of human stories and models — science and religion included. After all, these are just words — mere descriptions (here, the terms ‘mere’ and ‘just’ are actually apt), whereas reality is an entirely other matter altogether. And I get excited when I hear those words ‘matter altogether’, partly because there are secrets hidden within language and words that most people will live and die without ever being privy to, even should their fortunes make them poets.
But back to my point.
I have come to realize, directly, that life is indeed a bit … like a strange species of dream, and may be understood or approached as a peculiar way of relating with ‘an instant’, such that time and distance are largely artifacts not of the direct experience of reality, but rather our habitual modes of interacting with it.
These modes, it seems to me, are multiply metarecursive*, which is to say that they re-enter, modulate and … through experience and relation… transform consciousness and memory… in ways that grow ever-more numerous, astonishing, and diverse… in each moment.
Thus it is that life, a bit like a dream, appears to have ‘significant extent’ when, indeed, an entire ‘lifespan’ could ‘in reality’ have no greater temporal extent than an eyeblink.
Or, even more provocatively: no extent at all.
And here I have given you a clue to the sort of question that could unlock its weirdest secrets… but you will have to fashion and pursue the question… in person.
[ *Note: Nature’s modes of recursion are not merely those common to math, and they are rarely (perhaps never) pure fractals (as many people love to quip and suppose). They are more like the relationship between your body and your hand, which is to say that they are uniquely and meaningfully instanced at any given ‘order’ of magnitude. Consider the following: You are first ‘one’ whole. Like your hand, you have a unifying body. Like your hand, you have ‘a thinking member’ which is comprised of two major sections (neck and head) and like your hand, you have ‘four working members’, which, like your hand, each have 3 major sections.
Could you be… the hand of something?
You are bipolar: there are two sides of your body that correspond almost physically to the hidden treasure in your skull: the brain, which is ‘divided’ (yet this means connected) into two hemispheres that are, approximately, responsible for each of the (opposing) sides of your body.
This is a better example of how nature ‘recurses’ in form than the common examples in math or fractals. Nature is not ‘merely’ numerically fractalline… she is also meaningfully thus, and her expressions of metarecursion vary across orders of instancing. ]
I remember one of the early minor philosophical realizations I had about ‘reasons’ and ‘things happening’. I was 19. It was my lunch hour, and I was in downtown Stockton. I was listening to the soundtrack to Rumble Fish by Stewart Copeland (which is musically redolent with the essences of temporality and clocks)… and I was watching cars pausing and passing the traffic signals. It was then that it hit me, suddenly, like lighting: everything that happens in our lives is because of traffic signals.
Think about it a moment. Let it sink in. No matter where you were when something happened, anything that was temporally based or founded, was mediated by every traffic signal you ever encountered. They stopped you, or let you through, and the sum of those events ‘determined’ where you would be, and when. Mechanically.
Fascinating, no? Your mother and father met because: traffic signals.
So ‘everything happens because of traffic signals’.
Well, not precisely. But I think that now you begin to see that things are a bit more complex than they might superficially appear, or than our common truisms could survive, let alone indicate.
Later in life, in my mid-twenties, in a slightly run-down apartment on Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa, California, me and a then-relatively young prodigy named Gary Paolini did a 45-minute improvised industrial opera called ‘Traffic Signal Man’, about a man who was supernaturally convinced that he could read the signals of the cosmos and the future in the specific changes around him that accompanied traffic lights.
Every day, he simply went to a corner and ‘read the world’ from these sequences and the associated synchronicities that evolved nearby.
The tape of this was (apparently) stolen from me by another man named Mark Rousseau, for purposes too complex to go into here. But the thing is this: I met both of these men, at least in part, due to the direct influence of traffic signals. It’s almost more than any sane person can fathom.
Did I ever claim to be sane? No. I did not.
Traffic signals are not ‘a reason’. They are machines. But as I suspect you realize that everything doesn’t happen ‘for a machine’. And if you realize that, well, we are almost ‘home’.
Now, reasons are peculiar beasties; they are structured fictions that people make up in their minds, primarily as a convenience of description or to reassure themselves that the vast and unencapsulable prodigy of the universe can be taken in hand like a three-year old utensil that you get from a kitchen drawer and be known. Or manipulated by human mouths and minds.
Now, there are, in fact, narrow contexts (such as science or explanation) where this has some ‘reasonable’ degree of veracity. They problem is that reasons, like monsters, are wont to escape their natural habitats and run rampantly over human minds, lives, intelligence… or even life on Earth. The results are catastrophic. As an example, there is this cat who calls himself a scientist (Daniel Dennet) who literally claims that your experiences don’t exist. He is so terrified of there being something that he cannot analyze and manipulate that he has decided the brain is just a machine and experiences are merely a side effect of its activity. In case you cannot understand how insane this is: machines are assembled by people from parts for purposes. Minds emerge as wholes from nature. They are purposive, but not empurposed. The entire affair is little more than a failing bulwark against the unimpeachable mysteries of existence and embodiment. Everyone prefers, of course, to pretend they can know the unknown, and thus refrain from feeling that falling sensation that is familiar to those who have lost their grip in one way… or another. One way is terror. Another is flight.
And frankly, this is the root of your choice here, and that choice is being obviated by idiots who want to pretend that you are either falling or fine.
But the specific mode of the farce is even more ridiculous than is superficially apparent. Here’s the reason: the universe is not laid out according to models or reasons, at all. And the basic suggestion here, is that ‘there is a higher purpose’ which, one surmises, would be ‘reasonable’ if it were only understood and known, you know… mapped out so that everyone could clearly see all past and future ramifications which… is just as ridiculous as it is possible to be.
There is another peculiar para-linguistic theorem I hold to ‘lie’ (in both senses of the word) at the root of an entire system of intrinsic and extrinsic torture chambers. The term ‘because’ has the peculiar feature of being the single English word most likely to inaugurate a falsehood. That is to say: a lie. It is also the basic idea that forms the foundation of a vast array of evils and prisons that comprise some of the most sickening, horrific and arbitrary nightmares in human thought, emotion, culture and history. We put people into tiny cages where they are to be violated and destroyed due to the bizarre attractiveness and force of this strange word, and some of these are people we love. We, ourselves are not immune. I cannot count the number of people I have found in cages of internal agony, many of which had lasted decades and seemed inviolable, simply due to that total misapplication of this seemingly innocuous string of seven letters. Simply stated, this word is a nightmare of propositional prosecution, and the most serious crime of all is that no one is apparently aware of just how forcefully misleading it can be, nor are they awake to the deadly dangers of its application—especially in ignorance, outrage, fear, guilt, or shame.
In this cliché, the ‘because’ is implied, rather than stated directly, but it is there, in the background, emitting its deadly rays like a hidden particle of radioactive poison. This cliché is ordinarily offered as a consolation when something has gone horribly or unexpectedly amiss. And the idea is to imply that ‘if you only understood the entire structure, if you saw the chain of ‘becauses’, you would see that destiny has a plan, and this is part of it, and you would feel relieved’. Well, that’s just wrong. Here’s why. Life has nothing to do with reasons, which are things that people make up. Literally. And when they make them up and we authorize this, everyone has to pretend things about identity, time, relation and meaning… that are simply … lies. Especially time. Too often, we must become such lies.
Actually, what you have is simple: opportunity. To relate. To dream. To go beyond all models or stories, all evaluations or narratives. All reason or desire. You have the opportunity to not only discover, but invent… and not merely your reactions. Your mind. Your intelligence. Everything. The past and the future are the palette and the canvas that the painter of being within you has unexpectedly free reign with.
Unless you think in terms of reasons.
If you get any kind of intimate taste of life you will understand something simple: it’s like a disease, in the sense that … it’s also like a storm or a fight… it’s opportunistic. Profoundly, almost tactically… opportunistic.
Now the whole ‘reason’ thing, isn’t even deterministic. It’s just narratological (which has a lot in common with insanity when it gets substituted for the vast and unthinkable depth of reality). Simply stated: life itself doesn’t have reasons, or even language like ours. It has something more like symphonies of possibility that emerge as events. And when people tell you ‘there’s a reason’, they are pretending that this is all ‘already structured in a rational, easy to capture way’. It cannot be so. And neither can you, your mind, or even your intelligence. There are mathematical proofs related to this—provided by such eminent geniuses as Kurt Gödel (who was also rather mad) and Werner Heisenberg. But you do not have to master their ideas to understand opportunism.
Follow the threads of a dream. Watch a fight that suddenly breaks out between strangers. Or two birds making love. Remember an accident you saw or were involved in directly. Think about the orgasms that preceded or invoked your conception.
Do you still think these were happening for reasons? You can certainly ascribe them. That is a fact. But are they the fundamental cause? No. And no reason you can ascribe shall ever suffice, except, perhaps, as superficial artifice.
If you are still confused, I would opine that you need to be kissed, deeply, by someone you adore, and while that is happening try to understand something fundamental to being as being: events happen and we are involved in this. And we initiate, respond or relate with them. There is no overriding thinkable way to kiss or fuck. It’s intimate, animate, animal. It’s relational all the way down to the roots of the matter. It’s unreasonable!
Now, when we attempt to relate in a relatively stupid way, such as, for example, cliché-slinging, we are abdicating the inherent prodigy of our own evolutionary history. We are abandoning the inherently purposive (but unpurposed) intelligence that is the hallmark of our potential as living human beings and a species. Why would anyone choose to depart from the profound opportunity of deep relational intimacy and wonder… only to retreat to the echoing halls of dead ideas that comprise a kind of golden crypt?
“ ‘Because’ is the one of the most intrinsically conflicted and internally tangled of all English words — a word that bears the malign distinction of having the greatest propensity for beginning a lie... and, especially, one for which oneself or others shall be unjustly tortured or ceaselessly defamed.”
Habit. Safety of the known. See, if you can get all of reality to look, to you, like a kitchen utensil—well, there’s no more mystery. You’re the master. You’ve become Traffic Signal Man. You’re now the sage ‘reader of signs’ who knows that ‘no matter how dire things appear, there’s a good purpose backstage, waiting to receive you’, and this good purpose isn’t a being, like a dolphin on your Grandmother. No. It’s… (drum roll) a reason?
No. Just no!
Go sit in a garden and watch the interactions between living things. Close. Try to imagine that you are these beings. Watch as some creatures prosper, others perish or are captured as food, while others seem to just stand or amble about… simply being. It is reasonable? I mean, seriously, does it make sense according to some pre-planned arrangement?
Take a good look at the sky. The weather. Think about the history and mystery of life on Earth and if by some sad quirk of habit or fate you come up with a reason I ask that you simply start over again until you begin to see a few features that you must have overlooked. The first is that your own position, awareness, and goals have a direct effect on everything you experience and understand. In other words, you are involved, intimately—whether you decide to ‘remain neutral’ or ‘be objective’ or get directly involved in being, killing, saving, or relating… you are deeply involved and cannot be abstracted into reasons… even if you have or think them.
In fact, what is really going on, is something that has no specific purpose, but is *fundamentally purposive. It has no specific goal or outcome, but goals and outcomes are born and dissolve into it. It is… metarelational and transpurposed. Uncaptured by language or description, living reality is an exquisite conflagration whose relationships to reasons modulate and explode right in the face of anyone who might be so confused as to reduce such splendor to descriptions, maps, or plans. And when you begin to get a deep sense, a direct, personal, intimate sense of this, you are going to feel terror. Ecstasy. Wonder. Confusion. Awe. Humility. Divinity and desire. And when you begin to feel those things you will know as a living breath that everything doesn’t happen ‘for a reason’. At all.
Everything happens as and with and all around and within… you.
And no ‘reason’ shall ever compare, encompass, explain, exceed or console you in this. You are everything… happening.
Right now.
There is, however, something we can get a hold of underneath all of this: opportunity. It’s almost pure opportunity. Beyond all possibility, explanation, or demonstration… it’s a nearly ecstatic…
Invitation.
So—go get some. I mean, you know… wake up from the sleep of reason and…
RESPOND.
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and nearly everything else. I hope my work may contribute to our ability to assemble the authentic sources of what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of. Together. With and for each other and our world.
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