Here’s a transcript of a class I gave in deep narrative theory in 1995. It goes in depth into the psychological underpinnings of narrative and the role of the justification process as the driver of narrative progression.
DEEP THEORY – CERTIFICATION CLASS
1 – 7 – 1995
Today’s discussion is on Problem Solving and Justification. First of all, do you have any questions about problem solving or justification beyond what you’ve already heard. Any areas that you want to know more about, or anything that you’ve wondered about?
Q: Are you going to talk about blind spots?
I can. O.K., so blind spots is one of the things. Anybody else have anything else.
Q: For me personally, I am kind of new to the whole thing, so whatever we touch, I’m sure will be helpful.
So, let me start then with an overview, and then we will get down to blind spots. We’re going to cover a lot of different ways of looking at the same thing. And each one of the ways that we cover will be complete from that particular perspective. But, it doesn’t really describe how the whole mechanism works, because all of the perspectives we’ll talk about, and many of them we won’t, are part of the process, because they are all valid ways of looking at it. You can’t really see the process of justification for what it is, because it’s the way the mind works. And you can’t use the way the mind works to look at the way the mind works. It really can’t be done. All you can do is see after-images left by where the mind has worked. Or look at things that are effected by the mind as it’s working. And say, we can get an idea of what the mind is doing by it’s gravitational pull on the orbits of other things around it. So we’ll be looking at how the mind affects a number of different things, and from that try to get a feel for what’s actually going on in the mind, as it tries to solve problems or creates justifications.
First of all, the most important thing is the definition of what do we mean by problem-solving, or justification? Well, problem solving is when you get rid of an inequity. And justification is when you balance an inequity. I will show you the difference between the two. What do we mean by an inequity? An inequity is when anything is out of balance. Anything covers a lot of territory. But, that’s exactly what we mean. Whenever the mind can be aware of a lack of balance, between two items or two processes, or two places or two approaches, or coming to conclusions between two means of evaluations. Whenever they don’t line up, whenever things are not the same in a sense. Whenever things are different, between the two of them, the difference that exists makes them unequal. And that inequity between them can be seen as a positive or a negative thing.
If there was only one thing in the entire universe, and we saw no difference; it was homogeneous — well, there would be no inequity. But, it wouldn’t necessarily be positive then, because there would nothing really. It would just be one thing, and since there’s one thing, you couldn’t compare it to anything. And since you can’t compare it, you can’t measure it — and since you can’t measure it, you can’t evaluate it. You don’t know whether it’s good or bad, it has no meaning. It’s only when we sub-divide and have at least two things to measure between, that we can say, O.K. in measuring these two things, the fact that they are different is a good thing, or the fact that they are different is a bad thing.
When two things being different is a good thing, you don’t want to hang a picture to a wall with another picture, you want to hang a picture to a wall with a nail. When there is something that you would like to have, but you don’t have it yet, that can be a bad thing or a good thing. If it is something you are looking forward to and the joy of anticipating it, because you really expect to get it, and you don’t see anything that could step in your way — Like Christmas morning, you look forward to it, and it becomes a joyous experience in anticipating, or perhaps a movie that you know is opening on Friday and you want to go see it, and you’ve been anticipating it because you’ve been hearing about it. So, here’s something you want that you don’t yet have, and yet that’s positive, because it’s something that you expect to get, and it’s not causing you any negative ramifications now, because you don’t have it.
In other words, things now are good. Things with that would be better. You expect to get that thing, and therefore, there’s no way that it could be seen as negative, because you expect to get it within a reasonable amount of time, that you would feel not like you’ve been anticipating it for so long that it was negative, because you look forward to it and look forward to it, and you look forward to it, like a career in the movie business, and it never happens. Well, that begins to get negative after a while, because you keep waiting and it doesn’t come. So, waiting for something for a very long time can be a positive thing, like getting a degree in college. Yes, you’d like it, but it can be very positive, because part of the excitement is in earning it, and every time you are making progress, you can sense that you have gotten closer to it, because there are a certain number of requirements to achieve. It has an optionlock, and with an optionlock, you can say that when I’ve taken this course, and this course, then they give me the degree. So, you can chart it off, and see your progress.
The real key here is not just saying there is this arbitrary amount of time that makes it positive or negative, but again, it’s another way of measuring the difference. The difference between how big the reward is, and how long it’s going to take to get. So, already, we have shifted our perspective. Originally, we just said inequity is a balance between two things when they are out of balance, or when they are different. Inequity exists between them. It doesn’t make one better or worse than the other, it just means they are not in equilibrium. That can be a good thing or a bad thing.
But, now you have to go a step farther than those two steps and say how do we determine what’s good or bad. Well, now we have to go a step farther than those two steps, and say how do we determine it’s good or bad. And now we have to weigh things against each other and say here’s the benefit I will get from it, which makes me anticipate it. Here’s the length of time I have to wait for it, which delays it. And so, the positive aspects of anticipating it, because of the size of it’s rewards, and the costs I have to pay at how long it takes to get there – to wait for it, those two are played against each other, and we see it as a positive experience or a negative experience. So, if it’s a great big reward, and there’s little waiting time, it’s a very positive experience, than a great big reward, and a long waiting time, it can get neutral or even negative. If it’s a little reward, and a little waiting period, it can be very positive. If it’s a little reward and a long waiting time, it can be very negative. So, it’s just a matter of balancing the size of the reward with the time we wait.
But, if we don’t have any way of measuring when it’s going to happen, then we get nervous if we can’t see progress, because there’s nothing to measure progress by. So, when we have something we’re waiting for, we want there to be either a timelock or an optionlock which ever happens first, which makes it even better. Because, if you have timelock, then you are saying all I have to do is count the hours, minutes and seconds until the film is released, and then I will see it, because I know where the screening is going to be. A Star Trek picture comes out released November 18th or whatever, ….then you say, O.K. well, I’m going to count down until the movie is released and see it. What an optionlock is, all that has to happen is I have to meet these requirements, and these requirements could be getting pieces to something, or learning something, or whatever it is , but it doesn’t matter how long it takes, it’s when you get all the pieces together and every time you get a new piece, you can see that progress has been made towards the goal.
But, although a time moves inexorably forward, so that it is constantly moving at the same amount of time, the same increments, optionlocks don’t move that way. Optionlocks can have three of them happen real fast, and one of them takes forever, so it’s a different kind of guide — it seems a little more stretchy. But, wait, for a moment, lets stand back and look at time, and say how fast does time flow for us. Are there not times, when we are lost and daydreamy, and we go through incredible journeys, and seems like it’s been hours, and we come back and five minutes has passed. And other times, we take something that seems like it’s happened very quickly, and it’s really taken a lot of time, because we are thoroughly engrossed – how much we are involved.
And how much we are involved is a function of how many parts of the mind, how much of the mind percentage-wise or potential-wise becomes involved in the considerations. So, that when we are wholly involved in something, we lose track of time, and it goes faster, when it’s an external thing. When we are wholly involved in an internal thing, often time will go slower. And so the internal – external issue starts to come into play as to how we begin to appreciate the nature of these locks that show us progress towards resolving an inequity and determining whether it’s positive or negative. Whether it’s outside or inside, sometimes you see a mirror image of the effect. When you are wholly involved in something outside, time will be something that can go by very quickly. When you are wholly involved in something inside, time can go very, very slowly.
Time becomes stretchy, and you really can’t tell how long you have to wait for something because how long it seems when you are waiting for a doctor’s appointment versus when you are waiting in line in the supermarket or whatever. Time can seem to change – stretchy time.
There really is no wholly objective time. Objective time is made up of the change in mass in it’s relationship to energy. Subjective time is made up of the relationship between time and space, which seems like a contradiction — using time inside and space inside. So, you really have two kinds of time. We label them the same thing, but one of them is time per se, which is the movement of mass because of applied energy, which is completely consistent and external to ourselves, whereas, inside ourselves, it’s not time, but duration.
Time is measured in increments. Duration is measured in speed. And the two don’t always line up, as we’ve mentioned before. It may seem like a lot of external time has gone by, but seem like it’s been a very short duration or vice-versa.
Now when we are dealing with justifications, the male perspective on justifications, is to look at it in balance between things. And the female way of looking at justifications is to look at the imbalance between duration and time. Which will lead to really neat tricks that you can use by members of the opposite sex or of the same sex, in order to play their justifications, and get them to do exactly what you want, or be how you want them to be; with a minimum outlay of resources on your part.
Men don’t have a good sense of how long something takes duration-wise. So, all you have to do to make men justified and stay with something is tell them maybe. Maybe leaves it open, and as long as it’s maybe, there’s a chance it could happen. When there’s a chance it could happen, there’s no way of measuring how long they’ve been hung on the line with this chance of it happening, which is why whenever a woman want’s to lean a man in any respect, all she has to do is say maybe. If she says no, right from the beginning, no means no. If she says yes, yes means yes. Maybe means yes, but later, to a man. And so, that’s the way they are going to read it.
And as a result of it, you string on guys, by just saying maybe, until finally he’s waiting is so long, that begins to lose interest. And as he begins to lose interest for whatever it is, then all you have to do is show them a little progress by unbalancing the inequity between things just a little bit. And as soon as you do, just a little bit, then they see progress and even note it. Then you can keep on saying maybe until they lose interest again. But, you’ve reviewed all their interest because they’ve seen something budge.
Now for women, women have a very good sense of what the overall balance between things is. Meaning that it doesn’t take much leverage in the external, real world, to make them feel that progress has occurred. In other words, no real progress has to made and they can be fooled into thinking that progress has been made, because women think that how long it’s taking, before she sees progress, that’s how she measures it. How long does it seem before I’ve seen any progress. Now, a woman is not just looking at step progress like men are. She’s looking at acceleration progress. She’s looking at am I getting closer to the goal, because progress is being made faster? Like a train looming up into your face on a railroad track. That’s what she’s measuring. It can start off slow, but it’s got to accelerate.
Men are looking for linear progress, where you’ve covered a certain number of tries, and it’s more of an objective view of progress. The more subjective view of progress which women take, is that things seem to be looming closer and closer. So that, you get that feeling of acceleration, even though everybody hasn’t changed speed, but has changed speed in relationship to you. And so, it’s a doppler effect — it’s basically a female experience. When you want to string a woman along, all you have to do is to allow things first to accelerate a little bit. Now, that means that if you want a woman to do anything at all, you promise her that eventually she’s going to get something. When you say, when this is all over, you will get something. She will work for you without a timelock, she will work for you without an optionlock. Eventually, she will begin to feel that she is getting nowhere, and start to re-evaluate. As soon as you sense this happening, you give her a bite size candy bar, and put it on her desk, or a single carnation and put it on her desk. Now, she will say, “Oh, I’m getting closer to nice things, and therefore, the way things are going is accelerating, going better, because before I had nothing at all, and now I’ve got something, which is definitely an acceleration.
So, she will continue to work for you until she begins to sense, there’s been no acceleration. Now, because there’s been no acceleration. Now, because there’s been no acceleration, that means that the rose may have died, or the candy’s been eaten. The experience has gone a little bit behind. You cannot, and this is the mistake that men make in not being able to manipulate women, is give her another bite size candy bar, or another single carnation and have her feel that progress has been made, because she got another one. From men, as long as they are getting the treats doled out, they are going to figure O.K., I get one every so often so that’s how I am making progress, and they are continuing to pay me step by step as I do this job.
For a woman it doesn’t work that way. Next time she will will want a full-size candy bar or a single rose or two carnations, because you’ve got to show acceleration. Now that means that it’s very important for guys in order to save their resources, when trying to get women to do things and force them into justifications. I’ll hold out a little longer to do the job I don’t like, because things are going O.K., and I’m getting faster at where I want to go to. Start out small. Use the minimum investment you can at the beginning, and give her the smallest thing that will renew her interest, and then next time go to the minimum increment you can that will show to her that things are better than they were, because she got a bigger prize than she did last time. You’ll find that the frequency with which she needs these — Although she should never figure out that you’ve planned it out, so always go one day, one way, and one day another way. The frequency is roughly the same. They are like the railroad ties. She needs to have these railroad ties so often, but she’s not thinking that way, she’s just realizing that it’s beginning to wear off. And then she needs a bigger prize to be feeling like acceleration is being made.
Because for a woman, stacked linear progress, is no progress at all. For guys, as long as they do the steps being accomplished, they know that they will get there eventually, because they are charting it on a straight line. But women need to feel that it’s looming closer and closer. Because women deal primarily with time sense, and men with space sense. The space sense will demand that progress is measured by taking one step after another after another of equal increments if possible, until you’ve eaten away at the distance you have to cover, and you know exactly how long it’s going to take you to get to your destination. For a woman, she just has to feel that she’s getting to her destination faster and faster, because on any chore she’s doing that she doesn’t like, her interests are weighing faster and faster and deeper and deeper, and the baggage she’s carrying will get heavier and heavier, so that she has to feel that the end is closer and closer.
So, that’s how you would use the justification between the two. Now, what determines if one is justification, and one is problem solving? Well, as we said balancing an inequity is justification. Resolving an inequity is problem solving. Sometimes resolving an inequity is bad. And sometimes balancing an inequity is good. Good and bad have nothing to do with whether it’s problem solving or justification. It has to do with how you approach the inequity. Look at them as extropy and entropy, when you have extropy you’ve got building up, getting more complex; creating an infrastructure that is more and more gossamer. It has more and more connections to it, and eventually if you build it big enough, it will grow too weak to support it’s own weight. And it will collapse on itself or it’s gravity in the area is not strong enough, and it will just float away and you won’t have it anymore because you made it so big, that it just gets picked up by the currents of wind and taken away.
Buckminster Ford did some research and found that you could build a geodesic dome of a certain size that was so big that because the triangles you are creating that increase as the area of the outside, the volume is increasing as the cube, while the area is increasing as the square, and you reach a point eventually where the thing can become so lightweight compared to it’s size, that the slightest breeze could make something a half a mile across just take off into the air, because of the breeze. And so, that’s the physics of it, and the same thing happens mentally as well.
But, there’s that second force, that force of entropy that is trying to bring it all down. Entropy is not just a destructive force, entropy is the force that seeks unification, as opposed to complexity; instead of variety, singularity. Entropy tries to make things more and more simple. Simplify is what it’s really about in terms of entropy. But, that’s not necessarily a good thing either. If you simplify enough, you get to singularity, and as we talked about earlier, when you get to singularity, then you have nothing to compare things to and it becomes completely neutral. When you have complete neutrality, there is nothing — no life, no thought, no movement, no inertia, no change, nothing. Look at the moment of the “big bang”. Big Bang is the ultimate singularity. Complete expansion of the universe to an infinite degree would be complete complexity. It is my opinion that neither of these has ever been achieved.
There’s never been a moment like they describe in terms of the “Big Bang”. Not where things reduced to a singularity. Because that’s a limit line that you approach. You approach and you never actually get that limit line. Eventually something throws you to the other side of the limit line and we’ll talk about that later too. But when it throws you too the other side of the limit line, you’ve never actually been at that moment of singularity, you’ve just gotten infinitely close to it on one side, and then you are infinitely close on the other and moving away from it, instead of close towards it. And this causes the universe to act like an oscillation, where it expands almost to infinity and then contracts almost to singularity, then expands on the other side into the anti-energy. Reverse energy, reverse time, anti-energy, negative space, non-mass …That’s what you have when you go into the other side of the other universe.
And in fact, because all of them go at once, you can never tell when you are in the positive or negative universe. Because all you have to compare things are things that are either all positive or all negative. As long as this happens, things are working properly — they oscillate between the positive and the negative, but it always seems neutral when you are in one or the other, because all you have are all positives or all negatives to compare it to. We are not talking about anti-matter here, we are talking about non-matter; things that not only do they not exist, but they strongly do not exist. In other words, their lack of existence is an existence of it’s own. In other words, it would take more than just transmitting energy to create mass. You’d have to overcome some inertia, against coming into existence first. Overcome the entropy when someone has a catalyst even to bring it to a neutrality where it could begin to exist.
So, existence is not just something that is there. It is a matter of how firmly it is there. And even if it’s not there at all, that’s just neutral, because some things have a definite tendency not to come into existence. A lot of things have a tendency not to happen. And some of these negative aspect, only if you’re negative can you compare them to the positive. And in fact, even in this universe, you can easily look at things and say — Here is something that has a tendency to happen. Here is something that has a tendency not to happen. On any given day there is a great tendency not to have a plane crash. Within in the days of the year, there is a great tendency to have at least one plane crash. Because on any given day, most likely one is not going to happen. A lot of things have to converge to make the plane crash happen. And because those things don’t happen very often, there is a tendency for a plane crash not to occur, within a period of one day. But, if you change the way you measure it, and say now I’m going to show it within a year, you can’t predict any given plane will crash, but you can say there will probably be some crash of some plane within a year of a reasonable size jet-liner. Certainly within 5 years. We’ve never had a five year period where we haven’t had a jet-liner crash. You can almost count on it.
Plane crashes have a strong tendency to come into existence in the generic sense in a five year period. But, in a generic sense, within a one day period, they have a great tendency not to occur. Well, how can it be that day by day, there is a great tendency not to, and yet at the end of the year or two years, there is a great tendency to. When does it switch over? That’s that limit line I was talking about, that you never actually hit, but get close to. When does it change from being a tendency not to come into existence to a tendency to come into existence. How does that happen? When does it switch from not being to being? It’s a magic moment. And that was the moment I was looking for in the unified field theory, because it’s the key to understanding how everything hangs together — it’s that magic moment. And it turned out that it’s not anything intrinsic to what you are looking at — it’s intrinsic to how you look at it. It’s all in the context, it’s all in the perspective. It’s all in what you measure.
There is no point at which you can stack up the number of days and say now there is a plane crash. But, there is a way when you can go through a five year period and say I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a plane crash. It depends on your measurement. Where you begin measuring is arbitrary. And how long you measure is arbitrary. It works kind of like this…there are tendencies and there are trends. And they work in opposition to each other. Trends are when you see something and say….like suppose you’ve got a coin, and you are flipping a coin. You flip this coin five times in a row and it comes up heads every single time. What’s the trend? The trend is it’s coming up heads. So, based on the trend, you would expect it would come up heads again. Now, what are the actual odds on any given toss that it will come up heads or tails? On any given toss? How can you say you expect it to come up heads if the odds are 50/50. Because there’s been a trend that has shown that it has done that. consistently, and one would expect maybe that there’s some outside force at work that is affecting things so that in and of itself, intrinsically the item under study has a 50-50 chance of coming up one way or another, in the environment in which it is being flipped, something is apparently affecting it to come up heads, and one could expect that that’s the inertia that it carries.
However, there’s another force at work. The force at work is tendency. When you have a trend that says it has come up this many times, what would you expect for the next five, in order to make the odds come out 50-50? It would come up tails, and that’s the tendency. Although the trends points to coming up heads, because of something perhaps environmental. Maybe though, there’s nothing environmental, and it’s just a matter of chance that it’s come up heads 5 times in a row. But, for the odds to hold true, which they eventually will have to, then you needs five times that it will come up tails, if all you were going to do is ten tosses. But see you would expect the tendency is pulling it towards coming up tails on the next throw.
Now there is the most interesting relationship between those things, because it has to do with like Las Vegas odds. Las Vegas odds in the long run and the longer that you measure, the more likely it will come down to the exact odds. If you put a slot machine in a Las Vegas establishment, and certain odds have been established on it, and it’s a brand new machine, and you put in one coin, and you hold down the handle, there’s no way anybody knows what it’s going to do, because the statistical nature of it, to make sure that the odds come out to a certain level, to a pay-off, can’t function with only one play. The odds don’t work out. The more you play it, it’s bound to pay anything off, assuming that it is functioning correctly. In order for that slot machine to be working at the proper odds, eventually it’s got to catch up. So, if it doesn’t pay off, and it doesn’t pay off, and it doesn’t pay off, and it’s done that for ten years, and it hasn’t payed off at this place, and it’s working properly, that has got a lot of built up tendency. And that would be a machine you’d want to play, because when you play that machine, then you figure eventually it’s going to have to pay off a lot, in order just to make up for all the ten years when it didn’t pay off. So, it doesn’t matter actually when you begin measuring or when you stop measuring — it’s a subjective thing. So, that would be a way to play it at Vegas.
What is it that prevents us from actually doing that? Because you would think everybody could get rich from just by looking at somebody playing and playing who ran out of money and left, and they hadn’t gotten any wins, then that’s when you want to sit down and you will end up in the long run even ahead of the game, because you’ve already built up a negative potential on it. The point is it’s not even the matter of a starting point, because that’s kind of arbitrary, because there are many different places you could start, and any one of them to have the odds be right from wherever you start, they’d have to be equal. But, that’s only because you are looking at things in terms of time. How many times it takes something to do it.
You don’t look in terms of space, because in terms of space, you look at the casino as whole, and if you look at the casino as a whole, there’s going to be one machine there that just happens to pay off twice as much as another machine there, that pays off half as much, and another machine that hardly ever pays off at all. And yet they are all built the same, they all have the same odds on each machine. But, in the spatial scenario, some of them, just as a matter of chance, will not pay out very much at all. And others will pay out quite regularly — but there’s no way to predict which ones will be which, because the minute you sit down at that machine and say “this one has traditionally paid off a lot”. But, it may be that it will stop paying off, and another machine will start paying off a lot somewhere else. So, if you look at all the machines, and you see how much they pay off, they are all like peaks and valleys. They are up and down like bar graphs, and some are down negative, and some are high. But, there’s no guarantee that this will continue.
So, when you look at it temporally on any given machine, you can expect that the tendency is for it to be pulled back to the odds, whatever direction the trends happen to be momentarily. And the longer a trend goes one direction, the greater the tendency to go to another. But, trends and tendencies won’t tell you what it will do, because there are other machines, and when you take them all together collectively, they do the odds. But, collectively in that casino, one casino is going to pay off, more than another casino, because of the fact that it just happens in terms of chance that the machines in one casino are paying off at a higher rate than another casino. And you can go out wider, and wider and wider, and eventually you get to the point where the scope of the limit of your measurement, you can see no real difference. When we see no real difference, for all practical purposes, the odds are holding true and right to form.
So, you can’t win it, because whenever you look at it in terms of time only, you can see it in terms of space, we can see space only in terms of time, and that’s why we are trying to make other people justified. What you want to do is give them one of those things where they seem like they’re seeing rewards, and if they are not, look at the other one. And because all of us have the capacity within ourselves to see both time and space, but only one at a time as it were, or one being foremost, and the other one being secondary, because of that, if you can focus somebody’s primary sense, or the one they use first, and make them see apparent progress, then you can have them lose like crazy at the one they are not looking at and they won’t be able to notice it because they are seeing progress where they are focusing. And that’s the nature of focus and blind spot in a very conceptual sense is that if you are focusing on time, your blind spot is space. If you are focusing on space, your blind spot is time.
The only way to protect yourself against ills, is to vacillate between the two as frequently as you can, so that you look at it timewise, and then you look at it space-wise, then you look at it timewise and look at it space-wise. As you go back and forth between those very quickly, it doesn’t allow time for a lot of things to go through. So, is that what we have to train ourselves to do, go back and forth between time and space? No. Because going back and forth quickly between time and space is talking about doing it quickly which is time. And as result that means that we are ignoring a spatial way of doing it. And the spatial way of doing it is not to go back and forth between the two quickly, but to go back and forth between the two on any given subject.
So that whenever anything comes up, you make sure that you look at it spatially and you look at it temporally. Because if you go back and forth too many times, you don’t stick with one perspective long enough to see anything change. So, if you are going quickly, you are losing your sense of things changing, and then you are caught unawares when something comes up and bites you, because it was changing very slowly. You lose your long wave perception, and you can’t see gradual change. On the other hand, if you look at things spatially, and you see it all in space, and then you stop and look at it all in time, and only do those measurements, you don’t see change either, because you don’t see two instances of it from the temporal view and two instances of it from the spatial view, you only see one of each. So again you don’t see change. So, either way you’re screwed.
You can widen your scope, but the minute you widen your scope, you also open yourself up to more instances of trouble, so you can limit within any given scope how many unexpected things are going to happen within it, and how susceptible you are to them, but you do that by widening your scope of consideration, while only being concerned with this part. But, as soon as you open your consideration wider, then you are letting more things into the system which can upset things out here, that can ultimately change this thing and impact it in ways that you hadn’t expected. So, it’s a no win situation. A losing situation is a neutral situation, it all comes out to zero. And that’s what it really comes down to, is the fact that there is no objective way to say that things are good or bad, or right or wrong. But there’s plenty of subjective ways, because each of us is one of the little machines that we have as a slot machine. Each of us finds that in our life, we lead a charmed life or a doomed life. And we can’t really tell between the sense of a charmed life or a cursed life — we can’t predict if it’s going to continue. Some people are so lucky, one thing after another happens to them; everything good, they die happy, never have any problems, worries or fears. Other people suffer from the moment they are born, and live a long suffering life and go to their graves feeling miserable. How can you predict, how can you determine, how can you protect yourself?
Well, the only thing you can do for a subjective viewpoint, is unlike a slot machine, you can change your odds. You can change your odds by shifting context. When you shift context, that’s when you justify, because then you are balancing inequities. If you steal yourself against inequities, and try to snuff the inequity at their source, then you are problem solving. And here we have the beginnings of do-ers and be-ers and change and steadfast. Where people balance and where people snuff, differs between do-ers and be-ers. Everybody snuffs and everybody balances. If you are a be-er, you are going to have a tendency to snuff internally, and balance externally. For example, you have two kids and you’ve got one piece of cake. Both of them want the piece of cake, and they are arguing and screaming when you walk into the room. Now, a be-er will try and balance things by saying, “O.K. who got the cake out?” or you could say, “You get the cake this time, you’ll get the cake next time” and balance it out that way. That would be a balance.
And when they snuff things it would be that there’s only one thing, and they know that only one kid can have it and not the other one; maybe there’s an award, or something that can’t be divided or something, and you give it to one kid or the other, because you have to make a choice. And you realize the inequity, that you have to snuff it inside. So, you do the work inside of trying to snuff it inside, so you do the work inside of trying to snuff your feelings, or you do the work outside and try to balance things off. “Oh, well here’s this jacket that was sent to us, there’s only one jacket, and you have a jacket and instead you get the beach ball.” So, you try and balance things off, so that you make up for it. We are making things up on the outside, robbing Peter to pay Paul, and that’s something a be-er does.
Whereas a do-er is somebody who is going to try and snuff the problem outside. They would be the ones to divide the cake up. They would say, either you each share it or nobody gets anything. They put the balance in a different direction and they were trying to balance things inside, and they were balanced inside by saying, “Yes, I know that it’s not fair to this one not to get the cake or jacket, but this person needs the jacket more because they are out in the cold more, so that’s why they are going to get the jacket and the other one is not going to get a jacket.” So, they would balance inside. And you will see that the approach between do-ers and be-ers is that often in terms of items that have to be divvied up, of which there aren’t enough, do-ers will seem to rely on an analytical external view, and inside they seem to be heartless, in situations where there isn’t enough to go around. Whereas, be-ers seem to miss the point, because be-ers are trying to give oranges to satisfy a taste for apples, in external situations.
So, anyway the one who tries to balance inside is the do-er, and snuff it outside, just take action, precipitous action to make it work itself out — to resolve it. Whereas, the be-er is going to try to resolve it inside, and then take action to balance it outside. And that doesn’t mean change or steadfast. Change or steadfast means do you try that and if it doesn’t work, do you keep trying it another way or do you drop the other’s approach; shift your internal and external places where you want to do it. That’s another way of looking at change and steadfast.
Q: Does Change or Steadfast always affect your approach?”
Not necessarily — It doesn’t have to because sometimes problems aren’t between the inside and the outside, sometimes problems are between the inside and itself, and problems are between the outside and itself. In other words, when you look from a “they” perspective, you’re not personally involved. You don’t have any feelings about it one way or another. You are a judge sitting on a bench and you have to make things work out between the parties, and you don’t have any favorites, ostensibly. And then in that case, it’s a completely external inequity you are dealing with, and so you are going to be putting all your work out there. The whole notion of being a do-er or be-er will be applied to the situation as to how you deal with it. But, change and steadfast will not have anything to do with it. Change and steadfast will be “do I try to resolve it, or do I stop trying to resolve it externally”.
Whereas for an internal situation, in which you feel a certain way, or a lack of motivation for something, and you want to create a motivation for something, or you have tendencies or drives that you want to get rid of, you are working with yourself, and there really is no external manifestation of it, it’s yourself you are trying to work with.
“I don’t like being this kind of person, why do I say this or do that?” . “Maybe I can change myself inside.” Well, that’s not really change in change and steadfast, that’s be-er’s work, and be-er’s working to alter themselves inside, because they are trying to snuff it, internally. And if they are trying to work with themselves inside, if they eventually give up on it, then that’s change.
And if they stick with it, then that’s steadfast. How long do they have to keep working with themselves before themselves change. Did they give up too soon, because whatever was holding them back was just ready to give because of their persistence in trying to think a certain way, in terms of Zen or in terms of controlling our emotion. Could they have broken the back of it, if they had lasted just a little bit longer. Or is it a useless endeavor because they really can’t change that no matter how they try. That’s the leap of faith for a be-er, internal working person.
Do-ers and be-ers both have external only problems and internal only problems and problems between the outside and the inside. And when they are between the outside and the inside, both do-ers and be-ers can perceive it as being this is where it ought to be resolved; externally or internally. And then once they determine where it has to be resolved, what makes them a be-er or do-er is when they determine whether it’s inside or outside and has to be resolved, where they are trying to strike a balance. So, a lot of stuff is going on in that. But, change and steadfast is do you switch from looking from outside to inside, or inside to outside and the other one is at the crossfire, do you stop trying or give up on it. Or do you keep going — inside do you keep going or give up on it. Those are the four change and steadfast issues in the change/steadfast quad.
Now, why would there be such a thing as justification? Why would that even exist in the species? Well, in fact, you can’t get away from it. The reason you can’t get away from it is because of the fact that we have either a spatial brain operating system or a temporal brain operating system. We either favor space or favor time intrinsically. Men favor space and women favor time, in terms of male and female mental sex. And why would this be? Well, in reality, outside of our minds, there is only mass and energy. There is no time, there is no space. They just don’t exist. They only exist in our minds. The fact that we have bodies, the fact that we sit in a room, the fact that we can see things and perceive them – all that mass exists, but the space it takes up is all in our minds, because it really takes up no space at all.
As a matter of fact, it doesn’t take up zero space, there’s no such thing as space. Space is when we have a relationship between space and time that favors space. What that means is that when we have a sense of looking at how things are arranged versus how that arrangement changes, the fact that things had any kind of arrangement is all in our heads, because we are putting a pattern on something and saying here are things that are related. And all those relationships is an order that we impose on the essential key of nature of energy and mass. So, whenever we perceive something as being arranged in a pattern, we’ve supplied the pattern. We projected it, we organize it that way.
Q: We can’t argue that, because there wasn’t something to perceive the space then there would be no way to say that there was anything. It seems that mass a shape to it, and because mass has a mass that can be great or small, then it inherently has something, that’s at least related to space.
Mass has nothing to do with size. As an example a black hole or a neutron star. Matter can be compressed, infinitely small by the forces of gravity. So that, it still has the same mass, but it’s being compressed, because it’s warped space. And what do we get when it’s warped space, it’s warped our perception of it. Which is the relationship between mass/energy and space/time. Space and time are subliminal, and mass and energy are awareness.
Q: But then what is the objective of a shared space, what is the great mind that space that we all seem to be able to share, the earth, etc..?
The best way to describe it is that mass and energy continue to move towards entropy. So, the external universe is the force of entropy and the force of extropy which is the increasing complexities that force us to self-awareness. The two of them are in conjunction and at the moment there is a trend toward self-awareness becoming more complex. The chance of dependency that eventually it will become less complex, or cease to exist at all. Perhaps it is so large it will collapse under it’s own weight or just float off somewhere, and no longer be in this universe. If it collapses under it’s own weight, it’s like what happened during the dark ages. Knowledge was lost, awareness was lost. The levels of thinking were lost. Societally, but individually as well, because there isn’t much difference between a cave person and a person of today. You have the same essential innate capacities of mind, but our thoughts are much more grand today because of the combined knowledge that we have; the complexity that has happened in society.
When different self-aware awarenesses come into being, the first one that thinks of a concept makes that concept manifest, tuned here to reality, just by perceiving it. In other words, instead of saying I’ll believe when I see it, it’s I will see it when I believe it. But, all existence comes from perception, from this perspective. Of course because were made of material that generates our minds, all perception comes out of existence. Remember we can never get to the heart of the matter because we can’t see everything, because we are part of the picture. So, we can’t step out of it, no matter where we place ourselves, that’s a part of the picture we can’t see. So, we’ll never get the whole deal. However, when you have a new concept, it could very well be that for millions of years the earth was flat. It could have very well been.
Now, why did it not stay flat? Well, it didn’t stay flat because someone created a larger paradigm that explained more, bordered more things. Created patterns of understanding that were larger, that required having a round earth. And describing those things that required a round earth, then allowed a round earth which accomplishes much of the notion of a flat earth, but also came with it the larger paradigm for understanding even more stuff, that before was completely non-understandable. And as a result of it being a larger paradigm, it shifted the perspectives of all those who were aware of it, and changed the nature of the way the world worked. Meaning that there’s still plenty of opportunity in terms of thinking about nuclear science and astrophysics — in terms of looking at social movements. There’s plenty of opportunity for changing the way things really are, because we come up with another explanation for how we perceive them.
So, did this seem any less liked a chair, because we know there are atoms in it? But, once atoms were conceived and agreed upon, there where atoms in the chair. Until that was agreed upon, there was no need for there to be atoms in chair, because they’d never been thought of before, and so the chair could exist without atoms and truly be a solid material.
Q: And the effect of that versus making the world round,….it’s like if the world hadn’t changed in nature, they got all this false evidence created….
No. See that is the thing — any paradigm that explains things, that has to replace one learning curve, has to explain everything the earlier paradigm explained and more. And that’s the key. Now, guess how that works? That’s why it becomes more and more difficult to come up with new paradigms that shift everything around. Now that’s what we’ve done with story. Until we came up with the notion that some of this was psychology, it wasn’t. Our own thoughts during the psychology of finding a way to make that explain using the psychological paradigm, yet stories were actually a psychology of the single human mind. As soon as we came up with it, that’s what they were. And the more people believe it, the more firm it becomes, because then you have a lot of people from a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different self-awarenesses, converging on a particular conception, so that they all agree with it. And they bring to it baggage from their own personal existences, that isn’t shared by the general community.
Although the concept is shared by the general societal community, the individuals don’t share it, they have their own experience, and it’s got to prove true to each one of those. As long as it proves true to each one of those, it is true, and that’s what it is, but if one of them says it doesn’t work for me because of something in my personal experience, then what they need to do is to come up with a paradigm that explains that everybody else’s point of view and their’s as well in a new light, and as soon as they do that, then that’s what it was supposedly all along, but in fact from this perspective, it only comes into being when it is proposed.
Q: Hmmm. That’s wild because it seems like almost contradictory — it’s weird.
It’s a very big thought. And it’s the same place you get when you go to your passionate argument, and you begin to see that all is nothing and nothing is all. It’s as narrow as infinity. When you begin to see that and it makes sense, then you have become a model of Zen. When you get this particular thought, you become more aware of mental relativity, because it really is one of the central places that you have to lose the paradox, in order to know that you are becoming one with that perspective.
So, all this is tied in then to our space sense and our time sense, and whether things are right or wrong, or good or bad, or whether we should stick with our guns or change. Or whether we should change from seeing the problem outside, to seeing the problem inside. Or whether we should see the problem as outside, still, but just give up on it, because it can’t be solved. Now, that by itself is an interesting philosophy, but it doesn’t come into existence until you actually creating a model in our society, whereby you can explain the mechanism through which it happens. This is really intriguing.
We are going to start with the neurology, and work our way through understanding justification in terms of the brains neurology about chemistry, and then we are going to work our way through mental relativity understanding, and then we are going to work our way through a psychological understanding, and then we are going to work our way into the final perspective which is external or physical justification. So, we are going to start with the physical part of the mind, and then go to the mental relativity part of self-awareness, and then go to the psychological part of the mind, and then we are going to carry it outside, and then bring it back to the body. So, we’ve gone full circle.
Q: So, justification is a style of problem solving?
Well, problem solving and justification are two means for dealing with an inequity. When you try to get rid of the inequity, it’s problem solving, when you try balance the inequity, that’s justification.
O.K., so first of all, in terms of the neurology, there are a couple of models. (ON BOARD):
We have narrow networks in the brain, and these narrow networks are little things that look like little brains. They are called ganglia. There’s a left-headed ganglia, and a right-headed ganglia, and within it, maybe four thousand neurons are all interconnecting. Then they connect one to another and then you have all these little neural networks. That’s why it’s not just in neurology, because they are little tiny networks, within a larger network, with subgroups. And there’s a biochemistry that exists outside here, that all of these ganglia are in that effects them as a group. And there’s also a membrane of the ganglia, a little micro-climate zone, and one side of the ganglia produces primarily the dopamine, and the other side produces the seratonin. There is sort of a balance between the dopamine and the seratonin in the network. This is where our real space and time sense come from in the ganglia.
Our sense of mass and energy are kind of dealing with the external here. There’s this larger biochemistry and the big network. The big network has 4,000 neurons and if we look at it as a single entity, that’s like one switching point, and this is another switching point between themselves, so it has less resolution, than when start looking at what’s actually going on here. This matter of resolution here is that they would each appear to be containing our sense of mass. In other words, it’s there, it’s not a very binary sense, all these things work together and say yes or no. So, you sort of get that sense. Whereas, the biochemistry that works outside of it, is our sense of energy. That there is either pressure upon it or not, in a very unsophisticated way or less resolved way. When you get down to the level of the ganglia themselves, inside, it becomes more sophisticated, because now you are dealing with relationships between things, instead of just binary states between things.
And you have the enclosed micro-climate in our biochemistry is such that you have a neuron, and there’s something over here called the threshold. The threshold here is an electrical difference between the outside of the neuron, and the inside of the neuron, when you are looking at the axon. The axon is this body of the neuron, and it has its receptors, and it’s dendrites. And they all come up here and go to various neurons. So, all of these connections to various different neurons.
One of the first places we notice space and time is in the synapse, where the two come together. There’s some neuron over here that’s firing and when it fires, the way it works is down at the bottom, there are little spherical containers holding the neurotransmitters, that are created inside one of these little areas and shooting it out. And these things migrate and are attracted to the edge of the membrane, depending upon the degree of calcium that’s contained in this liquid inside. And the amount of calcium has to do with how frequently this is fired. So, the more familiar you become, the more calcium builds up. And the more calcium that builds up, the more of these things are ionized, and attracted to the bottom . And when enough of them are attracted to the bottom, what they do is they sit there long enough, which is where you get time – spatially you get a bunch of them down there. Temporally, they have to be there long enough. And when they are there long enough, then if you made one of these larger, with just the edge of this, with one of these things sitting down there, you go through a series of steps, where it begins to open up to the outside, until you end up with something like that.
Eventually, it just goes straight, but in the meantime what’s happened is that it has dumped it’s neurotransmitter in here outside into the open environment. And then your neurotransmitter is totally out, and the membrane is closed, so there’s a real interesting way that it opens up like that. And, if it’s there long enough, it will do this. As they are created, it’s are they getting close to the edge, and they are sort of like, do you have one here, and they are all lined up on the edge, or are they pointing out in the center like this. So, that’s going to determine how many are close to the edge, and we have how many are close to the edge. And we have how many are close to the edge, tendency because they are pulled there to stay there longer, and in greater quantities. And so it adjusts how much of this stuff flows out. It’s not just that you are going to end up with having it all flow a certain level. We can modulate it’s affect. So, even though it fires or doesn’t fire, if it fires, it could just be a little tiny fire, and there could be a lot of neurotransmitter dumped out.
So, that controls the amount of biochemical that’s going into the synapse. Remember, the synapse is the one that comes down here, and then it’s captured by the one that comes in. The neurotransmitters don’t just go directly from here to here, like flaming torpedoes or something, some of them go directly there, but they also spread out, and get into the general mix. Various atoms of the neurotransmitters. And as they do, they get over here, they get to work throughout the ganglia, inside it. So that whenever anything fires, that has thought that occurs. But, maybe they could be firing seratonin, or they could be firing dopamine. Or a lot of other neurotransmitters, but they all have the same kind of effect, to cause excitement or slow them down. Well, the dopamine has a tendency to reduce the calcium inside, while the seratonin has a tendency to increase it. So, it doesn’t just affect the receiver, it also reflects what’s happening here. So, that while you have something that is firing, and gives it a tendency to fire more and more frequently, at the same time, what’s out here, could be causing it to fire less and less frequently.
So, that means that there could be inhibitors from the outside that inhibit a specific signal coming from the outside. In other words, even if something is very familiar, coming from this particular neuron, from a sensory neuron, of which there are millions throughout your body, — well, if one of these pathways says “fire” and the rest of the ones have something going on that say “don’t fire” its not going to fire, because this threshold is the difference between an inner and outer electrical energy, in terms of the ionization , and as such, that can be controlled by putting more ions of one kind or another inside or outside. And because of that you can adjust the action potential. All of a sudden the potential gets to this point, and if it hits that threshold, it will fire. When it fires, it overloads, spikes, and it goes down back like this and then comes just under it, and it forms real interesting wave patterns, a typical wave pattern. So, it’s going along underneath it., and it’s always ready to fire. Something drives it over the edge, then it takes up it’s own inertia, goes through the whole thing, and then after it fires it dips down, so that it will prevent it from firing, which is what gives us our binary sense. If it just came back down, being ready to fire, we would think analog, instead of thinking binary.
But, the very fact that it dips down, prevents it from doing that. Below the line it