I believe Identity is a case of mistaken identity. We want to distinguish between the copy and the original, the unique person and his followers. We would like to think maybe Margaret Thatcher as embodying an ideal of neo-libralism, for example. She invites us to not care about others’ misfortune in favor of our own greed. She had the idea to change our souls this way.

Unfortunately when we try to find the unique person, we have other copies that are candidates for being the original unique. One school of thought believes that there is a kind of collective pack-mentality (not a conspiracy) of people who are like-minded. When they are public with their ideas, people want to pick one of the pack, when in fact this oligarch of an idea has no one leader, they are all copies of each other. There is no unique from which a copy was produced. “Where do the copies come from then?” you may ask. And the answer is that they come from previous copies that were dissimilar in some way. There was a culmination of similar copies that may make an original seem possible.

The whole idea of a Unique Identity depends on a beginning of the Universe, a One God that breathed life and can be inferred from the present, as so many theologians have tried to do.

If there is no beginning, there are no originals to begin with.

We are all copies, dissimilar and similar in different ways. like the wave, we keep crashing against the shore as if to battle the sand, but eventually we return deep into to the ocean and not the wave. The fight ends when there is no wave, no form… The end of form is the end of violence.

The deeper understanding, however, is that similitude and dissimilitude are a creative dialectic force for this world. People simply accept this dialectic without thought. The dialectic of similitude and dissimilitude is not necessary if we think outside of this world, this creator god, and manage an escape.

This escape depends on asking the question: Which is there, similitude or identity? Is an originality is possible, maybe from aliens? (haha) We grasp and stretch our minds to find this original, but all we have are copies to compare.

This does not preclude divine intervention. It just means that this creator god’s interventions are only true in the world the god created. The originality is not ultimate; it does not come from The Beginning.

We could build a house with copies and instructions, made from many copies of copies of ideas about house making. Materials are made to fit a copy all going into the achievement of a copy of shelter from nature. The ideal of the Buddhist monk, on the other hand, is to make a shelter within the mind. And it is better to build this shelter without depending on a house much.

An established monk can roll down a hill in a barrel full of spikes and his shelter to protect him will not have left him in that moment.

At the moment of the Buddha’s enlightenment he speaks of the metaphor of a house as a house of ideas and views:

Through countless births in the cycle of existence
I have run, not finding
although seeking the builder of this house;
and again and again I faced the suffering of new birth.
Oh housebuilder! Now you are seen.
You shall not build a house again for me.
All your beams are broken,
the ridgepole is shattered.
The mind has become freed from conditioning:
the end of craving has been reached.

Dhammapada 11.153, 11.154
https://tipitaka.org/romn/cscd/s0502m.mul10.xml#para153

Anekajātisaṃsāraṃ
sandhāvissaṃ, anibbisaṃ
gahakāraṃ gavesanto;
dukkhā jāti punappunaṃ.
Gahakāraka! Diṭṭhosi.

Puna gehaṃ na kāhasi.
Sabbā te phāsukā bhaggā,
gahakūṭaṃ visaṅkhataṃ.
Visaṅkhāragataṃ cittaṃ:
taṇhānaṃ khayamajjhagā.
Listen: https://download.pariyatti.org/dwob/dhammapada_11_153_11_154.mp3

To those who have felt my pain and to those whose pain i have felt this is part of being a human to share our pain because we are friends and these bonds we make, bonds of sympathy, without them the world would unhinge.

May those that i have named and those not included in this naming only feel the effects of good fortune and may their minds know peace, learning peace even in the face of pain.

May those drawn with a fine horse hair brush be happy, may the heavy ones drawn with rough charcoal, who barely scrape by, may they learn to love again.

Those light beings that tickle us and tease may they learn the joy of stillness.

May this world drain peacefully into white.

The most interesting part is at the end of this video shared with other poets at Lapageblanche.com. Deleuze talks about the world emitting signs and the importance of understanding these signs. In a fast conversation, as Deleuze describes, the signs are very rapid, and the other place where there are rapid signs is the animal world. I have entered the world of rapid sign interpretation, but I have decided to let go of what is not understood. We gather what we can gather and let slip what must slip away.

Most of what can’t be understood has to be filtered out. The filter that is usually given to us, the Cartesian filter of lines like on graph paper, create a world where zooming in for details is something measurable, at least until we get into Quanta. Then there is still measurable, rational knowledge to be had, otherwise nothing would be published on the subject.

This filter is very powerful and has a certain grip on the minds of the world, even on respected intellectuals I have met. Yet this filter was never proven to be logically necessary because Euclid’s parallel postulate was never proven. With the advent of non-euclidean geometries (that seem logically consistent) more than a century ago, and, further, the more recent advent of deductive logical pluralism, the Cartesian filter is old hat. In spite of this, including some famed follies of educators, people repeatedly try to prove it and sometimes convince themselves they did. Even top mathematicians of the 19th century did this. There is something so compelling about the Cartesian filter.

One problem with this filter is that it makes people believe they understand the signs coming at them, because of the automatic removal of signs that aren’t understandable to the Cartesian mind/world filter. Many “great minds” bent on knowing things can feel very knowledgeable with this kind of automatic ignorance. These “great minds” may give the impression that they know you, even though they do not. I would encourage anyone and everyone to NOT be taken in by this pretense. It is an aggressive method used against people who prefer not to judge rashly, such as the skeptic.

The mark of a genius is originality, and one fundamental form of originality is having their own filter. Accepting the Cartesian filter is a very difficult obstacle to people who are not meant to fit the mold. It is given to a genius to be a maker, and is always giving gifts of his originality wherever he goes. To a genius, producing is just part of his being in the world.

There is a higher mind to attain to, one that recognizes the interpretation of signs is a miserable state to be in. Just like how the Quantum Physicist’s idea that there is no Observer or “Self” was interrogated by excited Buddhists, only to find that these physicists were miserable people (For this the source is Goenka). They had an intellectual understanding of no-self, not a direct understanding. They had a network of signs that they felt they understood, and did understand in a way. Just not in a direct way, as one knows one’s self, one can understand directly no-self.

Attaining to this higher mind can be done by anyone, it does not require having an original filter. It does not require being a genius at interpreting signs. It requires meditation on the emptiness of signs, of the pleasure of watching them rise and fall. When you have attained to this higher mind, the signs you yourself emit almost take care of themselves. Still, there is a lot of work for me to do to take care of the signs I emit.

For the Gladdening of Good Folk

For Faith in Emptiness of Signs.

May all Beings Attain Peace of Mind.

The poet drowns in a blurred surface

The poet drowns in a blurred surface
Painted to look like water
The painter has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt
That 3/4th of an inch is repugnant to the nature of his bread crumbs.
All he has are crumbs and he feasts on them
Smaller and smaller, emaciated, he can’t find the right amount of blurriness.
He fails because thinks blurriness 
is an amount
He read Plato when his bread crumbs were bigger,
How he says likeness and difference are relationships between the same two things
Even though they are opposites
He wants there to be a degree for likeness and difference
So that he can ignore how little sense there is in the world
Therefore, beyond a shadow of a doubt,
He can never finish his painting.
Maybe 1/4 of an inch is a small enough crumb to stop.

The Naive and the Mature is didactic in a useful way. The main barrier to intellectual growth is the idea of intellectual progress. Many people, for example, consider Zeno’s paradoxes to be solved by Calculus. One philosopher, the author of the book Zeno’s Paradoxes, considers these many people to be quite far from a good understanding of both Calculus and Zeno’s paradoxes. And children can sometimes come up with Zeno’s questions (they are only paradoxes to the mathematician, For Zeno, they are merely questions put to the mathematicians because they reduce a mathematician’s beliefs into absurdity/paradox.) Children would probably never come up with Calculus. There is a certain attitude of naiveté required to reject the very mature and also dishonest representations of movement and the whole/part relationship taught in a standard Calculus class in college.

Someone who is a pedant will naturally follow the pressure to assent to the representations of Calculus. I remember reading about how one math learner was “helped” to believe in the Axiom of Completeness, even though he was a smart math student studying advanced math, he was having a crisis of faith and needed to be “helped” not because he didn’t understand, but because he wanted to disagree with this axiom. This is how a normal Calculus class is dishonest. Disagreement isn’t really allowed.

There is a strange interplay between naivete and mature thought that is required to attain understanding in mathematics. So I can look at the idea of a limit, or the version of likeness used to build our number systems (equality), and if I criticize these ideas, I can be accused of being naive. In the face mathematical complexity and exactitude, its formal structure and its teachers with fancy salaries and forceful minds, all this pretension about mathematics is actually not complex. The pretense of mathematical complexity is as simple and naive as a simple question in critique of mathematics.

In my research I discovered some significant statistical results that students have an easier time learning logic when they are given alternative logics to compare with Aristotle’s logic. Learning Aristotle’s logic is not the point, or we would follow these results and start teaching alternatives to help them understand Aristotle’s logic. The point is assent, control, and to prevent too many people from having a different mind about things. That is why Aristotle’s logic has to be the only one taught. (even though probability is another fuzzy logic, and statistics follows another logic to reject null hypotheses.) These are labeled “theories” instead of logic, to prevent the inevitable dissonance with the message that there is only one kind of deductive logic.

The skeptic attitude is to learn everything about a certain subject, and then to decide that belief in these theories is too rash a decision. A skeptic, after 20 years of learning mathematics, has to reject it in the end, out of a sense of honesty.

It does take naivete to really see the troubles with mathematics. It requires that you trust yourself and can suspend all your learning to look at a simple idea in mathematics, such as a graph representing mathematics discontinuity or continuity. I would offer that this naive attitude is essential for learning, and anyone who stops learning because they know so much, doesn’t know anything.

Mathematical learning is the most forceful subject for conditioning people out of the skeptical attitude. So I have a written a dissertation on mathematics, and am accused of being naive when after all my education, I reject almost all of mathematical constructions. Not because disbelieving in mathematics is simple: skepticism about mathematics is most certainly a more complex attitude to take after so much learning on the subject. But in a way the pedants are right, I do take the air of the Socratic interrogator, and I daresay that attitude is less naive than acceptance of mathematics.

Full disclosure: I failed my Calculus I class twice, even though I learned some of it in high school, but went on to get an A in Calculus II, and a B+ in the easier Calculus III. Then I learned analysis over and over again. I never passed Calculus I, even though I have taught the subject to students many times.