I think sex, coming from any side is about domination and power. Yes, that makes it related to freedom, but that is about as uninsightful and pessimistic as the phrase “knowledge is power.” Knowledge is almost entirely not power, and sex is almost entirely not about freedom. That makes the relationship sex has to freedom special, but not very helpful for gaining freedom.

Why is sex not so much about freedom? You can gain power with sex, power over your children, power over your partner, power over the opposite sex in general, or the same sex. Sex is often sold in many ways, but there are forces of domination at play in the intellectual circles talking about sex-as-power (often disguised as sex-as-freedom, which is double-talk), and derivative circles, that will probably rob you of any power you might gain from thinking about sex (including gender) or enacting sex.

In the same way that focusing on the individual instead of corporations is a way of controlling people financially, politically, and psychologically, focusing on sexual identity is no different. The main effect of focusing on sex is it limits people’s ability to understand everything else. Just like if you only focus on yourself your ability for compassion and understanding others decreases (though not entirely). People forget more important things like happiness, peace, and an entire spectrum of wonderful human things that, yes are related to sex, but not determined or defined by sex. The secondary effect is groups like male and female and so many others jostle for power and in that setting power-players can play people against each other and keep control. Because sex is primarily concerned with power, powerful people (editors, etc) are able to control the dialogue. Other topics like happiness are not like this.

So if you decide to allow yourself to be pushed into thinking this is the central issue, you are feeding yourself into a patriotic power structure. Shifting to a matriotic power structure is hardly revolutionary to powers that push sex, it is like voting democran or republicrat to fight capitalism.

Once I was in an education class where the teacher was telling us: “when you teach you are wiring the student’s brain.” I asked the teacher: “isn’t learning also losing a connection in the brain?” Say you want to learn to stop drinking. You have to lose the brain-pathways that lead you you drink. So he said “yes, losing a connection or wire in the brain is also learning” and I got a lot of “ahas” from the other students. But the teacher wasn’t going to mention that part.

For me, teaching and learning is asking a question, and then answering it. Yes, that is everything, its almost boring to say that. Maybe you like the learning stages “learning is synthesis and analysis” but actually, that is just as boring and unhelpful. I think the question answer model can be helpful. Education is coming up with a problem you see or that you want to shed light on; or seeing an opportunity for how you want to help with problems in the world. The next part is having the capacity, the energy, and the resources to answer the question or shed light on the problem. All human development comes from that process.

So we are told from on high that education happens in the brain. Well, if learning is wiring and unwiring the brain, both, it might as well be neither. Whats the difference? Learning could have nothing to do with the brain. At all. And all the arguments about learning-as-brain come down to the same basic problem that you know things that aren’t wires or connections or brain pathways. There are non-connections that are not just good, but necessary for a good life, like learning not to go down negative rumination pathways.

Just give your self a moment, where you ask a question. A free moment. And you are free to answer with your energy, capacity and resources, and you can see that learning is not the brain.

An interesting empirical example of the axiom of completeness is the night sky with a telescope of ever-increasing magnifying power. Take any space of darkness in the night sky and assume you can magnify as much as you want. The axiom of completeness asserts that you will eventually find a star in that space. Take another, smaller space within (not containing a star) and magnify more, you will find another star in that smaller space, or any space, no matter how small*.This, of course, is impossible under the standard physics mandate that there is an edge of the universe and it is not unlimited. In any case the idea of a limited universe is in direct tension with an elementary empirical (if we could inductively continue to magnify) example of the axiom of completeness. The use of stars instead of points gives an alternative to formulating analysis with 0-dimensional objects such as points. They appear like points only at certain levels of magnification.

Another iteration of the axiom of completeness is one in two or three dimensional space. The usual axiom expressed in two dimensions uses objects of 0-dimension: points, and asserts that a bounded increasing sequence (of points) has a least upper bound. Using more realistic objects of the sequence— instead of points, three dimensional shapes such as spheres or cubes—The cubes have to get smaller and smaller, and be contained in the previous cubes of the sequence (after cube N). The problem is that this sequence always contains some space, and asserts that the sequence converges to a point instead of a cube. This is not the inductive inference. The inductive inference requires that all cases that can be reasonably checked by hand resemble the cases beyond, approaching infinity. If the cases known resemble the cases beyond, there would always be some space inside the cube, and the axiom of completeness fails. All this is related to the unrealistic belief in 0-dimensional objects.

• just for fun lets be precise and say the next smaller circle has 1/4 the radius of the current circle. It is easy to see that this circle can always be found so that it does not include the star you found. Oh, and what if you find two (or more) stars at the same time? leave as an exercise!

sand and foam sand and
foam sand and foam sand
and foam sand and foam
sand and foam sand
and foam sand and
foam sand and foam
sand and foam sand and
foam sand and foam sand
and foam sand and foam
sand and foam sand
and foam sand and
foam sand and foam
sand and foam sand and
foam sand and foam sand
and foam sand and foam
sand and foam sand
and foam sand and
foam sand and foam

An outlandish red was once discovered, the vermillion knide, on the feather of a lady’s hat. Investigation suggests it may have come from a peacock fed a diet of microphospherous. For the most part, however, photons are not small enough for the total description of the human iris, let alone the mythical iris.

Color is not a leaf.
I wouldn’t put it in a jar
without refining into white powder,
but if you must know, colorful nanoplastics were once used in a mosaic
As big as all seven oceans put together.
(it is well known that such a synthesis is beyond imagination)
The fluid dynamics of watercolor can be caught even in motion.

It was the red ghost star
That showed us the primary primary color
Was more elusive than a silver space octopus.
Yet there are those exalted observers, observing science with science, who
Cloister themselves and meditate on the octopus
That the Venerable Full Professor Doctor Rodimus Vindicatus once caught.
He stood virtually alone in his insight into color,
virtual color though it may be,
Surpassing even a fledgling eagle.

The dance of the two elemental colors, proto-red and electro-blue,
Leave a wreath-vacuum for the neutro-green/neutro-yellow duality to occupy.
The general relative theory of minipigmypigments,
which are even more atomic than atoms,
but not quite as atomic as subminipigmypigments,
take as many tomes as there are rooms in Buckingham Palace.
The base foundation
Of the theory is thoroughly supported by ghost data,
and the death scribblings of Dr Vindicatus himself,
with a probability of one in one ten-thousand.
Nothing is beneath mentioning, but with a probability that small,
we might as well mention it.

The super-Walmart of ideas, by and large,
has seen the theory last the test of the consumer,
who knows such theories take a lifetime to even try to understand,
and longer to communicate. With introspection into four-colordimensional space,
The many happily educated imagine they can almost see red
for what it really is.

Who decides what words mean? In a way I believe it was somewhat organic. People used the word for server for a robot (robotiti) as a metaphor, and then that became the word for robot, the metaphor of robotiti “dies” a natural death. But then there is the case of USA politics and terms like “democrat.” (or people like Aristotle who gave new meaning to words like essence and substance in a very deliberate way). I believe words in the USA are kind of like commodities. (the term “organic” is certainly a commodity in the USA) The word democrat starts out appealing to people, and the alternative affiliations being repulsive, people get entrenched under the word democrat. Once the word democrat is “bought” it begins to change: kind of like how a new product uses extra flavoring to start, and once it gains name-recognition, the substance and essence of “democrat” put through the sausage-grinder of US media, gradually reduces in substance and essence the idea of “democrat,” as much as can be gotten away with. It is common knowledge that at one point “republican” was more similar to some current ideas of what a “democrat” is, and this will continue as fast as it needs to to maintain control over voters’ minds.

How do you resist?

We ought to know what meaning means first. “Pending a satisfactory explanation of the notion of meaning, linguists in semantic fields are in the situation of not knowing what they are talking about.” (Quine 1961 p 471) People say a word, what do they mean? They mean whatever it was that they wanted to mean. In other words, I don’t know. If you can figure out even a little of what they meant, success! That is communication. If you talk to someone who thinks meaning is decided from on high and they have to fit their lives into those meanings, then you have to talk to someone who is mind controlled. It is good practice in serious situations to use your mind first and then your mouth, not the other way around. And who decides what words mean? Usually editors and Elite People who are usually interested in consolidating the power of their class or profession, so they are “conservative,” at least as far as that word has any meaning.

Of course there is the problem that people might not know what they themselves mean. I would offer that this doesn’t matter, in a skeptical sense. What appears to person A when they utter a phrase B need not be analyzed by the listener until person A doesn’t know what they mean anymore. It is enough that it appears to person A that “phrase B”, and Aristotle’s eternal project of digging for a subject without a predicate (substance) need not be carried out.

The metaphors of “top down” and “bottom up”, are relevant, as is just about everything, since we are talking about what can be accomplished with language, and how to resist what has been accomplished. People, especially in the USA, are very used to words and their meanings being fixed, and think it is a sign of intelligence when they are used precisely. There is a great deal of anxiety in patients when words like their diagnoses are adjusted in official handbooks identifying (mental) illness. Playing with words is an important way to resist this top down understanding, but in the USA doing so will make you sound mad. As I have said before “English is not a language to play a language game with.” So English speakers in the USA and elsewhere are rather in a bind.

Female/Male is the Yin/Yang of the West. The Tao Te Ching includes a system of description that is basically the binary number system endowed with the meanings of Yin (0) Yang (1), mingling, so “100” is “Yang, Yin, Yin” and has certain intuitive meaning.

The Western Female/Male shows how reducing the world to binary fails: take the terms Manly Female (10), Womanly Female(00), Manly Man(11), Womanly Man (01). And then: Girlish Manly Female (010), Girlish Womanly Female, Girlish Manly Man, Girlish Womanly Man, etc.

What I want to show is how more and more people fall through the cracks as the system becomes more exhaustive. When you get to three digit precision, most people wont identify with any of the terms like “Girlish Manly Female,” etc.

So exhaustive language, precise language, cuts out more and more of reality as “off topic” and people who are too sensitive about what is or isn’t relevant become debilitated when trying to make connections or make sense of the senses (including the sensation of ideas by the mind).

The debilitation of the mind, and the way precision language makes people fall through the cracks of technical terminology (diagnoses, identities, etc) are precisely why they are uplifted by the powerful oligarchs of the USA. Precision language is in no way superior to everyday, or poetic language, except that if you show yourself as someone who follows the rules of mathematics (equivalent to “understanding” “accepting” the rules of mathematics) you’ll get funding, or get published, or pass whatever gate you are trying to pass. It doesn’t really matter what the term “micronutrients” means, what matters is that it is very precise, and by being hypnotized by it, you cut out the rest of the world from view.

The liberal dream of inclusiveness can’t be achieved by a process of refinement of language or symbols, quite the opposite is achieved. The functional use of words is to reduce people’s desire for worldly things, by turning the things into concepts first. Bertrand Russell said that knowing the origin of the word for a fruit increases his enjoyment of the fruit. He is mistaken. The enjoyment he feels comes from removing the enjoyment of the fruit, and replacing it with a different enjoyment of the knowledge of words, which is less visceral, and easier to let go of. This is the way that words are beneficial and useful. If you want to enjoy a person, you suspend judgement in terms of concepts and practices. You suspend the need to know facts that can be expressed with words. In the same sense, as Feyerabend mentions, of the ancient belief that counting people endangers them.

People often find friendship nowadays by feeling that their friend knows the same things he knows. It is a measure of the persons integrity and worth as a person that they have faithfully studied science fiction or some other part of culture. Unfortunately this form of love and companionship is much less than the enjoyment of a person you can have when you don’t need to know that they know the same things. Reviewing shared knowledge of concepts is a way of reducing a felt bond with a person, not increasing it. In a way, we are all going to die, so this pessimistic approach to relationships might be ultimately the right way to go. We are all subject to separation in this world, but that does not mean we shouldn’t fight against this tendency. Success as a human family is not measured by our knowledge of one another, quite the opposite.

The value of the intuitive feelings about Yin and Yang are that they are expansive in an ineffable way, so that they reach the irrational by including each other, and everything else. Male and Female may be able to join in sex. Sex is the kind of irrational and mystical union that we can know the most about. Knowing is at best unimportant, when it comes to irrational wisdom and mystical union. More likely, knowing with concepts and names is destructive to union between man, woman, black, white, gay, straight, etc

Our union is not found in the cracks between these concepts, it is found in the space that makes the view of concepts and their boundaries possible.

Trash

I will be the one you throw away.
I will do that for you.
When I was thrown away, I used to become dirt,
But now trash is dirtier than dirt
Because it is preserved in landfills.
“Still-recognizable-25-year-old-grapes,”
Says a university-produced heavy-analyzed language-substance, saying,
That art is forever,
At least, recognizable,
As an image of a
—a single-serving
Building kept in its wrapper, keeping in a city, keeping
In the fake snow, and
“That dirt is organic!” says the mathematical salesman with the fake
Little book of poems,
Where he decries his daily consumption
of babies.

I have a few children’s books that are very precise about animals. Alina has learned to ask “what is that?” and expect an answer that is “real”: “thats a Northern Cardinal.” Some people feel really satisfied by knowing an animals “true” name. What I do when my daughter Alina demands something more than “thats a red bird” is “well people call it a Northern Cardinal, but this particular Northern Cardinal’s left leg is a little longer than his right, and there is no name for that.” Its like when Thich Nhat Hahn was asked by child “what color is that tree?” and his answer was “its the color that you see.” He explained that he didn’t want to replace the child’s experience of the tree with something else, a word, a concept. The Northern Cardinal visiting your yard is not a Northern Cardinal; it is the bird you see. The Buddha shrine is not an image of the Buddha. My Buddha statue in my house has a most unusual head, with a golden spike coming from the top and pointing up, and the rest of his head is black and knotted and bumpy, except for his face. If you forget it is an image of the Buddha, but an image of a human being not unlike yourself, you can learn a lot from this image. What can a bird or an ant teach you, about being a bird or an ant, if you forget what you think you know about them, like “what” they are by their name?

Look at a cockroach, for example. Imagine being a cockroach. Would you protect your life from a predator, and crawl below the surface of the sidewalk for shelter, even if it lead into the sewer? Of course you would, because you would think you’re life is good and worth protecting. This insight is not available to people who dismiss a cockroach with a technical name, or worse, try to kill them; both acts are ignorant. I invite you to pit yourself against the lives of cockroaches with all the conceptual knowledge necessary to kill as many as you can, and I hope after while you will see that the cockroach will find a shelter you cannot reach. It will survive all the names you give it, even “it”. For this, I am grateful to the cockroach.

Identity is important for logical reasoning. We have to have objects and identities for logical laws to be about something. Strangely, the laws themselves create the identities the laws are to be about, not the other way around. What I mean to say is, with the law of excluded middle (either it is p or it is not p): either a human is male or female, is a part of a human’s identity–  not because we went out and asked people what their identity was, but because logicians need us to be that simple, so they can depend on their logical laws, and publish what they think they know.

But the cost of the Law of excluded middle is a great cost. The knowledge we think we  gain is largely vapid and empty:

The law of excluded middle excludes every shade and color that can impress the soul. It is an about-face from any instructive experience that one could pay attention to. But the worst damage is the Law trivializes our thoughts into overly simple formulae.

The real number system has been painstakingly built and demonstrated logically because some people want to imagine that any point in space has a name. Maybe its name isn’t “one-third” or “0.2145…” exactly: you could make other sounds with your body’s inside noises. The point they want to make is that these points in space can be singled out with some name or other. If you would like to see how this attempt fails, I direct you to my essay Many Roads from the Axiom of Completeness (2013). The desire behind identity, regardless of what bodily inside noise you use to designate that identity, is extended here to other things besides numbers.

Also, it is good to be reminded that all the names we know are not any real kind of knowledge, even if one already knows that “in name”.

The woodpecker is a kind of borderline case because it is both a name and a description. Even for these types of names, seeing, hearing, smelling this woodpecker peck wood is real knowledge. The animals don’t need those names, they don’t need the name woodpecker to peck wood. People who like to watch or care for animals will already know a lot more about what its like to peck wood, and don’t need those names. Its the person who clings to this type of “knowledge” that needs them. People think they are doing a good thing, even an ethical thing, by calling each thing by their “proper name”. They can get rather righteous about it, but actually they are only clinging to an ill founded desire, or needing, to know names that that are of no consequence. The name Northern Cardinal is of no consequence. Recognizing this bird, its relationships to others you have seen, and understanding it, the way I tried to understand a cockroach above, this bird’s condition, way of behaving and expressing, regardless of what you decide to call it, that is real knowledge.

---

Shrine

I have something to say
And the old words show a way
But the way I am bound
There are no words to be found.

Gotta unthink the unthinkable
A hope, another lie
Its a different point of view
The liar said he would fly, and then he flew.

Hard bind like a railroad line
Face the race and step out of place, yeah
Hear the bell rhyme
In the middle of your mind

Our poem crows a broken joy
That’s changed all its lines
So I built this shrine with the help of Father Time