Levels of Awareness

There is an important concept to remember when considering who governs us: their Level.

Level 4 – Unconsciously Competent
Level 3 – Consciously Competent
Level 2 – Consciously Incompetent
Level 1 – Unconsciously Incompetent

95%+ of our world exists at Level 1 (reference Socrates story about The Cave of Ananke). They do not know that they do not know they are imbeciles. That makes them dangerous, egotistical fucks — children whose “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” remarked Lord Acton.

If we are lucky enough to have been kicked in the head by Fate’s agonizingly distressful randomness, then we MIGHT have awakened to witness our foolishness. That we have existed in our own familiar misery, living for the comfortable but unfulfilling…. what Thoreau poignantly described as “… lives of quiet desperation.”  Level 2.

If we use our agony to stay frosty, we may climb towards less foolish reactions and more purposed responses. Level 3.

When we become excellent at the latter, we might have reached the haven of Level 4.

If we ever allow ourselves to believe our taskmasters are anything above Level 1, we know that we exist at that same level with them — wallowing in our own excrement and blathering about our own brilliance while we step into oncoming traffic because we were texting an important message about the irrelevant.

Autotelic

I’m conflicted… and confused. Saddened to the point of near madness. It’s turkey day in prison and the food service cop stood at mainline apologizing for what he had to feed us. I could not have cared less. It was no different than any other day in my last 5,340+.

My sadness arises from what I imagine a 32 year old Julius Caesar felt as he stood before a statute of his hero. At the same age, Alexander the Great had conquered the world; he’d only subdued Gaul. The analog is that I’m 6 months away from conquering what was intended to be a life sentence for refusing to cooperate with Big Brother. Another man has conquered more hell, enduring greater agony — not out of love of family or honor but for something more transcendent.

A man is defined by his hero. Though Alexander is not without his faults, history records that he rose above and beyond the call of duty to engage opponents no sane battlefield commander would dare. Deeper study reveals his driving force was fueled by the Greek words philotema and dynamis, “the love of honor” and “the will to fight,” respectively. He is without equal in my book because he led the vanguard of every assault atop his black charger Bucephalus.

After fighting for thousands of days to realize Justice is just another illusion, I was focused on preparing to return to what Ayn Rand described in Atlas Shrugged as the “looters and moochers” – society in general. Though he’d invented a free-energy fusion engine, her hero John Galt abandoned society permanently. No doubt Socrates’ story of The Ring of Gyges influenced them. In it Socrates proved that men are not inherently moral but act in proportion to the consequences they risk suffering.

With my last 15 years in retrospect, this perspective about humanity seemed more that apropos. I became insouciant — a Stoic Spartan goading Fate to do her worst. Not from insanity but because only through adversity can we arrest the secret that lies dormant within. I’d already climbed my Everest, a feat few can imagine much less endure, respecting only those few who have been baptized by a similar fire. Yet contrary to Galt’s Socratic pragmatism, I have spent my last year scribbling my secrets of survival into a system that I call Rubicon — a name birthed from Caesar’s legendary crossing of the Rubicon River: the point of no return.

Within this life navigational system, a bearing towards one’s personal destiny must be charted — preferably something so audacious that it scares you to LIFE!! I was now within feet of mine, a summit I thought I’d never rest atop. I needed a new “mission impossible” — something even more audacious as Rubicon’s PATHFINDER-0001. I had set a goal to raise millions for Dr. Mohamed Yunus’ Grameen Bank project that won him the 2006 Nobel prize as a proven method to halt poverty by handing out microloans to turn the homeless into micro-entrepreneurs. But never a day passes that Galt’s perspective does not echo in my ears. As I witness the likes of “the 99 percenters” — a society of self-entitled “looters and moochers” who fear adversity and cower in Fate’s presence, I question my mission. Why should I share what has cost me so dearly?

In this quandary I stumbled upon an unusual character that does just this — doubling down on SpaceX and Tesla with his entire $200 million fortune at risk. This caused me pause. Why? Because Rubicon’s prime directive is “to emulate the best or die average like the rest.” I had to know what possessed him to rise above what I had discovered to be the pinnacle underpinning beneath an ultimate life purpose. The Greeks called it “autotelic,” engaging an objective purely for the experience of the challenge itself. Yet Musk drives himself and his cult-like teams for something greater. He exploits inefficiencies, disrupts convention, and revolutionizes our world — for the sole destiny of bettering mankind, the “looters and moochers” that I disdain.

After my Sisyphean quest has revealed the worst of humanity, it is here that my confusion causes sadness:
1. What does Elon perceive in these “looters and moochers” that is worthy of such an Alexandrian philotema and dynamis?
2. How could he disagree with Socrates’ indictment and Rand’s conviction of the despicably mediocre?

Maybe answers to these questions will introduce me to a humanity I have never met.

Alexander

As you may have figured out by reading my essays on my blog tsuyomatte.wordpress.com, I despise most and revere few. Among these few, my favorite heroes include Alexander the Great and the samurai Yagyu Munenori.  I have studied much about them both, seeing value in their best qualities despite their few failings.  Just yesterday I discovered a book called The Virtues of War: a novel of Alexander the Great by Steven Pressfield.

Pressfield’s skill at delivering the physical and spiritual dimensions of the battle at Chaeronea is pure mastery. This was Alexander’s first great victory, noted because he defeated the renowned Theban Sacred Band of 300.  What was most bewitching was the details of the great valor expended on both sides.  Fate gave the day to young Alexander (age 18) as he led the left wing of his father’s battleline.  His Companion Cavalry routed this undefeated heavy infantry phalanx, but they refused to surrender as even the most elite eventually acquiesce.  They were surrounded.  And, in order to keep them from committing ritual suicide (in similar fashion to samurai seppuku), they’d been disarmed.  The last 40 huddled together, bleeding and broken, begging for death due to the dishonor of defeat.  They refused to bind their wounds… bleeding the ground wet.  “Cease!” was Alexander’s command, holding back the bloodlust of his warriors who had lost friends, brothers, and fathers in the othismos exchange just minutes ago.  Still sitting astried his black charger Bucephalus, he looked on them–past the rush of a glorious poet’s lines of his utter annihilation of his foe–and ordered their weapons returned and for them to be released without harm.

As his father Phillip II rode up and was told of this counterintuitive action, he nodded at those who wished to finish them off with his overriding command.  “Follow the orders of your commander” were his words.  Alexander had acted with reverence– without respect for whose standard under which it was displayed–to that rarest of actions that make the gods themselves envy the rarest of us.  Valor!

KIBA GA DERO

The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become because of it. ~John Ruskin, critic

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, author

It’s not how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and still keep moving forward.  ~Rocky Balboa, fictional boxer

In a world of two classes of people — heroes and zeroes — this attitude makes the difference.  To lead from the van, to be the tip of the spear, to be the leader that reaches the enemy first, you must be willing to taste the metal in the back of your mouth from being knocked down.  But, GET UP!  Come back for more, again and again.  Earn your rank by the scars you bear!  Be the poster child for: GET AMONGST IT!

The Japanese samurai had a battle cry – KIBA GA DERO!  “FANGS OUT!!”

AUT TACE AUT LOQUERE MELIORA SILENCIO

2013 was my best year yet for learning and overcoming; I hope yours was equally positive!

In this year I look forward to completing my studies in behavioral finance.  And equally important, I wish to increase my meditation practice.  Here are a couple of Zen concepts to contemplate:

To foster life everything must be killed; once all is destroyed, you can dwell as ease.  If you understand this meaning, an iron boat will float across the water.  ~Layman P’ang

Something must act as no-thing, no-thing must act as something; shatter both ends and drop off the middle.  ~Rinzui

Bliss belongs to one who knows that things are empty, and that man too is no-thing.  ~Bukko Kokushi

Cut off dualism and keep a single sword against the cold sky.  ~Gokushun

Lovely snowflakes falling one by one nowhere else.  ~Tesshu

If Zen does not interest you, cool.  Work on simply remembering to think about your breath as many times during the day as you can.  Just remember to stop and think about breathing.  Return to this moment as often as you can.

Do just this for one year.  And if you get bored, try out one of my favorite Latin translations, worthy of all our attention:
“only when the words outperform silence.”

FORTES FORTUNA ADIUVAT

Far better is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, then to take rank with the poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight of mediocrity that knows neither victory nor defeat.  ~Theodore Roosevelt

“The coward never begins and the weak die along the way,” goes the Navy SEAL motto.  The Latin above represents the other category: “fortune favors the bold.”  Louis Pasteur said it this way: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Coward, Weak, or Bold.  How do rank?

MUTO

October 2013 by Steven Moreland

The movie Tears of the Sun portrays a rescue-turned-vendetta mission of a U.S. Navy SEAL team responding to evil in a war-torn African country.  With precision, poise, and audacity, the special operators delivered extreme prejudice.  Up close.  Personal.  The quiet blade’s measured force…  Piercing.  Lifting.  Judging.

Man’s history has seen every configuration of bladed steel acting as judge, jury, and executioner.  And among the many reigns the Japanese katana sword wielded by the storied samurai.  Yagyu Munenori (1571-1645), renowned for his swordsmanship and bravery during combat, practiced the most unique of methods: he carried no sword!  The technique of the Shinkage’ Ryu was known as muto (“moo-to”) or “no sword.”  These practitioners robbed the evil challengers of their swords… and killed them with their own blades, if necessary.

“It is missing the point to think that the martial art is solely in cutting a man down.  It is not in cutting people down; it is in killing evil.  It is the stratagem of killing the evil of one man and giving life to ten thousand.”
~Heiho Kaden Sho (The Sword of No Sword), Yagyu Munenori’s manual

Two hundred years later, Yamaoka Tesshu (1836-1888) trained daily from age 9 in the Shinkage’ Ryu method to become a samurai.  Headmaster Seguin instructed him: “If you want to attain true victory, broaden your understanding of virtue.  No enemy can defeat a man of superior virtue.  Attempting to win through exclusive reliance on technique will lead to nowhere.”  Studying these two philosophies, does it not appear that samurai had a different agenda than measured force and judgment for their blades?

“Evil” in the Eastern perspective means “ignorance” or the lack of learning, not the malevolent force depicted by the West.  Or, from a more idealistic perspective, ignorance causes evil.  But more to the point, the metaphor of the blade or sword symbolized the mind.  How it endured crises depended upon its strength of philosophy, its art of thinking.  When challenged, a Shinkage’ Ryu samurai’s responsibility was to rob the evil thoughts from the challenger before he harmed others with his ignorance.  His practice and preparation determined his performance as a martial artist and a tatsujin (a complete human being).

In the entrance hall to his school (Muto Ryu), Tesshu defined muto (no sword) as “the one-mind that both inside and outside there is ‘Not One Thing.'”  In practice, one-mind meets his opponent with “no-enemy” in front and “no-self” behind.  Symbolically, “no-enemy” refers to having no-thought of the future (front) and “no-self” refers to no-thought of the past (back).  A samurai’s fearlessness rested here.  His secret was simply that he could lose no-thing; virtue resides within.  When no-enemy and no-self remains, Not-One-Thing matters.  (note: Not-One-Thing is often hyphenated as “no-thing”)

What a legacy.  Here, two Zen knights rescued thousands by practicing no-sword and maintaining one-mind with no-enemy and no-self… so that Not One Thing mattered.

This is Zen.

“Lovely snowflakes falling one by one nowhere else.” ~Tesshu

Objective Opinion

Humans cannot be objective outside of the physical world.  True we can measure the height of a building above the ground based upon an agreed up metric but we cannot measure which father loves his children more.  Like quantum physics, when we look at a quark, we instantly collapse all other possibilities of its appearance except for our preconceived idea that we projected upon it.

The moment we judge, measure, or conclude, we cannot help but become subjective.  And this subjectivity is always flawed because this opinion is concluded from unintentionally false perspectives stored in our interpretation processor called the neocortex.  Whether experiences, or adopted assumptions filed as memories, they are all compressed into symbols (or stories), categorized (into preset ideas of the subject matter that are often incorrect), and compared (to existing data in order to understand new information) which causes many of our errors in judgment.  What we do not know, our minds make up (ie, heuristics).  And maybe the most critical error is overconfidence: “believing” that we know more about a subject than we do, or, not knowing the difference between what we know and what we think we know (commonly called platonicity).  All of the above combines into biases that cause us to see what we wish to perceive.  And therefore we are anything but objective.

The objective of Zen realizes the above and seeks situations where the student can dismiss himself of the proverbial dog chasing his ass around a tree.  Most of the philosophical endeavors are to learn how to entertain the ego until we can restrain it, quiet it, and subdue it.  Yagyu Munenori taught that a samurai was to learn all to forget all.  This paradoxical axiom means to satisfy the ego with learning great things so that it can finally realize the futility of it all.  Only then can the self calm the ego into calmness.  This is the moving stillness concept noted in many sacred text.

In practice, it just means realizing that “it don’t mean nothing.”

I’ve not necessarily become nihilistic, but maybe more simplistic in my perception as a Stoic that my attention is limited by time and effort.  Adding virtue to my self is all that matters; it is the only thing that cannot be taken from us.  And, it is all that we can effect.  Everything outside of us is an illusion, hence the dog chasing his ass analogy that exhausts us.  The great man is the one that makes the world better by continually improving himself, becoming less evil by becoming less ignorant.  Nothing else truly matters.

SUTOR, NE ULTRA CREPIDAM

By STEVEN MORELAND
August 2013

Growing up I was incessantly curious: I wanted to know answers to questions that most did not care about, always asking “Why?”  For more than twenty years I’ve studied the art of thinking to learn why we don’t know, yet lie… thinking that we do.  There’s a blindness to the gap between what we know and what we think we know… but do not.  We’re addicted to the assumption that our beliefs represent “truth,” especially those beliefs that we adopt from “experts.”

Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan) and statistical analyst Nate Silver (The Signal and The Noise) explain many of the problems we create by entrusting our decisions to the predictions of Experts.  Validated by psychology professor Philip Tetlock’s 15 years of research (Expert Political Judgment) after analyzing thousands of expert predictions, he discovered that the more prominent the expert (ie, the more they were quoted by the news media), the worse their records tended to be.  There is almost an inverse relationship between the confidence of the individual forecaster and the accuracy of their predictions.

These charlatans babble utter absurdities, repeatedly proven false, but no one questions their “error rates.”  Yet we cannot wait for the next release of Roberson’s prophecies, McLaughlin’s political forecasts, or the government’s economic predictions!

So I’m the last guy to profess an alternate “truth.”  Instead, as an aspiring Stoic, I look for the simple and the functional.  Sutor, ne ultra crepidam means “cobbler, no further than the sandal!” or don’t offer your opinion beyond your competence!

First, the Latin references our beliefs as the interpretations they are — opinions, nothing more.  Secondly, it cautions not to offer these opinions beyond our “competence.”

How would our world be different if we adopted this motto?  Doctors could offer his opinion re your collapsed vertebrae but not about religious preferences.  Judges could proffer their opinion re the established law but not claim to know an accused’s thoughts (motives).  An economist could opine about financial history but not how the market will react to future events.  And the clergy could get legitimate jobs as circus barkers… while politicians would all be sent to the welfare line.

In The Four Hour Work Week, author and Stoic Tim Ferriss offers this provisional solution that I find both simple and functional:    “If it can’t be defined AND effected– abort it.”
Part 1: every question must contain fully defined terms.
Part 2: can the answer to the question be acted upon to improve the current state?

Examples:
Q. What is the meaning of life?  A. Violates Part 1 and thus Part 2.  Abort.
Q. What happens if I miss the train tomorrow?  A. Violates Part 2.  Abort worrying about it.
Q. What does the Creator expect us to do with our lives?  A. Violates Part 1 and thus Part 2.  Abort unnecessary worry.
Q. What if I stopped relying upon “experts” and learned to just be quiet?  A. Check, Part 1. Check, Part 2.  Proceed.

Bottom line, experts’ opinions are anything but competent, rarely beating random chance.  And Mark Twain once remarked about common sense, that it’s not very common.  Maybe we should work on acquiring more of that and less time listening to talking heads.

Cicero said in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

“Men may construe things, after their fashion… clean from the purpose of the things themselves.”

WABI-SABI

WABI-SABI 16 July 2013

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.  William of Occam

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.  Henry David Thoreau

One does not accumulate but eliminate.  It is not daily increase but daily decrease.  The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.  Bruce Lee

Getting to great starts by cutting out stuff that’s merely good.  Jason Fried, http://www.37signals.com

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.  Leonardo da Vinci

The hardest thing… isn’t knowing what to do or having enough strength or courage to do it.  It is learning to stay focused.  John Lyons

Do as little as needed, not as much as possible.  Henk Kraaijenhof

Focus and simplicity.  Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.  But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.  Steve Jobs

It’s a cliche’ to say “less is more.”  Yet these multiple perspectives compliment the Japanese term wabi-sabi, meaning to value simplicity, character, and uniqueness instead of a shiny facade.  As a personal trait, authenticity is rare and therefore powerful.  From a project management angle, eliminating all that is not functional demonstrates the concentration of effort experience brings.  They are hallmarks of excellence.