Small small Wisdom

Image this situation, a joker god is stretching indefinitely your life (no immortality, but hardcore longevity), but is also making you sterile. You and everyone else. First reaction is: fine! I won't have kids, but who really wants them, when you'll have the future all for yourself! At the end of the day, having children is a substitute for desire of immortality; if I can have the real thing, who cares about the fake??? It's like methadone for heroin or pornography for sex. Yet, you'll discover that sex without eroticism is more like digestion than pleasure. And heroin without the craving burns the perception of satisfaction: you have everything you want, but you have paralyzed your will. Satisfaction is dissolving of desire, not its amputation.

So back to this diaperless world: when shit will come, you'll be powerless. I'll start from the most trivial thing. Economy, at least in the way we intend it, will collapse: our model is based on future growth, if you remove future and growth, you cancel every motivation for economic prosper, even if greed and selfishness are totally there. Individually, you may still want more, but the collectivity surrounding you will lose interest in a game without prestige: nobody wants to win the final world cup, or become the last pope. Suddenly you'll realize that human prosperity is psychologically ingrained in handing down that prosperity to the next generation. In the absolute absence of a next generation, well, you'll see the real face of money: a future promise. Without tomorrow, money is a lie.

That world starts to look ugly? I've just started....

When you have children (you or your brother, or your friends, or anybody else on the same planet for that matters), you have to train them. A human brain doesn't come fully equipped with concepts and ideas. Actually it doesn't come with a mind either. The learning process is structuring a mind around the child brain. For the purpose of this experiment, it really doesn't count if you train your baby to become an angel or an asshole: teaching is what is important. Teach him to become a vulture, if you like, but teach him!

Now the funny thing is that we understand the concepts and the meaning we already master through teaching, through the process of handing down them.

Say I'm the most knowledgeable person in the world, well, knowledge is a commodity that cannot be stored. At least for human brains. If you have the wisdom, if you know the answer, you can't put in the cave and seal it: you'll forget it. There is no place in your brain where meanings and ideas are actually codified. You don't nail concepts in your gray matter. Concepts are an acting process: they flow in the act of representation. You represent your mind and along with her, you carry on the attached concepts. If you are the most knowledgeable person, you need to act as such. And there is only one way to impersonate wisdom: in the teaching theater. So without a disciple, there cannot be any master. Thus in a world without children, wisdom is doomed to dissipate in games more and more meaningless.

Wisdom takes its positive meaning from the negative emptiness surrounding it. The written black words become visible by the surrounding white emptiness. Remove the answer of the silence to your words and language become a monolithic block of noise. So the master is taking the meaning of his wisdom by handing down it to the disciple.

This is the full life of meanings: that you grasp them when you let them go (to someone else). You think of knowing what your words say? Try yourself with a child. What does it mean to live? And to die? He's struggling on the surface, whilst you are rooted deeply. But: does your depth really sweep away his superficiality or your wisdom actually aligns with his ignorance (recalling forgetfulness?) ? The living spring of meanings, comes from describing experience for the first time. You had your first time ages ago, to regain your linguistic attachment to reality and its relative virginity, you need to teach words to someone who is making that first experience.

Otherwise your meanings are just words of words.

P.S.: Of course in the process of learning from teaching, you really understand the emptiness of wisdom. From the dawn of mind, you realize that the full noon of your wisdom is nothing but a fading light. Enjoy the bright light of the morning of wisdom, because it is easier to learn the inconsistence of knowledge. Wisdom really is a small thing.

Say a little prayer for the generation of your self-consciousness

Every little gesture you make, disseminates cognitive infrastructuration in the world. We rarely explore intentionally new circuits of the world; and the few new things that are experimented in a day, are vastly overwhelmed by myriads of usual patterns. The way you walk, talk, the small tics, the journey home. Habits root our worldly cognitive being there in the world or if you like the generative production of substantives, our situatedness.

Every gesture is a reminder of our being situated in an environment. If you think that we are a closed system, an entity that can be placed on a shelf or in a storage like a tin, without significant modification, then rephrase it. Quick. What we call “environment” is the world which is familiar to our cognitive system. We are here. I mean we are even more “in” than a fish in a pond. Our mind is not a small dwarf seated behind your eyes. Our mind is the room we walk through, is the body seated in the chair, as well as the perception of objects, light and sounds coming in: we are in the environment.

When you scratch your head, you are re-enforcing the conviction of our brain. We have a very flexible set of movements, we can bend and assume enormous numbers of postures, we can learn to move our bodies in novel ways. This is pretty amazing. Very few animals are so open to new bodily configurations. Every organism is endowed with set of movements to carry out specific tasks in his environment. On the human side instead, we can twist and bend for purposes we invented, like dance, yoga, gymnastic, bondage, etc. etc. Every move is the trail to design a cognitive organization. Follow the pattern and you'll start to represent the establishment of a cognitive pattern. The way you move is yourself. Every little habit concurs to generate the cognitive representation of your brain, the self consciousness of being there.

Every gesture is a little prayer to believe in the awareness of being there. The benign demon that your brain calls “I”, is the bodily navigation in the familiar environment.

Oh my god, I started again to talk like Heraclitus. We must share the same vices. I want to cry. Of joy (but I'm less worried than Heraclitus).