You asked what is true novelty. Seems to me that it is THIS. Right here. Now. And now. And now (beyond the word "now" and the word "here"). Seen with fresh eyes, eyes that are not entranced by words and clouded with knowledge, with "I already know what this is".
As soon as we’re convinced the world is a certain way, we’re toast. You know?
The HARDNESS of our fixed beliefs is like soul-rust, and it encrusts our vision, our curiosity, our ability to imagine anew. And can often make us cruel, in the stiff certainty of our fixed beliefs and conclusions..
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu points out, “Man is born soft and supple; When dead, we are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; When dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.”
There is something life-affirming about being soft, not knowing, adaptable and supple.
Life is always MOVING, CHANGING, FLOWING, MORPHING. Never static and fixed.
Our certainties, maybe, are pale and hollow, and only serve to disappoint. How many times have my conclusions been pulled from beneath me? Too many to count.
So, then, maybe it’s our QUESTIONS AND INQUIRIES ARISING FROM NOT-KNOWING - with their suppleness and openness - that are wiser than our conclusions.
Maybe coming forward empty-handed, willing to be made anew again and again, is the kind of softness that keeps us ALIGNED with Life.
I don’t know… I don’t know…
I ask: How can I be SOFTER today? More supple? Less FIXED (and cruel in my conviction) but more empty?
How can I be more present and less ENTRANCED BY MY OWN RIGID OPINIONS, BELIEFS AND STORYLINES?
How can I be wowed and awed and more CURIOUS?
How can I be supple enough to MEET THE TRUTH OF WHAT IS HERE, EVEN IF IT DOESN'T ALIGN WITH MY BELIEFS about what should be?
"Deep in my bones I know that a return to the sacred is what’s being called for at this time in history, but have no idea what it looks like or where it will come from. " Really agree with this, this is also what I keep circling back to in various conversations and my work. It took so many years, hundreds of years, for us to wipe out animist worldview from mainstream collective consciousness, and we don't have the luxury to wait another 400 years to reanimate collective attention towards the sacred and animate.
This essay felt like looking in a mirror…..and feeling like I’m with you. Thank you for sharing. We are all doing this together, somehow. Without knowing what we are doing. I’m so exhausted by all the polarity, fighting and chaos. Sometimes, we just have to stop and be in what is. Which is nothing, and waiting to see where it goes.
I like your somatic meditation technique, Alexander, thanks for demonstrating it. Someone was saying that many of us feel exhausted because the earth feels like that at present.
I think that just when you think things are inevitably going in a certain direction they can flip and go a different way. Future -tellers are usually wide of the mark. It's something like the quantum uncertainty principle, it's simply not yet knowable. We exhaust ourselves enquiring into the unknowable.
I agree that online 'content' can affect you like wading through an evil miasma. I have woken up to heavy snow today, completely unexpected and beautiful.
I always appreciate your musings Ali. We seem to have more conveniences to help us with our tasks, jobs work, etc. but at the same time I have not experienced the number of those things dwindling in anyway And that’s all fine and good like “Thomas the train” I enjoy , “being of use.” I work with children, who seem to be scaling up on the anxious more so than ever in my 26 years of teaching. I would say the same of their parents. So I definitely feel “in the sun “or “in the arena. “So it’s struck me that maybe I’m out of balance with the time to sit under the stars or the time to allow the soul to emerge in silence. I’m gonna work on that. Thank you . I am finding novelty in that I am building a cottage because there is such a housing shortage here since the Maui fires. Definitely novelty because I don’t really know what I’m doing and figuring all this stuff out and doing myself. I would say 2024 is a bit novel in the question of. “WTF is going to happen ?” or as I look at most of our current political leadership, “ The novelty of the inmates, seeming to be running the asylum “ (wish I was joking) . Not to be apathetic returning my back on the world, but really the grassroots acting locally to affect our communities in a positive way and bring our light it’s about what we can do. And though you are far and I’ve never met you but done workshops with you in the past ,I appreciate what you are doing to make a better world. Keep at it brother. Stay authentic stay true , keep dancing, keep your heart light, know when to say “fuck it!”and thank you for sharing.
According to Buddha, three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth. This speaks truth to me. I'm living in the same kind of confusion --- capitalism having devoured my novelty and spit it out --- and yet, in my work is where one uncovers epiphanies. Thank you for this. Time will tell....
Something quite profound occurred as I read your piece, Alex, and I’m not going to be able to properly express it, but there was a sense that the sacred was invoked - not so much by you, or by me, but in you allowing me to in some way join your process.
We/I talk a lot about “fostering the conditions for emergence” à la complexity theory, and what your writing afforded in my reading of it was to come to a stillness in myself/my thoughts where those conditions arose.
For the moment, that feels sufficient: something invoked, and some clues as to the need to remain open and responsive to whatever may flow from that.
This was a good and interesting read. I just had a thought: As more and more people realize that we have been and are being socially engineered, they are actively and intuitively seeking out more traditional values and ways of being as a counter-cultural reaction. I know it’s happening with me, that’s for sure.
So good. Thank you for putting to words this feeling obviously many of us are feeling. That, let’s just see what happens with AI because it’s something new. The appeal of the old because it feels new. The endless repetition of everything, the overwhelming content being pumped out every day. The pull towards destruction, towards the void just so it all STOPS for a freakin moment. Really appreciate the way you followed your somatic experience as you wrote. This is important.
These underlying somatic sensations, these deep deep thoughts pulling us toward something, longing for it all to stop, longing for novelty is impacting so much of our individual and collective behaviour and health and not for the better.
You touch on some of my favorite themes, and the comment about "the mindless expansion of content" plays into something I've been struggling with for a few days. Recently I noticed how much the reaction to AI in education and business has been about process - how to change our processes, how to teach processes, etc. - and elides over the obvious problems with AI-generated content. More generally, content has been replaced by performance (as in the interview you mention between between Lorenz and Raichik), by processes (consumption, production - which seems to be replacing creation - and reproduction - even more distant from creation), and by reification into technologies. Maybe the Apple Vision Pro is the perfect example. It is nominally a device for producing and consuming content (mostly the latter, but theoretically a device with which work might be done), but really the device is the point and the performance - the hand gestures, etc. - is necessary to complete the reification. I don't know, maybe that is too abstract. What I do know is that what we call "content" is increasingly void of content, and that turns to tradition can only take us so far.
I am a retired scientist living in Venezuela, the isle of nothingness, All is the same and nobody cares about what is happening. Your work is illuminating for those who don't dare to collaborate in the diminution of social entropy and the conquest of hope, a realistic hope. One thread I have think of : Socialism is not human.
I enjoyed reading your piece, with its sense that you didn’t know where you were heading as you wrote it. That’s more akin to someone talking to me where my silent presence is helping to shape what they have to say. That helps me feel more alive as a remote participant, even if the words (in this case) are yours. I really appreciate your honouring of silence and not knowing.
I have a growing sense that written and spoken commentaries “about” what’s going on, beautifully articulated as many of them are, can’t actually be digested unless we’re in our bodies with other people and form of life around us. Of course what happens then is that the words I read get dissolved (as I may not be around others who also read them) and combined with all the other things going on around me. If I try to preserve the “signal” with the words intact as I share them with other people I am - we are - probably staying in the abstract world which is not where things are going on. I guess that’s the challenge of trying to engage at the cultural level.
Perhaps we all need to get onto the knotty side of the fabric together - in real life - and work out some things we can do. There is plenty of novelty to be discovered there, but perhaps it can’t be widely shared.
You asked what is true novelty. Seems to me that it is THIS. Right here. Now. And now. And now (beyond the word "now" and the word "here"). Seen with fresh eyes, eyes that are not entranced by words and clouded with knowledge, with "I already know what this is".
As soon as we’re convinced the world is a certain way, we’re toast. You know?
The HARDNESS of our fixed beliefs is like soul-rust, and it encrusts our vision, our curiosity, our ability to imagine anew. And can often make us cruel, in the stiff certainty of our fixed beliefs and conclusions..
In the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu points out, “Man is born soft and supple; When dead, we are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; When dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.”
There is something life-affirming about being soft, not knowing, adaptable and supple.
Life is always MOVING, CHANGING, FLOWING, MORPHING. Never static and fixed.
Our certainties, maybe, are pale and hollow, and only serve to disappoint. How many times have my conclusions been pulled from beneath me? Too many to count.
So, then, maybe it’s our QUESTIONS AND INQUIRIES ARISING FROM NOT-KNOWING - with their suppleness and openness - that are wiser than our conclusions.
Maybe coming forward empty-handed, willing to be made anew again and again, is the kind of softness that keeps us ALIGNED with Life.
I don’t know… I don’t know…
I ask: How can I be SOFTER today? More supple? Less FIXED (and cruel in my conviction) but more empty?
How can I be more present and less ENTRANCED BY MY OWN RIGID OPINIONS, BELIEFS AND STORYLINES?
How can I be wowed and awed and more CURIOUS?
How can I be supple enough to MEET THE TRUTH OF WHAT IS HERE, EVEN IF IT DOESN'T ALIGN WITH MY BELIEFS about what should be?
Nestling closer to the pulse of life..
This is the best newsletter I've read in a long, long time. Helped tie together a lot of random thoughts I've been having.
"Deep in my bones I know that a return to the sacred is what’s being called for at this time in history, but have no idea what it looks like or where it will come from. " Really agree with this, this is also what I keep circling back to in various conversations and my work. It took so many years, hundreds of years, for us to wipe out animist worldview from mainstream collective consciousness, and we don't have the luxury to wait another 400 years to reanimate collective attention towards the sacred and animate.
This essay felt like looking in a mirror…..and feeling like I’m with you. Thank you for sharing. We are all doing this together, somehow. Without knowing what we are doing. I’m so exhausted by all the polarity, fighting and chaos. Sometimes, we just have to stop and be in what is. Which is nothing, and waiting to see where it goes.
In the great words of Shirley Bassey, isn't it all just a little bit of history repeating?
I like your somatic meditation technique, Alexander, thanks for demonstrating it. Someone was saying that many of us feel exhausted because the earth feels like that at present.
I think that just when you think things are inevitably going in a certain direction they can flip and go a different way. Future -tellers are usually wide of the mark. It's something like the quantum uncertainty principle, it's simply not yet knowable. We exhaust ourselves enquiring into the unknowable.
I agree that online 'content' can affect you like wading through an evil miasma. I have woken up to heavy snow today, completely unexpected and beautiful.
I always appreciate your musings Ali. We seem to have more conveniences to help us with our tasks, jobs work, etc. but at the same time I have not experienced the number of those things dwindling in anyway And that’s all fine and good like “Thomas the train” I enjoy , “being of use.” I work with children, who seem to be scaling up on the anxious more so than ever in my 26 years of teaching. I would say the same of their parents. So I definitely feel “in the sun “or “in the arena. “So it’s struck me that maybe I’m out of balance with the time to sit under the stars or the time to allow the soul to emerge in silence. I’m gonna work on that. Thank you . I am finding novelty in that I am building a cottage because there is such a housing shortage here since the Maui fires. Definitely novelty because I don’t really know what I’m doing and figuring all this stuff out and doing myself. I would say 2024 is a bit novel in the question of. “WTF is going to happen ?” or as I look at most of our current political leadership, “ The novelty of the inmates, seeming to be running the asylum “ (wish I was joking) . Not to be apathetic returning my back on the world, but really the grassroots acting locally to affect our communities in a positive way and bring our light it’s about what we can do. And though you are far and I’ve never met you but done workshops with you in the past ,I appreciate what you are doing to make a better world. Keep at it brother. Stay authentic stay true , keep dancing, keep your heart light, know when to say “fuck it!”and thank you for sharing.
A great post to re-read over the weekend a few times and marinate in.
According to Buddha, three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth. This speaks truth to me. I'm living in the same kind of confusion --- capitalism having devoured my novelty and spit it out --- and yet, in my work is where one uncovers epiphanies. Thank you for this. Time will tell....
Thanks for writing. Much to ponder in the candlelight and silence.
Something quite profound occurred as I read your piece, Alex, and I’m not going to be able to properly express it, but there was a sense that the sacred was invoked - not so much by you, or by me, but in you allowing me to in some way join your process.
We/I talk a lot about “fostering the conditions for emergence” à la complexity theory, and what your writing afforded in my reading of it was to come to a stillness in myself/my thoughts where those conditions arose.
For the moment, that feels sufficient: something invoked, and some clues as to the need to remain open and responsive to whatever may flow from that.
Gratitude.
This was a good and interesting read. I just had a thought: As more and more people realize that we have been and are being socially engineered, they are actively and intuitively seeking out more traditional values and ways of being as a counter-cultural reaction. I know it’s happening with me, that’s for sure.
So good. Thank you for putting to words this feeling obviously many of us are feeling. That, let’s just see what happens with AI because it’s something new. The appeal of the old because it feels new. The endless repetition of everything, the overwhelming content being pumped out every day. The pull towards destruction, towards the void just so it all STOPS for a freakin moment. Really appreciate the way you followed your somatic experience as you wrote. This is important.
These underlying somatic sensations, these deep deep thoughts pulling us toward something, longing for it all to stop, longing for novelty is impacting so much of our individual and collective behaviour and health and not for the better.
You touch on some of my favorite themes, and the comment about "the mindless expansion of content" plays into something I've been struggling with for a few days. Recently I noticed how much the reaction to AI in education and business has been about process - how to change our processes, how to teach processes, etc. - and elides over the obvious problems with AI-generated content. More generally, content has been replaced by performance (as in the interview you mention between between Lorenz and Raichik), by processes (consumption, production - which seems to be replacing creation - and reproduction - even more distant from creation), and by reification into technologies. Maybe the Apple Vision Pro is the perfect example. It is nominally a device for producing and consuming content (mostly the latter, but theoretically a device with which work might be done), but really the device is the point and the performance - the hand gestures, etc. - is necessary to complete the reification. I don't know, maybe that is too abstract. What I do know is that what we call "content" is increasingly void of content, and that turns to tradition can only take us so far.
I am a retired scientist living in Venezuela, the isle of nothingness, All is the same and nobody cares about what is happening. Your work is illuminating for those who don't dare to collaborate in the diminution of social entropy and the conquest of hope, a realistic hope. One thread I have think of : Socialism is not human.
I enjoyed reading your piece, with its sense that you didn’t know where you were heading as you wrote it. That’s more akin to someone talking to me where my silent presence is helping to shape what they have to say. That helps me feel more alive as a remote participant, even if the words (in this case) are yours. I really appreciate your honouring of silence and not knowing.
I have a growing sense that written and spoken commentaries “about” what’s going on, beautifully articulated as many of them are, can’t actually be digested unless we’re in our bodies with other people and form of life around us. Of course what happens then is that the words I read get dissolved (as I may not be around others who also read them) and combined with all the other things going on around me. If I try to preserve the “signal” with the words intact as I share them with other people I am - we are - probably staying in the abstract world which is not where things are going on. I guess that’s the challenge of trying to engage at the cultural level.
Perhaps we all need to get onto the knotty side of the fabric together - in real life - and work out some things we can do. There is plenty of novelty to be discovered there, but perhaps it can’t be widely shared.