Section Two

Formulating the Hypothesis

(Meditating on the Object)

Chapter One

Object Meditation

            Now that the problem has been described I will move forward with an analysis of the most mysterious aspect of scientific inquiry, the formulation of hypotheses.  I will dissect its origin and illustrate how meditation of this sort can increase the quality of one’sintuitive voice.  In other words, I will amalgamate hypotheses to optimism in a way that I hope is conclusive.
            Hypotheses are proposed solutions to problems or questions.  That humans have this faculty to form suppositions where there is some unknown quantity is reflective of the profound human capacity for insight.  I hope I have been convincing of the constructive alliance that science makes of human nature and desire.  For this meditation on the object to be beneficial we must not digress to seek the source of intuition; we must accept that our insights are practical starting points for the constructive engagement with life.  I will attempt in this section to draw out those phenomena that led me to believe that progress was possible thus recreating the architecture of insight and the formulation of this work’s primary hypothesis.  Since that hypothesis is rooted in my personal desire this section has as its first chapter a meditation, a construct of thoughts, that work to defend desire, once more, as the sole object and its pursuit as a crucial factor in the discovery of one’s purpose.
            As I have said before, one’s purpose can be obscured by complexity.  As I work to make reasonable my belief that progress is possible and dependant upon human intervention it will be necessary to utilize complex ideas.  As I introduce new ideas and they interact and complexity builds we are challenged to maintain the simplicity of the argument on top of a comprehensive defense.  In doing this we are working together, author and reader, to give life to a complex body of thought that has a narrowly defined purpose. The successful union of principles, or the maintenance of a complex body of thought by a unifying idea, is a profound and rare occurrence.  Elemental to the success of this effort is the ability to maintain the integrity of the object, the purpose that acts as the heart of the work.  I am not digressing here into literary mechanics.  Rather, I am illustrating how one maintains the object within an argument by explicit reference to the activity.  I find this exercise, the conscious concentration on the object, to be the greatest metaphor within this science of living for self-discovery.  Meditative redundancy and concentrated clarification of the object are reductive measures that separate the essential from the inertia of excess.
            In the Experiment Section I will discuss the Fluidity of the Object (FOTO) and its relationship to survival.  Here, however, it is only necessary to understand that the object (one’s purpose or desire, in my case progress) is mobile, that as reader or author one or both of us is capable of distraction.  By losing focus the author or reader might unknowingly be following some tangential element of the work.  By forcing the work to maintain its confined parameters I am exercising authority.  I am aware that this can seem both self-conscious and tedious.  However, as I argued previously complexity is a great threat.  I hope that taking time to meditate on the object of discussion and the means by which we pursue that object (our purpose) will help not only clarify where we have been and where we are going but will also serve as a metaphor for the protection of purpose.  I find that many allow the implications of the subsequent ambiguity that follows careless argument, the innuendo, to pose as social science when it is in fact poetry, and poetry weighed down in politics, which is another way of saying propaganda.  Propaganda can be the result of good intentions but it is never responsible for good results.  So, if we are in fact engaging in something that aims at objectivity and clarity, the kind found in true scientific inquiry, then we must embrace the redundant practice of calibration by reaffirming with each step the original hypothesis.  In that way we compensate for nature’s tendency toward decay.  This tendency for an object to deteriorate is magnified by resistance.  In other words, when one’s desires (hypotheses) are confronted with problematic reality, the object becomes more difficult to maintain.
            If science is dependent upon an intuition or desire that has its origin in some unknown but given source then the formulation of hypotheses can be understood as that part of science that brings us closest to our pure non-integrated, non-worldly self.  So to meditate upon the object, in this case progress, is to meditate on the self that longs for that progress and its existence.  Giving into that desire by applying the hypothesis to experiment (action) is to seek validation for that part of our self that longs for something other than reality as it is, it is indicative of the divine human ability to create.  Later, in the Allegory of the Lion, I will illustrate the connection between this urge for creation and one’s dissatisfaction with reality.  As we meditate here on the structural mechanics of scientific engagement we are concentrating on the object, the source of intuition, and in doing so (being thoughtful) we not only acknowledge the longing that comes with human experience we grant it a capital position in our psychological relationship with the world.  Doing so represents its own form of desire or intuition, in explicit form.  As we meditate deeper and deeper upon the object, as we maintain it by nurturing our desire for it, we discover within an infinite bias that drives our existence, at least those of us who operate in this thoughtful way.  That bias is a position, a positive relationship with desire, and is necessary to the scientific process since it allows science to yield knowledgenot only in the material realm but also helps connect that material insight to the self that engages with it.  In this way the science of living is an augmentation of science, a response to the cold materialism that has hit a very formidable wall in the principle of uncertainty.  In summary, to embrace desire as an element of rational living is to affirm that faith is an inextricable human quality that does not contradict virtue.  Desire is not only capable of coexistence with faith; it is a variation of the same essential principle.
            My longing for progress is that mysterious urge that inspires me to grow.  My engagement in the scientific process comes from my desire to understand it.  So, when one builds a wall around their desire in order to engage in science they are cutting the tree from its root and expecting it to grow.  Many do this because reason is seductive in its ability to complicate the simple desires of the heart.  Many forget that science finds its roots in emotion, the human desire for happiness that is contingent upon an increasing understanding of reality.
 
The Physiology of Intuition
 
            To meditate upon the object is to see our desire as the starting point for acquiring knowledge.  In other words, enthusiasm is essential to this process.  The best students are those that are hungry for learning.  Desire urges us, compels us to consume the details of life and to digest them, processing them in a way that satisfies our needs.  As one digests knowledge the elements of experience are distributed in psychologically unique ways.  Many, for instance, utilize their brain, that organ that houses the reason, for digesting experience, using the deductions as thematic guides for the interpretation of further experience.  I spent much of my life doing this finding that rational living led to a terror-stricken existence.  Because of its critical nature reason digests most experiences hungry only for those ideas that would protect me from danger.  It sifts through the details of each experience processing everything as a potential threat.  It is a protective capacity that posits defensive lessons in response to each experience.  Because of this I discovered that the rational mind has an inherent pessimism since learning is based on the negative aspects of experience.  Only in this way can protective techniques be developed.  Experiencing life this way was like learning a martial art, it pitted me against my fellows in a defensive posture looking for weaknesses to be exploited.  Reason, housed in my brain, was vigilant toward my personal security and saw sacrifice as a mystery and so, operating this way, I fell the way a selfish man falls in this world.  In the depths of this sadness, horror and desperation I asked myself if there was some other way to process the experiences of life.  I was shown that my heart was also capable of providing direction as it housed the soul.  This appeared to my rational mind as poetic and counter-intuitive poppycock.  However, I had no choice, the personal security that my reason was supposed to protect was under serious threat and I began doubting my dependence upon this purely rational approach.  When I began interpreting my experiences through this new emotional center I found that my heart responded like a chamber of echoes, a vessel, a vacuum that granted each experience unreal dimensions.  It was frightening as it seemed to lack all logic and I had very little hope in its ability to secure me against a threatening world.  I was desperate however and this leap marked the end of my purely rational engagement with life.
            I am getting a bit ahead of myself here discussing the experimental leap I took when I began living by the motivations of my heart.  I am only doing this to provide a setting for the object of discussion.  As I am describing the birth of hypotheses I must describe how I stumbled across my first experiences of personal progress.  So, to my surprise I found that my heart, which housed my soul, did not lack logic it merely operated on a higher plane, one that my rational mind was incapable of fully understanding.  My mind, because of its ability to organize, would become, in its subordinate position, a very valuable asset for the development of understanding.  However, I found that a purely rational perspective was actually highly subjective, far less rooted in macro-reality.  Therefore, the results gained from living rationally are far less reproducible, in a reality that is constantly changing, than those gained living from desire.  In conclusion, rational life is a less scientific form of living.  It seems paradoxical but let me continue with describing my process of self-discovery in order to illustrate the systematic relationship that the heart has with the mind.  In this way I hope to sweep clean the stage of understanding in order to present the main players, those ideas whose interactions led to the dramatic conclusion that progress was possible.
            As I began to act from the impulses of my emotional center, taking the leap of detachment from my reason, my brain was given rest.  In its convalescence it became observant of my new life.  As my heart ached under the strain of a dysfunctional life my mind, still searching for strengths and weaknesses, organized itself, purging its fears and concerns, achieving clarity as the result of my determined commitment to eliminate its capital position in my psychological hierarchy.  As an archivist it began to catalogue experiences of the heart organizing them into emotional categories.  After time, having nothing better to keep it busy, my brain began sorting these categories further searching for connections to explain the nature of each experience to be used for growth.  My mind was trying to understand the reason of emotion, the underlying principles that guided the intuitive direction (it was meditating upon its object).  Patterns began to emerge that helped explain the emotional character of experience.  In other words, due to this new cooperative alignment the mind was developing a higher understanding due to its submission to the body’s most mysterious element, the soul.  My mind became the reference library for my heart, my creative center.   Once my heart (the source of desire, intuition and hypothesis) became the central operating system it developed quite naturally a cooperative relationship with my rational brain that led to an inner peace growing concurrently with the outward peace that would evidence the success of the heart’s scientific process.
            So the growth of wisdom is dependent upon the relationship between the mind, the richness and organization of its catalogue of experience, and the heart whose courage for risk would be bolstered by its developing understanding.  Due to the sublimation of reason the heart inevitably gains self-awareness as it finds that all of its emotive efforts bring back a variety of results with unique commonalities that cannot be reduced to elements outside of the self.  The reason, as it strengthens in its piety and clarity, finds that all experience is affected somewhat by the context of self.  So, as it reaches outward for understanding of reality it becomes necessary to reach inward to clarify the most common variable in every interaction.  When this occurs we have fully conscious experimentation whereby the mind and heart are working together to engage the world in a way that yields answers to the problem of existence.  Mathematically it is always prudent to isolate an unknown variable, especially one that is constant in every equation.  In that way clarity is brought to every other variable.  One living from the heart inevitably looks inward for deeper understanding of his/her world.
            The self posing hypotheses against nature finds that it has a unique relationship with the world and that its desires are integral to that relationship.  The clarification of that relationship is the equivalent of reducing one’s desires to their purest form.  Once that is accomplished one has described their life’s direction or purpose.  This perspective allows for a higher level of consciousness and a more profound ability to understand how the soul moves through its experiences in the past, present and future.  Once one discovers their innate inner direction (their soul’s desire or object = objective living) by use of analysis, after living for some time committed to the actions of the heart, truthfully conforming to impulses of an unknown agenda, one is then faced with the awareness of one’s purpose and then the unity of consciousness formed by the alliance between reason and desire is given the power of choice on a daily basis to maintain that purpose regardless of the consequences.  In this way the awakening of the consciousness is the experience of freedom simultaneous with the knowledge of one’s captive fate.  Anything other than this is animal or regressive in nature and consequently lacks consciousness or choice.  For this reason the scientific process is innately spiritual and most scientists today pervert this in order to avoid facing their duties.
            As a result of this process of awakening I discovered that my personal direction was one consistently governed by a desire for human progress.  All of the emotions in my heart worked to derive from the reason the necessary clauses that would enable it to express power in a way that would achieve this object, the object being progress, this being the destination, rooted somewhere in dissatisfaction, longing and desire.  As I knew I was moving in a direction validated by the development of a greater and greater unity of self I was gaining faith in the possibility of arriving at my goal.  Because the object or purpose of my existence was easily described by the idea of progress, my actions, rather than being phenomena outside myself for observation, became conscious experimentation aimed at collecting specific types of information to be used in the development of that object.  Meditation on the object, forming hypotheses about reality, became my way of life.  In ever-increasingly conscious ways I was developing a technology, a tool, to be used to manufacture the object of my desire.  I was using my ability to take action and my freedom to make choices to fulfill my purpose.  In the same way that I had submitted my reason to the direction of my soul I had submitted my life to the direction of my purpose.
            With the development of greater personal unity my worldview became more unified.  Because of this optimism began to grow and surprisingly, as my mind sought to verify this optimism it found results.  Very clearly there were reasons for hope.  The chapters following this one are examples of phenomena that validate optimism.  They are a defense of my hypothesis as a reasonable starting point for experimentation.
            Together as author and reader we have stripped away the complexity from the object, narrowing it down to the desire of the heart, making clear the starting point for this science of living.  By driving our imagination with pure desire rather than fear-based desires we affirm here its infinite power.  I have given reason a subordinate relationship to the object and I have equalized desire with the scientific idea of hypothesis, rooting it in our intuitive natures.  Obviously, when speaking about the heart we are metaphorically referring to the soul and reason has a very limited role in the essential understanding of that idea.  The soul finds its completeness and growth in the inter-relationship between itself and its use of the reason in active engagement with the world.
 
The Reader as Object
 
            In writing a book there is an assumed reader, a mysterious assumption that here, at the finish of this explicit meditation upon the object and purpose, I will address.  You, as the reader operate as a variable in the equation of dialogue and here I would like to clarify that role in its relationship to the whole.  As the author I see the reader as a symbol of my engagement with the world.  As I work to nurture the ease of my heart’s longing, as I build a life that will prove my hypothesis, it is necessary to engage others in order to get an outside perspective on what it is to be human, to have a heart.  You are that other, the object toward which this meditation is aimed.  When meditating on the object I am simultaneously meditating upon you, the other, and your reading as a reflection of that process.  The completion of this cycle is found in the enthusiastic engagement of the reader with his/her world be it represented by me or others.  I, by way of expression, represent an element of the world to the reader.  I am the outside, a man with a heart and mind proposing a possible orientation that can be assumed by these two parts of self and further, I am proposing, that this particular orientation is not only preferable but necessary to our survival as a species.  That, being a very bold proposition, demands that I exercise in a very forthright manner.
 
Summary
 
            And so, as I delved into the mystery of hypothesis formulation I felt it would be helpful to start with a meditation on the hypothesis as object, narrowing down this mysterious human capacity (intuition) to its proper physiological source.  Having clarified that I will further illustrate some relationships between the over-arching principles that make reasonable my belief that progress and hope in our world is a possibility.  The following few chapters will be devoted to phenomena, interactions between two or more principles, that not only involve human participation but imply that human choice can alter the direction of said phenomena.  Human social power manipulated for the purposes of increasing equality and community health; this is what we are seeking if we believe a problem exists and believe further that a solution is both possible and necessary.  Take these sections as encouragements of that belief, support, and spiritual evidence for the heart’s quest to free itself from the fears of reason.  If I have been successful in this meditation on the object I have drawn further suspicion around the validity of our rational character for the purposes of increasing our faith in the act of longing for ideals.