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If the object we are pursuing (progress) is fluid, changing in form and therefore in relationship to reality, and it is so because of the relationship language shares with the environment, and the environment because of technology is understood to be dynamic, then language, if coupled with a desire for progress becomes a force that moderates the expansion of the environment. So fluidity of objects describes not only the location and form of an object but its volume as well. If the environment expands in its complexity and language does not grow in matching proportion, due to lack of desire, then progress is flooded out by technology. Just as a lake can lose balance through a bloom of algae that monopolizes the oxygen making it impossible for the diversity of life to survive so too can technology and systems of communication, lacking moderation, create an environment that is dangerous for human beings. An overly complex, misunderstood environment, out of control due to our lacking sophistication recalls for humans the days of the jungle when they were ruled by fear, hopelessness and dread, the driving emotions for greed, violence and warfare. Due to the great legacy of human progress against nature we have created an environment that has a nature all its own with an inertia or will to grow that is ambivalent to our success. However, because of our authorship this new environment is based upon laws that conduct their power through language. Because of these relationships language can be understood as a true force of reality. As I move forward in this chapter it is vital that language is seen not as a metaphorical force but a physical force that can be interpreted scientifically the way we comprehend gravity or electricity, a force that drives actions or phenomena. If that premise is accepted, then a sophisticated understanding of language will help empower us to hold back the flood of new information. Through the practice of a definable exercise we will acquire a channel through which we can translate our finite human capacity into a progressive force of nature.
Human Forces
By transforming a mysterious social tool such as language into a physical force I am affirming that the social reality within which we exist has a deeply rooted connection to the cosmological reality. In various ways I will try to prove this notion but here I am merely wishing to clarify this idea of force when used to describe social phenomena. Language is not the only social phenomena that can be understood as a physical force. All forces that depend upon human participation are responsible for social phenomena. There are historical forces, sociological forces, sexual forces, spiritual forces, political forces, cultural forces and many more. All of these forces are ideas that conduct energy in the same way that electricity, gravity and magnetism do. In conducting that energy they can be understood as having a type of inertia, a kind of potential energy that can be very powerful if transformed through some human action into kinetic energy. For men and women to engage in social progress a sophisticated awareness of all these forces is essential. An object of such subtle fluidity like progress requires one to develop the kind of personal power that comes only from language.
As a force, language must be informed, if it is to be harnessed by an individual wishing to participate in the government of the dynamic human environment. In other words, a human being engaged in social progress, as described, in order to manage the fluidity of progress, must develop and intense and rich relationship with language. This is the epicenter of the process of education, research aimed at the development of the greatest possible personal efficacy. My reason for drawing such a tight focus on education as a crucial part of the science of progress is that there exists in this process some myths that pervert a natural human tendency for curiosity into a destructive type of distraction. Although curiosity and a desire to learn come natural to human beings, due to civilization the connection of that learning to practical language does not. Civilization, because of the fluidity of its object, sometimes obscures our natural tendencies and they become unnatural and self-destructive impulses. This is the essence of The Garden of Eden mythology. Our social contract depends upon enthusiastic participation in the adaptive creation of prescient law. However, the benefits of civilization remove, for some, the survival instincts that drove the learning process initially. So here, in this section I present mechanisms that can be used to identify and analyze when learning is taking place and how to maintain the object of one’s initial spiritual longings through the use of that learning. The stupor of civilized life can sometimes obscure the initial reasons for our belief that we are socially compassionate creatures, distraction being the main means for supporting this kind of self-deception. Often times that distraction is merely the result of a lack of practical principles that will help secure ideas that inspire growth and inner harmony.
The Art of Reading
The essence of distraction or intellectual dissipation can be seen in how men and women, who believe themselves to be educated, go about taking in the information that accumulates into their worldview. In an age where information is overly abundant we can no longer see reading as a categorically virtuous activity. I will compare it to eating. If a gorilla decides, rather than searching through the forest for the foods, berries and nut that are appropriate to his diet, to eat blindly whatever appears in front of him be it leaves, sticks, dirt, feces, etc., his health will decline. In order to eat properly that gorilla will have to have an idea about what it wishes to eat and it must search patiently disregarding all the distracting material if he is to successfully secure some measure of health. Reading can be looked at similarly. There are many who believe that reading has some innate value, that the exercise of translating words into thoughts builds character regardless of the types of thoughts that are being ingested. This kind of misconception, and the word misconception here has a profound literalism, leads to all sorts of distraction and a generalized numbing of the learning instinct. A person who reads whatever is most convenient for the purposes of entertainment, with the mistaken notion that it will build his/her character, develops a world view that is fractured, confused and lacking substance. Many because of this discard study altogether concluding conversely that reading is of no use. A great majority of the slaves of my world have shut down completely their capacities for learning and critical thinking and instead escape the horrors of this life through sensuality. The next largest population insists that reading is good for them and they continue to read regardless of the volume of confusion that accumulates inside. I suspect that in some basic way, they are not reading at all, that they are merely skimming the text and allowing it to make sounds in their heads. This is a form of sensuality. If they continued to consider what they were reading they would go mad in a very short time.
Reading, just like eating, requires an art for its proper exercise. The art of reading is successful when it takes us closer to our pursued object or purpose. The reason the Fluidity of the Object is presented as an acronym (F.O.T.O.) is because our experience of the object is often like seeing an image, a photograph if you will. So the F.O.T.O. of education is blurry if we are reading without purpose or doing it for its own sake rather than driving the activity toward some intuited object. If we are in fact reading consciously and with desire then the object becomes clearer. This can be understood as a growth in self-awareness, if self-awareness is the object of the process of education.
In other words, reading demands hypothesis. One reads to learn, rather than learns to read. If one has no desire to learn then reading is a waste of time. Reading, in this chapter, can be seen as a metaphor for interpreting reality, the art of reading resembles the art of engagement with reality. A human being looking at reality with intention is in a very different psychological state than a human being lookingat reality passively. One is seeking and the other is lost.
The Technique
As in every art, the art of reading depends upon a technique. The technique described here is quite simple and, as we will discuss in the next chapter, depends only on one’s motivation for its success. First, one must be inspired to read, to engage with knowledge, and that inspiration should stem from a desire to learn in a particular direction, an intuited relationship with reality. There must be a question that precedes the effort, even if the question is as simple as “Why is this author considered great?” If such a question is present then the act of reading is already one step higher in sophistication then it was as mere entertainment. However, once the reading begins the real distinctions between the art of reading and the act of reading become clearer. For instance, when reading one must maintain a position, a hypothetical answer to the question that precedes engagement with the material, even if the position is a general picture of what is already known about a subject of interest. Let us again, for simplicity’s sake, use the example of the gorilla and assume that he is reading a book about the proper foods to be found in the jungle. If he already knows that berries and nuts are adequate foods then he must keep this in mind while reading for a few reasons. One, he might be wasting a lot of time if he is laboring over an argument for the benefits of eating berries. Also, keeping these two things in mind will help him to highlight new information. For instance, if he reads that the leaves of a certain berry bush are also edible he will have to retain that information with the image of the berry that is already in his mind. These are seemingly common sense deductions and I know it seems tedious but here is where the main tension can be found that divides artful reading from passive reading. If the gorilla comes upon a passage that argues against the eating of berries that he has long loved he is forced to confront new information that contradicts his understanding. If he reads artfully he will, simultaneous to his reading, form defenses and arguments to support his knowledge and pit that against the arguments of the author. It is out of this conflict between the searching reader and the convincing author that education is born and the conception is the result of a reader being inspired to step outside of his/her knowledge into the risky activity of acquiring new information. If fully convinced that the berries he has been eating has been causing him harm the gorilla, now educated, will experimentally refrain from those berries and add to his diet the new foods that he has been informed about. Noticing differences in his disposition under the new diet our gorilla might grow to appreciate the information as knowledge or he might find that the new information did not match with reality. Either way reading extends far beyond the act itself into the life that is lived as a result. For education to be true it must be exhibited in action or else, stuck in the realm of theory, it stagnates growth through distraction.
The Study of the Great vs. The Study of the Obscure
Continuing on using our mythological soul-searching gorilla let us assume that after reading the book on foods of the jungle he finds that the author has given good guidance. There is a very simple technique for augmenting one’s knowledge along a line of inquiry. If the gorilla is motivated to become deeply educated about the jungle and has found an author whose ideas improve his reality then he has found a doorway into higher knowledge providing the author has left some clues concerning further research. Those clues can be found in reference material. Most great writers leave clues in the form of ideas, authors’ names, other book titles, subject matters, terms, etc. that have informed their work. It is important to clarify before we move on that to go back to a book that has proven itself useless to one’s understanding of reality for further information is an almost incomprehensible form of ignorance but one practiced in staggering popularity. However, assuming that readers are at least as smart as our gorilla they would only return to trees bearing fruit.
As a human being our reasons for wanting to understand our world are much more complex than a desire for berries or nuts. We have developed into creatures that are capable of wanting such profound things as justice, equality and compassionate integration with the environment. To pursue ideas such as these requires the art of reading to be practiced at a level of mastery. And so when we approach the world of knowledge and its record in books and letters we must reassess at each confrontation our state of knowledge as well as the state of our inquiry. The art of reading requires a life lived in reflection of the process of education. Otherwise, the reading, the investigation, if we are too hasty and move forward without integrating the learning into our life, gets ahead of our verification of theory. If we are not living out those theories, acting out our hypotheses as a method of digestion, awaiting the results for the purposes of verification, then moving forward in our reading can only be done blindly, out of some kind of impatience, perhaps fear. So it is clear that the art of reading exists side by side with the art of living. The science of living is the conscious engagement with life coupled with a process of self-education necessary for the fulfillment of one’s desires for progress.
To reiterate, academians or those professors who live and work in classrooms, detached from the world of which they theorize are destined to become lost in meaningless nuance. True education has life as its testing ground and an educated human being or a true intellectual is constantly engaged in a process of research and experiment with oneself as the subject. In one’s research, if it is to be considered artful, one would read the master of the master and one would define the unknown principle by defining the surrounding principles. In this way an artful reader clarifies and reduces knowledge to its essential elements. In this process a reader would have to maintain the object at all times aware of the tendency toward distraction.
One form of distraction in education has its origin in pride. Wishing to find, in the great library of human thought, something original a student may get lost in the Study of the Obscure. The historical picture is one full of tangential elements, human groups that expressed themselves in ways that did not add to the great lineage of present knowledge except for the ways in which they might have helped the great discoveries in the form of resistance. Many scholars choose to study these obscure elements of history hoping that in the resurrection of one of these failed notions that a great and profound glory might be bestowed upon them. It is the educational version of the ‘get rich quick’ scheme. It is a long-shot investment and it evidences a kind of mediocrity of character. If one wishes to become great one must study the greats. If one believes in history as a proper historical force then the attempt to manipulate it is as futile as the attempts made to manipulate gravity. It is paradoxical to believe in the greatness of history simultaneous with a belief in its failure to recognize truth. Students of the Obscure are victims of arrogance.
True humility rests in an unashamed submission to the great teachers of human history. If the tangential philosophies that define spiritual victory inasmuch as they contrast them have glaring contradictions it is usually a great waste of time trying to understand their existence. When one begins to read artfully focusing on those great teachers of history the object becomes clearer.
Disclaimer
I am aware that at this point there is a slight, unaccounted for, discrepancy in my argument. I am insisting upon the importance of passionate research for the object, self-awareness, education, etc. yet I have not tied it in any structural way to the activity of social progress. I have yet to discuss why one would be so motivated and how that motivation relates to the manifestation of progressive action. In the next chapter I will discuss motives in a very conclusive way and how they relate to our perception and engagement with reality and that will help clarify the duality of these two ideas, the art of reading and social progress, and how they are bound to one another; all of which will be supported further by the chapter on self-purification.
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