One : Orientation
/“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”
To the Reader.
This first post will be longer than future posts because I’d like to give you a warm welcome, and a little bit of an orientation, especially for any newcomers. So welcome! Context creates meaning, and that’s why this is the post where I’ll lay out how we got to here, get everyone on the same page, and then all go forward from there.
My intention for Helping Friendly Corner is to keep most of the posts short and dense and heady, but this feels like the right moment to tell you the story, once and for all, from the very beginning…
The Legend
Legend has it that a long time ago, in a land far away, there was a book that was written that contained within it All The Inherent Knowledge in the Universe. That book was called The Helping Friendly Book, and it possessed the ancient Secrets to Eternal Joy and Never Ending Splendor.
Unfortunately, The Helping Friendly Book and all its secrets fell into the wrong hands long ago, so instead of the Knowledge being used to enlighten people, it was used to brainwash and manipulate them, and this ushered in the dark age of the tyranny of the dulled mind, where some say we find ourselves today.
In 2013, after hearing rumors of the legendary lost book, we decided to form a search party and call ourselves the Helping Friendly Book Club, and we’ve been searching for the lost Secrets to Eternal Joy and Never Ending Splendor ever since.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the tyranny of the dull mind.
What is the Quest?
It used to be that All the Inherent Knowledge in the Universe could be found in one place, at one time, in one book, which seemed like a great idea until The Helping Friendly Book fell into the wrong hands and the Knowledge was used to usher in the dark age of the tyranny of the dulled mind. Whoops.
What turns out to be so dangerous about having All The Inherent Knowledge in the Universe in one place, at one time, is that part of what All the Inherent Knowledge includes is how to mind-control people without them being aware of it. Because the people being mind-controlled aren’t even aware it's happening, it makes it that much more dangerous when it's in the wrong hands. Even though the Knowledge itself is neutral per sey, it has the power to create a self-reinforcing feedback loop of mental programming that can keep people dull for generations if it gets out of hand. Ironically, the best way to enslave people is to make them think they’re free, and then tell them that freedom is being threatened. This is nuclear grade Knowledge we’re talking about.
So now, as a precaution, instead of all being found in one place, the Knowledge is spread out, couched in symbols, and interwoven through many books, through many ages, by a long lineage of lofty wits. Now, instead of learning all the SEJNES at once, a person (such as yourself) must embark on their own journey of self-revelation, discovering the Knowledge SEJNES by SEJNES, weaving golden thread with golden thread to create within themselves an intellectual mirror of the universe. That person can then learn to use that mirror-image to develop and increase their understanding of deeper reality. We call this aggregate of Knowledge ‘The Ship of SEJNES’, which is a Philosophical Ship of the Imagination that is greater than the sum of all its parts, but we’ll come back to that. I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we must come at last to regard the world.”
The labyrinth at the farm in alabama
Preparing for a Hero’s Journey
One of the first paradoxes you have to face when you embark on the Quest to discover the lost Secrets to Eternal Joy and Never Ending Splendor is what to take with you, and what to leave behind. When you go on a ‘Hero’s Journey’, there are only so many presuppositions about the truth you can start with, and only so many you can hold onto at any one time. You also have to assume that you’re going to be discovering new truths along the way, and in order to make room for those new truths, you’re going to have to learn to let go of some of your old ideas about the truth, which in hindsight, will be the ideas about the truth that you’re holding onto right now. Think about that.
“The aim of this book [club], therefore, has been to suggest that if we take a fresh look at the basic conditions of our existence, they may perhaps be seen in a radically new way. In fact, they may be seen in a way that is nearly completely the opposite of what we have been brought up to believe. This is what philosophy does, if it is done well.”
When the moment comes it can be a little disorienting as you start rearranging your basic assumptions about reality, and then suddenly realize a lot of assumptions you have about reality are actually all built on top of just a few underlying assumptions that you’re now starting to see and think about differently. Your whole psychological pyramid might collapse from the bottom, which feels weird, but it’s actually the first step. Some journey’s start with an orientation, like High School, but this journey starts with a DIS-orientation, like HIGH School. Get it? The more mentally prepared you are for this, the less of a shock that part of the journey can be, but it does still need to be a shock. We all need to jostle our mind’s to reframe our thinking. Like the moment when a seed suddenly moves from its dormant stage to its germinating stage, we all need a little jolt to get us started.
I’m sort of giving you a map here, but you’re going to learn that the map is not the territory. You’re also going to learn how to use language like a thorn to remove a thorn, but that will come later. For now you can just imagine this process of transformation being something similar to the way a lobster molts, or a snake sheds its skin, or a person goes on a pilgrimage...
“Nevertheless it is important to understand how the present is like a seer with two faces, one looking toward the future, and the other toward the past. Accordingly, I have decided to prepare for your instruction tables of both ages, containing not only the past course and progress of science, but also Anticipations of things to come. The nature of these tables you could not conjecture before you see them. A genuine Anticipation of them is beyond your scope, nor would you be aware of the lack of it unless it was put into your hands. It is a compliment reserved to some of the choicer spirits among you whom I hope to win thereby. But generally speaking science is to be sought from the light of nature, not from the darkness of Antiquity.”
According to Francis Bacon, imagination is personified by Janus. Janus is the chief of the Roman gods and hierophant of the mysteries—the gatekeeper who holds the keys and opens the door for us to pass through into a higher consciousness and revelation of truth, or who prevents us from doing so, depending on our purity of motive. As Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
Helping Friendly Corner
What follows here, at Helping Friendly Corner, will be an extension of that quest to discover the lost secrets Secrets to Eternal Joy and Never Ending Splendor. As I’m sure you can imagine, after eight years of searching, we’ve discovered quite a lot, which means there’s a lot to catch up on, and still lots more to learn. For this reason, we’re doing to follow Janus’ lead in our design because “the present is like a seer with two faces, one looking toward the future, and the other toward the past.” Some posts will face backwards towards the 32 books on the Quest we’ve already read, and some posts will face forwards towards what lay ahead. Some posts will probably wax soulful about the goings on of the day, and that’ll be fine too. We’ll just surrender to the flow and see where it takes us.
So what I thought I’d do, to get us started, is to just follow my pinecone and share some curated readings that are near and dear to me. Your attention is your most valuable commodity, and I respect that, so these readings will be only of the highest Quality. I will try to keep them relatively short so as to not to be overwhelming, but everything I post in here will be hand picked pieces of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle, drenched in brain honey and ready for your illumination.
By design these posts will tell an unfolding story and build on themselves, like bricolage. My hope is each post becomes a building block in an ever ascending uncapped pyramid of philosophy in the intellectual sphere of your imagination. The only way to build a pyramid of philosophy is from a firm foundation up, from the laws of the visible and then to the laws of the invisible, so the first thing we need to do is to lay a foundation. We need a firm foundation in order to build a pyramid of philosophy on top of it, which is why the first part of Helping Friendly Corner will be focused on laying down some cornerstones. The cornerstones, the fundamental patterns that we come across again and again in our readings, are what you’ll use later to build an entire pattern language, and a pattern language can take you all sorts of places.
For now it’s best to be patient and just know that it’s going to take a little time to set up the background of knowledge necessary for some of the bigger insights to phorph into place, but that process can’t be rushed, and it’s quite enjoyable anyways. I understand some of you may have some extra time at home on your hands, and you’re looking for something worthwhile to spend it on. I hope Helping Friendly Corner can offer you some suggestions for that and play some small role in your days to come. There’s nothing quite like quarantine during a pandemic to get the creative juices flowing, is there?
It’s easy to get stuck overthinking the first step, so to begin, I’ll just begin, and follow my pinecone from there. Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions or feedback, I’m all ears.
Yours in the foam,
Your Identity is a Mosaic #SEJNES
“Ishmael thought for a moment. “I’ll give you a general idea of where we’re heading, then you’ll understand.”
“Okay.”
“Mother Culture, whose voice has been in your ear since the day of your birth, has given you an explanation of how things came to be this way. You know it well; everyone in your culture knows it well. But this explanation wasn’t given to you all at once. No one ever sat you down and said, ‘Here is how things came to be this way, beginning ten or fifteen billion years ago right up to the present.’ Rather, you assembled this explanation like a mosaic: from a million bits of information presented to you in various ways by others who share that explanation. You assembled it from the table talk of your parents, from cartoons you watched on television, from Sunday School lessons, from your textbooks and teachers, from news broadcasts, from movies, novels, sermons, plays, newspapers, and all the rest. Are you with me so far?”
“I think so.”
“This explanation of how things came to be this way is ambient in your culture. Everyone knows it and everyone accepts it without question.”
“Okay.”
“As we make our journey here, we’re going to be reexamining key pieces of that mosaic. We’re going to be taking them out of your mosaic and fitting them into an entirely different mosaic: into an entirely different explanation of how things came to be this way.”
“Okay.”
“And when we’re finished, you’ll have an entirely new perception of the world and of all that’s happened here. And it won’t matter in the least whether you remember how that perception was assembled. The journey itself is going to change you, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.”
“Right. I see what you mean now.”
Title Page for Francis Bacon’s Advancement and Proficiency of Learning, Published 1605
Bacon’s Method for Building a Pyramid of Philosophy
Stage 1: Collect all the information you can about the subject at hand.
Stage 2: Extrapolate temporary axioms from your collected mass of facts.
Stage 3: Design experiments to test those axioms out in the physical world.
Stage 4: Present what you’ve learned to your higher mind through “poetry” to make it stick.
Stage 5: Repeat the process of extracting axioms from what you’ve learned and design new experiments to test them further.
Stage 6: Present the verified axioms in the form of summary laws.