Eight-ball into the side pocket! It's so easy, or it is with a little practice. You line up the 8-ball with the side pocket, you fix the line in your mind, you line up your cue ball with the spot on the 8-ball intersected by your imaginary line to the pocket, now you line up your cue stick, decide whether to roll the ball straight, whether to impact the cue ball low or in the middle, depending on where you want the cue ball to go after it impacts the 8-ball, decide if you want any English on the ball, and make your stroke. If your stroke is true, the 8-ball will fall into the side pocket: far more often than not. If it doesn't, then you didn't stroke it right, or, you didn't see your lines correctly, didn't make the right decision about where your balls impacted. In any case, unless there was an outside disturbance, an earthquake, the table disintegrated, the 8-ball went where you made if go regardless of where you intended to make it go. That's physics, that's the physical universe, the universe Gregory Bateson calls
Pleroma. The trouble with our thinking is we think, and we are trained to think, by not very bright or original thinkers, that we live in the physical universe. Well, indirectly we do: the physical universe as modeled by our symbolic universe. But it's that later universe, or combination of universes,
Creatura,
Sentiens, that we directly live in: and in these universes of life, of symbols, of intelligence, of awareness, of false awareness, things are not simple.
I repeat a favorite illustration of my son's:
Black Crayon. The school system learned that children who attempted suicide had used more black crayon in their drawings than normal: so they took all the children's black crayons away. The morons in charge of schools and children confused symptom and disease: they thought that by preventing the symptom, use of black crayons, they could prevent the disease. (Their action was irrelevant: except as a betrayal of liberty.)
Now here's an illustration that's long been a favorite of mine. The kid acts up in school, he's over-active, they say. They give the kid a med, you learn that the med is classified as a "stimulant," you go
whoa! You're trying to calm the kid down, a stimulant is the last thing you should give him. Wrong: the stimulant tried by the staff stimulates the kid's activity repressor: it's the kid's natural depressive system that stimulated. Paradox? Only superficially. The logic is complex, but not illogical. That's Creatura, Sentiens: the universe of life.
But, I repeat: we think we live in Pleroma. We think that causes are as simple as lining up the 8-ball. We all do it. I do it.
Ferinstance, if you've read around pk enough surely you've seen his iterations of his identification with Jesus, the martyred god, with Galileo, the martyred genius .... The more so since my arrest in 2006. Still, it was not new thinking. I've identified with Jesus since childhood, and so do all Christians, even if not to the extent I do (or with the manifest justification!)
But dig this: in pk thinking, Christianity itself, Jesus himself, is subject to the same simplifications, the same vanities. God made man in God's image, a vain, self-maximizing fragment of consciousness.
I offered the world Illichian social networking in 1970 when I joined Illich's deschooling ideas to found the Free Learning Exchange. Cybernetic data basing, digital record keeping, in a public institution Not Controlled by Government! might allow humans to realize some of the social implications of Christianity, help us live together convivially, without the arrogance and interference of imperial kleptocracy. There, see? I think of myself as a
cause! Well, of course I
am a
cause, and so are we all. But what is being caused is very complex: maybe there's an 8-ball involved and a cue ball, and maybe also an earthquake, and the table disintegrating.
When I invented the internet I was very much aware, and have routinely said, that "my" ideas had been floating around me for a decade at least, 1960ish: so much flotsam and jetsam. Now here's me, flotsam floating around amid jetsam. I encounter Illich, himself a jetsam floating around amid flotsam. He refers to Jesus in a way I resonate with, though I see Jesus as also so much flotsam floating around amid so much jetsam: in a world where Augustus Caesar, himself a Sargasso sea of flotsam and jetsam, was deluding himself that he could take 8-ball-in-the-side-pocket control of the world! Augustus influenced the world. So did Jesus. So do I, and you. So does the catatonic institutionalized in a box hosed out every other day by someone without a green card who the moment before stole the hearing aid from some old lady in the same facility.
Now here's the United States, stealing everything that is or isn't nailed down, paying royalties to those perceived as powerful and stomping extra hard on those perceived to be defenseless, deaf, and not accidentally, to my claims that it's
my ideas that were stolen.
This is familiar. This is the universe of life, subset Sentiens, complicated by politics: the state of people organized for leverage, bossing people down-tide of them. I don't claim to understand it all: what I claim is that the Augustus Caesars, the Hitlers, the Nixons, don't understand it, understand if far less well than I do, but lack the humility to admit it, as well as the intelligence to understand it half as well as I do: and too stupid to see that it's they who are helping to disintegrate the table!
The majority is always smarter than some minority, but also less smart, far less, than some other minority.
I like to trust that god is smart, but fear that he too, at least the capitalized one, God, is so much flotsam. So instead, these days, I just trust that the 8-ball is going where we actually sent it, never mind where we meant to send it.
Bateson's cosmology of Pleroma and Creatura I report on and developed further (Sentiens ...) at Macroinformation.org. That domain got destroyed, is still down, but some material is being restored (and further explored) at my Macroinformation blog. (Same host as IonaArc.)
