Inspiration and Insight

Critique of pure love

Edward Chalk

Critique of pure love

The post-modern striving to create conscientious and global citizens has resulted in a generation that is unsure of its own identity. Stripped of national pride, parochial values and family ties, modern man struggles to identify a purpose in life that is unique to himself, and that justifies his value as a unique individual.

Nature abhors a vacuum, however, and so a plethora of mind-numbingly virtuous causes has risen from the ashes of conservative values. The plight of the newly-declared misunderstood and underrated, has galvanised millions out of their hedonistic stupor and poster superhero infatuation. Thus the sins of the arrogant ages have garishly rematerialised to arouse the indignation of all decent thinking people.

And so we are left undecided. Would it be better to live in an age of chivalry, classical culture and spurious mores? Or is it better to embrace slavish freedom and autocratic salvation?

 

One love

Probably the most undiscussed assumption of the modern zeitgeist, is the belief that all love is one. Not only did the hippies promulgate the ideal of unfettered love, they also promulgated the idea that love is indivisible and universal. Mankind is united under this sublime spirit of goodness, all expressions of which are one. Because there is no difference between the electric love of an open-air rock concert and the sublime devotion of a sanctuary, love can serve as the universal solvent of man’s differences.

It is not altogether clear if this assumption is correct, however. Love is the power to give of the self, and the self is hard-earned and different for everyone. That is why the love that comes after a long period of striving and accomplishment, is an altogether deeper and sweeter love than the artless love of whimsy and desire. That is also why every culture has its own unique way of displaying love, and why every person within each culture has their own unique way of loving, each according to their inner-self and persona.

So instead of assuming only one love, it would seem more likely that there are instead infinite loves. One nation’s love is not the same as another’s, one man’s love is not the same as another’s, and the love of each day with its particular challenges, is not the same as the love of yesterday or tomorrow.

 

Local love

The interaction and fusing of two souls that we call intimacy, comes at the intersection of the distinct and unique loves that each has to give the other. The more different the loves, and the greater the distance from which the souls communicate, the greater the beauty and grace each bestows the other. In this way, the greatest oneness is born of the greatest separateness. Additionally, when strong opposites attract, the forces of attraction are localised between the attracted. However when weak opposites attract, the forces of attraction spread out and are diffused among the surroundings.

This is why the more we buy into the notion that all love is one, the weaker the bonds of love become. Relationships become increasingly ephemeral, because there is no difference who the lover is and who the beloved. Lovers become desperate for expensive shared experiences, since these experiences comprise the surrounding world’s ratification of their romance. And so the cottar’s gentle evening walk with his wife has been snuffed out by the psychedelic overture of modern loving.

Despite the hippies’ promise of love for all, we live in a world where true, enduring love has become increasingly rare, so that the banality of ubiquitous love has resulted in no love at all.

 

In conclusion

To find true, sincere love we must find character, and to find character we must find challenge. Once upon a time, challenge was provided by a parochial system. In order to profess to love, one had to first meet the challenges demanded from those who aspired to such an elevated calling.

For good or for bad, these prerequisites have gone the way of yesterday’s newspaper, and so we have to challenge ourselves to create our own trials. Perhaps it is not obvious that we do not need to refine our characters, force ourselves to live for others and work hard to find the meaningfulness in every fleeting moment and chance encounter.

There is no easy way to earn true selfhood. Maybe the most we can hope for is that if we are true to ourselves, we can be true to others, and others can be true to us. But being true requires a lifetime commitment of grit and hard work.

Problem solving and autonomy

Edward Chalk

Problem solving and autonomy

Situation

You are faced with a real problem that is augmented by your imagination. Therefore you end up with a larger problem, which is part real and part imaginary.

The imaginary problem exacerbates the real problem, since you may discount possible solutions and make wrong decisions.

Approach

You can solve a real problem, but not an imaginary one. Therefore you have to determine which part of the problem is real and which part of the problem is imaginary.

How

Use the following problem solving technique:

  1. Think about how to solve the problem, to the best of your ability.
  2. Identify the most powerful person of whom you know, for example, the Queen or the Prime Minister.
  3. Imagine explaining the problem to them, and them telling you how they would solve the problem.
  4. Take the opposite approach suggested in Step #3, and add this to the solution from Step #1.
  5. You now have the solution to the real part of your problem.

Why

The imaginary part of the problem is based on the feeling that you are in the power of other people. Therefore, when you imagine yourself asking a “powerful person” for the solution, the “powerful person” will “solve the problem” by asserting their power over the people whose power you are in.

Since you are not, in reality, in anyone’s power, the actual answer must lie in the opposite direction indicated by the “powerful person”. In other words, the real answer is to realise that you are not in anyone’s power, and then to address the actual problem.

Example

You are currently employed and you are offered a better job by your company’s competition. However, it is not clear if the business venture that the competition wants you for, will eventuate. Additionally, if the company that you currently work for finds out that you are considering a job offer by the competition, they will make life difficult for you.

Going through the above steps provides the following result:

  • Your own best solution: Take the job offered by the competition and run the risk that it will not work out.
  • Powerful person: The Queen
  • The Queen’s solution: Tell the first company they have to employ you even if the venture with the second company does not work out.
  • Take the opposite approach: The Queen suggested that you coerce your current employer into continuing your employment. The opposite of this suggestion is that you should remove yourself from the sphere of influence of your current employer. I.e. the competition should become the source of your income, regardless of whether the new job works out.

Adding this approach to the solution from Step 1 gives, “Take the job offered by the competition and do not run the risk that it will not work out.”

Practically speaking, this means that your new employer should guarantee your income regardless of whether the new job works out. For example, the company could escrow your income for one year with a third party. If the job works out, this money would become your salary. If not, you would receive the money anyway.

In summary

To progress in life, maintain your personal autonomy. This means, you are in no-one else’s power, and no-one else is in your power.

Let go of what you think is making you safe, and fly.

Emotional homeostasis

Edward Chalk 1 Comment

Emotional homeostasis

Every living thing must maintain a stable internal environment, so that it can survive and grow. This ability to self-regulate is called homeostasis, which the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines as follows:

Homeostasis, any self-regulating process by which biological systems tend to maintain stability while adjusting to conditions that are optimal for survival. If homeostasis is successful, life continues; if unsuccessful, disaster or death ensues. The stability attained is actually a dynamic equilibrium, in which continuous change occurs yet relatively uniform conditions prevail.

Whatever the external conditions, all living things must maintain a stable internal environment, for life to continue.

Just as a stable biochemical environment is vital to biological life, so is a stable emotional environment vital to our continued personal inner life. And just as a plant’s internal stability is actually a dynamic equilibrium, that is constantly adjusted to allow for changing external circumstances, so is our inner emotional stability a dynamic equilibrium that we continually adjust in response to emotional stimuli.

For plants, the chemical makeup of the sap provides a basic measure of health. What measurements can we take to check our own inner emotional health?

 

Awareness

The gift of consciousness allows us to be aware of ourselves, of others and of the world. However, our initial awareness is always of ourselves.

Our simplest feeling of self-awareness is a sense of being, “I am,” All other feelings, thoughts and actions are based on this premise. This seemingly simple statement incorporates two fundamental notions:

  • I: By using the word “I”, we imply that we are unique, “No-one else is me, and I am different to everyone else.”
  • Am: I have a sense of life and of emotional existence. This sense of being gives me a feeling of continuity and wellness.

Each of these basic types of self-awareness is vital to our emotional well-being.

 

Self-definition

If I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you. But if I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you.

Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, Tales of the Hasidim: The Later Masters

Every sentient thought implicitly includes the word “I”. “I see a car,” “I am hurt,” “I am happy,” “I am glad to see you” or “I know them.”

Using the word “I” implies that we are unique, distinct individuals, who possess our own feelings and thoughts.

Our sense of uniqueness is strengthened when we do things that are uniquely us. When we experience wonder and love, when we think originally and when we formulate our own thoughts and opinions, we create building blocks of unique self-identity. Our sense of uniqueness is also strengthened when other people recognise us for who we are.

On the other hand, our feeling of individuality can also be weakened, for example when we feel that we have been discounted as a person and, instead, have been treated as a thing (i.e. we have been objectified).

It is worthwhile noting that it is difficult to form strong relationships without a healthy sense of individuality. This is because our ability to relate to other people on their own terms, depends on our own sense of uniqueness. “I, as a unique individual, understand your individual uniqueness.”

 

Being


“No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.” “Wouldn’t it, really?” said Alice, in a tone of great surprise. “Of course not,” said the Mock Turtle. “Why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going on a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?”

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Just as we do not go anywhere without a purpose, we also do not go anywhere without a sense of being. We feel that we are in a street, we are in a crowd, we are in an office or we are at home.

Our sense of being is strengthened in a number of ways. It is strengthened when we receive love and recognition. It is strengthened when we feel good about our own accomplishments. And it is strengthened when we tune in to the being of other things, whether those other things are people, animals or plants.

When we feel good about ourselves, our sense of being becomes stronger and more positive, “Being me is fantastic.” This self-affirmation makes us full of life and gives us the strength to carry on.

On the other hand, when we feel down, our sense of being becomes doubtful, “I’m not sure that being me is a good idea.” This lack of positive self-affirmation can make us depressed and directionless.

 

Thought experiment

Throughout life, we work to build our sense of uniqueness, our sense of self-worth and our sense of “being”. Like all other endeavours, this has its ups and downs.

  • Ups happen when we feel appreciated, when we feel loved or when we sense the brilliance of just “being me”.
  • Downs happen when we feel that we have failed, when we feel that we have been rejected or when we feel that our individuality has been denied.

The more we build up a bedrock sense of individuality and self-worth, the more we are able to motivate ourselves to progress, to do and to build. Investing time in developing a bedrock sense of individual self-worth can also see us through when the going gets tough.

A useful thought exercise to measure our sense of uniqueness and self-worth is as follows:

 

Imagine that the entire city you live in suddenly ceases to exist. There is absolutely nothing left, all the streets and the buildings vanish. You alone are left standing there.

Imagine the following specifically, no longer exist: The train (or car, bus, bike etc.) you take every day to work, the train-station you get off at, the business district you work in and the office building your company is housed in.

 

Now, think about the following:

“I”

  • Can you define yourself as a person, with all the props of your daily routine removed?
  • To what extent are you defined by the environment in which you live, and to what extent do you define yourself?
  • Is the “city you” the same as the real “you”?
  • Is what’s important to the “city you” the same as what’s important to the real “you”?
  • Are you doing what the “real you” wants, with your life?

“Am”

  • Do you need a reason to be happy (e.g. you have just bought something, received a promotion, gone on a holiday etc.), or can you just be happy with who you are?
  • With all the hustle and bustle of the city gone forever, are you happy with who you are?
  • Is your feeling of self-worth because of who you are, or because of what you do?
  • To what extent are you significant because of your job?
  • Do you decide what makes you valuable as a person, or are you living someone else’s expectations of you?

Now, let the city come back into existence, and take the real “you” back into the city.

Intuition and meaning

Edward Chalk 1 Comment

Intuition and meaning

Intuition and meaning go hand-in-hand; through intuition we gain true understanding of subjects with which we are grappling, through deep understanding we come to further intuition. However, although intuition can lead to valuable breakthroughs, it can be hard to come by.

It is worthwhile understanding what intuition is, so that we can increase the natural flashes of insight that give us new understanding.

 

Microchips and intuition

One of my favourite stories about intuition relates to the 741 op-amp.

The 741 op-amp is the godfather of all chip-based amplifiers, it was designed by David Fullagar in 1968 at Fairchild Semiconductor.

The IEEE Chip Hall of Fame relates the following story:

David Fullagar… realized that the chip, however brilliant, had a couple of drawbacks. The biggest of these was that the IC’s input stage, the so-called front end, was overly sensitive to noise in some chips, because of semiconductor quality variations.

“The front end looked kind of kludgy,” he says.

Fullagar embarked on his own design. The solution to the front end problem turned out to be profoundly simple—“it just came to me, I don’t know, driving to Tahoe”—and consisted of a couple of extra transistors. That additional circuitry made the amplification smoother and consistent from chip to chip.

Fullagar took his design to the head of R&D at Fairchild, a guy named Gordon Moore, who sent it to the company’s commercial division. The new chip, the μA741, would become the standard for op-amps. The IC—and variants created by Fairchild’s competitors—have sold in the hundreds of millions.

Part of David Fullagar’s brain had been thinking about the chip design problem in the background. When that part of his brain finished processing, it told David the answer.

Why was the background process in David’s brain able to come up with the correct chip design, when David could not consciously come up with the answer?

 

Types of knowledge

Our first impressions of the world come through direct experience via sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. After this brief introduction to the world, we are sent to pre-school and our education begins. The teachers tell us that the way to think is to use words to label those things which we have directly experienced. Using words, we can define relationships between those things. These relationships allow us to know about things which we have not directly experienced.

  • This is a car.
  • Look, the car has wheels and an engine.
  • Not only does this car have wheels and an engine, but all cars have wheels and an engine.
  • So if ever you see a car, you can know that it has wheels and an engine.

By using words and classifications, we have converted experiential knowledge into abstract knowledge, which can then be applied to further real-life situations.

 

Words as an interface

Every writer has a different way of expressing the same idea. As Strunk and White say (page 64):

All writers, by the way they use the language, reveal something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities, and their biases. This is inevitable as well as enjoyable. All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation — it is the Self escaping into the open.

The way a writer puts words to paper gives a unique insight into the way that the writer themselves perceived their subject matter. Therefore, we can understand a writer’s thoughts and feelings through their writing, just as we can understand an artist’s thoughts and feelings by admiring their art.

This rule does not only apply to writers. Every time anyone speaks, they do so in a way which reflects their unique way of perceiving the subject of their speech. Speech is the interface between our internal sensations and our external expression of our inner world. Our inner world is wordless, it is where we maintain our internal equilibrium. It is the world beyond our inner-selves, that is created by people communicate with each other using speech, that contains words. Our inner sensations and thoughts are invariably richer than the words we use to express ourselves, which is why we sometimes find it difficult to find the right words.

 

The problem with learning

We learn from others in many ways; by attending lessons and lectures, by reading textbooks, by listening to the radio and by watching TV (or their modern equivalents). In most cases, the majority of the information is transmitted verbally.

When we absorb that verbal information, we assimilate the way that the speaker has subsciously decided to string the words together, as well as the words they used. Subsequently our thinking on that subject is coloured by the way the speaker decided to express themselves. When this happens, we can become locked in to thinking in the same way as the person who introduced us to the subject. Even if we formulate our own thoughts concerning the subject matter, our new thoughts are simply an extrapolation of the essential intuition that lay in the words that we first heard on the subject matter.

Therefore the problem with learning is that the more we learn, the more we tend to lose touch with our own natural way of thinking.

 

The art of forgetting

When we turn the lights off in the study, we give our inner-selves a chance to figure out the true meaning of our studies. By turning away from the artificial world of words and entering the world of naturalness and spontaneity, we break free of the circular thought-patterns that result from thinking like other people.

Intuition occurs after we abstract and internalise the verbal knowledge that we have learnt from other people. Once we understand the knowledge on our own terms and in our own way, we can home in on the basic principles and think intuitively and about the best way to build on our understanding.

In other words; after you have figured out what your knowledge means to you, you can gain intuition. But in order to know what something means to you, you sometimes need to stop thinking about it!

As David Fullagar was driving to Tahoe, he had entirely forgotten about the chip design problem, to the extent that he was surprised when the correct solution popped into his head. But it was exactly because he had forgotten what he was working on, that he was able to break free of the old thinking in chip design and come up with circuitry that is still in use today.

Emotions, thought and sunlight

Edward Chalk

Our star, the sun, is powered by a massive nuclear furnace at its core. The energy generated in the sun’s core travels from the core through the radiative zone, to the outer surface of the sun. From the outer surface of the sun, the sun radiates this energy as light and as other forms of electromagnetic radiation. When light from the sun reaches the part of the earth on which we are standing, then we say “The sun is shining.”

The distance from the sun’s core to the outer surface of the sun is approximately 550,000 kilometres, so it should take the energy generated in the sun’s core 1.8 seconds to get from the sun’s core to the sun’s surface. However in reality it can hundreds of years for a photon (the smallest unit of electromagnetic radiation) to get from the sun’s core to the surface of the sun.

This is because as the photon travels from the sun’s core through the convection layer of the sun, it keeps on bumping into atoms which absorb the photon, and which subsequently re-emit the photon in a random direction. Because the photon keeps on changing direction, it takes a long time to travel a relatively short distance.

 

Like the sun

In a sense, the way in which we experience emotion and thought is analogous to the way the sun creates and radiates energy and light.

  • We have an emotional furnace at our core where we form emotions and feelings. In this inner emotional world we do not think or use words. That means to say that our inner feelings are not experienced verbally, instead we sense them as a part of the very fabric of our being and of our becoming.
  • We have faculties of thought where we process knowledge and information. When we think, we use words and imagery in order to make calculations, to gain intuition and to learn by making comparisons. Eventually when we come to a conclusion, we decide what to say and what actions to take. Just like the sun radiates energy from its surface, so too we use words and actions to convey our emotions and feelings to the people with whom we interact.
  • Between our inner emotional core and our faculties of verbal thought, we have a emotion-to-thought transference zone. Within our emotion-to-thought transference zone, we connect our inner wordless emotions with the real life things and people with which we associate our emotions. Making this connection allows us to formulate the thoughts that will allow us to actualise and demonstrate our feelings.

    Conversely also, our transference zone is capable of transforming words and information into inner emotions. This happens when we convert the stimuli that we experience and the words that are spoken to us, into inner emotions and feelings. In other words, our transference zone is where we decide what the world means to us and how we will convey our meaning to the world.

    Just as it takes a long time for energy to travel from the sun’s core to the sun’s surface, so too it can take us a long time to decide how to embody our emotions in thoughts, in words and in actions.

What exactly happens in our emotion-to-thought transference zone, and how do we convert wordless emotional energy into verbal thoughts and ideas?

Icons

There are some things about which we feel so deeply, that when we are asked to explain exactly why we feel so deeply about these things, we are unable to expand any further and we simply reiterate our feelings.

  • “Why is your family so important to you?” – “It just is.”
  • “Why is your football team so important to you?” – “It just is.”
  • “Why is nature so important to you?” – “It just is.”

These are the things which we live for, and in some cases, are prepared to die for. These are the things which may we spend our entire lives bringing to fruition and making a reality. Because these icons are so important to us, the concern that we feel for them lives in the depths of our hearts and is ingrained into the very fabric of our being.

At a psychological level, because our icons are so deeply rooted within our consciousnesses, they are the first material thing that we perceive when we look out at the world from within our inner selves. Our icons are the first reality that we encounter on the journey from our inner world to the world at large. Hence we come to associate our inner emotions with these iconic realities.

On the other hand, since our icons are actual tangible things, we formulate verbal thoughts that address the complexities which we face in making our icons become a reality. In this way, our icons form the bridge between our inner emotional world and our verbally based thought processes.

Harmony and success

Successful people are often those who have aligned their inner emotional core, their life-ideals and their thoughts and actions. Because they have achieved this level of harmony and personal unity, they are able to apply their entire energy and drive to achieving the goals that are important for them.

In order to achieve this level personal unity, there must be harmony between our inner emotional core, our verbal thoughts and ideas, and our iconic life endeavours.

To accomplish this state we can

  • Think about what our iconic life endeavours are, what they mean to us and how we can bring them to fruition.
  • Make sure that we are working towards this goal, however long that will take us.
  • Make sure we are not doing anything contradictory to our long term goals, however attractive the short term gains may appear to be.

By treasuring our primary beliefs and our core values, we can achieve inner harmony, a sense of purpose, focussed personal energy and ultimately success.

 

Homework

Think about one ideal which you treasure above all else. Determine if you are working towards making your icon into a reality or if you have become sidetracked. Set yourself measurable goals and celebrate together with friends when you accomplish them.

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