I used to be Afraid of the Dark

My older brother slept in a pitch black room.  I idolized him for that because I was afraid of the dark.  I idolized him enough to eventually develop the habit myself. Now I love the dark.  There are a couple ideas that helped me make the transition, and I want to help you make it too, though not in a literal sense.

One idea is that a lack of light is a disadvantage to a victim just as much as it is a disadvantage to an attacker.  I wasn't really afraid of real attackers though.

I was afraid of ghosts and wraiths and poltergeists.  No physical evidence has ever been produced showing that something supernatural was responsible for any kind of suffering.  I eventually mastered something I call "apophatic" reasoning, which is a term I got from Mark Passio.  The lack of physical evidence for supernatural causes of human suffering is powerful when you understand how quickly and forcefully such evidence would spread.

Supernatural causes, philosophically, are impossible.  "Supernatural" means beyond the nature of the universe.  "Cause" identifies a relationship in the nature of the universe.  Supernatural, philosophically, is a euphemism for "I don't know enough."  Roll a die and it will land on a number.  Can you predict the number?  No, you can't, not if you roll it properly, and it's balanced.  That doesn't make the number supernatural.  Maybe you'll roll three sixes in a row.  That also does not make it supernatural.  If you continue rolling sixes and you cannot get the die to land on another number, then you can pretend it's supernatural, but any decent physicist will offer to analyze your die to see if it's loaded.  Perhaps he will not find the reason.  Would you then call it supernatural?

I wouldn't.  To give up the hunt for the reason your die lands only on the number six is to abandon one of the best faculties human beings have, reason.  It takes a lot of humility to study such a die for weeks and continually admit that you're still "in the dark" about why it always lands on the same number.  Humility is valuable.  It stops us from believing fairy tales.

The non-literal sense in which I wish to help you not to be afraid of the dark is to encourage you to keep looking.  Whatever it is that makes the die always land on six is a metaphor for how we improve the world.  Most people give up, and that's a metaphor for accepting fake authority, also known as relying on government.  When authority is not fake, it does not use punishment.  It has no use for punishment.  It even encourages the kind of thing that fake authority punishes, because that kind of thing (going against the advice of authority) provides great learning experiences.

Governments and police are fake authorities, which is why they punish people for breaking their laws.  A law is a discovery about how the universe works.  Watch a dog with a bone.  If another creature approaches, the dog growls, "This is my bone.  Get away or I'll bite you."  Humans, well, sane humans, do this too.  Perhaps we don't bite (or growl), but we demand that our property rights be respected.  At least we make that demand to other humans whom we view as equals.  Some of us don't make that demand to fake authorities, and that is because we are, figuratively, afraid of the dark.

When we speak truth to power, we are insisting that a balanced die will land on random sides when "rolled properly," no matter how difficult it is to show why a particular die doesn't have this characteristic.  After listening to some lectures on physics by a guy name David Harriman, I blame Immanuel Kant for the idea that it makes sense to give up on finding a reason for the unexpected behavior of the die.  I also lay part of the blame on him for the legitimacy of fake authority.

People like Victoria Roberts and Nancy G Edmunds use fake authority to hurt people, either because they derive some benefit from it or because they don't know any better.  Either way, I wish I were closer to them (geographically) so that I could confront one or both of them.  I'm not afraid of the dark any more.

Meet More People. Open Your Mind and Theirs!

I would like more people to see themselves the way I see myself, as a bit of the universe capable of great joy, which realizes that potential and helps others do the same.  I think a great way to go in that direction is to introduce people to the ideas of voluntaryism, Stoicism, gratitude, humility, curiosity, meditation, and knowing oneself better and better.  I have a plan to do that on my daily morning walk. Perhaps that's why you're reading this.

Did I say "Hey, can I give you $10 to read something I wrote?"  Did I then hand you a business card, that said:

Thanks for accepting my offer.  I'd like to start a trend of people who meet in person trading cards like this one so they get to know each other and begin to see value in disparate views of the human condition.  I hope the $10 is enough for you to justify visiting tinyurl.com/amkinder, and if you see the value in it that I do, perhaps you'll make this same offer to someone else.

What will be at the URL?

Thanks for visiting!  You might have received $10 for reading this, but you certainly have that beautiful curiosity that makes you wonder what else is here.  I'd like to introduce you to the ideas of voluntaryism, Stoicism, gratitude, humility, curiosity, meditation, and knowing oneself better and better.  Each of those items is a link to something about the idea.  If you already agree that a more widespread awareness of and interest in one or more of them will do a "whole lotta good," consider spending $10 to give someone a business card like the one described above.  I bet it works with $1 too.

P.S. I don't have any such business cards yet, nor have I printed this on paper and stuffed the papers into envelopes to carry around tomorrow morning.  I did write what people would find at the URL, and the preliminary text for the business card.  It's progress!

Potential Interests: Now it's Your Turn

Following is a list of things about which I would enjoy writing.  You might enjoy reading about some of them, and we would be a match.  If you let me know about that, then I'll have that much more motivation to write about them.  I'll probably write about them all eventually anyway, but the underlying list (in my mind) will grow whether or not I edit this post, and probably faster than I can write, and someday I'll be dead (probably).  Thus, your input might be the difference between something you want coming into existence and it dying on the curve of procrastination.

1. What do I mean "probably"?  Everybody dies, eventually!
2. The Global Consensus Clock, which is a way that you can prove something must have happened between two specific timestamps.  My conception of it uses an analog clock with pretty colors and synthesized bird chirps, along with blockchain technology.
3. How I floss my teeth (oh wait, that's already at Everything2.com if that site still exists).
4. Some sort of index to other stuff I've written that is still available on the Internet.
5. The power of being vulnerable.
6. "Striping" which is how I think of the process of homeostasis, or the constant back and forth across the "right" values for everything.
7. Chapter Two of my book and the conversation I just had with my daughter about it, since the characters in it are based on real people.
8. Other chapters of my book.  You have some influence over how it goes. It is, after all, an exploration of the human condition and I'm only one of us. I already plan to release a chapter each week on Sunday.  This will help me stay ahead of the procrastination curve on which lots of great endeavors find their death.
9. The value of butt dials.  No, not dials on your buttox, but rather accidental mobile phone connections.  Yes, I see value in them.  ... (Sometimes I hear thoughts from the future).  Ok, then just ask and let everyone know that it was your thought I heard and I'll explain :-).
10. All the meaning that "Cancer" has for me.  I do have a very (VERY!) mild form of cancer, according to the medical industry, but don't use that as an excuse to be sad (see the first item in this list).
11. My "Landmark" years.
12. My THC weeks.
13. What I think George Price (who studied altruism and also committed suicide) missed.
14. Being an autodidact.
15. What Voluntaryism is, in preparation to give a speech on it.
16. How we handle the failure of cooperation and how I think that should change.
17. Bitcoin and how it affects the world.
18. Crowdsourcing a magic spell, which is my latest description of my vision for memeracing, my site that redistributes bitcoin among people willing to propose and identify tiny pieces of high quality writing.
19. Ask Me Anything - a post that will never exist until there is enough curiosity among my readers to provide at least one (but hopefully a few!) questions that I'd like to answer.
20. Some pointers on how to become more humble, and the benefits of humility.

I just changed that list from bullets to numbers so that you can refer to the items in it more easily.

At this point, I usually go through and add links, but today, I'm hoping you'll do some writing (in the comments below) instead of more reading.  I don't know what the ideal ratio of input to output is, but I'm pretty sure that with this 30-day challenge, I'm way over-weighted on the output side, especially with people who are interested in the persistence of my existence.

A friend told me yesterday that the Principia Discordia indicates that the answer isn't 42, but rather 23.  I haven't read it, so if it's important to you, I recommend that you go find out for yourself :-).

Dear Future Me, Letter One

The sooner you start reading this, the better.  There are a lot of things to learn and it will take a long time to learn enough of them.  In this letter, I just want to give you some pointers.  Remember yesterday when you made some kind of decision about how you do something?  Maybe you have to go back before yesterday, or maybe you really did make that kind of decision yesterday, but you don't see it that way yet.  In any case, your brain stored it.  You'll wake up every day of your life until and unless you reconsider that decision and change it, and your brain will bring it up each time you need to do that thing.  That's how we all work, and I have been working that way since I was born.  I'm writing you this letter because that brain that stored all those decisions is going to wear out and stop working properly, and this body it uses to do my bidding won't do it any more.

People will tell you things and sometimes you'll believe them even if they aren't true.  We like to build up our sense of self as a person who "knows" particular things, but we don't actually know them.  You "know" your name, but if you choose to ignore people who use it and answer to a different name, then you'll really be changing your name, even if there's no legal name change.  It's not really knowledge, but your decision. You "know" that two and two make four, but again, you decided to use a definition of "two" and "four" that make it so. You "know" that if you drop an egg from six feet above the cement, it will break open when it hits the cement, but someone could catch it and drop it again from a half a centimeter, and then maybe it won't break.  In any case, what you know or think you know isn't what you are.

A guy named Jack Kornfield said "Wisdom says we are nothing. Love says we are everything. Between these two, our life flows."  In my experience, he's right, and so you can choose to be nothing or everything, honoring either the claim that love makes or the claim that wisdom makes.  Over time, you can honor them both.  This will help you have humility, avoid being egotistical or selfish in the way that degrades your experience of life, and it will teach you.

Think about the things you "know" as either definitions or working assumptions.  Be spry and adaptive.  Sometimes people will use words in a way different from how you use them.  Be curious and kind as you explore what they mean, and gently invite them to appreciate how you would interpret what they say given your way of using those words.  This opens up great conversations about language and understanding.  When you talk to someone who uses a particular word differently from how you use it, try to stick with their meaning, and use different words when you want to use it in your normal way.  This will help to avoid confusion and arguing.  The beautiful thing about a working assumption is that when you get the right kind of evidence, it's easy and natural to update the assumption.  If you pretend that your working assumption is something you "know," then you will resist some kinds of evidence that show imperfections in your "knowledge."  This is called "cognitive dissonance."

What you are is nothing and everything.  If you want to keep learning, remember that whatever you feel like you know can become ever more accurate if you leave it open to adjustment by calling it a working assumption.  Your skill at living will get better faster when you do these things, and I have one last request.

If you can put these two ideas into your own words and tell them to other people, and then ask them to do the same, we will have created an oral tradition.  It will be largely immune to the degrading influence of political authority and also to the petrification that happens over time.  These two forces, I think, have a strong negative effect on the experience of life.  At some point, I hope it will make sense that you and I are one, that we thought up this letter long before either of us was born, and that the wisdom of it wended its way through time, into my mind, out my fingertips, and now is something you can extend to our future selves.

Respect Your Body's Intelligence

Drawful is a party game I've been playing with my family for a couple months. I was tasked with drawing "shaved bears."  We only get to use two predetermined colors. I drew the outline of a teddy bear but the legs were kind of messy.  I drew some "fur" on the ground next to the bear, same color as the outline. I drew a T at a diagonal (looks like a razor) above the bear.  I drew a can with some shaving cream next to it.  How do I make it look like the bear is shaved?  I couldn't figure it out, so I decided to fix the legs.  I colored over the messed up part, filling in about half the (very short) leg.  I did the same thing to the other leg.

When my drawing came up, many players recognized the bear.  Some recognized the razor.  When they had all finally guessed what it was, I realized that filling in the legs was the answer to the question I couldn't answer.  It made the rest of the bear look shaved.  I believe this was my subconscious at work.  The solution that my brain came up with did not make it into my consciousness, but "fixing the legs" did.  The fact that I didn't realize I had found the answer until later in the game fascinates me.  Sure, it could have been dumb luck, but that theory would only present itself to someone who wants to deny the existence of the subconscious, the processing power to which our awareness doesn't have access.

I've been working on a book the beginning of which is Chapter One: Waking Up. The book is a kind of diary for me, rendering my life into story along with my search to be known better by the people who love me.  Chapter Seven is about the main character (my) wife, and I was stuck on how to write it because I wanted her input.  A friend emailed me asking about my progress and I wrote back that I was stuck on chapter seven, but while writing the email, I thought that maybe if I looked again, I'd be able to continue writing.  When I looked, chapter seven was already there.  I had forgotten that I wrote it.  I assume that having forgotten about it made me act a certain way until that moment.  I had already figured out how to write it, and I don't know why I still felt stuck.  Again, I think forgetting that I wrote it was a function of my subconscious, trying to help me with ... something - and I don't know what it is.

I'm in several Telegram groups and in one of them, someone posed a problem and asked for help.  The simple answer I provided was: Meditate.  Since I've developed the habit of taking my own advice whenever I give it, this made me chuckle.  I meditate every morning, but when I sent that message, it was the afternoon and I hadn't meditated yet.  It was a slow day, I guess.  More and more, I notice subtle benefits of meditation.  Meditating is something to which I don't mind being addicted.  Now I'm curious what are the symptoms of too much meditation?

As I try to understand myself better, I wonder about how that mind-body connection can be so elusive. Maybe it's not elusive at all, but we just take it for granted. It shows up starkly for me sometimes, and maybe what's different is that I have the humility to recognize that something my body did was not my intention. Sometimes we actually disagree, me and my body.

I noticed my motivation to do sit-ups, squats and pushups disappeared for a few days and then came back. I had done the extra exercise anyway, but it was getting more difficult each day to find the motivation.  I traced it to my use of a mat between me and the floor. The hard floor doesn't bother me, but I guess it bothered my body enough that it sapped my motivation away.   Since I started using a mat again, I find the extra exercise a lot more enjoyable.

My hope for this post is that by making you more aware of the processing power inherent in your body, power of which you might not be aware, you'll appreciate and accept yourself more, and respect the intelligence that your body exhibits in those moments when you discover it doing something you didn't intend to do.  Evolution has been chipping away at the singular goal of creating things that reproduce themselves. Apparently, intelligence is very helpful, and there is no reason to doubt that some of that intelligence is built into the structure and not available to the awareness of the being that inhabits the structure.  Not available, that is, until you look for it, and possibly not until you learn to appreciate it.