Justin Harnish's Blog, page 3
June 27, 2022
No clothes, but safe for work!
Try and learn from children. Notice how they see the world, how they play and imagine new worlds, how they react to your interest and mindfulness.
I am the adult that always gets pulled away by children, to go on make-believe adventures in the yard or help design an elaborate drama of stuffed animals. This is almost always preferred to the conversations with the adults!
Kids learn at such a fast pace, taking in 1,000s of new observations each day, discarding most. Modelling in play acts of will, morality, choice, experimentation, and faith. Verbalizing their thoughts for feedback from the adults that have shown them care and compassion. Testing boundaries and tweaking all of these learnings for tangential play, storytelling, or actions that have a fierce immediacy.
Mostly these learnings and regurgitated displays happen without the filters of our particular cultural norms. If the emperor’s tailors are fit to be tied by his Highness’s demands for more extreme couture and deceive him with invisible garmets of such grandeur that only the most faithful and loyal can see; but only a child, lacking in these survival norms, will be able to call this indecency out. It is good to be reminded where we are not being our most intellectually honest, even if by a child.
June 22, 2022
In Your Head
Last night (and not for the first time) I was mindful while staring into the overlapping branches of a few trees. This complex shape, especially as a twilight black-on-blue siloutte, is unrepresentable in words or math—its dynamism leads to its definitionlessness.
Being in a mindful state—non-dualistic—I was ever more awed to discover that this indescribable complexity was in my head. Whatever topspin my years of mindfulness or my evening cocktails or the actual structure of the trees, branches, and pine needles in THE REAL WORLD had spun, the experience the cognitive part of me will woefully convey, was rich with visual and mental vibrancy in consciousness. As I write these words today, in nearly the same spot and look over my shoulder to the same scene in the late afternoon light, the same interplay of dendrite needles both obstructing and being obstructed by axon branches who make synaptic gaps with neuronal trunks both in front and behind.
Whatever consciousness is, whether information processing in the brain, a non-material semblance simultaneous to the material world, or an interference with consciousness in parallel computational universes, its intimacy offers a constant source of enchantments and charms. Breath it in now. Appreciate the subtle smell or a far off sound. See something common in a new way, with a focus on the far off or as a backdrop for what is near.
Take a break from labeling the stuff you see, feel, hear, and smell. Near my home is a busy road (33 sections south of the temple to be precise) whose road noise sounds like a strange stream. The snowcapped horizon of Mount Olympus has a “J” of green set against the grey-blue sky. I have a sense of a pinprick in the space I am making for this scene.
Pinecones fall from trees in consciousness, landing like these words, silent after they are read in the same experience they encounter a normal force. Unless, of course, they hit my tin gazebo or spark a shared experience across our ocean of subjective semblance, and reverberate, finding firmament in your head.
June 20, 2022
I see fractals... everywhere.
A bedsheet is 2-D, a mattress is 3-D. For the former, we purchase according to specific length and width (Twin, Queen, or King) and for the later, we add a fluffiness-factor of depth to our dimensions.
Now when we go to wash our bedsheet, we crumple it into a ball of sorts. The bedsheet has attained a fractal dimension, say 2.37 dimensions. It’s less than 3-D because looking close enough at any crumple and you can resolve that there are lots of flat surfaces, but obviously more than the 2-D stretched out over the bed.
I was really enjoying my latest fractal fascination the other day—Mandelbulbs on Youtube—and found these 3-D shapes represented on my 2-D screen gave the perfect experience of fractal dimensions.
What will this beautiful mathematical conception teach us next about existence? What is the limit of human perception? Can we perceive a 3.24-D shape in VR? Does color, altered awareness channel strength in sensory deprivation, or music act as a proxy for fractal dimensions above 3? How about for a person with synesthesia?
With awe and investigation into reality, existence leaps out of the undergrowth and pushes back against findings of flat, round, or symmetrical—making a party for our perceptions.
June 16, 2022
Practice
Observing the nature of your mind,
skillfully filling your mind with
intimate experience,
being consciousness,
is a lot like adjusting bunny ears
to improve the reception of antenna-based television.
There are a set of conditions,
traits not states,
that can help improve our “picture” into
what it is like to be consciousness…
but these settings—everything really—is impermanent.
A sore neck—darma pain…
A plan to place…
An unskillful altercation…
Ahh a selfless thought… that I cognitively labelled!
All send us scurrying back,
to practice.
Starting over.
(Without judgement).
Worth it,
every time.
June 14, 2022
I am always thinking of me, myself, and I
Our most prevalent mental model is our sense of self, our thought of psychological continuity, the strange loop of self-reference that we refer to as “I.”
The self has been called an illusion, but our first-person being that we refer to as “I” is necessary to get us through the day. It is better to think of I as a program, something essential to our operating system, an iKernal that loops back around to capture important subroutines’ outputs—the pleasure of stomach fullness from our lizard brain, all the way up the modular mind to our narrative reconstruction of our selves in the day’s events—but not the main program.
Try this, close your eyes, and become very aware of yourself. Associate what you feel on your body or in your body with how it makes you feel—calm, agitated, or something else. Where are these sensations arising, these feelings, or the thought that they define you? They are arising, along with your self, in consciousness—the only place any mental-models, feelings, perceptions, or sensation can ever arise.
June 8, 2022
The Wrong-Side of the Bed
Today I woke up on the proverbial wrong side of the bed. Yesterday too, if I’m being honest. Frustrated. Behind schedule. Ornery. Grumpy. Feeling sorry for myself.
I could see it, I was mindful of my worsening mood, focused on it, and let it take over my behaviors anyway.
I’m not proud of it, but think it’s pretty normal, ordinary behavior. I was burnt out. After months of effort, I stumbled across the finish line at work and the hiring at my nonprofit fell through. Problems are inevitable, but problems suck! (The actual quote, by my favorite brain on the planet, David Deutsch, is “problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable,” was just a little more hopeful than I could muster.)
But muster I eventually did, for what was to be gained from sulking? Why worry, I’d rather wonder. Every little thing is going to be alright. We have the power of our perception to look out from the darkness of our minds lost in thought, through the clarity of our single eye of conscious experience and come to the spark of embodied illumination, a oneness with the contents, as the context, of consciousness.
I didn’t get back here easily. I sulked instead. But if we happen to get up on the wrong side of the bed, we can always just begin again, close and open our eyes to the never far away, but always subtle, splendor of our boundless, loving awareness.
May 11, 2022
On the Inside, Looking Out
We are forever on the inside looking out. This is one of the first things impressed upon us by the likes of Stephen Hawkins (amongst others) is that we are doing science on the universe from within the thing we are studying, reviewing a brief history of time where time can never have a beginning or an end.
A God’s-eye-view is truly a supernatural perspective. Where would you stand if you were outside all existence?
This can be difficult to get used to. We want to look all around a thing, get under the hood, kick the tires. When we imagine the universe, we think of it as an edge-on light cone or the flattened globe of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, but this is only our imagined view, a conjecture our amazing mind can make, knowing the science, and creating a visual where no light exists, an image only ever to be appreciated by the mind’s eye.
Even this mind’s eye perception is inside looking out at a formless, shapeshifting, multimedia consciousness. Experience in all its narrative and sensory forms is made of a consciousness unique for each subject, a non-dual strange loop that is the wellspring of meaning and morality. While offering only the most subtle signals on the nature of our enclosure: impervious to deception, timeless, with a depth of feeling; it is the only reality we’ll ever know.
Paradox and mystery arise as we realize that our imagination (is the only thing that) can take us to the edge of the expanding universe, but that we will never see even the common reality of our own kitchen outside our mind. This reality is not limited—far from it—it is just different from our ordinary conception of it. Upon introspection, we know it’s our mind’s eye that looks out, that constructs reality from the things-in-themselves that are out there.
But we can do much more than just recapitulate reality—we can overlay it with our imagination and invention. The characters and plot in a good novel overlays reality in an effervescent way. Our science instantiated in VR creates worlds that we can never travel to and narratives that make us appreciate one another from inside, looking out of another point of view. We come together and create a more fulfilling world this way.
April 25, 2022
What is Ordinary, Illuminated
By the numbers, I am an ordinary guy.
I have lived all my life in the mid-West, in mid-range population centers like Boise, Idaho or Salt Lake City.
My parents were middle class and worked hard to keep our average-sized family of four safe and happy. I went to the local state school and enjoyed the experiences most of my peers of my same age enjoyed. Out of college, I got a job as a mid-level professional, working as an engineer to make a middle-class salary.
I got married, divorced, and remarried. (My wife is the most extraordinary woman, the exception to my narrative thus far.) She speaks two languages fluently, I only speak one. She quit her job to become a world-recognized non-profit executive serving forcibly displaced women, I work in the back office, making sure the web page works.
I interviewed, was hired, laid off, rehired, and made it all the way to middle-management before being demoted. I changed careers after twenty years, a mid-level professional, product manager for a mid-sized firm.
I’m now middle-aged, mildly overweight, and—when asked—doing just fine. I’m average in most every way.
Middle of the road.
Mediocre. Mild. Miltose.
Like most of everyone else.
Ordinary.
At least that is what the numbers say.
But my side of experience is illuminated. Anything but ordinary.Being consciousness, realizing my own headlessness, I am surrounded by mystery and paradox. Examining this formless space is a permanent playground, a literal subjective laboratory all my own.
Eyes closed: sensations are a new cloud of pressure or tingling that aren’t arm or cramp; sounds aren’t traffic or house settling but uncontrollable entreaties on silence; and my visual field can be a chasm or rich with read-in imaginings.
Eyes open: I am a space for things and the myriad creatures, a translation of reality into my experience, all interfering in my mind but effortlessly so.
Being consciousness, realizing my own headlessness, I am surrounded by mystery and paradox.
As if that were not enough, I have conceptual markers on many of the concrete entities in this space (sun, stars, rocks, brains, genes) and much that is abstract (energy, spacetime, materialism, mind, and culture). I think at the boundaries of the many-worlds and am home in time for dinner.
I can debate both sides of modern events, model potential outcomes for their impact, and resolve a worldview—all without making a peep! Science guides a view of reality that labels things, ideas, and processes with the knowledge passed down not only from our shared efforts to understand, but also from a universe whose mechanisms and mysteries are actually discoverable and to an extent malleable to technologies we construct.
This illumination of the ordinary is not just about me, but also about my relations with others. Leading an examined life is not only or even mostly a quest to discover one’s self (or selflessness), but instead how our shared humanity is created in the context of illuminating ordinary relationships.
Have you ever wondered how love differs from affection or just acknowledgement? Might it be in the space we make for the whole of the other person within ourselves? The attempts we make to understand experience from behind their face? A communion of how we think and feel when in one another’s company (as if we were at one)?
Leading an examined life is not only or even mostly a quest to discover one’s self (or selflessness), but instead how our shared humanity is created in the context of illuminating ordinary relationships.
And so it is with my relationship with our human culture, what I hope to create and how I hope to be in relation with posterity. An ordinary relationship—a natural one anyway—would be dictated by my genetics and their kin-selected means of propagation. The algorithm of selection has methodically increased the diversity of the myriad creatures and our experience is more interesting because of it.
However, given a single human life and not eons of slow-moving genetic drift, desiring an impact on more than a few random genes but on the outlook of people present and future, I have to untether from an ordinary relationship with human culture in an attempt to endear one and all to their illuminating birthright, no matter how ordinary they may think themselves to be.
March 14, 2021
Spiritual Media Podcast
I recently interviewed with Matt Welsh of the Spiritual Media Podcast and covered Meaning in the Multiverse: A Skeptic's Guide to a Loving Cosmos and we also chatted about the following topics:
How to create meaning and purpose during “flow states” How to turn daily practices, hobbies and activities into a “flow state” Using subjective experiences of mindfulness and meditation to create more purpose Practical ways to create meaning and purpose in our life or if we are not happy in our career How our relationships with our family can be a source of meaning, purpose, and "flow states" for us Using the science of existence to create meaning How the Universe uses our gifts, talents, and work to expand and create more value
February 21, 2021
The Inner Universe
The human mind is on the constant lookout for similarities, ways that we can understand our existence through our experience. We love metaphors.
Thoughts arise. Some are the product of my focus or surroundings, but all percolate up from the brew on the other side of the space I have made for them–my consciousness.
I tend to consciously and deliberately make a lot of space for physics–the science of the fundamentals of existence. I have always been overcome with awe at the processes and pieces of both the largest and smallest expanses of reality. I am fascinated that we can even know it in the first place.
If there is one picture that represents the conceptualization of the universe, it has to be the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). This picture represents the oldest expanse of electromagnetic radiation in the universe, our first opportunity to get a picture of the universe.
The CMBR highlights some interesting things about the early universe. It is very smooth, but not perfectly so, it is a landscape of slight fissures where matter and energy are more likely to collect, and other areas where space is more likely to be empty. In its modern day representation, it looks like… an in-focus view of what I see when I sit and meditate on the picture behind my closed eyes.
Try it. At the end of this sentence, close your eyes and see if your mind-sky is completely dark, the absence of all light.
Okay, now that you are back with your eyes focused on the page, think about what you saw. Did you notice that there are places in your visual field with your eyes closed that were light? Almost like there were tiny micro-fissures in your eyelids that trapped light?
In a mostly light room or outside, the light may overwhelm the dark, and in a mostly dark room, the dark will likely overwhelm the light, but it’ll never be one or the other. The light won’t so much shimmer as tunnel, slowly making areas slightly lighter or losing luminescence and becoming darker. At other times, you can see superimposed images and have those change to three dimensional shapes inside the landscape of the fissures of light and darkness.
Indeed, if you asked me today, “what does consciousness look like?” one of my answers would surely be a faded, more-dark-than-light, black and purple picture of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Having this metaphor gives me a soft-touch on not conceptualizing consciousness, but exploring the experience as it is. The space behind my closed eyes is a vast inner-verse, complete with changing foregrounds and backgrounds that I do not need to label or create, but that offer me opportunities to sit back and simply be.
The difference is–and this is not at all subtle when understood, but subtle to come to terms with–I am not exploring this inner-verse as a mindfulnaut on a voyage, I am exploring as the inner-verse. Where I am supposed to have a head, is instead this deep and dynamic landscape where superimposed images and thoughts all come together and make this rich formless space that only I can experience. This visual landscape is experienced the same as sounds and sensations, not something separate–objects to be studied by a subject–but a whole awareness.
The more we are able to see ourselves as this inner-verse and appreciate that others are their own similarly mysterious and magical kingdoms, we can grow into the dynamic space we were meant to fill.
