http://knol.google.com/k/dennis-hgglund/psychology-of-creative-intelligence/2n5c5345q1u7a/2#

In case you're wondering what I've been up to since I last blogged.

The ultimate farce of education is when it produces psychologists. A psychologist by education's measure is at best a normal person. This means he has been elevated from a normal person who needs therapy to a normal person who can't admit that normal people are perpetually self-diminishing, always senile compared with their younger days. He vindicates authority, like some Pope of Normalcy.

Two kinds of people exist in normal society: those who have suffered severe damage due to experience, and those who have little or no experience; old and young. Authority is a vice indulged in by those who are damaged, as they inflict the damage on new generations.

Authority is an insistence that becoming damaged is wisdom; that the adults damaged themselves intentionally. There is no authority of being rational, because being rational will not spread by insisting, or by demanding respect, cooperation, obedience, friendliness, etc. There are no rational second fiddles. Humanity under present circumstances is something each one must become equally expert at, and which each undamaged person can readily achieve because his humanity is intact, lacking only the latest chapter or upgrade.

The reader of this blog may discover something by looking only at the current entries, but this blog is intended to be a course of study beginning in June '08, and may seem obscure or even mythical taken out of order. You go to previous months by clicking the left arrow under the current month's calender on the right. If you are looking for my political comments the link is in the list below that. If you are a regular reader you can search for rev. to see what I have changed (revised) since you read it.

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Today I have begun a process of rewriting the original entries in this blog; a sort of second draft. I chose this method as opposed to starting another blog for the rewrite. You, the reader, are being taken more seriously, and I hope you'll enjoy that.

Human life develops in confusion. Confusion makes a conscious, a separate and isolated place in the mind, where the confusion seems clarity. This resemblance to clarity is so convincing that if we try to make something clear we are trying to give this conscious a complete grasp of it.

At some point, usually around the time when we are trying to gain some sexual experience, thought introduces itself into the conscious, eliminating for a lifetime all resemblance to the mental or perceptual workings of other species and of children. We become an oddity, with our waking hours being neither waking nor sleeping, but with no way to know what waking is to those who have it to be.

When we are thinking we are trying to make certain that what we know about ourselves does not become known to anyone else. We are aware that if anyone else comes to know what we know about ourselves we would no longer be respected. We would be ostracized, shunned.

We think in order to represent ourselves as someone others do not reject, fully knowing that if they knew what we know of ourselves we would be rejected. This in itself precludes relationships. We can not think of or imagine having relationships, because the foundation of relationship is to have complete awareness of each other. We resign ourselves to something else from our encounters, the way people are resigned to cows for their milk. We become exploiters.

If we are shut up in a box, for what they call "sensory deprivation", it is at first stimulating; helpful in a way. When we come out we tend to see things more clearly. But if we are trapped in the box for a long time the opposite happens. When we finally get out we are not interested in the world. Being away too long has destroyed perception. And this is where thinking leads. This is exploitation: a blindness to life's true worth.

We have a past. If you are drowning you still long for air. Air is the past. But if you are guilty, if you know what no one must know about yourself, you do not long for innocence. The innocence has actually vanished from your ken, like someone who would not breathe once he surfaced. You see a world without innocence (without the innocence that is actually there), which is a world that does not invite attention to the perpetual present (as the real world, where innocence exists, does).

It is confusion that gives us the world of progress as it has been throughout history and is today. This progress gives us plenty to gain so we have no need for relationships, no need for the original and evolved wholeness of the mind and perception. Most people never realize they have lost something profound, because they have so much trivia to gain. Society is an environment for those who have lost sight of the beauty of innocence, and the beauty of innocent living. It is a morbid retreat from universal values.

Is it this private self-knowledge of a past that can not bear another's scrutiny which wakes up thought instead of perception each morning? What would it be like to find perception awake? Nothing you saw would mean what it means to society. A child would be a child, and not a student of human society. A breast would be a breast and not an opportunity. A cow would be a slave and slavery an abomination. And the stars would be an infinity and an eternity of profounder events past than ever happened or will happen on Earth, rather than astronomy.

Perception is not the senses, the sight and hearing and so on. These vary from species to species, while perception does not, because perception is what all the species together accomplish. But only in innocence, which is freedom from confusion, immersion in total clarity of others.

Deceptions create belief. No deception means no belief, a void of the experience of believing, a kind of virginity of the mind.

Belief is a surface effect. Once we have people believing something we have established a surface on which we can sow shallow things (knowledge) as a substitute for discovery or depth of learning. To learn deeply and quickly, then, we must remove this surface.

And it is hard to remove. This is not just patriotism or religious nonsense, but the deceptions imposed on us by each older person we met during childhood, and then our peers, and eventually even our juniors. Deceit is the intended product of thinking, which is ubiquitous.

Words embrace all. They embrace the shallow and the deep. We can all say "Love" and "God" and "Evolution" and so on. So when there is something deep in love, in God, or in evolution, we have two versions. Thus the student who has deep love will always be meeting the teacher who has shallow love, and the teacher will always belittle the student's love either directly or by insisting that they both have the same love.

Language mesmerizes, so that it becomes impossible to tell a person that he is not looking deeply, because he is in full possession of every deep word. From this perception we must derive what it means to be a serious teacher, a teacher who never resorts to gaining control of the students. Control is shallow; it is the recourse of the shallow mentality. I get paid to teach, which means I must get results, but I am shallow, which means I can only get a result if I control the student so he accepts shallowness as the desired result, a result that on the surface seems to be genuine although it never represent new insight, 'new insight' being the definition of education.

Intelligence wants to go deeply; it is equipped for it. Authority or control means forcing shallowness on those who are innately deep. Only by forcing them can they be made shallow. Once shallow they are prey for exploiters, and we have a politic of exploiters instead of public servants.

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What is intelligence? It is when experience has not interfered with evolution. Experience is achieved in a way evolution actually resents (as it resents human habitats, the fount of experience), which is why it creates a separate mental compartment called conscious.

Consider virginity. Virginity is chaste. What is it waiting for? Intelligence! Ask experience when to make a child, or just when to have sex for the hell of it, and it has an answer, but intelligence has no answer, meaning it produces no child (given society as it is) and no sex.

(No child? If you need the government to make and maintain an incubator to hatch eggs, which do you do, make eggs, or wait until the incubator is fully functional? Look how stupid it actually is to make babies and then complain about the world not being fit for them. 'Rotten eggs preferred' is who governs, no matter what pretty phrases they campaign with, and if you want to change that you don't play into their hands.)

Experience becomes ones eyes, and through them one can not see this chastity or this intelligence. Show them a virgin and they are just waiting for a chance to change his or her status. There is profound beauty there, but through the eyes of experience one finds only a fresh new toy.

This undiscovered beauty is the depth a virgin's relationships can achieve. It is unfulfilled potential, like having lungs but being stuck on the bottom of the sea. Of course this is only sexual virginity. Experience has already robbed this person of a great deal of his or her potential, so sexual virginity is not the complete potential; it is only a great deal more potential than what will remain after sexual experience, which usually comes after the experienced peers, functioning as authority/control, have sufficiently berated the adolescent for having none ("peer pressure").

When we are deceived by someone's self-representation, where he represents himself as respectable be means of conscious self-control, something must become misplaced. In fact, anything that is true about the person and his relationships must become misplaced.

To illustrate, let's say we are watching a video of a person being himself, a video taken of him in private without his knowledge. But! Before we can view this video he catches us and imposes a photo of himself over the video so that all we see of the video is its edges. We strain and strain to make sense of these edges, but all we really are getting is his touched up portrait. One thing we do know, however, is that what we are seeing around the edges is misplaced in the context of the portrait. So what we want to see is where is the parallel of this video information when someone is putting on his usual act.

And the answer is: it's feelings. Let's say this is an angry person, but his portrait, his act, is saying that he is feeling quite at home and nonchalant. If we look at the act, then the anger is misplaced. And when there is misplaced anger present there is a conditioned inclination to assume it as ones own. As ones own it fails to produce a sense of the other's anger, even though the other's anger is actually present. As soon as we decide it is our own it becomes suitable to our own disposition, thus it fails to serve as disclosure.

Consider the zebra (from an earlier entry) who assumes the role of killer because it doesn't see or smell or hear the tiger in the reeds. It is not feeling a tiger's killing lust. It has subverted the information by taking credit for it. There is no such thing as a bloodthirsty zebra, so that subversion is quite dramatic.

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Envy is a conditioned response to a contrived stimulus. Let's say you see someone with a costly boat out on a lake. The boat is a contrived stimulus. Man invented it. So instinct is not used to it's presence. This means we, as authority, can more or less dictate how it will be viewed. And since we want to make money on this invention we condition everyone born to say, "Wow! I wish I had one!", leaving those of us who can't afford one in an odd and uncomfortable place.

Nature equipped us with a way of always perceiving directly what is going on. So when we as people who can't have the costly boat see the person who has one we are not actually left having to try the boat to find out what happens when a person has one.

Let us say that a person has something that completes him. Why would the feeling then be bad or strange? Why wouldn't it be uplifting like seeing a species of bird with its wonderful unique wings? Is it possible to find a bad feeling accompanying something good? It is quite schizoid, this idea that in some cases we are delighted by someone who is complete, and in other cases we are broken up about it.

Here we have another example of the video hidden by the portrait, except here the video has been explained so that we are inclined to think it is a nice frame for the portrait. How lucky can a person be, when he owns things that people envy him? Portrait: happy owner. Frame: we envy him. That explains everything. Nothing seems misplaced.

Intelligence is social. So if we direct our affections to mere objects, like boats, we become senile. Envy as other is the discovery of the degree of senility the owner has incurred to date. If we want to keep the mind, which is the perception and the thrill of living, fresh, we have to indulge our instinctual urge to socialize broadly, with all the available species. Intelligence is the ability to cross social distances, which means we originally have an overwhelming urge to find other species, and to maintain a kinship with them (Human language is actually one of our most detrimental habits, so verbal thinking is anathema to our intelligence). The full spectrum of the social distances we are crossing is our whole intelligence, the one by which we conceptualize God and the cosmos as well as someone can at this point in evolution.