Life is filled with abstractions. And the only way we make heads or tails out of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution. It’s emotion and intellect going together – David Lynch
Inescapable Reality
One of 2020 year resolutions was completely sober year. No psychoactive compounds at all. Year was highly technical. Basics of SQL, Machine Learning, Back-end with Flask, Designing shit with Solidworks, coding Python and VBA projects.
On investing front we had the most rapid recession in humankind. In short period of time I had to track what businesses were reporting, what central banks were doing. What individual as well as collective consciousness makes out of all available information. That’s a lot of webinars, seminars, tweets and strained back starring at growing que of articles and blog posts. Business analyses, macro overviews, financial news.
And then there was real life with its problems. There’s isn’t much pause. Pause has opportunity costs. Other times pause is not possible without damaging reputation due to commitments.
Coffee and Cigarettes
One evening I played Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes on mute, while I was trying out a set on soundcloud. Once in a while I peeked and observed the interactions I have seen at least 4 times before. That’s one of the movies that periodically kept pulling me in. Each time I would try to see patterns, try to make meaning of underlying fabric of these dialogs.
What occurred to me this time, is there may very well be no particular meaning. Meaning is to slow down. I believe both – dialog and being without conscious purpose are beautiful too and carry intrinsic value. Coffee… and cigarettes. I’m a user of neither, maybe that’s why I took so long to draw my conclusions.
Three Levels of Desire
Years ago, one stoned evening me and my close friend came up with three categories of people by their level of consciousness.
- Survival. Rural Eastern Europe would be just that. Social benefits, alcohol numbness to life, deep cynicism. Job (?) – TV – family – addictions loop.
- Ambition. Self-mastery inwards and outwards. Career people. Love to accelerate, learners, readers. Takes care of body and mind.
- Exploration. Creative. Understand the limits of physical world, goes out to find walls for the subconscious.
Generalism is blindfold taken off in Ambition. Pause and abstract thinking is blindfold taken off in Exploration. In 2020 I have intentionally crafted the circumstances to swirl around the physical world and its gifts, but damn I miss going deeper.
Define the Undefinable
Irony is two-fold:
- I’m current embodiment of level 2, therefore I have to tap to memory, not direct stream of consciousness.
- Writing is mainly a process of logic. For you to understand me, I have to use logic and structure, which limits ability to put it in understandable form.
Value of Void
Mind is a generator. Experiences such as sensory deprivation tank, meditation or dreams are prone to evoke ideas in right side of the brain. To create a void inside your head is preparing a soil for ideas to grow. But there has to be sufficient space to bring these idea-sprouts to life.
To supplement opening quote by David Lynch, my take on intuition is a bit more pragmatic:
We experience world in 5 senses and there’s a stream of data coming in every second of our awake time during the day. Cognitive processing power (much like computer processing power) is very energy demanding and optimization genius – nature has put a bandwidth limit. However unprocessed sensory data (think of woman’s hair color two tables from your last dinner in restaurant) still comes in and is directed to unconscious, where perhaps (?) every piece of available data on the world around us is directed to form and train (though dreams or instincts) our default perception.
This default perception / reaction to novel situation in my current understanding is intuition. It operates a vast ocean of data we never knew we had.
Ideas, new thoughts, unique data connections – are vital. In my experience they serve to develop intuition – best course of action given all possible information. This somehow reminds me of “Man of Knowledge” from Carlos Castaneda.
How?
Another important question. How does one get off the daily rails of Instagram, twitter, facebook, youtube, work, Netflix, family issues? I want to address this with another blogpost, that will focus on alcohol.
This year I have reiterated, that my gateway was art. Both artworks and their creators. Listening to creators’ interviews, has a tendency to transfer their state at least to some level to viewer (mirror neurons type stuff). On that note, I’m off to watch Mulholland Drive for at least a 3rd time.
As a side note, this has been accompanying me while writing this:
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