# We are all thought

All that we are is the result of all that we have thought. It is founded on thought. It is based on thought.

Buddha, The Dhammapada

# Prometheus Rising (Robert Anton Wilson, 1983)

Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.

Este é um livro que transforma vidas. Ele não é apenas para ser lido, mas vivido. Sua sabedoria está em construção e você pode fazer parte dessa jornada de descoberta humana sobre do que somos feitos e como podemos ser outra coisa. Um esotérico e maravilhoso livro sobre nossa consciência e dos infinitos mapas mentais.

When we say A is B, we are saying that A is only what it appears within our field of study or our area of specialization. This is saying too much. When we say A can be considered as B, or modeled by B, we are saying exactly as much as we have a right to say, and no more. Whatever you think you should see, you will see — unless it is physically impossible in this universe. All experience is a muddle, until we make a model to explain it.

The software is more “real” in the sense that you can smash the hardware back to dust and the software still exists, and can “materialize” or “manifest” again in a different computer. Imprints (software frozen into hardware) are the non-negotiable aspects of our individuality. Each successive imprint complicates the software which programs our experience and which we experience as "reality.

These symbols go back a long way; Cabalists find them in the Old Testament (where, indeed, the lion-angel-bull-eagle appears in Ezekiel). They are found constantly in Catholic art, associated with the four evangelists (Matthew-angel, Mark-lion, Luke-bull, John-eagle) and run all through the design of Tarot card decks, medieval and modern.

The dysangel, the bad news, created by St. Paul was traditional Sklavmoral — “Slaves, obey your masters,” but nourish your resentment with the firm belief that you are “good,” and they are “evil,” and you will eventually have the pleasure of watching them bum in hell forever. In Nietzsche’s analysis, all Marx added to this was the idea of burning and punishing the Master Class here and now instead of waiting for “God” to attend to the matter post mortem.

It is interesting, in this connection, that Nietzsche dropped “psychological” language from his books as he went along and replaced it with “physiological” language.

Nietzsche was on the right track, but lacking neurology he looked for the physical basis of these processes in genetics alone.

Remember again that all these categories are for convenience and that nature has not employed the sharp boundaries that we use in our models of nature.

Any system for describing human behavior should be flexible enough to be extended indefinitely, and should also still contain meaning when reduced back to its fundamentals.

Circles of this sort, called mandalas, are widely used for meditation in the Buddhist tradition. Often they are cornered by four demons who evidently, like the Occidental lion, bull, angel and eagle, represent the extremes to be avoided.

EXERCIZES 1. Whenever you meet a young male or female, ask yourself consciously, “If it came to hand-to-hand combat, could I beat him/her’?” Then try to determine how much of your behavior is based on unconsciously asking and answering that question via pre-verbal “body language.” 2. Get roaring drunk and pound the table, telling everybody in a loud voice just what dumb assholes they all are.*

Get a book on meditation, practice for two fifteen-minute sessions every day for a month, and then go see somebody who always manages to upset you or make you defensive. See if they can still press your territorial retreat buttons.

The third semantic circuit handles artifacts and makes a “map” (reality-tunnel) which can be passed on to others, even across generations.

Human beings (domesticated primates) are symbol-using creatures; which means, as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted, that those who rule symbols, rule us.

In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world, the human organism is transformed. In this dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself.

Berger and Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality

A pattern that is not random is known mathematically as information.

If you know something already, or can predict it easily on the basis of what you do know, it is not information for you. Conversely, if you don’t know something, or can’t predict it, it is information.

Gregory Bateson has defined information as “differences that make a difference.”

A stochastic process is a random series, but it is a special kind of random series. In a stochastic process, some agent or agency is making selections — picking out of the randomness a pattern that is not random.

Information is also known mathematically as negative entropy or, in a widely used abbreviation, negentropy.

Without getting embroiled in metaphysics, life (evolution) behaves as if it were always aiming at higher coherence, i.e., higher intelligence.

Hence, the accelerations noted by Adams and Korzybski are human increments in a process that has been innate in evolution all along. The human increment accelerates faster than pre-human evolution because through the third, semantic circuit and its symbols (words, maps, equations etc.) we are able to pass information (negative entropy: coherence) from generation to generation.

As Bateson points out, if we accept any ordering process as intelligent, then the biosphere is indeed intelligent; but if we save the word “intelligence” only for those ordering processes that move at the same speed as our brains, then Nature is merely mechanical, not intelligent. To an extra-terrestrial with a different time-sense than ours, this question would not arise at all.)

This whole book, not just the present chapter, is based on the belief that an overview of evolution shows beyond all doubt that the wealth-producing faculty (the search for higher coherence) is the deciding factor. The illth-producing faculty is an archaic mammalian survival system rapidly becoming obsolete.

# Intruso (Garth Davis, 2023)

Assisti por recomendação do meu amigo, então sentia que haveria uma reviravolta. Só que ela não chega e o filme estica e você começa a duvidar sobre o que é o filme. Quando finalmente surge a reviravolta as peças se encaixam em dois relacionamentos que servem de espelhos da alma de cada um, o que é triste e doentio. Melancolia sobre o amor na carona de temas recentes. O nome no Brasil não é muito bom. Chamaria de Amor Rival.

# Meio Grávida (Tyler Spindel, 2025)

Piadas ágeis em formato dinâmico me fizeram relevar a linguagem mais recente do cinema, desse pessoal jovem. É engraçado. Assisti dublado e não me arrependo. Filme para não pensar muito. O jeito que a heroína usa a barriga é visceral.

# Casamentos Cruzados (Nicholas Stoller, 2025)

Eu gosto tanto de Will Ferrell quanto de Reese Whiterspoon, mas dessa vez eles estão em um roteiro fraco, infantil. Tenta ser sobre sentimentos maduros, mas acaba sendo só pela carência de cada um em não se encaixar mais no que seria uma família, seja tradicional sulista ou pai viúvo. A química entre os dois nunca funciona.