Introduction: I’m not highly educated. Not in the traditional sense anyway. I’ve always preferred the autodidact route to knowledge. This path has its pitfalls though. It seems to me like the purpose of higher education is to train the mind to be able to effectively incorporate the further autodidactic efforts of the student after they have left the university. I haven’t found that to be the case yet with most graduates, but university administrators don’t listen to me. I can’t imagine why. What this means for much of my independent studies is that I am sometimes ignorant of the underlying structures that the great thinkers are building upon. It means, if have to do some serious work sometimes to catch up. Some of that effort I look forward to, its fascinating. Some of it not so much. Some of it I’ve already done, I just didn’t know it at the time. Some of it was pounded into me by reality itself.
This catch up...makes me feel stupid sometimes. I know I shouldn’t. Everyone is ignorant of something. It’s impossible to know everything. And thank god for that. That sounds, busy. I digress. I’m trying to look at it like this: I have my area of expertise, I have my area of passion. Huge overlap between those two for obvious reasons. Those areas will have entries that include ideas that are more developed, more fleshed out. Most of the time, those entries will have ideas that have actually been put into real life practice. All other areas (I reserve the right to explore any and all topics) will be pieces that ramble a bit. Commentary by me attempting to create order out of chaos. You will see the struggle in my Personal Paradigm pieces.
Yesterday I felt fatigued and a little overwhelmed. Part of it may be the winter months. Part of it may be that my son has been a little sick lately. Damn kids, walking harbingers of disease. Mostly though, I think I was just mentally and spiritually fatigued. You see, I've been binging on Dr. Jordan Peterson videos and material for a while now. Like seriously binging. A couple months probably, but it's been much like drinking from a firehose. Interestingly enough, that's the title of one of his videos, one that I haven't watched yet. Pro tip: if you are going to binge Peterson watch the videos at 1.5x speed. When you are done you’ll feel like Neo waking up saying “I know kung-fu”
Anyway, I've been burning thru his videos and it's been mind blowing. Seriously. Most of the concepts aren't new to me. At least, they don't feel new. His maps of meaning course didn't so much tell me about the nature of our minds and the interaction with reality as it shed light on something that I had an intuitive grasp of already. He articulated the framework that I had been using. From my observations, he articulated a framework that all of us have been using. It may not be a complete framework, I'm not even sure if that is possible. Even if it is incomplete, it's complete enough to be useful.
Combine all of Peterson's work with all of the memory, persuasion, and influence research I've been doing lately and I'm a bit fried. So...instead of watching more Peterson or any other intellectual themed work I opted instead for practical knowledge. It helped. In fact, I need to incorporate it much more. This goes along with my resolution to start expanding my influence in a real way. I've built a beachhead of practical knowledge, I need to expand upon it.
One of the side effects of my Peterson baptism by fire is that I am starting to see the meta messages much easier. For instance, last night we watched The Santa Clause 2 with the family. This is the Disney show with Tim Allen as Santa Clause and he has to find a wife before Christmas. It's a somewhat silly show. That was what tipped me off that it's really a meta show. All silly shows aren't really silly. They are an attempt to portray a meta message. Silliness is the calling card of the meta.
Anyway, I started seeing characters as the archetypal representations they are. Some are obvious. Santa as our incomplete higher selves as well as a representation of culture itself. When he leaves and the false Santa remains he is too rigid and quickly becomes tyrannical. The message: following articulated rules in a rigid manner leads to tyranny and ultimately rebellion.
Then there is the red headed child that comes on the scene without any introduction, and we all just kind of accept this new character to the story. Partly because she represents the child in all of us. She's inquisitive and calls bullshit on stuff that doesn't make sense from a meta perspective. In one scene she asks the son a lot of questions about his relationship with his dad. They are all meta questions and he tells her that they are really hard questions. She easily brushes him off and says they are easy. You see, that's what gets lost with age. The ability to see the meta and live the meta. Children are all meta. As they age the meta starts to fall away, but the representative of childhood in the movie stays meta.
The brave part of my continues my training in meta sight, but the coward in me just wants to watch a movie ya know.