Picture the 16th and 17th centuries along a timeline. Punctuate the timeline with a gradual procession of revelatory events, each informing in its own way the statement:
the earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around.
The Copernican Revolution can also be referenced as a logically singular historical event. While an achievement a long time in the making, it now refers simply to a statement proven beyond a shadow of a doubt in the past. What makes it so memorable still in the collective psyche is its impact. Reorientation to heliocentrism sent ripples of change through a critical mass of culture’s interworking parts. Broadly, science, religion, and philosophy and the cultural institutions governing each.
The culminating event on the timeline toward heliocentrism was simple. Telescopy. This made Galileo, inventor of the telescope, the lightning rod of controversy that he was. By making it possible to see further, the heavenly patterns specified by Copernicus and generally by others before them became undeniably logical. Sun at the center. Earth, like its neighbors Mars and Venus, moving around at different yet consistent and thus calculable rates and distances.
Before these events no one, even those who were already in their own ways forwarding a heliocentric solar system, knew precisely when the statement would begin to have far-reaching cultural impact.
The objective framework necessary for a science of representational reality is a similarly profound culmination. I am writing so you can recognize the timeline we are on for what it is.
Looking objectively at a given timeline, in the case of the Copernican Revolution from a position in the distant past, we observe something self-evident. In this way of telling – a retrospective timeline – we recognize that one way to understand time itself is as memory constrained so as to serve as proof.
<aside> 🔗 Come to understand how this represents the existence and functioning of timelines.
“OKIC Orderly Vibe-Constraint Timeline”
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One way then to define the perceptual experience of our time-constrained world is the experience in which what is happening — the events, objects, timelines in our immediate awareness — are self-evident. What I am able to know tells me all I need to know to participate effectively and meaningfully. In exploring Outer Kaleidoscope, Inner Compass through the Everyman’s Collection you will learn about how memory, which integrates effortlessly with time-constraints like timelines, does so precisely because of its timeless qualities.
<aside> 🔗 Come to understand how this represents the existence and functioning of focus-driven remembering
“OKIC Hall of Mirrors Focus”
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Objective facts, including events, are in isolation. Timelines give context to both by tying them to direction. Both are used to prove statements, to present them as true beyond reasonable doubt. When referring to a time-constrained world, think of actions and events without context as direction-less, as they lack a timeline. This makes their meanings necessarily subject-dependent. Determined in accord with the preferences of the individual responsible for the citing of the fact. The word bias also works here, but while fitting enough, is a cultural landmine. In the absence of a meaningful connections to representational reality, context confusion has us turning against each other.
The point about facts and meanings is that humans have preferences, and they affect how we sense-make with others. Through OKIC you will come to appreciate exactly how this is not a bug in the system. It’s a feature! The trick is to relate to preferences as both true and time-constrained.
Citing isolated facts refers to the part of reality, truth in particular, that is slippery. By laying out important context, timelines and similar concerted efforts prove a statement’s relevance. If taken one step further and represented in a timeless way, its relevance resonates beyond any specific person’s preferences. With both timeless and time-constrained contexts informing facts and events, it seems true that the reality of statements can only be communicated through concerted efforts like timelines, where relevant context and parties are present(ed). Vibe plus constraint equals momentary preference lived.
The revolution that gave humanity heliocentrism brought with it major socio-cultural change. Humanity started integrating the different distances into deep space that humans with the right equipment were now able to use to make new, precise observations. For people in positions of leadership, it was a bitter pill. The revelatory yet utterly accurate telescope **meant they had to swallow any wrongness in their own doctrines about the earth’s, perhaps even humanity’s, role in any greater celestial dance. Humbling, scary perhaps, because beyond doctrine is always a bunch of perplexing conundrums that, even today, most prefer to ignore.
Truth can be hidden in plain sight, counter-intuitive even, and may not be derivable from past information. What might the future hold that I cannot reasonably foresee? How can I be confident to lead?
The leadership crisis of the day gave science a tremendous boost. While science – the systematic sharing of human curiosity – was already thriving, telescopy and heliocentrism propelled technology-based science into the spotlight. Devices, it turned out, might not just be good for transporting water and fighting battles. Clever devices might free humanity from its collective blind spots. About the heavens. About the future. Even perhaps eventually, in the rapidly unfolding human imagination, about human health and well-being, efficiency, and collective sense-making.
We looked at one timeline, that of the Copernican Revolution. Now consider putting all timelines present at this moment, like scarves of various colors, in a magician’s top hat. We often think of humanity in terms of diversity, as a collection of agents with labelable roles and identities. So what do we get when we gather up timelines instead? Does the magician turn the hat over and – POOF – it’s empty?! Does our integrated sense of reality, evident through facts and timelines, vanish into thin air? Objectively, no, in that we continue to communicate with others despite changes of context, pursue goals to real ends, and reflect meaningfully on the past and future.
So perhaps instead, the magician pulls on the single scarf protruding from the top. The trick then has us mesmerized as he slowly but steadily pulls what he reveals to be one long strand of scarves, tied haphazardly and going on without end. Like the frog heated slowly to a boil in a pot of fatal water, the long string of timelines is suggestive of a nightmare “timeless” scenario. Time without end. Our focused attention having no ultimate purpose. Just anticipating the end. In a later essay, reflecting on a figure titled “’The Suspense Is Killing Me’ | Prelude to Memory Map,” we’ll again address this unhappy position.
A central premise of the Everyman’s Collection is that, in suspending the particularness of identity – setting aside, as it were, our specific attention, subjectivity of facts, and reliance on timelines for sense-making – what comes out of the magician’s hat once all of the timelines have been stuffed in is – ABRACADABRA **– Outer Kaleidoscope, Inner Compass. Representational Science.
What the metaphorical string of scarves refers to is not timeline after timeline “stringing us along”. It hints instead at the fact that all of the figures throughout OKIC are figuratively, geometrically, meaningfully, numerically related. What humans share unconditionally, with each other and the rest of creation, we share in one richly memorable three-dimensional timeline – impossible to perceive directly but possible to infer and communicate through the “telescope” of timeless phenomena. In short, representational reality.
The figures in OKIC are timeless patterns by which we already integrate events and people and objects. Like the earth revolved around the sun, and it just took humanity a while to satisfy its doubts about its own deep-seated counterintuitive position, given the awkwardness of observing from a rotating, ellipse-moving, heavenly “wandering body”. Aka Earth central.
Timeline “proofs” of history-changing events make it obvious (retrospectively) how important they are as human socio-cultural transformations. What OKIC provides humanity is the means for embracing and reversing the damage from done from the counterintuitive position that relating is something other than identity-reinforcement, so we can move forward into better ways of relating. By experiencing OKIC, you will come to know how to relate to context using inner compass, and how to newly appreciate the structure, function, and potential inherent in outer kaleidoscope. You yourself will be primed to achieve identity, including self-governance, so as to make you a vibe-enacted [effective?] navigation device in a time-constrained world.
Still, self-identity (I-ness) can never be timeless because a person is embodied, informed by time and known by place, oriented largely through direct input received and processed by sensory organs. Similarly, in their lived experiences, other entities are not timeless. With modern technology though, we’re pushing the limits of what can be integrated, in part because of the current confusing landscape of timeless information. This is the case because there is an unmet challenge: meaningful and useful information from sources calibrated in different ways failing to be integrated effectively enough to contend with enormous global crises. We will have met the challenge when facts, events and timelines can “talk”. Relate. The figures of Outer Kaleidoscope, Inner Compass are a relational language, expressed geometrically rather than being a set of statements understandable largely through semantics-driven natural language analyses. In this way the logic of the natural language and other information present throughout Outer Kaleidoscope, Inner Compass can be understood as the template for realistic integrations.
Going back to the astronomy example, anyone aware of telescopy-informed cosmology also grasps the following. We can talk about revolutions, we can talk about revelations about timelines or timelessness, and at base each of us is sensing and understanding ourselves as oriented to place. By comparison, when four directions, latitude-longitude, the positions of stars are designated, accurate maps can be created and shared. Add synchronized timepieces, and you can rendezvous with others. Add enough clever devices that are 1) programmed to track things that our place-oriented bodies cannot and 2) working together with others, and we can rendezvous two large and distant objects, such as a rocket to the moon, even though each is moving at a different rate in different directions.
To continue the analogy, at some level the naively true “me standing still” sensation and even my functioning as a perhaps epically informed navigation-master do not adequately characterize the whole and complete dynamic map that is, by analogy, a solar system, in a galaxy, and beyond. I am unable to navigate through direct perception alone all of the moving parts.
And still, under the stars on a lovely clear evening in the 21st century, even a well-informed person might have the awe-inspiring experience
I am the center of the universe.
Philosophy refers to this position as naïve realism.
I am the center of everything because I sense how I occupy my own center. It is so because I said so.
Taken in stride, my universe may not be the universe, but it is mine.
What telescopes and other devices that reveal hidden things have done is make it possible for humanity to integrate to place despite the necessary yet naïve realism that functions as metaphysical armor around each human. An undeniably real whirligig of activity and dynamic change exists in the imperceptible, giving rise to many counterintuitive parts of our condition as earth-bound humans. Telescope, and yet much more. There is structure in what we contemplate as the whirligig of the unknown. Welcome to Outer Kaleidoscope, Inner Compass. OKIC.
OKIC caps off a modern cavalcade of events, humanity reaching critical mass along another timeline now dominating culture’s interworking parts. It makes undeniably real the statement
humans revolve around relating, not the other way around.
The verb revolve is strange though. Revolving refers to how the solar system functions. Humans function by relating. In short, humanity’s is due now to see itself not as a collection of self-important beings but as meaningful parts of a whole.
So if not for self-important influence-peddling and survival gaming, what function might relating serve? By the end of Part 1 of Everyman’s Collection, you will understand it to be centering. Can humans with the capacity to center and relate beyond the limitations of subjective reality really be as important of a timeline as the Copernican Revolution? Might OKIC be as momentous as telescopes were? To get insight on relating and humanity’s crisis, I bring you, in the next essay, mid 20th century psychiatry and pop psychology.
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In 1957 a deceptively simple psycho-social formulation from an outsider psychiatrist took root in popular culture. A book was published by the same name. I’m OK. You’re OK.
Between its publication and popular embrace, researchers expanded on its relational landscape, totally human-relationship-centric like so much before it in modern perspectives. I’m OK. You’re OK led to practices broadly referred to as transactional analysis. Its formulation can be traced to a complex array of relational strategies common today. It’s not a stretch to call it the e=mc² of modern psycho-social phenomena. Through related forms of… relating… researchers went on to validate a multitude of methods over more than half a century, leading in part to the now burgeoning field of cognitive sciences and the relative newcomer behavioral economics.
Early on, through books by titles like Games People Play (1964) and Scripts People Live (1975), transactional analysis attested, in a rye psycho-social fashion, that there are inevitable ways people establish OK-ness. Rather than pushback about homogenizing people’s diverse experiences, at the time, it was embraced. This speaks to the perception of psycho-social patterns as itself a powerful insight. There are hierarchies in terms of leadership; there are patterns in seeking and achieving of psycho-social balance.
From this perspective, functioning in a psycho-socially complex role, from social worker to psychologist, diplomat to schoolteacher, would not necessarily, despite the ups and downs of real relationships, resign one to an unfortunate position. Ancient legend Pandora, with her “only hope” and unfortunate box of suffering, begone! Let games and scripts predominate. Whether they be in the background or the foreground, no problem, so as long as options and choices (or the perception of them) are there too.
The real traction in the I’m okay You’re okay formulation then is a subjective driving force: that humans are capacitated – through our relationships with “other” – to recondition ourselves out of difficult pasts. Bootstrap thinking. Fast forward to today, and we face the difficult future humanity seems to be speeding towards, speeds reached in part by capacitating humans so that they might surpass each other (a generalizable measure of success still being okay-ness).
The Science of Representational Reality — with content library available at OKICscience.com — first, questions the inevitability of vacuous okay-ness style relationalism. Then it replies thoroughly and thoughfully to the problem that, from the current state of psych-socio-cultural state of affairs, humanity has not yet arrived at an adequate formulation for its own thriving. The bootstrapping towards I’m okay You’re okay increasingly and ironically carries the weight that, humanity on its relational path might have to resign to a collective death sentence. It’s a timeline, so far, by which the evidence for “relating does not center around humans” includes reactively cycling activities around violent populism, computers destroying the world, climate crisis, fear of alien invasion. On the non-reactive side, we find an inspiring assortment too. Biomimicry, indigenous skill-building including animistic practices, collective intelligence, and computers saving the world.
So if relating does not revolve around individuals and their relative okay-ness, why bother examining or believing in OKIC’s universality of relating? If relating is possible so as to activate new optima of inter-relatedness, it is possible to transform human creative endeavoring through centering and balancing, such that businesses, economies, art, and technology can themselves repair the human dependencies that have come asunder: nature, health, education, innovation?
The trick is, the orientation has to capacitate a shift from okay-centeredness to more broadly defined/available/relatable centering. In this is a counterintuitive condition, like heliocentrism still triggers. Our “I’m whizzing through space rotating in two directions at once around a ball of fire” wtf doubt. Humans can be resilient in the face of disorienting conditions. And even though centering, as broadly construed as OKIC achieves, is unlikely to be perceptible to us as individuals, we can learn to, and be given digital tools, relate to and through it. In OKIC, the word generative is used to refer to the real effects of centering that overcomes disorientation. It stems from adequately addressing the challenge of comprehensive meta-relating.
Relatedness is a characteristic of all things, yet it no more revolves around humans as the sun revolves around the earth. Most early cultures embraced beliefs and practices centered around the view that everything can be related to in some way or another. Broadly, animism.
There’s a wise naivety in animism that can be deconstructed using the metaphor, as the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant does, of examining the parts of a trained elephant without being able to see the whole. This represents the human predilection to add special meanings to our own curious explorations. A clever enough enterprise until we begin to conflate reductionism with a harmless bunch of quibbling monks.
OKIC looks and feels nothing like an elephant. Moreover, it reveals the elephant metaphor to be quite inadequate. The myth of the unknowable elephant leads to an understanding of animism little different from superstition and of science as hopelessly blind. The wisdom latent in animism, and which OKIC itself brings alive, is that the human concept of “understanding” must contain not only extra-personal comprehension but centered relating if it is to mirror reality, similar to the way nature and co-existence of lifeforms happens.
In the drawing above, the elephant becomes instead an uncharacteristically restrained dragon. With this revised metaphor for modern times, we begin to get a sense of how ancient animism has been hinting all along at representational reality. Its paradox, and thus institutional science’s achilles heal at present, is that the inherent limitations of human inquiry warrant a special type of self-restraint. And hopefully you will begin to appreciate that OKIC is nothing like an elephant.
In timeless relating comes comprehension and with that real solutions to seemingly intractable problems so far thought to be inherent to the human culture machine, like “human nature” is (tautologically) inherent to humans. Including the reductionist, siloed views of reality. On an intimate scale, we need no longer hinge the future on tireless admonitions to others that they not be self-centered. Nor do we need disorient our minds by experimenting with hallucinogens or superstitions that are mumbo-jumbo (to us) in ways that remove us, when we are lucky just temporarily, by huge scales from real and pressing cultural concerns. Conspiracies too graduate from paranoia to patience puzzles.
Humanity will not get to optima of interrelatedness by catering only to our well-meaning impulses for kumbaya relating games, healing our inner child wounds, or “saving” or “waking” us one soul at a time. We will not get there by entire countries simultaneously (as if by magic) shedding their imperialistic ways, such that no one country has any particular advantage. And we will not get there by continuing beyond the stage of reality hypoxia whereby we hold our collective breath for theoretical physics (and now computer science) to build a relating-to-reality black box or superintelligence.
Those are not the problems, and therefore cannot provide direct solutions. The basic misrepresentation about relating – the lack of universal style – is. The human culture machine finds itself now peering down the barrel of serious global disruptions, resigned to an inadequate trifecta of well-meaning non-solutions. This is humanity’s humility moment. Personal humility, and also “the machine”, “the system” type humility, leaving us, it would seem, with no option but to increasingly humiliate ourselves through righteous indignation fueled by equal parts futility and guilt, while seemingly having no possibility for reprieve. Peace-less pieces.
Relating that is limited to humans relating to each other, affecting each other, is a “funhouse” (uncentered) version of relationalism. Its fuel, also a magnifier, is polarities prone to distortions. No one’s experience is the same as anyone else’s, for sure, yet this needs to spur innovation rather than grinding to a halt all progress towards not just reprieve but repair.
We can’t get there by dismissing how humans actually relate in real time. By brushing off difficulties as “human nature”, whatever that means. The patterns point to something altogether more interesting. “Human nature” as an explanatory framework can be replaced by how we integrate meaningfully to our inseparable, timeless dance of co-existence.
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OKIC extrapolates a nexus of interrelated parts that can be difficult to grasp. Separately not so much, but as an interrelated whole it’s a formidable challenge. It cuts across disciplines, generations, socioeconomics, and types of intelligence.
To help make it more interesting than confusing, I’m peppering Everyman’s Essay Collection with three socio-cultural frameworks, like scaffolding that we can hang something meaningful on. As we tackled in the first essay, there’s the heliocentrism timeline framework. As introduced in the previous essay and expanded on in this one, there’s the I’m okay You’re okay framework. And in the next section, the third framework of mischief and mayhem will be introduced. The intriguging issues raised with these particular frameworks is not, I’m afraid, meant to “solve” the difficult parts of OKIC for you. You have to do that through experiencing in depth its unusual written and figurative content. The ways in which I am framing the issues here, for the purposes of introduction, are essentially to provide you key angles, important perspectives to orient you, as you work through the rest.
“Identification by Okay-ness”
For instance, I’m okay You’re okay can be examined in numerous ways. To generalize, people commonly apply the structure known in information theory as a 2-bit matrix. That’s a basic breakdown for any complex phenomena that can be represented as two bits combined in all possible ways, that is, four ways.
In the matrix above, the combined two “bits” are self and other (subjective experiences as “I” and “you”) which have two forms each (okay + , not okay - ). Such an analysis is based on absurdly limited and yet precise parameters. Loop it to the heliocentric timeline, and what the I’m okay You’re okay matrix does is render succinctly the logic that confines humanity to the common assumption and experience that “relating revolves around humans.”
Narrative and behavioral therapies developed precisely because the quintessential issue of the limits of human subjectivity become self-contained given the I and You matrix effect. First most obvious thing to notice is the mirror effect, a phenomenon you will come to understand deeply (and not without confronting plenty of paradoxes) in exploring OKIC. What OKIC shares with the I’m okay You’re okay matrix is that it can be understood as a thermodynamically open system.
In I’m okay You’re okay the “I”s and “You”s are interchangeable. However their relational contexts… not so easily. Which is where OKIC comes in. For purposes of understanding more deeply then, open system “I”s and “You”s are best articulated in a generalized fashion as “self” and “other” (as the axis labels in the matrix above indicate). With that, the complexities of relating, even starting from a simple model, show themselves as a Rorschach test rather than a Venn diagram.
Relatedness functions more like this…
than this…
Look at self and other as combinations of positive and negative attributes and anything can be applied meaningfully to the same formulation. Just as without energy and mass there is no universe, without I-ness and You-ness, there is somehow no fundamentally meaningful relating. But how can that be?
Since the Rorschach-relatedness in I’m okay You’re okay is subjective, it cannot stand alone as a meaningful psycho-social formulation. In the same way mass and energy are interchangeable, ambiguity of meanings is an essential feature of relating meaningfully. Part 1 (Inner Compass) begins on the topic of ambiguity, using the most pervasive form, linguistic. Moral ambiguity comes later, in Part 2 (Outer Kaleidoscope), after the dynamics between ambiguity and timelessness are keenly established.