While its aim is new optima, OKIC is top to bottom, inside and out, about navigation and orientation that is realistically optimistic. Not naïve. Not sharkish. Humanity faces the profound and distressing problem that too many of us no longer understand or can relate to what realism or optimism mean without getting bogged down. Lost in ourselves because of overwhelming inner tension and cynicism. Lost to the world because our communication with others is dominated by disorienting perceptions, a despairing trifecta of confusion, lostness, and wrongness.
With lack of realism or optimism comes a perceived need, mirrored in social structures of all kinds and including social media, for echo-chamber style isolation or digital or other temporary exists from the “real world”. And for those established enough and organized enough to build right in the middle of a bog, cue righteous indignation.
Recall the point in an earlier essay that assumption-making and points to the every-day challenges we face in walking the line between “great new approach!” and old patterns sneakily repackaged (like when assumptions are differently hidden). Recall too that three quarters of Figure Series A-H are concerned with binds, predicaments, and shielded re-experience. It may perhaps be surprising to hear my say, the timeless collection of representations in OKIC, its calls for revolution, are not fueled by suspicion and indignation.
The challenges, shared by all, are not “in the way” (as in, to be righteously defeated, ignored or discarded). They are “the way.” Let me explain.
The relational structure (geometric relationships in the figures) of OKIC reveals and thereby helps us newly optimize through applying its understanding to
- how we get constrained by prior reasoning (logic) that gets iterated in real life stuff that affects us, and
- how natural language and other forms of communication (like various forms of art and math) embed time-constraints through our necessary object orientation (the external context of our lives).
These affect assumptions and the “vistas” we can perceive. Okayyyyyy… but as fascinating as this may sound, it’s not at all obvious to me how such complicated wisdom about these more obscure parts of experience (and resulting “representational reality”) might help.
At this point, it is easier to show than explain. First consider the general structure of the mysterioscope again.
First, notice the number of vertices, twelve, can be broken down in to 3x4, 6x2 and other combinations of numbers that sum to or are factors. These numbers correspond to how the complex structure behind the scenes of OKIC works. You can perhaps begin to understand that not only does the mysterioscope function, with its central role in the OKIC figures, in a systematic way through the Figure Series A-H. Consider too the simple curiosity, that many systems of knowledge and understanding can be quickly mapped to a figure with twelve vertices, including music, genetics, astrology, Chinese medicine, and Christ-consciousness.
But seeing the dynamics of binds and predicaments, it is easy to conclude it functions for both good and ill. For instance for the later, leading to human-imposed constraints that can make optimal (such as harmonious) navigating and orienting difficult to impossible. The same combinations of layers and directions that make the mysterioscope dynamic and changeable (such as through scaling and self-similarity) are also responsible for constraint-making.
Unconstrainedness is like flow, but without distinction in direction. Call it kaleidoscopic unboundedness.
At this point it makes sense to distinguish two types of constraints. They are complementary yet, in so being, make discernment about the real map within reality the extraordinary challenge – as well as opportunity – that it is:
- Inherent structural aspects to existence, which we benefit from and can relate to (indirectly) because they establish the coherent basis for:
- conscious awareness such that context-sensitivity is achievable and
- interpersonal framing (shareable memory and timing) such that changes of focus are easily navigable.
- Human-imposed proliferative adaptations
- ambiguity towards objects and meanings, making us susceptible to confusion and other forms of reactive navigation,
- desire to construct equivalences through explicit or implicit metaphor, making us susceptible to falsehoods (due to misperception or inaccurate metaphor) and
- ability to fabricate complex meaning states, reductive ontologies (categorizations) that serve a particular goal (and when generalized, may be used to synthesize and optimize into bigger systems, though absent integration with Type 1 constraints, results in separation from whole, e.g., siloing).
The Type 2 constraints cannot be left unchecked because they give rise to human systems with the capacity for sabotage. When systems get complex enough to not be able to juggle change and development directly through Type 1 constraints, larger, more complex and/or less masterful systems tend to reinforce approaches that are suboptimal, inharmonious, out-of-sync in relation to the whole.
Constraints can be from distortion, binding, masking and can be unknown or known, benevolent or sneaky.
The mysterioscope in OKIC combines representationally complex phenomena into a full spectrum of underlying patterns. Below is a general model showing the same pattern of basic “ready, set, go” present in the series A-H model figures, but this one reveals the key underlying features of tension, focus, direction and context. It corresponds generally to unconstrained awareness of the issue, meaning all assumptions are accounted for.
OKIC map features can be applied to new situations, or to reevaluate old, contingent on:
- Behaviors that make up central triangle are compatible.
- Tension at each rhombus are unique and paired with its opposite. (When tensions are the same for each rhombus, the figure collapses into a bind.)
- Context or focus that make up outer points of each rhombus are compatible.
Here’s another tricky part that is also a bit disconcerting. When our efforts to constrain form a triad of any sort, the relational structure of the mysterioscope can get co-opted. When effective and optimally applied, great. When not, we end up with particularly pernicious forms of reinforcement due to collapse of a complex meaning state, entered perhaps in good faith, into highly context-specific binds, predicaments and shielded re-experiences. These insular types of constraints can be tricky to sort out.
OKIC constraints, being foundational, are generalizable from one context to another. As such they are a sort of shared map. The non-OKIC ones are there to separate. If done with goal-directedness, there is no problem. Yet when generalized or used for internal checks, complex meaning states impose a new set of constraints that are suboptimal in relation to the whole.
Back to the general model, now have a look at the same boundless figure, but with one of the three “arms” of the figure obscured. This is when we move to what I term Rational Roulette, the subject of the next essay.