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 as an achievement it was 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.
One way then to define a time-constrained world is one where we experience what is happening, the events, objects, timelines in our immediate awareness, as 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.
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-based. 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 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.