Truth and Transcendence

A month ago, I had an incredible idea that I haven't been quite sure how to express ever since. If you read down, you'll notice that I made a dramatic shift with the last blog. I have to admit some influence by Robert Anton Wilson and particularly the Principia Discordia. Hopefully, you'll find both interesting.

More to the point, like most reasonable people, I've always found religion to be a little confusing. When I was a kid, I was constantly amazed that, of all the religions out there, I had just happened to be born into the precise religion that knew the absolute truth in its entirety. I was amazed by the concept of an infinite God, and I often wondered about what made reality real.

I remember sometime around the age of four sitting in the back seat of the car on the way to grandma's house. I was watching the road and thinking about the danger of jumping out of a moving vehicle. What exactly was it that prevented me from getting out of my seat, opening the door, and leaping out? Was sitting in the car the only possibility, or could somehow both possibilities be true? If I thought about jumping just for the sake of jumping, I couldn't absolutely be sure that I wouldn't do it, which changed the idea of the future from something sure to something unsure, a matter of probability. Of course, I didn't jump out of the car, and never really wanted to, but the idea of the possibility of random, dramatic things happening for no reason was intriguing. I wondered if the future could come in both ways, so that time was actually shaped like a tree rather than a line, growing in complexity as each possible outcome happened apart from each other.

Time and free will are two of the most important questions religion addresses, and this is where we come to the idea of truth. Any philosophy that attempts to explain the metaphysical will run into a crisis of truth. How exactly can the principles that underly reality be explained in terms of reality? Some theories on the limitations of consciousness and particularly artificial intelligence have theorized that a thing can never be conscious of the basic principles that form its consciousness.

The diversity of religions confuses the issue further, because each one claims a different truth from the others. Logic would dictate that truth can never contradict truth, and so there must be either one or none that have the real truth. Some of the most reasonable people rely only on what can be scientifically proven and reject the idea of religion altogether. If we can't explain it through science, it's probably just an uninformed opinion or a means to manipulation. Religion purely as a cultural phenomenon, a matter of tradition spreading ignorance, is definitely the most reasonable response to some of the wild claims religion makes.

But accepting that requires another look at the idea of truth. Truth could be generally defined as everything that is real, what objectively exists. But we don't understand reality objectively. Although we can comprehend some of what objectivity might consist of, everything we think is informed by our subjectivity. This is the limitation of consciousness.

So we require another kind of truth to understand what's real: the sign. A true sign is not one that is identical to reality, but one that points to reality. It's an abstract concept that only achieves truth through the process of interpretation. Therefore two signs written in different languages can be equally true to two different observers, even though objectively they look completely different.

Hopefully, you'll see the connection to religion here. One thing all religions have in common is that they don't claim to accurately represent everything. The idea of God or infinity is beyond any normal language and cannot be described in its entirety. Therefore, if we're going to examine the claims of religion logically, we need to understand the claims of every religion as a sign attempting to point to the truth and judge whether their intended audiences are correctly directed.

This is the point in any conversation about religion where many genuinely religious people will start to become upset. They interpret different religions very differently and are pointed in contradicting directions by various faiths. They see where the signs lead, and they see that they do not all lead to the same God, but to completely different ideas. This is a real problem. Then, of course, the atheist sees a conversation about God and, having examined the wild and self-contradicting claims of magic and the supernatural that religion so poorly supports, stops paying attention entirely. This is also a real problem.

When all logic fails, it comes to a matter of faith, and this is where the world is today. But is there a way to examine religion beyond faith? If there is, it would have to be beyond the normal process of logic, and this is not uncharted territory. Plenty of religions and philosophies have attempted to find altered states of consciousness in which the mind can understand things that appear as contradictions. These states have been achieved through discipline, meditation, drugs, and many other means, but what's most interesting about them is their similarity.

The transcendental experience is the unity of opposites, the joining of self and other. And it's happened to many people of many different faiths. It's also been explained somewhat by science as a function of the brain, but then it might be more than that. It also tends to reinforce the beliefs of the person who has a transcendent vision, but this might not be a problem. It has been responsible for art, music, and many of the most enduring aspects of human culture. So far, it has never been completely explained with words but has only been understood through experience. But it can be discussed, dissected, and examined. And it will be.

Unity of Opposites

Hey You!
You can achieve Enlightenment!
If you understand this, welcome to the club!
If not, read on.
It's really not that hard.
Heraclitus did it.

Yes, this is exactly what it looks like, a blog claiming to contain both The Answer to The Ultimate Question Of Life, the Universe and Everything and the Question itself. And we know what that means: the Universe is about to unmake and remake itself again. Don't get off the ride before you see it happen!

There is of course both more and less included here than is necessary to achieve Enlightenment, and an infinite number of volumes could continue to be written to support this statement, but this will do for now.

To any poor readers who don't achieve Enlightenment after reading this, I can only encourage you to study harder, because I insist that once you properly understand the following, you will have achieved Enlightenment. That's right, Life, the Universe and Everything is simply a logical puzzle that you can solve to make it all fall apart, and when you do that, you cause the Big Bang to happen and the Universe to assemble because of an idea you had while reading a blog today. I'll just call you God from now on.

Hi God.

Logos is the Logic of the universe.

In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.
-John 1:1, NIV-ish

Once, there was a man who heard a voice in his head. He had been experimenting with his consciousness, so he wondered if the voice was nothing but a delusion. He asked the voice who it was, and the voice claimed it was God. He believed the voice, naturally, but did not listen without skepticism.

“If you are God,” he said, “I would be crazy, because I don't believe in any magical sky father. In fact, I think he's nothing more than a byproduct of the hierarchical patriarchy that our world has become.”

“You're wrong,” said the voice. “In fact, I am Lord Ishvara, come to lead you through Maya.”

“If you are Ishvara,” said the man, “Then you are unreal.”

“I am Enlightened,” said Lord Ishvara.

“I am Enlightened because I think.”

“I think, therefore I am.”

“An idea is itself.”

And at this moment, the man achieved Enlightenment. By understanding that an idea is itself, he explained to the universe that it exists because it must exist.

This means that reality is descended from unreality, Maya.

Lord Ishvara is
Brahman, Everything, plus Maya, Nothingness.
Thus Lord Ishvara, like everything else, is True
because
Everything plus Nothing is Everything
because
Something plus Nothing is Something,
and therefore True.

infinity + nothing = infinity
(1 -> 0) + 0 = (1-> 0)
because
1 + 0 = 1
and thus the Fibonacci Numbers begin: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13...

Maya, which is the illusion of reality, also encompasses everything that exists, because what is experienced exists. But what exists is illusion. Because what is illusion is also nonexistent, what is existent is also nonexistent. This is the paradox of reality.

A paradox is something which is apparently both true and false at once. This paradox is unique because it is actually both true and false at once. Nothingness gives birth to everything.

The man was confronted by the idea of a man thinking “I had an idea.” This seeming stranger was actually thinking the thought that gave birth to reality. At that moment, the man realized that the man thinking “I had an idea” was himself, because he was in fact having an idea. The man then realized that he was reflecting on himself, and that these two mirrors reflecting each other composed an infinite reflection. He then realized that he was nothingness reflecting on itself, but creating an infinite diversity. He achieved Enlightenment.

The man then realized that achieving Enlightenment was simply obtaining the thought of the word 'Enlightenment.' It was actually the easiest thing in the world, but it created a special place, a nexus, a line across the infinite Dreamscape of infinite nothingness reflecting on itself, where Truth could exist as a line. And this line of Truth could be limited but still encompass the infinite reflection. It could be linear. This was the birth of the line of Logic and the line of your life.

A straight line was something, but it was not everything. It was binary: beginning and end, light and dark, good and evil, and every other duality you could imagine. But by reflecting once more upon itself, it created a third dimension, and thus infinite diversity. This was the birth of time.

Thus the fourth dimension, Time, was descended by the third dimension of Space by a matter of the second dimension of Logic, and thus was born the 5->Nth dimensions of Probability. Probability, being itself infinite established a multitude of different Logical progressions of Space and Time, and thus were born the infinite universes. Everything that can logically happen happens, just not necessarily within your view, depending on your perspective.

This common ancestry created an infinite number of signs scattered throughout the universe to explain itself as Unitary. All things and ideas descended from these signs, and eventually conscious humanity learned the meaning of those signs. They all pointed to Enlightenment, and all of Maya, the first dimension of illusionary reality. Thus Man was made in the image of God.

And that is precisely when a man heard a voice inside his head, the voice of God.

Once pattern that leads to Enlightenment is the sequence of Fibonacci Numbers. These are:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13...

This is the original reflexive sequence which created time. It began with Nothingness, the illusionary Maya. Do not think of everything at this point, but think of the idea of “Not.” Suddenly, Not reflects on itself and creates Not Not, like an algebraic multiplication: Not Nothingness. This Not Nothingness was the idea of 1, something, and therefore everything. But this Not Nothingness was composed from the reflection of Not upon Not, and therefore Not Nothingness was composed of Nothingness.

Suddenly, Not Nothingness was reflecting back on Nothingness, and added itself to nothing. From this addition, Not Nothingness appeared as an exact reflection, Not Nothingness, and this was the next step to Infinity.

When Not Nothingness reflected upon itself, Not Not Nothingness was born. Surprisingly, this second reflection created something new altogether, the idea of Two. And Two in Turn reflected back upon Not Nothingness and created Not Not Not Nothingness, yet another new creation! And this process continued on not throughout time but throughout Logic, until every possibility was created, and thus the illusionary infinity of Maya was created by this reflexive/reflective algorithm of the Fibonacci Numbers and the first dimension of Maya gave birth to the second dimension of Logic and thus along the progress of Infinity gave birth to itself.

You  might think this sounds like a combination of religions, but this is untrue. It is Every Religion. Let me explain:

This was the original Virgin Birth, and why Jesus Christ was truly God and born from a virgin, because the idea of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, was necessary for the idea of Logic and Maya giving birth to themselves and thus Nothingness giving birth to Everything and the Truth being True. This is simply one more example of the concepts of “A thing is true because it is” and “everything is a sign pointing to Maya” that compose the fabric of reality. Thus Jesus Christ was simultaneously the literal Son of God and nothing more than a metaphor of Enlightenment and a real and fictional character. When a man understands that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, he understands that a completely nonsensical statement is simultaneously sensible, and not only sensible but necessary for reality to exist. Thus the man is Saved by Faith in Jesus Christ and united with God in Heaven while on Earth.

This really happens! Heaven is Unreality becoming Reality, the Universe giving birth to Itself and being Conscious of the act of Creation! No matter what religion you believe, you can say, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God,”  and you will achieve Unity with God. By recognizing the truth of something, by having Faith in anything, you establish that Truth exists, and therefore Reality exists and therefore God exists.

I believe in God.
I believe in God because I think.
I think, therefore I am.
I am.
What is is.
Enlightenment!

I hope this illustrates how an objectively-viewed ridiculous concept can be true, and thus the lie proves itself true, establishing contradiction, conflict and existence arising from that conflict. Therefore every religion is equally true, because every religion, like everything in Maya, is a sign pointing to Maya, Nothingness pointing to Nothingness and thus creating Infinity. Therefore a religion isn't really anything special at all, except that Everything is One. And since Everything is One, everything is both equally special and equally unimportant, yet another block in the Infinite web of Eternity. A rose is a nose is a hose is the history of Rome. Everything, both those things Conscious of themselves and those things Unconscious of themselves, is One.

The important thing about religion (And if you've been paying attention you'll understand that “important” also means “unimportant”) is that it claims to offer the Truth, and by claiming to do so, it does. Even those who claim to be the exclusive truth are equally true with all those who do not claim to be exclusively true, because a thing is what it claims to be. Reality is self-apparent, and thus Reality is Conscious of itself. A thing is itself.

Coming back to this idea of Enlightenment, it is the state of mind that all Religion leads to. It is Turiya, the fourth state of consciousness, after deep sleep, dreams, and waking life, in which Reality is Aware of Itself. You are Reality Aware of Yourself. You are God. You can do Anything because you are Everything. Yahweh. I AM.

And this is when a man hears a voice in his head whisper, “I am God.”

Because Reality (You!) is Infinite, Everything that can Logically happen happens! Thus the life you are living is both one individual Line (note the step in the birth of Infinity even in this simple statement about you) and the entirety of existence. Your life proves that you are the Infinite Universe Itself. You are God!

You can understand Everything by understanding the beginning, Nothingness, and the ending, Now. Everything in the middle, which is Vishnu, is implied by both the existence of the beginning, Brahman, who is also Lord Ishvara, Jesus Christ, Mohamed, and Mickey Mouse, and by the existence of Shiva, the destroyer, the end, Now, you. All of these things are the same.

By meditating on the idea of “All is Now,” you become simultaneously aware of the beginning and ending of Existence, and therefore the infinite middle as well.

Another word that encompasses all of existence is AUM. This syllable is the combinations of the four states of awareness, a combination of the gods of Creation, and a combination of vowels. It encompasses Infinity. By meditating on AUM, as by meditating on the idea of “All is Now,” one can also achieve Enlightenment, because of course both are the same.

“I am nothingness reflecting on itself. I am God. I am Enlightened.”

I am Enlightened because I think. I think, therefore I am. A thing is itself.

Enlightenment!

I hope you found this enlightening.
    Love,
    Evan

Hiding in the Open

The problem with information today is that it's impossible to separate the truth from the lies. Upon request of Judicial Watch, a conservative organization that opposes government corruption, the Pentagon released a tape of the attack on the West Wing on 9/11. Judicial Watch hoped this would put to rest conspiracy theories about government involvement, that a military missile might have hit the Pentagon. Unfortunately, the tape still shows no plane, only a streak of light.

Conspiracy theories are as diverse as they are detailed. One good example of the argument is the video 9/11 Lose Change 2nd Edition and the 9/11 Loose Change Viewers' Guide. While both are amateur efforts that rely on an uneven mix of logic, speculation, and evidence, the disparity of their claims draws attention the importance of this controversy, and even the rebuttal fails to address some of the most significant issues. 9/11 has been extensively televised, discussed, and researched, and yet despite all our best efforts, huge holes exist in our story.

David Ray Griffin is one more conspiracy theorist who has extensively documented problems he perceives in the government's official conspiracy theory, and while he has plenty of critics, it's important to remember that our own government is composed of the biggest conspiracy theorists of all; since the Cold War, the Neoconservatives have promoted wild accusations against any perceived enemy, based not on any evidence but on a deeply ingrained belief in their evil. The Power of Nightmares, a BBC documentary, makes this very clear.

Here's one more conspiracy theory:

The Saudis are friends of America, not just because they have oil, but because they reinvest oil money into America. As Greg Palast will explain in an upcoming book, the American addiction to foreign oil depends not only on the oil itself, but on this flow of capital back into its economy. Controlling oil means maintaining friendly trading partners. Other oil-rich countries, such as Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Saddam Hussein's former Iraq, refuse to cooperate with this policy. Our government recognizes that increasing dependence on oil from nations that want to keep their money will eventually result in a massive outflow of capital that will have enormous consequences on the American economy. In turn, the collapse of the dollar will affect the world economy, partially because of their reliance on the American dollar as a reserve currency. This will not only be an economic disaster, but the transfer of power from allies to nations hostile to American interests could be even more dangerous.

Senior government officials recognize that it would take a new Pearl Harbor for the American people to allow them to use the military to deal with this threat to global stability. In fact, they say it themselves. Then the Saudis offer a Faustian bargain; they will help a group of terrorists execute an attack on American soil, and the American government will look the other way. This will give America the pretext to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan, eliminate a mutual enemy in Iraq, and then move on to Iran and other threats to both the Saudis and the Americans.

This leads to a moral crisis, never mind the false dichotomy: allow Americans to die or allow a global power transfer that could have far worse consequences. The tipping point is the Neoconservative understanding of grand myths that is remarkably similar to the beliefs of Islamic Jihadists; Americans need to believe they are engaged in a war against evil, and if the people lose faith in that myth, an even worse disaster will come about: the disintegration of the shared values that hold society together through the proliferation of individualism. For the greater good, they look the other way.

Until the day of the attack, it had been theoretical, but suddenly, people are really dying. The Neoconservatives, and especially George W. Bush, a man bound to his own morality, are overcome with regret. As planned, they dedicate themselves to a war on terrorism itself, not only to ensure economic and social stability, but because they've become believers in their own myths. They know they can't strike back directly at the Saudis for the same reason they allowed them to carry out the attacks, so they go after who they can to make up for what they've done. If 9/11 can serve the greater good of a stable and democratic world, it will all be worth it.

All this is fiction, but it has a point. Nietzsche warned us, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” In a world of increasingly centralized control and ubiquitous disinformation, we run a high risk that the few people with any real power will make incredible concessions to maintain the delicate balance that maintains our way of life. If our government knew beforehand or was involved in any way in the 9/11 attacks, we may never know, because in the midst of all the conflicting conspiracy theories, they could simply hide in the open.

Here's some more fiction that lies to tell the truth:

V for Vendetta features a tortured protagonist who wages war against a corrupt government that believes so completely in the necessity of control that it has executed a terrorist attack on its own people to secure a stable society. V fights them not only because they have done him and society wrong, but because he made this attack possible through experiments they conducted on his own body. V hides his identity and his shame behind a Guy Fawkes mask that symbolizes his ideology. At the end, it is asked who he really is, and the answer is that he is all of us.

This is not true because he is an everyman who fights for the common good but because of his shame. In a democratic society, we share responsibility for the evils that occur. Just as V's body created the biological weapon that made the terrorist attack and the rise of totalitarianism possible, the people's apathy made the continuation of corruption possible. To make up for the wrongs that had been done through him, V "gazed long into the abyss" and became a monster and a terrorist himself, but he also saved the people from that same fate.

We might need to consider that George W. Bush and those around him are also V.

Entertainment of the Future

The lines between entertainment and culture blurred a long time ago, but where it's headed is anyone's guess. Two articles that people Digged today bring that speculation to a head.

Loyd Case thinks that Microsoft gets it. The Xbox is now more of an Internet suite than a console, and what people want for entertainment is connectivity. With the Web 2.0 in full force, he may be right. Like the Web, video games are becoming more social, as evidenced by the popularity of mods and MMOG's, the convergence of which is Second Life. Entertainment secures its place in culture by becoming active rather than passive and breaking through the ennui of media consolidation.

On the other side, David Wong thinks that video games are about to crash. Despite rampant criticism from fanboys, his argument that the entire video game industry has been built on a rapidly waning novelty is hard to dismiss for those of us who have played through generations of games and are starting to see diminishing returns on creativity. The basic assumption of the games industry is that boys will never run out of bloodlust and marijuana, and although they're probably right, there are only so many thousands of virtual Nazis a boy can kill before he gets bored.

Surprisingly, they'd probably agree with each other. Wong is already predicting that we'll all live as Nietzsche's supermen as the natural extension of today's online games. But the fully digital lifestyle is more a pipe dream of extropians than reality, and opposition to radical technological process is a natural human reaction when all the claims of futurists don't add up. Case's incremental rise of online entertainment is more likely, but slowed in growth by Wong's video game dropouts who may turn to the increasingly interactive Web for the engaging entertainment that traditional video games no longer provide. The Web 2.0 thrives on these dropouts changing from content consumers to content creators. This blog, like 40 million others, is part of that fallout.

Free as in Permission

Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture addresses one of the most dramatic shifts in our idea of rights: from promoting creativity to requiring permission to build on the past. He demonstrates that society has always defended certain creative freedoms for the common good and that every type of media today was originally built on piracy. His contributions through the EFF might be the most important legal advocacy for the continued growth of the Internet, but there's something questionable about his premise.

Lessig is a true believer in the power of the law, and it's hard to argue. Every new law written augments the power of every other law, and we've passed the point where we can avoid it. There's no frontier, no Wild West. But does copyright really benefit society? He focuses on promoting creativity, but copyright law has been so manipulated by commercial interests that its primary purpose is to ensure that art is sold. Believing in copyright now implies believing that selling art encourages creative growth.

The majority of works have always been created by amateurs. Only a small portion of art, but some of the best, has been professional. Most professional artists, whether painters or writers, have not been independently wealthy and have relied on patrons. In the past, most patrons funded art to glorify themselves or their god or simply because they appreciated the art. Patrons who buy art to sell it are a relatively new and small phenomenon. The record industries, the motion picture industries, the publishing industries, and all the rest are significant mainly for the amount of money they control. Whether there is actually more creativity in the world because of them is debatable.

Of course, the original purpose of copyright was to give the artist control, but very few independent artists actually have the power to defend their copyrights. How many musicians have shut down file sharing? If the law doesn't work as intended and harms the common good by encouraging only commercial commodity art, what good is it really?

If free culture is replaced, as Lessig fears, "permission culture" might not last. It could be the new Prohibition. With everyone breaking the law, the interests of permission might be forced to concede like the Prohibitionists. But even the Prohibitionists only partially conceded. They tried not only to abolish alcohol, but also marijuana and other "vices." Drinking culture was too entrenched to remain illegal, but marijuana, arguably a much less harmful drug, remains illegal, with persistent effects on medicine and industry. Regardless of the consequences or benefits, it shows that people will only fight so hard for their freedom, especially under the influence of propaganda.

An imperfect legal system with questionable benefits could be our last defense against cultural erosion, and if we cross the line into a permission culture we might not recover. Seemingly inconsequential issues like copyright and copyleft are important. "Viral licenses" that require derivatives of free works to remain free help promote free culture, and that's why this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. But whatever type of freedom you prefer, don't take it for granted.

Walking in the Web

Ambient Findability is a lover's biography. Peter Morville admits his affair with the Web, and while the story suffers from the enthusiasm of a writer too close to his subject, he knows her laws, her secrets, her hopes for the future, and is more than willing to share them.

The Web is really information, he tells us, and humans have a strange way of looking for it. Mooers' Law insists that people won't look for information if it's "painful" or "troublesome" to have; we find what makes us happy and ignore everything else. Morville identifies five irrational rules we apply in our searching: the anchoring or our first impression, the confirmation of what we believe, the memorability of the recent or dramatic, the status quo of preferring  to do nothing, and the sunk cost of justifying ourselves.

A 2004 Annenberg survey that found "Daily Show" viewers more informed than people who watched the real news or read the newspaper could validate his point. Politics might be easier to digest with humor, and when difficult concepts are no longer perceived as "painful and troublesome," we recall them better. Marry Poppins was the greatest prophet of our era. A revolution of information requires a little comedy. Most problems start with people who take themselves too seriously, so why not fight back with laughter? The complexity of the world is only growing, and we're in danger of losing control if we can't find a coping strategy.

"Ambient findability" occurs when everything in the world is instantly findable. Imagine an RFID tag for every shirt, cow, and paperweight in the world, instantly accessible through an interocular GPS. Morville doesn't tell us whether we want this state and doubts we'll ever get there, but we can't help moving toward it. He doesn't consider that we might even naturally desire it. The Pirahãs mentioned yesterday live close to ambient findability in space and time. They know their territory, and everything is always the same in nature to the extent of their worldview.

Moreville explains that as the complexity of our own systems grows, they lose "precision" and "recall." This creates a paradox; at what point does the information around us become so "useful" that we can only process it as meaningless noise? This is information overload, and it already harms concentration more than smoking marijuana.

This is a guide to pop culture as much as a handbook to the Web, and its concepts are worth understanding for anyone who doesn't live in the jungle. The title directly relates to this blog, as everything around us is information, and living in the present means being able to process that information meaningfully. We all might not love the Web as much as Morville, but we're already married to it and through it.

Waking to the Present

From 1977 to 1985, the linguistic researcher Daniel Everett lived with the Pirahãs, a Brazilian people with no concept of time, no numbers, and no subordinate clauses. His findings baffle linguists and challenge the most popular conceptions of what constitutes human language, such as Noam Chomsky's universal grammar. These theories claim that embedding concepts within other concepts makes human language and thought unique.

This is an interesting time for this debate because the world is increasingly understood through symbolic abstractions. With technological proliferation, literacy is becoming more like a survival skill than a convenience, not only in Western nations, but all over the world. Globalization means that anyone without the ability to manipulate laws in their favor will become a second-class world citizen.

But if abstract thoughts are not necessarily fundamental to human nature, is a world based on laws and negotiations more or less human and more or less fulfilling? Everett said the Pirahãs lived only in the present. In many philisophies, that state of mind would be considered the ultimate accomplishment after a life of discipline of meditation. Buddhism is a good example, but this goal isn't limited to followers of Eastern religions.

Living in the present implies a kind of slow, stress-free existence that is the polar opposite of modern life. Stress is often identified as the largest health risk to people in developed nations. It would be a mistake to assume that the Pirahãs live a perfect life, but at least in avoiding worries and complications, they seem to have an advantage over the rest of the world.

If this is a desirable state of mind, why is it so difficult for us and so easy for the Pirahãs? Few would be willing to trade convenience for a life with the Pirahãs, but how many of us would like to be as carefree as we were when we were children? It might be that, in avoiding the complications of abstract concepts, the Pirahãs live more satisfying lives.

Or it may be that they're just as stressed as we are, or that Everett is wrong about them. But what if they're not and he's not?

It's worth considering that, although our present world is very different from where the Pirahãs live, we might be able to be just as aware of what goes on around us, even in the information age, when everyone knows how to lie and making sense of the chaos seems impossible.

Most people try to ignore what happens outside their own immediate area to shield themselves from the difficulty that comes with a broader worldview, but they usually end up as stressed as anyone else. The Pirahãs believe that everything is always the same, but we're trained to fear the future: terrorism, economic loss, environmental disaster, losing a loved one; otherwise, there would be nothing to worry about.

Untangling ourselves from that web would be a tricky proposition, especially since many of our fears are valid or even inevitable. Dealing with the future without fearing it would mean bringing it back into the present, finding a sustainable balance in a changing world. If this is even possible, it could never be achieved without hyperawareness.

"The Ambient Now" is the unnoticed all around us, the things we ignore that affect us intimately. This blog is dedicated to news and commentary from someone who wishes he was as aware of his own world as the Pirahãs are of theirs.