A literal perspective of Easter is not an element of my current personal worldview, but perhaps because so many people are currently focusing on Easter themes, I find myself reflecting on them too. My abiding focal concerns directly relate to the archetypal patterns and themes at the heart of Easter, not to any specific doctrines.

Among the Easter-related themes abuzz in me this morning are:

• The principle that in bridging any gap between or among people, the person with greater capacity and agency has to meet the less capacious person where they are, not where it ‘would be nice’ or convenient for them to be.

• The slipperiness and counterintuitiveness of hand-up (direct engagement in a deeply relational context) versus handout (indirect, decontextualized resourcing, often with performance expectations) dynamics.

• Affordances: In the life sciences and design practices, the word ‘affordance’ means a feature of an object or process that makes some interaction with it possible, and in particular ways. For example, a cup’s handle telegraphs its purpose so clearly that no instructions are needed. The handle ‘affords’ grasping and orienting the mug.

When we perceive that someone’s circumstance is less well positioned than our own in a given context, we may consider helping them. To accomplish that, the better-positioned person must have or create affordances the other person can both recognize and effectively engage with. This can be tricky, especially if we lack adequate awareness and appreciation of their actual situation. (I am aware of colonializing tendencies and that many mines and tripwires lie hidden in assumptions of being better positioned than some needy other, but bear with me.)

Returning to Easter, in the Gospel story, God creates an ‘affordance’ at the organic level in human form. The more complete and competent Being meets the less complete beings where they are: as an organism in (yet clearly also apart from) the world-enmeshed situation of humans.

In any social context, choosing to really see and meet others where and how they are, rather than prodding them to be more like us, is not how humans tend to interact with each other.

This principle that the more capable one bears the greater relational responsibility is intuitively clear and compelling across all relational contexts. Consider the driver in a parking lot lane yielding to the driver backing out of a parking space. The driver in the lane is more capable by virtue of seeing more context than the driver backing out can see. The driver in the lane bears greater relational (specifically, safety ensuring) responsibility in this case. If she honks the horn and speeds ahead, she fails this common test of mature relationality. Examples abound and characterize not only individuals but also societies.

Implementation of asymmetric responsibility among humans is full of difficulties, of course, because

• We can mistake having more (money, social privilege, power, knowledge, etc.) for being the ones whose values and ways should be emulated.

• We can misapply empathy by trying to force others, “for their own good,” into our ‘enlightened’ patterns (which typically amounts to them being extraction sources).

• Via dark-triad personality tendencies, we can seek to disempower, dispossess, and dominate others.

There are endless ways to botch even sincere (if naive) intentions at giving a hand up, reasons often having roots in biases about what ‘up’ and ‘the other’ mean.

Moving back toward Eastery territory, I’m marinating in an unresolved tension between (a) sensing the fragmentary nature of myself and others and (b) my awareness of a Field enveloping, penetrating, connecting, and enlivening all within One. Inadequate awareness of and relating with that Field is what I perceive as separation from ‘the divine’, which is the gap requiring spanning, which calls for the agent with greater capacity to move toward the ones with less.

The curiosity I lovingly hold, while resisting an impulse to collapse the tension to doctrinal propositions is:

How can I, being a fragment of the Whole, meet and participate in That which is not fragmentary or incomplete? How can I, who am so limited, participate in the Boundless?

The ‘as if’ aspect here is in declining to look for or attach to definitive, crystallized stories or claims. I hold most claims, especially claims on or about Reality, as provisional. They stay provisional until they prove themselves.

I do have beliefs, beginning with the proposition that one of two propositions is true:

1. Some kind of materiality (energy, matter, space, time, etc.) is fundamental, and consciousness depends on and emerges from it, or

2. Some kind of Consciousness is fundamental, and we and whatever we can perceive, measure, etc., arise from It.

By the way, after pitching my tent in Camp 1 for years, I’m back in Camp 2, sans a lot of baggage from my years in Camp 1.

As for ‘sin’, I find the classic notion too simplistic. I believe there is something about how humans are shaped by evolution and reinforced by other evolved facets of human nature, something inextricable in our configuration, that locks us into an extinction-seeking path that entails a dilemma: We must either

• engineer or discover a way to change our fundamental nature to prioritize mutuality, stewardship, and ecological homeostasis, or

• become extinct (taking most macro-level biodiversity with us).

We are well on our way along the second path of the dilemma, the extinction path, with our collective foot mashing the accelerator pedal.

There’s a vast array of options available to us to avoid the worst, but we keep doubling down to act against our and Earth life’s better interests. How can anything but something innate and fundamental explain that?

Some expressions of religiosity claim to offer the first fork in this dilemma: fundamental change of human nature. While it has led to important civilizational outcomes, I see no evidence that religion alters the aspects of human nature in question. They are ‘hardwired’ by evolutionary configuration. When I say alter, I mean at the level of the neurological and endocrinological systems and processes that enable and modulate our affective (emotional) and cognitive functions and tendencies. Because alterations to fundamental human nature are taboo and likely will remain taboo in democratic societies, we will stay on the self-elimination path.

The heart of the dilemma echoes the saying of disputed origin, You cannot resolve a problem from the same perspective that caused it. But if the issue is inherent in our constitution, any attempt to pin it down and mitigate it will be distorted and undermined by it.

Scarier to many is the notion that we might actually discover the self-damning factors of human nature AND invent ways to mitigate them. That potential is frightening for at least two reasons.

First, we are back to the one who is the source of the issue being empowered to define and implement a fix at the level of essential configuration.

Second, even if the fix works, any change to human nature implies potential changes to individuals’ identities. I was a being who sensed, perceived, valued, and acted one way, but now that chain is altered. Am I still me? Attachment to our narratives about our identities causes much confusion and fear.

The only other potentially feasible end-run around our extinction-seeking that I can imagine is some form of benign, superintelligent absolute dictator that would deprive our species of the ability to keep acting in sociopathic, ecocidal ways. But if we are to design such a wise and superintelligent dictator, we would have to figure out how to prevent our human faults from infecting it. In any case, this option does not try to change human nature. It seeks to contain it. We would still be our pre-dictatorship selves, with the same extinction-seeking impulses, but constrained by a powerful and much-needed (if non-conscious) parent. Sadly, AI outcomes to date (specifically, LLMs trained on human content laced with human biases, blind spots, and values lapses) don’t give us much to hope for along this path.

In sum, religion can inspire us with visions of liberation through constitutional change, and we need such a vision, but in my observation, the troublemaking elements of human nature persist and wreak compounding damage. Let’s consider upping our game and taking explicit, evidence-informed charge of our fundamental nature.

We should hold on to the most promising, life-enhancing stories and ideas that originated in the past, adapting them away from ‘hereafter’ bypassing and toward here-and-now course correction. We also require new stories to inspire us to take the next steps for surviving and thriving here in this reality. This living world.

And that’s why I write, friends. It’s not much, but it’s something.

This bunny requires some air and sunshine. ☀️ 🐇 🕳️

☲ Fire

I come to the forge uncertain,
Yet open and keen to create,
Reaching toward some middle way
Between channeling it whole
And shunning the Source, the Fire.

☵Well

Do I come to the well to drink,
Or only to gaze at my mask?
To dive into the flow beneath,
Or bob in its shallows
Between sky and underground stream?

☰Moon

In your fullness, reflection clear.
Waxing, waning: night hugging day.
New: dark waters invoke dreamsight.
Even this pool, this small portal,
Knows the tidal tug of your arc.

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Imagine a huge prize in a global competion for the first individual or group that develops an absolutely contagious pathogen capable of eradicating humanity. There are virtually no government controls. In fact, if your idea is promising, your government and venture capitalists will line up to fund your lab.

That’s close to the situation today with AI development, with the exception that the Manhattan Project, and similar efforts in other countries, were explicitly seeking to develop a new, inconceivably destructive weapon. AI, by comparison, appeared in the guise of entertaining and largely positive applications, like solving complex protein folding challenges that have stymied important medical breakthroughs.

AI, like nearly all technologies, but far more so, offers tantalizing benefits while simultaneously harboring the darkest destructive potentials. Developers have shared some of their concerns about the risks of large language models’ (LLM, the popular forms of AI most people have interacted with), but the hype over their more dazzling outputs drowns out the warnings. Governments have proven as eager as greed-driven investors to be first to command the most powerful AIs. We see no meaningful precautions or controls in the USA, China, Russia, or Europe.

I participated in Daniel Pinchbeck's July series of interactive webinars and discussions investigating AI’s current and emerging capabilities, opportunities, and risks. A number of insider guest speakers covered a variety of perspectives, beginning with the cautiously hopeful and tracking toward the decidedly fatalistic. The more 'inside' they were (Silicon Valley, etc.), the more alarmed and pessimistic.

The emotional trajectory of the group followed that of the writers in last year's prize winning short film, Writing Doom, about a writers room starting work on a new season of a popular streaming show. Aside from the show runner (team leader), they are initially bored with the project. A studio staffer introduces a new addition to the group, a fan fiction writer who's also a PhD candidate in machine learning.

To get a feel for where Daniel's group landed during yesterday's final scheduled webinar meeting, or simply to understand the conundrum humanity now faces, take 28 minutes to watch the film.

Many in the group continue to press for pro-human, pro-Earth-life outcomes that prevent the worst potentials of the current ungoverned race to create an alien super-intelligence, an inscrutible mind that will have zero capacity to care about humans or other living organisms.

Because of the chilling conclusion of the webinars, Daniel scheduled an ad hoc follow-on discussion for this Sunday. The link is in his recent Substack post. If you are interested in the existential threats inherent in the potential near-term advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI), including the potential quick-turn follow-on to AGI, artificial super-intelligence (ASI), consider joining the conversation.

Near-term AI developments have the potential to eclipse all other threats to life and wellbeing combined. It's past time for people to set aside their divisions and cooperate to force politicians and sociopathic corporate officers to prevent AGI development.

Many groups are working to understand and mitigate risks AI poses, but companies, universities, government agencies, and—we can be certain—criminal enterprises are sprinting to get the first AGI and SAI out of the gate. Regardless their varied motives, their approaches are alike in their recklessness. We need to increase the focus on lasting human wellbeing immensely. We have to ramp up pressure to limit further development and to isolate advanced AI projects from the internet and from critical infrastructure.

In the next few months, I will write some post and notes digging into specific issues and ways to engage with relevant decisionmakers. In the meantime, please don’t wait for me, or any other sole voice. Please educate yourself, family and friends, colleagues, and anyone who will listen.

Why are there thousands of books and courses, each claiming to teach the best way to achieve some particular outcome? Logically, either all of those claims, or all but one, are false. Yet advertisements barrage us claiming to offer the one universal best way, and you can only access it if you act within the next [imagine a countdown clock here] minutes for the heavily discounted price of [imagine an exorbitant figure here]. We need only this one perfect book or course.

Let’s be wildly generous and assume the author or teacher actually knows their stuff. Why do no books or courses deliver on this promise equally to all readers or students?

Because

• for the most part, knowledge and skill are not transactional commodities; they are unique, living integrations of a complex, dynamic person and some part of a complex, dynamic universe.

• each map of a territory works well for only the person who creates it.

• being able to do something effectively has close to zero correlation with being able to transfer one’s ability to someone else (creating and delivering instruction is its own, separate area of expertise).

We each need to imprint our tools, techniques, and processes with our own perceptions, experiences, and ways of being.

The upshot? We need the meta-skill of taking inspiration from others’ insights and approaches, but blending and adapting them to mesh with our unique needs, ways, and goals.

Most people cannot use others’ frameworks, tools, or practices effectively out-of-the-box. Instead, they must wrestle with their work and craft their own representations, processes, methods, techniques, and even tools before they can feel comfortable and be productive. Borrow, remix, amend, extend, and repeat until you have a system that works for you.

One word is spoken.
I hear many words,
Carrying many thoughts,
Mysteries of life,
Paradoxes of truth,
Contained within one word,
Direct knowing,
Knowing the oneness of life
Comes while listening,
Listening in the silence ...

Excerpt from ‘In the Presence of the Word’, in The Star Cross, by Ira Progoff

In your meditation, Ira,
A mysterious Word lands
Like a bird in the nest
Of your occidental ear,
And you hear:
'Tremendum'.

You note the 'archaic' tone
Of the syllables
That form in your mind.
Old, Western phonemes
Dress the primal Sound
With the sounds
Of your heritage.

Sounds are evidence
Of the Voice making them
Notes borne on breath,
Articulated by fingers,
Flow from a flute,
And announce the Musician.

Instruments express the Music
In the tones their forms permit.

'Tremendum'.

Archaic in its linguistic root,
But well suited
To bring form from void
through shape and meter:

Tre – MEN – dum

It marches,
Paced to living heartbeats
stitching the timeless to time,
step by step,
in the dark, embracing silence.

Silence sings
In the dense forest.
Layers of life above;
Strata of past years below.
Sheltering canopy
mirrors supporting roots.
Colonnades of timber
Anchor Earth to Sky.
Mycelial fibers,
Knit a living web —
Animated matter,
Intimately knowing
The unity of Being.

Two HMs and no publications in 2024 may not seem like much, but it gives me some sense I’m not entirely insane to have wobbled off down this path. I submitted nine out of 12 months and felt only three submissions were truly ready. These were two of those. That suggests I’m developing some sense of what works in short fiction.

What about 2025?

I’ve never found annual resolutions useful. Instead, I meander into my aspirations. I dabble, doodle, and muddle (bet you thought I would write diddle), all while metabolizing guidance and examples. I stay lightly but persistently engaged in a few interests, building skills slowly and steadily. Occasionally, I indulge in a period of intense involvement with a project (e.g., a PhD and 5 National Novel Writing Month completions, all prior to AI availability).

No resolutions then, but this year I’m putting a few stakes in the mud.

• Achieve basic conversational, listening, reading, and writing proficiency in Spanish.

• Improve my author deliberate practice, with the guidance of superior sources including , , and coaches like and (Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit That Lasts).

• Continue writing short fiction and submitting to contests and publications.

• Post more regularly here, beginning not later than April. (April? There are reasons. Reasons more mysteriously compelling than the possibility the cast of Oak Island may find another rusty hobnail.)

I hope you create and enjoy beauty, joy, and community in 2025.

Why. Generic resistance? That was a factor, but the greater suspects were focus and lack of supporting habits. Not lack of focus, but too much of it invested in deep diving into whatever holds my attention this week, month, or longer. That’s why I need to establish habits to support other goals, including short form writing with some regularity. I have habits to ensure I get adequate sleep, nutrition, and exercise; habits for learning; habits to remember appointments; and habits for the other behaviors of a functional person. What I don’t yet have, but shall, are effective habits around drafting, revising, and posting to Substack.

I doubt I’m alone in this. The market for apps addressing the causes, associated frustrations, and proposed mitigations for undesired or desired-but-absent habits was $9.93 billion USD in 2023. The global habit management apps market is growing at 13. 21% annually, attesting to our hunger to achieve more deliberate control over how we spend our attention and time, and what outcomes we generate as a result. 

Is there more to my lack of traction with online communicating that than the challenge of habit management? I think so. 

Motivation comes to mind. In the past, I’ve noticed no significant difference in felt reward from writing for myself and writing for a public. As an introvert deeply motivated to explore ideas and concepts, I usually feel satiated after feeding on good books, articles, videos, podcasts, and conversations with one or a few friends. I take notes and continue working with ideas. Nothing feels lacking. But, of course, something is lacking.

What is the point of this relatively self-contained guy writing to and dialoguing with an audience beyond himself? 

Writing here, and not only in my private notes, can serve values I tell myself I hold:

• connection: discovering patterns of meaning that move toward greater internal and collective validity and coherence

• community: cultivating mutually meaningful relationships with others

• contribution: sharing my efforts at sense-making and meaning-making with others who are exploring the nature and implications of our existence

• competence: prompting me to communicate more clearly and completely, which is key to thinking more effectively

The first two values depend in some part on how well the publishing platform accommodates connecting and interacting respectfully and productively. Substack appears to be an excellent environment for engaging with others and their works. 

Serving the second two values may benefit from a platform’s design but depends more on my commitment to writing as a deliberate practice.

Read

• Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (2018), by Robert Plomin. There’s a little story behind this one. While looking at houses for sale in May, during a fit of irrationality with respect to the housing market and mortgage rates, I visited a lovely home in Charlottesville, Virginia. In the home’s small office, I saw about 15 paperback copies of this book on a shelf. 

  

  I thought the home must belong to the author, one of his close relatives, his editor, or his publicist. I realized I had heard about the book when it first published and had wanted to read it. I took a photo of the shelf of copies to remind me. 
  The science of genetics is complicated. I embarked on the reading with low expectations. There are many things to know if we want to have basic genetic literacy. Plomin walks the reader through the forest of concepts and terms like a jungle guide who knows every tree, boulder, stream, and animal path. He exposes and dispels many misunderstandings and false claims. 
  It’s the best popular science book I’ve read on the topic, and I will read it again, more slowly and taking notes, before I corner anyone at a party. (Did I say I’m an introvert? Right. No parties.)
  Some of my takeaways:

  • Nurture vs. Nature is a false dichotomy. Many factors commonly assumed to be purely environmental are largely shaped by genetics. Shared environments, like family and schools, account for less than 5% of differences in educational achievement and mental health, once genetically shaped environmental factors are controlled. The upshot is that genes have the greater part than culture, education, or family in influencing each person’s predispositions and behaviors.

  • Most traits are polygenic, meaning thousands of genes influence them, and also leaving little opportunity for targeted engineering, such as designer babies.

  • There aren’t actually any psychological disorders. What we think of as disorders are extremes on spectrums of normal variation, not distinct categories. Everyone is somewhere on each psychological spectrum. It’s not binary, yes or no.

• At a Journal Workshop: Writing to Access the Power of the Unconscious and Evoke Creative Ability (1992), by Ira Progoff. (See the Wrote section below)

Watched

• Dark Matter (Apple TV). I read (and loved) the book, by Blake Crouch, when it first published. I don’t watch series often, but I was curious to see how well the writers (including Crouch), director, and other project principals adapted the complex multiverses thriller to screen. Bravo! And they followed the novel closely. Aside from one sizable logic hole (see if you can identify it) that glared in most episodes, it was superb. Compelling story and performances. 

Wrote

• Six Intensive Journal entries. I’m learning the structured journaling method developed by the late psychologist, Ira Progoff. The Intensive Journal’s structure and processes are optimized to stimulate creative insights and productivity. In preparation for a 6-day workshop, I’ve been reading the workshop book. I also attended a 3-hour online introductory session led by the kind, insightful author, poet, and artist, Carolyn Kelley Williams (goes by Kelley). 

1. https://www.econmarketresearch.com/industry-report/habit-tracking-apps-market/ ↩︎

I’m a meaning-thirsty preschooler disguised as a Boomer. I never stopped asking questions or marveling at the boundless strangeness and beauty of existence. I want to understand what I am, what you are, and what our shared circumstance (everything else) is. Join me in some of my meaning-tracking excursions.

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What to Expect

Frequency: Expect an article at least monthly, but usually weekly.

Topics: My fascinations include psychology (emotions, perception, memory, sense-making, meaning-making), social behavior, how and why stories work (or don’t), evolutionary topics, and a basketful of topics generally considered philosophy (existence and its challenges, meaning, reality, subjective experience, etc.). I also explore various scientific topics, the built environment, technology, and the metacrisis/polycrisis. I’m likely to reflect on what I’m reading, watching, and listening to, especially when I sense meaningful connections within and among them and with my core interests.

Lens: As the newsletter’s name suggests, I aim to maintain a provisional posture with respect to any knowledge claim — make claims earn their place. We’re pelted with propositions about what’s real and what’s important from every angle. What to believe? Fortunately, we can simply ignore most of them. And when we do embrace beliefs, we are wise to hold them lightly, test them frequently, and amend or retire them when they stop aligning with attentive experience and best available information.

Provisional thinking means

• being choosy about which claims to expend effort considering

  • some (most?) claims are simply noise and don’t earn our focus

  • rapid-fire, hyperbolic claims are often tactical deceptions (the real topic of interest is where they are not pointing)

• the one making the claim owns the burden to

  • convince me I need to pay attention

  • provide evidence; we (usually) don’t need to disprove it

  • prove their and their sources’ relevant authority

• accepting that we aren’t obligated to believe or dismiss anything that isn’t relevant to our needs, wants, nature, or verified circumstances

• maybe it’s so / maybe it’s not — poke it and see — and if it is, so what?

Why ‘As If’?

As-if thinking is a specific application of provisional thinking. We can apply as-if thinking to knowledge claims we want to experiment with. (Remember, we’re still ignoring the other ones.) We test a claim by imagining (thought experiment) or acting (behavioral experiment) as if it were true, while never taking it as a certainty and resolved to drop it if it doesn’t prove itself.

About Me

I grew up in the southeastern United States in the 1960s and 1970s, spending as much time as I could exploring the outdoors, reading, drawing, and imagining alternate realities. After undergraduate studies and marrying a Kentuckian, I spent 20 years of active service in the Air Force, which took us to seven states and two other countries. We settled in New Mexico for another 14.5 years in Civil Service. Most of my 34+ total Air Force time was in information technology management and knowledge management. Since retiring, in 2021, we’ve been back in the Southeast, reconnecting with relatives. It’s probably not our last stop.

My academic journey focused on psychology, natural sciences, and philosophy (undergraduate); systems science, information resource management, and military science (master’s level); and computing technology in education (specialist and doctorate).

I also write fiction, hike, and am learning Spanish.

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