Our Kaleidoscopic Future

Can we find a new way of thinking? Yes, and we already are.

There are multiple doors into meaning. We are the keys to one another’s doors; we find our rhythm and presence in the flow of one another as we share ways and open doors. It can be as simple as a word spoken to someone at the grocery store. It can be a lifelong passion, career or creation. It can even be the way we talk to ourselves.

We Contain Multitudes, We Are Multiplicities

In sharing our paths, we share new ways of unlocking the world around us. This has been true for at least as long as we’ve had poets, and yet we still do not have a shared worldview that can accomodate such radicality and wildness in everyday life.

That’s why the next big shift could be a shift in the way we think. In short, we could begin to think in multitudes and multiplicities rather than binaries. We could move into forms of Expansive Thinking that offer new forms of connection, hold the polarities in our lives, and open the space around what currently feels constrictive or irreconcilable.

“I’ll tell you right now, the doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious.

If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door.

If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door.

If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

One way this shift can come is through the simple and excruciating practice of understanding that there are multiple paths to the same place.

Even though we share a real world, we are each experiencing that shared experience uniquely. It’s not that our experience is cut off from others or solipsistic—we do share most of our regularities and most of our experiences because we do share the universe—but the part that is uniquely ‘me’ can mean ‘I’ sense and experience the world very differently from others. This can be problematic if I assume they’ve had the same path as me.

Hating another person or feeling a rush of anger and frustration at their views is not a battle of good and evil but rather a sign of how different our paths have been.

This doesn’t mean there is no right or wrong; it just means figuring out what they are will require a bit more work. It will mean sitting with that reaction and letting it be felt, and also letting it pass. And it will require opening to the path of the person in front of us, and trying to do it from a neutral embodied stance.

What could be harder than that? It is truly the work of a lifetime.

Until now, often for the sake of our own sanity and survival, we have mostly assumed that everyone around us is having an experience similar to our own. We don’t think about this and decide to feel this way; it’s more like an assumption that is the default mode of our existence as we move through life.

To be aware of the multitudes in everyday life is a little bit like doing psychedelics and trying to go shopping for vegetables—the fractals of the broccoli make it very hard to move on. In truth, however, each person around you really is having their own sober trip. Everyone in that crowded airport or that university class or that church or that train station is experiencing the life you share with them in a unique way, one that could be a portal for you, a key to your lock, if only you had the time to open it.

‘Their’ ways, like ‘ours’, are oriented by every experience they’ve had up till then. Every word that has ever been spoken to them, every book they have read, every song they have listened to, every experience of being loved or unloved or hurt or helped, and every way they have learned to get through those experiences and continue in life—all of this is walking by us on the street.

As Walt Whitman says in his poem, Song of Myself, we are multitudes and each of us has our own intricate purpose. That purpose is to communicate our unique experience in any way we can, but especially through learning how to share it with those with whom we come into contact—maybe we have the key they need, or maybe they have ours. As Whitman writes, this is even the purpose of the moss growing on the rocks and the bird flying through the woods and of the daylight as it falls upon your face:

Do you guess I have some intricate purpose?

Well I have, for the Fourth-month showers have, and the mica on the side of a rock has.

Do you take it I would astonish?

Does the daylight astonish? does the early redstart twittering through the woods?

Do I astonish more than they?

This hour I tell things in confidence,

I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.

Still, it can be hard to hold the multitudes of others in view in daily life without losing the thread. I’ve struggled with it myself, and it’s not to be taken lightly; much of what we call ‘mental illness’ may in fact be related to different levels of overwhelm relative to these multitudes and the ways our bodies sense and align with them. A “a new way of thinking” is also a new way of being, there’s no separation; we are nested, continuous experience.

Thinking differently is a change in the basic way we exist. It requires taking a step back in presence and choosing to love the person in front of us. Love is the act of opening to other paths. It is the foundation of our existence and it is also our greatest challenge. We have reached a time where we can become aware of this and even choose to assume multiplicities of presence rather than contrast.

Are we ready for it?

Indeed, yes. Many of us are ready. Many people are already beginning to experience it. But we do have to be careful. This process is challenging and delicate and can easily spiral. For that reason, it can never be forced. It can only be started when the person starting it is ready for it. To act now, we need infinite patience.

Growing Community

Through my university research, working with Making Ways, and in all the conversations we have in Love and Philosophy, I’ve realized that there are many people who want to find, learn and co-create orientations and ways of thinking that are not based on contrast. Many have already found ways of doing this and are looking for community.

Community is crucial; we all need all the help we can get. As someone who is generally a lone wolf, opening to community has been (and continues to be) a major practice for me. It is part of why I started Beyond Dichotomy. We need one another, and we need to connect in as many fields and disciplines and professions and ways of life as we can, because changing habitual patterns of thought and action on this scale is The Big Challenge.

Binary division is rooted in many of our worldviews; we often take it for granted that either/or is our only choice. We do so without even noticing or questioning the pattern or rhythm that structures those categories and actions. And, as expressed above, there has been good reason for that. Still, over the past year, I’ve found many out there who are already engaged in the same practice by different names, working to implement a different pattern of action beyond dichotomy across scales and levels of life.

One cascading example from this past week: Manda Scott invited me to be on her Accidental Gods series, and since that conversation—which is all about the themes presented in this Substack—many others have reached out or written movingly about their own ways of finding this balance. This sort of sharing will become all the more important as we go along through these next years, because we will be creating new ways of meaning, passing across traditional bounds. Manda’s podcast is itself an example of this practice.

Calibration

Now for the real post ☺️. The following is made to be read in full OR scanned and perused as feels best over time, as there’s a lot in it. It is a nested, complex system of the ideas above but told through many different questions, approaches and perspectives. Here are the sections:

1. Life is not a hallucination

Beyond the either/or of simulation

2. In the Spirit of the Fractal

3. Embracing Paradox

Distinct Indivisibility

From whatever place you enter and for however long you explore, the main idea at the heart of this is to bring out the pattern of multitudes, to engage in expansive thinking, moving beyond traditional, assumed confines of either/or while embracing both. At the end, you’ll also find a list of references and inspirations.

Life is Not a Hallucination

It has become popular in some philosophical and neuroscientific circles to talk of the world, or our experience of it, as a simulation or a hallucination. This has trickled into popular culture in ways that are not always helpful, especially for young people.

‘Life as hallucination’ is easily confused with eastern-inspired ideas of meditative experience or no-self. It can also be confused with the idea that ‘self’ is transparent or that our concept of self is a story we tell ourselves—all true in ways and all coming with helpful heuristics. Still, we do share reality. If we didn’t, we would not be able to communicate about all these ideas in the first place.

It’s easy to feel the world is meaningless or that your actions do not matter if you are constantly being told that they are not real. One has to go very deeply into ‘non-duality’ to find it can be a delightful path. There is a way of realizing the world is very meaningful through this feeling of unreality, but the larger point is this:

We really do create and share our experience.

Beyond the either/or required by simulation

To say we do not share reality, or that there is no reality, requires a binary either/or mindset, and we would like to move beyond that, even as we hold those polarities and appreciate their many approaches and tools.

It can certainly be attractive—and it certainly grabs one’s attention—to imagine the brain as creating hallucinations that are all we ever know, but this view is built upon, and depends upon, a binary conception of mind and brain, or mind and body, one that assumes there is something in the brain that can be a hallucination in contrast to whatever it is that might be ‘having it’: This is the binary worldview and it has been troubling us for a very long time in similar forms because its loop is so addictive.

An early example of this same idea—that there can be one thing that is real watching another thing that is not—was called the homunculus, which can be imagined as a tiny you inside your brain that is watching your life like a screen (because that’s often how it feels, right?) but that little you would need to have another you inside of it to watch its screen, and so on. This pattern is actually very useful and points to a very real truth, that of nestedness. The trouble only comes if you try and imgine there are beginnings and ends or that you can ever separate from you.

This pattern has gotten confused for us because of our either/or mindset. We think that there is something like hallucination that is totally different from something like reality, for example, but there is not. That truth is hard to understand and hard to hold, and requires a different sort of thinking.

If you want to continue along the binary either/or route, you’ll find yourself looping addictively to try and solve this infinite regress, always trying to get to the beginning or end of yourself, to be satisfied, to find the one thing that will make you safe. After all, if you brain is hallucinating, then so must every other part of you and every part of all you are part of. Your fingers hallucinate touch and your mouth hallucinates taste and your lover hallucinates love. The deeper you go into it, the more you realize that this loop is addictive because all you’ve done is replace what was meant by one word (say ‘life’) with what was meant by another (say ‘hallucination’) and you can do that forever; there will always be another question train to hop onto and never any place to land or rest, if you stay in the binary mindset. It is like hopping from one foot to the other endlessly.

The more accurate (if more difficult and less exciting) approach to life is the one that holds the paradox of hallucination and reality in the same space and understands they are pointing beyond what we assumed for both of them. This does not stay in the binary either/or mindset that assumes mind and brain/body are different, but rather allows them to be words pointing to patterns of movement, the pattern that is never exactly the same as itself and beyond beginning or ending.

Instead of believing there is a you that magically hallucinates its own existence —instead of getting stuck trying to understand how you can be a hallucination hallucinating itself—it may be helpful to realize that ‘you’ is a distinction made through language to describe your embodied experience as the pattern of life. It might feel like we are going too far to say this, but: You are life becoming aware of itself in a new form, which is what life has done for as long as there has been life, and which makes you a very important movement in your own right, a link that cannot be broken.

In this approach, we are each having a unique experience of life and for that reason, none of us experiences it except through one another. We are all connected as life at the same moment that we are individual, unique happenings of it. We are a unique experience of life that no other part of life experiences; our embodied experience is sharing it. Finding our flow there is life’s calibration.

It can be helpful at times and in certain contexts to understand the ‘story of self’ as an illusion—and I respect and like the work of many off those who have been identified with the hallucinatory message, but to move into a new way of thinking, we have to realize these are ideas that only make sense in a binary world. To fully engage with them, we have to believe in that either/or mindset. What happens if instead we sense what is going on in the space around those choices? What if we allow the hallucinatory mindset to exist as one way we come to learn how to move past those very dependencies? In so doing, we do not reject it but rather open space around it so that it becomes a portal and embrace into the feeling of being alive.

Life is real, and it matters. That’s the starting point, and there are many paths into it, even the path of hallucination.

There’s no getting around life’s nested dynamics, but it can be challenging and certainly comes with a responsibility that we might wish we could escape at times. Wanting and needing a way out of that challenge and pressure is often the impetus at the heart of our excitement in imagining we live in a simulation. It’s also why it can sometimes be a good thought experiment. Call it a simulation or call it life. Either way, it is our reality, and we have to deal with it.

How might we do that?

In the Spirit of the Fractal

It helps to start with some basic patterns to set the mood for expansive thinking.

What sort of mood might thinking in multiplicities rather than binaries entail? The most obvious sort of movement to come to mind for many is the fractal, that wonderful creation that helps us understand self-similarity and the nested nature of patterns and beings in the world.

There are many mathematical ways of describing a fractal—the term was coined by mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot but the neuroscientist Karl Friston inspired me to think recently (due to a conversation that will be published around Christmas), that rather than the fractal itself, sometimes all we really need is the spirit of the fractal.

This spirit is described well by the Fractal Foundation in their defintion of a fractal as a ‘never-ending pattern’—no matter which direction you turn or what dimension you head into, the pattern continues. It is similar to all it previous potentialities and realities and yet it is never static or holding to any particular set of parts. When we embrace the spirit of the fractal, we are no longer on a line with only two directions or two choices. Rather, we are at the center of an intersection of lines that go in all directions and do not conform to anything binary. This is a helpful spirit to consider as we begin to move into new ways of thinking—we are shifting patterns, not parts.

Another term that is in the spirit of the fractal is the Strange Loop, whereby we come back to where we started but never come back at all to where we were. The pattern continues, but all of what we thought were parts, or many of the material configurations that we once perceived, continuously change. Another image that can be helpful is the spiral staircase. This rhythm is a bit like going up a spiral staircase except there is not only ‘one’ up or down or left or right but rather a multiplicity of dimensions in all directions which changes depending on your position. These may need to be labeled from our position—from our position, it might even seem that there is only one staircase—but the new way of thinking understands that from another perspective, we might have very different orientations, a very different path of very different stairs. Still, the overall pattern of the staircase is shared and remains.

Two people going up a spiral staircase will sometimes face one another, at which point whatever direction is ‘left’ for one of them will be ‘right’ for the other. This sort of spiral and change of perspective is expressed well in this drawing by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher.

Stories by Jorge Luis Borges or Italio Calvino are also helpful, as is the poetry of William Blake. Some discussions I had recently about this are Perspectival Realism with Michela Massimi and this conversation I had about spiral ladders and Blake with Iain McGilchrist.

All these are variations of the spirit of the never-ending pattern; expansive thinking follows a similar rhythm. Another way of putting it that may make more sense is that the spirit of the fractal is the same spirit as this new skill we are developing. We are coming to understand a world of patterns rather than parts and nested, planetary systems rather than binaries and oppositions. What is left or right depends what dimension you’re in and what staircase you’re on, but you need another’s experience to unlock the doors as you go.

“It is curious, how one often mistrusts one’s own opinions if they are stated by someone else.” ― Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

Embracing Paradox

If you have happened upon any of the conversations I’ve been having on other podcasts lately, or if you’ve been following Love and Philosophy, you’ve probably heard me talking about this. Still, I wanted to include it here because it seems like it cannot be said enough at the moment. So, here goes: the most potent practice into a new way of thinking is the practice of Holding Paradox.

In many ways, the practice of holding paradox is exactly what ‘the spirit of the fractal’ and the ‘strange loop’ and other ideas discussed above are doing, too. It is also at the heart of the practice of Navigability. It is also the spirit of what we feel that is so wonderful in the experience of reading someone like Calvino or Borges—where reality goes a little bit beyond itself. It is a practice that shows us the binaries we thought were in an absolute contrast to one another are actually only two positionings among many, many other nodes.

From where we are right now, in this same line of thought, we might feel as if there are many oppositional and irreconcilable parts to our individual, social and planetary lives. Everywhere we look, there is opposition or something that does not quite fit with what we are doing or who we think we are or who we want to be or what we thought was wrong or right. Many seem to be taking sides and fighting and a sense of panic can make us feel we have to do this, too, even if it is only with ourselves. We are fighting the paradox at the heart of our lives but it is not the paradox that is the problem. Rather, it is our current dualistic orientation which limits us such that we cannot see and explore the space all around it.

The same is true in much of our current science and philosophy: At the heart of both, there is an issue that feels irreconcilable, and it is this: Life can never be fully captured, represented, modelled or constrained and yet it longs to be captured, represented, modelled and constrained.

In other words, life longs to have its stories told, its songs sung, its picture painted, its patterns and regularities mathematized, and so on. Even though none of these will ever fully represent or describe life, it longs for it, because life is dynamic and includes these very attempts. Life is the meaning for life to be, well, doing this life-ing. This paradox is not to be resolved but held; life perpetuates life through these vessels of ever-shifting creativity.

Holding this paradox means we realize we never have the whole story or the whole picture, but we have an important and unique part of it, one that has to be shared. At the same time all of this, we also understand that our motivation comes when we find authentic ways to ‘keep trying,’ to keeping wanting the whole picture so we keep trying to see it from some new point of view while also finding ways to share our own point of view in that process. The quest to know what it is like to be somebody other than ‘me’ is part of how we share our unique position with others.

This may sound like a great deal of effort, and indeed it is. Doing this is the primary challenge and motivation at the heart of our lives and for that reason, it can cause a lot of trouble and get everything all out of whack. Still, it is the only source we have for alignment and flow, and these strange loops and paradoxes and spiral staircases and forking stories are also portals into a rhythm perhaps best described as grace.

We’ve all had little tastes of it, or at least a drop of it on our tongue at some point in our lives. Maybe it was when we were playing outdoors as a child in the summer or riding into the sunset on our favorite bike. Maybe it came on a road trip, or while taking the train, with our favorite song playing on the stereo or in our headphones. Maybe it came while playing football (or baseball or soccer) and feeling like we were suddenly the air and the grass and our teammates and the ball. Or maybe it came while surfing a wave or having a wonderful conversation or walking in the forest or reading a poem or just being hugged by someone. These can all be moments when we are no longer ourselves and yet we are more alive than ever, when we are both the moving and the mover, the observer and the observed, in a rhythm of life beyond the usual patterning. These are invitations and confirmations of expansive thinking, which is really expansive living.

Embracing paradox redistributes the charge of what at first felt irreconcilable and oppositional and shows us there are many other nodes in connection; there were never only two. After some practice, what once felt charged against something is now charging with it; binaries only make sense from a limited position. They are polarized in directions that can no longer be understood as diametric once you begin to think in multitudes; boundaries become open and fluid the closer we get to them.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Part Two coming in January, 2025. Hugs and blessings to all for the holidays.

References and Inspirations

Walt Whitman Song of Myself

Douglas Hofstadter I am a Strange Loop

M.C. Escher,

Borges The Garden of Forking Paths

Calvino Invisible Cities

Perspectivism

Perspectival Realism by Michela Massimi

Deleuze and Guatarri Rhizome

Fractals Benoit Mandelbrot

Minna Salami Sensuous Knowledge

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

Photographs: Diane Helentjaris, Robert Nelson, moren hsu