Killing the Cosmic Joke
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I remember hearing people talk about sequels and remakes, their concern that it’ll ruin the original.
How does it ruin the original? I’d wonder at them, with little success. Just don't watch it, if you think it's a dull travesty.
I was equally confused by people who would, with heartfelt disappointment, say “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”
Why does it kill the joke?
Feynman shared my confusion in his own way:
I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
Like Feynman, it’s the visceral irk that I could never connect with. The sequel, the remake, the explanation, the science, don’t they each only add, and not subtract?
I’m here, sending you the next sentence. You’re here, reading what I’m about to say that I don’t yet know. I don’t know you. All I need to know is that your tongue has perfected enough dances of English. Its ghost travels as you read this sentence… can you feel your bottom lip graced by your mind-teeth as you subvocally read the word “lip”? Who gave us these ghosts, and why do we keep worshiping them?
Anyway… subvocalization slows our reading down. Repeating what is already there. Muttering to yourself, as if your meanings are in need of sonic steadying.
Why does naming work? How is it that ownership frees you and me, by the simple act of vocalization?
Why does naming kill the cosmic joke? The cosmic joke is that all of your isolation and unfreedom is reality gently pranking you. In fact, you, as a certified, chewy bit of reality, are in on that joke. You just keep forgetting it.
Why does naming work? Owning your shit moves your attention and my attention– your truth collects your violence, your betrayal; then your words catapult them into the dream of language where we can prank ourselves unharmed and unlonely.
Right? All it takes is the establishing of shared reality.
Establishing… with whom? On what? How? Vocalization? Subvocalization? Are tongue-ghosts and mind-teeth not enough to cast the spell of shared reality?
Establishing, on what ground? What is a foundation so violent that it is not a dream?
bear in mind, the karmic patterning of what one creates in one’s dreams is exactly the same as in one’s waking life. Murdering someone in your dream is exactly the same as murdering someone in your waking life in terms of karma; there is no difference. If the motivation is there to do it, that is the same motivation.
Why does naming kill the cosmic joke? I don’t mind that you keep forgetting the cosmic joke. It’s cute. It makes it funnier. But can we also try with you not killing the cosmic joke with steadying sonic vocalizations of ownership, please?
No sub-, no ghosts, not the slightest whisper. Just the groundless gateless stemless cosmic mischief of unencumbered awareness.
how could you add obscurity to clarity?
We can't actually kill the cosmic joke. But don't ask me to encumber it with explanation. I don't want to be complicit in sustaining dull travesties with our attention.
It irks me when we add, and not subtract.
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Explanation.
I’m here, sending you the next sentence. You’re here, reading what I’m about to say that I don’t yet know. I don’t know you. All I need to know is that your tongue has perfected enough dances of English. Its ghost travels as you read this sentence… can you feel your bottom lip graced by your mind-teeth as you subvocally read the word “lip”? Who gave us these ghosts, and why do we keep worshiping them?
Without warning, a seemingly simple post switches into strange and mostly irrelevant-seeming meta commentary.
Contentwise, the paragraph says “I’m writing this. I know you can read this because you know how to read in english. When you read, you say the words in your minds. Why do we do that?”
But it's doing a few things whimsically. First of all, it's talking about the act of communication, in a direct way, as it is happening between the writer and the reader, catching the reader in the act of reading the words and thereby inviting a little more crisp presence. Secondly, it's anchoring "vocalization" and "subvocalization". These are understood to be essential for speaking and reading respectively. They foreshadow "naming", in its connection to ownership later, since that is a kind of vocalization, for example.
Anyway… subvocalization slows our reading down. Repeating what is already there. Muttering to yourself, as if your meanings are in need of sonic steadying.
The "sonic steadying", i.e., repeating words in your mind instead of directly living the meaning, is similar to extraneous sentence stems. Sentence stems are affirming when you can't trust each other to own without overt proof, but distracting otherwise.
It’s also an excuse to segue into leaning a little deeper into "subvocalization", in order to talk about facsimiles (a representation/copy) generally. Subvocalization is an easy case study in questioning whether more layers of representation are helpful. Although controversial, it is generally held that saying words in your mind throttles the flow of meaning from the written words directly, especially in speed reading.
> Why does naming work? How is it that ownership frees you and me, by the simple act of vocalization?
Another abrupt change. In the same rhythm as "why does it kill the joke" from the beginning, it's a new instrument added to the orchestra. Again, seemingly irrelevant. But fans of stemless know that ownership is always relevant; stemless is all about subtleties of ownership.
By default, relational practices tend to see naming ("vocalization") as the enactment of ownership. The question above deliberately also provocatively takes that for granted, but invites questioning of how.
> Why does naming kill the cosmic joke? The cosmic joke is that all of your isolation and unfreedom is reality gently pranking you. In fact, you, as a certified, chewy bit of reality, are in on that joke. You just keep forgetting it.
More clearly in the style of the refrain of "why does it kill the joke", before saying more about what the cosmic joke is. Whether naming kills or doesn't kill the cosmic joke according to the writer is unclear at this point, and will unfold over the course of the post.
What does it mean that your isolation and unfreedom is a gentle prank? In fact, you are never isolated and never unfree.
"You just keep forgetting it" is borrowed from "you are already enlightened, you just keep forgetting it" which is a Dzogchen perspective. The "certified bit of reality" also points at self-evident nonduality of "you".
There is some continuity with "naming" in "naming the joke" (instead of "explaining the joke"), to bring out the conflict with the previous sentence, as a nod for those who understand Stemless and see naming as similar to explaining the joke.
This question was also sudden, but another instrument has been added to the orchestra. Now we have some rich interacting rhythms… at least, if there were some syntax or indication (the italics only help a little) to convey that the writer wants to set up these questions in parallel.
It mentions "isolation" and "unfreedom" which are foreshadowing minor details in the next paragraph.
> Why does naming work? Owning your shit moves your attention and my attention– your truth collects your violence, your betrayal; then your words catapult them into the dream of language where we can prank ourselves unharmed and unlonely.
Back again to the previous instrument of “Why…”, with the same question. Perhaps more of an editing hack than anything else. The sentence following the question is dense with a few things going on.
"Attention", because stemless ownership is more about attention than words, which are only a proxy for attention. That is, when we attend to our unowned movements, it is no longer unowned. (Of course, if you go still further, perhaps attention is also only a crude crutch. But we're not going that far.)
"Your truth collects your violence, your betrayal" is poetically pointing at unowned movement, as a kind of "violence". Here "your truth" is the honest recognition of that which is unowned, thereby making it non violent. Simultaneously, "violent" is an important word for more foreshadowing, about what feels "real": similar to how "they were just shouting at each other but then it got real" means "then it got violent." But this sense isn't comprehensible yet.
"Your words catapult them into the dream of language" suggests that the non violence of ownership takes place because instead of acting from unowned anger or betrayal or whatever, we can talk about it instead. And talking about it in language doesn't cause any harm, because words are just symbols, not actual reality. And so “fighting” at the symbolic level makes it safe. Like a harmless dream where you could explore any act.
"Where we can prank ourselves" is a callback to the cosmic joke. Here, the reader is provoked to consider: perhaps the words, the naming instead of acting, is what helps us be in on the cosmic joke. Then we can realize the joke/dream and play with it, rather than be subject to it in painful ways. But actually, this is a trick. The paragraph is trying to get you to think this, so that the writer can later remind you that Stemless doesn't need naming (for ownership) to connect with the dreams that are our realities.
Right? All it takes is the establishing of shared reality.
This sows doubt, with the word "right". And it links to an older post that talks about how "establishing" is an intersubjective bureaucracy that gets in the way of truth rather than communicating it, and isn't actually possible anyway. Gives more of a hint of the folly of "shared reality", at least, if you read the post.
Establishing… with whom? On what? How? Vocalization? Subvocalization? Are tongue-ghosts and mind-teeth not enough to cast the spell of shared reality?
This is some payoff from the random tangent on subvocalization. It continues to question whether establishing is possible. What is the process? Do you have to say something? Can you just whisper it in your mind perhaps? Wouldn't you then own it within yourself, at least? It invites the same question as before, of what is the magic sauce to owning something.
Establishing, on what ground? What is a foundation so violent that it is not a dream?
Continuing to question establishing, by questioning if there can be any non subjective foundation that's actually "real". The use of the word "violent" to talk about this "reality" suggests the strong imposition of such a foundation. The foundation would be impervious to negotiability with unmistakable consequences… like a punch. The opposite of a temporary dream.
The allusion to "dream" is from the "dream of language" earlier, as the safe space where we could look at and observe things.
Stemless is all about how everything can be safe and dreamlike, and this is only achieved by letting go of "neutral" seeming statements like "I'm projecting that…". Such statements, ironically, seem to be said from a place of non projection, and also make it sound like there was a time when you weren't projecting. In doing what language can do without explicit language, Stemless makes reality playful like language.
In this and other ways, Stemless seems to “reverse” symbol and reality, but it is only exposing the endless intricate, harmonic ironies of form and emptiness.
bear in mind, the karmic patterning of what one creates in one’s dreams is exactly the same as in one’s waking life. Murdering someone in your dream is exactly the same as murdering someone in your waking life in terms of karma; there is no difference. If the motivation is there to do it, that is the same motivation.
This is a quote from a Dzogchen practitioner. It has both violence and dreams, which is great for this piece. But furthermore, it blurs reality vs dreams, in its provocative statement about karma. This blurring and connection between violence and dreams is why the quote follows the previous paragraph. There is also something subtle yet central about ownership in karma, but never mind.
Why does naming kill the cosmic joke? I don’t mind that you keep forgetting the cosmic joke. It’s cute. It makes it funnier. But can we also try with you not killing the cosmic joke with steadying sonic vocalizations of ownership, please?
We return to "killing the cosmic joke", but this time, it confusingly seems to say you can kill a joke by adding more. I'll explain this in a minute.
It asks to not kill the joke, with references to the "sonic steadying" and "vocalization" from earlier. This is a plea to be stemless.
But it also says "it's cute". And that's some of the way out of the confusion: the fact of contradiction wants to highlight the paradox of it being impossible to kill the cosmic joke. Importantly, the impossibility is for a completely different reason than the "it only adds, it doesn't subtract" from Feynman; namely, that you can let someone own their stems by the vehement kindness of noticing that any utterance is stemless, even someone being very “stemful”. It also notes that it would be nice to "actually" do stemless. But it doesn't quite say that, only lives it in some way.
This paradox is also related to the gateless gate, coming up next.
No sub-, no ghosts, not the slightest whisper. Just the groundless gateless stemless cosmic mischief of unencumbered awareness.
This is the most direct attempt (lol) to say "yay stemless" rather than writing koans about it. The "sub-" there is as in "subvocalization", the "ghost" is the internal tongue from earlier. "Groundless" is about lack of foundation from earlier. "Gateless gate" is as mentioned before, and also the quote from The Gateless Gate comes in next.
Contentwise, it’s talking about all the symbols, the scaffoldings, the extraneous re-representations of the present moment, that only get in the way.
"Unencumbered" starts to be the bridge to a new interpretation of "adding" and "subtracting". Awareness is a pointer to "attention" again, loosely speaking. But it's also the primordial purity of awake awareness that is the big-m Mind in Dzogchen.
how could you add obscurity to clarity
This is the actual quote from gateless gate, and links the whole (literal) koan and the post based on it. This now uses the word "add", but in a negative way, rather than a positive way, as Feynman did. It’s an inversion of what Feynman said, where addition is the issue. We're almost ready to meet the final irony.
We can't actually kill the cosmic joke. But don't ask me to encumber it with explanation. I don't want to be complicit in sustaining dull travesties with our attention.
"Encumber" and "adding explanation" (and “adding obscurity”) are connected a little more.
The last sentence, of being complicit in sustaining dull travesties with attention, is perhaps the most important sentence in this whole post.
It harks back to the dull travesty in the beginning. But this time, the "dull travesties" are the additional words/stems that are saying the obvious, repetitions. And moreover, they are distracting from the real thing. This is really important: they are taking away attention from the real thing– and as discussed, attention is the more crucial thing for ownership. By taking away attention and putting it on the repetition/simulation/bureaucracy (i.e., attempts at shared reality) it actually hurts ownership, ever so slightly!
Now we can resolve the simple questions in the beginning: a sequel or explanation could take attention away from the original, making it in fact zero-sum rather than purely a bonus. And so it would take away from the experience. The idea that more choice is good rather than bad, is only the case when you don’t respect the dynamics of attention.
In the case of stemless, this is the attention being taken away from the play and the life, and doing bureaucracy instead, dragging the helpless ones along.
It irks me when we add, and not subtract.
The layered, final irony is brought to a finish.
Stemless is all about subtracting stems and other such overt things that were assumed necessary for contact. Addition of nodding-words, like in "adding obscurity to clarity" leads to contracted investigation away from what's meaningful.
The "irk" is the same mock-irk that pleaded not to explain the cosmic joke. The writer also mentioned that they didn't feel visceral irk like the people complaining about sequels and other such… which is restating the paradox that stemless doesn't demand you to do anything, really. Even if people use long elaborative stems, you can listen deeper. What is the texture of the momentum of the soul, and how does that unfailingly articulate their whole dream world? How is their total liberation recruited for creating beautiful tiny pretend prisons?
Explanation
The joke is that this whole post has added a painstaking explanation of itself, at times giving boring detail. Even this metajoke has now been explained.
Presumably, this only adds to its beauty, rather than subtracting.
It is obvious that this has backfired and made it dull and self-indulgent instead
…right? Right?