Teleography: Everything Happens for a Reason.

Teleography:

I’ve recently had to close frequently at the restaurant that I work at. This does not bother me. My parents are concerned that I am spending so much money on the taxi rides home from Oceanside to Rancho Bernardo. I am even met with questions from the taxi drivers themselves about why I would elect to work so far away from home. I struggle to convey to them the overwhelming sense that I SHOULD be there, an ironic fact considering that by the same exact token my interactions with these taxi drivers are fated. It has even gotten to the point that the ride itself is worth the money, destination notwithstanding. My most recent driver was an accomplished programmer who had actually consulted the founders of Google on their code. Not even twenty-four hours earlier, I was riding home with a younger man who had recorded rap music with one of Kanye West’s producers in Detroit.

Why have I been so blessed? Does Lyft keep a record of my interests (since I am double-majoring in Computer Science and Music, though this remains undeclared and unofficial, except in passing conversation)? Does it only hire people with exemplary success in these industries?

I recently gave a coworker, who has shown interest in learning English, a copy of my favourite novella, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, by J.D. Salinger. Within, the central character, the narrator’s elder brother, says that, if he is anything “by a clinical name”, he is a “paranoiac in reverse” who suspects people of “plotting to make [him] happy.”

This is at long last my relationship to the Universe. It is by no coincidence that every late-night driver I’ve had of late has mirrored me, not only in ambition, but in personality. Frankly, their status in a competitive field is never what impresses me. I am much more moved by what they can teach me about myself. When a man recounts the birth of his twins, which was prefigured, he is not recounting an instance of confirmation bias, because a self-fulfilling prophecy cannot change the facts of biology. Nor is this man helping me to “achieve the status” of a psychic in the “competitive field” of Divination. He is simply sharing his own miracles, and for some reason that was prefigured as well I am privy to the knowledge. Perhaps it is because the twins are Aquarians, one male and the other female, one analytical and the other affective, that this driver came into my life, since I’ve been studying the archetype of late and want to understand it better. Perhaps this is why I picked up the book The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell: because an Aquarian female who insists that all things happen for a reason recommended it.

The claim that everything happens for a reason is paradoxical in context of that text, primarily because the mystical statement that everything serves a purpose implies the principle of teleology, that ancient notion that all events move towards a common goal. This in turn suggests an inversion of Aristotelian Causality and extraverted common sense in general, for whereas Aristotle suggested that the past is what creates the future, teleology implies in its purest form that it is the FUTURE that creates the Present and the Past. Events are not predetermined by previous causes, but rather they come out of the Creative Void and merge with the Present Moment in a manner directly proportional to our choices between Good and Evil. The theme occurs across centuries in such diverse works as those by Kierkegaard and by Rupert Sheldrake. Yet the great miracle of the Future is lost on a tragic cultural hang-up: the past.

Malcolm Gladwell tries to use his book in order not only to narrow the definition of an exceptional person to someone who excels externally in a competitive field, but he tries to excel in his own field by settling once and for all the modern quandary of nature versus nurture. By Gladwell’s diagnosis, no one is born more naturally gifted than anyone else, and neither does a man or woman become that way as the result of a series of fortuitous choices. Rather, all persons in Gladwell’s cosmology are the products of environment, and only by sweeping collective social change can people become empowered. Yet intrinsic to this argument is an old set of biases:

1.        That all success is external.

2.      That all causes, whether natural or social, rest in the past.

3.      That any trend that can be explained “rationally” must not be considered “mystically”.

4.      That all external success can be quantified.

5.      That any quantification of success will produce a rational explanation.

6.      That these facts are ubiquitous throughout human society.

7.       That an “outlier” is not someone who excels in uniqueness but who excels uniquely.

What this last part means is that by an extraverted definition an “outlier” is anyone who is PECULIARLY GOOD AT something in an UNPECULIAR manner, such as an excellent sportsman or technician. Yet to my disappointment the text does not seem yet to address the outlier as an Eccentric: that is, someone who is good at something BECAUSE he or she approaches it in a PECULIAR manner.

Aldous Huxley ascribed social progress towards the sudden appearance of extraordinary people. In an interview he argues that nothing in Shakespeare’s environment suggested what the Bard would be. By referring to introverted writers rather than extraverted athletes, Huxley strikes gold. Take Franz Kafka, for instance. Kafka was all most never published, there was little evidence of an extensive literary education, and even were it so that Kafka was a great scholar there was little available at the time that could account for Kafka’s brilliance. It is true that Kafka’s work can be read as a rebellion against Industrialization. However, what sets Kafka apart from Marx or Sinclair is that Kafka was, by a clinical definition, a Visionary. Huxley writes about Kafka in Heaven and Hell, pointing out that the writer’s descriptive style could be considered something akin to schizophrenia. One does not have the privilege of a word named after one’s self (“Kafkaesque”) by simply expressing the cultural zeitgeist; one becomes a legend by responding TO the Spirit of the Time in so PECULIAR a fashion that a new word MUST BE INVENTED, as though by fate, in order to describe the message. All true legacies follow this pattern; one is not raised to be a genius, but genius happens. James Joyce might have been educated in classic Irish literature, but no one pushed him to write Finnegan’s Wake; he had to push himself. And what compelled him to do so was nothing short of his own, PECULIAR brilliance.

In her infamous TED talk (which I assure you it’s been years since I have watched it) Elizabeth Gilbert, author of a rather boring memoir called Eat, Pray, Love, refers to a “genius” as something that one HAS rather than something that one IS, an ironical echo of Erich Fromm’s classic psychotherapeutic recipe for happiness (that is: defining one’s self by what one DOES, which in a Wattsian sense would be what one is, rather than by what one “has”).

Gilbert’s own genius lies in the traditionalism of her definition. Descartes, when he was losing his mind and discovering the Post-Modern Condition, posited that all his feelings and thoughts of certainty might be the products of an Evil Genius that lived within his own mind. Etymologically, as well as simply logically, a “genius” is no different from a “genie”. Yet for some reason or another, even in an age that praises and aspires towards “Genius” as an Ideal (Perhaps: the Aquarian Age?) there is markedly little discussion pertaining to genies. One anonymous post on an online forum recounts the story, from the father’s perspective, of an everyman whose son asked him how genies “work”. The father’s kneejerk post-modern reaction is a positivistic attempt to deconstruct an ancient superstition, and the poor man tells his son that genies are simply an archaic attempt to explain things that science could not explain yet to an underdeveloped people. Yet even encoded INTO that claim is an other presupposition, which is that of a teleological PROGRESSION that INEVITABLY, as though it had originated in its destination in the Future (Now the Present), would bring humankind to a superior posture now than it had been in Aladdin’s time.

To the modern man’s mind, the concept of a genie is simply a ticklish brainteaser, curious not only in that a fictional genie might exist but that its existence might somehow, by some unknown process, have been considered factual to an earlier Humanity. Implicit to this is the hidden temptation to Believe, some archaic reservation about the Noble Savage of the Past: the possibility that those pot-smoking Arabs who surely wrote the Thousand Nights in fact were onto something that the modern Eurocentric thinker has forgotten how to see. Formally, Western Science says that genies don’t exist.

Yet genies DO exist. Examined closely, the son’s question is not unlike “where do babies come from?” or “how do you make crayons?” The Oedipal Child, like the first-time reader of the Bible, is concerned with maternity and conception; he wants to know who MAKES the genies. The ancient Christian might say: God, the Uncaused Cause, creates all beings, and if He does not do so directly then He acts by delegation to his Angels, one of whom is responsible for all Evil, Deviant Beings, for he was himself a fallen angel. Martin Heidegger, under his veneer of rationality, provides a similar explanation: that all beings come from Being, and they’re thrown into the Nothingness, but Being (as opposed to Nothingness) has no known cause.

What is a genie, though? A genie is that being that creates ITSELF. This is impossible, of course, from the perspective that all matter is energy in disguise (the modern claim that form and substance are one and the same and that the atom can be split) and that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. By a stringent physical definition, rooted in the traditions of both Newton and Hawking (both of whom were incidentally Capricorns in many senses), not only cannot genies exist; Our Own UNIVERSE cannot exist. Perhaps that is why Hawking has suspected that all of it might be a clever computer simulation (presuming that computers exist, and that they run on Cartesian Evil Geniuses). Yet the contemporary atheist himself continues to believe in genies, because in the absence of an Uncaused Cause (God) one must conclude (unless one leaps into Camusian Absurdity) that the Big Bang CREATED ITSELF.

No one wants to state the obvious, except for those TRUE outliers on the fringes. Terence McKenna, despite his love for science, wonders where the magic went. He satirizes modernity by saying that Positivism claims to explain everything AFTER A CERTAIN POINT; give the atheists One Free Miracle, which is Existence Itself, and they will gladly explain the rest.

The answer is obvious to Zen man Alan Watts: God created the Universe, and we are all God in Disguise, pretending we are not. We do not simply HAVE a genie; we ARE genies, and Space-Time is our lamp. If we so chose, we could ESCAPE the trap of time-binding, shedding our karma and becoming receptive to whatever the Next Order (from the Future, technically) might be. The question of an Uncaused Cause is silly in a Universe WITHOUT CAUSE AND EFFECT, where all existence is simply a playful expression of that childlike will.

Doctor Gladwell has lost that childlike spark. He too does not believe in genies. In the Outliers, no man or woman is “self-made”; all are shaped BY THEIR ENVIRONMENTS in a PASSIVE FASHION. Personal change is impossible, so only the avenue of Systems Theory remains: to effect change in persons by changing groups of people. Gladwell is essentially a classic communist; all personal growth happens not through the sovereign will but through the State. Social progress is not the result of angels falling out of heaven and writing the Divine Comedy; it is only ever the product of a series of causes and effects that recede past our cognitive limits INTO THE PAST.

Modern Man refuses to believe that the Future Herself has a plan for us. When Sheldrake lectures the world’s populace on the epistemological pitfalls in modern science, refusing to accept Newton’s Draconian laws without question, reversing Aristotelian causality as though it were another ancient Greek anecdote, the patriarchy he challenges bans his TED talk from mainstream circulation. A true outlier, right alongside Graham Hancock, Sheldrake is ridiculed for even SUGGESTING that the Universe Itself might in fact be an intelligent genius whose ideas come out of Nowhere.

The religious elite have a different take on it, and their hand gets into everything nowadays. It is not uncommon for young people, especially in lower-income communities, to say that things “happen for a reason”, that they are “old Souls” who have lived many lifetimes before this, that they “agreed to everything” that will happen to them before they were even conceived in flesh, and that the past does not drive the present any more so than the wake directs the ship.

Personally, I have taken kindly to not only Western astrology, another Greek intimation, but likewise to Native American spirituality. Being on Sacred Ground, even if one is not conscious of its identity, inspires one to chant like the shamans of old. Even far from the Reservations one might have, Power Animals might visit one’s self at peculiar moments. When I had to take my phone into the Apple Store, the man who fixed it shared a birthdate with me, down exactly to the year of birth. Upon returning home, I saw an owl swoop right in front of my car. Earlier that same day, I’d set a photo of an owl as my desktop background on the home computer. Owls are my Spirit Animal (really: my “Power Animal”, since “anima” means “Spirit” any way in Greek) and it’s no surprise that after meeting that established programmer who drove me home from Oceanside I had to walk my dog and heard the Wise Owl hooting in the street-lit night. When I hear my Power Animal, I not only hear it but I smell it, see it in my Mind’s Eye, and I feel it right beside me and within me. How is this possible? Owls are my inner genius.

My parents were not uneducated people. My small family managed to work its way up to the American suburbs, out of the poverty of the crumbling Soviet Union, due mainly to their devotion to the Hard Sciences.

But my genius was not their genius. In high school I nearly flunked out, and like my sister I did not see straight A’s again until I’d found a calling in college. This I only managed once I balanced my Aristotelian love for logic puzzles, in programming, with my Platonic passion for Music. No one else in my family ever excelled in either discipline. My sister, likewise, is original in that despite my mother’s gifts for illustration my sister remains the only accomplished visual artist in our entire family. Our privileges and circumstances were not the determining factors in our talents. Those all came from the Abyss.

Gabriel Marcel says that the problem with modernity is that it reduces all Mysteries to problems. People are so self-identified (yes: one can BE self-identified without self-identifying voluntarily) with their social and biological functions that they’ve forgotten the mysteries of their own Souls. Carl Jung saw this as well, hence he spent an entire life putting the Psyche back in Psychotherapy. Unfortunately, Marcel falls by the wayside in the European philosophical tradition, whereas Jung is treated like he’s Freud’s neurotic cousin (ironically, since Jung is not known to have been sexually deprived). The entire QUESTION of Nature versus Nurture has woven into it the conflict between biological functions and social functions, Id and Superego, Proletariat and Bourgeois, et cetera. The common sense of the Twentieth Century continues to imprison our True Geniuses in the bottle of Reduction.

Yet as Bukowski put it: Be on the watch. There are ways out. The Universe itself might have been made after a night of heavy drinking. If each of us HAS a hidden talent, each of us has the OPPORTUNITY to cultivate it. Where attention goes, energy flows. It takes patience, since the Spirit is slower than physical time in the End Times. Yet if my own personal miracles are testament to anything, it’s that the Universe provides for those who seek its secrets. Study music and you’ll meet musicians where you least expect to; study programming and coders will follow, as though programmed to do so in this Great Computer Simulation of a Universe. All manifestation is just Shiva’s dance: illusory, for we are all God in Disguise. Malcom Gladwell is a trickster, because he wants us to believe that we are the “products of” a set of circumstances. Yet his sociology is nothing more than just an other magic lamp. All privileges are won by SOMEONE’S efforts, and it is only by undergoing an Individual Quest that those privileges can be vindicated and turned into a source of Privilege for Others. Beginning with Others in a progressive, social sense will not effect true change and success, unless one’s path IS THAT OF THE REFORMER and not one of the Eight Other Personality Types. Our Fate is not given by the past; it is waiting for us in the Future, teased every day, for we agreed to it. This is why people with epilepsy come unstuck in time, why psychics are able to predict the birth of twins, and why our time bears a striking resemblance to the predictions of both Hindus and Christians. It’s not that people are dumb and made some lucky guesses and then filled the details in imaginatively. People are not dumb. We are geniuses. Co-creators of Reality. One simply has to own this in one’s self personally, deep down, and in an introverted manner, unafraid to frown upon those who refuse to hear the cry of their own Hearts and Power Animals.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]