The plus (“+”) Paths are all about recog- nizing the inherent power of human abil- ity, of learning to strengthen and enhance the strengths of the human race. They are about trying harder, doing more, getting better through practice and examination of what works best. These are Paths of faith, whether faith in the divine, faith in science or philosophy, or faith in humanity itself. The minus (“-”) Paths are about avoiding inherent human weaknesses, not making mistakes, sidestepping problems that don’t really need to be problems. These are Paths of skepticism. A person on the minus Paths laughs, sometimes with pity, sometimes with disgust, sometimes with empathetic concern, at the foibles and blindness that continually plague normal humans.
Those on the plus Paths usually achieve high levels of what average people aspire to: intelligence, confidence, emotional intensity, ability to get along with others. Thus those on the plus Paths are usually recognized and understood quite easily by the general population as being “superior” or “skilled” or “talented.” Those on the minus Paths, on the other hand, are more likely to shortcut past, to do without, what ordinary people want for themselves.
Ordinary people often view those on the minus Paths as lucky or as savants. Or, they try to explain the minus Paths Seekers with nebulous concepts such as “enlightenment” that posits an unknowable gulf between the enlightened and normal people. So, in the minds of ordinary people, the plus Paths are about advancement, progressing along the scale, while the minus Paths are about enlightenment, jumping off the scale. The truth, however, is that the plus and minus Paths are more alike than ordinary people realize. Neither is so mundane as “advancing along a scale,” and yet each is merely an extension of the improvements and refinements that mark all human self- betterment.
The goals of the minus Paths, to eliminate the weaknesses of thought, feeling, self- identity and connection to others, are probably not fully attainable in any one lifetime. Every time a Seeker thinks he or she is close to achieving that goal, they discover some major chunk of the unwanted weakness inside themselves, and suddenly the goal seems as far away as it ever has. For instance, a -Self Seeker might spend years carving away her self- identity, believing she is near to complete selflessness. Yet that -Self Seeker realizes,
Learning and Meta-Learning Humans are good at learning. It’s what we’re
designed to do. There is an astounding variety of things that people can learn to do if they put in enough practice.
But what if you could learn to learn better? What if there was something you could practice doing that would make whole categories of learning easier? Psychologists call this “meta-learning”: learning how to learn better. The simplest forms of meta-learning, the forms that psychologists
have studied, are small mnemonic tricks that kids learn to help them get through school. The Paths can be conceived as a rigorous course of meta-learning (and meta-meta- learning and meta-meta-meta-learning, etc.). Seekers learn how to learn about emotions, about thinking, about being in harmony with others or about selfhood. The Paths make people so much better at learning and adapting that they can seem superhuman.
Plus and Minus
In Brief: Plus Paths about increasing ability, becoming more powerful and making more use of abstract mental objects. Minus Paths are about avoiding error, becoming perfect and dealing more directly with the universe that can be seen and touched. It is possible to walk both the plus and minus of a Path simultaneously.
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in a moment of painful epiphany (see The Black Gulf, p.56) that “the self-less one” has become her new identity and that this identity itself must be cleansed. Any Seeker who believes he or she has achieved complete enlightenment and no longer suffers under any of the errors of thought, self, feeling or harmony, is deluded and has most likely fallen into a trap (p.62).
Another way to see the dif- ference between the two types of Paths is that the plus Paths tend to deal with ideas and concepts, while the mi- nus Paths tend to deal with what can actually be seen and touched:
+Self is all about con- cepts of self, while -Self is all about dealing directly with the world without con- sulting abstractions about selfhood.
+Thought is about learn- ing to manipulate ideas and concepts, while -Thought is about focusing on simple and self-evident facts. +Harmony is about learn- ing about and anticipating relationships, and figuring out the “right” way to inter- act. -Harmony is about try- ing to view and interact with the universe without regard to pressure from culture, peers and instincts.
+Feeling is about being aware of feelings and emo- tions and aesthetic percep- tions, while -Feeling is about trying to ignore those things and deal with the absolute facts of the universe around oneself.
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Perspectives On Mental Illness
+Thought: Illogical and irrational beliefs cause much mental
illness. These beliefs reflect poor knowledge of what is likely. A paranoid schizophrenic, for instance, might not be paranoid if he knew that vast conspiracies were statistically improbable.
-Thought: Mentally ill people spend too much time worrying
about questions that don’t matter, like: Is the world a good or bad place? Am I worthless or worthy? These questions are essentially meaningless and their answers irrelevant, so mental energies spent on them is at best a waste and at worst is self- torture.
+Harmony: Mental illness is usually a symptom of separation
from one’s community. In the spaces where people are alone (or think they are), they start doing things which are shameful to them (e.g. drugs, self-mutilation) or believing things which reference to common wisdom would say is wrong (e.g. paranoid delusions).
-Harmony: “Mental illness” is any belief or behavior that
makes one a liability to the surrounding society. What is thought of as “crazy” in one society is perfectly acceptable, even prized, in another. The idea that there is one state of “mental health” that all people should be returned to ignores the fact that cognitive variety is natural. People should no more be made to think alike than they should be made to look alike. Maybe a person who is having trouble working in an office shouldn’t be working in an office, maybe they should be an artist or explorer. Suffering occurs when people are forced into roles that are not natural for them.
+Feeling: Mental illness is mostly a product of trying to deny
emotions. Emotions cannot be canceled out simply by denying them and tend to come out in other ways. For instance, anxiety about one’s worth as a person, if denied, may pop up as a phobia of snakes. Fear, anger, desire and even love, if not expressed in healthy ways will be expressed in unhealthy ways.
-Feeling: Mental illness occurs when people give feelings
precedence over rational thought. Paranoia is the triumph of fear over reason. Depression is the triumph of sadness over reason. Almost every mental illness can be cured if one can learn the discipline to control one’s emotions.
+Self: Even though they may not be aware of it, most people
today suffer from low self-esteem. They don’t believe in themselves and they don’t believe they have the strength to conquer their own demons. People try different methods to hide from their own self doubts, from drugs to avoiding the company of others, but the only cure is to start believing in themselves.
-Self: Most mental illnesses are caused by concepts of self that
are not only false (as most self-conceptions are) but severely dysfunctional. The focus on self makes people think that the universe revolves around them and what they are feeling (e.g. there must be a conspiracy against me, or I feel bad so therefore the universe must be a horrible place). Concepts of “mental illness” hurt people because people start thinking of themselves as “ill” and stop trying to improve themselves.
Despite their differences, the plus and minus Paths are not incompatible. It is an unfortunate weakness of the human mind that it is difficult to keep both the plus and minus sides in mind at once, but just because it is difficult doesn’t mean that Seekers won’t do it. Many Seekers walk both the plus and minus of a Path at once, endeavoring, for instance, to learn to create and use the power of emotions within thenmselves while, at the same time, learning to bypass emotions and make decisions based on logic free from emotional bias. Walking both the plus and minus Paths at once can be very powerful.
Perspectives On Evil
+Harmony: Evil is ignorance. It is the incorrect
belief that you can achieve happiness and prosperity for yourself while destroying happiness for others.
-Harmony: Evil people rarely think of themselves
as evil. They believe the moral judgments of those around them, assume that if good people are all doing something then that thing must be okay. Evil is, thus, the lack of an independent check on the moral assumptions of a community.
+Thought: Morality is a negotiation between
people: you respect my property rights, I’ll respect yours. You agree not to kill me if I make you angry, I’ll agree to the same. Evil is when someone breaks these social contracts.
-Thought: There is no evil. Some people just
get too caught up in other things to do what they know is right.
+Self: Evil is when people have never decided
for themselves to be good, or they forget that they have decided to be good, and so without this moral anchor they let circumstances push them towards extremes of behavior.
-Self: Humans are not programmed to hurt other
humans, except when we view them as ‘others,’ as being not like us. It is the creation of false categories of ‘my people’ and ‘not my people’ that causes evil.
+Feeling: Evil is caused when people try to
deaden within themselves the empathy and compassion that are natural to all humans.
-Feeling: Evil is caused when hatred, fear and
desire overcome the rational desire to get along with others.
Perspectives On Nature
+Harmony: Whether we know it or
not, we are part of nature and it is part of us. To respect nature is to respect ourselves. To be fully healthy and ful- filled, we must live with and be part of nature.
-Harmony: Nature is brutal, violent,
ugly, dirty, diseased and amoral. We are dependent on nature for things like the air we breathe and the food we eat, but we should learn to temper, not cel- ebrate, the weakness that is that depen- dence.
+Thought: Nature is a wonderful ex-
ample of how simple principles, such as that of evolution, can create some- thing of astounding complexity, so much so that merely understanding it all is a task worthy of our greatest thinkers.
-Thought: Nature is all around us,
even within us. If we work with it, let it do what it wants to do, our way will be easy. If we try to fight it back or force it to do what it doesn’t want to do, our way will be difficult.
+Self: Nature can provide great ob-
stacles and be a challenge to survive. In this way, it is a great way for us to prove our power and industriousness.
-Self: Nature is good to be around
because it does not recognize, nor re- spond to, our self-concepts. Living with nature can be unpleasant and dan- gerous, and dealing with that can be a great way to practice being selfless.
+Feeling: Nature is beautiful, a wor-
thy subject for our appreciation. Like the human heart it can be calm and gentle, or changing and wild, but al- ways powerful.
-Feeling: Nature is too complicated to
be accurately called beautiful or ugly, harmonious or violent, those are just how people want it to be to justify their own interactions with it and with each other. It can be useful to us, and it can create hardship for us, yet even this hardship can be a good opportuni- ty for people to practice living without comforts they don’t really need.
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Principles
The Path of -Thought can be most simply explained as not overthinking things that don’t need to be overthought. -Thought is not about being ignorant or dim- witted. Those on this Path try to develop undirected rather than directed mental skills. Rather than trying to think of the solution to a problem, a Seeker learns that it is often more effective to relax, be aware and recognize the solution when it presents itself. To someone on the Path of -Thought, the relaxed mind is as powerful as the active mind, perhaps more so. Those on the Path of -Thought love anything random: clouds, tea leaves, tarot cards, etc. because it is easy for them to find answers to their questions in randomness. Similarly, those on the Path of -Thought are big believers in intuition: they know that the conscious mind is not the only part of the mind with knowledge and intelligence.
Those on the Path of -Thought try to never prejudice themselves. They know that any- one who asks a question usually has an an- swer they are hoping for, and they tend to pay attention to the evidence that supports that answer and ignore that which doesn’t. Often -Thought Seekers try to avoid any kind of decision, instead considering mul- tiple beliefs or plans but not deciding on any until the moment that concrete action is required. This can cause them to be frus- tratingly vague when asked a question.
The Path of -Thought is also the Path of be- ing skeptical of the beliefs, ideas and abstrac- tions that are the products of human minds. Words and concepts are just dim or simplis- tic representations of real things, yet people commonly forget this and start to believe in the words as entities unto themselves. Ask someone on the Path of -Thought if they be- lieve God exists and they might say ‘tell me what you mean by that word and I’ll tell you whether I believe in it.’ To most on the Path of -Thought, concepts like “good”, “life,” “justice,” “beauty,” “sanity,” are only sim- plistic ideas of limited usefulness. Even an idea like “cold,” for instance, is relative. A thing does not have its own coldness, there must be another object and a conscious- ness that wants to compare the two. One fire could be “cold” if compared to another, hotter, fire.
Some on the Path of -Thought even begin to question whether the concepts “real” or “exists” have universal meaning. This is best illustrated by the Buddhist concept of sunyata, often translated as “all encompassing nothingness.” Sunyata seems a paradox: universal non-existence and meaninglessness that is, itself, non-existent and meaningless. Yet to many -Thought Seekers, Sunyata represents a truth so simple and basic that complicated minds have trouble grasping it: that concepts such as “exist” only have meaning when applied to things we can see and touch, not to the entirety of the universe.
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-Thought
“The key to being a successful children’s book author is to realize that adults are ridiculous. All the great classics of children’s literature are about some normal kid going around being entertained by the silliness of grown-ups. The crazy characters in Alice in Wonderland with all their quirks, fears and petty squabbles, they’re all just grown-ups. They worry about silly things, they believe in abstract “isms” that have little effect on reality, they don’t know how to relax and enjoy the world around them, and they look for complex answers to questions when most questions actually have very simple answers.
That’s why I’ve set off on my own ‘journey through Wonderland.’ I don’t want to be a kid, but I do want to remember what kids know that adults have forgotten. I want to disconnect from the adults around me, divest myself for a while of adult society, so I can look at it objectively and recognize all the things that are just silly.”
Those on the Path of -Thought are very nonchalant about the ‘big questions.’ They don’t stay awake wondering about the purpose of life, whether God exists, if the pleasures in life are worth the suffering, if there is a universal right or wrong, if humans have souls, if there is life after death, etc. Even if it were possible to answer those questions with a simple yes or no, the answer wouldn’t affect the day- to-day lives of those on this Path. The right way to act is based on the road in front of you, the people you’re with and the fullness or emptiness of your belly, not on abstract truths about the universe.
Inter-Path Relationships
Many come to the Path of -Thought from the Path of +Thought. They use logical thought to prove the limits of the usefulness of logical thought, then they go on the Path of -Thought to explore the alternatives to logic.The Path of -Thought often leads to the Path of +Feeling. Without an abstract meaning to life, the only reason to do something is because you feel like it, so -Thought Seekers set about exploring what it is they feel like doing. Similarly, when one on the Path of -Thought decides there is no ‘higher purpose’ to life, they turn towards more simple goals: being healthy and happy, causing no harm, getting along with others, which leads them to the Path of +Harmony.
The Path of -Harmony can sometimes lead to the Path of -Thought when skepticism of a culture’s most important concepts leads the Seeker to believe that concepts are, at their root, meaningless. -Thought can also lead to -Self when a -Thought Seeker decides that the concept of Self is an empty one. Similarly, the Path of -Self can lead one to the Path of -Thought: belief that one’s Self is nothing special can lead to belief that one’s thoughts and ideas are nothing special.
Traditions
The major traditions that contribute to the Path of -Thought are Eastern and Western Mystical traditions. The Eastern traditions include Taoism, with its emphasis on observing and knowing without making judgments, and Buddhism, especially