Coherence isn't rational

and rational isn't what it's cracked up to be…

“Enfold”

I’ve been locked in a silence. It appears to have begun when it dawned on me that understanding how, and even perhaps why, things are the way they are is just not enough.

This is how the limits of rationality feel when they come into view. Knowing how a dynamic works, say with a disease, or a derailment, or War, does nothing to change the outcome.

We kick the can when we say, “Well, lesson learned. Next time….”

But next time the same thing happens again, or worse. The solutions proposed by reason have amplified our disasters instead of alleviating them.

This is one of the most difficult of the lessons of Nemesis:

So long as we miss the point, and, what that might be remains perennially vague and unfathomable, Nemesis will return with ever more vehemence to insist we abandon our Hubris.

As I write this, I can imagine the reams of justifications and explanations our Edifice of Thought have provided to maintain its control. They all boil down to calls to, “Be reasonable!”

Language, especially written language and especially the kind of language we use to map “thinking,” is seen as a form of Calculus. Its words and sentences, paragraphs and pages all expected to create a structure of reason. We see this as a form of Mathematics, QED….

At the same time, our time, the only time we “have;” we find it harder and harder to avoid the realization that so much of what is destroying us is fueled by Nightmares of Reason. We sit in horror at the way “leaders” refuse to see what is so clear and continually insist that we follow them over the cliff. We find that at every turn, the wages of fear buy us more violence and destruction. When we look at possible motivations for why people do what they do we are led again and again to fear and reaction as the drivers.

For all our hate of “Monsters,” they are always someone else. Even as we find that we cannot resist being monstrous ourselves, because….

Yet, when I look at Coherence as a way of interacting with…, Everything, it is clear that coherence isn’t rational. It’s not “irrational” either. No matter how much rationalists throw that term at anything they refuse to understand.

Understand, what does that mean? I’ve been at the point of asking this question, and have made stabs at an answer at least since I started Horizon of Significance. I always begin with the way the word describes us being in a position of standing under something. Most definitions or explanations jump right on to something else, something to do with the way numbers work, some kind of Arithmetic….

This always throws us back onto rationalism, seeking ratio, measuring and weighing….

Is that really what happens when we stand under something? Especially something as…, enormous, as Our Enormity?

Looked at this way, it seems clear that my first reaction to Enormity tends to be Awe, not a search for measure. We’ve long ago passed the point where “weighing the risks and deciding a course of action” feel like a suitable response.

Enormity is a fact. Unassailable and untouched by rationalizations.

As hard as it is to abandon the habits that lead to resorting to reason; what happens if we do?

Ask a rationalist and they will cry, “Chaos!™”

As though their little fence does anything to keep the chaotic at bay as it does little more than keep our attention focused on futile gestures.

My experiences relating with a spectrum of Incoherence and Coherence has always shown that another way is possible. Every attendance on this question has opened avenues and dissolved blockages that have never been visible through a rational lens.

There’s a “catch!”

None of this can be “scaled” by simply describing this dynamic or by trying to “win over converts.”

We’re thrown back into that point of silence….

Coherence does not avoid Paradox. Relating with Coherence does not involve shutting anything off as “off limits….”

We can sit with the silence that has found us.

We can sit with it and still make forays into finding ways to express…, not “ourselves,” as Ego always wants to finish that phrase, but find ways to express, squeeze out the essence of value, of what is, what is true from out of its dross matrix and….

Stand under it?

Standing under silence does not limit us to saying nothing, thinking nothing, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing. Standing under silence we have freed our Attention so that what was previously drowned out, by the weight of Thought and its habits, can come into view.

Rationalism insists that its reasons are Objective. That when we weigh, we ratio, we are doing something that connects us to some greater authority.

It’s been said that Science, especially as it has devolved into Scientism, grew as a reaction to the authority of the Church. In this way it grew as a Doppelganger.

Yet, when attempting to place their Greater Authority who did the Rationalists turn to?

What did Rousseau say?

“I think therefore I am!”

At this point along the trajectory of all the wreckage strewn from this expostulation, all I can see remaining is an adolescent tautology. As with every tautology, it is a lie, pushed fervently to avoid any greater reckoning. At this point in time all that remains is that breathlessly repeated, “I…, I!”

This “I” looks at Everything and finds the most significant thing to be…,

“I.”

So much for a greater authority….

But then, is there anything more substantial behind any claim to authority?

How was this any different from The Divine Right of Kings, or any Divine Authority, going back all the way to when this worm of Thought insinuated itself into dominating human existence?

Coherence does not rely on, does not rest with any Authority.

It simply is. We can either see it more or see it less. Its effects are there one way or the other. The same with Incoherence.

Co-here, to stick together. That which coheres sticks together, holds together. That which does not cohere falls apart. Judgements and reasons and intentions don’t touch it. It simply is. Or it is not….

It’s important not to conflate Coherence with Concretion. “Gluing things together,” making something “Concrete,” is an act of Will. Not a search for Coherence. We live in a world that has been Aggregated and made Concrete. All at the cost of destroying Life and closing off the potential for future Life.

Our whole organism is structured to make the “best” of imperfect perception. For most things this “works.” Our blind-spots are invisible. We just don’t see what we don’t see.

This kludge is now coming back to bite us in the ass.

Before it was married to Authority, our blindness to blind-spots was tempered by Humility, by Awe, by Mystery.

We could allow space for Coherence to influence our behavior even if we are not in a position to understand what it might be.

What coheres in our situation is that there is a way of relating to/and/in-the-world that does not keep rushing us back into the same tautologies, the same vicious cycles and double-binds, that brought us to this impasse. We struggle to explore its relations, our relations to it and therefore to and with Everything, as a result of the momentum and inertia of Thought. What is required is an opening of Attention onto this other, relational view of what-is. We can only do so by turning and returning our Attention to Coherence as it presents itself to us in as many aspects of its, and therefore our, existence as we can.

Writing, or reading, posts is better than nothing, but unless we find ways to broaden and deepen our Attending to Coherence we do nothing to ease Nemesis’ hold on us.