Getting Unstuck
Using Structural Thinking as guidance.
Structural thinking is said to be the highest discipline the human mind can be engaged in. This should not be a surprise to anyone because any subject matter will contain structure — or be about structure.
The smallest piece of matter will show us structure, and the largest reality of everything will also have some kind of structure.
- Yet the human mind can be confused, particularly about the largest reality of everything.
This article is meant to help you get unstuck about that largest of levels.
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Let’s avoid confusing terms like God and generally accepted ideas like the Big Bang for now. To showcase the specific problem the human mind can get engaged in, let’s pick a rather generic example and explore its structure:
- The word Everything.
Obviously, everyone will have a good idea about the word Everything and what it means. Yet the focus in this article is about the structure behind the word that Everything presents us.
It turns out that there are two distinct structures for one and the same word.
A: Everything, excluding Nothing
B: Everything, including Nothing
It may seem silly to have a distinction made based on the presence or absence of what is basically nothing at all, yet the point is once more about structure. Because of that pure nothing, included or excluded, there are two structures that are battling it out in the human mind when thinking about Everything.
Is Everything in some kind of way singular, or does Everything always present us at least a duality?
Reflection: The deeper structural question is how we organize our own brain. Babies are said to start out with a blank slate (tabula rasa), and through experience and perceptions we start to develop our own brains. We are the ones who structured our mature brains, with the help of others and society as a whole.
Yet how we structured it depends on our recognizing structure as essential, or through ignoring the importance of structure.
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Let’s find an example in which the Nothing is shown to be important enough to be included as a separate entity on the list of Everything.
Money!
When your wallet is empty, then that would not be nothing to sneeze at.
Entire nations rise early in the morning just to make sure the wallet does not become empty.
The lack of money may be the most important Nothing there is in the world today.
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Okay, if that is a good point for Everything + Nothing, so what?
Recognizing that the Nothing can play important roles among everything there is, allows us to focus on the other structure of Everything, the one that excludes the Nothing.
It turns out that Everything without the Nothing is mighty important for human societies. When the whole of Everything is declared with one word and no empty position next to it, then people can gather around that one idea.
Let’s fill in this structure with some examples.
Language, for instance, is a focused expression of the human mind. We speak one language in our own society. Though there are many other people living in different societies speaking other languages, each of us focuses on that one language that helps us forward the most.
Collectively, it is true that mankind speaks more than one language, but to express ourselves we mainly focus on one language. The structural point to understand is that our focus is toward a single setup and finding common grounds for that focus among ourselves.
Another example is currencies. People use just one currency because the local store will not accept any other currencies. Again, our focus is on a single kind of currency, and we are excluding the other kinds.
Same can be told about religion, though we organize ourselves then in temples to express ourselves and keep the rest of the world out.
There are many examples of concepts, institutions, and ideas that we place at the highest level of everything there is, often with ordinary, daily benefits as a result.
Our mind organizes itself structurally then with an inclusion zone, while all aspects that are excluded are made unimportant.
Realize how this structure is distinct from focusing on multiple positions of a different kind.
Reflection: Declare for yourself how you view the universe as a whole. Is it a unit of some kind, or is the word universe merely a name tag to point to everything there is, including aspects that are in conflict with one another?
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This is the setup, and the introduction to get unstuck at the largest of levels follows now.
First, let’s focus on how one can get stuck at the highest level.
There are two ways to be stuck about Everything.
- By embracing the Everything and excluding the Nothing on the list. This allows the human mind to unify Everything as if there is some universal unification possible. Particularly in human society, power is based on unifying people behind a single principle or person, and as such unification is mighty important. But… it is inside the brain that this power-building first occurs before it is expressed in the outside world. The other way to be stuck:
- By rejecting the Everything that excludes the Nothing on the list, but then also rejecting the Everything with the Nothing included. Folks can then state that the human mind can never know the structure of the largest level of Everything. In this case, the mind simply rejects any structure at all for that overall level. While there are seemingly two babies, they are both thrown out with the bathwater.
Reflection: Can you accept two distinct outcomes that are both expressed in reality, yet with one being natural and the other being artificial?
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A painting is of course a natural way for a human being to express feelings, memories, or just express their creativity. Yet the painting itself is not a natural reality; it is an artificial expression.
Money is also artificial. One cannot eat or drink money, though some can swim in it. Similarly, languages are artificial means of communication; we can do it by writing down words, for instance, and often the meaning does come across.
It gets harder to declare that religions are artificial, yet that is mainly due to the reaction this can bring about inside people. We adore our God or gods, and there is nothing wrong there. Yet God or gods are not present in a physical manifestation other than through Everything there is.
Once it is understood that the human mind can think in two ways about reality — in natural and in artificial manners — then we can get ourselves unstuck.
The enigmas can get diminished through removing all artificial realities (and then later incorporating them back in again).
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Let’s focus on one artificial reality that is quite important: mathematics.
In the olden days, human beings did not consider the numbers 1 and 0 to exist. There was no way to find these two numbers in our reality. That is, until we invented them.
Prime example to show how the ancient minds were operating is found with pharaohs Akhenaten and Nefertiti. They adhered to the unifying idea of a single god. They were worshipped by their people and they could do what they wanted to do. Yet after their deaths, all artifacts about them were destroyed or buried.
There is no stronger historical example how the highest and mightiest of people were nevertheless removed from history (until remaining artifacts of them were discovered much later on) because they considered an idea that everyone else rejected as impossible.
Reflection: Would you consider the way the ancients were thinking to be more natural or more artificial than how we are thinking today?
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Okay, let’s battle it out with God and the Big Bang.
It turns out that most people believe in God in an artificial manner. They do not desire God to be natural. For our daily lives, this really does not matter much. However, here is why it is important.
When we talk about creation, and imply that God is the source, then this relatively new religion (of about 6,000 years old perhaps) does something special:
- It unifies people around a single leader.
The Jews fleeing Egypt, for instance, were better capable of escaping with all of them believing in a single God than all of them believing in various gods. It is likely that they would not have made it to the promised land if they had not unified themselves in their singular belief.
Same for other peoples who unified to defend themselves against intruders. Unification increased their power to sustain their lifestyle.
Yet there is more:
- A hierarchy is then established that is smart but not necessarily natural.
The prime example here is God creating Adam, and subsequently Eve. With this storyline, a hierarchy was established that put women in second place.
And that is why the single God as presented is unnatural.
The true structure of God would have Adam and Eve be created at the same time. Yet it is inside your mind that you need to find the structure that makes this a correct perspective indeed.
The point of Adam first and Eve second is that we established or accepted a unification within God godself. God is first and takes one step at a time. It is the purest top-down approach possible as if Everything is united within God (and excludes the Nothing as a separate position).
- This would then translate into a structure like that of a Cyclops. God would then have a single eye, and that is not possible if we accept that we ourselves are created in God’s image.
So, God must have two principles that are both divine and distinct in some shape or form from one another.
You can therefore get unstuck at the largest of levels by recognizing that God can NEVER have a single eye. God cannot be a Cyclops.
Any time you desire to unify anything of your liking into a single truth, you are deceiving yourself with embracing an artificial structure.
Kurt Gödel already showed this about 100 years ago, making even mathematics itself an incompleteness. Not even mathematics can take place at the highest level and deliver us our much desired unification.
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And that brings us to the Big Bang.
I do adhere to the notion that matter first came into being some 13.8 billion years ago. I have no solid grounds to reject this information, and I can work with the Big Bang model. Yet the Lambda-CDM Big Bang model is structurally flawed.
Physicists included an artificial position and molded an entire structure around it.
- The funny thing is that the singularity was the fundamental essence of what makes the Big Bang model the Big Bang model until the singularity itself got booted out from the model later on.
The word singularity is still used, but now points to the position(s) where mathematics does not provide us an answer.
- The horrific part is that the overall model did not get changed from a structural perspective.
Physicists keep spooling the movie back, and desire to explain the results based on the results, without stopping at the appropriate moment. They still desire to find some unified reality at the very beginning of the material results that came forth with the Big Bang event.
The short cut to this table is found with the Lambda-CDM Big Bang theory in which the white section is not truly knowable, and then working just with the green section to explain the green section.
Contrast this with the Big-Whisper Big Bang theory in which the orange section provides a structure why the white section got undermined, and how that demise of the white section resulted in the green section.
All people embracing whichever Big Bang theory do agree that the white section led to the green section. Yet the structural setup of the Lambda-CDM model is artificial and as such it fails to deliver the truth because it contains the idea of unification with the green section.
By thinking in a structure of Everything without Nothing included, physicists are embracing a unified idea of some kind. And yet they never thought this through. They did not consciously make a decision here; they just followed the structure of their brains that they had established in their lives. They never questioned the largest of structures.
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Lastly, an example how physicists say that the universe is expanding. This is also an artificial structure, a mistake that nearly no one recognizes.
First the setup of the incorrect structure with an example.
A boy of three years old starts to recognize that his bedroom is getting smaller. By the time he is twenty, the bedroom is definitely a lot smaller than when he was three years old.
Obviously, the situation is easy to understand. The boy grew and grew, and in relationship to his body, the room became smaller without the room becoming smaller in reality. The boy is indeed correct, and all evidence points out that the room has become smaller for him. But the structure focuses on the wrong aspect and he made his brain be the ruler of his reality.
Continuing this storyline, the young man ends up basing his world view on this idea, and by the time he is forty and has traveled the world a lot, he can even state that the world has become quite a bit smaller than when he was a boy.
Now envision this person to be a physicist and ending up being engaged mainly with like-minded people. This group ends up seeing the world in a very peculiar manner. Other folks not engaged in this kind of thinking do not understand immediately what this special group of physicists are talking about — they can’t comprehend the specific ideas expressed by them.
Okay, you probably noticed I reversed the idea of the boy and the idea that the universe is expanding. The boy saw the room and then the world becoming smaller, while the universe is said to expand, becoming larger and larger.
Yet the point is that the wrong thing got appointed as the essence in both cases. The brain is not recognized as the source for what the largest structure should be. These brains in these examples do not question the structure of the brain.
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Let’s do a quick recap.
When thinking about the largest level of them all, we will be engaged in a specific structure.
There are three structural options for the universe:
- Unification is possible
- Lack of unification
- We can never know for sure
To get unstuck, you must first recognize what your brain is telling you.
- If you picked #1, then #2 and #3 are automatically incorrect.
- If you picked #2, then #1 and #3 are automatically incorrect.
- If you picked #3, then #1 and #2 are automatically incorrect.
So, there are two ways to being stuck.
By embracing an artificial structure, or by simply rejecting both possible structures.
Good luck getting unstuck. You should be able to do it now yourself.
(unless you remain stuck in your one chosen structure)
