Spiritual Black Swans - Part 2

In part one of this essay I looked into what Nicolas Nassim Taleb had to say in his book the “Black Swan”. I ended the essay saying that Taleb completely ignores one thing that could solve the issues raised in the book – spirituality.
The central point in the book is the completely random, unpredictable nature of reality and the limitations of the human mind in grasping this.

The first part of the book deals with the limitations of the human mind. The mind operates on a collective subconscious map of reality. This reality is a fragmented and insanely complicated. Events are explained in terms of cause and effect reasoning without any holistic perspective.

How does the spiritual person deal with this? Well he steps out of the collective delusion. He steps out of the mind. He transcends the problem of black swans as she knows there are no swans! A swan is part of the delusion of reality generated by the human mind; the map rather than the territory. Spirituality sees reality as one non-dual undifferentiated whole. All distinct entities that are perceived are therefore transitory illusions the mind generates to make sense of the world. A spiritual person knows that you can never truly know anything. In addition to this there are no simple cause and effect explanations for events. Every element of the universe is related to every other element in one undivided whole. It is not possible to isolate parts of the whole and claim to explain it.

Taleb explains that humans use 2 modes of thought –
System 1 - Experiential , intuitive and based on heuristics.
System 2 – Cogitative , logical, self-aware, what we normally call thinking.

Taleb claims System 1 is inherently flawed as it is based on a number of defective modes of thinking. The tendency to explain events in terms of simple cause and effect, the extrapolation of the past into the future, the inability to see black swans are all due to System 1 mode of thinking. The advice he gives is to deliberately use System 2 logical thinking to overcome the “intuitive” thought of System 1 by rationally understanding black swans and acting to mitigate their effects.

This is where the spirituality disagrees completely with Taleb. The true source of knowledge is intuition. What Taleb claims is intuition is the subconscious part of the mind. The same mind that fails to perceive the one spirit and instead sees a fragmented collective reality. True intuition arises when the mind is silent. This would be difficult for someone like Taleb, who is immersed in mental reality, to grasp. This intuition is responsible for all creativity. It connects one to the infinite intelligence of the one source. The “thinking” mind may be blind to black swans but the intuitive mind, the pure consciousness will not be. In silence can emerge knowledge that may seem utterly impossible to the “thinking” mind. In silence the working of the infinite intelligence is revealed.

In the second part of the book Taleb deals with the problem of prediction. Taleb claims that black swan events are completely random so not predictable. To a spiritual person there is no randomness in the universe. The universe is purposeful and is guided by the one source. Though the process of entropy is well known the opposite process of extropy is not. Life is a highly improbable event that is getting more improbable all the time as it evolves into ever more complex life forms. This is the process of extropy. It should logically not exist. It does. A spiritual person taps into the intelligence of the source that guides this process and gets an intuitive understanding of where the universe will jump to next. As he is one with the universe his goals align with that of the universe. Elaborate plans and predictions are not needed by the spiritual person as he is guided by the source. Indeed planning and prediction may rule out the serendipitous non-deterministic events that are the essence of the universal intelligence.

As black swans are unpredictable according to Taleb he advices us to experiment, tinker and explore in order to maximize the chance of catching a positive black swan. In other words try and maximize out luck. The spiritual person on the other hand makes his own luck. The universe will let you know in advance if you use your true intuition

The key then is silence. A Zen master once said “Don’t seek the truth. Just stop cherishing opinions”. We can then hear the sound of one hand clapping and see a world without black swans.