Delving deeply into our categories, or the law of similarity, we can come to see not only how things are stable and unified, but how they interact with each other in a holistic way. Even medicine is having to bend its knee to this process. Though the color of a pill has nothing to do with its active ingredient necessarily, they still have to color the pill correctly in order to avoid triggering an adverse placebo effect. If a person takes a tranquilizer that just happens to be colored red, there is a very good chance it will have a reduced or even entirely mitigated effect.

Better to have all pills be white, then? Yes, white is generally neutral, but blue works for tranquillizers also unless you are an Italian male.

Blue for lowering blood pressure, too. Yes.

So, everything in your world affects you in ways that match these categories. It’s even why people are easily subject to social deception. Besides having a trust bias, they categorize people whether this has any basis in fact or not. But my point is, awareness of and control over categories gives you a greater command of both your personal energy and environmental influences on that energy.

You don’t really even choose your categories. You live in the culture you live in, were raised by whoever raised you, and have inherited whatever traits your parents had to impart to you.

I find that organizing things into categories gives me greater in-depth understanding of them. So if something is wrong it may be time to purposefully recategorize? Exactly. You are on to exactly what the law of similarity has to offer.

Could we train ourselves for bottom-up thinking rather than categorical thinking (top-down). Accept the experience and then make associations? Actually, you can, but you do not have to voluntarily train yourself this way. Your dreams do it to you every night.

No object has a single category it’s linked to. Nothing is one dimensional or it literally, physically could not exist, at least not at our day to day scale. The relationships between categories shift according to cycles that occur in nature, like a constantly scrambling Rubik’s cube.

That’s when you need a database to cross reference. Our dreams are always cross referencing? Yes.

Left as humanity tends to leave these processes, rather than living through the seasons as perhaps we should, instead the seasons live through us. Life becomes defined by fads, passing moods, and transitory relationships. Anyone feel at all victimized by this model?

The seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is winter living through us instead of us living winter? Yes, exactly.

I feel dragged along by the model rather than victimized by it. But also know that I can disconnect from it to some extent. Well, getting some perceptual distance or perspective is a big help. Meditation can help there. But what about instead of having a passive stance in the face of these changes, looking for causes to give us permission to behave a certain way?

That is one of the tensions I think we were discussing. There are some traditions I believe in. They have come from others but adopted by me. And there are some traditions I conform to that become a burden of sorts. The two aspects of your life can be blended though you don’t actually have a choice. You either generate resistance until you become exhausted and accept them anyway, this is what they call acquiring wisdom in old age, or you focus more on moving through the conditions and definitions around you rather than moving along the lines of the grid they create. It’s why we can feel like we are plotting our own course. We sometimes plot tangents instead of sticking to the binary switching routes. Honestly, how much of our lives do we tend to see as yes/no switches?

So, nothing is really either/or? Exactly. There is always also “maybe.”

No choice in where we are now but we can make a small adjustment in our path that will grow in impact down the road. Indeed. You are where you are, but where you go from there is not dictated by what the place or condition appears to be.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~