I am a language process: Cycles of Literal Pressure and Figurative Release

Consciousness is not merely a projected division between two static categories, but they are projected by a dynamic sequence, creating a feedback loop where each element feeds into the next, creating a tension that necessitates its counterpart. The initial distinction seems like a simple dichotomy—on one hand, the limitations of reality, fatigue, and stimulus-bound creatures, like apes, trapped within circumstance. On the other, the aspirations of mind, reason, and divinity, striving toward ideals that transcend the mundane, seeking “answers” beyond the immediate. However, they are not separate categories but stages within the same process.

The First Pressure: Limitation

The ape, the fatigue, the fly in the jar, all represent the immediate, the literal, the constrained. These are the “circumstances” that press upon consciousness, the borders we encounter in our daily interaction with the material world. Realism—perhaps best defined here as the acceptance of what is directly perceivable and measurable—confines us, like the jar confines the fly. The literal world is bounded by what can be sensed, touched, measured, and experienced.

In this sense, pressure is the key distinguishing feature. The fatigue arises from the tension of being confined within the boundaries of what is physically possible, knowable, and visible. The fly in the jar cannot escape because it cannot perceive anything beyond the jar’s walls, much like the ape’s machinery keeps it operating within its biologically determined limits. The circumstance becomes the force that creates the question—a yearning for something outside the immediate confinement.

The Ideal as Oppositional: Release

On the other side, mind, reason, and god (in their varied forms) represent the opposite response. They arise as rationalizations, but nonetheless the ideal itself is squeezed out of the constraints imposed by literal reality. The need to break free from limitations is what births the ideal—the concept of “beyond,” of reason transcending the animal condition, of divinity representing an unattainable perfection. The mind begins to formulate “answers” to the questions posed by the literal world. These answers are often literal in their own right, declarations, formulations of truth that seem to overcome the limitations of the ape or the jar, but in doing so they create a damming effect. “It has been spoken,” and thus gains authority.

In this stage, we reach rigidity. The ideal answers calcify, becoming just as literal as the circumstance they oppose. The pressure mounts because the literalization of the ideal (turning the figurative dream into a fixed “truth”) again creates confinement. The surge of ideals becomes bottled up, leading to the next stage.

The Figurative Surge: from the pressure between literals, a Release

The figurative arises from the need to release the pressure caused by the rigidity of the literal. The bursting forward happens not because figurative language or thought is a separate realm, but because it is the only way out of the overconstrained system. When literal answers become too rigid, too narrowly defined, they stop functioning as answers at all—they become like the bologna pressed out of the slicing machine, from pressure behind it, instantly sliced by the knife of perception, falling flat on the table as nothing more than one more literal recollection, an extension of the sequence.

The figurative, then, is a re-slicing of the same material, offering new ways to interpret and break free from the overly defined literal truths. It doesn’t transcend the literal, but it reconfigures it, letting the pressure escape, letting meaning flow anew through fresh channels.

One Process, Two Movements

Thus, the categories are not only conceptual opposites within one cognitive domain but are also two parts within an oscillating cycle, manifesting to consciousness, from a precognitive behavioral squeeze, as figurative expression. The literal imposes constraints, rationalizaton seeks permission to escape by finding new ideal, the new ideal, literally spoken with authority, imposes new constraints, and the buildup of tension releases the figurative, allowing meaning to flow through newly opened channels. This is a cyclical movement, where pressure builds, forces a new direction, and then builds again.

The ape trapped in its circumstance is not separate from the mind striving for divinity—it is the same mechanism in different phases of expression. The literal and the figurative are not distinct realms but different feedbacks from the same pressure system, constantly alternating between confinement and release, damming and surging.

In this light, no single element seems misplaced; rather, each element represents a stage within this dynamic sequence. The only error would be to see them as static categories when they are fluid, interdependent, and continuously evolving.

A page from the Book of Job: The Liberation of Unknowing

Job sits in the dust, covered in sores, having lost everything he once cherished—family, fortune, even the sense of his own innocence. He is crushed by forces beyond his understanding, yet his friends surround him with their answers: accusations of secret sins, defenses of a just universe, a parade of doctrines meant to make sense of his suffering. But Job refuses these explanations. He rejects the comfort of easy logic, the illusion that the world is tidy and knowable, the pretense that moral formulas can account for his misery. Job only knows that he does not know, and yet in this unknowing, there is a profound depth—a single step into awe, realizing that he knows more than he did before.

In this affirming negation, Job finds his clarity. He does not need to transcend his agony to perceive its truth. Job sees that the cosmos does not fit the shape of human righteousness, that there is no map to his suffering that can be drawn by human hands. And yet, there is a strange freedom in this unknowing—a relief from the burden of having to *know*. The mechanical attempts of others to analyze his pain only reinforce his awareness of how futile those attempts are. His friends are not just wrong; they are trapped, like he was, in the belief that their perceiving minds must be capable of encompassing everything. But Job, at the edge of his collapse, lets go.

It is here that Job becomes Buddha—not in the enlightenment of answers, but in the surrender to the unsolvable. In the face of his own destruction, Job does not retreat into the safe house of certainties. He does not need a final judgment or a cosmic verdict to make his experience whole. Instead, he sees the empty space where certainty once dwelled and embraces it. This is the Buddha mind, the mind that refuses to grasp, to clutch, to cling.

Job’s insight is not a renunciation of the world but an acceptance that reality is not meant to fit human understanding. He can only perceive through the limits of his suffering, and yet those limits are what make his perception clear. The great speeches from the whirlwind, the divine answers that offer no explanations, reveal to Job that the universe is *not* within his grasp, that the machinery of existence will always be too vast, too wild, too indifferent to human judgments.

And this is not despair; this is liberation. Knowing that he does not know, Job knows everything. In his unknowing, he is free from the prison of certainty, free from the need to impose his will on the formless. This is the Buddha’s path—to see the self-imposed cage and understand that the attempt to impose the Will on reality was Job’s ignorance. This was his cage. The mere awareness that the Will is unimposable on formless reality stops the urge to impose it. Thus, freed from ignorance, the cage no longer holds him.

Job has become one with the dust he sits in. The world remains, unchangeable and unexplainable, and Job remains, part of it, no longer struggling to tear it open for answers. Knowing nothing, he has learned everything.