Letter to an INTP.

Letter to an INTP

                Before we take risks experimenting with Logic, we should ensure that we are in a consequence-free environment.

                I’m not saying that a ‘reasonable’ line between reality and fantasy cannot be pragmatically drawn, but I am saying that there is a way of interfacing With Reality that does not Necessitate that such a line be drawn, and by the same token it is liberating and profound.

                The presence of a discerning ‘reality’ principle is inessential to the assessment of the emotional value of a work, and it may also be stifling to the imaginative process necessary to conceive such a work. If one’s relationship to Reality and the Universe is to be intimate, one need not take a fundamental division between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ too seriously, unless it particularly befits one’s personality type and gifts. (Engineers, for instance, will require this discernment to arrive at the same place that the poet arrives at by irrational abstractions, or whatever his/her style may be.) To take this kind of discernment that says, with definition, ‘this is true; this is playful imagination’ into the intellectual realm of artistic assessment reflects merely a bias in favour of realism over romanticism. It may be conceived of as a ‘merely’ personal bias, but it stands as a bias, regardless. For many people, a fixed view of What The World Definitely Is is not necessary to a healthy life, and, for all people, it is not necessary for compassion, irrespective of differences of viewpoint and opinion, be they religious, cultural, scientific, etc.

                There are two trends of thought: The feminine and masculine. Jung, Kiersey, Myers, and Briggs postulated this dichotomy in, respectively, intuition and sensation, introversion and extraversion, feeling and thought, and perception and judgment.

                Where the Sensory (masculine, though by no means is this to be confused with ‘male’) artists sees as his/her quest the Rendering of Obvious, sensorily accessible and incontrovertible Reality, the intuitive (feminine) approaches the medium as an exploration.
  
   By virtue of the same process, an intuitive, feeling writer may write something directly from his/her imagination and feel what he/she might describe as an 'epiphany': What he/she has written is immediately recognised as True, as though by virtue of the writer's talent the Platonic screen between Ultimate Truth and the 'false realism' of habitual thought were penetrated.

   This is not to be regarded as a hallucination; it may very well be that logic and language obscure our view of a reality that is wordless, complex and irrational, and that the skilled writer is one whose mastery of words has transcended a dependency upon them and who is capable of rendering some semblance of the Unspoken and Unthought in words and thoughts.

   Where his/her view of Reality contradicts logic, that is, where the visionary sees the ocean beyond the mountains where the relatively grounded cannot, the rigorously logical may condemn his vision as a mirage, simply because words and discursive thought obscure an insight into the world's irrational processes, less flattering to the rational mind that devised the strain of thought.

   Where logic oversteps itself, it shows a bias also in favor of a particular, fixed Reality in mind toward which human beings must do their best to subordinate their views, as contrasted with the Hindu model in which the world itself may be (in certain sects of Hindu belief) an Illusion and a creative fantasy.

   To presume that we are more advanced than the ancient Hindus when our own model of logic still carries the biases and theoretical complications that could only have arisen in a Christian Culture is hubris, especially when our most contemporary and tantalising physics seems increasingly to line up with Hindu cosmology. As the Upanishads say, 'If you think you understand Brahman, you don't,' and, as a notable physicist put it, 'if you think you understand Quantum, you do not.'

   In order to practise yoga and in order to think outside of one's personal cultural confines, humility must pervade one's being entirely. But this is not to dissuade Action, for to be so sure that you do not know that you do not Act is still to be sure of oneself.

dm.A.A.

Yes, I am egotistical.

What do you mean by ‘ego’? If you are referring to the Freudian ‘Ego’, you are employing a simple and probably outdated psychological model by virtue of which no progress can be made in understanding human motivation and behaviour. Incidentally, this is the model that most people use, and it is failing. If you are referring to a particular perspective toward which you attribute the characteristics of ‘untruth’ and ignorance, then history has shown that a deviant opinion held by one individual is not nearly as dangerous as one held by many, irrespective of the originator.

            If you mean to disregard my point of view but cannot see outside of the confines of the one in which you are entrenched, who is the egotist in this scenario? After all, the ‘ego’ represents myopiea. It may not be, in itself, (whatever its actual nature) a menace, so for you to attribute such importance to it as to call my life ‘dominated by the ego’ (as though Ego were an Ontological Entity, which is open to debate) is as absurd as to say that a person does not have a Soul because he/she has freckles, without any discussion as to the existence or Nature of a Soul. For all I know, the ‘ego’, by many definitions, is a useful tool if not abused and, by many other and a few of the same definitions, is inevitable as a characteristic experience in a sane psyche.

            But if, by ‘ego’, you seek to pigeonhole an entire spectrum of ignorance, greed, malice, myopia, and violence by virtue of which one defends a superficial image of oneself and feels justified in blindly disregarding the viewpoints of Others (be they general or specific), is it really the person you are targeting who has an ego problem?

 

Dm.A.A.

Ketchup's Theory.

Ketchup had a theory. He described it as he drove me through the depths of the one-story seaside city, as it tapered into the beach and ultimately dissolved into an ocean that on a day a shade mistier would have swallowed the horizon as well.
'You know, man, I took three and a half days away from home...'
'Wait, so you left the house for three and a half days?'
'Right.'
'Yeah, that's about how long it takes.'
'Right? And I got back and everything was better, and I thought maybe that how's the Universe is. Maybe at some point it got too much, and it was like, you know, you guys, just go and do your own thing and we'll see you in a couple... oh, a couple trillion years...'
'It needed some space.'
'Exactly'.

Ketchup's theory, pt ii.

'You know, man, I took three and a half days away from home...'
'Wait, so you left the house for three and a half days?'
'Right.'
'Yeah, that's about how long it takes.'
'Right? And I got back and everything was better, and I thought maybe that how's the Universe is. Maybe at some point it got too much, and it was like, you know, you guys, just go and do your own thing and we'll see you in a couple... oh, a couple trillion years...'
'It needed some space.'
'Exactly'.

The Monster.

When I was in kindergarten, I only got in time-out a few times. Facing a red, brick wall during recess was an unluxurious kind of embarassment, so I avoided it.

Come first grade, we moved from the splinter-box to the sandbox. There was a jungle gym in the playground. We would play a kind of game wherein people climbed the outskirts of this metallic mountain and, with daring, grabbed the pole running from the dome at the top, jumped off the top rail, slid down, and, landing awkwardly on the sand, scurried, too fast for the monster to catch, to climb out from between the rails.

            I was always the monster. I chose to dwell at the bottom of the volcano, looking up at them, chasing them as they ran too fast for me. Only a few times was I clever enough to try to climb up the rails from the inside.

            One day, however, maybe in Spring, I was not the monster. I walked along the rim of the sandbox, in luxurious embarassment, looking down at them. I smiled, shyly, and told them that I did not feel like it today. Girls and boys crowded about me soon, pleading. But not today.

-->

Maya, continued.

I talked to Maya, again, on the phone, three years later. It had been the first time that I had spoken with her since I think shortly after my break-up with Cassie.

In her first semester of University, she had dated a drug dealer. This led to her first experience with psychedelics, embodied in the Mexican Sacred Mushroom.

Shortly thereafter, she became suicidal.

'Maya, we love you!'

She was doing better now, however. She had decided to take a semester off from college. I envied her for her freedom. She told me that she did not understand my enthusiasm for things with a kind of delighted but fundamentally Confused tone.

She was working for a magazine, and her job, something to the effect of a secretary, as I surmised a year later, entailed that she wear high heels.

I later talked to her through a webcam. Aroused by her femininity, a passion fueled by nostalgia but funnelled and side-tracked like chimney-smoke by the degree to which she began to remind me of her mother, I adequately lost face with her.

Several days later, when I sent her a message online, she wrote me this: 'Phoenix, I am homeless. I just had my first experience at a shelter.'

I replied: 'Cool! How is your experience? Several of my friends are homeless, and I've hung out with them.'

Her response was to block me from her users. Her justification was that I did not respect her.

It would be about a year before we would speak to one another again.

Maya was a free thinker now. My contact with her had been limited to a few photographs of a chance meeting with Vivik and friends on their way to a convention of sorts in Colorado. Her hair was long and her eyes were closed, a wicked but innocent grin standing in contrast to Vivik and the tempered smile of Franklin.

Finally, she added me again. She was intrigued by things that I was posting and saying online.

She had a blog again.

Unable to find it in retrospect, I decided to Google her name.

Approximately half the results on the first page were slander reports.

They were all written by a coworker from the magazine company. They began with, 'It is appropriate that Maya _. ___-_______ listed her age as eighteen, for it adequately describes the childish nature of her behaviour...', continued for four paragraphs, and described, with commendable imagination, a scene of Maya using 'language inappropriate to the workplace' to accuse a respectable employee/er of a damage to a company item for which she herself was responsible, and then storming out in two-inch heels.

She gave me her phone number. I called her.

We spoke again, this time longer.

I told her about the slander gossip. 'What?' she said with a groggy tone of surprise.

'Yeah, I'm on your side, though,' I assured her.

She took time to justify my trust.

'The guy who hired me was a pervert.'

'Oh, really? How so?'

'I don't know. He wanted me to be his--' and she half-giggled self-consciously-- 'secretary or something.'

That aside, she was fine. She was about to move into her own apartment.

'Oh, that sounds awesome,' with envy.

'No, it's not. Because I can't have sex.'

She went on to tell me, for about fourteen minutes, about a mistake she had made whilst trying to use a corrosive chemical for the first time. Not knowing it was corrosive, she spilled some on her left calf.

The doctor told her that it would clear away after a few months. Her embarassment at the fact would last that long.

'I think that women can have sex whenever they want,' she told me.

Within a few weeks, she blocked me again. I had posted my most Shakespearean poem and Greatest Poetic Accomplishment on facebook. It was a testament to my frustration with the death of chivalry, the subjugation of abstinence, and Miranda's friends. I had tagged Maya in it.

This time, the verdict was new: 'I don't like you and don't want to talk to you. Stop adding me.'

Maya, alternate.

-->

Maya, alternate.

Maya had been one of few girls on the Rancho Buena Vista high School Robotics team, but, with all due respect to the moral and personal Virtues of the one or two others, she was the one that men would be most likely to notice as our token 'girl'.

She had only stopped by the state of California for one year. Her family moved with inexplicable frequency.

Within a few months, Maya had built up a following of people, not necessarily confined to her age group, that would have dearly loved to see her crucified for her views and the ardour with which she would defend them.

One deep indigo night, she handed me a Q'uran. She was just recovering from the gentle and almost innocent harassment of Vivik, an old friend with probing, logical eyes juxtaposing a maniacal grin, the former only relenting with a hysterical laughter that nonetheless failed to efface the latter.

She had intimated few things to me without ever really feeling close to me. As the deep December night settled into an uncertain, terrifyingly sedated future, standing in an alleyway between a row of trailers and a wall of classrooms, she told me that she had used to live on the internet for the longest time.

I commented on some headlights we saw from the street, postulating something to the effect of them being space aliens. She faked an awkward, stifled giggle.

Maya.

-->

Maya

Maya had been one of few girls on the Rancho Bernardo High School Robotics team, but, with all due respect to the moral and personal virtues of the one or two others, she was perhaps the only one that an average boy would have noticed.

I had known Maya during the one year that she was at our high school. She, back then, was notorious for building up a strong opposition toer for her political and religious views. The few people who kept her afloat were the disillusioned romantics, comprising an antisocial minority, and the men who wanted to have sex with her, comprising a majority.

One night, she handed me a Q'uran. It had been a deep blue night settling into a frighteningly uncertain future, in the November of my Senior Year. The young sophomore girl, with a sheet of auburn hair wrapped about an olive visage, allowed herself to be harassed gently by Vivik, a wildly theatrical but nonetheless Noble and Intelligent human being with a reverence for caffeine and a probing gaze that could threaten all statistical miseducation despite a maniacal grin that seemed to jeer at Reason Itself.

She had intimated few things to me without ever really feeling close to me. One night, standing in an alleyway between a row of trailers and a wall of classrooms, she told me that she had used to live on the internet for the longest time.

I commented on some headlights we saw from the street, postulating something to the effect of them being space aliens. She faked an awkward, stifled giggle.

$$$$$&&&-@@@@

Bonobo and Chimp

            I had relayed Maya’s story, quite statistically, about the eight men in one week in Minnesota.

            Looking up from the piano, I met his glassy eyes and immediately felt almost as though I had been caught unawares by a predatory primate.

            ‘When was the last time you had sex?’ Frank asked with an ex-drug addict’s curiosity.

           

            He was a psychology major, drug past aside. He had a charming way of treating the sexual game as though it obeyed the kind of rules that Alcoholic Anonymous followed, except that he was not preaching abstinence but something a pole apart.

            Over the next hour, he managed to have me convinced that all of my emotional longings, so tender to me that I could not withhold them from my new friend with the kind of paranoid defensiveness which seems so epidemic of my generation, was a merely ‘obvious’ and readily visible (as though such a thing could even adequately be made a topic of conversation, as he seemed to disprove) Symptom of not Abstinence – a mark of moral fortitude and, as far as I could attest from having had experience with Happiness, Love, and Sanity – but Sexual ‘Deprivation’, and that, quite apart from this condition being attractive, it was likely to be a deterrent.

            Well, this was an astronomical fantasy on par with magical thinking to me. After all, if his argument that promiscuity was advantageous to the survival and health of the human species held any water by even Darwinian standards, then, if the survival of the species was his main concern and, hence, the chief interest of all of his respected female friends*, then wouldn’t a pattern of sexual behaviour that was likely to diminish Population Growth be the most attractive feature?

            Clearly, his point seemed a challenge to the classic heroic idea that one must, as a test of true grit so as to enter into Manhood, surpass the temptress and walk the long and painful road towards the goddess, collapsing, heroic(, probably thirsty,) and ‘deprived’ at her feet.

            But this would be quite a feat, on par with war and death in the family.

   *        ‘I know a girl who’ll go to a party and literally pick the nerdiest guy and have sex with him,’ he related to me with genial and vulnerable glee.

‘Do you have any children?’

‘There’s a strong likelihood,’ he replied with a comical poker face.

‘Does that bother you?’ I asked with not nearly as much the veneer of a preacher so much as the inquisitiveness of a good reporter.

‘Very much so,’* he continued, expression unchanging.

Had he been a temptor? The whole fantasy* that he presented seemed too much akin to the comic books that he had once loved, for whom he hid a burning lifelong passion from the world.

He had been with thirty-seven different women after one of his first and most memorable ‘stepped on his heart’. This he told me with almost dramatic irony.

It had been mostly unprotected.

‘I only got Climidia once*,’ he said.

Now he was due to be married. His fiancée called him on the phone. She sounded somewhat groggy and defensive, but they exchanged ‘I Love You’s’ without obstruction or self-consciousness.

I’ll never forget him. He was dressed like a pirate one day, a motorcyclist the next, and, at one point, we got on a brief tangent about semantics, wherein I corrected him on the etymology of a particular word, and, leather-jacketed and mustachio’d, he almost sniggered with congenial delight at the observation.

Dm.A.A.

I have strong reason to suspect that most people tend to live within their own fantasies, and that many seek the company of those who will corroborate their fantasies to the point that they appear “real”. This, historically, would seem to be a much more dangerous phenomenon than that beautiful peculiarity of the private world that recognises its own subjectivity.

I had known the Troll for some time.



When we first met, he was charming and childlike in his enthusiasm, as misunderstood as I had been but appearing markedly less perturbed by the fact. He recounted, with enthusiasm, his safe haven, Satan’s Alley, and in his descriptions of the entrance between two stone walls I could see the deep darknesses of the valley I would have yet to become familiar with.



Syd, back then, had his particular group, and in my mind he was a Mahayana Cultist.

Yet it was troll’s company, almost a sore thumb in Syd’s grounded group, that prompted me again to consider paving the world in leather rather than wearing sandals. It was, in particular, Troll’s charmingly innocent unawareness of the almost Christian piety behind his passion that made his enthusiasm that much more moving, at a time when I could not relate at all, except intellectually, to the extreme non-involvement of his peers, which, again, seemed almost to not affect him.

‘Do you support causes’’ I asked Syd, and, of course, his reply was of the almost jeering kind that he himself, and many of his friends, took always to be ‘charming’, as though the fact I wasn’t barking up his tree meant instantly that I was barking up the wrong tree.



I had finished the drawing of my crush’s face as I was eating with Troll and another friend. It was my first attempt, back when I was not in the established habit of illustrative art, so it was understood when she ultimately overlooked it with an artist’s disinterest.

Yet it was vivid, swarming with detail. The seasoned gentleman sitting by the window at Sorrento’s gave me the kind of appraisal for it with, in retrospect, a widening of the eyes that at that moment had seemed ecstatic and assuring but that, in hindsight, proves to have been, assurance and approval notwithstanding, the tempered, sagely look of a man who was Alive in the Sixties but who, in that moment, witnessed something surprising come of our generation.



I was geared up and revved like an automobile.

An ecstasy that was partly brought from home and partly that of the Palomar Student Body coursed through my veins like gasoline and solar power, respectively.



I stormed into Randy’s, spotted the cute, young Mexican woman behind the counter, and, approaching her with an upsurge of gusto, asked, ‘How do you say, “Can I have your number?” in Spanish?’

She seemed pleasantly taken aback. I explained that I needed to ask a girl out.

She encouraged me, finding my quest admirable.



Passing the parking lot, I saw Troll, walking far ahead of me, ambling joyously, almost gelatinously, not looking behind him, immersed in the joy of his companion.


I knew, for his sake and hers, that I couldn’t do it.

It is my choice to withdraw from sexual encounters because I feel morally that they are susceptible to social rules and boundaries, I feel personally that they are a dissipation of energy, and I am vigilant of the consequences. This is my personal choice.
How I feel about people I am In Love With is clearly distinct from how I feel about people to whom I am "attracted", just as exciting events in my life are distinct from moments of intense Understanding, the latter being a kind of dying and almost mythic breed in this current Ecstatic culture. Though I am not invalidating the importance of a healthy sex life, I would like to make it clear that there are other reasons that human beings suffer save from sexual "repression", and that there are things Worth suffering for if one can find the reason in oneself to. (These things may very well also be on a level that is so distinct from "mere" sexuality that they are not governed by the same social rules, and even may impel an individual to defy those rules, at great personal risk.)
So please do not deliver an ad hominem attack against my unconventional (and frankly religious) viewpoint, because I am trying to conduct this discussion like an adult, based upon my own experiences as one, and those of other adults with whom I have spoken.
Thank you, and Ford Speed.

dm.A.A.

And Question This Too.

To accept any view Totally and Unconditionally is not to Learn. To Learn is to take another's point of view with a grain of salt, allowing both to gestate together. If you follow a wise man around a mountain, you will merely be brought back to your original point of departure. True wisdom, true novelty, comes from leaving the wise man and seeking your own wisdom at the peak.

Creeps, an apology.

Creeps, to me, seem to be people who are trying to drink from the gutters of life to purge a thirst because they cannot find the Fountain.

These are probably truly sensitive people who often think entirely in terms of guarded feelings and have some 'negative conditioning' which they are too considerate to burden others with.

They are not to be confused with rapists. They are not villains. No one is around to tell them that they are Too Smart For Their Own Good, in certain respects Wise Beyond Their Years, and not-as-bad-as-they-think.

Most, i hope, will find someone to open up to them and help them to open up. People who Will be Burdened because they value Growth.

dm.A.A.

The Two Styles of Avant-garde.

There must be at least two distinct types of "avant-garde" artist: The hipster and the true artist.

The hipster is likely to call his or her work "avant-garde". The true artist, conversely, is more likely to be surprised should his work be called that.

The hipster's "avant-garde" will be "experimental for experimental's sake", whereas the true artist may be so far as insulted to have the deepest vibration of his or her Soul labeled "trendy" or "strange".

dm.A.A.

A recent excerpt from my Dream Journal.

 Last night, I dreamt that there was a horrendous evil girl, presumably with blonde pig-tails, whose annoyingness (she was quite obviously taken from the web comic that my freckled friend in Robotics showed me) was so intense that the most Horrendous Tortures would be preferred to her company.

My immediate impulse is to interpret this as a dream commenting upon the ills of the Collective Unconscious. Obviously, if we were to all consider the true terrors of the world, the notion that mere 'annoyance' could rival the horrors that my dreams produced (adequate portrayals of the Actuality of the Naruka worlds which so many wretches occupy) is Absurd. This could quite obviously be seen as a parallel, also, to the Marissa situation: the sheer nonsense of this 'nameless', 'unseen' villain invading a fortified compound, and these Poor Souls preferring Nazistic horrors In Favor of Group Thought to the unseen devil of her appearance which (as such things tend to go) did not ultimately manifest as expected, despite an earlier appearance.

ii. I have been developing my extroverted intuition almost as a form of 'selling out'. I long even more for a Niche in Escondido or San Marcos. Somewhere serene, where I am not Overwhelmed by myself nor Encroached upon by Extroverts, but where enough Happens for me to recognise that I am Alive, capital 'A'.

dm.A.A.

A True Story.

A True Story



            I was hanging out with a friend of mine who was (and probably still is) homeless and who smoked (and probably still does) a lot of weed.



            At first, I had romanticised him, calling him, somewhat pretentiously, an ‘aristocratic bum’, to which he had to take a moment to think and discern that it was a complement.

            ‘Thanks, bro.’



            I then told him about the computer game I had been designing the first time I saw him that semester.

            ‘Bro, no offence, but I think you waste a lot of time with things that you could be using more constructively.’



            My companion ultimately disappointed me, however, which is a turn of events that I always admit with embarassment. I tried reading my most confessional poetry to him, towards which he replied, at one point, ‘Bro, I appreciate your taste in poetry, but I just want to smoke weed and watch South Park.’



            At around 1 o’clock in the morning, we got into an argument because I wanted another swig from his water bottle, which I needed only for a few seconds so that I could fill it up at the water faucett he had shown me, a few yards from where he was lying.

            He, however, was upset that I wouldn’t go out to 7-eleven to get him a lighter, and insisted that he could not ‘nurture my dependency’.

            Somehow, I ultimately talked him into letting me have the damn container. I think that I pointed out that he was doing the kind of thing that the Ruling Elite would do. That clicked something into place in his brain.



            At around 2 o’clock in the morning, he requested that I sneak onto the Palomar College campus so as to retrivee some wire cutters that he had left there whilst fully living up to the title of the crime ‘Illegal Camping’.

            He had a whole plan laid out for this. He showed it to me on a bird’s-eye-view satellite map on his phone.

            He had a good deal of zeal in orchestrating this heist, as you can imagine.

            Well, around the time that I made it to my designated point of entry, located conveniently under a street light, a police car passed me by, and I was like, ‘screw this.’

            I walked off, past my companion’s hiding place, and waited for the 4:40 train on San Marcos plaza. Of the few people whom I saw there, no one said anything to me.

            At around 3 o’clock A.M., I made the mistake of falling asleep at one of the tables outside the Pat and Oscar’s.

            Twenty minutes later, I woke up, and I was Freezing.



            I told myself, ‘screw you and your weed, ---- (the name of my acquaintence)’ and proceeded to withdraw from my back pack a pen and note book.

            I began to write a poem addressed to my crush.

            Practically the moment that I set the pen to the paper, two things happened: Time disappeared Entirely as an entity, and I felt a Gush of warm blood from my heart permeate my entire being.



            I got into that train thrilled.





            The next time I saw my companion, he held little against me for flaking out on him, although he preferred that I do not mention it.

            I asked him if he would like to hear a poem.

            ‘No, thanks, bro,’ he said quickly and definitely.

            I then began to tell him about what happened to me that night. He tried to hush me up and cut me off, as though he had an appointment he just remembered.
            I persisted. I told him about the poem that I wrote, and how it affected me. He paused, staring analytically and ponderously into space, and then said, ‘that’s pretty trippy, dude.’

dm.A.A.

Everyone has a number of interpretations for what goes on in regard to any given event. Because I cannot cater to all on the internet, especially in the realm of social absurdity that is facebook, without appearing Mad to the General Concensus, I must counter my friend's assertion that 'action is more effective than renunciation' in regards to facebook.

In life, most of the people one will meet will be incredibly biased in favour of one particular point of view or another, and to the degree that one's exhibitionism on facebook interferes with the harmonious interdependence of oneself with all other individuals, to that degree it acts as a menace, and to the degree that this neurotic pattern encroaches upon Actual Life, -- outside the internet -- to that degree the Internet Itself becomes a threat to humanity.

dm.A.A.

A Culture without Nads.

1. The popular assumption in this 'culture' seems to be the one that Freud held most near and dear: That sexual repression was the root of all evil and that merely 'turning a person on' in that particular area could solve all the problems of the world.
     Unfortunately, this is not the case. Regardless, people who live by this theory, upon learning that they cannot save the world by increasing the human population, abandon saving the world altogether, believing it to be, as Freud seemed to, 'terminally fucked'.
    But this is absurd.
    Obviously, if you spend all of your energy on sex and are under the impression that all 'civilised' impulses -- intellect, beauty, love -- are just merely 'sublimated' (direct quote from Dr Freud) impulses from the rectal area, it is no wonder that we fall short of the glory of those Cultures and individuals who marry all the impulses.
    We're practically designed against it.
    But very few educated people who also happen to be intelligent believe the World of Nature to follow a 'design'.

dm.A.A.

2. I think that a large part of the problem is that we do not value knowledge that isn't physically experienced, unless it is from a particular authority.
    It's no wonder that people do things like heroin and meth, drugs which kill, respectively, their users and, to quote a friend of mine who once encountered a meth-head and barely escaped alive, 'something inside you'.

   We also, as I alluded previously, practically condemn as heretical such 'pretenious' claims that were once made about the Spirit, Love, and the Soul.
    And yet we spend most of our conversations bragging about the Past, as though that Ghost could sway the present if we didn't let it.

    Fantastic.


    I enjoy the disciplined, solitary life. Not that I am lonely: Just few people want to / can share their solitude with me. Which is a definition of Sanity if any definition can be drawn.

    Sanity, to me, is a -- if not the -- religious issue. It is, Naturally, flowing, fluid, and vague -- rarely glimpsed by mortals who value scientific 'knowledge' over the Humanity necessary to keep it in check.

    No wonder we are so cynical. 'Facing the facts' -- the Figures -- must leave us with room to turn our heads and imagine their application.

  It is not a mark of good Art to merely present something as a 'fact' -- an incontrovertible constant. We reserve that for propagandists.

   A truly 'sexually liberated' culture would be free from the devils of sexual perversion. But the fact that those devils still Haunt us can be seen in the fact that we project it onto the 'other', the 'creep', or, in other words, our own brother and sister, just as much a beggar as we. One needs not be a religious person to see that others are a mirror for ourselves, regardless of whether we like what we see or not.

    I have seen both angels and demons in those mirrors. And I was accused of heresy, labeled a conspiracy theorist, a stoner, and a virgin.

   But the kicker:

  I had never heard of the Illuminati. I have, to this day, never seen LSD, and my virginity is a choice. I know that drunkenness is the beginning of a hangover, and alcohol and lust both fail to ensnare my tastes.

   Yes, I am desperate. No more than the average individual in this day and age. My desperation would persist despite any insufficiency. It is my Spirit: my Zeal for Life.
    And even in times of lack, as well as excess, for those are known to all wise people to come and go, we must be vigilant and ready to meet Reality on its own terms. Even if it threatens to drive us mad, for sanity is subjective.
   My sanity, like my religion -- my sanctity -- is personal. You will know it by its fruits, and it will comfort you if you do not threaten it, but you cannot copy it. A picture of food is not a very satisfying meal. And one lives not by bread alone.

   I have called myself a 'non-believing Christian.' I have deeply enjoyed the warmth and camaraderie of certain Christian circles, singing along with them at their bonfires as the Sun set on the ocean horizon.
   But just a few treated me as seasoned, pretentious 'fans' treat a 'newbie' at a rock show. True: I never followed the history. But I dig the music.

dm.A.A.