Conclusion Regarding the Fallibility of the Formal.

Conclusion Regarding the Fallibility of the Formal.

 

I have defined the Formal as that which is a relationship directly between Mind and Word, in the absence of Being. I affirm Heidegger’s notion that Truth must be dependent upon the Comportment of not only Mind and Word but also Being.

The Process of Thought may be carried out calmly and with freedom even whilst vigilant of its shortcomings. Yet because of these shortcomings, one must note that simple logic, which belongs to the Formal, can never allow us to arrive at Truth; the moment that we try to, we are overcast with the Black Void of our own human fallibility and the black-light of Doubt is shone in the Darkness as a challenge to the sanity of Common Sense.

For this reason, Rationalism will always fail, except where it is used dynamically in conjunction with a specific circumstance or vague Universal or constant.

For my sources: Try playing an instrument whilst thinking quietly to one’s self, but never daring to speak aloud one’s thoughts. One may get the impression that the music lies on one axis of time and the process of thought, having BEEN thought to have been nearly instantaneous, actually stretches out over indefinite time, is only understood at intervals (like Lincoln-Logs), and fails to create the clear picture or even the (sensation of a) completed structure, either never coming to fruition or, if it has, never making that fruition certain, apparent, or distinguishable from any pre-existing structure.

Thought definitely is happening, but this “Clear and self-evident Truth” is no longer available outside of one’s own comfort zone. The process of thought can only be carried out calmly and with security if there is NOT the vested interest of finding some reliable Authority within it.

Dm.A.A.

Conclusion Regarding a Sense of Accomplishment.

Conclusion Regarding a sense of Accomplishment.

 

In all matters where one’s intellectual acuity is concerned, Truth is determined finally by the sense of Accomplishment created by Novel break-throughs, as opposed to the sense of Failure which is nothing more than the hurdle of Repetition that is simply waiting to be broken down.

 

Dm.A.A.

On the Process of Thought.

When we think verbally and logically, we construct a mental image in a fashion not unlike the systematic stacking of children's 'Lincoln Logs'.
At every instant, with each log, the Mind refers, by immediate, short-term Memory, back to the thought that was just thought, becoming Cognizant of it.

The problem with Repetition is herein: That during that brief interval betwixt thoughts, it becomes equally probable that the mind is referring back to the Original Thought as it is that it is referring to the Repetition. So long as they are indistinguishable (which they must be in order for the Repetition to be successful) there is Absolutely no way of knowing that the Repetition was successful unless it was somehow Outwardly Expressed. This is why, once an Original Thought has run its course, it becomes impossible to distinguish a Successful Repetition from the Intent of making that Repetition (which may in fact stem simply from [trying to re-live the Glory of] the Original Thought).

This seemingly crippling condition in fact cripples only Common Sense and Prejudice. So long as Thought is Fresh and Novel, sprouting from a healthy, Active relationship with Being, the Sinking House does not occur.

dm.A.A.

On Thought.

 

At every step in the mechanical process of thought, one’s Unconscious Mind checks that what is being thought is relatively unprecedented. This is why thinking the same thing over and over is fanaticism or obsession, whereas doing the same thing over and over in the physical world is madness.

 

In this sense, any house we construct may become a Sinking House. The moment that the construct is no longer novel to the Unconscious Mind, the Unconscious withdraws all support holding up the structure.

Dm.A.A.

Conclusion Regarding the Sinking House and Standing Reserve.

Standing Reserve, in the Heidegerrean sense, depends upon a Truth being drawn NOT from the comportment of Being, Mind, and Language, but upon fairly feeble connections betwixt these three points.

If our senses are fallible, then we cannot rely upon them entirely, as in the instance of Empiricism.
If our minds (especially insofar as they depend upon Memory) are fallible, then we cannot rely upon them exclusively, as in the instance of either Rationalism and Platonism.
If our language is often inadequate in relating to our minds and senses, then we cannot rely upon either Rationalism nor Common Sense, for either is constructed from it or in some way limited to it.

When I look at the computer, I am confronted with information being transmitted through wires, depicted in pixels, and published by other individuals. At any point therein, distortion can occur, and I am aware of this, even if I am Unconscious of it.
I was listening to a song by Missy Elliott, wherein I suspect that she reversed the entire song at a certain point, playing it back at intense speed, and then rhymed the following line with the reversed audio sample.
Nothing on azlyrics.com could corroborate my theory, yet neither could it dissuade it. All that it took note of, to the knowledge of my senses, were the two lines, adjacent to one another, that had appeared to border the reversed part. I found no evidence from Standing Reserve, therefore, for either the reversal having been a reversal or a misheard lyric. The absence of a third line betwixt these two lines would suggest that, to the best of my guesswork, the writer had not been able to distinguish a lyric during that brief stretch of time either, and so the ambiguous sounds were probably a reversal. (The line immediately preceding the reversal, "Listen up close while I take it backwards", corroborates this, and it is a matter of common knowledge among audiophiles that the remainder of the song employs this reversal technique repeatedly, even within the very chorus.)

It may have been a reversal of the entire song or just the lyrics that followed.

I have three reasons to believe that it was a reversal of the entire song:

1. The peculiar quality of the sounds would suggest that it was the entire song.
2. The fairly contrived feeling* of the following line.
3. The improbability that the following line was in fact auditorily palindromic.

Yet what interests me is not so much whether or not what she had done WAS a reversal or not. What interests me is this: Can I trust my senses when I am staring at that screen? If Unconsciously I am aware of the probability of distortion, then I do not see within my Mind's Eye a Truth, and so distrust occurs. and Uncertainty becomes apparent.

The immediate but tentative evidence of my senses would account for the relationship between Mind and Being, accounting for the Practical. The relationship between the Words and the Mind, the Formal, becomes feeble when I become aware that the Words I comprehend are NOT the words that were written and conceived by the writer but the words I imagine when I trust my Mind. The relationship between those Words and the Being, the Artistic, is absent.

Therefore, in the absence of Comportment, no Truth can be derived from Standing Reserve that cannot be deconstructed.

*Albeit after I had all ready developed the prejudice that it was written to rhyme with the reversed section.

dm.A.A.

On Academia.

 

 

My favourite character from the problematic and difficult outing with Kresten and his friends was Nelly. At one point, as we were arguing about Greed and Money, she looked me in the eye and said, “That’s just your opinion. That’s not a fact.”

I was given pause. I could think of nothing more obvious. Yet why was she bringing to my attention this fairly self-evident fact?

I probed her for answers. Eventually, she seemed to suggest that she knew “facts” because she learned them in college, whereas I only had opinions because I heard them by word-of-mouth.

Undoubtedly, the most well-read of my peers was John the Hitchhiker. He was also the one who had the most time available to dispense in conversation and disinterested* learning. It was his insight that I had made reference to, in the context of a larger argument. As far as I was aware, practically speaking, we might call what he told me (about the three-level theory of the Human Brain) a tentative “fact”, whereas my own applications in the argument were my subjective “opinions”. Just to underscore, however, the tentative nature of the fact, I had prefaced John’s argument with an emphatic “from what I heard”. Apparently, this humble concession was the crux of her entire attack. Yet were the things she “learned” at college not equally what she had “heard”? Why should I value the “authority” of some professor I have never seen over the authority of John? Why should I confine myself to a curriculum when the curriculum encroaches upon the learning that I do naturally in quest of answers and not only answers but deeper questions?

I hear people quite frequently parrot that “everything is subjective”. Yet I did not LEARN that from a curriculum. It took me years of arguing painstakingly with my peers in middle and high school before we arrived at the age when they stopped lording their own “facts” over me as dogmatically. Too sore are the wounds of bullying from someone with no imagination who hated me for challenging his or her dogma, if I approached him in a group, or who scoffed at me within a group and left me to grovel and wonder how it could be that someone could be so CERTAIN of anything. Personal Subjectivity had been something more or less intuitive to my mind, and I deplored the educational system for not introducing it more thoroughly in its education curriculum until high school. Yet now I seem to encounter the phrase “everything is subjective” as though it were something read from a book – yet it is STILL TREATED as an end-point. Most people who make the claim that everything is subjective seem to be relativists. But what lies beyond it?

Nelly said that we cannot make decisions according to opinions, and that we had to make them according to facts. Yet WHAT ARE FACTS? It was merely Kant who drew a line between the Phenomenological and the Objective. Yet not only Nietzsche or Shestov but experience itself seems to lay this abstraction to waste.

The point is not that I was smarter than my peers; that is somewhat of a leap. The point is that something as basic as the relativity and subjectivity of experience was not taught to me within the confines of a classroom. If anything, I only found words for it from books that I had read in my free time, but the mystery of what other’s lives were had always been what cast doubt on any kind of Absolutism.

Of course, if one supplements** a curriculum with one’s own studies, one will sooner or later call the curriculum into question. But even within the CONFINES of the curriculum one must call the institution of Academia into question! Did Nelly not read Hugo, or Salinger, or Emerson, or Thoreau? I might imagine that any serious scholar, unless he or she had a really brilliant argument otherwise, would enter into college with immense tentativeness and humility, and my ideal would be, should I choose to return to school, to ALWAYS keep an eye open for what the Hitch-hikers of the world are doing.

Yet if one has no intrinsic interest in Truth but simply a vested interested in “Education”, then one can entertain the pitifully fossilized notion that one in-group has the Truth and the other does not have it. Yet this is not only unsubstantiated but impractical, because WERE THAT SO, then only individuals within a given system would be of equal intellectual merit as individuals outside of it. This kind of thinking leads to Fascism, typically. How can a learning person possess oneself of such a pretension or prejudice?

Yet of course not all students are scholars; many are simply parrots who employ the educational system in order to gain social status, to climb a social hierarchy, and to put down others on a lower “rung” of the hypothetical ladder. Education is supposed to teach humility – not timidity, but humility. Nietzsche may have written in a vain tone of voice because he was unintimidated by the masses, but was he not intimidated by the Universe? I may write as though I “know everything”. Yet I do not make that claim at all. I know a good deal. The more that I know that I know, the more I know that I do not know, and if I did not make clear what little I do know, even if it is never Certain, I run the risk of forgetting not only the answers I have found but the multitude of questions they imply.

 

*Learning without a vested interest, such as social status or some goal.

** And of course, once the curriculum has become voluntary rather than mandatory, a more appropriate term would be to “supplement one’s own studies with the curriculum”.

 

Dm.A.A.

On Friendship, Utilitarianism, Sexuality, and Evolution. (F.U.S.E.)

On Friendship, Utilitarianism, Sexuality, and Evolution. (F.U.S.E.)

 

In retrospect, I can find some argument in Evolutionary Biology for Michael’s assertion that any relationship between a man and a woman, at least outside of the immediate family, is sexually motivated at its radical core. This assertion usually clashes with my conscious ideals, but in the absence of any clear “evidence” from the Unconscious (chiefly because it IS Unconscious), I will entertain the evolutionary argument.

The argument is thus: You can study the behavior of apes and see some distinctly human-like behaviours. The adult males typically hunt together as a pack, and this would thus engender friendships amidst them. This makes sense because of the utilitarian advantage of forming such bonds. When the apes are not hunting, but they are out in the clearings, they have been known to play primitive “war games”. If we are to presume that our ancestors did something like this, we can guess that similar games were the origin of our modern games, sports, and even warfare.

Meanwhile, the adult women spent their days at home, caring for the young. They were of a markedly introverted nature, and this would explain the tendency for modern women (according to the theory) to tend more towards introversion, whereas men tend more towards extraversion. The relationship between Mother and Child thus developed, yet there is no reason to presume, by common sense, that anything like that would have been the relationship between Father and Child, because quite obviously at one point it was the Father’s biological duty (for the survival of the species) to tear the male child away from the comfort of home and to introduce him to the hardships of hunting. We do not know, to my knowledge, if the father had anything to do with his daughters.

So it would seem quite probable that friendship has traditionally existed as a utilitarian relationship between adult males, and we might presume based upon this that any relationship between an adult male and adult woman was sexual in nature. After all, what purpose would a Platonic relationship serve?

 

I have several problems with this:

1.       IT IGNORES THE SUBJECTIVE FACTOR. We know from our experience that there is something distinct about how we see ourselves when we describe ourselves as subjects as opposed to objects. When one writes a poem or even just a description of what a day in one’s life is like, it does seem to paint a picture of what it means to be human, yet this is quite distinct from the picture painted when one is asked to describe one’s own characteristics, such as one’s skin colour, one’s ethnic background, one’s social status, et cetera. This distinction Sartre pointed out when he spoke of “non-reflexive awareness”: The tendency to see things without making reference to one’s self in the process.
We do not know about the subjectivity of apes. We can only regard them as Objects, and in describing them, we may draw parallels to our own “objective” views of what it means to be human, but we totally efface the subjective factor.

2.       IT COMMITS THE PATHETIC FALLACY. When we presume the experience of apes to be in some sense either identical to ours or motivated by a common motive, we anthropomorphosise them. Because of the first point, there is no evidence that this is not a huge leap of faith.

3.       OUR ANCESTORS WERE NOT IDENTICAL TO PRESENT-DAY APES. In truth, I am not certain of this fact, yet it seems as if not more probable than the alternative. Were our ancestors apes in the modern sense, then why did these apes that we have available to study not evolve as well? One may presume that only certain apes broke off and developed into human beings, whereas the remaining apes remained unchanged throughout those thousands of years of human evolution. What right do we have to make this guess? Is it not totally improbable, given how much our species alone changed during this short time?

4.       EVOLUTION IS A THEORY. It may be, to my mind, the most coherent theory that we have yet. (I know little of Creationism, and usually my schooling and upbringing have dissuaded me from doing studies into Creationism; I simply don’t find immediate interest in studying the issue at present.) Yet there are no facts in Science, only theories, and these theories glaze over several problems which are only called into question in the other schools of thought, such as philosophy. It is time that we reconcile these schools of thought.

5.       IT NEGATES FREE WILL. Any statement of the “nature” of something has been regarded as silly by the existentialists when applied to a human being, because, according to one’s individual experience, one seems to have Free Will, which means that even if one has a set of predispositions, be they genetic or cultural (and the line betwixt these two influences is not clear as we might hope) one can always choose one’s behavior and therefore determine one’s Nature. Modern science seems to corroborate this.

6.       IT UNIVERSALISES INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE. Mike may very well have found, giving his memory a cursory glance, that most of his relationships with women were sexual in nature. Yet I can personally say that I have maintained very close friendships with girls who I was either not attracted to or, if ever I was attracted to them, eventually sexuality became an absurdly marginalized factor that never entered into our conversations again except in pure theory (such as the consideration of this very philosophical question).

Personally, I never tended to find the same enjoyment in conventional Games, Sports, and any semblance of Warfare as did most of the other boys on the playground; I preferred to write, draw, and invent games imaginatively. Does this mean that I am superior to those boys who, growing up, showed a marked close-mindedness and anti-intellectualism, except where they saw the advantage of studying someone else’s work in order to attain social status? Not necessarily. Yet it certainly always set me apart.

7.       FRIENDSHIP IS NOT UTILITARIAN. Here again I must appeal to the subjective factor. From my experience, the distinctly delightful thing about Friendship is that, while it may fulfill needs, a good friend will not keep track of such things. When I use the expression “friend”, I refer to a kind of unconditional love.

8.       ONE CAN IMAGINE OTHERWISE. So what if we can find no empirical evidence for early man having Platonic friendships with early women with whom he was not sleeping? One can barely find objective “evidence” for this in modern life, yet subjective accounts seem to suggest that it is possible and maybe even common. Simply because we cannot conceive of a Rational REASON for such a thing occurring in early, prehistoric society does not mean that it did not. The very fact that we can imagine it seems to suggest that, whatever the case may be, modern man is different because he or she can at least picture such a situation and desire it despite all Utilitarian pragmatism. The argument against this imaginative faculty (which seems to define, as far as I am aware, the Human Experience) serves only to underscore our Rationalist and Empiricist prejudices from the Nineteenth century, which only incidentally was Darwin’s time.   

9.       WE ARE NOT APES. We may have, theoretically, DESCENDED from Apes, but we are not apes. The modern adult male may very well be a home-maker, whereas the modern adult woman may be a businessperson, lawyer, or politician. It is not uncommon, and psychology seems to tell us that each of us has both feminine and masculine traits, whereas gender roles are conditioned. They may have been necessary at one point in history for survival. Yet we have come a long way; no other animal we can think of has produced civilization on such a large scale. Is it not possible that we evolved Free Will, or that if our ancestors had Free Will, they simply did not find it profitable to employ it yet, for survival depended so much on their being practical? This is not difficult to imagine when one examines the modern individual who stifles his or her creativity for practical purposes.

Joseph Campbell distinguishes the birth of the “Human Human” as the earliest instance wherein man appreciated Art. There was a stone found by archaeologists that had supposedly been hoarded by an early ancestor. The stone had no conceivable practical purpose (or if it did, the process of hoarding it did not). What set it apart was that it had a zigzag pattern running along it. Anthropologists have speculated that this was one of the earliest instances of an ape appreciating Beauty. Does this not suggest, therefore, that the essence of what it means to be Human is not only to be Free but to Use that freedom in service NOT of self-preservation but of something more vague and mysterious, be it aesthetic, idealistic, religious, mystical, or otherwise?

I am reminded of a quote from the film Waking Life: “The gap between a Nietzsche or a Plato and the average human is GREATER than the gap between a super-chimpanzee and the average human.”

One needs not any empirical evidence, so much as simple day-to-day experience, to corroborate this. I always seem to hope that it is not true, yet my experience definitely lends meaning to this statement. And Michael himself admitted that I might be an exception to his generalization.

 

Dm.A.A.

Conclusion Regarding Truth, Scientism, and Gullibility.

Anyone can give you a belief system, whether it is justified by Scipture or by Data. By opening your mind to it uncritically, while you enjoy the ethos of an open mind, you allow that "truth" to proliferate within your mind. Yet simply because one has painted the tree red does not mean that the tree was red to begin with, and so entertaining any sort of dogmatic point of view or metaphysical generalisation would appear naiive; any evidence one finds for it is a constructed fashion statement.

So many of these are currently in circulation, so readily accessible and seldom questioned, that should one consistently refuse to accept them one would be labeled a close-minded elitist, and at the moment one questions them and criticises them instantly at their very core, one is accused of jumping to judgements and refusing to open one's own mind. Scientism is so prevalent and people so hesitant to pick up a book (more than ten years old or so) that, unless one foregoes politeness and ethos, one is condemned to forever be a mouse in a labyrinth, bumping into walls again and again, (in the instance that one rebels against Scientism) or one is a mouse in a cage, running on the same exercise wheel and getting nowhere, for all opinions must be entertained and even the ones one disagrees with are equally arbitrary.

The patience to question a statement is most easily understood in this example: Michael asserts that "Human beings are intrinsically greedy." One may listen for hours to Scientific justifications for this "truth", but does at any point one hear another say what the phrase itself means? What does the word "intrinsic" mean? Does one have free will? Even if one has a genetic predisposition towards greed, does free will not allow it to be overcome? What is greed? How can we presume it to be the same for one person as it is for another? What does the WORD mean? Are we justified in simply presuming that our ancestors had the same experience with greed as we do? Why does it seem likely to one person and unlikely to another?

There may not be definite answers for these questions, but like most mysteries, they may never be solved, and we may be more than happy to see that they are never truly cleared away.

I have heard it said that this is the difference between Philosophy and Religion:

Philosophy deals with Questions that may never be answered.
Religion deals with Answers that may never be questioned.

When I hear anyone mention an absolutely sweeping generalisation as Universal "fact", I can only naturally think back to this definition of Religion. True Scientists are not Sciencists. The more that one knows about the world as seen through the lens of Science, the more one rejects any pretense to Science offering an answer to all problems and questions, as though it were the old God. The spaces in the reasoning are most glaring to those who have followed the reasoning to its ultimate cliff. It is they, not those who are still lost in the forest and preparing to turn back, that can fathom the expanse before them. The more one knows, the more one really knows that one does not know. Any idiot can say to a wise person, "No. You don't understand." And the more that one knows, the more idiots there seem to be, just waiting to say it.

dm.A.A.

Conclusion regarding the Relationship between Everyman and the Internal Monologue.

I will briefly re-introduce the relationship between Questioner and Questioned.
Similarly, the Internal Monologue is the product of a relationship to a hypothetical Everyman.
Yet the Average Human does not exist. One only begins this imaginary dialogue when met with the unyielding stubbornness of another's dogma. This dogma, when generalised, constructs the Everyman, which spreads like a memetic virus and adapts to its host, invisibly.

dm.A.A.

Conclusion regarding Open-mindedness and Epistomology.

To be openminded is to be receptive to the information of one's own senses and the process of one's own imagination.

Of immensely less importance are the opinions of others, which often will be lost in translation. A Non-directed Truth cannot be Expressed but only Described to one who has had the same experience. Yet Universal claims ignore the individuality of deeply personal experiences. One ought not to entertain them with some pretense to have an "open mind"; one merely consents to a temporary belief as though it were a fashion statement, divorced from one's own innermost knowledge and wisdom (from the past) and one's receptivity to the incontrovertible Present -- incontrovertible because it, like the Non-directed Truth, has not yet entered into the boxing match of argument and is not yet either "right" or "wrong" -- on this side or that.

dm.A.A.

On the Epistomology of Opinions and Open-Mindedness.

Most college-age openmindedness seems merely to be flattery in an anti-intellectual or pseudointellectual environment. I have seen the most brilliant of my peers fall into this trap as a part of their lifestyle. Dostoyevsky was right when he said that nothing is easier than flattery nor harder than the utterance of truth. I would be entirely naiive, in my insecurity, to simply entertain all points of view equally. At one point, in order to move forward, one must learn not only to take a position but to recognise which points of view are merely repetitions of old, familiar dogmas. The temptation towards the Old is so great in a society wherein one does not have the privilege of being exposed to novel ideas. Were I to live in Berkeley, I should probably have better luck than in suburban San Diego, where opinions are so homogenous and utilitarian that several people may hold an identical one and only corroborate it by their own homogeny -- an Appeal to Mass Opinion.
When Kresten said that I have trouble listening, he knew nothing of the arduous climb that brought me here. I could site two examples of people who had at one point or another challenged my most basic of assumptions, just within the past year. In each of those instances, I rebelled against them with all of the devices of my intellect, and it took a considerable while for me to see the merit of what they had said.
One was John the Hitch-hiker, who in fact taught me to distinguish an informed opinion from an uninformed one. The other was Ali, who taught me that there is no such thing as a truth*, a point of view that has brought me into closer agreement with the existentialists. And another was Kresten himself, coupled with Andrew, who helped to revive my faith in the Uncertainty of all phenomena.
In the past few months, I have gone from being a Spiritualist to an Agnostic to a Believer to an Agnostic to an Atheist to an Agnostic. I have gone from an outright rejection of Existentialism to a deep love for it, and then a skepticism of it so deep that I tried militantly to shed all prior pretensions to Meaning, and then finally to an appraisal of Existentialism again. My mind is now a sort of suspension of these disparate and contradictory ideas that refuse to settle.
Because thought is not a mere pastime for me, and because Action is essential, mere sophistry or Socratic exercises will not do. I cannot accept another's point of view without first of all exhausting every resource with which to attack it. Only after I have done this can I accept. Most of the arguments I am charged with are either naiive generalisations that experience itself negates and that empiricism could not prove. When Michael told me that he felt that "any relationship between a guy and a girl is sexual", how could I bring myself to believe that? If I chose to entertain the belief, it would be as though I were painting the tree red to prove the next day that the tree was red; "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves". Michael provided little in the way of a groundbreaking argument or exercise of Reason that I could use to justify such a claim.
Has anyone I know amongst my peers been more committed to the Truth than I have been? Have people really exhausted the Hours trying to disarm their own conditioning, not just to attain social status but to recover what they had lost from the tenderness of unconditioned youth?
Would it not be merely to humour someone else that I would knod in agreement or consideration of something so radical and dangerous as Determinism, or Scientism, especially when I have all ready spent years pledging my faith to each of these fairly childish** beliefs and seen them totally collapse?
It is true that I can site only a few examples of people having truly changed my mind. For the most part, I still maintain that I was right. Yet this is more tragic to me than to anyone else; I constantly bemoan the fact that so rarely do I have an actual Conversation with someone else: Something that Challenges and leaves one totally Speechless once all the words have been exhausted. I blame the trends and dogmas which I try to disarm at every corner. I am tired of flattering them. They are everywhere! A truly novel idea is not met with counterargument, for one has not yet even thought of it. So much of our short and precious lives is wasted on semantics and hearing the same errors and fallacies over and over. I tire even of knowledge as a battle. As I have said before: Lines of "right and wrong" -- this "side" or that -- do not exist in the natural topography of truth. Must my life be a constant war game? Or can it be a Quest where I find items of Truth that I can marvel at, but which cannot be taken away from me***?

Another's Opinion will always be secondary to my own because one only really has one's own opinion; to simply follow another's opinion is to deliberately soften one's own mind, because one represents the other's "truth" in a way that may be totally distinct from how the other perceives it.
Usually, if one is commited enough as an intellectual, one will find the answers for one's own self, and the questions will not be the ones from outside but the ones swarming up from within. The philosopher needs not to please others but to beat away one's own private intellectual woes like flies. One who does not know what it means to suffer for the Truth is not qualified to as open a mind as one who truly beats his head against the glass hoping to break through. If I stand alone in a crowd and refuse to yield to common agreement, and if common agreement is all that would assuage me and is probably the underlying motive for whatever it is that I am expected to believe against my better knowledge, then perhaps even if I simply persist, defending myself even to ears that have turned away from me, I may have, for one fleeting moment, a break-through that goes entirely unnoticed. It had been about a year and a half since I had penetrated the calcified haze of familiarity, and no one thought better of me for it. Can I be accused, though, of a fascistic commitment to my own Truth when the Truth that I have broken through to has, for once, the freshness that all dogmas are devoid of? And if this gasp of breath is so rare to me, can I be condemned for usually maintaining my position, taking it not for granted but with all the resources of Reason and the visceral convictions of Passion corroborating my view? Maybe I AM right in most cases and most others are wrong; my commitment to the quest for Truth seems so tiring to people because they do not have it, though I would love for them to. Yet again: The people who have opened my eyes to new ideas, including Kresten, leant me something that I could take to heart. Kresten forgets that usually I have no counterargument to his findings, for they are so novel. Bickering and arguments wherever one has to "listen to the other side" tend most often to occur in the presence of ignorance; wherever Truth is available and Communication truly possible between two people, there ar no "sides" to be taken. Yet if intellectual warfare is necessary, then we must treat it as such, and as such the participant will always be one-sided.

* At this point, I have refined my point of view of what "truth" is, and I can distinguish the false, constructed "truths" that Ali had taught me to deconstruct from profound Truths. Heidegger, Ali's favourite philosopher, may have helped to arrive at this point.
** Justifiable when the responsibility of Action is not a burden to oneself (i.e. in childhood).
*** Perchance they cannot be taken away from me Precisely Because they are my own constructs.

dm.A.A.

On Criticism and Professional Criticism.

In defense of Carl Jung, I have been accused of a tendency to follow people blindly and uncritically. Kresten said that I never or rarely listen to 'both sides of the issue'.

This appears ridiculous, in context. It was not that I rushed into Jung's work blindly. My rationalistic education ensured that what little I had read about him I would find incriminating of his questionable merit.

It was not until I had spent several years out of high school that I was ready to encounter him, and by then I had all ready made innumerable mistakes that, had I had his guidance and been unconditioned enough to set aside my atheistic prejudices, I would have avoided in prevention of a tragedy.

To suggest that I would simply turn my back on his work at the beck of someone who had probably never read him (a psychiatric student named Carlos) seems incredible. Carlos failed to cite even one example of a theory of Jung's that had been 'disproven'; he seemed to find the 'authority' of the Scientific Community to suffice, heedless of Jung's own warnings against a Scientific Orthodoxy, consequently unjust in his parroted denunciation.

Yet I will now address the larger issue. On a micro level, I can only speak for a few quotes I had read from Fritz Perls and possibly Erich Fromm, the former of which I had simply seen in the process of Psychoanalysis that had been videotaped (and which did not leave me impressed), and the latter of whom I had been exposed to consistently in Dr. Englund's A.P. English Language class.

On a macro level, I must speak against the reading of others' Criticism in general. Yet not for one instant do I condemn Criticism.
On the contrary, I stand in the firmest conviction that the most reliable Criticism arises Within One's Self.
This is why I take kindly rarely to personal criticisms. If I determine my own path, I can learn from my own mistakes; I do not requoire a plethora and cornucopia of outside opinions in order to find fault with myself; usually, they cloud my judgment of myself to such an extent that self-criticism feels crushingly hopeless. The consent of the Herd is not my motive, because my own pain is my own worst critic. Perhaps what sets me apart from my critics is a difference between extraversion and introversion. Maybe it is age, maturity, or even commitment and courage. I am no longer so timid as to rule those out of possibility.

At heart, the matter can be traced back to high school. I was never around anyone long enough to hear Gossip to the point of Belief. I would always prefer -- ardently -- to seek the scapegoat out for myself and get to know him or her intimately. What I discovered was the immensely arbitrary and secondary nature of outside opinions.
Opinions truly are Cheap.

Kresten may say that I am uncritical. Yet daily it must be that one of my 'gods' clashes with another. Criticism, for me, must not be learned from the Authorities; I am too familiar with running about from book to book, allowing all critical thought to dissolve into sophistry and all insight to become obscured in the mire of a merely adolescent* cluelessness.

I have no time to ferret out the Internet for criticism of Jung. I do not require it. My own studies endow me with my own criticisms.
When Jung is called into question by the thoughts of a Camus, yet not directly by Camus but rather by my own perplexion at their differences, the intellect produces its own Criticism; it requires not the secondary** opinions of a Fritz Perls, much less a psychiatry student.

The world is not divided into Prophets, False prophets, and the collective that has the authority to weed them out. It does not come ready-made with dividing lines. An issue only has 'both sides' when two people enter into debate; hitherto, Truth is a country without borders.
I know a good deal about Debate from having practiced it in high school.
I probably know more about Judging arguments as a third party than does Kresten, having worked as a Judge at tournaments.
I know what it means to see 'both sides' of an issue. Yet the moment that it comes time for me to express MY opinion, I am ardently on one side. Maybe it is true that, were I to begin competitive debate again, I would have difficulty clashing with my opponent. Yet I have little reason be believe this blindly.

*Not all adolescents have this quality, yet many 'adults' do.
** Secondary TO ME.

dm.A.A.

On the Institution of Household Chores as a Means of Imposing Control.

I have found that the attitudes of many parents seem eerily reminiscent of political dogmas when it comes to the issue of Chores.
Ideally, one might imagine that the act of playing house would be a creative and inventive venture. Were it not, one would have no reason to feel any debt of Gratitude towards those individuals in whose name the Deed is.

Yet if this sense of humane enjoyment is at all the case, why should Guilt or Compulsion be at any point an imp in the presence of One's Experience?

One can impose a Master-Slave relationship by virtue of this Guilt, which is rationalised as Indebtedness. The Machinery and Dogma of Debt and Resentment are thus perpetuated through the generations Until the moment that one has the temerity to say, 'I am Free. I was Born Free. My lot in life I have the right to either Enjoy or Deplore, but in neither case will It determine my Actions, for it is only with my consent that Blind Luck becomes, to me, either Good Luck or Poor Luck.'

dm.A.A.

On a Parallel between Camus and the Sinking House.

 On a Parallel between Camus and the Sinking House.

If one lives the life of the Absurd Hero, the Sinking House eventually ceases to be a problem. One does not venture into the exercise of futility which is the construction of a Sinking House. One does not take the Leap, be it into absurdity or one of faith in logic (the two become the same). All repeated attempts are seen to be the same, for there is no evidence within those infinite stretches of time, within which every second contains more Planck-seconds than there have been seconds in the Universe, and wherein a simple eight hours of dream-time may amount to an entire life-time, that one experiment is any different from the next. One commits oneself to systems insofar as one’s Heart is in accord with their service to the Self. If this be madness, yet there is method in it. What I describe is nothing more than that territory we see at peak experiences when Reason has been intensified to a crescendo that sharpens to an infinitesimal point and poetry, not mathematics, is the language of the Universe. It is not unscientific, but rather available to any man or woman of Science that retains his or her imagination and humility. It is an appraisal of the territory of the Artist and the sovereignty of the child’s mind. It is truly a life without appeal or dogma, for the repetition which makes possible that dogma, which rests so heavily upon a trust in Memory, now falls apart like a pier smashed in by a Tsunami, condemned to the definition of Insanity, yet condemned not as one condemns a soul to some eternal hell, for even its condemnation is temporary and ephemeral, bothering the mind no more.

 

Dm.A.A.

A Revised Definition of the Sinking House.

A Revised Definition of the Sinking House.

 

The Sinking House: An instant of intense perception when one is shocked to find that a certain construct upon which Common Sense casts no doubt is challenged because, in the process of performing the necessary sequence of operations to enact this construct, one is stunned by the incredible possibility of cognitive distortion occurring at every moment, and logic is seen to have been a matter of several leaps of faith across infinitesimal, yet infinite, space-time.

dm.A.A.

On Free Time.

I may have more free time than any of my peers. This has been brought sardonically to my attention. Yet this is because I am among them perhaps the most FREE.

When I look at my generation and my Society in general, I am in rapture at what we are capable of, shaken by what we must do, and speechless at what looms to be discovered beyond even the border of what we consider Human.

Yet time and time again I crash into this wall. The leitmotif I hear from people of every age group and generation is: I am too busy. One goes through one's entire life and forget entirely what it means to Dream.

I am tired of complaining like a hypocrite. If I want to see films of someone's dreams, music that dissolves every known boundary of what music is supposed to be, or games played by people of all ages which transform the thinking of innumerable people at once, then I will see it happen. Guilt will not burden me. I am past the age when I can rely upon others to do this, and I suspect that anyone who criticises my lifestyle is either unimaginative, hypocritical, or envious.

dm.A.A.

On Writing and the Artistic Process.

On Writing and the Artistic Process.

Usually, from what I have heard most recently, it would appear that what follows is the conventional method of the Writer:

 

1.       Write regularly.

2.       Select from what has been written what is best.

3.       Eliminate the rest.

I might have once believed this. In Middle School, my seventh-grade teacher criticized me for my tendency to submit papers that were about half-occupied with thick black blotches from my having attempted to vanquish my mistakes. I was a pathological perfectionist for a long time, refusing to write about anything that I did not feel was the Absolute Truth, or at least my most sincere, heart-torn guess. The temptation towards the comfort of revision – the privilege of regarding my work as though it were my creation – was a double-edged sword and a curse as well as a blessing; I became mired in my own confusion to the point of what some would have called a clinical anxiety.

At one point, my friend and fellow writer must have asked me if one ought to write regularly or not to if one wished to be a writer. A student at Berkeley, he might have in fact been merely parroting an orthodoxy which I misheard as a question. At any rate, I had to ask him for clarification as to his conviction. In hindsight, it seems to have been the aforementioned attitude: Write daily. Edit. Purge. Repeat.

I no longer feel that way. Perhaps it is a testament to my success in the Art of Living. I rarely if ever edit. I have made it a point to only write great work, even if it takes me several months to see its greatness for myself. This is because, as Heidegger had pointed out, I have realized that Art is something independent of me. Like a child, I have no right to judge it.

Art is a tree from which I pluck fruit. I have become skilled in plucking it only when it is ripe. I never prune it. Like a parent, I have freed my life to be ready to answer its cries at any moment. Yet when the tree does not yield fruit I go to another tree. I have planted many trees. Writing has become to me what painting must be to the visual artist or performance to the musician. Only the most neurotic or unsatisfied of painters litters the dumpster with completed but rejected paintings. As with one’s decisions and nature, one must live with them. One cannot undo a performance, and rather than insisting that all bootlegged records be destroyed I am in rapture at my own imperfection.

I am not the trumpet but the mouthpiece, and just as poetry flows through me so does prose. The feed-back of the Crowd does not dissuade me, for I find the ultimate spiritual attainment in the marriage of a deeply personal ambition with the tolerance to take proper note of its eventual attainment.

Yet this destination has not been attained without a long and arduous road that nonetheless sheds light on every step in the journey as beautiful not only as a step but as a destination.

 

Dm.A.A.

On Children, Introversion, and the Open Mind.

I have heard it said that the minds of children are 'still developing'. Yet is that not redundant? It would not be so were it that one could define the Adult mind as 'developed'. Yet if I have lost the ability to Develop and to Dream, is there not something left for children to teach me?
If I wish to understand the mind of a child, Positivism will do little to help me. I should have to RE-LIVE what was most intimate to me in childhood, exposing myself* to their company, remembering what childhood was as a Subject rather than substituting for children a metaphysical Object. No degree of solidarity with my peers would justify ignorant Scientism or Elitism. As far as I can remember, I was, for the majority of my Life, younger than I am today. Yet I often am possessed of the phobia that I have forgotten more than I learned. I owe as much to the non-discrimination of my elders as I do to my memories of youth, and either is preferable to the acceptance of my peers.

The allegation was delivered in the mask of Science; America told me that it was the 'Brain' that was 'still developing', not the 'mind'. Had she said 'mind', the subjectivity of the matter would have been called more apparently into question. Yet does the 'objectivity' of a Brain Scan justify a subjective elitism?
America used the allegation in context of an argument I was making for Imagination. I pointed out Jung's dichotomy of Directed Thinking and Non-directed thinking. Children have, typically, all the time in the World to dream. In a world wherein all guesses are equally probable, the boundary between Reality and Imagination is blurred. Is this not the case for the Accomplished Artist, the Baffled Scientist, and the Expert Therapist?
It is too easy for the outside observer to criticise so radical a subjectivity as madness or maladaptation. Yet to the individual Actually Involved in that experience it is maddeningly incontrovertible.
Is it improbable that these three individuals tread a line that we all heed, yet by laying foot to it lay bare the line in the sand that Humans themselves drew? Was it not merely Kant, by drawing that line betwixt the Phenomenal and the Objective, that set this trend? Why persist in his wake?

Kresten claimed that I fancy myself open-minded, yet that I really fail to entertain an opposing view. The empiricist would test all belief systems on for size as a fashion statement. Yet I have found simple empiricism to leave one with merely a mess of useless and secondary opinions.
Discretion Unconceals whatever Truth may underly all popular opinions. Often, one may be heedless of the line between Belief and Consideration. Perhaps it is because of my introverted Nature that I am so tentative** to Choose a Belief, to act according to it, and to Conceal my own skepticism. Where Kresten may judge the safety of a house from inside, I will make my assessment at the Open Door, from the safety of the Porch.
It is merely a matter of preference.
What I see from the outside is the Subjective Factor: The leap that one makes from Scientific 'fact' to personal fiction.

*Obviously, no innuendo was intended here.
**'Tentative' does not mean 'unwilling'. Once my trust is won, I am sometimes unwavering in my faith, though not at the expense of discretion, even if that had once been the case.

dm.A.A.

On the Tortured Artist.

Looking back over my novel, I realize that what I had thought to be erratic and barely pardonable breaks in structure and form were purely imagined. I merely remembered them by their associations with sudden changes in my life. Yet the text itself is consistently Awesome.

Sometimes I wonder if others will understand my work. There is no way of knowing, and so I must be self-sufficient. Yet I remember how miraculous it is that I can relate to my friends about the subtlest of things as though they were entirely obvious, and I feel hopeful.

Dm.A.A.

On Kindness as Sociological Currency and Debt.

 

Kindness is a social activity. When one does something nice for someone else, it is not necessarily a gift in the monetary sense. Money encourages us to think: If I give, I have less, and the other owes me more. This is a binding capitalistic mentality.

Kindness, such as washing the dishes to suit another person’s aesthetic preferences, (as opposed to washing the dishes to fulfill one’s own needs or impulses) is thus entering into a relationship with another.

Yet individuation necessitates a natural and healthy, if not essential (although of course it IS essential) abstinence from excessive attachment to others. In this sense, one is not consistently Kind, but one simply follows one’s own Nature. This is what is meant by the Taoist expression that when the Way of Nature lost, there came talk of kindness towards others. Kindness is not natural but socialized. Yet following one’s own Nature is far from depraved. It is unconditioned, but our Western stigma against allowing things to follow their natural process is inflated. Sooner or later, one’s own aesthetic preferences would ensure that the dishes be washed. Yet the sociological dimension would be absent, and no record would be kept of the “favour”.

Dm.A.A.

On Reciprocity.

Usually, we feel guilty for taking more than we give. If we do not feel guilty, others may insist that we should. Yet too much of life is wasted in trying to maintain the ideal of fairness.

When I ask for attention, I do look to TAKE more attention, but what I GIVE in return is whatever it is that one might pay attention to. Most situations are thus reciprocal. This renders Guilt usually obsolete as a motivator. What we avoid usually is a new opportunity for a new arrangement.

Dm.A.A.

On "Pseudo-Science."

On “Pseudo-Science.”

 

“Pseudo-science” is merely a term that Sciencists use by means of which they put down other forms of divination by absurd comparison.

 

Suppose that I want to learn the language of birds. Science would do very little to help me to do this. The logic of science is itself merely a recent development in the HUMAN psyche. Why should the language of birds be presumed to have the same structure? To relate with them, one must let go of that logic and to overcome it as one would a hurdle. What does SCIENCE have to do with language? Do we learn our first languages by the Scientific Method? Do we use the Scientific Method to converse with one another? No.

My study, were it enacted, would be released with a simple caveat: This is not Science. But to describe it as “pseudo-science” in order to label it (“pseudo-science” literally means “not science”) would be to define the method entirely in terms OF science, implying that it can only be understood by relation TO science. This has the connotation of a put-down.

 

Dm.A.A.

A Tentative Theory about the Internal Monologue.

All private thoughts are mere memories of words that we had heard ourselves or other say aloud.

dm.A.A.

On Jung and Science.

I have heard that Jung has been marginalized in the psychological profession, as well as psychotherapy in general, for being “too unscientific”.

I posit this as a simple test:

If Science goes hand-in-hand with empiricism, I recommend that one TRY Jung. TRY Camus. TEST what it means to be Nietzsche. Do your own experiments. Find out if it works. This is the scientific method.

Kohlberg was not the only person to point out that the most moral people were also the most individuated, although this individuation is not to be limited to mere Relativism, for at one point or another they purportedly discovered Universals: Subtle trends in the course of human history which seemed available to a select few who had ventured out of society’s norms, either by necessity, curiosity, or some other unknown motive.

Your life is important; it may very well be the only thing you can trust. To invest too much faith in information is to be simply Socratic; to invest too little is to show up to a battlefield unarmed. Let us not marginalize ourselves by treating our devices as dogmas. So much depends upon the human subjective factor, yet our homogenous era of decadence and technological entitlement obscures what it has meant to be a human. Let us not obscure our teachers, seeing a man lecturing on Nietzsche and saying merely, “He is a philosopher.” Let us recall that when we see the World we never see it as it is, but as WE are. One can look upon the professor of philosophy through the lens of Science and not see the unique bouquet subtle wisdom he conveys. Yet the one of these views must be simply a perpetuation of the Old and the other a vulnerability to the New; they cannot be fairly equated. We have lost so much of our ability to confront the Other as something unlike ourselves to be respected and seldom judged, and never according to the conventional social constructs of Conventional Morality. So many of my peers have become unanimous and identical in their frames of reference that I have heard it said and implied that mine is merely “opinion,” whereas theirs is “fact”. Is this not an appeal to Mass Opinion? Is the forgetfulness or pardon of this Classic Fallacy, the avoidance of which had served the human being for centuries* **, not an early symptom of Fascism?

If you want to know what it MEANS to be Human – If you want to see the extent towards which all facts are in fact opinions – and if you intend to pass judgment on a man like Jung, in the name of Science and Empiricism, Do a test. Find out for yourself.

 

*Prior to the attack upon traditional philosophy in the midst of Modernity, which left us vulnerable to its bastardisation.

 **It may be true that I do not have it on good authority that this is historically sound. It may be, in "fact" [that is, according to the evidence of our historical accounts] that the formal logical fallacies have only been around for less than a hundred years. Why should I trust the evidence of Wikipedia over my own intuition, however? Why not value a hunch over a conviction? If it may be "true", by the authority of historicity, that this is a more recent rule and tool in academia, then my argument should suffer no sleight except that it becomes a poetic exaggeration as opposed to an "objective truth". But if one cannot, as of yet, derive an Is from an Ought, then why should a pathos lie lower than a logos on the totem pole of credibility?

The Negative Anima and the Anima have in common that they deal with all that Rational man has marginalised: Aesthetics, detail, and intuition.
The Negative Anima exploits the reasoning intellect, with its rigid opposition to these "minute details", in order to perpetuate its own dogma. Only by acknowledging the importance of Aesthetics, detail, and intuition (all tradition qualities of Art) can one free oneself of her paradigm and emancipate oneself of her clutches, lest she sink her teeth into the throat of the Anima.

Dm.A.A.

On Money, Manic Depression, and Greed.

I could think of nothing more horrifying than the contemplation of the current global predicament. We have all of the necessary resources to feed, clothe, insulate and shelter everyone. We have for the past fifty years or so. The only barrier is, as it was in the Great Depression, the institute of money. What was money if not, as Watts pointed out, a merely abstract measure of wealth? The Great Depression was a quandry I could never understand. There had always appeared to have been something schizophrenic in its nature. Alan's explanation was that it was a "measure of wealth". Yet the absurdity of the Depression was that we had all of the necessary resources to pull ourselves out of it. He explains the absurdity of the situation by analogy to the construction of a house: Imagine that you wanted to build a house one day, but someone came around and told you, "Sorry. You cannot build this house today. No inches." The country had all of the necessary lumber and nails to construct this house, but there was a shortage in inches.
My personal take on it is this: The Stock Market was nothing short of a gambling system. Its very presence had struck me since childhood as being at odds with the notion of ethical and moral commerce; it relies upon one's skills, essentially, in gambling. I still stand by that, fully vigilant of the counter-argument that our economy would collapse without this giant entity. There is no question that it would; it did. And human beings were so dependent upon this system that they could not begin to say to one another: Well THAT didn't work. Let's try something else. Instead they said: Well THAT didn't work. Let's starve instead.
I have been told that money is necessary as an incentive for people to work. The chief contention is that there is a greater gap between a Nietzsche and the average human and a super-chimpanzee and the average human. The altruistic impulse is rare; empathy and insight rarely develop in most people. Yet was Maslow not right in that all people have the actualising principle? Is it not astronomical to venture a guess that, should we eliminate the need for people to work forty-hour weeks just to survive, more would transcend their deficiency needs and experience the joy of excess, which has as its distinguishing characteristic a glorious charity? Is it not when we are most involved in the intrinsic joy of work that we enter into Cziczentmihaliy's Flow state, and is it not in THIS state that we truly transcend the sense of separation that is created between Us and Them -- Subject and Object -- by the mires of self-consciousness?

I have been called Manic Depressive before. But is that not the most appropriate response to Life at this moment? The contemplation of human potential and the direct experience of its fullfilment in my own life fills me with an unfathomable joy and ecstasy which prompts me towards service for others and the Collective Humankind. Yet the remembrance of the actual suffering of others, while it may dampen my spirits, does NOT numb my senses. As Smith put it, "Happy and sad come in quick succession. And I'm never going to become/ What you became."

I have been told that it is Greed that will perpetuate the monetary system. Yet greed is not intrinsic necessarily to the human being. Greed may owe more to the civilised institution of money, which NECESSITATES it, than to human nature. I can never know that hunter-gatherers were greedy. Joseph Campbell attested that primitive people felt a sense of "Thou" with all of Life. Does greed, conversely, not dictate an "I-It" relationship? Are we not misguided in anthropomorphosising animals and merely equating ourselves with our distant ancestors, presuming their experience of Life to have been identical to our own? Greed cannot be justified by Necessity; Greed is a tendency to hoard a Surplus, and surplus was the product of Agrarian society. But at any rate, the time seems ripe for us to transcend it; it seems essential that we do. As an aesthetic, Greed is miring to the artist. As an ethic, Greed is stifling to civilisation. I do not need to cater to anyone's thirst for empirical evidence of these things; they are either readily apparent or incommunicable to those who have not seen them to be true. If Greed is what is preventing us from living in what earlier civilisations would have envisioned as a Utopia, and if its simply self-perpetuation is what keeps all human beings in bondage, either to another or towards themselves, then it is high time that we dispense with it.

dm.A.A.

On Repetition.

On Repetition.

 

When something or another is repeated, it is no longer real. This is why it is the mark of neuroticism to think the same thing twice and the mark of madness to repeat the same thing again and again in anticipation of different results.

Yet how does one distinguish repetition from constancy, or either from novelty?

The answer: At the point that there is no conceivable difference between the desire [and intent] to perform a repetition and the repetition ITSELF, there is also no boundary between the construction of Truth [as fabrication] and its finding. All distinctions between a proper execution of a mental exercise and the improper execution dissolve. We know only that we have done something properly because we can remember having done it. At the moment that we intend to Perpetuate Naiively the Old, we all ready remember, so we have no way of knowing after we have made an effort to repeat whether or not we had in fact repeated at all. So it becomes impossible to know whether or not the repetition was successful. Nothing New was attained, because we (had) all ready (been) [K]new.

Dm.A.A.

On Sundays.

It was the Sunday after the last Speech and Debate tournament that I had judged. As I was leaving to go to Carmel Mountain Plaza in pursuit, as always, of my career, and in devotion to my writing and my dreams, my mother tried to dissuade me, but the sense of energy I had about me she could see would not be assuaged.

Within minutes, and as I prepared restlessly to leave, I overheard her in the computer room, Skyping with my grandfather, loudly and bitterly, and I was possessed of the usual anxiety with which I greet my mother. “… maybe it’s a kind of psychotherapy for him.”

What does that imply? “Psychotherapy” means “He is sick. All that he does is mere neuroticism and purposeless. He needs psychiatric help, yet we would not spare money for him to go to the only credible authority in dream interpretation he can find because he is so far-gone that we do not trust his own authority [despite the hours he has spent chronicling ninety of his dreams in an ardent ritual of devotion to Jungian psychology].”

But what strikes me most is that she has the nerve to gossip(!) within earshot of me rather than turning ninety degrees and opening to door to say, “What does this mean to you? Why is Joyce important? What do YOU find to be the categorical imperative for the human life?”

But why should I bother to become upset? She knows nothing of Work. I could gain nothing from the task of barging in and asking her to have a sense of decency. Were I possessed of the naive hope that she knew ANYTHING of Work, I might even venture a guess as to the possibility that she knows more about my life than I do, to the point that such blatantly shallow behavior, so out-rightly symptomatic of her ongoing existential failure, would be justified. Yet such a leap into Absurdity and Hope is a heinous committing of the Black Swan fallacy. One might call to attention that she is my provider: that I sleep under her roof*, that she pays the bills, and that she knows much more of Work from “years of experience” than I do. Yet all of these sand-castles wash away with a single wave: None of these claims amount to more than abstraction in my frontal lobe. However minute the possibility, for all that I know, she may have been laid off from her job, and I would not notice the difference. The sophist will claim that that itself is an instance of the Black Swan fallacy, yet in this case it is indispensable as an argument for this reason: The very fact that this possibility EXISTS brings back home the IMMEDIATE fact of the present situation, just as charging any naive Hope with the label of Black Swan attains the same end. That end is consistent: An Absurdist must rely entirely upon the evidence of his experience and NOT the imagination with which he is conditioned out of guilt by his peers. AT THAT INSTANT, Mother was not working, and even if she is working right now as I write this, and WORK is available to her as a BEING, it was not available to her AT THAT MOMENT, whereas it WAS available to me, as my imminent goal and intent within sight. SO, at that moment, SHE KNEW NOTHING OF WORK, and I did.

I can thus suspend any consideration as to the hypothetical. I pass no longer any judgment upon her for the quality of her occupation. I need not determine whether what she does at her job is Work or Labor. I need not complain about her treatment of me, because I have seen it to be irrational, and I accept it as a part of the Absurd, hopelessly and heroically. One cannot call oneself a WORKER unless one is in the PROCESS OF WORK. The moment that one stops, one no longer knows anything of Work. Imagine my disgust at having arrived at the plaza to find myself mired in the collective lethargy of people DOING NOTHING, vegetating, and committing every infraction the Zen Buddhists might surmise: Allowing the day to go to waste, becoming flabby, and taking the glory of the morning for granted.

I was told that I would do that, too, if I had had to work for forty hours in a day. Yet Sanity would thus necessitate that I not only refuse that sort of lifestyle but combat it at every corner. No Work that I have ever done was so available to me routinely as a whore. Art is a love affair and it is the gentle raising of children, ardent and demanding that with every day one confront the absurd mystery of its unveiling. It is something I accept the entire community’s support in. Yet I am told, so naive to have asked, that Art is a CHILDISH impulse to be stifled! Ought a Mother to stifle her love for her child? The first step out of the homely narcissism of dependency is commitment to a cause that UNNERVES one! And THAT is what Work is! Not labour in service of some end-goal, as my mother has seen fit to treat it in the past.

I recall the day that I first heard that song by the Black Eyed Peas: “I Gotta Feeling.” I wondered, Ought I to enjoy it? because I knew the context in which the song had been justified: An anthem for people to “celebrate” at the end of a long week of work and to “lose their minds”.

And I can only think back to the Monks and Nuns at Deer Park Monastery. Every Day, they worked, because what was important was NOT the fruit of their labour, but the Work Itself. I recall a nun admonishing against laziness, saying that it is a day wasted.

Yet people here seem to be content to work like mules six days a week and to “go crazy” (and become mad) on the Day of Rest. So the Christian tradition pales in my eyes to the Buddhist tradition, because it is an act of hypocrisy. I can take no credit for ANY work the MINUTE that I become lazy and flabby. Yet people SET ASIDE A DAY OF THE WEEK, every WEEK, to be entitled and to sacrifice that ALERTNESS which is the Absolute and the Categorical Imperative for the Buddhists! Is that Constant Vigilance NOT, as has been said time and time again, the price of FREEDOM? Is this NOT why I so seldom see people debating politics in the streets, re-inventing their minds so that the Collective Consciousness remains a bursting bouquet of opportunity and progress?? It is no wonder that Democracy is dead within this country. Society itself seems to be heading towards Fascism.

*Except when I spent an entire week-end at UCSD, sleeping roughly four hours in toto, composing music for the Global Game Jam, or the instances wherein I stay up from Dusk until Dawn writing, living off of McDonald’s coffee and the alms and kindness of strangers and acquaintances, wherein my biggest hassle is her eventual coming to pester me and the pressure me beyond all decency, when I am all ready tired, to return to my bed and to justify her calling me a “parasite” by my very consent to be dependent[, though everything within THAT ACTUAL MOMENT does not even justify her pestering].

Dm.A.A.

 

Post-scriptum: While it may be true that, IDEALLY, I would not pass judgement upon my Mother and she would not pass judgement upon me, my indignation herein is NOT ONLY merited in self-defense because she has overstepped and thus made [temporarily and theoretically] void that theoretical boundary, but I have also proven that at no point do I overstep that boundary and pass judgement upon her. The issue of her own occupation is never addressed, because shedding Hope means that I forego any but the most tentative guesses as to what her work-day entails. All that I do is in self-defense. The Universal of Work, if it is a Universal, is available to me at that moment, as it is available for her to see, yet it is not available to her at that moment, as it is available for me to see, for the act of gossip is a lazy action and not an act of discipline. Furthermore, even were “work” not to refer to a Universal but to a Specific detail, then I would be totally justified in my statements, because to say “she knows nothing of work” would be merely to say, in abbreviation, “she knows nothing of MY work”.

On the Will to Truth.

The Ascetic Ideal will only be overcome when the Will to Truth begins to see itself as a problem.

This was how Sadler described Nietzsche's point of view in conclusion of his lecture on the Genealogy of Morals.

I corroborate. When the line between what is found and what is created is so blurred that it becomes impossible to distinguish logic from delusion, the repetition of a conviction becomes Absurd.

One then foregoes the posture of the enlightened intellectual. Yet this cannot happen by a simple act of will. I may never know how I penetrated the thick forest of prickly thoughts and prejudices to arrive at a safe clearing where I can rest my head. Yet the struggle was inevitable. What is insane today was sane yesterday. A new leaf turns over. A new flower buds. Yet what is untrue now was not untrue before. Now is simply all I have, with memory trailing behind it like a tail.

dm.A.A.

On Society, Manifestation, and Education.

 

 

Among what I love in Heidegger is that he points out what seems most basic and forgotten about the mystery of Being: Society does not create the human being.

What is society? The evidence of facebook seems to suggest that society is one person’s abstraction. One is hard-pressed to find two people with the same groups of friends in their facebook profiles. Does this not indicate that, if society is the web of one’s sociological influences, that no two people have the same society, definitionally? If we could all agree, with a few exceptions, upon what society is, then my argument would be rightfully condemned to ridicule. Yet the very presence and prevalence of wars, economic “crises”, absurd depressions, both personal and collective, and a pervasive hopelessness as how to overcome these collective issues and reaffirm the individual quest – all of these factors indicate that Society is not only particular to every individual but in many senses not commensible with the ideals of others when it is treated as an ideal. Society itself is an individual subjective phenomenon, and our agreements as to what it is are therefore understandably superficial. So we defend ourselves with rigid common sense, tribal guilt, and an anti-intellectual media and popular culture.

So it follows that we must shed Society as an ideal, one at a time. Only then can Humanity progress. These two terms – society and Humanity – are as far apart in meaning and far from being synonyms as are creed and Religion. The more that one breaks with one’s own regularities, adventurously, the greater the pull towards those outside of one’s social group. One does not seek homogeny but heterogeny. The vagrant on the street becomes an informant. The “out-group” becomes what one feels most comfortable in, because one only knows oneself to be an individual when a minority in the midst of a minority. This is how I feel in the company of African Americans, Arabs, Mexicans, Native Americans, and any other racial minority that convenes to share a common culture. I become more universally Human when in the presence of someone from a different background, and eventually distinctions in class and race are forgotten.

Labour serves society, yet that is more selfish than Work. Work is in service of the Ideal, and the Ideal originates within that which is Universally human, not particular to the norms of either capitalism or communism, America or France, et cetera. What can be said to be Universal? Art seems to be. Money does not. It is true that the consideration is vague. Yet one must ultimately go by one’s deepest intuitions in such profound matters. Art has been an aspect of the human condition since prior to barter; some attribute the very birth of the Human Human to the first appreciation of Beauty. It predates even barter, and it certainly predates Capitalism, not to mention United States Capitalism, especially as it is practiced in a given community in the suburbs of San Diego. Yet when I speak with certain patrons in this town, I am told, “this is what Life is. Art is not the bigger picture. Spiritual needs are for one’s self, but work is for the society.”

My question is two-fold: How does one know that what is best for society is best for Humanity? How does one know that what society “*is*” even exists outside one’s mind?

 

What is most universally human seems to speak through intuition and Art. Yet we have forgotten how to listen, and ours is a story of the Human Being, both in the individual and the Collective sense, tapering to a point and only remembering his most recent dragons, paradigms, and forms of conditioning. Art may be our only hope to regain our Sanity.

Heidegger was probably right, however. Art is not produced by the human being; it creates the Human Being. When we look at a box with print inscribed upon it, we think: This is the product of human intelligence. It is the product of Society. It is the product of our labour. Yet how do we know that we can take such credit for it? Beings reveal themselves to us, and they manifest through us. Technology uses us as much as we use technology. Is it such a stretch of the imagination to consider this admonishment from Heidegger? Or is this most blaringly an issue now, as modern technology becomes more and more homogenizing, sophisticated, and menacing? Has the machine so tapered us and have we become such tools in ITS service that our imaginations are dulled and we cannot even begin to imagine that what we think we control, what we justify as a tool, is using us by its very nature? Heidegger’s metaphysics seem like the only sensible explanation, but in the absence of “scientific proof” we want to hear nothing of Beings. When Art falls on deaf ears and we forget the Other, why should one bother to care about the mystery of Being? It all begins to sound like Christian back-wash, and yet our very pious attitude towards Science, the enduring rigour with which we repress the individual imagination mercilessly from a young age, and our hatred for those who are not homogenous leaves little room for one to say, “Art creates us. Technology uses us.” How many poets retain that spark of individuated consciousness when everyone around them not only fails to provide corroboration for the most astronomical of their experiences but out-rightly condemns it as impossible? What seems possible is constructed from words and ways of looking at things which are beaten in by convention, and the moment that one says, “Art is selfish. Art is unimportant. Art is only important to you,” we lose that territory to the machines. We forget what it means to see a building and to feel as though its windows looked back at us. How many teachers not only applauded the student poet for his imagination but actually sat down and asked, “What do you mean by that? I need to know. Because I have never heard it put that way before.” And how many students were not frightened by being put in such high regard? Questioning is the piety of knowledge, but we are not taught to question, because it cannot be taught, and teachers are only insistent often, as so many members of the herd, in doing their “jobs”, thinking little of whether or not they are hurting the Dasein. If one says of the Other, “it spoke to me,” if one is taken figuratively one is merely justified in the ears of the beholder by one’s verisimilitude to an older common meme. If one is taken literally, one may also be taken to a hospital and forced out of believing that the metaphysical view of what Life Is to the common sense may be fundamentally flawed at its roots, and all of our justifications for common sense may simply stem from that original misconception like weeds. As people become increasingly memetic in thinking, with the advent of social networking and technology becoming not only a homogenizing agent but something regarded as a social “duty” and “necessity”, we lost the ability to question Existence at its very roots. How will we resolve social problems if we cannot think outside of the confines of our own societies? Of our own culture? Of our own routines? Hopelessness is a form of madness; it creates depression and other forms of illness. It leads to suicide on a large scale. Yet the imagination will not be repressed. If it does not serve human purposes, it will destroy Humanity; it can be ignored, not stifled. As was wisely put, and as I have paraphrased in verse:

 

We can move backwards or forwards.

Very rarely can we stand still.

Whatever it is we move towards,

Will work either for Great or for Ill.

 

Dm.A.A.