The Vulgar are Luminous: Chapter One.

The Vulgar are Luminous: Chapter One.

'Do you have impending feelings of Doom?

Does it feel like tomorrow will never come?

Are you feeling hopeless or depressed about the Future?

If you answered 'yes' to any of these questions, you may suffer from I.T.D.

What is I.T.D.?

I.T.D. Is a rare disorder caused by an imbalance of serotonin in the brain.

Thankfully, there is a solution:

Cerebratax.

Cerebratax has been proven by clinical studies to effectively treat I.T.D....'

'Who are clinical studies?'

'Huh?' replied Marc Blankenship as he lifted his forefinger momentarily, with measured hesitation, from the steering pad.

'What are clinical studies?' his son, Blake, repeated, watching the dancing snakes of laser-lights and neon whiz by from the back seat, and smiling gently in wonder at them.

'Clinical studies,' began Blake's father, catching his attention as he more firmly grimaced towards the road ahead, 'are observations made by scientists and doctors about...'

'Like Doctor Shannon?'

'Right,' replied Marc after a moment's hesitation, and with deliberate patience, 'Except Dr. Shannon is a practising doctor. They have other people in the scientific profession who run tests on drugs called 'pharmaceuticals' before someone like Dr. Shannon can prescribe them to you.'

But Blake's eyes had already returned to the window, his ears immersed in the hum of the surrounding world beyond the cubic frame of their zooming vehicle. His father raised one eyebrow over the other, as he had always been apt to do so when ignored, and, with equally methodical fidelity, maintained an unchanged look in his glassy eyes.

'Dad,' Blake mused.

'Hm?!' his father acknowledged his son with an almost-snarl, which Blake was too accustomed to to be upset or even surprised by.

'What if all people followed predictable patterns?' Blake continued, eyes flying out the window with the leaves of trash as father and son zoomed through the Forest.

'I don't know,' came Dr Blankenship's passionately unclimactic reply, as he peered through his least favourite place to fly in with a glare that seemed almost like a futile attempt to bring their destination closer to them.

1.

Phoenix decided to disregard Nestor’s comment on the social networking web site: It’s just probably going to be long and contrived.

He heard Nestor’s voice all ready in his head. Sporadic and manic: But what about all the times YOU went on for FIFTEEN MINUTES?

What the fuck does it matter, Nestor? What I had to say then MATTERED. What you have to say DOESN’T. Obviously if you have to level with me you have nothing more of interest to say. You were the one who demanded a constant warrant. That you would prioritise your ego over the issue and make this an affair of the Soul and not of Reality is enough of a reason for me to disregard your entire frame of reference. And allow me to finish. OBVIOUSLY the art is one of being complex but not complicated, simple but not simplistic. All life is paradoxical and it is a stab in the gut and a slap in the face to be held accountable for all of one’s contradictions as though they were all symptoms of hypocrisy. If your life makes sense still, good for you. Others are suffering at the expense of your privilege. Incidentally I TRY to be concise on this web site. I have nothing to learn from you and that you would equate what I have to say with what you have to say is evidence that you have not seen beyond the boundaries of your perverse ego.

Dm.A.A.

Let it Fall Apart.

Let it Fall Apart.

There is really no such thing as a society. What we call society or the system is the projection of an individual psyche upon a confluence of forces too complex to even comprehend. So never fear the collapse of such a system. It is merely a loss of innocence.

Feeding the world begins with recognizing that food is a universal human right. That begins psychoanalytically with the Self. We cannot gain total independence but we can gain ethical independence. The system will not fall sooner if we stall later; the longer that we conform to it the later it will change. We must not entertain sentimental feelings that are conditional for those who provide for us, for gratitude is debt and debt is a bondage to past karma. Those who are addicted to their habits will deny this, and to the degree that they can fathom this addiction to that same degree they will be passionate in fighting Change.

Those who fed us yesterday may become enemies today. They were surely enemies yesterday. Tomorrow everyone will eat without debt. Today they say that you should be grateful that they had a job so they could feed you. Yesterday they had a job. Today they lost it. One step closer to paradise. That energy that was expended in the service of one paradigm will now fuel a new world order. No one is in charge of it; no one knows how to run this. Those who claim to know are merely specialists in manipulation. Many of them have their selves duped.

“The vulgar are luminous, knowing. I alone appear dull and confused.”

Of course, we are all confused. Could we ever once agree about what “society” is, or even “Reason” or “ethics”, there would be no politics, philosophy or religion. The individual is the only thing there really is; society is an abstraction. I do not need to put that phrase in quotations and ascribe them to Jung to make this self-evident point clear. And Gnosis is all ways self-evident; the intelligent merely lend words to enter it into the inter-subjective sphere. It is only propaganda that opposes it. But Shiva will crush the dwarf. Its blood will feed the starving children. Do not be afraid to appear mad in expectation of it. Do not be afraid to be mad in expectation of it. No one expected the Inquisition. No one expected the Holocaust (except Nietzsche). No one expected Agrarian society (except the ancients). Over the course of history this was available to a few who were systematically silenced but not entirely forgotten.

The process of transformation is its own reward. What hostility we project upon others is usually if not invariably our own. The Zen Buddhists would have gone so far as to all most say that we can be entirely unaffected by the surrounding world. The temptation for them was to detach completely.

Virtue is its own reward. Intelligence and Good will are the two essential and indispensable and important things. Life is a process of growth so it is fruitless to regret the past. The past has passed. It would not be the present now were it not different. And if the present is an improvement upon the past then that should be celebrated rather than the past condemned. The Japanese have a word (I do not remember) for elevating another without putting down one’s self. Surrender guilt. The past is the past. Do not blame it for the success of its follower, as though the former could be jealous of the latter. That kind of resentment is only felt by people who are sore losers, be it in a game or an argument. If I seem to be a proponent of irresponsibility, I assure you that it is not for my benefit but for yours. My children will not grow up embarrassed to be alive. And in a world where gratitude is not forced but kindled involuntarily through openness and kindness, there will be less to forgive as there will be more to live for. I am not fan of the scape-goat as a technique. But nor am I a fan of guilt in general. Punishment solves nothing; publicity only gives the example set by the deviant more power. It will not influence my feelings towards my fellow man. And if you accuse me further of evasion I will make your wish come true and evade, for I do not need you to tell me who to be. The delight of being my self is enough.

Courage is necessary. Wisdom is recognizing when others stumble in the dark. The ego all ways becomes jealous and tries to blame the Bigger Man. No worry. “Cruel, but everybody does it. Thought by now I’d rise above it.” What naivete is there in a Hope that is immediately full-filled? Who can really judge except those who crave power and have hatred in their hearts? Christ was crucified because people hate hearing about Love as much as the ego hates Shiva’s foot. But hate loses in the end, I’ve heard. We could all die out and the Universe would be just fine; it would have no longer the pimple of the human race to pass judgment upon its unfairness as the occupants of planet Earth harm one another. Kindergarten boys would all ways say “Life is not fair” to justify their own unfairness. Why did they choose such as Life?

Some thing in us is stirred in a righteous anger to lift our fists in opposition to oppression. I hate that, though I should not. It is a power attitude and an act of hypocrisy. Why lift our fists to aggravate the problem? Did shame ever solve a thing? Did it not open up more shame? More paranoia and exhaustion? A weaker human community where in more dropped out and returned to the wild, haunting the civilized beings like a splinter? A feeble imitation of humanity that could not stifle one act of deviance without spinning off so many more? Never does a horror justify a horror, or seldom does it. It certainly does not resolve a social problem, but only an individual thirst that is satiated in collective blood-lust. Yet that example in turn justifies more deviance. The deviant has a form of courage, if a perverted one, by acting out the shadow of the masses and defying their cruelty by showing them a mirror. We rage at mirrors a lot.

Wherever you may find your self recognize that life is in harmony. But harmony is not stagnant or perfect. It is not “balance”. It is dynamic. You contain the Universe within you and it contains you. This stuff gets easier to understand when you have experienced four-dimensional thought. There is nothing in you that is unnatural, and time will guide you through your fear.

Dm.A.A.

One last attack against Leveling.

There is one last reason never to level with people, and this will be some what abstract: It turns every one into a hypocrite. Think about it: In so simple a frame of reference, what alternative have you? Consider the man who says: Stop killing my people! He then kills a soldier from the oppressing army and is accused of hypocrisy. By leveling – by reduction, by the refusal to Think – he is accused of commiting murder whilst denouncing murder. Yet of course his gesture was consistent with his principles: He was stopping the murder of his people. By only pointing out the commonality – killing – and ignoring the difference, the judge of the matter takes a side. It is impossible not to take a side. Any ambivalence is a pretension towards peace, for so far as one side is stronger than another then ambivalence just prioritises the oppressor passively-aggressively. By dismissing the motives underlying an action, which of course pass our threshold of understanding consciously, we become oppressors by equating “behavior” with goodness.

Dm.A.A.

Why we are Not Equal.

Why we are Not Equal.

Your argument against my natural humane aversion towards leveling is nothing short of circular – the same kind of circularity you claim to denounce. The only warrant you could provide in favour of leveling is an aversion to elitism. And this is the kind of oppressive dominator attitude that would compel me, if I cared less, to never talk to you again. You have nothing in common with me. We are not “equal”; you have not worked towards the attainment of such an ideal. Equality is a linear mathematical concept, not a quality of character. By equality all that you mean to say is that we are held to a common standard in the eyes of your God, and we are recognized as having an equal vote in the system of your State. You do not care about me and the solitary sufferings that brought me to my place in time. You want the world to treat you “equally”, pandering to your entitlement, as an a priori with out having earned the right. You are absurd. Equality cannot exist between two sovereign entities, for equality is a similarity, a continuity, and not a difference. Were we equal not only would we have no disagreements; we would all so have no dignity, for our differences and not our similarities unify us. Only a jealous God, the projection of an oppressive State, could force us to humble our selves before him, to stifle our natures and our tendencies to grow and to be uninhibited by each other in our growth. Only a jealous and oppressive person would stifle the growth of another and force that other to conform, dismissing all differences of situation, perception, and opinion that makes life magical and that makes decision-making arduous by playing the Fascistic, God-forsaken “equality” card. As though Excellence were not a private attainment! As though we all REQUIRED a kind of nihilistic ambivalence and absence of preference in order to co-exist! There exists surely a Higher Plain towards which a few (and God have I wished to delude my self that it was more) ascend where in there is no pain but only struggle, where no reference is made in capitalistic schizophrenia to a remote “equality”, as though we were mere dots on a line, and what is more not even dots but ONE dot, and where each strives towards one’s own Excellence with out interference with another’s private path, for each answers to one’s own private God and this relationship is so personal that only that God knows whether or not every private God is the same. Yet most have not risen to that plane. Only a few, far in between, make any sense, can offer any sanity or reprieve, and they comprise a network that is accessible to a select few as well, for while these texts are available their significance is lost on the masses who would rather parrot a collective hatred. How many times in a madness did I PRETEND that this was not so, and how much time did I waste.

You have nothing in common with me. Your relationships with each other, where in you cloister each other from the world, are every thing I will not be. If we had any thing in common we would not argue, and if we argued in spite of a hidden commonality then Life would be Absurd, but I refuse to settle for so de-moralising a proposition. You have more hatred in you than do I (I only have anger), and you clump with others for they are an out-let for this hatred. My individuality is an attack upon your conspiracy, my metaphysics an attack upon your Fascist dream of a common reality where in you, as the oppressive, dominating, capitalist Christian American pigs that you are, are justified in ruining my family and all that I love because you have influence and you call that goodness. There is no access that I have to your romance and so (though not because, but rather in addition) you have no access to mine. It is literally impossible to compare and to assign it the arbitrary value of “equal”. Leave California for once in your life and see how much people in other parts of the world care about your pretension towards “equality”. When to be similar is accorded a greater dignity than to be different, the motive is all ways that of assimilation to the Borg – of hegemony. And if you are still unconvinced and you have the nerve to equate my love with “yours”: Remember that you alone think this, and we do not. That is the final test and proof, for so long as we disagree on this point there is no equality between us. It is like any other sign assigned arbitrarily as a gesture of power, for Life does not operate according to the feeble principles of mathematics: Only the panicking and calculating mind of a dictator. Life has not requirement for Leveling because the process of freedom is a constant over coming of the Majority, of the Status Quo, and of Human Nature: A never-resolved, indefinitely undefined re-evaluation and re-definition of what it means to be Human. If God is a parent then He lets his children play unwatched and to decide for their own selves what they pretend their selves and each other to be. To break with Equality is simply to Become: To break with the undifferentiated Mass that is meaninglessness and Nihilism and to find in piercing this myst a GENUINE love for those around one’s self, who all so break this myst and excel in their own solitary way, and whose differences lend them a value that, were we all subsumed to a common self, would yield to hatred, for nothing is more repulsive than the Self. Power all ways tries to subsume things to the Self; Love admires the Other, and the Other can never be reduced to a set of mathematical qualities or bullied by conventional morality. If this seems illogical and unwarranted it is only because my experience and study have brought me to a different quality of Reasoning. Yet as Wittgenstein said the mind is all ways logical; this is not a dispute of the mind but of the Heart, and your Heart, you admit, is corrupt. You force your failing religion upon me in a hope to lend it value you ask me for advise to salvage your Soul but reject what you hear in response as heresy. Yet again: Whatever “equality” that you project upon the world is a manifestation of your Will to Power and nothing more. Whatever value you universalize will be like wise corrupt. That acknowledging another’s individuality, another’s plight and solitude, another’s oppression, another’s humanity and upheaval, another’s pilgrimage, another’s madness, is an attack upon your ego, it only reflects your egoism. You want the world to be only as you see it. You want us all at once to compete for a common goal and yet you want never to have any one talk down to you. In short you want some thing impossible except to a schizophrenic: Constant competition in an objective world but without objective superiority. This is madness. And hence you cannot allow it to be admitted within your self and can only project it upon others. I have no interest in competing with you, so I have no interest in leveling with you. No set of rules is necessary that I do not abuse my power; I do not desire power. In place of constant competition, why not in stead constant struggle, and not against others, as though to subvert them, but to overcome one’s own self? Surely then you would understand that you have no business judging another when another has known more of genocide, or of madness, or of religion, and you would know your place in these instances and have no problem asserting your superiority in others? But you must clearly have no superiority of your own; your life has been too much a bed of roses. No? Then why not admit it? If you can still cling to a feeble, jealous God, those roses could not have been too thorny. If in hearing of genocide you feel that this is the same genocide you read about on Wikipedia, if in hearing of madness you think that this is the same madness that you “dealt with” with your mother, who was no more than a frustration to you for you dealt with it but did not Dwell In it, and if in hearing another’s religion you must immediately turn a matter of the deepest personal subjectivity into a contest, as though my God had insulted your God’s honor, as though we were children of rival parents, or as though we were rival children of the same parents and you felt that I was claiming some favouritism in His eye, your offense is, as Kierkegaard said, a failure to comprehend the moment. It says more of you than it does of me, and all though you are desperate to find your self with in me unfortunately there is no commonality between us. Go in stead to your friends who will cater to your power attitude and share in the lower pleasures of the world.

In a world where one cannot excel, cannot surpass, cannot travel farther than others have dared and cannot contend with other masters, there is no human dignity, for there is nothing one can give to others and be met with generosity. Like wise in a world where there is no competition with others but with the self, where goals are not assigned but Found and where the individual strives towards a private end, there equality does not matter. There is no objective criteria that fits all, and it is useless as a policy. Compassion there is difference and inequality, for we are not dots on a line, much less one dot. We are scattered across the Multiverse, of which each of us is a private Center and one's own final adversary.

Dm.A.A.

My letter to Arthur. Now Open.

Preface: IF any of this offends you you need it. Ultimately I think that it is rather tame criticism.

I will be perfectly frank. I refuse to allow people to stifle my spiritual and personal progress. Every decision I make requires an effort that most people do not even imagine and I do not condone any sort of attitude that is so atrocious to the individual as to prioritise mere involvement in a society and convenience over the solemn journey that one has to make in solitude towards a greater understanding of God and Humanity. You force people to stoop to your level by virtue of this Mass Mentality and it is literally shocking to me. I cannot believe it. Floto could have set aside her ideological biases and not seen herself as justified in preaching to me about Jesus as though some how what I choose to find interest in warrants an out right Inquisition. I perceive her response as nothing short of that because were she secure in her views she would probably have spent months in prayer or meditation re-evaluating her relationship with God and seeing why she had no business impressing a linguistic understanding of God that was entirely personal to her upon me at a moment that it was so glaringly obvious that I could comprehend the Ground of Being without interference from symbols. This is a distinctly Christian thing; it practically never happens in Buddhism and Hinduism. Make reference to what Huxley says about God in Island. My life is wasted away on convention and flattery and at nights I am embarrassed that I have allowed my self to be so stunted in my spiritual growth through fraternity with others. Yet make not the mistake of thinking that I had not, to my DEEP embarrassment to admit (and hence my hesitation in so doing) that at some point I had found preaching from others to be permissible. Your distrust of Kierkegaard reflects a will to power: the presumption that the ground of being would conform to a readily accessible standard that all “rational beings” could agree to. This is such blatant oppression that I could carve my eyes out. You have no respect I think for the suffering that that kind of pretentious bull shit has created. Human beings must be left to their own devices as moral agents and only a fraction of what we experience can be verbally communicated. The way that you communicate is abusive and structuralist. It is constantly defensive and you pander to what ever the people around you want rather than what you or God want. I find that repugnant.

If I seem angry right now note that I was relatively calm when I was in the car but that you made the unpardonable mistake of setting me up for criticism and then denying me an ability to defend my self. The sanctity of the moment that I entrusted you with has been soiled and I shake as I write this. Whatever hopes I have of solidarity with you lie shattered and I shudder for the thought of ever transcending my solitude. By the way: If this offends you, why? Surely you in your brilliant ethical wisdom and omniscience daily flagellate your self more so than I am doing so for you right now; I am merely expressing anger. I tire of this.

Floto had she been a genuine religious thinker would have probably not used God’s name in vain. But to say this is leveling. I do not like the morally repugnant way in which you conduct our conversations so that I am literally seduced to surrender my values in order to hear your opinions. It is absolutely crazy and unnecessary; that should never be an issue. I have not read the books that you have read; I have not practiced your yogas. I struggle to convey a subtle moment of affront that is an immediate source of authority in my life. You try to reduce it to an object of abstract knowledge without considering how I feel. And you have not considered how I feel because you can only express my feelings in terms of the person to whom you have an ideological bias by virtue of her Christianity. Under your frame work tyranny could run rampant in your world because people who are oppressive and over-bearing would have ease in gaining favour and prioritizing people that they could benefit from. This is all so a capitalist model. Quite clearly the ideal is to be alert at every moment in one’s life and never to flee to some abstraction. When I speak from my heart of hearts and you dismiss me I am not just offended but betrayed. It suggests that you do not trust me and that you value your bias over my innermost soul. And this is unpardonable. But I am sure that you can take this criticism. What ever you say you will not change the fact that you were not there at this instant. You can only evaluate Floto’s behavior according to an abstract guide line, yet of course it is madness to live according to these abstract guide lines when in one’s life one has constantly to take into consideration phenomenological, metaphysical, sociological, psychological, aesthetic, and religious factors into every ethical decision. And besides that intentionality is transparent. I feel that Lynne lacks transparency and that provides me with closure for what not only I but a number of people have found to be an incomprehensible personality. You have all so not accorded me an opportunity to expound upon what I had once found to have been her virtues because you expect me to like and to approve of every thing that you do. And this will not do. With in one car ride we discussed the distinction of idealism and pragmatism. Did that not stick in memory? We discussed all so the over-bearing tendencies of Varsick’s father. Could not the same be said of Floto? Why would you prefer the one for the other, if not for an ulterior motive, and why would you PRETEND towards an interest in what his father had to say that was quite clearly a more egregious affront to his character than had you honestly refused to talk, even if he might go to his dying day without conscious knowledge that you were trying to get away from him?

This comes down to American dominator culture. You are not an immigrant. You have not had the struggle of reconciling two worlds. How could you understand? Americans are infamous for leveling and all so for being superficial and fake. When I humbly brought to mind some thing of interest to Floto I was clearly interested in intellectual discussion. Yet that she would mention it again with such passion on the way back was unreasonable. And of course I hold her to a standard of excellence as I hold my self. I had no way to stifle the conversation; I was her captive. I tried to suggest that she drop it, but that would have been unreasonable. She could easily had she been secure in her religious views have entertained our right to agree to disagree (forgive me for the atrocious use of clichés; I know that I am playing to the pit here), but instead she imposed her God upon mine because rather than letting people be she insisted that some thing that shook her world view must be corrected. This is oppressive; a genuinely religious person would have been able to wait, according to the virtue of patience, for at least a year before bringing it up again. For the record: I did.

As you can see each of us is appointed, if I may use religious language, a unique set of challenges and skills with which to meet those challenges. Your journey must be one of actualizing this potential and embracing solitude in so doing, for these tasks cannot be communicated. I can only convey to you a palatable summary of a Moment; I can NOT provide you with all of the actual details, and this difficulty will be bolstered by defensiveness. Needless to say I had idealized you and many other Christians, including the Flotos, based upon my knowledge of the tradition. But when one needs to talk about God even when the recipient clearly does not have an affective inclination to do so, that is Christendom, not Christianity.

If you compete with others your duty is to excel; your ideal is to be the best, and it is mad to be embarrassed or to lack febrazi in the attainment of this ideal. If you compete with your self the stakes are even higher, for definitionally you can never be surpassed by another but you can at any point fall short of the standard. Having read Huxley, Watts, Shestov, Heidegger, De Beauvoir, et cetera, my proverbial plate is as full as it needs to be. I do not need extra helpings; the challenge is challenging as is. And every day I read and learn more. We are not here to judge each other; you your self said that only God can judge us, but your God when you tell me that He judges me becomes a projection of your self. It is narcissistic. And incidentally I have tried leveling with people, belonging, making my self clear, and “loving my human imperfections”. I have wasted so much time with that I could vomit. The fact is that at the end or the beginning of the day your frustrations only stem from your American up-bringing, where important actions are not taken because people are dragged into the problematic mass by the other crabs. And this is LITERALLY ATROCIOUS. Seriously. I all most never want to talk to you ever again thinking of it. The least we can do is expend every bit of intellectual and moral effort in healing the ills of the world, even if it is in the superficial form of fraternizing with those friends that we have even if we must ignore that we are lucky that they do not live with oppression. But while none can pass judgement on your Soul we MUST pass judgement on those actions that might allow a person to perform at less than one’s standards, for each of us is responsible to try to resolve the problem of human evil. Considering the boundless quality of the Imagination and that we as adolescents have only attained a fraction of it I see no reason to ever compel a person to FAIL. I refuse to FAIL in my life simply in imitation of yours; your journey is not mine. It may be steeper; it may be less steep. But of course the metaphor is flaccid. You see this as an attack upon your ego but you forget why we do debate and why we volunteer: To self-transcend. To not become guilty of genocide and torture through our rhetoric. Yet not to surrender our own Reason and Sanity in some Fanaticism.

The ideal is the perfect world so it is not shameful to demand perfection of self and other. If one can find within one’s self a moment of temporary perfection and absolute authority of the Universe at which one’s self is the centre, that is merely to be expected. You must never condemn that. To pretend that any two Universes are the same is likewise insane. I find absolutely no evidence for it. Just meeting another person is a confrontation with another world. So where remains your ground to defend leveling? If to parrot back everything one has said is conversation then conversation is futile. Yet I know this is not the case with more mature people. If every criticism is taken as an attack then you merely are apt to find fault with people for your own short comings. It does not warrant a counter-attack or an accusation of hypocrisy, for you have no access to another’s mind. This will seem paradoxical, I understand. But as Krishnamurti said: What is possible is never enough. We must do what is impossible.

The way to note Moral progress is through novelty, not redundancy. I am stunned by my peers and their superficiality. Adults I maintain conversation with are capable of respecting my Otherness and imparting upon me wisdom that opens my mind. The conclusions stand: Conversation is an exquisite Art that demands extraordinary care but that all so requires total transparency. The intent is not to HIDE some thing in order to maintain a position, for one should be able to surrender any station in favour of a virtue. The intent is to be delicate in carrying out God’s will in Co-Creating this new reality with the Other, who of course becomes an end in and of her self whilst participating temporarily in this teleological cooperation. The sharing of ideas should be done with as little confrontation as possible unless they have egregious implications. My friend Jennifer had the bloody right to be an atheist and had I had the nerve to be I might have saved her from suicide. I try not to think that. I was INSULTED that Floto would preach like a stereotypical Christian about her God as though my heresy posed any threat to Him. I had no out; she was driving me home, and I was indebted to her. Yet a year later I can say that she was in the wrong, because I surrender the cowardice that would have kept me in Bad Faith.

Essentially all that you can attack is my tendency to estrange my self from others in pursuit of a necessary excellence, perhaps the only necessity. Where I should be thrilled to have surpassed an other in a certain respect, for that other was clearly not FIT to excel in the same act, in stead I am met with Resentiment. It is nothing new; Nietzsche expounded upon it in regards to intelligence, and of course as Jung said ethical propensity is quite akin to intelligence in Nature. At least I can say with confidence that I have not entirely violated my values. Can YOU do that? Or does your relationship with Awilda cloud your own judgment? You are embarrassed by it. I have no business judging. But you insisted that I do so. So I will. Rilke says that lovers become conventional through a premature union and seek shelter in each other. He all so says that the third person in the room is all ways intrusive. NO amount of clever word-play that you can produce will discredit this to my mind. It rings of a truth I am severed from in my regular, sleep-walk life by entire years of wasted time amidst stupid people. It is a direct and unabridged GNOSIS. Reality is entirely the product of two people in a given instance of conversation, and if you valuate an absent third party above the conversation ITS SELF then the conversation phenomenologically loses its credibility. Even a third party would only be able to interrupt by directing attention to another bridge of communication. And that this profound solitude that people bridge daily is not terrifying to people was news to me when in an attempt made, under unprecedented and stressful auspices, to answer the question “What happened?” I was miss-diagnosed as having MANIC DEPRESSIVE DIS ORDER (an arbitrary Sign, as per Foucault, as I might have intuited even at the time) simply for having spread my answer. Well, seriously. How ELSE did this fellow student of psychology, of, I might have presumed, the works of Freud, Fromm, Adler, Frankl, and (though I did not know them at the time), Fritz Perls, Marie-Louise von Franz*, Woodman and Jung, have NOT appreciated that I tried, REASONABLY, to save her time by compacting the entire necessary phenomenological, sociological, and psychological and ethical account of my experiences of the past fifteen minutes into the FOLLOWING fifteen minutes, under unprecedented stress? And you know what the bitch said to me by the end of it? That I was ‘going ninety miles an hour’. She had NO business passing judement upon my Soul according to my behavior, any more so than had some one preached to a suicidal Jennifer about Jesus Jennifer would not have had the right to slap that person. But of course a person who ignores other people entirely (As SOLITARY ENTITIES with UNIMAGINABLE experiences) would have no clue and would gladly and fatly appeal to the status quo because inter-subjectivity is the instrument of privilege and things are claimed to have been ‘understood’ when they are made reference to to some thing familiar. I swear to God: After having my childhood robbed of me in favour of education I certainly did not expect THIS as its final out-come: That for my proficiency of performance in a time of Actual Peril I would be CONDEMNED and not PRAISED for being told to UNDER-PERFORM and to SLOW DOWN. As though “ninety miles an hour” were even its self up to par (it never cured hunger) and the mind had a speed limit! What essentialist horse manure.

In short I hope that you understand by now that I am not putting on airs and none of this to be taken personally. After all: How could I be qualified to judge you? This is merely a poetic expression of my frustration with my self: That at times when my life is not perfect (in the Japanese sense of duty rather than the American sense of personal fulfillment) I cannot even IDENTIFY what it is that I am over-looking. It cannot be a suggestion from with out, for that would contradict my intuitions. My intuitions, the sum of wisdom taken from without (though perhaps within) must all ways be immediately available, so dependence upon help from others except in the merely material realm must never be an option. These are just the values I have absorbed from Education. They are there for a reason.

Hope that that did not make too much sense.

Sincerely and with love,

Dmitry A. Andreyev.

Dm.A.A.

Post-scriptum: Rilke said the hardest thing is for two human beings to love one another. A lot has to happen.

Accountability.

The thing that frustrated me most about Brinn's prose was the scene that the girl was flirting with the boys. The adolescent boys could not have been much older than the protagonists, and recalling adolescence i certainly can understand that reckless desperate romanticism. Most probably when the boy lumbered in he was drunk or high, yet his intentions were good in mind. I did not register more than an unnamed pang of indignation every subsequent time that i heard Brinn deliver the bicycle scene that fore shadowed the climax. Now i have understood its meaning: the girl was flirting because she enjoyed the attention. At least that was how Brinnlinson depicted her.

Sartre said that we create one hundred per cent of our circumstances. I would qualify that that seems a bit too optimystic, but then his point in its radicalism is an enduring challenge, especially when in an age of conformity and a society of privilege (and it IS an entire society, no scape goat of it) we are more tempted than ever to pass the torch of responsibility rather than running with it.

It was tragic that the boy had miss read her advances. But then what was he to do? Communication is absurd; the only hope that humans have of communicating rests in that we are Free to interpret signals and cues as we so choose. When he described 'the way [she] look[ed]', he was noting the same subjective phenomenological observation that we all ways make, consciously or unconsciously. This was where I felt that Brinn (and Perkin)'s interpretation of the text became abusive: that the male was depicted as aggressive and stupid where as the female was depicted as a totally power less damosel in distress as though to make us forget her actions from earlier. An adolescent boy might easily and reasonably have taken her flirtation for a pass. What did he mean by 'the way she looked'? Was it her dress, where in she had flirted with him, ostensibly trying (as I know that at least one adolescent girl I knew had done frequently) to attract him in previously? Was it her intentionality? None of that is specified in the text. Brinn in her brilliance (and between her and Perkins i do not know how to apportion the blame, which all so spares me that responsibility) twisted the piece a bit to fit a feminist ideology -- feminist not in the sense of equalism, accountability, and self-empowerment, but in the same sense as masculinism: preferring one gender to another.

Dm.A.A.

Why Dogs have Self-Awareness.

Why Dogs have Self-Awareness.

Kresten as per usual miss represented my generalisation as an accusation. Such elitism is not uncommon in Scientism. It IS true that if you put in Humanism, Aristotle, and Descartes that is what the system puts out inevitably. But i made no accusation of this having been a deliberate effort; that Kresten projected that is evidence that it was Unconscious. Humanism is based in the notion of a Human Nature that can be observed in Behaviour and is suggested by Behaviour. This is the Naturalist Fallacy: that because you have a certain nature you must behave a certain way, and its inversion is what Nietzsche accused priests of doing: of assessing a being's Soul by virtue of its Actions, a fallacy as morose as the attribution of Meaning to Text. All text refers to other text, and all Behaviour refers to other behaviour; we have no access to another being's mind. We only have the capacity to 'ape' human behaviour with the hope that our comformity will appease another's consumer expectations.

Kresten insists that science is reliable because one can use it to control systems. Yet the post-modernists inverted this to say that power is not a measure of the sanctity of knowledge; knowledge is a measure of the will to power! All that any Sign describes is the relationship of Power betwixt a Signifier and a Signified; the sign its self has no A Priori value, because it is arbitrary and the Signifier, the Master in the Master-Slave Dialectic, can get away with it. Here we see how Humanism created science and how Heidegger, in rejecting Humanism, all so ungirdled science. The Chain of Being as an innate idea pre supposes that what rests higher up on the Chain is capable of accounting for what ever lies on a lower place of Consciousness, but the obverse can not be true. Thus the Master-Slave Dialectic is re born. Subject is divided from Object, (a gap that Heidegger re solved) the Object is represented by a sign, (of course: the division of Subject and Object was from the out set a sign) the sign is elevated to objectivity, and all animal rights abuses, environmental degradation, and Wattsian anti-materialism follow by moral justification from the Sign. The Sign is unified with other Signs and the Signs are arranged systematically in to a linguistic dogma that all people have access to but that none are allowed to criticise. This is not simply a church creed. This is Science.

Dm.A.A. 

The initial bias that dogs are inferior is necessary to establish the notion of objectivity ('objectification'), and a will to power is necessary to have the notion of knowledge (the i-It relationship). What you put in you get out, consciously or unconsciously. The researcher is judge jury and executioner because all empirical observations are scientifically meaning less until they have been represented by Signs, which all ways will be arbitrary. Think of racist policies in the past by way of analogy. We can commit the same unpardonable logocentric fallacy with any thing. If however we recognise that the division of subject and object is a linguistic formality elevated to metaphysical proportions by an age old elitist (Humanist) prejudice, then we see that we are what we observe, and if the Observation is an act of Intelligence (which now can have no antonym, having removed the Dialectic, so it MUST be) then Every Thing is Intelligent. And just in the same way that Behaviourism is Fascistic, de humanising in its Humanism, and epistemologically unwarranted, so it is when it is applied to animal species. All generalisations about species are marks of prejudice because scientists read and internalise each others' dogmas before corroborating them, and confirmation bias plays a large part in an arbitrary act where in one is literally making stuff up. It is an egregious fallacy to ascribe to an other a nature, to speak for those who can not speak, and to make a straw man of them. It is inhumane and unpardonable, and that it happens is only evidence of a will to power and a patriarchal elitist pretension. That Kresten lends value to the work of some one else only describes his hope that that power will trickle down to him; it is not empirical.

Dm.A.A.

All signification is an inter play of similarities and differences. To draw a conclusion is to construct an artifice as a Truth; it was precisely what Derrida tried to post pone. To call some thing 'significantly' similar or different is thus to admit to the arbitrariness of the signification. We impose these two Kantian categories as a false duality, based upon whether or not a certain behaviour accords with our pretensions about human nature, and the arbiter will all ways be our unconscious prejudices against the 'nature' assigned (=signed=signified) to the object. Moral maturity compels us to turn our intention in ward and to admit to this. Science, as a phenomenology of power, the sum of signs used to describe relationships of Power (as in a Newtonian Bureacratic Universe where in every thing carries out its social function with out free will), is ethically untrue.

Dm.A.A.

Madness is the tendency to equate things according to their similarities. Even a chemistry student can see the danger. What pigs share in common with dogs or what sets them both apart from humans is all ways a learned, logo centric prejudice projected upon the object. To dismiss the chakra system in favour of a mentality born from and confined to the third chakra, as most people ostensibly are, is sophistry.

Dm.A.A.