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.