On Reality.

On Reality.

 

 

Nothing is permanent. How can it be? If we attribute Reality to the world as it appears as represented by consciousness when our basic philosophical foundations upon which conscious values are established ignore Uncertainty and Impermanence, then we suffer.

 

Reality is determined by what we attribute Meaning to. Loss aversion, or attachment, as Buddhists call it, is the tendency to cling to an existing conscious set of values. The pressure to do this is great in a society wherein Freud is prevalent. Where the ego is defined as the Reality principle and its absence is defined as insanity, the latter of which is condemned and punished with the hostility of an Inquisitorial staff, ego-death is avoided at all costs.

 

Yet, for the neurotic conscious of his or her own neurosis to escape the trap of questioning her sanity, she must let go of what she values as Sanity. The alternative is to withdraw into subservience to dogma and metaphysics that will only worsen the neurosis.

 

Insanity is not a fate but a process. Sometimes, if an illness runs its course, it will heal the psyche. The notion of a “hopelessly” insane person may be phony and absurd, representing only the condition of an immensely Liberated and/or Individuated person whose condition passes the understanding of the observer.

 

Only by falling through the net of what Reality appears to be to the Ego can we arrive at another constant. There is a superior solace in embracing Uncertainty if we can attribute Reality to this Uncertainty. Once the hole in the net has been torn, the net disintegrates, as does the World as it appears from the perspective of the old Ego, given time. Yet the World Itself does not disappear. By virtue of the Unconscious and the Second Subject, we are still HERE, and we are at peace in the process of Change. We establish an expanded frame of reference. The cycle begins anew.

 

Dm.A.A.

On the Inevitability of Hypocrisy in a Post-Modern Mode of Being.

On the Inevitability of Hypocrisy in a Post-Modern Mode of Being.

 

Thought and Action can be delineated as two separate phenomena. This may be an illusory distinction, but insofar as one is deeply possessed of such an illusion by virtue of Conditioning, it may be practical to regard these two as separate.

 

Thought is not always required for Action.

Thought may have virtue until the threshold where Thought ends and Action begins is reached.

 

Hypocrisy occurs if this threshold is not crossed successfully.

 

The greatest barrier to this crossing is Doubt.

 

The greatest false justification for this sort of Doubt, which is illusory as opposed to the constructive Doubt necessary for Philosophical exploration, is Dogmatic Post-modernism.

 

If I presume that I cannot know a thing, this presupposes that I KNOW that I cannot know a thing.

 

This is a conscious pretension. It suggests that I know with CERTAINTY that I am unaware of a fact, simply because it is Unconscious. This becomes void when we consider the presence of the Unconscious as a second subject that may very well KNOW a thing, but does not speak directly with consciousness except in the case of schizophrenia and other so-called “mental disorders”.

 

This would suggest that our delineation of mental disorders is misguided when we take an attitude of condemnation towards people with them.

 

Segregation, forced drugging, and a sense of having a “superior” knowledge or “Sanity” is therefore unjust. It is a passive way of condemnation.

Dm.A.A.

On the Absurdity of Collective Knowledge.

On the Absurdity of Collective Knowledge.

 

Suppose that I am watching a video on the history of Rock and Roll. This video is on youtube. I make, halfway through the video, a joke in the Comments section of the video. The joke makes reference to the song “Anarchy in the U.K.”, by virtue of a pun.

 

At one point later on in the video, a man being interviewed in the video makes reference to a band known as the Sex Pistols.

 

I have a vague suspicion that the Sex Pistols wrote a song called “Anarchy in the U.K.”. Yet I am uncertain.

 

I perform a Google search. I search for the song “Anarchy in the U.K.”. I find the name of the group The Sex Pistols. It is in the context of this understanding that I realize that, with some probability, the entire nature of my joke depended upon my unconscious knowledge of the fact that the Sex Pistols were banned in the United Kingdom.

 

I would conclude, using tribal reasoning, that “The man and I were referring to the same band and the same historical instance.” He had, in fact, mentioned their ban as well, but in the form of an informed historical opinion rather than a feeble joke.

 

There is a fallacy in this.

 

In order for me to make this equation, I should have to make another set of equations:

 

1.        I should have to equate “Anarchy in the U.K.”, in the instance that I used it, with the formally recognized song, thus changing it from a matter of personal experience to Collective Knowledge.

2.       I should have to equate the visible text “the Sex Pistols”, with an image in my mind created by Memory.

3.       Only after having done this can I then equate that image in my mind, over the course of time, with the audible words that I heard the man pronounce.

4.       I should then, using the transitive property, have to equate the auditory input with the visual input.

5.       I should presume that his experience was identical to mine.

There are several problems with this. Imagine the scenario, in the first place, that I can speak the English language, but I would be unable to read or write it. I should be entirely helpless in making this connection. Yet there are also several fallacies at work here. Between steps two and three, time elapses, and therefore the image in my mind may change, unless it is truly static. This is an opportunity for distortion. I can never have Total Certainty that this has not happened, at least not from the solitary perspective of Consciousness. There may also be, for this reason, a problem with employing the transitive property at step 4. In the absence of Memory, this equation would be impossible. Yet the largest fallacy appears to be in Step Five. The entire relevance of the equation seems to be grounded in the presumption that his experience with the band is relevant to mine. Yet because each of us occupies a different Universe, this may not be so. His interpretation of his memories of the band has little to do with my interpretation of my own memories. Either set of interpretations would also have little relevance to the Current Condition of the band. We see an immediate departure, therefore, from the apparent clarity of “mutual understanding”, or Kantian intersubjectivity. The irrelevance of Memory would suggest that no further authority can be leant to Common Knowledge, at least where it is defined by History rather than immediate experience. We may still be able to "share" experience when it Happens, but we may be unable to say with fairness that we "have shared" a moment. Yet this may be an extreme conclusion. A more apparently reasonable middle-ground would probably be to say that, whereas a Collective Phenomenon understood through Directed Thinking can be shared, the immediate experience of revelation cannot be shared in the same way. I can Describe Non-directed thinking in terms of language, but I cannot Express it. In other words, if I have had a non-verbal experience, and you have not, no degree of language would enable you to understand the experience. I cannot "make you see it" as I could make you see a style of logical thought, if that even is possible. It cannot be Expressed. Yet if we have both had the same experience, hypothetically, and I can artfully Describe my experience in language, then perhaps the description would resonate with you because you have had the same experience. This would belong to the type of Universal that Kohlberg makes reference to in his psychology. We would both be, in that instance, on the Sixth Level of Moral Development. Yet in the case of my relation to the man in the youtube video, that would be an instance of probably the Fourth Level, wherein the World is still understood through agreement with others, yet without considerable consideration for the distance between one person's subjective reality and the other's.

Here we see a reprisal of the "Rule of Three". There seems to be, in many instances in the history of philosophy, psychology, and religion, the theme of three steps. This could be seen as analogous to the three stages of life in a butterfly. In the first stage, we are an innocent caterpillar. In the second stage, we are in the awkward predicament of a cocoon. In the last stage, we are a splendid butterfly.

Kierkegaard makes reference to such stages in the transitions from the Aesthetic way of Being to the Moral Way and, finally, to the Religious Step. Neitzche refers to the three stages of Life as that of the Sheep, the Lion, and finally the Child.

There is, in the Bible, the theme of the Garden of Eden. Man begins in innocence, not knowing the difference between Good and Evil. He is banished to the difficulty of Living with a loss of that innocence. Yet, by eating of the Other Tree, with luck, he returns to the original state of peace.

The Positive Psychologists posit three styles of Happiness. One is analogous to Kierkegaard's aesthetic life: A life of pleasure. The second is the life of Engagement and Flow. The third, at the top of the hierarchy, is the life of Meaningful Correspondence with Others.

We can say that Kohlberg's stages three and four of Moral Development, which comprise Conventional Morality, are the innocent stage wherein the world "makes sense" through Collective Agreement. Stage five, the beginning of Post-conventional Morality, is the dissolution of the agreed-upon sphere of World. Stage six is a return to the comfort of a kind of Universal, but only through oftentimes arduous work and a true appreciation for solitude and the difference between different People.

dm.A.A.

On the Matter of Conditioning by “Past” Events.

On the Matter of Conditioning by “Past” Events.

 

The irrelevance of Memory as I have thus delineated it does NOT, however, negate the relevance of Conditioning by Past Events. In this circumstance, the word “Past” has a different context. Although, using verbal logic, the notion of being “influencedsby Past Occurrences” seems to contradict my thesis, it, upon closer examination, corroborates it.

 

Suppose that my father, whilst I was very young, criticized my writing as being unoriginal. Unconscious of the reason for my paranoia, I became excessively vigilant of hiding my writing from him. This would appear to suggest the relevance of Memory. Yet since the conditioning affected me Unconsciously and memories exist in Consciousness, Memory is of yet irrelevant.

 

Suppose that, one day, I become aware of the fact that I have probably been thus conditioned. This would suggest the relevance of Memory, because I have to remember the original insult in order to understand its current effect upon me. Yet this is a prime example of a situation wherein Neville has the Remembrall, not Malfoy: I am not CONTROLLING or MANIPULATING Memories in “Bad Faith”; THEY ARISE spontaneously BY VIRTUE OF the Will of the Unconscious, and their arisal and Relevance is momentary, as in the metaphor of the crater.

 

My original thesis serves to dissolve the illusion of a Platonic timeline “from” Past “through” Present “to” Future. This assertion stands in the face of Conditioning. To affirm that one has been Conditioned is actually to deny the illusion of Time and therefore Past as it is understood in the context of that illusion. This moment is seen to be no different from that moment wherein my father insulted me “many years ago”; it is the SAME moment. I cannot blame him in an attempt to renounce responsibility, in fairness. I cannot blame the Past for “causing” this event as though all authority rested in the abstract metaphysical region known as History. The authority rests Now, and it always has. I am empowered right NOW to overcome the conditioning that happened NOW. Yet should I misattribute the Cause of this Conditioning to the “past”, I should make appear irrelevant, in my mind, the true nature of this Cause, its nature being Present, not Past, and, by condemning it to the Metaphysical realm, renounce Responsibility for it.

 

Dm.A.A.

On the Absurdity of Analysing “Past” Events.

On the Absurdity of Analysing “Past” Events

 

Nothing can be learned from the analysis of memories, with one exception: An insight into one’s current subjective prejudices which come into play in the personal mythologisation of a set of scattered mental images, unheard sounds, and other imagined sensations into a “cohesive” fiction known as “My Life”.

 

In this sense, the one who is asked to refer to any definition of his or herself by which he or she should be compelled to use Memory would best meet the criteria for Sanity should he or she NOT produce a cohesive narrative but a scattered “mess” of apparently unassociated phrases that lack any kind of traditionally accepted narrative structure.

dm.A.A.

On the Importance of Little Things and Thought Patterns.

On the Importance of Little Things and Thought Patterns.

 

It is pretty much agreed upon today by members of both the scientific community and the philosophical community that there is no “outside world” which could be described as, as Philip K Dick put it, “exist[ing] when [we] cease to believe in it.” Heisenberg’s allegations that, observing the process, we change it can now be applied not only to physics with some degree of what the modern man can call Certainty, but to the psyche of the individual as well. It is generally agreed by a school of thought known as Correlationism that there is nothing in the world as we perceive it that does not depend upon our thoughts, and so the New Age way of thinking which seems to suggest that our thinking can alter the Universe seems more pardonably optimistic (if it is, in fact, optimistic) and even less far-fetched. Each human being seems to be at the center (or somewhere) of his or her OWN, Personal Universe. Multiverse Theory may be just a modern way of making reference to the experience of another individual’s mystery, for in the wake of Rationalism and all dogmas that predated it we lost a sense of the Other Human as being truly an alien organism, if not an entirely different planet or World of experience. Yet all of the different Paths seem to be converging now on one truth: That each of us is a unique Universe, by any definition of the Universe that we can make with any serious consideration free from dogma or laziness, and that each interaction with another person is shared not within one Cosmos but between two dramatically different ones.

 

Given this awareness, the existentialist assertion of Individual Responsibility becomes increasingly apparent. If What I Think determines not only how I see the World but also how it (by any philosophically sensible definition of World) is, then I have to be especially careful in what thought I entertain. After all, if Multiverse Theory is not only true but applicable to interpersonal relations, my thoughts will in turn affect the entire Universe of which ever Other person I come into contact with.

 

Given this, the naive notion that one should be more wary of the “Outside world” than the sanctity of one’s own thoughts holds no further merit. To make the argument that one is too victimized, either by socioeconomic conditions or personal tragedy, to “spend time thinking (or meditating) about something”, becomes a blind withdrawal from responsibility. This can be understood theoretically without even any need to pay attention to the psychosomatic effects of things like poetry and moods.

 

Given all of this, Little Things become exceedingly important. Where our fairly medieval conventional approach to psychology would always describe Attention to Minute Detail as a neurosis, it is not always so. In fact, to make that dogmatic blanket-statement dooms the patient who may suffer from something like, for instance, a Negative Anima.

 

The functioning of the Negative Anima in men tends to make them attribute excessive and pointless attention to detail which escalates into an Obsession. The way that many men deal with this is by constructing a very patriarchal ego that tries to repress the Negative Anima by condemning all attention to detail as neurotic. This is what the psychologists oftentimes mistakenly reinforce.

 

Yet it is precisely this dogmatic attitude that, whilst keeping the negative Anima “in”, metaphorically speaking, keeps any chance of salvation Out. The way to cure a Negative Anima is to redirect its energy to a Constructive Anima. In this instance, attention to detail becomes not a compulsion but a delight, and sanity (as it is defined as Cognitive Peace) is restored. Yet the very distinction between compulsion and delight would be exactly the kind of minute distinction that the patriarchal guardian ego would reject.

 

The basic presupposition of the dogmatic modern psychologists is that one can cure an excessive attention to detail by drawing the individual’s attention to the “Bigger Picture” and the “Future”. Yet both of these promises are philosophically and spiritually ridiculous. To claim that certain things or thoughts (and remember that things and thoughts may in fact be the same thing, as Alan Watts points out when he explains that the words “think” and “thing” share a root) are “more important” than others is incredibly dogmatic and lacking in constructive seriousness because they represent a regression to what philosophers call Dogmatic Metaphysics. To attribute anything close to an “absolute” value to a certain object of consciousness or state of subjectivity (the two of which appear to be the same to the correlationist philosopher) is to presuppose that there is a metaphysical dimension wherein “Things are definitely and Absolutely important”.

 

Zen teaches us to overcome this neurosis by drawing our attention again to little things. This is also the art of many forms of poetry and many other forms of Art. It is also what is done in the process of reintegrating the Constructive Anima that I have hitherto described.

 

If one defines Sanity by what appears Important, one runs a tremendous risk of a break with the Unconscious. If, for instance, I define Sanity as “what gives me a sense of success”, then I cease to feel myself to be sane when I inexplicably fail to feel successful. Suppose that I am a mathematician. This I have attributed importance to (my occupation) and have thus learned to derive a sense of Success from the proper execution of a mathematical problem.

 

Suppose that one day I awake and find that I can no longer calculate, WITH CERTAINTY, the space of time between two events.

Suppose that I saw an old friend that I had not seen in four years. I see her once in 2013, The second-to-last time that I had seen her was around the same time of year in 2009.

 

FORMALLY, I have not seen her in four years. Yet, all of a sudden, I begin to question whether or not this is true. This is because, inexplicably at first, I can no longer feel the sense of SUCCESS that I have conditioned myself to feel at the proper execution of a mathematical problem.

 

Having identified my ego as that of a mathematician, I am naturally very insulted. I begin to repeatedly do all kinds of figurative mental gymnastics to prove to myself that 2013 minus 2009 equals 4. I scour my mind for any lapse in sequence. This is difficult, of course, for I am essentially constructing a house from mud in a swamp and then trying to enter it while it is all ready in a process of decay.

 

I begin to think: I must be going mad. How can I not make this simple calculation? How can I, a mathematician, fail to do the arithmetic that a five-year-old child could do? And then I should begin to wonder if, in fact, a five-year-old child could complete such a simple task of arithmetic. And I would begin to obsess over that.

 

What I may find is that, because any calculation requires time, time is working against me in this instance. If I cannot complete the calculation automatically because there is no Pavlovian sense of success to indicate that I have been successful, I have to resort to a process which may have several steps:

 

1.       The envisioning of the number “2013”

2.       The equation of this number with the second event.

3.       The envisioning of the number “2009”.

4.       The equation of this number with the first event.

5.        

a.       The counting of all of the integers between 2009 and 2013. AND

b.      The addition of “1” to this sum of these integers.

OR

6.       The subtraction of 2013 from 2009 (somewhat of an automatic process).

7.       And finally, the attribution of this numerical sum (four) to the length of time between event one and event two.

The problems here are exceedingly subtle. In the first place, each step of this process is an event in and of itself. The time it takes for me to go from step 1 to step 7 may occupy several seconds. During that time, I may all ready have forgotten what the first step was. This may easily happen in a situation wherein this sequence of thoughts is only one of perhaps an infinite multitude of possible paths to arrive at “four”. The awareness of these paths, coupled with a basic sense of humility, should suggest that I have no way of knowing by the arrival at step 7 which path I had taken. I may have accidentally repeated a step or skipped a step, but I would not know, because memories are fallible.

 

The predicament could be described by Zen Buddhists as a situation of your innermost mind playing a trick on your rational mind. It can be described more “innocently” in this koan: I last saw my friend in 2013. The second-to-last time that I saw her, it was 2009. Yet, in between, four years have not passed. How is that so?

 

If our mathematician contemplated this long enough, he should come to a sudden realization that in Zen is called satori: Time is an illusion. Your feelings towards your friend have not changed over the course of this time, and so all calculations are unimportant. Because they are unimportant, they are meaningless. Because they are meaningless and abstract, they are not Real.

 

In this case, for all intents and purposes, 2013 – 2009 does NOT = 4.

 

The Unconscious, as the seat of the Buddha mind, knows this, of course. It is for this reason that, when we are faced with the impending annihilation of a set of conscious values, one of the earliest symptoms is the withdrawal of our conventional, conditioned responses to things and thoughts.

 

In the absence of a sense of Success on the part of the mathematician, he or she is left with an empty vessel: A Consciousness of things that have no meaning. In such a situation wherein a proper calculation is of equal merit to a miscalculation, all sense of a “proper” calculation dissolves. Anything goes, and yet nothing goes.

 

Clinging excessively to a dogmatic idea of Sanity may therefore be, in fact, the perpetuation of a neurosis. Definitionally, a neurotic is one who does not know that she is neurotic. Yet it is possible to know that one is neurotic if one knows that one is neurotic but misattributes the cause of the neurosis to certain faculties. In this instance, the neurotic tries so hard “not to be crazy” that she in turn behaves in a neurotic manner. If we are to accept the popular definition of insanity as the repetition of the same action with the expectation of different results, she would match our description perfectly. She would insist on ignoring the will of the Unconscious and repeatedly exercising Will to repeat the same thought experiment in an infinite number of its possible variations. Her calculations would never yield anything REAL, by any definition, because the sense of Success that had hitherto defined Reality and therefore Sanity for her has been withdrawn, lying outside of her conscious control and in the domain of the Unconscious.

The only way that such a neurotic may come to health by her own choice would be to accept “insanity” as she had defined it. By renouncing a dogmatic view of thought and the World, as well as the relation of one to the other, she has freed herself from an excessive dependency upon one way of thinking and therefore one form of Universe.

 

Dm.A.A.

On the Fallibility and Fallacy of Memory.

I will begin with several visual metaphors.

Imagine, in the first instance, a crater in an active volcano. This is distinct from a caldera in that it has a solid surface. It is akin to one because it is situated over an active stream of magma. From time to time, a ball of magma is shot into the air through a hole that appears in the surface of the caldera, by virtue of pressure from underground. It then becomes lava, formally.

Imagine that this lava, whilst airborne, solidifies into a stone called pumice. This is a fairly ashen gray rock with many holes running through it like the tunnels of exceedingly minute insects. By the time it hits the ground, it is solid.

Imagine watching four of these thus soar into the air, observing the process from a frame of reference at the base of the volcano.

You see each as it flies into the air, in succession, and you watch it "disappear" into the crater. They disappear from view.

You ascend the volcano, against your better judgement, to investigate the rocks.

Upon arrival, you see four nearly identical stones at the base of the concave surface. You cannot tell which is which. If asked which soared first into the air and which soared fourth, you would not be able to produce more than a good guess.

In this illustration, the balls of pumice represent memories. When they are airborne, this represents the formation of memories at the moment of Experience.

Imagine a second metaphor. Imagine that the four memories were puzzle pieces. You have to arrange them into their original image. Unfortunately, this cannot be done with certainty. There are several combinations which would appear to create a cohesive image. You would arrange them into whatever picture appears to make the most sense. Yet that would be determined by your frame of reference.

Imagine that I asked you to recall the major events of a day that befell recently. You would probably, usually, be able to recall them. With luck, you would be able to even recollect the order in which they befell.

Yet consider an instance wherein I ask you to recall extremely minute details that befell within seconds of one another.

The probable likelihood is that you would have difficulty remembering in what order they befell. You would be able to synthesise a good hypothesis, but that would be the product of what appears to make sense to you at the time. To claim Certainty in this consideration is misleading. With a different or expanded frame of reference, you may rearrange the events in your mind to form a different storyline. The differences would be subtle.

You would be just as helpless as though you stood at the rim of the crater and had to tell me in what order the stones hit the ground.

dm.A.A.