Dream Journal

Dream Journal

At one point in the dream, prior to the climactic episode, I saw a news head-line cross the bar at the bottom of a television screen. This was in a metropolitan area. Having escaped, somehow, the underground facility that I had been trapped in for months (lower chakra vibrations), I was now in the midst of a bustling metropolis that I recognize from earlier dreams: The District. This area looked akin to the Apple headquarters and downtown UCSD, as prior dreams had portrayed it (as with Oleg).

The head-line, in the midst of some vacuous skyscraper interior (I think), open to the air by many balconies like an airport (in aesthetic) that offered no escape by virtue of their height but were at least not claustrophobia-inspiring, however bureaucratic and impersonal, read: “Materialists report that there are still immaterialists/immanents in the world.”

My wandering about, pondering this message in frustration, at once with its self for the public insolence it portrayed and with myself for being unable to abandon it as a concern, segued into my return from the emporium to my neighbourhood.

I dreamt that there were three creatures that I had to save. Actually, if I am to be honest, there were two. Returning from a sort of emporium, I discovered, at night-time on my street (which again was a host to a bustling home where the Qafiti residence would be in Actual Life), that there were several animals running about the street. Two I took into my care: A cat and a rat. I thought that they would be great additions to my family. A coyote, if not several, were pacing the streets, and I worried that they might consume the cat and rat. I tried to hold them in my arms, as though I were grappling with Pumpkin. I was terrified. It is all so possible that Pumpkin was out and about as well at this time, though I doubt this in context of what followed. My father drove by, and I was thrilled at the opportunity to stow my newfound friends in the family van. I did so, and to my chagrin I found him fairly inattentive. Thankfully, in retrospect, his neurosis was not of a hostile, angry character. Yet my rage made up for this fact. I had to keep reminding him to be careful and not to let them escape.

He drove us home, where Pumpkin met my new friends. Soon, I miss-placed the rat. I was furious, panicking, and I troubled my father about this. This might have been the following day, when we were on our way again to the emporium. There was a big event taking place. My father kept assuring me that the rat was safe, though he provided no evidence for this fact. My rage and angst were reaching a breaking-point when I discovered, in the back of the car, what looked like a stuffed animal. The creature, which appears now to have been a hedgehog, had a zipper like Awilda’s pencil case in Actual Life. I opened it to find my rat inside, alive and safe. My father’s assurances, however feeble, seemed justified, but only, I might think, incidentally. He did not know, surely, about the pencil-case, but it seems impossible to ascertain.

Dm.A.A.

In Defense of Higher Consciousness

In Defense of Higher Consciousness

Higher Consciousness and Altered States of Consciousness are totally things. I need not corroborate this claim, but I will explain why some deny it, to my chagrin, and why they are wrong.

Enculturation is the arrangement of symbols in such a way that perception is confined to certain rules. Imagine the mind as a series of switches. At times, enough of these switches are On, and they create a brilliant pattern of light and colour that we call the Universe. Yet whenever this occurs, Levitch’s scorned “Anti-Cruise” comes in, and it begins to flip them off. Having adequately silenced them, for it has “all the authority of Reason” and the Light has only the “authority of Tenacity and Faith”, Reason flatters its self like a pompous tyrant: See, there was never anything to that after all. In fact, in fact, this is a banal claim. All that Reason could fairly attest to is the current condition, once it has been subverted to Reason. The reasoning is circular: It is “only so” because it is “only so”, and we shall render it “merely so” to prove that it is “merely so”. The very process of thought is the flipping of switches – the re-arrangement of ideas and perceptions – in accord with an existing [set of] prejudice[s]. Most poets will attest to this.

All Life is a series of, as Foucault pointed out, Similarities and Differences. Every style of thinking, including Reason, is a different permutation of these facts. You would not KNOW how to deem one opinion superior to another were it not, as you should have to ultimately admit, a matter of aesthetic preference. Different ideas as seen to be related to each other in a way that creates a given aesthetic, such as Reasonable or Mad, et cetera. The nature of this aesthetic cannot be ultimately quantified in Words, for it is the Space of which Words are the Matter; it transcends words, and it MUST do so, for otherwise it would have no authority. Yet we usually, as Watts pointed out, pay attention to the Form and ignore the Background.

Every set of philosophical presuppositions and proclamations is thereby valued by the degree to which it creates a given state of consciousness. All arguments in favour of one style of thinking over another are appeals to preference; one values one state of consciousness over another. Philosophy is ultimately the exploration of states of consciousness, and it cannot be a discipline that exercises discretion were it not that some states of consciousness must thereby be labeled “higher” than others, or in some other way superior. (Let’s not belabor the semantics.)

To out-rightly deny someone’s experience in this respect is to be a poor philosopher. Theoretically, higher consciousness is available to anyone. At any rate, Truth cannot be expected to be readily available to all “Rational” beings, when many of its permutations are transrational. It is an attitude of ignorance and entitlement to demand proof for such as phenomenon without having worked to attain it. Philosophy can go in one of two ways now: Either the perpetuation of existing aesthetics through the manipulation of symbols, or through the exploration of new aesthetics by the same token, foregoing Familiarity for Novelty.

Dm.A.A.

God Does Not Play Dice (Or if He does, He is no Mere Gambler).

God Does Not Play Dice (Or if He does, He is no Mere Gambler).

It is a fallacy to refer to God as though He were a law-maker prone to human error. The Paradox of the Law-giver out not to upset the intellectual, however restless, even at the very start.

The paradox reads: A law-giver has no a priori value according to which to ascertain the virtue of his law. Only once he has made a decision does that law become just (and virtuous), after the fact. [a posteriori.]

This means that a human law-giver is all ways arbitrary. The human in this example tries to be God, effectively, in the way that many have misconstrued God. Now, the fact that this is a paradox [and I use “fact” liberally and loosely] ought not to bother one. As Kierkegaard pointed out, God is a paradox. But even regarding the brilliance of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology, this may appear like a vacant appeal to Authority.

This paradox is prejudiced in favour of Atheism from the start. Only if there is no Divine Grace to hold the law-giver’s hand is his action arbitrary. Were God present to administer laws, the decisions of the person of Pure Faith would no longer be arbitrary, even if in meeting a challenge the human is still prone to botch it as in any well-designed video game.

So remains the question: Is God arbitrary? Is He comparable to the human law-giver? The paradox never raised contention, at least on the surface, with God’s existence, but rather with his nature as administrator. Yet one need go no further than our own human administration systems to see that, despite apparent disappointments (exaggerated poetically in the eyes of a cynic) owing to human error, as in the case of the human law-giver that botches a Divine Project, on the whole a system can be much more effective and efficient, to a mystifying and miraculous degree that is never fully comprehended by any one of its parts [like Kafka’s Law], than an individual operating in isolation.

So is God arbitrary? If God is a system that encompasses all of existence, its Order is PROBABLY of a higher degree of both efficiency and mystery than just the experience of a human being operating in His absence. So how is the one, a system of relative chaos from the perspective of contemporary physics, to judge fairly the nature of a Divine Order [again, from the perspective of Physics, everything is in Harmony, and one might infer that this harmony is no mere Baroque Cadence] by COMPARISON WITH ITS SELF?

In truth, all arbitrariness is the absence of comparison. We make decisions THINKING them to be arbitrary but IGNORING the possibility (and probability, given dreams and other evidence of a transcendent Unconscious) that our actions are guided by more intelligent motives. Is Revelation not the comprehension of these motives, and Grace not the surrender to them (which is not a pitiable surrender but a bearing of grave responsibility)?

When an action is arbitrary, we judge it to be so because of our own masculinist prejudices. Why should something Random and Chaotic by reduced to an inferior position? Given a more integrated view, does this not resolve the problem of Evil? Perhaps all talk of God’s Goodness is merely consolation for us who worry so much about man-made laws of Bad and Good. Perhaps GREAT and AWESOME are over-used in secular conversation.

There is another prejudice immanent in this inquiry. It is that if Man following God is not arbitrary, God at least, as the Ground and the Ultimate Bureacrat, is. Yet what does it means to be arbitrary? When we judge our selves to be arbitrary in our actions, we feel that we fail to meet the “a priori necessity” of providing justification and warrant for our action. Yet all such things, in a world that is fundamentally NOT hierarchical, are merely comparisons to other things that we have done in the past or, if we are more sophisticated thinkers, objects of concern within our present(s). So we are arbitrary to the degree that we appear to be disconnected. [As Heidegger pointed out, Appearance (or Semblance) is Reality, inextricably, in different forms, to speak in scientific language. No false dichotomies, please.] But a Supreme Unity by this definition could never be Disconnected. As Schoenpenhauer put it, what appears at first to be a paradox is seen later to have been incontrovertible: A truism. The root of our problem at the beginning was that we construed of God as the Ground of Being upon which everything was founded, but we did not comprehend Him as including all that was “founded upon it”. In fact, no notion of a “foundation” (which is “arbitrary”) should any longer be necessary.

Dm.A.A.

A Kritik of Attempts to Stifle Beauty.

A Kritik of Attempts to Stifle Beauty.

You are not defined by your perception of your self alone, but all so by your perception of the World around you. The beauty* of Art is in that it divulges the disparate ambiguity of Human Perceptions and casts doubt upon the existence of a Noumenal, objective world. Ideology moves in the opposite direction, operating upon a lower beam entirely. Ideology seeks to unify all consciousness into one “whole”. Yet just as there is no evidence for the existence of a Thing in Its Self, so there is no evidence that such a Hegelian unity could be possible. The condition of Fascism is probably one of mutually assured isolation, wherein every individual perceives the world as he is inclined to, in isolation, but this isolation becomes narcissistic because it is presumed to be “The Truth”, and in the absence of free criticism it is impossible to challenge this delusion.

Why I have the right to call women beautiful:

1.       Art is Phenomenologically important. It is a mode of perception. Beauty, in its true sense, is the perception of a love object. It is not limited to one person, as in an obsession, all though such a peculiarity (as in a dream wherein a gray world is populated by only one coloured feminine figure) could be benign and sentimental. Without the perception of Beauty, a “complete” picture of Reality could never exist.

2.       Beauty is a perception of Love. Beauty is a style of perception wherein the distinction between Subject and Object dissolves. Peculiarities are seen to be unitive rather than divisive. Because they are peculiarities, a woman’s beauty will all ways be distinct, both from that of other women but all so from that of men in general (depending upon the observer), even in a world that is revered on the whole.

3.       Beauty is a feminine quality. This is not the same thing as a female quality, all though women are supposed to possess more feminine qualities. The integration of the Anima into the Male Ego, as in a symbolic reading of the Damsel in Distress archetype, will tend to create the perception of Beauty and the honoring of femininity, whereas the absence of this (in the case of an inflated ego responding to the tyranny of patriarchal ideology [and Feminism is entirely patriarchal]) will created turgidity and put all things at the proverbial “distance of objectivity as though she were an enemy to be shot”.

4.       The Ethos is self-contradictory. If the Collective is permitted to judge my actions without access to my psyche and motives, I should be allowed, with relatively little derision, to make observations of other’s aesthetic appearances, since phenomenologically the two are practically indistinct. IDEOLOGICALLY, they are severed from each other, but in its raw form it is one process: The perception of Reality as it Appears rather than a presumption upon its True, “hidden” (and probably non-existent) “Nature”.

5.       The perception of one’s own “Beauty”, in a Fascist state, cannot happen without the Collective. The only way to do this would be to reconcile Individualism with Collectivism by insisting that Aesthetics are entirely an individual phenomenon, rejecting collective judgements as not “truly” aesthetical. (Were they, they would be equally adequate.) Yet if the Society is not responsible for one’s self-image, then why criticize how others perceive you, if they can be safely presumed to simply be perceiving you NOT according to the oppressive trends of some sociological phenomenon but according to, in fact, their own aesthetic tendencies, entirely individuated except expressed in relatable language?

6.       To blame others for one’s own insecurities is irresponsible. Just as we depend, if any kind of Collectivity could exist at all, upon others to criticize us morally, even if ultimately we can be the solitary judges of our own characters, so it follows that the same principle can apply in aesthetics. Others can call you beautiful (to be treated with respect) or ugly (to be treated with derision, for that is what was intended usually), but ultimately these will be at your disposal in constructing your own self-mage.

7.       To value your self-image over the perceptions of others is Narcissistic. That is okay, but why should I join your Collectivist movement, lying down before your harsh moral imperatives, if I am to be barred from any true Solidarity of consciousness that can only come about whenever another Contradicts me?

I could go on.

Dm.A.A.

A Kritik of Gender Neutrality, I.

A Kritik of Gender Neutrality, I.

I all ways found in the words Man, He, et cetera, a shelter that housed both and all as though it were a warm café on a rainy day. It was gender-neutral to my mind, for ‘man’ occurred within ‘woman’ and ‘human’, and ‘he’ occurred within ‘she’. From extreme youth, learning the English Language, I found this peculiarly delightful. It was as though ‘he’ and ‘man’ were the ribs of which ‘she’ and ‘woman’ were flesh. I felt no sense of inferiority to women, as I might have, but only interest in that each woman, as though out of manners, was accorded the special dignity of a gender-specific pronoun (for ‘he’ was so often applied with implicit gender-neutrality) and five letters to delineate the sex rather than the mere three that comprised the root-word. ‘Man’ was all ways such a root-word, for obviously it did not delineate a Thing-In-Its-Self (as a logocentric dogma would imply); ‘Mankind’ was valid for its utility – alone, by the same token – as meaning ‘all words of the kind that include the root word ‘man’.’ ‘Humankind’ never affected such a utility, for it could only apply to all words containing ‘human’ (such as ‘superhuman’), unless it were ‘tacked onto’ some Thing-In-Its-Self in a logocentric manner.

Dm.A.

On the Fallacy of Reason.

In the enterprise of Reason, many leaps are taken and forgotten. Might it be said they are forsaken [mistakenly]?

In a text, there is no Reason intrinsic to it. What we call Reason is a series of extrapolations that abstract away from the given text and make it appear as though connections existed betwixt phrases and words where in fact no such connections are ever intrinsic to the text its self; they are entirely the product of the reader’s imagination. Thus the leaps of faith that we call “logical consistency” contain WITHIN THEIR SELVES what we call contradiction – the opposite of consistency, by definition, and therefore its absence. All contradiction is the absence of consistency, and vice versa. Need I elaborate further along the lines of Reason, aiming to establish myself in this camp, now that my idea, if entertained, would lay waste to it? Perhaps, because an idea by its self without a proliferation of other ideas enshrouding it is nowadays accorded the dignity of a solitary grass-blade struggling against an overpowering layer of cement.

Since all pretense towards Reason is therefore extrapolated FROM a text, so it is that all accusations of “contradiction” are equally arbitrary. Might it not be said that any contradiction could be just as easily called a paradox? After all: Why presume that Reality Its Self would accord with the illusory principle of Reason, if [even] language does not do so in Reality?

Dm.A.A.

Men Are Just As Likely to be Raped as Women Are.

Men Are Just As Likely to be Raped as Women Are.

The statistics would suggest that there are more female rape victims than male rape victims.

This means that a minority of men are raped. This is not only a smaller minority of the male population than the number of women victims in the female population. This is a minority within the population Of Victims.

Given this estrangement, felt by the presence of these statistics, it is understandable that many men would rather die than to admit to being victims. And many do.

Since the statistics themselves predispose fewer men to report victimhood than women do, and since this all so means that more women will tend to make false accusations than men do (because a greater dignity is accorded, judging by these statistics, to female victims than to male victims) it is quite possible that so many male victims are still in hiding that an IDEAL survey would yield a 50/50 split, roughly. In short: It is conceivable that roughly as many men are raped as women, or have been since we began the survey.

There is just as much a likelihood that a man will be raped as that a woman will be, and the perpetrator will not necessarily be male.

These victims will tend to withdraw into isolation and tortured obscurity.
The musician Elliott Smith was one example.
I have all so heard a group of young high school boys at a McDonald's, members of a football team, recall JOKINGLY their friend, a fellow boy and I think member of the team, having reported being raped to the speaker, who treated the report with cavalier confusion as the boys sat around the table, baked.

Never judge by statistics. They all most all ways lie.

dm.A.A.