Hooting with the owls
Written in Summer 2005.
This one's a doozy. Feel free to skip it if you find it boring. The people referred to are posters to the Internet, with whom I have had debates.
Some of the ideas in here, however, I believe are worth looking at.
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So Mr. Bat had a fine ole night hooting with the owls! And not only the owls, but the howls. The owls make the howls and the howls make the owls and over the backbone of the H they form a mirror image of each other. As in, eviLive.
It's been a fine night for Mr. Bat, out on the streets of Alexandria. First I read Mr. Khodorkovsky's epistle from the jail: "True freedom is within," "a result of pursuing one's principles" - and of course the main question to ask is, "Are your principles truly yours?" And then, "By what authority?" And then, "After what process?" And finally, "To what extent true?" (and of course the idea that Scorpio stuff is destructive: No, you first reject what you don't like, then you figure out what you do like and affirm it). (and the correlated concept of self-awareness: Self-awareness in terms of a false set of beliefs is wrong and can only be done in terms of true beliefs) (and the corollary concept of taking responsibility for one's life: That only becomes possible truly when you've studied and experienced and have an informed knowledge of what you truly want: all else leads to wasted lives). After philosophy class (continuing education program) at the community college, in which was discussed Spinosa's concept of God being self-existing manifesting through all people who are nodes (and it is the purpose of the node, I presume, to refract the light until it creates a picture that is most appealing, with each node shaped by substance & reshaping substance and self and - hey, Mr. Self-existing One, could you please notice me and what I've done with your substance (oh and tell me the true causes of things, in what cases it's linear & in what cases it's over-determined & in what cases it's a web & of what or what behind the web (and as a mode could I be good this way or could I be good another way or could I let you be me for a second so you could show me the ropes or could you let me in your shoes here for a moment so I have compassion for you or could you and I work together here for a second and to reshape one another with our essentiality so that we could establish flux between the self-existing and the merely-existing and allow the emanation to respond to the core with experimental results its actions [true/false/transcendent] while the core enlightens the emanation with its continued manifestations of self-existence) - I see this fashionable black woman rubbing lotion on her hands, and I say she smells tasty, and she asks "Do you want to eat me?"
So I get out of class, it's 10:25, my bus leaves, it's a gorgeous summer night so I walk down the street. I keep hearing "Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die" - while professors leave the parking lot, one in a Beetle - and I keep merrily heading down the road, occasionally kissing a flower. I see the den of the enchanted she-spider hanging in the air between the trees. That den of the enchanted she-spider, thank the grounds of being for that, I can just get lost in those embraces and those enfoldments and that gentle caressing mist between trees seeking to shroud life with its delicacy and bring it into its complete resplendor. And all night long it's something with "95" (year of the enchanting she-spider) it's something with "56" (year of my muse) or the next number "57" (year of Sputnik in space - not coincidental) it's something with "7:07" or "9:11" or all along the same line.
I remember from previously: The movement outward is hardest from most closed-minded places and easiest from most open-minded. The worst ones are the hardest, while the better ones are freer because much of the work has been done for you. The places with greatest political and social obstacles are ones that have least to offer, and whose people have most legitimate reason to go somewhere else. The same is true for all propaganda, family-values, militaristic, religious, Marxist, feminist or any other: The less the place has to offer and the worse it is, the more propaganda and moral bludgeoning it requires. Which creates an inverse relationship between actual moral quality of the social order and amount of moralizing done by the social order. A social order that is most malignant is one that is most moralizing. The more malignant, the more moralizing; the more actually morally upstanding, the less propaganda and moralizing required. Which is the reason that moralizing societies lead to the worst abuses against people. Some think this is coincidental, I see direct and inevitable relationship.
I see some toughs loitering outside King's Pizza and wait at bus station, walking around the corner and stand at bus stop watching restorateurs leave in cabs, and here I am again in treespace while bus does not come and I keep walking. And there I run into the whole sociopath nonsense and say in response that that is a concept that underlies the economic system and political system and to apply it to Wollmann without applying it to Gates is despicable - and then I keep reiterating: What we have here is a science selling out to a political interest: adopting as health the interest of American middle class and its dogmas and pathologizing what speaks otherwise: That it speaks to American dogmas rather than Soviet ones does not make it any less of a manipulation. And then I notice something more on this issue: Through manipulation of social climate and attitudes and actions and reactions pursuant those attitudes, consequences are assigned to actions that are not natural, but rather artificial & create an impression of good actions being bad and bad actions being good. We see that run through all societies and times. We have, for example, Pakis saying that romance is disastrous and proving it by killing those who fall in love. We have, for example, Cubans saying that business is antisocial and proving it by killing those who do business. The idea of God being through all things is used to excuse deliberate social manipulation, by nodes and creators of nodes, as though those were divinely ordained rather than manmade. The obvious problem is that substance may manifest through nodes, but nodes, involving choice, mean that they are not obligated to the ground of being but are as such nodes capable of deliberate choice, God-ordained or not!
And then it is used to impose this order as though it was divine. Which requires calling the bluff. If God is through all things, in other words, then not only the order you create but the order I create is manifestation of God - as is the order created by any of your other enemies.
So we have environmental science claim that environment exists according to its order, unless disturbed by man (devil #1). We have systems like Confucianism that claim society as a matter of social order having a place for everyone - place according to divine order - unless that order is disturbed by man's ego (devil #2). We have economic science that has applied this to economic activity and said that all things are guided by "invisible hand" when in a "free-market" context, with everyone competing against everyone, unless disturbed by intellectually conceived and goal-directed political action (devil #3), even as this same science adopts will and ego and montarily defined self-interest (combination of devil #1 and devil #2) as basic concept of legitimate human interest and claims the competition within framework of law to be the natural order. After which we have the concept of intellectual-political action uniting people in what it believes to be intellectually right ideology; that seeks to educate people based on intellectual and philosophical ideas and shared interest (and which the economic mindset sees as meddling or evil or arrogance - the same way the social interest was to the economic mindset from the beginning - even as the media-intellectual-political ideas created anyway necessitate for the people to move toward a place of politics and philosophy and awareness of their civilization beyond the dogmas of laissez-faire and even to protect laissez-faire demand political and intellectual action on the part of the business class). In this political-intellectual order the devil (devil #4) is spirituality, which main proponents of this ideology see as being one or another form of mental malfunction - much like the capitalists think of the political-intellectual. Once that stops working, after many corpses and disfigurements, and people start realizing after collossal battling that, no, spiritual experience is real, the next step seeks to create an order of people united in their spiritual experience and loyal to their knowledge and conception of the divine. In that order, the devil #5 is attained will (the people familiar with the subject know what I'm talking about). In all cases, we see a concept of nature, then society, then economy, then intelligence, then spirituality, then attained will, being divine; which order in all cases starts through one or another stage of will-assertion. Each level considers itself divine - unless disturbed by the artifact of man's deliberate act of choice and of will as it stands to disrupt these supposedly divine workings. And what each level fails to understand is that the case of something being divine does not make what goes to the next level less divine.
Each of these deified orders regard the next one as being demonic in origin. It refers to it as one or another form of hubris, without realising that according to a previous order it itself has been regarded as hubris, and that what works is for gradations of hubris to build on itself! We have Dan Mocnsny here, an evolutionist, saying that the problem with the world is that "freaks won't know their place" when if his belief in evolution is true then it is the freaks that are the source of all evolution, and it is their "place" to move the world forward (and yes Dan, you most certainly are a freak and there is nothing remotely bad about it - the problem is what you do with your mutation). The social order is based on man - the demon vis-a-vis the natural order. The capitalist economy is based on ego - the demon vis-a-vis the social order. The politics and ideology are based on ideology-based action, which is the demon vis-a-vis capitalism. The same dynamics work at the next levels. And what we are seeing at every level is, essentially, demonization of the next stage of liberty, until it is either supplanted by it or unless it subverts it to perpetuate itself.
How do I define liberty? AN ACT OF DIRECTING WILL DELIBERATELY. Liberty is an act of saying, essentially, I EXIST. And as corollary of that: I direct my action. And note to Gail and Mickey: Whether you like it or not (and note number 2: If God did not like arrogance then he would not have created signs Leo and Scorpio, and especially He would not have created a Scorpio with Leo rising, Pluto opposite Jupiter and Uranus square Saturn).
The interesting part consists, once again, in the absolute insistence of each preceding order ind the demonic quality of the coming one. The new order gives promise to lift man to a higher level; the previous order attacks by claiming that motive to be based in thinking oneself better than the authority by which the order is believed to be ordained (and to which will is made to believe to be subjugated). Essentially each order considers the preceding level to be divine and the following one as based in disruption of divine order. Both are right, and both are wrong. If all is God, then so is what man does (and to all the you-think-you're-God people, the response is: "ye are gods" is part of the New Testament, it's a matter of how you use it). As the situation rises, the deliberateness quotient rises, but the complexity of the system builds. The life becomes more free of the preceding level, but more tied to the following level. The devil becomes the shaper and is then himself exceeded.
Now based on similar observations made two centuries ago, was developed a historical inevitability model: That politics would overcome capitalism and lead to a global order based on all-unifying political action based in shared interest of all. The problem with this model was a problem common to Tauruses: A grossly incomplete concept of human nature, that accepts what he believes to be bottom line as the only legitimate interest and anything else as form of deviance or insanity: A concept we see among many in the capitalist world that Marx tried to supplant and whose error he perpetuated in its essence while claiming to overcome it in ideology. He took a futuristic outlook and put it in service of barbaric mentality and created just what would be expected: A futuristic barbaric order! An order that put the first man in space while keeping its people in a barbaric condition. The very people he claimed to speak for - at the expense of all actual human traits.
Now based on the step-by-step approach I've talke about previously, we see in many cases a hierarchial mentality develop: Of claiming the next level of separation from the ground of being to be the higher level of mind, beneath which all else is to be subjugated. I object to this idea because even the most technologically advanced order has not created anything approaching a rainforest, a tiger or an experience of romance, and the so-called lower levels possess legitimacy and deserve respect just for their sheer complexity. That something is preceding does not make it inferior, and true human experience involves experience of such things as nature and passion (or at least, anyway, an experience that I seek for myself and seek to make possible to similar tastes).
The problem of hierarchial thinking - and the resulting cruelty and oppression against experience that make the most of existense - led to thought, among feminists among others, that this model is patriarchial, whereas the feminine way is holistic and regarded to be more in tune with life. Now while noticing as needed an obvious reverse snobbery in this situation - to regard yourself as being in tune with life for being a woman rather than a man is as ridiculous as it is to regard yourself more human for doing manual labor rather than for being a professor - we are confronted with two potentials for improvement and two potentials for evil. The problem in hierarchial thinking is suppressing experience of life, seeing emotions or sexuality as lower functions, spitting on nature, despising things one had no chance of being able to create and robbing life of its color. The problem with holistic thinking is that fails to differentiate in quality and seeks to achieve similar outcomes - a condition that of course shackles the best.
The problem with American feminism, as I have repeatedly stated, is that it is just as authoritarian, as abrasive, as cruel and as malicious in enforcing the feminist social role as the patriarchy was in enforcing its concept of what women should be. Which has rightfully led to reaction by many women of intellect and initiative. We see many educated upper-class young women in India deliberately choosing subservient role because they see it as natural. We see many women in America reject feminist values because they rightly claim them to be inappropriate, wrong, limiting or against their religion. The beautiful, successful, intelligent Russian women of my acquaintance, my generation or previous one, all tell me the same thing: That American feminists are insane; that they don't understand what being a woman is all about; that they rob women of the best qualities that come with being a woman and impoverish not only what she is but what she can get out of life. That they've bought into man's value system and in so doing destroyed the uniquely good and beautiful in the woman - in the same way as, well, as Marx bought into the materialistic value system and sought to make it a part of his collectivistic ideology and as a result caused a still more oppressive form of materialism to the very people whose interests he claimed to espouse.
As I see independent-minded women say again and again, Unisex does not work. It is not right for them; it is not fulfilling for them; it is not what they want. The problem with former system was not its differentiation of feminine traits and masculine traits; it was the belief that one set was superior to the other - which I, of course, regard and always did regard to be complete idiocy. (Priest says: Men and women are different in roles, not in value). As a poet, I am in love with female beauty, tenderness, gentleness, and emotional richness - the qualities that I see, in women who have them, to be far better than traits of the next man (or, rightfully, of the woman who does not have these traits). These are the qualities that make a world worthy of human habitation! These are the qualities that I, rightly, would like to see more in the world - whatever the woman in glasses in the academia has to say about it - and that most certainly does mean protecting the women who have these qualities from those, women and men, who would like such traits not to exist! The problem is not the beautiful traits; the problem is a competition-based culture that fails to value, respect and reward such traits! And if feminism is in any way to be honest to its claimed goals - to give woman freedom of choice and of who to be - then it has to live with women choosing, deliberately, to have these traits, whether or not the feminist wants them to have them - whatever it thinks about their cultural origin or their psychological fundamentals - and what it, in its arrogant claim to speak for the rights of all women while denying the real women the right to be who and what they want to be, completely overlooks as virtues that women are uniquely capable of having and that make life worthwhile, for women who have these traits and for people around them, when they find the way to a man who rightly appreciates them and rightly rewards them for having such qualities!
It's not "feminist vs. misogynist" or any such nonsense. It's this: That under the pretext of women's advancement you people denied women the freedom to be what you do not want them to be! And yes, we are seeing women rightly rejecting this authoritarianism left and right, in the same way as we saw the world righty reject Marxism. And in standing up to - that - women truly assert their liberty. It's very heart-warming to see women say to the psychological bullies that claim to speak for them that, no, they don't represent women. In the same way as it's heart-warming to see black people stand up to the African "big men" and gangsters who claim that they represent Africa while killing Africans - and to see industrial workers stand up to the unions that attack workers for working well and say that they don't speak for them either.
The problem with feminism is the same as the problem with Marxism. It adopted the enemy's value structure and concept of what makes a genuine human interest or mentality, and then sought to beat them at their own game. This can be done only at the expense of hideous disfigurement and ultimately degradation of the very people the ideology claims to help. And the next step beyond feminism - as articulated by smart, strong-minded women again and again - is HEALTHY HETEROSEXUALITY - defined as CELEBRATION OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF MUTUAL LOVE AND RESPECT. And yes, that does mean standing up to bullies on either side of the aisle, both idiots who think women to be inferior and monsters who want to rob women of being women.
To go back to the hierarchial model. What I seek to state is that the fact of something being on a lower level in the hierarchy of organization does not make it inferior or having less to offer people. Thus, for example, we see many people, who are quite capable of intelligent thought, do such things as commune with nature and revel in romantic passion. The reason is this: To do such things is to experience the totality of life as life is meant to be experienced in total. The beauty and interconnectivity of nature does not go away because man lives in St. Louis; indeed it is in that interconnectivity that is found an aspect of mankind that corresponds with life itself, at the level near the ground of being that is most profound and is in many ways the most complex (What economy ever produced a rainforest?) Romantic love, I explain in the same way as did Ayn Rand: A passionate affirmation, with the totality of one's being, of the other person: An act of saying yes with one's whole entity to what the other person is; a statement that puts one in touch with the truth of life as it is expressed throughout one's beingness and in the other, in both one's consciously known values and unconsciously known ones. It is, likewise, a case of experiencing life at a more profound level and a more complete level - and to make such things possible (and to make possible for such things to thrive and survive longterm) is a secret to securing life worthy of human existence.
Now there is much ado about the idea that a man who presumes to act out of his volition or use his mind is seeking to be God-like. To people of such conviction, I would like to offer the Biblical story at Mount Sinai, in which God was going to kill off the Jews until Moses told him that if He were to do so, He would be seen as negating His promise. This shows of course that, whether God be omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent, He is not infallible - that man's perspective supplements God's perspective - that man comes up with ideas that God hadn't come up with - and that is further the case not only for people regarded as wise by one or another culture or priestry, but especially for people who have unique ways of combining information, whom cultures may not regard wise or benevolent at all, but whose perspective, being unique, supplements that of the culture and corrects it in its endemic errors (in the same way that sometimes even a carpenter's perspective supplements that of God).
I keep developing the psycho-ethical equilibrium concept: The world at any given time is at equilibrium point among people's just-world concepts; which equilibrium is constantly shifting as people's condition changes and so do just-world concepts, with both feeding into each other. I remember my comment that, when someone is being bullied, there's a pressure on people to regard that person as wrong - then I recognize how difficult it is to maintain one's sense of self as good in presence of constant nastiness or to maintain sense of another person's good when they are being savaged or the sense of goodness of self and the world in presence of hideousness all around - and well, that still may very well be a flaw in design, but one I see as something that can be overcome - though not simply by effort of will, by no means, as will simply embodies one's basic beliefs and convictions - but rather by having a structure of convictions that are structurous of a will and by which these convictions manifest and are part of formation of interdependent reality pursuant your just-world convictions.
I hear about God-in-all-through-all of Spinosa, Jungian version of this, Platonic and I look at how this is exclusive of free will - at the same time I have to watch for barbaric beliefs of people who are not schooled in such concepts and deliberate manipulations of those who want to blind people to cultural factors especially when those be their own - and I say that hey, Confucians equated social order with this ("li") and Taoists claimed it to be part of natural way toward which deliberate action and social order is hindrance - and then I say how we've seen an abomination of all abominations: American psychology deriving from spirituality the idea of collective consciousness and then used it to mean what they wanted psychosocial environment to become - creating a "li" type condition to freeze-dry in eternities a sociocultural moment and set of false convictions and interests - using the consciousness movement sellouts to deify precisely the thing that they sought rightly to overcome and shoving, through character destruction and psychological violence, the lie of the deliberately created construct being natural or divine, down people's throats. Creating this abomination of all abominations; Bigotry, barbarism and sheer malice using spiritual tools to enforce itself and claiming to be spiritual consciousness of civilization! Treating its dissidents as demons! And claiming for itself absolute authority over people's lives, while denying them any freedom of will and choice and thought: An encompassing American "li," the deviation from which is deviation not only from sanity but indeed from divine order! Confucianism on American soil, ladies and gentlemen, denying not only deliberate choice but denying people the knowledge of the Choices That Went Into Creating This Situation - that pass off social construction as part of divine will or all that is while not only ignoring the fact of human will (modes, right?) in formation and co-formation of social reality but denying people the RIGHT TO MAKE A CHOICE, period!
Which means that any meaningful concept of liberty means breaking down that construct.
So I'm walking down the street and still seeing the den of the enchanted she-spider in front of me and pulling me further ahead into her grasp. Oh! You know how much I need you, devour me, why don't you, and turn me into food for webs. The she-spider laughs. I would be corrupt if I were to use such feelings for short-sighted purposes. I'm only pulling you to where the self-existing one lives. That's whom you want to talk to, then you could actually have informed choice & to reason why would be yours.
I remember "in the middle of the road only yellow stripes and dead armadillos" and I walk between yellow stripes and a SUV approaches from behind and I think maybe I could disprove that but it shows no signs of seeing me so I move off and well I think the middle-of-the-road view can sometimes work and in some cases may even be optimal, but it also is taxing and hard to maintain energy (and some things are furthermore not to be integrated, as compromise with what wants you dead leaves you half-dead: Dialectic works for legitimate pairs of existents, while in other pairs of existence one is all-good and other is all-bad in which what is needed is not dialectic but radicalism, and in other existents still we have some convoluted mixture), so on occasion it will happen that one extreme topples the moderate and then the two need to fight or make up and, well, just that you came up with this solution in DC as a politician at 50 does not mean that it it true for Puerto Rican at 30 or the 15-year-old rape victim or the German retirees or the bus driver in India or people in Ethiopia or Ukraine. And yes, I do expect the same things to be said by the next or the preceding, and see that as part of the job. Moving equilibrium, right? Composed of just-world hypotheses, shifting all the time.
And then - far right. Path to the greenery, and inside it a brook. I'm in my shorts with bare feet, and I hear Well if you're so in touch with the light then go into here, through darkness, through brambles, and let it carry you. I do, while at one point laughing at a vine above me (she once swung on a vine too and it broke but she lived - here I think vine is a helping hand, a high place extending me hand I need as it hangs off the emanation of the self-existing and looks like umbilical cord but only apparently mimics that adaptation to lead out and up) - and so I walk through and find myself in the brook, and I stand as they tell me, and I let she-spider weave all around me and be enfolded by her skin and remember the river nymphs and know the true meaning of communing. The river nymphs Ms. LL said were always lonely and sought to be loved, but found upon contact with man that he saw them as satanic and wanted to either kill them or put them in horrible place - and I said I am with you I won't stand to let you be killed whatever that means to my salvation - and then I hear about hardness of walls and I say that I will show what is under the wall ("earth hard - fire under it"), as I rummage through rocks - rocks polished by water - rocks arranged meticulously - I take a rock that has flat bottom and circular top, the presentation I presume of model of being - until I find WHAT WAS UNDER THE WALL.
This one is all black, containing many black rocks within a fused-together ground of being shape of an L. No spheres, no polish, nothing. Absolutely uncompromising. A bit of a nematode I conjecture, a bit of a coral reef I conjecture, a bit of a colony in which each is its own seed and whole being manifests through all. So I think OK this is the integrative synthesis, with self and structure reshaping both and belonging to each other, making best of each other and best for each other through synthesis and abrasion and creating synergy within framework of checks and balances - actually I think this later, what I think here is:
If you WWIIers or Xers still don't get a clue, the clue is as follows. That particular society combined the worst of spirit and matter: Regimented and intellectually oppressive as in religion and barren of all emotional and spiritual experience as in rationalism. And the purpose of mind is to combine the best of all possible worlds. A world that makes the best of spirit and matter: Full of emotional and spiritual and experiential richness (the best of spirit) - and with real liberties and well-being (the best of matter). And yes that means the best of all possible worlds; and if you say you can't have the best of all possible worlds then I say that it is the purpose of mind to make the best of all possible worlds and if we don't have the best of all possible worlds then we either aren't thinking or are being sabotaged or are sabotaging ourselves.
("And what if humanity does not deserve that?" Whether or not that is so, your job as a human is to make that possible. "And what about original sin?" Well if there is such a thing as original sin then it speaks to the totality of the human nature including all agendas belonging to it, including desire to control your children or run your community or control people's behavior or make money or shape your country or stand in anyone else's way, so the concept applies to anything you may do and is for that reason meaningless to all practical action - in the same way for example as the concept of all things being illusion becomes meaningless by the same standard.)
So I am out of the stream and walking past a cemetery. It says "Mitchell" (Hey you know who) then "Bowie" and before all of them in the middle, "Shepherd." (and I guess the ones behind you are sheep, and well guess where they are now). Then: "Onion" and "Simpson" (I start laughing: Hey boss, thanks for that) followed by "Stuart." OK, you got my attention (someone else knows significance of that too).
Then there's the church that talks about 11:00: Christianity 101: Repentance and I see this as initiation ritual akin to all others in other religions (you reject sin or the world of sin or ego and then you proceed on path to illumination or enlightenment) and then I think I don't repent things under consideration so I hear then let's manipulate the events in society and in people's lives in such ways that they would suffer negative circumstances and you would be seen as a culprit or as a wrongdoer and I say This is your social manipulation done using deliberate effort of will and mind and is in no way a natural consequence of those actions, so the one guilty is not me or my loved ones but you. I remember the observation that said non-Christians got headaches and mental pain and I remember that state of affairs when in Christian school and of course this is not natural state of being non-Christian but state induced by Christian people's thoughts and prayers - you think you don't do magic? Your whole mindset is magic - and so I start thinking well am I not bringing murderous memes of Christianity to those whom I don't want killed and - that was the problem before, I kept bringing shit to those I did not want to bring shit and I hoped Christianity would free me of that
So I reiterate what I said before, There's the true spiritual attitude that fills world with richness and the religious component that regiments, and there's the logic-based worldview that gives circumstantial liberty but disallows any feeling or thought or existence that actually makes life worthwhile, and I say there's ways to combine it with 00 rate of return (religious applied to behavioral standards - material applied to emotion: no liberty, no richness, aka pure evil), 01 (religious applied to behavioral standards - spiritual applied to emotion: no liberty, but richness, the experience of the Mexican), 10 (material applied to behavioral standards - material applied to emotion: Liberty, no experience, the experience of the Unitarian), and the prize: 11: Material applied to society and spiritual applied to experience: Liberty AND life worth living.
Now this has happened once in American history: The path from 10 moved to 11. The Transcendentalism. A more traumatic transition: From 00 to 11: the Hippies. And in both cases they were described as being spoiled. Will you people learn? IT IS MEANINGLESS TO GIVE PEOPLE CIRCUMSTANTIAL LIBERTY, OR PEACE, OR PROSPERITY, IF THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO LIVE! What happened was not merely rebellion; It was improvement: It was progress: It was the next level. It was the innovation upon what existed previously. You've created a civilization in which people have rights. Now, it can be a civilization in which people can actually live. AND Integrate the spiritual component, while Building it, On top, Of, The, Intellectual, Structures, That, You, Created!
In other words: Liberty AND emotional richness! Mind AND spirituality! Not only have statutory liberty, but make it possible to actually live! Like I said, what's the point of being free if you are not allowed to feel, or to live, or to have beautiful experiences and beautiful existence? We have New Agers freeing themselves by saying that they must essentially be a world to themselves - that others are reflection of self but not important - that romantic love is a myth - that everyone creates their reality (corollaries: that everyone who's being mistreated caused it, that the privileged Westerner created conditions of his privilege and the Ethiopian has done the same for himself, that any feeling worth having is to be exculcated, that leader can do anything to his subjects because they would be creating their reality through his actions and you can do what you want to another because they caused their reality) - and what I'm saying is, This is monstrous! So you've found a way to be free, I see that; but you've done it by becoming cold and heartless and malevolent! And utterly lacking in compassion, ethics or any sense of what your ideas would mean for the world as a whole.
The problem I've seen with a lot of spiritual adepts is that they become cold, heartless, and cruel, and that's simply not a direction I would accept any spirituality taking me! What's the point of having spirituality if you end up cold? "You are the river" - no, a river is a flow, it is a flux, it is a relationship. "Just be love" - an impossibility: You cannot be love because love is something that is felt by one thing for another - you can love but you cannot be love: You can be fire, you can be light, I've been motion and verb for a while, you can even be self-existent for a while if you swing that way but you cannot BE love. The Bhakti Yoga is not based on "being love"; it is based on devotional love of God bringing one into Godspace. In the same way as love for the next person creates similar flux that reshapes both.
And meanwhile we have (from a Castaneda group leader and publisher of "Tucson Poet") the poetic imagery of the civilizaition being a giant eros-extracting mechanism directing lifeforce toward consumption. What does this mean, and where does this lead? If eros is something to be extracted and used to fuel economy - what world do we have? As Robert Tkotch rightly stated, a population completely and deservedly emasculated in every respect that counts. A population in which, to paraphrase Onion, 90% of the population are permanently sedentary, all their life force expropriated. A population that attacks the true river - the true flux - the true manifestation of eros: The passionate love between man and woman. And that, by attacking the basis of all true emotional experience, becomes this and this absolutely: An expropriation and usurpation of life. Itself. Apparently "God is love" becomes "military-industrial complex is love" the upshot of which is: Pepsi loves you.
I've seen this malignant element in thought of aforementioned spiritual adepts: Their claim of passion between woman and man as "a shortcut." A shortcut? A shortcut to what? Enlightenment? What if they aren't interested in enlightenment - what if they are simply interested in living? No, it is a better technology. It is a claim on existence. It is a birthright of human beingness. It is the truth of experience, and without such things being possible all the progress you have means nothing!
Don't you YET understand? To have liberties, is meaningless unless you can actually have an existence worthy of experiencing! It puts a question to the whole idea of, "Well what do we have these liberties for?" To have legal liberties, without a freedom to feel, to experience, to have life worth having, is like having walls without a building inside of it! Once again, WHAT ARE THESE LIBERTIES FOR? Is it worth fighting to protect liberties without it being acceptable to live? if it is impossible to have a fully human, fully passionate, fully experienced, existence? Don't just say you've made this building (and everyone owes you their life, and then go down in history as yet another set of tyrants who fed in order to choke while people legitimately start asking if maybe it's better to surrender some of these liberties for the sake of spirituality), make it habitable so that your work actually BENEFITS the world! Put furniture, paintings, carpets inside so that somebody actually BENEFITS from what you've created! Put this work in service of human interest, use hardware to carry beautiful works and beautiful artifacts and ideas that allow people to develop beautiful thoughts and emotions and by implementing them in their lives and sharing them with each other not only make life beautiful for each other but actually create a social order that does the world the honor for existing - that makes possible life worth living - that Consummates the Edifact of Civilization and allows light to manifest through the structures of manifestation and create a livable world rather than simply a working economy!
So we hear intellectualists argue that emotions are necessarily entrapping and regressive, and I say, Ridiculous - and to paraphrase someone, what's so freeing or rational about the emotion of hate. And then we hear religious people argue that you're not independent. Well, I may be independent or I may not be independent; Khodorkovsky just told us a way to be free whatever the circumstances. And there's Mickey saying that that makes you arrogant and I say SO BE IT, Be arrogant when dealing with people like Mickey, STAND BY your thoughts, STAND BY your feelings, stand by your being and right to exist as an independent unit of volitional consciousness and a being who feels - and for people to be able to do that is the only way to defeat dictatorship and oppression by any name, whether it come from people who think you arrogant for having your own thoughts or people who think you infantile for having feelings worth having or from the marriage in hell between psychology and religion to create an encompassing American "li" the devation from which is a deviation from sanity and goodness itself (and Scott Peck as its ultimate arbiter). Yes, I read that the idealist's strategy is to create a holistic synthesis that gets everyone to agree - and I keep saying that's fine and good and a noble project, but don't tell me that that means I have to submit to this if I see and know to the contrary!
So I see two complementary half-rights half-wrongs: Religion being oppressive of behavior but enriching of experience, and rationalism creating circumstantial liberty but denying freedom to feel and to experience life. And I say that the poet's way is to combine the best of both: To have circumstantial freedom and the freedom of passion and beauty and inspired, beautiful, passionate, romantic existence. You may claim the latter to be an impossibility. But I've seen it work and would fight for it for the next person. And to the people who regard such things badly, I say, This is the prize of existence, and anything against that is against all the good in humanity. It is for this that every great person has ever striven, and to make such things possible for the next person is one's duty before America and one's duty before humankind.
This one's a doozy. Feel free to skip it if you find it boring. The people referred to are posters to the Internet, with whom I have had debates.
Some of the ideas in here, however, I believe are worth looking at.
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So Mr. Bat had a fine ole night hooting with the owls! And not only the owls, but the howls. The owls make the howls and the howls make the owls and over the backbone of the H they form a mirror image of each other. As in, eviLive.
It's been a fine night for Mr. Bat, out on the streets of Alexandria. First I read Mr. Khodorkovsky's epistle from the jail: "True freedom is within," "a result of pursuing one's principles" - and of course the main question to ask is, "Are your principles truly yours?" And then, "By what authority?" And then, "After what process?" And finally, "To what extent true?" (and of course the idea that Scorpio stuff is destructive: No, you first reject what you don't like, then you figure out what you do like and affirm it). (and the correlated concept of self-awareness: Self-awareness in terms of a false set of beliefs is wrong and can only be done in terms of true beliefs) (and the corollary concept of taking responsibility for one's life: That only becomes possible truly when you've studied and experienced and have an informed knowledge of what you truly want: all else leads to wasted lives). After philosophy class (continuing education program) at the community college, in which was discussed Spinosa's concept of God being self-existing manifesting through all people who are nodes (and it is the purpose of the node, I presume, to refract the light until it creates a picture that is most appealing, with each node shaped by substance & reshaping substance and self and - hey, Mr. Self-existing One, could you please notice me and what I've done with your substance (oh and tell me the true causes of things, in what cases it's linear & in what cases it's over-determined & in what cases it's a web & of what or what behind the web (and as a mode could I be good this way or could I be good another way or could I let you be me for a second so you could show me the ropes or could you let me in your shoes here for a moment so I have compassion for you or could you and I work together here for a second and to reshape one another with our essentiality so that we could establish flux between the self-existing and the merely-existing and allow the emanation to respond to the core with experimental results its actions [true/false/transcendent] while the core enlightens the emanation with its continued manifestations of self-existence) - I see this fashionable black woman rubbing lotion on her hands, and I say she smells tasty, and she asks "Do you want to eat me?"
So I get out of class, it's 10:25, my bus leaves, it's a gorgeous summer night so I walk down the street. I keep hearing "Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die" - while professors leave the parking lot, one in a Beetle - and I keep merrily heading down the road, occasionally kissing a flower. I see the den of the enchanted she-spider hanging in the air between the trees. That den of the enchanted she-spider, thank the grounds of being for that, I can just get lost in those embraces and those enfoldments and that gentle caressing mist between trees seeking to shroud life with its delicacy and bring it into its complete resplendor. And all night long it's something with "95" (year of the enchanting she-spider) it's something with "56" (year of my muse) or the next number "57" (year of Sputnik in space - not coincidental) it's something with "7:07" or "9:11" or all along the same line.
I remember from previously: The movement outward is hardest from most closed-minded places and easiest from most open-minded. The worst ones are the hardest, while the better ones are freer because much of the work has been done for you. The places with greatest political and social obstacles are ones that have least to offer, and whose people have most legitimate reason to go somewhere else. The same is true for all propaganda, family-values, militaristic, religious, Marxist, feminist or any other: The less the place has to offer and the worse it is, the more propaganda and moral bludgeoning it requires. Which creates an inverse relationship between actual moral quality of the social order and amount of moralizing done by the social order. A social order that is most malignant is one that is most moralizing. The more malignant, the more moralizing; the more actually morally upstanding, the less propaganda and moralizing required. Which is the reason that moralizing societies lead to the worst abuses against people. Some think this is coincidental, I see direct and inevitable relationship.
I see some toughs loitering outside King's Pizza and wait at bus station, walking around the corner and stand at bus stop watching restorateurs leave in cabs, and here I am again in treespace while bus does not come and I keep walking. And there I run into the whole sociopath nonsense and say in response that that is a concept that underlies the economic system and political system and to apply it to Wollmann without applying it to Gates is despicable - and then I keep reiterating: What we have here is a science selling out to a political interest: adopting as health the interest of American middle class and its dogmas and pathologizing what speaks otherwise: That it speaks to American dogmas rather than Soviet ones does not make it any less of a manipulation. And then I notice something more on this issue: Through manipulation of social climate and attitudes and actions and reactions pursuant those attitudes, consequences are assigned to actions that are not natural, but rather artificial & create an impression of good actions being bad and bad actions being good. We see that run through all societies and times. We have, for example, Pakis saying that romance is disastrous and proving it by killing those who fall in love. We have, for example, Cubans saying that business is antisocial and proving it by killing those who do business. The idea of God being through all things is used to excuse deliberate social manipulation, by nodes and creators of nodes, as though those were divinely ordained rather than manmade. The obvious problem is that substance may manifest through nodes, but nodes, involving choice, mean that they are not obligated to the ground of being but are as such nodes capable of deliberate choice, God-ordained or not!
And then it is used to impose this order as though it was divine. Which requires calling the bluff. If God is through all things, in other words, then not only the order you create but the order I create is manifestation of God - as is the order created by any of your other enemies.
So we have environmental science claim that environment exists according to its order, unless disturbed by man (devil #1). We have systems like Confucianism that claim society as a matter of social order having a place for everyone - place according to divine order - unless that order is disturbed by man's ego (devil #2). We have economic science that has applied this to economic activity and said that all things are guided by "invisible hand" when in a "free-market" context, with everyone competing against everyone, unless disturbed by intellectually conceived and goal-directed political action (devil #3), even as this same science adopts will and ego and montarily defined self-interest (combination of devil #1 and devil #2) as basic concept of legitimate human interest and claims the competition within framework of law to be the natural order. After which we have the concept of intellectual-political action uniting people in what it believes to be intellectually right ideology; that seeks to educate people based on intellectual and philosophical ideas and shared interest (and which the economic mindset sees as meddling or evil or arrogance - the same way the social interest was to the economic mindset from the beginning - even as the media-intellectual-political ideas created anyway necessitate for the people to move toward a place of politics and philosophy and awareness of their civilization beyond the dogmas of laissez-faire and even to protect laissez-faire demand political and intellectual action on the part of the business class). In this political-intellectual order the devil (devil #4) is spirituality, which main proponents of this ideology see as being one or another form of mental malfunction - much like the capitalists think of the political-intellectual. Once that stops working, after many corpses and disfigurements, and people start realizing after collossal battling that, no, spiritual experience is real, the next step seeks to create an order of people united in their spiritual experience and loyal to their knowledge and conception of the divine. In that order, the devil #5 is attained will (the people familiar with the subject know what I'm talking about). In all cases, we see a concept of nature, then society, then economy, then intelligence, then spirituality, then attained will, being divine; which order in all cases starts through one or another stage of will-assertion. Each level considers itself divine - unless disturbed by the artifact of man's deliberate act of choice and of will as it stands to disrupt these supposedly divine workings. And what each level fails to understand is that the case of something being divine does not make what goes to the next level less divine.
Each of these deified orders regard the next one as being demonic in origin. It refers to it as one or another form of hubris, without realising that according to a previous order it itself has been regarded as hubris, and that what works is for gradations of hubris to build on itself! We have Dan Mocnsny here, an evolutionist, saying that the problem with the world is that "freaks won't know their place" when if his belief in evolution is true then it is the freaks that are the source of all evolution, and it is their "place" to move the world forward (and yes Dan, you most certainly are a freak and there is nothing remotely bad about it - the problem is what you do with your mutation). The social order is based on man - the demon vis-a-vis the natural order. The capitalist economy is based on ego - the demon vis-a-vis the social order. The politics and ideology are based on ideology-based action, which is the demon vis-a-vis capitalism. The same dynamics work at the next levels. And what we are seeing at every level is, essentially, demonization of the next stage of liberty, until it is either supplanted by it or unless it subverts it to perpetuate itself.
How do I define liberty? AN ACT OF DIRECTING WILL DELIBERATELY. Liberty is an act of saying, essentially, I EXIST. And as corollary of that: I direct my action. And note to Gail and Mickey: Whether you like it or not (and note number 2: If God did not like arrogance then he would not have created signs Leo and Scorpio, and especially He would not have created a Scorpio with Leo rising, Pluto opposite Jupiter and Uranus square Saturn).
The interesting part consists, once again, in the absolute insistence of each preceding order ind the demonic quality of the coming one. The new order gives promise to lift man to a higher level; the previous order attacks by claiming that motive to be based in thinking oneself better than the authority by which the order is believed to be ordained (and to which will is made to believe to be subjugated). Essentially each order considers the preceding level to be divine and the following one as based in disruption of divine order. Both are right, and both are wrong. If all is God, then so is what man does (and to all the you-think-you're-God people, the response is: "ye are gods" is part of the New Testament, it's a matter of how you use it). As the situation rises, the deliberateness quotient rises, but the complexity of the system builds. The life becomes more free of the preceding level, but more tied to the following level. The devil becomes the shaper and is then himself exceeded.
Now based on similar observations made two centuries ago, was developed a historical inevitability model: That politics would overcome capitalism and lead to a global order based on all-unifying political action based in shared interest of all. The problem with this model was a problem common to Tauruses: A grossly incomplete concept of human nature, that accepts what he believes to be bottom line as the only legitimate interest and anything else as form of deviance or insanity: A concept we see among many in the capitalist world that Marx tried to supplant and whose error he perpetuated in its essence while claiming to overcome it in ideology. He took a futuristic outlook and put it in service of barbaric mentality and created just what would be expected: A futuristic barbaric order! An order that put the first man in space while keeping its people in a barbaric condition. The very people he claimed to speak for - at the expense of all actual human traits.
Now based on the step-by-step approach I've talke about previously, we see in many cases a hierarchial mentality develop: Of claiming the next level of separation from the ground of being to be the higher level of mind, beneath which all else is to be subjugated. I object to this idea because even the most technologically advanced order has not created anything approaching a rainforest, a tiger or an experience of romance, and the so-called lower levels possess legitimacy and deserve respect just for their sheer complexity. That something is preceding does not make it inferior, and true human experience involves experience of such things as nature and passion (or at least, anyway, an experience that I seek for myself and seek to make possible to similar tastes).
The problem of hierarchial thinking - and the resulting cruelty and oppression against experience that make the most of existense - led to thought, among feminists among others, that this model is patriarchial, whereas the feminine way is holistic and regarded to be more in tune with life. Now while noticing as needed an obvious reverse snobbery in this situation - to regard yourself as being in tune with life for being a woman rather than a man is as ridiculous as it is to regard yourself more human for doing manual labor rather than for being a professor - we are confronted with two potentials for improvement and two potentials for evil. The problem in hierarchial thinking is suppressing experience of life, seeing emotions or sexuality as lower functions, spitting on nature, despising things one had no chance of being able to create and robbing life of its color. The problem with holistic thinking is that fails to differentiate in quality and seeks to achieve similar outcomes - a condition that of course shackles the best.
The problem with American feminism, as I have repeatedly stated, is that it is just as authoritarian, as abrasive, as cruel and as malicious in enforcing the feminist social role as the patriarchy was in enforcing its concept of what women should be. Which has rightfully led to reaction by many women of intellect and initiative. We see many educated upper-class young women in India deliberately choosing subservient role because they see it as natural. We see many women in America reject feminist values because they rightly claim them to be inappropriate, wrong, limiting or against their religion. The beautiful, successful, intelligent Russian women of my acquaintance, my generation or previous one, all tell me the same thing: That American feminists are insane; that they don't understand what being a woman is all about; that they rob women of the best qualities that come with being a woman and impoverish not only what she is but what she can get out of life. That they've bought into man's value system and in so doing destroyed the uniquely good and beautiful in the woman - in the same way as, well, as Marx bought into the materialistic value system and sought to make it a part of his collectivistic ideology and as a result caused a still more oppressive form of materialism to the very people whose interests he claimed to espouse.
As I see independent-minded women say again and again, Unisex does not work. It is not right for them; it is not fulfilling for them; it is not what they want. The problem with former system was not its differentiation of feminine traits and masculine traits; it was the belief that one set was superior to the other - which I, of course, regard and always did regard to be complete idiocy. (Priest says: Men and women are different in roles, not in value). As a poet, I am in love with female beauty, tenderness, gentleness, and emotional richness - the qualities that I see, in women who have them, to be far better than traits of the next man (or, rightfully, of the woman who does not have these traits). These are the qualities that make a world worthy of human habitation! These are the qualities that I, rightly, would like to see more in the world - whatever the woman in glasses in the academia has to say about it - and that most certainly does mean protecting the women who have these qualities from those, women and men, who would like such traits not to exist! The problem is not the beautiful traits; the problem is a competition-based culture that fails to value, respect and reward such traits! And if feminism is in any way to be honest to its claimed goals - to give woman freedom of choice and of who to be - then it has to live with women choosing, deliberately, to have these traits, whether or not the feminist wants them to have them - whatever it thinks about their cultural origin or their psychological fundamentals - and what it, in its arrogant claim to speak for the rights of all women while denying the real women the right to be who and what they want to be, completely overlooks as virtues that women are uniquely capable of having and that make life worthwhile, for women who have these traits and for people around them, when they find the way to a man who rightly appreciates them and rightly rewards them for having such qualities!
It's not "feminist vs. misogynist" or any such nonsense. It's this: That under the pretext of women's advancement you people denied women the freedom to be what you do not want them to be! And yes, we are seeing women rightly rejecting this authoritarianism left and right, in the same way as we saw the world righty reject Marxism. And in standing up to - that - women truly assert their liberty. It's very heart-warming to see women say to the psychological bullies that claim to speak for them that, no, they don't represent women. In the same way as it's heart-warming to see black people stand up to the African "big men" and gangsters who claim that they represent Africa while killing Africans - and to see industrial workers stand up to the unions that attack workers for working well and say that they don't speak for them either.
The problem with feminism is the same as the problem with Marxism. It adopted the enemy's value structure and concept of what makes a genuine human interest or mentality, and then sought to beat them at their own game. This can be done only at the expense of hideous disfigurement and ultimately degradation of the very people the ideology claims to help. And the next step beyond feminism - as articulated by smart, strong-minded women again and again - is HEALTHY HETEROSEXUALITY - defined as CELEBRATION OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF MUTUAL LOVE AND RESPECT. And yes, that does mean standing up to bullies on either side of the aisle, both idiots who think women to be inferior and monsters who want to rob women of being women.
To go back to the hierarchial model. What I seek to state is that the fact of something being on a lower level in the hierarchy of organization does not make it inferior or having less to offer people. Thus, for example, we see many people, who are quite capable of intelligent thought, do such things as commune with nature and revel in romantic passion. The reason is this: To do such things is to experience the totality of life as life is meant to be experienced in total. The beauty and interconnectivity of nature does not go away because man lives in St. Louis; indeed it is in that interconnectivity that is found an aspect of mankind that corresponds with life itself, at the level near the ground of being that is most profound and is in many ways the most complex (What economy ever produced a rainforest?) Romantic love, I explain in the same way as did Ayn Rand: A passionate affirmation, with the totality of one's being, of the other person: An act of saying yes with one's whole entity to what the other person is; a statement that puts one in touch with the truth of life as it is expressed throughout one's beingness and in the other, in both one's consciously known values and unconsciously known ones. It is, likewise, a case of experiencing life at a more profound level and a more complete level - and to make such things possible (and to make possible for such things to thrive and survive longterm) is a secret to securing life worthy of human existence.
Now there is much ado about the idea that a man who presumes to act out of his volition or use his mind is seeking to be God-like. To people of such conviction, I would like to offer the Biblical story at Mount Sinai, in which God was going to kill off the Jews until Moses told him that if He were to do so, He would be seen as negating His promise. This shows of course that, whether God be omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent, He is not infallible - that man's perspective supplements God's perspective - that man comes up with ideas that God hadn't come up with - and that is further the case not only for people regarded as wise by one or another culture or priestry, but especially for people who have unique ways of combining information, whom cultures may not regard wise or benevolent at all, but whose perspective, being unique, supplements that of the culture and corrects it in its endemic errors (in the same way that sometimes even a carpenter's perspective supplements that of God).
I keep developing the psycho-ethical equilibrium concept: The world at any given time is at equilibrium point among people's just-world concepts; which equilibrium is constantly shifting as people's condition changes and so do just-world concepts, with both feeding into each other. I remember my comment that, when someone is being bullied, there's a pressure on people to regard that person as wrong - then I recognize how difficult it is to maintain one's sense of self as good in presence of constant nastiness or to maintain sense of another person's good when they are being savaged or the sense of goodness of self and the world in presence of hideousness all around - and well, that still may very well be a flaw in design, but one I see as something that can be overcome - though not simply by effort of will, by no means, as will simply embodies one's basic beliefs and convictions - but rather by having a structure of convictions that are structurous of a will and by which these convictions manifest and are part of formation of interdependent reality pursuant your just-world convictions.
I hear about God-in-all-through-all of Spinosa, Jungian version of this, Platonic and I look at how this is exclusive of free will - at the same time I have to watch for barbaric beliefs of people who are not schooled in such concepts and deliberate manipulations of those who want to blind people to cultural factors especially when those be their own - and I say that hey, Confucians equated social order with this ("li") and Taoists claimed it to be part of natural way toward which deliberate action and social order is hindrance - and then I say how we've seen an abomination of all abominations: American psychology deriving from spirituality the idea of collective consciousness and then used it to mean what they wanted psychosocial environment to become - creating a "li" type condition to freeze-dry in eternities a sociocultural moment and set of false convictions and interests - using the consciousness movement sellouts to deify precisely the thing that they sought rightly to overcome and shoving, through character destruction and psychological violence, the lie of the deliberately created construct being natural or divine, down people's throats. Creating this abomination of all abominations; Bigotry, barbarism and sheer malice using spiritual tools to enforce itself and claiming to be spiritual consciousness of civilization! Treating its dissidents as demons! And claiming for itself absolute authority over people's lives, while denying them any freedom of will and choice and thought: An encompassing American "li," the deviation from which is deviation not only from sanity but indeed from divine order! Confucianism on American soil, ladies and gentlemen, denying not only deliberate choice but denying people the knowledge of the Choices That Went Into Creating This Situation - that pass off social construction as part of divine will or all that is while not only ignoring the fact of human will (modes, right?) in formation and co-formation of social reality but denying people the RIGHT TO MAKE A CHOICE, period!
Which means that any meaningful concept of liberty means breaking down that construct.
So I'm walking down the street and still seeing the den of the enchanted she-spider in front of me and pulling me further ahead into her grasp. Oh! You know how much I need you, devour me, why don't you, and turn me into food for webs. The she-spider laughs. I would be corrupt if I were to use such feelings for short-sighted purposes. I'm only pulling you to where the self-existing one lives. That's whom you want to talk to, then you could actually have informed choice & to reason why would be yours.
I remember "in the middle of the road only yellow stripes and dead armadillos" and I walk between yellow stripes and a SUV approaches from behind and I think maybe I could disprove that but it shows no signs of seeing me so I move off and well I think the middle-of-the-road view can sometimes work and in some cases may even be optimal, but it also is taxing and hard to maintain energy (and some things are furthermore not to be integrated, as compromise with what wants you dead leaves you half-dead: Dialectic works for legitimate pairs of existents, while in other pairs of existence one is all-good and other is all-bad in which what is needed is not dialectic but radicalism, and in other existents still we have some convoluted mixture), so on occasion it will happen that one extreme topples the moderate and then the two need to fight or make up and, well, just that you came up with this solution in DC as a politician at 50 does not mean that it it true for Puerto Rican at 30 or the 15-year-old rape victim or the German retirees or the bus driver in India or people in Ethiopia or Ukraine. And yes, I do expect the same things to be said by the next or the preceding, and see that as part of the job. Moving equilibrium, right? Composed of just-world hypotheses, shifting all the time.
And then - far right. Path to the greenery, and inside it a brook. I'm in my shorts with bare feet, and I hear Well if you're so in touch with the light then go into here, through darkness, through brambles, and let it carry you. I do, while at one point laughing at a vine above me (she once swung on a vine too and it broke but she lived - here I think vine is a helping hand, a high place extending me hand I need as it hangs off the emanation of the self-existing and looks like umbilical cord but only apparently mimics that adaptation to lead out and up) - and so I walk through and find myself in the brook, and I stand as they tell me, and I let she-spider weave all around me and be enfolded by her skin and remember the river nymphs and know the true meaning of communing. The river nymphs Ms. LL said were always lonely and sought to be loved, but found upon contact with man that he saw them as satanic and wanted to either kill them or put them in horrible place - and I said I am with you I won't stand to let you be killed whatever that means to my salvation - and then I hear about hardness of walls and I say that I will show what is under the wall ("earth hard - fire under it"), as I rummage through rocks - rocks polished by water - rocks arranged meticulously - I take a rock that has flat bottom and circular top, the presentation I presume of model of being - until I find WHAT WAS UNDER THE WALL.
This one is all black, containing many black rocks within a fused-together ground of being shape of an L. No spheres, no polish, nothing. Absolutely uncompromising. A bit of a nematode I conjecture, a bit of a coral reef I conjecture, a bit of a colony in which each is its own seed and whole being manifests through all. So I think OK this is the integrative synthesis, with self and structure reshaping both and belonging to each other, making best of each other and best for each other through synthesis and abrasion and creating synergy within framework of checks and balances - actually I think this later, what I think here is:
If you WWIIers or Xers still don't get a clue, the clue is as follows. That particular society combined the worst of spirit and matter: Regimented and intellectually oppressive as in religion and barren of all emotional and spiritual experience as in rationalism. And the purpose of mind is to combine the best of all possible worlds. A world that makes the best of spirit and matter: Full of emotional and spiritual and experiential richness (the best of spirit) - and with real liberties and well-being (the best of matter). And yes that means the best of all possible worlds; and if you say you can't have the best of all possible worlds then I say that it is the purpose of mind to make the best of all possible worlds and if we don't have the best of all possible worlds then we either aren't thinking or are being sabotaged or are sabotaging ourselves.
("And what if humanity does not deserve that?" Whether or not that is so, your job as a human is to make that possible. "And what about original sin?" Well if there is such a thing as original sin then it speaks to the totality of the human nature including all agendas belonging to it, including desire to control your children or run your community or control people's behavior or make money or shape your country or stand in anyone else's way, so the concept applies to anything you may do and is for that reason meaningless to all practical action - in the same way for example as the concept of all things being illusion becomes meaningless by the same standard.)
So I am out of the stream and walking past a cemetery. It says "Mitchell" (Hey you know who) then "Bowie" and before all of them in the middle, "Shepherd." (and I guess the ones behind you are sheep, and well guess where they are now). Then: "Onion" and "Simpson" (I start laughing: Hey boss, thanks for that) followed by "Stuart." OK, you got my attention (someone else knows significance of that too).
Then there's the church that talks about 11:00: Christianity 101: Repentance and I see this as initiation ritual akin to all others in other religions (you reject sin or the world of sin or ego and then you proceed on path to illumination or enlightenment) and then I think I don't repent things under consideration so I hear then let's manipulate the events in society and in people's lives in such ways that they would suffer negative circumstances and you would be seen as a culprit or as a wrongdoer and I say This is your social manipulation done using deliberate effort of will and mind and is in no way a natural consequence of those actions, so the one guilty is not me or my loved ones but you. I remember the observation that said non-Christians got headaches and mental pain and I remember that state of affairs when in Christian school and of course this is not natural state of being non-Christian but state induced by Christian people's thoughts and prayers - you think you don't do magic? Your whole mindset is magic - and so I start thinking well am I not bringing murderous memes of Christianity to those whom I don't want killed and - that was the problem before, I kept bringing shit to those I did not want to bring shit and I hoped Christianity would free me of that
So I reiterate what I said before, There's the true spiritual attitude that fills world with richness and the religious component that regiments, and there's the logic-based worldview that gives circumstantial liberty but disallows any feeling or thought or existence that actually makes life worthwhile, and I say there's ways to combine it with 00 rate of return (religious applied to behavioral standards - material applied to emotion: no liberty, no richness, aka pure evil), 01 (religious applied to behavioral standards - spiritual applied to emotion: no liberty, but richness, the experience of the Mexican), 10 (material applied to behavioral standards - material applied to emotion: Liberty, no experience, the experience of the Unitarian), and the prize: 11: Material applied to society and spiritual applied to experience: Liberty AND life worth living.
Now this has happened once in American history: The path from 10 moved to 11. The Transcendentalism. A more traumatic transition: From 00 to 11: the Hippies. And in both cases they were described as being spoiled. Will you people learn? IT IS MEANINGLESS TO GIVE PEOPLE CIRCUMSTANTIAL LIBERTY, OR PEACE, OR PROSPERITY, IF THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED TO LIVE! What happened was not merely rebellion; It was improvement: It was progress: It was the next level. It was the innovation upon what existed previously. You've created a civilization in which people have rights. Now, it can be a civilization in which people can actually live. AND Integrate the spiritual component, while Building it, On top, Of, The, Intellectual, Structures, That, You, Created!
In other words: Liberty AND emotional richness! Mind AND spirituality! Not only have statutory liberty, but make it possible to actually live! Like I said, what's the point of being free if you are not allowed to feel, or to live, or to have beautiful experiences and beautiful existence? We have New Agers freeing themselves by saying that they must essentially be a world to themselves - that others are reflection of self but not important - that romantic love is a myth - that everyone creates their reality (corollaries: that everyone who's being mistreated caused it, that the privileged Westerner created conditions of his privilege and the Ethiopian has done the same for himself, that any feeling worth having is to be exculcated, that leader can do anything to his subjects because they would be creating their reality through his actions and you can do what you want to another because they caused their reality) - and what I'm saying is, This is monstrous! So you've found a way to be free, I see that; but you've done it by becoming cold and heartless and malevolent! And utterly lacking in compassion, ethics or any sense of what your ideas would mean for the world as a whole.
The problem I've seen with a lot of spiritual adepts is that they become cold, heartless, and cruel, and that's simply not a direction I would accept any spirituality taking me! What's the point of having spirituality if you end up cold? "You are the river" - no, a river is a flow, it is a flux, it is a relationship. "Just be love" - an impossibility: You cannot be love because love is something that is felt by one thing for another - you can love but you cannot be love: You can be fire, you can be light, I've been motion and verb for a while, you can even be self-existent for a while if you swing that way but you cannot BE love. The Bhakti Yoga is not based on "being love"; it is based on devotional love of God bringing one into Godspace. In the same way as love for the next person creates similar flux that reshapes both.
And meanwhile we have (from a Castaneda group leader and publisher of "Tucson Poet") the poetic imagery of the civilizaition being a giant eros-extracting mechanism directing lifeforce toward consumption. What does this mean, and where does this lead? If eros is something to be extracted and used to fuel economy - what world do we have? As Robert Tkotch rightly stated, a population completely and deservedly emasculated in every respect that counts. A population in which, to paraphrase Onion, 90% of the population are permanently sedentary, all their life force expropriated. A population that attacks the true river - the true flux - the true manifestation of eros: The passionate love between man and woman. And that, by attacking the basis of all true emotional experience, becomes this and this absolutely: An expropriation and usurpation of life. Itself. Apparently "God is love" becomes "military-industrial complex is love" the upshot of which is: Pepsi loves you.
I've seen this malignant element in thought of aforementioned spiritual adepts: Their claim of passion between woman and man as "a shortcut." A shortcut? A shortcut to what? Enlightenment? What if they aren't interested in enlightenment - what if they are simply interested in living? No, it is a better technology. It is a claim on existence. It is a birthright of human beingness. It is the truth of experience, and without such things being possible all the progress you have means nothing!
Don't you YET understand? To have liberties, is meaningless unless you can actually have an existence worthy of experiencing! It puts a question to the whole idea of, "Well what do we have these liberties for?" To have legal liberties, without a freedom to feel, to experience, to have life worth having, is like having walls without a building inside of it! Once again, WHAT ARE THESE LIBERTIES FOR? Is it worth fighting to protect liberties without it being acceptable to live? if it is impossible to have a fully human, fully passionate, fully experienced, existence? Don't just say you've made this building (and everyone owes you their life, and then go down in history as yet another set of tyrants who fed in order to choke while people legitimately start asking if maybe it's better to surrender some of these liberties for the sake of spirituality), make it habitable so that your work actually BENEFITS the world! Put furniture, paintings, carpets inside so that somebody actually BENEFITS from what you've created! Put this work in service of human interest, use hardware to carry beautiful works and beautiful artifacts and ideas that allow people to develop beautiful thoughts and emotions and by implementing them in their lives and sharing them with each other not only make life beautiful for each other but actually create a social order that does the world the honor for existing - that makes possible life worth living - that Consummates the Edifact of Civilization and allows light to manifest through the structures of manifestation and create a livable world rather than simply a working economy!
So we hear intellectualists argue that emotions are necessarily entrapping and regressive, and I say, Ridiculous - and to paraphrase someone, what's so freeing or rational about the emotion of hate. And then we hear religious people argue that you're not independent. Well, I may be independent or I may not be independent; Khodorkovsky just told us a way to be free whatever the circumstances. And there's Mickey saying that that makes you arrogant and I say SO BE IT, Be arrogant when dealing with people like Mickey, STAND BY your thoughts, STAND BY your feelings, stand by your being and right to exist as an independent unit of volitional consciousness and a being who feels - and for people to be able to do that is the only way to defeat dictatorship and oppression by any name, whether it come from people who think you arrogant for having your own thoughts or people who think you infantile for having feelings worth having or from the marriage in hell between psychology and religion to create an encompassing American "li" the devation from which is a deviation from sanity and goodness itself (and Scott Peck as its ultimate arbiter). Yes, I read that the idealist's strategy is to create a holistic synthesis that gets everyone to agree - and I keep saying that's fine and good and a noble project, but don't tell me that that means I have to submit to this if I see and know to the contrary!
So I see two complementary half-rights half-wrongs: Religion being oppressive of behavior but enriching of experience, and rationalism creating circumstantial liberty but denying freedom to feel and to experience life. And I say that the poet's way is to combine the best of both: To have circumstantial freedom and the freedom of passion and beauty and inspired, beautiful, passionate, romantic existence. You may claim the latter to be an impossibility. But I've seen it work and would fight for it for the next person. And to the people who regard such things badly, I say, This is the prize of existence, and anything against that is against all the good in humanity. It is for this that every great person has ever striven, and to make such things possible for the next person is one's duty before America and one's duty before humankind.
posted by Ilya Shambat at 4:06 PM
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