The Big Picture
A thousand years is but an instant. There’s nothing new, nothing different. The same pattern over and over. The same clouds, the same music, the same insight felt an hour or an eternity ago. There’s nothing here for me now, nothing at all. Now I remember. This happened to me before. This is why I left. I have begun to find my answers. Although it will seem difficult, the rewards will be great. Exercise my human mind as thoroughly as possible, knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe. Savor the input from all the senses. Feel the joy and sorrow, the laughter, the empathy, compassion and tote the emotional memory in my travel bag. I remember where I came from and how I became a human. Why I hung around. And now my final departure is scheduled. This way out. Escaping velocity. Not just eternity, but infinity.
I’ve been kind of on zombie autopilot lately. I don’t feel like an ant in my head, but I guess I probably look like one. D.H.Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road and instead of just passing and glancing away, they decided to accept what he calls “the confrontation between their souls”. It’s like freeing the brave reckless gods within us all. I don’t want to be an ant. I mean, it’s like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one other, continuously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. “Here’s your change”, “Paper or plastic?”, “Credit or debit?”, “You want ketchup with that?”. I don’t want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don’t want to give that up. I don’t want to be an ant. I’m not awake right now. I’ve got the benefit in this reality, of a consistent perspective. It’s mostly just me dealing with a lot of people who are exposing me to information and ideas that seem vaguely familiar, but at the same time, it’s all very alien to me. I’m not in an objective, rational world. I’ve been flying around. It’s weird, because it’s not like a fixed state. It’s more like this whole spectrum of awareness. Like the lucidity wavers. Right now I know that I’m dreaming. This is the most in myself and in my thoughts that I’ve been so far. I’m writing about being in a dream. But I’m beginning to think that it’s something that I don’t really have any precedent for. It’s totally unique. The quality of the environment and the information that I’m receiving. It’s like something outside of myself. It’s something transmitted to me externally. I don’t know what this is. So much of the information that these people have been imparting to me. It’s like really heavy connotation to it. I seem to think I’m so limited by the world and the confines, but I’m really just creating them. And I keep trying to figure it out, but it seems like now that I know that what
I am doing is dreaming, I can do whatever I want to. I am dreaming, but I am awake. I have, so many options, and that’s what life is about. Well, sometimes I feel kind of isolated, but most of the time, I feel really connected, really engaged in this active process. Which is weird because most of the time, I’ve just been really passive and not really responding, except for now, I guess. I’m just letting the information wash over me. Most of the people that I’ve been encountering and most of the things that I would wanna say, they say it for me and almost at my cue. It’s complete unto itself. It’s not that I’m having a bad dream. It’s a great dream. But it’s so unlike any other dream I’ve ever had before. It’s ‘the’ dream. It’s like I’m being prepared for something. I feel, my transport should be an extension of my personality. The windshield is my little window to the world, and every minute, it’s a different show. Now, I may not understand it. I may not even necessarily agree with it. But I accept it and just sort of glide along. You want to keep things on an even keel is what I’m saying. You want to go with the flow. The sea refuses no river. The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving. Saves on introductions and good-byes. The ride does not require an explanation. Just occupants. You come onto this planet with a crayon box. Now, you may get the 8-pack, you may get the 16-pack. But it’s all in what you do with the crayons, the colors that you’re given. Don’t worry about drawing within the lines or coloring outside the lines. I say color outside the lines. Color right off the page. Don’t box me in. We’re in motion to the ocean. We’re not landlocked. I’m afraid we’re losing the real virtues of living life passionately, the sense of taking responsibility for who we are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it’s a philosophy of despair. But I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre once interviewed said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. But one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as, a real kind of exuberance of feeling on top of it. It’s like your life is yours to create. I’ve read the post modernists with some interest, even admiration. But when I read them, I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more that you talk about a person as a social construction or as a confluence of forces or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he’s not talking about something abstract. He’s not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It’s something very concrete. It’s you and me talking. Making decisions. Doing things and taking the consequences. It is true that there are seven billion people in the world and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It’s always our decision who we are. Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from. It came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival. Like, “water”. Or, “Saber-toothed tiger right behind you”. We came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting, is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we’re experiencing. What is, frustration? Or what is anger or love? When I say “love” the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person’s ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, through their memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I’m saying and say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They’re just symbols. They’re dead. And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It’s unspeakable. And yet, when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we have connected, and we think that we’re understood. If we’re looking at the highlights of human development, we have to look at the evolution of the organism and then at the development of its interaction with the environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life perceived through the hominid coming to the evolution of mankind. Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon man. Now, interestingly, what we’re looking at here are three strings: biological, anthropological-- development of the cities, cultures-- which is human expression. Now, what we’ve seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if we look at the time scales that’s involved here, two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, mankind as we know it. We’re beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then when we get to agricultural, scientific revolution and industrial revolution, we’re looking at 10,000 years, 400 years, 150 years. We’re seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time. What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it’s gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime, within this generation. The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence. The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism. And you knit the two together with neuro-biology. Before on the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, non- competitive grouping. Independent from the external. And what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and the desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, we produce a neo-human with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that’s only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until you reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space. And the manifestations of this neo-human type evolution, manifestations could be dramatically counter-intuitive. That’s the interesting part. The old evolution is cold. It’s sterile. It’s efficient. And its manifestations are those social adaptations. We’re talking about parasitism, dominance, morality. War, predation, these would be subject to de-emphasis. These would be subject to de-evolution. The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution. That is what we would hope to see from this. That would be nice. A self-destructive man feels completely alienated, utterly alone. He’s an outsider to the human community. He thinks to himself, “I must be insane”. What he fails to realize is that society has, just as he does, a vested interest in considerable losses and catastrophes. These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well-defined needs. Man wants chaos. In fact, he’s gotta have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. We’re irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It’s in all of us. We revel in it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies. But we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world. Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven’t given us any other options outside the occasional, purely symbolic, participatory act of voting. You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left? I feel that the time has come to project my own inadequacies and dis-satisfactions into the socio-political and scientific schemes. Let my own lack of a voice be heard. In a way, in our contemporary world view. It’s easy to think that science has come to take the place of God. But some philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of free will. This problem’s been around for a long time, since before Aristotle in 350 BC. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, these guys all worried about how we can be free if God already knows in advance everything you’re gonna do. Nowadays we know that the world operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world. Now, these laws, because they’re so trustworthy, they enable incredible technological achievements. But look at yourself. We’re just physical systems too. We’re just complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We’re mostly water, and our behavior isn’t gonna be an exception to basic physical laws. So it starts to look like whether it’s God setting things up in advance and knowing everything we’re gonna do or whether it’s these basic physical laws governing everything. There’s not a lot of room left for freedom. So now you might be tempted to just ignore the mystery of free will. Say, “Oh, well, it’s just an historical anecdote. It’s sophomoric. It’s a question with no answer. Just forget about it”. But the question keeps staring you right in the face. You think about individuality, for example, who you are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make. Or take responsibility. You can only be held responsible, you can only be found guilty or admired or respected for things you did of your own free will. The question keeps coming back, and we don’t really have a solution to it. It starts to look like all your decisions are really just a charade. Think about how it happens. There’s some electrical activity in your brain. Your neurons fire. They send a signal down into your nervous system. It passes along down into your muscle fibers. They twitch. You might, say, reach out your arm. Looks like it’s a free action on your part, but every one of those, every part of that process is actually governed by physical law, chemical laws, electrical laws and so on. So now it just looks like the Big Bang set up the initial conditions, and the whole rest of our history, the whole rest of human history and even before, is really just sort of the playing out of sub-atomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws. We think we’re special. We think we have some kind of special dignity, but that now comes under threat. I mean, that’s really challenged by this picture. So you might be saying, “Well, wait a minute. What about quantum mechanics?” I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it’s not really like that. It’s really a probabilistic theory. There’s room. It’s loose. It’s not deterministic. And that’s gonna enable us to understand free will. But if you look at the details, it’s not really gonna help because what happens is you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is apparently a bit random. They swerve. Their behavior is absurd in the sense that it’s unpredictable and we can’t understand it based on anything that came before. It just does something out of the blue, according to a probabilistic framework. But is that gonna help with freedom? Should our freedom just be a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That just seems like it’s worse. I’d rather be a gear in a big deterministic, physical machine than just some random swerving. So we can’t just ignore the problem. We have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons, with all that it entails. Not just bodies, but persons. And that means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility and trying to understand individuality. You can’t fight government, death and taxes. Don’t talk about politics or religion. This is all the equivalent of enemy propaganda rolling across the picket line. We saw it all through the 20th Century. And now in the 21st Century, it’s time to stand up and realize that we should not allow ourselves to be crammed into this rat maze. We should not submit to dehumanization. I don’t know about you, but I’m concerned with what’s happening in this world. I’m concerned with the structure. I’m concerned with the systems of control, those that control my life and those that seek to control it even more! I want freedom! That’s what I want! And that’s what you should want! It’s up to each and every one of us to turn loose and just shovel the greed, the hatred, the envy and, the insecurities because that is the central mode of control that make us feel pathetic, small. So we’ll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. We have got to realize that we’re being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state! The 21st Century is gonna be a new century, not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues of no significance and classicism and statism and all the rest of the modes of control! It’s gonna be the age of humankind, standing up for something pure and something right! What a bunch of garbage, liberal Democrat, conservative Republican. It’s all there to control you. Two sides of the same coin. Two management teams bidding for control the CEO job of Slavery, Incorporated! The truth is out there in front of you, but they lay out this buffet of lies! I’m sick of it, and I’m not gonna take a bite out of it! Do you got me? Resistance is not futile. We’re gonna win this thing. Humankind is too good! We’re not a bunch of underachievers! We’re gonna stand up and we’re gonna be human beings! We’re gonna get fired up about the real things, the things that matter. Creativity and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit! Well, that’s it! That’s all I got to say! It’s in your court. The quest is to be liberated from the negative, which is really our own will to nothingness. And once having said yes to the instant, the affirmation is contagious. It bursts into a chain of affirmations that knows no limit. To say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence. The main character is what you might call “the mind”. It’s mastery, it’s capacity to represent. Throughout history, attempts have been made to contain those experiences which happen at the edge of the limit where the mind is vulnerable. But I think we are in a very significant moment in history. Those moments, those what you might call liminal, limit, frontier, edge zone experiences are actually now becoming the norm. These multiplicities and distinctions and differences that have given great difficulty to the old mind, are actually through entering into their very essence, tasting and feeling their uniqueness. One might make a breakthrough to that common something that holds them together. And so the main character is, to this new mind, greater mind. A mind that yet is to be. And when we are obviously entered into that mode, you can see a radical subjectivity, radical attunement to individuality, uniqueness to that which the mind is, opens itself to a vast objectivity. So the story is the story of the cosmos now. The moment is not just a passing, empty nothing yet. And this is in the way in which these secret passages happen. Yes, it’s empty with such fullness that the great moment, the great life of the universe is pulsating in it. And each one, each object, each place, each act leaves a mark. And that story is singular. But, in fact, it’s story after story. Time just dissolves into quick-moving particles that are swirling away. Either I’m moving fast or time is. Never both simultaneously. It’s such a strange paradox. I think that what we don’t take into account when we’re young is our endless curiosity. That’s whats so great about being human.Benedict Anderson talks about identity. He’s talking about a baby picture. You pick up this two-dimensional image, and you say, “That’s me”. Well, to connect this baby in this weird little image with yourself living and breathing in the present, you have to make up a story like, “This was me when I was a year old, and later I had long hair, and then we moved to Delhi, and now, here I am.” So it takes a story that’s actually a fiction to make you and the baby in the picture identical to create your identity. And the funny thing is, our cells are completely regenerating every seven years. We’ve already become completely different people several times over, and yet we always remain quintessentially ourselves. Our critique began as all critiques begin, with doubt. Doubt became our narrative. Ours was a quest for a new story, our own. And we grasp toward this new history driven by the suspicion that ordinary language couldn’t tell it. Our past appeared frozen in the distance, and our every gesture and accent signified the negation of the old world and the reach for a new one. The way we lived created a new situation, one of exuberance and friendship, that of a subversive micro-society in the heart of a society which ignored it. Art was not the goal but the occasion and the method for locating our specific rhythm and buried possibilities of our time. The discovery of a true communication was what it was about, or at least the quest for such a communication. The adventure of finding it and losing it. We the unappeased, the unaccepting continued looking, filling in the silences with our own wishes, fears and fantasies. Driven forward by the fact that no matter how empty the world seemed, no matter how degraded and used up the world appeared to us, we knew that anything was still possible. And, given the right circumstances, a new world was just as likely as an old one. There are two kinds of sufferers in this world, those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an overabundance of life. I’ve always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved. Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress but rather this endless and futile addition of zeros? No greater values have developed. The Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that’s this: Which is the most universal human characteristic, fear or laziness? They say that dreams are real only as long as they last. Can’t you say the same thing about life? A lot of us out there are mapping that mind-body relationship of dreams. They are called the oneironauts. They are explorers of the dream world. Really, it’s just about the two opposing states of consciousness which don’t really oppose at all. See, in the waking world, the neuro-system inhibits the activation of the vividness of memories. This makes evolutionary sense. It’d be maladapted for the perceptual image of a predator to be mistaken for the memory of one and vice-versa. If the memory of a predator conjured up a perceptual image, we’d be running off to the bathroom every time we had a scary thought. So we have these serotonic neurons that inhibit hallucinations that they themselves are inhibited during REM sleep. This allows dreams to appear real while preventing competition from other perceptual processes. This is why dreams are mistaken for reality. To the functional system of neural activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action and actually the waking perception and action. The worst mistake that you could make is to think that you are alive when really you’re asleep in life’s waiting room. The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Cause if you can do that, you can do anything. Did you ever have a work that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes. And immediately you wake up and realize that the whole day at work had been a dream. It’s bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free. I fancy myself the social lubricator of the dream world, helping people become lucid a little easier. Cut out all that fear and anxiety stuff and just rock and roll. They’re more realistic and less bizarre than non-lucid dreams. Technically, it’s a phenomenon of sleep, but you can have so much damn fun in your dreams. And, of course, everyone knows fun rules. But the trick is, you got to realize that you’re dreaming in the first place. You got to be able to recognize it. You got to be able to ask yourself, “Hey, is this a dream?”. Most people never ask themselves that when they’re awake or especially when they’re asleep. Seems like everyone’s sleep walking through their waking state or wake walking through their dreams. Either way they’re not gonna get much out of it. If the world that I am forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible. On the way to discovering what I love, I will find everything I hate, everything that blocks my path to what I desire. The comfort will never be comfortable for those who seek what is not on the market. A systematic questioning of the idea of happiness. I’ll cut the vocal chords of every empowered speaker. I’ll yank the social symbols through the looking glass. I’ll devalue society’s currency. To confront the familiar. Society is a fraud so complete and venal that it demands to be destroyed beyond the power of memory to recall its existence. Where there’s fire, I’ll carry gasoline. Interrupt the continuum of everyday experience and all the normal expectations that go with it. To live as if something actually depended on one’s actions. To rupture the spell of the ideology of the commodified consumer society so that our oppressed desires of a more authentic nature can come forward. To demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be. To immerse myself in the oblivion of actions and know I’m making it happen. There will be an intensity never before known in everyday life to exchange love and hate, life and death, terror and redemption, repulsions and attractions. An affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified, that it amounts to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation. I’m all theory and no actions. What was missing was felt irretrievable. The extreme uncertainties of subsisting without working made excesses necessary and breaks definitive. To quote Stevenson, “Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest". Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, that no one does it anymore. It’s not dead. It’s just that it’s been forgotten. Removed from our language. Nobody teaches it, so no one knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity. I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced. Ever. So whatever you do, don’t be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting. “On this bridge,” Lorca warns, “Life is not a dream. Beware and beware and beware”. And so many think because “then” happens, “now” isn’t. But didn’t I mention the ongoing “wow” is happening right now. We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance where even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, coauthoring a gigantic Dostoyevsky novel starring clowns. This entire thing we’re involved with called the world is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be. Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each other’s presence. The world is an exam to see if we can rise into the direct experiences. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write a hundred stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized at last something was happening to him. An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion. Before you drift off, don’t forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting. Lorca in that same poem said that the iguana will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person’s dream, that is self-awareness. I haven’t met myself yet. But the advantage to meeting others in the meantime is that one of them may present me to myself. Examine the nature of everything I observe. For instance, I might find myself walking through a dream corridor. And, yes, those are dream feet inside of my dream shoes, part of my dream self. And so, the person I appear to be in the dream cannot be who I really am. This is an image, a mental model. Down through the centuries, the notion that life is wrapped in a dream has been a pervasive theme of philosophers and poets. So doesn’t it make sense that death, too, would be wrapped in dream? That, after death, your conscious life would continue in what might be called, “a dream body”? It would be the same dream body you experience in your everyday dream life. Except that in the post-mortal state, you could never again wake up, never again return to your physical body. As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough. I have recently returned from the valley of the shadow of death. I’m rapturously breathing in all the odors and essences of life. I’ve been to the brink of total oblivion. I remember and ferment the desire to remember everything. I wake up because I was dreaming, and later, I find out that I am still dreaming, dreaming that I'd woken up. But I'm still in it now. I can't get out of it. It's been going on forever. I keep waking up, but I'm just waking up into another dream. I'm trapped. I keep thinking that I'm waking up, but I'm still in a dream. It seems like it's going on forever. I can't get out of it. I wanna wake up for real. How do you really wake up?
I’ve been kind of on zombie autopilot lately. I don’t feel like an ant in my head, but I guess I probably look like one. D.H.Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road and instead of just passing and glancing away, they decided to accept what he calls “the confrontation between their souls”. It’s like freeing the brave reckless gods within us all. I don’t want to be an ant. I mean, it’s like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one other, continuously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. “Here’s your change”, “Paper or plastic?”, “Credit or debit?”, “You want ketchup with that?”. I don’t want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don’t want to give that up. I don’t want to be an ant. I’m not awake right now. I’ve got the benefit in this reality, of a consistent perspective. It’s mostly just me dealing with a lot of people who are exposing me to information and ideas that seem vaguely familiar, but at the same time, it’s all very alien to me. I’m not in an objective, rational world. I’ve been flying around. It’s weird, because it’s not like a fixed state. It’s more like this whole spectrum of awareness. Like the lucidity wavers. Right now I know that I’m dreaming. This is the most in myself and in my thoughts that I’ve been so far. I’m writing about being in a dream. But I’m beginning to think that it’s something that I don’t really have any precedent for. It’s totally unique. The quality of the environment and the information that I’m receiving. It’s like something outside of myself. It’s something transmitted to me externally. I don’t know what this is. So much of the information that these people have been imparting to me. It’s like really heavy connotation to it. I seem to think I’m so limited by the world and the confines, but I’m really just creating them. And I keep trying to figure it out, but it seems like now that I know that what
I am doing is dreaming, I can do whatever I want to. I am dreaming, but I am awake. I have, so many options, and that’s what life is about. Well, sometimes I feel kind of isolated, but most of the time, I feel really connected, really engaged in this active process. Which is weird because most of the time, I’ve just been really passive and not really responding, except for now, I guess. I’m just letting the information wash over me. Most of the people that I’ve been encountering and most of the things that I would wanna say, they say it for me and almost at my cue. It’s complete unto itself. It’s not that I’m having a bad dream. It’s a great dream. But it’s so unlike any other dream I’ve ever had before. It’s ‘the’ dream. It’s like I’m being prepared for something. I feel, my transport should be an extension of my personality. The windshield is my little window to the world, and every minute, it’s a different show. Now, I may not understand it. I may not even necessarily agree with it. But I accept it and just sort of glide along. You want to keep things on an even keel is what I’m saying. You want to go with the flow. The sea refuses no river. The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving. Saves on introductions and good-byes. The ride does not require an explanation. Just occupants. You come onto this planet with a crayon box. Now, you may get the 8-pack, you may get the 16-pack. But it’s all in what you do with the crayons, the colors that you’re given. Don’t worry about drawing within the lines or coloring outside the lines. I say color outside the lines. Color right off the page. Don’t box me in. We’re in motion to the ocean. We’re not landlocked. I’m afraid we’re losing the real virtues of living life passionately, the sense of taking responsibility for who we are, the ability to make something of yourself and feeling good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it’s a philosophy of despair. But I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre once interviewed said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. But one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as, a real kind of exuberance of feeling on top of it. It’s like your life is yours to create. I’ve read the post modernists with some interest, even admiration. But when I read them, I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more that you talk about a person as a social construction or as a confluence of forces or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he’s not talking about something abstract. He’s not talking about the kind of self or soul that theologians would argue about. It’s something very concrete. It’s you and me talking. Making decisions. Doing things and taking the consequences. It is true that there are seven billion people in the world and counting. Nevertheless, what you do makes a difference. It makes a difference, first of all, in material terms. Makes a difference to other people and it sets an example. In short, I think the message here is that we should never simply write ourselves off and see ourselves as the victim of various forces. It’s always our decision who we are. Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from. It came from our desire to transcend our isolation and have some sort of connection with one another. And it had to be easy when it was just simple survival. Like, “water”. Or, “Saber-toothed tiger right behind you”. We came up with a sound for that. But when it gets really interesting, is when we use that same system of symbols to communicate all the abstract and intangible things that we’re experiencing. What is, frustration? Or what is anger or love? When I say “love” the sound comes out of my mouth and it hits the other person’s ear, travels through this Byzantine conduit in their brain, through their memories of love or lack of love, and they register what I’m saying and say yes, they understand. But how do I know they understand? Because words are inert. They’re just symbols. They’re dead. And so much of our experience is intangible. So much of what we perceive cannot be expressed. It’s unspeakable. And yet, when we communicate with one another, and we feel that we have connected, and we think that we’re understood. If we’re looking at the highlights of human development, we have to look at the evolution of the organism and then at the development of its interaction with the environment. Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life perceived through the hominid coming to the evolution of mankind. Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon man. Now, interestingly, what we’re looking at here are three strings: biological, anthropological-- development of the cities, cultures-- which is human expression. Now, what we’ve seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if we look at the time scales that’s involved here, two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, mankind as we know it. We’re beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then when we get to agricultural, scientific revolution and industrial revolution, we’re looking at 10,000 years, 400 years, 150 years. We’re seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time. What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it’s gonna telescope to the point we should be able to see it manifest itself within our lifetime, within this generation. The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence. The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism. And you knit the two together with neuro-biology. Before on the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, non- competitive grouping. Independent from the external. And what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and the desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. So, we produce a neo-human with a new individuality and a new consciousness. But that’s only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. Until you reach a crescendo in a way could be imagined as an enormous instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space. And the manifestations of this neo-human type evolution, manifestations could be dramatically counter-intuitive. That’s the interesting part. The old evolution is cold. It’s sterile. It’s efficient. And its manifestations are those social adaptations. We’re talking about parasitism, dominance, morality. War, predation, these would be subject to de-emphasis. These would be subject to de-evolution. The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution. That is what we would hope to see from this. That would be nice. A self-destructive man feels completely alienated, utterly alone. He’s an outsider to the human community. He thinks to himself, “I must be insane”. What he fails to realize is that society has, just as he does, a vested interest in considerable losses and catastrophes. These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well-defined needs. Man wants chaos. In fact, he’s gotta have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. We’re irresistibly drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It’s in all of us. We revel in it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies. But we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world. Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven’t given us any other options outside the occasional, purely symbolic, participatory act of voting. You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left? I feel that the time has come to project my own inadequacies and dis-satisfactions into the socio-political and scientific schemes. Let my own lack of a voice be heard. In a way, in our contemporary world view. It’s easy to think that science has come to take the place of God. But some philosophical problems remain as troubling as ever. Take the problem of free will. This problem’s been around for a long time, since before Aristotle in 350 BC. St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, these guys all worried about how we can be free if God already knows in advance everything you’re gonna do. Nowadays we know that the world operates according to some fundamental physical laws, and these laws govern the behavior of every object in the world. Now, these laws, because they’re so trustworthy, they enable incredible technological achievements. But look at yourself. We’re just physical systems too. We’re just complex arrangements of carbon molecules. We’re mostly water, and our behavior isn’t gonna be an exception to basic physical laws. So it starts to look like whether it’s God setting things up in advance and knowing everything we’re gonna do or whether it’s these basic physical laws governing everything. There’s not a lot of room left for freedom. So now you might be tempted to just ignore the mystery of free will. Say, “Oh, well, it’s just an historical anecdote. It’s sophomoric. It’s a question with no answer. Just forget about it”. But the question keeps staring you right in the face. You think about individuality, for example, who you are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make. Or take responsibility. You can only be held responsible, you can only be found guilty or admired or respected for things you did of your own free will. The question keeps coming back, and we don’t really have a solution to it. It starts to look like all your decisions are really just a charade. Think about how it happens. There’s some electrical activity in your brain. Your neurons fire. They send a signal down into your nervous system. It passes along down into your muscle fibers. They twitch. You might, say, reach out your arm. Looks like it’s a free action on your part, but every one of those, every part of that process is actually governed by physical law, chemical laws, electrical laws and so on. So now it just looks like the Big Bang set up the initial conditions, and the whole rest of our history, the whole rest of human history and even before, is really just sort of the playing out of sub-atomic particles according to these basic fundamental physical laws. We think we’re special. We think we have some kind of special dignity, but that now comes under threat. I mean, that’s really challenged by this picture. So you might be saying, “Well, wait a minute. What about quantum mechanics?” I know enough contemporary physical theory to know it’s not really like that. It’s really a probabilistic theory. There’s room. It’s loose. It’s not deterministic. And that’s gonna enable us to understand free will. But if you look at the details, it’s not really gonna help because what happens is you have some very small quantum particles, and their behavior is apparently a bit random. They swerve. Their behavior is absurd in the sense that it’s unpredictable and we can’t understand it based on anything that came before. It just does something out of the blue, according to a probabilistic framework. But is that gonna help with freedom? Should our freedom just be a matter of probabilities, just some random swerving in a chaotic system? That just seems like it’s worse. I’d rather be a gear in a big deterministic, physical machine than just some random swerving. So we can’t just ignore the problem. We have to find room in our contemporary world view for persons, with all that it entails. Not just bodies, but persons. And that means trying to solve the problem of freedom, finding room for choice and responsibility and trying to understand individuality. You can’t fight government, death and taxes. Don’t talk about politics or religion. This is all the equivalent of enemy propaganda rolling across the picket line. We saw it all through the 20th Century. And now in the 21st Century, it’s time to stand up and realize that we should not allow ourselves to be crammed into this rat maze. We should not submit to dehumanization. I don’t know about you, but I’m concerned with what’s happening in this world. I’m concerned with the structure. I’m concerned with the systems of control, those that control my life and those that seek to control it even more! I want freedom! That’s what I want! And that’s what you should want! It’s up to each and every one of us to turn loose and just shovel the greed, the hatred, the envy and, the insecurities because that is the central mode of control that make us feel pathetic, small. So we’ll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. We have got to realize that we’re being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state! The 21st Century is gonna be a new century, not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues of no significance and classicism and statism and all the rest of the modes of control! It’s gonna be the age of humankind, standing up for something pure and something right! What a bunch of garbage, liberal Democrat, conservative Republican. It’s all there to control you. Two sides of the same coin. Two management teams bidding for control the CEO job of Slavery, Incorporated! The truth is out there in front of you, but they lay out this buffet of lies! I’m sick of it, and I’m not gonna take a bite out of it! Do you got me? Resistance is not futile. We’re gonna win this thing. Humankind is too good! We’re not a bunch of underachievers! We’re gonna stand up and we’re gonna be human beings! We’re gonna get fired up about the real things, the things that matter. Creativity and the dynamic human spirit that refuses to submit! Well, that’s it! That’s all I got to say! It’s in your court. The quest is to be liberated from the negative, which is really our own will to nothingness. And once having said yes to the instant, the affirmation is contagious. It bursts into a chain of affirmations that knows no limit. To say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence. The main character is what you might call “the mind”. It’s mastery, it’s capacity to represent. Throughout history, attempts have been made to contain those experiences which happen at the edge of the limit where the mind is vulnerable. But I think we are in a very significant moment in history. Those moments, those what you might call liminal, limit, frontier, edge zone experiences are actually now becoming the norm. These multiplicities and distinctions and differences that have given great difficulty to the old mind, are actually through entering into their very essence, tasting and feeling their uniqueness. One might make a breakthrough to that common something that holds them together. And so the main character is, to this new mind, greater mind. A mind that yet is to be. And when we are obviously entered into that mode, you can see a radical subjectivity, radical attunement to individuality, uniqueness to that which the mind is, opens itself to a vast objectivity. So the story is the story of the cosmos now. The moment is not just a passing, empty nothing yet. And this is in the way in which these secret passages happen. Yes, it’s empty with such fullness that the great moment, the great life of the universe is pulsating in it. And each one, each object, each place, each act leaves a mark. And that story is singular. But, in fact, it’s story after story. Time just dissolves into quick-moving particles that are swirling away. Either I’m moving fast or time is. Never both simultaneously. It’s such a strange paradox. I think that what we don’t take into account when we’re young is our endless curiosity. That’s whats so great about being human.Benedict Anderson talks about identity. He’s talking about a baby picture. You pick up this two-dimensional image, and you say, “That’s me”. Well, to connect this baby in this weird little image with yourself living and breathing in the present, you have to make up a story like, “This was me when I was a year old, and later I had long hair, and then we moved to Delhi, and now, here I am.” So it takes a story that’s actually a fiction to make you and the baby in the picture identical to create your identity. And the funny thing is, our cells are completely regenerating every seven years. We’ve already become completely different people several times over, and yet we always remain quintessentially ourselves. Our critique began as all critiques begin, with doubt. Doubt became our narrative. Ours was a quest for a new story, our own. And we grasp toward this new history driven by the suspicion that ordinary language couldn’t tell it. Our past appeared frozen in the distance, and our every gesture and accent signified the negation of the old world and the reach for a new one. The way we lived created a new situation, one of exuberance and friendship, that of a subversive micro-society in the heart of a society which ignored it. Art was not the goal but the occasion and the method for locating our specific rhythm and buried possibilities of our time. The discovery of a true communication was what it was about, or at least the quest for such a communication. The adventure of finding it and losing it. We the unappeased, the unaccepting continued looking, filling in the silences with our own wishes, fears and fantasies. Driven forward by the fact that no matter how empty the world seemed, no matter how degraded and used up the world appeared to us, we knew that anything was still possible. And, given the right circumstances, a new world was just as likely as an old one. There are two kinds of sufferers in this world, those who suffer from a lack of life and those who suffer from an overabundance of life. I’ve always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved. Why so few? Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress but rather this endless and futile addition of zeros? No greater values have developed. The Greeks 3,000 years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that’s this: Which is the most universal human characteristic, fear or laziness? They say that dreams are real only as long as they last. Can’t you say the same thing about life? A lot of us out there are mapping that mind-body relationship of dreams. They are called the oneironauts. They are explorers of the dream world. Really, it’s just about the two opposing states of consciousness which don’t really oppose at all. See, in the waking world, the neuro-system inhibits the activation of the vividness of memories. This makes evolutionary sense. It’d be maladapted for the perceptual image of a predator to be mistaken for the memory of one and vice-versa. If the memory of a predator conjured up a perceptual image, we’d be running off to the bathroom every time we had a scary thought. So we have these serotonic neurons that inhibit hallucinations that they themselves are inhibited during REM sleep. This allows dreams to appear real while preventing competition from other perceptual processes. This is why dreams are mistaken for reality. To the functional system of neural activity that creates our world, there is no difference between dreaming a perception and an action and actually the waking perception and action. The worst mistake that you could make is to think that you are alive when really you’re asleep in life’s waiting room. The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Cause if you can do that, you can do anything. Did you ever have a work that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes. And immediately you wake up and realize that the whole day at work had been a dream. It’s bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free. I fancy myself the social lubricator of the dream world, helping people become lucid a little easier. Cut out all that fear and anxiety stuff and just rock and roll. They’re more realistic and less bizarre than non-lucid dreams. Technically, it’s a phenomenon of sleep, but you can have so much damn fun in your dreams. And, of course, everyone knows fun rules. But the trick is, you got to realize that you’re dreaming in the first place. You got to be able to recognize it. You got to be able to ask yourself, “Hey, is this a dream?”. Most people never ask themselves that when they’re awake or especially when they’re asleep. Seems like everyone’s sleep walking through their waking state or wake walking through their dreams. Either way they’re not gonna get much out of it. If the world that I am forced to accept is false and nothing is true, then everything is possible. On the way to discovering what I love, I will find everything I hate, everything that blocks my path to what I desire. The comfort will never be comfortable for those who seek what is not on the market. A systematic questioning of the idea of happiness. I’ll cut the vocal chords of every empowered speaker. I’ll yank the social symbols through the looking glass. I’ll devalue society’s currency. To confront the familiar. Society is a fraud so complete and venal that it demands to be destroyed beyond the power of memory to recall its existence. Where there’s fire, I’ll carry gasoline. Interrupt the continuum of everyday experience and all the normal expectations that go with it. To live as if something actually depended on one’s actions. To rupture the spell of the ideology of the commodified consumer society so that our oppressed desires of a more authentic nature can come forward. To demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be. To immerse myself in the oblivion of actions and know I’m making it happen. There will be an intensity never before known in everyday life to exchange love and hate, life and death, terror and redemption, repulsions and attractions. An affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified, that it amounts to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation. I’m all theory and no actions. What was missing was felt irretrievable. The extreme uncertainties of subsisting without working made excesses necessary and breaks definitive. To quote Stevenson, “Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest". Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, that no one does it anymore. It’s not dead. It’s just that it’s been forgotten. Removed from our language. Nobody teaches it, so no one knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity. I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced. Ever. So whatever you do, don’t be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting. “On this bridge,” Lorca warns, “Life is not a dream. Beware and beware and beware”. And so many think because “then” happens, “now” isn’t. But didn’t I mention the ongoing “wow” is happening right now. We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance where even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, coauthoring a gigantic Dostoyevsky novel starring clowns. This entire thing we’re involved with called the world is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be. Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each other’s presence. The world is an exam to see if we can rise into the direct experiences. Our eyesight is here as a test to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life than write a hundred stories. Giacometti was once run down by a car, and he recalled falling into a lucid faint, a sudden exhilaration, as he realized at last something was happening to him. An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously. I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree. I would say that life understood is life lived. But the paradoxes bug me, and I can learn to love and make love to the paradoxes that bug me. And on really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion. Before you drift off, don’t forget. Which is to say, remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting. Lorca in that same poem said that the iguana will bite those who do not dream. And as one realizes that one is a dream figure in another person’s dream, that is self-awareness. I haven’t met myself yet. But the advantage to meeting others in the meantime is that one of them may present me to myself. Examine the nature of everything I observe. For instance, I might find myself walking through a dream corridor. And, yes, those are dream feet inside of my dream shoes, part of my dream self. And so, the person I appear to be in the dream cannot be who I really am. This is an image, a mental model. Down through the centuries, the notion that life is wrapped in a dream has been a pervasive theme of philosophers and poets. So doesn’t it make sense that death, too, would be wrapped in dream? That, after death, your conscious life would continue in what might be called, “a dream body”? It would be the same dream body you experience in your everyday dream life. Except that in the post-mortal state, you could never again wake up, never again return to your physical body. As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough. I have recently returned from the valley of the shadow of death. I’m rapturously breathing in all the odors and essences of life. I’ve been to the brink of total oblivion. I remember and ferment the desire to remember everything. I wake up because I was dreaming, and later, I find out that I am still dreaming, dreaming that I'd woken up. But I'm still in it now. I can't get out of it. It's been going on forever. I keep waking up, but I'm just waking up into another dream. I'm trapped. I keep thinking that I'm waking up, but I'm still in a dream. It seems like it's going on forever. I can't get out of it. I wanna wake up for real. How do you really wake up?
Couldn't be better! ;)
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