Do I have to do this all over again?
Didn't I do it right the first time?
Do I have to do this all over again?
How many times do I have to make this climb?
Didn't I? Didn't I?
Can I see my way to know what's really real
They say time can fix things by itself
I know life's more than just some kind of deal
Won't you tell me what all, when my soul comes off the shelf
Didn't I, oh, didn't I?
Peter Tork, Monkee
"We are imprisoned inside the linear assumption that I'm a person in a place, I'm alive, most people aren't - but in fact when you deconstruct all that, THAT is fiction - the truth is more an onrushing magma of literary association. The character of life is like a work of literature. We are told we are supposed to fit your experience in the model that science gives you - probabilistic, statistical, predictable - and yet the felt datum of experience is much more literary than that - we fall in love, we make and lose fortunes, we inherit mansions, we lose everything, we get terrible diseases, we're cured of them or we die of them - it has this "Sturm und Drang" aspect to it which physics is not supposed to have but literature always has. What I'm willing to entertain at some depth is the idea that salvation is somehow the act of encompassing comprehension, an act of apprehension of understanding and this act involves everything.
Somehow the career of the Word is the overarching metaphor of the age, and if the book is the central metaphor for reality then reality itself is seen as somehow literary, somehow textual, and I believe this is how reality was seen until the rise of modern science. Everyone assumes tools are tools and that's that, but for McLuhan the entire toolkit of modern Western man can be traced to the unconscious assumptions of print - for example - the idea of the individual is a post-medieval concept legitimized by print. The idea of the public, this concept did not exist before newspapers because before newspapers there was no public, only people, and rulers very rarely passed on their thinking and only then for utilitarian reasons. The idea of an observing citizenry somehow sharing the governance of society is a print-created idea... the idea of interchangeable parts without which our world would hardly function there would not be automobiles, aircrafts or modern buildings - that idea comes from the interchangeability of letters in a printer's block, the concept of easily reformulated sub-units. The linearity of modern city planning is an unconscious bias imbibed from the world of print - they make sense if you're a print-head, but one of the peculiar things is that animals do not possess language, many human societies do not possess writing and very few human societies invented printing and yet once invented it feeds back into the evolution of social structures and defines everything and yet it is an extraordinary artificiality. Reading is not looking, reading is an entirely different kind of behavior; nobody opens a book and looks at print, we READ print.
Notice that the world created by print is a world of gestalts - buildings, highways, bridges - we know how they're supposed to look, we don't experience astonishment each time we enter a home or institutional edifice. There is a built in set of syntactical expectations in linear space, and when those are violated this is very noticeable and becomes the basis for architectural or design innovation. All of the breakdown of linearity in the 20th century can be seen as new behaviors emerging as the cloud of print-constellated constipation is lifted."
Terence McKenna, monkey
Before I go further, you must decide whether or not you believe that there exists a physical and spiritual bondage that necessitates salvation. If you do not believe or have no life experience that suggests that such a condition blankets the human condition, than this whole blog probably seems a bit silly, and a bit fucked up. More power to you. I sometimes review what I have written here and laugh, secretly thinking that a cry for salvation is simply a symptom of weakness, fear, and sloth. But not as much as I used to.
If you have had life experiences that suggest that a physical and spiritual bondage does exist, or if you find yourself in a state of physical and spiritual bondage right now, salvation is our number one priority.
"The unconscious is not aware of its own
mortality"
Sigmund Freud
"The unconscious mind is aware of its own
immortality."
Aleister Crowley
What if physical death does not release us from bondage? What if good behavior and good deeds are not enough. What if prayer and devotion are not enough? What if money, fame, and the security of possessions only make us forget the task at hand? If Terence McKenna is correct, that salvation involves "the act of encompassing comprehension," then school is always in session. Every blind spot must be illuminated, every chicken accounted for. We cannot allow any informational monopolies, no Christian wisdom, Hebrew wisdom, Muslim wisdom, Sufi wisdom, scientific wisdom, occult wisdom, Republican wisdom, Democratic wisdom, ancient wisdom or modern wisdom. There can only be Human Wisdom, and the goal would be to access as much of this information as possible and then share, analyze, and interpret All and Everything in as many ways as possible, increasing all of our chances for salvation. We are all Detectives working on the same case.
"Find The Others"
Timothy Leary
For 17 years I've followed a trail of clues that have led me to read, listen, attend, endure, and experiment with just about EVERYTHING that promised a new source of information, a new clue towards the mystery of salvation. And from the start I scribbled my thoughts in school notebooks, napkins, the inside cover of books, envelopes, in a Moleskine or two, and finally over the last three years an official journal. I had entertained throughout the years of writing the next great American science-fiction novel, a Hollywood screenplay, or developing a stand-up routine. My intent was to transform my pain and suffering, my trials and tribulations, my notes and my gnosis into fortune and fame. Turn on, cash in, cop out.
But this is not the world I was born into, the world has changed. We are living in the Age of Information. With this blog, I AM writing a novel, I AM writing a screenplay, and I AM doing a stand-up routine. It's just all happening at the same time. And this melting pot of memories, observations, ideas, dreams, and feedback is available to anyone who stumbles upon it, from Japan to Belize to Germany to Arizona.
Not only is it available to read, it is open for global response. Anytime someone responds to these posts and adds a new idea, offers a correction or disagrees with anything, the informational content increases and we get closer and closer to our goal.
We must keep our eyes and ears wide open to the North, to the East, to the West, and to the South.
Not only is it available to read, it is open for global response. Anytime someone responds to these posts and adds a new idea, offers a correction or disagrees with anything, the informational content increases and we get closer and closer to our goal.
We must keep our eyes and ears wide open to the North, to the East, to the West, and to the South.
"I carry a log - yes. Is it funny to you? It is not to me. Behind all things are reasons. Reasons can even explain the absurd. Do we have the time to learn the reasons behind the human being's varied behavior? I think not. Some take the time. Are they called detectives? Watch - and see what life teaches. "