SIStem

SIStem

 

            The industrial revolution began with a few innovation in textiles. What mattered most in the industrial revolution was not sewing machines, per se, but the idea they presented, the possibility they stood for.

            What is the ecology of culture herself?

            The internet is the next frontier. Americans ever go West, reclaiming more land from the dead, following the sun to his hiding places. If we run out of frontier we invent a new world. We created the internet: an entire new reality.

            We first create SIStem into the world, and later those tools become introjected again as our undermind. Our unconscious was first our tools.

            If I were alone no earth for billions of years, with the gift of eternal liveliness, though with no fellow man, I would eventually achieve everything world history has achieved. The full of history is in the individual man.

            Sophia-logos-Pneuma-Paraclete-Ghost would be the most basic and primordial form of sistem, but sistem is everything created by man, as an interacting totality. In a word, it is all our technology. The words of man, the world of communication, magnetizes our brains to think alike. What we see reins what we think. The thinking creates language, and therefore cannot be determined by it, merley influenced.

            SS The sacred spirit is the essence of our language, but SISt#m is the essence of our physical products.

            Can a computer beat a man at chess? No, of course not. It can’t even think. With the stunts that IBM pulls to raise its stock, with deep blue, the machine is given the most souped out computer chip availab, can calculate 200 million words a minute, and has a database of every significant chess game ever recorded, including, unfairly, every game Karsakov played (while he was not allowed to watch the computer recite games itself). Further, they reprogrammed the computer in th middle of the game because he had outsmarted its programming.

                SIS#em now

 

            Sistem is the consciousness of our technology through our use of it, and in its own functioning. Today at the hospitol brought a series of systems under my nose. We were seeking speech therapy for my autistic daughter. Aside from the obvious systems in road traffic, car construction, the english language in general, architecture, all those man made things that surrounded us, we were instantly accosted by the receptionist at the entrence, who grilled my wife with questions for about twenty minutes, while I amused my fussy daughter, before Natalie could be assessed for speech therapy. She questioned Sherry about our family physician, the physical and electronic reality of Dr. D’s recommendation, our birthdates, social security numbers, and insurance; also we were required to know our rights and sign signatures before they would see us. Thus we have credentials, universities, governments, citizenship, law, and economics, all acting like a paper barrier, a buffer fluff to stop us, literally, at the gate, and the presence of security camaras and the idea of security guards and policeman are the violent reality if anybody wishes to avoid the rigmorales of the system.

            The insurance system is the most difficult for us, costing me half my paycheck and paying for a fraction of the full cost of services. Yet each other these systems, rigid as a square, are layers of square like a crystal, slowly letting us closer to the inner circle of a living intelligence – perhaps! – of a counselor. The mind of the counselor itself required large sums of money to be paid to complicated university structures, in order to arrange a few microscopin neurons in the counser’s brain: the whole world and moon have been turned to move those few neurons! And this again to move a few neurons in my daughter’s mind – the rest is ten layers of scaffolding.

            The two dominant systems here are the legal system and the economical system, property and propriety. Property is the body, propriety the mind, property the genes, propriety the ideas (or the “memes” though this term only means “ideas.”)

            SIStem is idol is world, the great enemy of the early Christians, which lead to the weakening and dissolving of the one world government Rome. Sistem itself is authority, and benevolent authority is placebo, and can cure a man and make him sane merely by saying, “this is the law, do this and you will live.”

            And so Natalie falls out of the square system of our house, and is made to circulate in the wider community, and the community bound by state, etc.

            The virtues behind it include truth, justice, and productivity, which are embedded in layers of rigid crystalline structure. Ultimately, the life of the system is in our brains, hypnotized and trained from infancy to participate in the larger whole, so that when we revolt and rebel, we do it in such a way that affirms and strengthens the system.

 

 

ÿ

Perfection Is Easy

www.msu.edu/~junedan

 

"the undermind"

I dislike the term unconscious, because if anything is unconscious, you can easily find it in some form in the unconscious. The idea exists on all levels, but in our practical consciousness of day to day ideas, the conscious of the I, as the ME lets him see, everything working under is present and symbols, but in such a way that we overlook it. Nothing is hidden, nothing is lost.

 

The structure, is simple: the mind is the I, awareness, and this awareness is limited by the habits of a ME engine, the thinking habits that choose what is needed for us to be aware of. The engines are filters, in other words.

The undermind is the habits that work below conscious awareness, yet their tails reach up to the conscious I, and the overmind, or oversoul, is the part of us that participates in the thinking of the larger group, though we don’t know it. It is the political part of us. I talk about the overmind in my essay “spheres of consciousness.”

This essay, as fragmented and uneven as it is, begins my work on the undermind, which studies everything that works beneath our immediate awareness.

Daniel

 

Undermind

 

            Writing about the unconscious is difficult. I opened myself up to her and she stung me with utter love for everyone. Does the under fear nothing? But she seems to fear nothing. I could only shine my love on every man and woman in my life and think nothing but “love you love -- how I love you.” Do not tamper too much with the under, she will turn you fool.

            The under is by nature “chaotic,” that is, incomprehensible, and is only understood by introjecting an artifical schema over her, a fanciful image to paralyze it and let you use it. Any attempt to map the unconscious is to impose a fake map over utopia. You will in part tame and claim her for your own. Hell is sheer delight, Blake was right about this, and hell is the unformed moments of the under, half beauty, half death.

            So far the metaphor is literary and nonscientific. Let’s make it more so. The unconscious mind goes by many names, including: muse, Holy Spirit, metaphor mind, intuition. It is the faculty of play, as we see in Freud, for whom the unconscious tauntingly echoed everything, and revealed nothing. The book of Acts represents it as a tongue of fire, and earlier as a dove—thus as a pheonix. But in fact it is not words, but glossolalia, the emotive ocean of nonthought—strictly sea.

            Its starting materials are life and its instincs, and these reflect a definite fate for this life – this is who you are – but the interpretations of this fatum are infinite. They are narrowed by the expereriences of this child within the first five years; not by what happens to the child, but what the child does with each of those experiences. To experience X utterly limits you as one who reacts to X, but it cannot determine anything about how you respond to X. Within any segment of a curve there are an infinite number of degress. Every man is responsible for who he is.

            The first five years determine the gross anatomy of the soul; the rest of the life involves knitting this anatomy into a sublime skin.

            What is this “unconscious mind”? The systems of habits, assumptions, and memories, which create desires or new associations without our awareness.

            Why does it matter? "Luck" is the name of unconscious mind. The situations we find ourselves forever finding, the strange coincidences and fated patterns we see in our lives, were guided by our subtle rudder. Therefore, the loser makes himself lose, finds situations in which to lose. The optimist subtly molds and fashions a happy world for himself, to support his point of view.

            Destiny then is the path the world forms before you in response to what you are. From your tongue the red carpet.

            Unconscious mind was first conscious mind. It began as the thoughts of children. Yes, the otherly unconscious was fashioned by the hands of infants. For the babe in the crib is a thousand times more free than her mother. The boy punished to sit in the corner has the liberty of wind compared with his dad. In childhood, we felt unfiltered emotions in a clear conscious mind. Faced with a world we did not understand, we created the thinking habits that would allow us to cope. Some of those thinking habits remained conscious, and so grew as we grew. Other habits we combined with the habit of amnesia, of confusion, of fear, thus making it unconscious and repressed. This the child chooses to do. Before he has words to express the thinking habits in his mind, before he can find any words to express the inner world, he has created thinking habits for himself. The child has not learned the habits of teachability as well as an adult, but he instead teaches himself what to do, say, think, and feel.

            Since the unconscious mind is habit, and so should be called “unconscious habit,” it can be undone. If only it is made intelligible. We must do our best to root out secret assumptions that are the real motives. For these unconscious habits were somewhat conscious when we first made them.

            Nevertheless, it is time consuming and fruitless to try to penetrate into every desire or image in our mind. At such points, we simply create a new overt habit to supplant the old one, never minding about its origin. Yet if we do this, and the supplanted assumption remains, it may maintain its influence. For this reason, it is good habit to automatically uproot our habits and assumptions, and to tease out our fears until we see what they hide. It is where we are defensive that we are most interesting. We must take such opportunities as anger, irritation, embarrassment, boredom, changes of conversation, joking, and confusion to reveal some hidden assumption.

            The unconscious habits work for us. There are cases of men who ponder a problem deeply, give up, forget it, and then while walking down the street, humming an idle tune, the solution springs forth and they exclaim “Eureka!” For the mind is moving and planting ideas according to the conscious habits we have trained in it.

            Psychoanalysis and its generations of effort sometimes can help us understand this. Put in psychonanalytic terms, we have a YES (Id), a NO (Superego), and an I WILL (ego). Or to put it in our terms: pain, pleasure, and desire. Desire is the tug of awareness beyond or against our volition.

            See how cleverly the mind hides its major decisions from itself! See how the mind sinks decisions out of sight and then later pants with the result of it. Life's struggles and tribulations are no real test; the real moment precedes it. My trial is after the fact; my decisions were cool and subtle. Consider the graphic account of Saul's conversion. He converted nothing on the road to Damascus. Nor was imprisonment his moment of tribulation. Rather, he fully converted when he first persecuted another man on account of religion. Every flowering since then only reinforced that conversion.

            What shall we say about dreams? What is their worth and structure? To begin with, consider the dream as a second self. I experience the weirdness, I might even remember it the next day, but was it I in the dream? I would not have swore at my parents in life as I did in the dream, nor do I want to—but at least that is rational! My behavior in dreams defies explanation. I eat a book in the dream, and think nothing of it. Why am I so rarely surprised in dreams? If any of that happened in my waking life, I would be awed and terrified. Suddenly I'm flying? my grandpa is back from the dead! the words on this page change every time I look at it! First I talked with my wife, but suddenly it is my brother, and I do not even pause to consider how that happened.

            The consciousness of the dream differs from the consciousness of the world. It seems as if my mind not only dreams a stage for me to play in, it even dreams my reactions to that stage. Who is in control here? Where is this dream coming from?  First, let us delineate a few peculiarities of dreams. A dream is essentially an interpretation. The sensations of the sleeper, his digestion, his body functions incite the mind, but not in their waking way. Stimulants melt into weird and artistic interpretations: the bird outside my window becomes the gym-master’s whistle in my dream.Very little surprises the dreamer, and this is due in part through false memories. I was dreaming of flying, and when the real bird whistles outside my bedroom, this instantly became my gym teacher’s whistle, and suddenly I remember the gym teacher was teaching me to fly, and we had even talked at length about the virtues of good posture, etc. We remember what the dream just made up.

            Consider an example dreamer. He dreams he is aristocracy, that his political intrigues built up like a plot, leading to his public execution via guillotine. At that moment, the headboard of his real bed falls off, and his head falls down. Coincidence? Rather, he dreamt none of that, but in his dreamer's instant genius, created a plot that would unfold itself as he “remembered” it. I often wonder if reported dreams are really dreamt as we report them.

            I’ve experienced metadreaming. Like that annoying genre of writing, metafiction, when the characters discuss how they’re doing as fictional constructs, I dream about what dreaming means. I narrate to myself: “The actual content of the dream is relationship issues. But see how the dream converts it into these unrelated images. What’s really going on here, is you are processing complex issues in a heiroglyphic format.” Of course, those demos are themselves programmed by Freud’s writing, so they offer no direct clue as to how dreams work. To find out for myself what dreams mean, I record them and analyze them.

            Dreams pull pranks. I will dream I am flying above my old college classmates, and they are leaping to grab my feet; as it happens I realize I am dreaming and analyze it in the dream to mean I felt above my peers, and they endangered my superiority by dragging me their level; then I awake and tell my wife about it, along with the explanation—but I didn't really wake up, that was just another dream—and then I am fighting a gang at my house, but I realize it is a dream and say: I'll change this, and I will fly away, which I do; I try also to dream a beautiful woman, but my dream's generosity has limits, for now I waken; I say very deliberately: “This is what Descartes meant about reality having clarity and distinction from dream life. I feel the coolness, and this looks so much better then a dream, which is a little darker then real life. You just can't mistake real life for a dream.” But then I really wake up, at last. I look around: I'm the only one up, and wouldn't it be nice just to go back to sleep again? Which I do.

            The dream is clearly messing with me.

            To move beyond the uncertainty of dreams, into the seeming certainty of awakedness, take the chair with a psychonanalyst. As we listen, we see this mysterious pattern: The patient is the pun of his problem. The overeater feels empty inside, the woman with the frozen face has frozen herself into a moment in the past, the man who holds unto his dead lover's pictures keeps her alive through venerating them. As puns, they use language, and language is the handle of desire. We wish to freeze life with the spell of desire.

            Dreams and other mystical experiences belong to nonvolitional portions of the brain. Thus, sleep, drugs, intense pain, all these change the nature of control; we join a world of multiple meanings, ambiguity: but every experience is concretely exact. Even ambiguity is a definite recordable experience. The dream thinks in puns. Jokes always rely on ambiguity of meanings. For the dream-brain, each image puns a fuller relationship, not to hide, but to most easily represent. The language feels directly what it intends, and ignores interpersonal considerations. My dream experience is incommunicable: you will never know it. For my puns are personal, my private experience wholly unique.

            What have I learned from my taunting dreams? Only what was straight in the face obvious to begin with: the unconscious is essentially the faculty of play. The child created the unconscious, the child is dominated by the instinct to play. And not only the child is playful. Adults love to pretend: myths, books, movies, role-games, art, music, all playing, all played out, all by players. For everybody enjoys dreaming and teasing out the meaning of their dreams, and this is not because the dreams represent wish fulfillment, but because our dreams tease us with wish fulfillment.

            Dreams play with a little horror story excitement too. Oh the nightmares! But who is ever bored with their dream? For the unconscious lives off energy, including trauma. Thus the unconscious drinks in our pains and sets them up.

            So the playful child builds a playful unconscious. But was not this unconscious destined to be a form of play? For play is preparation, as two lion cubs batting with their kitten paws, so the unconscious is a pair of lion cubs. Play is more then preparation, it is also a tamer of violence, such as the football game. It is also a mode of living, to regard life itself as a game. The "animal" part of the brain is not vestigial, but is as evolved and appropriate as everything man, is partner and prankster to conscious and conscience alike.

            "Why then so serious?" Because seriousness is a mode of play! Consider the child focused and swallowed up in his play, and winning or losing is no laughing matter, but absolutely whole. Yes, seriousness is merely another way of playing the game.

            And so the talk of heaven and hell as the big "No!" to lightheartedness and ease of being, as the great impossible seriousness behind earthly life—but again another game, Persian, like the game of good versus evil. "We will make the stakes infinite. Then we will finally be able to take the rules of our morality seriously," but haha! You don't! Even with hell staring you down you still hypocrite yourself. You create your own hell, and your hopes for heaven damn you.

            And yes, people seek out the miseries, the tears, the pains—especially as games. Thus the dramas and tragedies, soap operas, great fiction. For play is change and seriousness is static, but play undergirds everything.

            A game is play aiming to win by a set of rules. Play is fun centered activity. It is helpful to posit opposites to position a term. What is the opposite of play? Seriousness, boredom, work, fight? We know that we can take our play very seriously, so there is the seriousness that is a mode of playing the game. But is there also seriousness outside of play? Play opposes labor. For play aims to enjoy itself through its own activity, and so play is self-fulfilling activity, characterized by freedom, independence, selfishness, carefreeness, grace and mastery—as in playing music, acting out a play, playing with marbles, playing a video game. Work is done primarily for the sake of money or duty, and so is not done for its own sake; that it is done right is more important then that it is done lightheartedly. The seriousness of work is based on fear whereas the seriousness of play is based on joy, and so each seriousness has a different texture.

            How then is the unconscious the faculty of play? And is this merely because the unconscious was created during a period of life where the play instinct dominated? Rather, the unconscious is primarily for grounding the mind in the instincts, and so it must interpret the instincts, interpretation being a form of play. The unconscious is a desire system meant to massage and balance the focus of the mind, to economize conscious thought. And as the dreams and subliminal fate of the unconscious make clear, the unconscious plays with ideas, and presents its world through puns, substitutions, games, taunts, confusions, symbols, poetry, suggestions.

            Let's speak of the collective consciousness, the symbols and personifications that live in our minds and move from mind to mind. Robin Hood exists in our imagination. Like an image that moves across a computer screen from one pixel to the next, these ideas exist in their own right. Robin Hood is a water figure: he means this, he means that, but however much he changes from person to person, movie to movie, book to book, he maintains a certain integrity, because his image is always referred back to his other stable forms. I cannot freely imagine Robin Hood, but have to imagine him in his hollywood/historical guise. If I invent new fables for him, they will only grow by how far the old image receives them. While it is actually the responsiveness of the people to accepting the new images, and allowing their habitual ways of imagining him to mutate, in a metaphorical sense, the image of Robin Hood decides the matter.

            It is in this sense and only in this sense that we may say that God lives. There is no God outside of the minds of man, for indeed, even to his own esteem of truth, what man imagines God to be is impossible. Yet this person is powerful as idea. He has personality, he has place, he has influence. When a man sets out to kill God, he means the tangible God of our imagination. (As for an external God out there, he would never associate himself with the blasphemous presentation of Yahweh in the Bible.)

            The unconscious is proved by our dream lives. As for the symbolic encoding of dreams, how could they be proved? Yet there is a sense we have of dreams symbolizing something, because they feel meaningful and suggestive. Since the unconscious contains the whole ideas that connect between ideas, the unconscious mind know something the conscious doesn’t: the identity of systems. There is much equality between disparate objects in the unconscious. An act, seemingly irrelevant, actually symbolizes much. That I gave you this particular token as a gift may mean more then I am aware. For the full structure of ideas groove desires into place, creating larger patterns in our life.

            The metaphorical mind is the habit of seeing similarities between disparates. Since the mind only focuses and identifies, it must relate all its objects to each other through metaphors called categories. The Atman religion of the Hindus, especially as expressed in the Upanishads, characterizes this feeling of identity as the mystical unity of all things. But to merely say “all is one,” and to actively integrate all things into one are two different matters. The mystical unity of events is merely a feeling which must lead to some creation, otherwise it is no better then LSD.

            If we take a clue from Freud, can we still say that the unconscious may cause insanity? Only if we take his sense of the word to be real. But what is insanity? Let’s clean the word up. What is divergent thinking? As insane posturings and delusional thinking are in fact normal parts of everyman’s daily thinking, how does a clinically insane man differ? He is open about his unconscious thoughts. His deam mind had overcome his actor’s mind. It is the actor’s mind, the social mind, that determine’s one’s sanity. I have myself induced temporary “insanity” on a few intimates, by mere questioning and emotional hedging. Insanity is mere strategy. When a man has a chemical imbalance, no new thinking pattern emerges. They do not “leave” their senses. They merely manifest and exaggerate subtler thinking strategies. We are all “mad,” but through regulation, appear sane. Which is to say, madness is merely a form of sanity. There is no antilogic, there is no insane. All is mind is lawful.

            My metaphorical mind is muse. My muse is an ocean.

 

            The unconscious is metaphor is heaven. Once we have comprehended an action, we can perform it perfectly.

The metaphor mind demands myths, the basic narratives enacted by Gods. You may give your mind what it demands, but do not betray truth, as the creationists do, and call myth “science and history.”

            Our I is our consciousness and we are ever conscious of our full “unconscious”; only it is a different feel than consciousness. Our full unconscious, which I call metaphor mind, m-mind, gives us our view of the All. One eye looks to the all, the other eye looks to the part.

 

My biggest problem with conspiracy theories is their impluasible and misleading insistence that conspiracies, and especially world-scale conspiracies, are conscious. Such a broad secret would inevitably sabatage itself. But when you assume that the conspiracy is unconscious, it makes sense.

Encoded in our legal system, as a rule to be propagates throughout, is the concept of degree of murder. If one preordains the murder, plans it out, consciously determines in advance that he will murder, he is more guilty then if impulsive rage forces his hand. And of course, this presupposes a philosophical system behind the law.

So if you hate a man, or a type of man, your murder of him is no more guilty than if you did not. But if you consciously fantasized about killing him, you are guity in the first degree.

Are not all our “sins” less guilty the less we face the, the less we think them through, the less deliberate they are, the more we let our unconscious do th edeed the more “innocently animal” we are?

But the greatest insight of the desert religions and Buddhism agree with this: knowledge is death.

Conscience, conscious, science, that is the enemy. Perhaps they are right. The great lie may be the savoir of mankind. We don’t trifle with this perhaps: we are true to truth because we are true to ourselves.

            Do not be undermined by the thoughts you are afraid of. The Under is both the support of the I, and the basis of it. Most of our thinking we are not directly conscious of. This is the under. Its only importance to us is how it affects the I. The over-I is the sensual world.

            Slips of the tongue reveal inner processes. Here Freud is alined with Cognitive Therapy, which regards “Automatic Thoughts” as a sort of slip of the tongue that both alters or mood unawares, and also hides deeper assumptions.

            It is the demon, the unnamable, the unsayable.

            The undermind is compensatory. If your attention tends to some difficult desire, the undermind must equally bend in the opposite direction, to balance it out. The I becomes attenuated, like a thin oval. The more anxiety an object gives, the more the need must compensate itself with a fantasy of its achievent. The mind must always return to concentricity with the needs.

            Thus our dreams compensate our daily losses. In this way, our children become our dreams. They compensate our failures by the burden to achieve where we failed. Or if the father sacrifices his liberality for moral strictness, the son must obey the fathers desire, and disobey his father’s will, by drinking, womanizing, and making merry.

            Dreams are tone poems. You can describe all the images, but only a silly person would resort to a dictionary. What matters is how each of these images felt to you. The tone poem conveys all its meaning, from one part of your unconscious to the other, and you are merely watching, wondering, confused, and if you never get it, so be it. It is like mommy and daddy telling each other stories, and you are to young to get the stories, but you feel warm to hear them  anyway.

            Not that my undermind doesn’t tease me here as well. I dream of interpeting my own dreams. I analyze elements, and I dream that I wake up, describe it all to Sherry, and then fake wake up again to realize that that was a dream, and later finally really wake up, wonder what time it is, shrug, and duck back under till noon.

            Our tools train our mind. The undermind is made in the image of our favorite tools. Now, our unconscious will be shaped like the internet. Before, as a computer, and before that as television, the printing press, the farm, or again, like money. Many televisionaries think in advertisements, inspire themselves to act morally like a television add. This is bumper sticker morality, and it is the working way for many people even today.

            In the same way, incidentally, our unconscious projects a mind unto the world of tools, until, for instance, in our situation, the internet has a tacit mind, and finally she will teach us to wire her an AI brain.

            Freud revels to be the man to insult mankind with the profoundest wound to his pride mankind has yet received: “Copernicus made man rotate the sun, Darwin made man a mere animal, and I will make the mind of man the mere plaything of his irrational instincts: the ego is not master in his own home.” Who speaks here, Freud’s ego or his id? For whether Freud speaks from I or it, no prideful I nor exuberant it would wish to own these words. Perhaps a “super-I” a superego would wish these words—but why? To punish the I of mankind with guilt for being—happy? And so Freud wishes to put himself first by putting all selves down. He seeks the glory of the disevangelist, to tell us all the bad news that all our mind, consciousness, awareness, self is a mere bauble to irrational forces. What was Freud repressing with this grand formulation? Could he say with Nietzsche that we do not have an over-I but an over-man, that we are agencies of power, and that the will is power?

            Freud believes “Pride goes before a fall,” and where he sees pride, he must lay his analysis caves. I trust no man who would be proud to bare such horrible news to man—not as one who would wish to escape or solve a problem, but to universalize and utterly prove the insolubility of the problem. There are no Freudians nowadays. There are only Rogerians.

            The intuition imitate our culture’s tools. Our tools spring forth from the inuition combined with the creative I’s initiative. Therefore, every generation is in their unconscious, the tools of the previous generatino. Listen now to how the philosophers and psychologists speak: the mind is a computer! And our children will believe that our mind is an internet. And who knows what comes next?

            Our unconscios imitates our tools and our skill in using them. Each man, to the degree of his greatness, internalizes the every culture in his world. Everything external is mirrored, with creative modifications, in his internal garden.

            The great moments of free will in a man are mostly unconscious. Yes, there is the great and mighty wrestling between opposite desires, in which the will ultimately must push with all its power upon a decision, and reconcile one desire as normal habit, and the other as subjugated slave. But the greatest moments of choice are humble, self-effacing, hardly known, immediately forgotten. Your brother makes some remark, and you shrug and think “that was weird.” Or you read about something about a career, being a musician, and you wonder for just a second, “people actually do this for a living?” and forget about it. The decision has already been made at this point: you will see that decision unfolding itself, magnetizing your unconscious, making great ammends, tweaking the lens: yes, in ten years you will hate your brother and will be begin a career as a musician. So a decision is like a person’s first orgasm. He had heard about it, desired one for himself, and after learning the trick of masturbation, finds the whole thing weird and wonderful. But then the orgasm, was that it? Well it feels awkward to continue, so that must have been it! But what’s the big deal? Is that all, I harldy noticed it. But a day later when he tries again, it grows bigger. In the same way, a decision is experienced without our even knowing we have made it. Consciously, we made it, but very slighlty, just hardly. We won’t consciouly know what we consciously did till time goes on. Free will does not go to hollywood. The great striving of already made decisions, becoming conscious to fight it out, are the moments of hollywood cinema. And even these are made visible to fit the medium. Listen to a masterpiece by Beethoven or Mozart, listen to Wagner or Bach, and you will finally see what it means to make a decision, down, deep as a kernal idea low below the metaphor mind, in the shadows of the creative womb.

            The most intent and fascinating dream may be forgotten within seconds. All we remember is having had an intent and fascinating dream. The dream, of course, stands for a set of needs that conjoin and travel through the mythic memory into an autonomous fantasy. Nor does this symbol leave us: we live it the day through. Because we forget it, we live it.

            The unconscious alone is moral, and we must judge a man and his virtuous act, not by the consequences, nor the intent, but by the unconscious system it came out from.

            The undermind is for internalizing structures and systems, sometimes called “schemas.” Such a system may be a city map, or a route to school, but in fact every data of our experience is to fit into a spherical system. We have the earth sphere, the self sphere, the family sphere, the national sphere. We have a sense of how all spheres fit into each other, and sing together.

            The first internalization of the world will be the reactions of others, and therefore, our expectations of the world. All shames and preemptive forebodings of shame, therefore all guilt which is an anticipation of shame, are actually nothing more than expectations of the world. This engine of shame and guilt is the mores system of society. By the time we are adults, a complex network of decency is internalized till we take it for natural, right, god-sent, unquestionable.

            For every sphere needs a sense of integrity, and so guards itself against doubt, assualt, and questioning. Certain mores are encoded to feel nervous to question. And the more this nervousness is felt very deep below the consciousness, so that the consciousness gets the shyest whiff of it, the more we are governed by the idea, and consciously unaware of it, though unconsciously determined by it.

            When a child first restructures a desire, handled by him as a proposition (this basic language is easy enough: a symbol of the self, the object, the desire, and the action to enact it) in order to take the pain of the desire, and the wrongness of the desire, into the conscious mind, where pain is no longer loved but hated, the proposition must be reversed, inverted, introjected, projected, euphemized, and generalized. And at every step of this reformulation, we must feel the implied previous meaning and yet not know its full meaning, so that once the conscious appropriate idea is prepared, we intuitively know the full chain of restructurings behind it.

            This refomulative process becomes streamline, habitual, and easy, causing no nervousness, until a society, in mutual emulation, develops a form of entertainment for itself that lets them nod and laugh in mutual agreement that these original desires are enjoyable, and yet not seeing them for what they are. They come back to the ME’s basic needs for love and power, which are too intense and impossible without ten layers of interpretation, of indirection, to give us a sense of delay and a chance to review possibilities. This indirection alone makes mankind the true animal, and the deceitful animal, that which delays its needs long enough to open up a new avenue.

            The more formalized these definite but indirect urges of masturbation are, and by masturbation I mean a direct fulfilling of an urge, we call these practices “rites” “ceremonies” and “traditions.” Every society is a sphere, and in that sphere, all possible contingencies must have a relatively immediate solution. No society is caught with its pants down. For within it the criminals, con men, lawyers, interpreters, and exploiters wish to short circuit the system, in the name of “honesty” and “truth” in order to uncover the ten layers of maya that we put there on purpose, in order to gain control over the immediate demands of the need. Anything that is assaulted by such parasites developes immune systems, counter attacks, safetly valves, etc. These may seem like street violence, fashion fads, parties, parades, or whatever else seems a chaos of anarchy, but in fact, a nation is very integrated, a synchronized dance, the most meticulous of crystal clockwork.

            The self-deception must be fully known and feared, and so self-represented in a double fasion, so that the full lie can be talked about and embraced when it doubles as another reality. It is like a husband who visits a prostitute after work who happens to live next to the grocery store. He can talk all about his visit to the grocery store to his wife, and fail to mention who lives next to it. But for the self-deception, it is not the whore who lives next to the grocery store, but the whore who is the grocery store, so that I can be absolutely honest and explicit about object X, while secretly feeling that every aspect of it also stands for hidden Y. It would be as if two conspirators created a secret cypher and memorized it, and then sent each other quotes from Bartletts that were seemingly straight forward quotes, but were chosen from all the thousands of quotes because these alone also fit the cypher and revealed the true message.

            We internalize all spheres in our life, and thus through this internalization have an interface when we enter the external system. A banker can tell when something is amiss in his accounts, intuitively, because he has internalized a set of stereotypes of how the system can go, and this internalization directs his eyes to the the external system he plugs it into, and detects subtle discrepencies.

            A book may have a set of meanings, like lines

======= == ========  =========== ========

            Within about one thousand meanings, an undermeaning is exposed.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

     u1                                      u2

            And scholars can easily show that these meanings are truly there and not introjected there.

            Amond all these undermeanings, after a 100 of them is a deeper meaning.

u1                                  u2                               u3

             uu1                   

            And so on till we get to the central insights of the author. How deep an author has dared go determines how meaningful his books are. The greatest books go the deepest, and will not be understood for thousands of years.

            Language is an instrument of desire, as the tongue is nothing but desire. It both communicates desire and disguises it. For the most obvious and direct desires are considered obsene, exploitive, cruel, etc. not in themselves but always and only because they are so bare and immediate. A deep man will speak many things, and be happy when people talk at their own level, but knows immediately when he hears somebody respond to his deepest meaning. This is how great men and women find each other and fall in love

            How to desire is by no means evident. The first instinctual desire is to learn how we should desire in our culture. Television, movies, stories, and myths fulfill this desire by teaching us how to desire other things. We desire first of all a map, and impose this map on our own hearts.

            Most of the desires we are taught to seek in society are from the desires from the consciousness of the full society, to keep us cheerfully frustrated so that we will make the system work. We must always seek more junk to keep capitolism working. Diogenes, if followed, would destory Greece. Anybody who is self-satisfied is the enemy of society, and the greatest enemy, insofar as he teaches others how to be self-satisfied as well.

            Our work in all systems requires an interface to handle.

            The greatest decisions in life are completely forgotten. For decision X to be allowed, it must not be consciously known, for the consciousnes triggers all sorts of habits, self-protections, emotions, and dissolving elements. We make our decision must subtle, and plant it very deep where it can grow strong enough to compete with our conscious desires. When the decision ripens, he seems to come to us from outside, imposed on us, when in fact, the inner calls to the outer, and we always bring on our own trauma.

            For the needs are two: stability and growth. When we are stable and at peace, a great inner trauma is growing, but we won’t experience it until an external trauma as if by chance coincides with it, and blows it out into the world.

            Even the most fantastic and impossible fantasies are really about immediate personal realities.

            There is a very ancient and very modern war against great men, and those who make such war we take as enemies. They consist of such men as Paul, Augustine, Calvin, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Dawkins, Dennet, to mix the mortal mediocres with the immortal greats – although I wish they were all mortal, yet they hold a great truth to them which will ever be popular because it is true for many people, and utterly false and despisable to me, namely, that the self and the autonomous ego he sees by are unfree, made out of, and determined by illusions. Paul, as hateful as he was, began innocently enough as selling “Christ” as a means of self-control of the so-called “sinful nature.” Augustine, a sort of demonic man – that is, controlled by his demons, agrees that mankind is controlled by the sinful nature – did he dare exclude himself at any point in his life? Calvin would assert that this fated nature controls all of human conduct, so that a human being cannot do anything good at all, and if a good happens, it is God who does it, never man. Marx secularized the same idea, calling the sinful nature “It” a bunch of violent and incestuous instincts (the worst he could come up with), and said that it determined all human behavior, and that autonomy was an illusion allowed by thirteen layers of self-deceit. His contribution, and the only I hold interesting, is his descriptions of some of the manners of self-deceit. Marx called the “economical base” this bit of fatum, whereas Lacan combined them both, and giving it the twist that it wasn’t incest that scared us, but the truth that there is no free will, and that a man is determined by the chances of langauge, making him a poor-modernist. Dawkins and Dennet, however, adapt Darwin to mean that since everything a human being is and does is determined first of all by his genes, and second of all by “memes” or information created by genes in an envirnonment that controls human values, behavoirs, and choices, so that our sense of freedom is an illusion that makes us breed more often. All these are variations on one theme, one idea, that a man is not a self, but merely a tool for some evil, sinister, or nonratiotional, and illusion-making force, and that ultimately, this is the deepest truth behind everything we love and value. This idea will always be with us, for it appeals to certain intellectuals and the masses who feel that they are not responsible, who feel a lack of power, and now have an intellectually proven “truth” to verify this prejudicial urge. And indeed, those who believe it are right, for a free and powerful man would never believe such a thing of himself. They are right only of themselves.

            An unconscious fantasy never happens, makes no sense, for why would the unconscious need an image and not merly desire itself? The object and the desire would be enough. Rather, the under-conscious fantasy is only fantastic as an encoded and quadruple overplayed interpretation. We have an unconscious fantasy to beat our sibling, and perhaps a scenario of necessary parts develops, but this fantasy only has energy when parts of it are enacted by the joys of ordinary life events. We fight against a peanut butter jar and get it open, and are pleased with ourselves. Unconscously, the original fantasy is stacked over this, where deep down we remember our sibling failed to open a peanut butter jar.

            We might repeat our early traumas in various ways and in part, until we master each part and then evoke the whole again to triumph. For a man desires love, but also power. The conscious demands that we aim only at proud goals, and insofar as pride is also vain, that is, thinks of what others see of us, we will permit no unpopular goals to our mind. But the under-desire remains ever present, and it schems to become conscious. I should say, the conscious cleverly rephrases the unconscious, because the unconscous has no autonomy nor ability, but only that which we create consciously. If I trick myself to think I am at the popular, when in fact I am at the personal, that means I had to slowly program the trick step by subtle step and work it back into the unconscious. Or to say it more plainly: every pecadillo we commit is merely a bit of engine parts for the under-conscious machine that will filter and control what becomes conscious.

            All desire is basically good, for everything a man is and needs is good. But because of fear of society, we stop directly feeling and thinking our experiences, but hide these down and take in what we perceive is socially acceptable. But knowing what is socially acceptable requires an insight into the public mind which is ultimately impossible, and the rephrasing of private desires into public terms must always fail. That failure of translation we call our own evil desire, or selfishness, or self love, when in fact is is merely differences in language.

            Technique skill and practice is the least part, the 99% perspiriation, but really that 1% inspiraction is what allows us to perspire. Be cheerful, audacious, charming, and determined, and nothing is impossible to you, the people love you, and if you hurt them or make mistakes, they are quick to forgive.

            The under is love. The over is power. The overmind, the I, wishes power and control, glorious orb of light that he is; the undermind wishes love, utter love, dark fullness that she is. The unconscious lives in and below the automatic habits. The love that you feel at any time is not willed, you cannot will love. And yet love is free. How strange! The under-I chooses whom to love – really she loves everybody possible, succulent thing! but she chooses the wisest to call dear – and you are only free to let her speak.

            The overmind is free in power alone, but he is not free whom to love, or what to love. How wonderfully easy life would be if we could secure a modest meal, a modest job, a modest amusement, and love, utterly love these things. No, but love seems to be forced upon the mind from withing, so a man stupidly falls in love with an uncaring woman, or wastes his breath on this or that young thing. The under is free in her actions, the over is free in his actions, but neither controls the other. The under would be the All, the Over, the I alone.

            Now you see why the under loves pain, because the erratic to her is a dispersal of energy everywhere, the great entropy of love, the whole being, humming with love. She loves the lovely, to hear all things are lovely, but she cannot see so well as the power of taste will let her. There are gradations of beauty. She is beauty, and the other mere fair.

            Therefore, there is no unconscious violence – unthinkable. She loves all, stupid thing. The heart loves everything. Only when he sees the oneness of the lover does he put a halo of hate around her, hate of the ways he would not have her become.

            Sometimes, when with a lover or friend, there comes a moment of decision, in which you have presented something, exposed something, dared something, perhaps brought a truth to her eyes she had tried hard not to see, or perhaps, revealed a judgment about her you wished her never to know, and such a reality, such an experience is felt by her, you can see that she has experienced it in some form, and made a decision about it, and immediately fed that decsion deep into her memories below consciousness, where it can grow strong and make the triumphant break from you or him, or her, or whatever grand all power life decision, that if she admitted it to you, you would talk her out of, and yet if you are canny to her ways and bring the facts of the matter before her, spell out ever nuanced detail of the event, she will look bored, pained, and angry, in denial to your insight. The look in her eyes says all: she does not need to talk like you do, and she is beyond words, and cannot be reasoned with. Its over.

I think most people are insane, its just buried down there, and with us more towards the top. I have heard people open an intimate place in their heart, and then slam the door shut with a silly joke and act like it never happened. People can be frightening self-deceived.

The underconscious enjoys pain for its invigorating effect, but the consciousness hates it, being overwhelmed by it.

The under by nature is demonic. That is, an ocean of chaos, and yet, unified, a contradictory thing, and yet one, and all those koanic nothing riddles that we should not waste our time on.

The demonic is a part of the underconscious that differentiates itself by contacted the conscious, by getting a name for itself – without a name it would dissolve – and then integrated around that name it draws off energy from the under, the I, and the over, and gains at last enough energy to spring forth and control the conscious will.

Artists call this inspiration. When I write a book, that book does not essentially exist in notes and drafts, but as the inner demon child that doubles itself over every conscious concern I have, so that as I answer my mundane challenges, I am answering his questions too, and he grows strong, and at night, when the sun has hid her grace, and the moon of inspiration is flowing, I tune myself towards the Idius, towards Madeye, towards Lux, and let all the gestation of months pour out into the mortal part of the art work, the external composition. If I never did this, the immortal and ever present idea would still exist and glide under my mind.

The overmind, as we have said, is the part of my I that acts also for the larger WE of the state, the larger WE are ONE of the I of Mankind himself. This overmind acts out of all our personal, selfish, trite, boring day to day tasks, and does epic things without us knowing our seeing our contribution. The Undermind wishes to control this Oversoul, and thus plots and plans the perfect art work to implant himself in the greater whole. It takes a whole nation sometimes to plot such a conspiracy, and though the entire people are innocent as lambs, yet these lambs give birth to the wolf will rule the all.

How do these demonic fragments gain in power? They arise like a series of sin waves, a wave the gains and gains in amplitude, a series of ten sine waves staggered from one antoher, so that when one goes into the under, we pick up on the next sine, not knowing that the first goes deep into us, and so we live on the rising line of tension of a series of sines, singing like salmons lept from the lake, when they swim deeper and deeper to gain a higher leap out the surface. What we thougth was a flat lake surface was in fact a mountain of rising tension. We did not know that we were growing in life: everything seemed so routing and regular.

The under itself was not able to differentiate itself, and so could never control the over. It was required for us to push an idea or problem under, to lie to ourselves or otherwise pause a problem, in order for it to grow complex and interesting. This split consciousness is the basis of all art, but some art comes as the word of God, whereas others come as the intent of the Author. They are both the author’s work in both cases, but remember that each mans I myself, extends to the farthest and reaches to the deepest.

Mind is symbol, for it brings to light directions to other realities, but does not fully contain them. We speak in signs but we think in symbols, and philosophy is the converstion of symbols into signs.

 

 

ÿ

Perfection Is Easy

www.msu.edu/~junedan

 

comment on Buddhist Koans

CASE 1. JOSHU'S DOG

A monk asked Joshu, "Has the dog the Buddha nature?"
Joshu replied, "Mu"

Mumon's Comment:

 

==Nevermind Mumon’s commentary, its only purpose is to mislead.

==Nor do we care to meet the Buddha, let alone kill him, nor do we care who or what has dog nature. Chao-chou says that the dog has Mu…that is the dog has not-having, Buddha nature. But we don’t care. Do not trust Mumon for anything, he will put gates and barriers all over the little paths for truths. He is the kind who will tell you a joke, but the punchline is always, “and with that So and so was enlightneed.” “A man walks into a bar….his friend ducked….and was enligthened!” Really, you could end any narrative or fraction of narrative, with the words, “if you understand this, you will be enlightened” – go think about it for 20 years in full lotus position, whatever it is, and they are right. Take a few sentences of Lewis Carroll and the same result will greet you.

 

ÿ

Perfection Is Easy

www.msu.edu/~junedan

 

the meaning of salvation

“None comes to the father but through me” – here, “comes to” is a bridal term. “There is no salvation but through the church,” and here salvation means being saved from being a human, centered in himself. To be saved from being human means to “resurrected” into the collective spirit in the one body of the bride of Jesus. Yahweh gets the Jews, Jesus the Christians, and they all “lose their life for his sake,” being the “one body of the Church.”

To be saved from your fate, of being a human, and developing into a perfect human, to be a mere church body, the bride of Christ – is to save yourself of the greatest pains and greatest joys of life, for neither is possible without the other.

 

 

ÿ

Perfection Is Easy

www.msu.edu/~junedan

 

Interpretation

This is a draft of an essay which will be part of a series of essays I am writing about literary criticism. One of the other essays, entitled “The mirror Test,” I have already sent out a few months back. I have been making much progress on this particular essay, combining many of the ideas that have been floating around me lately – you will see snitches and snatches of other things I’ve written in other contexts, combined and corroborated into one essay – but this essay will not be done for another month or two. But I am taking a reprieve, so you have this for now!

Daniel

==========================-

Interpretation

 

1.  These are the hidden sayings of the living Jesus, which the twin Thomas wrote down. “Whoever interprets these sayings aright becomes living and never dies.”

2. Jesus said, “Let the seeker never cease to seek until he has found: finding, he will be disturbed, disturbed, he will be astonished, astonished he will rule, ruling, he will repose.”

 

            It would be better said that whoever interprets anything aright becomes living and never dies. Interpretation is a gaze in the mirror; and some texts mirror back a part of us no other mirror can shine. According to our mythology, the afterlife is one great Jupiter of myth where all man come together, and one is in hell and one is in heaven, one is a devil one a God, based solely on how he has learned to intrerpret, from this our formative life. Interpretation is the only miracle.

            Hermes stands for interpretation, and Apollo stands for oracular words. Therefore, it was necessary for Hermes, from the beginning, to steal the sun from Apollo, from his originality, in order to interpret his own humble beginnings into the glorious thief and owner of every other glory. Historically, he stands for man exploiting man, which has been the greatest impetus in developing human intelligence and creativity. First he steals from Apollo, then he barters the cows in exchange for music, which Apollo of the sun could not resist. As the sun makes winds, Apollo could not resist the power of music for his own. He would not, however, give the power of divining to Hermes, who gained it instead from teaching himself how to read the cast of a handful of pebbles – how they fall is the answer.

            Wodan gets the same powers only by dying, pierced on his own spear, and hanging from the World Tree of the mother’s womb. He dies, and gains the wisdom of those dead, which amounts again to magic words and reading of stones and pebbles. The difference between the two Gods is that Wodan is allpowerful, and has a stong will over the world, and is no messenger. The self piercing is akin to the original creator God Atum who made the world by enseminating his mouth and words and speaking the world thereby into existence.

            Interpretation is a way of making a text empower you. If you can make a speech that is seemingly supported by the Bible, the Constitution, and even Shakespeare and Milton, you have some great friends on your side.

            The powers of history, among the different books, and even in a single book, and especially in your own inner instincts and inner memories deliver a wide range of powers that work each in a single direction, like a dozen arrows of light pointing in different directions in the fog. Your ability to interpret yourself, your family, your community, is not to merely wrench the arrows that can be directed at your goal, but to interpret the light of each arrow in a curve towards the one pen spotlight that melts the fog. Each arrow of light must be taught to thread up together, like a bunch of fiber optic wires, to double and redouble together into an all-piercing flood of light. Insofar as you respect the text for what it is and when it comes from, you are not doing hermenuitics, but only historicizing the text. What Paul intended for his epistles is really nothing at all, it matters the least bit. The historical will of Paul and his reason for writing the text is in fact merely another part of the text, insofar as we can get at it, another text equally useless until it too is interpreted. Interpretation is the miracle of transforming that text into a feeder of your own. If you make all the hotsprings to bleed in the same direciton, you will have the river in the end. Every book in history must be reduced to a prophecy of your life, advice on your personal goals, and commentary on your selfish interests. Otherwise, don’t read at all.

            Mind is symbol. Consciousness and all we are conscious of is always symbolic of the external world and the internal needs. But the touching of the external world to the internal needs, which is Memory, memory of current happenings, active recall, and past possibilities – a touching called “experience,” the experimenting of needs with world – are not conscious, but become conscious only after a partial interpretation. Everything we are conscious of is already interpreted, just as the light we see is already of  a past thing, not only with distant stars, but also, technically, with the smiling friend before us. The initial interpreter is memory itself, which are shaped into a mythological structure of the basic set of events; then these events are assumed into concepts, or at least put into the bubble of a concept; finally they are automatically evaluated by those habits of desire called “engines” which filter what is worthy of conscious attention, and this at least is given an ability to influence conscious focus. Mind is symbol, and all experiences it symbolizes are already partially interpreted into signs and figures.

            “Repression” is imagined as a bad thing, when in fact, the repressed is the part of experience and the part of memories that require further materials to be worthy of being made conscious – otherwise they would worry us unneccessarily. This is to say, again, that the human mind is good and does its job and does not need an artificial interpretive process to create a legend to unlock all “repressions” – and such a practice doesn’t help anybody, but distresses them unnecessarily.

            Interpretation is powerful, and if we wish to say that the under-memories all really concern incest, we can consciously and convincingly interpret them to make this seem plausible. Ditto if we wish to say that they all express archetypes, or the instincts of our selfish genes, or ambiguities in class structure and group ideology. Interpretation is limitless, since it does not touch facts at all, but only uses facts to make a case. Interpretation is pure rhetoric. It should be respected and used at such, without pretentions to being “science.”

            No study of interpretation is complete without a visit to the psych word, or at least reading a dozen conspiracy theory books, and a solid interview with a paranoid schizophrenic, preferrably an intelligent one. For you will see how any interpretation can be made plausible, especially with the magic of charisma, by which I mean, adopting the tone that says, “This is important and true, and you would be a fool to withhold your trust from it.” If a group of fifty people exude this charsima, they will become one day a world religion; among the world’s religions and philosophies, every concievable absurdity has been believed as utter truth, more important than life, love, and honor. The eloquence of ancient street preachers convinced some listeners to even castrate themselves on the spot, in honor of Attis—not to mention the suicide cults even in the last fifteen years. Trust nothing in statistical certainties, but be ever skeptical of every claim, faith, and religion that you did not invent yourself. Interpretaion is the only miracle.

            Freud viewed dreams as substituting for fulfillments, but Jung saw them as planning for fulfillments, and here Jung is right. The dream challenges by putting out subliminal messages, the final purpose is to change our behavoir in the waking world. In this, the dream does not need interpretation, for it is sufficient to itself. Likewise, the nation’s dreams and fantasies, in the cineman and in the novels, do not need interpretation, and often interpretations are botched, exploitive and self-serving, or otherwise disruptive of the natural dream process. Dreams did not require thousands of years of being wasted till Freud found a use for them. They did the trick from the beginning.

            It is not the dreams but interpretation itself which reveals the unconscious. The patient might as well interpret the therapist’s dreams – that doesn’t matter – so long as he refers back to his own experiences in explaining them. His own dreams are more personal to him, and thus he will open himself up more to them, but he could intrerpret a song, a book, a play, or coffee grounds, so long as he interprets fruitfully, and the analyst interprets this interpretation back to make it even more fruitful. Contamination is inevitable, but the therapist must be modest and teach the patient to be what he already is and should be: autonomous and self-defining.

            Wings are a burden to the bird unaware they’re for flying. Interpretation is not reading the book of life, nor writing the book of life, but bridging the read to the written. An interpretation is a story about a story. The greatest miracle is that people believe miracles, this is the proof of a laughing God: I know of no better proof. The literalists in all religions are the comic relief we seek, to share a giggle with God at their expense. Only atheists know God, only heretics have touched her, only the perfidious knows his own mind to be God, his own heart bride of God. For the others, interpretation binds them to the wall, because they have been trained to interpret their slavery as freedom, so that to shake the chains from off their limbs, they would leap into the bosom of earth and wrap the very weeds around their wrists. “If there is no God, then everything is permitted” they say, not knowing that the permission of everything IS God – they mispeak themselves! – they define their God as Limit.

            The favorite works of art defy interpretation, need no interpretation, and accept interpretation only as your means of showing off, catching the sun of their canvas and basking as if it shown for yours – that is to say, interpretation is fun and games, mischief and foolery.

            To interpret, keep one eye in the full picture, like a pool of wisdom, and the other on the detail at hand. You do not see how government depends on attempts at anarchy, how the drunken blasphemor strengthens the church, how prostitutes strengthen marriage (and yet weaken other aspects thereof), how police depend on drug dealers, and your cheerfulness grows by seeing car wrecks on the way to work—even when it seems the opposite is true. If you value any part of the world, any exception, you value all the bad, mediocre unpleasantness that makes that exception stand out. All ideals you hold above the world were thrown into the sky by that same world, and without a world beneath them, they would fall abyss. “The brothel is bricked with religion” of course.

            Interpretation is the great art of turning writing into life. Interpretation is the only subject I have formally studied—and lucky thing! It is omniscience.

            Specifically, interpretation is having two things: an objective writing, and a desired meaning. Two texts: what the book in hand says, and what it must instead say. Between what the book seems to say, and what you feel it must say, is the interpretative process by which a thousand religions come from one holy book. Interpretation is only a means of creating something new between point A of the text, and point Z of what you wish the text said. By moving from A to Z,  you gain new powers and abilities of such worth that neither A nor Z matters any more.

            You can only interpret what you have put a circle around. If you interpret a part, not knowing the whole, you lack a map, and cut in vain. You must be like Odin, who has one eye in the wisdom fountain of the All, one eye on the matter at hand.

            There is no “it” at the bottom of your personality, only need, the necessary, the necrovivia, the death life. If I teach anything to this world, it will be to read life as a literary critic reads a book. The “irrational unconscious drives” of others are in fact philosophical in nature, an unconscious philosophy, and beneath that, poetry. The polite, kind, formal, proper things we say to each other’s faces, these are the irrational obscure fakeries of life. Beneath them, beneath the polite nothings we say, beneath our own thinking and self-reflections, lie the philosophical war that we live for—all of us!—and beneath that, the poetry and poetic justice that is our eternal mood. Read again, professor, and do not get stuck in one rhetorical device.

Buddhism focuses less on theology and philosophy than does Hinduism, which writes endless commentaries on holy texts. Buddism can really boast of no holy texts—nothing it writes is worthy, but only the practice, for books come to nothing, but only enlightenment suffices, which is as important to seek as the arrow in your chest is to pull. Buddha reacted against the Upanishads the way Jesus reacted against the Rabbinical interpreters: he insisted that one thing was needful, or at most two or three commands, and all the rest could be shelved and forgotten. He disdained interpreters.

            Nietzsche wrote about living by interpretive powers. Emerson insisted that all nature was merely trope-material for writing, and writing was itself the scholarly ease, the act of God and complete being of her.

            The greater the intellect, the farther a man can stand from his necessary experience. He can abstract sharper and subtler names from his need and fantasy, and imagine a better fulfillment than the most immediately envisioned desire. The men and women of lower intelligence brag of brawling and fucking, of cars, trucks, guns, muscles, whatever – and the higher man speaks of such things too, but not in the most obvious and stupid examples, but personalized, refined, perfected examples adorned in divine raimant – the true blue sky is the sphere of his winged word, while the sensual man crawls on the earth.

            Children too imagine the most immediate and stupid fulfillments – television commercials trick them every time – they do not interpret or understand their needs, nor pour them into ideosyncratic application. For this reason lower men and women are easy to stereotype – it is so easy to type them that we must make it bad taste to do so! – while the sophisticated man has already typed your typing, and waltzes with you till you trip.

            The interpretive is the leap of the sphere, from Needs through myth into the fantasy space, from fantasies and other memories and interpreted into assumptions, from assumptions interpreted into habits. Myth interprets needs, the imago interprets memories, engines interpret assumptions, mood interprets habits. The map of the universe posites many layers of interpretation.

            Facts are already interpreted before you perceive them. You must further interpret them with the flick of will that makes all the difference. Each intuition is a unique decoder, so that nobody in the world but you sees what you see, nor can omniscience or the Mother see what you see, but only by your report.

            Listen to the murmer of the street, or see the blinking of the stars, read the lies of the newspaper, or the truths of the malicious gossip – it doesn’t matter. Its all garbage. Scriptures are garbage. Augery as well as Bible is meaningless, but only in the interpretive power are these validated, and with a powerful interpreter, either could be best, depending where your talent lies.

            How stupid it is to decry prejudice. My greatest strengths come from prejudice, taking a small first impression and hammering it with so much meaning that it became a key into rejudging, into comprehending. Every key is by nature bent and crooked, and subtlely so. If the lock were straight and easy, no more key than hairclip would be needed.

            When I hold a prejudice against a book, an author, an idea, I exaggerate it, explore it, and hammer away at it until the little scamp is perfect.

            Man is cheered by man! The Teutonic truth must be foremost in your interpretation: you prejudge in order to ease yourself into the rejudge, to know a man for what he is, no easy matter. Each man has a grey image of the whole. Only after looking very closely—man ever enjoys looking with his eyes, Aristotle told us—do we see the matter. The wise man has wisened eyes, the seer sees the most.

            To understand a book, you must read its frame: where you found it, where it came from, who else knows it, what they think, and also the inner frame, how the book presents itself as a genre, or how it refers to what it is trying to do. You must look at the triggers, the parts of it that you immediately get because they are visceral. After you have understood those two outer-meanings, you have a context by which to swim into inner meanings.

            To fully understand a book would be to resurrect the author.

            John Cage had zero content for his work. All he had was resentment inside, and a messwork of framing as a product. Where is the object? What is its worth?

            One way to evaluate the place and importance of an object within a text is to image the text without it. For instance, if you imagine a basketball game without the ball, or without the scoreboard or any sense of “whose winning?” imagine a society in which everybody did the same things, and yet money didn’t exist, or imagine money itself floating towards and away from people, and wondering what the money thinks of it, of imaging a fantasy novel without any magic in it (the kernal plot behind the fantastic element), as depressed teenagers imagine what the world would be like if they weren’t in it, to show what that missing part meant to the whole.

            I wasted quite a few years and quite a few dollars getting a degree in Literature from MSU. The theme, it seems, was not to look at what makes a writing great, how to be a great writer, how to be a great person—the things I was interested in—no, but to look at those authors who talk most about race and gender, to study the works of “so-called great authors” that speak of these issues, and focus on them. How tedious! I do not think of myself in such secondary terms: why would I want to hear some “professor” yammer on about it. I have met scarcely more than two professors who were more than highly educated fools.

            Don’t read commentaries, for a commentary is the watering down of a great mind. The author is sun, and the commentator merely a mirror of one ray: he can by no means tell you more than he was able to receive from the god. An obtuse reader would call the gospel of Matthew Jewish, and the gospel of John antisemitic, as if the sermon on the mount were not the most antisemitic text in the Testament.

            Juxtoposition is the spice of life. Read your books in contrasting pairs.

            There is no end to interpreting. But know that behind every confusion is a simple figure. Every story yet written is a variation on the same story, and from this one story, eight basic types, and from these eight, many many many many.

            The one story is this: hero wishes this, is frustrated, does this, and resolves.

            Most myths are based on a simple geometrical shape, or a single pun, something similar. The rest is filler.

            In avoiding an idea, the author, like the neurotic, will continually misdirect, even if he does not admit to himself he is. Sit back and watch, through all his wandering he will come full circle and find his secret encircled. And here we must emulate the ancient Germans who learned to tell the future by watching a horse neigh, or in other words, listen to your gut hunches.

The greatest accomplishments of myths and dreams are to communicate psychological truth, even if you or I never guess at that truth. That is what is great about them: they shouldn’t be interpreted. The self-appointed interpreters are liars, all in all.

Life is a book. Zoroaster said to strive for God to write your name in the book of life, besides the names of the others who beautiful the truth of the world – and so Zorastrianism invented the morally shaped world – but really no man’s name can be excluded from the book of life of eternal perfection. Yet you cannot see nor realize this now until you gain the power to interpret.

My will is Odin, destined in the end to be swallowed back into the wolf of necessity: my primal needs. My email is one raven, and my work headset another. Every dawn a new set of eyes rise from my dreams to meet a day unlike the last. My ego grows with lust of blood like the strutting cock, nor will I be subdued by mooing slanderers. Such a subtle art is slander! Some men have worked it out for generations! Did not Freud say: “I have taken a break from Jung because of his antisemetism” when he meant “I have pushed away the son whom I wished to rape!” So the truth is divulged by and by, like Calvin in hell, predestined to announce his own fall, like Tulips on his tombstone – “A man perishes of his own truth.”

Interpretations! Interpretations! Like kidneys for the blood. And the world full of vampires, seeking the fluid of life, seeking the inspiration of Kvasir, seeking to steal the womb of woman by drinking her menstrual beauty, waiting in hope for the bloody moon, not seeing that the moon menstruates each month, for the moon is soul is blood, and the sun is spirit is breath. The sky has ever been the screen of the will, by which we project the spirit of Man called God.

Psychotherapists never interpret aright. Didn’t they say that the snake who hid in the womb was the penis of the Father? Lacan mispoke himself: it is the penis of the mother, removed and internalized – that is the first step in the right direction for you Lacan! The serpant fully enjoys the body of Mother earth, protects the vulva of earth at the temple of Delphi, till Apollo stings the Python with his shafts of sun.

The Greeks lacked a devil or Satan or Demons, all their Gods were holy and both. The Germans held Loki, blood brother of God, as the source of the downfall at Ragnorakk. He was beautiful and helpful, most helpful in the problems he had first caused.

As for Attis, Samson, Hercules, and Jesus by and by, the problem is not with daddy – but with momma! Thus the snake opposes them, and to be bit in the foot is to be castrated for your lust – not by dad but by mother. These interpreters need to look again. Samson ate honey from the body of a lion, as Cybele was moon goddess of Bee and lion, and her lover son in regret castrates his “eyes” as Delilah castrates Samson’s – Hercules was also done in by a woman, and the most masculine men are done in by women. For these men, their anima is Mother: they never breathed in a second anima to repalce her.

Well a small evil, if invinciple, grows large. Thus Loki’s children, having the blood of Allfather himself in their veins, would be his undoing: the Germanic God is betrayed by him he loves most. We perish of our truths, that is the system, that is Shivet – personalize this. Personalize all your readings.

My own namesake, Juno, goddess of money (meaning “monitered,” as in something to be strictly watched over by a jealous Goddess) – has at least blessed me to know that my true cash is in mental effort. To know that mouth and eyes are I – my highwords fall in turn.

The world spirit has shifted through different focuses – magic, myth, religion, philosophy, art, technology, computers – and we can see where the world views sit in relation to these. Judaism sits between myth and religion, a jumble of legends derived from myths, but literalized, the way historians made Zeus and Odin to be literal kings and men, who supposedly were mistaken for Gods. Genesis is the most mythic, containing many myths, but by the time David comes, we have more legendary material, similar to the Nibelngenlied and the Illiad. The religious phase will have theologized all these myths and legends into ethical principles and mystical metaphysics, and this we see in the Upanishads, and strangely enough, in the Tao Te Jing.

The best in narrative are the myths, by which I mean, those ultracondensed paragraph stories. Who can beat the Eddas, the Metamorphosis, Giglamesh. In each story is the kernal idea from which everything else is an unfolding and elaboration (although some books are mere libraries of random or loosely related ideas). A myth, or fairy tale, or legend was created by one perfect mind, and then itself perfected through a few hundred years of oral tradition, till everything essential is revealed, and everything personal returned back to the artist.

Interpretation is the story we tell about stories, to relate them to our stories. A story requiring interpretation is dead – ignore it. All the old stories are with us. Friday is the day of the morning star, Lucifer Aphrodite, mother of the sun of God, child of Heaven and Sea – these words wash over you like the black waves of the inky sea, yet you already know all these stories – and we call her lover of God, and her children the sun and moon—and moon Shivat. We intuit all of it, but we prefer long drawn out novels and do not see that the individual contains the entire history of mankind, the indiviudal contains all intelligence. As they say in the East, such a one is unenlightened.

I never understood religious terms, especially names like Jew, or Christian, or Pagan. I can discern no difference between Jews, Christians, or Pagans, except those called pagans predominately focus on myths, whereas the Jews and Christians have raked up a lot of those myths and pretended them to be historical, and thus are legendary faiths. The purist religions are Taosim, Zorastrianism as it is in the Gothas, and the Upanishads, and also Western Materialism in the writings of Lucretious and others, which present a full world picture without various stories to back it up, a sort of description of the world-map itself, the universe as such, and nothing historical nor fake-historical. Jesus said “the field is ripe for harvesting” by which he meant: “harvest all the myths and make me out of them.” He is not a religion, and lacks the purity of religion, but at least it is progress beyond the Jewish legends (as for the Jewish religion, it came after Christianity, despite popular belief).

Stories about stories to tie the old to our own story – all that is manipulation. The best stories ever told are those that require no interpretation – Ovid collects them, Appolodorus has a library of them. Personalize all your readings, every moment in history you have also lived by analogy, every myth is also about you.

You will find that Satan is the great incorruptible, the one who is true and faithful, despite God’s dual nature, the one ultimate monotheist – as Ibliis she refuses to bow to any but God, as Satan she wishes God to love only her. Holy Spirit called Lucifer called Aphrodite is her mother, and as the Wolf she will contain God forever in her womb, by and by.

Why was the first man named “Ash” and why do Gods and mankind resurrect on the Ash tree – the only being to survive the maturation of Hell? Why is man made out of an Ash tree? What is the human intuition that guessed it all from the beginning?

Hate forgives, but love sees nothing to forgive.

Freudian criticism – the only interesting contribution left to Freud, since his therapy doesn’t work – is guilt criticism: the innermost part of man is horribly bad, and it enacts itself through secret ways in all of a man’s actions, if you can catch it off guard when it mutters, mispeaks, or winks, you will have caught the evil thing a man is, the shit at the center of his soul. Psychoanalysis is like Anna Freud: frigid and psychofucked.

His school of thought resembles the interpretations of mystics which Emerson ridiculed: “the mystic says a lamb represents God’s love for man, and that’s all it means,” a rigid and stiff stuckedness that falls out of the flux of life. Jung was closer. “Shit” does not mean shame and power and money, it means earth, and earth is the mother, and the “anally retentive boy” is one who holds his earth mother within him, who is pregnant with his own mother. This at least is to descend into Freud’s world, and not get too stuck on one way of seeing things. The snake is not the penis, but the mother’s imagined penis, and protecter of mother earth. Castration never happens: we fear instead of being mocked and slapped. “Incest is the secret of the soul” he croons, but his patients never look much better, till he reminds us of the Christians who are born again, and the congregation never mentions that no sins seem to have washed off.

At least he is fine to try out and fun to mock. As for the Marxian critics, hell take them!

Guilt is the anticipation of shame, and through paranoia imagines slanderers. Paranoia is a fine method of interpretation – the New Testament has little else but this sort of interpretation. I myself have spoken with dozens of paranoid men and women, whose keenest eyes see into the wiliest conspiracy theories, which are really there, but no matter, since the guilt itself weighs them too much down. Hermes sets the boundaries and transgresses them – but transgresses them in such a way that they remain as bound and final as before, a border fully in tact. Hermes is no criminal.

Life is proteus. We are better than mere stoics, who know how to suffere whatever life brings them. But to be cheerful and optimistic in all situations – this requires strong ability to interpret. Heaven and hell are the same place in the afterlife, according to how you have learned to interpret in this life.

Considering the sophists and their method of arguing, I do not see how Socrates escapes this category. Aristotle is much better as an advance on Sophism. But as I see it, Sophism was stamped out too soon, and principly for their presumption, which to expose and mock Socrates staked and lost his life over. Yet Socrates is impossible without sophistical insights into language and cultural relativism.

The command of language and the ability to see beyond absolutist worship to a series of possibilities – is the sophism that survives to this day.

 

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Perfection Is Easy

www.msu.edu/~junedan