KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA 32 (Muller)

Commentary 30 (to C27 by von Glasersfeld)

MOTIVES, YER HONOR
by Adrian van der Meijden
4 April 2001, posted 24 April 2001

<1>
Thanks for the "profound" and if I am allowed a giggle, so would I love go for a wine sniff with you. To choose the wine you'd need a deep pocket, should you wish to please me, although I'll happily accept what is given <G>. Is that a Sufi allusion to getting drunk ? I too made many mistakes when acquiring my "second" language, English. But I made an initial entry through imagination. Allow me an anecdote to colour in some background to my "thinking". My Grandmother, illiterate, made clothes by looking at a person, cutting cloth on her knees by hand and sewing with a needle. They always fitted, so I asked her how she did that. "Simple", she said, "You just fold out a person flat and cut around that", with a look that said "What's the problem, boy !". Of course it was obvious, to her. It only took me ten years to achieve that feat. I have not a clue how I do this, nor know of any formal way to describe this. For words and "being" I fancy actors are a natural at this. Alec Guinness, Danny Kaye and Charlie Chaplin surely were, as Bob Hope or Wayne, the cowboy, are not. Of academics let me keep a respectful silence, I don't know enough about them. Shakespeare knew about it, with his "In his life a man plays many roles" as he shaped his drama around his actors.

<2>
So too Lyall Watson, "Dark Nature", I think, speaks of a little girl who could "pop" tennis-balls inside out and education ruined that ability quite thoroughly. In Topology its done with a car tyre - torus- through a wee hole, quite impossible in a physical sense. In Samoa one speaks of "talking with the ancestors" when one's own store of acquired tricks and experience runs out. Unknowing of the "erudition" since acquired I did that spontaneously to learn foreign languages, for which knowledge does not give us much credit. Otherwise one may find examples under "idiots savant", as well as in "genius", who seem to be unaware of what ordinary folk seem unable to readily do.

<3>
When changing a language spoken I sense a chameleonic shape shifting in myself, body posture and all, as also seems to happen in a lesser sense when shifting disciplines. Thus I much appreciate NLP's "body armour". For me it is a swimsuit, if you need a metaphor, to hunt for "pour-poise". Einstein wrote it up as "The theory determines what we can observe". And so do our belief structures, which I find somewhat sad, if knowledge allows us only one. Dan Moonhawk Alford, linguist too, speaks of how Amerindian Languages utilise the empathetic/kinaesthetic mode I applied in discussing "horse". Buckminster Fuller was all in favour of "verbs". It's otherwise categorised as "magic". For knowledge I use fact, fect, fict, foct, fuct and fyct to keep the categories distinct. That's also why most archaic languages did not fill in vowels. Watch what the mouth does when shaping those sounds and then transmap that into a journey from a here to there, which makes a fyct most farfetched and a fuct what Charles Fort called the damned facts. It's how I do my contextual manipulations. Foct is all muddled up and a fect made up to suit.

The real difference between us and horse is that horse only ever knows the local where we can imagine action at a distance which, betimes, seems also to come as action from a distance or voices from afar, which we queerly call "psychic" and which Jung ascribed to our collective unconscious. And nobody can convince me that when a "scientist" comes up with a formal description of something hitherto unnoticed he has not imagined before. Nicolas Tesla did and I very much doubt he is unique. Edison did it like a bull at the gate, more muddled than successful.

<4>
Treating that as background I am, perhaps, more sensitive, who really knows, no known scale for that, when talking with other people how they shape shift me with their words and views, and which is congenial at times and not at others. I am having a case of conflict right now with the President of a society who insists his role of president shall dominate so he defines the rules of our interaction to which, it being a conflict, I cannot concur, although when faced with a judge in Court I have no such choice. The way the law runs here we cannot appeal to a "referee" to arbitrate so I am forced to play "awkward kid" which he, of course, dislikes as all he has is awkward parent to play with. So I am forced to both teach him some flexibility while pretending not to. All very prolonged and rather tedious unless one makes it a fun exercise when I'm supposed to be serious about it.

<5>
None of that has much to do with the meaning of meaning, signifiers or denotation and connotation, it's parlour politics, which comes in rather handy when debating. But is not that most of the substance of our lives? And still that is about language and not "in a foreign country" and the wench is anything but dead {Timon of Athens pastiched, I learnt that trick from T.S. Eliot's paradiorthosis, in medieval rhetoric called "turning sentences" or variations on topoi and topic means "place" so maybe I "dance" here?}. I most thoroughly agree with you that making careful distinctions is most important as otherwise I'd be a very confused person. I do not attach mine to words but to "discourse" and there's the rub. And so that does not "bind" me, it sets me free. Are your distinctions my distinctions ? Unfortunately linguistics does not afford me the categories I've had to invent to cope. I once made up a list of some 100 emotions without a proper name, paraded this around friends who all grinned and asked "Are there really no names for them?". In my more seamy moods I find knowledge a bit of a constraint, to put it mildly.

<6>
So, if I may, I took your post as more of an opportunity than to quibble. The major fora for "consciousness" are JCS, very intellectually 3rd person, Chambers of the hard problem and KJF, enough said. I'm all for what H.M. called flexibility, my image for it Father William and Alice, the most complexly plotted story ever. I took to psycho-collages like a duck, another word to play with. To me beliefs, and that includes knowledge, are more to be used than believed in. Most folk of that ilk complain about how language works, if not malfunctions. I am still working on finding an extended set beyond denotation and connotation, which is basically about fact and fiction only, when, in a sense, we all imagineer our lives; avoiding that Freudian nasty called projection. Like any kid I get into a most high when coming across another such imagineer and we can *play*. And sad to say a lot of them are into hiding.

<7>
What am I saying here ? Two things. 1: Blithely, and it has been said before, that we vastly under-rate the powers of our minds, and are much handicapped by language. 2: More complex, that in the history of our Ideas, knowledge and epistemes we have projected our musings into our world and "mistaken" it as *real* only to stumble from one correction to another as discovered in the credibility gaps of earlier findings. By the time we get a theory to near enough to a 70% isomorphy with our portended reality we make up another theory to do it again, and again.

<8>
I can "see" the changes happening, right under our very gnoses. I *know* where it is going but I fear to formulate it or give it a shape, I might be wrong, and who am I to say ? Besides I have no *control* over it at all, nor want any. But the sailors on the quay speak of many things, of shipwrecks and of sealing wax because, perhaps, the snark may turn out to be a Boojum, or again, from their antique wisdom they know better. Should I jump up and say the emperor is naked, look for yourself, we both know what will happen, so, as with that president, I have to exercise patience. I wonder how many others are doing just the same ? Who among us are playing; "After you, dear Alphonse", while a committee decides on how to bell the cat ?

<9>
Captain Cook had this in Tierra del Fuego where the natives could not "see" his ship, being too large for comprehension. It took the local shaman a week to convince his people it was "really" there. For the change of our 24 to 23 chromosomes it was a nurse, honest enough to admit a mistake and a supervisor with wit enough to recognise serendipity when it strikes to effect a change. I shall not speak of the many losses along the way. Of course DNA is water soluble and alcohol dehydrates it into a clump. Had Democritus realised that for there to be atoms it needed glue we now know to be electro-magnetic, where would we be now ? It is not logic that holds the world together. "Water, water Everywhere, and not a drop to drink", so why not catch the water dreaming ? To catch a fish it needs a hook and bait, to venture a connection. Yes, I am here using "water" as a symbol of the unconscious, it's conventional. But is not "research" fishing for something we may recognise when it happens ?

<10>
Why, I ask, does everybody have to be made out as "the same" when we know all too well we are not ? Why, I ask again, do we all have to be ergonomised into a factory with a shop up front ? I wrote a poem, now a while ago, that could archaic man "see" what his dreams produced he'd tear it up and start again. Of course I am "passionate" about it. There's no room for it in our 3rd person domain. Read Fritz Perls, "In and out the Garbage Pail" and how many others ? All wasted.

<11>
It needs but a small change in our ways. The Keplerian Cross of Sacrifice, our xyz coordinates, an Art of Memory device, on which we locate "things" in time and space, as if they are *real*, can be converted into a virtual "gyroscope" to go flying about by seeking other targets than efficiency and communal consistency by a simple stroke of imagination.

<12>
This, I know, can be done formally by instructing our intuition. In fact I know three different ways to do this. We already live in a virtual reality, as my Cheshire cat would tell me could it speak. That, in effect, is what antiquity and alchemy mean when they speak of squaring the circle of time into an imaginary space, and add fixed and mutable as brake and gas pedal. Did you "know" that Alice is a compendium both of wordal figures of thought and mathematical operators, both wild, eccentric things that will not be tamed into order ? So we have a white queen and a red queen, and I am playing red queen here. The white queen plays "off with your head" and I'd rather keep mine. Carroll tells us all about his depth psychology as a known eccentric. So we give it to children to read. I don't need to read his biography. I *know* Carroll, intimately. And so too for "Lord of the Rings", a game of tautologies and "closures". The recent video "Matrix" expands on that again in more depth.

<13>
Psychologically it happens every time we get that glazed look in our eyes, saying "now let me think ?", to shift into another Altered State of Consciousness, their number maybe legion, Coleridge's depth immeasurable, and romantics all. I am not into the content of those ASCs, I am into how they can be imagineered. My "rationalising" mind will fill in the details if I get the context right, perhaps by doing a "mood swing". What's the UFO craze about but the invention of new "gods" to project our dreams into, as Jung points out ? Against that does it really matter whether they are *real* or not ? Plotinus told us "ye are the gods". In the Rg Veda "Surya, the sungod, lends his glance so that all may behold him", a reflexive figural "verb". So I am not even being very original. In Shamanic times the shaman would climb his skypole to visit to gods to re-solve social conflicts as the Kahuna in Hawaii does still, vide Max Freedom Long. I don't imagine the shaman would "believe" his own fibs but it worked for the people. And what are saviour gods and Anthropology's "cargo cults" about but conflict resolution from afar ? So it is not that we lack examples to lead the way. All "i" want is to escape from language so I can use it properly.

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Further note (MODIFICATION) from A vd Meijden

23 April 2001

<14>
I may be able to patch up some of the difference between us ? Vico took the heroic attitude one may expect during his time. Yet Dante took a deep-sea dive into Hell - the depth psychology of how we commit so many wrongs - to find Heaven at the feet of Satan. Israel Regardie, occultist, informs us that we hardly develop our magical prowess and skills without also using the methods of analytic psychology to rid our selves of alchemical dross - typical of his time too - as like the left hand of darkness. Yet alchemy tells us keep the dross, it comes in handy later. It reminds me of Orpheus in the Underworld seeking his beloved Euridyce and having to leave all profane trappings behind on entry and his return and failing, as we all so often do. Or, again, Pyramis kissing his Thisbe through a crack in the Sufi Garden wall, and various other metaphors.

<15>
While I can hardly deny that one can gain entry by rational means, using the way of the njana as in Indian thought, there are many roads to Rome and experientally I have had to take a deep sea dive and was looking for my pourpoise quite a while. Discussing the matter of drugs with researchers like Claude Rifat, rightly handled, that can also work. Or again, as HM pointed out to me, one may be born that way, as I was too, and retaining it through all the clutter of our lives. I am always somewhat leery of those who insist their path is the only or better one. The object is to become free. What amuses me is that I had to acquire all that learning to explain this well, if at all.

<16>
Together with this I tumbled into another insight. We use a different definition of solipsism. Mine reads that our current intellectually *real* world is a fantasy and nightmare erected on a false dualism and belief in a MIR of materialism. Yours seems to follow Berkeley rather more and also typical of his time. Mine is born from the rational mess we have created and its rejection in a here and now. I don't feel very heroic, or warrior like, although it takes a lot of courage and persistence to venture forth in unknown seas and shadow laden caves.

<17>
By all this, no matter how we try, the misconceptions of our past can and will distort our insights and idealism. By this I re-thought once more and again, about mysticism and maybe found a whiff of insight or passage through Scylla and Charybdis that may prove useful - I don't mind mixed metaphors? I dislike all the *heavenly* clutter surrounding this. My best "old" notion was the M.E. retrieves our foetal experience, not unlike Merrell Wolff's "Consciousness without an Object" and Hampolle's Unknowing of our History.

<18>
Well, IT changed my mind into something more complex and dynamic. Let us say the M.E. breaches the wall or dichotomy between conscious and unconscious, unfalsifying both. The conscious traces by linearised attention. The unconscious contrariwise IS conscious of it all and keeps live track divergently and non-linearly, reporting in our dreams and other things. Unify or marry them and a third worldview emerges as the transcendental one with the hitherto Silent Witness now coming forth into the Light, as is the meaning of the Egyptian and Tibetan "Book of the Dead". And tumbling after comes the paranormal and supernatural which somehow we seek metaphors to portray as a now non-local consciousness.

<19>
When the unconcious is repressed or blocked our nasty shadowed side, the exploiter of resources, the hunter killer and so on, can make us go awry with even the best and especially the best of intentions and when unblocked that is what we face at first. Our instinct to get rid of and kill *demons* tries to once more repress or disown when we refuse to face our fears so everything looks rosy and romantic again. But when we accept that is whom we really are, and this is built into the very core of life, it changes once again. I can kill and be as nasty as the rest of us, but I don't want to do this any more because there but for the grace of god go I and what I do to others I do to myself. That is not just a pious platitude, it's my experience.

<20>
The typical negation by consent "You don't really believe in such hallucinations?" begets my reply "No, I don't, and merely report what befalls when there. This, of course, offends against having to supply reason and cause for events. One does not *just do something* as Diogenes was told, tossing plucked chicken around. We seem to share a fondness for metaphysical dialectics with Socrates. Yet when the a-rational and rational merrily dance together that is what can happen. One can invent excuses like everybody else but why bother to lie? For all said and done our feelings and the a-rational governs what we do and we rationalise afterwards. Taking refuge in the rational also does not work too well. That does not say it all but, perhaps, it says just enough.

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Adrian van der Meijden