Category Archives: Silly

The lunatics are in the house

Most psychotics are harmless.  Lucky people get to be psychotic without harm.  Musicians do. Music is psychosis without the pain.  Best really listened to alone. But there is a serious point to this.  If there is continuity between the suffering psychotic and the happy psychotic, and both rest on an altered equilibrium between the endogenous dynamic and the exogenous one, then we could learn more by studying the felicitous ones.  Are there mirrors there when they are enjoying themselves?  Do advertisements inhibit enjoyment? What role do the various visible evidences of other similarly constituted dynamics give? It is a huge imaginative step to try to imagine a P-world that is not subjected to the influence of endogenous and exogenous dynamics.  It can’t really be done.  But recognizing this boundary does not rob the individual of autonomy.  Because there is no I in a P-world.  There, there is a boundary that marks the subject-object divide.  It has to do with nervous systems.  It is the mediation between perception and action.   Perhaps here is a way to reconcile personal and public.  The altered equilibrium referred to above is morally neutral. By studying the interface in the happy and the sad lunatics, we will learn more.  The word lunatic is about to get a new definition.  p.s. I now feel silly for thinking badly of people who listen to music in the background while they work.  There is no background.  No foreground either.  Experience is a shape shifter.  This was written along with some excellent Russian modern classical tones.

Addendum, over a year later, I stumble upon this in Charles McCreery’s work:

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Found here.

Bring on armageddon!

The Church of the Stone Pharisee demands belief in the rationality of the lunatic.  The ‘delusions’ are none such, but result from a specific relationship between the P-world of an individual and those around him.  They often are being controlled by the ideas.  In hearing voices, they are merely being aware of some of the stuff going on in nervous systems (that annoying repetitive tune: do you own it?).  No wonder its confusing, and the stories come out peculiarly.  Therein lies the lack of the self: the P-world has lost some of its autonomy.

In this regard, I am highly amused to see that that gloriously batty compser, Alexander Scriabin, described Stravinsky as “Apostle” to the “Latin reactionaries”.  I have no ideas who these Latin reactionaries are, and I suspect that they do not constitute a natural kind. Scriabin was entirely incoherent, and that is interesting, because he was standing at an interesting point. He was immersed in a sea of cultural currents, and he dreamed of multimedia performance (Scriabin was a VJ long before there were VJs).  He was probably also a synaesthetic. He had tics as a child and was known for not sitting still (Children, pay heed!).

Before he died, runour has it that he was working on a big light and music job, to be played in the Himalays.  Once played, in the right setting, it would bring on Armageddon.  Anybody fancying having a go?  I’d love to try it out.

What it is…..

…learning not to force, to pass control to coordination (or surrender), to put up with a shift from a distinct image to a play of light.  I can well believe that nausea is a frequent partner on the road to enlightenment.  Does ‘enlightment’ mean anything at all? If it does, it probably means something reasonably better expressed in the language of biology, rather than, say, psychology.

Noumena

Noumena are scary.  They are unknowable almost by definition. If the nature of the P-world is seen more clearly, then noumena become, not unknowable, but a challenge.  There are limits to our knowledge, but we have no idea how far they stretch.  Nor need we ever.

My spell checker knows the word unknowable.  How weird is that? 

A complaint to the monks

Buddhist monks and similar lads have, some of them, seen a  lot of this before.  They were witness to incredible realities.  We are becoming so too.  Their instinct seems to have been, duck and cover.  Bliss must be obtainable with full immersion in the world too.  Democratize bliss.  We can all see together.

Toroids everywhere!

As we peer down the microscope at worlds ever smaller, we encounter weird things.  Counter-intuitive things.  Imagine, now, how that parallels the experience of looking back in time.  Close by, in the recent past, we have lots of familiar hand-holds.  We understand things quite well.  But the further back we look, the less we understand readily.  And detail gets lost.  If we look back far enough, we draw lots of blanks.  So much of the history of humanity is lost to us.  One might say that we ‘see’ those bits with causal relations to our own.  Those that we understand as playing a part in how we are in the moment.  But that’s remarkably like peering down the microscope.  As we peer further, detail is lost as a direct function of  the ability of what we think is there to manifestly affect something in the observable universe.

Add to this these two little bits of philosophical doggerel:

[1]  As we look outward, what we see is ourselves.  The more we understand as we look outward, the more we see ourselves for what we are.  That is a central tenet of the CSP.

and

[2] I had a fevered vision last January of a toroidal time axis for the cosmos.  This seemed beautiful in my vision, as we appeared in there as a thin disk-like membrane of infinetessimal thickness, moving at one second per second around the circular time axis.  We were the live process in the universe that regenerates itself.  The razor edge of the now.

Now the whole thing looks toroidal.  Because what we know of the big architecture of space-time comes from peering down as far as we can.  Thus we find out about things like suns going nova, the mystery of the big bang, etc.  Likewise, we find out about our inner selves by looking outward.  Or vice versa.  Another Buddhist strain, I fear.  And  if peering into time is parallel to peering into space, I really don’t know which way is up any more.  Every polar direction turns out to form a loop.