From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Aug 09 2003 - 16:34:18 MDT
A later development along these same lines came in
college. I was studying some leaf in connection with
biology or something and suddenly realized that when I
looked at the leaf, I was only seeing the surface. It
suddenly occurred to me to try to mentally internalize
the leaf structure and function so that when I looked
at it, my thoughts would be focused not on the visable
image, but on the actual 4-Dimensional leaf. As I did
so, I felt as though I were somehow sinking into the
structure of the leaf, and losing something of my own
separated identity as I visualized the complete
perceptual/conceptual me/leaf system.
For the next several weeks, I went around picking
stuff up and staring at it, imagining that I could
somehow see into its internal structure, hefting it
around, feeling the textures, the smell, ect., it an
effort to "grok" all kinds of things, not in any sense
of imagining that I COULD actually miraculously see in
the Xray range, but as a very pleasurable exercise in
extending the integration of perceptual and cognitive,
and, as experiencing myself extending beyond the
discrete boundaries of skin, into the system of
relationships that made "me" possible.
I had never, BTW, used any kind of mind-altering drugs
up to that point - except for caffiene, nicotine,
alcohol. My later couple of years of extensive
experimentation with mariuana and other psychodelics
was largely aimed at refining that function and
getting past all the mental screens and filters,
reworking them into something more objective than the
simple inherited memes of childhood. I could be
wrong, but I am convinced that most people are still
stuck on "surfaces."
The extrema of this come in areas like interpersonal
relationships, in which people learn how to "be" what
other people want, developing a persona that fits
either what some lover, parent, etc., wants to see, or
following some extreme rule-based or
rule+fashion-based program. Such people are so
blocked in seeing what they are, in part because it
never occurs to them that there IS any alternative,
that they find real emotional interaction
incomprehensible and/or terrifying. So they legislate
away anything that challenges their myopic
2-dimensional perspective. And, mostly they elect the
people to power who are best at maintaining "face."
(The Chinese, of course, base a whole culture on
"face," i.e., lies, power, deception. Try telling
truth to power in China. So, there is hope for our
culture at least - altho, given the right inputs,
China, with a much worse case of the problem, might
actually be able to better isolate it and turn it
around radically. I'm working on that one.)
Realizing this, I began to program myself to take the
opposite approach. For several years, whatever
fashion or social norms demanded, I would try to
eliminate from my behavior and mental focus. (I
suspect that many people thought I was extremely weird
during that phase.)
I had been programmed by my neurotic religious
fundamentalist parents to avoid "evil thoughts," and
this extended of course to the sin of gazing at a
woman with sexual desire. Once, when I must have been
about 10, I was at Sunday School when this whole
little clique of girls came giggling into the room,
and, as on some pre-arranged signal, all grabbed the
bottom edges of their dresses and pulled them up to
their chins, like a Lolitan Can Can line. Underneath,
they were all wearing shorts, for some athletic event
later, but I didn't know that. I literally almost
fainted in shock, the room spinning around me, my
heart pounding, nausea, etc.
So, I began the habit of reacting to any feeling that
I needed to avert my eyes, to doing just the opposite,
getting a lot of angry looks in the process from women
as I studied their crotches or breasts - or faces.
(Four billion years of evolution looks awfully damned
good from here...)
Philosophically, in parallel, I developed the habit of
thinking the unthinkable. If some conclusion were
wrong, then I should be able to identify WHY, not just
slam down the mental shutters against considering it.
Child-rape is bad? Well, let's just assume the
negative, imagine exactly what that would be like,
whatever kinky pleasures might be involved, and then
ask, is it really bad or not? What contradictions
emerge from that assumption? (I leave that exercise
to the reader.) Suicide is scary. So, seriously
consider suicide at least once a day.
The result, after quite a few years of sometimes scary
or miserable experiences, was that I developed what
seems to be an extraordinary basic confidence in
myself as a sentient being. I don't claim to be a
genius - and what would any such relative present day
measure matter when we develop our successors, anyway,
comes the singularity? - but I can ultimately
understand any particular thing that I need to, I'm
reasonably convinced, altho not necesarilly as quickly
as I need to. And I have NO need to refer to
authority of ANY kind as an unquestioned source of
truth.
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