Creative writing and artful observations

[Magical Realist]

I had a brief nightmare last night that a demon was shaking my bed. I cried out for my mom, just as I often did when I was a small kid. I even referenced Jesus at one point. My voices, which know my dreams telepathically, were not amused!

Awakening, I was reminded by the lesson of The Tibetan Book of the Dead: that all those terrifying demons you encounter at death are only you and nothing more. There ARE indeed powerful monsters it seems. But only in the mirror of our own highly culturalized minds

[Magical Realist]

One might think that this citation from C S Lewis's "The Four Loves" was because it was mentioned a few days ago by Syne in a debate we were having. But it was not. As just one among many ongoing though seemingly pointless synchronicities in my life, it just came up randomly on my FB newsfeed! Are the algorithms becoming omniscient?

"Lamb says somewhere that if, of three friends (A, B, and C), A should die, then B loses not only A but “A’s part in C,” while C loses not only A but “A’s part in B.” In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” For in this love “to divide is not to take away.” Of course the scarcity of kindred souls – not to mention practical considerations about the size of rooms and the audibility of voices – set limits to the enlargement of the circle; but within those limits we possess each friend not less but more as the number of those with whom we share him increases."---C.S. Lewis. "The Four Loves"

On any given day we could probably prevent a lot of unnecessary bloodshed in our world if we just kept all the people in a good mood separated from all the people in a bad mood, at least until their first cup of coffee.

In my grave, long after I have passed from this grey windswept world and my old tombstone's name has eroded away, there will still be Saturday morning cartoons faintly flickering inside my bones.

[Magical Realist]

All knowledge and understanding is based on metaphors. Metaphors of movement, sight, sound, touch, embodiment, water, light and darkness, containment, spatiality, and navigation. Data translates into useable information when it is made relatable thru metaphors and common themes that touch us internally, and perhaps even unconsciously. All conscious being-in-the-world is therefore metaphorically, symbolically, and ultimately archetypally manifested in the free flowing of thoughtful and open-hearted living..

“It is a great thing, indeed, to make proper use of the poetic forms, . . . But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor” (Aristotle, Poetics 1459a); “ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh” (Aristotle, Rhetoric 1410b).”

[Magical Realist]

Serendipity is the gifted knack for finding what you had no idea you were looking for. Somehow you just know it when you see it. It is solid proof that we are not just in THE world, but are somehow at the same time in OUR world as well.

[Magical Realist]

Where is the meaning of a factual statement, its actually existing referent, when that sentence can coexist as text on a screen, handwriting in a letter, a series of sounds emitted by our throats and mouths, or a series of braille dots felt by the fingers of a blind person? Such an objective and multi-representational status must mean that it surely exists, but not in whatever physical medium that is representing it. Facts then not as physical things in themselves, like the media that are expressing them and that we can perceive with our senses but only as shareable and correct conceptions of some state of affairs or beingness. This hidden unity of the physical medium with its own meaningful content or message—it’s hybrid nature as seemingly fusing together thought with sensation, consciousness with matter—- is the reason for language's frequently surprising and reality-defying magic.

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Our culture/society shows every sign of being a closed system of signs and language and ideas and artifacts that enables it to keep making its own parts of itself. This is what Maturana referred to as an autopoeitic system and is typical of all living organisms. But is not our own society/culture alive in some sense too, feeding itself on the resources of the land and reproducing itself relentlessly in the form of the human beings who constitute it? It thus perpetuates its continued necessary isolation from the world it is part of in the form of militarism, nationalism, xenophobia, institutionalism, and blind patriotism.

The only thing that could ever trigger any sort of needful evolution or updating of this system would be in the form of "viral" information coming from outside its safe and static bubble world. Anarchal paradigm-shifting information unleashing a new awareness among its manufactured clone-like units.

Now granted our culture/society already has in place an extremely effective immune system to such a possible foreign invasion. Thru censorship, authoritarianism, and the media-enforced somnolescence of the status-quo, such threatening injections from the "outside" become effectively neutralized and reduced to absurdity. Thus does everybody unquestioningly accept the absoluteness of the culture/society system they have been tailor-made for. The very idea of something alive and non-human outside of it is denied and scoffed at tooth and nail. But the intensifying presence of the outside is more and more making itself felt. How will we ever survive the complete upheaval of all that we have been brainwashed to love and believe in? Who among us could survive such a new ontic state? Time will tell..

[Magical Realist]

I find it amusing how so much that is being written and thought about NHIs seems to obsess with the question of their identity--that this trans-rational phenomenal presence will only be understood if we locate it somewhere inside the culturally/linguistically structured matrix of names, categories, and memes hardwired into our brains. So what IF we can label an NHI as an extraterrestrial? Have we increased one iota in our understanding of it? Not really. We have only assigned a third person identity to it that allows us to examine it as something physical and objective, as if this gets us any closer to understanding it in its being and otherness. On the contrary, it only isolates us further from reality by keeping us inside our bubble-like worldview. How about we approach NHIs phenomenologically--as a dialectic between a you and an I that is the germinal second person mode of understanding based on intersubjective communication and intuitively guided experience? NHIs may be in the end precisely a transhuman manifestation of the you-I consciousness of being, which is the root experience out of which first person and third person consciousness emerges. Neither merely a physical object nor a mental projection, NHIs are quite plausibly the harbingers of a new level of reality--one where the transjective both contrasts and binds together objective reality and subjective consciousness.

“Whomever or whatever the visitors are, their activities go far beyond a mere study of mankind. They are involved with us on very deep levels, playing in the bandwidth of dream, weaving imagination & reality together until they begin to seem what they probably are - different aspects of a single continuum. To really begin to perceive the visitors adequately it is going to be necessary to invent a new discipline of vision, one that combines the mystic's freedom of imagination with the substantial intellectual rigor of the scientist.”
― Whitley Strieber, Communion: A True Story

https://www.integralworld.net/may7.html

[Magical Realist]

Science discovered centuries ago that if it halted the movie of reality so that it projected on the screen only a static freeze-frame, it could then analyze that still and infer lots of things about it and the world it is part of. Hence the power of discursive and reductionist logic, always digging up more reasons for the way things are. At least as long as it operates on the assumption of a static timeless reality. But at about the same time science was testing its new legs, romanticism emerged as a poetic and mystical description of reality. With daring audacity they insisted that the movie continue and be allowed to run its own course. Nothing in fact was reducible to a freeze-frame of equally static and non-morphing units but was instead a qualitative experience of sights and sounds revealing its own unquestionable manifestation in the context of the continual running of the movie itself. Time then as essentially indemic to reality and not some mortal illusion we are all heirs to. Story and narrative as hardwired into anything appearing and disappearing.

[Magical Realist]

We betray our fundamental belief in the semantic nature of reality in how we come to understand and relate to it. Events for example always have a context like sentences do--the surrounding circumstances in spacetime defining the nature of the event. We use phenomenally manifest descriptors called properties to describe things and events with, just as we use adjectives and adverbs to describe nouns and verbs. We use metaphors and analogies and figurative allusions to better understand events with, just as we poetically do with words. We seem to assume that events can be meaningfully directed towards some purpose, as if being told in a story or narrative in film and literature. And we understand that there are facts and truths and laws behind the world that exist objectively and absolutely, much as we understand various propositions to be proven, given, a priori, or logically apodictic..

This is what Derrida meant when he said there is no outside the text--that everything that happens and exists falls into place for us in some inwardly-grasped grammar and semantical structure. Everything that exists and happens as a concept can be used as a sign or representation for some other concept. We can understand it all because we can decipher and track their cross-referential happenings and connections. Otherwise nothing we experience would ever make sense. It's also why Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." It is the philosophical meaning behind the biblical proclamation "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God."

Slavoj Žižek (on Lacan): "The Symbolic dimension is... the invisible order that structures our experience of reality, the complex network of rules and meanings which makes us see what we see."

[Magical Realist]

The sameness between the signified and the sign, or the presentation and its representation, is the possibility of understanding something that already exists. But it is precisely the difference between the presentation and its representation--their fundamental otherness if not enmity to each other--that enables a new kind of thinking and a radical rediscovery of the Real. It is an experience of the unrepresentability of the presented, of its unmediated presence within us, as the possibility of knowing in itself.

“For Lacan, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are the three fundamental dimensions in which a human being dwells.” – “The Imaginary dimension is our direct lived experience of reality, but also of our dreams and nightmares – the domain of appearing, of how things appear to us. The Symbolic dimension is what Lacan calls the ‘big Other’, the invisible order that structures our experience of reality, the complex network of rules and meanings which makes us see what we see the way we see it (and what we don’t see the way we don’t see it). The Real, however, is not simply external reality; it is rather, as Lacan put it, ‘impossible’: something which can neither be directly experienced nor symbolised […] As such, the Real can only be discerned in its traces, effects or aftershocks.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

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We must not forget that sentience is not always about perceiving something outside of us and in the world. Sometimes it is less a sign of something else than it is a signal prompting us to act. Pain is such a sensory event, not in itself showing us anything other than its own unbearable self, which it screams thruout our whole being to be tended to and relieved. This whole possibility of a sensation happening as pure signal or prompt is the basis for the whole evolved gamut of human feelings and emotions. From ecstasy to melancholy to rage to desire to fear to hilarity--- it is this for-itselfness of these pecularly internal but socially demonstrative sensations, manifesting as nothing more than its qualitatively-felt character, that also makes possible consciousness itself as something shareable and empathizable to others--an expressive and yet entirely phenomenal experience of our universal human selfness.

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The experience of Time, ever morphing from past to present to future, is essentially a disassociative experience. But we mustn't despair because of this relentless serial fracturing of our being. For even as we are changing from this perspective to that--from remembering to perceiving to projecting, we are also being triangulated from the self that we were, to the self as we are now, to the self as we will become. A new fourth sense of selfness emerges, a place of absolute displacement, and yet also one that is solidly located and centered between all three dimensions. We thus stand outside of our own triple aspect, freed into some kind of eternal peace and stillness of pure imaginative understanding.

[Magical Realist]

My first request upon visiting an intelligent alien world would be to show me your art, your music, your modes of entertainment, your poetry, your architecture, and your spirituality. It would be these things that would most intimately bind us together as fellow sojourners on a common cosmic quest.