Creative writing and artful observations

[Magical Realist]

The ever roaming nature of attention, effortlessly shifting from a TV show playing in front of us to a feeling we're having to a memory of some event in our past to a thought we just had, strongly suggests to me that all these events we alternately notice and blank out are not discrete or separate from each other in any sense but somehow occupy a common space and time which consciousness constantly traverses with ease like a bird flitting from one tree branch to the next. There is a copresence of all these events to us that allows them to be accessed directly and immediately simply by noticing them suggesting the fundamental unity of our inner experience with the objective world beyond us. Not a unity of being so much as a coalescence of form or interconnecting wholeness.

[Magical Realist]

All rational explanations and theories are abbreviations or summations of intuitionally-grasped truth. They are abstractions and generalizations trying to compensate for the lack of phenomenal manifestedness of specific and lived experience with their own version of absolute certainty. Not truth per se, but an idealization of truth as a coherent and self-contained system of formulae and principles and laws designed for giving the mind an illusion of the real without any concrete experience of the real. As if abstractions could ever simulate the prima facie presence of the real to consciousness. No theory and mathematical proof for example could ever match the unshakeable certitude with which I know that I exist. It is an intuitively-grounded fact of all my experience and knowledge. It is the sole place where my consciousness and reality meet and necessarily presuppose each other. It is not rational or logical, but it is self-evident and absolutely given.

[Magical Realist]

One can never infer the overall pattern or whole just from examining its parts, especially when, like a car or the human body, the parts are diverse and all different. But there IS an intuitive sense that there IS a whole due to the simultaneous and harmonious functioning of the parts. Nothing empirically confirmable, but an assumption nonetheless. Reality is like this. The diversity and contradictions of all our experiences in life may initially suggest only randomness and chaos. But over time the unfolding of a pattern begins to emerge. We thus acquire thru living our lives a nagging hunch, a growing suspicion, that there is more to it than just this. That it has a unknown and perhaps unknowable meaning that transcends all particulars--an overall form or unity that is being hinted at in everything that is happening.

[Magical Realist]

We seem to get easily snared in the trap of binary thinking. Of defining things in terms of two absolute and irreconcilable opposites. Male and female. Life and death. Good and evil. Human and machine. Light and darkness. Real and illusion. Derrida was all about deconstructing this kind of thinking and showing it to be inherently flawed. I accept that. While it seems to be widely popular among the masses, always inciting strong emotions and inevitable conflict, it lacks a certain finesse and subtlety that reality always reveals in itself.

Take the binary "consciousness and unconsciousness", often assumed in philosophical debates about the nature of the mind. Here we frame consciousness as more or less an on/off switch. You are either conscious or unconscious and that's it. But I don't believe it is. Think more in terms of a dimmer switch. Think also of all the varying shades between consciousness and unconsciousness. Trances, dreams, hypnotic states, drug-induced hallucinogenic states, brain-washing, fugue states, meditation, visions, sensory-deprivation, psychosis, and so on.

There are, it appears, many liminal or "in between" states between lucid consciousness and total unconscious. Gradual increments from being totally aware and in control of our minds to being unaware and under the control of unconscious influences. To me this strongly suggests an underlying potential unity of consciousness and unconsciousness. Of focusing on some phenomenally present datum while blanking out the bulk of other data. If we take Huxley's filter theory seriously, we can say that consciousness itself only arises by negating or filtering out other things we are experiencing. There is, iow, a dialectical or reciprocal relationship between our phenomenal experience and our unconscious experience. Between what we perceive as real and present and what we feel as ideational and latent. Consciousness and psyche intertwining in an elegant and mutually creative state of being. This is why the path of Wholeness is one of imagination, artistic expression, symbolic play, fantasy, intuition, meditation, spiritual ritual, story-telling, and introspective observation.