1

The Butterfly and the Diving Bell

Mark Higham 2011

Preface
I wrote this book while experiencing a spiritual mood. The book is entirely improvised.
Since there is no emphasis on structure, the reader will most likely become overwhelmed
with the sheer rapid pace of concepts and ideas furiously coming in. It is best not to
understand everything. I suggest you just plug into your spirituality and let the sound, the
music of the style simply wash over you and then just feel the universal energy I plugged
into become your spiritual energy too. Hope you enjoy. Cheers!!
God does not play dice with the universe. Einstein.
You must die to your past self. Lao Tzu.

1
The hunchback is ringing his bells. His fair maiden is on the cusp of death, and he is
almost foolhardy in his unctuous desires to pour the heated oil on his tormentors below.

The hunchback might be unready for the challenges of being fully human wanting instead
to be made of stone, but what he may not fully realize is that any human action or any
action by anything at all fails to persuade the gods that be to gently lower their splayed
and splaying fingers upon the boiling men and the soon-to-be-rescued maiden Midas
touching blessings upon the heads of the unconsoled.

The terror of living is the iris eye of the defenders and offenders shrinking reality down
into a brain related meltdown. Is it our biological selves that blind us? Is it the awful
burden of embodiment that oppresses us? Perhaps these are questions better left to a
proper theory. But theories ultimately fold down on themselves as there is a certain
uselessness to truth.

Jean Beuadrillard commented on the ultimate uselessness of theory making when he

came to the conclusion, after a short argument, that almost every genre of fiction was
imploding and that literary criticism itself was short circuiting under the deluge of a word
imprisonment, meaning that the whole literary universe was on the verge of complete and
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total obsolescence event. Theory and fiction get united, and in their oneness, collide with
sense making in an almost beautiful failure gone to this point unnoticed in the
hardheadedness of the cognoscenti who cant give up on rationality.

The whole idea of having a reason for something lies in the brilliance, almost porcelain
delicacy, of a gossamer string of reasons webbing across a universe of a kind of linear
unfolding. Reasons, we scream. Give us a fucking reason. A reason to live. A reason to
keep ourselves from the abyss of the seppuku that is the operative reality of our death/life
resonance. And it is this resonance, in its soundless sound, placing interstitial voids in
the spaces between words, words we have to have boundaries around in order to have
anything like a language at all. It is the words that drive us. But the lack of recognition
that sense making always fails precisely when we have captured a phoneme in our net
with a nagging voice, soundlessly soundlessly letting us know that not only are we on the
wrong track, but the people who have it right, namely the Zen masters, use their response
of silence like a weapon cracking open the skulls of their students to let the light, the
enlightening light flow into their heads that are actually supposed to already realize the
illusory nature of everything.

Even when we track the Buddhas path from hedonism to sage hood, we have to put a
pause on his hurried journey when he emaciated his body in the interest of spiritual
renewal. Somehow, as the Bhodi tree worked its healing magic upon the tired and
perhaps a little confused soul of our beloved Guatama, who, with kaleidoscope eyes,
experienced the tempters wiles, Maya, the god of illusion, the god of making desire into
a thing impeccably irresistible. But illusions are illusions, and in placing the word are
in this position we are untangling the incipience of an argument on beingness every time
we resort to using a verb of being. Language absolutely hinges on being: am, is, are, was,
were, be; and we are told by our noble experts that if we use verbs of being too much,
then we are making a syntactical error whose rules were made to follow actually do
more harm to sense making without the realization of our scanning of the implantation of
the ambiguous, if we dont embrace, will lock us in logic and throw away the key
forever. Michel Foucault writes about the implantation of the perverse, meaning that
society, in its thirst for building power discourses, wants so desperately to suppress
normal bodily impulses in what turns out to be the creation of a voluble space. Instead of
the wanted suppression, we have a situation where the suppressing power discourses
quixotically open and we have a society of speakers wanting to share every single
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perversion they have, even as they implant these confessions in memoirs, on reality TV
shows, and any other media outlet willing to lend an ear.

We can begin to timidly make a foundation upon which to build by emphasizing the
cultural relativity of language. Just imagine the multiverse of languages. Hindi, Farsi,
Xoxa, French and German and the entire Indo-European family. We can exchange ideas
across languages without being overly concerned about fluency issues, but we have to
master the moment to moment pausing in order to fence build comprehension, which, as
we know, requires an ability to at least foreground meaning even if the meaning we have
is only a matter of situating ourselves in a mere linguistic signifier.

To truly understand each other, we have to examine the ways in which our differently
configured cultures interact. And perhaps that crucial point of the absolutely heaving
need to bridge differences will always remain an asymptote, but, equipped with eternal
hope, we can push the horizon of understanding into a place where we can access both
latent an overt truths.

But what is truth? Can we use the plural form? In our culturally relative lives, perhaps the
plural not only can be used, but must be thought as a necessity. The language games we
play, especially if we heed Wittgensteins advice on how to use words, we can isolate
ourselves in our private language. We live in private unreal reality based hells.

But we will feel the need to implement the implication of the destruction of the Self if we
decide that the word hell, describing an historical arc, like a defense against this
destruction, in order to erase this origin point of meaning with a recognition that the idea
of hell has made us into private communists. We feel the need to have just about
everybody we meet agree with us or we will suffer a disconnect making communication
an incommensurability we cannot overcome unless we sacrifice. And what do we
sacrifice? Every iota of bias in a reaching out towards that Other that Martin Buber says,
if we dont do this, we will be trapped in the it-world. We must practice the higher
spirituality of I and Thou or risk that destruction of the Self.

So where are we now that we know that hell is not only the qui bono of our existence but
desired as well? The Christian idea of heaven is too deficient a concept to embrace
without the needed fall into entropy that will inevitably erase the distinction between
heaven and hell through the device of love. But love rarely gets privileged over justice.
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Most people think that justice is beautiful because the holy destruction of evil is the true
beauty of the universe. And we are all evil. In some way or another we are so flawed that
salvation, even for the really good rule followers, is actually an illusion.

Cormac McCarthy was able to make an ugly world beautiful. Even though the
apocalyptic event has erased every possibility of having an ethic at all, there is the boy.
And if God does not speak through this boy, then God does not speak.

In The Road, we find out that the road is a highway to hell with no destination and only
despair driving us hapless fallen. The devil was cast out of heaven for the crime of
wanting universal salvation and Jesus indifference to the whole, incomprehensibly
making him Gods favorite, gave us Christianity, functioning as a plague, responsible for
just about every war there has ever been. Even Newton gave up on trying to describe why
the orbits of the planets are elliptical, and it would take three hundred years to give us
Maxwell, who figured out the math, and in doing so, removed the need for a God in his
hypothesis.

Were now ensconced in a god-less world, secularism. And yet the Christians battle the
actuality of society in what looks like to outsiders rank superstition. The amazing and
incomprehensible emphasis on exclusivity organizes the rank and file in a line where they
lift their arms in a military salute, automatically following their master who has already
reported that almost everyone is going to hell.

And yet Jesus continually said time and again that he and the Father are one. Perhaps the
true intention of the gospel writer of John is to show that the human half of the divine
personality had already taken over, leveling Jesus, making him exactly the same as us.
His divine side should be ignored the more we realize that his preaching was telling us
that the kingdom of God is already here, and not only that, but the kingdom of God is
within us. Jesus understood that the fabric of the universe is composed of this in-here/out-
there dichotomous tension. Jesus is a mystic. And so is Moses. His climb up the mountain
of Sinai reveals the ascent/descent cycle so common to mystical practice. He ascended
and in his ascension, believed the very finger of God had written on his stone tablets. And
in descending from his holy vantage point, immediately slaughtered the golden calf
worshippers.
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So now we have entered the realm of mysticism. Merkabah mystics believe that it takes
500,000 years to reach the first mansion of God, and since there are seven mansions, it
takes approximately 3,000,000 years to reach the seventh where they can finally rest in
the arms of the Real.

Time is a funny thing for mystics. They dont petition God on a daily basis like the
orthodox do, and even if they did, they would not be asking for material blessings.
Instead, they wait. They play, they play a waiting game. They will have one contact with
the divine at some specific moment and then they might not hear from God again for
another twenty years where, in their patience, are rewarded with that contact and again
comfortably waiting, comply with the will of God tailored just for them. The Buddha
managed to recall 96 eons of past lives, 96 Big Bangs. It isnt entirely clear why he took
so long to become enlightened, but perhaps he just had a patience so infinite that he was
completely, almost disdainfully, willing to wait(No good answer will ever present
itself). And then there is the constant, unrelenting suffering. Mystics are born sufferers.
Mother Teresa spent the remaining twenty years of her life severed from her spiritual
connection with God; she died an unhappy death.

This phenomenon is known as the Dark Night. Every single self-identified mystic will
experience one sometime somewhere along the path of his life. Suddenly Gods love is
removed, and the mystic has an epiphany that he has been traveling a razors edge all
along, and that the Dark Night is just a consequence of his deterministic and unavoidable
choice within a choice.

The Cabbalists would experience, if only in their minds eye, a great light passing from
the Crown to the Kingdom, Malchut, the origin story of ourselves having to put up with
Ayin, nothingness, the idea that mystics are so lost, that the yarns stitching together
reality, come apart like a cheap suit, and the consequence is an inability to ever, forever,
wander a cavern where stalagmites torment their feet. This is the true division point
separating them from God. The fact is they have never been connected to God and never
will be. They are fallen, they are rehashing the Monotonian idea that to be purely sacred,
they must embrace pure evil. And in this ersatz recognition, the telos of their existence
gets revealed as a trip through an almost LSD like hellworld where they suffer the
delusion that there is a Real when there really isnt. They no more understand themselves
than people, risibly, blanket these heterodox travelers, and name rename them deluded,
mad society deniers. Kierkegaard put this loneliness of the traveler in succinct terms
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when he examined the madness of Abrahams attempt to murder his son in the name of
God. Could a god ever wish this mad command on anyone? And yet Abraham would
follow through actually raising the knife, and in its mid arc coming down to complete the
disembowelment, an angel appears out of nowhere, staying his hand, and the quixotic
attempt by God to teach Abraham the depth of a loss of a son by ones own hand in an
analogue on Jesus, becomes a lesson never learned.

This peculiar pathology Kierkegaard labels the Knight of Faith, forever misunderstood
and misunderstanding himself. Kierkegaard thought hard on the issue of individuality,
and with despair, realized that almost no one would be able to find a way of penetrating
or migrating into the concept. And so he quickly, almost in a bums rush, tells his
acolytes that, if you look closely enough, you eventually figure out that Christianity is
absurd. But we should believe anyway. Even if Jesus were a brilliant impostor, yet must
we believe, completing the almost circular nature of Pascals Wager who claims that
living a good and happy life, even without there being a God, and despite the apparent
nihilism, is a Good that we ought to embrace in order to cover our bases just in case God
does exist and we can keep ourselves out of hell.

The Dantean speculation in multiplying circles replaces the heat of hell with a devil stuck
in a frozen lake. And Virgil seems to think this is all normal even as he shepherds his
visitor to the ultimate union with his beloved Beatrice, perhaps a virgin until the moment
of the inevitable penetration separates her obvious displacement of the Virgin Mary with
a rather whorish holiness washed down the gullet of messy though humane symbolic
mouth masticating souls as an intermediary. What exactly she is up to is difficult to
comprehend in the multiple confusions of gods: St. Francis of Assisi, Adonai, the Holy
Ghost, Jesus..who exactly are we expected to direct our devotion to? The Catholics have
made it so complicated that it might be impossible to know.

2
Steven Hawking would join with Einstein in disproving Newtons idea of absolute rest.
Einstein had already done the hard work by establishing the relativity of time, meaning
that the actuality of our universe lies in the relocation of time in a space/time continuum.
Actually, in order to get to his theory of General Relativity, he was involved in a race
with a brilliant mathematician by the name of Hillman, a race Einstein would lose. But
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because Einstein is Einstein, he, of course, was awarded the credit, revealing that just a
little bit of corruption lying like a coiled snake poised to strike, killing his reputation in
the stubbornness of his self belief that he is a genius when he isnt even a genius at all.
He was so inept at math that he had to hire mathematicians to help him with his
equations. Actually, he was only good at thought experiments. This is evident in the fact
that with middling grades, he had to get a family member to secure him a post as a lowly
patent clerk. He didnt even win the Nobel prize for his more grandiose speculations, but
won it for the work he had done on optics. Practically no one really believed that the
Theory of Relativity had anything to do with anything.

Steven Hawking is the true master. His conception of time led to the belief that times
arrow was established upon the incidence of the Big Bang, and even this proof of time
would outdate itself quickly when physicists began realizing that, in Hawkings theory, it
is possible to do the impossible, and that is to travel back in time. He would eventually be
lauded for the correct perception that Black Holes have a function. And that function is
creation activities.

The necessity of explaining our current nature of things hinges on the discoveries by
quantum mechanists that atoms arent doing the things they are supposed to do. Matter
could easily be explained in a context of particle theory or jus as easily be explained as
wave packets, essentially making the infinitely small world of neutrons, protons, nuclei,
conflate upon itself into the smaller particles of up, down, strange, and charmed quarks
that create a confusion. Why is the small world not manifesting its strange proclivities in
the macro? These would be mystifications, but the answer becomes quite simple.

The earth is actually ruled by furiously interacting energy systems. The

interconnectedness of everything gets beautifully explored by Chaos theory. These
scientists realized that the energy systems are so intertwined that a butterfly flapping its
wings in Beijing could bring down an airplane in Pennsylvania. And then, as they began
experimenting with different kinds of infinities, they began to produce computer models
of nonrepeating shapes they labeled fractals. The amazing collocation of these patterns
makes for a visually applied beauty perhaps never seen in a scientific experiment before.

With Chaos theory we had a contradiction, a contradiction completely and utterly

provable through empirical means. Chaos theorists had successfully juxtaposed
randomness and order together. This should be a paradox, but its not. The physical
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constants, the equations responsible for keeping the planet just the right distance from the
sun to make the earth inhabitable, if moved just one degree, would destroy all life. This is
sometimes known as the Goldilocks Effect. Just as in the fable, the porridge most eatable
was the one in between the other smaller or larger offerings. Actually, the theory of life,
namely evolution, while being mostly correct, reveals a lot of gaps and circular thinking.
The Dalai Lama, for instance, pointed out that we cannot know that a trait is survivable
until after it has survived thus making it impossible to understanding the mechanism
supporting its sudden continuance in the gene pool. There are other challenges. The Gaia
hypothesis can be argued from many points of view, but James Lovelock takes the idea
down a science based field of explanations. With the launch of Sputnik in the 60s, we
suddenly had an idea about what our pale blue dot looked like. Lovelock examined this
celestial information and discovered something interesting. Not only is the world a
sphere, but given its spherical nature, the very atmosphere can be examined and with a
sort of combinant method where the investigator can examine the composition of the air
we breathe, a speculation that would lead to other empirical investigations, essentially
mixing together the rather obvious spiritual aspects to the theory in a synthesis that will
probably eventually completely refute the theory of evolution. Even a woman, who had a
discovered a theory labeled Genetic Symbiosis, would wipe away any trace of legitimacy
to the theory of evolution, but it took her twenty years to make the textbooks, and is now
highly dismissed. Evolutionists are rather rigorous in defending themselves even though
the invalidity of the theory is quickly becoming proven at a breakneck pace.

Deepak Chopra is basically a charlatan, but he has a huge following. He seems to rely on
a kind of New Agey blend of almost all of the great teachings in the world with a slight
tilt towards Eastern thought. He has written on Jesus before, and in his latest book, War
of the Worldviews, he wants to engage his coauthor in a dialectical debate in an attempt at
settling the question on who is most right; western science or spiritual views. The effort is
doomed to fail as almost all attempts at reconciling these worldviews will. The founder of
The Human Genome Project is a Bible believing Christian and has written a book called
The Language of God where he tries to show that the helical structured enzymes that are
our genetics is a blueprint for living laid down by God himself. He believes that the
reconciliation of science and religion happens literally in a mirror of everything the Bible
says. This is, of course impossible, since the usual timeline we use for marking the pace
of intellectual progress reveals that sciences late appearance in history makes any kind
of scientific speculation appearing in the Bible impossible. Even the great biologist E.O.
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Wilson reveals a lot of liberalism on the subject of God when he labels himself a
seeker.

Religion and Science will be eternally at odds with each other even though it is obvious
that religions are simply a bad Medieval hangover that no Hair of the Dog can possibly
ameliorate.

Actually, there are three proofs for the existence of God, and they all fail in one way or
another: The Argument from Design, The Cosmological Argument, and The Ontological
Argument. Descartes Evil Genius wishes to keep us in thrall to his will perhaps, but the
circularity of Descartes method of argumentation makes getting out of the mind
impossible. Even though Descartes will admit that because he has been burned by a
match he must accept some form of objective experience, this too fails when we realized
we are still puppets on a string.

St. Anselms proof in defense of the ontological argument descends into silliness with his
maxim that God is the greatest thought beyond which no greater thought can be
conceived, turns into a shouting match between two five-year-old boys trying to one up
each other in fight to determine whos Dad is the strongest.

But the scientists, led by strident atheists, do no better at disproving the existence of God
than religionists do at proving it. God may or may not be there up in his heaven just
perched on the disc that is the sky, waiting for the entrants through the pearly gates,
where, he may have to wait forever because most if not all of us will never show up.

The problem with religious speculation is the same problem we have with scientific ones.
Neither can be absolutely right and neither can be absolutely wrong, and this is not an
argument for relativity. The real problem is the insane focus on certainty. So credulous
are the scientists on this issue that without it, they would not even have a science. Even
the qualitative science of psychology wants certainty so badly that they have invented the
terms external validity, internal validity, and control and experimental groups all in
an attempt that, when we look closely, becomes an actual exercise in pseudo-science.

Michel Foucault would comb through the phasing of intellect happening in the 15th
century, and discover what he called spontaneous sciences. These sciences were
actually a direct result of the development of language itself. Thinkers were appending
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labels such as written language being Masculine and spoken language being Feminine.
After thinkers had shed the idea that language had a telos, being a disclosure of the logos,
the Word, they would be able to skew the progress of science towards a more mature
view on the nature of whats possible to explain.

But Foucault would bemoan the lack of morality in western society, even going as far as
to say that morality is impossible in the west. There seemed to be a breakdown in society
somewhere along the way, and where before society was tightly woven together, now its
sprawled civilization with all its skyscrapers, banks, and businesses of every kind only
operating on bureaucratically driven assumptions, prosperity became the only focus and
hence the idea of morality got inverted and we suddenly had a society of narcissists.

3
So what am I actually doing here, where am I actually going? Are these the insane
ravings of a madman too steeped in Nietzsche to realize the Superman isnt really all that
Super? Actually, Im trying to get to a hermeneutic circle where I can revisit all the
wisdom, both eastern and western, in a sweeping exploration for that tired idea that we
need after all, a theory.

To begin the space explorer mission that has astronauts constantly twirling in zero
gravity, we half to realize that our world is fast becoming a dystopia. And this phasal
event happens every one thousand years or so and ours will last perhaps as long. The
Hopi first discovered this idea of holy destruction when their shamans advanced the idea
that the earth, at its creation forward, constantly recreates itself in three creation events or
perhaps creation catastrophes would be the better word. These Shamans discovered that
the earth is some kind of organic machine, that, at least in the vegetable realm, will
constantly break down like a radiator exploding and the event of spiritual renewal
becomes necessary. I dont think this will include an actual physical destruction. The
number of natural disasters will operate as a kind of symptom of a flu that perhaps the
earths energy system has contracted in an effort to punish its various collection of
evildoers and we are all evildoers.
What is fast becoming obvious is that the world has been sick from the time a human
established a footprint on it, and everything slid downhill from there. We were never
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meant to stay on the earth very long, and the possibility of a supernova isnt a possibility
at all but a certainty.

Now we have to grapple with a newly reorganized image of ourselves that says not only
have we failed God but he has failed us too by making us too imperfect. We are so
imperfect in fact that finding any kind of humane behavior seems to be an exercise in
futility just like Lot wandering the streets of Sodom looking for that one righteous man.
The story is actually a metaphor for the complete absence of good people.

Say aliens come to visit our planet, aliens that have such an advanced civilization that
they have transcended the need for any body at all, actually being beings who are totally
composed of light. In this release, this freedom they absorb knowledge as if collecting it
was as easy as going to fill their animal skins at a watering hole.

Now they set foot on our planet and put down different footprints. If we compare the two,
ours and the light beings, we can see that there is no comparison. Their footfalls are so
different from ours that we cant really refer to them as footprints at all because, in all
actuality, they just dont leave any. Immortal beings dont have bodies, let alone feet. The
obsession with alien civilizations riding around in hovercrafts in their patrolling of our
environs is a propitiation of some unknown God of technology we mistakenly believe the
point of progress is for. Technology in being so vaunted, blinds us to the inadequacy of it.
A truly advanced civilization would be totally unconcerned with flying cars.

So where do we stand now?

Technology is stupid, and that is all we can say (the Luddites are right).
Our civilization is imploding precisely because we cant muster even one ounce of real
compassion, real unadulterated love. Instead, we invent better ways to kill each other. We
stare into the face of our enemy and in slipping the knife into his back realize with shock
that the same knife is knifing us. The death of one is the death of all.

The aliens would be very concerned that there isnt a one world government benevolent
and riddled with philosopher-kings. There is supposed to be a Prince who acts a fount of
virtue, but the very idea of him has been buried under a tidal wave of scholarly articles all
ivory tower shiny in their impugning of the multi-disciplinary.

Intellectuals are supposed to specialize, and in doing so, murder truth.

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For what is truth after all but a self-identification situating the human condition in a
Shakespearean Folly of our own making, essentially proving that Falstaff was a great
man after all. Even Christopher Marlow in all of his double dealing and mysterious death,
is an exemplar of what literature is for, and that is that Blakes Poetic Genius is the muse
that escapes us. We can never recover her because she fled the planet long ago as soon as
the first murder happened (Was it Abel?)

So here we are steeped in a messiness that just wont resolve. The cleaners are absent
because we have only been successful at recruiting psychopaths, not people with virtues
worthy of applying the right cleansers to heal the brokenness that is really Humpty-
Dumpty all over again. There never were any kings horses and the men were all too busy
fucking whores to worry about a cracked egg.

4
So let me open my mind to all of you readers and you can see the beautiful savagery, the
sunshine of a spotless mind. My tears are great like that horribly exploitative commercial
of an American Indian all dressed in his stereotyped garb, shedding tears at the sight of a
single piece of garbage. I am a stereotype too. I am so fictional that even an author as
great as James Joyce will be wholly unable to dream me up in even his best stream of
consciousness fantasy. I slipstream in fact. I soul travel regarding the silver yoking me to
my body as if it were a kind of fakery making me believe I have some body to return to
when I am really reaching for the heaven that can never be.

This idea of me being fictional is an affectation perhaps, but how are we to establish the
authenticity of our experiences? Perhaps we need a little Borgesian wise doubt to keep
our greed and cruelty in check. Perhaps what we really need is a healthy dose of
unconcern.

Its like the time I found a dead drunk in an alleyway. He was in shabby clothes of
course. Someone had evidently robbed him, of what I couldnt tell because being a bum,
he obviously had nothing to steal. Perhaps that was the point. To steal the only thing he
had and that was his life.
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Our bodies are the only true high value material essences we own. Even Jesus recognizes
this. He mentioned that possessing anything that thieves can break through and steal
makes the act of hoarding objects pointless since the ruby ring laying in a vault is
telepathically conveying to the robbers in the area the exact location of its padlocked
home, having a little mind wanting to give a dig to its owner just in case the master thinks
he has it when the object is actually the master personality.

Objects often have control of us, we dont have control of them.

The power of the uselessness of valuing can begin to overpower us with the smear
campaign of the commodification peddlers who use every available holiday to encourage
buying activity. The brevity their selling techniques shows is a marker of the greed to
have every single toy or latest gadget to fill the collective maws of the little slaves we call
children.

Parents are running down their children as if the point of having a child was to make him
a punch dummy.

Violence actually has a certain intimacy to it. The spanking a child might receive when
being bad, rips emotional muscles apart in a routine of breaking down tissue in order for
the tissue to reemerge stronger than before, the necessary modus operandi of the body
builder.

So what about our dead bum? Has he been reduced to a mere symbol? Actually, as long
as the body stays inert and unmoved on the pavement, it actually really has more
humanity in it until its removed and finds its way into a pine box interred in a paupers
grave. Funny. The rich not only get all the advantages in life, but they also get wonderful
coffins where their better than average embalming keeps the tan bed brown going
perhaps a few more years than our humbly destroyed bum. Amazing how far a million
dollars can go as it reaches into the afterlife giving a good looking corpse perhaps the
result of living fast. But I am alive and you are dead. Carl Jung feels that life is a
composition of collective memories we are unable to recall because recalling is
unnecessary. Its like trying to describe the way a raindrop functions when all you need to
know is that its wet. Even a blind man can see the truth in that.
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But Im beating around the bush. Actually, there are two reasons for why I survive you. I
am practiced in the art of tapping into two phenomena known as The Spiritual Sensory
Program and The Psychologically Damaged Self. Each one plays off the other in a
cooperation coordinated by two apparently apposite things. They are actually so
intertwined that one automatically effects the other whenever the pressures of living get
so daunting that the out of body/in body duality conflates into an enterprise of mental
batches.

However, there are differences between the two concepts that bear discussing separately.

The Spiritual Sensory Program is a supernormal patterning of extraordinary sensations

falling beyond the reach of the five senses. This spurning of sense-data driven
speculations returns the center of autonomy back to its royal position in the sensorium
that suddenly corpusculates into a form both mirrored in the body and the mind. The
peculiar thing is that the experiences we have of the divine are entirely natural-scientific
in their expression but entirely unique in their raw feels. These signals also have a
unique interpretive causeway. For some reason, they not only feel natural but familiar
in a way that we illusorily process as a common experience when the truth is that we
have no idea of their origin even though we are taught to believe the sensations arrive in
our minds via a divine intelligence we believe to be morally innocent. Our full
expectation is that the person delivering these raw feels is indeed the person who desires
our moral benefit when the truth is that we can never know, in fact are entirely left to
wonder about the actual being behind everything we experience in a smashing together of
pleasure and pain in what turns out to be an investigation into the holy benefit of a
dominatrixs tits. She will be busily paddling us while the safe word gets stuck in our
mouths, becoming something more than mere submission but a pleasurable violence only
the people blessed with the perversion can possibly understand this rewiring of mind.

The Psychologically Damaged Self relies on these pain messages turning pleasurable in
order to function as a storehouse for painful memories, a processing place for snapshot
scenes of past horrors, and, interestingly, providing an electrical outlet where our fleshy
appliance sucks the juices out of the indifferent gonad confused between femality and
mality in a recognition of a third eye chakra that, without an eyelash, eternally gets
exposed to the waiting insights The Spiritual Sensory program lays down like a feeding
tube into the Physiology of being human thus making everything we think we know
about pleasure and pain into a paean on the possibility of wisdom.
 15

Spirituality and wisdom appear to go hand in hand when nothing could be farther from
the truth. Ancient female oracles often would occupy a cave that, with its protective
shadow, commune with their wisdom literature sources in order to inscribe a hieroglyph
inside the mind of the seeker of wisdom. Scientists seem to think that these women were
inhabiting these caves because they were drawn to the scent of a kind of hallucinogenic
gas prompting inspiration whether real or fake we cannot possibly know.

Visiting fortune tellers is an age old practice. But believing them has always been a
matter for debate. Perhaps we can assign legitimacy to this phenomenon while being
wary of charlatans, in a full awareness that even the more accurate ones may be unaware
that futures are quite malleable and can easily change from one previously determined
course to a new one.

This idea has been labeled The Garden of Forking Paths, and it means that every time we
are confronted with the choice event, and then make the decision, an entirely new future
is created out of the dross of the old one we are now leaving behind.

This is, of course, an ultimate commentary on the nature of how time functions. To refer
back to The Psychologically Damaged Self for a moment, the charnel storehouse, acting
like some sort of difference engine, spits out memories to us. If course we have to deal
with the sorting process to divide the pleasurable from the painful even though this has a
tinge of the fools errand to it. How can a house of horrors possibly produce a thing we
want to call wisdom?

Actually, wisdom is a complex thing. We dont really know it or recognize it until we

have an actual event of it to base a perception on. We tend to try out the word
intelligence to define it, but this too fails because the thin line separating the two
concepts is actually a great gulf that no amount of mental discipline can alter. Seeing is
believing and emergent wisdom into any perceptual field is simply an ersatz recognition,
the appearance of an ah-hah that opens a kind of door, we first crack open just a little,
seeing the light coming through, until we feel comfortable flinging it open and this
trueness, this authentic slivering message from God, will wash over us and we will sigh
inwardly saying, Ah, this is what it is after all, isnt it? It certainly feels that way. It kind
of feels like love.
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Our incompetency in the area of love has Erich Fromm adjuring us in his book, The Art
of Love, to just find a quiet moment with our partner and then let everything around you
and she/he fade to black in a benign staring match where souls are allowed to interwrap
around each other in a moment of mutual concentration, a meditation really, on the
beauty body and soul of what youre looking at. And you should practice this intimacy as
often as you can because it is really being silent for long periods of time with your
partners hand in yours that you can have anything like an authentic relationship.

Actually, we are really only alive in our dreams, which is itself intimately tied to
memory. Bergson thinks that memory is so important to dreaming that this much
researched topic, while being dispatched by the medical community, is entirely a plunge
into that charnel storehouse where we are pulling up blocks of episodes from our lives,
that then get inverted into the messy dream world we inhabit as if it were a world within a
world, having a reality unique to it and only accessible to us. No one can tell us anything
that will help us understand our dreams. The dream is one of the most private events in
all of human experience and we have to just accept that the reality we think we have
when were awake is extinguished to actual reality we experience in our dreams,
something even the hardheaded Bertrand Russell admits as a possibility since in his
estimation, even fictional characters have a kind of objective existence, and this from a
man who wants to lock us in that prison of logic!
It could very well be that what we take as the life we are leading now is actually a
fleeting thought, just a memory held in the mind of an immortal being we would have
morphed into some millions of years in the future. In this beings mind, our life is the
only embodied exercise in living the immortal being has ever had. We are just a thought
rolling around in our future self, who feels the need to obsessively recur to this former
life, giving the mere thought in his head, peopled with beings on an actually existing
although greatly faded memory of a world, the immortal makes present in a Nietzschean
Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Again, we are only alive in our dreams.

And so I end, dear reader, having taken you on this tour in a Magic Bus, where Seargant
Pepper leads our band, even as we drop the necessary acid tabs in order to fully
participate in the celebratory experience of living. Our lives only last as long as it takes
us to snap our fingers, thats it. As soon as we meet thumb to finger and snap! We are
successfully dead already. Especially if we examine the Buddhist idea of emptiness, a
concept that means that not only is reality an illusion, but the illusion itself is an illusion,
we are informed that the samsara realm is exactly the same as the aspired to higher realm
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and thus there is no one to do the saving and no one to be saved. Think on that one and
see if it bends the mind a little.

Before I write the last sentence, I want to describe to you the very reason Im
automatically writing this book. I was standing on the balcony outside my apartment door
where I live in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, staring up into a starless sky, and began thinking
on the Christian concept of perfection. You should know that the amount of misprisions
and mistranslations are so high in the Bible that the errata itself is enough to make a
Second Bible. As I gazed upward, I realized the cruelty of a single error of translation.
The Christians would interpret the idea of perfection as being without flaw, something
decidedly so difficult to achieve that it is practically impossible. Now, you should know
that the New Testament was written in Koin Greek, a very old precursor to the modern
Greek spoken now, so a great deal of knowledge on this language is needed and almost
impossible to attain the requisite fluency in order to have anything like a correct
translation. The mistranslation event occurs when the Church committee, Gods
Secretaries, looked at the original text and when they came across the passage that has
Jesus saying that we should be perfect even as our father in Heaven is perfect, they had
totally missed the point of the passage. To digress for a moment, at the same time I was
thinking about this, I was teasing out an interpretation of an old Zen puzzle that asks us to
figure out the meaning of the phrase What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping? I
pondered and pondered until the insight came. When we have a lightning storm, the bolts
of lightning that bolt out of the ironclad cloud, create a momentary division in the ether
where the two walls of air once separated crash back together into their previous state.
Here is the cause of thunder. Thunder is actually a marker of wrath. Gods anger flashes
out in a touch penetrating our minds, in an attempt to alter completely our orientation to
the world. He was entirely successful on me. Once I realized that the Greek word for
perfection is actually harmonousias, only meaning harmony gave me an experience I will
never forget. As I pondered my mind stopped for a moment. I was a blank slate. I had just
been blessed with a Buddhist Enlightenment experience. Every ounce, every trace of fear
and anxiety left my body in an incomparable peace I had never felt before or since. WE
ARE ONLY ALIVE IN OUR DREAMS. I walked back inside like I was leaving behind
a former life, no an alternate imprisoning place. I walked back, backwards/forwards,
realizing the foolish of everything. I was a changed man. We are only alive in our
dreams.