Our legal systems, our religions, our educational systems are all deeply concerned with controlling pleasure. We have created detailed rules and customs surrounding sex, drugs, food, alcohol, and even gambling. Jails are bursting with people who have violated laws that proscribe certain forms of pleasure or who profit by encouraging others to do so.
Most experiences in our lives that we find transcendent - whether illicit vices or socially sanctioned ritual and social practices as diverse as exercise, meditative prayer, dancing 'til you drop, and playing on the internet: They all evoke neural signals that converge on a small group of interconnected brain areas called the medial forebrain pleasure circuit. Evolution has, in effect, hardwired us to catch a pleasure buzz from a wide variety of experiences from crack to cannabis, from meditation to masturbation, from Bordeau to beef.
One purpose of chaos, paradox, nonsense, and absurdity is to set itself against the linear world. These are not meant to take the place of linear knowledge or functions, but to act as a point of focus calling our attention and awareness to the something(s) which the linear model has missed, thus breathing new life into the predictable.
Further, our non-linear models help us to see old facts in new and exciting ways. If there is a summum bonum it lies in reformulation and utility in the service of tolerating more of the unknown. The function of Monotheism is to control the anxiety created by the unknown. Monotheism is a form of glue which attempts to hold an expanding world together.
Dualism... Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.
"I" affirms a separate and abiding me substance, "am" denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. "I am." Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth! The religiously minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit, or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.
The initiatory cycle can likened to a snake ploughing off its skin. So too, we must be prepared to slough off old patterns of thought, belief, (about ourselves and the world) and behaviour that are no longer appropriate for the new phase of our development.
Utopic space - a space that has been hinted at all through recorded civilisation. There exist no external clues as to its existence or actual characteristics.
Every form of "morality" is, of course, irksome at some level to everybody, because no individual ever has exactly the sexual imprint desired by the tribe. The sophisticated totem-cults (the "higher" religions, so dubbed by themselves) take account of this by the doctrine of atonement. In one form or another, this allows the individual to be ritually "forgiven" periodically for not being the perfect sexual robot degreed by tribal morality.
This becomes hilarious only when one realises that most of what domesticated primates are asking their priests to forgive them for consists of that Kinsey so accurately called "normal mammalian behaviour".
We stumble on identity. We cobble together a self, using the imperfect plans laid down by the ego. We are motivated by memories of what hurt in the past and what felt good, which impel us to repeat the good things, and avoid the bad. As a result, "I" is a product of accident, fickle likes and dislikes, old conditioning, and the countless voices of other people who told us what to do and how to be. At bottom, this whole structure is totally unreliable and, in fact, unreal.
If we ... talk in terms of a universe that is constantly evolving, you can join the evolutionary flow or not. The choice is yours. Either way, evolution will proceed, but if you opt out, it won't proceed through you.
You can still make me mad,
It is the human situation that is bssically tragic. Right and Left revolutionaries cannot alter this basic dilemma. For instance, the most readical Left-wing group has no program to overcome death. The entire Right-Left establishment is still death-oriented.
Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitations is based on experience of the past. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or what he may do.
The universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed and choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity - those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance of divinity - those who mold them themselves blind masks of ideas and thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead man's eyes.
Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard-done-by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane.
Negativity is totally unnatural. It is a psychic pollutant, and there is a deep link between the poisoning and destruction of nature and the vast negativity that has accumulated in the collective human psyche. No other life forms on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it.
