A Rambling Post From Nowhere to Nothing

Back to those next two questions, "Does anybody else actually exist or am I just a waking dreamer, dreaming the world and all of its inhabitants into existence in order to actualize my fractured consciousness?," and "For that matter, do I even exist or am I just a scripted player in a wider dream?"

As to the first question, it is one of those many questions that are obvious to the intellect but which cannot be proven by philosophy. For example, there are many philosophers who absurdly affirm that free will does not exist, when nothing could be more self-evident to the awakened intellect than the existence of our objective and transcendent will. Without freedom, we could not know truth, and therefore, we could make no truthful statements at all, so denying free will is logically self-refuting. Nor could virtue exist, for our choice between good and evil would be an illusion. At once we would have to abolish our legal system, since it would be founded on the illusion that people are free to choose between obeying the law or breaking it.

It is possible to "prove" many sophistries with philosophy, which is why so many minds can end up shipwrecked there in a no-mind's land between the macro world of theology and the micro world of empiricism. It's not so much what you can prove with philosophy, but what you cannot disprove. For example, you cannot disprove that free will is an illusion, that other minds don't exist, or that natural selection fully accounts for human consciousness, because philosophy is not equipped to deal with things that form its basis and possibility: truth, free will, other minds, and non-genetic meaning, among others.

So there are naturally philosophers who have made the sillypsistic argument that only their own mind narcissarily exists and that the world is its dream. This represents a half-correct perversion of the true state of affairs, which is captured in the following quote by Frithjof Schuon:

"The truth of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum is, not that it presents thought as the proof of being, but simply that it enunciates the primacy of thought -- hence of consciousness or intelligence -- in relation to the material world which surrounds us." Now read carefully, Coons: "Certainly, it is not our personal thought which preceded the world, but it was -- or is -- absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is precisely a distant reflection; our thought which reminds us -- and proves to us -- that in the beginning was the Spirit."

There is a sizeable area where "bad philosophy" meets with the leftist impulse to deny human nature in order to create their notmore utopia, because all leftist ideas originally hatched from the unfertile egghead of some cracked philosopher. But the yolk is always on us, because teaching people that free will is an illusion is a sure way to lay more beastly bad eggs on the public. In short, if you argue that humans are less than human -- or set up a system of disincentives toward becoming human -- pretty soon you will have a world of infrahumans.

A fine example is the so-called "Palestinans." Now, a normal person would naturally ask the question: what must a people do to prove to the world that they are not deserving of a state, unless that state is called "Subhumanistan?" (Pronounced Sub-huMANistan.) For fifty years liberals have excused these Arabs of the obligation to elevate themselves to the human plane, which is precisely why they have created such a comprehensively infrahuman hell on earth.

If I were president, I would simply say: "you are beasts -- which is to say humans reduced to a state of nature -- so the best we can offer you at this time is a cage. However, should your population begin to show rudimentary signs of humanness, then we might talk about a state. But monsters are not 'given' a state. They are given Nobel Prizes. Monsters only take states, and this is something we cannot allow you to do, any more than we intend to solve our crime problem by turning San Quentin prison into the 51st state of the union."

There would be no reason to waste a single moment arguing with someone over the question of free will, because freedom is lived, not arrived at inductively or deductively. All serious spiritual seekers understand the meaning of the phrase, individuality is freedom lived.

Now, the fact that most people squander their freedom and live their lives as if they were a machine or computer does not detract from the reality of the situation. I was thinking about this the other day, with regard to something as mundane as my Blogger profile. There I have a partial list of my biggest influences, my favorite music, etc. You may click any of them and discover who else in the Blogger world shares your interests.

Here, let's give it a try. Let's start with the enigmatic Scott Walker, who is little known to the public but has an intense cult following based mainly upon four brilliantly eccentric albums he made between 1967 and 1970. I see that quite a few fellow bloggers are members of the cult. A lot of weirdos, I might add.

Likewise, I am gratified to see that many Bloggers apparently understand that Buck Owens was hardly the grinning doofus of Hee Haw fame, but one of the great innovators of country music, especially between 1960 and 1966, when he single-handedly defied the bland Nashville conventions and forged the magnificent twin-telecaster, locomotive Bakersfield sound.

But I'll but you a dollar that if you go through all the names, there is not a single overlap between the Scott Walker people and the Buck Owens people. That alone makes me an individual as unique as my DNA. Or take the handful of philosophical, psychological, and theological influences. Only three people come up for Melanie Klein, one other person for Allan Schore, none at all for Matte Blanco or Whitehead. Add all my influences together, and the chance of someone sharing the same ones would be billions to one. Someone once referred to reading as "the mystery school of individuation." How much more is this true of the internet, which allows us to "fine Coon" our individuality in ways never before possible?

In short, whether for good or for ill, there is no question that I am alarmingly "unique," in a strictly value-free sense of the term (I am not making any special claim for myself, as this is probably true of all Coons -- the only "species" that consists of unique individuals as opposed to a "type"). And as a matter of fact, I am quite aware of this uniqueness. When I was a young kit -- especially because the uniqueness existed in potential but was not actualized -- it was a source of pain, because naturally I wanted to be like "the others."

Even now, when people meet me, there is good chance that they will walk away from the encounter mumbling to themselves, "Hmm. Never met anyone like that before." For some -- for Coons -- hanging with Dear Leader would be a positive experience. But for the non-coon world, there is no question that contact with me would be an irritant or a puzzle, unless I specifically rein it in -- as all Coons must do in order to make their way through the sub-Coon world.

Now, the other day I mentioned the "celestialization," or vertical globalization, that will have to accompany horizontal globalization. I am going to talk about this despite the odious Mr. Pibb's request that I do so. In the absence of this vertical globalization, I see no hope for man -- or at least no hope that human beings will achieve their potential and become who they were meant to be. As you can see from my own little example of myself, no government or collective could possibly confer my uniqueness upon me. Rather, they can only limit it or take it away entirely, which is precisely the problem in what Barnett calls the "non-integrating gap" of the world, including Islam.

As Barnett explains, once your nation connects to the functioning core of the world, you no longer have control of the "content flow" into your country, and this is a big problem for the infrahuman who is only prevented from acting out by strict top-down control of information content. In America, we are so accustomed to having total access to all information, that most of us can handle the content flow that comes with globalization.

But not everyone. There is a reason why access to porn remains the primary use of Al Gore's magnificent invention. In other words, if there are literally millions of Americans who cannot handle the information flow of globalization without being sucked into a world of infrahuman compulsion, imagine the catastrophic effect on a culture that thinks a two-piece bathing suit consists of a burqa and a snorkel? Frankly, if the internet were available when I was a young punk (which in Joey's case was a term of endearment, BTW), I do wonder what the effect would have been on my soul.

Nevertheless, as a result of globalization, never before have human beings had more of an opportunity to realize their unique potential and become who they are. But how many people take advantage of this? Relative to the total, I would say very few. But in my spiritual system, an absolute prerequisite of real spiritual growth is to first become who you are, otherwise, ipso facto, you are someone else. And the entire Islamic world is invested in preventing people from becoming who they are, which is why freedom must be rejected at all costs.

The only world-historical purpose of our liberation of Iraq can be the vertical liberation of a small part of the Islamic world, so that they might have the intoxicating experience of living their individuality. Once this happens, it cannot be put back in the bottle -- as in the case of Gorbachev's attempts to save the communist system through Glasnost, or "openness." Openness is incompatible with any form of leftist (or religious) mind control, so the whole system rapidly collapsed.

This is why economic liberty is far more important than political liberty to vertical globalization. This is obvious if you consider your own life, in which your liberty is "lived" on a moment-by-moment basis in the free market, what with the countless little decisions you make every day. Meaningful political liberty arises not through abstract ideas, but through the experience of living one's economic freedom.

This is also why leftism is always against the Cosmic Law, because it always limits our ability to discover and live the unique idiom of our freedom in the open system of natural liberty. And this is why leftism always arrives gland-in-hand with totalitarianism, whether in its "hard" form or in "flaccid" forms such as political correctness, campus speech codes, the education system in general, and the stupifying worlds of the MSM and a so-called "entertainment" industry which mainly functions to magnify ugliness and depravity, disregard beauty and virtue, and eclipse any dimensions beyond the animal-human lowbrid. One way or the other, you must always bend over forwards to accomodate leftism.

Well, I had better sign off. As part of my Total Slack Retrieval System™, I actually work seven days a week. That is, instead of doing a lot of work five days, I do a little every day, and then knock off early. That way my Sabbath arrives every afternoon and I don't really require vacations because I make sure to rejewvenate every day.