The Best Operating System For Your Wetware

Have we been focusing excessively on politics lately? I don't know. As far as I'm concerned, when I write about political philosophy, the spirituality is implicit, whereas when I write about spirituality, the politics is. It's just a matter of rotating the ball of consciousness within the cognitive plane that bisects it -- which is why one can only be consciously conscious of one thing at a time.

There are a multitude of horizontal planes that cut through the sphere of consciousness, and each of these is relatively autonomous and complete -- especially if one forgets about the ball! But only the ball encompasses the whole, which is perhaps why O should be thought of as a sphere rather than a circle. And which is why there are infinite ways to be a flatlander living out on one of those dry and dusty academic planes.

One might think of each of the horizontal planes as a kind of operating system one uses to recognize and "read out" the content of O. Each is a discipline, but if you fail to maintain discipline and become a disciple of just one plane, you won't be able to pilot your plane above or below your abstract little errpart.

Again, it would be an elementary error -- of both epistemology and ontology -- to confuse one's operating system with the actual totality of O, but when has that ever stopped people? Some of these operating systems are as crude as can be -- materialism, Darwinism, rationalism, existentialism, Marxism -- while others at least have the umlauts to know that in this post-Gödelian world of ours, a consistent philosophical system will be incomplete, and vice versa.

While we typically think of an unconscious "below" and supraconscious "above," these are merely spatial metaphors borrowed from the 3D world to try to make sense of the holographic order of O. For in reality, the unconscious is not below but within the conscious mind, and vice versa.

In other words, consciousness as such is somewhat analogous to the "total flowing atmosphere" of the earth. If one looks at a cloud in the sky, for example, one is generally not aware that what is available to the senses is actually a small visible "ripple" standing out against the backdrop of a much more encompassing meteorological process. (For those of you in Rio Linda, "meteorology" is not the study of meteors.)

It turns out that the subatomic realm operates in this fashion as well. A subatomic "particle" is not actually a separate entity, but the local manifestation of an oceanic, wavelike reality which is nonlocal and unmanifest. In my view, thoughts can be seen in the same way, as analogous to the clouds produced by the total atmosphere, or subatomic particles floating atop (so to speak) the oceanic field of quantum energy.

Just so, if O represents the ocean of total consciousness, (k) is a little grain of sand tossed upon the shore of the local ego. There is always a complementary relationship between O and (k), just as there is between wave and particle. This relationship "cannot not be," any more than there can be time without eternity, horizontal without vertical, interior without exterior, male without female, Toots without Herman. And this is why it is absurdly naive to posit "facts" in the absence of an operating system that recognizes and places them in a greater context.

In his earlier metapsychology, Freud envisioned the mind as "layered," so to speak, with the unconscious "below" and the conscious mind "above." In his second model, he developed the idea of different "forces" pushing each other around, namely, id, ego, and superego.

The point is that both models clearly borrowed from a domain with which we are familiar -- the physical world -- and transfered concepts appropriate to it to the study of the non-physical world. But of course the mind is not an object and it doesn't have layers. Whatever the mind is, it is not a machine, or a layer cake, or a bag full of stuff, even though we often look at it that way (and fruitfully, I might add).

It wouldn't at all be going too far to say that immersing oneself in psychoanalysis -- or any other ideology -- is very much analogous to using a different operating system to navigate O.

In order to think about O, or to translate it into local knowledge, we require an operating system. This is where "all the trouble arises," because people tend to fall in love with their operating systems, and not realize that there are other systems -- some very good ones and some very, very bad ones.

Islamism is an example of the latter. On the oppsosite end of the spectrum, our classically liberal founders came up with the best political operating system ever devised. It will never be surpassed in its essentials, since they had the wisdom to root it in certain truths that can never be surpassed, e.g., "all men are created equal." Any competing system can only fail to reach this truth, never surpass it.

Obviously, leftism -- or any philosophy that can trace its lineage to Marx -- is also a horrible operating system, partly because it legitimizes some of the most regretable characteristics of human beings -- both innate and parasitic -- but also because it poses a more or less permanent barrier to obtaining the true operating system (which can only come from the being who created the computer). It warps reality, but even worse, it gradually perverts the person who uses it.

Or, a point is reached at which you are no longer operating the system, but it is operating you. It begins by envying others, but envy eventually corrodes the soul of the envious. To say that it makes true happiness impossible is perhaps redundant.

Marx, like Freud, was informed by the best mechanistic science of his day, so that his conclusions and prescriptions are wrong a priori; indeed, they are not operative on our planet or for our species.

Nor, despite Obama's best efforts, can this operating system be adapted to the present, because it is completely at odds with reality -- economically, psychologically, historically, spiritually, politically, epistemologically, morally, ontologically, and comedically -- which is why leftists are such angry and humorless bores. As you know, nothing pisses you off more than when your operating system goes down. And bear in mind that the most sophisticated computer in the world is nothing without a good operating system.