A Course in Hallucinations

Another attempt at a brief and pointed post. Otherwise I won't be able to post until Wednesday, and I want to maintain contact with my nonlocal sources before they become impatient and maybe leak to someone else. I want them to know I am reliable and not some kind of flake who doesn't take the voices in his head seriously.

Voices in the head. Don't pretend you don't hear them. For what is life but an unending commentary on existence? You could say it's a monologue, but in reality there is no such thing, for language itself is irreducibly dyadic and intersubjective, in that its reason for being is communication from party A to party B, even if both parties are in the same being. (The Trinity, for example, involves a kind of perpetual exchange between persons inhering in same substance.)

Therefore, the voice in our head must have a from --> to relation, but from Who to Whom? Moreover, there are diverse modes of speech, from the literal to the allegorical to the poetic, so the voice must be interpreted in terms of both content and mode or genre.

And even literal speech is never actually literal, because a word is a symbol, and a symbol points to something other than itself. If I write "chair," I don't mean the letters that constitute the word, but that thing over there that you can sit on. Now, what if I say something more abstract, like "justice" or "being" or "God"? To what am I pointing? Language is still mediating, but from whom to what?

There's another twist: that one must be adequate to interpret the message. Someone could relate a perfectly sound mathematical equation to me, but I would have no way of knowing whether or not it is true. Rather, I'd have to take it on faith.

Now, what if existence itself is a message? To turn it around, how could it not be a message, for everything we do, all day long, involves, or may be traced back to, the interpretation of the world. For example, at the moment I'm typing on a computer keyboard, which presupposes a computer science rooted in various related disciplines such as information theory and digital transmission.

The so-called "scientific revolution" was revolutionary precisely because we began listening to the world in a specific way and interpreting the message. To everyone's surprise (boo!) it spoke in pure mathematics, to the point that it was eventually forgotten that it doesn't only speak in terms of abstract quantities.

Soon enough there was a counter-revolution (Romanticism) that felt the math nerds were totally ignoring the aesthetic message of the world. Positivists insisted that math is the only message, while our existentialists and deconstructionists maintain that there is no message at all. The latter are essentially saying: there are no voices in my head, and I obey them implicitly! Come to think of it, that's what leftists say as well.

For example, the message of biology is that you are a boy or you are a girl. Period. DNA has spoken! If you go the ER with a serious medical problem, they're going to want to know: man or woman. It will be of no concern to them what you think you are, or what you want to be. If they do care about that, then you are in the wrong ER. Unless it is a psychiatric emergency, which is another matter entirely. As a psychologist, my stock in trade is what people feel is the case as opposed to what is actually the case.

Is the truth true if we don't want it to be? No, truth must by definition be what IS, regardless of how we feel about it. Same with reality: it doesn't disappear just because we're not in contact with it.

Some people on the left -- the Deepaks of the world -- will tell you that "perception is reality." Indeed, Deepakrat presidential candidate Marriane Willamson is a student and teacher of the Course in Miracles, which started off as a voice in the head of a psychologist named Helen Schucman, which she presumed to be Jesus. Strangely, despite the voice insisting that illness is an illusion, she died anyway of pancreatic cancer. Now, who are you going to believe, the voice in this lady's head or your own lying eyes?

Yeah, you could say that death is a Course in Reality. It has its downside, but think of how little we could understand of reality in its absence. Why would we need to learn anything about the world if we were immortal?

For example, the word from reality is that we shouldn't jump off buildings or walk in front of buses. But if doing so didn't result in injury and death, we'd have no reason to learn about gravity, or the physics of collisions.

Besides, if everything is love, then nothing is. And if perception is reality, that's another way of saying that there is no such thing as reality and therefore nothing to perceive. Nevertheless, you have to pay for such wisdom with real money. Try paying for it with LUV and see how far it gets you.

Which leads to the question: who is really saying this, and why is anyone listening? Examples:

"It [the Course] states that everything involving time, space, and perception is illusory."

"Healing is accomplished when the sufferer no longer sees any value in pain."

"A mind and body cannot both exist."

To this latter I would say that man is by definition both material and spiritual at the same time, which is kind of the Whole Point, certainly of the Incarnation. If this weren't the case then God would just incognate as a voice in our head.

A voice in my head once remarked that the two essential principles of Christianity are Incarnation and Trinity, and that everything else is, as it were, an entailment of, or commentary on, these. I believe it.