The title of the post is from a lecture once given by Robert Anton Wilson, which I first heard on the radio in the middle of the night some 38 years ago while working the graveyard shift in a supermarket. I don't recall anything about it except for the title, but credit where it's due.
Back then I was a big fan, but we all have to start our spiritual journey somewhere. Wilson was an
author, futurist, psychologist, and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews.
In 1999 he described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth." Wilson's goal was "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."
In addition to writing several science-fiction novels, Wilson also wrote non-fiction books on extrasensory perception, mental telepathy, metaphysics, paranormal experiences, conspiracy theory, sex, drugs and what Wilson called "quantum psychology."
Interestingly,
Wilson also joined the Church of the SubGenius, who referred to him as Pope Bob. He contributed to their literature, including the book Three-Fisted Tales of "Bob", and shared a stage with their founder, Rev. Ivan Stang...
Thus, some influences remain, what with the faith in Slack and the skepticism toward manmade maps and models. Also, my doctoral dissertation was on a kind of "quantum psychology," and his apophatic mysticism is right up our alley.
More generally, one of my few goals in life was to adopt the playful attitude of people like Wilson, Alan Watts, and Terence McKenna, only in a serious way: to be seriously humorous or humorously serious. You can see it in that quote right above the comment box: A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes, or the one toward the bottom of the sidebar, The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
If you asked me to write something completely serious, I'd have to say no. I made a promise, and I must remain true to the call.
Now, the title notwithstanding, this post originally had nothing to do with Wilson's talk. But let me skim the essay and see if anything else comes up.
This is actually an important point:
the human mind behaves as if divided into two parts, the Thinker and the Prover. The Thinker can think virtually anything; it can think it is mortal (materialist view) or immortal (theological view) or both mortal and immortal (reincarnation model.) It can think its way into creation of a Christian universe, a Marxist universe, a Nazi universe, a nudist universe, a vegetarian Lesbian universe, etc. ad infinitum.
The Prover is a much simpler mechanism and operates on the simple rule: What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves. If the Thinker decides to become an anti-semite, the Prover will prove that Jews are evil; if the Thinker becomes a Marxist, the Prover will prove that Capitalists are evil; if the Thinker becomes a Woman's Liberationist, the Prover will prove that men are evil, etc. Conversely, if the Thinker thinks all people are basically decent really, the Prover will prove that, and if the Thinker decides that holy water from Lourdes will cure its lumbago, the Prover will often prove even that, to the astonishment of medical doctors.
You could say that every belief system is a kind of conspiracy theory, and if that's all there is to it, the conclusion is ineluctable:
the Irish Catholic, the Iranian Moslem Fundamentalist, the Chinese Maoist, the Samoan tiki-worshipper, the Cambridge University agnostic etc. are all living in distinctly different universes, each of which has been manufactured out of thoughts and opinions.
In other words, absolute relativism, skepticism, subjectivism, etc.
The sum total of imprinting, conditioning and learning... make up the software, or filter, through which we “see” existence.... This grid, which edits the experience to conform to the Thinker’s expectations, can be called our reality-tunnel.
The question is, is it possible to not be in a reality tunnel? Is there a reality outside the tunnel(s), and can we know it?
I suppose this is precisely where and how we can tell our friends from the apes (in my opinion, not Wilson's). For according to Garrigou-Lagrange, the immutability of human nature clearly opposes relativism and provides a stable "meta-ground" that is the basis for escaping this or that reality tunnel, so to speak.
But we're out of time, so, to be continued...
3 comments:
Is human nature immutable? I say yes, or at least deep down, but I expect that's what my Prover is giving me. Are we really the same? My dumb dog is only vaguely like his wolf cousins. I am the dumb domesticated version of men only a few centuries back.
We'll have to define the term more precisely in tomorrow's post, i.e., exactly what is meant by "human nature," and why it can never be explained by any purely immanent philosophy, since our nature is to transcend nature.
and if the Thinker decides that holy water from Lourdes will cure its lumbago, the Prover will often prove even that, to the astonishment of medical doctors.
The downside of that idea is that it leaves little room either for genuine miracles or for solutions which go against established norms (for instance, alternative remedies which succeed where prescribed solutions have failed miserably). The only way to prove a solution isn't just in your head is to try it on someone who can't possibly expect a resolution (say, a child or a pet), and then observe what objectively happens. In the case of miracles, however, it's often not a simple task to prove that anything happened at all.
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