The hardest thing in the world is to see the obvious.
“Let us not forget that culture and language were the first virtual realities. A child is born into a world of unspeakable wonder. Each part of the world is seen to glow with animate mystery and the beckoning light of the unknown. But quickly our parents and our siblings provide us with words. At first these are nouns; that shimmering pattern of sound and iridescence is a ‘bird,’ that cool, silky, undulating surface is ‘water.’ As young children we respond to our cultural programming and quickly replace mysterious things and feelings with culturally validated and familiar words. We tile over reality with a mosaic of interconnected words. Later, as we grow in ability and understanding, the culture in which we find ourselves provides conventionalized relationships for us to model. Lover, father, investor, property owner. Each role has its own rules and its own conventions. These roles, too, tile over and replace the amorphous wonder of simply being alive. As we learn our lines and blocking that goes with them, we move out of the inchoate realm of the preverbal child and into the realm of the first virtual reality, the VR of culture. Many of us never realize that this domain is virtual, and instead we assume that we are discovering the true nature of the real world.”
—Terence McKenna, in The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History
Everyone eventually becomes a philosopher.
One can’t ‘know’ truth— because just as one is part of all, so ‘reason’ is just a part of ‘intuition.’ Therefore, one must be truth.
But— doesn’t this seem too simple? A metaphorical matter of numbers, quantity. Just become ‘one with all’— and you will be the Truth. Can it be so simple?
I just found a tiny bug, a baby cockroach, in my friend’s cabinet, and instinctively squashed it with a napkin.
So, too, can someone or something squash me in an instant.
We nestle away in lees of safety, adorn ourselves in houses of comfort, live a grand illusion, when we exist on the flimsiest of foundations, bound to fate and the seemingly blind, indiscriminate will of the universe.
The law of the fear of death. The closer a creature is to inanimacy, the less it fears death?
There is no mind without matter. Therefore, when the body expires, the spirit leaves in the form of ethereal matter— which we can’t yet detect. Cats and some other animals can see it. We could systematically monitor creatures at the point of death to detect what the spirit is comprised of.
That ‘business’ and ‘friendship’ are separate is a myth. Life is a dialectic of utility, pleasure, and virtue, and there are always trade-offs and repercussions in all realms based on how one conducts oneself— based on one’s intentions and actions.
After all, money is a man-made illusion, a game (‘the Money Game’), a grossly inadequate solution for quelling the power struggles that have beset humankind since inception, that typify all species in certain epochs of their development.
Still the way of the world: Most people say they will do what is right, and then usually do what is most convenient for them in terms of utility and pleasure. Will it ever be otherwise?
Today I had the most insightful conversation I’ve had in the last month, and it was with a four year old (uncle’s son). Children at this age are just old enough to know enough words to express themselves adequately, but not to become brainwashed by what passes for “common sense” and “wisdom.” They see a lot because they don’t know a lot.
He told me that numbers go on forever, but he can’t imagine ‘forever.’ And that his toy soldiers can’t imagine it either, because they’re not alive, which is why their feet have special grooves for being propped up by living people. Something to all of this. (“Only second-rate minds are afraid of the obvious.”) Research laboratories should employ young children to come up with observations and ideas.
