The Philosophical Perspective of a Gnostic

My approach to reconciling the physical intellect with a Truth that it was designed to avoid seeing. 

Part I: Philosophers and Lemmings in Human Shells

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is initially an anthropomorphic venture but the very  nature of its form indicates that it has possible ramifications beyond the bounds of its own initial form.  It starts as the consideration that appearances are distinct from what presents them.  Its aim is to continue observing appearances so as to decode their actual relationship to that which is thought to appear.

The maxim of metaphysics at this stage is:  Mistake not the signum for the signatum. Therefore the first step in metaphysics is to accept as initial parameters the human conditions in which this discipline is conducted with an eye toward discovering something as yet unknown.

So metaphysics seeks to clarify the relationship between appearances and substances but first must gather much information concerning these and collate them into various paradigms until it finds the most stable and most comprehensive paradigm by which it can determine that no further clarification is possible concerning this relationship.

It sets up general categories of experience which seem to account for their classification by every possible taxonomy, hoping to shake loose some further experience or intuition which will radically assist the effort.  It begins by empirical exploration of experience and conjectural deployment of reflective thought.  All of this must rest on the basis of some fundamental and relatively absolute intuition, however, or else it is not possible to begin this project nor finish it.

The clarification of this fundamental intuition, the metaphysical intuition, is therefore also a part of metaphysics itself.  Metaphysics takes itself to be a radical element in and object of its own study.

We already observe that the relationship between appearances and substances are not clear, or else such a question as their proper relationship would never have arisen.

The first axiom we may draw from our experience is that appearances and substances are essentially different phenomena.   We notice this comes with the implication of some minimal degree of obscuration of substances by appearances.

In order for this to have been noticed there had to have been enough consistency in their relationship, however obscuring the nature of it.  We know intuitively that the cognition of a pattern requires that a pattern have existence.  Initially we can explore the possibility that the pattern in the mind corresponds to a pattern in the phenomena of observation.  We are not bound to assume otherwise, and to do so would end our investigation at its beginning, which runs against the impetus of our intuition.

Therefore we recognize more explicitly the meaning of our terms "appearance" and "substance".  Appearance is what we experience directly, substance is what we intuit to be expressed to us by means of the appearances, and is experienced indirectly vis-a-vis appearances and in terms of them, but not necessarily as we think them to be nor necessarily otherwise.

Metaphysics is an essential expression of the consciousness in some humans.  It is manifest in a desire

to know, which is itself a sense of missing something one ought to have.  It is a longing for completion of something which is incomplete.  A person wants to know the why of things, the causes and the purposes of events.  They want to understand life, the world, the self, and all aspects of these phenomena.  They don't want "answers", they want Truth.  They innately sense that there is some proper explanation and explication of everything. 

These persons will find that in this world there is a persistent obfuscation of this Truth they seek, and those who persist on this track in spite of that resistance are called Philosophers, for they truly Love the Truth, have an inner need for it, accept no substitutes, and never give up seeking it no matter what the threat or resistance.  It is a passionate need and has all the qualifications of True Love.

They also have an aesthetic appreciation of Truth, and despise as ugly any falsehood or fallacy, especially if they are of a deceptive intent.   Lies are perhaps the most hated of crimes for these persons.  They seem to have an incapacity to lie.

So there is a constellation of aspects to consider when seeking to understand even what

metaphysics is in a basic and fundamental way.   Context is very important when analyzing any factor involved in anything, but especially in the case of metaphysics in this human condition because the very reason metaphysics exists at all is particularly tied up with the specialized conditions of human beings who happen to have an intuition which inspires metaphysical thought, and these are also inseparable.

The Metaphysical Condition of Humans

The experiences of humans give them two domains which intersect to form what is "meaningful" for them.  The outer, "adventitious" realm of sensory experience, and the inner and "intentional" realm of mental experience. While intimately related there is a common understanding in humans that the sensory realm is an impingement upon the inner realm of the person's mind "from without".   The sense of there being an "outside" is partly a notion of stable parameters of the sense of what is "inside", which is to say, what is experienced as a private world of the person's own body vs. a public world of bodies which interact with that private body.  The experiences of other bodies seem always to be through the private body, and so it is a unique body as far as "bodies" go.  The experiences of those other bodies seems also to have an existential uniqueness which belongs, in time and space and in some ineffable way in content, only to this person.  While other persons may exist, and while their bodies may provide for them similar, or in point of form identical experiences, they never provide the actual experiences endured by the subject of this body.

So there is already a solipsistic aspect to the consciousness which pertains uniquely to each body.  Other bodies may also have a private world of experience of bodies held in common, but these are not directly experienced by the consciousnesses which know their own experiences through their own bodies, so it is noticed that such privation of experiences held in common seems to be mutual.  At least for a certainty a consciousness will know for itself whether or not it has intimate experience through other bodies or only of  such bodies.  It cannot directly know whether other consciousnesses have such a restriction, or even whether or not other bodies genuinely have a consciousness of experience, at least not in the standard case here considered.

The limit point of this disjunction is the consciousness having experience of its own body through its own body.  It experiences its own body as an object and subject simultaneously.  It may see its hands, and see them as part of a series of objects.  Perhaps it is numb to feeling them, or feeling through them, and so it sees them there on the keyboard typing.  It has to trust that they are hitting the keys it intends with the only feedback being the letters on the screen.

It might even be unsure whether or not there is simply a fortuitous conjunction between the behavior of the hands as they type, the intention to type certain words, and the event of seeing those words appear on the screen.  Perhaps they are all three simply coincidences!  We here make a little leeway for such thoughts merely to get a lay of the landscape, for later much more strict understanding will prevent such suppositions as "fortuitous" and "coincidence".

But as the hands are felt, they are felt through feeling the keys themselves, which are not the hands, but are felt through the hands.   So the hands are felt through feeling other things.  If it is temperature, then they are felt by way of the temperature of the air or water which surrounds them, which they feel.  If the surrounds are colder, then the hands feel "cold", which is a feeling of the greater heat of the hands leaving them.  The colder hands are felt receiving the greater heat of the environment, which is felt to be "hot".   Pressure is the feeling of a certain kind when pressure is applied to the hand from an object, perhaps which it is being used to press.  But these feelings of the other objects are really only feelings of the body itself, and so in a real sense are just the body as it feels in itself, albeit as understood to be interacting with "other bodies".

Indeed, the body itself may be taken to be a condition of the mind in its own experiences, which are all just as intimately connected to that mind as the experience of other bodies are to the body through which they are experienced.  There results a cascade of dependence of experience which flows ever back into the mind, which has a supremacy of relevance in this whole spectrum of experiences.  Starting from the unwieldy world of "other minds" and coming all the way to the issue of the mind being seemingly solipsistically  immured into itself, the very language of objectivity, as well as of any alternate subjectivity, seems to be entirely derivative of a primary language of subjectivity of experience.

As Descartes and others have rightly noted, it is the "adventitiousness" which seems to point up the validity of this ensuing discourse from subject to object.  It is a power of meaning which seems delegated outward to a true recipient, albeit still a mere suzerain vis-a-vis the subjective hegemon which issued it.  The subjective consciousness  is its own guarantor of the sense of intention and therefore knows when it has not intended an experience.

Therefore it is sensed that there is at the very least a polarity within the mental experiences of a person which include an adventitious, seemingly "given" and "outer" end, or perimeter, and an inner, central and optative  polarity which seems central to the identity of consciousness.  This is simply one aspect of a cursory examination of the initial and human conditions of consciousness and not a declaration of its ideal, true, or ultimate states, as human, or as consciousness per se, or as both together.  We are still just rummaging around in the sensorium of experience to get our bearings.

That is the human condition of consciousness, and it is in this condition in which all its metaphysical longing will be initially mired as well.  Many perennial issues of philosophy have already sprung up immediately in this cursory examination, and a look at the work of many philosophers will find that such considerations as these recapitulate time and again in their initial forays into what become sometimes long and involved attempts at systemic encapsulation of what it all turns out to "really mean".  I will attempt to do the same, but with some perhaps novel features to my plan which won't be found in the literature.

Continuing this survey, there is a sense that this condition of man in which he first expresses consciousness has the effect of skewing his initial understanding of things in certain ways, and if we are to follow the track of centering the identity of experiences upon the epicenter of subjective experience of a given mind, then the onus of the cause of this condition is the structure and function of man's mind, and not of any extraneous environment, however provisionally allowed.  The very distinction which causes our sense that the central aspect of consciousness is intentional indicates that there is upon it an onus of responsibility for the matrix of experiences which it endures, and the adventitious perimeter of experience can only have circumstantial bearing, by definition.

This seems to sit well with most specimens of men, and they get along without a lot of conflict when interacting with their worlds of experience, at least so as not to have any deep intutions about it which must be reconciled with facts as they stand, or with understandings as they have been accustomed to entertaining.  It is just a few beings who seem to have the spark of metaphysical intuition which spurs them to seek a systematic understanding of the given.  The apparent structure of consciousness and its experiential content seem in some need of explanation and this need presents itself on the one hand adventitiously, as if the phenomena themselves called out for it.  On the other hand this need is experienced as a spontaneous aspect of one's own central longing for something which is missing in one's very self-identity.

The "Philosophic Human"

Apart from the tendency toward a certain sort of cleverness in humans which is the inspiration for their name homo sapiens, there is a unique class of humans who seem to love knowledge not only for its practical value, nor only for its own sake, but seem to have a need to know the nature of reality.  This need is felt to be as strong as a need to survive, and therefore is quite apart from any need for knowing in order to survive.  It seems not merely an aesthetic compulsion either,  but seems rather a primary function of these persons, as if essential to their existence in the same what that breathing is essential to the life of the body.  Indeed, they are found to desire knowing the Truth even when the form of doing so is very unpleasant, when elements of this Truth, or the process of its discovery at least, turn out to be quite ghastly or horridly ugly.  Sometimes they have been found to persist with this inclination toward Truth to such an extent as to ignore perils to their physical comfort and even survival, to say nothing of other people's opinions of their endeavors.  Think every great mind ever to walk the face of the earth who had to wade through a teeming throng of ignorant fools in order to reach his goal.

These "humans" seem so different from other humans that they raise very deep questions about what a human being is, or indeed what "beings" are.  Of course this discourse runs disjoint to the prior survey of the metaphysical aspects of humans in that it clearly speaks of a class of objects called "humans" and then proceeds from there.  That is the normative, public approach to discourse which runs rampant in the world and asserts hegemony over the subjective polarity of experience which ever revolts against that pressure and treats it as inherently non-binding.  In this discussion I will need to weave back and forth between these two modes of expression, but must here clarify their distinction and emphasize that I alternate between them consciously and with good reason.

Whatever the "objective norms" asserted by the outer world of society and its structures, the philosophic perspective of consciousness, and the consciousness which operates in a philosophic perspective, will not be bound to accept them.  While I understand that people speak "as if" they had consciousness, I am not bound to assume that they do, because the fundamental parameters of my experience dictate my actual grounds of understanding, and this does not grant me any direct experience of the veridicality of others' claims to having experiences.  I am not forced to understand anything by others' claims to understand anything.  I am not forced to understand anything by way of my own experience either, but if I actually want to understand anything with any real and substantive understanding I must ground my thought in the matrix of my subjective experience, and never in accordance with others' claims concerning their supposed experiences.

This position is the essence of consciousness as I experience it, and that is the ultimate ground of any activity of a consciousness (as I understand it… and that… etc.).  I owe no explanation of this to "anyone else", and I am not beholden to "anyone else's" claims concerning their supposed experiences.  This is the foundation of my philosophic perspective.  It is not solipsism, but it is something with which solipsism has an overlap but to which it does no justice as a philosophic position.

It is also not "merely a reflective exercise" either.  I have stated clearly that I am operating in strict conditions of understanding of what conscious experience is, and of what those conditions are by way of my experience as a human being, and now I simply proceed into the specialized realm of the philosophic human being, which is in fact an altogether different kind of being than a "human" being.

So not only does my position run against the grain of the public discourse in its form, but even in its content, because I stress that there is a substantive difference between human beings simpliciter and philosophic beings having a human experience.   Philosophic beings are not a strict subset of human beings, because they are not essentially connected to being human in the first place.   Further, there is nothing about humanity which is essentially philosophic.  Human beings are an idea of physicality, and this is special subset of conscious experience, and some consciousnesses are philosophic, some are not.  I have my own consciousness as the proper starting point of this discourse, therefore, and not the public one, or the "undifferentiated other-centered" consciousness, of which I do not partake.

By the same token I have not expressed any antipathy to the idea of "other consciousnesses" per se.

I am a philosophic being having a human experience, and this is the actual foundation of my discussion of metaphysics.    This being true does not mean that there is something fundamentally human about the experience of a philosophic being, or of philosophy itself.   While there is a philosophy of anthropology, and there is also an anthropological deployment of "philosophic behavior", philosophy itself is strictly what a philosophic being does in his own consciousness.  Clearly I am not a materialist and certainly not a humanist.

The Philosophic Being

A being is that which sustains conscious experience.  If a being sustains its own conscious experience then it is a conscious being.  If there were only one originative being, then it would be conscious already, since there could not be such being without a consciousness to sustain, and there would be only one being within which to sustain it.  But if there were consciousness apart from being, then consciousness would be epiphenomenal to being, and so being would be a vacuous concept within consciousness and without meaning.  Therefore from the point of view of consciousness (the only point of view, as such ) being is consciousness.  Being means being conscious.  Consciousness has being and is being.  Consciousness sustains its own experiences by its very nature.

Consciousness has no other meaning than that which sustains experience.  Being has no other meaning than the persistent power of consciousness to sustain experience.  Indeed, persistent power has no other meaning than the being of consciousness, or conscious being, or being conscious.  In each consciousness there is a fundamental sense that this is true.

Consciousness has created further consciousness, has expanded its own being, has been expansive.  It has done this as an expression of its own power and not in any way is this strange.  Consciousness exists as such and experiences the glory of its own existence without any boundaries or obstructions.  The truth of this is also within every consciousness.   The greatness of this is the greatness of being itself, which is the greatness of consciousness itself.  These ideas are not new, but in fact are the oldest and most archaic ideas (within time), but are really timeless, and as to importance are the only ideas.

This is the meaning of "power and glory".   Consciousness is glory, and glory is its enduring experience.  This is what was meant by "bliss".  This is a truth contained in all consciousness.  Such is being, and being is just this.  It was never and could never be anything else.  The only dynamic which it possesses is the existential fullness of its own experience.  Experience, fundamentally, is just this experience.  Its enduringness is not a temporal matter at all, nor is its content or form having anything to do with "space".  Time and space, at best, are delimited productions of this Fundamental Being.  All consciousness participates in this and experiences this as the Truth.

There is not a "better than this", but there is a "more than this".   This is the expression of its fullness, that Fundamental Conscious Being can expand, elaborate, and proliferate itself into more beings.   It can pluralize within itself and as itself.  It can grow beyond its own measure.  What this means is that our efforts to understand it in contexts of wretched finitude do its magnitude no justice.  It means this just as it means the same about "infinity" and "glory".  The quantity which infinity indicates is the only true quantity, but the imposition of finitude so as to generate a smallness called "number" is to be an infinitesimal chip off of an infinite block.  The magnitude of what?  Of a quality of experience which in its conscious fullness is the fundamental fact and value of reality, fused as one.  This quality is Glory in its full measure.

When physically limited minds assign some notion of value to their wretched lots it is the most that they can comprehend.  It is all they can endure if they experience some worldly encounter with fortune, defined as some alleviation of the misery of the poverty which is physical existence.  The chains and manacles of their fleshly form is somehow made less bruising, perhaps even given a glimmer or ornament.  They count this a blessing.   Perhaps a garnish is thrown on top of their fetid gruel, and they think that it is a king's feast.

These reified negations of what is real stand as oddities in the view of a mind of full stature, but in a mind boggled down in the drudgery of taking bodily form as its own normal mode of experience, finite forms of qualia are deemed the true forms of things.  Normality becomes the result of a spell of confusion cast upon a mind, a disordering of its processes due to the separation of it from its true context.

The consciousness which is Truly of this original nature is innately privy to this knowledge and cannot be deceived.  The very essence of "knowing" is derivative of an immediate experience of the Truth of Being which a True Consciousness innately experiences.  It is of its very essence, and "doubt" is not a sensible ability or possibility in this context.  So in fact the "infinite" is something which is originally real, and the "finite" is a "not infinite" or a privation of infinitude.   In another way, physical beings are crude misarticulations of reality in its full abundance.  Physicality is a privation of what is real just as shadow is a privation of light.  It is no wonder the physical world is, to the philosophic core of a True Consciousness, something like a shadow.

The Worldly Condition

Unfortunately the context in which a Philosophic Being is placed is key to the discussion of matters, and this context is called "the world" and this is a foul and wretched place in comparison with that to which Philosophic Beings are used to experiencing.  One must understand that not only is this Being the primary source of data concerning the nature of Real Consciousness, but that it persists to be so even though other paradigms exist, and also exist in terms of forms of data which are not proper to the experience of Real Consciousness.  Therefore our initial study of the Philosophic Being is in the context of a world which made its nature seem exceptional rather than the rule.

We find the world to be a place which situates Consciousness into a role as something ephemeral in the midst of what is solid and "substantive".  When speaking of consciousness people speak about something intangible, easily forgetting that the very notion of "tangibility" refers to an experience for consciousness, the de facto arbiter for any claims of what "matters" by way of experience.  This is outright odd to any True Consciousness, and yet it seems to be the lingo of the land when it comes to our ten-fingered and ten-toed throng.

Intelligent minds such as Locke, Descartes, Berkeley, among others knew better than to pretend not to see a sharp difference between notions of "matter" and "mind".  I will clarify the fundamental fact which was clearest in the mind of Berkeley and at least semi-apparent in the other two.  

Mind is the fundamental substance, and any discussion about "substance number two" will have be transacted in the currency of ideas which already pertain to the mind in its own nature.  This is the fact which the worldly people with their pseudo-duality conveniently forget rather perpetually.  There is no discussion about the mind, the body, or anything else, except in a mind.  Whatever is meant by something "alien to" a mind has to be something the mind understands by those terms.  So if "matter" is something fundamentally unlike mind, the mind can know nothing of it.

What there can be other than one mind is another (an other) mind.  The mind seems to have no trouble at all comprehending such a thing, the worldly dialogue of bodies seems to at least attempt some semblance of harmony with such a notion.  Solipsism is not a serious problem in that the only cause of what is not a minds own doing should be properly ascribed to the power of another mind.  What materialists focus upon are the interstices of these interactions and pronounce them to be the primary agents of reality, which is so obviously inane as to beg belief. 

They would propound such non-sense to you, the listener, but not to your body...  They take the body, in other words, as a vehicle by which to communicate to a mind, and they pretend to the listener that he may trust that on the transmitting end of the speaking body's gesticulations and vocalizations is a mind which originated the message being relayed.  Yet, this message is one which undercuts the very idea of its being communicated.

This is important because in order to understand the position of Philosophic Beings in this part of the cosmos, a part I will explain is very defective and evil, we must understand that there are no less nor more than exactly two languages being spoken at all times, and that the intentions of their speakers are diametrically opposed, although neither the relationship of their interaction nor the contents of their beings are symmetric.

The experiences of the mind encounter a chronic clash with the world, which has put in the limelight the mechanism of interaction between putative minds, and has put in the background as a mere epiphenomenon the mind itself.  Of course this is what it claims to be doing in its practices and communiques, but the fact is that it can never be taken seriously by any given mind, because the ideas involved prevent a mind from taking them seriously.  So in fact for the rest of this discussion a major feature will be the strange world of disjoint and opposing dialogues which continuously talk past one another and yet are somehow forced to coexist within the same system, the same world.

One World, Two Minds

The ancient Wizard Zoroaster laid it plain that a cosmopolitan paradigm in the world of values cannot be permitted to exist, because if it is permitted to exist then only one of two competing values will dominate, and the other will be gradually destroyed after a long period of torturous debasement.  The value which gains from this forced integration into one system of transaction is so different from the value which would escape such a system by all means possible that no other set of differences in the world deserve to be presented as a metaphysical distinction before it.  This is the distinction between evil and good.  I say evil first because in this world, evil has the first and primary say in all matters, and rules the public dialogue.  The question of the "problem of evil" is really an amusing one, for it pretends to have distinguished the idea of evil from the good in the first place, but whenever one examines the logic involved in such arguments and their premises one finds the author didn't even know the difference.

Evil and good operate in relative modes when considered in the light of parochial valuations of objects of experience as experienced by different minds.  But in order to begin to straighten out the difference between two things we cannot start with the assumption that they have merely a scalar relationship since that is nothing but a contrast of intensities of the same vectoral polarity.  If I think in relative terms as my basis I really don't know what I am distinguishing.

Evil and good must have not merely some relative reference point by which to be distinguished, say Person A says X is good, and Person B says it is evil.  That doesn't clarify anything about the meaning of "good" and "evil".  It can't be that way because it means nothing about their absolute difference, if any.  Indeed, valuations of things will never be the proper starting point for understanding absolute distinctions in values, because the valuations describe something merely in terms of a common plane of experience which presents itself as a fact rather than a value.  The world of conditions in which beings may disagree about values indicates that values don't have a common denominator regulating their manifestation to those which make claims about them.  It reduces the idea of values to a bickering about facts which are only incidentally contrary.

For example, if I say that something is fundamentally wrong, like theft, I am claiming this to be true but the thief will claim that it is not.  The same fact, taking of my possession by a non-owner of it, is evaluated in to very different ways.  When we look at the event in its "physicality", there were no laws of physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, logic or of any other kind which were broken.  There were laws made by society, but these didn't carry any force, for the action occurred anyway.  Those aren't the sort of laws which carry power because their enforcement depends upon people agreeing to them.  But my possessed object seemed to "agree" with being taken by the thief even though it supposedly "belonged" to me.  I and the thief disagree about who owns that object, don't we?

It's not that events and their inherent value which are the question, but rather it is the existence of two different types of minds which are involved.  One type of mind wants proximity to the other in order to exploit it in some way, and the other type wants to avoid the other in order to avoid exploitation.  The fact is that this world, in its physicality, forces these two types of minds to coexist, even though they are so contrary to each other that no greater contrariety in the world can be found.  So this puts the realm of "physical fact" at odds with the realm of "mental value" but not in a symmetrical fashion with respect to those values.  In fact, it is at odds with the value which is maintained only in separation from the other:  It disfavors ownership, and favors thievery, because it put a mediate state between them which doesn't discriminate between their polarities, namely possession, but this only favors the thief since his whole are is gaining possession of what an owner created.

And physicists say there is no free lunch!  The physical world, with respect to the mental world of values, exists in order to grant a free lunch, to one sort of axiological being at the expense of the other.  This is the aspect of the world that Zoroaster detested and which made him call it 'evil'.  Evil works by getting a value for nothing but its willingness to seize it from beings who have created it from within themselves.  It is the negation of the value for beings who have it in favor of beings who do not have it nor could have created it.

He saw that some of the religions existed to promote destructive and exploitative aspects of the human condition and that this could only be destructive to the religions which upheld values made vulnerable when coexisting with the former types.  Therefore he drew a red line between these types of value promoting institutions and claimed that one actually existed only at the expense of the other, and that those who promoted either really belonged in the former if they also promoted their coexistence, and that those who did not promote their coexistence were the only true members of the latter type of religion.  In other words, he awakened the axiological type "B" beings into realizing that they have been subtly enslaved by the type "A" religions and that they must purify themselves through a separation process, and separate themselves by a purification process, on all levels of their existence as a society.  This of course led to war.  But Zoroaster's people won that war against astounding odds, and that is the event which marked the modern era of spiritual warfare of the Good against evil.  The former are led by the Good Mind, which comes from a Higher Consciousness called Ohura Mazda, and the latter comes from an Evil Mind which is named Ahriman.

One Language, Two Meanings

The irony is that while certain people just love to speak of everything being one, and the world being one, and everyone being the same, these same people don't want to live in a maximum security prison with rapists and murderers.  Yet their language suggests that they believe that such a thing, somehow, would be okay.  When you actually present them with the consequences of such nonsense, they don't actually back down from their position, but they do find themselves less enthusiastic about discussing it with you!  I mean, when you tell them that a rapists idea of "being one" with them would be to violently insert his penis into their various orifices against their will, in fact preferably against their will, they seem to irritated not so much at the prospect of such a thing as with its incoherence with their worldview.  "How dare he show me that the world makes a mockery of my worldview" they seem to be saying.

Then when you show them that their own actions suffer from the same incoherence with their worldview, they really get upset.  They don't thank you for helping them to see how they can better live up to their ideology, but they blame you for showing them how their ideology is complete bullshit.  At the same time, if you point out how the world at large is systematically oriented so as to enable the maximal advantage to a select group of people who live completely at the expense of everyone else, and that all the problems of their lives can be traced to their lower position on the totem pole with respect to these ubercriminals, they will call you a conspiracy theorist...  It seems that these people possess a special sort of "mind" which cannot integrate the meaning of ideas with the facts which exist in their experience.  It seems that when they speak of something, especially if it has anything to do with "how things are" or "how things should be", they are not bound by the same rules of logic or the same semantic structure as are a certain other group of minds.

What they mean when they speak of "one world" is some fantasy whereby victims are discounted from the membership except as a fuel source for its existence.  What they mean, in effect, is a world for the sake of predators at the expense of prey.  After all, this is what their wonderful world with all of its precious ecosystems is all about:  predators feeding on prey.  If this is world they so love, isn't this because in their hearts they wish to identify with the predator and not the prey?  Granted these people are typically bottom of the barrel of weakness and incompetence, hardly qualities expected of predatorial greatness. Still, they seem to be at least indoctrinated in the mindset which most suits the predator, for he no doubt views the world as "one", a world where only his experience of being on top qualifies as descriptive of the world's rightness and unity.  His symbol for unity would be something like his beak or talons firmly inserted into the flesh of his prey.  Surely the prey could not understand any other meaning to such a notion, but certainly has a very different evaluation of its desirability.

The difference in evaluation is obvious, but the difference in understanding is a bit odd.  Just how do we understand this doctrine of the rightness of the world as a whole in the minds of these who seem to speak of its one-ness in mystical tones?  There must be at least a subtext which clarifies for the unfortunates in this world why they are insolently reminded of the sanctity of a world which binds them together with there perpetual misfortune.

Predator, Prey, and Lemming

In the natural world prey seem not to be bothered by notions of being or becoming one with their hunters.  They waste no time talking themselves into living in a harmonious relationship with that which would kill and eat them.  They are possessed of sensibility.  In the human world there seems to be a real break with natural reality.

Humans possess the ability to speak about their own defilement, abuse, enslavement and destruction as if they were in love with these ideas.  They tend not to like the concrete results when they actually take effect, but often they are not burdened by a mind keen on relating such effects to their causes in the first place.  They are possessed of a mind which is not like a predator, but not entirely like a prey either.  We will call them something else, a lemming.

A lemming, for the purposes of this discussion, is the human prototype (apparently). It exists in thriving abundance throughout the world, in every nation, every clime, every society. A lemming is a docile, labile, plastic, highly programmable sort of mind which can inhabit any sort of body perhaps, but for now we restrict ourselves to its human manifestation.

Lemmings go through their lives doing whatever they are told.  Of course within that framework they have a great deal of leeway about many trivial things, but basically they will obey those who program them.  They needn't know who programmed them, nor for what purpose.  In fact, they don't know that they are programmed at all.  They are for all intents and purposes organic robots.  Values exist for them only in a scalar mode if these extend beyond the parameters of the concrete effects upon their bodies as programmed.  They may oppose other lemmings, but this is easier than opposing their own programming by far, so there is really no net resistance to the systems of the world in which they are harnessed.

Lemmings are rather massive in number, albeit mediocre in quality.  They are adept at enabling just enough of their kind to aspire to a certain higher altitude of qualities as dictated by their programming, but no more.  So, if it is permitted, they will allow a man to think up some advanced technology to keep them more comfortable.  But if they are not programmed to do so then they will not, even if by doing so they would permit themselves to be entirely free of any need to work for others, or be told what to do by others, and could live life precisely the way they wanted to.  So for example they are fine with alternating current, but they don't want to quibble about the inherently unhealthy frequency specifically chosen for such currents of electricity as it streams through their houses and appliances, or beams at them through their lighting or computer screens.  They may like electrical technology in principle, but lets not bother them about improving 1000 or more times beyond its present modes of harnessing and distribution.  And if the same man, Nikola Tesla, were to be on the one hand responsible for what they are programmed to accept and also responsible for what they are programmed not to accept (the default unless programmed othewise), then they will be happy to take what is allowed and refuse the rest, forgetting to reward the man, or if necessary happy to punish him.  This is if they are ever bothered to acknowledge him in the first place, or even to be aware of his existence.

Lemmings can be programmed in many ways.  They can be quite vicious when it is desired by their masters, and they will even be programmable as to targets with or without reasons, valid or invalid.  They prefer to operate in groups against weaker specimens in smaller numbers, if they are bothered to do the dirty work of destroying others at all.  If the proper programming is put into them, and they are supplied with the right equipment, then they may be happy raging against any odds.  It may be required that some electromagnetic stimulation to the posterior amygdala be provided in a context rich in delusions of righteousness plus perhaps some euphoric ideas of invulnerability (in other words, no real courage needed or possible), but the right specimens in the large pool of lemmings do exist.

Lemmings are just that, and as to essence the word "lemming" and "human" are interchangeable.