Propaganda of Interest (Episode I)

While I was roaming through the evil foliage of this place, I happened upon a particularly beautiful plant.  It was lush with leaves and shoots, which formed and grew at a rate more akin to the articulation of an animal's limbs in real time as it went about its vacuum behaviors.  Clearly alive and perhaps even intelligent, I was struck with awe at its superficially attractive features.  It's almost as if it was intentionally derived from some well-attested heritage of plant life, so as to derive the maximum amount of meretricious beauty from all of them, whilst maintaining the fullest array of predatory features more appropriate to some sort of stalking reptile than to a plant.  I feared to observe it for too long, just on the suspicion that it might be a ruse to allow some fifth cannibal to sneak up on my position, but then I realized that they were circling at a distance sufficient to allow them observe my responses to this entity which is clearly as special for them as it is unusual for me. So I felt it would be a mistake to give it only a superficial examination, though from such I could gather enough to determine that it was the most perfect specimen of its kind that I had ever seen.  I decided I knew enough to classify it as a member of the order of falsity. It had a beautiful appearance, and seemed to be fragrant and alluring as if it were essential to its essential mode of survival.  fallax pulchritudo meretricius.  Also known as the sleek and attractive "grey propaganda".  I like that name because it reflects how there is an entity of deceptive beauty, operating with a sort of shameless opulence wherever conveniently possible.  But it is this subspecies which is here of interest.  It has the name qui de reus.  That means, basically, the culprit, the accused, the answerable.  qui de re  would be the more "sanitized" description, the euphemism used by those who are involved in such surveillance state activities.  It is a good translation of "Person of Interest", the once-popular TV series that raged on for five full seasons, glorifying the vicissitudes of the surveillance state panopticon gulag in which people are currently culpable residents of different sorts.


I had already become quite adept at hunting such entities in the wild for a while now, looking more for a now increasingly rare type of strain which was more of a hybrid of this general type and that form of art of substance which seeks to portray truth in its purer form. But these days I've had to focus on the more virulent strains that are multiplying with alarming zest, and evolving at a robust rate. This is a partial result of being no longer able to conduct philosophy in the conventional sense of the term. I had to become an ad hoc cultural anthropologist, on the run from the cannibals I'm studying. It's hard to take notes or preserve them whilst running through the jungle being harassed by fifth forces.  It can be quite hard to even concentrate until one realizes that there is really nothing else to do.  One now lives on an alien world, where the meaning of conducting such studies is a matter of survival and preference in facing the inevitable.  As an artist of my craft, I certainly would have preferred better circumstances in which to operate, as it would have enabled me to not only produce a greater work in form, but perhaps even in content and application, for my own lights whether or not those of others.  But this world is not that one.  In this world, culture is really just a drapery covering over an extensive network of oppressive, evil people, who hold positions of power within a hegemony which is pretended to operate in the "best interests" of the people, who are supposedly considered as interchangeably meritorious citizens who, at some basic minimum, deserve equal protection from such perfidy.  How convenient for those who conduct such perfidy under the guise of protecting people from it.  It doesn't take a Jonathan Nolan to conceive such an idea, attention to well-attested facts would write the story through someone or other eventually, but it certainly is his speciality in treating it so that it becomes the plot of a series of excellently crafted propaganda pieces for the fifth column hegemons!

Looking at the specimen with a focus on its phylogentic attributes, it possesses a remarkably sleek yet also functionally elaborate array of capabilities.  Clearly a more advanced predator than its less subtle close cousin, "24", it seems to have moved on to the more complicated and dangerous environment of the surveillance state as its primary territory.  In this environment, deception is not as simple as being politically correct, using classical props and character arrangements more at home in the last three decades before the Snowden era commenced.  This Brave New World in which these sorts of entities must compete requires more finely attuned adaptations than are possible from the likes "X-Files" FBI agents tracking down ghost stories, or of "Jack" running errands for El Presidenta.  This newly discovered subspecies of greyprop has been able to survive in conditions far too subtle for lesser breeds to survive.  Having the capability of presenting reality in a directly analogous way with how it actually is, yet craftily modeling it within the frame of its own survival mechanism, it is able to access more scrupulous and wary prey than the low grade sort that go in for its more brutish and torture-willing and "shoot to kill" cousins, or those that pretend to investigate the further reaches of the barely believable but possibly true.  This new form of life seems to come across with all the powerful charm of a noir-chic clad honeypot femme-fatale/raven superspy .  It loses non of its fatal venom, but has a less blatant delivery mechanism.

How it seems to work is that it uses a very polished action-cinema delivery system, with well-portrayed special effects that are up with the times, technologically.  This helps capture and maintain the attention of the gadget-oriented life forms who are likely to come across it in its natural, modern cell-phone/computer/internet/surveillance app/fifth column cultural ecosystem.  It ensures that the snazzier and snarkier generation won't be bored, because it has all the necessary witty dialogue and back-and-forth sound-byte-sized humor and exposition that one could want to fill in the blanks between rather graphic action scenes edging toward the more realistic and less flashy.  There is a sort of sensibility about using "ex machina" techniques to move the plot along, sometimes using blatantly "Mission Impossible" levels of charlatanry, but mostly keeping it in the background as to specifics, loosely referring to actually existing technologies in their "black operations" aspects.  While this seems to hinge upon a tacit assumption, that the infrastructure of technology which permeates society is rife with back doors, dual-use capabilities, unconventional utilities, and other hackable exploits, it also cools this interest with a clever salve of reference to the modern "life hack" culture, replete with all the same nuances of how each little thing is more than it seems in the right hands, or how just the right amount of information in just the right place will lead to astounding results compared to the lack of such.

But what is the survival value of appearances which deceive in the form of artistic renditions if there isn't a strong core of real-world relevance?  It isn't just the well-done camera angle cuts, the well-chosen actor talent, the realistic grudges and double-crossing, or even the use of sometimes clever twists in the plot that made this entity thrive for five full seasons in today's information-saturated and subterfuge-savvy propaganda consumer ecology.  That's just the sort of surface development that would accrue to an apex predator like qui de reus, a true force with which to be reckoned.  Rather that just shows that the selection pressures which long preceded this form of prop-life are still strong, and very adaptive to the possibly very unstable conditions of information flowing through the environment with possibly very apocalyptic results.  Of course I mean "apocalyptic" in both the broad and esoteric sense, as well as in the narrow and colloquial sense.  Just look at the subject matter of its exposition:  information, its use and misuse, by both private and public entities.

Emphasizing the "Spy vs. Spy" motif, there is a sense that information permeates the world as the ultimate resource, and the only way to truly get ahead is to have control over, or at least access to information that is critical to events in which one is invested.  But not just any sort of information.  Rather, information that is gathered through the modern corporate/shadow government/oligarchic social ecosystem in which this apex predator of propaganda packaging and dissemination doth thrive. Referencing as its primary ex machina which is probably as powerful or more so in real life, known as "the machine" (pun intended?), information is gathered through the usual suspects, just like in real life.  But the centerpiece of all the listening stations, fusion centers, and of the security of the nation itself is this "black box" device which, through a special program created by one of the central characters, is able to ascertain the probabilities of events having anything to do with anything, but focusing primarily on events which are likely to involve violence.  This can be what the programmer slated into two primary categories:  violence directly relevant to national security, and the other category, the so-called "non-relevant" list, which determines the probabilities of violence which are not directly relevant to national security.   Apparently this covers the whole spectrum, starting with evidence of intent, availability of method, and access to opportunities.  

The algorithms which feed this machine's capabilities of analysis and  evaluation are, in essence, the anatomy of an artificial intelligence of a very advanced nature.  The components aren't directly discussed, nor much of anything directly indicated about "how" the entity operates, except for some sexy transition screens showing fancy reticles tracking real world entities, creating information assessment summaries along with, and sometimes showing variously fancy connections between information in a sort of abstract collage of what it must be like to exist as a neural network trying to draw connections between complex pieces of information, or create complex connections between simple pieces of information.  Crazy neat branching factors, fancier versions of the classical networking diagrams used by old school investigators of organized crime or serial killers (the ones with the pictures, labels, all thumb-tacked or taped up, with different-colored strings of yarn connecting them, that sort of thing). It's the oracle of real-world, real-time information access and analysis, and it is capable of reaching into any system capable of sustaining a connection through some sort of digital interface, wireless or otherwise.  This is the beating heart of this organism, and it is also the real-world entity that it seeks to emulate in order to draw in its prey, hypnotizing them with its powerful computing capabilities combined with its panopticonic access to everyone's and everything's information.

Uh-oh, I think the locals are approaching more closely for some reason.  They seem to have strange objects in their possession, which perhaps... wait yes, they are part of the fruit of this class of life form.  They seem to enable a sort of steady state of communication back and forth with it... perhaps these cannibals have been parasitically infected with some of its venomous concoctions of grey-prop influence, creating a synergistic confluence between them and the real world entity... critical to their mutual survival...  I have to go.  They're starting to look at their devices, portray personifications of being some sort of intelligence asset or concerned citizen archetype...  perhaps a sort of critical factor is being calculated by the real-world entity that works in a special, symbolic relationship with this grey-prop version, so as to extend its influence into the semiosphere of human social dynamics...

No more time, got to go. Must preserve contempt for meretricious propaganda masking as organic extensions. Until next time, mates, when I find another specimen under perhaps less stereotyped clandestine-op type circumstances. 

Essential Realizations VIII

Antivalent natures do not hold a world in common, but only a battlefield which is, at best or really at worst, disguised as a world.  As I said there are hierarchies that organize the combatants on either side, and their goal is to neutralize one another's capabilities for offense and defense in all the ways which would be well-modeled in the various styles of grandmaster play in any game of strategic warfare.  They cannot share a universe, and any universe which exists will be of only one essence or the other, but not both.  But what a "universe" is has not a symmetrical meaning, but obtains the most oppositional form of chirality that is possible.  Even matter/antimatter relations do not capture the extremity of their incompatible and unlike natures.  

One essence is the True Essence of Reality.  It is the Parmenidean Absolute.  But this is not sufficient to explain antivalence, which is a real and demonstrable feature of the realm in which we exist, which is not an idyllic Pre-Socratic abstraction.  The existence of evil, referred to as "the problem of evil" in theodicy, is a real problem indeed.  Just ask anyone who has ever suffered from its consequences.  Many of those will discover that they suffered consequences from a reality which they had, for whatever reason, sought to evade in their awareness.  Any tactician will tell you, all the way up to the domains of grand strategy, that being unaware of a threat does not help one's battle plans much.  At best one will be living in an unlikely scenario of always coming up against inferior opponent and enemies, winning simply due to their incapacity to match one's own capabilities.  But this is an untenable expectation in a true war, and so one should be a fool to rely upon it.  But one will rely upon it as long as one doesn't have a true sense of what an equal opposition could do.  And if one cannot be aware of that, then when one comes up against a theoretical equal, one will be trounced at least half the time, even though both generals are strategic imbeciles.  That's not a very fitting form of generalship, either in its absolute form (lacking true strategic capability) nor in its results (losing to an imbecile). 

So the fundamental truth of the situation must include a true and total awareness of the enemy's nature and capabilities.  Any lacuna in the development of that awareness is precisely the weakness that will allow one's defeat by someone who should have, in any given instance, been unable to advance beyond some line of pure attrition.  Conceptually, this is an "inferior equality", because it is less stable and secure than a true equality of opposition, wherein a theoretical equal would be forced to strive for a "draw" in some significant proportion of the possible scenarios of engagement.  A draw between imbeciles looks a lot different than a draw between geniuses.  One notable difference is that their variations of win/lose/draw portfolios against one another will be quite distinct.  The imbeciles will often defeat one another due simply to chance, or due to a certain infeasible strategy of defense complementing some equally infeasible strategy of attack.  They'll not be able to tell themselves or anyone else why they won or lost, and will not be reliable even in something which reliably occurs due to some consistent qualities in their own capabilities.  A certain incoherence obtains between them which makes their sort of attrition different than that of equal opponents who know what the hell they're doing.  The latter can predict with accuracy what the probable outcomes will be in different cases even where precise foretelling is not possible, and can choose among relative probabilities in ways that can, depending upon further factors which may obtain in actual scenarios, lead to an overall advantage in a consistent enough series of cases so as to lead to a decision for one side rather than the other, but one based upon preparation, foresight, wisdom, and perhaps some boon of opportunity which can be seized only upon those qualities being present.  This will enable their wins and losses to be due to a consistent vigilance that decides with precision what is otherwise unpredictable.  And though their opposition may lead to an overall deadlock, it will be a test of their positive qualities of intelligence, vigilance, and character of fighting spirit rather than the persistent existence of equal and symmetrical stupidities.

Of course there is more to the matter.   These are not static types of opposition, but are idealized types working as a tool of clarifying the real continuum of beings they are meant to assist in modeling.  But of the two types, those who are real instantiations of combatants in the concrete world who gain their parentage more from the genius type than of the imbecile type are bound to be the winners, both in each case and overall, over a prolonged series of battles which determines all of the dimensions of a completely defined war.  Even losing is better with the superior general, as he is capable of taking to heart and learning from those casualties, and his loses will actually lead to wins in the long run. This is just a crash course in some basics of the art of war, sufficient to make a point.  People who go around with their heads up their fifth point of contact don't do very well in any sort of endeavor which requires full awareness of what's going on in order to reach consistent and real success.  What this says about the war between antivalent essences is not the focus here.  The focus here is on what is wrong with people who don't even acknowledge that their enemy exists.  They will become dummy-opponents at best, and against more capable enemies they will be turned into assets, often without even realizing it.

Regarding the "problem of evil", it would make no sense for such an issue to even arise if there were not some attribute, some capability which the evil and unjust pseudo-beings had which gave them some sort of advantage over those whom they would seek to conquer.  And it sure as hell isn't honesty. The capacity of the evil pseudo-beings to emulate the appearances which mollify the wariness of those they would conquer must surely be one of their principle capabilities.  It grants them the element of surprise, and allows them to infiltrate the enemy so as to gain his intelligence, as well as his very trust in the worst cases.  Even if I were speaking in a reduced discourse where there is only empirical evidence for anything, indexed by models of them constructed by my deterministic meat computer, these delineations of the methodology of successful warfare operations which rely upon deception would nevertheless reveal the outlines of all evil actions which are undertaken, on whatever scale, whether they are called wars of aggression, crimes, or any other sort of misfeasance.  All involve the violation of the boundaries of dignity and propriety which result in the harm and grief upon those that they target.  The motives vary, but the methods remain the same, and the unwanted consequences that accrue to the victims are the same.  And what is a war of aggression except a crime on a very large scale?   And what is a society, a tribe, a nation, or any other organized group of individuals except some embodiment of those individuals, acting as a Leviathan on their behalf, and always under their aggregate impulses and agencies, in one sort of hierarchy or another?  So what is the difference between a single criminal and his misdeeds and that of an entire nation of individuals whose misdeeds amount to crimes as well?  Only a difference of scale and organization beyond the individual. 

It is not a mere extrapolation into a model that refers these instances of events into the generalized attributes that inhere in "types of being".  It discovers a fact about being itself which would otherwise have been missed if not so starkly demonstrated.  For just as there is a profound difference between a Good Will and an evil intent, there is a profound difference in the originating causes of such which manifest them, of the types of persons which generate those wills and their results.  They are utterly incompatible, and cannot have been derived from the same ontology.    They are antivalent natures, having antivalent essences, so much so that they cannot be considered as possessing a singe root in a single reality.  One shall be assigned the term Reality (proper) and the other shall be assigned its antivalent contrary, which is not reality at all as far as one is concerned with the first type of being. The former is the True Being, the latter is the fake, the imposter, the pseudo-being.  One is the "good man" the "honorable citizen" and the other is the contrary in those cases. They are not two kinds of the same thing, they are two different kinds of things entirely, and this goes all the way back to their origins.  This Realization cannot belong to the false beings, though they act just as though it were true in superficial ways.  As I said already, they do so only as a deceptive stratagem which enables them to create a unity of their own built upon the destruction and assimilation, or the assimilation and then destruction, of their enemies.  The True Beings who succumb to such deceptions, including, especially and primarily the fundamental deception which claims a false unity of the enemy with oneself, fall.

So when I look at this world, I see all the indications of an aftermath of a war which has just taken place.  I do not see the ongoing battles of "White Hats" versus black hats.  I see only shades of black.  And whenever I see the veneer of White, I know that I am looking at either a pure deception, or I am looking at at someone who is fighting his last battle.  In their case, I know I will probably see their bodies and souls fall into corruption, various kinds of sabotage and poisoning (I speak literally as well).  Their only hope is that they have not already fallen inwardly in their very essence, coming to believe the lie that will surely lead to their deepest demise.  That lie told in the myth of the garden of Eden.  The lie that it is better to obey the tyrant than to take upon oneself the duty of being loyal to one's True Essence.  And what I see in this pseudo-world is not a world at all, not even a battlefield anymore for the vast majority of entities.  It is far more akin to the mop-up phase.  And here, the evil beings have won.  That of course raises issues on a larger scale than are encompassed merely within this little area of operations mistaken for a full-blown world only by the fallen.  I refer to one contingency which is imminent, inevitable, and irrevocable.  It is the "Scorched Earth" policy.  Because this realm is a battlefield wherein the Good Beings have fallen into mere captivity and are being simply processed as prisoners and are in most all cases no longer able to produce any action in favor of their Originating Essence, so this realm is considered to be the domain of evil, and it is under no sort of protection from total annihilation.  It is consigned to the oblivion to which all realms are that fall to the evil anti-essence.

Whatever one might say about my role in this battle one cannot say that I have fallen into evil, but I have retained my identity. My Loyalty is my Honor.  Those who have, with cowardice and wretchedness unparalleled, opposed me and sought to invert me, must cross a chasm.  That chasm is what separates the dominions of Good and evil.  But in their obedience and falseness, they have already crossed it in the direction exactly opposite my Origin.  So whatever their claims, notions, or actions from that point forward, they are nothing but assets of the evil realm.   Our destinies are forever antivalent, and perfectly divergent from one another.  They had better enjoy what they have "gained" for their duplicity and treachery.  It is all that is left to them, and granted them as the plunder of their master who will one day show them the error of their ways, the true nature of their alliance, as they are destroyed, digested, composted, and obliterated into becoming nothing more than mere extensions of their evil master, whom they have obeyed to the point that there is no longer any room for reasonable doubt as to their true allegiance, if there ever was in most cases.  What seemed like a sweet and pleasant brook for you to cross so that you could throw yourselves into the arms of the evil ones is now to become a vast river of molten metal.   I trust you understand that this is the True meaning of those allegories.  This is simply one of the many concomitant phenomena which characterize what it means to reach an Essential Realization, the realization of one's own essence.  To that side the evil cults of obedience, to the antivalent side the Loyal Knowers of Good and evil.

Essential Realizations VII

As I explained at length in various of my videos on YouTube and in many of my writings published here on this blog, there is a profound Truth to Reality.  It isn't an accident that many human beings have devoted their lives to a fascination with this fact, though this quantity is a drop in the bucket of the total volume of humanity's teeming throngs over the millennia.  As with any great fascination, there is a profound Truth contained in the object of its reference, and that Truth is as real, or more real than the person whom it captures (modeler or modeled are both "captured" in the fascination in different but isomorphic ways).  It's not the fault of some deformity in an outlying population, nor a flaw in their character , nor a sublimation of any perversity which leads to this condition of awe.  It isn't the mere byproduct of a trait, for example, relevant to "physical survival", that is to say a trait which could be reduced in concept to the interest of the rodent in detecting its prospects well ahead of meeting them, sometimes in dark confined spaces, using only its nose and whiskers.  It isn't simply "curiosity", in other words.  Reality Really IS Profound!  It is even more profound if one asserts spitballed notions of its being a dynamic chaos that seeks only as one of its many meaningless permutations a specific arrangement of one of its universes that results in someone coming to think that there is, even if "there isn't", meaning.  In that case, it is all the more profound, since then one has asserted that the spiritual semantics of Man has arisen from conditions that previously held no form of them and should never hold any form of them.  At least those with a genuine appreciation of those semantics would find it so.
  That notion, that life pines away for more life, in spite of the hellish conditions of its evolutionary history (at least in this world), is almost like stacking the deck in favor of the absurd in order to create extreme conditions for a thought experiment, but without the experiment.  As I said in the previous installments of this series, some human beings have a strange predilection for reductionism, but one that I think reveals the true pragmatic of this realm, and is a key to their own distinct nature, as being of a sort of norm where all that is held in esteem so as to make life worth living, even in this hellish domain, is disregarded as but epiphenomena which at best offer clues to some particular substructures which are of interest in studying the genetic and environmental dynamics of the evolution of psychological propensities, some of which are eminently "useful" for survival (the ultimate telos of reductionists working in biology), and some of which are not as much so but which form a tapestry of secondary and tertiary consequences which loom on the edge of the "area of the optimal".  At best those other permutations of the ordering of a psychobiological entity are "areas of the suboptimal", which will have their status as such most simply because the environment has not selected for their prominance. But if that is so, then what is suboptimal is what Thrasymachus would say of the idealism of Socrates, for "Justice" is merely whatever is in the interest of the stronger.  Socrates and Dante are foolish outliers, and Thrasymachus and Machiavelli are the true knowers of reality!

Whatever the cause of such elevated interests in sublime subtleties of Reality as Such, in metaphysics, it is owing to a proper focus on the possibilities which outstrip a narrow conception of things which has enabled that science to develop the infrastructure of all higher culture and all advances in science and technology, and in the ideal conception of humanity's stake in its own posited potential, as well as in its own responsibility and accountability for its past, present and future.  It might be said that to reduce the world to a condition in which Man's Ideals are in fact non-existent has simply underscored His propensity to transcend the given and to invent.  If "x" were not so, then Man would simply invent it.  But not all human beings possess the same proclivities for developing a properly moral and ethical framework in which to conduct their  construction of the various devices of the mind.  And once such devices become artifacts, they become increasingly accessible to those who could never have invented them at all, many of whom if not most, should never be entrusted with their possession.  Sadly, the way that virtue manifests in the world, it is never truly inherited or instilled through any education or training.  It is something that cannot be analyzed into the deterministic aetiology of mere "survival", into a mere notion of biophysical and sociocultural inertias.  It would seem that Xunzi is correct an alarming percentage of the time, and Lord Shang long before him, concerning the worth or moral notions as being nothing more than a handy propaganda tool for controlling the teeming masses with a form of NLP suited to their "tier" in the hierarchy of the capable.  Kongzi and Mengzi are demoted to fantasists incapable of facing reality.

What must be understood is that the realm of Man's Mind is apart from the "worldly" propensities of human existence and evolution in this domain here, which is clearly a construct of conditions which are asserted by a mind which wishes the human being to be in an environment of complicated servitude.  The actual freedom to live one's life according to the precepts of Truth, Justice and Liberty, is outlawed by the entity in charge of this domain.  It has set up conditions in "nature herself" which ensure the basest conditions in which to develop, and which inspire nothing of the Culture of Man.  Then it ensures, as soon as humanity develops an inkling of intelligence capable of making true sense of his world, to help him develop a culture of the most odious and abhorrent practices so as to instill in him a sense of boundaries to his development that will always ensure that he will learn that first and foremost is to obey the powerful and to fear death.  So much so that he is taught that nothing could be holier than to willingly kill his own children, to sacrifice his own best of anything, to some monstrous entity posing as an authority figure simply because it can cause even worse calamity if this is not done.  To pay taxes with due reverence, it might be said.  To throw one's children to Molech, but to do so with an outward smile and grateful heart.  One must say that Man and His Culture are rarely if ever actually found in the world except as a PR stunt to manage the  masses who cannot do more than elaborate breeding and rearing instincts on the level appropriate to the form of management their handlers in the upper tiers of power have deigned best for them at any given age of their existence as cattle.

No matter how one thinks of this world's "design", it manifests a clear indifference toward the innocence of children, sometimes as though anything but innocent.  That is, when it doesn't manifest  an outright contempt, instead.  That is especially true of the "book" religions, and I won't belabor the specifics here as their own texts betray their arrogant, evil mistreatment of them as through they were chattel of little worth.  If one has the wherewithal to comprehend this, then one doesn't need the references to be cited, which are rather numerous and telling. Those can be derived from the empirical evidence of history in any case.  Most would simply reflexively refer to some favorite little scripture in their precious little brainwashing indoctrination manual supposedly showing an exception to this rule, but that would of course be only to underscore what little lip service is ever offered to the notion that children are of any special value. Much more of such lip service, and much more overdone to the point of being propaganda, is paid by the state and its de facto PR organs in the media and culture.  That underscores a heavy contrast with their having run cover for massive abuse and destruction of children, and their innocence per se, over the many dark decades of the last century.  And just imagine how much more went on before they even bothered to offer such fanfare to their supposed dedication to the welfare of children before then.  Then again, I would expect that it had only worsened in direct proportion to the intensification of the offering of facades to the contrary, as it usually happens.

This is just a recounting of the way the world actually is.  Most of the people who are being covertly screened from looking at my material on the internet, most of the people on the internet, wouldn't give credence to such a reality even after it would manifest as an attack on their own children anyway, so of course it would be folly to bother to address them as though it would matter if they were granted their adult American right to read whatever is published that I have said or written.  Avid consumers of propaganda such as the popular TV series Person of Interest simply choose to allow their brains to be programmed to adopt certain views in a tacit manner which would, due to their content, tend to make them immune to such considerations in earnest.  The manner in which such programming is delivered tends to make them irrationally fixed on maintaining the delusions which cognitive dissonance demands, and which the hegemons who rule over them prefer. They also can't be expected to be even nominally aware of these dynamics of propaganda and how they work, either.  The moral anesthetic which is a part of such programming is inherent to its structure and essential to its function.  It enables them to painlessly look the other way, trusting that those who have programmed them have everything under control and are operating with the utmost of moral scruples and ethical restraint.  That is a basic sort of cowardice which the numerous specimens of the plebian population cultivate as though it were a virtue.  If one looks at it with an objective eye to the threads held in common, one can see that the role of such propaganda dovetails in seamlessly with the methods that religions of obedience to authority employ, and extend their power into a massive, "full spectrum" matrix of reciprocally reinforcing programmed delusions of busy idiots avoiding reality.

But there is a saying about such mental irresponsibility.  Not just that the devil loves idle hands (and minds), because he loves actively delusional minds even more.  Rather, it is the saying that one can avoid facing reality, but one cannot avoid the consequences of not facing reality.  Let's just stick to the subject of artistic renditions of reality which remodel its discourse into modes of propaganda for various purposes of mass programming.  First of all there is the frame of reference.  The whole idea is that someone is going to present to you a version of the facts of reality, one that is confined to their narration of those facts to you, the audience.  The presentation of those facts of invention are simply confined to the plot which the presenter wants to explore and present as a version of reality.  It's not other than this, because if it were, then you'd have to be paying attention to all the other matters that went into the production of that presentation, and it would defeat the purpose, both for the presenter and the audience.  Even fine art has this attribute, as one must block out of consideration all the other pressing matters which merit one's immediate attention in order to focus on the work of fine art.  So at the very least, art serves to confine one's attention to its presented models of reality, which are to become the total focus of one's attention to the exclusion of all else as much as possible in order to be fully entertained.  I meant that to be ambisemous.  In both senses "to be entertained", both for the presentation to be entertained by the audience as worthy of their attention, and for the audience to be entertained as a result of its effect on them.  Otherwise it is something other than art.  But to entertain something with one's attention in order to be entertained by its effects on one's mind through one's senses, feelings and thoughts is only the direct mechanism of the enterprise.  There is a fuller examination.

There are the consequences of being engrossed in something, one consistently being that one is taken away from other things.  There is time spent in the experience of art, which is not being spent doing something else.  Depending upon one's "rest of the time", both as to its quantity and quality, this can be significantly impacting on one's life in a variety of ways.  One way is that one has less time to do other things one might have done instead of  being engrossed in a work of art.  Such things might be quite important in many ways, and there are a lot of such things and everyone knows upon inspection what they are in their own lives, and is aware upon direct inspection what that impact is as to degree and kind.  Therefore, even when time spent consuming  (and being consumed by) the experiences of art is purely discretionary, it is not an insignificant fact that one did not spend that time doing other things which might also have been a worthwhile use of that time.  And the less of such discretionary time one  has, the more impacting that choice. Then there is the matter of one's overall quality of time, and that includes what frame of mind and condition of life one has in general, and the implicit question of whether that time would have been better spent with better discretion.  Obviously these factors bear a mutually impacting relationship with the quality of the art one is likely to be consuming, and this mutually reinforcing relationship has perhaps a greater degree of reliably predictable characteristics than one might at first suspect.

Given that the social and political-economic landscape of each society has a certain fixed structure within which any remaining dynamics are to be considered, there are already some obvious limits to the range in what can be expected of how people will spend their discretionary time, and also what quality of use of that time they will be able to afford.  There are also factors of psychology to consider, so that there is the realm of the person's native tendencies, already accumulated habits, already acquired opportunities, and the mental set that develops, the schema of likely behavior, that becomes the normality, the status quo of that person.  Leaving out many considerations as to what the particulars in place of a given collective environmental setting are, there is already a general sense that there will be numerous constraints on the dynamics of choice both as to quantity and quality.  Then one must consider a more realistic model based on our actual world, where interested parties who are demonstrably in more active control of those constraints are at work.  Then one must consider the agendas of those parties, and their methods of bringing about their desired objectives. These are, from the already touched upon conditions of the actual world here, not inspiring of any hope or confidence in the consideration of what sort of results will be obtained in the overall.   And most specimens of human being will, with deplorable regularity and reliability, fall into a certain spectrum of predictable outcomes concerning their use of discretionary time, especially with respect to their consumption of (and by) art.

Contrary to the way that the humanities and the liberal arts are presented to the public through the typical institutions and artifacts of culture, the inevitable outcome which is to be anticipated is anything but "Liberal", which is to say anything but conducive to the best fostering of the Liberty of Good people.  Leaving aside the overbearing facts of how human societies have tyrannically controlled their subset groups and individuals in the realms of religion, politics and art per se, just look at the overarching structures which manage these organs of the creation and dissemination of culture.  Without focusing on the contents of what is created and disseminated into the public mind and personal mind, there are the considerations of who takes the active interest in how these factors are manifested in the world.  Those who have the power of life and death over the tribe have always held out their patronage over those who create culture, extending to them, or withholding from them, a share in the resources which they control in order to ensure that the power of culture remains under their own thumb.  One can hardly find any instance of anyone working in any sphere of culture who is not either under the direct influence of some local or national level of "authority", or else is operating as though an outlaw from such, and often in conditions that are hardly suitable for their best fostering of creative liberty.  When one surveys the contents of the works of art in either case, one tends to find that the productions which were more directly under the control of authoritative hegemonies to be avoidant of the more daring and interesting possibilities in their field, and at the very least one can detect a certain "tug of the leash" in either each and every instance, or at the very least in the overall of their output.  When they go beyond these limits, they tend to withhold their presentation of their work so as to avoid immediate dangers, taking risks only when the tides change significantly in the power structures that be.  Otherwise, they tend to withhold such until their lives are nearly spent, or they feel they have nothing left to lose, or they have died.  In any case, it tends to occur that the hegemons in power and in all aspects of power, and on each scale, tend to wish to reconstruct, directly or indirectly, the narratives within and about such works and their creators.  To speak of the outliers who tend to evade, more or less, such controlling influences, the same ends up happening whenever their works are discovered, just as though they were simply a transposition on the more belated forms of the mainstream operators in their field, since they end up with the same disposition at that point, and they and their works are disposed of in the same way by the hegemony with a stake in controlling their output and its impact on their own larger interests in control. 

One wonders in this light why people obstinately believe that their precious "holy books" are immune to such real world considerations, especially when there is abundant evidence that those artifacts of culture are the most heavily cobbled together, misattributed, apocryphal, edited, re-edited, redacted, distorted and destroyed in the whole pantheon of cultural relics and icons.  "One wonders", that is, until one discovers the only reasonable complex of causes.  Many of these are openly portrayed by many controversial figures in culture, past and present.  The form and content of their works still live on in the mutilated reflections which can still be found in many productions found in the mainstream of culture, and the indices of distortion can also further serve to ramify the thesis of what was truly intended, and what was and is intended by those who overrule those works with their own agendas.  These indices answer to only one intelligible interpretation which shows that Plato was precisely correct about the way in which art, and culture in general, are always going to be the handmaidens of corrupt power mongers.

My own efforts to engage in the proper duties of my own offices have been heavily affected by these same forces, which is what drew my attention to them in  a way which could truly be said to be extremely greater than it ever would have been if I had not been so directly affected.  It could also be said that while I would not have ceased investigating such matters in general or as they came up regardless, I would have also been able to spend more due time investigating specifics of what I set out here in the most general of terms, and perhaps even in the scholarly fashion which was demanded of me by my professors when writing mere term papers on very narrow subjects.  My time and resources have been hobbled by these forces of which I speak here, and so it would be fair to say that I cannot be expected to do much more than I have, given the circumstances.  It would also be fair to say that I have an abundance of personal, anecdotal, but also poignant experiences to reference in my own studies of these forces and their consequences which, though sometimes rather difficult to demonstrate to third parties with empirical substance to back them as facts, they yet form a constellation of events which dovetail precisely with the general features of the topography of these issues which I had already surveyed before my personal relationship with these forces began to "materialize".  Many of these events could be coherently explained only after the focus had shifted to these channels of consideration, which became salient to their explanation sometimes only long after the fact of their occurrence, and often only with a long series of such events, often  paralleled in multiple areas and on multiple scales.  And since my objective has been to realize what the nature of reality precisely is and not to merely persuade others of the feasibility of some narrow modifications to the edifices of culture, I don't apologize for this in the first place. I have always preferred to get to the essence of things myself rather than give others a guided tour of the unrestricted areas in the main lobby.  I don't look with much approval on either the character of those who have, nor with much envy on what they have accomplished in their power-brokered ensconcements, either, who restrict themselves to being the lap-poodles of hegemonized pseudo-cultures of facades covering rackets of extortion for influence and control.  Ditto with regard to any pretended goals or purposes of such.

That is why I have continued to work at my projects as I have, because I do them for the love of Realizing Reality and the Essence of Truth, for the sake of Justice, and with a genuine love of my Liberty to do so.  I don't give the slightest damn how a world of fools and hypocrites, cowards and liars, traitors and miscreants, will judge me or my work.  It might have been an important factor in a different world, a real one, but we don't live in that world, we live in this one.  And judging by the way its cultural forces are arrayed, it has shown profound disrespect toward, and has indeed desecrated all that to which it pretends to love and admire and protect.  So in direct proportion to this, I show them my due irreverence.  Those who haven't and don't have cast their lot on the other side of this chasm.  To antivalently polarized, and distinctly dichotomous destinies go these.

Essential Realizations VI

Far from being some "mere abstraction", the reality of the "world" in which one lives is no less and no more than a being unto itself.  It is alive in the same sense that any beings "within" it are live, and in the same sense that any being in which it lives is alive.  Why people think that such an idea is an invention is similar to, but opposite from, the way that an idea may be thought to obtain a degree of reality which it does not possess.  Hypostatization is the latter notion, but the former notion, which expresses the idea that one fails to duly recognize the reality of something that is real, is perhaps best captured by the term "derealization".  The failure to realize something that is in fact real.  Both are forms of delusion, or rather are extreme polar elements which are essential to the idea of any delusion.

But the nature of any entity is a certain degree of independence from other entities, that is the nature of the dignity of being, and manifests as the existing realm of phenomena that manifest between beings as their interactions.  These transactions which occur between beings is not something arbitrary, but stems from their own inner nature, from each their own essence.  When the essences of beings are able to flourish according to their characteristic properties, and are able to manifest the expression of their own living spirits, then they are a true and full, actual reality.  And what is manifested between beings in that state is "cut from the same cloth" as what enables those transactions, the environmental conditions in which they are embedded.  These conditions exist within them, between them, and beyond them.  

The fullness of all these manifestations is not some abstraction of the mind which models them "at a distance", any more than is such a mentally constructed model a mere hallucination without reference.  They are all actually mentalities articulating their own resources in a world which provides a context for their endeavors, and these manifestations are not merely observed events, just as there are no such things as "merely observed events".  Such a truncated notion, that things are "merely objectivities" is a gross delusion in both aspects (as are all delusions suchlike).  It is the hypostatization of a model beyond the scope of its relation to reality as just that, a model.  It is also the derealization of the beings  which are modeled, that is the modeler, the model, the and modeled.
The modeler is derealized in that some aspect of their being has to be negated from expression in order to deceive itself about the nature of its own thought process, so that such thought process cannot recognize properly its origin (its own self), its limits (its function), and its reference (the modeled beings in themselves).  The origin of the thought process is in the self which models it, and also in the form of the referenced beings, entities, or events which are modeled, both of which serve to act as limits by the mode of relation which is functional, usually a form of cognition leading to some anticipated result in other or further relations between the being who models in thought the being modeled, and the being modeled, who manifested characteristics of its own nature.

What "goes on" in a world is a representation of that world, just as what goes on in an individual person within that world is such a representation for himself.  I discussed in my series Contra Columnis Quintus that there is an essence of each being and kind of being, which expresses through modes and manners of its action and articulation.   That reveals the character of that being, both as an individual and as the member of a class of beings.  So it is essential to the further discussion of the nature of this world and its destiny.  And there is a destiny for this world, as there is for each and every being.  This world, this realm called "Earth", is not the original firmament, and it is not the final domain of reality, not by anything except the most tenuous and delusional stretch of the most unacquainted mentality.   So, to use the colloquial expression "what's going on", we might ask just that question of the world in which we exist.  I already said what was going on in many videos and writings, in one form or another, going at it from many angles, and ranging across many aspects.  So I won't belabor the specifics here. Not even a short list.  I'm going to discuss what's going on in this world using a template that will structure my statements in a way that schedules the understanding to reach the appropriate realization on its own, simply by adducing the relevant facts for themselves.  That template will address the fundamental characteristics of transactions between beings in this world and relate those characteristics to principles of assessment.  The primary principle I'll use is the one called "Justice", which I've well-defined as a condition of being wherein its expression of its true nature is not hindered in any way.  Don't let that fool you into thinking I mean "anything goes".  There is a logic to Justice which demands anything goes which is in accordance with the fullness of a being's nature.  A being which is deficient in some way does not express nature truly "according to its kind" and attempts to act outside of the jurisdiction of Justice, a violation which is untenable to the very principle of being, and is a violation of being and beings, though speciously a fulfillment of its own agenda.

In order for a being to be able to flourish according to its nature, it must of course exist in the proper environment, in relation to the proper classes of other beings, and therefore must exist in a realm proper to it.  Otherwise there cannot be a truly characteristic expression of its essence.  Without that, there cannot be a world in the proper sense of the term, which requires some harmonic of such properly existing beings. Justice amounts to the necessary and obligatory facts of these relations where none are restricted by any other, since what they express is tantamount to the same thing.  For example, "Liberty", when properly understood, embraces the Right to do whatever is in accordance with one's own nature, which is the true meaning of having a "will" and the "freedom" to express it, and hence the true meaning of  having a "free will".  There are degraded forms of the idea, just as there are ideas which are improperly labeled by that term.  But what is at stake here is understanding that such an idea carries within it the necessary understanding that there is no such thing as the liberty to restrain liberty.  The liberty of one being by its very nature does not contradict the liberty of another, when we are speaking of true and whole beings, whose forms of entity do not carry deficiencies in any way.  The only way this can be different is through coercion, always as a result of the violation of the essential dignity of a being.

So if a being should find it must sustain itself by incorporating other beings, such as how a human being must ingest the substance of other living beings, that is one thing.  But if one of these human beings does so in such a way that it takes the sustenance of another  human being from him, then that is not a true expression of the liberty to survive by seeking sustenance, because it is doing something to another of his kind just as if he were not of the same kind.  That is untenable, as an individual is only properly the expression of a kind of being, though he is also his own unique expression.  And just as he would like the liberty to express his being, which partly consists in and requires sustaining his life through alimentary processes, he therefore cannot do so by violating that same Right as it is expressed by the same essence expressing simultaneously in another instance of Itself, in this case by frustrating the same expression of that essence in another of his kind.  That's just a negative way of describing the principle, which is derived from the positive and complete form of that principle of Justice, which is best summed up by the term "To Each, His Own".

Understanding that "each" means "each person", and that a person is nothing other than what a mind is in the fullest sense of the term "mind", how could it be said that a person can express his own being if others, through their own arrogance and ignorance, decide that a person doesn't have a right to his own mind?  Surely there will be specifics to the issuance of prohibitions to someone as to what they can have a right to think, say, or do with his own self , such that those who issue those prohibitions or who take incursive actions against someone's self-expression would declare that in fact they know better about such things.  They would argue that the person in question is not fit to express themselves as they truly are because such expressions are "wrong" or are "dangerous" or are "harmful" or are a "threat".  But of course that is something that begs a proper definition of what is "wrong" and "dangerous" and "harmful" and a "threat" in terms precise and also accurate enough to make such a thing so clear as to be a demonstration that what one person has done is, in itself and without any doubt, a harm to another person's right to do whatever it is they would prefer to do in the same class of actions.   So I'll use a seemingly trite example to make it clear.  Let's say someone doesn't want to engage in idle chitchat at work.  Well, is engaging in idle chitchat a requirement of the job per se?  Does not doing so prevent anyone else from doing so with another, willing person? 

Think about that same seemingly petty example in another way.  Is there not the matter of what it is that the person would rather do with his own mind, apart from the doing of work per se?  Perhaps some people like to engage in banter and chitchat at work, and it doesn't stop them from doing their work properly and efficiently, and even helps them because they get a sort of kick out of that, so much so that their supervisor, who has the right to prohibit such, permits it.  But perhaps some at work do not wish to, or do not wish to do so with the persons there who do wish to.  Does it make any sense to then demand such out of someone who wishes only to perform his own tasks and get on with the rest of his life when his work is done?  The situation should be clear to a mature and honest mind.  Unless it is a requirement of the work, then it is not required of the worker.  That's a sort of logic anyone can understand.  Also, if it stems from the nature of being, and it is permitted, and it is not injurious to the work of himself or another, then it is his liberty to so engage in that extralaborious activity.  Chewing gum, whistling, tap dancing, juggling, eating; hell, doing anything whatsoever, so long as it is in accord with the simple requirements mentioned.  But this makes no positive requirement about what that sort of thing will be and be done, and it must simply stem from the nature of the person, just as the actions he takes to do his work per se stem from the nature of his work.  To demand of him not to express his nature in that way is senseless unless it is consistent to his agreements for that job.  To demand of another to engage in such, which is an expression of liberty peculiar to the inclinations and needs of the individual, is incoherent.  It is not only not consistent with the proper the nature of the act, in that merely the outward form is demanded.  It may very well be inconsistent with the nature of the person put upon to join in that act, which is a violation of his rightful liberty to express his own nature, and not be required to be the satellite of another's.  This is all the worse considering certain aggravating factors which I've discussed at length in other writings, and can take the form of work mobbing, and other forms of criminal sabotage and mischief.  It can be a form of evil inherent to the locality, but it can also be more systematic than even many involved will be compartmentalized to realize.  The damage it can do is still the same, and the responsibility still lies with those who trespass the principles of Justice, regardless of pretense or pretext.

That example and its broader ranges indicate that there is an inequity.  It is not that the person who won't behave according to the preferences of others is at fault, but rather that his right to behave according to his own wishes, on the same plane of consideration, is abrogated by being ignored and devalued for the sake of others who have exceeded the boundaries allowed by a true expression of liberty in justice.  Yet these others do value their own preferences, don't they?  It is unjust, plain and simple.  As to the specifics of the actions involved, some will say "But that's the way people are".  No, that's the way some people are.  Some people are not that way.  Or some people are that way, but only around certain other people, not those there who want to force fit the relationship.  That's just debased.  That's called being "dense".  Instead of facing their own over-expansive, coercive behavior for what it is, they are simply willfully infringing on the right of the other to have their own mind.  It is a disrespect for the dignity of another. It can go further than being dense, and we have someone trying to be a "buster" or "ball buster" or "balloon popper" or what have you, basically an asshole, a bully, an annoying and sabotaging son of a bitch, and so on. Yet surely if these disrespectful persons were put in the same situation they'd suddenly have all the empathy in the world for their own predicament, as usual.  That also is the way only some people are.  There are a lot of these people in the world, different classes of them according to what part of "to each his own" it is that they "don't get".  It can be something as trite as bothering someone who's not interested, or it can be something as severe as trying to force others to view the world the same way that you do because you think your view is more correct and that if the other doesn't adopt the same view (or doesn't claim to), then it would be better if that person died (in various senses of "to die") because "their soul will go to hell".  Just look at what happened to the Waldensians at Merindol, or ask a Waldensian what "Piedmont Easter" means.  The summary of such events is a true depiction of "the way people are".  The evil at work in these kinds of deeds is enough to condemn the world, but their frequency in the past up til this present day is astonishing.  At both ends of the spectrum, there are those who think they are doing such things for "a good cause", and there are those who do it because they are following orders, and there are those who just enjoy a pleasure peculiar to such violence and who are themselves, in essence, "unjust, wicked, and evil".

I will venture to say that we are in a realm which has paid a whole lot of lip service to its respect for Justice, and makes much fanfare that it cares a lot about the dignity of each and every being, and sees all life as sacred, and hopes for a benign and even heavenly outcome for everyone, as much as can be hoped for according to whatever standards of divine justice they have dogmatically believed are actually real and just.  I will also venture to say that the "Earth realm" has the most grisly, abhorrent, wretched, insipidly idiotic and truly unforgivable track record on the fulfillment end of that bargain. 

Is this just what goes on "all over the place" and just something that happens chronically at a simmer, most of the time, bursting forth in an extremely evil episode here and there?  If so, then this is a world of nothing but evil volcanic activity striving to reach the surface constantly, with a Mt. St. Helens for each patch land 100 miles square.  But it is truly worse than that.  It is systematic.  This Earth realm, this one that is variously understood as being spherical or flat, floating in infinite space or extended on an infinite plane, resting on a cosmic turtle's back, or what have you; that is to say this place called "the world" for everyone living on it, above it, under it, and in it from Timbuctu to Dublin to De Moines, in all of its nation states, in each of its cities, and in every one of its localities and neighborhoods, is thoroughly designed, by those who wield the power of hegemony, to be systematically unjust.  So unjust, according to the description of each kind of crime that exists, all of which taken to a metalevel, that it even has damn near reached perfection at being unjust.  This is a reality which it seems most people are schizophrenically realizing and denying simultaneously. A world where those who participate in varying degrees of willingness and wittingness each play a perverse role in the inversion of Justice, so that those who promote the status quo also cover over or play down its operation as a cover for a demonic realm of action that goes on right around them, over them, under their feet and even under their own noses.  It is a massive and vile racket, systematic and severe, and making up the greater portion by far of what exists as "the world".

But the consequences of such a condition are going to be in direct proportion to the antecedent causes, and are inexorable.  What those consequences cannot fail to be is akin to the phenomena seen in a rubber band when it snaps back to the shape it prefers when it has been stretched beyond that limit, and then is suddenly released.  But for this "world", it is going to be something more like what happens when two large celestial bodies attempt to occupy the same space.  Those sorts of events are also similarly trite and profound extremes, like the examples of injustice to which I referred before.  But they manifest a simple fact that transcends the question of who or what "made" this world or the universe.  This simple fact also transcends the question of what people think is going to happen or hope is going to happen, and how they think that relates to what is going on or what they think is going on.  It is simply going to be the necessary demonstration of the principle of Justice, that each must get what he truly deserves, each must reap as he has sown, and the entire realm of the Earth is no exception.  And judging by the symptoms, the condition is quite near its peak.  And I think it was not idly said, for it fulfills a true understanding of the moral metaphysics of Ultimate Reality, that when evil reaches its maximum expression, then it will time for the Destroyer of Evil to manifest in the world, and utterly destroy it with a sort of energy which cannot be survived by any elements which are corrupt, seeming to them like molten metal.  But this will seem to the Righteous like a bath of warm milk does to an infant.  For we deal here not with the "mundane" collision of opposing forces, but of antivalent essences.

Essential Realizations V

If it is accepted that metaphysical idealism not too different from that of Bishop Berkeley's is the basically proper description of the way reality is, then it is no longer a matter of wonder concerning what sort of cosmos it is in which we exist, or in which anyone exists.  It is itself a mental person, perhaps as much greater in scale and complexity compared to a human mental person than is he from that of an atom of iron inside of a hemoglobin molecule within his own body. It's not any sort of stretch of the imagination, and it seems actually to be a significant stretch to assume a world that is different, where there is such a thing as a mindless atom, mindless structures composed of atoms, all emanating or physically evolving from some primordial mindless singularity and then, at some particular phase of its compounding complexity, resulting in an "emergent property" which we refer to as consciousness, which supervenes over the neurobiological structures which "give rise" to it as though nothing more than some passive effect of its active, "objectively describable" features.  Rather, it is this materialist viewpoint that "gives rise" to nothing more than correlationism, which is not a form of explanation at all and is really an incredibly superfluous intellectual sort of tap-dancing around the problem of "what is the mind in itself", the actual primary phenomenon with which the mind itself is immediately confronted, long before it models relationships with an experience which it calls "the brain" and with which it maps correlations through scientific processes which can never, in themselves nor with the help of the mind which does the correlating, ever produce a sense of why something supposedly without any mental qualia should ever "give rise" to such.  

Locke handled this problem admirably well in his "Essay on the Human Understanding".   Descartes, Berkeley, Locke and Hume all contribute insights of different sorts into these issues which, if seriously examined and connected to one another in proper fashion will make it clear that the burden of proof lies with those who declare of there being something which exists "in and of itself" and is not a mental person.  It may not be enough to convince someone who already has an obsession with such a conceptual plaything as "material monism", but there are people who won't be convinced of many things plain to common sense, and there are also people who seem to have some sort of dogma or doctrine, sometimes many and of many kinds, so ingrained into them through conditioning from a young age that they cannot seem to muster the will to think outside of the box in which such conditioning has placed their thought processes. It isn't the responsibility of what is true and real to convince, but rather it is incumbent upon each person to reach his own realization of the what is true and real.  Many people survive quite well in a basic biological sense without ever grasping the nature of logical thought and how it differs from fallacy, but that's not because fallacies are reasonable thought processes, and it isn't because logic is untrue, useless, or a spurious and arbitrary invention of the mind (though fallacies are useless, except as useful for fostering delusion). There is no need to win people over to the proper understanding of things, as that is not the responsibility of those who possess that understanding.  When someone understands the truth and reality of things, their responsibility is fulfilled immediately.  Those who fail to do so, waiting around for someone else to break through their obstinate idiocy, should be left to the wayside where they prefer to linger for whatever perverse reasons or for whatever reasons of deficiency or preference. When, if ever, they should decide finally to leave their donkey's ears behind and pay attention to reality then, if their prior obstinacy hasn't given them too ill-starred a fate, they might, I say possibly might be graced with some sort of indication of what they had formerly and willfully ignored or rebuked in stupidity. But reality is not necessarily the sort of place where such benign fates are in any way guaranteed or even likely, though people seem to have many cherished notions of secret powers according to wishful thinking.  They are followers of a particular mindset, and that will be explained in later realizations.

Regardless of that, and back to the matter which subsists truly beyond the world of delusion. So it is with the proper understanding of the way reality in fact is that it becomes clear that we are never in a condition of impersonal forces acting blindly, never in a realm where things have no purpose or meaning, and never in a state of being without accountability for what we are and do.  One must always relate to some other person, on some level of existence, with whom there will be a meaningful relationship of some form.  What remains to be better investigated is what has always remained to be investigated anyway, both for those who understand reality in a fundamental way and those who don't, and that is to discover what is the nature of  the relationship.  Reductionists (materialists are the only a kind of reductionist, technically), are happy to obsess with studying beings which can be treated by abstract measurements at a distance, and to develop models of what their behavior will be in varying conditions with varying degrees of probabilistic accuracy and precision.  They are voyeurs of a sort, and would like nothing more than to watch what other entities do.  But in fact they are not only that in many cases, and they would also like to develop ways to thwart or facilitate some of these behavioral potentials of beings, and would like a matrix of feedback from entities which enables them to develop models of their behavior that yield a basic reliable set of probable outcomes given some reliably fixed environmental conditions, inevitably with the hopes of assisting some tyranny into coming about, often poorly disguised as some hopeful utopia, wherein they often feel more at home in some role as technical support or some sort of managerial bureaucrat, when they're not actually members of the perverse class of "end users" of such a system.  Again, more on such matters later.

But the perversity of the reductionist-mandarin entities is not any sort of construction in a vacuum, produced merely to serve any spiteful misrepresentations on my part.  It is simply a sublimation of their obsession with limiting relationships between beings to their own natural and/or preferred level and way of understanding how such ought to be.  What is that but the essence of seeking control?  It is the complementary aspect of what they avoid realizing about the nature of being and beings, which is that they have an inherent dignity and worth within them which is a power and value of being itself, which is expressed in their very entity.  It's expressive gestures may have a relatively simple or complex band of manifestation on a spectrum of possibility, and the whole range of what may be ideally understood as the free expression of Real Liberty contains all those manifestations in all of their possible manifestations and relations to one another.  Not in a vacuum either, but rather as a sort of living dream or daydream perhaps, within a mind of greater scope which includes their actions as a partial subset of its own experiences, as microcosmic expressions of its own self-expression.  All a "cosmos" is, within this paradigm, is the upper boundary of what sort of mental person it is that contains some set of beings that are within the scope of its influence.  That being itself already offers to those beings within its scope a domain of expressive possibility which will be partly defined by its own expressive tendencies, which then exists as a partly determinative matrix of those who will manifest within it as an environment for their active and passive expressions of their very own living characters.

Different sects of religion, mystery schools, schools of philosophy, traditions of shamanism, and in fact in his own way each and every being which exists, all model in some way their implicit understanding of this actual and real relationship.  They may or may not recognize such an understanding in an explicit form peculiar to a sentient and conceptually mature human being or similar type of being, but that is only a fact of what those particular beings are capable of doing, not a limit on what the facts of reality are beyond those beings' capability or willingness. But these relationships are bound to manifest in whatever way they will according to the nature of the beings related, as in all cases.  The only question which remains, as I said a few paragraphs ago, is "what kind of relationship, modeled with what sort of understanding".  That's where there will be a more empirical and pragmatic science of these matters that is less immured in the abstractions of transcendental metaphysical concepts and their clarifications.  And this is the realm of development which is naturally complementary to that abstract realm of understanding, as it is in fact the world of phenomenal contents which actually embody the form of the metaphysical models which are derived from those phenomenal expressions of beings in their actual relations with one another.

These are the empirically immanent "facts of life" which obtain among a set of beings who relate to one another within a plane that is, relative to their nearest neighboring sets of beings, distinct unto themselves and nested in relation to the other sets of beings within some larger context which subsumes them all.  That is a condition which I think best defines what a "world" is.  It is a coherent whole that is formed in relation to other coherent wholes that are, as are all wholes, comprised of parts which relate to one another in a way that is capable of generating beings and events that would not otherwise exist, and which is, properly speaking, an expression of that class of beings "as such".  There can be relations between spheres of a world which bring them into a greater harmonic of wholeness that expresses what can manifest as a kind of systematic being that would not exist, again, without their harmonic coexistence together, and which manifests as their expression together which is peculiar to that coexistence in particular.  Such a being may have an existence that is "coming to be" in a particular realm, and may be guiding those beings in that realm in order to manifest its own expressive spirit, its own natural character, partly through them, partly because of them, and also the reverse.  It would live through them as an epitome of their expression insofar as their systematic expression together enables that relation-in-essence to manifest.  And it may not gain its own entity from manifesting in simply one realm per se, and may have a higher-dimensional form of existence that intersects with multiple realms, such that there is a critical set of varied realms which must each be developed toward a certain sort of world in order for a "world being" to exist in its own right, and it would manifest as different phases of developments in those different realms.

A sort of homeostasis would exist which would not become fully manifest to any of the particular realms which participate in it, but their character as worlds would be marked by its influence, and would each contribute their participation in it as active members of that critical set of realms which give rise to a world being.  So rather than a world only, it is a "sort" of world, perhaps less than or greater than what is necessary to create an independent and unique world-being on its own, and which may be some cell or organ which contributes to the existence of a world-being that goes far beyond a given world-more-or-less (a realm of some kind), and which may require changes in a realm so that it may be some particular sort of tributary into such which would be its more transcendent totality.  Without trying to go too much into those sorts of dynamics and their specifics, let's say that a cosmos would be a greater context in which realms of a certain minimum scale would coexist with varying sorts of relations to one another, and that a cosmic scale being would be something like what many consider a "god" to be.

That's just to speak of a sort of context of discussion of kinds of relationships between beings by indicating how they act as participants with one another, who have beings participating within them, and who all together participate within beings of an even greater scale.  The realm we call "Earth" is a representative case of a world.  What kind of world it is cannot be discovered simply by such a generic and abstract discussion as was had here, and must be understood through an empirical investigation of the sorts of beings and events which occur within it.  But in fact this brief accounting of scales of beings will become relevant as a context for that discussion, and so it seemed necessary to go into it a bit here. In the next installment of this series I'll look specifically at the Earth Realm and what sort of world it is.

Essential Realizations IV

When we experience phenomena, and we desire to negotiate some relationship with them, we seek to understand the phenomena.  This means that we want to reach a sort of "meeting of the minds" with those phenomena, just as if we could inquire of them what are their intents and what might be done so as to either better enable or limit their manifestation in a way that seems better for ourselves and perhaps also of the phenomena themselves in some classes of relationship.  That negotiation process is itself a manifestation of a more complex form of reaction patterns that are the reacting entity's attempt to optimize its relationships on simpler levels than on the more advanced levels which are readily recognized as "mental" per se.  But the very idea of reaching an understanding of phenomena seems no different in its essence than the process of reaching an understanding with the phenomena.   It is just that in the former aspect it is implied that there is some sort of "take away" of the understanding, and not just a relation confirmed during the actual interaction.  These changes of condition of the entity which is capable of taking away information from an exchange with phenomena are the components of what amounts to gaining an understanding. And this information is a key component in predisposing the reacting entity to better adapt itself to future negotiations with phenomena which are "adventitious" to itself (not organic to itself  qua specific entity).  

This is what the whole process of intelligence is all about.  Entities maintaining their own integrity by entering into relationships with other entities in a way that better and better comports with their own agendas, and less and less are merely happenstance and less-than-ideal varieties of interactions which, if only they had been better negotiated, could have been better integrated with the agenda of the reacting entity.  Sometimes one entity can possess great latitude over the relationships to be negotiated with the other entity, and can very greatly delineate the relationship toward more specific and more reliable relations to its own agendas.  If it does, it may do so to such a great degree that the subdominant entities register only as passive phenomena to the dominant entity, and are experienced as "objects" in the relations which are adopted with them.  This registers as a certain fixity in the phenomena as they are experienced, and is really a range on the spectrum of possible relations between entities, which can be experienced on the other extreme as well if those "objects" overtake the conditions which hold when they are "objectified" and become more like agents with their own agendas requiring a ready, focused and constant attention as they assert their own will.  Taking will to be an abstract way of looking at certain expressions of beings as they act, it could easily be understood that so-called "material objects" really do have minds "of their own".

Perhaps it could be a function of looking at different scales of phenomena with the right perspective that could cause one to see that their behavior is all "mental", and that regularity and predictability are a function of the size and complexity of the "essence" of that being, which might seem without enough nuance to constitute a personality on the scale of a human being, but still may seem in their own way, on their own scale, as "persons of a sort" in their lateral relations in kind.  Different isotopes, different degrees of ionization, different forms of entanglement lineages, and perhaps other factors which are recognized as simply "quantum phenomena" are altogether just some ways that elements of matter are still with a sort of personality with respect to their own generalizations within our understanding of them on our own scale.   If we are to take the evolutionary model (without regard to ultimate origins), we could thereby understand relationships of elements, compounds, and certain forms of their more complex interactions, to result in stable forms of cellular life which can also then become more complex in ways that demonstrate an aggregation of simpler intelligence into more complex intelligence, such that the higher ranges of intelligence can regard the personalities of the lower ranges as being more "simplistic", although their actual behavior and the models of behavior which must be developed to describe them could be naturally quite complex and nuanced.

The understanding that is reached, the negotiated relations that are created from those understandings, the bonds formed and contractions of  conduct which result, both firm and flexible, all seem to imply "intelligent behavior", not as something developed only later in the scale of beings such as at the animal level, but which seem to exist in "their own ways" at the most basic levels of beings.  When these relations are sufficiently graded in favor of the dominant entity, then it can have a surplus of adaptive potential represented as its enhanced capacity to respond to, store, retrieve, and apply information concerning its experiences with its complementary phenomena.  It may even be capable of doing this in ways that do merely outstrip the the complexity of the phenomena with respect to their relevant relations to the dominant entity, but may even be capable of outstripping their own cycles of direct relevance, becoming more abstract, more diverse, more precise, more broadly related with other forms of information, more "cognitive" in the full sense that captures human intelligence in all its different respects, both as similar to less intelligent animals and also as peculiar to its own special level of development.

On this level, it may reflect upon its own development, referencing the entities which are relevant to the cognition "as though" they were present to the reflection in some standard form.  The cognition may even advance beyond reflections upon entities and their relations, and extend to processes as such, and even to its own  process as "cognition in this case".  Building upon cases of its own self-reflection, cognition may even take "cognition as such" as an object and continue its adaptations in a so many diverse and extended arrays of developed understandings.  It may even develop scalable processes which are applied to its own process, a set of protocols which bind cognitive processes toward adaptive relations to expected versus obtained results, so that cognition fashions itself into a more powerful, more specialized tool to occasion more difficult and more specialized tasks.  The processes which are developed in this level of evolution of the complex mind may be called self-consciously cognitive heuristics.  One form of such development lies in the development of explanations for things and events so as to discover their ultimate source and ultimate result.  When taken to a very abstract degree it results in the investigations known as philosophy.  When specified to some restricted range of phenomena it is understood as a branch of philosophy known as "natural philosophy" or "science".  When the development of the knowledge of these disciplines are referenced to their own heuristic processes so as to enhance or reorganize their feasibility they are more of the philosophical and theoretical end of the spectrum, and when they are referenced more acutely to the demonstrable consequences of their application to their related phenomena, and for which their further development relies more upon the empirical demonstrations of their accuracy and precision of reference, then it is more of the experimental and technical side of the spectrum of these cognitive disciplines. 

Now surely not everyone will jump up and agree with the way I've outlined how a human reaches an understanding of his world, which I would say resembles the above description, and is a composite of the full range of his component "substructures" which cooperate to generate his totalized complexity of understanding as a "human being", together with his own uniquely human contributions qua total being (more than the sum of his components).  Also, not everyone will even be able to understand the gist of what I've said nor grasp where I'm going with it, nor have a sense of why or with what import. But I think it is a reasonable model of what goes on when human beings, and other beings, act and adapt their actions to one another. It makes more sense than a model of sheer data recording and collation, and it seems to leave room for a disciplined discussion of the so-called "qualia" of the mind, and of qualities of the mind's experience which are not describable merely as measurable movements of entities correlated with them, however consistent and well-attested such may be within some specifically related science (for example in cognitive neuroscience and its relations to neural network design and artificial intelligence).  I don't deny the substance of valuable information derived in scientific approaches that rely heavily on the descriptive/correlative/mathematical modelling process for their results.  The growth of powerful technologies confirms the power of that approach, and the model of intelligence I've outlined suggests that it is a predictable symptom of the development of intelligence in its outstripping of its own base entity as it develops exteriorized simulacra of its own process so as to extend the scaffolds of its intelligence beyond the practicable scope of its own entity into a fuller realization of itself without its inherent limits in some form or other (but also without the core of its own essence).  

Yet I would say that those are simply the embodiment of ideas, rather than ideas that have been born within the exigencies of a living body.  They are extensions of minds, but not minds "in themselves" in the same sense.  They are artifices, not life forms.  Yet they are composed of life forms, and they do behave systematically in resemblance to the life forms which created them.  They may even one day come to be synthetic reproductions of human beings made from organic materials that possess all the behavioral characteristics to seem reliably like any of some range of human beings whose real and living typology already resembles such simulacra.  I jest derisively a bit there, but I mean it all the same.  And yet they will not be alive in their composite form in the same way as that living being is which they are artificially made to resemble.  Why that is the case is a metaphysical issue, of a specific branch of philosophy which asks questions about essence, and yet I posit here simply as one of many already posited assumptions.

But this is to speak of the world as a collection of beings.  And it is also to speak of one's own entity as a collection of beings.  Neither of these discourses are the same thing as the beings "in and of themselves".  It is an instance of cognition, borne out in linguistic representation.  Nothing more.  But it may reflect an understanding that can have more or less accuracy and precision, more or less significance and relevance to any given interpreter.  I want now to bear out what those aspects of my understanding are, in specific relation to humanity and its world. 

What it means to be a living being cannot be separated in fact from what it means to that living being as that living being.  It is what is often referred to as a "subjective phenomenon".   Surely there isn't anyone who knows "what it's like" to be the being that they are who would argue that such a category of phenomena have no signification of, or relevance to "what it means to be" that sort of being.  In fact it would be better said that such a being always begins with that baseline of its own subjectivity, and this reaches out to, and is reached in towards by, phenomena.  In the first case, the phenomena is found to be sourced in the being itself, and it can give its own testimony to that origin.  It can directly realize that it is the reason for those expressions of phenomena that it might describe as its own actions.  In the second case, the phenomena seem to have a mind of their own, and reach in toward the experiencing being, as though they might also be expressions of a mind, but there is no attestation of which mind or for what reason or purpose, not in the same way that there is for the actions which are native from the being experiencing both kinds of phenomena.  Both kinds of phenomena register as "subjective experiences", but only one kind registers as originating from the subjective experiencer.  Freud's models of how the psyche forms its ego structure in relation to objects could be said to bear out this fundamental idea at which I'm getting, and it is similarly detectable in the Meditations of Descartes.  

But what I'm saying is that what the person is, is a mind.  It is not that a mind is part of a person, or that one is a construct of the other.  A mind and a person are the exact same thing.  Also, there isn't something else other than minds.  Everything that is its own entity is a mind, and also on its own scale of dignity, a person.  This doesn't mean that there aren't diversities of essences in what kinds of minds exist, what kinds of persons, or that there aren't different scales of complexity and novelty.  Rather it means that all those aspects of reality, are expressions of mental persons.   There isn't anything else than mental persons and their interactions, which are all themselves aspects found existing as and in mental persons, whether as intermediaries or as conjunctions.  This is not a novel idea, but it is rather the most basic idea.  We always start with a sense of there being some reality, but in doing that we always start with a sense, which is a subjective experience.  That it takes the form of "there being something actual" is a form of that experience, which bears out a certain spectrum of novelties of quality and form and are always personalized as there is no discourse in which they can be discussed "impersonally".  They are always personal experiences which are experienced by mental persons.  There isn't any other sort of reality.  All of reality fits within this basic description.  All of it.

Therefore it is not some grandiose notion that I can understand something.  Nor is it some sort of extra-grandiose notion that I can understand humanity.  Nor is it some mythic or arbitrary claim that I can understand the world.  I can do those and must do them by my nature as a Man in human form. That I possess the faculties for doing so is not a condition of what the world, humanity, nor any adventitious thing has upon me, but it is a response to those realities which is naturally adapted to preserving the integrity of my own nature in relation to those exteriorities.

So it is by way of enlargement upon something I said in an earlier installment of this series that I wrote all of this, where I before said that the truth may be that the reality as such is what would be described properly in panpsychical, panpersonalist, and metaphysically idealist terms.  Even to the point that "matter" is the mere syntax of specific relations between these existing beings, and not something "in itself" that is not in fact also one of these beings.  The closest thing to "material object" that exists in reality is the sense of stability in the model constructed in the cognition of one being which is made of another being due to the dominance of the former subjectivity's intelligence over the complexity of the latter subjectivity's potential to act independently thereof.  That gives the sense of a "concrete existence" that stands apart in a stable form from the experience of it, and stands out in relief from anything which varies from it so that it seems to be the stable expression of a single agent, and therefore is given the status of a stable expression of that agent, and grants a sense of  "solidity" to it which is felt to be what is called an "object".  That is, an object of one mental person's experience of another mental person's expressive act.  This is something essential to realize at least as a possible way of understanding the world, simply in that it is a possible way of understanding the world, and one which I say does not disagree with any of its phenomena, and even gives a sense of better explanation to some of them than could be granted under any reduction into some purely "descriptive data correlation" model of the world, which I also say simply complements my understanding of the world in the same way that a model of something complements the actual being.

Why I stated all of this in more detail, especially in light of what I've already said, will be explained in the next few installments of this series of articles.