Revolutions are caused by tribal regrouping. If you can reclassify people you may well be able to bring about a new revolution.
Tribes first were large matrilineal communities. The women would have had a strong influence on the internal culture, whereas the worth of the men would have depended mainly on their efficacy in war, protecting the weaker members on whom the tribe depended for its continued existence. Fight for territory would probably only have set in when land became a scarce commodity, but there would have been a lot to gain from fighting other tribes. The invaders could obtain what their victims owned, use the despicable aliens for slaves, steal their women (as the Vikings did) and introduce 'new blood' to get stronger, more beautiful and intelligent offspring.
Tribes regrouped by their approximate positions in relation to rivers, mountains and seas, according to the languages they developed together, and most importantly, according to the customs, religions and thoughts associated with those languages.
Tribes became almost coincident with nations. Jingoism was rife. Of course tribalism demands that you 'talk up' your own tribe and 'talk down' other tribes in order to justify fighting them and probably stealing everything they've got.
Nationalism was followed by Communism. Marx came along and reclassified (although he was not the first) people according to social 'class'. People regrouped. Instead of saying 'I'm British' and being proud of that, you may have begun to say 'I'm working class' and the working class became the tribe. Then we had to 'talk down' the other tribes, even refuse to acknowledge their very existence (who will acknowledge the existence of an 'upper' class?). 'Middle Class' was an acceptable term, because that sounded despicable and mediocre. Don't forget, it is acceptable to hate other tribes.
Once people are successfully regrouped, it is a short step to revolution, because revolution, even though perhaps starting as high-minded indignation, gathers energy from tribalism. The other tribe has all the goodies. We want those goodies. We'll fight for those goodies.
You can see the progression from clans to class (which stratified us horizontally, cutting across national boundaries).
What stage are we at now? Do we have to wait a hundred years for historians to tell us retrospectively?
No. It is obvious. The new tribes are based on gender. Gender can overthrow any tribal structure throughout the world. What we think we are is the basis for tribalism. With the rise of feminism and 'women's studies' our minds are becoming conditioned to identify ourselves first by gender. It is a very small step from that to the notion of gender exploitation. "The other tribe has all the goodies. We want those goodies. We'll fight for those goodies."
When we have food, shelter, education and social order preserved by parliament and police, women no longer seem to need protection by men. The State becomes the father. Families are weakened by easy divorce, while serial polyandry makes the bond between man and woman loose and exchangeable.
But please remember, all the great civilisations that we know of were based (and please tell me if you can think of a high point of invention and culture which was not) on the new idea of family. The idea is probably no more than four thousand years old, which of course is nothing compared with the whole development of mankind. Strong stable families are our only bulwark against tribalism.
As the family breaks down, tribalism returns. Do we want this?
Tuesday, 19 June 2012
Thursday, 31 May 2012
Why Families Break
Tribes. Long ago pre-Abraham, tribes made up the essential building-blocks of society. Instinctively, people realised it was better to outbreed than to inbreed: the offspring were more intelligent and beautiful. Today of course, we would talk of better genetic variety: earlier we find the expression 'bring in new blood'.
So tribes might turn a blind eye to their girls getting pregnant by a man from another tribe. If they made a fuss, the girls themselves would briefly turn against their own tribe so that they could meet their foreign lovers.
But once the babies were born, the mother's tribe would WANT THOSE CHILDREN BACK! They had the tribal culture to sustain, and of course without new children to replace the old, the tribe and all its delicious ways would die.
So the next thing was TRIBAL WAR.
Tribal members had to be kind and polite to others within the tribe, but to anyone outside the tribe they could be as hostile and horrible as they wished. They would only get praised for it. It was best to VILIFY the alien parent before one robbed and possibly murdered him.
In general, because in ancient history families in the modern sense had not been thought of, the tribes would naturally be matrilineal and therefore the women had tremendous power. They would, on the other hand, rely on their brothers and grown-up sons (and maybe a few pathetic inbreeding henpecked local fathers) to fight off the alien genetic contributors who had provided them with a nice new set of babies.
So who was the alien father's number one enemy? Of course it was that formidable matriarch, the mother's mother. She would be the one who would lead the father-vilification program that would start the tribal war which would bring the babies back into her own tribe.
Where do you think all those mother-in-law jokes come from?
We see the first stage of the process in Romeo and Juliet. Juliet looks to another tribe for a mate. She turns against her own tribe so that she can meet her 'foreign' lover. If she had successfully produced babies with Romeo, it would have been Lady Capulet's job to vilify Romeo and pull those babies back into the Capulet tribe. The tribal war between the Capulets and the Montagues would have been stepped up to new levels of horror and murder.
Now of course all this wrangling, fighting and murdering did not produce great civilisations. It was not until the invention of something new (something which is now in deep trouble) that the oppressive power of the tribe could be overturned. It was this invention that provided small tough units that could think independently, challenge injustice, bring down dictators, but above all conserve that energy which had previously been wasted in tribal conflict. Like putting coffee in a thermos flask, it stopped the dissipation of heat that could now be used for a useful purpose. You've guessed it. It was the idea of the family.
By Shakespeare's time the family was well established, but tribal wars were still in the air. The struggle between Lancaster and York were well remembered, but fresher in Shakespeare's mind would have been the violent clashes between the tribes of the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk on which the Capulets and the Montagues were surely based. Nor did it end with Shakespeare. The Civil War between the Roundheads and the Royalists was still to come.
Even in Tudor and Stuart times the integrity of the family was threatened by tribal war.
So tribes might turn a blind eye to their girls getting pregnant by a man from another tribe. If they made a fuss, the girls themselves would briefly turn against their own tribe so that they could meet their foreign lovers.
But once the babies were born, the mother's tribe would WANT THOSE CHILDREN BACK! They had the tribal culture to sustain, and of course without new children to replace the old, the tribe and all its delicious ways would die.
So the next thing was TRIBAL WAR.
Tribal members had to be kind and polite to others within the tribe, but to anyone outside the tribe they could be as hostile and horrible as they wished. They would only get praised for it. It was best to VILIFY the alien parent before one robbed and possibly murdered him.
In general, because in ancient history families in the modern sense had not been thought of, the tribes would naturally be matrilineal and therefore the women had tremendous power. They would, on the other hand, rely on their brothers and grown-up sons (and maybe a few pathetic inbreeding henpecked local fathers) to fight off the alien genetic contributors who had provided them with a nice new set of babies.
So who was the alien father's number one enemy? Of course it was that formidable matriarch, the mother's mother. She would be the one who would lead the father-vilification program that would start the tribal war which would bring the babies back into her own tribe.
Where do you think all those mother-in-law jokes come from?
We see the first stage of the process in Romeo and Juliet. Juliet looks to another tribe for a mate. She turns against her own tribe so that she can meet her 'foreign' lover. If she had successfully produced babies with Romeo, it would have been Lady Capulet's job to vilify Romeo and pull those babies back into the Capulet tribe. The tribal war between the Capulets and the Montagues would have been stepped up to new levels of horror and murder.
Now of course all this wrangling, fighting and murdering did not produce great civilisations. It was not until the invention of something new (something which is now in deep trouble) that the oppressive power of the tribe could be overturned. It was this invention that provided small tough units that could think independently, challenge injustice, bring down dictators, but above all conserve that energy which had previously been wasted in tribal conflict. Like putting coffee in a thermos flask, it stopped the dissipation of heat that could now be used for a useful purpose. You've guessed it. It was the idea of the family.
By Shakespeare's time the family was well established, but tribal wars were still in the air. The struggle between Lancaster and York were well remembered, but fresher in Shakespeare's mind would have been the violent clashes between the tribes of the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk on which the Capulets and the Montagues were surely based. Nor did it end with Shakespeare. The Civil War between the Roundheads and the Royalists was still to come.
Even in Tudor and Stuart times the integrity of the family was threatened by tribal war.
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Riots
It is time I fulfilled the promise of my headline.
Riots broke out simultaneously in London last night starting in over twenty 'flashpoints'. Croydon to the south and a police station in Birmingham were on fire. There was further trouble in Liverpool and Bristol. Masked children roamed the streets on BMX bikes ransacking stores and stripping PC World of its entire stock. Over 225 arrests were made, including a boy of eleven. Some of the kids in the mahem were as young as seven.
The ostensible cause of the riots was revenge against the police for shooting Mark Duggan. He was himself in possession of a gun which may or may not have shot the bullet embedded in the handset of a policeman from Scotland Yard's firearms unit.
There is nothing the devil likes more than tit for tat. If you can prove that a good man made a mistake, then hey presto! You've got carte blanche to kill, injure and rob as many innocent people as you like. The whole world can be regarded as one great blob of hostile otherness. It deserves everything it gets.
Where does this impression come from, that the world is full of evil people who deserve to be stripped of everything, followed by a horrible death?
It comes from babyhood and childhood: the time when the emotional substratum is laid down. A child learns to love or hate from his own parents. The skill with which the parents manage family interactions is crucial to his or her consequent development.
But now we live in an age where more than fifty per cent of marriages end in divorce and many children are born into loose-knit families that do not involve marriage at all. A happy couple who have been married for more than six years is as rare as a queer tomcat.
Mothers are bribed into divorce by the near certainty that they will be 'awarded' most of their husband's wealth plus custody of the children by the courts, followed by government benefits. So the incipient urge to find a new partner after five or six years (the recipe for a second-rate or decadent culture) is actively encouraged.
Civilisations at their height incorporate conflict into relationships: they learn to quarrel without hatred and without destruction. Love can survive this 'managed' conflict, but it cannot survive a deceitful superficial harmony. Good people can laugh while they quarrel. Conflict, like evolution itself, is one of the essential ingredients leading to a beautiful creation. Without it, life would be bland, tasteless and dull.
Conscious people know all this, because it is obvious. Surds do not, because their innate hedonistic drive can see no sense in anything except self-gratification. When it comes to surds, social harmony is an engineering problem. Let us study the data and see what leads to a society with maximum harmony and minimum crime.
The best is an intact family which does not watch violent videos and maintains careful control of the content of computer games. Holding up a mirror to nature is fine: but if nature is reflected in a distorting mirror which revels in blood, sex and gore. it gives children, especially those with absent fathers, a totally UNTRUE picture of normal life which they will then adopt as a template of normality. In the old days, children would imitate the elders of the tribe. Modern children see ANYTHING THAT COMES THROUGH A SCREEN as the ideal on which to base themselves. Children without fathers will splash around trying to get an idea of what masculinity is, and the screen is where they will look.
Mothers who look after their children in a two-parent family are like gold dust. They shine and never tarnish. They bring good luck and wealth to the whole society.
Mothers who try to justify their divorces by vilifying the fathers to everyone including the children, will conjure up nothing but enemies and bad luck. Their children will be stuck in shallows and in miseries.
There is a very easy way to stop divorces and separations: the courts should give custody of the children to any father who asks for it. The statistics in a major study showed (Hathaway and Monachesi: Adolescent Personality and Behavior: MMPI Patterns of Normal, Delinquent, Dropout and other outcomes - Table 92 and 93) that single fathers kept the crime rate of their children at the same level as the average for the whole sample of over 7000 families, whereas single mothers produced a crime rate amongst their children which was even higher than that of children who lived with neither parent.
In other words, single mothers are much more likely to rear the type of children involved in yesterday's riots.
If custody were granted to fathers (currently this happens in only 2% of cases) then the mothers who rush into divorce (80% of divorces are instigated by mothers) might think twice.
The ideal that I, for one, admire, is a stable two-parent family.
Riots broke out simultaneously in London last night starting in over twenty 'flashpoints'. Croydon to the south and a police station in Birmingham were on fire. There was further trouble in Liverpool and Bristol. Masked children roamed the streets on BMX bikes ransacking stores and stripping PC World of its entire stock. Over 225 arrests were made, including a boy of eleven. Some of the kids in the mahem were as young as seven.
The ostensible cause of the riots was revenge against the police for shooting Mark Duggan. He was himself in possession of a gun which may or may not have shot the bullet embedded in the handset of a policeman from Scotland Yard's firearms unit.
There is nothing the devil likes more than tit for tat. If you can prove that a good man made a mistake, then hey presto! You've got carte blanche to kill, injure and rob as many innocent people as you like. The whole world can be regarded as one great blob of hostile otherness. It deserves everything it gets.
Where does this impression come from, that the world is full of evil people who deserve to be stripped of everything, followed by a horrible death?
It comes from babyhood and childhood: the time when the emotional substratum is laid down. A child learns to love or hate from his own parents. The skill with which the parents manage family interactions is crucial to his or her consequent development.
But now we live in an age where more than fifty per cent of marriages end in divorce and many children are born into loose-knit families that do not involve marriage at all. A happy couple who have been married for more than six years is as rare as a queer tomcat.
Mothers are bribed into divorce by the near certainty that they will be 'awarded' most of their husband's wealth plus custody of the children by the courts, followed by government benefits. So the incipient urge to find a new partner after five or six years (the recipe for a second-rate or decadent culture) is actively encouraged.
Civilisations at their height incorporate conflict into relationships: they learn to quarrel without hatred and without destruction. Love can survive this 'managed' conflict, but it cannot survive a deceitful superficial harmony. Good people can laugh while they quarrel. Conflict, like evolution itself, is one of the essential ingredients leading to a beautiful creation. Without it, life would be bland, tasteless and dull.
Conscious people know all this, because it is obvious. Surds do not, because their innate hedonistic drive can see no sense in anything except self-gratification. When it comes to surds, social harmony is an engineering problem. Let us study the data and see what leads to a society with maximum harmony and minimum crime.
The best is an intact family which does not watch violent videos and maintains careful control of the content of computer games. Holding up a mirror to nature is fine: but if nature is reflected in a distorting mirror which revels in blood, sex and gore. it gives children, especially those with absent fathers, a totally UNTRUE picture of normal life which they will then adopt as a template of normality. In the old days, children would imitate the elders of the tribe. Modern children see ANYTHING THAT COMES THROUGH A SCREEN as the ideal on which to base themselves. Children without fathers will splash around trying to get an idea of what masculinity is, and the screen is where they will look.
Mothers who look after their children in a two-parent family are like gold dust. They shine and never tarnish. They bring good luck and wealth to the whole society.
Mothers who try to justify their divorces by vilifying the fathers to everyone including the children, will conjure up nothing but enemies and bad luck. Their children will be stuck in shallows and in miseries.
There is a very easy way to stop divorces and separations: the courts should give custody of the children to any father who asks for it. The statistics in a major study showed (Hathaway and Monachesi: Adolescent Personality and Behavior: MMPI Patterns of Normal, Delinquent, Dropout and other outcomes - Table 92 and 93) that single fathers kept the crime rate of their children at the same level as the average for the whole sample of over 7000 families, whereas single mothers produced a crime rate amongst their children which was even higher than that of children who lived with neither parent.
In other words, single mothers are much more likely to rear the type of children involved in yesterday's riots.
If custody were granted to fathers (currently this happens in only 2% of cases) then the mothers who rush into divorce (80% of divorces are instigated by mothers) might think twice.
The ideal that I, for one, admire, is a stable two-parent family.
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
Love
When you fall in love, it transforms you like alchemy. The whole world changes in the light of this love: things that might have been boring before take on an extraordinary vibrancy. The whole world suddenly makes sense and the suffering in it becomes almost incidental. The person you love seems more valuable than you are yourself and you know that you would willingly die to save that person. To use Bertrand Russell's word, everything is 'transfigured'. It fills you with extraordinary joy.
Now I am going to stick a pin in the balloon I have created. You may find that your love isn't reciprocated and the person isn't nearly as good as you thought they were.
But heck, the love was real and the experience was real. The world in that transformed state was just as valid as it was when you were doomed and gloomy. That leads you to search for the experience again. The person may have let you down, but you still love love. The love has a reality of its own, like the fragrance of a flower.
When you love someone, you love them just because they are there. They don't even have to do anything.
What if you could love the whole of creation like that, just because it's there? What if you could love the source of all things like that?
Now I am going to stick a pin in the balloon I have created. You may find that your love isn't reciprocated and the person isn't nearly as good as you thought they were.
But heck, the love was real and the experience was real. The world in that transformed state was just as valid as it was when you were doomed and gloomy. That leads you to search for the experience again. The person may have let you down, but you still love love. The love has a reality of its own, like the fragrance of a flower.
When you love someone, you love them just because they are there. They don't even have to do anything.
What if you could love the whole of creation like that, just because it's there? What if you could love the source of all things like that?
Surds
I wish to coin a new word, or rather extend the meaning of an old one. 'Surd' has only, to my knowledge, been used as a noun to mean an irrational number or a voiceless consonant. As an adjective it can mean 'stupid' or 'insensitive' and in philosophy 'surd evil' is the same as 'natural evil' - the evil of a falling rock that has no human agency.
I want to call this word into service as a noun, to help us with the problem of forgiveness.
We all know that most of the problems of the world come from not forgiving. We feel aggrieved and we think we must get our own back in some way. 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord' but 'for goodness sake, Lord, when are you going to get on with it?' So we wait for a bit, and then we do the job ourselves.
The trouble is, we misfire. If the person who wronged us had a green face, and that person is unavailable or dead, who can we punish? Easy. We can punish somebody else with a green face, because he is in the same group. He must deserve punishing pretty well just as much. That is why a woman punishes her husband for what her father did and a man punishes his wife for what his mother did. They belong to the man group or the woman group and they must deserve punishing just as much as the rest of their kind. Most wars are like this, e.g. Protestants like to punish living Catholics for what their dead forebears did and vice versa.
Now to summarise what I have said in previous blogs: in order to do evil, you have to know that you exist. Knowledge of your own existence leads naturally towards goodness. A conscious person who tries to do evil is extremely rare.
Most of those who harm others are unconscious. The stories we have inherited from such as Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley express this metaphorically and that is why I have toyed with the words 'zombie' and 'vampire'. They are the people who want to punish a leader because the crowd has turned against that leader, like hens pecking at an injured bird; the sort who yell 'crucify him!' for no good reason except that everybody else is doing it. They are following unconscious evolutionary programming. This is not fictional and that is why I want a new word: I think 'surd' will do very well.
Once consciousness is present, it is self-corrective. Conscious people can't do harm to others without suffering themselves, because they are CONSCIOUS and they feel the pain of the other person. That is not to say that they are soft and weak or cannot be cruel to be kind.
This makes it possible to forgive. The one who has wronged you is quite possibly a SURD. He or she is following an unconscious routine, running an entirely selfish program. The surds are legitimate fodder for evolutionary psychologists. They survive at the expense of others and over many generations this will produce a passable receptacle for something better. The whole process takes place in mental darkness. 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.'
If, on the other hand, the person you think has wronged you is conscious, there are only two possibilities. Perhaps he or she was trying to do you good (tough love), but you didn't realise it or you didn't like it. If a conscious person knowingly tries to harm you, there is absolutely no necessity for revenge. Why? Because consciousness inflicts its own punishment, and believe me, that person will suffer horribly.
I want to call this word into service as a noun, to help us with the problem of forgiveness.
We all know that most of the problems of the world come from not forgiving. We feel aggrieved and we think we must get our own back in some way. 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord' but 'for goodness sake, Lord, when are you going to get on with it?' So we wait for a bit, and then we do the job ourselves.
The trouble is, we misfire. If the person who wronged us had a green face, and that person is unavailable or dead, who can we punish? Easy. We can punish somebody else with a green face, because he is in the same group. He must deserve punishing pretty well just as much. That is why a woman punishes her husband for what her father did and a man punishes his wife for what his mother did. They belong to the man group or the woman group and they must deserve punishing just as much as the rest of their kind. Most wars are like this, e.g. Protestants like to punish living Catholics for what their dead forebears did and vice versa.
Now to summarise what I have said in previous blogs: in order to do evil, you have to know that you exist. Knowledge of your own existence leads naturally towards goodness. A conscious person who tries to do evil is extremely rare.
Most of those who harm others are unconscious. The stories we have inherited from such as Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley express this metaphorically and that is why I have toyed with the words 'zombie' and 'vampire'. They are the people who want to punish a leader because the crowd has turned against that leader, like hens pecking at an injured bird; the sort who yell 'crucify him!' for no good reason except that everybody else is doing it. They are following unconscious evolutionary programming. This is not fictional and that is why I want a new word: I think 'surd' will do very well.
Once consciousness is present, it is self-corrective. Conscious people can't do harm to others without suffering themselves, because they are CONSCIOUS and they feel the pain of the other person. That is not to say that they are soft and weak or cannot be cruel to be kind.
This makes it possible to forgive. The one who has wronged you is quite possibly a SURD. He or she is following an unconscious routine, running an entirely selfish program. The surds are legitimate fodder for evolutionary psychologists. They survive at the expense of others and over many generations this will produce a passable receptacle for something better. The whole process takes place in mental darkness. 'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.'
If, on the other hand, the person you think has wronged you is conscious, there are only two possibilities. Perhaps he or she was trying to do you good (tough love), but you didn't realise it or you didn't like it. If a conscious person knowingly tries to harm you, there is absolutely no necessity for revenge. Why? Because consciousness inflicts its own punishment, and believe me, that person will suffer horribly.
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Do we really want things to come right?
That is not such a silly question as you might think. If the ONLY wish of EVERYONE was for all things to come right, then I am absolutely certain that we would enter a golden age. It requires ABSOLUTE SURRENDER to the common good. This does not mean making the other person good, but on making oneself good. Politics is about making other people good, and religion is about making oneself good (but as we all know, religion has a habit of wandering into politics). Richard Dawkins is wrong to attack religion as the source of all evil. He should be attacking the wandering of religion into politics as the true cause.
Of course, zombie motivation pivots on 'getting what one wants' regardless of the common good. One cannot blame zombies for this. It is the essential mechanical tropism which has pulled, apparently by magic, good bodies out of the primal sludge. We call it evolution.
From a zombie point of view, consciousness has absolutely no useful purpose. It simply interferes with normal, selfish, zombie functioning.
Yet we who know existence also know this: without consciousness, the whole physical universe might just as well not be there.
What would be the use of a multifarious, complex, orderly universe, held like a hologram in the midst of infinite space and infinite time, if nobody knew it existed?
Now consciousness is in the picture, we need no longer be chained to the slavery of mechanical selfishness. Using our beam of consciousness, we can illuminate matter and chisel our local chunk of inchoate stone into a beautiful sculpture that comes alive.
Of course, zombie motivation pivots on 'getting what one wants' regardless of the common good. One cannot blame zombies for this. It is the essential mechanical tropism which has pulled, apparently by magic, good bodies out of the primal sludge. We call it evolution.
From a zombie point of view, consciousness has absolutely no useful purpose. It simply interferes with normal, selfish, zombie functioning.
Yet we who know existence also know this: without consciousness, the whole physical universe might just as well not be there.
What would be the use of a multifarious, complex, orderly universe, held like a hologram in the midst of infinite space and infinite time, if nobody knew it existed?
Now consciousness is in the picture, we need no longer be chained to the slavery of mechanical selfishness. Using our beam of consciousness, we can illuminate matter and chisel our local chunk of inchoate stone into a beautiful sculpture that comes alive.
Friday, 11 February 2011
Dream and Creation
Creation is not a single act; it is a continuous process. Everything has to be sustained, held in existence.
When we go to sleep and dream, everything can seem very real, especially if love, hatred, or fear comes into it. When we wake up we may feel foolish for having believed so deeply in the reality of what we just experienced. If you have ever dreamt, as I have, that you went to sleep inside the dream and dreamed a dream within the dream, then you may wonder if you comprehended the nature of waking up correctly. What if this is a dream? Is there an infinite series of wakings up? Will we go on waking up from different layers of dream for ever?
So what is so specially real about what we so smugly call 'the real world'? Well, you say, everything's much more consistent than in a dream. If you put something down on the table, it stays there if nobody moves it, until tomorrow. Then what about pain? If you have a really bad toothache, there is no way that you can see that as a dream. Sex, of course, seems pretty real (more on this later).
But what if dreams use different tricks on each level? What if pain, sex and consistency are unique to our level? There are hints of these even in sleep, but 'waking' life certainly has the edge.
And if we are dreaming now, whose dream is it? Yours or mine? Solipsism is a real danger here, but solipsism is not rational (as I have said before) because even my own liver is 'other' and the dreams I have when I go to bed are almost completely out of my control - I can hardly claim a right to talk about 'my' dream: I don't even know what is going to happen next. If you can do 'lucid dreaming' you might have a little more claim to being lord and master of it all, but even then, the fabric of the dream is provided for you.
There is even more 'otherness' in waking life. That is what makes creation on our level so beautiful: we can experience OTHERS, we have company and we are not alone. We know that the source is 'OTHER', and yet always present and close (holding us in existence). The things which we sometimes think should not exist, like enemies and pain, are the very things which compel us to accept and believe in the reality of otherness.
When we go to sleep and dream, everything can seem very real, especially if love, hatred, or fear comes into it. When we wake up we may feel foolish for having believed so deeply in the reality of what we just experienced. If you have ever dreamt, as I have, that you went to sleep inside the dream and dreamed a dream within the dream, then you may wonder if you comprehended the nature of waking up correctly. What if this is a dream? Is there an infinite series of wakings up? Will we go on waking up from different layers of dream for ever?
So what is so specially real about what we so smugly call 'the real world'? Well, you say, everything's much more consistent than in a dream. If you put something down on the table, it stays there if nobody moves it, until tomorrow. Then what about pain? If you have a really bad toothache, there is no way that you can see that as a dream. Sex, of course, seems pretty real (more on this later).
But what if dreams use different tricks on each level? What if pain, sex and consistency are unique to our level? There are hints of these even in sleep, but 'waking' life certainly has the edge.
And if we are dreaming now, whose dream is it? Yours or mine? Solipsism is a real danger here, but solipsism is not rational (as I have said before) because even my own liver is 'other' and the dreams I have when I go to bed are almost completely out of my control - I can hardly claim a right to talk about 'my' dream: I don't even know what is going to happen next. If you can do 'lucid dreaming' you might have a little more claim to being lord and master of it all, but even then, the fabric of the dream is provided for you.
There is even more 'otherness' in waking life. That is what makes creation on our level so beautiful: we can experience OTHERS, we have company and we are not alone. We know that the source is 'OTHER', and yet always present and close (holding us in existence). The things which we sometimes think should not exist, like enemies and pain, are the very things which compel us to accept and believe in the reality of otherness.
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