AT THE FAR EDGES I
Dear pen pal: I am fine, how are you?
The wether hear is good,
but I have not herd from you in sometime...
This gray spirit yearns in desire to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought...The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; the long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep moans round with many voices. Come in friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world...
Symbolic language is a language in which inner experiences, feelings and thoughts are expressed as if they were sensory experiences, events in the outer world. It is a language which has a different logic from the conventional one we speak in the daytime, a logic in which not time and space are the ruling categories, but intensity and association. It is the one universal language the human race has ever developed, the same for all cultures and throughout history.
Yet this language has been forgotten by modern man. Not when he is asleep, but when he is awake.
Most of our dreams have one characteristic in common: they do not follow the laws of logic that govern our waking thought, The categories of time and space are neglected. People who are dead, we see alive; events which we watch in t he present, occurred many years ago. We dream of two events as occurring simultaneously when in reality they could not possibly occur at the same time. We pay just a little attention to the laws of space...despite all these strange qualities, our dreams are real to us while we are. dreaming; as real as any experiences we have in our waking life. There is no "as if" in dreams.
The dream is present, real experience. So much, in fact that it suggests two questions:
What is reality?
How do we know what we dream is unreal and what we experience in waking life is real?
I dreamt last night
that I was a butterfly
and now I don not know
weather I am a man who
dreamt he was a butterfly
or a butterfly who dreams
that now he is a man
When we first start up this path
[and its been a long and arduous one]
we were looking for something.
We didn't find it. The seemingly simple question was --
are there technological solutions to some of the social, moral, political,
and philosophical problems of our time?
Nobody yet knows the languages inherent in the new technological culture"
We are all technological idiots in terms of the new situations
Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to he previously existent
not the present
Turned out it was not a simple question
Once upon a time there evolved upon this planet an organism that was ill suited for survival. It could not run fast enough to escape enemies; if caught, its teeth and claws were too small for protection. It was too big to hide behind a leaf and too weak to burrow deeply into the ground. To survive, it took refuge in a cave
1. Pervasive fear, anxiety, and persistent feelings of insecurity
2. Obsession with the accumulation of things or the symbols of things
3. Fear of losing any portion of what has already been accumulated, even though it served no life- supporting purpose
4. Hostility against any living being that threatened to diminish the accumulation because this meant the reduction of security.
5. Deep feelings of depression following each "success" was not permanent; in a changing world, could be reversed into defeat. And so there followed a greater effort to achieve "real" success -- a compulsive and destructive behavior pattern that reinforced itself because every success was reality a failure
In the obsessive compulsive mechanism, the overriding purpose of the behavior is to attempt to achieve some security and certainty for the person who feels threatened and insecure in an uncertain world....
I see the obsessive maneuver as an adaptive technique to protect the person from exposure to any thoughts or feelings that will endanger his physical or psychological existence...
There seems to be something going on inside us that we do not understand. Some sort of cosmic transcendental forces flowing through us. Continents drift, currents shift, winds blow, snakes slither, hawks glide, the little fish float in silver schools of motions. In most of the inhabited world, most people still walk through their daily roles. We know very little about the morning of life, except that it was where mobility began; we like to think we know a little more about the afternoon. In that glade, with the late sun illunminating a dance of a creature half beast, half god, we dimly see, as in an x-ray, the mobility that is his heritage. We should be thankful we do not see the evening as clearly
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