Culture as play

 

With the 1953 notes on “Culture,” Yockey develops a theme that repudiates rationalism, positivism, and other such 19th-century materialistic philosophies, presenting the post-rationalist era of History as the unfolding of a great drama that is beyond rational or scientific interpretation, because Life and hence History, shaped by the “higher man,” is itself part of a mysterium.

Here Yockey incorporates his previous themes of the “higher man,” or what has been termed “heroic vitalism” as a foundation of History, and his doctrine of polarity as a post-Hegelian dialectic. The foundations of Life and History are shaped by irrational forces, and the actors, the great men of History, follow a script according to Historical laws, rather than writing their own. They must act within the theme of the drama according to how their epoch the Zeitgeist—has scripted it as if by Divine or Unseen Hand.

Here we might also recall the concept of the “Myth” as the motive-force of History, explicated by Georges Sorel; although Yockey has recourse not to Sorel, but to German scholar Hans Vaihanger and the great Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón.

We might also be reminded not only of Shakespeare’s often quoted opening lines “all the world’s a stage,” but the entirety of the bard’s lines, which poetically antedate the morphology of History of Spengler and Yockey:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.[1]

Culture as play—the thought is not precisely new, but it is immensely important, and has not been see in its fundamental significance. The “let’s pretend” of the child is the proto-human asserting itself: similarly with savages—they too “pretend” that this action is sacred, will bring favourable consequences, while the other action is evil, will bring disaster. But children growing up in a culture-atmosphere are already vastly above savages, for they KNOW they are playing, while the savages—except for the witchdoctors, the medicine men, the proto-priests—actually believe in the collection of totems and tabus which make up their primitive culture.

***
Francis Parker Yockey on Culture

The drama is the pretense that the artificially arranged events on the boards are real. All of us accept this pretense, most obviously during the performance, and—literature and conversation show—even to a great extent thereafter.

***

Music presupposes the attitude: “Let’s pretend the world of sound is orderly, pleasing, and beautiful—like this: . . .” The inner-world of symbols is then projected into sounds.

***

Religion is the pretense: “We can understand the totality of things, so completely that we can even assign with perfect security that which we cannot understand to an orderly place, under the heading: “Mystery.” Every religion can make everything come out without remainder, because the will-to-play (here, the will-to-believe) is stronger than any mere intellectual weapons—logic, contradiction, etc. —that can be brought against it. Philosophy is religion—except that the compartment for “mystery” is smaller, and progressively less respected. Science is mere fact-ordering until the will-to-play abates to the point were it becomes world-outlook, and then it is the pretense that the sum total of things is nothing but the things themselves.

***

Ethics is the pretense: “We can be as perfect as our play-ideas of perfection if we just observe the right rules.” Thus describes both types of ethic, that aiming at goodness, and that aiming at beauty.

***

Painting is the expression of the play-feeling: “Let’s pretend that landscapes, people and things, really look like this.”

***

Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As If was an early form of the idea of Culture as play.*

* Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933) a scholar of Kant, considered in his primary work Philosophy of As If the vital role of “fictions” —what he called “fictionalism” —in both individual and collective life. Hence the world was not governed by “truth” but by the impact of an idea. For example, we might say that the “value” of Darwin’s evolutionary theory is not that it has been “proven” but that it served the Zeitgeist of 19th-century materialism and English economic theory.

Yockey’s reference to Vaihinger was written in by hand in what seems to have been an after-thought. One might conjecture that he read Vaihinger’s work after having typed the MS, and that it was closely in accord with the idea of life-as-drama that Yockey was propounding.—Ed.

***

The dying out of culture is the dying out of the will-to-play, and its attenuation ever-cruder games. The 19th century society said to itself: “Let’s pretend that we are clockwork figures, and create our codes our buildings, our dances, our inner lives accordingly.” The 20th century says: Let’s pretend we are gangsters”—but what is the gangster—a crude individualist, a savage desocialized, without the tabus of the savage. That is to say, for mere man to pretend to be a savage is no pretense, the game is thin. Almost the only play-element left in the gangsters’ code is the insistence on courage to be observed in the ideal gangster.

***

The 20th century finds the Baroque and the Gothic orientation in architecture silly. It stresses instead the “Principle” that “function must govern form.” This is the ideal also the aborigines of Australia and the Congo. This is the aggressive and deliberate declaration of war on culture. In this architecture is not isolated. In the realm of morale a doctor-quack like Freud, or a prurient statistician like Kinsey can find a hearing as an ethician in the 20th century. Instead of Kant’s magnificent Categorical Imperative, which tells us how we should act, quite regardless of how anyone else does act—again, the will-to-play—we want to know how most people do act, with the latent idea already there: if this is the way people act, then I too can act this way.

***

In warfare, the 19th century—to say nothing of the 18th—still treated war as a game with strictly permitted and forbidden measures, of which the fundamental principle was: civilians are excluded form warfare, both actively an passively: they must not fight, nor may they, as such, be made the object of warfare. This was still culture-warfare. Its last appearance was in the German conduct of the Second World War, and in that same war, it was brought to an end by American primitivity. American fliers, en masse and individually, made war solely against civilians as such, and individual fliers were instructed to murder even isolated civilians. In pursuance of these orders, American fliers murdered civilians fleeing form railroad trains, running in the streets, in parks, working in the fields. From this, there is now way back to culture-warfare.
*

Rousseau is the break with the will-to-play which is synonymous with Culture. With his idealization of the savage, the peasant, the shepherd, the milk-maid, he expresses, on the cultural plane, Culture’s fatigue with itself, Society’s fatigue with the demanding and exhausting game, the ever-intellectualization of the game, and, on the individual plane, the outburst of the jealous and inferior individual with moral indignation and moral hatred directed against that to which he is not equal. In a previous century Rousseau would not have burst out, nor he have been heard. There are always Rousseaus—there is one in every class-room.
*
We today can no longer feel the immensely strong play—urges of Gothic men, the culture-bearers of their time. These knights errant were ready at any time for a significant trifle, to risk their lives. Granted, no actual Parsifal ever lived. Yet the Parsifal ideal was present in generations of knights, rulers and warriors, and worked there formatively, just in our day literary-gangster ideals work formatively. Some respond more than others to ideals, to the Zeitgeist—all respond to some degree.
*
Children play, but know that they play. Culture-man plays, and does not know it. Civilized man consciously revolts against play, but here is still a great deal of historical necessity, i.e., unconscious play, still latent in him, and this he will play out, whether he wants to or not, whether he knows it or not.
*
Play not only makes magic—it is magic. The theatre always works magically: every successful theatrical piece contains the polarization between that which the players instinctively would like to do, and that which for any reason, they feel they should, or should not do.
*
All great men, all higher men, affect us magically. Polarization attracts us, but so does diffusion. We are drawn to the polarized man by our own higher desires, our own wish to do something with our lives above the plane of the proto-human; but so also does the kindly, gently, diffuse man attract—he is soporific, and is as pleasant as the green, sunlit meadow. But the higher man is like the snow-covered mountain peak.
*
Selected from
https://counter-currents.com/2013/09/culture-december-1953/

Francis Parker Yockey - aphorisms and notes

 

The “human race” is mostly not human — i.e., not only numerically does the animal element predominate, but in a given sample of large numbers, the animal plane predominates. Examples: obviously outside the Western culture-area the animal plane dominates the human component in the “human race.” Let him who does not yet know this visit China, India, Africa, Islam. But in Europe itself, in any great city, for example, the greater part of the population is governed by animal needs and ideals, this IN FACT, but not in theory. In America, this is true also in theory.
*
Each phase of life has its prime characteristic, and on each plane, each species of life has its special characteristic; among animals, the eagle’s EYE distinguishes him, the dog’s NOSE, the horse’s FLEET FOOT. What, however, is human? What is it that human beings have that no animal whatever has, no other form of life whatever? MIND is the prime characteristic of the human, but mind at its highest potential exists in vanishing few members of the “human race.”
*
Life and death are not opposites, not polarized — Life and matter are the poles. Death is only through poetic derivation the opposite of life — in death, the living become matter, the principles of life, spirit, departs. The process of this occurring is called death, or in other words, Death is the last performance of Life.
*
Life and spirit are identical.
*
Superiority is an attempt; mediocrity is an accomplished fact.
*
Philosophy in the 20th Century no longer has the obligation to present a system, but a picture.
Why is philosophy necessary at all in the 20th century, the age of Absolute Politics? Because even we children of machinery and statistics still have our proto-human metaphysical sense — we must fill in the background of our minds, however roughly, however superficially. For most men, this is no problem: the parents transmit their metaphysical notions to the children, and — the child is father to the man. How many men create their own world-outlook, independently of family and immediate environment? Quite factually, with no wish to exaggerate, I estimate one in a million in culture-populations, far less among savages, fellaheen, and barbarians.
*
Freud is a fairly truthful picture of the usual man; so is Marx, so is Darwin. The common denominator of these three vile systems is the equality idea. All three of these systems are, in their unconscious origins, revolts against superiority, aristocracy, culture. Darwinism says: “You see, with all your pride, you are only an ape.” Marx says: “All you superior ones are merely richer, and thieves at that, and we shall now expropriate you, and you shall be our servants.” Freud said: “Even your proudest accomplishments are nothing but your sexual impulse.”

The three vile systems have absolutely no validity applied to superior men, higher men, creative men. BUT IT WAS AGAINST THESE THAT THE THREE SYSTEMS WERE DIRECTED. With Darwin, it was purely intellectual, but with Marx and Freud hatred and jealousy are the motive forces, and all the ponderous verbiage merely decks out their “inferiority complexes,” the smoldering resentment of inferiority. How Marx and Freud would have enjoyed the Nuremberg trial!

From the beginning Marxism and Freudianism were polemical systems, never “scientific” systems. They aimed, as did all those who used these vile doctrines, at leveling.
*
Both Marx and Freud wanted to described that which they were unequal in terms of something they did understand. What is the imperative of Marx: get rich at the expense of the rich. Marx understood greed, therefore he made the whole world and its history into a sticky mass of greed. Freud’s system makes it obvious he was a monster of unspiritualized lust. If he had been gifted for love or erotic, Vienna would have had a Jewish Casanova. But love and erotic are both unknown to him. His lust is dark and animalistic, and dominated his nature utterly. Because it was coupled with impossibility of satisfaction, owing to his lack of money, position, and personal charm, it was utterly frustrated, and, like the cripple who make himself into a master chess-player, Freud smeared his unsatisfied lust over the whole world, and said “Look at this dirt, this filth — this is what you all are, even when you think you are so refined and spiritual.”
*
To Marx, the world is a huge money-bag; to Freud it is a dung-heap; to Darwin a zoo.
*
How different was the world of the author of Theologica Germanica! For him the world was an endless striving, a constant tension between the soul’s loneliness in the grey infinite and the soul’s warmth in the feeling of the Perfect, God. For him, the essential is the relationship of man to God, and that of man to man is so plainly a mere reflection of the first that he barely mentions it. And what was the Path of salvation of this man? Surely the most intense and dynamic religious imperative ever formulated: das Lassen der Ichheit, the abandonment of the very principle of Individuality and mystical union with God. This to be attained however, not like an India, by sitting still and refusing to live, but in the midst of active life.
*
All theories and proofs of the soul’s immortality beg the question. The question: “What comes after Death?” already contains in the words “comes after” the idea of Life. Life is Time; the phrase “comes after” is also Time.
*
It is a simple impossibility for the Principle of Individuality to assume or conceive its own termination. Every one of us believes instinctively in his own immortality, just as every atheist instinctively believes in God — all he does is bring a change upon names, and God becomes Nature, or something similar. But to assert in the 20th century that either God or immortality can be logically proved is stupidity; this is for the common people and for those minds which have remained stuck in the 17th century. To prove God, or soul-immortality is to insult them, doubly, for every such proof shows a weakening of the instinct belief. Reason KILLS instinct.
*
The bitterest of all things is frustration. It is the denial of Life by Life. It is a victory of the outside over the inside, the victory of Accident over Destiny.
*
There are degrees of frustration. Defeat is no frustration, provided one has been able to exert his powers to the utmost, to use himself up. Who can say Napoleon, or Hitler, were frustrated? The worst frustration — ask me, I know it — is LACK OF OPPORTUNITY.
*
Leonardo Demetrius (Ms published 1891, Milan) used to say that there was no difference between the words and voice of the unlearned and ignorant and the sounds or noises from a belly full of superfluous wind. And he said, not without justice, that it seemed to him to make no difference from which part they emitted their voice, from the mouth or from below, since both were of the same value and substance.
*
There are men who deserve to be called nothing else than passages for food, augmenters of filth, and fillers of privies, because nothing else in the world is effected through them, and they are without any virtue, since nothing is left of them but filled privies.
*
Keyserling — America Set Free, page 135

Accidents and individual variation mean little. No defeat has every changed the destiny of a nation inwardly strong if it was not annihilated. Nor has any victory which was not founded on moral and intellectual superiority ever lasted.
*
Goethe: Reverence, which no man brings into the world with him, is yet that upon which everything depends, if man is to become a man in every sense.
*
Keyserling — op. cit., If a man meeting another man begins by thinking, “I am as good as he is and accordingly treats him with familiarity, he will never learn from him, even though the other be a god. On the other hand if reverence is the primal attitude even the greatest can learn, and always does learn even form the humblest.”
*

Women are first woman and only then human beings; men are first human beings and then men.

Courtesy toward women: in Europe the respect of the strong for the weak; in America the respect of the inferior for the superior.
*
Woe to the general who comes onto the battlefield with a system. Napoleon.
*
Will, character, industry, and boldness have made me what I am.

The ambition to rule souls is the strongest of all passions.

Self-interest is only the key to commonplace transactions.
*

The Americans are psychologically socialist; so are the aborigines of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. This means merely that within each individual the social impulses predominate over the individual impulses. In this environment, individualism is stamped out, and higher types become almost impossible, because a higher type can only be individualized, psychologically egoistic. This is true also of saints, all of whom were psychologically egoists, even though they were spiritually altruistic. In America, instinctive altruism predominates, but spiritual egoism.
*
Prussian Socialism† is the opposite of American socialism. Prussian Socialism, arising as it does in a land and Culture of psychological individualism, absolutely requires an aristocracy to actualize it. An aristocracy is an expression of individualism. Thus Prussian Socialism encourages automatically the arising of higher individuals, since without them, there can be no Prussian Socialism, but only chaos. Prussian Socialism is spiritual socialism, not, like the American variety, psychological. In Prussia, Socialism is a value, a conscious ethic, an ideal, an organization-form, a means of accomplishment. In America it is unconscious, an inhibition, a negation, an inability to be individual, thus a denial of the human in man and an assertion of the herding animal in man.

† Oswald Spengler, Prussianism and Socialism (1919). The concept is derived from Spengler, and Yockey also refers to it as “spiritual Socialism” and Ethical Socialism.” It can be summed up in the word: Duty.

Source
https://counter-currents.com/2012/09/twentieth-century-metaphysics/

Jewish Leftist Activism in Children’s Fiction

 Andrew Joyce:

 What many of the book’s opponents missed, however, was that its author was a keen promoter of traditionalism and community — Jewish traditionalism and community. Unlike Heather Has Two Mommies and later books such as The Boy Who Cried Fabulous (2004), A Fire Engine for Ruthie (2004), Momma, Mama, and Me (2009), Daddy, Papa, and Me (2009), Donovan’s Big Day (2011), and Sparkle Boy (2017), which brought homosexuality, gender dysphoria, and AIDS to a mass child readership, Newman published a number of niche children’s books for her own community, offering conventional and traditional treatments of Jewish festivals devoid of any of these themes. Matzo Ball Moon (1998), Runaway Dreidel (2002), The Eight Nights of Chanukah (2008), A Sweet Passover (2012), My Name is Aviva (2015), and Hanukkah Delight (2016) all feature traditional Jewish families without a hint of sexual or cultural pluralism. They have been highly praised as traditional, family-friendly works by the Jewish Book Council.

That Newman has consciously or unconsciously produced a body of work so thematically segregated is unsurprising within the framework of Jewish deception and self-deception. The crucial factor here is that Jewish identity is integral to Newman’s sense of self and belonging, and is something that she feels very protective of. Indeed, in our attempt to assess the true psychological driving force behind the production and dissemination of the former body of work, it is worth recalling Newman’s description of herself and Gover not as feminists or lesbians, but as “fierce Jewish women” (emphasis added). One would be fully justified in asking why, given the apparently non-ethnic and non-religious context of the origins of Heather, Newman would lay most emphasis on her ethnicity. My own interpretation is that, as a homosexual, Newman is a kind of outlier within the Jewish ethnic group who, consciously or otherwise, has sought to advance the interests of her co-ethnics by ‘weaponizing’ her sexuality and directing her activism exclusively against ‘society’ rather than within her community. Of course, one finds precisely the same incongruences among heterosexual feminists who, in their fevered railings against the patriarchy remain curiously yet unanimously silent on the patriarchal aspects of Judaism and Jewish culture.

***

“From the very beginning—that is, from the publication of the first book specifically for children — the intent was to mold and shape the mind to accepted standards of behavior.”
Saul Braun, The New York Times, June 7, 1970.

This article is the product of research originally conducted for a recent article titled “Jews, Obscenity, and the Legal System.” Given the significant amount of material discovered and the uniqueness of the subject matter, I decided there was enough material for an article devoted to children’s literature. During research for the obscenity essay, I consulted the American Library Association’s list of “Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000–2009” with a view to assessing the nature and extent of the Jewish presence. The first fact to become apparent was a marked Jewish over-representation in the production of books deemed controversial or perverse by parents, schools, and other institutions. Jews are notoriously shy of the census, but are probably somewhere between the 2.2% of the U.S. population suggested by the Pew Research Center and a maximum of around 5%. Even accepting a grain of truth in the apologetic argument that Jews are disproportionately attracted to literary professions (to say nothing about motive), one might very generously expect a Jewish representation of around 10 books on the ALA’s list.

However, my biographical checks on all authors on the list, some of which were indeterminate, revealed that 22 books on the ALA’s list were penned by 17 Jewish writers.[1] Jews are thus significantly over-represented in producing contemporary literature deemed oppositional by the surrounding culture, and are even more radically over-represented when older, White-authored, entries such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (now often opposed as ‘racist’) are taken out of consideration. Since the majority of entries on the list were children’s books, and taking into account my previous discoveries concerning Jewish manipulation of demand for ‘diverse books’ in the school system, it occurred to me that children’s literature is an important, but sometimes neglected, front in the cultural conflict we see played out daily. This article is therefore intended as a brief introduction to some of the most pertinent personalities and themes in the area of Jewish Leftist activism in children’s fiction.

A great deal of Jewish radical activism in the cultural sphere comes under the umbrella of the general relationship between Jews and the Left. This relationship can historically be understood as involving Jewish innovation of, or support for, social, cultural, and political causes likely to weaken the cultural structures of the host society and make it more amenable to Jewish interests. In the chapter titled “Jews and the Left” in The Culture of Critique (p. 50 )Kevin MacDonald cites Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter, who remarked in their Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left (1982): “Whatever their situation…in almost every country about which we have information, a segment of the Jewish community played a very vital role in movements designed to undermine the existing order.” MacDonald argues that superficial divergences between Jewish religion and radical agendas are negated by the fact many ethnically Jewish radicals have persisted in adhering to a strong Jewish identity, and have often explicitly pursued Jewish interests. MacDonald writes (p. 51): “The hypothesis that Jewish radicalism is compatible with Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy implies that radical Jews continue to identify as Jews.”

Be a Jewish children’s author

> For goys: “it’s fine to have two dads. Traditional marriage means nothing. Diversity is more important than cultural traditions.”
>For Jews: crucial to protect and promote our Jewish traditions. This book features traditional Jewish family.”

I argue that the material presented in this essay should be seen firmly within the same theoretical framework proposed by MacDonald. For example, several of the Jewish writers under consideration here are homosexuals, radical socialists, and feminists. A common apologetic from “Jews on the Right,” is that such figures are anathema to Judaism, or that as adherents of the Reform movement etc., they are unrepresentative of “true Jews.” The contention here is that the situation is quite the opposite, and I stress that many of these writers are demonstrably committed to Jewish tradition and the Jewish group.

Excellent case studies in this regard can be found in Jewish lesbian feminist writers — figures who are, on the surface at least, incompatible with a group evolutionary strategy. After all, how could women who have personally forfeited reproduction be said to engage in a Darwinian struggle? However, history tells us that it has been quite possible for Jewish celibates and homosexuals to contribute in some form to group advancement. A useful example is my own recent review of the work of R.A. Maryks, “Jewish activism in the Jesuit Order,” a scenario in which Jewish males traded reproductive possibilities for political, social, and cultural influence intended to benefit the converso community of Early Modern Spain. Similarly, Jewish scholar Sylvia Fishman points out in Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Fiction (1992) that “a significant amount of Jewish lesbian writing is deeply committed to Jewish peoplehood and Jewish survival.”[2] A particularly interesting example of a radical Jewish feminist is Betty Friedan (born Bettye Naomi Goldstein), the activist behind “Second Wave Feminism” who “confessed to having always had ‘very strong feelings’ about her Jewish identity,” and saw feminism partly as a means of getting closer to Judaism and her identity as a Jew.[3]

That radical Jewish activists should turn their attention to children’s culture and education is also unsurprising. Jewish intellectuals have, in recent decades, pushed the idea that nativist and/or anti-Jewish attitudes are on a par with a highly infectious disease — with inoculation, in the form of aggressive “educational” treatment, at an early age seen as the surest remedy for the perceived ills of an “intolerant society.” Although the idea that anti-Jewish attitudes are a form of disease with roots in childhood goes back to Freud, it remains current in mainstream Jewish academic and political circles. Take, for example, the closing remarks from Abraham Foxman’s Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype, where parents and teachers are urged to “try to help the next generation grow up freer from the infection of intolerance”[4] — the goal being, as Mr. Foxman once articulated, to “make America as user-friendly to Jews as possible.” Theodore Isaac Rubin’s Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind, describes anti-Jewish feeling as a “contagious, malignant disease,” and concludes by stating, “extremely active application of insight and education is necessary to check the disease. Checkmate and eradication is [sic] extremely difficult and probably only possible if applied to the very young before roots of the disease take hold.”[5] To Rubin and the ADL, the solution to the problem of solidarity and tradition in the surrounding population is one requiring “prophylaxis” and “approaches to children.” Indeed, the ADL-sponsored tome Anti-Semitism in America (1979), concludes that “It is apparent that the schools are the most appropriate and potentially effective agent to carry out the instructional strategy just outlined.”[6]

Children’s literature, therefore, whether for entertainment or education, would be an obvious conduit through which Jews could advance ideas or encourage behaviors likely to benefit Jewish interests.

One could also reasonably predict, based on historical precedents in the form of Jewish intellectual movements (particularly multiculturalism, sexology, Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, and the theories of the Frankfurt School), that such ideas would revolve around notions of ethnic and sexual pluralism, and the critique and deconstruction of traditional family structure in Whites. Indeed, one might even expect contributing authors to have overlapping affiliations to psychoanalysis and radical socialism. Such predictions are largely borne out in the findings presented below.

One of the more interesting figures in this sphere of cultural activity is Lesléa Newman, a lesbian and Jewish feminist who has the dubious distinction of penning one of the most controversial children’s books of recent decades while also producing a series of books for Jewish children promoting traditional Jewish culture and values. In 1989, after being rejected by almost every mainstream publisher, and together with co-ethnic backer Tzivia Gover, Newman self-published Heather Has Two Mommies, described as “the first lesbian-themed children’s book ever published.” Newman recalls, “People were scared to publish ‘Heather’ even though there was a need for it. No one would touch it. But we were fierce Jewish women.” Newman’s work was recorded as the 11th most challenged book of the 1990s by the American Library Association. However, in common with reactions to Jewish activism in other cultural, social, and political spheres, the response to Newman’s work was boisterous but lacking in focus; the perception being that this was exclusively part of a homosexual agenda and there being little or no understanding of the Jewish element involved. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that “the head of a school district in Queens declared “war” on the book and sent a letter to parents warning that their children were going to be taught about sodomy. …The district president sent out over 30,000 letters  to district parents decrying the book as ‘dangerous homosexual propaganda.’” At one point Newman was described as “America’s most dangerous writer.”

What many of the book’s opponents missed, however, was that its author was a keen promoter of traditionalism and community — Jewish traditionalism and community. Unlike Heather Has Two Mommies and later books such as The Boy Who Cried Fabulous (2004), A Fire Engine for Ruthie (2004), Momma, Mama, and Me (2009), Daddy, Papa, and Me (2009), Donovan’s Big Day (2011), and Sparkle Boy (2017), which brought homosexuality, gender dysphoria, and AIDS to a mass child readership, Newman published a number of niche children’s books for her own community, offering conventional and traditional treatments of Jewish festivals devoid of any of these themes. Matzo Ball Moon (1998), Runaway Dreidel (2002), The Eight Nights of Chanukah (2008), A Sweet Passover (2012), My Name is Aviva (2015), and Hanukkah Delight (2016) all feature traditional Jewish families without a hint of sexual or cultural pluralism. They have been highly praised as traditional, family-friendly works by the Jewish Book Council.

That Newman has consciously or unconsciously produced a body of work so thematically segregated is unsurprising within the framework of Jewish deception and self-deception. The crucial factor here is that Jewish identity is integral to Newman’s sense of self and belonging, and is something that she feels very protective of. Indeed, in our attempt to assess the true psychological driving force behind the production and dissemination of the former body of work, it is worth recalling Newman’s description of herself and Gover not as feminists or lesbians, but as “fierce Jewish women” (emphasis added). One would be fully justified in asking why, given the apparently non-ethnic and non-religious context of the origins of Heather, Newman would lay most emphasis on her ethnicity. My own interpretation is that, as a homosexual, Newman is a kind of outlier within the Jewish ethnic group who, consciously or otherwise, has sought to advance the interests of her co-ethnics by ‘weaponizing’ her sexuality and directing her activism exclusively against ‘society’ rather than within her community. Of course, one finds precisely the same incongruences among heterosexual feminists who, in their fevered railings against the patriarchy remain curiously yet unanimously silent on the patriarchal aspects of Judaism and Jewish culture.

With two entries on the ALAs list, Robie Harris is another excellent example of Jewish activism in children’s fiction, having been born into an orthodox Jewish family. Harris’s most challenged text is It’s Perfectly Normal (1994), a book described by Kirkus Review as demonstrating Harris’s desire to “present more ethnic and sexual diversity than New York City’s Rainbow Curriculum ever bargained for.” Harris accomplishes this by introducing pre-teen children to multiple sex acts, transgenderism, homosexuality, and AIDS. In 1996, It’s Perfectly Normal was challenged in Washington because the “book is an act of encouragement for children to begin desiring sexual gratification … and is a clear example of child pornography.” In 1999 Harris published It’s So Amazing, which was equally challenged by parents and schools on the grounds that it was introducing ten year olds to “sexual intercourse, masturbation, abortion, and homosexuality.” In 2012 Harris provoked further controversy with the publication of Who’s in My Family, which “tells the story of changing family structures, from biracial to gay households.” Of considerably greater interest is who is in Harris’s own family, an extended network of uniformly Jewish households. Indeed, Harris’s cousin, Elizabeth Levy, is also a children’s author. Levy is best known for her Something Queer series, published between 1973 and 1997, which told the story of  the adventures of two young girls with a barely-concealed (for those who missed the title’s double entendre) lesbian subtext. In 1981 Levy abandoned subtlety altogether with the publication of Come Out Smiling, a sordid tale aimed at teens and exploring lesbian relationships at a girl’s summer camp. The villain of the piece is a White, “homophobic” father against whom the girls must “bravely” struggle.

All of this is not to say that the pushing of sexual and ethnic diversity or undermining traditional representations of masculinity in children’s fiction has been the sole preserve of Jewish women. Harvey Fierstein’s The Sissy Duckling (2002) is aimed at children ages 5–8 and “tells the story of Elmer, a duckling who is mocked for being a “sissy” but who ultimately proves his bravery.” Another incredibly controversial children’s work of recent decades is Two Weeks with the Queen, published by Morris Gleitzman in 1990. In this work, aimed at children ages 8–12, Gleitzman discusses themes including “AIDS, homosexuality, and gay-bashing.” A particularly interesting case study is Maurice Sendak, the homosexual Jewish children’s writer and illustrator behind Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Sendak made the ALAs list for In the Night Kitchen (1970), which depicts a young boy’s dream journey through a surreal baker’s kitchen where he assists in the creation of a cake to be ready by the morning. Particularly controversial was the fact the boy is illustrated by Sendak as fully naked throughout, and is depicted in a range of scenarios resembling, in the words of journalist Saul Braun, a “masturbatory fantasy.” The son of Polish Jews, Sendak has confessed in interviews to Jewish subtexts in his works, including In the Night Kitchen, and to ways in which his Jewish roots have impacted his life, views, and work.

For example, Sendak claims that from a young age he viewed “the human race as fairly aggressive and confrontational,” and remarked that the bakers in In the Night Kitchen — “with their Hitler-esque moustaches — were a reference to the Holocaust.” Similarly, it has been remarked that Sendak’s illustrations of children are “somewhat stout and gnomish. … His children are dark, with stumpy figures — not your standard, Anglo-Saxon Janet and John types.” Sendak himself has stated they are Jewish figures, being “a curious admixture of Brooklyn remembered and shtetl life in Poland fantasized.”

A heterosexual male Jewish children’s author who has thus far avoided challenges to his work is Michael Rosen, born in England to Jewish parents with roots in Poland, Russia, and Romania. Both parents were members of the Young Communist League and had opposed the Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists during the “Battle of Cable Street.” His mother was a secretary at the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the Community Party of Great Britain. Rosen himself is strongly affiliated with the radical Left, writing columns for the Socialist Worker newspaper and speaking at conferences of the Socialist Workers Party. Having carved out a reasonably successful career as a children’s poet and author, even a cursory glance at his body of work suggests that his politics has intermingled with his ‘art.’ One of the best, and perhaps subtlest, examples is This Is Our House (1996), aimed at pre-schoolers. In essence, this is an anti-nativist tale designed to dissuade children from having “prejudices” or any sense of ownership or property, but it masquerades as a simple tale about sharing. The book’s description states: “George says the cardboard house is his and no one else can play in it. It isn’t for girls, small people, twins, people with glasses, or people who like tunnels. But Lindy, Marly, Freddie, Charlene, Marlene, Luther, Sophie and Rasheda have other ideas! One by one each child is refused access until tables are turned and George finds how it feels to be on the receiving end.” In the course of the book George (depicted as White) plays happily with a box that he has constructed as his “house.” But the other children, half of whom are non-White, insist that his “home” is not just his but “belongs to everybody.”

More recently, for children ages 10–12, Rosen has authored a non-fiction book titled Who are Refugees and Migrants? What Makes People Leave their Homes? And Other Big Questions (2016). The book is said to compare “the effects on society of diversity and interculturalism with historical attempts to create a racially ‘pure’ culture. It takes an international perspective …. There is also a role-play activity asking readers to imagine themselves in the situation of having to decide whether to leave their homes and seek refuge in a new country.”

Essentially then, it is a quite typical example of multicultural propaganda. Jewish involvement in producing pro-multicultural non-fiction texts for children is of course nothing new. The earliest example I have been able to find (at least in the English-speaking world) is Dorothy W. Baruch’s Glass House of Prejudice (1946). The text was described by Kirkus Review in the year of its publication as the “first approach of its kind to problems of minorities, of racial discrimination, of intolerance, based on case histories, many of them closely aligned with adolescent problems. Dr. Baruch’s approach touches both intellect and emotions; she cuts to the heart of the matter …. She has shown how the problems [surrounding immigration] are rooted in conditions we [the native population] must face, insecurities, false attitudes, ignorance.” Such ideas were of course fully in keeping with the theories advanced by the Frankfurt School.

Before concluding, some mention must be made of the most prolific author on the ALAs list of most challenged books, 2000–2009: Judy Blume (born Judith Sussman). Blume’s three entries exceed any other writer, while during the 1990–1999 period she had five entries. For the period 1990–2004 Blume came second only to fellow Jew Alvin Schwartz, whose violent and explicit horror stories were deemed inappropriate for the age group he claimed to write them for. Blume has come into conflict with parents, schools, and other institutions because her works contain graphic sexual content and offensive language, as well as themes that have been deemed unsuitable for any child age group. Those elements are present in every one of Blume’s challenged books, but to cite just two examples, Deenie (1973) Forever (1975), Blume introduced into teenage fiction such themes as compulsive masturbation, teenage pregnancy, attempted suicide, homosexuality, and talk of sexually transmitted diseases. But how does Blume see herself? A feminist role model? A cultural egalitarian? In her own words: “Culturally and spiritually I’m a Jewish girl from New Jersey.”

Discussion

There are of course many more writers who could be profiled, and many more works which could be explored, but the intention of this essay has been to offer a modest introduction to some of the more pertinent themes in this area of Jewish cultural activity. The contention here is not that Jews are solely behind the decline in social, cultural, and sexual norms that historically have been very beneficial for White societies. After all, once we exclude non-White authors from the ALAs list we still find around 60% of socially oppositional works being produced by White writers. There’s obviously a market for such material, and, as usual, no shortage of Whites willing to take advantage of it. However, the contention here is that there is significant evidence that individuals identifying as Jews, and seeing themselves fully as members of the Jewish ethnic group, have been at the cutting edge of cultural erosion, often innovating or acting as pioneers in the deconstruction of social norms. Essentially, what we see is that writers like Baruch, Harris, Levy, and Newman broke ground into which fellow Jewish activists — and outlier Whites — could follow. It is difficult to say with certainty how different things would have turned out without such aggressive action from these self-described “fierce Jewish women” (and men), but one could reasonably surmise that the policing of morals and norms within our group would have been significantly more robust without the undermining cultural influence of fads like psychoanalysis or the selective “backing of free speech” by Jewish groups when it suited their interests to do so.

Finally, the bigger picture here is the indoctrination of our children. On this note I refer to the epigraph that opened this essay. Ultimately we are dealing with materials designed to mold and shape the minds of our children to the new “accepted standards of behavior.” We are now not far from a time when healthy tales of White children engaging in adventure will be deemed reactionary because of their potential to instill pride, or dangerous because they aren’t tolerant enough of the proliferating motley of sexual and racial minorities that now intrude into all aspects of culture. Our challenge in the coming years will be to get into this culture war in a more significant way. That will require developing a new literature, and stamping out the poisonous one that lies before us.

[1] Avi (aka Edward Irving Wortis), H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger, Judy Blume, Esther Drill, Lois Duncan (Steinmetz), E.R. Frank, Bette Green, Robie Harris, Carolyn Mackler, Johanna Reiss, Louise Rennison, J.D. Salinger, Louis Sachar, Alvin Schwartz, Maurice Sendak, Charles Silverstein, R.L. Stine.

[2] S.B. Fishman, Follow My Footprints: Changing Images of Women in American Fiction (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1992), p.50.

[3] F. Klagsbrun, “Marching in Front,” Hadassah Magazine (Nov. 1993), p.24.

[4].A. Foxman, Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype (New York: Palgrave, 2010), p.230.

[5] T.I. Rubin, Anti-Semitism: A Disease of the Mind (Fort Lee: Barricade Books, 2009), p.156.

[6] H. Quinley & C. Glock, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: The Free Press, 1979), p.202.

Andrew Joyce 

The religion of the 19th century, that grotesque materialization of the spiritual, profanation of divine, mechanizing of the organism and insolent disrespect to the Awful and the Unknowable

 

Perhaps there are a few souls in Europe who feel within them the religious imperative of the future. Unlikely, but possible, just as Nietzsche and Carlyle were utterly improbable in the desert of mechanistic criticism that was the 19th century. If so, they are the summit of the religious pyramid of Europe. Beneath them is the stratum of our precious and strong interim religion, making out of skepticism a Faith, and out of History a sacred philosophy. Beneath this is the great mass of the population which is still, in the religion of the 19th century, that grotesque materialization of the spiritual, profanation of divine, mechanizing of the organism and insolent disrespect to the Awful and the Unknowable. This god-killing mockery took two forms, in Europe, Christian-social politics, and in America, compulsory social entertainment in the Sunday meeting-houses. These forms it still, has, and this is today what calls itself religion in the Western Civilization. Below this stratum in the religious pyramid—not in any absolute spiritual sense, but only in a chronological sense—is the Jesuit level, the plane that regards religion as a matter of knowledge, formula, law, and in case of doubt, of authority. This is simply the Counter-Reformation, and includes members of both sides of that era. Below this is the Reformation level. Still today in Germany there are many, and elsewhere there are some who have remained permanently in the Lutheran stage. To that they attained in their personal forming, and there they stay. Below them—are there any left who feel the old, pure, monastic religiousness of the pre-Renaissance period of true religion? Yes, there must be, although they are not to be found in the offices of the church, wearing the purple, or engaging themselves to the hilt in those banking operations which constitute religious administration today. They would be in some monastery, in an isolated rural district, the plains of the Romagna, or the Spanish Sierras. This type simply, could not survive in a city. But these, together with those others of problematical existence, the religionists of the 21st and 22nd centuries, are the only true religionists in Europe; for these two groups—and for them alone—religion is directed to the transcendent, it knows and loves the Unknowable, it personalizes the impersonal, it cares for the indifferent.

***

For the other aspect of our interim religion is that the object of its tremendous feelings is unworthy of it. God and the Gods are still asleep, still in the deep slumber into which the Counter-Reformation lulled them. For when Western man introduced militarism and politics into religion, he expelled God and the Gods. Religion is the window of the Culture looking out into the cosmos, and when the culture becomes obsessed with the surface of the earth, that window is closed. But it is only the cosmos—the entirety of all things, organic, inorganic, man, culture, and meaning—that is the proper object of religion. Culture is not worthy. But there is nothing else; the divine aspect of the cosmos—god and the gods—cannot be violently reawakened. It is slowly awakening, but not for us, for those who come 2 or 3 generations after us. Every religion has its mysteries, its idiom, and even its painful point. This is ours, that our religion takes the form of a yearning which sees its satisfaction beyond its grasp, that the last perfection of religious feeling is forever denied us, moving across our dark golden-brown autumnal bridge of culture-religion, bathed in the dying light of the second twilight of our superpersonal Western life.

*
And so, nobody tells us, that to put into effect the Brotherhood ideal which our One-World apostles shower upon us from the pulpits, requires dictatorship, a reign of terror, armed force, the inequality of a system of slaves and masters, men in command and men in obedience – in short: Moscow. – (text from 1953)

When Jesus was taken before Pilate, then two worlds were facing each other in immediate and implacable hostility: a world of facts and a world of truth. At this appallingly distinct scene, overwhelming in its symbolism, human tragedy took the highest conceivable form. In the famous question of Pilate: “What is truth?” – lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of truth, the prestige of State and war and blood.

“What is actuality?” – for Pilate actuality was all; for Jesus nothing. How – otherwise – could pure religiousness stand up against history or sit in judgment on active life?

“My Kingdom is not of this world.” This final word admits of no gloss. A statesman can be deeply religious, a pious man can die for his county – but they must, both, know on which side they are standing. When the statesman ridicules the inward thought-process of the ethical philosopher in a world of fact . . . or the pious man discards all ambition in the historical world as sinful and as lacking any lasting value . . . then for the onlooker it is meaningless to argue which one of the two is right or wrong.

But if our present administration wishes to “improve” the religious feeling of our masses in the direction of political, practical, purposes – then these ten, twelve, or fourteen point acrobats stand before History as absolute fools.

And equally, when our Brotherhood Preachers try to bridge the course of History and the existence of a divine world-order – they are fools also. They’d better leave this experiment to those champion prestidigitators whose nation-feeling over the last four millennia comprised neither more nor less than what was and is covered by the Ideas of the Church of their landless, boundless Consensus.

Francis Parker Yockey

Nanamoli Thera - Consciousness and Being

 What follows will have to be stated in terms of ordinary speech, though that necessarily involves the word “is” and logical constructions, because speech is hardly possible without them.

Nevertheless they have to be regarded here as a makeshift, and the whole of what follows tends to undermine the ultimate value of speech, retaining it, however, as a necessity for communication in conditions where separateness and individuality predominate.

The word “consciousness,” it seems to me, can only refer to what one might define provisionally as “the knowing that cannot know itself without intermediary and that cannot function in experience (of which it is an indispensable component) except negatively.”

To the question “What is consciousness,” then, a low level provisional answer might be “It is the pure subjective” or “It is the bare knowing of what it is not that constitutes (orders) experience and allows it being.” It must be added that, when consciousness is, it seems to be individualized by what it knows. But on another (higher) level the “is” in the question has still to be questioned, and so the low-level (and logical) answer is only a conventional makeshift, a conventional view, nothing more. And this qualification applies not only to logically inductive and deductive statements necessitating use of the word “is,” but also to descriptive statements that appear in “logical” form, using that term, or any equivalent.

When I ask myself, “What does the verbal expression ‘universal consciousness’ refer to?,” I confess to be unable to find an answer, because, in spite of its “attractive” form, I cannot distinguish it from non-consciousness (see below). So I seem to have no alternative but to regard the phrase as one of those abstract expressions that appear on the surface to mean something, but when more closely examined, do not. (This, I know, may seem shocking, but I am more interested here in finding the facts than in avoiding shock.) The more I examine and observe experience (What else can one do? Build castles?), the more I find that I can only say of consciousness (and in this I find a notable confirmation in the Pali Suttas) that it seems only describable (knowable) “in terms of what it arises dependent upon” (i.e. seeing-cum-seen … mind-knowing-cum-mind, known or mind cum-ideas), that is, negatively as to itself. And so, instead of being said to appear, it should rather be called that negativeness or “decompression of being” which makes the appearance of life, movement, behaviour, etc., and their opposites, possible in things and persons. But while life, etc. cannot be or not be without the cooperation of the negative presence of consciousness, which gives room for them (and itself) to “come to be” in this way (gaining its own peculiar form of negative being, perhaps from them)—the only possible way of being—they are, by ignorance, simultaneously individualized in actual experience.

Unindividualized experience cannot, I think, be called experience at all. Thus there appears the positive illusion also of individual consciousness: “illusion” because its individuality is borrowed from the individualness of (1) its percepts, and (2) the body seen as its perceiving instrument.

Unindividualized perception cannot, any more, I think, be called perception at all. The supposed individuality of consciousness (without which it is properly inconceivable) is derived from that of its concomitants. This illusory individualization of consciousness, this mirage, manifests itself in the sense both of “my consciousness” and of “consciousness that is not mine” (as e.g. in the sensation of being seen when one fancies or actually finds one is caught, say, peeping through a keyhole, and from which the abstract notion of universal consciousness develops). The example shows that the experience of being seen does not necessarily mean that another’s consciousness is seeing one, as one may have been mistaken in one’s fancy owing to a guilty sense (though the experience was just as real at the time), before one found no one was there. To repeat: my supposed consciousness seems only distinguishable from the supposed consciousness that is not mine on the basis of the particular non-consciousness (i.e.material body, etc.) through which its negativity is manifested and with which it is always and inevitably associated in some way. It is impossible, I think, to overemphasize the importance of this fact.

So of the concept, “universal consciousness,” I at present think that the word “universal” misleads. (Perhaps some hidden desire for power to “catch all consciousness in the net of one’s understanding,” and so escape the horrors of the unknown, seduces one to catch at this seemingly attractive term.)

Again it may be asked: What knows universal consciousness?

Would not individual consciousness (if the “universal” is accepted) be held inadequate to judge it? And how can it know itself, or what are the means by which it can know itself and distinguish itself from non-consciousness and individual consciousness? I can find no answer to that and so I conclude that, if I ask it, that is simply because I must have started out with an unjustified assumption about the nature of consciousness (which, platitudinous as it may seem, is horribly difficult to understand and handle in view of its negativity; when one talks about “consciousness” normally, one finds on examination that one has not been talking about it at all but about the positive things like pleasure and pain, action, perception, etc., that always accompany and screen it). Is the question then really necessary? Consciousness, of course, cannot be denied as a necessary constituent of experience, but the trouble starts when we begin to ask what consciousness (or its nature) is. We have assumed the individuality of consciousness, apparently unjustifiably, because of the observed individuality of the objective part of experience through which we say it is manifested; and the assumption of its individuality logically leads to the further assumption of some universal form. Why?

Now, as I said earlier, when I begin to ask what something is (is, say, consciousness individual, universal, both, or neither?), we have taken being for granted and failed to examine the nature of a part of my question. In one sense consciousness seems correctly describable as functioning (that is in its true negativity) by putting everything in question: What is this? What am I? What is life? What is consciousness? What is being? Now here the emphasis must be removed from “what” and “this” and placed squarely on “is.”

Suppose I suggest this: for “is” read “belief-attitude” (as a mode of craving combined with ignorance). In other words, it is the nature of consciousness to make be (with the aid of desire-for-being and of ignorance-of-how-anything-comes-to-be) and the nature of being to depend on consciousness. The multiplicity and the contradictoriness of the answers normally given to these questions ought to be sufficient evidence for something of the sort, or at least for the suspicion, that all the methods of answering them in the way normally done are radically wrong in some way. In fact the contradictory answers in all their variety, as usually given, each bolstered up by logic, betray, it seems to me, just that form of ignorance-craving combination which make perception/non-perception, change/immortality, time/eternity, life/death, action/ inaction, choice/fatality, unity/variety, individuality/universality, seem not only possible but real. (It then seems necessary or “right” [here we have craving] to determine what among these is [here we have ignorance] real and what is not.) And the trouble begins again: I begin asserting “I am this, I am not that,” “This is that,” “A is B,” “Consciousness is life,” “Truth is beauty,” “Life is good,” “Killing is right,” “The end is the justification of the means,” “I am,” “God is,” etc., all of which others may deny. Perhaps we get angry and come to blows. How many more people in history have been killed for the sake of opinions about what is and what is not than have been killed for the sake of facts? View-points, interpretations, and opinions about the raw material of experience differ, less or more, from individual person to individual person. The more consistent and logically strengthened any moral, religious, or philosophical system becomes, the more possible it becomes for it to be contradicted by an opposing system. And then bare craving has to arbitrarily choose and bash the opponent on the head if it can. That is why Buddhism (especially Nāgārjuna, but also Theravada) favours a dialectic that pulls down all such positivistic-negativistic systems (the positive is always haunted by the negative, and so there is really no true via negativa or via positiva in any absolute sense). It pulls them down using their own premises.

Of whatever I can say that it is, by that very fact I imply that it is not: It is this, is not that. It then is in virtue of what it is not, being so constituted by the consciousness that determines it thus. But the consciousness on which its being depends is negative, whose negativity appears in objective things as their temporality and change, the change in their being. But while the being of whatever is objective to it appears as positive, even though it may change, its own being appears as a negation of itself and a denial, flight or movement, the temporalizing of the temporalized objective world.

Now, perhaps, you will understand why it is really impossible for a Buddhist to answer the questions, “Does Buddhism teach the extinction of consciousness? Is nibbāna the extinction of consciousness?” On the basis of what has been said above, could it be answered yes or no without examining each term of the question?

There is, of course, another, different approach to the analysis of (not the answer to) that question: Why should consciousness (however conceived) seem preferable to cessation-of-consciousness (however conceived)? Consciousness of deprivation, of an “abyss of nothingness,” is not cessation of consciousness. Would not any preference (absolute one-sided choice) for one over the other show craving in the aim if that were set up as the ultimate aim? The desire-to-end-craving, as I see it, is a provisional measure adopted while craving is still present in order to use craving to terminate itself, while the aim is absence-of-craving and consequently ending of suffering. Use of the word is (which implies presence of ignorance) in this way is also use of present ignorance to terminate itself, while the aim is (to me in this state) liberation from ignorance.

Second, suppose a state of consciousness without suffering.

Would it not have to be entirely without change since the slightest change in the state must imply a degree of suffering intruding. But can a state of consciousness absolutely without change be distinguished at all from absence of consciousness? I do not see how it can. However a mixture of longing for the incompatible (craving) and fear of or disinclination to face the facts of the association and complexity which are inseparable from conscious experience (ignorance) can make it seem as possible and realizable as the catching of the red in a rainbow with a butterfly net. So out we go with our butterfly nets chasing colour … and get wet instead.

Craving and ignorance persist in heaven, though suffering may be suspended there for a time.

That is how I see Emerson’s “Take what you will but pay the price,” viz. “Pay death as the price of life,” or “Pay suffering as the price of consciousness.” May get it on loan, but if one does not pay up when the bill comes in, the bailiffs distrain. But that does not mean that I think one should counter with undiminished craving and ignorance and use them to denounce life, consciousness, etc. I say one should take them as they are and develop understanding of them. That, as I see it, and only that, along with the sharing of it, is the true source of joy, not joy of life haunted by fear of loss-of-consciousness, and so on. This you know, so I am not saying anything new.

If I ask myself “Is it possible for me to end consciousness?” I have to reply to myself that I see no possibility at present. (What might happen if I succeeded in ending craving and ignorance, of which I see no prospect at present, is, of course, hard to say!) If the possibility were available now, I at present see no sound reason why I should not avail myself of it. Pure speculation! Yes, but at least it prevents me coming down one-sidedly in favour of consciousness or in favour of non-consciousness in the crude mode.

I do regard death (my life’s end, murder, or suicide) as the ending of consciousness: to presume that conscious continuity (negativity) ends because a particular continuity of its material objective world (including its body) ends seems to me a pure assumption whose opposite is just as valid, with possibly better logical arguments in favour of it if the evidence is observed without bias. However, what happens to me at death cannot be known. Consequently I am at liberty to assume (since I cannot avoid assuming something about it) what seems most reasonable. Death seems above all to be forgetting. I do not know. But since I have to believe something about it whether I like it or not, I do not believe that consciousness ends with death. Memory may well do so. I don’t, however, know that this is what I want not to believe.

It is, I think, rather important to bear in mind one thing in regard to what has been said above. With this view there are two scales of value (not so much divorced as crossing at right-angles) which must be carefully discriminated. The physical world of consciousness-being-action in which we live and are, biased by ignorance and propelled by craving, is governed by perception of being and the practical values based on that. But any positive metaphysical system, whether based only logically or emotionally on it, which is founded on that, is haunted by the shadows that it cannot avoid casting and that it cannot itself see (like the Sun). It acts in virtue of cause and effect and its thought is logical by its dependence on the word “is.” As far as we live in this world we have to live its mode and by its values, or we risk falling into wells through star-gazing. But none of its laws are made absolute (without divorcing idea from experience). The Void, of which it cannot be said that it is or is not, nor that it has consciousness or has none, while it denies absoluteness to any experiential value (alike to being and to consciousness) cannot be identified. And that is the doctrine of not-self (anattā) as I see it in one aspect at present. This voidness cannot be “is-ed” and so introduced into the worldly scheme, except as the denial of absoluteness of all particular values. It has no more effect on ordinary life than the theory of relativity. But just as that theory completely alters calculation of enormous speeds, so, as I see it, this void-element completely alters calculations of extraordinary situations, of death (as killing, suicide or the partner of old age).

Written in June 1957

Solalterism versus Solipsism—Dialectic

 The solalterist description of the world, as used openly by the Behaviourists, and as used covertly by such scientists as Ross Ashly, contains a hidden ‘dishonesty principle’ (i.e., active functioning of ignorance as self-deception) when it claims and believes its description to be subjectively adequate and altogether complete.

The difficulty of the ‘Theory of Types’ which questions, the validity of any ‘complete’ description of ‘all’ because it cannot include itself, need not be brought in here. The ‘dishonesty principle’ is evident in Ross Ashly in his, on the one hand, admitting that he is not dealing with consciousness and, on the other, claiming that pain ‘is’ a certain physical behaviour pattern.

Association (whether absolutely co-essential or not, is not known) of purely subjective pain is identified with that behaviour pattern, which, unlike the pain aspect, is describable in purely physicists’ terms. That includes the two principles of Adaptation and Feed-back. Resting on that identification, which is false, the conclusion that conscious man is only an elaborate machine follows, and it proves that he has no soul. This proof has nothing to do with the Buddhist proof of anattā. 

The illusion created by the apparent completeness of behaviourist-physicist description is reinforced by the absence of any strict solipsistic (correspondingly inversely false) description to oppose to it. All solipsistic theories so far have been badly self-deceptive on the point that they have never been pursued with scientific and logical ruthlessness and have always contained a large element of properly solalteristic material mixed up. They are thus easily shown to be absurd and consequently solipsistic thought has been bullied and frightened off the subject. 

The difficulty lies in re-stating and purifying the true solipsistic from injected solalteristic material and in finding a set of terms in which to describe it. 

What is essential therefore is (a) to show clearly where the solalterist treatment (absolutely necessary as it is) must necessarily end in incompleteness (which can only be glossed over by false identification with the purely subjective) and where it deceives itself and others by covertly smuggling in (properly) solipsistic material (pain) and (b) to make a correspondingly adequate solipsistic description showing where the deception and the ‘smuggling-in’ or injection of solalterist material lies. (Sep. 56)

658. …And this is so not only with technicalities as these but also with theories of importance current in Western thought, about Perception, Causality, Consciousness and Being. It is said that the (strictly objective and so most respectable) sciences have abandoned speaking in terms of ‘causes’ and ‘effects’; and Hume remains unrefuted where Causes (as usually conceived) are upheld. There is no agreed theory of Perception. That, perhaps most fashionable now, which (tacitly treating consciousness as an ‘epiphenomenon’) looks for its justification to the laws of Physics, to Neurology and to Protoplasm, is an admitted makeshift at best and ultimately vitiated by its failure to take proper account of the subjective side of experience (to deal with ‘I’); for it remains awkwardly incontestible that all data are ultimately private. Should Consciousness be taken to include, or not, also the ‘Unconscious’ of the Psychoanalysts, which Existentialists deny? Fear of solipsism seems to have shepherded the main body of thinkers towards the opposite, perhaps more insidious, fallacy of solalterism.

Schopenhauer described the Solipsist as ‘a madman shut up in an impregnable blockhouse’. But the Solalterist, who ignores the observer,—the Behaviourist who only admits the existence of ‘the Other’—may perhaps be considered scarcely more sane and to have shut himself out of his house, slamming the door with the latchkey inside: ‘the philosophy of the subject leaving himself out of his calculations,’ to quote Schopenhauer again. Then the indispensable words ‘being’ and ‘existence’ (there are and is—as copula or as absolute), with their ambiguity and the homeless family of fundamental assumptions that they are often made to shelter, are normally taken for granted (the otherwise critical authors of The Meaning of Meaning, for example, are strangely content not to examine them at all), or they are left to the more inaccessible of the post-Hegelian ontologists. It has even been complained that there is no longer in European philosophy any agreement on what these words stand for. Such conditions have made of European Ethics, as it were, a displaced person: she has to take shelter where she can.

*

22. The observer does not appear in his observed field in any way at all, which ‘lacks nothing’ (§ 7), which is why he is symbolized by ‘o.’ While he is everywhere, while he is absolutely essential, he ‘does not count’ at all. Whether he is one or many it is impossible to tell except from the field or fields that are being observed. But this anticipates. Consequently, while his singularity or plurality may be a matter for consideration in an inquiry into his nature, in an inquiry into the nature of the observed he can be disregarded (so long as I remember that there I learn nothing about him). I shall therefore, for the moment at least, put him in brackets (‘o’) and forget him (remembering, of course, that I have forgotten him). 

This is what all Objective Science claims to do (and often forgets to do) and for which admiration is commonly expected.

(The results of this I shall call ‘Solalterism’ or the ‘Science of the Subject leaving himself out of his calculations’). Since He counts for zero in the observed, which is not observed without him, he can easily be reintroduced. It is, of course, the converse of the opposite procedure, where results are usually condemned without trial as detestable and are commonly called solipsism’ or that of the ‘madman who has shut himself up in, an impenetrable ‘blockhouse.’ (the last passage comes from The Essential Relation in Observing 195

Nanamoli Thera 

Michaux or rare indeed are the madmen equal to madness

 The Waking Zone.

 The above observations of micro-operations* in rapid action, noticed and recorded as they are happening, require tremendous accuracy of perception. It is remarkable that, in spite of all the mental turbulence of the micro-operations, this wakefulness and precision is completely available during the second state. Michaux called this function of intelligence an “incorruptible observer”: “All is madly shaken. All or almost all, because at the same instant, a new, hitherto unknown watchfulness is there, installed, observing, reflecting . . . purely me, a separate me, irreducible me, beside the mistreated, fragmentary, intermittent one.”47  This acute awareness appears to function almost unaffected by mental speed and has an unshakable capacity to discriminate the micromoments of experience. It is on this “waking zone” that all recovery depends.

During the hallucinogenic experience there are moments, sometimes long moments, when there is a direct perception, a direct “knowing” of the waking zone. It happens most strikingly when there is a “slowing of associations,” as Michaux called it. Thoughts may entirely cease. It has been likened to entering a calm sea or the relaxation after the struggle of birth, of truly being on earth or in the true depths of oneself. It is sometimes described as being pristinely clear to the extent that the cause and effect of all activity happening in the realm of mind is illuminated. This experience is usually overlooked and ignored by everyone around the person having it. Professionals, especially, dismiss these experiences as having no value, of being only further “imaginings.” Yet the one who experiences the waking zone as being at the very core of existence feels it as a momentous event of life-changing and “spiritual” proportions.

A psychotic episode may contain within it the beginnings of a spiritual breakthrough. The spiritual qualities of extreme mental states are real and powerful, and they are part and parcel of the pain, confusion, and dangerous quality of madness. To devalue or negate these spiritual aspects is to devalue or negate the person who experiences them, for these qualities are inseparable from the person. That is the true definition of stigma—a devaluation or negation that marks as shameful those qualities that are in a person's heart. 48

It is almost impossible to chemically obliterate this awareness. But it can be obstructed. It can be clouded over, or made dysfunctional by a variety of conditions. For instance, there can be an extreme swing of the pendulum toward slowing down. Just as the speed of mind can be seem-ingly infinitely accelerated, so it can be decelerated, to the point of com-plete “numbness” or
total inertia. 49  Thus, the waking zone needs to be protected, supported, and strengthened during the turmoil of the micro-operations. Recognizing both the existence and the vulnerability of this waking zone is therefore of critical importance to an intelligent administration of powerful mind-altering “antipsychotic” medications.

What happens within the waking zone that makes it so indispensable to recovery? It precisely separates and distinguishes between the appearances of mental events. It is attentive without bias or distortion. It can recognize what is happening within the mind for what it is, whether sane or insane. It focuses particularly on a fundamental quality of mind, the impermanent nature of the field of consciousness.

During the speed of the second state, no phenomenon of mind is brought to as much painful realization as the impermanent flux, the continual arising and dissolving of mental worlds and apparitions. This impermanence is also responsible for the momentary breaks in what might otherwise be an unbearable intensity:

No matter what the spectacle you were watching in your vision . . . it will suffer a general overthrow. Another composition will take its place, will be developed, will be repeated until a new upheaval occurs and your attention will turn to the next sight. It is then that you give a low sigh, a sigh of extreme relief which is very moving to anyone who hears it and understands. But the new presentation will follow without delay. Here it comes: it emerges, grows distinct, is developed, is manipulated, changes, multiplies, then in turn, when its time has run out, it collapses and is not seen again.50

The shock-substance is not creating this spectacle of “change.” It simply allows what is ordinarily taking place to be unveiled in agonizing clarity. Many people who have not necessarily been in extreme mental states have spoken of the inherent and fundamental role of the impermanent nature of mind. It is crucial to early Greek philosophy, to the Hindu and Buddhist meditative traditions, to the philosophy of Nietzsche, and, in its most abstract form, to modern physics.51

In its most subjective form, impermanence is dazzling. It gives no quarter. Michaux called it the “torture of what is unstable,” and it is at the very center of the infinitizing machinery. This fundamental situation of chaos is itself represented, is itself theatricalized in hundreds of ways. A deluge of images dramatizes what is happening. Here is one of Michaux's “field notes,” called “The Razor of Impermanence”:

Dazzling scythes of light, scythes set in flashes of lightning, enormous, made to cut down whole forests, start furiously splitting space open from top to bottom with gigantic strokes, miraculously swift strokes which I am forced to accompany internally, painfully, at the same unendurable speed and up to the same impossible heights, then immediately after-wards down into the same abysmal depths, with the ruptures even more and more monstrous, dislocating, insane . . . and when it is going to end . ..if it is ever going to end? . . . Finished. It's finished.52

Impermanence in excess and the chaos of losing orientation are translated into bodily feelings of huge extension. The sense of the body loses its limits: transformed into another body, or into an abstracted body, one without restraint, or released from measure and restriction, in a delirium of vastness. The mental mechanism, following the body's delirium, is also repeatedly drawn to the infinite: “an impression familiar to dozens and hundreds of unsuspecting, dumbfounded mescaline experimenters, which has it equivalents in several mental illnesses and ranges far into unreality and megalomania.” 53 The razor of impermanence is the most cutting blade of all the micro-operations within the infinitizing machinery.

Overbearing metaphysical convictions abound. In the second state Michaux is in a chasm of reaching for divinity (a “theomania,” as he calls it) and he claims direct contact with a palpable infinite. Everything leads him to it:

a certain metaphysical banality consisting of the common human basis of thought that instantly transmutes itself into beliefs bearing on Immensity, Eternity, Immortality. The Absolute. Immanence. What is beyond Time, Space, the accidental, the phenomenal.54

It must never be forgotten, Michaux warns, that all these disorders occurring to someone in the second state are the results of “innumerable little internal ambushes,” which only later becomes visible to others. Even when he is delirious, said Michaux, “he creates and manifests a disorder much less acute than the multiple minute disorders that hack him, shake him, unbalance him from all sides.”55

Michaux expressed this further in his poetry:

Firing
Firing in the head
firing which doesn’t stop.

Collapse
Outside became too strong

A man standing in a corner of the room
suddenly there
suddenly disappeared

Sabotages
innumerable little sabotages56 

The critical factor for being able to protect one's mind during madness is the recognition of impermanence. Madness is a violent lesson in impermanence. The basic fact of the inevitable decay and death of every aspect of life is terrifyingly highlighted during the second state. If recognition of this is resisted, denied, or repressed, it causes tremendous psychological tension and a recurring escalation in the wildness of mind.57 A final chasm-situation might evolve: “The infinitization, the perpetuation, the atomization, the undifferentiated fragmentation, aggravated by the antagonistic and conflicting agitation which reduces everything to absurdity, permits nothing but ambivalence, reiterations, obstinacy, refusal, and an inhuman detachment.”58  Detachment may be the result, becoming “chronic” psychosis, the psychosis of arrest, where many simply “let go,” and live and mean to live on the “other side.”

One wonders how many sufferers are able to learn this. After all, said Michaux, “Rare indeed are the madmen equal to madness.” But it is possible, it has been done: “In the huge organism that a human being is, there always remains a waking zone, which collects, which amasses, which has learned, which now knows, which knows differently. “59

* The Infinitizing Machine

As the second state is entered, the ordinarily silent micro-operations begin to spring to life. Their “cover-up,” by the usual lumbering and meandering activity of forming a thought, is lifted. They compel and command attention.
It can feel like the micro-operations are slicing through the mind. In gigantic, razor-sharp “Zs” the undulations come, zig-zagging, severing, dissecting, disconnecting, and showing the molecu-lar structure beneath:

Everything in thought is somehow molecular. Tiny particles that appear and disappear. Particles in perpetual associations, dissociations, reassociations, swifter than swift, almost instantaneous 33

The Speed of Mind. The sense of energy, like a wind reaching gale force, is a common theme in the life of all who have lived in the second state. To them, a “speed,” of which they had no comprehension in their normal state, at first thrills them, and then dislocates them. This ubiquitous phenomenon of insane speed has been described in a number of different ways, but mostly in terms of its effects and consequences. Here, with Michaux, we are examining the nature of mind-speed itself. What is the origin of this speed, so infamous to every species of madness, and what are its characteristics?

First, the speed is already there. Anything that moves one into the functioning of the second state reveals it rather than creates it:

A speed now seen as much more considerable than previously supposed, an intensity which brings to perception the images (and micro-impulses) otherwise imperceptible, vague and remote. The drug makes the subject conscious of many other transitions and also of desires, which become sudden, violent, lightning-like impulsions.34

Man is composed of many different speeds happening simultaneously, but usually we are aware of only a narrow band of speeds, the ones we can comfortably attune to. The speed band of the micro-operations is beyond our everyday ability to observe. The ponderous speed of language—a summation of thousands of high-frequency thought processes that give birth to content and grammar—is hopelessly inadequate to describe the rapid conduction systems of the micro-operations. Meanwhile, for all of us, words and sentences calmly pass over abysses of speed: “Let us not be fooled by them. Man is a slow being, who is possible only as a result of fantastic speeds. His intelligence would have long since divined this, were it not for the very operation of intelligence.”35  For Michaux, perhaps not everyone is always so far from the real mental speed. He suggested that idiots savants and lightning calculators, those who are prodigious for their speed, somehow manage to take advantage of the ultramental speed—the fast circuit—and can enter into a direct relation with it.

The micro-operations are neither good nor bad, sane nor insane; they are simply the essential building blocks of our “macromind” abilities (of discrimination, of “holding in mind,” of following through, of imagination). We cannot function well without them. However, they are a potential problem, an enormous problem if one does not relate to them properly. Normally, they are ignored, taken for granted. In the drugged condition, they are forced into awareness; there is a direct confrontation with the reality and configurations of ultraspeed. The one who enters the second state has no choice, he must enter into some kind of relation with the speed, whether it be accurate or inaccurate. There is no reverse gear. How one relates to the micro-operations will tell a story of either health or illness. First, they need to be recognized.

Here we discuss the sequence that micro-operations appear in when someone is going mad. Sometimes they appear in a steadily advancing order, sometimes they are all happening at once. They are natural functions running amok, brush fires flamed by winds of psychosis, and moving.

Repetitions. Repetitions of ideas and images come in bursts and are related to the sensation of advancing waveforms, like a thought or an image suddenly caught reverberating in an echo chamber and becoming insistent, louder, accentuated.

Multiplication. Everything in mind is multiplying: cloning, branching off into endless varieties of itself, never tiring, producing a jungle of new species of thoughts, an insatiable evolution, filling the whole world.

Proliferation. The energy of proliferation has been let loose. Proliferation occurs in a dimension just behind the ordinary linking of thoughts. It is the energy that links thoughts together in what is ordinarily called “discursive thinking”: leaping out in any direction, generating an endless procession and what on the surface appears to be a continuous running on of thoughts. As fast as everyone knows such racing can sometimes be, it is slow motion compared to the speed of the micro-operations spinning thoughts together. The running on, or flight of ideas, happens in minute surges: First, the thought or image is “named,” then appropriated as “mine, my thought,” then judged pleasant or unpleasant and to be approached or avoided. That high-speed sequence produces a chain reaction of thoughts.

Proliferation increases as the speed increases. It loses inertia or resistance. All resistance to proliferation is swept aside as proliferation “runs over” every sense of pause, every gap in thinking, every moment of rest, becoming a wall-to-wall consciousness of thoughts. Along with this there is a gathering of suffering:

Thoughts, images, urges—everything comes at an excessive speed, disappears with the same speed, which no sentiment will influence. It thinks, it doesn't need him to think. It does without him entirely. It leaves him outside. Without thought, in a parade of thoughts! Wholly disarmed, impotent. To think is to be able to stop thoughts, to take them up again, to find them, to place them, to displace them and especially to be able to 'go back.' But he can only go forward, forward . . . His head cannot stop thinking. He cannot say 'enough' to the swarming useless activity which continues and which he cannot stop.36

Thought-Image. In a lightninglike interlock they are wedded: A thought, and the spontaneously imagined sensation of it, causing a momentary “dream” of the thought, are linked together. This linkage is a building block of ordinary “imagination,” and also of hallucination. It is the basic fast-circuit habit of a natural, or constitutional, “tendency to apparition.” The second state startlingly uncovers this linkage. It can also be seen “in action” if one is able to pay extraordinary attention to the formation of a dream, as it is being fabricated in front of one's eyes. 

For example, when one is falling asleep, a sudden “twitch” of the leg is immediately linked to the drama of stumbling.

This imaging micro-operation, the relentless illustrator, creates theater by dramatizing ideas, and it does so “without the least participation of the will and without any consciousness of desire.” Within the second state, this micro-operation can be seen to be embedded in consciousness, an automatic act of being “conscious.” Some have said that this action is in “bondage to consciousness.” 37  It is a common experience in the second state (and sometimes while dreaming) 38  that it dawns on one, “Whatever I think—happens!” Within the excesses of second-state speed one may come to feel, “I can create worlds!” Donald Crowhurst called this phenomenon “creative abstraction.”

A chasm-situation is created through a “calamity of intensifications.” Thinking, intensified by speed, repetition, multiplication and sensation-lock, becomes heard reflection. Thinking is materialized in voices, or whisperings, or buzzings. It feels like “someone is saying aloud the thought which I am about to think.” And the sound takes over, said Michaux, and “glues itself to the front of the stage which everyone carries within himself behind his brow.”

Inside or outside? Where is all of this happening? Inside or outside? That is always the question. Perception teeters on the brink of doubt as to whether what is happening is inside one's mind or in the environment. Or whether it is happening at all! One appears to have fits of inattention when all one's concern becomes fixed on a dangerous interior.

Oppositions. Oppositions are endless, whiplashing chains of thought together with their negative antithoughts, in mechanical coupling, in sub-atomic parity. This is a reflection of how the nervous system is built:

Every neural unit is an on-and-off coupling, every impulse arises with its counterimpulse, every muscle group is linked with its antagonist, every perception includes its negative afterimage. The structure of the system seems wired for instant complementary counterpoint—a primitive stereo-thinking principle. Whatever is subjected to it, whether it be a sight, sound, idea, or feeling, is as if put in a rotary blender: “Everything you offer to the mescalinian schizo will be ground to pieces.” It is “infinitized”; he is infinitized. Within the micro-operation of oppositions, speed thrives on itself, perpetuates itself, accelerates.

The chasm of oppositions is a chorus of discordant and disparaging voices, conflicting commands, and staggering ambivalence at every level. On the surface, one is unable to eat, or not to eat. At times it comes to a standstill, a gridlock, a jamming, perhaps the only “braking” this system can know.

Infernal Animation. In a sense, this is nothing more than the human tendency to “personify,” to imbue with life. It is a further action of the nervous system at liberty to do more freely what it already does. It is usually innocuous on the surface. But at the point of its microdevelopment— almost mockingly brought to light in the second state—the micro-operation of infernal animation can achieve demonic proportions. The first moment of animation feels like a sense of presence, of imminence, of “about-to-happen.” At first, it is only a potential space, pregnant with possibility, yet directly sensible. Then it begins to pulsate (and what space can resist throbbing in this atmosphere of pulsing proliferation?). A “prebeing” begins to quicken and emerge.

Yet it cannot stop there. The presence becomes a creature; the creature has eyes, around which forms a face, which looks at you, which is inquisitive, and so on—anything can happen from there. To John Perceval they often appeared out of a flame. (For years, Justice Schreber called them “fleetingly improvised men.” They could appear out of anywhere; some even lived in the pores of his skin.)

Perverse Impulses. The attack of perverse impulses may begin slowly, at first only by innuendos, suggestions, urgings. But they escalate into a furious onslaught of infernally animated oppositions:

a procession of mad ideas, for they always came one by one . . . I might do a thousand insane things, cut my finger, break the window, set fire to the chairs, open my veins with a razor, smash the mirrors. The contrary of normal action was what seemed tempting. The fascination of the aberrant idea, the fascination of the thing that should not be done. Any object, when an idea for dramatizing gets hold of it, is capable of anything. I was afraid to go to sleep. I was afraid to let myself go. I was afraid to turn out the light, knowing that in the dark my thoughts would be without resistance.39

The one who is attacked struggles with all his might against preposterous acts rushing into his mind. Arriving at unbelievable speeds, they seize him, goad him, throttle him to make him carry out the acts in question. Everything that has been rejected raises its head. They are all abnormal ideas and they are avid for realization, the lure of the indecent, a kind of perverse “freedom.” Many of the saints, during “sensitive” states of mind, have attested to the temptations of the demonic. But here, the brakes have faltered; Michaux felt it impossible to resist a perverse impulse: “I am they. They are identical with me, and I am more than acquiescent, I am inseparable from them the moment they appear.”40

Now arises an archetypal chasm-situation of madness, the sense of per-secution:

That he is assailed is the pure truth. He undergoes assaults, mysterious, invisible and not understood by others. This persecutes him. Who holds this extraordinary power over him? The lunatic sometimes takes years to be able to point out his persecutor or persecutors, and sometimes they never are clearly designated. Generally, both ignorant and educated people likewise end up in madness by incriminating secret societies, supernatural, paranatural beings, who act at a distance, by magic, by fluids, by rays. This is in a sense a rational reaction. It is hypotheses to be tested, which is dictated by circumstances so singular. The general idea of a persecution invades him, comes from all directions, a real cross-roads-idea which everything supports.41

There is no doubt that it feels like one is being “possessed,” sometimes by a demoniac double or opposite: “By idealized perversity which every man unknowingly carries within him, an ideal made up of thoughts and desires grouped together, momentarily forming the 'self, a self which is totally and vertiginously swept along.”42

Selves. Selves come and go. They are utterly real, new visions of oneself, at times a processional of them. In an instant, a “past life” is lived and abandoned. There may be many of them, new personalities, momentary, short-lived. They may be lives of nobility or of infamy. One may experience them like a tearing apart, a tearing down, or stripping away. While that is happening there might be flashes of insight: “There is no one self. There are no ten selves. There is no self. SELF is only a position of equilibrium. One among a thousand others continually possible and always ready.”43

Each self is experienced as complete and profound, intensified and exaggerated by the micro-operation machinery, yet it also has a certain hollowness. But it is not simply their transiency that makes them suspect. Each is transparently manufactured, and when it leaves there is a momentary disillusionment. However, when one of these selves is held onto and elaborated, it leads to chasm-situations of disastrous self-importance.

Sense of Conviction—Certitude. Everything is convincing: Once you get a mescalinian idea into your head, it is more real than anything else, and it has to be reckoned with, on the spot. An intensification of thought-images, plus the sense of “presence” linked to most sensations, gives mental images a surreal presence. These hallucinations are infinitely more compelling than the sight of ordinary reality, they are “super-real.” Ideas become reality, memories become present tense, speculations (“what-ifs”) become convictions:

In the tragedy of the measureless intensifications in the midst of which he is advancing, here comes the one which is perhaps the gravest of all (and he does not see it), the one which will cause the doors of the asylum to close on him, the sense of total certitude.44

Everything becomes a “sign” to him, or a proof of what he only sus-pected. But the glibness of his explanations gives him away. After all, he is using logic only as an afterthought. His real basis for argument is in his conviction, in knowledge by direct revelation. He is again in a chasm-situ-ation of “insight and power.”

The most natural study of the sense of conviction is, of course, the dream state. The dream state is marked by complete certitude, by a conviction in the reality of what is happening. In fact, it is a caricature of our inherent tendency to become so convinced. Thus, the apparatus, the means necessary for such an illusion of surety, is within all of us and is always disturbingly available.

Two Places at Once. Being in two places at once is a “trick” that we perform very comfortably in the normal state. It is our tendency or habit to be somewhere else, as to be in a daydream at the same time that we are trying to be here. We can eat, read, bathe, and do most of our work and at the same time we might be absorbed in a mental drama. We often seem to prefer to indulge a divided world, to dilute the world by living with a split consciousness. In the second state, too, this tendency is accentuated to the point of a chasm-situation.

The dislocated one is torn between the absolute certitudes of an inner reality and an outer reality, and both are making demands on him. John Perceval felt overwhelmed with ingratitude when he could not do it, when his world of angels and demons demanded his complete obedience at the expense of his body and mind. It is no wonder that the deranged one so typically asks himself, “In what part of the world am I at the same time that I am here?” He feels that his survival depends on how well he can perform the difficult feat, like a juggling act, of living in two places at once.
When he is able to do it, he feels that it is a most magical sensation: “The lunatic constantly talks of magic. He has a right to do so. On whom more than on him does magic operate, an altogether special magic?”45 But otherwise, and for most of the time, he lives in the great pain of feel-ing inadequate and doing poorly in both worlds—he is a “failure.”

Reorientations. In the normal state, we may notice that we have casually glanced at our watch for no apparent reason. That is only the tip of the iceberg of what we ordinarily do in the microunconscious. The one in the second state discovers himself invoking micro-orientations to trace, to recall, to grasp, to fix, to predict, to recapture a sense of place—many times a minute. He tries to find shelter. But over and over again, in hun-dreds of ways, he keeps losing track of it. This repeated orienting of him-self, this abrupt and incessant taking of coordinates, is like a continual tic movement of the mind.

These ordinarily silent operations of reorientation and realignment are uncovered and magnified in the “desperate attention” of the second state: “I had to admit it: from birth, I had spent most of my life orienting myself . . . taking bearings, second by second.”46  The amount of time and energy spent in attempted reorientations is phenomenal, and fatiguing. The moments of exhaustion can be profound.

From Recovering Sanity
by Edward M. Podvoll, M.D.

33. Michaux, Major Ordeals, 13.
34. Ibid., 23.
35. Ibid.
36. Michaux, Light Through Darkness, 175.
37. Hsiian-tsang, The Doctrine of Mere-Consciousness, trans. Wei Tat (Hong Kong:
1973).
38. Hervey de Saint-Denys, Dreams and How to Guide Them (London: Duckworth, 1982).
39. Michaux, Miserable Miracle, 72.
40. Ibid., 67.
41. Michaux, Light Through Darkness, 135.
42. Michaux, Infinite Turbulence, 148. ' 43. Henri Michaux, Selected Writings, trans. Richard Ellman (New York: New Direc-tions, 1968), xvi.
44. Michaux, Light Through Darkness, 156.
45. Ibid., 157.
46. Michaux, Major Ordeals, 4.
47. Michaux, Infinite Turbulence, 173.
48. Sally Clay, “Stigma,” Journal of Contemplative Psychotherapy 4 (1987).
49. Oliver Sacks, Awakenings (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983), 306.
50. Michaux, Miserable Miracle, 37.
51. Jeremy Hayward, Perceiving Ordinary Magic (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1985).
52. Michaux, Miserable Miracle, 10.
53. Michaux, Major Ordeals, 117.
54. Ibid.
55. Michaux, Light Through Darkness, 158.
56. Henri Michaux, Vers la completude (Paris: Editions G.L.M., 1967).
57. Terry Clifford, Tibetan Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry (York Beach, Maine:
Samuel Weiser, 1984).
58. Michaux, Major Ordeals, 120.
59. Ibid., 42.