Write it down. It doesn't matter if it makes no sense at first. Eventually, it will.
Because I feel it in my being.
Visions that come from instincts. Now I want to use conscious projection, now that I have come to see it clearly: The world is made up of psychic projections. Call it Maya, or the Veil. And that's what I mean when I say I want to talk about: the Apocalypse. (Okay I admit, I don't actually say that often. But in my head I do.) For,
An apocalypse (Ancient Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apocálypsis, from ἀπό and καλύπτω meaning 'un-covering'), translated literally from Greek refers to a revelation of something hidden, although this sense did not enter English until the 14th century.[1] In religious contexts it is usually a revelation of hidden meaning - hidden from human knowledge in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception.Isn't it time we lift the Veil of ignorance, together, so as to acknowledge how we've been going down a path of falsehood and lies, which seems to be leading us towards catastrophic times? Isn't time we dare to recognize the impact of our behaviors? Modern man has prided himself on the capacity to use logic and lay out the laws of cause and effect. Modern man has gone too far in wanting to use these sciences in order to control the world, for his own ends. Modern man doesn't have control...
But do not despair! For ''post-modernity'' has been formulating responses! Tadam! Thanks to Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Einstein, Derrida, Heisenberg, etc. (Some womyn in there ??)
If all that is human is projection, if God is finally dead (thank God!) and humanistic morality has showed itself to be but another unsatisfying panacea against the depth of our existential guilt and anxiety, if relativism today gets thrown around by social and natural scientists alike... what can postmodernism give us?
I have picked up Jean Gebser's book ''The Ever-Present Origin'' again. I'd started reading it two or three years ago but had lost momentum (this is one thick and dense piece of philosophical work!); today, the timing feels just right...
Structures of consciousness: archaic, magic, mythical, mental... integral.
I won't get into all of this right now, but my idea was to try and put some of the myriad of concepts and intuitions in ''order''. (How faithful to the mental's obsession with ''dividing and conquering''!)
So as a point of departure, let's sample a few quotes:
It is of fundamental importance that we clearly distinguish between ''irrational'' and ''arational,'' for this distinction lies at the very heart of our deliberations. Arationality has nothing to do with irrationality; their only connection exists in the fact that a rationality is not possible without irrationality, or far that matter without the pre-rational or the rational.Wow. I was just thinking about this recently!! Well, that's what I was coming closer to express, though my thinking was incomplete. I was pondering the anti-rationalist stance I seem to have gradually adopted over the last decade. How can I become a CÉGEP philosophy teacher (I'm about to go back to school and get some teaching tools and credentials) when I can also picture myself writing a Ph.D dissertation on the topic of wildness and the necessity to overcome and transcend rational thinking?! Would that make me a hypocrite?
Gebser says it so well. It's time we integrate all structures of consciousness.
Furthermore addressing my conundrum and the fear I have about teaching, he writes:
Two difficulties present themselves in these deliberations with which we must contend. The first is inherent in the demand of any treatise for a sequential presentation, which is necessarily contrary to the simultaneity of an integral mode.Believe it or not, this actually speaks to what I was telling my mom, just last week!
''I don't know if I can be a good teacher,'' I was admitting to her, ''because I don't consider myself very eloquent when it comes down to conveying the knowledge I'd like to share.'' She said she thought I'd be a great teacher, on the contrary. ''I don't know. I feel disillusioned and borderline resentful towards half the curriculum, and whatever I am passionate about, I have such a hard time verbalizing in a clear, concise, and linear fashion! I feel like a webpage with dozens of hyperlinks: I want to open them all, enter in every concept, explore all angles and all directions so as to really get the whole picture!''
My mother laughed. I felt that she understood and it felt good.
No doubt I could keep this blog entry unfold to great lengths. I mean, I didn't even get to explore my first idea in sitting down to write a blog today! I wanted to reflect a bit on Gebser, but I also wanted to explore the intuition I've been having, that my addiction to food (it's so intense these days!! Compulsion galore!) could have something to do with the shift we-I are going through.
Making loose parallels between the fast burning, highly concentrated energy which is characteristics of fossil-fuels consumption (along with their long-term consequences), and the energy resources I am fueling my own body with: carbohydrates and simple sugars. Isn't there a parallel there?
Immediate gratification versus health. Why can't I stop reaching for breads and sugars, when I am perfectly well aware that it is not good for me?! I call this an addiction.
The good thing about this is that I get to belong and remain part of the collective. (Belonging is a vital and primary need.) Observing my addictive behavior fills me with empathy for all the addictive behaviors everyone is grappling with.
The ecological crisis is a question of addiction.
Oh! There's got to be a thread linking the contents of this entry... the apocalypse, postmodernism, Jean Gebser's genius work, and my idiosyncratic challenges and ways of making sense of them...
The thread? Consciousness.
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