Oneiric Otium

pleroma

2007-05-17T04:06:36Z

The aroma of the pleroma,
the body of my (m)other,
Pluto and Sun at zenith,
a smell of bread with butter.

sacrifice at the altar ego

2007-05-07T20:20:40Z

At the altar, the ego to the alter ego.

"We shall not be what we have been, but we shall begin to be other."
-- Joachim of Fiore

To be: the other, the alter, the altar. There is (no) more chance, for those who have ears to hear.

withdrawn blind

2006-11-13T03:17:56Z

...in a time after time,
a place after place,
an anchorite, withdrawn
into the desert,
knee deep in the flux, between

radicals and rhizomes:
no points, only lines --
no lines, only edges --
no edges, only

complex fluctuations
of intensities
intricately entwined --
the sight of the blind
in a time after time....

Deleuze

2006-09-15T19:55:33Z

"Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments."

"When someone asks 'what's the use of philosophy?' the reply must be aggressive, since the question tries to be ironic and caustic. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy which saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought.... Philosophy is at its most positive as a critique, as an enterprise of demystification."

remembering english-speaking philosophers

2006-09-05T20:19:50Z

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
-- G. Santayana

In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.
-- A.N. Whitehead

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.
-- B. Russell

Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of.
-- W.V.O. Quine

The simpleminded use of the notions of "right" or "wrong" is one of the chief obstacles to the progress of understanding.
-- A.N. Whitehead

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-- G. Santayana

hermeneut @ 2006-08-26T13:27:00

2006-08-26T21:05:17Z

I've done a lot of research on shamanism and daoism lately, and so I've come across heaps of new-age drivel that I've had to separate from the thoughtful and critical texts that have found their way into publication. It's wonderful that there are so many publications available on issues relating to trance, transcendence, and self-transformation, but it makes me sad to think of the number of people who aren't educated enough to know good writings from bullshit, the number of people who learn about these things from within the confines of an epistemological straightjacket. (I'm not speaking of a relative sadness, but of the sadness that brought us the compassionate tears of avalokiteshvara and tara, the tears of weepy prophets or saints like Jeremiah or Augustine of Hippo)

Even people who have access to profound altered states of consciousness can only interpret the content of those states according to whatever epistemological suppositions they inhabit in their everyday lives. You (can) stare at the dharmakaya all day and still manage to relate to it according to a way of knowing that persistently reduces ultimate reality to a dualistic paradigm. {and I mean "dualistic" in an advaitin sense, which includes pluralism and even qualified monisms such as visitadvaita vedanta). You can taste the One Taste of enlightenment once or twice a week, but any abiding transformation takes place in an epistemological and ontological purification that emerges out of everyday practice.

Without purifying one's sense of knowing and being, with purifying oneself of ignorance (avidya), how is one to let individuation and differentiation bloom in all their effulgence, how is one to practice the emancipatory separation of the proverbial wheat from the chaff?

If you don't separate the wheat from the chaff, if you don't exercise the discerning precision of a mohel or manjushri, you may find yourself buying into new-age paradigms arguing that cosmic consciousness is a "fifth dimension" (with spatiotemporal dimensions comprising the first four). Without the blade of our judeo-tantrika, how are we to open up the clearing that liberates absolute (nondual) from relative (dual) reality? There is a difference between dimensionality and a dimension, just like there is a difference between thinghood and a thing, beingness and being, essence and manifestation. This new-age fifth dimension doesn't take into account the basic and fundamental problems of metaphysics. I'm not mentioning the book I saw this newage argument in. I've already forgotten its title. I didn't even want to write about it, but I had to exercise my judeo-tantric blade to purify myself of a shiver running through my heart.

mohel and manjushri

2006-08-24T01:21:28Z

A dualistic understanding of politics has pervaded Western Civilization since its inception in the philosophy of hellenistic greece, specifically in Platonic philosophy and its allegorical representation of the relationship between scientific/philosophical knowledge and political power in terms of a cavern or cave which indicates an ontological and epistemological gap between two parties: 1) those who dwell in the cave and are unable to see the things themselves, as they exist on the surface, and 2) those who can leave the cave and see things with the illumination and enlightenment provided by the Sun. The illuminated initiates use their power to control the masses who dwell in the shadows of mere reflections. This dualistic understanding of political power is still at work in modernity, whether in Hobbes' concept of sovereignty, in Hegel's concept of the State, in the real and/or fictitious illuminati, and in the completely unrealistic politic that calls itself realpolitik. A nondual interpretation of political power would call for something entirely different (and this allusion to difference is not accidental; rather, it is indicative of a quasi-transcendental interval that cuts through duality -- the mohel and manjushri lend us their blades).

nibbana

2006-08-09T22:31:44Z

The Sanskrit word "nirvana" (pali "nibbana") has no semantic or etymological similarity to the English word "Enlightenment" or the German "Aufklarung." But the translation is inevitable, and within the gaps of this translation, the tathagatagarbha (is).

all things are my body

2006-07-27T04:50:30Z

From Wang Yangming:
Man is the mind of the universe: at bottom, heaven and earth and all things are my body. Is there any suffering or bitterness of the masses that is not disease and pain in my own body?

(page 27, Yamauchi, T. "Wang Yang-Ming." In Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment, ed. Joy A. Palmer, 27-33. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001.)

magister ludi view and review

2006-07-23T21:19:18Z

If you like Nietzsche, Herman Hesse is probably a little boring, predictable, and exiguous. If you're interested in the integration of Eastern wisdom into Western civilization, Hesse probably seems antiquated and naive from any perspective situated within our globalized teletechnocracy.

I wrote a few comments about Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game) a while ago, and I found them again recently, and though they deserved to be made public, released from the Castalia Foundation that funded them. To summarize: 1) I liked The Glass Bead Game the first time I read it, when Aristophanes called it Clouds; 2) I don't know why people would read this in English without reading the German, most of the puns are lost and a dry ironic tone becomes too serious; 3) only scholars worry about the relationship between the realm of intellectuals and the common realm of everyday reality (i.e., it is the self-proclaimed intellectuals who fabricate the dualism of intellectual-world vs. common-world).

holiness

2006-07-22T03:55:58Z

I often turn to Bodhidharma. He came from the West. His legs suffered some sort of paralysis or extreme atrophy due to his persistent meditative practice. When an emperor asked him for the fundamental teaching of Buddhism, he replied "Vast emptiness, nothing holy." So the emperor asks him who he thinks he is, saying such things. His reply, of course, is "I have no idea."

Oui, practice a religion sans savoir, sans avoir, sans voir. Religion sans religion.

hermeneut @ 2006-06-28T20:34:00

2006-06-29T03:54:52Z

From Lao Tzu: wei wu wei ce wu bu zhi --
act without acting and nothing will be out of order.

Simultaneously giving birth and becoming born, action emerges at an aleatory point where ordinary opinion (doxa) completely breaks down, where para-dox irrupts.

For Foucault, the value of psychedelics (particularly LSD) is not that they disclose the truth of being (or the being of truth, or any other perennial wisdom), but that they de-stratify one's action so that the advent of paradox interrupts the ontological and epistemological conventions of truth and falsity. Similarly, Fitzgerald spoke of a "crack up" that Deleuze has integrated into his homage to psychedelia, and Castaneda spoke of a crack that disturbs the egg-like peace of one's conventional sense of events.

To recapitulate: Lao Tzu, (non)action as an aleatory point of the paradoxical event, (non)action as psychedelia, Foucault, Deleuze (Fitzgerald), Castaneda. This is postmodern psychedelia, psychedelia after the subject -- inventive acts of a body without organs.

viens, oui, oui

2006-06-04T23:02:24Z

Saying adieu, releasing ourselves into the undecidable mystery of the impossible.
...saying goodbye to god (saying adieu a dieu)
...saying goodbye, knowing there is no god (a-dieu, in the sense of not-god, dieu sans dieu)
...speaking, undecidably, to (no) god.

Saying adieu so that we might let the impossible eventually come, to say welcome to the advent of the mystery, to release ourselves into the impossible event (the advent of the wholly other, ganz Andere, tout autre).

Saying a prayer, praying like the devil for a god without god, performing the ritual, raising holy hell to prepare set and setting for the incoming of the other, for the in-vention of the impossible event.
Some french friends imparted to me a prayer to speak in the occasion of such psychedelic rituals, and I adopt this prayer in french, as a 'foreign' language already begins to invoke the other, in this case, with only four words for inventing the advent of the event.

adieu
viens,
oui, oui

The first word: uttering goodbye/to god/without god, leaving theism and atheism behind, saying goodbye to being and non-being. Saying adieu, the ritual prepares for the incoming of that which cannot be prepared for. The second word begins the excessive affirmation that accompanies the gesture of adieu. The second word is simple: viens, come, come in, welcome. The final two words perpetuate this excessively affirmative gesture: oui, oui, yes, yes, I say yes, yes I said yes.
adieu -- viens, oui, oui.

(im)possible buggery

2006-05-28T04:58:26Z

I am not a man, I am dynamite....
only after me is it possible to hope again....
we shall have convulsions,
an earthquake spasm,
a transposition of valley and mountain
such as never been dreamed of....
Only after me will there be grand politics of earth....
and if (and only if) you're wondering,
this is why I am (a) destiny.....
which is philosophy -- wisdom/love -- buggery

A kairotic and kenotic moment, annointed with
the eventual invention of the impossible (re)birth

ego sum

2006-04-08T18:24:20Z

Anthropos, transmutated, becomes a microcosmic archetype
as the macrocosmic world becomes macranthropic.
My eyes appear to be my eyes, but now
a surplus of alterity becomes revealed:
my eyes also appear to be intimately intertwined
with the opening of lips (oral and vaginal),
with the opening and closing that mark the setting-rising sun and moon,
with the opening of water on the (sur)face of lakes and ponds,
with the opening of earth in the fissures of cracks and crevasses....

I am the center of the cosmos, but this I is not opposed to everything not-I; this center is not opposed to everything marginal or peripheral. The cosmos is an extension of Psyche (the "I am"; ego sum) only insofar as Psyche is an intention of the cosmos. The ego is the center of the cosmos only insofar as this center is dispersed, diffused, scattered, differentiated, displaced. Every place is displaced, every position is disposition, every center is eccentric. The world is a giant Argus.

This coincidence of I and not-I appears insofar as the boundaries of I and not-I are interrupted and ruptured by a wholly other power that makes possible the opening of distance and stance, disposition and position, eccentric and center. We coincide with a non-coincidence, which is to say, we coincide insofar as we are broken open by that which is other than coincidence and non-coincidence.

anamnesis (ich-du)

2006-03-18T07:47:51Z

I felt so empty and then I
was just kinda making up stuff --
so I kept still until...

my favorite thing to do is die.
with nietzsche's rejuvenation of dionysus, we heard
"that which doesn't kill us makes us stronger."

how decadent, romantic, dionysian.
the shaman says to the patient,
"that which kills us makes us stronger."

my guru says, "that's really trumping the ace now isn't it."
we laugh, and invoked between us, somehow
appears the sacred vine of the dead.

You're beautiful, I love you (too).
You will forget this, as an excessive
infinity you have already passed over.

remember your past and future dismemberment
unforget the lift and life of death --
ours, yours, mine.

mea culpa

2006-03-13T05:11:36Z

I'm writing more journal entries in private these days, as I don't feel like being public about the psychological hermeneutics that pervade my writing. I'm not sure if I feel too misunderstood, or not misunderstood enough. In any case, I'll keep in touch. Keep inside of touch, tactfully intact and in contact, touched that you think(s) this of I, touched that you open(s) a temporary place whereupon a world becomes inhabited, built, and contemplated.

Beyond the face, and catch
a glance of a surface
always already
receding into
hymeneal traces
of some lapidary
love-wisdom.

reframing the ontological constitution

2006-02-28T00:58:06Z

I should really be quieter, keep my mouth and eyes shut. Withdraw and retreat. I've said too much already.

The sciences need to have their epistemological and ontological constitutions reframed. (I didn't say Science, in the singular, but sciences, plural). Mckenna argued that the ontological foundations of shamanism could found a new epoch of scientific understanding, yet such an ontology is far removed the limited erudition of people who take psychedelics without a disciplined background in phenomenology or jnana yoga.

Most people are quite pleased to experience themselves in their being, rather than experiencing themselves as mere cogs in the machinations of the post-industrial globalized economy. But are people ready to question the meaning of being, are they ready to reframe the ontological constitution? It seems easy to remain complacent in one's epistemological and ontological contexts, exploring the myriad realms of being without a question as to how the meaning of this being takes place.

I don't hear enough criticism from anybody. Not nearly enough questioning. I won't contribute to such complacency. To placate your libidinal curiosities, take drugs or something.

If I could be in a group, a collective, a community, that community would have to remain unconditionally open to the attitude of critical questioning. Such a community would operate only insofar as it is open to the inoperative facet of its operation.

--centricity

2006-02-17T20:45:33Z

Kosmos and Anthropos decenter one another. Of course I am anthropocentric. I am always self-centered, ego-centric, centered around this embodied dynamism traditionally referred to as "human." But this center, this anthropomorphic center, is always already de-centered by that which is eccentric -- out of the center. The self is always already decentered by the not-self, the I is decentered by the non-I. In other words, the anthropos is always already decentered by the kosmos.

To decenter is not to un-center, just as definite doesn't mean in-finite. Decentering is the ambivalent act whereby the centrality of the self is secured through its relationship to an eccentricity. Decentered, I can be I only by facing not-I. My center is a center only if it is simultaneously an eccentric kosmos. Centripetal and centrifugal, eccentric anthropocentrism, anthropocosmology.

salivary joke

2006-01-27T22:18:44Z

This is serious play. Accordingly, there is a joke (hidden) within the very title of this journal. It often comes up that I practice the subtle art of hermeneutics, but the relationship of this practice to oneiric otium is never explicitly mentioned. My otium is certainly not otium cum dignitate. I'm indecently public about my laziness -- beyond leisure and recreational relaxation. And it's clear from the poetic and hallucinogenic character of my hermeneutic otium that this otium emerges in the magical dynamic of dreaming -- a dreaming that is beyond the distinction between diurnal and nocturnal, a dreaming that proceeds to and from the marriage of sun and moon. So, hermeneutics depends upon an otium that is oneiric. But this is the exoteric reading of the journal. The esoteric reading depends upon one's familiarity with a few pseudonyms that I'd rather not disclose. If I were to explicate these pseudonymous relations, it would only make it more difficult for myself (oui, we others) to preserve a taste for the secret invaginated within every inscription taking place with/in this journal.

In the meantime... the joke is crossed out. And hasn't Artaud shown us the salivary power of the cross. The joke is still here to be laughed at. However, the words of the joke are covered in spit. If you want a taste for and of the secret, swim around in the small pool of saliva perpetually forming underneath my tongue.

subtle (non)duality

2006-01-10T21:01:20Z

The opposition between duality and non-duality (or unity) is perhaps the most insidious of all oppositions. Even more insidious, perhaps, is the opposition between oppositional and non-oppositional action.

Ultimately (or at least penultimately -- leaving space for the ineffable ultimate), this is a matter of learning to correspond and communicate with the mystery of being. This wouldn't mean realizing that life and death are ONE, and it wouldn't mean realizing that life and death are Not-ONE. We become open to the mystery by waiting, and nothing more. We aren't waiting for the mystery, we are waiting upon the mystery.

To engage the subtle realms of being,
we must wear the clothes of our own essential subtlety.
To engage the most subtle mystery of being,
we must let our body perform only the most subtle of movements.
To engage the ineffable mystery of being,
the organs of our speech must perform
a dance more subtle than any ethereal stream of wind.

Paramodern chiaroscuro

2006-01-09T02:19:38Z

A sense is (n)either subject (n)or object, (not) sensitivity and/or (not) sensation.

There is no sense in introducing a sense of the world, in explicating the world of sense.

...sense takes place transitively, entrancing and transforming the place of sense....

There are many senses of sense, none of which is confined to the productive activity idiomatically expressed as "making sense."

al--

2006-01-04T05:09:37Z

...in order to demonstrate that...

...that it is natural for humans (and other animals) to engage in altered states of consciousness (ASCs).
...that all beings exist only insofar as they are in contact with alterity (otherness).
...that the ego and the alter ego are mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive opposites.
...that the familiar and the alien are mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive opposites.
...that all beings are always already altered and alternating.

10 sentences on writing

2005-12-31T22:34:08Z

1) When I write, it is not just: I don't just write.
2) I inscribe the measure that makes it possible to distinguish the limits of the just and unjust, the boundaries of order and disorder, right and sinister.
3) This act of inscription makes it possible to discern the agency of an "I" that enacts this inscription by letting it take hold and take place.
4) I perform the act of writing, but my action is characterized by acting patient, acting passive, acting receptive to that which I am enacting -- this active passivity (and passive activity) is the circulation of light.
5) "I" can enact writing only be letting writing enact me; I can write only in not writing; I AM only with/in the transitive processes of luminous circulation.
6) It is not I who writes, but writing that writes through me.
7) This is not to say that "In the beginning" there was writing, and then writing entered the realm of the One, then the One gave birth to the Two, then Two gave birth to all beings.
8) Writing is the fire that ignites and illuminates the differentiation between beginning and ending, the differences between the formless, the One, the many, the differences between self and other, between I, You, We, he/she/it, they, them, us, me, etc.
9) Writing is not a type of spiritual practice; spiritual practice is a type of writing.
10) Here, there is no trace of my writing.

a cursory introduction

2005-12-30T04:09:59Z

An anonymous friend recently asked me about what I am trying to do here, and what do I have to say or do to contribute to his own liberation and the liberation of all beings. This deserves to be made explicit, and so I'm answering this question in it's own post. To people who know me or read me, this is obvious, but for others, it is strange and elliptical.

First -- what I'm doing can be understood via negativa, i.e., what am I not doing.
I'm not doing anything, in my writing, my life, my existence, etc. However, this doesn't mean that I'm doing nothing, as doing is always doing something (even when that something is called "nothing"). I have nothing to do, not even nothing. Various forms of yoga and contemplative activity occupy my time, but I don't do them as opposed to not doing them. I don't write as opposed to not-write. I don't save or sanctify beings as opposed to secularizing or profaning them.

Second -- what I'm doing can be understood positively, but only in a limited sense.
For better or worse, I'm a hermeneut. I interpret and interpenetrate the sense of the world (i.e., the world of sense). My work is to engage the transitivity of things, to participate in the "in-between" that allows things to interrelate and interconnect. My work is to let the interpenetration of things take place. My work is to let the limits and boundaries of things be translated, transcended, transgressed, transformed, transmutated....

I don't have "beliefs" or "convictions"; my personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal preferences are intimately intertwined with the preferences of the things interpenetrating me. I'm always already liminal, in transition between limits. The experiments or "writings" in this journal are traces of transitivity: letting inscription take place, tracing a trace of a trace.