THE NAKED ANIMAL

What follows has turned out to be what amounts to a collection of thoughts pursuant to an autodidact's master's thesis on the subject of comparative philosophy and the nature of reality. If that sounds too serious for you, read this instead; it's a recent post from "Uncommon Denominators," Joe Kane's blog about his "peculiar struggle for a commitment to principle-based living (absolutes and ideals) as a young American in a swiftly decadent culture." It's mostly about movies, but we're talking about the same thing.

For those who don't mind following the truly necessary noodling of a right-brained intellectual (which means I take things in through the apparatus of the mind first, not necessarily that I'm brilliantly book-learned, though I haven't done too bad as far as the reading of world texts goes in my life; and also that I do it in a completely idiosyncratically creative, disorganized fashion [that's the right-brained part]), allow me to continue my quest for philosophical soundness.

In an earlier post I referred to one of my premier vital links, the Anarchology Research Society blog, as "a thoroughly academic philosophy that mirrored my own idea that every single thing in the universe, from the tiniest quark to the universe itself, is a true, integral whole in and of itself, and that we interact synergistically to create copacetic collective entireties." In Anarchology, these various entities are described singularly as "a truth moving through its freedom" interacting with other truths moving through their own respective freedoms to create collective, or "plural" freedoms in which they may move together; and these plural freedoms nest inside each other like paragraphs in books to form a protective shell of universally known stories that amount to a system of agreements that come to be regarded as the immovable elements of reality.

Hmmm, I don't know if I explained that very well, but it was a damned good stab. The far more erudite and scientifically rigorous Anarchology Research Society seems to be a small group of student and professor scientist-philosophers who are in the process of creating a new theory of life in the universe that redefines what we see and experience from the bottom up. I say "seems" because there is no information about the blog authors, except that they are indeed the authors of the blog, anywhere--and they don't answer comments. I say "in the process" because the blog leaves their theory hanging with a final entry entitled "What is Truth?", which ends with the final tantalizing lines:

So truth, even cosmic truth, is subjective.
We will continue this discussion of Truth in the next letter, 'What is Freedom?'

Now, what I mean by "from the bottom up" is the most important part of what I mean, because it strikes at the very heart of what is wrong with our world today (insert any take on that topic here, and I'll most likely agree). The "bottom" is the very first basic unspoken assumption that we all make when thinking about absolutely anything, and that is, in simplified terms, that any being is separate from its environment; when he looks at the world around him, he is viewing something different and apart from himself. This is the core import of what is known as Plato's Doctrine of Forms (circa 4th century BC), upon which all modern science and thought is based. On top of the viewer being separate from her environment, Plato also posited that the environment itself was separate from--was in fact but a shabby stand-in for--the pristine integrity of absolute truths, which were supposed to exist as actual entities in their own ethereal realm (somewhere outside the cave, in a realm where only the Philosopher Kings were wily and brave enough to wander...[harumph]).

It's interesting that I should have entitled my first book as a play on Plato's simile of the cave. I didn't know what I meant, really, back then, except that Plato's Garage was my way of philosophizing in a more than glancing way about cars and our symbiotic relationships with them. I didn't quite know what I thought about Platonic thought and what it has wrought, but since reading the wonderfully written Anarchology Research Society blog, I've realized that the subject-object worldview that Plato forwarded into reality so efficiently is in fact responsible for all of the schisms that manhandle, maul and haunt our minds, morals and civilizations: good and evil, love and hate, lustful and chaste, fate and free will... the list goes on and on. I also think Plato was an elitist, a philistine and a self-repressed homosexual, which thoroughly explains to my satisfaction his intense pushing of the idea that sex was an earthly distraction to be transcended in favor of more enriching activities, such as contemplating those precious perfections that existed elsewhere. Plato was basically the west's first famous self-hating faggot (just look at that face), and the schism between sex and spirit that holds the world in its murky grasp is the most insidious branch of the great river of thought that we somehow got directed into thanks to the dear ol' dysfunctional dad of Western thought (yeah, Plato), and in which we're still flowing, haphazardly, further and further away from integration into separation and conflict.

Argh, I need a mediator sometimes. Someone to bitch slap me when I get too fancy on my homely soapbox. The point is that there's an alternative to the Platonic subject-object paradigm, and it's just as old, perhaps even older, than Plato's deal. It is known in psychological parlance as subject-subject reality, as opposed to subject-object. The Anarchology Research Society gives credit for formalizing this way of thinking to Zeno, a contemporary of Plato's and premier member of a rival school of thought informed by Xenophanes idea that "all is one." Hmmm, very interesting. Sounds kinda new-agey, right? Jung also touched upon the idea of subject-subject consciousness, and these days, Harry Hay, who brought the idea to the cultural semi-fore through its integral position in the philosophy of the Radical Faerie movement (a gossamer, diasporic web of fabulous flouncing freedom fighters with whom I strongly identify; it's one of my sidebar's vital links), is credited with its re-introduction into the framework of human thought. It is also the basis of epistemology, and of ontology, both of which strongly inform such "futuristic" scientific things as quantum physics and artificial intelligence research. On the other side of the planet, and through osmosis on this one, too, now, it's responsible for the tenet of nonduality that dominates all Eastern philosophies and religions.

I believe that the idea of "all is one," also known as "omnology," is even more ancient than the ancient Greeks or even the more ancient Asians. Again, I hark back to the kaleidoscope of arcane knowledge that my Turkmenistani ESL student displayed last semester. We were discussing world religions, and he brought up the research of a Russian scientist who has been finding references in ancient texts to obscure phenomena, such as ocean currents and the exact movement of the stars, that scientists have charted only in the last hundred years. We spent that entire class period discussing the possibility that we harbor within us prehistoric, probably innate, connections to the kind of wisdom we now think of as being either ultra-complexly scientific or ultra-unprovably metaphysical. Proving nothing, we both nonetheless decided it was probably true.

That student was very good for me because we ended up having the sort of dialogues, ironically, through which Greek philosophers plied their theories. He helped me refine a lot of my ideas about the world through these impromptu lessons (in which the teacher became the pupil), and, in essence, led me in a roundabout way to the Anarchology Research Society, which finally pushed me off the fence about the effects of Platonic thought upon reality and its horrors.

What it all amounts to, in the end (or is it in the beginning?) is that I can finally, truly believe in my innate understanding of the "all is one" idea because the Anarchology Research Society has made my mind understand it. For someone who, unfortunately (I think [tee hee]), still uses his mind as the default filter for most things that fall within his radar's grasp (though I am getting better at letting my emotions do the walking and talking), that kind of intellectual gateway is key to a fuller self-understanding and healthy integration, both of which I'm courting with fervor these days.

If you're also a seeker of synergy and feel flummoxed by the insane indelibility of the schisms that keep us from being whole, but you can't seem to "just let go" like all the new agers have been telling us all our lives, take a look at the Anarchology Research Society blog. It may not have the exact same effect of opening previously-closed doors on you as it had on me, but maybe you can follow its signals through the Web to find your own intellectual links to intuitive urges. I'm not a hundred percent sure why yet, but I feel this connection is indispensible to our arsenal of attributes as we transform our reality into a more balanced and less terrifying one. It has something to do with another "New Age" (damn the denigration of that term through charlatan-laden marketing brouhaha!) notion about the merging of science, philosophy, spirituality and art into one universal discipline of creativity-nurturing and wisdom-cultivation. Or something like that.

With a sigh of relief, I'm glad to defer that topic to a later post, since I now have to get ready for my second shift at the ol' ESL "college," (Can I just say how much a split shift SUCKS?!) where my evening students will either be half asleep, ready for a nightcap (or six) or rabidly demanding serious grammar drills. I just love to be kept guessing, I really do.

And thanks to you fellow confused intellectuals and other interested bystanders for noodling with me!

Categories: transformation, philosophy, faeries, healing, holistic, synergy, omnology