If reality were to exist, what would it be like?

Most people are pretty confident that they know what reality is. Many, however, do not believe that others know what they know. Some say there is no reality. This, of course, just translates into the statement, ‘In reality, there is no reality’. Really?

On the other hand, people who would blush at not knowing the name of the captain of some football team, are quite confident to ask, ‘What is reality? Who can say?’ and be content to leave it as an open question. This is fine, so long as the question does not intrude itself.

But sometimes the question of reality does intrude itself. ‘Does she really love me?’ If we have ever had a misperception, and realised our mistake, we have established a relativity of reality. We have accepted that what we thought was real, was not. We measure this against some more certain standard of reality. Once we have yielded to this temptation, we can no longer assert with any assurance that we may not have replaced one error with another. We are certain of this reality. But we were certain of the previous reality, until something changed our mind. With what greater certainty can we assert this current view?

Alan Watts entitled one of his books, ‘The Wisdom of Insecurity’. I confess I bought the book, then lost it before I could read it. But the title remains. Once we have passed through the portal of doubt, and are able to question our own perception of reality, we have reached the first stage of Socratic Knowledge: we know that we do not know. Really to feel this sense of doubt, called Existential Doubt, is a terrifying experience. Better just to think about it.

Reality is closely linked to truth. In fact, it is the search for certainty, (and if there is an ultimate reality, certainty must surely be one of its attributes), that gives truth its urgency. It is not just about keeping your word, or telling the truth, or not actually breaking the law. As we approach truth, (perhaps on an asymptotic curve), so do we approach reality. We have discussed that our perception might be mistaken. Even if we do not go so far as to believe that all that we experience is a fabrication of the mind, we must surely admit that we retain some illusions. As my squint, Belgian, Philosophy professor used to say to me, his good eye enlarged by his monocle, ‘But Meester Meetchelle, I ‘ave my prejudices’. Truth dispels illusion, just as paper trumps rock, or scissors, paper. Even the most conceited of atheists, Bertrand Russell, confessed that, if we accepted the idea of creation, there would be no logical refutation of the proposition that the entire universe was created a moment ago, complete with records. There really is no proof that things exist independently of our perception of them, because all proof is filtered via our perception.

Russell’s observation is nicely illustrated in the making of the film ‘The Ten Commandments’. The set was created, complete with Pyramids and Sphinx, in the Arizona desert. When the film was complete, the set was abandoned. About 30 years later, archaeology students excavated the site, discovering historical records which were created in modern times. In the same way, we may ‘remember’ memories which our own minds have constructed. Just kidding. Or maybe not.

Carlos Castaneda in ‘A Separate Reality’, talked about a warrior’s folly. The warrior understood that he could not change the way things were, understood that his perception of reality was just a perception, but he still behaved as though things were real. We have to. It is the only way to remain sane. The courage comes in doing so, knowing that they are not.

Questions of the nature of reality lead to questions of existence and quickly devolve to questions about time. This is because we perceive reality sequentially, like the frames of a reel of film. Interesting that the film has already been shot before we view it, and that our perception of the film is simply a matter of seeing the light pass through it, like Plato’s cave. But as soon as we think of existence, we have to think of some sort of time frame. What was there before things existed? This is why Kant began with space and time as the two accepted starting points of his cosmology. Of course, our subjective experience of time varies vastly against chronology. Studies have been done on ‘expected duration’. If we wait more than five seconds for a dial tone, we put down the phone and start again. For an elevator, we’ll wait, say, forty five seconds before we press the button a second time. For a tax refund, we’ll wait a year.

To quote William Blake:

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

If life hereafter is eternal, then, since eternity has no beginning, we were already in existence before this life. How that life was, we may not remember, but we cannot confirm its absence.

Macbeth said,
….‘that but this
Blow might be the be-all and the end-all -; here,
But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th’inventor.’….

There is a bit of an unresolved paradox for me in the view that we exist but in this fleeting moment on the earth. To say that a belief in eternal life is a comfort, is no comfort. If life were to end with our mortal death, there would be no consequences of our actions beyond what judgements may be made here, on this bank and shoal of time. Eternal life is far more terrifying because there is no escape. If our consciousness ended with our death, we could choose a good day, and die. There would be an end to it. We could have no regrets and, provided our passing were tranquil, there would be no loss. But if our awareness is eternal, there can be no escape.

Interestingly, Rupert the Bear was created by the wife of the editor of ‘The Times.’ Although the cartoon was popular, people began to complain that, whenever Rupert got into a tight spot, a magic genie would whisk him away. People could not believe in that, and the writing of the stories was handed over to another. In Greek tragedies the ‘deus ex machina’ – the god hiding in a box on the stage – would come and rescue the hero. Yet, people who do believe that consciousness ends with death, have a tenacity to life that denies them this escape, and to some extent, denies their belief.

If I remember it correctly, Spinoza said, ‘We feel and we know that we are eternal’. I do not claim he is right, but what he says is nicely illustrated in the film, ‘The Matrix’. Even though Neo’s whole experience of his consciousness is a computer-created fantasy, something within him stirs to make him uneasy. He feels, and he knows, that there is a greater reality behind the one he experiences on a daily basis. He has an involuntary impulse to move towards the discovery of that more real reality.

From infancy, we first learn to perceive the illusion. That gives us the tools to start to clarify our perception. In adolescence we have a second chance to re-organize our perceptions. For the rest of our lives, we can continue to clarify our perception of reality, if we want.

How do I define ‘reality’? A definition is merely a boundary put around something you know is there. No definition will enable you to know what is there. It is not a matter of defining reality, but of being real, of learning to see it for yourself. If you ask me who I am, I cannot tell you. If you really want to know who I am you must spend time with me.

A final quote from G Spence Brown in ‘Laws of Form’:

To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practised, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not busy behaviour of any kind . Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know ….’

And that’s the Truth.

© John Mitchell 08 05 08

The carrot and stick heresy.

How people love this analogy, the carrot to reward and the stick to punish. The visual image appeals, the dichotomy between reward and punishment is clear, and somewhere in their semi-conscious minds, there is an image of a child on a donkey, dangling a carrot before it, promising a reward that never has to be delivered.

If people are to base their philosophies on seaside amusements, they should at least look at the picture they are using. How does the carrot stay just in front of the donkey? On the end of the stick. The stick is not there as an instrument of punishment, but to support the reward. Negative reinforcement never works as well as positive. Of course, to retain your credibility with human beings, you have at some time to deliver the carrot. (There is a story of a greyhound who caught the mechanical rabbit and was electrocuted. It is not a reward, but a ‘promise’ of a reward, some might say.)

The desire to punish is deeply rooted in our collective, Puritan, unconscious. If we can show that someone else is bad, then we must be less bad. Jung explained well that we project the bad we feel within ourselves, outward to others.

Remember that guilt is not about feeling bad when you have broken a rule. It is the existential angst which might arise, for example, in a child feeling responsible for the divorce of its parents. In fact, there is in Germany a group of individuals struggling so terribly with their sense of Nazi guilt, that they can barely cope with life. They are the children of Nazi war criminals who were themselves too young at the time the war ended to be held in any way accountable for what their parents did. Yet they feel the guilt.

From guilt, follows the desire to punish oneself, and through punishment, the hope of expiation or forgiveness. How nice to be able to project that guilt and that punishment onto someone else, and keep only the forgiveness for yourself.

Everyone wants peace, it is only the terms of the peace people disagree on, (i.e. capitulation of the other side). Well, almost everyone. Sometimes war arises simply because enough people want it. For some, it is the only job they know. Ever heard of an ‘Offence Force’? All armies exist purely for defence.

In the classic Western novel, which includes most of them, the hero’s life is given meaning by the desire for revenge. He has a purpose in life, and to that purpose he can subordinate all other desires. It relieves him of ever having to confront his own mortality. As van Morrison sings, ‘you breathe in, you breathe out, you breathe in, you breathe out, you never, never, never wonder why though’. Revenge is not a popular notion nowadays, so now we ‘focus’.

We are enamoured of the idea of war. We have of course, sublimated it, to a war on poverty, a war on crime, a war on drugs, and, forget not, the virtual war on terrorism.

A few years ago the United States spent $50 billion on a war on drugs. A real war, with lots of helicopters, guns and troops in Columbia. At the end of it, they had to admit, they had achieved nothing. They then brought out the stick, (the Columbians having swallowed the carrot), and threatened Columbia with trade sanctions. The response was simple. ‘You stop buying, we’ll stop selling’. Spend $50 billion on counselling drug users?

In my favourite movie, Hopscotch, the CIA agent has an insight. ‘Perhaps we are going about this the wrong way’, he says, ‘sometimes bullying people doesn’t work’. That soft approach might work for the CIA, but not for the rest of us. But perhaps we are going about things the wrong way. Despite what people say, children do not have high status in our society. This is because it will be many years before they earn money.

Add to that Freud’s very accurate description in ‘Totem and Taboo’ of why adults feel threatened by the young bulls, the myth of over-population, (some countries are now actually concerned about under-population), and the focus of attention adults have put on re-defining their roles as males and females, and no wonder the children are left behind.

An amendment to the child-abuse law, limiting the number of strokes a parent may belabour their child per day, and also excluding the breaking of bones or raising of blood from the welts, met with loud outcry from law-abiding parents who feared that their children would become so unruly that they could not be controlled. A social-worker explained that these, (still horrendous), limits had to be imposed because, whenever a case of child abuse was brought to court, the parents simply claimed they were exercising their parental duty to discipline their child, and the case was dropped.

So we focus on hunting down criminals after they have become adults, and spend vast sums on punishing them, putting them in jails, and releasing them with little chance of survival, only to catch them again. Yet most criminals of almost any strain, have had horrendous childhoods. This does not excuse, but it might explain.

There is a syllogism that runs, “What this person has done is unforgiveable. If I were to understand what drove him to do it, I might be tempted to forgive him. Therefore I will not try to understand what drove him to do it.’ Logically true, perhaps, but practically disastrous.

We approach the problem from the wrong end of the telescope because we do not want, enough, to solve the problem. We want to have bad people to punish. And anyway, the political implications of interfering with an adult’s right to raise it’s child as it pleases is far too controversial to approach. So we do very little to restore the inner balance of the unbalanced child, to protect them from trauma or support their emotional healing. But we all agree that criminals should be punished.

We can see the absurdity of the notion that we have to use a stick to raise a child when we look back at past accepted uses of the stick – to discipline slaves, employees, and of course, wives. All we ever teach by using the stick is that violence is an acceptable solution to conflict – which it is not.
06 05 08

Sassenha and other names

NAMES

A description is not a name, though some names may also be descriptive.

The gate to our house was painted green. We called it ‘the green gate’. Later, we painted it red. We still called it, ‘the green gate’, because that was its name. Now it has been painted once more, this time green. We call it, ‘the green gate’. Is that a name, or a description?

We have lost our facility for naming things. Instead, we allocate initial letters (AIL), even if we never use those initial letters again in the article. Why do we do this? One reason is that many of the names that we do have, like telephone, television and telescope, actually come from Greek. In fact, they were never really names, but descriptions in another language.

Another we avoid names and replace them with descriptions, is that we want to deny the reality of what we referring to. Political riots were described as ‘unrest’, blackouts are described as ‘outages’, and a dwarf is a ‘person of limited growth potential’. Is that any better than the name itself? What we overlook is that we only use circumlocutions, (walking around the word), where we actually believe that there is something wrong with what we are referring to. Where there is no problem, we just use the name.

Some people dislike lawyers. When lawyers start referring to themselves as ‘members of the legal profession’, or ‘defenders of justice through argument’, we shall know that they, themselves, have doubts about their profession. As long as they describe themselves as lawyers, we know that they are comfortable with who they are.

Sometimes descriptions intended as insults are adopted with pride, as names. This has often happened in the history of Christian religions: Quakers, Methodists and Doppers. (The Doppers were so named because it was claimed they were ‘Snuffers’ snuffing out the light of religion).

In the wilderness of namelessness in which we have been languishing for a number of years now, we began with acronyms and quickly degenerated into jumbles of incoherent sequences of letters. (An acronym should properly make a pronounceable word. ‘AIDS’ is an example.) Could there be any connection between an absence of meaning in the name, and a corresponding lack of meaning in the named?

We are gradually returning from our bout of acronyms to the previous method of using descriptions in other languages as names. Thus Hans Strydom highway becomes ‘Malibongwe’ which means ‘we are thankful’. Toyota calls its taxis ‘Siayaya’ which is, in a word, ‘we are getting there’. Optimistic, but appropriate.

We forget that our life spans are short. New generations rise in our place, and learn language by direct connection between the name (no matter how obscure), and what it really refers to. We can hide the truth from ourselves, but our descendents will see us as we are.

Tolkien wrote an enlightening piece on the importance of naming things in ‘Lord of the Rings’, when he described the Ents and the importance they placed on naming things correctly. He was on to something. When we name something honestly and appropriately we are acknowledging its reality. We acknowledge the truth of what it is. This is particularly important in dealing with our feelings.

There is a lot of confusion about ‘being in your head’ or ‘head-stuff’ which tries to break the connection between our feeling, and our cognitive self. When we name what we are feeling, we create the connection between our thoughts and our feelings, and can then move to resolve the feeling and express it appropriately. Amazingly, people who refer to ‘head-stuff’ usually point to their heads at the same time, as though the word were not sufficient and they have to remind themselves physically what the word ‘head’ refers to. The truth is, you cannot engage your feelings without using your thoughts. Just not thinking does not make you more honest in your feelings.

And so to Sassenha. By an ironic twist of fate, this name is derived from the initial letters of a description, Sassenha comes from ‘Suid Afrikaanse Spoorwee en Hawens'. My first job was on the Cape Town docks where I went to discover ‘the real world’, (it was not there). On night duty, I had the steam locomotives parked and fuming quietly but restlessly, outside my office and I promised myself that, if I ever wrote anything, I would call it ‘Sassenha’.

And so I have.

The original always beats the replica

What is the significant difference between an original and a replica?

In short, an original was created by someone who was doing the best that they could possibly achieve, working within the constraints of the knowledge and materials available at the time. They were also working to fulfil both psychic and material needs directly connected to the outcome of what they were doing.

Compare that to the replica. Exclude any considerations of how well the replica is actually made, whether someone is simply trying to cash in on a cheap imitation, or is going to great lengths to be as authentic as possible in both the choice of materials and the methods. No matter how authentic, the replica does not have the urgency of the originator to create to fulfil his personal need, neither is he working within the constraints of knowledge that the originator used. It is the difference between trying to solve a riddle, and doing so after having read the answer at the end of the book. You can get there, bet never with the same sense of discovery as when you work it through for yourself.

Jimmy Carter, ex-president of America, spends his time building replicas of early American furniture, using the exact methods and materials of the time and doing so with great accuracy. This is interesting, because he makes each one himself, personally, and is not employing underlings to do part of the work. This highlights the paradox because each piece of furniture is at the same time both a replica and an original – an original of the new series ‘hand-made by Jimmy Carter, ex President’. It is possible to imagine a counterfeiter making an identical piece of furniture and selling it as: ‘hand-made by Jimmy Carter, ex President’. That would be a copy of an original replica!

Why is it important to consider the difference between the two? It is important because, if we pursue the replica without knowing what makes it different from the original, we shall not fulfil our personal and psychic needs. It is simply a matter of being in error, to mistake the imitation for the original, and this means we are moving further away from a clear perception of reality. We continue in the world of illusion.

Earnest hippies in the sixties set out to become subsistence farmers and craftsmen, (one of the reason that the cutler’s art is so well developed in America – people who might otherwise have gone into nuclear physics applied their abilities to making knives). They hoped by this to attain some of the sense of connection with the earth, some of the sense of wisdom and authenticity that they saw in other craftsmen and other subsistence farmers. But they themselves were replicas, no matter how faithfully they stuck to the original processes.

The lifestyles they were following did not arise from necessity, but from choice. Go back to my original differentiation between the original and the replica. The originals were farming to the best of their ability, struggling to survive in a situation in which they could see no alternative, no answer at the back of the book. The craftsmen were working to the limit of their capacity, doing what they had learned, the best they knew how. They did not have degrees in engineering which enabled them to understand the transfer of forces in what they were making. They learned through trial and error and through a constant battle against failure. The were groping in the dark, not working under floodlights. And so they had their personal interaction with their challenges in life. It is this process which gave them that sense of vitality and authenticity that their imitators were looking for.

Can you really imitate authenticity, no matter how honest your intentions? It is an oxymoron.