i was thinking about the fakeness of souplantation along with its faux industrial look (at this location) when my dad decided to strike a conversation with me about the illuminati. started by saying that george washington in a letter acknowledged their existence.
he went on a little bit about the statue of liberty — talking about first how the two men who built it were illuminati… talking about various symbols in the statue of liberty.
i wont repeat the conversation but frankly i found it vaguely annoying because i don’t care. my reasoning as i explained was that such symbols do not do anything. does the symbols on the U.S. dollar bill serve to make the sun shine? guarantee the U.S.’s place in the world? serve to hurry along the 2nd coming of Jesus? when i explained this to my cousin she found it to be incredibly negative. she retorted, saying that symbols are important because they serve to remind one of things. i then mentioned the stain glass windows in catholic churches with the 12 stations. things like that do carry meaning and can help improve one’s life, but the presence of symbols themselves are meaningless — one has to take them seriously and bring them into being with one’s own person, otherwise it’s as plain as decoration. really if one lives it, why does one need symbols?
it seemed that my dad took the presence of such symbols (in some part) to mean the presence of a shadow government, i found that completely bogus. governments and institutions are so ineffectual. for there to be a shadow government ruling the planet for hundreds of years, one would need an incredibly tightknit organization — one completely disciplined and lean with near perfect information (some how). how often do the local police solve crimes (for instance)? i won’t get started on that but i will mention that belief in a masterful conspiracy is really unlikely. government is so cumbersome. and any kind of super secret government won’t be secret for long — because there is no elite squad with near perfect technical information, certainly not fifty+ years ago.
nonetheless, disproving conspiracy theories is kind of a ridiculous thing to do because it’s near impossible. it’s an epistemologist’s field (which i am bad at) but how can anyone prove anything? if we have a choice in what we believe in and how we organize anything then we should have a set of criteria to determine the most effective beliefs.
what i want to get to here, is what carlos castenada calls the 2nd attention.
i want to extend castenada’s thought as exposited in books like ‘the power of silence’ and ‘the fire within’. he calls the first attention to be that of everyday man. the 2nd attention is the shifting of awareness from the first attention into the other bands of awareness, like that of other animals or other creatures not of this world. the 3rd attention is when the entire luminescent being lights up simultaneously, and that is analogous to near immortality or complete awareness or enlightenment. i don’t want to go into detail about this but i will analogize the 2nd attention here.
in a sense there is no first attention…if there were, it would be common sense, or an everyday sense of things. a shared reality of sorts. when getting into the particulars it’s apparent that there isnt a shared reality. there are clusters of shared realities in different groups that reinforce one another. these groups verge into areas that castenada would define as the 2nd attention.
the analogy of the 2nd attention is best explained with the ‘sorcerers’ who search for the truth and power in the 2nd attention. castenada talks about these men, heroically going through unknown areas of the psyche and going mad, or disappearing altogether, lost and unable to come back. often, in castenada’s books, don juan and carlos get stuck somewhere overnight in the desert, because they are wandering through the 2nd attention (in a controlled way by don juan) when they are spotted by a creature of the 2nd attention (sometimes one who was once a man) and they must hide from it and wait until sunrise before they can escape.
in this analogy, the 2nd attention works for ppl who try to identify truth and gain power from it. they are ordinary people like you and i but they are also people who are interested in politics, or religion, or philosophy. they are world-builders, system-builders, mystics who try and find the source. in reality, they are pretty much anyone who gets shaken up by reality, who experiences the death of a close one or a traumatic failure of some sort and comes to question life and existence and meaning. we all wander the 2nd attention in some way, departing from the strict ‘middle way’ of the 1st attention to come up with our own conclusions about life and reality, of the people around us and whatever else that seems to need explaining and ‘fitting into’ with everything else.
in a way, meaning is used to formulate social hierarchies so that we can fit everything together in a way independent of any one individual or according to one individual. we say this is how we should live, this is how society should be — we judge everyone and ourselves — whether it be from a perspective of economics, or a religion, or evolutionary psychology. some kind of universal meaning is introduced to reinforce a social order so that we can say “this is how things should be and our place in those things”
so in that sense, all different theories and systems are equal — because what kind of objective metric for which we can possibly come up with which is ‘right’?
in what sense are things ‘right’?
is it arguable that a paranoid-schizophrenics’ daydream “works” for them as much as my paranoia about paying my taxes on time “works” for me? there are consequences to both! and while we can say well, most of us all pretty much believe in paying our taxes (as we also believe in the consequences) can we say also say that when reading a paranoid-schizophrenics’ exposition (say written in a notebook) about the nature of the universe when we understand that words can have inter-textual, slipperiness? likewise, to capitalize on deleuze and guattaris’ schizo-analysis (which is not about schizophrenics at all, but a structure or a way of connecting things, a different kind of meta-epistemology) can we reject alternate modes of meaning make simply because they are unfamiliar to us? most of us do! that’s the point of meaning! to find the big man, or who should be the big man on campus.
so it comes about that i think a criteria for 2nd attentions that ‘work’ should be whether or not those models are ‘dead-ends’. i think in the ‘planet earth’ series, sponges were called ‘evolutionary dead-ends’ because they could not progress anywhere else. likewise, in the castenada world, many of those sorcerers are dead-ends simply that because while they may gain power, they are also lost, or unable to return from their situation. they are trapped in their own separate worlds, forced to focus and rely solely on the inhumane in the second attention.
example?
many some ppl who know me know that i like philosophy (or that theoretical shit) so that when dan brown’s book ‘da vinci code’ came out, quite a few recommended it to me, equating what i liked to what dan brown did. i know many ppl won’t equate philosophy with whatever dan brown wrote about in his book, but if you think about it, abstractly the two do resemble one another. esoteric knowledge, hermeneutics — systems of thoughts, abstract arrangements of meaning… much like what foucault’s pendulum by umberto eco was about with the knights templar, the crusades, free masons and what not. connections of history and finding a meaningful connection/system in place by which we order the world. the difference between philosophy per se, and this other stuff, is that philosophy isn’t tied so necessarily to individuals nor do specific time and places.
nonetheless such ‘master’ conspiracy theories seek to explicate events and order a grand narrative, much like fredric jameson’s the political unconscious, such that even ‘the end of narratives’ qua postmodernism is incorporated into an articulate structure which cannot but preserve the theory itself. to get back to grotesque conspiracy theories such as those involving the knights templar, such theories often take real ambivalence and incorporate it into the theory so that one’s own ignorance plays a role in reinforcing the theory’s metaphysics of presence.
like the 2nd attention sorcerers, one then becomes trapped in that world.
and what then?
is the purpose of developing such a theory, one founded on history and specific events to continually find more information to support it? even freud with his oedipus complex moved into a different direction as time went on. it’s inevitable that one’s theorys and ideas should slide as one grows older, or changes location. but isn’t it usually the case that ppl abandon their ideas, and forget them if they don’t write them down? we are not our ideas and our ideas are not us. but ideas at a particular time do suffice as the internal workings of how we orient ourselves among everything else.
and if orientation is what’s at stake, then truth is less important than we feel it to be absolutely. i say it is best to have an out look which does not force us into any kind of intellectual, emotional or otherwise ‘dead end’. one should, aesthetically and on principle, seek to come to terms with one’s surroundings… and as we are imperfect beings, in the spinozan sense, we always will have partial knowledge, incomplete and inaccurate. we must continue to absorb, be flexible and evolve.
even when choosing a career, who wants to be hemmed into being just a customer-specialist? it’s true (in nature and in today’s world of specialists) that to survive well, one should pick a robust niche that will exist regardless of market forces, and narrow in on that niche to ensure one’s employability. but that’s only if you want to stay still. staying still though, is much like a mollusk or clam. we can’t direct the environment — it’s too big — so it’s best to just ride along within its shadow.
i think of the energy used to lodge and unlodge one’s self from a position to be analogous in structure to the pianists who practice for hours daily to become virtuosos. when you play a passage, your hand does the motion in the most efficient way for it. but that’s not going to help when you have a variety of complex forms to perform which require a different motion. so to be efficient in those complex forms you need to undo the easiest hand motions repertoire in your subconscious and mold your virtual hand (stored in your head) closer and closer into the shape of a keyboard. and to do that you must transverse the keyboard.
the energy to unbind and re-train one’s hands can be thought of in terms of activation energy. to transition to a lower energy state (smoother motion and thus, more efficiency). this is much like the energy it takes to unravel ‘bad habits’ or in our case, to utilize complex hermeneutical pathways to satisfactorially explain phenomenon. theories which do not explain phenomenon well, require continual maintenance and continual upkeep. it takes a great deal of energy and anger to be a racist or a bigot. it takes a great deal of emotional investment and risk of suffering to be self righteous in the face of society. the harder one solidifies a theoretical apparatus the greater the risk to the thinker if it fails.
i don’t know if enlightenment is ‘real’ in the way of stories. certainly buddhist enlightenment is real, in the sense that is a publically acknowledged phenomenon within various religions. i won’t speak of it, but i will mention that it’s difficult to discern how if ever anyone were to understand that one was not in fact lodged in the 2nd attention and that one ‘got it’. this brings back the question of metrics — or i should say, the lack of metrics. there are so many different systems and ways of understanding. for instance, to bring ‘karma sutra’ back to its origins, there is a warning in many tantric traditions of looking up and trying esoteric meditations and yogic practices by ones self. without the proper teacher, one runs the risk of invoking pain and wandering off the path these practices were designed to follow. the risk in this reminds me of much in the end of the yoga sutra which warns against indulging in the powers that arise from getting close to the unpolished mirror.
when one closes in on the sun, one risks blindness. the closer one gets, the increase in the risk of permanent blindness. if one were on the path to becoming the perfect pianist (assuming such a thing were possible), if one were to stop when one were close, the habits that one has acquired only solidify all the more so, for all the energy and work one has sunken in would help emboss the structures one currently has. it takes more energy to undo errors done in the extreme than it does errors early on.
this warning, of course, only explicitly functions within the context of there being a given path to follow.
real life — naked life, i should say — is fuzzy and without clear boundaries. within the context of organized religion, there is always a direction to tread (as it’s organized in a certain way). slavoj zizek, true to his hegelian loyalties has written extensively that one should follow a given (and perhaps seemingly arbitrary) path as such a path is the best way to guarantee one access to the universal. if one follows the hegelian dialectics for synthesizing meaning, then one should! and so zizek has written a good number of books on why the christian legacy should be protected, and what such a pathway has to offer. aesthetically it’s also consistent that zizek is in fact an authoritarian. the best way to ascend to a universal guarantee of some sort (any sort, for with zizek all roads lead to the hegelian-esque Notion) is to follow a path as deeply as it goes. sufis, as well, have an added requirement that one should master at least two different disciplines in order to understand how mastery extends beyond the prohibitions of a medium.
i have waxed about hegel before, so i won’t do that now, but it will suffice to say that if one reaches beyond the mode of the medium one can encounter analogous structures unbound by a particular medium. we master painter and a master musician can talk! we don’t need to use the language of a particular language to understand that literature of one culture has analogous movements and tropes possibly found in other literatures… and that syntax in computer languages can invoke syntax in non-computer expressions.
in this way, one can seek the various territories of particular fields, as they are woven with their tropes and their memes and their intensive structures to alight on more primary principles. such principles posit indexes which can become expressed in a particular discipline. folks, i am talking directly on deleuze and guattari’s combined notions of plateaus, machinic indexs and territory. deleuze and guattari are right to repeatedly invoke the success of man not only of his hand as a de-territorialized paw (which can become a hammer in holding a hammer, or a screw driver when using a screw driver) but also in his ability to abstract beyond aesthetic and sexual beauty — to combine abstractions in fomulations of bodily meaning, philosophy and the literary arts.
we can be affected! and we can affect! highly developed sensibilities follow the most human of us.
while in the abstraction of so much internal semiosis eventually allowed each of us to experience the reterritorializing of that internal phenomenal space as ‘consciousness’, the process does not guide us in a given direction to further de-territorialize the signs which are re-terrtorialized along specific expressions originating from specific contexts. perhaps a word ‘allegory’ will always remind you of your 8th grade english teacher, or ‘meta-physics’ will always be the astrology and tarot card section in a bookstore. and the sight of lingerie will always afford a sexual or ‘naughty’ sensation. we respond to that with our vaguely deterritorialized bodies, smitten with tattoos and panty hose and other trappings of social signify-ance… and for all our abilities to abstract, build bridges and realize that a pen is also a weapon… remain trapped in the inner workings dependent on the inherited contexts of our social bretherian.
is it enough then, to realize an illumaniti conspiracy theory as a way of gaining access to social order? is it enough to work out a ‘pick-up-line’ system to get laid only to have to invest into that system over and over, and refine it and work it so as to be able to work it? or to vote for a particular political party and rally under that party with the trappings that this is the only way to clear up society and make it ‘what it should be‘ so that it is the ‘best possible world’? to clothe julian assange with the trappings of christ or satan when he is still a man? or in some cases, to claim our less fortunate as ‘mere animals’ for living off welfare?
i don’t write this so much for you, because i don’t doubt that this doesn’t apply to you.
in fact, you already know how things should be, and that it’s very apparent this or that style is the right style and that the order inherent in credit cards and drivers licenses are in fact one of the real orders of things. this is not far from the truth, and if you are thinking i am saying there is a way of mastering reality then you are a bit mistaken.
lets go back to aristotle with his seemingly minor distinction between artificial and natural. aristotle posited an order of things which says that natural things have essence. he aligns the state with natural things, as it is supported by people. artificial things, like wooden statues, do not have that essence, they do not ‘belong’ to the primary motion. and of course, aristotle brings about a taxonomy to get us closer to true immaterial being… a like a great-grandfather of the biological taxonomy we use today. but if aristotle allows the state to have essence because people make the state up, and the state changes over time, so then do all items and things of people. and it is not the objects themselves that we make (artificially) which have essence, but their meanings and ideas. in a very real way, we then go back to the earlier idea in this entry — meaning is what allows us to create social hierarchies for us to orient ourselves to everything (including each other).
reality as such, is all that, by definition, a meta-state of orientation: any kind of grasping or inclusion of another piece is also reality. we cannot unthink reality. very lacan! and given that all our positions, experiences and bodies are different, it makes sense that there be as many Real(s) as there are people. beyond that social criterion of orientation, we do have some abstract ability to understand non-people orientation, such as with chemistry or math. to understand how we fit in with them, however, is to mistake a rock for having the same kind of meaning as a spoon. natural things have essence as they were, but artificial things only have essence by virtue of how it functions (pragmatics — interesting aside but this does suggest that everything is pragmatics in the the deleuze and guattari schizo-analysis sense). in a real way, how you understand things is who you are. and how you change, when you do change, incorporates those alterations in a worldview.
but — wandering in the 2nd attention is not pointless! and to find commonalities in how various relations work in the inexpressible beyond specific signifying processes internal to us is in some sense to grasp the noumenal skin by which we generate context and meaning. certainly not a pointless endeavor! after all, to forgo such a process is to strongly risk being ruled by a 2nd attention dead-end, to be required to bring energy to maintain a world-system, which only asks everything of you — and takes away your free choice as a de-territorialized mammal, denying you much of the energy you might have otherwise, to grow.
