There is a kind of philosophy that is an experiment on your head; the sort of thing that sets up a research station of the mind and runs certain thought processes, within the rat's maze of an algorithm whose content *only* is undecided. To see how they strive for that piece of cheese at the end, in this case a soothing neuro-chemical. The experimental vantage may be camouflaged, may not declaire its experimental voyuerism, and may even follow a prime directive to not interfere with the wild and "native" thoughts that run past. These strive for an equilibrium after the balance or homeostasis of the subject of the experiment (indeed, insofar as it existed before either as homeostasis or as subject) is upset by being warped through language to go somewhere it didn't inhabit before--but largely being taken from the savage jungle of the brain, to cages at a world's fair put on by the brain for itself, subjugating its own wild, flowing electricity and the divine feeling whose conviviality it so enlivens.
But there is another kind of philosophy--the ideal of philosophy--where philosophy passes out of itself and becomes an experiment in life, or of a life. this is where the research station in one's head gets overrun; where the experiment mutates and runs amok like the atomic monster, starting inside parameters but breaking them down. Breaking through the maze, not even go to the end but going out, to multiply in all the crevices of the City. Where the researcher in the research station strips off his clothes, puts on a loincloth and starts running in the pack like a madman, all decked out in warpaint and with a bone through his nose.
No doubt, the tribe he runs with goes through its development and becomes civilized in its own right--really, in a blink of an eye, for civility or the state is as old as the primitive; but it is a new civility, an alien civilization--even from another planet. An ornate, classical civilization. The thoughts do not just stay thoughts, and this new civility is not just the creation of "values" by a man outside the process of creation, but is where the creator gets created by his creation. Then, afterward, one is as a sojourner in the strange land of one's birth, not as an experimenter who is cataloging field data for the mothership, but as a kind of shipwreck who could never find his way home.
The first and probably last of a dying, noble line of kings whose homeland is a planet annihilated before it even existed--but still for that possessed of the impulse of a converter seeking to civilize the natives. In the course of time it is discovered that there can be a science in this process, and that it can be applied through the whole of the society, if we could just set up a research station and ascertain its fundamental laws. So that our mind could become therapy for its sickness.
In this way we get further and further from home, and by now with all this experimentation we are far away from home indeed. Many light years berift of the earth and eden; and, on the present course, infinite light years back home if we are to go the circuitous route of following the universe out to where it loops back in on itself. If only we could forge ahead at light speed! Surely this is possible with a kind of warp drive...
Oh, if only we could create the fabric of the universe of which we could bend, to bring home to us, anywhere else but in our heads. oh--if we could even do that! Meanwhile we drift in space, no longer under any power at all, but gliding silently in the vacuum. This is the ideal of the ideal of philosophy--a perfect peace--but I ask: what good is it?
I dare say it would take a miracle happening for the laws of space, especially of inner space--a turning of the "water" of energy into wine; for it is this inner's space itself that's the barrier, and the truth be told we are already home, just like the hero and sojourner in The Wizard of Oz. We have but to click our shoes and wish, for the deepest wish of the heart. There's no place like home. If only God had become man, incarnated not just in one but in the whole world of people and things. Then we would already be home.
We're gonna meet some day in paradise. In that place the Jew is gonna rib the concentration camp guard and joke about "that one time" he gassed his whole family. And the guard will blush and say "entschuldigung!!!!!" Am I being offensive? Far be it for me to profess belief. I disavow, and say that I am just the sojourner in a strange land charting strange customs and rituals by leading them to a startling conclusion.
Things that I haven't yet been able to puzzle together into a complete picture, but surely will some day. To come up with an exact taxonomy of the concept traced out of the initial events of the life of man. Surely the idea is what you get when you add together the Mithraic cult+the Elysian fields+roman populism and the whole ressentiment+Osirus/Dionysus Zagreus+Essenic fanaticism and the sublimation of the messianic political hope. and these ultimately come from the totems and the primal horde, or else some other band of monkeys. And what is this all rooted in but the tragic, promethean act where a fire was set in the tongue. There are some missing links to this narrative, but surely future generations of spiritual science will tidy up and get the whole thing quite in order to place in the museum.
Until then, out of these gaps between totems and their more advanced permutations (but after all they're still just totems,) the dream time speaks as a quite different "fabric of reality," as what connects when causes do not connect up; and it whispers dreams in our ears that are, like the Freudian dreams, fulfillments of a wish. Indeed--the foremost wish of the human heart, which is just that we are already home. If only we could wish this wish with all our hearts, then we would already be home.
Maybe, just maybe we can. Maybe we already are wishing this wish with all our hearts. Then we would truly already be home.
I want to believe.
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