As I work back through the blog from the beginning, reshaping the work to the single auteur – having perhaps been too slashing when I tried to backtrack edit from the most recent – I have that old sense of fault slip that played so largely in extending the work and delaying publication : the sense that I am not yet the self of my self, that, once again, I am shedding personae.

            I slashed because what I did recently was both experimental and only transitionally necessary.

            My life has been based on finding the single persona. Or, rather, my life has been based in finding the momentary thread that once again insists on my unfragmented condition, the infusing power of value. The saving value sequence has progressively led me to understand reflection and its historical as well as psychological context, something not presently in any textbook.

            Ever since I was fifteen, and the phrase ‘experimental writing’ was still hovering in the common flux, I have always despised and detested it.

            The only writing I find worth reading arrives at the ear word by word, because the writer found the value infusion inherent in language, in the word, in the living symbol and sound, both natural shapechangers.

            Every word is an experiment. But the engrafting force that turns about from awareness to value and value to awareness through the medium of the word stands beyond all experiment. This is precisely the enticement of writing.

            For both kinds of fools.

            But the true fool puts on the coat of many colors.

            Now that I can make my nest in the esoteric, synthesizing things at the core, extant in the living cultural arrays available to us, to bring out relatively new perspectives, (thus, as I have suggested to my confirmation, in fact replacing the gone philosophy of speculative metaphysics with the psychology and philosophy of reflection, validating not only the mystical, but underwriting the core traditions), I need to level the safe walls of my single redoubt.

            Ghosts, dancers, spirits, perhaps even a god or two. No doubt teachers near and far will make their appearance.

            Unlike Whitman, I am not large. Nor am I in fact many.

            This is now my secret.

          Now that I understand that I can’t – that, as the phrase is, the time is not yet – nothing changes, since that means one can present the esoteric with impunity, so long as one is willing to parry the spiritual thrust of judgment against one’s sanity; something I have been dealing with, however successfully, since infancy.

          Yet, of course, at the same time, everything changes.

          What I see today is that the numbers are theology.

          My long dance with the numbers as basic symbols, as esoteric bodies of experience, as descriptive categories, and so on and so forth, drops through the first fact realization of their symbol status to the point that one recognizes the first seven as sets which define philosophy.

          That is, philosophy cannot be reduced to a single set.

          Historically, the dominant set is One, a natural paradox. But other sets have been tried. The spiritualist gets caught in five. As I have pointed out here, this gift began with Aristotle, but went to India and apparently returned. Much of the esoteric, as literature and practice, is dominated by five.

          But, of course, the seven is ancient, as much because it is seven as from any overt identification. That is, seven is the prophetic, necessarily both the inverse and the obverse of the first moment of self, which also establishes cause and substance, the conditions for history.

          ‘Where there are three gods, they are gods,’ says Jesus in Thomas. ‘Where there are two or one, I am with him.’

          There have been attempts to deflect this in later translations, but the first seems good.

          Presumably this is the source precept leading to ‘trinity’. But, of course, in this context, contrary to the trinitarian barricades, three is the anthropological introduction that allows me to find the same teachings in Zen and Shaivite Tantra. That is to say, I believe the teaching was thus transmitted.

          The three gods are the necessary condition of dialectic.

          Power is power; it has no logical place. That is, it has no place in logic. Necessity is only a power by default; and paradoxically, logic has abandoned cause.

          So what are powers?

          Bodies, perhaps?

          Certainly, the body is not One. This is an illusion of concept. Perception itself denies it.

          Power, then, is perception itself, a spontaneous response to value – one ‘side’ of the value, since the ‘fact’ of value, the whatever of its focus, specifies the power defining force, the rapprochement between consciousness and the perceived world.

          What gives the gods substance, however, is reflection – the reversionary nature indigenous in our present awareness.

          I love evolutionary theory because it’s the sodbusting plow in the fields of pseudo-scientific ‘secularism’. As soon as I acknowledge that consciousness is radical, which I am required to do by the pragmatic reality of reflection itself – evolution thus becoming responsible for awareness as a self-dependent fact – physics goes south by southeast.

          The I is cause, the history consciousness that gives substance to the substantive world, transforming the dream response of the reflective transition into the substantive world of ‘the real’.

          The mirror that is no mirror :

          There is only the figure.

          Did I mention the figure?

          The figure is seven.

          The mirror is the world as we see it now.

          All of these reversals in evolution before the final reversal of awareness itself.

          Gender reverses : the birth of ‘the other’.

          Body reverses as substance.

          Eye reverses as ‘world’.

          Breath ‘reverses’ as feeling.

          Mind is reversal itself, essence and substance: perception

          Dialectic is five. Dialectic is three.

            The Frankfurt school makes it clear that the peculiar power of the dialectic awakened by Idealism persisted in Germany well into the middle of the twentieth century. This is what distinguishes German philosophy from all other western philosophy, whether Continental or Anglo-American. But the dialectic consistently falls under the Kantian definition of ‘consciousness’ as reflective awareness, and not simple sentience. It is this which allows for the emergence of Marxism as serious philosophy. Since self-awareness pivots on ‘the object’ (although ‘object’ is a category created by self-awareness), the Kantian definition allows us to assume the potency of the thing-in-itself as the prior condition for ‘consciousness’.

            But the dialectic, in its ‘primal’ condition, depends on the play between the simple or infant sentience, which necessarily not only persists within the frame of reflective awareness but also grounds it, and the naturally divided reflective awareness. The dialectic arises precisely because the divided nature of reflective awareness necessarily seems to always point toward the simple or direct awareness as the ‘other’ within the frame of reflection, the ‘other side’ of the reflective process, when in fact ‘both sides’ are reflective, with the ‘simple’ awareness embracing both.

            When we place this dance between Two and Three at ‘the object’, we can apparently ‘deconstruct’ the object dialectically. But if, as Marxists, we essentially deny consciousness apart from ‘the material’, so that consciousness only takes the form of the object on the one hand, and only manifests as a pervasive condition of the collectivity on the other (something which can only happen under the aegis of the Kantian definition of consciousness), the object becomes a magical entity which both manifests and deconstructs consciousness.

            The Marxist then finds himself in the position where he must both assert and deny this magical property of the object, with the consequence that dialectic itself becomes both ‘pure’ process and hypostatic ‘entity’. But this is in fact tautology, since what was initially asserted was the object as the bearer of reality: i.e., ‘materialism’.

            The peculiarity of the Frankfurt school, of course, is that, in more or less openly recognizing this paradox, which essentially passes beyond the dialectical process itself, it confronted the dialectical potency as the mirror of the mirror, the reflection of the reflective process. Its ‘materialism’ became ‘dialectic’. Dialectic itself stands in for ‘the real’. But, as such, the process of dialectic becomes a moving rondeau of thought, apparently explicating by a sequential penetration that seems to exfoliate the given problem toward some revelation, although no primal or final moment is possible, since dialectic, as such, precludes ground, foundation and so forth. But the ‘target’ thus shifts toward consciousness itself. Dialectic alternately hypostatizes awareness (as ‘mind’) and ‘thing’. What the Frankfurt school effected was a definition of awareness in terms of this process, a mirror image for the structure of awareness as the mirroring function for things; but viewed only as ‘dialectic’, that is, something held as necessarily other than awareness.

            Here is that timeless suspension which allows for the extraordinary analysis of the development of nineteenth century industrialism and bourgeois society. The only problem being that the alienation which Marxism, and hence the Frankfurters, assign to industrial development is as old as human self-awareness, as old as the allegory of the garden. Granted that ‘bourgeois’ flowering of a unique sort takes place in the middle class societies that anchor the new imperialism of industrial commerce, as the ‘advanced’ nations impose themselves on ‘undeveloped’ markets, but the bourgeois mentality is imprinted in Akkadian clay tablets. It is an urban mentality, perhaps. But the alienation of the self through the act of self-awareness is the basis of urban culture. The alienation is not unique.

            The alienation is not unique except in terms of the development of dialectic. That is, what differs in the nineteenth century is the emergence of the ground understanding that allows for dialectic, not as the mechanics of logic, but as the mechanics of consciousness. It is dialectic itself which not only pronounces but embodies the final alienation, radicalizing the separation in consciousness which had hitherto been intuitive or tacit in all self-understanding.

            The two modes of the witness in the moment of self-awareness are the necessary basis for dialectic. But the dialectical impulse arises from the fact that neither alternative is the ultimate actuality of sentience, which is the simple or direct awareness of animal and infant, the immediacy of value and awareness – apparently the nature of consciousness as an evolutionary product.

            While the ‘conscious’ witness – that is, the self-consciously recognized witness – posits whatever it witnesses (including ‘itself’) as immediately independent or self-dependent, and therefore assigns the quality of immediacy to it, everything it thus witnesses as other and thus ‘immediate’ has in fact already been subjected to the reflective process.

            The ‘dialectic’, at its root, is not only the corollary ‘inversion’ of this process, it is this process. That is, because it is an act of consciousness which produces self-awareness, and the products of self-awareness, including our ‘consciousness’ of the witness, these are already dialectical process. And since ‘reflection’ means that the mirror fact persists in these phenomena, the enacting of reflection can move in either direction at any point. They are already dialectical in fact, apart from as well as ‘within’ the reality assigned to them.

            Dialectical abstraction can only follow this given dialectical fact. The ‘abstraction’ alone is what stands outside the original dialectical fact inherent in the given presentation. And only insofar as the dialectic is ‘expressed’ apart from the fact.

            Habitual abstraction wholly obverts the alienation, an alienation that allows us to move through the ‘facts’ of the world and ourselves while pursuing other goals. This alienation is what allows for ‘art’, since art is the non-habitual expression that momentarily collapses the alienation.

            As much as the Marxists and others want to insist on some ‘external’ apocalyptic change that favors the dispossession of individual alienation, and therefore of individuality in art, the issue finally is awareness. And while consciousness is universal, it is also necessarily individual.

            The problem always was and always will be solipsism. We cannot obviate our individual and exclusive self-involvement by an act of extraneous or abstract dialectic. Only the dialectical act that obviates our alienation by an expressive immediacy that collapses the prior dialectic of self-awareness in all our present experience – that is, art itself – can release us.

            Only legitimate creativity, the truly prophetic leap, can transcend our mutual as well as internal alienation, since finally the two forms of alienation subsist together in the nature of our experience.

            What has changed is precisely the recognition of the intimacy of the problem.

            Because I begin with the viewpoint of the poet, the viewpoint indigenous at least since adolescence, and since the true viewpoint of the poet never involves career apart from the incremental perfection of craft dictated by the ongoing spontaneity of the voice, it is only now, arriving at a pivot from which I can reflect on and question the impulse itself, that I can see how my odd commitment differs radically not only from the majority, but from the pervasive tendency of the mass. The poet I met who convinced me, finally, of the reality of the poet’s vocation never personally attempted to publish his work. And given my alienation (and presumably his) from what has been deemed publishable and sophisticated in the last fifty years – the corrupting influence of that spiritual link therefore being obvious – I perhaps have to add the caveat : because of the aesthetic conditions of the culture into which I was born.

            But even presuming that the vocation today is not historically particularly different, the role of the poet seems to involve this cultural isolation.

            I.

            Culture is language.

            The error of modern metaphysics – since metaphysics is act as well as concept – is the false (if tacit) equation of consciousness and language. Language is self-awareness. But sentience produced both self-awareness and language. Self-awareness radicalizes consciousness – ‘proving’ its self-dependence, its necessary independence from ‘inert’ matter – but does not ‘produce’ it. And language is the sustaining key for the perceptual mode of self-awareness, our present mode of ‘experience’ in which, as Kant says, the ‘I think’ accompanies all perceptual responses.

            This, of course, does not equate language with the ‘actualities’ of experience.

            But language is the sustaining perspective.

            In other words, language becomes the ‘interstitial addition’ within the field that supplies the sustaining basis of the field, since ‘field’ itself is a reflective category, a created ‘entity’ of the reflective process.

            If I say that I am ‘esoteric’ or ‘gnostic’, it is because the word, in this postmodern era, has become the word, for good or ill. Something changed reflective awareness so that our present objectification of reflection would become possible. This change takes place specifically at the level of the word, the sustaining key to the reflective process.

            The problem here is that the word is the mind, as opposed to the body. If we trace the same source for ‘the body’, the dichotomy comes into its full dialectical opposition. That is, this time, from the perspective of the mind.

            Historically, ‘the body’, while it had the ‘political’ force – the physical collectivity of the Spirit – everywhere destroyed the dedicated esotericists and gnostics. Naturally, the true word encompasses the body, since the body itself is simply another form for ‘field’, largely based on skin and breath, the pervasive nature of the tactile. Corporate spirit, of course, has its legitimacy. But without creative mind, it can only expropriate corporately experienced ideas, directly converting them to dogma. Almost all dogma of the body began as gnostic insight. But the gnostic insights resonate directly today, as if written for the postmodern.

            But this dichotomy of mind and body not only dictates a history of warfare and genocide, and not only infects culture, it has become a psychological principle as well. Now the mind and body are locked in an internalized battle that manifests in the swordspoint between ‘believer’ and ‘scientist’, in which the defining element is mutual fear.

            So this is the first order view of ‘the poet’.

            But the poet is the arbiter of the word. One needs to read the verb back into the noun to understand that this is hardly a boast. The arbitration is not particularly of the poet’s doing, except insofar as he or she accedes to the weird and uncanny demands of the living word as it proceeds toward tongue or pen.

            But what arrives, finally, is a self-validating viewpoint of the objective.

            This is not necessarily contiguous with everyday awareness. As in the traditions of the ‘magical’, a separation in consciousness has occurred. That is, the subtending objectivity is still ‘intentional’, requiring a sustaining focus to bring it into view in the immediacies of the moment. But clearly it is perpetually operating, an awareness one continually feeds by observation and study, but equally self-dependent and direct in its expression of value.

            II.

            The poet stands for the word as the living creative act.

            Because the word is a value sign as well as a simple or compound phoneme, the intuitive ground of the word is both body and light. We could say, as we have, that word structures the field. But the word itself is not structure.

            Consciousness has structure, but that possession necessarily disqualifies it as the ‘source’ of structure. Its structuring is an imperative key within structure. But structure has its ontological a priori in value : the separative instance that allows value to appear as both ‘immediate’, or essentially formless, and within form as Symbol or Sign.

            Symbol and Sign utilize the structures of body and the structures of consciousness as both act and form – or ‘mind’ – to make the sign ‘signify’, but its force as sign begins in the nature of value, not in the nature of consciousness or body.

            If the structuring instance seems binary, this is the act of focus as corollary of value that registers ‘immediate’ value and spontaneously assigns the ‘symbol’.

            The word is first of all habitual in terms of our developing vocabulary. But, structurally, it looks back into this first instance, the defining condition for moment and conscious experience. As such, the word is ontologically grounded in this a priori condition of value.

            The poet, then, returns to this ground.

            But, note, that in returning to this ontological ground in which value first of all subsists, the poet invokes body as well as mind.

            Language and knowledge are fields as well as awareness. All fields are forms of the body. In the classical Sanskrit tradition, the field of awareness is the Great Body, the ultimate extension of the body as the sensory instrument and, in its present representation in awareness, entirely ‘composed’ of the ‘substance’ of sentience. But conscious experience, knowledge and language have gone through the ‘reversal’ of body tacit in the eye and sight, which first ‘externalizes’ consciousness as contiguous with the field – a reversal, of course, in which we not only lose the sense of sentience as the instrument of presentation as well as the fact that the presentation is a simulacrum for the body.

            The connection of course persists ‘intuitively’. But this is also a definition of intuitive. In the creative act, or intuition, the whole body speaks through the ‘reversed’ body of the field.

            The peculiarity of poetry is that the body as the ‘instrument’ of sound is not reversed.

            What classical Sanskrit itself points to is the nature of the body as the ‘field’ of sound. As Yogi Vasant said, ‘Sanskrit was never anybody’s mother tongue.’ It was an ancient priestly medium, apparently highly cryptic, that developed according to principles laid down through yogic investigation of the internal ‘dimensions’ of the body.

            Sounds take the shape of the body as feelings. Feelings are the immediacy of values. Therefore individual sounds have specific values ‘located’ by body as the instrument of feeling.

            The intuitive in poetry moves both through the field of reversal, the field of light, and the direct field of the body. Which is simply to say, that poetry marries the direct and indirect nature of value through the single act of sound.

            It marries body and mind.

            The solution to the cultural collapse in which we subsist, today, is the systematic empirical philosophy that can be derived from the consistent patterns in the esoteric.

            Because I am gnostic, my viewpoint is gnostic. And gnosis is grounded in the epitome of prophecy. But since the actual change produced by this prophetic ‘moment’ in history is instantly independent of any name, it spreads throughout the known world.

            Peripatetic gnosis illuminates rather than ‘converting’ cultures.

            But ‘illuminated’ cultures produce thenceforth structural interpretations that reflect the core gnosis from the core religious and philosophical orientation which is the indigenous culture.

            I can list some of the core ‘moments’ in my gnostic journey – Einstein’s first paradox of light, the study of Upanishad and Sureshvara’s Pancikaranam, tantra as illuminated by hatha and other practices, and so on and so forth. These are important because they hold up the mirror of my individuality against the objective figure that emerges – the pure gnostic, shall we say.

            But what emerges finally is a structural and functional description of cosmos, of the empirical order. It consists in rules or principles that commonly revert to numbered sets.

            But, if we want to understand why numbered sets can correspond with correlated values, we need to go back to the place in which these relationships first evolved, namely the Greece and early Greek diaspora from the teachings of Thales and Pythagoras to the teachings of Aristotle.

            Aristotle, the father of linear inertia, ‘discovered’ the fifth element by observing that, unlike the sublunar world of the four given elements – the world of linear persistence – the indigenous movement of the heavens (‘aether’) is circular.

            From the spiritual perspective, Five is a pivotal number.

            The only pure gnosis can be found in the Gospel of Thomas. In the text, Jesus says, ‘You have five trees in paradise, and they are not moved in summer or winter.’

            As scripture, the first referent naturally has its literal value. The five senses are unchanging. But this is the unchanging of our keys to the manifest world. What needs to be observed carefully is the seasonal cycle in which the parable embeds them.

            In gnosis, the year is the cycle that transposes spirit or cyclical time into the figure for stasis, and hence the ground of history.

            Seven is the number for this historical / prophetic figure.

            In other words, we have a structural world for ‘religious’ and ‘spiritual’ practice, whether we choose to investigate the paradoxes of science – where the Einsteinian paradox and its consequences can be regarded as the native confrontation between Two and Three, and the subtending separative force, perhaps conceived as a ‘void’ Ace.

            Or we can study the peculiarities of the set of Five, whether in the early Greek philosophy or in such clearly derived traditions as Sureshvara’s Pancikaranam.

            Or we can turn to the figure of Seven as it expresses itself in the seven primary chakras of the traditional ‘kundalini’ model – which perhaps serves better as a descriptive than as a functional model, since the radical kundalini experience appears to be relatively rare, while, as description, the system allows for the paradigmatic investigation of one’s own body as the spiritual instrument.

            The differentiation of consciousness inevitably points toward five reflexive principles for consciousness. From the perspective of Five, the ‘external’ moment appears to concur. Here is the basis of Spirit.

            But, at the core of the moment, the value takes shape as a specific momentary figure for self, the uniqueness of the ‘I’, and this is the religious key to gnosis.

            My problem today is that my original vocation was and is the vocation of poet.

            But, even before I first attained my native voice, forty-seven years ago, it became clear that something was missing, culturally. The voice itself certified this, since it could only emerge within the narrowest range. When the range began to expand, as it naturally does, vocationally, I found myself at a total loss as to how to judge it – or the work it produced.

            In the last year, all of the research and the prose writing that I have done as a consequence has coalesced and finalized, a fact signified by the poetic impulse that has now reproduced these researches in two extended narrative essays under contemporary standards of versification and with legitimate poetic structure.

            Because of my commitment to the blog, I have tried, while engaged in the act of writing, to present my findings in verse here. But in the final editing of the texts, none of what I have presented here remains.

            I look back at my arbitrary and extraneous use of the rondeau structure for sound – one of the native elements necessary for the reconstruction of verse, but here compressed into unnecessary artifice – and I recognize the undue influence of the forces in the blog.

            One can only write for one’s self.

            At the same time, these constitute a legitimate introductory to the texts, although their journeywork prosody and unnecessary assertion belie the hack levels to which I can descend, usually only in early notebooks, but here in public performance.

            Eventually I intend to remove most of them. But, for the moment, I will let them stand.

 [Obviously, I have since removed the referenced posts. jtm 8/14/10.]

the old steel mills no longer breathe

                      in the night

        reshuffling the cards of the heart

            monstrous intricacies

sleeping on the sills of the riverbottom

          city of rust brown dreams

                                                – from ‘Song for the Stone House’

And the man of today? Must not this he hears be strangest to him, exactly because it is closest to his fathomless yearning? He dreams of change, but does not know transformation.

            – Martin Buber, speaking of the prophecy of the kingdom (‘a new heaven and a new earth’, Is. 66:22) [On the Bible, Schocken, 1982, p.12.]

            If I remember the quote correctly, Aldous Huxley described Bill Wilson as ‘perhaps the most important social architect of the 20^th century.’ Bill Wilson, of course, was the founder of AA. But while AA and Bill Wilson have been largely responsible for lifting the image of the alcoholic out of the gutter, AA has taken on some of the image of eccentric societies. And, at first glance, Wilson seems partly responsible. His dramatic mystical awakening translates into a spiritual insistence at the center of the 12 step program clearly at odds with our peculiarly secular society. As a rule, even our religious cultures (including jump and shout churches) do not insist on such a direct and immediate spiritual or religious awakening – since direct spiritual awakenings commonly violate dogma, as well as rigid ethical codes.

            But it is perhaps this which prompts Huxley’s statement. Bill Wilson grew up beneath Mount Aeolus, the ‘mountain of the winds’, and in the moment of his mystical awakening, he said that he stood upon a mountain on which a wind, ‘not of air, but of spirit’, was blowing. Such experiences, while they have specific manifestations, are essentially ineffable. Wilson also speaks of a great light. But as much as Wilson’s intelligence muted the booster language of the stock tout and gave him great versatility of expression, one senses a certain reticence, finally. When he took LSD – much to the chagrin of his AA cohorts – he described it as a ‘minor version’ of his original awakening. And, if one shares that moment on the mountain of the winds, one is inclined to recognize it as the epitome experience of the Great Death.

            Wilson, of course, was essentially unprepared for the experience. One assumes that he had felt the western goad – almost inevitable for anyone of intelligence. And his background suggests that he would have had a passing familiarity with the Bible, perhaps enhanced by his indigenous inquisitiveness. But the immediate prompt was someone – I believe, a doctor – telling him that his only hope at that point, against the compulsion of the addiction and certain death, was a radical religious awakening.

            The peculiar power of Wilson’s awakening is twofold. First, it is precisely spontaneous and unprecedented in terms of the mystical traditions available to him. And, second, it is entirely focused in the pragmatic. It arises out of need alone and effects a radical transformation of consciousness.

            What we have been describing here, in the written pages of this blog, could be considered the universalization of the issues of addiction and recovery. At this point, nowhere else will you hear, see or read them in this form. Because ‘we’ (this writer) had done the preparatory work necessary and experienced the necessary experiences of awakening prior to encountering the issues of addiction and recovery, we had the keys to the grounding philosophy by which to recognize that addiction is the core issue of the self and self-awareness, that is, of our present condition of experience.

            As a consequence, we have had the power to deal with this in the abstract, to recognize that it is the universal set of issues at the center not only of the historical evolution of philosophy, but also at the core of all legitimate religious traditions, from shamanism to the presently named ‘world’ religions.

            At the same time, we must assign the origin of ‘this’ understanding to the western tradition, since only the prophetic brings the focus to time itself, and only the focus on time as such brings forth the paradoxes of cause in the pragmatic and empirical forms we know as science. And only science turns us back, finally, to observe that the nature of the observer is somehow ‘objectively’ written into the nature of the universe. And it is only this turnaround in the practical experience of cause that opens reflective consciousness up and allows us to look into and understand reflection, since reflection itself, by nature, is the essential core of addiction, as well as the potential for ‘liberation’.

            We all experience ‘dis-ease’. We all experience the uneasiness that we are not properly ourselves. Somehow, I am not I. This is what the opening of Genesis is all about – not about some primeval woman’s responsibility for ‘sin’; not about some primeval man’s guilt. The body awakens to power. But ‘power’ takes us outside the body and opens the ‘Eye’ of the mind, the ground not only of ‘self’ but of the formalized nature of experience itself. What we ‘experience’ now is inherently proto-conceptual because it already contains the full cycle of reflective awareness as ‘objectified’ in something that can be named, something ‘located’ in a formalized structure of ‘time’ and ‘space’, all of which are essentially alien to the primal immediacy of infancy.

            But in the act of self-awareness which opens the gates to this understanding and which has served in human history and prehistory to develop this understanding of the world, there is also the unequivocal basis of a pervasive addiction, of which self and the perceived forms of the reflexive world are the tangible keys, cords and anchors.

            Breaking the addiction to self is the great challenge of life, the great adventure.

            Historically, the modern has brought us to this pass where this is the only true opportunity before us. All formal religions are falling because of this historical moment. Do you hear and see their disastrous reactions in consequence?

            Where I have come to ground, obviously, for the present moment, is in Buber’s presentation of Judaism, which – as Harold Bloom points out in his introduction to Buber’s text – like Gershom Scholem’s Judaism, is in fact a modern reinterpretation.

            Like many conservative Christian scholars, Buber points to the modern archaeological, paleological and epigraphical studies that suggest the peculiar validity of the story of Abraham. The named studies have shown that the details in the stories of the ‘patriarchs’ from Abraham to Jacob correspond with the mores of the appropriate era. They do not necessarily involve folkloric material, as once presumed. Nor does the internal and external evidence support the earlier contention that these stories parallel oral traditions in which gods are gradually reduced to human form.

            Therefore, of course, the conservatives have concluded that Abraham must have been a living man, whose story parallels the given text, although the text as it stands is clearly composed of residual fragments from dispersed traditions.

            The only problem here, of course, is that the cave paintings and little ‘virgins’ show us that verisimilitude is as old as art and art is as old as human prehistory. All we can say from the verisimilitude of the Abraham story is that the story was originally based in storytelling from the given era, whatever the validity of the man Abram or Abraham.

            But, that said, what is undeniable is the vision of Abraham, a man who put away the gods of his ancestors in the auditory ‘light’ of a God who had spoken to him, whether from within or from some more or less tangible form. And the story is about an ongoing personal revelation – a multiplicity of the appearances of this God, both in sequence and forms. It is the vision, and not the man that is the imperative here. And the vision is not simply a mystical vision, but a prophetic vision, a statement about promises and fulfillment.

            One of the key problems that the conservatives ignore is that given the non-folkloric motifs of ‘the patriarchs’, how does one explain the relentless and unrelieved folkloric material that constitutes the entire bridging narrative from the beginning of the descent into Egypt to the appearance of Moses in South Palestine?

            The evidence may validate the real existence of Jacob. And it appears some ‘outside’ evidence points to the emergence of the Mosaic traditions and a ‘Mosaic peoples’ from South Palestine, although the ‘conquest’ of Canaan is also cast into doubt. But, in between, one encounters next to nothing that is other than standard folkloric motif.

            The answer, again, has to be the question of prophetic vision.

            In this case, what we are apparently looking at is a function of the Mosaic revelation. Personally, I think I would like to consider it as a narrative constructed more or less directly out of the actuality of his vision, however much detail may have been added in the final redaction, not simply because of my intimate sense of the allegorical force of the presentation, but because I would like to think that the prophetic insight has the power to 'recover' history as well as both project and create, by however indefinite a text, a coming into being.

            What is Egypt, in this instance, if not addiction?

            The betrayal of a brother, the spiritual core of the ‘family’, into unintentional slavery, leads first to the rescue and then the enslavement of the rest of the family. And finally, a renewed vision leads the whole of the family, now a peoples, into a greater liberation, and a return to the land of first promise.

            Here is a structural reverse to the obverse figure of the couple in the garden.

            Until modern times, the image has served the peoples well.

            Self is first of all a liberating force, allowing us to awaken to our nature as conscious beings. But the very nature of the self enslaves us, once we have established the field of the self as a field of personal power.

            Now the vision must open the nature of self, the relatively complex reality not only of consciousness – of whole awareness, focus and volition – but of a world differentiated and rendered formal through cause, so that this and that dance together in endless arrays of apparently linked functions.

            But the new vision is at hand.

            In other words, the fact that we perceive objects and form ideas is a ‘given’ that cannot be explained, whether from sense data, substance or cause. Every act of awareness is essentially teleological, the function of a ‘final cause’ that no prior cause can explain. This is why George Berkeley, at the beginning of ‘empirical philosophy’, assumed that the divine is immanent in consciousness. And while, of course, this provoked all kinds of ‘empirical’ criticisms, the unexplained reality remains. The real problem with Berkeley’s relatively casual assertion is that, if it is true, not only must the divine be immanent, we must also be God. That is, our awareness is obviously the teleological instrument.

            George Berkeley is an interesting figure, perhaps the last fully religious man who is considered a serious philosopher in the lineage of western philosophy. The primary reason is because Berkeley first formally defined the problem of solipsism, a problem that had been hovering on the periphery as well as undermining from the center all philosophy hitherto. Everything is our experience. Ignorance is not just an idea, it is empirically tangible, however that is possible. Before we orbited the moon, the dark side of the moon was still a tangible idea, something we held in consciousness. Our idea of the objectivity and independence of scientific knowledge is nevertheless wholly within the frame of our experience and therefore also entirely subjective.

            Perhaps only someone who could have a simplistic idea of the immanence of God in consciousness could have consciously formulated and articulated the concept of solipsism. Any serious meditation on solipsism, and we fall into the eye of the vortex.

            But this is what we have done.

            The problem I have with postmodernism is that the postmodernist is lost in the pit of this solipsistic morass while he or she is shouting about what a lovely place this black hole is and how wonderful it is, and surely there must be something positive around here somewhere.

            This is what I call ‘epitome denial’.

            But denial, as the recovering addicts say, is not a river in Egypt.

            And what I say is that where there is denial, there must be addiction.

            For the ‘outsider’ not blessed with a stint in the star’s refuge, namely rehab, ‘denial’ as thus used must seem like a technical term. But addiction is not a technical term, but a behavioral reality. It resides in the same ambivalence of the will or volition that allows us to become aware of ourselves. The nature of awareness is intimate with focus and volition. Kant got lost in contortions because he understood that logically it is impossible for us to become self-aware. Logically, it is absurd that the witness witnesses the witness. But if we did not have this logical absurdity as fact, we would not have ‘conscious’ awareness, the awareness of awareness that allows us to see the world as we do, a field of time and space subdivided by objects and apparently behaving according to pervasive causal sequences. This is all something we awakened to and learned since infancy.

            When we trace this fact to its source, we find that it resides in the ambivalence of volition. That ‘the will’ is what can ‘look both ways’ from within ‘awareness’. The separation correlated with this ambivalence necessarily ‘opens up’ in the act of self-awareness. But this allows volition itself to get caught in self-feeding loops that are essentially prior to self-awareness. In fact, self-awareness is one of these self-feeding loops. Hence, the addiction to self is universal.

            What has happened now is that historically we have entirely fallen into the solipsism / addiction as the core of our culture.

            Culture is philosophy.

            The fact that culture finally falls back into the solipsism which is formalized and articulated through our philosophical study of the nature and process of experience should be sufficient evidence. The ambivalence in volition is not only indigenous in the tacit statement about the nature of the observer in Einstein’s Special Theory, it is also the formal corollary and the immediate expression of the actual ‘location’ of philosophy. Contrary to Kant and the logicians, philosophy is precisely psychology. The structures of reflection produce cause and the One, the conditioning principles of logic itself. The fact that these are grounded in ambivalence therefore places philosophy on a par with the Special Theory. This is the ‘subjective’ condition that finds its corollary expression in the ‘objective’ nature of Relativity Theory.

            But, consonant with this is the fact that philosophy has entirely fallen into the formal ranges of the solipsistic self. Until we resolve the issue of self in terms of the self, our culture is little more than the denial expression of the addiction to self.

            The first paradox we encounter with respect to the addiction to self is the fact that self is all and nothing. These are actual positions, and both are radical expressions of the disease.

            The self is all. In the addiction to self, I lose all boundaries. Everything you do is about me. In other words, pure paranoia. But this boundaryless condition imbues my ‘positive’ reactions as well as my negative. Your positive emotions must also be about me, like the child molester saying the child seduced him.

            The self is nothing. I am just the observer, and I am wholly objective. I am not present here except as a valueless I. I have no influence over the situation.

            Do we recognize these archetypes?

            But the self is ‘pure’ addiction. Hence, pure addiction, pure denial – epitome addiction, epitome denial. The addiction has swallowed all. The denial has swallowed all. No tradition. No history. No nature. Self and no self. Now you see it. Now you don’t. The final disaster of the Humean shell game.

            I can identify the self with the body, in all its subtle and gross forms – although it is always an essence-pointing intention that defines it, and the addiction is to this essence-pointing nature. This, in fact, brings us closer to the actuality of the addiction, since it points to the nature of Unity. Form is inherently addictive precisely because it is the simulacrum for the self. Form is the correlated creation of mind and world out of the solipsistic amalgam of pre-reflective awareness. Contrary to western philosophy, perception is active and not passive. No object inheres in any sense datum. Awareness assembles objects by a reflective act – the simultaneous generation of mind or self-awareness – and does it by pivoting on the felt nature of the body – the sensory instrument – as a Unity, thus simultaneously assigning the unity to object and ‘essence’ body or ‘self’.

            And this is addictive for two reasons : because it forms the basis by which we accept socialization in the historical interpretation which is our structural framework for ‘conscious’ (i.e., reflective) perception of the world, and because it apparently completely replaces the solipsistic immediacy of infant or pre-reflective consciousness.

            All of which is well and good, but does not explain why we have arrived at postmodernism. What is the history that brings the self to the fore in such a way that we are now entirely immersed in a pan-cultural addiction to self such that the denial of the self addiction eliminates culture – entirely blanking out culture itself?

            To answer this, we must begin by understanding that our sense of self, as we have it now, is an historical phenomenon. It is the epitome moment, historically, of this definition of self that now brings us to the point that we entirely define culture explicitly in terms of the self – a fact which the denial of the self addiction now entirely obscures, leaving us, paradoxically, with neither self nor culture.

            We are so immersed in this idea of self that, while the historical development of this understanding of self has allowed us to open anthropology – the study of the diversity of human cultures and hence, by corollary, the diversity of human self-understanding – we are not prepared to recognized the comprehensive uniqueness of our sense of self or of its historical emergence during the last two or three centuries.

            Much of my work in this blog has been to recover this history, to trace this modern sense of self directly back to German Idealism and the peculiar movements it spawned, such as the English Romanticism of both the Byronic hero and the subjectivist ideologies and intimacies of Shelley and Keats. Scholars are still lifting and carrying the ideological attempt to pair romantic and classical as somehow an ongoing alternation, but nothing like Romanticism had ever preceded the Romantic movement. It involves the unique emergence of the modern self involvement that has now displaced culture by denial.

            And, of course, I trace its sources further back, to the melding of the traditions of Israel and Greece, of prophecy and the historically and culturally unique emergence of explicitly causal analysis, whose synthesis in the Middle Ages determined the actual root history of the modern west.

            But these are meaningless asides until we recognize that what we are confronting is a universal addiction prompting a universal denial.

            What complicates the problem is the other side of the self. What we have spoken of thus far, whether witness, form, concept, body, essence body or the nature of Unity, is necessarily the essentially ‘passive’ nature of the self. The force of the addiction and the denial rests in the fact that the dominating focus of the addiction also includes a simulacrum for the active side of the persona – an equivalent for volition – namely cause itself.

            Cause is pervasive because perception is active. Since, within the reflective construct, perception is the perception of an ‘object’, whether substantive or ideational, the fact that the object is assembled by consciousness means that the object automatically has a causal history. And this is true of all forms for the self, as well as forms in the world.

            This means that both act and form – whether objective or subjective – now fall under the rubric of the addiction.

            It is this which has blotted out the cultural basis of our world. No matter which way we turn, form and act, perception and cause, all fall under the frame of the addiction and disappear into the horizonless black hole of denial.

            Paradoxically, the only way out is through the core of the self. What reflection teaches us, as essentially an exclusive first principle, is that every moment is necessarily a value. If this were not so, reflection would not be possible. We can only witness self through a specific value, the reflective pivot that produces ‘perception’. ‘Every moment’ can only signify through the experience moment of an individual experiencer. Therefore the only escape from the solipsism of the moment, as well as the addiction to self and its denial, is through this living value which in fact ‘is’ the moment.

            But awakening to this living value is not different from creativity, the essential expression of the value as simultaneously the intimately personal expression of the moment and the direct universal nature of the value. But, of course, such a creative act not only expresses the whole history contained in the specific value of the moment, in some sense it requires a consciousness of the whole history of the moment necessary for the value. All creativity is wholly spontaneous and entirely embraced in tradition.

            This, and not the artifices of the real / ideal dichotomy, is the true paradox of creativity.