Waiting at the Crossroad


"Well, write something."
"I don't have anything to say."
"Then write about not having anything to say."
"How about if I just ramble on for awhile?"
"I don't care, just post something."

"This is a really good book," Linda says. She is sitting at the kitchen table with a copy of "Thinking in Pictures," by Dr. Temple Grandin. I just linked you to the first chapter of the book, which I have not yet read. But I've heard Dr. Grandin interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air. She designs slaughterhouses. She knows people are going to kill animals for meat, and as I recall has no particular position against it, but she does have an issue with making the animals suffer being terrorized and tortured.

It seems that people in the business of killing animals remove themselves from being in the position of the animals, and lose empathy with what they kill. This is a very different way of killing than was experienced by the hunter, for example as modeled by Don Juan Mateus, who thanks the animal for its sacrifice of life so that he can eat. He eats only what he needs, no more than that.

Regardless of why those who kill have become removed from empathy with the life being sacrificed, they have been, and it is the mission of Dr. Grandon to design humane systems. That she is autistic means one thing to somebody who thinks in language and something else to somebody who thinks in pictures, I assume.

The word carries with it a kind of labeling more than it does a meaning. I don't know what autistic means, and what came to mind first was Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. But that's compulsive behavior, which is another label describing an obsession for ordering everything. If it could be backed off the redline it would probably do accounting and become a CPA. The next thing that comes to mind is somebody who is focused on an inner world, and is not seemingly capable of normal emotional warmth.

When I look it up, I find that Rain Man was exhibiting a symptom of autism, but that autism is a "spectrum disorder," which I guess means that you might have one symptom but not another one, so that you can't pin it down so to speak.

This reminds me of Dr. Thomas Szasz' book, "The Myth of Mental Illness." He makes a persuasive argument that we really don't like to look at the reality of how hard it is to socialize and function according to expectations, and so we label people as mentally ill when they are outside the parameters we've set. This is certainly not to say that there are not people who need to be locked up in the cellar and fed through a slot. It just means that many of these labels we use are filing cabinets more than they are disorders.

This is probably driven by private enterprise medicine, in which insurance only pays for what you can quantify, so that if you don't have a disease you don't have a way to pro-rate treatment and thus you can't adapt your plug to fit into the insurance currency. I wonder if autism is really something that I can picture? Or is there an individual there whose behavior doesn't fit into language based society?

In my above link to Don Juan Mateus, I got into reading the piece, which I thought was very, very good. I have said that Castaneda was an exceptional writer of fiction, and that the fact people are arguing about whether he "pulled a con" is a testimony to his skill. I mean, he was writing about people flying around like witches, and visiting other worlds, and there are so many gullible people reading it that when they discover it wasn't really a log of ordinary reality, they begin to put up "exposes," about what they have realized.

What they haven't realized is that they were fools not just once, not just twice, but three times. First they took it all literally, then they exposed their naivete, and finally, they never really saw the third choice. If they had, they wouldn't feel cheated. They would feel gifted. But I digress. In the piece the author mentions the field of visionary art, and that of phenomenology, and specifically Dr. Harold Garfinkel, with whom Carlos studied at UCLA. (Interview with Warren Sack, which includes some of Garfinkel's ideas.)

Castaneda was influenced by Talcott Parsons' concept of glosses, or systems defined not by objective reality, or by possible realities, but by a process of expectation, or habituation.

This was part of a renaissance in consciousness that hit in the 1960s, as existential thought began to move into the mainstream. All of a sudden there was a freedom from essentialism, which was fundamentalism. This thinking starts with who you are supposed to be, and you have to become that. If you look at it closely it rather resembles the idea that you are the property of your parents and and then, of the state. This accounts for the disconnect between the stated belief in individual liberty by conservatives, and their movement toward strict and even oppressive social control, driven by the fundamentalists.

At its heart it is economic, as is existentialism, in which you turn around and look to the future, creating your own reality. Existentialism is personal freedom in which you are at liberty to determine who you wish to become, and how you want to live your life, so long as you don't obstruct the liberty of others to do the same. In William Burrough's writing, he sets up this problem as one between the Johnson Family (who mind their own business and follow a code of good neighborliness), and the Shits, who have to be Right all the time, and who can't mind their own business because they have no business to mind.

With the translation of Von Neuman's writing on consciousness in the early fifties, in which he located the "measuring instrument" as human consciousness, and the explosive power of phenomenology expanded by LSD, mushrooms and other psychedelics, along with a revolution in music led by the British invasion, and with many other artists, the old essentialism was exposed as rigid and inflexible social control.

Suddenly, there was a great deal of interest in what we are filtering out in order to get our consensual reality. For example, we know that we are filtering out the images of the war and of the amputations in the operating rooms in Bagdad and of the dead children's body parts in Lebanon. But the people who think in language are conceptualizing that these pictures are in bad taste. You don't want to make somebody throw up their Cheerios or have a sudden influx of horror by realizing the reality of the war.

This might make the war unpopular.

So there is a "gloss" created, which has as its parameters the "talking points" and the "good news" from the battleground. The media presentation becomes a gloss in which people live and it becomes their reality. There are people who watch Fox News, and listen to Bill O'Reilly, and there are other people who read a variety of print sources, listen to BBC, and watch the actual debates on CSPAN. These people are in different glosses.

The gloss is more than a news filter. It filters out anything that doesn't fit into the constructed reality, and when the reality is under threat, people will go to great lengths to "prove" that the new evidence is not real, as with the Scopes monkey trial, in which evidence was disputed by emotional preferences.

The modern capitalist who is in the meat business has as much in common with a hunter as Jack the Ripper has with a surgeon. They do essentially the same thing but with a different intention. Maybe people who think in pictures have as much in common with people who think in language as Carlos Castaneda has with Dick Cheney.

And maybe people like Dr. Grandin, who are labeled as autistic, are really an evolutionary experimentation.

I remember one of my peak experiences had to do with thinking in pictures. I moved into a different state of consciousness, and it was horrifying to "see" behind the language that cloaked the actual naked self-interest of other people. I was certain that if I had been in public I would have been judged insane and taken away for some heavy medications, because it was unbearable to see it, even in the remembered images in my mind.

When I read the symptoms of autism, I think of that experience, and what it would have been like if I had been like that all the time. I think I would have exhibited some of that spectrum of symptoms. I remember wanting out of there, and realizing that I had to move back into a filtered perception. It was an experience that has always stayed with me, though, and which has always interested me. What was that shift in consciousness about? The expansion was so great that any question came with the answer as part of a complete, timeless, revelation.

What was obvious was that trying to separate means and ends is insanity.

By that definition, the people who lead us now are insane, and at least half the voters are insane for putting them in power.

I remember reading that madness appeared in the days of Socrates. As Reason displaced what Julian Jaynes called "The Bicameral Mind," in which there were "voices of the gods," which people followed, those who did not make the evolutionary jump were mad. By the definition of Szasz, they were actually unable to cope, having been left behind the evolutionary curve, like Neanderthals.

It has been the position of most of the people who have really interested me that this shift in hemispherical predominance happens in what would be a pattern when viewed in a long term evolutionary scale. In other words the dominant side collapses and the other side regains dominance, which is the only way it can develop. So we have the Dark Ages, when the picture brain rules and logic is weak, and then we have the Renaissance, when Reason once more reigns supreme.

So it makes sense that we are going to have to make a shift, and that it will either be back to the right brain dominance, or it will be a third thing, which is a consciousness which is inclusive. This has been the direction of social change: toward inclusiveness, where both sides are conscious, and away from fundamentalism, in which there is only a black and white, right and wrong, straight or gay, kind of mentality.

I was listening to Public Radio today and there was a program on Missouri, and a law they passed preventing a lesbian couple from adopting. The court decided there was no evidence whatsoever to show that they wouldn't be good parents, but the fundamentalists cannot escape from the gloss in which they are encased. They do not look for evidence in order to find a reasonable position. They look for evidence which supports their existing gloss. These people cannot evolve. No wonder they want to make evolution go away.

But to see this is to see the problem in the Middle East, America, and Israel, in perspective. "In the beginning there was the word." The introduction of the alphabet was what moved the power to the left brain. As the alphabet moved from culture to culture there arose in each a myth of a hero slaying a sea monster or dragon. This was the movement of the feminine, or earth-based, law under the ascendent written law.

It makes sense then that the next major shift will be the predominance of the feminine, or thinking in pictures. I have to laugh when I am writing this because Linda always said this is the difference between Apple and Microsoft. The Mac was designed to think in pictures, by people who think visually, while the Microsoft products were designed by linear, masculine minds. She also mentioned that of almost everyone she knows who is planning to buy a computer, they are going to get a Mac. The only Windows machines she has at her company are the ones she has to have for interfacing groups that aren't Mac friendly. She despises having to work on a Windows machine.

"Well, you certainly are just rambling on."

"I'm relating things."

"But not in any cogent flow of information from topic to expansion of topic to conclusion."

"You ever think of applying for a job with Microsoft?"

"If it weren't for your links, you'd be insane."

"That's a myth."

"Who Szasz?"

"Enough already."

Posted: Mon - July 31, 2006 at 05:25 PM