On Being Of Two Minds

As soon as ink embraces paper, our words become obsolete - archaic idioms of former moments.

First, An Exercise:

Fashion a stylus from bone or tree root; run a bath. Once in the bath, take your stylus and begin to etch your thoughts on the surface of the water. Note that the water responds to your direction but does not retain your thoughts. Once you are still, it is as if you were never present. Note that you are not naked, for you are wearing a robe of water. When you rise, you will wear a robe of air.

As you stand there in your comfortable robe and watery toe socks, wondering why you are clutching a bone or wood stylus like some daffy, sceptered regent, take courage. You are appareled in the unconscious. You have never been more naively hip.

***

Indeed, you are not mad, for it is not the unconscious, but the violence of reason, which breeds madness. The tool of reason, while not intended for violence, is often wielded as a machete, brutally vivisecting the mind into halves. The dream-half deemed indecipherable, hence unnecessary, is discarded, and the half most amenable to social, diurnal intercourse is placed on display and described as the total organism. Though widely accepted as fact, the description is winkingly false. It is not the total mind, only a dead remnant of totality. The organism, once halved, does not survive.

It is a requirement of the present society that its constituents walk about as lobotomized half-wits, out of touch with their primal, deeper selves. Such willing self-abuse is the social contract which one must agree to and sign in order to be granted status as a participant. Society is a marketplace of spectacle, an advertising campaign so large, so pervasive, that one is often unaware of its existence. It's the proverbial forest for the trees.

Advertisements are pointless without targets, and moving targets make life difficult for those taking aim. Tidily minded, sedate, and sedentary consumers, uncomplicated by any mental machinery other than that which is necessary for consumption, are the best marks. But do not be fooled, if you do choose to live a life directed by the total, creative mind, you can be a mark as well. There is a medication designed just for you and your disease, or, even better, there is just the job for you, harnessing your creative powers to the spectacle.

***

Logic and reason are not enemies. They are useful implements in the quest to better understand the universe in which we find ourselves, but, like most implements, they can be used for other purposes, good or ill. For those who have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is easily recalled that it did not take long for our apelike ancestors to deduce that they could use their newly discovered hunting tools against one another. The same with reason; we turn it upon ourselves.

We should turn reason upon ourselves, but in a different way. "Know thyself", proclaimed the Delphic oracle. Delve into your mysteries. There is so much more to us than just the surface we have been led to believe is the sum total of who we are. The ultimate goal is to unite and synthesize the two halves of the mind and to live under its direction.

Of course, the question is left as to the how of it. How does one tap into the unconscious mind and suss out its secrets, with the view of using those secrets to engage in the total life? How does one drop out of the commodity culture or shake its control? To become an explorer, a scientist of self, an artist, a writer of messages on water, one must have nothing to offer, and everything to gain. One must dive to the bottom of the bath, always risking the danger of drowning. It is in that moment of near-death where one enters the moment of being most-alive.

OK, you can get out of the tub now.