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Yet all his life he had never seen it. The culture hadn’t told him to so he hadn’t seen it. If he hadn’t read that book on yachting he was quite certain he would never have seen it.
A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too.
If objects are the ultimate reality then there’s only one true intellectual construction of things: that which corresponds to the objective world. But if truth is defined as a high-quality set of intellectual value patterns, then insanity can be defined as just a low-quality set of intellectual value patterns, and you get a whole different picture of
He’s gone into illegal value patterns because the illegal patterns resolve value conflicts that the culture’s unable to handle. The causes of insanity may be all kinds of things, from chemical imbalances to social conflicts.
Yet despite this knowledge you laugh when the 24 shadows per second tell jokes and cry when the shadows show actors faking death.
The insane person is running a private unapproved film which he happens to like better than the current cultural one. If you want him to run the film everyone else is seeing, the solution would be to find ways to prove to him that it would be valuable to do so, Phædrus thought. Otherwise why should he get “better”? He already is better. It’s the patterns that constitute “betterness” that are at issue.
From an internal point of view insanity isn’t the problem. Insanity is the solution.
Everybody gets on these negative contrarian streaks from time to time, where no matter what it is they’re supposed to be doing, that’s the one thing they least want to do. Sometimes it’s a degenerative negativism, where biological forces are driving it. Sometimes it’s an ego pattern that says, “I’m too important to be doing all this dumb static stuff.”
Suffering is the negative face of the Quality that drives the whole process. All these battles between patterns of evolution go on within suffering individuals like Lila.
Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be precursors of social change. They’ve taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle to solve their own problems they’re solving problems for the culture as well.
If she works through it she’ll come out at a Dynamic solution. If she works around it she’ll just head back to the old karmic cycles of pain and temporary relief.
To put philosophy in the service of any social organization or any dogma is immoral. It’s a lower form of evolution trying to devour a higher one.
“The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.”
Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.”
“There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing.”
What’s wrong with insanity is that she’s outside any culture. She’s a culture of one. She has her own reality which no other culture is able to see. That’s what had to be reconciled.
The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn’t necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in a right direction. It wasn’t necessarily a disease. It could be part of a cure.
With equal force it is possible to say that until you understand that this doll is really a baby you will never understand Lila. She’s a culture of one.
the mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of pure Dynamic Quality.
Sinks into the wonder
modern psychology cannot distinguish between a patterned reality and an unpatterned reality and thus cannot distinguish lunatics from mystics.
“Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness provided the madness is given us by divine gift,”
a lower biological pattern, “the Devil,” trying to overcome a higher pattern of conformity to cultural belief.
The Metaphysics of Quality suggests that in addition to the customary solutions to insanity—conform to cultural patterns or stay locked up—there is another one. This solution is to dissolve all static patterns, both sane and insane, and find the base of reality, Dynamic Quality, that is independent of all of them.
This could have saved him. A trip. A new life some thursday afternoon.
Static social and intellectual patterns are only an intermediate level of evolution. They are good servants of the process of life but if allowed to turn into masters they destroy it.
The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move onward.
“Wouldst thou be perfect, do not yelp about God.” Eckhart
But these interpretations become like golden vines that cling to a tree, shut out its sunlight and eventually strangle it.
The early Greek literature, particularly the poetry of Homer, showed that aretê had been a central and vital term.
There, beside aretê, was a treasure room of other derived “rt” words: “arithmetic,” “aristocrat,” “art,” “rhetoric,” “worth,” “rite,” “ritual,” “wright,” “right (handed)” and “right (correct).”
Rt referred to the “first, created, beautiful repetitive order of moral and esthetic correctness.”
But all the gods were conceived as “guardians of ta,” willing the right and making sure it was carried out.
But unlike the Greeks, the Hindus in their many thousands of years of cultural evolution had paid enormous attention to the conflict between ritual and freedom.
Ritualistic punctilio thus comes to be placed on the same level as natural law and moral rectitude.
The danger has always been that the rituals, the static patterns, are mistaken for what they merely represent and are allowed to destroy the Dynamic Quality they were originally intended to preserve.
While living, Be a dead man. Be completely dead, And then do as you please. And all will be well.
The social and intellectual patterns that caused the suicide have to be carried on by others. From an evolutionary point of view it’s really a backward and therefore immoral step.
The experience of William James Sidis had shown that you can’t just tell people about Indians and expect them to listen. They already know about Indians.
“The Dakota Indian considers goodness to be a noun rather than an adjective.” He will tell someone, “Take care of your goodness,” rather than, “Be good.”
