Psychodabbling in the Art of Darwin Leon

8/11/2019 Psychodabbling in the Art of Darwin Leon

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/psychodabbling-in-the-art-of-darwin-leon 1/11

THE PSCYHODABBLER

I

Psychodabbling in the Amazing Art of Darwin Leon

Self-Certainty and Self-Doubt

The self-conscious subject who feels his own body in distinctionof other bodies and develops a self-concept believes he is most familiar with his self and is therefore more certain of theexistence of his self than the objective world, which mightafter all be an illusion or hallucination; therefore he presumes

he somehow objectively exists as a feeling-judging (perceiving)subject, and he conceives of his “I” or unity of apperception asa deliberately thinking entity, the god or I-AM-I of his personal cosmos. On the other hand, there are atheistic grounds to believe that the self does not exist as an objectiveentity at all; that it is a flimsy metaphysical fiction or



THE PSCYHODABBLER

II

abstract being, and that only the objective world exists, areality severely truncated and distorted by the limitedconsciousness of the physical and mental plant called thehuman being. Either bias is arguably correct, but neither canstand alone without resort to absurdities and torturoustheodicy to explain them away. Dualism is the mostconvenient premise, although it might not be true to theThingie.



THE PSCYHODABBLER

III

The Self-Conscious Fact

Self-Conciousness: The Self as a Fact of Consciousness orConscious Event

Subjective awareness or self-consciousness is split off fromobjective consciousness pursuant to the conditioned perceptionof the individual body that seems to possess the self or mind perceiving it. The condition is the fact that such a self isreferred to by the social environment; that is, the self-entity is



THE PSCYHODABBLER

IV

an injected/introjected social concept. The self is identifiedwith the desires of the organism, hence is conceived of as if thewilling entity were itself an object, a landlord, as it were,inhabiting and possessing its body; that is, the physical self- object. The possession and mastery of the physical and nervousor energetic property, the bodily fact that is always changing,is imperfect because the body is a resisting mass, and, as theorigin of self-will or will made conscious, the body or energeticmass retains, so to speak, a will of its own. In fact, theorganism is a unity; its division into the subject – which isnothing but the inference of a willing self from its perceptionsof the objective world set against it – and the objects inthemselves – which can only be known according to theequipment provided – is artificial. In a word, the subjectiveself is a socially conditioned artifact. For convenience’s sake,we posit the subjective and objective moments of subject-objectconsciousness as if they were actually two objective factors orconcepts of separate things dynamically perceived, hence wehave constituted two concrete abstractions rooted in a fictitious difference.



THE PSCYHODABBLER

V

Fact as Event

Although the object perceived may seem stable or inactivewhen in fluctuating reality it is instable, the subjective perception of the fact is a change in consciousness. In anotherword, a fact is an event. That is, a perceived fact is an action,a differential event requiring the contribution of the perceiving agent from an unique perspective. Therefore perceptions of the same fact or event may differ according to

various points of view, until judgment is objectively limited toagreement by way of identically described events ordescriptions of objects; even then people may disagree as to themeaning of an object or event and respond differently one from the other albeit according to relatively uniform social patterns of behavior.



THE PSCYHODABBLER

VI

Sensation, Perception, Conception

A simple sensation comprises the two-fold mechanical actionof stimulus-response. Raw sensate data becomes conscioussense-experience when rudimentary judgments on sense dataensue as perceptions. Therefore perception comprises sensationand snap-judgment, and tends to become habitual whenreinforced. Conception implies the intentional presentation of

an abstract idea to an imagined other-self. That is, a concept isan object of directed thought.



THE PSCYHODABBLER

VII

Gravity is a Tyrant

Alienation is the condition of self-conscious beings. Humanbeings are exiled for life. The estranged individual wouldseemingly persist forever if he could, yet he has no choice inthe matter, for gravity is a tyrant unto him. No matter how far he strays from his origin, the exile must return home. Andit is as if the individual really wanted to perish all along theway, for, despite the cultivation of individuality necessary for

survival of the species, he seeks to lose himself by identifyingwith broader forms of alienation. Even the rebel who tearsdown all the fences has nothing to declare of himself in theend, except, "I am just another cattle."



THE PSCYHODABBLER

VIII

MA-MA

God has no reason to be puzzled by logical contradictions, or

by any other obstacles real or i ma

gined for thatma

tter,

except, perhaps, the problem of her own eternal existence. Of



THE PSCYHODABBLER

IX

course she might not bother to question her own existence

absent any self-defining challenge to it, preferring instead to

remain profoundly ignorant in eternal bliss. But If that were

the case, then she would not be omniscient, for she would knownothing of herself in relation to her universe. She would be an

inscrutable mystery if not Nothing.

Of course she is slightly more than nothingness toma

nu, primordial

ma

n, whom she "measures out" ( ma

) along with therest of the universe, in all its particulars - hence we double

Ma

and call her

Ma Ma

, the wisely infinitude, clothed in absolute

space, the womb of everything finite that would negate herbut must be satisfied instead with an infinitesimal portion.

Within her measure we self-consciously exist. We suppose sheis absolute wisdom instead of absolute ignorance. If she werenot wise to her particulars, then the fleeting fabric of theillusory universe would collapse back into her womb and shewould be the one and only non-dimensional point again, theAce. And then we would have nothing to post, posit or prove, for neither we nor anything else would exist. Since we arecapable of thinking of the absence of everything exceptNothing, we have good reason to presume that Nothing positively exists before anything at all, an unknownsomething, pregnant with everything including hu

ma

nkind.

Figuratively speaking, we propose that Nothing is fema

le,meaning, she who crowns

ma

n. Thatma

n is ignorant of the

0 rigin from whom all males and females are born is no reasonto believe that

Ma Ma

is ignorant. Rather,ma

n is ignorant,no matter how learned he might be: the more he knows about particular subjects, the less he knows of the perfect universal,or Nothing, the thou-art-that.



THE PSCYHODABBLER

X

Lost in Dreams

Reflections on dreams reveal that the dreamer unconsciously

organizes the content of the dream: the dreamer owns or is

identified with every property of the dream. The dreamer'shabitual identity is almost lost in the dream, hence we say

that the dreamer virtually is the dream, and has no will of its

own except a vague memory of a self-conscious will, the self-

composing will which identifies the individual in the waking



THE PSCYHODABBLER

XI

state. The dreamer would not exist as subject absent some

objective content from memory, hence the dreamer cannot

lose the set of self-defensive, self-constructive patterns

associated with personality in the waking state. The essence ofa person then may be a congeries of habits including the habit

of self-identity - a willful subject organizing an alleged unity

of consciousness. Since the dreamer has lost conscious control

of the production of the dream content, habitual behavior is

represented in unusual or distorted ways. The form of social

self-censorship is elastic during the more relaxed sleeping

state. The dream world is by definition a symbolic world. Theartful interpretations of the symbols cannot be scientific but

they may serve a therapeutic purpose. The insight that

dreams provide into the nature of personality indicates that

self-consciousness is a sustained illusion without which there

would be no such thing.

Documents

Psychodabbling in the Art of Darwin Leon