Cull the sack.
There you have it; a simple yet brilliant exercise in linguistic trickery. What I have done is to take a succession of words with which most of us are presuambly familiar; that sequence of words being "cul de sac", and I've replaced each word with one of phonetic identicality yet spelled differently & of different symbolic meaning. The result is a confusion in the synaptic connections of the mind where the expected well trodden pathways of intelligence are short-circuited, thus defying the emanation of the mind which is the rational self. This rational self tends to labour under the delusion that it is the self in its absolute sense as opposed to an emanation of mind and it is the aim of, for example, the reason defying zen koan to dethrone the rational sense from its imagined status of certain existence and its hegemony over the entelechy or self in its fullness. Someone may argue, quite correctly, that this word-playing is fucking with people's minds. However despite the violence of the phrase, fucking with minds may be of benevolent as well as malevolent or indeed neutral design & effect.
In the malevolent case, the breakdown of the cohesion of the rational self is replaced by scattered fragments of this same apparent structure, & these fragments fail to, at least temporarily, re-assemble into the prior structure nor do they succeed in re-convening in a new structure of cohesion. This is a state of paranoia & disjunction between the outer & inner worlds, & indeed within these worlds. The person whose rational mind undergoes such a breakdown cannot be said to have been improved by this unravelling of his synaptically connected self.
However, only the most paranoid among us could seriously interpret the very fine word-play of "cull the sack" in the malevolent sense of mind-fucking, & instead this is word-play of the benevolent kind. In this broad category of positive word-play a breakdown in the hegemony of the rational self also occurs, but crucially what it is replaced by isn't a fragmented sense of the previous self, but the pure mind which had produced the previous structure, or apparent structure, in the first place. So rather than a structure built on the symbolic world of language produced by the mind, or a scattered version of the same structure, we have the cohesion of pure mind, ie the famous state of enlightenment where mind expersinces itself as itself & all is well.
The rational self tends to fool itself into believing that meaning or truth depends on its own successful following of the pathways of language where meaning lies at the end of the correctly taken road. However the actual effect of these pathways of reasoning has the essential effect of ensuring the existence of the same rational self, & indeed here there is possibly a level of deviousness being exercised where this survival of the ego sense is the true goal of the apparently truth-seeking thought activities; the air upon which the rational self survives being thought. This extended may be why evil needs activities to persuade itself of its own self-imagined reality. The point of the zen koan is that mind being mind being truth needs no truth-seeking road to itself, & the thinking mind exhausts itself in its attempts to decipher the koan. A moment of supreme tension climaxes in the enlightenment experience, though someone like Krishamurti would stress that there is no need for annihilating of ego or any of that crap, since reality being reality is in no need of destroying what isn't.
And that is why I wrote cull the sack.
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12 comments:
is it my imagination or was that all just one sentence?
Jaysus, Andrew. That's put the pigeon among the cats.
It may have all been one sentence, lads. I used to find the bits of writing I used occasionally do to be quite pleasant until it was pointed out to me that I seemed to be little aware of how to use a comma, & now that I'm self-conscious of the commas I didn't tend to use, I'm in the unhappy state of putting them in now & again & hoping for the best.
The pigeons among the cats is right, Neil, but being a mind & cat fucking pigeon, twill probably be in no real danger, & maybe tis the poor cat who deserve our sympathy.
cats
Ah! 'Tis the fragrant scent of academia; the aroma of a time and place where words have such an abundance of meaning that only the truly enlightened minds can truly understand them.
In other words: I know I’m a thick old stripper from Bangor but could you please explain that in layman’s terms?
layman's terms....emmmmm...I'll try & do a bit of explaining. When people say, "I did ..."or "I think...", then there is a fairly solid notion that the I referred to is a real solid entity(I can see that this is gonna be at least as difficult as the original stuff). However try and locate this "I" as a solid piece of reality & it will begin to seem much more elusive. Actually, I think I can possibly save some heartache here with an analogy. The I is like one of those tablets that dissolve when placed in a glass of water. Someone might be perfectly confident of who they are(this I), but if one somehow experiences reality or Mind in its purity, then the self one thought one was merges with something far deeper. However, this expanded sense of being is probably impossible to conceive in any real depth from the perspective of the limited self or undissolved tablet, and no matter how well one philosophises, one still remains in the tablet form. So what is needed is the pure experience of being, which is beyond or without thought...That's the problem, language is ill-cut out for this kind of sense of reality. Imagine if your thong was under the impression that this was really you, Chip, and you in turn were fooled into thinking your thong was really you....
You see, much much better.
And now I can ask you: how is that different to, say, Derrida where we exist in a network of indistinct words and signs? I suppose you're saying that language cannot express being because being is more like the hum of a ventilator fan in the room while I go about by business thinking that I am me, in words, or whatever words are when not spoken. I feel pain and express it in thought or words but the pain is quite separate to that. Being, I assume, is somehow a combination of the two. Between conscious thought and experience?
I'm afraid my knowledge opf Derrida stretches about as far as his name, but I'm not so much talking about the limitations of language so much as language being simply a means of expression created by the mind. And this same mind also uses music & painting as expressions of itself, though you don't get people saying we are creatures bound by the inherent limitations of paiting or music, which in themselves are more direct means of expression of being than language.
From what I can infer from your Derrida comparison, I'd compare by altering that famous line:
"I think, therefore I am,"
to something like:
"There is thought, therefore the I that I think I am as a result of this thought, appears to be."
please don't talk about Derrida. It causes me pain.
I hate Derrida. He has one formulation which works for me but the rest is pretentious pap. However, I think I'm beginning to see what you mean. It's something like the imagination, sensing those things beyond the senses.
Matchless topic, it is very interesting to me))))
Though as long as you don't take my claims as to the liberating effects of 'Cull the sack" too seriously!
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