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coming down the ladder
Representations, as human brain products, have arbitrary, culturally-biased, connections with the non-symbolic (unmasked) events that trigger our brains to make the representations. Believing in any of them literally has the same fallacy as believing Picasso's wives and mistresses had giant bodies...Since the human nervous system, including the human brain, encounters and endures literally hundreds of millions of electrons and photons every minute (at a conservative estimate) the masks or models which compose our experienced reality-tunnel always exclude more than they include. The world of masks, the social world, has limits and laws; the unmasked remains infinite and (as Nietzsche liked to say) abysmal. All "paths of liberation" (brain-freeing schools) know that we cannot remain in the abyss of the nameless forever, unless we choose to become hermits. (Very few do.) Once we have returned from a school of brain-change to the ordinary world, we again must see and think in masks, or we will not have the ability to communicate with and deal with others.
robert anton wilson, "Cosmic Trigger Volume III"
Rama P. Coomaraswamy, in "The Door in the sky," writes of climbing rites whereby one ascends into the next world, the pole in these rites being coincident with the "bridge" or ladder. Involved is an initiation and symbolic death--a dangerous one. "The initiated Sacrificer is ritually dead, no longer a man but a Deva; 'if he did not descend again to this world, he would either have gone to the suprahuman world, or he would go mad.'...supremely important as the ritual death may be, in which the Sacrificer's final attainment of his immortal goal is prefigured, it is still of utmost importance that he should live out his full term of life on earth...he therefore relinquishes the rite, either by means of the formal 'descents' and the use of inverted chants, or..with the words, 'Now I am he whom I cactually am'. For in undertaking the operation he becomes as if nonhuman (a Deva): and as it would be inconvenient for him to say, "I enter into untruth from the Truth,' which is how the matter really stands, and as, in fact, he now again becomes a human being, he therefore relinquishes the operation with the test, 'Now am I he that actually am,' i.e. So-and-so by name and family. By means of such reversals the sacrificer, having virtually left the body, and virtually broken out of the cosmos, nevertheless 'secures whatever full measure of life remains for him here'. The logic of the whole procedure is superb."
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*Freud's couch image from the web, visit the Sigmund Freud museum to view his couch in all its colorful glory
Quoted excerpts from Ken Kesey's "Last Go Round", Robert Anton Wilson's "Cosmic Trigger Volume III"
and Rama P. Coomaraswamy's "The Door in the sky". |
