(7)


If I turn off my judgmental responses to the world – those judgments formed by the processes of reason and logic; judgments resulting from theorization and argumentation; emotional judgments; and judgments derived from some admixture of the above – what I'm left with are the nonrational responses manifested by my physical being.  Various kinds of sensorial input – sights, sounds, smells, etc. – either attract or repel me (or leave me indifferent, or rouse my curiosity, etc.) depending upon my physiological response to the stimuli; these responses then yield to behavioral "judgments" (reactions) pertaining to my desire for safety and comfort or fear of harm.  Below this level of judgment, there exists only the energetic responsiveness of the nervous system and the brain to the reception of external stimuli.  At this level there occurs no act of judgment, per se; there exists only the experiential quality of what "is."  And below the level of the purely experiential, there exists – at least insofar as I myself am able to tell – only a sort of darkness, a blankness:  the void.

It would seem that it's on the lowest level of responsiveness that the "dream" quality of reality is most likely to be perceived.  I say this because it's at this level that the perception of reality comes closest to the perception we have when involved in sleeping dreams.  Whatever import and/or causality the psychology of an individual has upon sleeping dreams, whatever import and/or causality the psychology of an individual has upon the waking dream that is reality, both are fundamentally based upon an energetic response to externally perceived stimuli – to the experiential quality of what "is."  Thus both the sleeping and the waking dream are experienced at the most fundamental level as irrationalities – though use of that term benefits us only in a relative sense, in order to distinguish our perceptions from the perceived orderliness of scientific and natural law (with regard to the waking dream), or of a psychologically derived orderliness (with regard to the sleeping dream).

Rationality has been developed as a survival technique for our species, but is this to say that rationality is the most evolved form of developmental potential open to us?  I would suggest that experientialism (or at any rate, something which uses experientialism as its basic mode of perception and understanding) represents a still higher level of evolvement.  By saying such I do not mean to negate the value of rationality, which allows us to extend life and provide for our well-being in such a way as to allow for the development of the experiential capacity.  Nor do I deny the psychological import of sleeping dreams, although in doing away with the psychological as the primary basis of sleeping dreams I do mean to suggest that they represent a separate reality within which humans exist.  We enter this reality spontaneously every night (and have the potential to enter at least one other reality as well – that of the out-of-body state); why should it be thought strange, then, given the ultimately mysterious nature of the totality of which we are a part, that sleeping dreams be considered as a portal to another aspect of this totality?

Psychology, I come to see, is useless to my endeavors – as is rationality.  Or, if not useless precisely, at least beside the point.  The fundamental mode of perception with regard to experientialism is that of  external stimuli impressing itself energetically upon a receptor (the nervous system in the waking dream, some correlative manifestation of receptivity in alternative realities).  Only this, and nothing more.



*                         *                         *



me
     a dream
     within a dream

not-me
     a dream
     within a dream

the dreamer
     leaves himself
     behind




Part Six, III, (6) Home Part Seven, (1)