Profane Exegesis: Scrambled Eggheads, or Plan 9 From Inner Space

The ego will disrupt communication when it experiences threat. This will be a
reaction to a specific person or persons.
ACIM – Creation and Communication - Chapter Four.

Fri. My focus on mystical experience got me nowhere before, though I did it partly
as I saw it as an area which might be more likely to interest you. So much for that, so
here’s another answer or approach. I’ll just add that if I went by your previous
response, as with the general tenor of the self-selected core in discussion groups, I
would be spending the rest of my life “walking on eggs,” trying to “prove” myself
worthy to be accepted into their company and others like them, meaning a good
section of the population, as well as apologizing for having the gall to have a
different opinion on the subject; or any subject.

One reason I set such store by the Course is it tends to explain in advance what
people will do before they’ve done it and why, such as tell me to get lost, or disrupt
communication in other ways. I certainly touched on this in the other Wilson group a
while back, without going into it in any depth. I also think the very fact I was upfront
about the Course put me at a “disadvantage,” and gives those overtly hostile to its
message or ideas just the excuse or pretext they need to dismiss it out of hand,
certainly after your previous synopses of it in the Afterword to Afterlife. But I’ve had
much the same reaction or variations on it for much of my life with certain people,
and long before I ever came across the Course as well as right up until I did, and
beyond.
In other words, some people have that reaction to me anyway, beginning with
my mother I would say, and that stemmed from projection and denial of her own
hatred. In short, she saw herself as the innocent while refusing to acknowledge or
even consider her own input into a situation, and how she attacked at every turn.
This covers just about the whole of the population.

It served the purpose of seeing herself as a victim justified in expressing the

aggression she then denied, in her self-serving, circular logic. That she was literally
insane didn’t really begin to sink in until I was in my late 20’s, and then I began to
generalise the insights, but thankfully by my teens I had begun to recognise it for the
utterly childish mindset it was. At the age of 8 or 9 onwards it was like living with
some out of control extremely bratty kid with the knack of convincing you almost
utterly that everything that went wrong in their life was somehow directly your fault.
In retrospect I see it as a form of brainwashing, but by someone who didn’t
really know much better, if that. It may have been consistent and methodical and
even calculated, but it was still insane and based on her own fear, stemming from
unforgiveness; and vice-versa. As neither was I wholly innocent myself, but what
was out of proportion was that she behaved as if I were an adult out to get her. The
most telling and outstanding aspect I think was her need to drum into me that I “had
no common sense.”
I see this now as her way of inverting and projecting her own deep insecurity
and mistrust in the world, even though her whole investment was in it and its
thought-system, which I do see as insane, and this is the focus of the Course. But as
she was so certain of her position, I could only see I must be in the wrong
somewhere, and she was the guilt-tripping adult after all and it worked, and she had a
whole retinue of authorities to back her up and take me away if need be if I ever got
out of hand; something she threatened every now and again to keep me in line – or
under the thumb.. The same authorities that provided her with her endless supply of
pills.
But what I’m trying to describe is the sense of intense frustration and
worthlessness it would induce, even while sanity and reading would tell me the whole
set-up was a crok, and this almost continuous barrage would have you doubt your
own senses, to the point of dissociation somewhere along the line. Predictably, she
detested my reading.
The most noticeable aspect was it expressed itself in negative emotional
reactions, apparently beyond my control. I was intelligent enough to know
adolescence is a problem for most teens anyway, but having picked up some books on
Freud and psychology in general, I came to see myself as a mass of complexes
beyond my conscious volition, regardless of how much “positive thinking” I
attempted.
One to one interactions and my opinionated tastes in music brought a modicum
of reality to the fore. It was difficult to be wholly in awe of someone who professed
to see The Bay City Rollers as “great” at the age of 18 still, when I had been listening
to The Pink Floyd and Deep Purple and Bowie and Roxy Music some years before,
as well as some classical. My mother and my tastes actually converged in some areas
as I found when I played some her records when she was out. The Mamas and the
Papas, and The Fifth Dimension and other 60’s bands, especially compilations of the
time.
But I’ve come to see the same or similar dissociation all around. The quickness
with which people will give away their self to outside authorities/symbols of worldly
power, not least in the Wilson group, and they have the gall to see themselves as
Outsiders. For me it came to be a bit of a joke. And I see the same thing in most
people, to the narcissists’ I’ve known, to the history of the Church, to some petty-
minded shop assistant or traffic warden, to the serial killers I’ve read about in your
books. We’re all at it.
In another context, you once called it “promotion” I think, but a uniform is still a
symbol of worldly power and looking outside oneself for that power and the escape
from the deep-seated guilt and sense of worthless we all feel on a subconscious level
for believing we've separated from God.
 This is where I find the course the most convincing and the most penetrating.
There is no other writing I know of that explores and delineates the sheer complexity
of the ego in all its subterranean and convoluted nastiness. And as most of us are
invested in its thought-system to a greater or lesser degree as well as identified with
it, it’s not surprising it arouses so much hostility in people, as to disengage ourselves
from it threatens our individuality and very sense of self as we know it and believe
ourselves to be.
Which is why it also emphasizes what it calls the real world; the same world, but
transformed in the light of forgiveness on a non-dualistic level, through the part of the
mind – the “decision maker” – that is outside of the ego’s thought system – and time
and space entirely – and that chooses between the ego and the real self or spirit. The
real equivalent to Husserl’s 'transcendental ego' I think (Frankenstein's Castle). And
which I’m distracted from every which way, speaking of which, I’ve remembered just
in time to switch the TV on to see Later on BBC 2. Or at least listen to it... though
I’ve yet to meet anyone with an Jools Holland album in their collection.
Here’s a quote from the Course; “If you think you understand the dynamics of
the ego, let me assure you, you understand nothing of it.” In describing the Course as
peddling endless variations on themes of sin, guilt and fear as could have been
written by a computer, utilising one of its more abstract paragraphs, you unfailingly,
and to my mind, tellingly, and so, somewhat predictably, focused on the very aspect/s
the Course sees as central to the understanding of its thought-system, as well as
gaining an insight into my own failings and rationalisations and projections, not least
the experience of being here at the mercy of an apparently objectively real world in
every sense, that would endeavour to convince me of how wrong I am in every aspect
of my existence and interpretation of it. And so it goes…

It might not need my defence, but I need its insights and the transformative
experience it describes where we can look back in sanity and see where we were
mistaken. All I see in others is their own rationalisation and intellectual conceits and
defensiveness. And what you said about Alexander Trocchie in your account in The
Angry Years comes to mind; that writing was his real escape. I've no doubt you're
correct of course, but what good would it do him if he had little insight into the
subconscious guilt his addiction/s stemmed from? You’re more likely I think, to
anthropomorphise whatever I say, saying or at least thinking if anything, I have the
same tendency to project it on to others – and you'd be accurate - but that would be
to not see the wood for the trees, as we all have subconscious guilt over the belief in
the separation from God, otherwise we wouldn’t be here; it applies to all of us with
few exceptions.
Jesus would be one. But I don’t think Trocchie’s even getting himself into a
position – hypothetically speaking, where he might write dismissively on the relative
unimportance – or downright meaninglessness of such central concepts would be
much of a solution for him – or is for anyone else for that matter. But then this
thought-system isn't for everyone.
 I also see many parallels between the Course and your own work, as well as the
Ken Carey material, and perhaps this is just as relevant.

Sat. It seems to have taken a lifetime to even begin to understand this, and as for
any worldly notion of ever having been a successful “writer” in any conventional
sense, well this seems to have fallen by the wayside, what with all the general
craziness....not to mention, the people in Nashville. Kidding. From such a
perspective, I can tell myself I’ve failed miserably and am likely to continue to do so,
if it weren’t for the possibility of fiction, but even that has to deal with specifics or
there is no story as such. And there will always be fellows around like your good
admirers and supporters to put the boot in if it hints even at the possibility of
undermining the belief in the reality of sin, guilt, fear and death.
That, and that if it’s too “abstract,” there will always be yourself to point out the
“incomprehensibility” of it, as well as its basic mediocrity compared to the true
discernment of yourself and your true followers – whomever they may be. But unlike
them, or some of them, you do seem to have a vastly more developed capacity for
genuine forgiveness, and open-mindedness for that reason I think.
On the other hand, I think it’s undermined by a rather superficial, or surface
understanding of the sheer magnitude of the problem, and the underlying dynamics of
it; reflected in your reductionist interpretation of the magnitude of the Course. In
short, I don’t think you can get to the content of it because of the form in which it’s
presented. In that sense, you’re no more superior than the rest of us, and a barrage of
intellect and firm opinions become just that; and as much of a hindrance, as a means
of progress. What is interesting and useful for me is discerning why this is so, not
whether you ever come to look upon the Course differently.
It’s utterly tiresome to be looked on as some kind of evangelical simple-minded
Jesus freak – and this after devoting years to studying your work – just because you
seem to be incapable of questioning your own denial on the subject.

Neither that – nor the obfuscation and evasion –and “dirty tricks” – of your
supposed supporters is the way to convince anyone, least of all me, that I’m definitely
on the wrong track. I tend to recognize denial and the denial of fear through
aggression, however disguised, when I see it, and for that reason. It’s also why
Picknett and Prince’s The Stargate Conspiracy focused on and highlighted something
important. And the apparent paradox, that your writing, or most of it, does seem to
be acceptable to what I see as fundamentalist materialists in different guises, often
disguised. What they all tend to have in common is their abject detestation and
hatred of ACIM. Because the ego is one also, and consistent... but insane. It's
anathema to them. Dissociation and projection abound. Without the Course I’d have
far less awareness of this, if I was ever truly aware of it at all. And neither can this be
put down just to your own account of it. If anything, I was more informed about of
your writings than they were. I could go on, but it seems to me the subject was more
than adequately covered in Wapnick’s article The Spiritual Significance of ACIM.
The detractors of the Course seem to be able to hold on to their presuppositions
and outworn premises through the simple expedient of ignoring any insights to the
contrary. Which, generally speaking, makes them, and whatever they choose to
believe, a waste of anybody’s time. In short, they're pseudo-scientists. Part of that
great skeptics club in cloud cuckooland.

I’ve just re-read An Extraordinary Man in the Age of Pygmies: You on Henry
Miller. Very stimulating! It struck me you would never spend the time it takes to
build up any kind of relationship with a true narcissist for example, time-consuming
fuckers that they are, due to your personal and professional obligations, but there is
something to be said for direct experience.

Everything in the world is only a symbol after all, as is the world itself, and
through that experience I don’t need to have read a thousand books – though I
probably have – in order to discern form from content, meaning pick up on the
psychological tricks and often lethal intent behind the barrage of erudition and books
cited and discussed in groups. But what books – ideas, insights – have done is clarify
that experience to whatever degree. And again, it’s a contradiction in terms to be
extolling the joys and superiority of reading and self-study yet dismiss a book which
itself is intended to appeal as much to the intellect as the heart.

A narcissist or psychopath would of course, if this were the case here, collate
any information I’ve given you so far, as well as pool their resources in collusion
with others, then look for ways to use it against me, the goal as always, to see
themselves as innocent at the expense of anothers guilt. And that’s the underlying
dynamic of most individuals and groups – and society, right there. And how
sometimes overly trusting individuals such as your truly tend to trip themselves up.
Nor is it just a matter of “drifting,” but of recognizing the situation for what it is;
dysfunctional, based on a dualistic thought-system incapable of questioning its own
premises sufficiently in order to stand outside of it and see it for what it is – a parody
of life and of self – the ego’s false autonomy in its war with God and our real Self.
This will do, as I added a couple of postings from the group here – written some
months ago:

I was having some good insights earlier, having got up even though I knew I was
short of sleep but as I couldn’t drift off again there was nothing for else for it. I read
another chapter on the book Immortality. It’s “reassuring” to know he writes based
on the usual premises that the brain is the seat of consciousness. All this crap about
freezing the brain – or a person, in cryogenic suspension until they can be revived at a
later date. He also seems to genuinely believe the biotechnicians will one day will
improve in their research over time enough to achieve it – immortality – for he rest
of us. Robert Anton Wilson believed much the same I think. It never fails to amaze
me how people of with such intelligence seem to refuse to take their learning any
further through material that would give them a wider perspective on it. Yes, through
the Course and Carey, but there’s other material out there, such as Barbara Marx
Hubbard, and Jean Houston, and Caroline Myss, and Peter Russell. I haven't even
mentioned Icke. The brain, as an aspect of the body, is only an epiphenomenon of the
mind. The body is in the mind; not the mind is in the body, just as Wapnick states...
But interestingly, and significantly, a later chapter discusses the possibility of life as a
dream. There’s also a section on the film Waking Life, so I look forward to that. He
even brings up PKD.
I’d like to see if I can recall any of the avenues for exploration that came up
earlier. It never pays not to take notes, and I rarely do. This is my notes. I’m
distracted by this “horror” film, Psychomania. 1970’s nonsense. There was a good
movie on police corruption before it, based on fact; The Glass Cage. The Glass
Shield, I meant to say. The former is a Wilson novel, and an automatic mistake on
my part. And I was thinking about it again recently.
But to get on… It becomes obvious again that I have a definite attitude towards
writing and its purpose, or at least that I can pinpoint it enough to try and get it into
focus. But not to make such heavy weather of it in advance – though it’s a bit late to
concern myself with that now – the fact is, it’s always been there. That I see writing
as only a means to an end, or rather, I slip into seeing it as that. I do get a certain
amount of satisfaction from writing for its own sake, as with the autobiographical
material from childhood onwards, but even then I do it with the purpose of clarifying
my perspective, as much as to get it down. And last but not least that my alter-egos
in the here and now and future get something from it rather than have to go through
the anguish and self-doubt I went through, but hey, I'm still here; there's hope for me
yet. You too.

Dr Heckle and Mr Snyde