This is good. I think woo is important for a variety of reasons.
- When I was three years old, I asked my mom to teach me how to be weird. "Just be yourself," she told me. Truer words and all that...
- I believe in some version of Mythic Time, or Dreamtime (if I recall correctly, Gurdjieff called it "Heropass" in Beelzebub's Tales.) Basically, some non-chronological river of time that interacts with and sometimes bisects our Chronological Time, but which does not run exclusively parallel to it.
- I believe that human consciousness, and perhaps even other forms of consciousness, can by nature interact with both Mythic Time and Chronological Time. The idea that "we are the universe observing itself" perhaps fits this notion.
- My current hypothetical cosmological model resembles a yin-yang extrapolated outward into a sphere. My hunch is that this universal sphere "breathes," so that as the darkness expands in one pool, the light side contracts in the other pool, and vice-versa. I also suspect that human consciousness has some effect on this "breathing," but I am honest about the likelihood of this suspicion being due to anthropological conceit.
- I use the light and dark metaphor above, but only reluctantly. The older i get, the less charm said metaphor holds for me. If we were mole-people instead of monkey-people, for example, I expect we would focus a lot more on good and bad vibrations and less on light and dark. Whether or not those means would lead to a different end, who can say? I mostly just don't want to unduly demonize darkness nor sanctify light.
- To put it another way, I believe that Michael Ende's The Neverending Story (the book, not necessarily the cinematic adaptations) is a fairly robust metaphor for my hypothetical model of reality disguised as a children's book, hence adopting AURYN as my avatar here. In that story, the protagonist, Bastian, is literally transported from Chronological Time to Mythic Time because Mythic Time needs him to observe it and interact with it or else it will cease to exist, consumed by the Nothing.
Once there, Bastian saves the day by naming the sovereign of the world and discovers hence that while in Fantastica he has the power to make his wishes into reality -- but realizes almost too late that with every wish, he loses a memory of his life in the real world and must quest for a way home at risk of compromising his very identity.
- I'm also very fond of the idea that humans are "a species with amnesia." That also fits The Neverending Story metaphor assuming that Earth is Fantastica: according to most mythological histories, we came here, starting naming shit, and began reworking reality according to our individual wills until we forgot where we originally "came from," at least in a spiritual sense.
- I'm currently very interested in learning more about shamanism and the role of spiritual leaders -- especially shamanistic ones -- with respect to society and history. Part of me can't help but wonder if there is some value to the role that Western Civilization has diminished to our collective detriment.
