Amateur philosophy

No value judgment can be made. That is, not in an absolute sense. In a relative sense, yes; one should not run naked in a blizzard as the resulting pneumonia would be a negative value, but this is plain common sense on the anecdotical level. The value judgement refered to above is not concerned with the anecdotical level.
Everything has to be accepted at face value. Would this lead to superficiality ? Not necessarily, even when looking beyond surfaces, into more intrinsically meaningful levels of reality, what one apprehends has to be accepted at face value, because when, having stepped outside the confines of dogma, religion or party politics and their usual yardsticks, one has to accept the lack of anything to judge by, so what is left is "face value", the countenance of chaos, the mien of the universe.
The ripple on the face of the universal sea is fear, "angst". And this angst is the prime motivator of human endeavour, the lever of history and the cornerstone of religions, philosophical systems and what have you.
I must surmise that this fear, this primordial angst stood at the craddle of language itself. Imagine primitive man in his earliest settlements or caves or even trees. No longer part of the animal kingdom with its unquestioning acceptance of nature, of its environment. The fear of animals being of a more immediate nature; this beast is bigger than me, I fear it, I appease it by a submissive posture, or I fight it. Either way, fear will resolve itself by defeat or victory or compromise, then it will vanish until another, unconnected fear-inspiring situation arises. Existential angst does not exist in the animal kingdom. Animals feel at home here, a feat seldom accomplished by humans. This fear is what divides us from animals and what made us make the attempt to become what we are (whatever that is, or will be). So picture the earliest humans confronted with majectic, unaccountable, fickle, intimidating nature with all its bewildering phenomena. They must have been stunned by the inexplicable, the dark, the wet, the cold, with no names to conjure up understanding and a certain mastery, the earliest magic being the naming of things and thus mentally mastering them, constraining them in terms defined by the "namer", who thus gains ascendancy and real or imagined power, or at least a certain understanding of the "named".
I can see men and women of that time huddling together and croaking the first coherent sounds at each other in order to overcome the fear by communicating some of it and thus relieving the pressure. Very soon after of course, language, once invented, must have been applied to practical matters such as cries to coordinate the hunt etcetera but I feel that it was fear that made us talk, fear that started our verbal interaction. Fear and the inner turmoil it produces which in turn produces new fear, a spiral that must have become such a powerful pressure crying for relief that the verbal scream that issued from it sounds to me like the initial form of mankind's communication. Once uttered, once humans found each other in this now shared basic experience, together they could start inventing anf fashioning the rituals aimed at mastering and transforming their angst, they could start out on the road to mutual assistance, the way of gradual growth into primitive societies and from there, at least for some of them, into the first forms of civilisation.
So here's this vision of primitive humanity confronted with incomprehensible nature, with the chaos of the universe. This makes for fear and fear produces  language which is then applied to the formalities of the first and most basic systems of religion and thought.
So I am compelled to look on religions and philosophies as systems of thought brought into being with the aim of exorcising fear, by prescribing ways (ritual, reasoning) to help minds gain ascendency over the turmoil that's at the root of their activity. All these systems function as barricades against chaos, the stuff the universe consists of. This is a natural process, however, the means always seem to have a way of becoming the end. So, self-perpetuating as they are, all these systems became power-structures, and, naturally, they tended to turn their followers into slaves. So these slaves, once cowering in the primordial fear, are now on their knees in front of the thinkers, priests and so on that once held out the promise of freedom from fear.
Now, who creates religions, philosophies, world-views ? Are they people out to manipulate, to dominate, to enslave ? I guess sometimes they are, still it seems obvious that in most instances we are thinking of inspired men and women, people of genius, poets, indomitable creators adrift on waves of insight and, possibly, full of love for all of humanity. They set out to unify, to lighten the burden of existence, and in just about all cases their message, their call is a positive one. And this, in the rather frightening epic of humanity, is the only hope, the diamond to be rediscovered again and again, to be cherished and treasured. What I'm alluding to is the fact that great masses of humanity can only be stirred or mobilized with mainly positive slogans, with positive programs and perspectives. If one takes a closer look at all the great religions and philosophies one will notice that each and every one of them can be summarized in a few lines. These will nearly always have a positive content, most of them will run along the lines of: all mankind is one, love one another, equal rights, unity can be achieved and so on. So here we have our one pole; theory. Theory is almost exclusively positive, it always promises the best for all of us, it forever will project the possibility of unity and peace (even if it takes a couple of wars to get there but even so). And that is the bottom-line, that is the call humanity will rise to, the watchword that quickens a seed in our hearts the world over and in all ages. Consider Christ, Marx, Buddha. When they first preached, wrote or acted upon their intuitions, there was no such thing as christianity, marxism of buddhism. There were just these thoughts, these, in the final analysis, simple messages of hope, these solutions, these intuitions, these possible courses of action humanity could take in order to reach a safer and more wholesome haven. At this point, the terrible and dreadfully hierarchical systems of christianity, marxism and buddhism were undreamed of, inconceived and dormant. And people respond, at first in small numbers, idealistically. The positive appeal, the wholesome theory stirs their hearts and minds and they set about making it real. How can this be done ? How does this happen ? By practice. And here human nature reasserts itself, saying "this is all very well, but what about number one ?" So organisation and hierarchy come into being. The practice differs widely from the theory. At this point, no real religion or political system has come into being yet. It is in its period of gestation. It slowly takes shape and we find ourselves confronted with its infancy, its tentative first strides and as time passes, so does theory pass into practice and we can discern that this is when negativity sets in, reality rears its ugly head. As sure as the sun rises, theory must be practiced, and as people have so far found no other means except power and coercion to practice what they preach ( and then some), slowly but surely a tension develops between the two poles of positive theory and negative practice, and it is precisely here, in this field of tension that the great and small religions and philosophical systems that now and in former times hold and held sway, come into being (let me just make time for a little aside here; a world religion is basically nothing but a once small sect that simply succeeded and became too big for its boots) The well-nigh intolerable tension between positive theory and negative practice calls up the spectres of organized religions (functioning along the same lines as organized crime) and systems of thought like communism etcetera that are the bane of the hearts and minds of people everywhere. All kinds of ways are invented to appease the untenable paradox that must exist between ideal theories and fallible practices. These ways are the rituals of religion, the "party line" etc. How does this work ? Let's look at the theory and practice of some of the major systems that have been paramount in shaping the world we inhabit today. Of course it would be somewhat futile to delve into too many intricate details here because the whole thing is so palpably obvious. Take christianity and its basic doctrine expressed in the sermon on the mount where the message is perhaps enunciated in the clearest possible way; it's love, brotherhood. A few terribly appealing concepts that were the motivating force, together of course with the emancipating implications that set at first small bands, and later infinite numbers of people, on the course that led ultimately to the institution of christianity. The original tenets left lots of room for interpretation, and that is exactly what they got. Slowly a "church" comes into being and the whole machinery of power follows naturally and in a few centuries this has become a political institution wielding dreadful powers that crush all differing insights. So on the whole, practice largely defeats theory and it is definitely kicking in an open door to state that precious few christians today do implement the basic principles their religion was founded on. The tension this causes, when not completely repressed by years of just going through the motions, is appeased by a number of technicalities like sacraments etc. and the result is a colossus nearly impossible to dislodge.
This mechanism is at work in all established religions and if we take a closer look at Russia it is not so difficult to see that the communist party fulfills the same function with the same results. A communist manifesto as the starting point, promising a more even distribution of material goods and opportunities in life. So once again, the positive call with, on the sublininal level, the promise of universal brotherhood and peace after the natural petering out of capitalism. All that resulting today in another system of oppression only marginally improving on the czarist one that is still a curse on the people's natural desire for the brotherhood and equality originally promised. So always this positive call, necessary to motivate people in great numbers, deteriorating into practices cruelly defeating the original intention. Some people might point to the rise of Hitler as a possible refutation of the thesis. They would get out their copy of Mein Kampf with its anti-semitic ranting  and raving and ask, where's the positive call here ? Well, firstly, the great mass of people don't even read books as voluminous and poorly written as Mein Kampf, and, secondly, in the campaign for the late 1933 German elections that brought Hitler to power, he hardly even mentioned the anti-semitic theme, in fact it was rather played down at that time just because of the fact that to find a majority for atrocities of the magnitude later commited is just about impossible anywhere on earth. The actual commiting of them is the lesser problem, it is in many ways the leitmotiv of history, but one doesn't come to power with a platform advertizing them.
Now take buddhism, a creed with a rather different slant on life from christianity. But still there is the promise of release from samsara, the endless cycle of death and rebirth, another appealing notion. Buddhism established itself in India but was relatively soon driven out though not before its missionaries had established bridgeheads in many parts of Asia where subsequently the belief and ritual (this last being a quite foreign notion to the historical Buddha I guess) were, by dint of the respective native peoples' genius, transformed and brought to various forms of fruition. Japan fashioning it into the rarified essence of zen on one end of the scale, and the Tibetans on the other end cluttering it up with a veritable barrage of ritual, superstition, magic and also mystical practices that must have been far removed from the historical Buddha's intentions. Let's take Tibet's case where buddhism, like christendom in feudal medieval Europe, realized the ultimate aim of all organized religion, i.e. the unification of the temporal and spiritual power. This, looked at from the point of view of religion is actually quite logical. One could even state that in the light of the idea of the tension between theory and practice, it comes down to a somewhat twisted way of adhering to the theory without giving up the malpractice. Indeed, the aim of organized religion cannot be any other than theocracy. The original aim of the founders of religions, seeing they are often emancipators, cannot be other than the opposite of theocracy. The aim of Karl Marx on the other hand was the emancipation of the working class, and today that means broadly speaking, just about everybody, but his way of achieving it was through dictatorship of the proletariat, which is tantamount to theocracy on a different plane. So on the practical level, where all these nice aims are to be implemented, what we see is usually a self-defeating (in  the light of the theory) way of coping with circumstances. Still in some (and possibly more than one might think at first sight) of the systems of thought there is a tendency to cope with the great paradox of theory and practice. One example will suffice to illustrate this. In Tibetan buddhism, which is an incredibly elaborate edifice of thought and speculation, there is a concept that kind of refutes all that is typical of its philosophical spawning ground. Here one must take note of the specific nature of the Tibetan religion in which everything revolves around ritual, mantras, visualisations, purifications and offerings to hundreds of deities, many of them incorporated from the indigenous animistic Bön-religion, which was partly ousted and partly coöpted when buddhism was introduced to the Himalayan country. In this environment, teeming with the technicalities of organized religion and completely saturated with every imaginable hierarchical tool of thought there exists the concept of a mental attainment which is called the state of "kuzulu". Now, a kuzulu, is "one who eats, sleeps and shits"; in other words, this concept conceives of a person who does not pray, fast, count his beads, turn prayerwheels, treasure amulets, do pilgrimages, seek blessings from so-called incarnated lama's, recite half-incomprehensible sutras in a garbled mixture of Sanskrit and Tibetan etcetera. One who is beyond all that and just IS. Beyond the paradox of theory and practice, power structure and the tyranny of hierarchy. A great achievement that, whether realised or unrealised, but how can one come to it ? Through the whole rigmarole of ritual etcetera, or the party discipline etcetera ? Can one get there by some sort of miracle ? I don't know but it is THE question and I fear that the transformation of the question into the answer, seeing that both are often, when looked at very closely, mutually interchangeable, is the key that was lost. Let's see how difficult this can be and take as our example the widely acclaimed and extremely popular but probably fictitious tales Carlos Casteneda and his bucolic Indian lodestar Don Juan. After a lot of trials the latter explains to Carlos that he teaches him by continuously playing tricks on him. Now, of course, a trick can only work its effect if one hasn't seen it performed before. So Carlos can only be taught as he's not aware of the fact he's being tricked. Now transpose this argument to the "trick" of religions etcetera, of appeasing the two poles of positive theory and negative practice and some sort of circle is completed. It is not a comforting thought and probable at this point I should come forth with some simplistic rallying cry along the lines of those some of the so-called "new" religions victimize their aspiring followers with. Usually that goes something like this: all present-day religion is perverted and all politics is bunk, but never fear, because God, my conscience or whatever, inspired me to lead all you slobs to the light. Now if you just give me all your affection, love and most importantly, money and other possessions, and put your time and skills at my disposal, I'll make everything come out right and you'll be happy ever after. It sounds completely incredible but that is exactly the line thousands, if not millions ofpeople are falling for nowadays, and this in  the more affluent societies. This is the kind of criminality, in religion and in politics, that teems wildly and seemingly cannot be rooted out.


February 1983, Mortsel - Kyoto; I can't imagine why I wrote this stuff or where it came from. It just gushed out but in the end it doesn't really seem to lead anywhere.