Suspicions

"let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC." -- Kurt Vonnegut

It is dangerous
to understand new things
too quickly. — Josiah Warren, True Civilization

"A young American named Simon Moon, studying Zen in the Zendo (Zen school) at the New Old Lompoc House in Lompoc, California, made the mistake of reading Franz Kafka's The Trial. This sinister novel, combined with Zen training, proved too much for poor Simon. He became obsessed, intellectually and emotionally, with the strange parable about the door of the Law which Kafka inserts near the end of his story. Simon found Kafka's fable so disturbing, indeed, that it ruined his meditations, scattered his wits, and distracted him from his study of the Sutras. Somewhat condensed, Kafka's parable goes as follows:

A man comes to the door of the Law, seeking admittance. The guard refuses to allow him to pass the door, but says that if he waits long enough, maybe, someday in the uncertain future, he might gain admittance. The man waits and waits and grows older; he tries to bribe the guard, who takes his money but still refuses to let him through the door; the man sells all his possessions to get money to offer more bribes, which the guard accepts —but still does not allow him to enter.

The guard always explains, on taking each new bribe, "I only do this so that you will not abandon hope entirely." Eventually, the man becomes old and ill, and knows that he will soon die. In his last few moments he summons the energy to ask a question that has puzzled him over the years. “I have been told," he says to the guard, "that the Law exists for all. Why then does it happen that, in all the years I have sat here waiting, nobody else has ever come to the door of the Law?" "This door,”the guard says, "has been made only for you. And now I am going to close it forever." And he slams the door as the man dies."

-- Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World

Image - Franz Kafka in 1923, the year before his death

"I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions. I strongly suspect that a world “external to,” or at least independent of, my senses exists in some sense. I also suspect that this world shows signs of intelligent design, and I suspect that such intelligence acts via feedback from all parts to all parts and without centralized sovereignty, like the internet; and that it does not function hierarchically, in the style an Oriental despotism, an American corporation or Christian theology.

I somewhat suspect that Theism and Atheism both fail to account for such decentralized intelligence, rich in circular-causal feedback. I more-than- half suspect that all “good” writing, or all prose and poetry that one wants to read more than once, proceeds from a kind of “ alteration in consciousness,” i.e., a kind of controlled schizophrenia. (Don’t become alarmed — I think good acting comes from the same place.)

I sometimes suspect that what Blake called Poetic Imagination expresses this exact thought in the language of his age, and that visits by “angels” and “gods” state it in even more archaic argot. These suspicions have grown over 72 years, but as a rather slow and stupid fellow I do not have the Chutzpah to proclaim any of them as certitudes. Give me another 72 years and maybe I’ll arrive at firmer conclusions."

-- Robert Anton Wilson, Email to the Universe: and Other Alterations of Consciousness