After a break from writing, though not from reading, inspiration resurfaces with a rereading of Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger (volume 2) ... a battered copy which somehow survived the wandering and renunciation of stuff, including all books ... and books have been, perhaps, the objects hardest to release ... some of them ... once upon a time, various lodgings in London had shelves with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Enver Hoxha ... and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, of course ... the next library, coming together for the new base, on the edge of the village, is unlikely to hold any of those ... J. Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, HHDL will feature ... and RAW, whose style and content manages to inspire, educate, entertain and amuse, whilst leaving space for the reader to interact with the writing ...
RAW is a polymath, who draws from a range of subjects of which he has quite deep knowledge, along with varied life experience and a close relationship with hallucinogenic substances ... and the courage to create crazy narratives from facts and factoids usually found in the basket marked "doesn't fit currently accepted versions of normality" ... wonderful!
Having embraced and embodied the essentially playful nature of the universe, and displaying the sense of humour characteristic of those lucky enough to avoid taking themselves too seriously, RAW proposes, and practises in places, eschewing the "is" and its relations, due to the inevitable danger of language leading to conflating the word with the thing described ...
Perceptive readers may have spotted the inspiration for the attempt to write the blog without reference to "me" and its relations ... a possibly pretentious ploy to decondition the receiving/transmitting apparatus from its tendency to take life personally ... advanced practitioners like HHDL and Jeff Foster are happy to refer to me, my, mine and I, comfortable in the illusion of the separate self as an illusion with roles to play in this round/act/chapter of the Great Story of the Universe ... maybe ...
Polymaths are under ever increasing pressure, of course, since information is expanding exponentially ... subjects sub-divide and specialisms become deeper and narrower ... all fine but tending to separation unless regular attempts are made to re-unite the parts into the whole ... the question posed here some years ago was: "Is there a person alive today who knows everything about everything?" The short answer is no, probably ... the response received suggested the question itself was more typical of a small child than an adult ... which was taken as a compliment, of course ... and such people almost certainly did exist centuries ago between the times of the extinction of the advanced civilisation of Atlantis and the so called Enlightenment of the Middle Ages ...
Education systems, meanwhile, morph from the beneficial banishing of ignorance to the malign cramming of facts and officially sanctioned factoids and the conflation of knowledge and wisdom. Inevitably following the cramming is the testing, to ensure that sufficient has been retained and regurgitated to enable a certificate .... and following the testing, the gaming, since, as wittily observed by Craig Larman, what gets measured gets gamed ... and not only in education systems ... and if we are to be blunt, in this context gaming is synonymous with cheating ...
And cheating is where we may go, when all the incentives point there and the heart has been ripped out of whatever it is we are engaged in ... education, health, social care ... has this writer ever engaged in such scurrilous behaviour? Where shall we start?!
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