Neo-American Church

FINAL P.S. BY M.T.

Hello—Central!

And if one doesn’t want to end it all, what then? Is anything gained, entertainment aside, from reading this stuff? Let’s assume the reader has never been exposed to genuine solipsist-nihilist philosophy before. This crippled intellectual condition is common, even among the erudite, in a culture in which such double-domes as Bertrand Russell and Edmund Wilson have consistently confused solipsism with subjectivism and introversion. Let’s say one has reviewed one’s own psychedelic experience and has come to the conclusion that, yeah, well, maybe there might be something to it after all.

If you are willing to give it a whirl, that is, learn how to see things this way, will you be any better off than you were before?

Probably.

You will be liberated from dualism and naive realism, and all the depression and neuroticism that flows therefrom, and from supernaturalism and occultism and all the paranoia and general mental derangement thereof.

On the positive side, you will have a capacity for synchronicity interpretation in the cheapest form it has ever been delivered, thanks to the marvels of modern technology. Another dimension of meaning will be added to your capacity to interpret experience.

The events of everyday life, what you see, hear, feel and think, should begin to fit together into new and surprising patterns and combinations, as you recall, when your next coincidence comes along, that it is all your dream, and look for the connection which, in the light of that hypothesis, must always exist between simultaneous or associated events in any dream.

Avoid syntactic rigidity. Remember that the relations you find are relations of meaning; not relations of physical cause and effect, power, or spatiality. It’s psychological, and therefore everything is “over-determined”; loaded to the bulwarks with meaning and riding low in the water. You can read it this way and that way and the other way. You can read it in a hundred different ways. This isn’t the pseudo-science of the occultists or science fiction. It’s an art. As with all arts, doing it well requires practice and self-criticism.

You’re free to see it any way you like and then you are also free to witness the necessary consequences, the corollaries, of your decision to see it that way. Every event, no matter how complex or accidental it may seem in McPozzm terms, can be seen in Snazzm terms as a commentary on the condition of your consciousness, and interpreted like an I Ching hexagram.

Take everything personally. It’s your world, after all.

O saisons, ô châteaux,
Quelle âme est sans défauts?

O saisons, ô châteaux,

J’ai fait la magique étude
Du bonheur, que nul n’élude.

O vive lui, chaque fois
Que chante le coq gaulois.

Mais je n’aurai plus d’envie,
Il s’est chargé de ma vie.

Ce charme! Il prit âme et corps,
Et dispersa tous efforts.

Que comprendre à ma parole?
Il fait qu’elle fuie et vole.

O saisons, ô châteaux!

—Rimbaud