The more I write on the internet the more I realize that I don't have the right to write anything I like. It's not so much a freedom of speech issue as one of ethics. I would write that knowing full well I don't have a clue what "ethics" really amounts to. My best shot at having any would have been when I was being hypnotized into using hypnosis in an ethically responsible manner, and I always have, but only because i wuz hyp-no-tized! ;-)
I'm glad I was unknowingly hypnotized into using hypnosis in an ethical manner because I was being inducted into a professional association named the Ethical Hypnosis Association. I was being inducted into this professional group by it's founder and President, Doctor Milton Erickson, otherwise known (but not to me, yet) as Uncle Miltie.
Uncle Miltie came to the graduating ceremonies of the hypnosis school I had been attending. He handed out the Certificates of Completion to the graduates of Harry Aaron's Hypnosis School. Harry was teaching Ericksonian Hypnosis, so Uncle Miltie actually cared who learned it, because he flew all the way from Arizona to be there in New Jersey. We were each called to the front of the room where Doctor Erickson handed us our certificates and said something personal to each of the twenty-two brand new professionally recognized ethical hypnotists.
That "something personal" was loaded for bear. Uncle Miltie was famous for taking the shortest amount of time using the least number of words to change people's lives forever. Who knew? I didn't. Not until some twenty-odd years later when I became interested in a method called neurolinguistic programming. It was primarily based on the now deceased Milton Erickson's work. In that brief interchange with Doctor Erickson at the certificate ceremony at Harry Aaron's second-floor Hypnosis School, he gave me a valuable gift I'd need to live so irresponsibly some people wanna shoot me. It took a long time to realize that his unrequested gift to me was a sense of ethical behavior that's got legs and can travel light.
I don't feel as though I especially need to act ethically according to some pundit's well-intended advice. My duty is just to be aware that some people place a lotta value on ethics of unknowable cultures and customs, and for that reason alone I gotta watch out for people like that with the cautiousness of a person attempting to live a life of no blame. They're easy to spot. Either they're wearing a bow-tie or they're persistently hanging around looking goofy with someone who does. '-)
I enjoyed writing the paragraph below to this guy (he uses a guy's name) on this philosophy discussion list I subscribed to recently. I like the end part where I wrote about having to be a child to see this guy in his pompous, emperor-like ways, wore no clothes:
"I don't know what shelf you have decided to put yourself on. How could I? I only have the woids and expressions you write down to impress who- or whatever you sing to for your supper. Since I've never seen you with my eyes or heard you with my ears nor touched you or smelled you or tasted you, the only clues I have for grokking who-you-think-you-are is the way you appear to judge the other as if they were you instead of themselves. Even then, I have to interpret your judgments of the other (as if they were you), but if they're of the same ilk you appear to accuse them of being, only the child in me, Great Emperor, can see that you're nakid. '-)"
This guy didn't like what I wrote. He called me not-me-s (names) for writing it. He suggested I was not his sort of person and that he was never gonna communicate or recognize my solipsistic posts again. Oh God, another shunning. Personally, I don't know what the big fuss is about.
Candidly, I don't think this guy was ever gonna abide with me much from the gitgo. He appears to think I gotta be like he thinks I should be to be okay. I don't be culling for that so much, but life in general seems to. Maybe I'll pray for him (or not) later, but right now I'm curious about what I might have meant when I wrote about having to see through the other's pomposity with the eyes of a child. That actually seems do-able. Watching myself write that statement might indicate how close I need to keep my child's eyes near to me for use in capturing drifting thoughts. One of my more involved avocations.
What does this say about being able to "see" or "look" upon a multiplicity of events within my sensory scope with the soft eyes of a child to "see through" the accumulated true or false baggage of making believe? Meditate more? Stay closer to the fire? Listen to the softest inner voices? Is this done with the peripheral vision?
It's claimed by vision researchers on the internet somewhere, that homo sapiens can comprehend the least amount of useable sensory data for making sense of the purported "little" that it does comprehend. I seem convinced the data that is comprehended as visual content of the peripheral vision has been less filtered by what our caregivers force upon us in order to civilize us enough to live in the company of man. I suspect many of the images we encounter in the peripheral vision in full consciousness are from a very primitive aspect of homo sapiens that can't be ethically named and thus given life in our memories.
I'm attempting to say, in my opinion, that the raw data processed by the peripheral vision is probably pre-civilized stuff. The unfiltered stuff of the dreamtime, but it happens when we're awake with our eyes open. I don't mean to patronize, but the eyes have to be open for the peripheral vision to be operant, but I'm suggesting that the peripheral vision "sees" the same hypnogogic material seen in the unconscious sleep cycles at night. By the time this beta stage data passes through the mediation process of the adopted rules of conscience that happens before it's "seen" by the foveal vision, the rough edges have been smoothed or you'd re-act to the way of the world as if a feral animal that's most dangerous when it IS civilized. Talk about selling myself short! Damn! What a fool I've been...
That frightens me a little. Keeping my childish ways close to the surface of my personality might invite snide comments and attract muggers of all kinds to what they see as a weakness. the inner sense of the innocence of that which is most childish about me is that it might be more of a curse than a blessing, time-wise, I would have to devote a lot of attention to changing it's swaddling clothes in order to make being there a common practice.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
