“Our thinking is inherently limited. There are numerous things about which we could conceivably think
yet which nevertheless do not even ‘cross’ our minds. That is true of our purely sensory experience as well.
There are many things around us which we could technically perceive through our senses
yet which nevertheless remain ‘outside’ our consciousness.”
(Z35)

Autistic response: “Oh, yeah?”

This seems so neurotypical-centric! The process is almost laughable:
1. define How Things Should Be, and call it “normal”.
2. place those who don’t conform to this outside the boundary of normalcy and label them “pathological”.
3. examine the pathological and see how they think.
4. We Normal People Don’t Do That, so
5. here is how we think, which is based upon Avoiding the Mental Bogeymen.

Orbits and eccentricity yet again, and trigonometry and quantum physics and the “irresistible” gravity of the norm. While we’re at it, may as well include neutrinos too, those whatever-they-ares that pass through matter as if it wasn’t there.

It could be argued that psychedelics produce merely the illusion of reaching some of this “outside” territory, but what about those of us who spend lots of time there without them? Are our experiences posited to be illusory? I have no problem with differentiating between the perhaps-vast majority of thinking which is bounded as per the quote and the perhaps-tiny majority which is not, but shouldn’t there be a conceptual framework to accommodate both?

Last revised: June 23, 2007
(c)2007 Dave Spicer
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