I’ve been reading actual printed books from the library. My latest, A SHORT STRANGE TRIP, is an autobiographical account of author John O’Conner’s wrestling with Terence McKenna — the environments he inhabited, his strange life and its disjunction with his even stranger, incomprehensible? ways of thinking, rendered simultaneously luminous and “truly” absurd, not only for his audience while he was alive, but for John O’Conner, who sets out, and in fact, is utterly determined, to grok, and therefore explain for us peons, McKenna at every level; but then has to admit that he ends up totally flummoxed.

I especially loved O’Conner’s deft, sly, wavering, epistemological ruminations, for example, p. 245:

“Terence, in the manner of Kant’s ne plus ultra, or “nothing further beyond,” bemoaned the limitations of any organized system of knowledge while admitting simultaneously the impossibility of rejecting any system altogether. His beliefs were malleable, his footing in the world ambidextrous. In this respect, we’re not so unlike him. Our beliefs, characterized by doubt as much as by certainty, tend to shape-shift. Even Mr. Egghead Extraordinaire, Ludwig Wittgenstein. . .

 

[Note: whose works I personally wrestled with in my PhD dissertation entitled This Is NOT A Book About Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was, you might say, my McKenna. Or better: my O’Conner’s version of McKenna!]

. . . widely considered the 20th century’s most important thinker, generally refrained from making definitive statements about truth or falsity and, by extension, what he did or didn’t believe, sensing it’d lead to theoretical cul-de-sacs. Terence Likewise. Much of the time, we know so little about reality, he suggested, that we don’t even know how little we know. But we know enough to know that some of what we know, even if unknowable, se still sorta know, you know? All of us, I’d argue, are caught in the same bottomless, gravitational tug-of-war, both committed and uncommitted — polyamorous, if you will — to our beliefs.”

 

To quote O’Conner one more time: “Belief is a moving target, its whereabouts unknown.”

Now apply the above to current, increasing epistemological weirdness — in any area, politics, health, education, religion, media, etc. — inside me, inside you, coursing, no, tumbling, twisting into ephemeral macabre shapes —  through all of us. Frankly, I wonder if anyone who still “firmly believes” in anything is not suffering from “cognitive dissonance.” This goes especially for those who want to cling to the dogmas of whatever their religion.

And in saying that, yes, I admit I suffer from my own reflexively arrogant “judgmental” attitude, itself totally dogmatic!