Teflon Type Thoughts

Expertness in philosophy is measured by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate perceptive epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come.

Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy fully to match it of the peculiar systems that he knows They don’t just cover his world. One will be too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job-lot of opinions, a fourth too morbid, and a fifth too artificial or what not. At any rate he and we know offhand that such philosophies are out of plumb and out of key and out of ‘whack’ and have no business to speak up in the universe’s name.

William James in his 1906 essay, The Present Dilemma in Philosophy explains the nature of human expression. Our cells retain the knowledge of all their affiliations and our consciousness is capable of the same thing. No knowledge exists outside of consciousness. Consciousness passes on information through living vehicles whether they are physically materialized or not.

Consciousness is always individualized, but not necessarily in our accepted terms. Ancestral experience is coded information that is used within a particular reality to express the validity of our identity, but that identity is a small part of the total that is expressed in the character of the universe. Concepts of selfhood would disappear if we allowed any subjective experience to intrude in our objective sense of self.

Our absent self is the portion of our existence that we do not perceive or accept objectively, but we continue to search for it through the philosophy of others, but that philosophy exists within the cells as well. The cells and the mind maintain current information about this absent self and philosophy develops that opens the door of doubt. From the doubt an outcrop of luxurious awareness creeps into the jealous and prejudice folds of the ego.

The absent self is not absent to anyone or anything; it is saturated in a reality that coats the ego with the teflon type thoughts that eventually begin to stick to our fragmented physical self.