Ordinary, Madness and In-Between: April 5, 2009
I have always loved the following passage and have kept it near me on some side-table or stool for years.
"Nobody today is normal, everybody is a little bit crazy or unbalanced, peoples minds are running all the time. Their perceptions of the world are partial, incomplete. They are eaten alive by their egos'. They think they see but they are mistaken; all they do is project their madness, their world, upon the world. There is no clarity, no wisdom in that!"
Taisen Deshimaru
Recently however I was re-reading Robert Anton Wilson's "Cosmic Trigger--Volume Three: My Life After Death".
"Talking about the CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), now re-naming itself as the The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), whose stated purpose is "to "encourage the critical investigation of paranormal and fringe-science claims from a responsible, scientific point of view and disseminate factual information about the results of such inquiries to the scientific community and the public." They are a famous (or infamous) group who devote themselves to supposedly de-bunking any claims of the "paranormal." This group has as one of its more famous spokespeople the "Amazing Randi", a stage magician and/or "illusionist." (I once saw him on television "debunking" a martial artist who was demonstrating what he called the power of the "Chi"--the Chinese word for life energy. He duplicated the demonstration using stage magic, but hey, duplicating something is not the same as disproving the original.) Robert Anton Wilson speaks of his involvement with something he calls the CSICON (the Committee for the Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal."
To quote Wilson (henceforth referred to as R.A.W.), "the 'normal' does not occur in sensory-sensual space-time and exists only as a brain construct, a concept in theoretical math." R.A.W. then quotes a CSICON member, a Prof. Timothy F.X. Finnegan, as saying "nobody has ever found a normal man or woman, or even a normal mathematician--or an ordinary rose, or an average symphony." And further R.A.W states, "And I cannot find any reason to credit CSICOP, the neo-Platonist cult that believes the "normal" really exists everywhere and that nothing else at all exists anywhere. Of course, like CSICON, the noodles at CSICOP also have a $10,000 "reward" for anybody who can disprove their Dogma that the truly normal exists somewhere even though most of us have never seen it. But CSICOP has their own judges, so you can't win. The less fanatic, more sophisticated CSICON will allow three judges selected *at random* to decide if any given dog, or cat or bobolink, or rat, or vole, or wombat, or man, or woman, or house, or chair, or Picasso, or Beethoven sonata, or cloud, or sunset or *whatever*, fits all the criteria of normalcy. Just claiming that the Totally Normal must exists somewhere because we can think of it (Plato's fallacy) does not count as 'proof'. To collect the CSICON reward you must show, and allow the judges to examine, a concrete example of the Perfectly Normal."
On page 199 of "My Life After Death" R.A.W. writes of CSICOP, "They have in their whole career performed only *one* scientific investigation, which resulted in the statistician quitting, claiming they had changed his figures to suit their prejudices. That happened in 1982 and they prudently haven't attempted another 'Scientific Investigation'." (This followed by a footnote siting "Starbaby" by Dennis Rawlins, FATE, Oct. 1981--on the statistical study of that led CSCIOP to abandon scientific investigation. Told by statistician (Rawlins).") Ed. note--My Life After Death published in 1995.
Soooo....all this brings us back to poor Taisen Deshimaru. I still love the sentiment expressed but maybe we should look carefully at his use of the word "normal" and prefix all his nouns with "sumbunall", R.A.W.'s shortening of "Some, but not all."