“That there is a God, many deny: for the fool says in his heart, There is no God, Ps. 14.1. But he has left so many signs of himself in the human mind, so many traces of his presence through the whole of nature, that no sane person can fail to realize that he exists.” ~John Milton, Selection from Christian Doctrine, Chapter 2 “On God” (1)
Updated: 1/25/2019
The Reality of the Unseen (Part II)
I have two older siblings, an eldest brother and an eldest sister both of whom are deceased. When my eldest brother died tragically in a car accident I felt a presence surround me. As I sat alone in my upstairs bedroom, I suddenly became aware that some one with me. This presence persisted with me for about 3 or 4 days. Then it seemed to have gone. I don’t what it was that I was experiencing just that I felt an unseen presence around me. Since clairsentience is an extra sensory perception we all posses, in order to promote a species survival success as an evolutionary adaption to avoid being eaten by a predator, I wondered if a hidden camera was planted in my home and wondered if someone might be watching me remotely from some clandestine source? I remember the feeling like it was only yesterday. Then, when my eldest sister would die prematurely as well due to complications surrounding heart disease sixteen years later. When she died I did not immediately feel the on-set of any presence. It felt as if she was still alive with us. As if she had not even died. She had graced our home with so much love and many memories and mementos that her essence permeated our living spaces. This was a marked difference in my experience with the “unseen” than when my brother died. My brother, whom we only had intermittent contact, left the nest when me and my twin sibling were only a few years old. He married, had a child, and then went into the military to make something of his life. He had no prospects for college as my parents were uneducated themselves with limited avenues for economic support. After the military, he lived abroad for almost a decade in his lifetime and when he returned home he resided in other states, Maryland and then in West Virginia. Which in my opinion was more of a move away in terms of its remoteness. His life was some what “detached” from the rest of the family’s life. Even though I admired him because he was my “big brother” it turned out there was a lot I was not been aware of about him. The reasons I felt closer to my eldest sister was due to very real socialized gendered reasons. The gendered experience can be quite a unique, yet common, experience. My eldest sister took on the role of “little mother,” a role she would come to resent as she was only 13 at the time.
Perhaps one of the consistent characteristics of many religions is the belief that there is an unseen order. Part of the characteristic of religious ritual is a consistent attenuation to modes of behavior that are in line with the “supreme order” that allow one to be more in line with the supreme goodness of that harmonious system. Part of the psychological peculiarity of religious faith is belief in an object which one cannot see. A belief in an unseen almighty God the Father. A belief in the existence of Eden known as Heaven. A belief in one’s own immortality that allows one to live even after death. The belief in an object we cannot see is a consistent trait found in human behavior though. For example, man has never traveled to the core of the earth yet he believes it to be made up of a liquid mantle and solid iron core. Man believes this liquid rock to be rotating around the core of iron thus producing our electromagnetic sphere that protects the earth from solar radiation. This fundamental belief is a core principle operating in every classroom that teaches environmental physics. And in Part I, I spoke of Plato’s Cave metaphor in which Plato renders the female womb a mute matrix, a non-speaking subject in his philosophical discourse. Woman becomes the “unseen” force that propels men to their future.
Part of the “supreme order” of the human psyche, with regard to family relations and behavior, is the psychoanalytic theory of Oedipus in which Freud outlines the castration complex as well as castration anxiety and to which Sigmund Freud attributes the symptoms he observed in the child’s game of “Fort-Da”; the compulsion to repeat which helps the young child manage the anxiety he feels during times of separation from his mother. (2) The throwing away from him his toy object, only to cry for its return and rejoice upon its glorious reunion. It is also the foundation of our sexuality and it is also found in the manifestation of psychosis in psychiatric disease. This theory helps to support forensic analysis of the criminal mind because it helps us to understand those mechanisms and process which oppress. Michelle Boulous Walker in the Philosophy of the Maternal Body writes:
“I shall argue that psychosis represents a much broader state; it constitutes the parameters of so-called normal masculine identity. This understanding of “normal” psychosis is defined by a masculine desire to be, or stand in for, the mother. It enables us to read the major texts of our patriarchal culture as psychotic texts, i.e., not as deviant or abnormal works, but more poignantly, as “normal” masculine ones.” (3)
Sigmund Freud’s “Fort-da” and the criminal conspiracy of mind control and the many various accounts of individuals’ experience with the “unseen” forces of technological power, otherwise known as electromagnetic frequency is an important one. It is reported that this technology targets individuals’ to the subjective power of another’s will. It is this use of advanced technological tools against victims which are designed to twart, attack, and divert a person life in a systematic orchestration, is of particular relevance when we are discussing the formation of subjective power, the notion of the “unseen” as aspects of the universe and human experience, and the manifestation of religious and secular power which sometimes produce war.
Let us compare, in contrast to concrete religious objects such as the church, the crucifix, the rosary, and holy medallions, the other various abstract objects of religion that remain unseen. Religion is full of abstract notions which prove to have an equal power but are in fact unseen from the naked eye. The abstract words such as “soul”, “God,” and “immortality” cover no distinctive sense-content what-so-ever, it follows that “theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any significance.” (4)This is a very important fundamental statement which was outlined by Emmanuel Kant that “theoretically speaking they are words devoid of any significance” because this idea as a concept set forth by Kant, provides the philosophical foundation of understanding Lyotard’s The Differend. In contrast, let us discuss the various reports of individuals who believe to be targets of a form of mind control or targets of some type of “unseen” advanced technology that tortures them. Let us consider how these reports have never been officially addressed and answered publicly, and, let us too consider Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Differend and discuss the feminist philosophy of rendering an individual a mute matrix as non-speaking subject that usurps their power away from the individual by signifying them as “devoid of any significance,” which has historically been seen in the oppression of women, African Americans, homosexuals, and various other minority groups.
It has been my experience that individuals who report being targets of mind control, have been stigmatized by others with the label of “mental illness.” It is believed the people suffering from these experiences are schizophrenic or are afflicted from some other type of mental illness that involves paranoid delusions. Part of the problem in raising awareness to this invisible crime of victimization is that many people do not understand psychopathy or, perhaps more correctly put, refuse to believe that this, as a criminal activity, is actually occurring. That is, that some invisible enemy can take possession of their body and mind through remote technological means. Since our society has moved into the iGen generation with all its wireless devices and android technology, with all its advancements in medicine and industry, and the fact that we are being “listened” to by the very computers and cell phones we use to assist us in our daily lives, I wonder how one cannot believe in these case reports? For example, the iPhone has a new application that can turn the iPhone into a hearing aid in combination with wireless ear buds. Its purpose was to help two individuals at a restaurant, cafe, or other loud and boisterous location to hear one another in conversation. One could, technically speaking, become a spy by placing their iPhone in a location that the individual wishes to surveil, walk away from their iPhone with their ear buds in place and listen to what is being said. How To Make Your iPhone a Live Listening System
But back to my argument. Let’s look at Lyotard’s The Differend which helps further the philosophical argument of victimization.
“Language” has no exterior because it is not in space. But it can say space. It can say the body. It can say that the body “says” something, that silence speaks.”~Jean-Francois Lyotard (5)
Lyotard’s description of the victim’s dilemma, the paradoxical logic that makes it impossible for the victim to be heard, is the philosophical concept that helps prove guilt in the litigation of wrongdoing. Here is a lengthy quote which captures the victim’s (impossible) trial:
“It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means. One loses them, for example, if the author of the damage turns out directly or indirectly to be one’s judge. The latter has the authority to reject one’s testimony as false or the ability to impede it’s publication. But this is only a particular case. In general, the plaintiff becomes a victim when no presentation is possible of the wrong he or she says he or she has suffered. Reciprocally, the “perfect crime” does not consist in killing the victim or the witnesses (that adds new crimes to the first one and aggravates the difficulty of effacing everything), but rather in obtaining the silence of the witnesses, the deafness of the judges, and the inconsistency (insanity) of the testimony. You neutralize the addressor, the addressee, and the sense of the testimony; then everything is as if there were no referent (damage). If there is nobody to adduce the proof, nobody to admit to it, and/or if the argument which upholds it is judged to be absurd, then the plaintiff is dismissed, the wrong he or she complains of cannot be attested. He or she becomes a victim. If he or she persists in invoking this wrong as if it existed, the others (address or, addressee, expert commentator on the testimony) will easily be able to make him or her pass for mad.” (6)
In The Differend: Phrases in Dispute Lyotard argues that the differend marks a wrong which results in silence; he speaks of this as the violence of silence. It is “a damage accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage.” For the philosopher, an agenda that makes it imperative that the philosopher not only identify the domain of radical silence associated with (and marked by) the differend, but more importantly to seek idioms, new ways of saying, this silence.
The differend is, amongst other things, an observation about judgments. It raises difficult political questions about who judges, whose authority is presupposed in such judgments, in fact it questions the applicability of universal criteria of judgement. He argues that: “A wrong results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse” and that “a universal rule of judgement between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general.”
For Lyotard, in as much as there is something unable to be phrased, there is something, and this is feeling. Lyotard talks about putting unspeakable phrases into language, and in this he includes the negative phrase of silence. For me, the differend represents the radical silence of reasons and explanations behind the various reports of mind control, the reports of people being tortured and targeted by some form of advanced technology.
There are many people who harbor resentment and hatred towards organized powers of authority like religion and/or political leadership. They look at the history of the various religions and political sovereigns and observe the persecutions, the inquisitions, and bloody wars which have plagued these various organized powers, and so reject its very nature. Religious wars have created great blood shed in search for an absolute position, as too has political sovereigns. It is for this reason, that people who do not believe in the organized power structure of religion consider those that do believe in them mentally ill. They are considered mentally ill because of their blind belief in something that is unseen and can not be proven in concrete terms. I used to be one of those blind faith followers until the advent of my “Inquisition through iGen.”
“Standing in the back of that church, I recognized, uncomfortably, that I needed to be there. Here was a place to weep without imposing tears upon a child; and here was a heterogeneous community that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine. Yet the celebration in progress spoke of hope; perhaps that is what made the presence of death bearable. Before that time, I could only ward off what I had heard and felt the day before. I returned often to that church, not looking for faith but because, in the presence of that worship and the people gathered there – and in a smaller group that met on weekdays in the church basement for mutual encouragement – my defenses fell away, exposing storms of grief and hope. In that church I gathered new energy, and resolve, over and over, to face whatever awaited us as constructively as possible for Mark, and for the rest of us.” (7)
Why does god endure without being seen? To reiterate, quite simply put, god endures without being seen because of inspired feeling and positive outcomes. Having sentience as a characteristic of the human condition, that is feeling, is the main reason God has endured without being seen. Being a student I will never under estimate the power of the written word. The power that literature possess in influencing religious groups and political movements. I’m reminded of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf which helped to power his abusive totalitarian regime as a Nazi party leader. There is no difference when it comes to the inspired feeling of religious literature or the inspired belief in political manifestos. What we read and digest into our minds can have a profound effect on the outcomes of our individual lives. It is what we are taught or “feed” to understand that allows us to place faith in, or non-belief in that which we are asked to evaluate. The following are some accounts involving the religious experience of the unseen. These are actual account of a person’s religious experience:
“One day, while standing in my living room, I recognized a new feeling. A peculiar feeling I had never felt before. As I stood there I felt like my body was a vessel and that the heavens above had opened. It was at that moment I felt the spirit of god fill me with the power of his being, the power of love. It was the power of unconditional love. As a result I finally felt it disquiet my anxiety and produce in me a calming state of mind.” ~An account from an active bible student studying a religious faith
Another example,
“I felt myself to be in to this fundamental cosmical. It. It was on my side, or I was on Its side, however you please to term it, in the particular trouble, and It always strengthened me and seemed to give me endless vitality to feel Its underlying and supporting presence. In fact, it was an unfailing foundation of living justice, truth, and strength to which I instinctively turned at times of weakness and it always bought me out.” (8)
Here we see two separate religious experiences of inspired feeling with positive outcome.
It is these types of experiences elicited from religious belief, feelings of not being alone in the world and being guided by something larger than ourselves that makes a person believe in the existence of god. This inspired feeling is strong and profound, so much so that when individuals report losing their faith, they report feelings of loss. It is as thou they experienced the death of a loved one. These individuals go into states of mourning. They may experience feelings of being terribly alone, isolated in the world, isolated from a world in which they previously felt connected.
“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen as its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” ~E.M. Forster (9)
Torturing an individual with “unseen” wireless radio signals is the exact opposite of the “pre-Oedipal connection and the “writing in mother’s white ink” that Helene Cixous wrote so poetically about. (10) It is the psychotic script of Freud’s “Fort-da” and the castration complex of Oedipus. It is the act of punitive castration and torture that seeks to imprison and isolate the individual being targeted, even though death may not be instantaneous, they will die prematurely from its side-effects. A person has a U.S. Constitutional right to be formerly addressed, charged, and violation made known to his sentence, free from cruel and unusual forms of punishment.
In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault discuss the history of the modern penal system. Foucault seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how changing power relations affected punishment. He begins by analyzing the situation before the eighteenth century, when public execution and corporal punishment were key punishments, and torture was part of most criminal investigations. Punishment was ceremonial and directed at the prisoner’s body. It was a ritual in which the audience was important. Public execution reestablished the authority and power of the King. Popular literature reported the details of executions, and the public was heavily involved in them. (11)
The eighteenth century saw various calls for reform of punishment. The reformers, according to Foucault, were not motivated by a concern for the welfare of prisoners. Rather, they wanted to make power operate more efficiently. They proposed a theater of punishment, in which a complex system of representations and signs was displayed publicly. Punishments related obviously to their crimes, and served as an obstacle to lawbreaking.
Prison is not yet imaginable as a penalty. Three new models of penality helped to overcome resistance to it. Nevertheless, great differences existed between this kind of coercive institution and the early, punitive city. The way is prepared for the prison by the developments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the disciplines. Discipline is a series of techniques by which the body’s operations can be controlled. Discipline worked by coercing and arranging the individual’s movements and his experience of space and time. This is achieved by devices such as timetables and military drills, and the process of exercise. Through discipline, individuals are created out of a mass. Disciplinary power has three elements: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and examination. Observation and the gaze are key instruments of power. By these processes, and through the human sciences, the notion of the norm developed.
Disciplinary power has three elements: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment and examination. Observation and the gaze are key instruments of power. By these processes, and through the human sciences, the notion of the norm developed.
Disciplinary power is exemplified by Bentham’s Panopticon, a building that shows how individuals can be supervised and controlled efficiently. Institutions modeled on the panopticon begin to spread throughout society. Prison develops from this idea of discipline. It aims both to deprive the individual of his freedom and to reform him. The penitentiary is the next development. It combines the prison with the workshop and the hospital. The penitentiary replaces the prisoner with the delinquent. The delinquent is created as a response to changes in popular illegality, in order to marginalize and control popular behavior.
Criticism of the failure of prisons misses the point, because failure is part of its very nature. The process by which failure and operation are combined is the carceral system. The aim of prison, and of the carceral system, is to produce delinquency as a means of structuring and controlling crime. From this perspective, they succeed. The prison is part of a network of power that spreads throughout society, and which is controlled by the rules of strategy alone. Calls for its abolition fail to recognize the depth at which it is embedded in modern society, or its real function.
So we can see the manifestation of Freud’s “Fort-da” manifest itself as a very real element operating in the social order of today. Society throws away from itself those that are in violation to its interest through the use of its civil codes and through the sanction of prison sentence. Society has historically also thrown away from itself those which do not represent the controlling parties interest and represent a clear and marked difference. The Klu Klux Klan was such an organization. It was a group of organized males that sought to promote their white supremacy with the elimination of those who possessed a clear and marked difference to its beliefs. Individuals who typically have been seen as representing a clear and marked difference to their philosophical views have been; homosexuals, prostitutes, drug dealers, women seeking independence, African Americans, and minority groups such as people of Jewish decent. These groups were seen as people who possess no merit because they violate the social fabric of white brotherhood. In the very real network of power that seeks to employ the ruling authority’s ideal. For a deeper understanding of what this ideal means we turn our discussion to the work by Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany:
“To millions of Germans the loss of the “Führer” (for all the oblivion that covered his downfall and the rapidity with which he was renounced) was not the loss of someone ordinary; identifications that had filled a central function in the lives of his followers were attached to his person. As we said, he had become the embodiment of their ego-ideal. The loss of an object so highly catheter with libidinal energy – one about whom nobody had any doubts, nor dared to have any, even when the country was being reduced to rubble – was in deed reason for melancholia. Through the catastrophe not only was the German ego-ideal robbed of the support of reality, but in addition the Führer himself was exposed by the victors as a criminal of truly monstrous proportions. With this sudden reversal of his qualities, the ego of every single German individual suffered a central devaluation and impoverishment. This creates at least the prerequisites for a melancholic reaction.”(12)
References:
(1) John Milton. The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. New York. The Modern Library. (2007) pg 1145
(2) Michelle Boulous Walker. Philosophy of the Maternal Body. New York. Routledge. (1998), Chapter 3 Reading Psychoanalysis: Psychotic texts/maternal pre-texts, “Fort-da” as the compulsion to repeat, pg. 55.
(3) Michelle Boulous Walker. Philosophy of the Maternal Body. New York. Routledge. (1998), Chapter 3 Reading Psychoanalysis: Psychotic texts/maternal pre-texts, Psychosis: foreclosing the mother, pg. 51.
(4) James, William. The Varieities of Religious Experience: A study in human nature. Barnes & Noble Classics, New York. (2004), Lecture 3 The Reality of the Unseen, pg. 58.
(5) Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Interview” with Georges Van Den Abbeele, Diacritics 14(3) 1984, p.17.
(6) Michelle Boulous Walker. Philosophy of the Maternal Body. New York. Routledge. (1998), Chapter 4 Philosophy and Silence: The Differend, Figuring woman: the idiom of sexual difference?, pg. 76.
(7) Pagels, Elaine. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. New York. Random House. (2003)
(8)James, William. The Varieities of Religious Experience: A study in human nature. Barnes & Noble Classics, New York. (2004), Lecture 3 The Reality of the Unseen, pg. 66.
(9) Wallin, David. Attachment in Psychotherapy. New York. Guildford Press. (2007), Quoted before “About the Author” and a very significant quotation regarding the formation of subjective power and the reason (mens rea) behind the vindictive infliction of punishment. Are the reasons for individual punishment aimed at personal growth, or are the reasons more closely aimed at self-serving satisfaction rooted in restoring a person sense of ego /manhood? Does it represent a symbolic exchange for the perceived victimization received through a wrongful act that corrects with the use of abusive authoritarian power?
(10) Michelle Boulous Walker. Philosophy of the Maternal Body. New York. Routledge. (1998), Chapter 7 Collecting Mothers: Women At The Symposium, Mother’s white ink: Helene Cixous, pg. 138.
(11) Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punishment. New York. Vintage Books. (1999)
(12) Eric L. Santner. Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. New York. Cornell University Press. (1990).
Proclivities' Principle Wisdom 