The City of Mind (Under Construction)

   This is a story about me, and how hard it can be to know what we mean when we use that word.  This is a story about love, and how hard it can be to know what we mean when we use that word.    This is a story about point-of-view, and how hard it can be to know what we mean when we use that phrase.  When I was in the fourth grade my teacher, looking over my shoulder as I was writing, asked, "Why do you always use 'one' instead of 'I' when refering to yourself?"  "I don't know," I replied.  Of course, as a fourth grade boy I had no idea it was unusual to use a third person pronoun when refering to oneself.
   Looking back on that day I now see that nothing has been more central to my existence than trying to figure out exactly who is speaking.  What is the origin of our POV?  Almost 100 years before I was born, the mechanical, cause-and-effect, pinball world of Galileo, Newton & Descarte had begun to crumble.   As far back as 1859 Gustav Kirchoff proved a theorem about black body radiation that led to Nobel Prizes for Max Planc & Niels Bohr for their articulation of quantum theory.  To the materialist's shock, when things were broken down to their most fundamental level, you found not the hardest of "stuff" but particles that had properties of both particle and wave; you found not separate, isolated atoms, but a unified field.  Yet the materialist view of the world is also grounded in our subject-predicate-object sentence structure, as well as the pronoun we use to denote point-of-view.  This breaking up of existence into various dualities is what Buddhists call "bifurcation."   So if I could go back to that moment in time in the fourth grade, I would say to that curious nun,  "And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, 'Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself cannot stand.'" (Matthew 12:25)
   This is also a story about California; specifically, Santa Clara Valley, ground-zero of the so-called information age. This is a story about pattern recognition.  This is a story about information, smarts and happiness, about the discovery that, ultimately, real smarts is real happiness.  This is a story about how what we mean by me is what we mean by love.
The history books will tell you California part of the United States, but in a mythic sense it has always been and will remain that fictional island filled of pagan Amazons for which it was named.   I grew up in what was then a small town in the Santa Clara Vallely called Cupertino.   Our home was nestled in the western foothills of Santa Clara Valley, built by my carpenter foster-father, Larry. He and his best friend, Jimmy, bought six acres and built their homes side-by-side.  Our living room overlooked a virtual garden-of-eden; as far as the eye could see were prune, apricot, cherry, lemon, grapefruit and walnut trees.  Santa Clara Valley is situated between the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west, and the Diablo Mountain range to the east.  The valley was created relatively recently, in geologic  time, during the Cenozoic or mamallian era; a time period that began about 65 million years ago.  
   These two ranges created a sheltered oasis located between the dampness of San Francisco Bay to the north, and the coastal area of Santa Cruz to the south.  The Ohlone Indians were the first documented inhabitants of this shangrila.  The first archeological discoveries place them in the valley as early as 8000 B.C.  I find it strangely comforting that even these aboriginal peoples engaged in social ranking, as evidenced by their practice of burying those of social prominence in what has become known as "shellmounds."  The question of whether these prominent citizens were their Einsteins or Paris Hiltons I'll leave to the professionals. 
   The first European presence began with the arrival of the explorer and privateer (i.e., pirate, how appropriate) Sir Francis Drake in 1579.  Worried about Russian exploration of Northern California, the Spanish sent settlers into what they called Alta California around 1840 (Europeans get so indignant when other Europeans try to steal what they stole first).  Convinced that the natives needed to be saved from someone or something other than themselves, they sent Father Junipero Serra in 1777, who gave Santa Clara Valley its name when he consecrated the Mission Santa Clara de Asis.  San Jose became California's first town in 1777 when the Spanish founded the Pueblo de San Jose de Guadalupe.  
   The United States, momentarily diverting its attention from genocide of the native population, declared war on Mexico in 1846.  Completing our manifest destiny (unless Iraq becomes the 51st state) we annexed California in 1848, along with the other western states.  Other towns began to spring up in Santa Clara County after the gold rush in 1849, when San Jose became the first Capital of the State of California.  My home town, Cupertino, founded in 1882, famous for its horse breeding, was named for the Spanish name for Steven's Creek, Arroyo de San Jose Cupertino (which was, in turn named for St. Joseph of Copertino, Italy).  
   In the 1890's Senator Leland Stanford established Leland Stanford University in Palo Alto.  By 1908, Santa Clara County was linked to the world by the railroads, providing access to world markets that fostered agricultural success.  This link, along with the discovery that artesian well water underlay the whole valley, created ideal conditions for an  explosion in agriculture.  Santa Clara was soon producing carrots, almonds, tomatoes, prunes, apricots, plums, walnuts, cheeries and pears.  And while lumber, oil and wine contributed to the local economy, it wasn't until 1955 when a graduate student at Stanford named William Shockley helped develop a transistor that showed it was possible to selectively control the flow of electricity through silicon that another industry, the semiconductor industry, began to supplant agriculture in the Valley. 

   Back on our corner lot overlooking the valley we enjoyed our very own "green acres" type farm.  My foster mother, Adeline, grew up on a real farm in North Dakota and had what amounted to a religious conviction that children were meant to grow up in the country.  We raised chickens and rabbits for food and, at one time or another, raised goats, horses, ponies, cows, geese and sheep.  I remember saddling my Welsh pony, Gypsy, and riding with friends through sultry summer heat to the cool relief of a nearby dam.  After tying up our horses we'd shoot the spillway on pieces of styrofoam, hooting and hollering all the way down, landing with a loud splash at the bottom.  When we tired of that we'd dive into the dam for a swim, keeping a eye cocked for the occasional rattlesnake that would slither by. 

   Other days we would ride down to Blue Hills Market, tie up our horses to trees that lined a nearby creek, and stop for an ice cream at the soda shop.  I remember long summer days dawdling in that creek with friends, fascinated by the pollywogs, frogs and lizards we'd find there.  In the shade of trees, splashing over smooth, cool stones, enveloped by the warmth, sights, sounds and summer rhythms of the earth, I'd journey over and in her.  As I drifted off to sleep each night, summer seemed a peach popsicle paradise with months of licks left.  I'd take my shoes off at the end of the school year, disappear into summer's brillant dazzle, and reappear somewhere down stream come fall.  There'd be after-dinner treats of watermelon, games of kick-the-can, and rounds of red light-green-light that would last until our bedtime call.  Then I'd climb into bed, book in hand, and drift off to sleep to the sounds of a cricket lullaby.  

    Our house was surrounded by prune and apricot trees, situated halfway up a hill with a steep driveway going down the hill.   Around the corner and to the right from our house was a vacant lot.  You could access this lot from a driveway, which is what I did with a high school friend named Randy one hot summer night.  We were drinking and looking out at the by now abundant lights of the valley that marked each home.  I was musing as to how impossible it was to imagine the lives of all these others when the idea that each light was a stancion at a drive-in occured to me.  Every light in that valley was a car parked at a drive-in watching the movie that was me.  And that pretty much summed up the POV of my teenage ego; others as intrugued viewers, bit players, in the drama that is me.  But have I grown up, really?  Have we, really?  If we're all emotionally stunted, how would we know?

   As the outside world turned, Stanford sought to improve the prestige of their institution by hiring highly respected faculty from East Coast Universities.  Their most prominent recruit was a Stanford graduate who was now a Professor of electrical engineering at  MIT named Fredrick Terman (now considered "Father of Silicon Valley").  Terman, seeing a lot of Stanford graduates going to the East Coast for lack of jobs, started encouraging studens and graduates to start companies near the university.  Among these students were William Hewlett and David Packard.
   The graduate student Hewlett had designed and built an audio oscillator.  Convinced of its market potential, he persuaded Packard, who had moved to the East Coast to work for GE, to return to Palo Alto and join Hewlett.  It was in 1937 that a small company started in the famous garage in Palo Alto.  Their audio-oscillator became the basis for a later deal with Walt Disney Studios in 1939, for the film Fantasia.  By the beginning of the next century Hewlet-Packard was a multi-national corporation with annual revenue of almost 50 billion and over 120,000 employees worldwide.  
  Meanwhile, other students founded companies that became the center of a local electronics-industry. In 1937 William Hansen, Professor of Physics, teamed with Sigurd and Russell Varian to develop the Klystron tube, an electron tube in which bunching of electrons is produced by electric fields and which is used for the generation and ampliflication of ultra-high frequencies.  During the Second World War the brothers worked rent free in a Stanford lab on their Klystron tube, later on radar and inventions involving microwave radiation evolved.  In return for free rent and $100 in supplies Stanford would share in any profits.  This was one of Stanford's best investments, as it brought in several million dollars in royalties.  During World War II Professor Terman made the most of his contacts in Washington, and succeeded in getting a lot of governmental contracts for Stanford and local companies.
   During the fifties Stanford introduced revolutionary new ways of working as a University.  Money was needed to finance the rapid postwar growth, and the idea of an industrial park came up.  Stanford had over 3240 hectares of land, but was prohibited from selling the land.  But it didn't take them long to figure out that long-term leases were just as attractive to industry, and as nothing prevented them from leasing this land, they launched Stanford Industrial Park in 1951.  Varian Associates was the first one to sign a lease contract and soon after companies such as General Electric, Eastman Kodak and many others followed.  
   During the fifties the defense programs in the field of air, space and electronics strongly stimulated growth in Silicon Valley.  Semiconductor procurements by the defense agencies amounted to two-fifths of total revenue.  Lockeed Aerospace located itself in Stanford Industrial Park in 1956, and a year later in Sunnyvale.  Lockeed helped starting up a space and air department at the university and Stanford gave scientific advice and training to their employees in return.  Soon after the arrival of Lockeed other research departments set up in the region like IBM, NASA, and Xerox.  
   In 1955 Stanford graduate student William Shockley founded Shockley Transistor, together with talented young scholars from the East Coast.  He had developed a transistor at Bell Laboratory based on the principle of amplifying an electrical current using a solid semiconducting material.  The concept was based on the fact that it is possible to selectively control the flow of electricity through silicon, designating some areas as current conductors and adjacent areas as insulators.  This principle gives meaning to the term "semiconductor."  This became a suitable alternative to the commercially unreliable vacuum tube.  

   So much smarts, so little happiness.  My little eden became a suburban wasteland.  So many ironies.  The valley's economic boom kept my carpenter father employed year-round for my entire childhood, which fed us as well as the ponies, horses, dogs and cats.  This country was founded on the pursuit of happiness.  All living beings seek happiness and try to avoid suffering.  It might be called our prime directive.  But as we humans have evolved (if you feel that's an appropriate word) we've sought happiness by improving our external conditions; more things, longer & healthier lives, a more comfortable existence.  But are we happier?  Or has our experience of happiness and peace decreased?  
   I came of age at information-age ground zero.  The ripples of this transformation have now spread to all corners of the globe.  But  isn't it apparent that the more things change the more they remain the same?   Isn't it time to seek a truer method for gaining happiness and freedom from suffering?  The mind is a good servant, but a lousy master, and until we are able to distinguish between problems rooted in the mind from problems rooted in the world, we will continue to chase our own tails.  I remember a billboard from the sixties that showed a Lincoln Continental with the line "The Final Step Up."  Let me know how that has worked for you. 

   Life is a round of seasons, not always in an order that makes sense.  It's not some pedant but a backstage pass, a chance to learn the secrets of rabbits and hats.  And I was to the hatter born.  My mother was mad.  Not at me, but clinically.  At first I felt the frustrated disdain evoked by a car that's nothing but problems.  You realize it's nothing personal, but you still feel mostly disdain anyway.  In time I felt compassion; the fake, liberal kind that's about you and not them.  Myself, I've avoided the nuthouse, jail and the street, though sometimes only by weeks.  I'm not crazy, but can hum it in a minor key.  It just seems to run in the family.  From a scientific perspective such things are thought to involve a crucial bit of circuitry called mrna.  It's a glorified office messenger and does a  damn fine job, mostly.  Sometimes though it bumps into a chum, stops for a drink and, even though it writes the message down (in this case, the correct value for dopamine receptors) on the back of its hand, it gets smudged or something and by the time it gets to its destination it says turn right when it should have said turn left, and you spend the rest of your life going around in circles; nothing personal.
   You know what's really confusing?  To sense you're certifiable yet, as you look out at the world, you still feel most are crazier than you.  It's disconcerting.  It feels like life in a flood plain, or Slim Pickens on the back of a Titan-Two, or as if I'm the only one who missed the alert on the early warning system that This, is only a test.

   I grew up in a foster home.  I was one of the lucky ones entrusted to two decent people with whom I lived from the age of four to seventeen.  I was in my forties before curiosity lead me to vist an blood uncle on my father's side of the family.  I'd never met anyone from this side of the family as they lived in New England and we lived in California.  At the age of three my sister and I, who was seven, were placed in Youth Guidance Center in San Francisco.  That familial trait of listing to port always seemed to bring my parents to the same spot, a seat at a bar.  Social Services, failing to appeciate our Irish idiosyncracies,  considered the constant abandonment child abuse and placed us with the state.    
   As my wife and I arrived in Boston for our visit, we pulled up in front of an old, brown, bungalow style house with a narrow front yard and low porch.  As we settled in for a chat in the living room I was told my grandparents had, upon arrival from Ireland, settled in Maine.  When the conversation turned to one of their son's, David, Stephen King came to mind.  One winter night when David didn't answer the call for dinner, my aunt Margaret went into the back yard to look for him, and found him hanging from a tree.  "Ya know, the funny thing was though, he didn't look so bad.  It was cold ya know."  My wife shot me a look.  A bit later  when discussing one of my mother's sisters, Mary, my uncle made a face.  "I don't know what would get inta that girl.  We'd be in church and the neighbors would have ta come fetch us cause she'd be up in that  tree again with a  rifle, shooten at 'em."  Oh, to have lived in a simpler time when psychotic breaks were considered mere character flaws, and neighbors were willing to consider whizzing bullets mere eccentricity.  

   But back at Youth Guidace Center I was, I'm afraid, less than a hospitable guest.  Some nurse with ankles thick as tree stumps noticed right off I was a troublemaker as I insisted on being able to see my sister.  She informed me that this was not possible, as boys and girls were kept in separate wings.  My point was this--How big could this place be, and how hard could it be to arrange a visit?  Her perspective was this--Other than me, her charges did not consider this arrangement to be an interactive one, in which they felt free to consider possibilites other that which presented itself.  After numerous such encounters I took a step back and shot her a look that said--This baby, is not over.  Twice a day we had a snack of grahmcrackers and milk.  From that point on my snacktime activities included dipping my cracker in milk, sculpting it into a perfect turd, and leaving it where I knew she'd find it. 
   
   As I was growing up I had friends no one else could see.  I saw them as my guardian angels, with wings tucked into trenchcoats, wearing creased fedoras and chain-smoking out in front of our house late at night by my bedroom window.  As an adult I was astonished to see these same characters make an appearance in a German film, Wings of Desire.

   Our foster parents were decent people possessed of an enormous inferiority complex.  It felt like the Pentagon, something massive that sucked up enormous resources but ultimately did no one any good.  Being the fast study that I am I came to consider self-esteem a character flaw.  And as for those who claim to have it, who are they kidding?  Are they looking close enough at themselves and others for imperfections, or are they just assuming I'm okay, you're okay?  What I didn't understand at the time is that there's no difference at all between someone who is looking down on the world and someone who is looking up at the world, because both imply a belief in hierarchy.
   Our bookshelf was full of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, which I never saw my foster parents read.  They did read Reader's Digest.  My foster mother, Adeline, was, like many housewives of her generation, depressed.  Her world seemed, bit by bit, day by day, to be in full retreat until we were mere pinpricks on the horizon.  Not understanding she was feeling withdrawn, she blamed us for retreating.  She'd hold family meetings to discuss how disappointed she was that we did not feel like a close family any more, and that it was clear to her that we were not making the necessary effort to pull together.  When we seemed determined to remain aloof she would withdraw into months long silences during which she would communicate only by notes, which she would place throughout the house.  Most of the time it felt as if we lived on separate planes of existence.   It felt like solitary confinement on a flat, rocky, barren asteroid.  We could see one another, but felt no center we trusted to hold.  
   My foster father had a routine that could only be disturbed by nuclear conflagration, which, at that point in time, was a real possibility.  Like a stock character in sitcoms, he would come home in a foul mood, lighten up after a little TV and a few beers, and by dinner time felt well enough to torture us with horrible jokes (How long is a Chinaman?).  After dinner he'd return to the TV and promptly fall asleep until awakend by his wife at bedtime.  
  But, what ever their quirks, they were home every night.  They arranged our elysian setting, hiring the expensive cast of characters.  They sacrificed, perhaps to much, to put on a play that assured that no matter how smart I might become, I'd always know something about happiness.  They were not concerned with whether I got into Harvard, but made sure I knew a thing or two about heaven.  They were my red wheelbarrow; that upon which everything depends.   

   Throughout grade school and middle school, my mother had a hard time getting me out of bed, as a last resort throwing a pan of water over me.  My teachers would send notes home saying I was falling asleep in class.  Today it would be obvious I was depressed, but magazines popularizing psychological jargon, like Psychology Today, were still a decade away.  So my depression deepened, reaching critical mass in my early twenties.  At its worst getting out of bed felt like climbing out of a well.  My thoughts were like a train made up of locomotives careening off in different directions.  
   
   I remember an article in Discovery magazine titled Escaping 3-D.  It asked you to imagine you were a two-dimensional creature walking along a rope when you encounter a knot.  As a two-dimensional creature there is no solution to this dilemma; only by learning to think as a 3-dimensional creature could you find a way around the knot.  

   Any split in mind must involve a rejection of part of it, and this is the belief in separation.  The wholenss of God, which is His Peace, cannot be appreciated except by a whole mind that recognizes the wholeness of God's creation.  By this recognition, it knows its Creator.
Exclusion and separation are synonymous, as are separation and disassociation...once... separation occurs projection becomes its main defense, or the device that keeps it going.  
   What you project, you disown, and do not believe is yours.  You are excluding yourself by the very judgement that you are different from the one on whom you project.  Since you have also judged against what you project, you continue to attack it because you continue to keep it separated.  By doing this unconsciously, you try to keep the fact that you attacked yourself out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe.  
   ...The process begins by excluding something that exists in you but which you do not want, and leads directly to excluding you from your brothers.  
                                          A Course in Miracles
                                                             
   In my thirties I wanted to make sure the super-eight home movies of my childhood were preserved, so I had them reformatted in VHS.  The very first film was of a train trip to North Dakota to visit my foster mother's family when I was five.  The first minutes of the film show us pulling away from the train station in Santa Clara.  There's no sound.  In the next segment, filmed about the same time the next day, you see the camera pan out the window, and for about two minutes you witness a massive train wreck on the tracks going the opposite direction, seemingly endless images of crumpled cars jacknived. 
   The novel Pattern Recognition by William Gibson describes a bit of cinema verite that takes on legendary buzz on the internet.  As the protagonist in the novel analyses the film she discovers hidden patterns that, when assembled, trace the jagged edges of a piece of shrapnel that she later learns is embedded in the brain of the filmmaker.  
    In the quiet theatre of the world the flickering dream repeats in some endless loop.  But, as Mark Vonnegue ruminates in The Eden Express, "Is the tea in the cup or in the tongue?"

   It's 1967, and I am a college freshman.  I am entering the Full Circle juice and health bar in Palo Alto, California, located up a flight of stairs above a clothing store.  It shares the top
floor with The Iligitimate Theatre, an improvisational group.  I am studying improv with the theatre, and rehearsal (if you can call it that) has just ended.  It is a hot summer day as I walk up to that bar and see by far the most  beautiful woman I have ever seen.  She has long, thick, dark hair, dark eyes, and milky white skin.  But it is the hint of mischief in her eyes that does me in.  I reach into my shirt between the buttons near my heart and move my hand to simulate a fast beating heart, then act so cool and nonchalant.  She laughs.
   "It's a heart condition" I said.
   "I see," she smiles.
   "I'm Michael."
   "I'm Amanda."
   
   Amanda is playing guitar in her dorm room at Stanford, and singing the most beautiful ballad I'd ever heard.  It's a cut from a new Judy Collins album called Suzanne.  We're 
smoking some decent weed, and somewhere near the end of the first verse I swoon back to the safety of the floor and drift off on her wavelength.

   Suzanne takes you down to a place by the river
   You can hear the boats go by
   You can spend the night beside her
   And you know that she's half crazy
   But that's why you want to be there
   And she feeds you tea and oranges
   That come all the way from China
    And just when you mean to tell her
    You have no love to give her
   Then she gets you on her wavelength
    And she lets the river answer
    That you've always been her lover
     And you want to travel with her
     And you want to travel blind
     And you know that she will trust you
     For you've touched her perfect body with your mind.

   Later, in bed, I read from Leonard Cohen's new novel, Beautiful Losers.

   What is a saint?  A  saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility.  It is impossible to say what that possibility is.  I think it has something to do with the energy of love.  Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence.  A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed a long time ago.  I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order.  It is a kind of balance that is his glory.  He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.  His course is the caress of the hill.  His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock.
   Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance.  Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.  His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world.  He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.  It is good to have amoung us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

   As I put down the book we slip out of our clothes and enter the river.  From time to time we try to disengage, but just lying next to one another there's this golden glow that hums and vibrates us nearly off the bed.  We'd be walking down the street on our way to a Sunday breakfast, and something would shift and we'd feel we'd entered a  higher dimension; same place, same people, different frequency.  We see the French philosopher, Jaques Derrida, at the Stanford Presidential Lectures, and God on LSD (yes, I think God is on LSD).  We made anthropological expeditions to the Haight.  Just about anywhere we go in nature--the Marin Headlands, Muir Woods, the beach, the park, we find beautiful naked bodies, and slightly dazed, holy grins.  It feels as if the largest generation in American history is giving itself a cotillion, with Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs making the arrangements.  

     The Holy Spirit sees the body only as a means of communication, and because
     communicating is sharing, it becomes communion. 
                           A Course in Miracles

    As a boy I remember sitting in church on Sundays with a few  hundred fellow parishoners, and finding comfort in the synchronicity of the rituals of the mass; the smell of the incense, the candles, the incantations in Latin, the sitting-standing-kneeling, sitting-standing-kneeling.  I remember serving as an altar boy at 6A.M.mass, with the church was empty except for the ten or twelve especially devout Eastern Eurpean women in their distinctive head shawls.  There is something magical about this time of the morning; the cloak of darkness, the quiet, the fact that the world is just beginning to stir as we chant, kneel, bow and move toward the moment of communion, wherein the mass speaks the priest, and we few disappear into the fabric of the moment.

  I stay in contact with my biological parents throughout my childhood.  I am twelve now, and making a trip by Grayhound Bus from Cupertino to San Francisco to see my father.  It's a beautiful summer's day as I get off the city bus at Letterman Army Hospital.  As  I begin walking through a huge expanse of lawn to the hospital on top of the hill, I am nervous.  These visits are always sad.  But from the moment I turn to corner and spot him in his hospital gown, it's all different.  He's smiling a real smile.  I'd never seen him smile, not really.  He is relaxed, at peace with himself, sober--the first and last time I saw him sober.  
   He is an adult, a father.  He speaks of a novel he has started--Through These Portholes (he is a purser in the Merchant Marine).  The man I see this day could write a book, could be an author.  He is intelligent, poised, articulate; no self-pity or blubbering.  I am so proud of him.  I wish I could tell him how much it means to me to finally meet the man behind the disease.  
   I am sixteen when I learn he's died.  I am relieved.  His effects are returned to me.  I am going through his wallet, excited to find money, when some chill comes over me.  I know he loved me more than anything in the world, and the cold realization that all I feel is relief wraps itself around me like an Anaconda.  He dies unloved.  He dies without a tear being shed. The realizatiion that such a thing is possible is the saddest feeling I've ever felt.  I cry for him.  I cry for me.  I cry for the world.  
   But my lasting memory of him is that day in the hospital.  I see him as he is that moment I turn the corner.  I see him smiling, free of the problems that mask a father I could have loved--risen.

   Early in my life I was able to articulate a philosophic question I'm still trying to answer,
What is the difference between what we call hallucination, and what we call reality?
A common definition of hallucination is a sensory perception with no basis in reality.  Which begs the question, What is reality?  reality: In its  most liberal sense, everything that is, whether or not it is observable, accessible or understandable by science, philosophy, theology, or any other system of analysis....
   Clearly this is a tautology.  It's helpful here to go to those who have to deal with people for whom percepts have become debilitating--psychiatrists.  What follows is from Archives of General Psychiatry.

   Delusions are a cogntive effort by the patient to make sense of...aberrantly salient experiences, whereas hallucinations reflect a direct experience of the aberrant salience of internal representations.  Patients with psychosis seek help because of disturbing experiences: odd beliefs, altered perceptions, and distressing emotions.  

  aberrant: deviated from the normal.  This seems more helpful.  It points to 1) experiences that are debilitating as reported by those having the experiences, and 2) experiences
marked by aberrant salience.  Experience of aberrant salience simply means an individuals field of awareness is preoccupied by experiences outside the norm that seem odd,
disturbing or distressing.  This is more helpful because there is no reality claim that
amounts to a tautology. 
   So let me pose a question, What if the reality to which we are normed is itself an example of aberrant salience?   Interestingly, there is a theory put forth in the book A Course in Miracles that makes just this claim.  This theory distinguishes between knowledge and perception.

   A Course in Miracles makes a fundamental distinction between the real and the unreal; between knowledge and perception.  Knowledge is truth, under one law, the law of love or God.  Truth is unalterable, eternal and unambiguous.  It can be unrecognized, but it cannot be changed.  It has no opposite, no beginning and no end.  It merely is.  The world of perception is the world of time, of change, of beginnings and endings.  It is based on interpretations, not facts.  It is founded on the belief in scarcity, loss, separation and death.  It is learned rather than given, selective in its perceptual emphasis, unstable in its functioning, and inaccurate in its interpretations.  
   From knowledge and perception two distinct thought systems arise, opposite in every respect.  In the realm of knowledge no thoughts exist apart from God, because God and his creation share one will.  The world of perception, however, is made by the beliefs in opposites and separate wills, in perpetual conflict with each other and God.  What perception sees and hears appears to be real because it permits into awareness only what conforms to the wishes of the perceiver.  This leads to a world of illusions, a  world that needs constant defense precisely because it is not real.
   The world we see merely reflects our own internal frame of reference--the dominant idea, wishes and emotions in our minds; projection makes perception.  We look inside first, decide what kind of world we want to see and then project that world outside, making it the truth as we see it.  If we are using perception to justify our own mistakes--our anger, our impulses to attack, our lack of love--we will see a world of evil, destruction, malice, envy and despair.  All this we must learn to forgive, because what we are seeing is not true.
   Perception did not exist until the separation introduced degrees, aspects and intervals.  Spirit has no levels.  The ego is a wrong-minded attempt to perceive yourself as you wish to be, rather than as you are.  The ego is the questioning aspect of the post-separation self.  It is capable of asking questions, but not of perceiving meaningful answers, because these would involve knowledge and cannot be perceived.  The mind is therefore confused, because only One-mindedness can be without confusion.  A separated mind must be confused.                             
   This philosophy seems like a too radical form of idealism.  But it is rather similar to certain Buddhist accounts of "the fall" of  consciousness into the material realms.  And both these accounts sound a lot like split personality, or disassociative disorder.  There is the true self; love, God, one-mindedness.  And then there is the ego's attempts to disassociate itself from the ground of its true being, by identifying with its paradnoid projections.    Of course we are making all manner of philosophic claims here, running up against the irony that all words are grounded, not in knowledge, but in perception.  The Course In Miracles acknowledges this, and allows as how it is sometimes necessary to try to correct perception in order to align it with knowledge.  And, ultimately, you don't need to subscribe to the theory to test the premises.  What 's needed is 1) the sense that our collective experience, i.e. this world, is marked by debilitating experiences of aberrant salience (lack, fear, paranoia), and 2) the sense that fear is the opposite of love.  To test these claims we need to transmute fear into love.      

   I am an explorer, a multidimensional adventurer.  One of the most interesting and insightful descriptions of the dimensions of self I've ever come across is in the book Integral Psychology by Ken Wilbur.  In this book he describes what he calls the four quadrants.  All these quadrants stretch back beyond the confines of human history, and attempt to describe what I'd call The City of Mind.  What follows is a brief introduction to Wilbur's thought.  See Chapter Five of his book for a full explanation.
   The Upper-Left Quadrant represents the interior of the individual, or the subjective aspect of awareness.  The is the home of aesthetics and inentionality.  The language of this quadrant is I-Language:  first person accounts of the inner stream of consciousness.    
   The Upper-Right Quadrant represents the objective or exterior correlates of those interior states of consciousness.  Researchers that study this quadrant focus on brain mechanisms, neurotransmitters and organic computations that support consciousness.  The language of this quadrant is It-Language: third person or objective accounts of the scientific facts about the individual organisms.   
   But individuals never exist alone.  Individuals are also part of some collective and, just as with individuals, there are the insides of a collective as well as an outside.  The Lower-Left of the quandrant represents the inside of the collective, or the values, meanings and world-views shared by any group of individuals.  The language of this quadrant is We-Language:  
second person language which involves mutual understanding.  In short, how you and I will arrange to get along together.  This is the cultural quadrant.  
   But just as individual consciousness is anchored in objective material forms, so all cultural components are anchored in exterior, institutional forms.  These social systems include material institutions, geopolitical formations, and the forces of productions.  The language of this quadrant, like that of the objective individual, is It-Language.  
   The basic idea is that all four quadrants are correlated dimensionally, like time and space.  For instance, a prokaryote (Upper-Right, exterior individual quadrant) might be described as having a mind limited to irritability (Upper-Left, interior-individual quadrant).  It also could be described (in Lower-Left, interior collective terms) as at a protoplasmic level of organization, and (in Lower-Right, exterior collective terms) as part of the Gaia system (as opposed to atoms, which exist, in Lower-Right terms, on a galactic level).  
   Integral Psychology promotes the view that any description or representation of self that doesn't understand it as integrated across all levels of all four quadrants limits our understanding of self in  some crucial way.

   So, you see, I'm not just jumping around randomly between unrelated fields and topics.  
What I'm attempting here is the first integral biography.  

   To call someone a metaphysician means nothing more than their attempt to discover what underlies everything.  Naturalists, who say that everything is made of lifeless, non-experiencing energy, are just as much to be classified as metaphysicians as are idealists, who maintain the opposite.  
   One of my problems is that I find the empirical way of looking at the world very compelling.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to be an empiricist means accepting that insofar as we have knowledge of a subject, our knowledge is a posteriori, dependent on sense experience.  Sense experience is our only source of ideas.  As one 19th century biologist put it, we are little more than complex amoebas.  Why is this a problem for me?  It's a problem because it is commonplace for me to have experiences that contradict empirical models of reality.  Such experiences have happened while on psychdelic drugs, in dreams, on long retreats and in the midst of everyday life.  It's not unusual for me to hear people's thoughts, even to have elaborate conversations that seem just like normal conversations, except neither of us opens our mouth.  My ex-wife and I experienced a ghost in our San Francisco apartment.  We were lying in bed when our cat, who was sitting by the doorway between our bedroom and the living room, arched her back, hissed and looked up
as if she was following the path of someone walking past her.  A few moments later I felt someone sit down on the edge of the bed.  Empiricist that I am, I asked her if she felt something.  She said she did.  I asked her what she felt.  She said she felt someone sit down on the end of the bed.  So now we have a triangulation of three "sense" experiences (okay, I couldn't interview the cat, but we both felt she was watching someone or something walk past her).  If such an experience is merely "anecdotal" then how is it different from the "sense" experiences so favored by empiricists?  The obvious answer is that not everyone has such experiences; ay, there's the rub.  The advantage to having such experiences is that you know that any empirical philosophy that denies the possibility of such experiences
is flawed; the challenge is to articulate that flaw. 
   
     Today, with more than a hundred years of research on this (psychic phenomena), an
     immense amount of scientific evidence has been accumulated.  Contrary to the
     assertions of some skeptics, the question is not whether there is any scientific evidence,
     but "What does a proper evaluation of the evidence reveal?" ...The eventual scientific
     acceptance of psychic phenomena is inevitable.
                                             The Conscious Universe, Dean Radin, P.H.D.