The Normal Versus the Paranormal: Are We Lying Through Our Teeth?

“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
― William S. Burroughs

"Thought can refer to the ideas or arrangements of ideas that result from thinking, the act of producing thoughts, or the process of producing thoughts. Although thought is a fundamental human activity familiar to everyone, there is no generally accepted agreement as to what thought is or how it is created. Thoughts are the result or product of either spontaneous or willed acts of thinking."

This afternoon I am dwelling on a subject that I have tackled before which I think is hidden in our psychology. In other words, a situation that we are deaf dumb and blind to..and the subject is crucial to placing the anomalous in its proper context.


How do we divide the paranormal from the normal? What is the first association I have when I think of the word normal? Predictability. Oddly enough the pointed satires of human societies came to mind from the pen of William Burroughs. "Nova Police" then came to mind as a satire and critique of the self referential nature of the processes of thought requiring conflict as a control system in order to maintain chaos. Certainly a paradoxical proposition but then again, so is the behavior of our societies still split into tribes after the passage of the centuries.


How do we separate the predictable from the unpredictable, the normal from the paranormal? Are accidents random, or in the same vein, what about the meaning of coincidence? The last two musings on the linearity of thought in relation to anomalous events seems to represent two banks of a river.


We are on one side with a strict set of architectures when it comes to the digestion, intake and outcome that originates from the tools we have in processing experiential reality and on the other side it seems that information has the means to organize and propagate itself outside of our own boundaries.


We have our approach to thought as being a form of self identity which the metaphysical world has termed false personality, a false set of self references. There is no Bruce in actuality. It is a distinction of based on a distinction that does an end run around the recognition that the whatever of the whoever this creature represents is also embedded in the whole species and beyond.

The subject becomes an object that does not exist. Sound familiar? The difference between a descriptor and what is being described. Consciousness to a great degree seems skewed by its adaptations to what are essentially unknowns. You can drill down the solidarity of a table to microcosms of quantum flux and still have no identification of anything beyond a sort of myopic perspective that is locally based that uses thought as a means to measure what ultimately is a subjective which we critically assume is objective. We divide consciousness into waking and sleep cycles and one experiential reality is much different than the other and yet the age old question remains, are we under the thrall of autosuggestion in both modes? And this is reinforced by the observation of others on the basis of comparison that reinforces this concept of being awake when we are asleep which is the reason I delve from time to time into metaphysics which not surprisingly perhaps predicted to some extent what physics has discovered that the predictable is unpredictable except when processed through the observer. So what sort of entity is this observer?

No one seems to get around to asking the tough questions.



“Smash the control images. Smash the control machine.”
― William S. Burroughs



Our religions appear to divide by thought as if the source of the transpersonal were composed of human thought that judges makes distinctions as we do and more than that, we can bargain with or please by observing this or that in order to be rewarded or...punished. The Middle East is a good example of religion at work that utilizes the divisions of thought as literally warfare...physical combat.

One species can have variables that are reflected in the divisions of thought, or classification systems that are incomplete as a recognition ,not simply as a term and so we focus on divisors, which in turn originate in ourselves as somehow being one and the same with the processes of thought, separate and distinct whereas our species is as far from a closed system as one can imagine such a situation to be. Time is the construct of comparisons and our comparisons are based on thought which is linear, and so how do we approach the anomalous which violates our senses by not conforming to predictability and causality? We seem to be poor arbiters of what constitutes the realities that lurk behind thought, that thought is an effect, a means and not a source of origination. It seems we need to be reoriented. And of course there are countless paths by which we become or can become imprinted by and assuming we have changed by replacing one set of thinking with another, with the illusion in mind that its all one in the same methodology of thought reinforcing our identification with it as it being at the crux of what we may be, whereas there seems to be evidence that this is not so.



“Language is a virus from outer space”
― William S. Burroughs



If information is energy and energy being an expression of information where does that leave thought in terms of how we transform energy by self organisation? It is strictly channeled by divisions.


Whereas the recombinant nature of the paranormal points out that our species operates in one way and in nature in another as a division or distinction that underlines our psychology, or what Gurdjieff termed psychology which he said was actually the study of abnormal psychology.


Upside down is a good metaphor for our approaches to issues of the anomalous.


Back to the concept of accidents and coincidences that highlight our means of predicting by measurement which ultimately fails us. We are fearful of anti-structure, even go so far as to term it demonic or manipulative whereas it may be our structures are the issue and are a cause of a great deal of whats wrong with this portrait of the human world as it stands, inasmuch as we have carried on a tradition of lying to ourselves as this is what we are taught.

Of course I am not suggesting we do away with thought which would be surrealistic to say the least but rather place it in it's proper context, otherwise, how can we ever place the anomalous in it's proper context?

Perhaps as Burroughs suggested, the products of thought as they are currently constructed are an addiction....and an artifice whose chickens have come home to roost.