Un livre essentiel pour comprendre apprivoiser notre fascination pour l'absurde

Meaning in Absurdity: What bizarre phenomena can tell us about the nature of reality

Beaucoup d'exemples de "grande étrangeté"

The demise of realism will force some very concrete issues on us. Finding itself in a reality of mind will force our culture to awaken to a level of responsibility we have entirely forgotten: we will no longer be able to look upon ourselves as victims of a dispassionate external world.

The foundations of our future may be aesthetical: that which inspires and feeds the soul; that which is conducive to happiness and harmony.

The calls of the absurd may be but protrusions of these normally unconscious meta-realities into the ordinary field of awareness. As such, they are both psychological and physical.

Here we have much reason to hope: we can look forward to the transcendence of our current limitations; to a future when we will look back at the meaninglessness, dryness, purposelessness, and emptiness of our current worldview as illusory, claustrophobic artifacts from a dark age of thought. We may then ask ourselves in bewilderment: How could people live like that back then? What kind of collective delusion was that?

What finality or limitation could you know were it not for your forgetfulness? What weight could your actions carry? What significance could your achievements or failures hold? Rejoice for your ability to forget, for it endows you with the colors of life. But bear this in mind: you will once again remember. And when you do, you will again be home. In the interim, live out your myths – imaginatively.

Yet your life is itself a dream. The problem is that you got it the wrong way around: the dream is not in the body; it is the body that is in the dream. All metaphors, all cartoons of explanation and closure, exist only in the dream. When you sleep, you partially awake. But ‘Who is It who dreams?’ I hear you ask. This question is itself a reflection of your myopia; your infantile need to conceive of everything as being produced by something else. You see, *the Dreamer is Itself the dream*. The dream is the eternal unfolding and expression of the Dreamer to Itself.

The literal storyline of consensus meta-reality emerges out of the metaphorical worlds of the personal unconscious through the creation and enforcement of such coherence constraints. They secure the coherent weaving of various metaphors into a linear, continuous, self-consistent, and logical story. This is a resonance of the aspiration for closure intrinsic to the Formless. Indeed, no closure can be found in the chaotic worlds of the absurd. But through subconscious exposure to the various, inconsistent, discontinuous storylines unfolding there, filters and selection mechanisms – both embodying specific constraints – can be evolved and then applied by the ego. As we have seen when discussing why the multiplication of two negative numbers *must* result in a positive number, the process can generate, from within itself, the constraints necessary to facilitate closure. The resulting filters block out every element of the bottomless chaos that does not fit consistently into the emerging, average storyline. The selection mechanisms pick out and weave together those that do. This way, consensus meta-reality is simply a constrained and synchronized version of the absurd; a version squeezed into fewer degrees of freedom. But the absurd continues to simmer under the surface, in its full glory.

As such, perhaps the Trickster has a fundamental role to play in the expansion of our understanding of nature. Its exile in the deepest reaches of the unconscious is unfortunate.

Either way, *the body of beliefs embedded in the paradigm is already implicit in the collection and interpretation of the ‘mere facts.’*[16](private://read/01hyvfjwtapk1qte4aa4s5czsg/#ch05.ftn.016) Finally, *it is also the paradigm that determines which explanations for the observed ‘facts’ are acceptable or to be preferred*. Indeed

Over time, these new myths – at least the ones that eventually gather momentum – could slowly propagate through the chain of coherence relationships and infect the entire story. This, it seems to me, is the way to change reality.

we do not have a causally closed, complete myth today that ‘explains’ everything going on. In fact, we are incredibly far from it, as I sought to illustrate in Chapter 6 of my book *Rationalist Spirituality*.

from a coherentist perspective, it is true that the multiplication of two negative numbers results in a positive number, since this is the only alternative that is consistent with the rest of arithmetic. The truth condition here has nothing to do with an ‘objective reality’ lying somewhere in wait, but is entirely constructed by our minds.

since our consensus meta-reality is constructed *coherently*, as we inferred above, then it is necessarily an interconnected and internally consistent whole. As such, it provides us with boundary conditions for determining the validity of statements: *statements are true if they ‘fit consistently’ with other aspects of the meta-reality*.

if we observe human behavior, we find an innate, incredibly powerful need to find *closure*. We all feel compelled to try and understand why things happen the way they do, as well as to anticipate what will happen next so we are not caught off guard. In order for us to find closure in this way, nature *must* operate according to organized, stable, internally consistent, and ultimately understandable patterns.

The global behavior of ant colonies is an example of what, in science and philosophy, is called ‘emergence.’[9](private://read/01hyvfjwtapk1qte4aa4s5czsg/#ch05.ftn.009) Here, I am postulating that our consensus meta-reality is itself an emergent idealist phenomenon.

As I articulated in my earlier book, *Dreamed up Reality*, even if individual minds had, in principle, absolute freedom to create their own meta-reality, when they do it *together*, collaboratively, a common set of constraints naturally and unavoidably emerges that all participants become subject to. It is this emerging, shared set of constraints that provides criteria for judging the truth or falsity of statements made within the context of this shared meta-reality.

![](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/media/reader/parsed_document_assets/177769531/dItzmDhZATogi9bcHFo710CKKml62en2WM53-9nijLE-id2-00002.gif)

However, having failed to uncover a purely medical explanation for the reports of his patients, Dr. Mack ventured carefully into the territory of speculative ontology. His observations are uncannily consistent with Vallée’s own. He talks of the concurrently psychic and objective nature of the phenomenon, as well as of its elusiveness. He speaks of a ‘third zone’ that violates the boundaries between the subjective world of mind and the objective world of matter ‘out there.’[10](private://read/01hyvfjwtapk1qte4aa4s5czsg/#ch02.ftn.010) He even suggests that the phenomenon is ‘designed’ – not necessarily in a teleological sense, but rather in a compensatory and spontaneous manner – to break down this separation between subjective and objective worlds and to force the experiencers to confront the inadequacy of the worldviews they have hitherto held.[11](private://read/01hyvfjwtapk1qte4aa4s5czsg/#ch02.ftn.011) He speaks of ‘ontological shock’[12](private://read/01hyvfjwtapk1qte4aa4s5czsg/#ch02.ftn.012) as the mechanism by which the phenomenon forces an expansion of people’s conception of reality towards a worldview where notions previously held to be absurd become intelligible.

However, by the time he wrote *Messengers of Deception*,[9](private://read/01hyvfjwtapk1qte4aa4s5czsg/#ch02.ftn.009) Vallée’s position had become more influenced by conspiracy-related hypotheses. He took the ambiguity, self-negation, and contradiction always present in the calls of the absurd not as natural, inherent properties of the phenomenon, but as devices designed to influence human culture through confusion and misleading signals.