Date Line - Good Friday - April 6, 2007

Experimental Existential Psychology – it is a "new" realm within an older realm which looks at human behavior and determines what is normal, and what abnormal. Ultimately, as it always exists, all human behavior is normal; but that which deviates from the majority of a population, or culture, is abnormal.

Normality is the ultimate democratic process. To be normal is to be like everyone else – to be the nail whose head is not sticking up. To be normal is to be perverse and hypocritical – is it not?

Does not the majority look to the deviant – those who are different, those who deviate from the norm – to define its culture? Who are our gods, or heros, the ones we claim as models when we seek to find a basis to denounce, suppress, or destroy the mythical "them"?

We need difference to justify our hate. We need difference to justify envy and jealousy. We need difference to motivate us toward our own destruction. We must hate "them", so that our hatred for ourselves can have a release.

The children hate their parents. This religion hates that. Those who love among themselves are hated by those who can find no love.

Treat your neighbor as you would be treated – Christian evangelicals, fundamentalist Christians hate gays; before that, they hated Jews,; before that they hated other Christians; and before that they hated everyone else. They still denounce all other beliefs as false.

Hatred is a great motivation for the masses. Could Experimental Existential Psychology be a way to learn why? Let us look at the name:

1. Experimental – relate to the act of the experiment, the act of conducting a controlled test or investigation.

2. To be "existential’ is to be in rebellion against conditions of existence. Is this related to indulgence in the "Theater of the Absurd"?

3. How are we to experiment with absurdity? Psychology is presented as a science dealing with mental processes and behaviors. Are we than engaged in the act of manipulating absurd mental processes?

The perfect area of scientific study – one which, by definition, is absurd. It must be fun. It is, after all an advocation devoted to the absurd idea that there is a conclusion to be drawn by manipulating absurdity to an absurd extent.

Experimental Existential Psychology – abbreviated XXP – is the ultimate academic waste of time. Yet, because it can point to "normality" as the element it seeks to understand, it is an area which cannot be challenged.

The central thesis of Experimental Existential Psychology is that humanity has created an organized "cognitive system" which is dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) through cultural structures has evolved symbolic meaning for natural events in response to some unique selective pressures related to human social environments.

The illusion of thought; illusion of immorality; illusion of design. Reinforcement by culture of the illusion that these are not an illusion, and that they are an illusion. Absurd contradiction as the basis for all human endeavor.

The absurdity of the idea that we can refer to a central social element – religious scripture – and find that the designer destroys the design because it contradicts that design through acting specifically as the all knowing, all seeing, all perfection, designer designed it to act.

Absurdity. At all levels of being, under all approaches to assertions of morality – which is itself an illusion – we have the contradiction and proof of the absurd nature of creation.

Is it any wonder that there is an emerging sect which holds that all life is a dream – that it is the product of a child’s dream; with the child one step removed from the creator?

Absurdity derives its existence from the assertion that there exists both rationality and irrationality – both logic and illogic – that there is something other than the absurd to which we can compare human actions.

For me? There must be a beginning, but it is lost within the infinite – just as the starting point of a perfect circle is lost once the circle is completed. There was a beginning; but is it possible there is no end? If there is no end, is no beginning a possibility?

Does it matter? Dose anything matter? And if so – why? How big a dose?

An award, and achievement, recognition, praise, denunciation, disgrace – freedom? Is it true that there are rules; and that these rules are the things which give meaning to all that we experience?

Can we manipulate the rules? Can we experiment with them? Can we engage in the study of Experimental Existential Psychology without seeing the cosmic joke?

Aw-w-w-w, poor baby. Your head is spinning. You’ve lost the meaning. You feel angry or confused because your fundamental beliefs have been laughed at. Your core being has been insulted. You fear failure almost more than, or more than, you fear success.

But, in reality, you don’t know how to define either. You know, or think you know, some extreme definitions; but where do the two meet? Where is that gray shadowed area into which you can step, and coming out will have placed you on one side or the other – the side of the successful, or that of the failures?

You are living in it. It is the realm of illusion, the realm of the absurd. It is where you are at any given point in time. It is George Bush screaming that he is a "decider" and failing to decide in any meaningful manner which can provide measured results. Absurdity.