The Jesus Trip ... soul to soul

THE JESUS TRIP soul-to-soul

Part I. Background

The "Jesus trip" was a 60's meme, coined for devotees of altered states of consciousness of people filled simultaneously with ("present to") 1. themselves, and 2. humanity. Their obsession was hardly anomalous, as an Archetype (see Part II). Part of the scheme of things.

A coincident historical factor was the Vietnam war. For those for whom gettin' high* lifted their mental state to 1. what they were, to-and-for-themselves; 2. the humanity in them was called upon to focus on the Vietnam War. So, out of the psychedelic era of Tim Leary, R. Crumb, Charles Manson and day-glo busses of tripped out itenerants, also emerged howling Jesus trippers. (I count Ginsberg, when he was still himself)

I was one of these, by religious background, philosophy, teaching experience. Assistant professor at Harpur College at the time, reading that a student of preceding year's classes had been killed in Vietnam aroused in me what could be called 'adopted son' syndrome. There was all the beauty, creativity, freedom. "They can't let me die," But this was one they did. Why? This has been my undeviating 60's Jesus-trip life question. Question of father-son relations and child sacrifice had spilled over into Exiztence* ("Dasein"). (...now returned, in Israel's use of "Existential threat" to justify bombing Iran)

By religious background, from Lockney, Texas, to Baylor University,
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (I yr), called to preach (licensed, not ordained). Repeated full-participation weekly church experience from earliest family recollections, followed by layers-upon-layers of textual and personal elaboration, left a deposit of New Testament soul template* of a child raised in that setting, '40's-50's. It is the experiential ground of Jesus-to-Christ life trajectory story constructed below.

By philosophy, post graduate at late 50's U. of Wisconsin, through study of sign-use; how humanity, learned and colloquial, communicates.
Through the token-intensive Symbol, linkage to Archetypes is kept alive. These communicate collective content of pre-historical, transpersonal consciousness. (<= e.g. in Western Europe, S* for clans, Houses, Courts"; woven into cloth as flags, kilt, uniforms, etc.). As a mode of communication, Symbol display goes with group-ritual, special ullulation, expressive movements (rhythmic, but not voluptuous) in sacral places. That is to say: the religous*. (*S*5vii)

From Religion to Philosophy => From Token to Text

Text is the proper study of philosophy: use of language to communicate what is true or false, or fact. In the pure form of text required for scientific discourse, the Symbolic function of tokens is entirely suppressed. The function of special tokens is to 'privatize' the subjective ground of discourse by attaching them to empirical conscious associations. Scientific work, accessible to verification independent of all such subjective associations, requires only the bare skeleton of nine primitive Symbols of logical syntax. The logical test of organized theory is self-consistency; the application of this test is validity of inference in hypothetico-deductive Systems*; the pure form of hypothetico-deductive Systems*, determining validity, is given by the primitive signs and observational operations of their use (<=the Logical Syntax of Language). This summarizes, or contains* the metaphysics of the meta-language of science* as organized discourse. The work of Logical Positivism purged the ideal language of factual discourse of Symbolic tokens to which special religious meanings attach.

This was proper and largely unchallenged; but it's entailment was psychosemiotic catastrophe. It split the factual reality communicated by text from the existential reality communicated by the token, in thinking totalities of S*. The objective ground of rational perception through causes tell one story; the subjective ground of conscious unity in relating to it tells another. One is science; the other religion. One uses signs*, the other, Symbols. Each act of communication brings together components of both. This explains how an atomic physicist can sit in the church pew and pray for rain. It seems contradictory for the same man to be taking both as "true", until his resolution of them as text and token is considered as a personal place of consciousness. Unfortunately, Science* has been digitally fused with Symbolic (re-) projections, legitimized soley through people's politically encouraged 'belief'.

TokenSpace, opened up by psychosemiotics, links text and token in a new, freer way. Opening that domain of intellectual freedom is the contibution to which this Trip aspires. It's formal completion can be conceived, as requiring an Ideal Meta-language common to science, religion, politics, government, economics, morality, culture and health -- the full spectrum of Token types. In practice, it is a work in progress (the S* matrix). If consciousness can be brought into unity with itself through sign-use, it ought to be completable and available for use in addressing the collective totality. My work here is an experiment in that.

The primary task has been uncovering what it was, as a totality.
Then, from the process of doing that and seeing what it entailed, coming to think it is what is. Once the snake brain position of consciousness takes over, it reverses being-rationality. That is why metaphysics must ground sign-use, rather than vice versa