The Ontological War

I’ve been putting off writing this post for a long time because it is not especially friendly: It takes a hard look at most people ontologically. I decided, however, to write this post after surfing the Science Daily website and reading through the list of its 310 articles on schizophrenia. Fairly strong evidence exists to support the belief that schizophrenia is caused by people becoming lost ontologically, but all of the Science Daily articles are oblivious of the realself within us. Thus, a strong statement needs to be made.

As men and women progress ontologically they begin to see that a few people are sensitive ontologically and others aren’t, and a few people are insightful ontologically and others aren’t. Ontologically, men and women can be categorized many different ways, but in this post I will divide them into two broad groups, positive and negative ontologically abilities, and then those with negative abilities will be divided into four subgroups.

It’s difficult to categorize the people on the ontologically gifted, positive side into subgroups because there are so few of them. Instead, one is forced to name the very few—just two, actually—people who are in this broad group: DH Lawrence and RD Laing. Lawrence is the best ontologically of anyone I’m aware of, followed by Laing. DHL is better because he covered a much broader range of human life and human existence than Laing, but Laing is better in describing the problems that can develop when people become lost during their ontological journey to find and become their realself.

The negative side of the abilities list can be broken down into four subgroups:

• Poor
• Very Poor
• Terrible
• Santa Mira or Santa Miran

Sadly, almost everyone falls into one of these four categories, with a few people in the Terrible category and almost all the rest in the Santa Mira category. This last, and worst, category gets its name from the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This was the movie where pods from outer space land in a town called Santa Mira, and when the people there fell asleep the pods would replicate and replace them: “The Pod People are indistinguishable from normal people except for their utter lack of emotion.”

Getting back to ontology, men and women who continue increasing their degrees of realself eventually become conscious of their realself’s existence within themselves, and they slowly become it more and more. As these men and women go through this change, the socialself, which used to seem real and vital to them, changes to a non-self, since these people now know that their socialself is no longer who or what they truly are: they know they are their realself before everything else.

But the people who are at the Santa Mira stage seemingly have a complete lack of ontological sensitivity and insight—an utter lack of realself emotion. As they go through life the men and women in this subgroup rarely if ever have a constructive realself emotion or thought.

Occasionally, someone will state that I am being an ontological snob—“You’re bragging that you are more your realself than others are”—but that is not the case. I don’t think in that way, mainly because if I did I never would have made much ontological progress. Instead, what I am doing is pointing out that everyone needs to realize that by failing to increase our degrees of realself we are perpetuating alienated life and existence for all of us, at an extremely high cost. Becoming who we truly are will be difficult, but we will never succeed if we don’t even start.

In the past almost all of my posts have been focused around “the realself is good and we should all become it.” Now, though, it is also important to recognize that the socialself is harmful and we should all stop being it. Ban the Socialself and Socialself Life!

BTW: It has been said (e.g., here, here, here, and here) that the pod people represented communists (1956, the cold war, etc.), but my guess is that the writers of this movie and the novel from which it was based were sensitive ontologically, and they were expressing their dissatisfaction with their ontological relationships and their ontological world. Nor is it inconceivable that this movie had a “reverse pod people” impact on the people watching it in 1956: It helped to make them aware a decade later that they were alienated from themselves, from each other, and from life, and they should do something about it. This could be an interesting subject for a research paper.