On Drugs and Anger...

When it comes to the 'Party that Does Inhale', I'm totally with you, and this isn't just an issue of legalisation, or the crazy criminal distortions that prohibition has caused in the black market of banned substances. It's to do with evolution and the human brain...

As far as I can remember, every human society known has used some kind of drug to alter it's mental state. It's just the levels of acceptability that change. Caffeine, Nicotine and Alcohol are all permitted substances under the laws of most countries these days. We know the problems with them (SOREAL FACT: the Americans consume so much caffeine, mainly through Pepsi and Coke, that it's detectable on the inshore waters of the Mainland US). I think we both feel that the problem isn't with the drugs, it's with the users. You can get addicted to water, carrots or exercise. And too much of any of those will also hurt you.

No, the point is that when the human brain evolved, suddenly and massively increasing in size some 200,000 years ago, it also developed ways, short cuts to reprogram itself. Most of these innovations were CULTURAL, music, storytelling, crafts and arts, wall painting, education etc. But some kind of MIND ALTERING DRUG evolved in all these societies at the same time. It's obviously a key part of our evolution, maybe because this massive brain needed fast rebooting, or because it was advantageous to change your perception and find new solutions.

Which brings me to your other point - Hatred. Yes, I also find it hard to hate a person, and since we are changing our mental states so quickly, it would be stupid to hate somebody and their brain. But you can hate a mental state I think - fascism perhaps, or obsessive sexual interest in young children, or any other compelling automatic process that stops us thinking and makes us stupid.

One of the things I think that helps fight these mental states (perhaps we should call them mental viruses or 'memes') is anger. I know compassion, understanding, creativity and a nice bottle of red also help. But anger can have a justication, and its purifying, cleansing effect. Some things, ideas, habits are so bad they're worth getting angry about, and if Wilberforce and the other slave trade abolitionists hadn't got angry, if Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela hadn't got a bit mad at times, where would we be now?

Makes me think of a line by Stevie Smith

"Sometimes my tears fall in a shower
Because of anger's freeing power"

There are a couple of great lines on this by William Blake if you'd like me to look them up. Once I've got our own wiki up and running, we can have a reservoir of this.

Hope you're having a soreal day

xpeter

That's amazing mate. When you said that 'gold' backwards spelt 'blog' I thought you'd had one bottle of wine too many.

But in fact you had one bottle of wine too few!!

I'm more and more convinced that there is something called the 'soreal' and that sorealism is a real thing.

So many instances flash through my mind. I was reading an old poem of mine (from my teens) - a fulmination against my True Love who said my Muse was faithless. It goes like this....

WRITER'S BLOCK

My Love said my Muse was faithless

And her fair words, being but a sham

Would turn in time to bitter fruitlessness

Leaving me no better off than I am

My Love said my Muse would desert me

And now my fate has confirmed her fears

Far away my Love can weep

Clear, exonerating, righteous tears

But since her predictions have proved so just

I hope all her maybes also turn to must

Peter Jukes 1982

There's nothing particularly soreal about this poem, but there is about the World of Maybe and the World of Must. I was explaining to a Polish friend how 'must' in English also means, mould, dust, mustinesss.

Sorealism is certainly not in the WORLD OF MUST - that's pessimistic defeatist realism. But is it in the WORLD OF MAYBE. Is that too airy fairy? I think it could be. But we live in a world of maybe... not in the sense of dreams, fantasies... but in the sense that is that true? Yes? No? Maybe.....

Or perhaps I've got this wrong. Is there another world to pitch against the world of must? Perhaps the realm of possibility? Or plausibility? The Third Man or Sideways isn't real. But it's true. Those worlds are also possible, but so is Terry Pratchett. These soreal world are more than that possible, they're plausible.

Morning

This is a fantastic place to start just sharing the truth...

Over the last two years or so I have been developing my Soreality, by writing, adapting old hard wired ways of thinking, and mending broken things, most of those things that were broken I either inherited or manufactured myself, mostly the latter.

What I have begun to understand, and what I am now beginning to enjoy and feel about Sorealism is that it is an open place the Sorealists world, here you really can express the truth without an agenda, without being a wooly liberal; let me explain.

Developing my understanding of Sorealism, and writing Soreally has made me understand that just because I am telling the truth, it doesn't necessarily mean I am right, or beyond reproach.

I love feeling, I love loving, I do not hate, I think I am broken in this respect, this is because so far in my whole life I have never hated anyone (honestly), I do not think I am capable and I have certainly had as much reason if not more at some points in my life than most, but that issue that inability to truly hate made Sorealism exist for me, it's oddly a bit Star Trek in places I can't explain it clearer yet.

Now we are all capable of this, we all kind of do it at sometime or another every day, some of us do it without knowing. So when someone hates you or they misunderstand you or you just don't get something suddenly my Sorealist switch clicks in, it's like being in a movie, I want to take notes, understand it, explain it, get it and help it, there is no room for anger (Well not always) and then invariably I end up writing about it.

A friend in an email told me "Time is money, but more than money time is Gold"
I think what she meant was time is more valuable than money, so if your going to waste time, waste it properly.

I am convinced that if there was a Sorealist Party running for a tick in a polling booth somewhere, it's strap line would have to be "The party that did inhale" That doesn't mean anything other than truth, Sorealism does not exist because of drugs, but if there were drugs and they had been smoked we'd have told you, because that is the way it is, not this ridiculous fake truth society with acceptable lies.

Look I am going to sign off this blog entry smiling, because it's 4:10am, I am not writing a personal blog, a band blog, a find me, hear me, get me, or save me blog.

This is a Sorealists Blog, and I am proud to be one.

M

LED - TechEBlog.com

Something amazingly SOREAL about this. Thanks to Doug for suggesting it. You just have to look at things IN A NEW LIGHT

Sorealism and nature, how we live and take our place on the this satellite revolving around the sun. This is pure Sorealism. M

Hello

I am amazed how suddenly Sorealism has erupted, from a thought to a movement, with it's very own website and now Blog.
Understanding that this train of thought is going to have a large Wiki element, I think it's true home is not just the internet or the official Sorealist website, but rather it's out there with you and me and the cosmos.

So what is Sorealism? Are you a Sorealist?

In order to understand the concept I feel one has to have experienced at least some kind of major life crisis; I mean if you haven't how can you see and feel the soreal, you wouldn't know the difference really would you.
Making the difficult choice to exclude a whole bunch of people does trouble me though, so if anyone can point me in a way that includes the non-damaged then let us know at sorealism.com this is like the Discovery Channel of Sorealism.

Sorealism is that trippy place where real life is stranger than fiction, where the true moments and places any decent artist who knows the address to visits and stays.
It's where we go to plunder and thieve from this crazy reservoir of life, death and atoms. Sorealist moments can be found by staring into a radom cloud formation, or appear to you in a really great tune, it's the place the lemon zest moment comes from, you know when you hear a truly staggering chord sequence and your hair goes on end.
It's kind of like Magic Realism, but without the crap magic...

See *

Magic

M

Below is the original Wikipedia entry, this is Soreal it may get deleted at any moment...

Sorealism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sorealism is a new wikimovement, founded by the composer Marcos D'Cruze and the writer Peter Jukes, in London in 2006. Like its 20th Century precursor - Surrealism - Sorealism claims not just be an art movement or literary school, but more "a way of life". [Sorealism.com] is also the first known instance of such a movement starting online, using groupware and social networking to affiliate its members to a general ideology

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Soreal Philosophies

Though sorealism claims to be less interested in ideas than 'reality', this is clearly an intellectual stance derived from English empiricist thought, and going back to the atomism of Lucretius and Epicurus. Suspicious of any a priori forms of thought, Sorealism is heavily influenced by the deductive methods of scientific analysis. On the sorrealism website [www.sorealism.com] Richard Feymann is in prominent position, along with Albert Camus and Isiah Berlin. Naturally, given the empiricist slant, sorealism feels most at home in the realm of history rather than ideology, and it claims kinship both to realist historians of the 20th century, and the more idealist claims of liberal historiography.

Sorealism in the Arts

Though it seems to have a lot in common with naturalism or realism in the arts, the main focus of Soreal visual aesthetics is photography. The web manifesto claims that this because 'reality is better than anything we can make up'. But given the backgrounds of the founders of sorealism, the visual arts - though heavily referenced - are not the main focus here. Both D'Cruze and Jukes have collaborated on several theatrical and musical projects, so there main area of interest is drama, film, music and literature. In a recent blog discussion, D'Cruze claimed that sorealism was invented to "reclaim all the plus points of magical realism, just minus the bad bits, the magic". A common thread between both founders, which links them back to the founders of surrealism, is a mutual admiration for flamenco, the concept of duende and the work of Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca was close to one of the surrealist avatars, Salvador Dali, for several years, before eschewing the increasingly shrill and controlling concepts of surrealism for something much more accessible and superficially realist in his later works. He is in many ways the main precursor of sorealism.

Sorealism and Science

Science is the sorealist method par excellence in that it uses doubt, hypothesis and proof: it is an open ended system in the classic topology of Popper, and therefore open to revision and improvement in the light of experience. One of the major claims of Sorealism is that it can, in the words of Jukes "unite both the arts and the sciences". They argue that belief, doubt and reinvention is the mental equivalent of natural selection in the evolutionary sphere, and their image of cultural propagation is not that dissimiliar to the memes concept of Richard Dawkins. However, it must be pointed out that both founders are practitioning entertainers or artists, and therefore their ideas of evolution are probably more 'creative' than exact.

Sorealism and Politics

Though there are some references to sorealist history and sorealist politicians in the website manifesto, there is no clear political line in sorealism as yet. This may not be a coincidence. The unfortunate alignment of surrealism with communism, thanks to pressure of Andre Breton provokes some of the more intense debate among sorealists: are they just creating an in-group which will exclude others, much like Breton excluded Bataille, or Freud excluded Jung. The Sorealist Movement claims to be the first ever wiki movement, and has an open manifesto than can be edited and revised much like wikipedia. But is this kind of openness really self defeating? Can you have a definable movement that doesn't define itself more concretely?