Bilgrami, Failure & Normativity as Ishraqi Illumination

The abstract of a recent paper by Akeel Bilgrami reads
 The paper first gives an argument for the Davidsonian thesis that norms constitute the human mind. 

Arguably, if scheme and content are interdependent, then any concept, viewed as a scheme, could be said to constitute anything else, viewed as content. I might say cattiness constitutes the human mind because its scheme is in the human mind and anything else could be viewed as, in some sense, its content- e.g. 'non-cattiness'. 

Stipulating that conceptual schemes can't be divergent is merely to say that the constituents of the human mind count for shit. Nothing is untranslatable because nothing in the mind has survival value. Davidson may have been quite bright but he wasted his life in a worthless branch of the Academy. 

Bilgrami was never bright and it is sad to think of the bones of Davidson and Wittgenstein and so forth being picked over by this vulture.

Then it shows that that thesis is better formulated by Wittgenstein rather than by Davidson himself. And finally, it uses the Wittgensteinian formulation of the thesis to establish why Davidson was right to further claim that linguistic meaning was not normative despite the human mind being normatively constituted. Through this entire dialectic of the paper, the concept of failure is made central to the argument.

Bilgrami focuses on something he should know very well- failure. Being an Academic, he doesn't get that failure means fucking up. Rather he thinks it means failing an exam- even if that exam is in meaningless shite. 

Failure, the very idea, presupposes a norm, by the lights of which it gets counted as such.

This is nonsense. We evolved by natural selection. Failure has a biological meaning. It is not 'an idea'. There is no examiner awarding passing or failing grades 'by the lights of' some supposed norm or idea. Instead there is a fitness landscape which is radically uncertain.

And so, failure, I will argue, is essential to understanding the nature of norms.

Bilgrami argues this because he is in a worthless profession which has been awarding credentials to people who have failed to learn to think. We don't need to understand the nature of norms or forms or dorms. If some garrulous fuckwit tries to explain their nature to you, you pretend to be an exchange student from Kazakhistan and do a Borat impression.

But I begin with a qualifying restriction. There is frequent talk of failure that presupposes something less (or other) than a norm, as when we speak of ‘heart failure’ or ‘engine failure’. What is presupposed in these latter expressions cannot—strictly—be a norm because these are breakdowns or cessations of a mechanism (whether natural or artificial). Mechanisms are defined by the presence of a causal disposition or tendency of nature or artifice. Hearts and engines are disposed to or tend to behave in certain ways under certain conditions. Under these conditions, if these natural or constructed tendencies proceed without interruption or obstacle, they are said to be functioning ‘well’, but the term ‘well’ here is not—again, strictly—a normative assessment; it merely registers that the causal disposition has been triggered and that the tendency is unhampered. Hence, strictly speaking, when a heart or engine fails, these failures presuppose only a descriptive notion of what is ‘normal’, which by a familiar sort of alchemy gets transformed in our careless understanding into something prescriptive or normative, a transformation whose genealogy has been illuminatingly studied by philosophers such as Foucault and Hacking under the label ‘normalization’. 

So these fuckers can't fix an engine or render medical assistance to a guy suffering a heart attack. They are taking up valuable space in premier Educational Institutions despite having failed to be of any use to Humanity.

I will not be looking at this sort of understanding of ‘failure’, only at failure, strictly so called, where the lights by which it is seen to be a failure is a ‘norm’ in the full and irreducible sense of the term, not a norm that reduces, in the end, to a descriptive tendency of nature or artifice while presenting itself on the surface as a prescriptive and evaluative standard.

So, the guy is not looking at genuine failure. Just something judged to be a failure by some fuckwit 'by the light' of some fuckwitted idea or norm. Still, if it were the case that people were saying 'Gee, that Bilgrami guy is real smart. Stuff he says is prescriptive coz doing what he says makes us all so much better off'- then we might listen to him and his fellow fuckwits. But, the fact is, we have evaluated their worthless shite and think they are either morons or paranoid nutjobs or moronic paranoid nutjobs.

I described this second-class idea of norm as part of a ‘careless’ understanding of the term but the point of Foucault’s and Hacking’s analysis is precisely that it is not careless (nor second-class) at all but part of a long institutional and social construction that affects the disciplining both of subjects of study and often (via such study) the structures of social and political domination through what Foucault calls ‘bio’-power.

Very true! The Government is watching us poop! There are secret cameras and other tracking devices implanted into our toilets. Even our farts are being monitored! Wake up sheeple! Don't you understand that Neoliberalism is gathering data on your feces!

I have no wish to deny what they say.

Coz Narendra Modi and Donald Trump are monitoring my bowel movements!

But since my interests here, like Davidson’s, are narrower and more purely methodological, I am concerned to distinguish this understanding of norms from norms that are not reducible in this way to causal dispositions and tendency. I do not even want to deny what is surely frequent—that once these causal and empirical tendencies get ‘normalized’ and erected into norms, many of these norms, so erected, get a life of their own and are not reducible, even eventually, to their genealogical ground in these causal and empirical tendencies.

Mummy was working for Wall Street when she brutally subjected me to toilet training! I see it all now!

If so, that is a normativity that we bestow on them and that is not reducible to their genealogical basis in tendency. So understood, they are indeed norms, strictly so-called, in the sense that is this paper’s topic.

So, Bilgrami is writing about the 'norms' which paranoid people see as pervading a world empty of humanity. Neoliberalism, or Populist Authoritarianism, or the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat is controlling all the meat-puppets we see milling about the campus studying useless things like 'Medicine' (as if 'heart-failure' were a real thing which needs fixing!) or 'Engineering' (as if 'engine-failure' were a real thing which can be prevented!) and then going on to live very successful and well remunerated lives.

What I am certain of, however, is that the examples I gave, our talk of engine failure and heart failure, cannot, just as they stand, possibly presuppose norms in the properly strict and irreducible sense. When there is failure to live up to norms, in that strict sense of norms, we are potentially subject to criticism. But though we may, of course, criticize someone for not maintaining a heart’s health or an engine’s operability, we do so only because there are other values and norms—the value of life, perhaps, or of material productivity—that the functioning of the heart or machine respectively make possible. That does not imply that a heart’s or engine’s failure, qua failure of a mechanism of nature or artifice, in itself presupposes any norm in the strict sense.

Hear-failure and Engine-failure are things that matter. Being criticized by some fuckwit for some soi disant failure with respect to some 'norm in the strict sense' is water of a duck's back because you can pretend to be an exchange student from Kazakhistan and get to do you hilarious Borat impersonation.

 In the little space I have, I cannot argue for this fundamental distinction between tendency and norm.

because you are as stupid as shit. There is no fundamental distinction here whatsoever. One man's tendency is another man's norm.

I will simply take it for granted. The distinction, though it has not gone without being contested, is intuitive and plausible.

to you, because you are as stupid as shit.

It seems to be everywhere evident in human thought and action.

to you, because that's the sort of stupid shite you could find evidence for anywhere you look

When we say of two beliefs, p and q, that ‘q follows from p’ we could mean by this two quite distinct things: 1) in subjects capable of belief, the belief that q tends to follow the belief that p (as a matter of causal disposition) and 2) subjects capable of belief ought to (as a matter of rationality) believe that q, given that they believe that p.

When someone says 'belief q follows from belief p', we reply 'no it doesn't. Fuck off you stupid cretin. A belief can arise out of a Newcombe problem or Kavka's toxin type situation. There is no Structural Causal Model that is necessarily involved. Pay me some money and I will believe q iff not q till the cows come home.'

There are very familiar distinctions at play here: between cause and reason, fact and norm, is and ought; and, as I said, I will only consider failures in those episodes of human thought or action that fall afoul of the latter in each of these pairs of distinctions—failures of reason, doing what one ought not or not doing what one ought, violation of norms in the full and irreducible sense of the term.

It is only worth doing this is we are speaking of a 'buck stopped', protocol bound, juristic process which imposes significant penalties or institutes valuable rewards- by Academic Philosophy isn't such a field- at least for tenured cretins.

Before I move on from these preliminary clarifications and distinctions, let me declare one more restriction that I will impose on this paper’s theme. When studying failure the primary interest in the social sciences has, quite understandably, been human behaviour that runs afoul of social, political, legal, and ethical norms since those are the norms that these disciplines are most concerned with—speaking too loudly, as it might be, or driving on the wrong side of the road, committing perjury, breaking a promise, etc. Though my concern in what follows is of indirect relevance to explanations in the study of society, my direct and primary interest, again like Davidson’s, is not in such failures but in the failures of thought and action of individuals by their own lights, whether those lights coincide with the lights of social, political and other such norms or not. (Of course, an individual’s lights by which she assesses her own behaviour as amounting to failure, may very often be an internalization of social norms. How could it fail to be? But that is the genesis of her lights. It does not spoil the idea that they are her lights. And it is, as such, that I am concerned with norms and our falling afoul of them in failure.)

So Bilgrami admits that 'her lights' may have their genesis outside her. But, ultimately, this means Biology is King. But he feels that the idea that there is something tangible describable as 'her lights' is 'not spoiled'. Yet, Evolution may- to baffle a predator or parasite- hide away 'her lights' from her. Indeed, it may ensure that they are unknowable or antagonomic in some impredicative way. Thus, if some fuckwit wants to talk to you about 'your lights' and you do your Borat impersonation till he fucks off to pester someone else, who is to say that, according to your own lights, your behavior is not normative?

An example of failures by our own lights may be found in the domain of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. We may be ostracized or sent to gaol if we fall afoul of social or legal norms but we feel guilt or go to analysts or therapists because we are, by our own lights, dissatisfied with our minds and actions.

The trouble is we may feel guilt even if we are satisfied with our minds and actions. Indeed, we may take the feeling of guilt as being evidence our minds and actions are on the side of the angels. Much virtue signalling consists of more or less bogus breast beating. By contrast, one may feel no guilt whatsoever for our unsatisfactory minds or actions because to indulge in such a feeling would be pointless or foolish.

As for 'analysts or therapists', few visit them. Those that do may just want someone to listen to them natter on. Others may be seeking what the Sufis call 'rabita'- a 'heart connection' to a wise and beneficent preceptor. Of course, there are specific things- e.g. overcoming phobias or compulsive patterns of behavior- for which one may seek treatment. But that is a purely medical issue.

When I suffer from an anxiety that prompts me to seek therapeutic attention (I am putting aside here anxieties that owe exclusively to biochemistry and for which we turn exclusively to pharmacological treatment), it is by some lights of my own that I find my behaviour to be wrong—and it need not be a moral, social… wrong.

If your behaviour is wrong, according to your lights, you may would a purely behavioural therapy and evaluate its effectiveness purely on the basis of how your behaviour changes. Do you still stutter, or still fail to maintain an erection or still start giggling uncontrollably when asked to make a speech? If so, you switch to another type of therapy- perhaps hypnotherapy rather than C.B.T.

On the other hand if you feel a sense of malaise- psychological, spiritual or whatever- then you may seek a preceptor or confessor despite behaving in perfect accordance with your own lights.

I mention psychoanalysis and therapy only as examples.

But both are commodities which someone has to pay for. In Bilgrami's America, the law relating to medical insurance applies the test of 'medical necessity' which is of an empirical sort. Thus, since this is a matter of idiographic economics, philosophy can find no 'examples' here.

The phenomenon of failing by one’s own lights is far more common and far more unremarkable than is suggested by these examples.

But if it is unremarkable then remarking it is unlikely to lead to any earth-shaking discovery.

It is ubiquitous and mundane and, on the face of it, often much less interesting than the cases that are of interest in psychoanalysis. But its study may have fundamental implications for how to understand what is distinctive about the explanation of human behaviour.

Sadly, this is unlikely. The fact is, there is a reputational benefit from having a preceptor or confessor. In any case, the thing has a certain psychological value. No 'fundamental implication' arises because the same drive expresses itself in the acquisition of friends and like-minded fellows. Perhaps Bilgrami's own Indian Muslim background- where 'rabita' was valorized- causes him to think that Ishraqi Illumination has something to do with a person's 'own lights'. But how on earth can this peculiar doctrine be connected to Davidson's views? Bilgrami supplies this explanation-

Where is normativity supposed to enter into all this? It is familiar from Davidson’s writing that it is as follows: the relation between the states of mind (the belief, desire, and intention) and the human behaviour (drinking the water) is said not merely to be a causal relation with the former causing the latter, but a relation that shows the latter, the behaviour, to be rational, given the presence of the former, the states of mind. (Here, as I said above, the notion of rationality or reason is not derived from social or legal or political norms, but from norms that govern the relations among an individual subject’s own states of mind, i.e., norms of consistency, transitivity, coherence, etc., and the relations between those states of mind and her behaviour, i.e., the norms of practical syllogistic reasoning or, in its more sophisticated form, the norms of decision theory.)

But decision theory is simply wrong because the maths for real world 'Knightian Uncertainty' is still not tractable. We know that something like 'Hannan consistency' is required. But we also know that there must be phenotypal variation if we evolved by natural selection. So we know that either the behavior in question does not matter or, if it does matter, it would be disastrous for us as a species if our minds were normatively constituted in that regard. In other words, what we know about decision theory is that everyone must NOT make the same decision. The norm to be observed is antagonomic. Even in our individual, quotidian, lives, we need to mix things up a little. There's a good reason to sometimes do things for a bad reason or no reason at all. Davidson didn't know about Hannan Consistency and multiplicative weighting update algorithms and so forth. But we do. There's no point picking over the bones of a failed research project.
By contrast, we should seek to identify 'Structural Causal Models' because of their predictive power and, more importantly, their utility in changing outcomes for the better.

Consider the following-

Though both the element of causality and of rationality are thus in play, the relations between these two elements need much sorting out because, on the face of it, it is not clear how exactly they relate to one another; in fact, they seem to run up against each other and the rational element seems, at least at first sight, to cancel out the causal element.

There is nothing to sort out. 'Rationality' isn't what people thought it was back in the late Sixties. Science has moved on. There is only a useful or useless Structural Causal Model.

Failures are essential to understanding how this happens.

No. Failures reveal flaws in the Structural Causal Model. They are not essential to a type of understanding which is no different than verbose stupidity.

Take the Aristotelian practical syllogism above as a causal claim.

Don't. Take it as a Structural Causal Model about thirst and the means to quench it.

If it is a causal claim comparable to the causal claims of natural science, it will not restrict itself to just that particular claim about that person drinking water on that occasion but aspire to greater generality.

The Natural Sciences don't make 'causal claims', they use Structural Causal Models to do useful, new, stuff.

Let us transform it to a more general claim as follows: The desire that one quench one’s thirst, the belief that drinking water is the best way, all things considered, to quench one’s thirst, and so the intention that one drink water, cause one to drink water.

This is obviously stupid. Lions and Lizards drink water same as we do. Beliefs about thirst don't matter save in the case of a person with some mental or physical abnormality.

Now, like all causal generalisations, whether in natural science or about human behaviour, this one too will have to be qualified by ceteris paribus clauses to rule out spoiling conditions that have the effect of the generalization failing to hold.

But genuine scientists don't bother with this sort of shite. They use Structural Causal Models do to useful, new, stuff.

So we will have to prefix such a ceteribus paribus clause to the causal claim above: “All things being equal, the desire that__ the belief that__ and the intention that__ cause__”. But now there is a problem. We have no idea of a general sort about what is being held steady (or equal) in the ceteris paribus clause of such a causal claim. This is because we cannot really gather the different things that spoil such a causal claim into general categories or sorts of spoiling conditions. On one day, someone may not drink the water because he prefers just then to drink orange juice even though he knows water is better for him (for his health, say), on another day he may not drink it because he is feeling lazy, on yet another day, he may not drink it because he gets distracted…and so indefinitely on and on. There is no common element in these spoilers that can be informatively stated ex ante. We wait for the failures due to one or other of an indefinite number of such spoilers and the ‘all things being equal’ clause rules each out only ex post. There really is no informative thing we can say in advance about what sorts or kinds of things cause the failure of the causal generalization to hold.

Yet, the beverage industry makes billions of dollars by having a Structural Causal Model regarding thirst. They cast their informational net very wide and do original research so as to come up with superior alternatives to water for people to drink. It is not a scandal of any sort to say our ex ante information set is inferior to the ex poste information set. Rather, this suggests that some useful work is being done. 

In advance, at best we can say something completely uninformative such as: If she believes__ desires__ and intends__ then, if she is rational, she will do__. But that really only shows that the causal claim, qua causal claim, has no empirical weight or punch, no informative, explanatory strength and power.

By contrast a useful Structural Causal Model has great empirical punch. It can make people very rich. It can fund pathbreaking research. It can even, if the story about Pepsi Cola toppling Allende is to be believed, change the course of History.

The ‘all things being equal’ clause (now taking the form of an assumption of her rationality) tells us nothing that carries empirical information about what will spoil the causal claim and therefore what has to be ruled out.

Econ now acknowledges that since, in the real world, Knightian Uncertainty obtains, it is irrational not to 'mix things up a bit'- i.e. play a mixed strategy as part of a wider Regret Minimizing, not Expected Utility Maximization, strategy. Still, by the Law of Large numbers, at the Macro level one can have comparative statics based on ceteris paribus. But that isn't the level of the individual and is independent of 'beliefs' or 'rationality'.

It has a ‘whatever it takes’ quality to it, and the mention of rationality is an admission of the completely normative nature of these allegedly causal generalisations, merely pretending on the surface to causal explanatory power.

This is completely wrong. There is no 'normative nature' here. There is merely stupid nonsense based on an obsolete, dead in the water, research program from 50 years ago.

Compare such generalisations, say, to the law of falling bodies and you immediately get a sense of the contrast between the two sorts of explanations.

WTF? There is no 'law of falling bodies'. There are equations which hold empirically over a particular range. But we don't have a unified theory yielding a universal law.

When, it comes to the laws of natural science, we have a relatively clear ex ante idea of what has to be held steady by the ceteris paribus clause.

No we don't. You don't call in a Physicist to fix your car. His 'ex ante' ideas are inadequate to the task. A Mechanic with expert domain knowledge fixes your car. An experienced Engineer watching the Mechanic may be able to arrive at a better Structural Causal Model which in turn enables the Car Manufacturer to produce a superior product and thus gain a competitive edge in the market place.

That is to say, the kinds of things that would cause the generalization to fail to hold are things that we have a clear understanding of in advance of those failures.

Nonsense! The reason new discoveries of a highly utile type are constantly being made in STEM subjects is because 'clear understandings' of things aren't clear at all because they miss some small but potentially very important factor.

We know and can state in advance the sorts of things that spoil the generalization from holding and so we can state informatively in advance the conditions that have to be held equal.

There are Scientists who indulge in this sort of talk. If they are highly acclaimed, they can hold back progress in their sub-discipline. But, sooner or later, utility triumphs- i.e. the potential of an innovation based on a superior S.C.M proves too lucrative- as so the Savant is toppled from his perch. He is then welcome to migrate to Philosophy's La La land.

Both the terms ‘ex ante’ and ‘sorts’ are important here in understanding failure. In explanations of human behaviour conditions under which causal claims fail cannot be sorted into general kinds of conditions and stated ex ante.

Nonsense! Explanations of human behavior, in the mass, by the magic of the Law of Large numbers, have this property. That's why Amazon pays big bucks to the Economists it hires.

Similarly, with enough domain knowledge of an idiographic sort, explanations of any given individual's behavior can actually be helpful to that individual. That's a win. Bilgrami's notion of failure is not helpful to anybody. That's not a win.

To say, as Bilgrami does, 'there could be no norm if there was no possibility of failing to live up to it' is only as meaningful as saying 'a norm isn't a norm if there's an ex ante possibility of living up to it. Otherwise there is only some deterministic, albeit stochastic, mechanism- nothing normative at all. ' Indeed one could go further and say that a norm can't fail to be lived up to, when viewed from some higher level of complexity, if it really is a norm.

The problem with what Bilgrami is doing is that he relying on a wholly outdated view of Decision theory and the Statistical Sciences. We live in the world of Big Data and sophisticated forecasting some of which is A.I driven such that its internal workings are a 'black box'. Thus it is foolish to say things like this-

They can only be observed after the fact because there is nothing that they share in common that we have a grip on in advance as a general sortal claim that is informative.

Yet, forecasting is an essential part of any sizable enterprise. If Bilgrami were right then we'd still be hunter gatherers.

That is why we simply appeal—a waving of the hand, as it were—in the ceteribus paribus clause to the agents’ rationality to save the causal claim, but in doing so it ceases to be a causal claim with any empirical import and the normative element (of an assumption of rationality) in human behaviour replaces the causal element on centre-stage. That gives a preliminary hint of the ineliminable normativity in our understanding of human minds and behaviour. 

Bilgrami's mistake is to stick with a wholly foolish and obsolete notion of rationality-as-normativity. The world doesn't work that way and some in the Academy admitted as much 50 years ago. Others who didn't care that they had failed at doing anything useful carried on picking through each other feces to produce worthless shite like this.

Bilgrami next turns to Wittgenstein who- poor fellow- never got up to speed on Game theory and thus was unable to save the notion of 'language games' from being nonsensical.
Consider the following-

 What does it mean to say that mental states are themselves normative?

It means some stupid shite like 'Language thinks us, because Language follows rules and we ought to follow rules coz like that sure worked out swell for all them guys in Germany who were only following orders'

Wittgenstein gives the following sort of example to illustrate what he has in mind. Take intentions. If I intend to take an umbrella when I go to work in the morning, then, just by forming that intention, I have generated a norm.

Nonsense! What if you intended to take an umbrella which you don't possess any longer because you left it on the bus last night? How can this generate a norm?

This norm will be the basis of an assessment of my future behaviour. If I take the umbrella, I have acted in accord with the norm that is my intention. If I do not take it, I have failed to live up to that norm. And ‘accord’ and ‘fail’, as I said at the very outset, are terms that presuppose norms. To express this normativity one could, so long as one is clear that it is not a moral ought but a broader ought of rationality, say that if I intend to do something, then I ought to do it.

This is not rationality, it is stupidity. We intend impossible things all the time- just at this moment I intend to open the fridge and eat up all the cheesecake left over from dinner. But there is no cheesecake left over from dinner. There never is at my house. But no 'ought' can attach to 'impossible attempt'.

Failing to do it is to fail of the rationality demanded by a state of mind such as an intention.

No state of mind demands some stupid shite which represent a boring and useless waste of cognitive resources.

We may say similar things about desires

only if we are as stupid as shit.

A desire, being less decisional (or being pre-decisional in the course that practical reason takes) than intentions, may be overridden by other desires, so the norm it generates is only a prima facie norm, a prima facie ought.

But the opposite could be argued with equal cogency- a desire is more purely decisional than an intention because the latter is hopelessly contingent. My intention to eat cheesecake can't be decisional or normative because it depends on an impossibility- viz. that people in my house don't scoff the lot immediately- whereas my desire to eat cheesecake is decisional and normative. It has actual consequences- e.g. my eating my pillow while asleep dreaming of cheesecake.

In a sense desires have an emotional component and thus could be said to be 'Darwinian algorithms of the mind'. A Structural Causal Model of Desires would actually be quite useful for me. Intentions, by contrast, are entangled with circumstances. Furthermore, it is in my own interest for my intentions to be hidden from me and that they don't have a logical structure such that they could be 'hacked' by a predator or parasite.

With Beliefs, on the other hand, we have Newcombe problems as well as the fact that, speaking generally, Beliefs are imperative not alethic and thus entail nothing necessarily. I suppose the same thing could be said of norms. But, in that case, this entire topic is meaningless.

Beliefs too are norms. If I believe that there is a table in front of me, that is a norm in the sense that I ought to, it commits me to, believing and not believing a range of other things: it commits me to believing that there is something in front of me, it commits me to believing that if I run very fast into it, I will likely hurt myself, it commits me to not believing that there is nothing in front of me; and so on.

Nonsense! I believe there is a table in front of me. But I don't believe it really exists. Thank you Mum & Dad for raising me a good Mayavadi Hindu!

If I do believe (and refrain from believing) these other things, then I am in accord with the norms that are generated by my belief; if not, I have failed to live up to those norms.

That sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. How does Bilgrami resolve it? The answer is he decides that the Natural Sciences are completely different from whatever shite he and his ilk do.

 Does this mean we have two different notions of cause, one that is present in the explanations of physical behaviour studied by the natural sciences and a different notion that figures in the normatively inflected explanations of human behaviour? I cannot see any way of avoiding saying so.

Actually, Bilgrami is happy to say so. He is into 'Enchantment' and bitterly resents the progress Humanity has made over the course of the last two Centuries.
Will he take the next step and declare that Human Beings don't exist on the Physical plane? Will he say 'tis nescience to believe we have bodies which interact with things. Actually, we are lights in the crystalline monadology of the Heavens. Once our beliefs and intentions and desires are in accord with the norms established by our own lights, then we will realize that we were never actually on Earth at all. We never had to eat or drink or take a shit or a piss. Chee! Chee! Such dirty things are not required of us. Believing otherwise is failure to live up to one's own inner light. Come, let us meditate quietly, till the illusion of this Universe is dispelled and our consciousness returns to our astral bodies which are made out of pure, celestial, light.