Dangers in the exterior field

The exterior field is a desert, which is governed by fixed pyramids (top down, well defined hierarchies). With the repetition of a same set of rules and procedures, the world becomes barren. Exhaustion of machines is the parts going through wear and tear and the machines stop working. Human beings as parts behave exactly the same way. Exhaustion, stress are words that are no strangers in the work place nowadays. Also of note is, this work, is in exchange for participating in yet another machine. Meaning; humans working for food, money, leisure, all of which are being regulated by their own systems.

Mother Medea in a green smock
Moves humbly as any housewife through
Her ruined apartments, taking stock
Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery:
Cheated of the pyre and the rack,
The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.

Aftermath, Sylvia Plath


Intellect creates dichotomies. True or false. In the group or out of the group. It creates the dilemma. The dilemma is of life or death. In the primal terms rationality and intellect are automatic responses based on previous cognitions lumped together. Kahneman's Type I and Type II thinking come to mind. The Type II being more reflective and being able to utilize the evolutionary jewel, our frontal lobes. If there are two varying initial premises, each one of them being captured by an external entity, intellect will arrive at very different conclusions, most likely in the service of their entity overlords.


The age old philosophical question of assigning the roles of carriage and horse to emotions and rationale is just another example of intellect to solve this particular problem with debate (dichotomy). Precisely for this reason the existential meaning of life is filled by arguments from multiple philosophers. Each one with a different premise and running with it (or away from it). (The shadow runs with regardless). Science on the other hand is equally filled with achievement of certain truths which were established in the interest of yet another institution (be it religion in the past and capital now). Even the "knowledge for truth" quest has become but another propagating system.

There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.

Bertrand Russell

The emphasis on "thoughts", in above statement is mine. D.T Suzuki answers beautifully with an anecdote of a wise sage who after being pestered by one of his disciples about where one goes after death, says "It makes one think". 


Intellect creates questions. Questions which it attempts to answer but actually not being able to help itself, makes more of them. The danger however is being in a field which is captured by questions which are made by the captor of the field.  Of course questions that are not in the interest of the captor are not going to be welcome. Because the question is corrupt (influenced by something), how can an answer not give something wholesome.


Psychiatry among its practitioners and the practiced, are given questions which are usually dictated by various institutions which define what the role of a physician and a patient are. Depression consists of covering questions about sleep, interest, guilt, energy, concentration etc etc. but questions that endanger the encounter from running above the allotted time are discouraged. The time allotment and the ability of the psychiatric formulation to fold itself in the larger health care models are all examples of the exterior fields being captured by various entities acting in their own interest in a never ending way. Imagine a patient who comes in the psychiatrist's office and says, "I need more than 15 minutes to explain my problems". Usually the system cannot take such questioners.


On the subject of questions, disorientation is another big danger that the combination of intellect and the external field induces. The compass points need to be "defined" and that definition is once again like all things defined under influence. There would be rare moments when reality breaks through the curtain of intellectual visors. Not being able to classify that is disturbing and possibly one of the driving impetus to philosophical movements. This place is run amok with school of thoughts.

O heart, such disorganization!
The stars are flashing like terrible numerals.
ABC, her eyelids say.

Sylvia Plath, An Appearance

Perception in the language of the external field is also colored. It has to be serialized and measured to be understood. There is a sense of denial in anything that cannot be quantified but is giving indications of being present. It might even be called hysteria or vacuum and then there will be a satisfaction in having named it and hence "know it". W.H Auden's "The Unknown Citizen" comes to mind.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Similarly in a massive system that is growing even more massive,  individual needs of the captured person are ignored. The sacrifice of the individual for the benefit of the captor. Picture a culture in which it is customary to sacrifice a child to a deity, so that the next year is propitious in certain terms. Almost sounds like a religious ceremony, forms of which are capturing a particular exterior field, as an institution would. And then again certain questions are not encouraged.

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