THE DEATH OF REASON We do not consider time definitive.  We create our sense of time, the continuous flow of experiences. We cannot say that past or future exist as we are aware of the present.  From Moment One, our brain has been selecting, storing and organising sensory data and it has been developing behaviours to respond to those data, according to hardwired programming.  It collects experiences in the sequence in which they occurred, which we might not find the most useful order.  How many times have you said, ‘If only I’d known/done that at the time’? We observe one of those hardwired programs as the tendency to make up bullshit reasons for what we feel to ‘be’ so.  To mangle a quotation from RAW, what the feeler feels, the prover proves.  We appear hardwired to make sense of things.  One mental patient deluded himself that he ‘was’ a corpse.  No argument or proof persuaded him otherwise, even when, having agreed that corpses don’t bleed, his antagonist drew blood from him.  His response: ‘Well I’ll be damned!  Corpses do bleed after all!’  Closer to home, somebody may ‘explain’ why they did something, making it up on the spot.  this we call ‘making an excuse,’ acknowledging the creative rather than descriptive use of language.  So having created a mistaken impression due to imperfect data gathering, we compound the error by ‘making sense of it’.  This apparently must happen.  I cannot imagine feeling that something ‘is’ right while it clearly contradicts other ‘right’ impressions.  This can lead to spectacular divergences between people.  For example, opinions of this war in the UK, in various parts of Europe, in the USA and in Iraq.  Every opposing party presumably believes that their point of view is justifiable, rational, logical, and that therefore to oppose it is totally unjustifiable.  None of the military, surely, contemplated the carnage and thought in their heart, 'My position is irrational, unjustifiable and totally lacking in sense.  Let's press the button.'  They send our young to kill each other for this.  Reasonable people have their hands on weapons of mass destruction and will happily use them.  They have very good reasons why they should.  My point:  part of my mission involves tackling rationally-justified people and fucking with their minds until their delusional structures become insupportable.  This I call the Death of Reason.  I consider it the must-have before one can enter the Pandaimonaion.  Furthermore, because we are dealing with hard-wiring, we will find this task continual, weeding out the new excuses, removing the dyfunctional ‘reasons’ within ourselves also.  And so to work.  For my hoe I choose (with apologies to Obi-Wan and to Ramsey Dukes) First there is the Force.  Then there is the Dark Side of the Force.  And then there’s the Funny Side of the Force, the Force of Levity, equal and opposite to the force of gravity.  For when someone chides us for our clowning and piss-taking. saying that we should appreciate the gravity of the situation, we can truthfully retort that they should appreciate the Levity of the situation.  And continue cracking their faith in Reason.