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The following first appeared in the private email list IVy-subscribers,
which was available to all those who subscribed to the
printed magazine, International Viewpoints.
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Postulates, postulates everywhere -- but not a drop to drink
by Phil Spickler
13 Mar 2001


       I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to Lars Peter for his ongoing
fine contributions to the list, and the good feeling that comes from knowing
he is there.  I (me, the one called Phil, that is) am extremely pleased that
Lars was kind enough to take up the subject of postulates, thus affording me
another opportunity to continue creating my favorite lampoon.  By the bye,
"lampoon" could be a Dutch word -- I'm not truly sure of its origins, but I
love the idea anyway.

        It seems to me that everywhere I look with the body's eyes, as well
as any other perceptions I may possess, that all I see, no matter where my
gaze falls, is postulates.  Can this be true?  Are postulates so readily
visible?  And is it true that everything that is perceived has previously
been postulated?  Well, if that is the case, let us thank the gods for
postulates that are perceivable!  The alternative sounds like nothingness or
nothing, and much as I like the absence of the perceivable, it remains kind
of hard, metaphorically speaking, to get your teeth into nothing.

         By the bye and howsomever, whilst we're still romping along on the
subject of postulates, it recently came to my attention, while drinking with
my body-postulate a very fine California wine-postulate, that there have been
a lot of considerations (well, perhaps opinions) regarding the condition of
that set of postulates called humankind that are said to inhabit, like a
virus or a bacterium, some of the surface spaces of this lovely postulate
that said humans call Planet Earth.

        Yes, yes -- and in an effort to explain in general humankind's
condition, which is considered by a number of authorities to not be OK, many
reasons have been marketed that have promised to explain humankind's awful
condition and promise to bring aid, succor, or recovery to these poor victims
(humans, that is), even if we have to ram this recovery, this help, down
their throats because they're too plowed-in to see how wonderful it is.

        I will not bore my readers (both of you) with the names of all the
things that have come along to explain mankind's awful condition and promise
to alleviate it, either in some heaven after life, or even, as some of the
latter-day -ologies would say, "why wait?  Let's do it right here and now on
Earth.  Us humanists don't have to wait until after we're dead to start
feeling OK."

       But anyway and in general, almost all this stuff, old and new,
essentially portrays mankind as the victim of forces and beings of bad or
evil intent, such as God or the Devil, or most recently those nasty
implanters, ranging from the OT 3 folks to the various invasion fleets that
have come to Earth and exercised their evil technology to turn mankind into
something other than the true and free nature of the beast.

        Personkind in its own way has seemed to successfully resist all of
the marvelous efforts that have come along to fix or repair or bring to
recovery us human beings.  Most failures in this effort are blamed either on
God, gods, or the Devil, or the awful strength of the implants holding sway
over humankind.

       Well now, I, we, all realize that most folks don't have any major
objection if someone tells tham that their condition is not their fault (or
cause), and that particular marketing ploy has had some small success on our
planet with some folks, but what I haven't heard over the years is anybody
looking at humankind exactly the way they are and saying, as they perceive
what they're looking at, "Well, for goodness sakes!  What I see, and I see it
clearly, is the individual and collective postulate," which we grant to
practically everything else that we do perceive, the one big exception being
humankind.

       It might be fair to say that the human beings, and some of them have
rather prestigious names, whether Biblical or contemporary, who have looked
on their fellow human beings and not liked what they have seen, that these
folks, many of whom have started repair groups for human beings, were simply
themselves too screwed up, or in other words in too bad a condition or shape
themselves, to be able to have that which they perceived, which has been
postulated so it *can* be perceived, and were unwilling to have or to
experience the isness of that perception without condemnation, criticism, or
the unwillingness for what is to be.

       Well, me and most of the folks who might be reading this have been
loaded down for quite some time and quite insidiously with heavy-duty moral
judgments about humankind and how it got to be the way it is,  without
pushing all that stuff to one side and simply acknowledging the testimony of
our senses.  And so I'm here to say that humankind is as postulated, and if
you can perceive at all, it's quite visible, and it ain't either bad or good
-- it's just as it's been postulated.

        I realize that that injects a horrifying simplicity into something
that has so many confusions surrounding it that lots of folks worldwide make
their living off such a confusion and do everything possible to prevent the
notion of acknowledging the postulate and the perception of it to simply be
OK as is.

        A postulate, in order to be worthy of that name, namely one that is
perceivable in the three universes, has to be just that; otherwise what a lot
of folks call "postulates" range from hopes and dreams through varying
degrees of existence, until they finally arrive as something -- matter,
energy, space, time, events, spirits, what have you -- that can be and is
perceivable.  Short of that, we've got something else, but not a postulate.
And so let there be no mistake about what I'm saying, namely: a postulate is,
as they say in German, the ding an sich, the thing in itself.

       Well, I'll close this for now in order to give others a chance to
agree or disagree, or ignore, or silently love, or loudly hate, what has gone
before.

      G'is la revido -- that's Esperanto, the easy-to-learn international
could-be-common second language that might bring us all a lot closer
together, for "Until I see you again."
       --Filippo