Notes on A Child's Book for Adults

Through The Jungles of Belief


This is a story of passage to find the high country beyond the cascades of Experience and traverse the thickets of Logic and the Plain of Solid Existence. Skirting the villages of the Uddercawses, a tribe which worships a remote figure in their past for having taken all their responsibility, we press across the fast-running stream of Mentality, taking a bearing on the high Peak of Introversion, a grim, remote, aloof and uninteresting mountain.

Small rabbits often dart underfoot and we have a conversation with one about his own species' worship of the Ignorant Conclusion, a black igneous rock formation in which the rabbits make their home..

Monkeys there are, of a species called False Being Monkeys, who chatter about 'Apriori' and 'Inverted Forms' and 'Will and Idea' without cess. Their only danger, if there are not too many of them, is that they throw down hard nuts from the Logically Possible Tree, some of which are painful, and which are known to be both hard-shelled and inedible. In a herd they become dangerous, forming a social matrix known as a Consensus of Mediocrity.

The caverns of Endless Pasts are tricky to negotiate. One of our party falls into one but is rescued when we find the warrior tribe of Time Mongers who are maintaining the caverns as a holographic illusion using some machinery left to them several thousand years ago by a remote alien culture. They are currently embroiled with the battle against the Simple Presents, a cousin tribe with a contrary philosophy about life.

One of the minor annoyances is being kept up at night by the shrill cries of the B'leefme bird, whose whimpering sounds like an unfamous philosopher looking for disciples.

Another tough hurdle is bypassing the Lifetime Conundrum, a mountain of granite in which ancients have carved thousands of faces.

The Quicksands of Being take another member of the party. We lose supplies fording the raging rapids of Compromise at the bottom of the Unethical Gorge. Beasts like lions with frog's feet, known to the natives as Gummint s'ztems, nearly bury us. We fight off the angry head hunters of TlooBleef, whose poisonous arrows tipped with a tree-sap known as Persuadare have been known to send a fellow into alternate realities for months at a time. The venomous, small, quick-moving Prffit-taker has to be dealt with. Poisonous clouds of Angst from the volcanic spring known as Helplessly Humanoid nearly suffocate us. The bogs of Shame and Regret swallow our pack animals whole. The fiery sulphurous Boil of Blame nearly discourages us to the point of hopelessness. Somehow we persevere. We learn lessons -- to avoid the bitter fruit of the Justify Tree and the rancid apples of the Betrayed Bleef, a large bush covered with thorns on the outside and soft, bleeding fruit on the inside.

We persevere and arrive, through the bayous of Rhetoric Intentional and Unconscious, to stand high on the bluffs overlooking Consideration Sea, where our kind has never tread before.

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