audience

to whom am i addressing myself. who is the intended audience.

i say "the skeptic," but what exactly does this mean. obviously i cannot expect to reach the dogmatic scientific empiricist, the logical positivist, whatever they are calling themselves these days.

a skeptic, as i am using the word here, accepts that any conclusion rests on assumptions, and that any assumption must inevitably be provisional. the "academic" skeptic, in other words.

what anyone thinks she "knows" about the nature of the universe is an amalgam of mostly received ideas, ultimately limited by the range of data available through our senses. "working" knowledge, if you will. amplified by various technologies, yes, but even with these we only ever look for what we think we might expect to find. again with the pattern making.

a skeptic, then, is at least vaguely aware that existing social and cultural norms are constructs, that is, they do not exist outside people's heads. the various narratives we accept as "history" are constructs. property and money are constructs. the identification of the "self" with an individual personality is a construct.

and what the empiricists call "verifiability" is itself a construct, which assumes causality and the "forward" motion of "time."

i am not asking the skeptic to accept any of the mystical premises of qabala, numerology, astrology, whatever. i haven't, much. but i am inviting her to suspend some of the premises that have framed her experience.

allow for the possibility that other patterns might be built from the same raw, chaotic material.