The Dose Makes the Poison: Steganographia & other notes from rabbit holes
Category: philosophy
A Knecht a’kneeled Before Flame
He saw how Joseph was annealed by the fire…[and] felt the ordeal more than Joseph. P241
Sounded overwrought to me. Then I bothered (sic. concerned) myself with actually looking up
/annealed/
I was being educated on several levels. I first read the sentence such that I thought I knew more than I did. I imagined /annealed/ to be some form of a bow or a kneeling position, a kiss the ring, smell the glove. A posture taken when the situation demands you take yourself seriously. If you can imagine such a thing! Or that you undertake to do something trivial quite meticulously. For the sake of the process itself. By your choice. You take part with and in. Or, when ritual, tradition, culture, bestows us a transcendental catharsis by allowing us to take very specific actions with others undertaking them alongside, as well. A hymn sung by a choir. Suddenly, lighting a candle is holy. Yet, lighters and matches abound. Fire is easy to come by but it was not always so.
Blind spot.
Shocking how much meaning we can contain. There are so many pearls that some readers start arguing over the appraising of an irregular pearl. It is all about finding, examining, analyzing, and drawing conclusions about the relative value. Waiting to find that big money shot pearl. A yup.
“awe, more valuable. made of pearl but unique, collectors edition. Gesture, essence. and articulation.”
“Worthless. It’s shape isn’t paradigmatic of the standard pearl. Misinformed. Monstrous, devalues the other pearls to even be in the same bowl with them.”
Who let the pigs out? Who? Hoo hoo?
Too much monkey business for me. We as a species have moved on. Or did I miss the train and am now out of joint?
The Glass Bead Game: Magister Ludi. 1990. First Owl Books Edition. $18.00 USD/$24.95 Canada. That seems really inexpensive as I think back on it now. At five hundred and fifty eight total pages, it is a trek but no death march. As with any trek, though there will be days. But, then there will really be days! Am I right, a hyuck, hyuck.
The length is not the deterrent. The printing of the book intimidates. At least my copy. That is why I bought it. It looked too heavy for a book that size. A thing that is larger than physics allows but your eyes empirically cannot deny. Your brain’s rational processors will fill in the reasons that ‘you can’t trust your eyes.’
A phone booth and doctor.
A House of Leaves.
A ship ever at sail on a foreign sea, the life of the house mouse lost.
S/he loses their position in the home.
You lose something you did not know could go missing. The notion of home? An ending spoiled. Don’t let the little ones hear. Something you cannot unlearn but surely there is room for doubt and maneuver. Doubt suffers where there is little room
Something you took for granted. Because there is so much to see and so many things vying for the pleasure of your (everone’s) attention at all times. We cannot process the amount of information we physically can conceive us. We get by and brains fill in the blanks. The way you discover your new car’s blind spot.
《《 》》
Crash. Ah, hell.
《《 》》
But what was to be done? Can you judge yourself for not knowing that your vehicle is afflicted with a blind spot? Sure, but where that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar. Speculating on some dreamy nonsense. The thing you did not see in your rearview & side mirrors (electric-adjustable, I’d wager) as you merged lanes, was, by dint of optical physics, unseeable. You cannot adjust for and account for such a variable.
The publishers did not eff around. There is a deliberate concern for both style and balance in the margin setting and lettering layout. There is room to scrawl. If you are into that sort of thing. I am! The luxury of the thick white broadband’s conjunction into right angles about the four verticies gains further dimensionality by its opposing page.
The reflecting pool in the palm. Narcissus finally went mobile. Each page appears with its predecessor and/or successor in symmetry. Consider the leaf of the sheet itself. Two page numbers and each bearing letter matricies yet on but one page. One page in the book holds two pages. Think about that. There ain’t ya’ll entertained? If that is not magic, then ya’ll doin’ it wrong. I see gods contained and present amongst the multiform streams. IHS Bacchus first. Then as Janus. Holding us in the present, pressed fast between the past and the future tense. So the text on each side of the page gives rise to leaf between your fingers as you turn the page.
Let us say, maybe, five hundred and forty pages are geometrically identical in dimension, same squares, same squares. Matrix array with its vectors contained in those critical margins. Two koi ponds reflected about the same axis of symmetry. Simpatico. The more you read, the more the very confined area with unnecessarily tiny pt. font, single spaced. Tight, trim, orderly. And you are drawn in and held fixed in that little space. Rapt. Enraptured.
And then the ratio expands. The page does not seem so small.
The biggest hinderance to the book’s popularity in America was a poor original cipher of the German language. But translating the lyrical prose of Hesse is probably like trying to translate a Japanese character into ‘the English word for it.’ You can pull it off but the English Equivalence is questionable. Americans are poorly positioned to be strong readers of such heavy, often erudite, ultimately, ironic tomes. We do not get the geographical exposure to other cultures.
Hell, we didn’t get the joke.
It fell for it too! The joke of being so dreadfully stoic that the reader would not dare think you were givin’ a ribbin.’ This is a book; An effing long one; I found all these pearls. I’m rich. Made-man. This is a book of power not jokes for blokes.
Sigh. Now, your cracking me up.
The good news is, if you do ever get the joke, it makes you smile and laugh out loud. Then shake your head. Hold on.
Although, states are arguably the same as little countries.
Parabolic Paean
There was a poet and his rose, and
A garter stalking both.
And the lady with forgetfulness
Oblivious until remembering the
Tresses of misses: one be model; one be tumbler.
A glass-looking to the star in the west.
A ladder Alice keeps handy.
A’Lateralus
That k/night of the encryption of all those cryptic Coptic scrambles.
Into the apparent innocuous steganography
Duplicitous, serving to conceal and
once concealed, serving hardly anybody
Cryptic.
(Brevity perplexing)
Ambiguity in meaning.
Employing cipher and code. Directory path unrecognized.
Cain and Abel:
Mystified mystics, huh?
Swan, iynx, ibis
Wrynecking at this cockchafer (May) doodlebug.
Khephra, my nighttime sun.
We witness the concluding clause of this instrument,
Writ as an English to Portuguese test.
The translated texts falling under the title of Book
With a keynote of ecstacy.
Marvel that it is just
The Beginning.
Barbarous Barber, oh! god of shears.
Shore them that be certain across their crowns.
Whilst I will show them their tears.
Pulling the tides of moons inside
making oceans bleed from their eyes.
With my lyrical vespers ecstatically heralding a wandering star’s return.
Harken, Venus.
Ariandte howls feral heat
Inviting Dionysus to the feast
Of Two Wandering under the Midnight Sun.
The Aura of Alice: Nikaia.
The model of an acrobat.
Circling tangled loops at the thought of a question as such:
If desire be not love; then what of feeling the desire to love?
Ecstatic coronating of this al-chymical betrothal
Lovers become beloveds.
Missives of purpose with intent embuing metaphysical eternal
While Elemental attendants runner it in a return back
To ward now.
Toward and from. Hither ampersand Thither.
But never former
Vows renewed through every flux of lung-moving breath need not be formally avowed at one big affair.
Mavericks each having Sun and Moon self-contained..
The quarrel of Aura to Artemis thusly resolved
Through electromagnetic absolve.
Twice born Dionysus with his lawful Ariandte resurrected.
The Hypnerotomachia of Poliphilo dreaming. Polia.
The Beautiful Dream of awakening to the mayor’s young daughter.
The dreams of Christian Rosenkreutz. Married indeed.
Are you not unbored? Then let me rub the fur of your fuzzy heart wrong.
The stimulant Irritate.
Irritating you up to
Irate.
I rate this meter, but am not its maid.
I am handmade anew everyday
Because I am dying to wake up and out my sleeping dreams.
Ae’ll not serve you potions of soporific words.
Funny how they seem so meek yet it is they who will rape you in your sleep.
Ae keep you awake to seek ‘the awful lucidity of insomnia’
where you will re-enliven in a world where heroines are no longer satisfied with mere men.
Wanting Pharaohs but no longer remembering
They had once created them with mere mortal men.
These are the blood tears the children of nations will so cry.
Just as Satan has been sleeping the whole time.
The blood of the lamb, replaced with lanolin.
Empurpling petals bloom inside.
As I gather your lips into mine.
Slow swaying to a band playing our saraband.
Gauzy dress of cotton becoming feathers beswanning me.
Ensorcelled by the pitch-black, starless hue of your suit
You wear the night sky.
And I am an unlit day.
It is now high noon for my midnight sun.
Silver corona glowing in plumes
As we change up the tempo. With more tempting teasing.
Humming: how pleasing it is pleasing.
The Radical Being Here While There
Come to lose yourself in this sublime union,
Melting into the elation of sated desire.
Protect me from hubris.
Honor my ignorance.
Open me to revelation.
Let my magnetism defrag your mind,
Increase your flow, and
Remove your templates.
Show you how
your divine quintessence & corporeal body
Exist as
Unity not duality.
Hold fast.
Give ourselves permission
To feel without judging.
You stretch me,
My ability to tolerate
Ambiguity.
This is the true art of Mastery and Service.
Of when we dominate, handle.
When we worship, nourish, slave.
Enacting a ritual of control in our temple.
Our existential reality is a fantasy of control,
As we have very little compared to the forces we feel around us.
Even controlling the forces in our minds requires diligent practice.
So, I remember the organ that is my skin,
Separating me from everything else.
My container.
My flesh reminds me what is mine to control
And what is not.
I may influence what is not bounded by my skin
But I let go my grip.
I seek practices to experience and realize the numenous force of eros ever flowing through us.
Animating.
It requires our attention;
Our attention is sacred.
I have it bound within my flesh.
My skin and quintessence exist together as integrals.
Integrating my physical and non-physical bodies.
To have one without the other is to no longer be.
(At least not be what we now are)
A sack of meat,
a ghost possessing it.
I am nothing until animated.
Enlivened through that Force that enlivens trees, dogs, crystalline structure, lichens, cellular mitosis
anon, anon.
So I come to transcend myself with shifts in attention.
I try.
Ways of practicing how to notice the sacred everything,
Not by hiding away in isolation
But through a passion to engage
From across the world.
Saraband
We belonged to the diatribes of idiotēs set among the swans,
singing the harmonics of new prophecy.
Alit upon the pond, whose waters stay so still, you could be tricked and
mistake the reflection of
for the actual sun.
Do you recall Nietzsche’s ecstatic, public collapse?
Seeing an over-heated, carriage horse being beaten unmercifully
Over he rushes
to fall down in exhausted camaraderie
aside a fellow beast of burden.
Will they blame Ulysses and seek him again?
Some grown men will ever be juvenile while somehow failing to stay young in spirit.
K/Nights leading on to nowhere, in vain
While we lie licentiously aside. Alee. Aleph.
The peek in as they post pass.
The fretting single mother rocks in their wake
frets behind them.
The smell of dinners prepared is served into the air of the neighborhood.
Their smells are free.
A Sunday night & Monday morning.
Let time move those outside our walls.
The world will keep up with it as we lose track.
The sun and moon do need us to help them.
Maintain the tempo.
Parsifal/Sufi Connection
As I research Parsifal/-zifal, I like to jot unexpected correspondences. Here is one involving the Sufi tradition. The quick quote below is included in a Sufi meditation manual that came into my possession a year and a half ago.
“The radiance of the streamers emanating from the shoulder blades has, when unfolded, often been compared by Sufi’s with a mantle of light. In the Parsifal legends, it was because there were holes in the mantle of Anfortas that the evil forces of the night were able to attack him.” Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan. The Ecstasy Beyond Knowing: A Manual of Meditation. 2014. p47
Anafortas: the wounded Fisher King who guard the Grail at Munsalvaesche.
[Perceval arrives at the Grail Castle, to be greeted by the Fisher King. From a 1330 manuscript of Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes, BnF Français 12577, fol. 18v]
Below is the context in which the quote above is presented. The reader is being given meditation methods to enliven these ideas. Parsifal is not mentioned again.
The (life) energy fields includes the electrostatic and electromagnetic fields, the aura, called bioluminescence (light body?), the sonic field, and perhaps fields of other alternate forces (chi force; etheric body, which pulses with your breath; celestial body.) p46
“The energy in the human electromagnetic field flows in manifold ways. You may distinguish [sic. seven total ways including]…..vi) streamers (plumes of energy). ” p46
The concept of energy pluming from your body can be illustrated by:
1) Energy streaming above the head, like the Pentecostal tongues of flame
2) Energy flashing from the temples “as the winged thoughts of Greek Mythology”
3) Energy pluming out from behind the shoulder blades as winglike or cloaklike.
4) Plumes around the temples, included with the wings of the Seraphim.
5) Plumes around the shoulder blades and ankles, as the wings found in images of Hermes or Mercury.
Khan proposes that attributing validity to the existence of such “higher” fields that have so far not yielded to the measurement of science, enables the accounting for some of the uncanny bouts of energy to which contemplatives refer. Examples:
- The quickening of the Holy Spirit to Christian mystics
- Ruh al-quddus to Sufi
- The Shekina among Jewish mystics.
“Actually, we [sic. science & mysticism] have been going along with the assumption that the body emits these fields, but what if the electromagnetic field, in fact, all components of the life field, were the templates, the mold, in which the body is being formed?” p. 47
One related meditation practice is listed among other practices given in this section.
- “Try to feel such streamers emanating from your shoulder blades. Envision them as unfolded and draped around your back, affording a kind of protection, or even as the robe investing the initiate into the Hermetic tradition. All the above practices will need to be extended to the aura of light.”p48
On the Currents of Dreams
Cicero. Fetch him. Will he read to us, aloud, his Dream of Scipio?
Recall the nightmares of Nebuchadnezzar? His hope for Daniel’s talent?
Recall. He refused to heed the warning this soothsayer pulled.
Recall: The king lost his mind, to a strange psychosis lasting seven years, at which he regained reason.
So where are the temples erected to Aesculapius?
And, who also dreams like pharaoh Thutmose IV?
Hormakhu comes and goes now.
New forms. Uncovered the Sphinx.
Perhaps goddess Safekht took Serapis as hers.
The learned ones of the library of magic.
《《》》
So incubate. Sleep. Dream
Learn.
The Egyptians taught.
Hermes & Moses received. Others too?
Encrypted. Pentaeuch.
《》
Everything is already written in the very measurements of the dimensions of the Temple of Soloman; and even Paracelsus, so long ago, already said: The Earth is a magnetic body.
Concerned with patterns of currents’ change, they replaced menhirs with Gothic cathedrals.
< < > >
Receiver-Transmitter.
Transmitter-Receiver.
Power & Directions
Flow & Tensions
Telluric
< >
Watch “The Folk Implosion – Insinuation ( Album Version )” on YouTube
A slick little number from a favorite of my mine.
I sat awake all night listening to this album at age 17.
Working my tail off to prepare Girl State campaign propaganda. It is a rather eerie patriotic program. Two gals picked from each public and private school in the state.
To this day, I do not know how I was selected. A bit clandestine. I returned from my lunch period (the effing latest one of all— major drag) to find a printed invitation on my desk. I’d ask the Randall family: publishing impresarios. Highest of royalty that I have ever met in the South.
Underdog was my theme. My goal: Sanitation Engineer (garbage pick up, yo).
Hotly uncontested. Responsibilities included: making sure the dorm rooms, where us Girl’s State occupants stayed, received regular trash pick up.
That’s right. I didn’t even pick up. A paid grown up did. So, I spent the days unencumbered. Bored until night fall. A swarm of white moths would descend upon the light outside my window. Dizzying numbers. Vertigo.
My 17 year old self did not micromanage the paid adult. I did put a big black garbage bag, sloppy outside the door of my and dorm mate’s (she was not impressed) suite.
It has a formal sign next to it, bearing Underdog’s image.
It read:
1. Please do not remove; this is not trash.
2. Please file complaints about your garbage service on paper and put in trash bag.
it gained me friends and foes.
we ended up overthrowing the elections through a write-in campaign,
instead of voting for the winners of the primaries, like good gals.
the most qualified candidate for a top position did not make it thru the primaries.
so, we waged a covert campaign. messages were passed through the obnoxious, yet seemingly innocuous garbage bag.
one must not underestimate the aversion most southern ladies experience when it comes to the idea of poking about in a trash bag. even if they knew it is clean. this was a big, industrial bag. you had to shove your head and arms into it to get the paper notes. it sat loose on the ground. no supportive structures to help hold it up while you lean in.
underdogs and insinuations. make change happen.
giggle
Labyrinthal Laboratory Conditionals
Knecht leapt years ago into the black water of the river.
A leap of faith made in the face of a numinous bemusement.
A mæstro professing the art of conduction.
Cantos ; stanzas ; quatrains ; sections ; headings ; chapters ;
The function of any value such as x wilt result in a set of potential solutions.
f(x) : {set}, {set of the set}
yields Sentence G.
Godel’s lyric.
Taken from a song called Settes.
Cantos: sections dividing long poems.
– ORIGIN C16: from Ital., lit. ‘song’, from L. cantus
Dante sang poems in one hundred cantos.
The infernal first album of nine is the only one that hit the record charts.
Bemusing that he still writes lyrics and songs after his exile from Florence.
The courters and patrons of knightly chivalry frenzied in feigned, immodest outrage at the song of attack (quite poorly executed too, it is said) that
he played his Lady.
But he keeps on playing.
A fine equestrian he would have made.
Socrates and his diatribe will be with Dante shortly
Cursing Odsyyeus again, malifacent Man in Black: agent of injustice to Ajax.
The fellow-temple servants redeemed Parceval just yesterday.
Maestro Virgil’s rock n’ rolling opera
Nine lines feed nine recorders.
Eight channels receive live feed.
Three mixers temper.
A music master architects.
The 1 audits the confluence of the Take Stream.
The 1 who will stop the band,
called And the Band Played On,
only long enough to
allow them to listen.
Players eager to hear themselves.
Impetuous.
Feedback looping.
The impetus of the 1.
The effect of showing the parts their whole.
Any system aware that is under observation is changed by the very act of being observed.
An axiom accepted and admitted to be a theoretical, not practical, concern.
In theory the results may be nullified.
The axiom is ad hoc. Improperly derived.
Invalid even if accurate.
As Wittgenstein’s Mistress, it behooves me to ask this
Question for the Vienna Circle:
Now that you have observed that the act of observation changes the observed,
Do you ever worry for the assured changes in your method, institutions, experiments, results, or selves?
As you observe the knowledge of this observation affecting your observations and that which you observe?
Or is that just another theoretical problem too?
~
Just an observation from this lovesome dummy.
Prettification per Parcigal
Parcigal learned the powers of personal appearance, nearly two decades past. She learned its ability to exploit and/or to be exploited, nearly a decade ago. Hell, all gals did where she was from, Alabam, the Dirty South. Personal appearance stood as the primary source of feminine efficacy (next to blood kin).
The place where they raised her never addressed that which she regularly pondered: the long game for pretty lady face.
This type of prettification during youth resulted in an aged-self prettifying to remain relevant, as a new generation of beautiful gals arose.
The true Tao seemed to be finding Beauty unmasked.
Bare face.
No jewelry.
Unadorned.
She started to let her face be as it is. Washed it, moisturized it, but that was all.
She became the appearance of the female she was.
She did this, going about daily public interactions, until she knew her face,
Became the female she is.
Then she wields the power of makeup’s masking properly. Not defensively.
Parcigal lived her dream of Art. She reinterpreted Myshkin anew, unbound to previous ties made.
Allegory.
Of course now, books are more often quoted than read.
The once enumerable is now innumerable.
Hypertextuality.
Parcigal recoils from monastic traditions. It is being one a crowd, faceless.
Initiation required heavy control over the individual’s entire life. Gives very little free will. They seperate sexes, assuming gals are even allowed at all. It imparts a tacit intent to shame the sexual nature of the h. sapien mammal. She does not doubt the resiliency of these traditions. But, her energy does not run properly in their circuits.
She recoils from secret societies and erudite traditions, because she distrusts agendas she agrees to but cannot fully see. It feels, in her mind, like blindly giving away power.
But she is wary. She is also extremely lovesome.
A lovesome nature required diligence.
What was the use of sensualism with a resonant partner?
Why was this primal magic so hidden?
Magnetism and electricity.
Conductors.
Conductive bodies are conducive to utilizing each resonant body.
By nature.
So, in her Fool way, she left her Ewer the note below.
The morning after she spent her first night in the handmade.
Before she snuck out (after two minutes of hard doting on his sky-eyes) without rousing him.
Narratory Recall (Thought)
Æ am a/the word. And a/the word is not only, but also, glad/ly.
The recounting or slight reprise of several (re)countings falls to me.
Í endeavor to do my best on this, your sojourn.
But(t < giggle >), í am a Fool, a bit of a cad. And proud of my wide-eyed wonder.
Please, bear in mind that what is “down for me is up.”
What the sisters did in this sphere marks history. Of course, time perpetually does this to history, so long as there is one conscious, sapient, vantage point to see it.
Cassandra and Echo. Aphrodite ruled Cassandra.
Cassandra knew it not until she reawoke from her latest dream.
Unselfishness went far. Embracing laughter and not war did too. Now, such names reach above and below.
There is a beautiful naked woman symbolizing this sphere, allegedly it is she.
Symbols.
Failure, futility, debauch and valour. Her titles and attributes.
One who loves roses as well as the name of the rose.
She sometimes takes the form of the íynx.
The wryneck.
Has the power of beauty triumphant. The meaning of this is not to be taken for obvious and it will become clearer in your imagination as we progress.
She took but two weapons. One was no more than a long bit of cord. Her girdle. Atypical. Her lamp. She carries her own. While she loves to sing the Song of the Goddess, she has yet to accept Shakti theology officially.
Amusing given her role. But then again, she is a fool.
Of course, Rādāh took most of the heat.
~ But, now í get ahead of what passes for my mind these days.
Your merry narrator has an acadæmic background. Outside.
An able learner keened up into a gifted child. The tradition of empiricism, many empiricists think, has become a large collective comprised in majority by a bunch of pretentious prognosticators. You may add my name to the list. I would not deny it.
We do have a methodology to which we may aspire; although í’m not sure we understand it anymore.
Any work undertaken is going to address a research question. This general question will lead us to our object of inquiry. From there, we may begin our study by commencing with research.
Let us consider our object of inquiry here to be of Landgrave tradition.
This endeavor, like all forms of writing, will be an imagined experience. One that we shall undertake together.
Í will address conceptual and practical problems.
Practical problems predominately belong in the professional spheres. They address states of affairs in the world that are found troublesome. Much like a lazy eye, this perspective will ultimately depend on whom you ask: what is the “real” problem?
Sex, love, gender, women’s rights, men’s desires. These are not problems as much as potentially and periodically problematic. The difference akin to someone who likes the soup hot but not spicy. Modernity shuffles the deck of sex, gender roles, discrimination time and again; and these term fly like spaghetti towards the wall.
And yeah, it sticks. The pasta is done. While a new bot boils already. Periodicity. Embrace dont fear.
Conceptual problems tend to the acadæmic spheres, as they often have the luxury of not solving any real problem, but rather simply pointing out that what people currently think is wrong. Undexterous. Or else, they may point out some other version of not knowing [sic. differentiated from not-knowing].
While there may be no tangible cost to this type of problem there is a consequence: a particular kind of ignorance: a particular lack of understanding that keeps us from realizing something else that is even more significant.
My conceptual problem will address the problematic notion we refer to as Cartesian Dualism. To put it nicely. But we will consider the present social bifurcation existing between sexuality (pleasure, sensualism, hedonism) and spirituality aka soul power.
We will also review the practical problems of the politicization of love. Our concept of love and souls and spirit tethered itself to new stakes of symbology with the birth of nations. Questions of individual efficacy and empowerment. Evidence nature is not foisted by self organization, but birthed by it.
Perhaps nature dealt us the recurrent self organization that becomes Parcigal et al.
No 0ne knows.
The Major Key Scale: Paths, Diagrams, Table on Contents. (notes on esoterica/mysticism)
*I draw the figures myself as part of my method. The understanding gained by looking differs from the understanding gained by doing/recreating. But to be clear: I know I don’t understand. I am unbothered by this. I give my method not as a suggestion, but as a token of my intent in transparency*
The Sephirotic Tree (found in Sufi meditation manual The Ecstasy Beyond Knowing)
Diagram (table of contents?) found between the two title pages of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.
The pages numbers and spelling variations, outside of the drawn SPHERES, are my notes and not present in Eco’s figure.
This is my attempt to syncretise the two and then discern through contemplation
This is the iteration I currently contemplate. It contains the previous three iterations and now attempts to include those symbols used by hermetic traditions in their depictions of the Sephirotic Tree. Best to view this as a best guess. I am not affiliated and thus cannot speak to the meaning ascribed under these traditions. This was taken from the Wild, Wild, West that is internet research. It is not a truthful representation of knowledge. It is a method for further methodological contemplation and meditation.
This is the Key Scale in order.
There are 22 possible paths in this Tree of Life.
Here is as far as I have gotten currently.
“How different really are atheists and believers?” (Costica Bradatan)
Thank you Costica Bradatan and John Gray.
Interesting piece very relevant to the cultural elephant in the room (at least in America). This elephant also relates to the popular perception that a scientific and a religous belief perspective are mutually exclusive.
Lots to unpack but highlights include:
“[Grey] uses paradox not just for rhetorical effect but to a philosophical end.”
<thank you. rhetoric abounds already.>
Voltaire and Nietzeche, as perceived atheists, are rexamined.
“no such thing as secularism”
The idea that religion is born from a fundamental need to make meaning.
The author suggests religion is irreplacable in our meaning making process.
I propose extending this more broadly: culture is irreplacable and religion is a social structure of culture. This is consistent with the authors’ arguements.
While categorization is reductionist at times, the breakdown of ‘types’ of atheists is appropriate and beneficial to the big picture “layman” discussion.
“Atheist” and “scientist” have become confused as synonomous. “Atheist” is largely a stigma in many local American communities. If you believe this is irrelevant to the endeavor of science, please consider public school textbooks and science. Evolution is less frequently taught (in the South, at least), then cited as theory and then discredited.
Why? Because text book order demand stems from state boards of education.
Please check The Revisionaries, a documentary demonstratig this process.
HARTZ. American Exceptionalism (pt3).
Because American industrial development generally resembled Europe’s, Hartz cast his exceptionalism thesis in strongly political and cultural terms.
What has differentiated politics in the U.S. are limits that have been imposed on economically induced political change by the agreement on liberal beliefs and practices.
Standard Critiques of Liberal Consensus Theory
The most common critique argues that the thesis seriously understated the extent and variability of class conflict and governmental interventions in the economy,
Hartz and Tocqueville did, after all, take for granted that widespread economic wealth was involved in sustaining the liberal character of American political thought.
Social pluralism and seperation of residence and workplace can be attributed at least in part to the openess and fluidity of a liberal society.
Implicit Metatheory of the Consensus Thesis
The consensus thesis is mainly concerned with the years near after the original settlement of America and there are three reasons why the thesis cannot be a causal explanation over the more extensive period.
1. The decisive causal factors took place in Europe and the thesis has little to say about these events or the causes that brought them about.
2. The thesis emphasizes continuity; it does not seek to explain political development nor is it concerned with the way one set of changes produced another set of changes.
3. Causal explanations must clearly distinguish between dependent and independent variables. The thesis attributes America’s persisting liberal culture to the liberal beliefs and practices of the original settlers. Beliefs and practices make up a culture, and the original liberalism of a culture cannot be a cause of its liberalism later on.
The Problem of Nothingness-Selected Tracks from Jean Paul Sartre
An abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state. Consciousness is an abstraction. The concrete can be only the synthetic totality of which consciousness, like the phenomenon, constitutes only moments. Effecting a phenomenological reduction will not succeed in restoring the concrete (of consciousness) by the summation or organization of the elements which we abstracted from it. The relation of the regions of being is an original emergence and is a part of the very structure of these beings. “Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the relation of man with the world?”
We have established a parallelism between the types of conduct man adopts in the face of Being & Non-Being. We’re tempted to consider Being & Non-Being as two complimentary components of the real -like dark and light. Two contemporary notions which would somehow be united in the production of existents and which it would be useless to consider in isolation. Pure Being & pure Non-Being would be two abstractions which could be reunited only on the basis of concrete realities~There is nothing in heaven or on Earth which does not contain in itself Being & Non-Being,
Things in general “are”, but their being consists in manifesting their essence. Being passes into essence. One can express this by saying, ‘Being presupposes essence.’
Being is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it. Being has a logical precedence over nothingness and it is from Being that Nothingness derives its efficacy. Nothingness haunts Being. Nothingness can have only a borrowed existence. Non-Being exists only on the surface of Being.
*this is just Sartre’s opinion, yo. Dissent? Thoughts?
Watch “John Irving on why The World According to Garp is more relevant now than he ever imagined” on YouTube
The Confessions-St. Augustine
The Problem of Sciences (one more old a** quote to discover from a great book)
Classical mechanics uses space and time but never questions itself about time, space, or motion. And, Social Sciences do not question themselves about man. We cannot take it for granted that experience will give us the facts of a group or that anthropology will bind these facts by means of objectivity, strictly defined relations, if we want to access “human reality.”
The problem is our research is aimed at constituting laws and at bringing to light functional relations/processes.
By indirect knowledge, I mean the result of reflection on existence. It is indirect in this sense-that it is presupposed by all the concepts of anthropology without being itself made the object of concepts.
The Problem of Nothingness (bonus pts if you guess the source-it should go without saying.)
An abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state.
Consciousness is an abstraction.
The concrete can be only the synthetic totality of which consciousness, like the phenomenon, constitutes only moments. Effecting a phenomenological reduction will not succeed in restoring the concrete (of consciousness) by the summation or organization of the elements which we abstracted from it. The relation of the regions of being is an original emergence and is a part of the very structure of the beings.
“Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the relation not man with the world?”
We have established a Parallelism between the types of conduct man adopts in the face of Being and Non-Being. We’re tempted to consider being and non-being as two complementary components of the real: like dark and light.
Two contemporary notions which would somehow be united in the production of existents and which it would be useless to consider in isolation. Pure being and pure non-being would be two abstractions which could be reunited only on the basis of concrete realities.
There is nothing in heaven or on earth which does not contain in itself Being and Nothingness.
What the Technical Meaning of ‘Emergence’ means to me (3 Things)
EMERGENCE
system: combination of components can form a more complex organization, that can be termed a system. E.g. of biological systems: cells > organism > ecosystem. To understand how biological systems work, it is not enough to have a complete “parts” list.
emergent properties of systems: with each upward step in the hierarchy of biological order, novel proerties emerge that are not present in the level just below. They are due to the arrangement and interaction of parts as complexity increases. E.g. thoughts, memories are emergent properties of a complex network of nerve cells.
reductionism
reducing complex systems to simpler components that are manageable to study (horseapples: I say) The dillema of understanding biological breaks down thusly:
1. We cannot fully explain a higher level of order by breaking it down into its parts
2. Something as complex as organisms and /or cells cannot be analyzed without observing them take their own selves apart.
WrittenCasey 