"One of the essential aspects of every good mood is a sense of identification with something outside oneself, whether it be delight in meeting and establishing a rapport with someone, or delight in personal achievement (i.e. we have intervened in the world and world responded as we intended it to) or finally, delight in some kind of work or action. Things seem to have a perceivable meaning and thus we seem to be in a kind of harmony with the world. If I include feelings of alienation and absurdity among my bad moods, it's chiefly because this sense of identification is lacking in them. Indeed the impression that I'm deeply alienated from what goes on around me, that I don't understand its logic and meaning, the belief that it will remain, probably forever, distant, alien, and incompatible with everything I think and feel - this is neither pleasant nor uplifting. On the contrary, it is chilling and sometimes even terrifying....Still, I don't necessarily consider it a thoroughly negative mood.
First of all, the sensation of absurdity is never - at least not as I understand it - the expression of a loss of faith in the meaning of life. Quite the opposite: only someone whose very being thirsts after meaning, for whom 'meaning' is an integral dimension of his own existence, can experience the absence of meaning as something painful, or more precisely, can perceive it at all. In its tormenting absence, meaning may have a more urgent presence than when it is simply taken for granted, no questions asked - somewhat in the way someone who is sick may better understand what it means to be well than one who is healthy. I believe that genuine absence of meaning and genuine unbelief manifest themselves differently; as indifference, apathy, resignation and the decline of existence to the vegetative level. In other words: the experience of absurdity is inseparable from the experience of meaning; it is merely, in a manner of speaking, its 'obverse,' just as meaningfulness is the 'reverse' of absurdity. Absurdity, therefore, cannot be thought of as something a priori negative or even reprehensible.
Moreover, I would even say that on some levels, the experience of absurdity may seem to move things forward. In many cases, it is precisely this sensation of distance and alienation from the world, of having abandoned the conventional stereotypes of experience on which the superficial and mystified meaning of the world is based, that opens the door to genuinely fresh, sharp, and penetrating vision - vision that particularizes; and this particularizing vision is precisely what can put us face-to-face with truth and therefore - through its 'capacity for doubt' - can uncover as well the real weight that 'meaning' has. (Some may have wondered - to return to myself - at the apparent contradiction between my 'absurd' writing and my 'idealism' in other things; perhaps this explanation will be illuminating.)
My...mood, however unpleasant, has yet another (rather practical) positive side: by creating a gap between me and my surroundings, it protects me in a sense. When I observe my surroundings in this way, I am less superficially vulnerable than someone who is fully 'involved,' caught up in the turbulence of random events and his immediate response to them. In short, I am less submerged, and so can manage to keep my head above water, which enables me to see better and - perhaps - to bear witness more effectively."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Saturday, December 30, 2017
Secular Sundays
"Much has been written about the hopeless, desolate atmosphere of Sundays in large cities, and there are many evocative cabaret songs about it. Essentially, it is what sociologists call the problem of leisure time; modern man has lost touch with the original, mythical significance and substance of festive occasions, and all that remains is emptiness. Perhaps my Sunday depression in prison is merely an extreme form or a distorted echo of a common problem of civilization called Sunday. I personally see this mood as one of the typical fissures through which nothingness, the modern face of the devil, seeps into people's lives."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Friday, December 29, 2017
The Work of Art from the Point of View of the Artist
"Art in general is a little like playing with fire; the artist deals with something without knowing precisely what it is: he creates something without knowing precisely what it will 'mean.' The work, it seems to me, should always be somehow 'cleverer' than its author and he should ultimately be able to stand before it filled with the same sense of awe and with the same questions in his mind as someone seeing or reading it for the first time..."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Havel on the 60's
"I once wrote about the particular significance I feel in the death of John Lennon....When a reactionary underworld decides to shoot a progressive president, that act has in itself - on its primary level. as it were - a determinable meaning, and therefore such a death does not cry out so powerfully for an investigation of its deeper, symbolic sense. Lennon's murder, however, is so nonsensical at that primary level that it is quite impossible to think about it other than as a symbol. And you can't help feeling that the shot was fired by the reality of the eighties at one of the departing dreams - the dream of the sixties for peace, freedom and brotherhood, the dream of the flower children, the communes, the LSD trips and 'making love not war,' a shot as it were in the face of that existential revolution of the 'third consciousness' and the 'greening of America.' As a symbol, Lennon's death has of course more aspects to it, and more complex ones at that, but this is the first one, the one that suggests itself most acutely. I do not believe that certain values and ideals of the sixties have been discredited as empty illusions and mistakes; certain things can never be called into question, either by time or by history, because they are simply and indivisible dimension of the Being of humanity and therefore of history as well, which though it is a history of repressions, murders, stupidities, wars and violence, is at the same time a history of magnificent dreams, longings and ideals. I only think that everything today is somehow harder and rougher, that one has to pay more dearly for things and that the dream of a freer, more meaningful life is no longer just a matter of running away from Mommy, as it were, but of a tough-minded, everyday confrontation with the dark powers of a new age. The fact that Lennon was shot by a psychopathic victim, of sorts, of the modern pop-cult created by the mass media, is also not without symbolic meaning: passive identification with an idol, replacing 'active faith,' finds its obscure climax in the schizophrenia of a man who shoots his idol to regain his own identity..."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
(letter written March 1981)
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
(letter written March 1981)
Tuesday, December 26, 2017
Spiritual Experiences - Similarities and Differences
Anyone who reads this blog will have noted that I'm fascinated by what James would term the "varieties of Religious Experiences." One of the things that is fascinating about studying other religions is the attempt to understand how their experiences differ from mine and what we have in common.
All of us express the spiritual experiences we have using the language we have available. And for each of us that language is embedded in a culture, a belief system, and a lifetime that (among other things) of a necessity forms the lens through which we view and by means of which we understand what happens to us. Add to this the fact recognized by almost all religions that human language seems to be incapable of fully expressing the contents of a religious experience and it becomes clear how difficult the task I have set myself can be.
It's odd, though. I'll be reading along through Nisargadatta explaining his experience from a Hindu point of view - alien and different as it is from mine - and then he'll drop a paragraph or a sentence or even a single phrase - and I have a sudden sense of recognition that lets me know that, different as our maps may be, they cover at least some of the same territory.
"You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That
All of us express the spiritual experiences we have using the language we have available. And for each of us that language is embedded in a culture, a belief system, and a lifetime that (among other things) of a necessity forms the lens through which we view and by means of which we understand what happens to us. Add to this the fact recognized by almost all religions that human language seems to be incapable of fully expressing the contents of a religious experience and it becomes clear how difficult the task I have set myself can be.
It's odd, though. I'll be reading along through Nisargadatta explaining his experience from a Hindu point of view - alien and different as it is from mine - and then he'll drop a paragraph or a sentence or even a single phrase - and I have a sudden sense of recognition that lets me know that, different as our maps may be, they cover at least some of the same territory.
"You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That
Atonement with the Father - Campbell's perspective
II - Initiation
4 - Atonement with the Father
"For the ogre aspect of the father is a reflex of the victim's own ego - derived from the sensational nursery scene that has been left behind, but projected before; and the fixating idolatry of that pedagogical nonthing is itself the fault that keeps one steeped in a sense of sin, sealing the potentially adult spirit from a better balanced, more realistic view of the father, and therewith of the world. Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster - the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed Id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy....
The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spots and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands - and the two are atoned.
....When the Lord himself answers Job out of the whirlwind, he makes no attempt to vindicate His work in ethical terms, but only magnifies His Presence, bidding Job do likewise on earth in human emulation of the way of heaven....Nevertheless, to Job himself the revelation appears to have made soul-satisfying sense. He was a hero who, by his courage in the fiery furnace, his unreadiness to break down and grovel before a popular conception of the character of the All Highest, had proven himself capable of facing a greater revelation than the one that satisfied his friends. We cannot interpret his words of the last chapter as those of a man merely intimidated. They are the words of one who has seen something surpassing anything that has been said by way of justification....
For the son who has grown really to know the father, the agonies of the ordeal are readily borne; the world is no longer a vale of tears but a bliss-yielding, perpetual manifestation of the Presence."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Why do I find Campbell so interesting?
Behind his invocation of mid 20th century psychoanalysis and Eastern spirituality to explain it all IS a genuine set of spiritual experiences that he, like all of us, is groping for words to explain.
4 - Atonement with the Father
"For the ogre aspect of the father is a reflex of the victim's own ego - derived from the sensational nursery scene that has been left behind, but projected before; and the fixating idolatry of that pedagogical nonthing is itself the fault that keeps one steeped in a sense of sin, sealing the potentially adult spirit from a better balanced, more realistic view of the father, and therewith of the world. Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster - the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed Id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy....
The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spots and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands - and the two are atoned.
....When the Lord himself answers Job out of the whirlwind, he makes no attempt to vindicate His work in ethical terms, but only magnifies His Presence, bidding Job do likewise on earth in human emulation of the way of heaven....Nevertheless, to Job himself the revelation appears to have made soul-satisfying sense. He was a hero who, by his courage in the fiery furnace, his unreadiness to break down and grovel before a popular conception of the character of the All Highest, had proven himself capable of facing a greater revelation than the one that satisfied his friends. We cannot interpret his words of the last chapter as those of a man merely intimidated. They are the words of one who has seen something surpassing anything that has been said by way of justification....
For the son who has grown really to know the father, the agonies of the ordeal are readily borne; the world is no longer a vale of tears but a bliss-yielding, perpetual manifestation of the Presence."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Why do I find Campbell so interesting?
Behind his invocation of mid 20th century psychoanalysis and Eastern spirituality to explain it all IS a genuine set of spiritual experiences that he, like all of us, is groping for words to explain.
The Ideal Mystagogue
II - Initiation
4 - Atonement with the Father
"Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent, consequently, now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from infantile illusions of 'good' and 'evil' to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in the understanding of the revelation of being."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
4 - Atonement with the Father
"Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent, consequently, now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from infantile illusions of 'good' and 'evil' to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in the understanding of the revelation of being."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
The Function of Initiation
II - Initiation
4 - Antonement with the Father
"The traditional idea of intiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images. The mystagogue...is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectively purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes - for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious (or perhaps even conscious and rationalized ) motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
4 - Antonement with the Father
"The traditional idea of intiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images. The mystagogue...is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectively purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes - for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious (or perhaps even conscious and rationalized ) motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
The Father as Initiator
II - Initiation
4 - Atonement with the Father
"When the child outgrows the popular idyll of the mother breast and turns to face the world of specialized adult action, it passes, spiritually, into the realm of the father - who becomes for his son, the sign of the future task, and for his daughter, of the future husband. Whether he knows it or not, and no matter what his position in society, the father is the initiating priest through whom the young being passes on into the larger world. And just as, formerly, the mother represented the 'good' and 'evil,' so now does he, but with this complication - that there is a new element of rivalry in the picture: the son against the father for the mastery of the universe, and the daughter against the mother to be the mastered universe."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
4 - Atonement with the Father
"When the child outgrows the popular idyll of the mother breast and turns to face the world of specialized adult action, it passes, spiritually, into the realm of the father - who becomes for his son, the sign of the future task, and for his daughter, of the future husband. Whether he knows it or not, and no matter what his position in society, the father is the initiating priest through whom the young being passes on into the larger world. And just as, formerly, the mother represented the 'good' and 'evil,' so now does he, but with this complication - that there is a new element of rivalry in the picture: the son against the father for the mastery of the universe, and the daughter against the mother to be the mastered universe."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Chief Characteristics of Satori - 7
"7. Feeling of Exaltation. That this feeling inevitably accompanies satori is due to the fact that it is the breaking-up of the restriction imposed on one as an individual being, and this breaking up is not a mere negative incident but quite a positive one fraught with signification because it means an infinite expansion of the individual....A wandering outcast maltreated everywhere finds that he is the possessor of all the wealth and power that is ever attainable in this world by a mortal being....But the Zen feeling of exaltation is rather a quiet feeling of self-contentment; it is not at al demonstrative, when the first glow of it passes away. The Unconscious does not proclaim itself so boisterously in the Zen Consciousness."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
Tenacity and Spiritual Insight
"M: ...Find what it is that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of 'I.'
Q: How do you go about finding this?
M: How do you go about finding anything? By keeping your mind and heart on it. There must be interest and steady remembrance. To remember what needs to be remembered is the secret of success. You come to it through earnestness.
Q: Do you mean to say that mere wanting to find out is enough? Surely both qualifications and opportunities are needed.
M: These will come with earnestness. What is supremely important is to be free from contradictions; the goal and the way must not be on different levels, life and light must not quarrel; behavior must not betray belief. Call it honesty, integrity, wholeness, you must not go back, undo, uproot, and abandon conquered ground. Tenacity of purpose and honesty of pursuit will bring to your goal.
Q: Tenacity and honesty are endowments, surely! I do not have a trace of them.
M: All will come as you go on. Take the first step first. All blessings come from within. Turn within. 'I am' you know. Be with it all the time you can spare, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That
Q: How do you go about finding this?
M: How do you go about finding anything? By keeping your mind and heart on it. There must be interest and steady remembrance. To remember what needs to be remembered is the secret of success. You come to it through earnestness.
Q: Do you mean to say that mere wanting to find out is enough? Surely both qualifications and opportunities are needed.
M: These will come with earnestness. What is supremely important is to be free from contradictions; the goal and the way must not be on different levels, life and light must not quarrel; behavior must not betray belief. Call it honesty, integrity, wholeness, you must not go back, undo, uproot, and abandon conquered ground. Tenacity of purpose and honesty of pursuit will bring to your goal.
Q: Tenacity and honesty are endowments, surely! I do not have a trace of them.
M: All will come as you go on. Take the first step first. All blessings come from within. Turn within. 'I am' you know. Be with it all the time you can spare, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That
Chief Characteristics of Satori - 6
"6. Impersonal Tone. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Zen experience is that it ahs no personal note in it as is observable in Christian mystic experiences....Father, God, the Son of God, God's child, etc. We may say all of these terms are interpretations based on a definite system of thought....alike in India, China, and Japan, satori has remained thoroughly impersonal, or rather highly intellectual.
Is this owing to the peculiar character of Buddhist philosophy? Does the experience itself take its colors from the philosophy or theology? Whatever this is, there is no doubt that in spite of having some points of similitude to the Christian mystic experience, the Zen experience is singularly devoid of personal or human colorings."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Is this owing to the peculiar character of Buddhist philosophy? Does the experience itself take its colors from the philosophy or theology? Whatever this is, there is no doubt that in spite of having some points of similitude to the Christian mystic experience, the Zen experience is singularly devoid of personal or human colorings."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Monday, December 11, 2017
Love as the result of mystic insight
As I study Eastern mysticism I see much diversity. If I were to pull out two threads that seem to run through most of it, I would identify them as awareness and love. We've been looking a lot at the Buddhist point of view here. Here is a Hindu one
"Let go of your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, or attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and loveable."
...............................
"The mind, by its very nature divides and opposes. Can there be some other mind which unites and harmonizes, which sees the whole in the part and the part as totally related to the whole?....In that mind...it becomes rather a question of love seeking expression and meeting with obstacles. The inclusive mind is love in action, battling against circumstances: initially frustrated, ultimately victorious."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That
"Let go of your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, or attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and loveable."
...............................
"The mind, by its very nature divides and opposes. Can there be some other mind which unites and harmonizes, which sees the whole in the part and the part as totally related to the whole?....In that mind...it becomes rather a question of love seeking expression and meeting with obstacles. The inclusive mind is love in action, battling against circumstances: initially frustrated, ultimately victorious."
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That
Chief Characteristics of Satori - 5
"5. Sense of the Beyond. ...in satori there is always what we may call a sense of the Beyond; the experience is indeed my own, but I feel it to be rooted elsewhere. The individual shell in which my personality is so solidly encased explodes at the moment of satori. Not necessarily, that I get unified with a being greater than myself or absorbed into it, but that my individuality, which I found rigidly held together and definitely kept separate from other individual existences, becomes loosened somehow from its tightening grip and melts away into something indescribable, something which is of quite a different order from what I am accustomed to."
................................
"To call this Beyond, the Absolute, or God, or a Person is to go further than the experience itself."
.................................
"The feeling that follows is that of a complete release or a complete rest - the feeling that one has arrived finally at the destination. 'coming home and quietly resting' is the expression generally used....The story of the prodigal son...points to the same feeling one has at the moment of a satori experience."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
................................
"To call this Beyond, the Absolute, or God, or a Person is to go further than the experience itself."
.................................
"The feeling that follows is that of a complete release or a complete rest - the feeling that one has arrived finally at the destination. 'coming home and quietly resting' is the expression generally used....The story of the prodigal son...points to the same feeling one has at the moment of a satori experience."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Two Modes of Puritanism
"There was a strong assumption of superiority in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution."
George Eliot
Middlemarch
It is all fine and nice to recognize, as the quote before this one does, that "souls have complexions" and that what might not be alright for me might be alright for someone else, but if it is accompanied by the assumption that what is right for me, though, is superior, the insight loses most of its force.
George Eliot
Middlemarch
It is all fine and nice to recognize, as the quote before this one does, that "souls have complexions" and that what might not be alright for me might be alright for someone else, but if it is accompanied by the assumption that what is right for me, though, is superior, the insight loses most of its force.
Souls Have Complexions
"Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another."
George Eliot
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Middlemarch
Dorothea in Middlemarch
"she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects;"
George Eliot
Middlemarch
Much the same could have been said of my younger self.
George Eliot
Middlemarch
Much the same could have been said of my younger self.
Chief Characteristics of Satori - 4
"4. Affirmation. What is authoritative and final can never be negative. For negation has no value for our life, it leads us nowhere; it is not a power that urges, nor does it give one a place to rest. Though the satori experience is sometimes expressed in negative terms, it is essentially an affirmative attitude towards all things that exist; it accepts them as they come along regardless of their moral values. Buddhists call this kshanti, 'patience', or more properly 'acceptance', that is, acceptance of things in their suprarelative or transcendental aspect where no dualism of whatever sort avails."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhims
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhims
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
The Worth of a Man
"Every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself."
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Chief Characteristics of Satori - 3
"3. Authoritativeness. By this I mean that the knowledge realized by satori is final, that no amount of logical argument can refute it. Being direct and personal it is sufficient unto itself. All that logic can do here is to explain it, to interpret it in connection with other kinds of knowledge with which our minds are filled. Satori is thus a form of perception, an inner perception, which takes place in the most interior part of consciousness....So, it is generally said that Zen is like drinking water, for it is by one's self that one knows whether it is warm or cold."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Characteristics of Initiation into the Mysteries in 2nd Century A.D.
Lucius, the protagonist of Apuleis' Golden Ass, is initiated into pagan mysteries (specifically those of Isis and Osiris) three separate times. Some interesting characteristics emerge -
1) Divine Authorization
When Lucius first sought initiation he was told to patiently wait for divine approval to be given to the priest who would officiate. For those in charge would not do so "unless personally ordered to do so" by the authorizing divinity.
2) Washing and anointing
"...when the priest said the moment had come, he led me to the nearest baths, escorted by the faithful in a body, and there, after I had bathed in the usual way, having invoked the blessing of the gods he ceremoniously aspersed and purified me." Asper is an unusual verb in 21st century English, meaning to sprinkle - mostly used in reference to the Catholic practice of sprinkling Holy Water.
3) Ceremonial Garments
"Then the uninitiated were all made to leave, I was dressed in a brand new linen robe, and the priest took me by the hand and conducted me to the very innermost part of the sanctuary."
At the end of the ceremony Lucius had assumed a somewhat more elaborate costume -
"...though my dress was only of fine linen it was colorfully embroidered, and from my shoulders there fell behind me to my ankles a costly cloak....This is what initiates call an Olympic robe....and my head was encircled with a beautiful crown of palm..."
"The very next night I dreamed that there appeared to me one of the faithful dressed in linen and carrying a wand tipped with ivy and other things I may not mention."
In a dream that urges him to be initiated a third time Lucius is reminded "the goddess's holy symbols which you received at Cenchreae are still in the temple there where you left them, so that here in Rome you cannot wear them to worship in on feast days or receive illumination from that happy attire when ordered to do so."
4) A Sacred Journey Towards Salvation
"the initiation ceremony itself took the form of a kind of voluntary death and salvation through divine grace."
"I came to the boundary of death and after treading Proserpine's threshold I returned having traversed all the elements; at midnight I saw the sun shining with brilliant light; I approached the gods below and the gods above face to face and worshiped them in their actual presence."
5) Sacred Saving Truth Imparted.
Lucius undertook religious disciplined to prepare himself to "better attain to the secret mysteries of this purest of religions." The information given was centered on "the keys of hell and the guarantee of salvation."
6) Content Points Towards a Regeneration of Life
Those who passed through initiation "had been as it were reborn."
"I celebrated my rebirth as an initiate..."
7) Content of Ceremony is a Sacred Mystery
In other words it is kept secret. The priest of Lucius' first initiation calls them the "holy mysteries of our faith."
"...he made me to stand at the goddess's feet and privately gave me certain instructions which are too sacred to divulge."
"I dare say, attentive reader, that you are all agog to know what was then said and done. I should tell you if it were lawful to tell it; you should learn it if it were lawful to hear it. But then your ears and my tongue would both incur equal guilt, the one for sacrilegious loquacity, the other for importunate curiosity."
"So all that can without sin be revealed to the understanding of the uninitiated, that and no more I shall relate."
"The very next night I dreamed that there appeared to me one of the faithful dressed in linen and carrying a wand tipped with ivy and other things I may not mention."
Quotations from
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
Translated by E. J. Kinney
1) Divine Authorization
When Lucius first sought initiation he was told to patiently wait for divine approval to be given to the priest who would officiate. For those in charge would not do so "unless personally ordered to do so" by the authorizing divinity.
2) Washing and anointing
"...when the priest said the moment had come, he led me to the nearest baths, escorted by the faithful in a body, and there, after I had bathed in the usual way, having invoked the blessing of the gods he ceremoniously aspersed and purified me." Asper is an unusual verb in 21st century English, meaning to sprinkle - mostly used in reference to the Catholic practice of sprinkling Holy Water.
3) Ceremonial Garments
"Then the uninitiated were all made to leave, I was dressed in a brand new linen robe, and the priest took me by the hand and conducted me to the very innermost part of the sanctuary."
At the end of the ceremony Lucius had assumed a somewhat more elaborate costume -
"...though my dress was only of fine linen it was colorfully embroidered, and from my shoulders there fell behind me to my ankles a costly cloak....This is what initiates call an Olympic robe....and my head was encircled with a beautiful crown of palm..."
"The very next night I dreamed that there appeared to me one of the faithful dressed in linen and carrying a wand tipped with ivy and other things I may not mention."
In a dream that urges him to be initiated a third time Lucius is reminded "the goddess's holy symbols which you received at Cenchreae are still in the temple there where you left them, so that here in Rome you cannot wear them to worship in on feast days or receive illumination from that happy attire when ordered to do so."
4) A Sacred Journey Towards Salvation
"the initiation ceremony itself took the form of a kind of voluntary death and salvation through divine grace."
"I came to the boundary of death and after treading Proserpine's threshold I returned having traversed all the elements; at midnight I saw the sun shining with brilliant light; I approached the gods below and the gods above face to face and worshiped them in their actual presence."
5) Sacred Saving Truth Imparted.
Lucius undertook religious disciplined to prepare himself to "better attain to the secret mysteries of this purest of religions." The information given was centered on "the keys of hell and the guarantee of salvation."
6) Content Points Towards a Regeneration of Life
Those who passed through initiation "had been as it were reborn."
"I celebrated my rebirth as an initiate..."
7) Content of Ceremony is a Sacred Mystery
In other words it is kept secret. The priest of Lucius' first initiation calls them the "holy mysteries of our faith."
"...he made me to stand at the goddess's feet and privately gave me certain instructions which are too sacred to divulge."
"I dare say, attentive reader, that you are all agog to know what was then said and done. I should tell you if it were lawful to tell it; you should learn it if it were lawful to hear it. But then your ears and my tongue would both incur equal guilt, the one for sacrilegious loquacity, the other for importunate curiosity."
"So all that can without sin be revealed to the understanding of the uninitiated, that and no more I shall relate."
"The very next night I dreamed that there appeared to me one of the faithful dressed in linen and carrying a wand tipped with ivy and other things I may not mention."
Quotations from
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
Translated by E. J. Kinney
Chief Characteristics of Satori - 2
"2. Intuitive Insight. That there is a noetic quality in mystic experiences has been pointed out by James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, and this applies also to the Zen experience known as satori. Another name for satori is 'ken-sho'...meaning 'to see essence or nature'....That this seeing is of quite a different quality from what is ordinarily designated as knowledge need not be specifically noticed. Hui-k'e is reported to have made this statement concerning his satori..."it is not a total annihilation; it is knowledge of the most adequate kind; only it cannot be expressed in words...."
Without this noetic quality satori will lose all its pungency, for it is really the reason of satori itself. It is noteworthy that the knowledge contained in satori is concerned with something universal and at the same time with the individual aspect of existence. When a finger is lifted, the lifting means, from the viewpoint of satori, far more than the act of lifting. Some may call it symbolic, but satori does not point to anything beyond itself, being final as it is. Satori is the knowledge of an individual object and also that of Reality, which is, if I may so, at the back of it."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Without this noetic quality satori will lose all its pungency, for it is really the reason of satori itself. It is noteworthy that the knowledge contained in satori is concerned with something universal and at the same time with the individual aspect of existence. When a finger is lifted, the lifting means, from the viewpoint of satori, far more than the act of lifting. Some may call it symbolic, but satori does not point to anything beyond itself, being final as it is. Satori is the knowledge of an individual object and also that of Reality, which is, if I may so, at the back of it."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Monday, November 27, 2017
Chief Characteristics of Satori - 1
"1. Irrationality. By this I mean that satori is not a conclusion to be reached by reasoning, and defies all intellectual determination. Those who have experienced it are always at a loss to explain it coherently or logically. When it is explained at all...its content more or less undergoes a mutilation....The satori experience is thus always characterized by irrationality, inexplicability, and incommunicability.
.....There is nothing here of cool reasoning and quiet metaphysical or epistemological analysis, but of a certain desperate will to break through an insurmountable barrier, of the will impelled by some irrational or unconscious power behind it."
.....There is nothing here of cool reasoning and quiet metaphysical or epistemological analysis, but of a certain desperate will to break through an insurmountable barrier, of the will impelled by some irrational or unconscious power behind it."
Saturday, November 25, 2017
Havel - Faith V
"Even though faith can assume the shape of particular human moods, states, loves and other psychological characteristics and expressions, it goes considerably further, pointing man - like responsibility, with which it is closely linked - toward something that is both beyond things and within them: their 'absolute horizon.' This horizon, as the originator, the bearer, and the giver of meaning, far from being a cold, abstract astronomical and metaphysical quantum is, as it turns out, the source of those vital forces that exalt man, humanity and history. It might be put thus: if man is a kind of concentrated reprise of the great miracle of Being, then all visible expressions of his miraculousness have their origin in what primordially and uniquely binds him to the miraculousness of Being, that is, in his faith in the meaning of that miracle.. To be sure it is a carte blanche faith, but it is precisely this endless tension between the living experience of meaning on the one hand, and its unknowableness on the other, that gives real inner tension to all the actions by which man represents himself as man."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Friday, November 24, 2017
Woman as the Temptress - Campbell
II - Initiation
3 - Woman as the Temptress
"The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is. Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, al the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some unpleasant someone else.
But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to pure, the pure, pure soul....The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond her, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.
For a God called him - called him many times,
From many sides at once: "Ho, Oedipus,
Thou, Oedipus, why are we tarrying?
It is full long that thou art stayed for; come!"
Where this Oedipus-Hamlet revulsion remains to beset the soul, there the world, the body, and woman above all, become the symbols no longer of victory but of defeat. A monastic-puritanical, world-negating ethical system then radically and immediately transfigures all the images of myth. No longer can the hero rest in innocence with the goddess of the flesh; for she is become the queen of sin."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Campbell her quotes the play Oedipus Coloneus.
3 - Woman as the Temptress
"The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is. Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, al the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some unpleasant someone else.
But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to pure, the pure, pure soul....The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond her, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.
For a God called him - called him many times,
From many sides at once: "Ho, Oedipus,
Thou, Oedipus, why are we tarrying?
It is full long that thou art stayed for; come!"
Where this Oedipus-Hamlet revulsion remains to beset the soul, there the world, the body, and woman above all, become the symbols no longer of victory but of defeat. A monastic-puritanical, world-negating ethical system then radically and immediately transfigures all the images of myth. No longer can the hero rest in innocence with the goddess of the flesh; for she is become the queen of sin."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Campbell her quotes the play Oedipus Coloneus.
Havel - Faith IV
"At the same time, it is not important at all how, and to what extent, you think about your faith, or whether you are aware of it at all; the only thing that matters is how profoundly the assumption of meaning, or the longing for it, lies dormant in the very bowels of your relationship to the world and of all your actions. I mean both the meaning of individual entities and 'meaning altogether' (as the unique and ultimate source of the meaning of individual entities), meaning that transcends the relative limits of space, time or utilitarian (i.e. relativistic) human calculation. (For it is only in the light of the eternal, absolute 'memory of being,' that most of the good things one does can be explained.) And so, just as that meaning transcends the relative world whose meaning it constitutes, so faith in meaning transcends all relative utility, and is therefore independent of how things turn out: everything - even what turns out badly - has its own admittedly obscure meaning in relation to faith. Without this assumption of meaning or a longing for it, the experience of nonsense - absence of meaning - would be unthinkable. (That is the case with so-called absurd art which, more than anything else - because it is a desperate cry against the loss of meaning - contains faith; the only art which may be able to get along without faith is strictly commercial art.) In any case faith, with its profound assumption of meaning, has its natural antithesis in the experience of nothingness; they are interrelated and human life is in fact a constant struggle for our souls waged by these two powers. If nothingness wins out, dramatic tension vanishes, man surrenders to apathy, and faith and meaning exist only as a backdrop against which others become aware of his fall."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Thursday, November 23, 2017
Spiritual growth as an increase in consciousness and awareness
II - Initiation
3 - Woman as the Temptress
"...every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The individual has only to discover his position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. Who and where are his ogres? Those are the reflections of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. What are his ideals? Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
3 - Woman as the Temptress
"...every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The individual has only to discover his position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. Who and where are his ogres? Those are the reflections of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. What are his ideals? Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Havel - Faith III
"But what, in fact, is this genuine faith? Where does it come from, what does it consist in and what is it directed toward? I don't have an exhaustive answer, of course, so I shall try to indicate only a couple of obvious things. Faith in this sense can, and usually does, assume specific forms, that is, it is usually 'faith in something,' but that 'something' is not the decisive factor, it is not, that is, a fetish of some kind, a challenge to which would either shake the faith or require a rapid change of fetish. Genuine faith is original, primal and discrete; it precedes its object (if it has one). In other words, it is faith that animates its object, not the other way around. (Naturally an opposite, 'reciprocal' tendency exists as well, but I think it is always secondary, a reflex caused by the main factor.) This is one of the ways in which genuine faith differs from the optimist's enthusiasm: it does not draw its energy from some particular reality or assumption, on whose existence it is utterly dependent and with whose loss it would collapse like a pricked balloon. It is not a state of enchantment, induced by the narcotic of an evocative object, but rather an intrinsic 'state of the spirit,' a profound 'existential dimension,' an inner direction that you either have or don't have, and which - if you have it - raises your entire existence onto a kind of higher level of being."
Vaclav Havel
"Letters to Olga"
As a Mormon, how do I take this description of faith - that the experience supersedes its object?
As one for whom faith is, by definition, "Faith in Christ," it seems unlikely that I could agree with the statement that my faith's object, Christ, is not the 'decisive factor.' And yet, I catch a meaning here that does to some degree accord with my experience--
Faith is a relationship of trust with God. Your conception of God may be incomplete and partially erroneous (and whose isn't to some degree?), but your experience with his reality has built a trust that is not dependent on the perfection of your personal conception. I've known plenty of Mormons whose faith was in what Havel calls a "fetish" - a particular, concrete conception of how things are. When such a person runs into a thorny knot where some portion of Joseph Smith's life doesn't seem to match one's picture of what the prophet should have been like, or the understanding of 21st century science doesn't match one's understanding of what our doctrine is, he often turns (sometimes with astonishing rapidity) to a positivistic atheism in response. His faith was never a genuine relationship with deity (genuine faith is a little more difficult to shake than that). He believed in the finger that pointed at the moon, but never really had that deep of an experience of the moon itself.
Vaclav Havel
"Letters to Olga"
As a Mormon, how do I take this description of faith - that the experience supersedes its object?
As one for whom faith is, by definition, "Faith in Christ," it seems unlikely that I could agree with the statement that my faith's object, Christ, is not the 'decisive factor.' And yet, I catch a meaning here that does to some degree accord with my experience--
Faith is a relationship of trust with God. Your conception of God may be incomplete and partially erroneous (and whose isn't to some degree?), but your experience with his reality has built a trust that is not dependent on the perfection of your personal conception. I've known plenty of Mormons whose faith was in what Havel calls a "fetish" - a particular, concrete conception of how things are. When such a person runs into a thorny knot where some portion of Joseph Smith's life doesn't seem to match one's picture of what the prophet should have been like, or the understanding of 21st century science doesn't match one's understanding of what our doctrine is, he often turns (sometimes with astonishing rapidity) to a positivistic atheism in response. His faith was never a genuine relationship with deity (genuine faith is a little more difficult to shake than that). He believed in the finger that pointed at the moon, but never really had that deep of an experience of the moon itself.
Saturday, November 18, 2017
How to handle "falling off the wagon"
"When thou hast been compelled by circumstances to be disturbed in a manner, quickly return to thyself and do not continue out of tune longer than the compulsion lasts; for thou wilt have more mastery over the harmony by continually recurring to it."
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
A different take on "the best revenge"
"The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong doer."
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
The Mystical Marriage
II - Initiation
3 - Woman as the Temptress
"The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness cam to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father's place."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
3 - Woman as the Temptress
"The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness cam to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father's place."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Havel - Faith II
"Genuine faith is something far more profound and mysterious, and it certainly doesn't depend on how reality appears to one at a given moment. For this reason, too, only someone with faith in the deeper sense of the word will be able to see things as they really are (or rather be open to reality, i.e., to phenomena), and not distort them in one way or another, since he has no personal, emotive reasons for so doing. This, of course, is not true of the man who lacks faith: he has no reason whatever to try to get to the bottom of reality, for such an effort - perhaps more than any other - requires faith, and is unthinkable without it. The faithless man simply tries to survive with the least possible pain and discomfort and is indifferent to everything else. Any claims he makes about reality will usually, in one way or another, serve his "conception" of life - in other words, again, merely what suits him. He is not open without prejudice to all the dimensions of reality."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Friday, November 17, 2017
An interesting insight into the adversary?
"...the ancient betrayers most evil and most vile snares vomit forth blackest murder with such great passion that the human intellect cannot fathom its insanity."
Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias
It's not an attribute I have really ever before associated with Satan, but I think it follows logically from what I do know of him. Satan is insane.
Food for thought.
Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias
It's not an attribute I have really ever before associated with Satan, but I think it follows logically from what I do know of him. Satan is insane.
Food for thought.
Havel - Faith I
"For the New Year, I wrote that the most important thing of all is for you not to lose faith and hope. As promised, I'd like to return briefly to that subject.
First of all: when I speak of faith and hope, I'm not thinking of optimism in the conventional sense, by which I we usually mean the belief that 'everything will turn out well.' I don't share such a belief and consider it - when expressed in that general way - a dangerous illusion. I don't know how 'everything' will turn out and therefore I have to admit the possibility everything - or at least most things - will turn out badly. Faith, however, does not depend upon prognoses about possible outcome. One may imagine a man with no faith who believes everything will turn out well, and a man with faith who expects everything to turn out badly. Optimism as I understand it here is not unequivocably positive and life-giving, but may well be the opposite: I have met many people who were full of euphoria and élan, most of it overblown, when they felt things would turn out well, but when they came round to the opposite point of view - usually at the first opportunity - they suddenly became profoundly skeptical. Their skepticism (usually expressed in catastrophic visions) was of course just as emotive, superficial and selective as their previous enthusiasm had been; it was merely the other side of the same coin. In short, the need for illusions in order to live one's life is not an expression of strength, but of weakness, and the consequences of such a life are just what one would expect."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
First of all: when I speak of faith and hope, I'm not thinking of optimism in the conventional sense, by which I we usually mean the belief that 'everything will turn out well.' I don't share such a belief and consider it - when expressed in that general way - a dangerous illusion. I don't know how 'everything' will turn out and therefore I have to admit the possibility everything - or at least most things - will turn out badly. Faith, however, does not depend upon prognoses about possible outcome. One may imagine a man with no faith who believes everything will turn out well, and a man with faith who expects everything to turn out badly. Optimism as I understand it here is not unequivocably positive and life-giving, but may well be the opposite: I have met many people who were full of euphoria and élan, most of it overblown, when they felt things would turn out well, but when they came round to the opposite point of view - usually at the first opportunity - they suddenly became profoundly skeptical. Their skepticism (usually expressed in catastrophic visions) was of course just as emotive, superficial and selective as their previous enthusiasm had been; it was merely the other side of the same coin. In short, the need for illusions in order to live one's life is not an expression of strength, but of weakness, and the consequences of such a life are just what one would expect."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Temptation
Eros's warnings to Psyche can be applied to many situations of the slow assault of a growing temptation -
"Fortune...threatens you with mortal danger....Don't you see the danger that threatens you? Fortune is now engaging your outposts, and if you do not stand very firmly on your guard she will soon be grappling with you hand to hand....the day of reckoning and the last chance are here...the enemy arrayed in arms against you; they have marched out and drawn up their line, and sounded the trumpet call; with drawn sword..."
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
"Fortune...threatens you with mortal danger....Don't you see the danger that threatens you? Fortune is now engaging your outposts, and if you do not stand very firmly on your guard she will soon be grappling with you hand to hand....the day of reckoning and the last chance are here...the enemy arrayed in arms against you; they have marched out and drawn up their line, and sounded the trumpet call; with drawn sword..."
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
Eros
Modern Western Society tends to limit erotic love to the purely physical, but the classical conception was broader than that. When the tern accuses Eros of neglecting his godly duties, his absence doesn't result in a lessened physical drive in humanity -
"there is no pleasure anywhere, no grace, no charm, everything is rough, savage, uncouth. There are no more marriages, no more mutual friendships, no children's love, nothing but endless squalor and repellent, distasteful, and sordid couplings."
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
Eros, in its fullest and deepest sense, is so much more than the sating of physical appetite. Much that our society terms "erotic" lacks the grace, charm, refinement, friendship, love, and commitment that mark the best that Eros offers.
"there is no pleasure anywhere, no grace, no charm, everything is rough, savage, uncouth. There are no more marriages, no more mutual friendships, no children's love, nothing but endless squalor and repellent, distasteful, and sordid couplings."
Apuleius
The Golden Ass
Eros, in its fullest and deepest sense, is so much more than the sating of physical appetite. Much that our society terms "erotic" lacks the grace, charm, refinement, friendship, love, and commitment that mark the best that Eros offers.
The power of concentrated effort
"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull."
Shakespeare
All's Well That Ends Well
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull."
Shakespeare
All's Well That Ends Well
The politics of the disinterested observer
"We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon."
Shakespeare
King Lear
I've always found the phrase "as if we were God's spies" evocative.
Lear's progress
I finished Lear this week. I was touched again by Lear's progress from a self centered, shallow man to a deeper, more compassionate, aware and thoughtful human being. I'm always caught by that bittersweet turning point in the storm where he first begins to think about the ills of others. First the fool -
"Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?"
And then a broader consideration for all the poor -
"Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this."
As it does for all of us, the growing awareness of needs we might have meet brings remorse.
"Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?"
And then a broader consideration for all the poor -
"Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this."
As it does for all of us, the growing awareness of needs we might have meet brings remorse.
Thursday, November 9, 2017
The two poles of my intellectual life
"The debate the two men [Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem] conducted...ultimately concerned nothing less than the question of how to create the most profound life work possible - how to avoid misspending one's time on earth. Do we mine down as deep as we can go into the shaft of our own personal origins? Or do we strive to disseminate our energies and insights as broadly as possible across the panorama of human production?"
George Prochnik
Stranger in a Strange Land
George Prochnik
Stranger in a Strange Land
Gershom Scholem - Zionism and Utopianism
"The building of the land of the Bible and the foundation of the State of Israel represent, if you will allow me to use a daring formulation, a utopian retreat of the Jews into their own history," Scholem wrote. He considered an exclamation by the philosopher Hermann Cohen against the Zionists - "Those fellows want to be happy!" - the most profound statement made by an opponent of the movement.
George Prochnik
Stranger in a Strange Land
George Prochnik
Stranger in a Strange Land
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Mountains and Seas
I'm partial to both of them -
"Seen from the shore the sea is very beautiful - streaked with brilliant colors. It is opaque at the edges, mingling the blue of the sky with the shining green of the coco and palm trees on the shore, and fringed with foam - a rainbow fringe. Farther out, it has a pearly lustre. The islands of coco trees, which float in the distance, in a slightly misted, vaporous radiance, have such fresh, delicate shades that one is enchanted by the sight. A slight breeze from the open sea tempers the heat of the town."
.........................................
"I was enchanted with the succession of peaks and precipices, torrents and cascades of water, wooded slopes and deep valleys. Water gushed and flowed everywhere, animating everything. It was a wonderful spectacle. A little terrifying too, whenever the train seemed to get close to the edge of the precipice."
Camara Laye
The Dark Child
"Seen from the shore the sea is very beautiful - streaked with brilliant colors. It is opaque at the edges, mingling the blue of the sky with the shining green of the coco and palm trees on the shore, and fringed with foam - a rainbow fringe. Farther out, it has a pearly lustre. The islands of coco trees, which float in the distance, in a slightly misted, vaporous radiance, have such fresh, delicate shades that one is enchanted by the sight. A slight breeze from the open sea tempers the heat of the town."
.........................................
"I was enchanted with the succession of peaks and precipices, torrents and cascades of water, wooded slopes and deep valleys. Water gushed and flowed everywhere, animating everything. It was a wonderful spectacle. A little terrifying too, whenever the train seemed to get close to the edge of the precipice."
Camara Laye
The Dark Child
Monday, October 30, 2017
The Sea
"Suddenly at the end of the avenue, I saw it. I stood a long time observing its vastness, watching the waves roll in, one after another, to break against the red rocks of the shore. In the distance, despite the mist around them, I saw some very green islands. It was the most astonishing spectacle that had ever confronted me. At night, from the train, I had only glimpsed the sea. I had formed no real idea of its size, nor even less of its movement, of the kind of fascination one feels towards its endless movement. Now that the whole spectacle lay before me I could scarcely come away."
Camara Laye
The Dark Child
Those of us who grew up far from shore understand the emotions of catching sight of the sea for the first time. Laye evokes those feelings eloquently.
Camara Laye
The Dark Child
Those of us who grew up far from shore understand the emotions of catching sight of the sea for the first time. Laye evokes those feelings eloquently.
Saturday, October 28, 2017
Satori and Insight
"Its [Satori's] semblance or analogy in a more or less feeble and fragmentary way is gained when a difficult mathematical problem is solved, or when a great discovery is made, or when a sudden means of escape is realized in the midst of most desperate complications; in short, when one exclaims 'Eureka! Eureka!' But this refers only to the intellectual aspect of satori, which is therefore necessarily partial and incomplete and does not touch the very foundation of life considered one indivisible whole. Satori as the Zen experience must be concerned with the entirety of life. For what Zen proposes to do is the revolution, and the revaluation as well, of oneself as a spiritual unity. The solving of a mathematical problem ends with the solution, it does not affect one's whole life. So with all other particular questions, practical or scientific, they do not enter the basic life-tone of the individual concerned. But the opening of satori is the remaking of life itself. When it is genuine - for there are many simulacra of it - it's effects on ones moral and spiritual life are revolutionary, and they are so enhancing, purifying as well as exacting. When a master was asked what constituted Buddhahood, he answered, "The bottom of a pail is broken through." From this we see what a complete revolution is produced by this spiritual experience. The birth of a new man is really cataclysmic."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Language and Spiritual Experience
"You mustn't take these and similar meditations too literally; they are only attempts to capture something from the flow of my feelings and inner thought processes; sometimes I map it out with these formulations, at other times I may use completely different ones. I'm no philosopher and it is not my ambition to create a conceptually fixed system; anyone who tries to understand it that way will soon discover that I am perpetually contradicting myself, that I leave many things unexplained or explain them differently each time, etc."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Havel is doing the same thing that believers have had to do since the beginning, using the language and concepts at hand to try to express our noetic experiences. However unsatisfactory this process is, I'm glad Havel did not settle for the other alternative, staying silent. I take strength from the words of others who have trod this path before me.
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Havel is doing the same thing that believers have had to do since the beginning, using the language and concepts at hand to try to express our noetic experiences. However unsatisfactory this process is, I'm glad Havel did not settle for the other alternative, staying silent. I take strength from the words of others who have trod this path before me.
Havel - Responsibility and Identity 2
"For me the fundamental flaw in the many different positivistic 'explanations' lies in the fact that it reduces human responsibility - as it does everything else - to a mere relationship of something relative, transitory, and finite to something else relative, transitory, and finite (for example, the relationship of a citizen to the legal code, or of the unconscious to the 'superego'). By its very nature, however, such an understanding hides, and must hide, what is most important and, in my opinion, as clear as day: what we have here is not the mutual relationship of two relativities to each other, but the relationship of relativity to 'non-relativity,' the relationship of finiteness to 'infinity,' of a unique existence to the totality of Being. It is true that responsibility usually finds expression as the relationship of something in us to something around us or something else in us, but essentially it is always a relationship between us, as 'relativity' - and our only genuine antithesis, that which alone permits us to experience our relativity as relativity; that is to an omnipresent, absolute horizon as the 'final instance' that lies behind everything and above everything, which as it were provides everything with a framework, a measure and a background and which ultimately qualifies and defines everything relative. This superabstract and superimaginary horizon is, at the same time, something confoundedly concrete - for do we not experience it today and every day, through all our particular experiences of the world of relativities, as a constantly present limiting element, and in fact as a dimension that touches us most compellingly?"
"In other words, as an ability or a determination or a perceived duty of man to vouch for himself completely, absolutely, and in all circumstances (in other words, as the only true creator of freedom), human responsibility is precisely the agent by which one first defines oneself as a person vis-à-vis the universe, that is, as a miracle of Being that one is. On the one hand, it is only thus that one defines and so infuses meaning into one's dependency on the world; on the other hand, it is only thus that one definitively separates oneself from the world as a sovereign and independent being; it is only thus that one, as it were, stands on one's own two feet. I would say that responsibility for oneself is a knife we use to carve out our own inimitable features in the panorama of Being; it is the pen with which we write into the history of Being that story of fresh creation of the world that each new human existence always is."
"In short, it seems to me that just as there can be no matter without space, and no space without matter, their can be no transitory human existence without the horizon of permanence against which it develops and to which - whether it knows it or not - it constantly relates."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
"In other words, as an ability or a determination or a perceived duty of man to vouch for himself completely, absolutely, and in all circumstances (in other words, as the only true creator of freedom), human responsibility is precisely the agent by which one first defines oneself as a person vis-à-vis the universe, that is, as a miracle of Being that one is. On the one hand, it is only thus that one defines and so infuses meaning into one's dependency on the world; on the other hand, it is only thus that one definitively separates oneself from the world as a sovereign and independent being; it is only thus that one, as it were, stands on one's own two feet. I would say that responsibility for oneself is a knife we use to carve out our own inimitable features in the panorama of Being; it is the pen with which we write into the history of Being that story of fresh creation of the world that each new human existence always is."
"In short, it seems to me that just as there can be no matter without space, and no space without matter, their can be no transitory human existence without the horizon of permanence against which it develops and to which - whether it knows it or not - it constantly relates."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
The Gentle Heart
II - Initiation
2 - The Meeting with the Goddess
"The goddess guardian of the inexhaustible well...requires that the hero should be endowed with what the troubadours and minnesingers termed the 'gentle heart.' Not by the animal desires of an Actaeon, nor by the fastidious revulsion of such as Fergus, can she be comprehended and rightly served, but only by gentleness: aware ("gentle sympathy") it was named in the romantic courtly poetry of tenth-to-twelfth-century Japan."
"....The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.
And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed - whether she will or no. And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
2 - The Meeting with the Goddess
"The goddess guardian of the inexhaustible well...requires that the hero should be endowed with what the troubadours and minnesingers termed the 'gentle heart.' Not by the animal desires of an Actaeon, nor by the fastidious revulsion of such as Fergus, can she be comprehended and rightly served, but only by gentleness: aware ("gentle sympathy") it was named in the romantic courtly poetry of tenth-to-twelfth-century Japan."
"....The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.
And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed - whether she will or no. And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
A thought provoking question
"Now tell me, O human: What do you think you were when you were not yet in soul and body?"
Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias
Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias
Our Mortal Test
This is a passage from one of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century Benedictine Nun and Abbess. The "I" in this passage is God. Hildegard has been shown images and the voice of God is explaining their meaning to her.
"Therefore listen and understand me, you who say in your hearts 'what are these things and why?' Oh, why are you so foolish in your hearts, you who have been made in the image and likeness of God? How can such great glory and honor, which is given to you, exist without testing, as if it were an empty case of nothing? Gold must be tested in the fire, and precious stones to smooth them, must be polished, and all things of this kind must be diligently scrutinized. Hence, O foolish humans, how can that which was made in the image and likeness of God exist without testing? For Man must be examined more than any other creature, and therefore he must be tested through every other creature. How?"
"Spirit is to be tested by spirit, flesh by flesh, earth by water, fire by cold, fight by resistance, good by evil, beauty by deformity, poverty by riches, sweetness by bitterness, health by sickness, long by short, hard by soft, height by depth, light by darkness, life by death, Paradise by punishments, the Heavenly Kingdom by Gehenna, earthly things by earthly things and heavenly things by heavenly things. Hence man is tested by every creature in Paradise, on earth and in Hell; and then he is placed in Heaven."
Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias
compare with 2nd Nephi 2:10 - 25
The complex imagery, the divine voice explaining them and answering questions, even the harsh seeming directness of the voice at times remind me a little of Nephi.
"Therefore listen and understand me, you who say in your hearts 'what are these things and why?' Oh, why are you so foolish in your hearts, you who have been made in the image and likeness of God? How can such great glory and honor, which is given to you, exist without testing, as if it were an empty case of nothing? Gold must be tested in the fire, and precious stones to smooth them, must be polished, and all things of this kind must be diligently scrutinized. Hence, O foolish humans, how can that which was made in the image and likeness of God exist without testing? For Man must be examined more than any other creature, and therefore he must be tested through every other creature. How?"
"Spirit is to be tested by spirit, flesh by flesh, earth by water, fire by cold, fight by resistance, good by evil, beauty by deformity, poverty by riches, sweetness by bitterness, health by sickness, long by short, hard by soft, height by depth, light by darkness, life by death, Paradise by punishments, the Heavenly Kingdom by Gehenna, earthly things by earthly things and heavenly things by heavenly things. Hence man is tested by every creature in Paradise, on earth and in Hell; and then he is placed in Heaven."
Hildegard of Bingen
Scivias
compare with 2nd Nephi 2:10 - 25
The complex imagery, the divine voice explaining them and answering questions, even the harsh seeming directness of the voice at times remind me a little of Nephi.
But a small moment...
"And consider this which is near to thee, this boundless abyss of the past and of the future in which all things disappear. How then is he not a fool who is puffed up with such things or plagued about them and makes himself miserable? for they vex him only for a time, and a short time."
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Friday, October 27, 2017
Woman, in the picture language of mythology...
II - Initiation
2 - The Meeting with the Goddess
"Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
2 - The Meeting with the Goddess
"Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Havel's critique of modern attempts to explain the concept of Responsibility
"But what, in fact, is human responsibility? And what does it relate to? It is, after all, a relationship and thus assumes the existence of two poles: a person who is responsible, and someone, or something for whom or for which he is responsible."
"Modern man, to the extent that he is not a believer and does not understand responsibility as a relationship to God, has many more or less concrete answers to this question. For some, responsibility is a relationship man has with other people, and with society, and they seek its roots (with varying degrees of emphasis) in education, in the social order, in subconscious calculation, or, on the contrary, in love and sacrifice, that is, in the various psychological potentialities of man. For some, the source of responsibility is simply conscience, a part of the biological equipment of our species (something like Freud's 'superego'). For others, it is ultimately a chimera left over from the times when people still feared the gods."
"Responsibility is certainly all of these things, or rather, they are particular expressions of it, or ways in which it might be described. But is that the end of it? Do these answers really answer the question?"
"I'm convinced they do not. At least I am not at all satisfied by these answers because I don't believe they touch at the heart of the matter. They tell us as much about responsibility as the model of an atom tells us about the essence of matter, or a tachometer about the essence of motion."
"This opinion of mine, however, is more than just an opinion: it is directly rooted in my 'experience of the world,' that is, in the experience I, as an actual person, have had over the years. All attempts to brush aside the mystery by localizing it in a particular region of the scientifically described world (ore more precisely, of the world as reconstructed by science) go directly against the grain of that experience. Such attempts, it seems to me, are self-deceiving and lazy, nothing more than one of the 'ideological' manifestations of the crisis of human identity: man surrenders his humanity by turning it over to the offices of an expert."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
The ruminations on responsibility are far less abstract here than they sound. They are the attempts of a dissident in a communist prison to make sense of the moral imperative that has pushed him into what rationally looks like a quixotic confrontation with remorseless, naked power. Why in heaven's name do we do it?
"Modern man, to the extent that he is not a believer and does not understand responsibility as a relationship to God, has many more or less concrete answers to this question. For some, responsibility is a relationship man has with other people, and with society, and they seek its roots (with varying degrees of emphasis) in education, in the social order, in subconscious calculation, or, on the contrary, in love and sacrifice, that is, in the various psychological potentialities of man. For some, the source of responsibility is simply conscience, a part of the biological equipment of our species (something like Freud's 'superego'). For others, it is ultimately a chimera left over from the times when people still feared the gods."
"Responsibility is certainly all of these things, or rather, they are particular expressions of it, or ways in which it might be described. But is that the end of it? Do these answers really answer the question?"
"I'm convinced they do not. At least I am not at all satisfied by these answers because I don't believe they touch at the heart of the matter. They tell us as much about responsibility as the model of an atom tells us about the essence of matter, or a tachometer about the essence of motion."
"This opinion of mine, however, is more than just an opinion: it is directly rooted in my 'experience of the world,' that is, in the experience I, as an actual person, have had over the years. All attempts to brush aside the mystery by localizing it in a particular region of the scientifically described world (ore more precisely, of the world as reconstructed by science) go directly against the grain of that experience. Such attempts, it seems to me, are self-deceiving and lazy, nothing more than one of the 'ideological' manifestations of the crisis of human identity: man surrenders his humanity by turning it over to the offices of an expert."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
The ruminations on responsibility are far less abstract here than they sound. They are the attempts of a dissident in a communist prison to make sense of the moral imperative that has pushed him into what rationally looks like a quixotic confrontation with remorseless, naked power. Why in heaven's name do we do it?
Satori defined and contrasted
"Satori may be defined as an intuitive looking into the nature of things in contradistinction to the analytical or logical understanding of it. Practically, it means the unfolding of a new world hitherto unperceived in the confusion of a dualistically-trained mind. Or we may say that with satori our entire surroundings are viewed from quite an unexpected angle of perception. Whatever this is, the world for those who have gained a satori is no more the old world as it used to be; even with all its flowing streams and burning fires, it is never the same one again. Logically stated, all its opposites and contradictions are united and harmonized into a consistent organic whole. This is a mystery and a miracle, but according to the Zen masters such is being performed every day. Satori can thus be had only through our once personally experiencing it."
"....In the psychology of religion this spiritual enhancement of one's whole life is called 'conversion.' But as the term is generally used by Christian converts, it cannot be applied in its strict sense to the Buddhist experience, especially to that of the Zen followers; the term has too affective or emotional a shade to take the place of satori, which is above all noetic. The general tendency of Buddhism is, as we know, more intellectual than emotional, and its doctrine of Enlightenment distinguishes it sharply from the Christian view of Salvation. Zen, as one of the Mahayana schools naturally shares a large amount of what we may call transcendental intellectualism...."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Both his recognition of some commonality with Christian 'conversion' and his emphasis on its differences puts me in mind of Thomas Merton's engagement with Buddhism - Zen in particular. Merton was struck by so much that seemed common between the monastic disciplines and experiences of the two traditions, but also wondered about the differences. One tool he used to explore that difference was reading and thinking about the experiences of Buddhist converts to Christianity. He concluded that they were seeking a "personal element," the "personal revelation of God" that was "in Buddhism, but it was not explicit."
For those who need a definition of the term noetic:
"no•et•ic: From the Greek noēsis / noētikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, or subjective understanding"
"For centuries, philosophers from Plato forward have used the term noetic to refer to experiences that pioneering psychologist William James (1902) described as:
http://noetic.org/about/what-are-noetic-sciences
The website is owned by the Institute of Noetic Sciences,
founded by Astronaut Edgar Mitchell
who does not hesitate to describe his own experience during his return from the Moon by the Buddhist term Samadhi, though it includes feelings and insights that would be more at home in Merton's world than Suzuki's -
“The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. . . .The knowledge came to me directly.”
"....In the psychology of religion this spiritual enhancement of one's whole life is called 'conversion.' But as the term is generally used by Christian converts, it cannot be applied in its strict sense to the Buddhist experience, especially to that of the Zen followers; the term has too affective or emotional a shade to take the place of satori, which is above all noetic. The general tendency of Buddhism is, as we know, more intellectual than emotional, and its doctrine of Enlightenment distinguishes it sharply from the Christian view of Salvation. Zen, as one of the Mahayana schools naturally shares a large amount of what we may call transcendental intellectualism...."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Both his recognition of some commonality with Christian 'conversion' and his emphasis on its differences puts me in mind of Thomas Merton's engagement with Buddhism - Zen in particular. Merton was struck by so much that seemed common between the monastic disciplines and experiences of the two traditions, but also wondered about the differences. One tool he used to explore that difference was reading and thinking about the experiences of Buddhist converts to Christianity. He concluded that they were seeking a "personal element," the "personal revelation of God" that was "in Buddhism, but it was not explicit."
For those who need a definition of the term noetic:
"no•et•ic: From the Greek noēsis / noētikos, meaning inner wisdom, direct knowing, or subjective understanding"
"For centuries, philosophers from Plato forward have used the term noetic to refer to experiences that pioneering psychologist William James (1902) described as:
…states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority."This from the following website:
http://noetic.org/about/what-are-noetic-sciences
The website is owned by the Institute of Noetic Sciences,
founded by Astronaut Edgar Mitchell
who does not hesitate to describe his own experience during his return from the Moon by the Buddhist term Samadhi, though it includes feelings and insights that would be more at home in Merton's world than Suzuki's -
“The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. . . .The knowledge came to me directly.”
Thursday, October 26, 2017
As A Man Thinketh...
"Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts. Dye it then with a continuous series of such thoughts as these:"
Marcus Aurelius then goes on to give a list of the kind of thoughts he wanted to dye his mind with. What thoughts would you like to dye with? What tinge has my own soul taken, and how would I like to change it?
Marcus Aurelius then goes on to give a list of the kind of thoughts he wanted to dye his mind with. What thoughts would you like to dye with? What tinge has my own soul taken, and how would I like to change it?
The Meeting With the Goddess
II - Initiation
2 - The Meeting with the Goddess
"The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage (ἱερὸς γάμος) of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
2 - The Meeting with the Goddess
"The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage (ἱερὸς γάμος) of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Satori as a Baptism of Fire
"The essence of Zen Buddhism consists in acquiring a new viewpoint on life and things generally. By this I mean that if we want to get into the inmost life of Zen, we must forgo all our ordinary habits of thinking which control our everyday life, we must try to see if there is any other way of judging things, or rather if our ordinary way is always sufficient to give us the ultimate satisfaction of our spiritual needs. If we feel dissatisfied somehow with this life, if there is something in our ordinary way of living that deprives us of freedom in the most sanctified sense, we must endeavor to find a way somewhere which gives us a sense of finality and contentment. Zen proposes to do this for us and assures us of the acquirement of a new point of view in which life assumes a fresher, deeper and more satisfying aspect. This acquirement, however, is really and naturally the greatest mental cataclysm one can through with in life. It is no easy task, it is a kind of fiery baptism, and one has to go through the storm, the earthquake, the overthrowing of mountains, and the breaking in pieces of rocks."
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
D. T. Suzuki
Zen Buddhism
Havel - Responsibility and Identity
"The problem of human identity remains at the center of my thinking about human affairs. If I use the word 'identity,' it is not because I believe it explains anything about the secret of human existence; I began using it when I was developing my plays, or thinking about them later, because it helped me clarify the ramifications of the theme that most attracted me: 'the crisis of human identity.' All my plays in fact are variations on this theme, the disintegration of man's oneness with himself and the loss of everything that gives human existence a meaningful order, continuity and its unique outline."
"At the same time, as you must have noticed from my letters, the importance of the notion of human responsibility has grown in my meditations. It has begun to appear, with increasing clarity, as that fundamental point from which all identity grows and by which it stands or falls; it is the foundation, the root, the center of gravity, the constructional principle or axis of identity, something like the 'idea' that determines its degree and type. It is the mortar binding it together, and when the mortar dries out, identity too begins irreversibly to crumble and fall apart. (That is why I wrote you that the secret of man is the secret of his responsibility)."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
"At the same time, as you must have noticed from my letters, the importance of the notion of human responsibility has grown in my meditations. It has begun to appear, with increasing clarity, as that fundamental point from which all identity grows and by which it stands or falls; it is the foundation, the root, the center of gravity, the constructional principle or axis of identity, something like the 'idea' that determines its degree and type. It is the mortar binding it together, and when the mortar dries out, identity too begins irreversibly to crumble and fall apart. (That is why I wrote you that the secret of man is the secret of his responsibility)."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Monday, October 23, 2017
Spiritual Reticence in the Modern/Postmodern Era's
Havel's description of a belief in the survival of human personality is thought provoking and suggestive, but certainly isn't really a logically reasoned philosophical "proof" of immortality. Nor is it really the foundation of his own certainty. He admits as much to his wife at the end of the passage we quoted in the last post -
"You have often wondered where I, such a rational man, come by my conviction that the human soul is immortal. In time, I'll try to write something longer and more fundamental about it; but if you like, you may take what I've written today as a small contribution to the subject. I haven't explained the real root of my faith in immortality, I've merely indicated a way in which modern man can conceive of immortality or how he might include it in his picture of his world."
The mystic vision is no less present in our modern age of unbelief, but it has a harder time giving voice to its insights, because, for far too many, there no longer exists a commonly accepted language in which to express the experience. They, like Wittgenstein, find themselves simply saying - "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
"You have often wondered where I, such a rational man, come by my conviction that the human soul is immortal. In time, I'll try to write something longer and more fundamental about it; but if you like, you may take what I've written today as a small contribution to the subject. I haven't explained the real root of my faith in immortality, I've merely indicated a way in which modern man can conceive of immortality or how he might include it in his picture of his world."
The mystic vision is no less present in our modern age of unbelief, but it has a harder time giving voice to its insights, because, for far too many, there no longer exists a commonly accepted language in which to express the experience. They, like Wittgenstein, find themselves simply saying - "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Sunday, October 22, 2017
Havel - Life after Death
He's not Christian. His belief system and philosophical vocabulary are heavily shaped by Phenomenology and Existentialism. And yet, similar to his belief in "something" transcendent that gives meaning to existence which he hesitates to call God, Havel also voices a conviction in the survival of "what matters" in a person beyond that end we call death --
"....human existence not only extends beyond the physical existence of its bearer, it clearly goes even beyond the physical existence of the experience of it by others. Nothing that has once happened can un-happen; everything that once was, in whatever form, still is - forever lodged in the "memory of Being." And everything we consider real, actual, present, is only a small and vaguely defined island in the ocean of 'imaginary,' 'potential,' or 'past' Being. It is from this matrix alone that it draws its substance and its meaning; only against this background can we experience it in the way we do. Along with everything that ever happened in whatever way (or could or should have happened) and what can now no longer un-happen, human personality, human existence too will endure, once and for all, in the 'memory of Being.' In other words, not only will it not cease to exist when its 'owner' goes into another room, or is imprisoned, or when everyone else has forgotten about him, but it will not cease to exist even when he dies, nor even when the last man who ever knew him or knew that someone like him ever existed, forgets about him or dies. Nothing can ever erase from the history of Being a human personality that once was; it exists in that history forever."
"But it exists there - and this is the most important aspect of the whole matter - in a radically different way from everything else, from my Parma cutlet in the Rotisserie, for example, which is indubitably a part of that history as well. The point is that human existence, as I have tried to indicate, is not just something that has simply happened; it is an 'image of the world,' an 'aspect of the world's Being,' a 'challenge to the world,' and as such - it seems to me - it necessarily forms a very special node in the tissue of Being. It is not simply something separate and individual, enclosed within itself and limited to itself, but it is, repeatedly, the whole world. It is as if it were a light constantly reilluminating the world; a crystal in which the world is constantly being reflected; a point upon which all of Being's lines of force constantly appear to converge, centripetally, as it were. Human existence, I would say, is not just a particular fact or datum, but a kind of gospel as well, pointing to the absolute and, in a way that has no precedent, manifesting the mystery of the world and the question of its meaning."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
"....human existence not only extends beyond the physical existence of its bearer, it clearly goes even beyond the physical existence of the experience of it by others. Nothing that has once happened can un-happen; everything that once was, in whatever form, still is - forever lodged in the "memory of Being." And everything we consider real, actual, present, is only a small and vaguely defined island in the ocean of 'imaginary,' 'potential,' or 'past' Being. It is from this matrix alone that it draws its substance and its meaning; only against this background can we experience it in the way we do. Along with everything that ever happened in whatever way (or could or should have happened) and what can now no longer un-happen, human personality, human existence too will endure, once and for all, in the 'memory of Being.' In other words, not only will it not cease to exist when its 'owner' goes into another room, or is imprisoned, or when everyone else has forgotten about him, but it will not cease to exist even when he dies, nor even when the last man who ever knew him or knew that someone like him ever existed, forgets about him or dies. Nothing can ever erase from the history of Being a human personality that once was; it exists in that history forever."
"But it exists there - and this is the most important aspect of the whole matter - in a radically different way from everything else, from my Parma cutlet in the Rotisserie, for example, which is indubitably a part of that history as well. The point is that human existence, as I have tried to indicate, is not just something that has simply happened; it is an 'image of the world,' an 'aspect of the world's Being,' a 'challenge to the world,' and as such - it seems to me - it necessarily forms a very special node in the tissue of Being. It is not simply something separate and individual, enclosed within itself and limited to itself, but it is, repeatedly, the whole world. It is as if it were a light constantly reilluminating the world; a crystal in which the world is constantly being reflected; a point upon which all of Being's lines of force constantly appear to converge, centripetally, as it were. Human existence, I would say, is not just a particular fact or datum, but a kind of gospel as well, pointing to the absolute and, in a way that has no precedent, manifesting the mystery of the world and the question of its meaning."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Saturday, October 21, 2017
Ondra Lysohorsky on Poetry
I'm having trouble finding anything by Lysohorsky in print in Northern Utah's libraries - either college or public, so I'm beginning to mine the internet.
"My poetry is humanist poetry. It speaks up for the best in people.
At my age, I’ve had enough of politics. I’ve been a victim of
brown fascism and for years I’ve been muzzled by red fascism.
But a poet has a duty to speak up for humanity and the lasting
verities. That’s why I never give up. That’s why I’m delighted
when some man or woman in France or Greece or Japan or in any
other corner of the world reads my poems in translation. It’s a
minor victory!"
Óndra Łysohorsky
Gill, David
1978-1979 ‘Ondra Lysohorsky – poet of Lachia (1978/9)’. Cine film (Super 8).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYjI9cPCd20
1978-1979 ‘Ondra Lysohorsky – poet of Lachia (1978/9)’. Cine film (Super 8).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYjI9cPCd20
(English translation presumably by David Gill; accessed 17 November 2014).
Quote and citation from
SUSANNA WITT
PASTERNAK, ŁYSOHORSKY AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF “UNHEROIC” TRANSLATION
Russian Literature LXXVIII (2015) III/IVPASTERNAK, ŁYSOHORSKY AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF “UNHEROIC” TRANSLATION
Monday, October 16, 2017
The Moment of Temptation
Shakespeare's genius often shows in his apt characterization of situations we all face. Who, in the moment when temptation seems to be gaining the upper hand hasn't faced the question of identity that Angelo poses -
"What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?"
"What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?"
Isabella's arguments for mercy
Measure for Measure is a play where Virtue and Mercy win. I'm finding it interesting to watch Shakespeare work with his themes: virtue and vice, justice and mercy. Today I focus on Isabella's arguments for clemency, some of which are quite powerful and moving:
"No ceremony that to great ones 'longs,
Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword,
The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe,
Become them with one half so good a grace
As mercy does."
........................................
"Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that;
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made."
.........................................
"O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant."
.........................................
"Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep;"
.........................................
"Go to your bosom;
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
That's like my brother's fault: if it confess
A natural guiltiness such as is his,
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
Against my brother's life."
William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure
"No ceremony that to great ones 'longs,
Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword,
The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe,
Become them with one half so good a grace
As mercy does."
........................................
"Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that;
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made."
.........................................
"O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant."
.........................................
"Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder! Merciful Heaven,
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle: but man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep;"
.........................................
"Go to your bosom;
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
That's like my brother's fault: if it confess
A natural guiltiness such as is his,
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
Against my brother's life."
William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure
Trials, continued
II - Initiation
1 - The Road of Trials
"The ordeal is a deepening of the problem of the first threshold and the question is still in balance: Can the ego put itself to death? For many-headed is this surrounding Hydra; one head cut off, two more appear - unless the right caustic is applied to the mutilated stump. The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination. Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed - again, again, and again. Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
1 - The Road of Trials
"The ordeal is a deepening of the problem of the first threshold and the question is still in balance: Can the ego put itself to death? For many-headed is this surrounding Hydra; one head cut off, two more appear - unless the right caustic is applied to the mutilated stump. The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination. Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed - again, again, and again. Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
The Road of Trials
II - Initiation
1 - The Road of Trials
"Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage."
"....And so it happens that anyone - in whatever society - undertakes for himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolic figures (an one of which may swallow him) .... In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the 'purification of the self,' where the senses are 'cleansed and humbled,' and the energies and interests 'concentrated upon transcendental things"; or in a vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past. In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
His quotes in this passage are from
Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism, A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness
1 - The Road of Trials
"Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage."
"....And so it happens that anyone - in whatever society - undertakes for himself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolic figures (an one of which may swallow him) .... In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the 'purification of the self,' where the senses are 'cleansed and humbled,' and the energies and interests 'concentrated upon transcendental things"; or in a vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past. In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
His quotes in this passage are from
Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism, A Study in the Nature and Development of Man's Spiritual Consciousness
Let not your left hand know....
"One man, when he has done a service to another, is ready to set it down to his account as a favor conferred. Another is not ready to do this, but still in his own mind he thinks of the man as his debtor, and he knows what he has done. A third in a manner does not even know what he has done, but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, and seeks nothing more after it has once produced his proper fruit....so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season."
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Friday, October 13, 2017
He who hesitates....
"Our doubts are traitors
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt."
Shakespeare
Measure for Measure
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt."
Shakespeare
Measure for Measure
The Test
"Lord Angelo is precise;
Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be."
Shakespeare
Measure for Measure
The test Vincentio proposes for Angelo (leaving him in charge of the government of the city in his absence) is a close parallel to the test we all face in leaving the pre-existence for mortality. What will we do, given the power to do as we please, out of the restraining presence and oversight of God?
Stands at a guard with envy; scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone: hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be."
Shakespeare
Measure for Measure
The test Vincentio proposes for Angelo (leaving him in charge of the government of the city in his absence) is a close parallel to the test we all face in leaving the pre-existence for mortality. What will we do, given the power to do as we please, out of the restraining presence and oversight of God?
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
Reverie
"It is easy for men who work in the fields all day long to fall into the habit of silence as the mull endlessly over one thing and another. The mystery of things, their how and why, conduces to silence. It is enough for such men to observe things and recognize their impenetrability. You can see this state of mind reflected in their eyes. My uncle Lansana's glance was astonishingly sharp when it lighted on something. But this rarely occurred. he remained entirely preoccupied, still in that reverie which he indulged in endlessly in the fields."
Camara Laye
The Dark Child
Camara Laye
The Dark Child
Writing While "in the Groove"
"I enjoy writing only when I know its just right, when it flows, when I have a decent idea (which seldom happens in my case, because very little seems to suit my rather special approach), when the thing 'writes itself,' as they say. At such times I enjoy writing perhaps more than anything else. When it doesn't flow, or when I feel it isn't exactly right - that is, when it doesn't precisely fit my poetics - then not only do I not enjoy writing, it actually repels me."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Monday, October 9, 2017
Havel and Jan Werich
In letter 53, Havel responds to news of the death of Jan Werich. Werich was an early mentor of Havel's -
"...he took me on at Theater ABC at a time when I had no prospects whatsoever....He had one exceptionally important influence on me: he helped me realize...that theater can be something incomparably more than just a play, a director, actors, audience and an auditorium: it is a special focus of social and intellectual life, helping to crate the 'spirit of the times' and embodying and manifesting its fantasy and humor; it is a living instrument of social self-awareness, one that is, in an unrepeatable way, lodged in its own time."
Werich was a much older man, who's roots went firmly back to the time of Capek and Masaryk. He belonged to an "avant-garde, with its wonderfully brash self-confidence and messianism" that arose in the "humanistic traditions of the First Republic." The years seem to have left Werich disillusioned however -
"From several recent conversations with him, I gathered he was afflicted by a deep skepticism and resignation, an isolated, sad, bitter and disaffected man, without faith and without hope. For someone who loved living so much and who in a way was the embodiment of love for the world and everything good in it, this development must have radically (though perhaps subconsciously) undermined his zest for living - and this, as we know, is one of the most destructive of diseases."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
"...he took me on at Theater ABC at a time when I had no prospects whatsoever....He had one exceptionally important influence on me: he helped me realize...that theater can be something incomparably more than just a play, a director, actors, audience and an auditorium: it is a special focus of social and intellectual life, helping to crate the 'spirit of the times' and embodying and manifesting its fantasy and humor; it is a living instrument of social self-awareness, one that is, in an unrepeatable way, lodged in its own time."
Werich was a much older man, who's roots went firmly back to the time of Capek and Masaryk. He belonged to an "avant-garde, with its wonderfully brash self-confidence and messianism" that arose in the "humanistic traditions of the First Republic." The years seem to have left Werich disillusioned however -
"From several recent conversations with him, I gathered he was afflicted by a deep skepticism and resignation, an isolated, sad, bitter and disaffected man, without faith and without hope. For someone who loved living so much and who in a way was the embodiment of love for the world and everything good in it, this development must have radically (though perhaps subconsciously) undermined his zest for living - and this, as we know, is one of the most destructive of diseases."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Havel and Kafka
"I'm reading Brod's biography of Kafka....I'm delighted by each new thing I learn about Kafka because of how precisely it corresponds to what I have assumed and imagined to be true. I've always harbored a feeling...that I somehow understand Kafka better than others, not because I can claim a deeper intellectual insight into his work, but because of an intensely personal and existential understanding of experience that borders on spiritual kinship."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
There is a scene in the movie Invictus where Rugby captain Pienaar wonders (thinking about Nelson Mandela) what kind of man "could spend thirty years in a tiny cell, and come out ready to forgive the people who put [him] there?" I have my own wonder about Havel. Out of the debris of communism after the Prague Spring, with only Heidegger, Camus, Kafka, the theater of the absurd (Ionesco and Becket of all people) and a little Frank Zappa to inspire him, how does he emerge as a major moral and spiritual force within East Europe's dissident movement? A champion of meaning in a world where so many believed it had ceased to exist?
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
There is a scene in the movie Invictus where Rugby captain Pienaar wonders (thinking about Nelson Mandela) what kind of man "could spend thirty years in a tiny cell, and come out ready to forgive the people who put [him] there?" I have my own wonder about Havel. Out of the debris of communism after the Prague Spring, with only Heidegger, Camus, Kafka, the theater of the absurd (Ionesco and Becket of all people) and a little Frank Zappa to inspire him, how does he emerge as a major moral and spiritual force within East Europe's dissident movement? A champion of meaning in a world where so many believed it had ceased to exist?
Saturday, October 7, 2017
The Threshold and the "Belly of the Whale" - temple parallels
I - Departure
5 - The Belly of the Whale
"The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed in the unknown, and would appear to have died."
"....This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation...here, instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward to be born again. The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshiper into a temple - where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal. The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond, above, and below the confines of the world, are one and the same. That is why the approaches to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silences within. They are the preliminary embodiments of the dangerous aspect of the presence, corresponding to the mythological ogres that bound the conventional world, or to the two rows of teeth of the whale. They illustrate the fact that the devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis. His secular character remains without; as a snake its slough. Once inside he may be said to have died to time and returned to the World Womb, the World Navel, the Earthly Paradise. The mere fact that anyone can physically walk past the temple guardians does not invalidate their significance; for if the intruder is incapable of encompassing the sanctuary, then he has effectively remained without....Allegorically, then, the passage into a temple and the hero dive through the jaws of the whale are identical adventures, both denoting in picture language, the life-centering, life-renewing act."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
5 - The Belly of the Whale
"The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed in the unknown, and would appear to have died."
"....This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation...here, instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward to be born again. The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshiper into a temple - where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal. The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond, above, and below the confines of the world, are one and the same. That is why the approaches to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silences within. They are the preliminary embodiments of the dangerous aspect of the presence, corresponding to the mythological ogres that bound the conventional world, or to the two rows of teeth of the whale. They illustrate the fact that the devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis. His secular character remains without; as a snake its slough. Once inside he may be said to have died to time and returned to the World Womb, the World Navel, the Earthly Paradise. The mere fact that anyone can physically walk past the temple guardians does not invalidate their significance; for if the intruder is incapable of encompassing the sanctuary, then he has effectively remained without....Allegorically, then, the passage into a temple and the hero dive through the jaws of the whale are identical adventures, both denoting in picture language, the life-centering, life-renewing act."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
The Threshold and its Guardians
I - Departure
4 - The Crossing of the First Threshold
"With the personification of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the 'threshold guardian' at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world...standing for the limits of the hero's present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown and danger."
"....This brings out the sense of the first, or protective aspect of the threshold guardian. One had better not challenge the watcher of the established bounds. And yet - it is only by advancing beyond those same bounds, provoking the destructive other aspect of the same power, that the individual passes, either alive or in death, into a new zone of experience....The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
4 - The Crossing of the First Threshold
"With the personification of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the 'threshold guardian' at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world...standing for the limits of the hero's present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown and danger."
"....This brings out the sense of the first, or protective aspect of the threshold guardian. One had better not challenge the watcher of the established bounds. And yet - it is only by advancing beyond those same bounds, provoking the destructive other aspect of the same power, that the individual passes, either alive or in death, into a new zone of experience....The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Friday, October 6, 2017
Central and Eastern European Literature
I'm leaving Daniel Alarcon's list for a while, but taking just a moment to consider the books I completed -
- Nowhere Man / Aleksandar Hemon
- Flight Without End / Joseph Roth
- This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen / Tadeusz Borowski
- Ours / Sergei Dovlatov
- The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat / Ryszard Kapuściński
I'm grateful for the chance to have some concrete glimpses of the intellectual currents, histories and attitudes of a part of the world and a period of time I have mostly known from summary and encapsulation.
Friday, September 29, 2017
The Dangerous Herald
I - Departure
3 - Supernatural Aid
"Not infrequently, the supernatural helper is masculine in form....Protective and dangerous, motherly and fatherly at the same time, this supernatural principle of guardianship and direction unites in itself all the ambiguities of the unconscious - thus signifying the support of our conscious personality by that other, larger system, but also the inscrutability of the guide that we are following, to the peril of all our rational ends."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
3 - Supernatural Aid
"Not infrequently, the supernatural helper is masculine in form....Protective and dangerous, motherly and fatherly at the same time, this supernatural principle of guardianship and direction unites in itself all the ambiguities of the unconscious - thus signifying the support of our conscious personality by that other, larger system, but also the inscrutability of the guide that we are following, to the peril of all our rational ends."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Havel on the Theater of the Absurd
"...the aesthetics of my plays - to simplify it somewhat - were based on a particular kind of foregrounding...i.e., on a viewpoint that removes the obfuscations of conventional perception from phenomena, tears them out of their habitual and automatic interpretational contexts and attempts to perceive them - as Ivan writes - "without glasses." Among other things, that means perceiving their absurdity as an insufficiently clear dimension of reality (because it is obscured by conventional interpretations). Ridding phenomena of false meaning. Manifesting them as absurd, and thus opening the question of their true meaning. The absurdity of entities as an invitation to inquire after the nature of being."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Not by any means the majority view of the writers of absurdist theater, but one I'm very sympathetic with. Absurdity is the experience of an absence. Meaning is what is absent. The hole suggests what once (and what might again) fill it.
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Not by any means the majority view of the writers of absurdist theater, but one I'm very sympathetic with. Absurdity is the experience of an absence. Meaning is what is absent. The hole suggests what once (and what might again) fill it.
Havel's Philosophical Background
"Of all the philosophy I have read since my youth, existentialism, and thus phenomenology as well, were always what stimulated and attracted me most. I enjoyed reading works by those authors, yet my knowledge in that regard was always superficial. I was influenced more by the atmosphere of their thinking than I was by particular theses, concepts, conclusions, etc. I read them for the delight and excitement I found in them, rather than to learn, study or commit details to memory. For some time, therefore, I approached philosophy somewhat the way we approach art."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
In Havel's description of his relationship to God (posted earlier) you can see the vocabulary of phenomenology - being and horizon, etc. Interesting to see how the spirit of your time colors the way you approach what we think of as universal phenomenon.
Saturday, September 23, 2017
Marcus Aurelius on the nature of things
"The universe is transformation, life is opinion."
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
This pithy little summary perhaps needs a little explanation.
There are two worlds Marcus contemplates here -
1) The outer world of objective reality. Its nature, as numerous writers ancient and modern have agreed, is ceaseless change. As far as outer circumstances are concerned, the one thing you can rely upon is that they will change.
2) The inner world of subjective experience. Perhaps "attitude" is a better 21st century translation than "opinion" here. How we experience life is determined not half so much by our outer circumstances as it is by our attitude towards them.
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
This pithy little summary perhaps needs a little explanation.
There are two worlds Marcus contemplates here -
1) The outer world of objective reality. Its nature, as numerous writers ancient and modern have agreed, is ceaseless change. As far as outer circumstances are concerned, the one thing you can rely upon is that they will change.
2) The inner world of subjective experience. Perhaps "attitude" is a better 21st century translation than "opinion" here. How we experience life is determined not half so much by our outer circumstances as it is by our attitude towards them.
Riding the Tide of Destiny
I - Departure
3 - Supernatural Aid
"...in so far as the hero's act coincides with that for which his society itself is ready, he seems to ride on the great rhythm of the historical process. 'I feel myself,' said Napoleon at the opening of his Russian campaign, 'driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me.' "
Joseph Campbell
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
3 - Supernatural Aid
"...in so far as the hero's act coincides with that for which his society itself is ready, he seems to ride on the great rhythm of the historical process. 'I feel myself,' said Napoleon at the opening of his Russian campaign, 'driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me.' "
Joseph Campbell
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Supernatural Aid
I - Departure
3 - Supernatural Aid
"For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero journey is with a protective figure....
"What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny....protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One only has to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
3 - Supernatural Aid
"For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero journey is with a protective figure....
"What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny....protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One only has to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Refusals and Second Chances
I - Departure
2 - Refusal of the Call
"Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in its reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required. So it is that sometimes the predicament following an obstinate refusal of the call proves to be the occasion of a providential revelation of some unsuspected principle of release."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Saturday, September 16, 2017
Havel on Camus (and some more thoughts on refusal)
"...the most important experience of recent days has been my rereading of Camus's The Stranger. As you know, it's not a cheerful book and yet I'm indebted to it for a few moments of great joy, that special and elevating kind of joy I always feel on encountering a supreme work of art. Part of it is the sensation that it is 'just right,' exactly as it should be; in other words a feeling that I too might have written it, or even that I did write it myself. It may sound silly to put it so baldly, but I'm sure you understand what I mean. It's simply an inner identification that you can feel equally well when looking at a painting or listening to a piece of music, even though you are not a painter or composer yourself. Moreover this book has many dimensions and it merged, in an interesting way, with my own thoughts on responsibility. The stranger is not a man without responsibilities, he is merely a man who refuses to conform to conventional order, i.e., to the conventional structure of duties, and he feels obligated to accept only those duties that are an authentic expression of his own sense of responsibility."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
The "Positive" Refusal
I - Departure
2 - Refusal of the Call
"Willed introversion...is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images....If the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experience an almost superhuman degree of self-consciousness and masterful control....It cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of transformation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
2 - Refusal of the Call
"Willed introversion...is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images....If the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experience an almost superhuman degree of self-consciousness and masterful control....It cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of transformation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Refusal - II
I - Departure
2 - Refusal of the Call
"...the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's present system of ideals, virtues, goals and advantages were to be fixed and made secure."
"...if one is oneself one's god, the God himself, the will of God, the power that would destroy one's egocentric system, becomes a monster....One is harassed, both day and night, by the divine being that is the image of the living self within the locked labyrinth of one's own disoriented psyche. The ways to the gates have all been lost: there is no exit. One can only cling, like Satan, furiously to oneself and be in hell; or else break, and be annihilate at last, in God."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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