The archeologist remarked that there was an ancient center of the old city marked by a Roman crossroads, which divided the city and the earth into four quadrants — the fulcrum of medieval geography. The roads had long ago disappeared, but at each corner of the crossroads had stood a Roman column which survives to the present day. As we made our way across the city to the very center of the ancient universe, my friend explained that the Roman columns stood in the interior of a modern building. Entering the building, I immediately saw the four columns. And there, between and around the columns, stood several pinball machines. Here, at the center of the universe, was the only pinball parlor in the old city of Jerusalem. I was amazed. According to the Bible the Lord speaks only to those who are ready for His message. The prophecy was not lost — I had seen a revelation of the God who plays dice.
Major technologies often enter our civilization in an innocent and undemanding way. Some devices, which eventually become important material forces, first appear as toys. Gunpowder was first used for fireworks entertainment. The use of steam power in Hellenic Alexandria around A.D. 100 is another good example. The Greeks saw in Hero’s steam wheel only a toy, a novelty, but centuries later, steam engines would be used as the motive power for the first industrial civilizations. The Alexandrian Greeks were not ready for the idea.
I think pinball machines are modern examples of such entertainment devices — they will eventually take us over. Determinists think of the universe as a huge clockwork; I think it is a pinball machine. Playing pinball requires total concentration, the right combination of skill and chance, a mastery of indeterminacy as the ball moves across the playboard and interacts with bumpers and cushions. The machine keeps score and you can cheat a little by shaking the machine, but not too much lest it tilt. It imitates life’s randomness, rewards skill, and creates an ersatz reality which integrates into the human nervous system in a remarkable way. Someday such machines will be combined with art forms such as films and a completely artificial reality will be created. We are already part of the pinball universe.
It is no accident that pinball machines — the symbol of the indeterminate universe — stand at the center of the world. The quantum theory implies that to know the world we must observe it, and in the act of observation, uncontrolled and random processes are initiated in the world. Also, Bohr’s principle of complementarity implies that knowing everything at one time about the world — a requirement of determinism — is impossible because the conditions for knowing one thing necessarily exclude knowledge of others….
— Heinz R. Pagels, The Cosmic Code, “Randomness,” pp.102-103.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Quoting the Quoter 2
He who has painted a divine picture or written one true poem may enter unbidden the company of the immortal. They ask not how much he has done, but what height he has attained, though but for once and a little while.
— Spalding, quoted in The Love Song, “Beauty 11,” Peter Nivio Zarlenga.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
— Wolfgang Göethe, in Ibid., “Love 14.”
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his own. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with more good-humored inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., “Vision 4.”
You must close the eyes and waken in yourself that other power of vision, the birthright of all, but which few turn to use.
— Plotinus, in Ibid., “Vision 13.”
A great faith animated me, and although I did not know that I should ever be able to test the truth of my idea, I gave up every other occupation to deepen and broaden its conception. It was almost as if I prepared myself for an unknown mission.
— Marie Montessori, in Ibid., “Vision 13.”
There is nothing on earth which is not in the heavens in a heavenly form, and nothing in the heavens which is not on the earth in an earthly form.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., “Hero 30.”
The only power is conscience in the service of Justice and the only Glory is Genius in the service of truth.
— Victor Hugo, in Ibid., “Power 7.”
Had I some difficult task before me which was exhausting, I would attack it again and again until it was done. So I practiced day to day from morning till night. At first, it called for a vigorous mental effort directed against my disposition and desire, but as years went by the conflict lessened and finally my will and wish became identical. They are so today, and in this lies the secret of whatever I have achieved.
— Nikola Tesla, in Ibid., “Will 11.”
There are three marks of a superior man: being virtuous, he is free from anxiety; being wise, he is free from perplexity; being brave, he is free from fear.
— Confucius, in Ibid., “Courage 7.”
If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Ibid., “Evil 4.”
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
— Blaise Pascal, in Ibid., “Evil 4.”
To how much lying, extravagance, hypocrisy and servility does not fear of ridicule lead? Human respect makes us cowards and slaves. It may deter from evil, but much oftener it drives to baseness. “We are too much afraid,” said Cato, “of death, exile and poverty.”
— Spalding, in Ibid., “Fear 20.”
— Spalding, quoted in The Love Song, “Beauty 11,” Peter Nivio Zarlenga.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
— Wolfgang Göethe, in Ibid., “Love 14.”
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his own. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with more good-humored inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., “Vision 4.”
You must close the eyes and waken in yourself that other power of vision, the birthright of all, but which few turn to use.
— Plotinus, in Ibid., “Vision 13.”
A great faith animated me, and although I did not know that I should ever be able to test the truth of my idea, I gave up every other occupation to deepen and broaden its conception. It was almost as if I prepared myself for an unknown mission.
— Marie Montessori, in Ibid., “Vision 13.”
There is nothing on earth which is not in the heavens in a heavenly form, and nothing in the heavens which is not on the earth in an earthly form.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., “Hero 30.”
The only power is conscience in the service of Justice and the only Glory is Genius in the service of truth.
— Victor Hugo, in Ibid., “Power 7.”
Had I some difficult task before me which was exhausting, I would attack it again and again until it was done. So I practiced day to day from morning till night. At first, it called for a vigorous mental effort directed against my disposition and desire, but as years went by the conflict lessened and finally my will and wish became identical. They are so today, and in this lies the secret of whatever I have achieved.
— Nikola Tesla, in Ibid., “Will 11.”
There are three marks of a superior man: being virtuous, he is free from anxiety; being wise, he is free from perplexity; being brave, he is free from fear.
— Confucius, in Ibid., “Courage 7.”
If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Ibid., “Evil 4.”
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
— Blaise Pascal, in Ibid., “Evil 4.”
To how much lying, extravagance, hypocrisy and servility does not fear of ridicule lead? Human respect makes us cowards and slaves. It may deter from evil, but much oftener it drives to baseness. “We are too much afraid,” said Cato, “of death, exile and poverty.”
— Spalding, in Ibid., “Fear 20.”
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Quoting the Quoter 1
It came into him life; it went out from him truth. It came to him short-lived actions; it went out from him immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is his quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it is issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in The Love Song, “Poet 6,” Peter Nivio Zarlenga.
When we build let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone, let it be such work as our descendents will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone upon stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, “See! This our fathers did for us.”
— John Ruskin, in Ibid., “Humanity 7.”
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.
— Kahlil Gibran, in Ibid., “Humanity 8.”
Yesterday is but a dream. Tomorrow is only a vision. But today lived for truth makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day! Such is the salutation to the dawn.
— James W. Henderson translation from the Sanskrit, in Ibid., “Truth 5-6.”
Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectations of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, “O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friends, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no laws less than the eternal law . . . I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., “Truth 7.”
Truth is truth whether uttered by the learned or the ignorant, by millions or by a solitary speaking in the midst of a desert.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, in Ibid., “Truth 8.”
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
— Leonardo da Vinci, in Ibid., “Truth 16.”
Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages.
— Turkish Proverb, in Ibid., “Truth 16.”
I am only one, but still I am one; I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.
— Edward E. Hale, in Ibid., “Action 6.”
For those who approve but do not carry out, who are stirred, but do not change, I can do nothing at all.
— Confucius, in Ibid., “Action 7.”
Tough decisions never get easier to make; indecision is the quickest killer of ideas — and man.
— Willi Unsoeld, in Ibid., “Action 8.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in The Love Song, “Poet 6,” Peter Nivio Zarlenga.
When we build let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone, let it be such work as our descendents will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone upon stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, “See! This our fathers did for us.”
— John Ruskin, in Ibid., “Humanity 7.”
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh, and the greatness which does not bow before children.
— Kahlil Gibran, in Ibid., “Humanity 8.”
Yesterday is but a dream. Tomorrow is only a vision. But today lived for truth makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day! Such is the salutation to the dawn.
— James W. Henderson translation from the Sanskrit, in Ibid., “Truth 5-6.”
Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectations of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, “O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friends, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no laws less than the eternal law . . . I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Ibid., “Truth 7.”
Truth is truth whether uttered by the learned or the ignorant, by millions or by a solitary speaking in the midst of a desert.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, in Ibid., “Truth 8.”
Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.
— Leonardo da Vinci, in Ibid., “Truth 16.”
Whoever tells the truth is chased out of nine villages.
— Turkish Proverb, in Ibid., “Truth 16.”
I am only one, but still I am one; I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.
— Edward E. Hale, in Ibid., “Action 6.”
For those who approve but do not carry out, who are stirred, but do not change, I can do nothing at all.
— Confucius, in Ibid., “Action 7.”
Tough decisions never get easier to make; indecision is the quickest killer of ideas — and man.
— Willi Unsoeld, in Ibid., “Action 8.”
Friday, January 28, 2011
Sing Singers
Democracy
the problem, of course, isn’t the Democratic System,
it’s the
living parts which make up the Democratic System.
the next person you pass on the street,
multiply
him or
her by
3 or 4 or 30 or 40 million
and you will know immediately
why things remain non-functional
for most of
us.
I wish I had a cure for the chess pieces
we call humanity . . .
we’ve undergone any number of political
cures
and we all remain
foolish enough to hope
that the one on the way
NOW
will cure almost
everything.
fellow citizens,
the problem never was the Democratic
system, the problem is
you.
— Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993, p. 216.
the great escape
listen, he said, you ever seen a bunch of crabs in a
bucket?
no, I told him.
well, what happens is that then one crab
will climb up on top of the others
and begin to climb toward the top of the bucket,
then, just as he’s about to escape
another crab grabs him and pulls him back
down.
really? I asked.
really, he said, and this job is just like that, none
of the others want anybody to get out of
here. That’s just the way it is
in the postal service!
I believe you, I said.
just then the supervisor walked up and said,
you fellows were talking.
there is no talking allowed on this
job.
I had been there eleven and one-half
years.
I got off my stool and climbed right up the
supervisor
and then I reached up and pulled myself right
out of there.
it was so easy it was unbelievable.
but none of the others followed me.
and after that, whenever I had crab legs
I thought about that place.
I must have thought about that place
maybe 5 or 6 times
before I switched to lobster.
— Charles Bukowski, Ibid., pp. 302-303.
BLESS THE LORD, O MY SOUL,
who made you a singer in his holy house forever, who has given you a tongue like the wind, and a heart like the sea, who has journeyed you from generation to generation to this impeccable moment of sweet bewilderment. Bless the Lord who has surrounded the traffic of human interest with the majesty of his law, who has given a direction to the falling leaf, and a goal to the green shoot. Tremble, my soul, before the one who creates good and evil, that a man may choose among worlds; and tremble before the furnace of light in which you are formed and to which you return, until the time when he suspends his light and withdraws into himself, and there is no world, and there is no soul anywhere. Bless the one who judges you with his strap and his mercy, who covers with a million years of dust those who say, I have not sinned….— Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy, p. 61.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Storied Stories
Five hundred years went by, and mankind devised another version of the infinite dialogue, this time not in India, but in China. An emperor of the Han Dynasty dreamed that a man of gold flew into his room, and his ministers explained that he could only be the Buddha, who had achieved the Tao in Western lands. An emperor of the Liang Dynasty had protected that barbarian and his faith, and had founded temples and monasteries. The Brahmin Boddhidharma, twenty-eighth patriarch of Indian Buddhism, had arrived (they say after three years of wandering) at his palace in Nanking, in the south. The Emperor enumerated all the pious works he had performed. Boddhidharma listened attentively, and then told him that all those monasteries and temples and copies of the sacred books were things of the world of appearances, which is a long dream, and thus were of no consequence. Good works, he said, can lead to good retributions, but never to nirvana, which is the absolute extinction of the will, not the consequence of an act. There is no sacred doctrine, because nothing is sacred or fundamental in an illusory world. Events and beings are momentary, and we can neither say whether they are or are not.
The Emperor then asked who was the man who had spoken in this manner, and Boddhidharma, loyal to his nihilism, replied:
“Nor do I know who I am.”
These words resonated for a long time in Chinese memory. Written in the middle of the eighteenth century, the novel The Dream of the Red Chamber has the curious passage:
“He had been dreaming and then he woke up. He found himself in the ruins of a temple. On one side there was a beggar dressed in the robe of a Taoist monk. He was lame and killing fleas. Hsing-Lien asked him who he was and what place they were in. The monk answered:
'I don’t know who I am, nor where we are. I only know that the road is long.’
Hsing-Lien understood. He cut off his hair with his sword and followed the stranger.”
In the stories I have mentioned, the ascetic and the king symbolize nothing and plenitude, zero and infinity. More extreme symbols of that contrast would be a god and a dead man, and their fusion would be more economical: a god that dies. Adonis wounded by the boar of the moon goddess, Osiris thrown by Set into the waters of the Nile, Tammuz carried off to the land from which he cannot return, are all famous examples of this fusion….
— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Dialogues of Ascetic and King,” 1953, in Selected Non-Fictions, Weinberger (ed.), pp 384-385.
Taller than the rest, the distant
Man would walk among men, faintly
Calling out to angels, speaking
Their secret names. What earthly eyes
Cannot see he saw: the burning
Geometries, the crystalline
Labyrinth of God, the sordid
Whirling of infernal delights.
He knew that Glory and Hades
And all their myths are in your soul;
He knew, like the Greeks, that each day’s
The mirror of Eternity.
In flat Latin he catalogued
Whenless whyless ultimate things.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “Prologues,” 1975, in Ibid., p. 457.
The Emperor then asked who was the man who had spoken in this manner, and Boddhidharma, loyal to his nihilism, replied:
“Nor do I know who I am.”
These words resonated for a long time in Chinese memory. Written in the middle of the eighteenth century, the novel The Dream of the Red Chamber has the curious passage:
“He had been dreaming and then he woke up. He found himself in the ruins of a temple. On one side there was a beggar dressed in the robe of a Taoist monk. He was lame and killing fleas. Hsing-Lien asked him who he was and what place they were in. The monk answered:
'I don’t know who I am, nor where we are. I only know that the road is long.’
Hsing-Lien understood. He cut off his hair with his sword and followed the stranger.”
In the stories I have mentioned, the ascetic and the king symbolize nothing and plenitude, zero and infinity. More extreme symbols of that contrast would be a god and a dead man, and their fusion would be more economical: a god that dies. Adonis wounded by the boar of the moon goddess, Osiris thrown by Set into the waters of the Nile, Tammuz carried off to the land from which he cannot return, are all famous examples of this fusion….
— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Dialogues of Ascetic and King,” 1953, in Selected Non-Fictions, Weinberger (ed.), pp 384-385.
Emanuel Swedenborg
Taller than the rest, the distant
Man would walk among men, faintly
Calling out to angels, speaking
Their secret names. What earthly eyes
Cannot see he saw: the burning
Geometries, the crystalline
Labyrinth of God, the sordid
Whirling of infernal delights.
He knew that Glory and Hades
And all their myths are in your soul;
He knew, like the Greeks, that each day’s
The mirror of Eternity.
In flat Latin he catalogued
Whenless whyless ultimate things.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “Prologues,” 1975, in Ibid., p. 457.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Running in Circles?
Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors. To outline a chapter of that history is the purpose of this one.
Six centuries before the Christian era, the rhapsodist Xenophanes of Colophon, tired of the Homeric verses he recited from city to city, denounced the poets for giving the gods anthropomorphic traits and proposed to the Greeks a single God who was an eternal sphere. In Plato’s Timaeus we read that the sphere is the most perfect and most uniform shape, because all points on its surface are equidistant from the center; Olof Gigon (Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie, 183) understands Xenophanes as speaking analogically; God is spherical, because that form is the best, or the least bad, for representing divinity. Parmenides, forty years later, repeated the image: “Being is like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, whose force is constant from the center in any direction.” Caloero and Mondolfo argue that he envisioned an infinite, or infinitely growing sphere, and that those words have a dynamic meaning (Albertelli, Gli Eleati, 148). Parmenides taught in Italy; a few years after he died, the Sicilian Empedocles of Agrigento devised a laborious cosmogony; there is one stage in which the particles of earth, air, fire, and water form an endless sphere, “the round Sphairos, which rejoices in its circular solitude.”
Universal history followed its course, the too-human gods that Xenophanes attacked were reduced to poetic fictions or to demons, but it was said that one of them, Hermes Trimegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42, according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes) on whose pages all things were written. Fragments of that illusory library, compiled or forged since the third century, form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum; in one of the books, or in one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trimegistus, the French theologian Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered, at the end of the twelfth century, this formula which the ages to come would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The Pre-Socratics spoke of an endless sphere; Albertelli (like Aristotle before him) thinks that such a statement is a contradictio in adjecto, for the subject and predicate negate each other; this may be so, but the formula in the Hermetic books enables us, almost, to envision that sphere. In the thirteenth century, the image reappeared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose, which attributed it to Plato, and in the encyclopedia Speculum Triplex; in the sixteenth, the last chapter of the last book of Pantagruel referred to “that intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call God.” For the medieval mind, the meaning was clear: God is in each one of his creatures, but is not limited by any one of them. “Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee,” said Solomon (I Kings 8:27); the geometrical metaphor of the sphere must have seemed like a gloss on those words.
Dante’s poem has preserved Ptolemaic astronomy, which ruled mankind’s imagination for fourteen hundred years. The earth is the center of the universe. It is an immobile sphere; around it nine concentric spheres revolve. The first seven are the planetary heavens (the heavens of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn); the eighth, the heaven of fixed stars; the ninth, the Crystalline Heaven, also called the Primum Mobile. This in turn is surrounded by the empyrean, which is made of light. This whole laborious apparatus of hollow, transparent, and revolving spheres (one system required fifty-five) had come to be a mental necessity; De hypothesibus motuum coelestium commentariolus [Commentary on the Hypothesis of Heavenly Motions] was the timid title that Copernicus, the disputer of Aristotle, gave to the manuscript that transformed our vision of the cosmos. For one man, Giordano Bruno, the breaking of the stellar vaults was a liberation. In La cena de la ceneri [The Feast of the Ashes] he proclaimed that the world is the infinite effect of an infinite cause and that the divinity is near, “because it is in us even more than we are in ourselves.” He searched for the words that would explain Copernican space to mankind, and on one famous page he wrote: “We can state with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere” (De la causa, principio e urco, V).
That was written exultantly in 1584, still in the light of the Renaissance; seventy years later not even a glimmer of that fervor remained, and men felt lost in time and space. In time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there cannot really be a when; in space, because every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, there cannot be a where. No one exists on a certain day, in a certain place; no one knows the size of his own face. In the Renaissance, humanity thought it had reached adulthood, and it said as much through the mouths of Bruno, Campanella, and Bacon. In the seventeenth century, humanity was discouraged by a feeling of old age; to justify itself, it exhumed the belief in a slow and fatal degeneration of all creatures because of Adam’s sin. (In the fifth chapter of Genesis, we read that “all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years”; in the sixth, that “there were giants in the earth in those days.”) The first Anniversary of John Donne’s elegy “Anatomy of the World” lamented the brief life and small stature of contemporary men, who were like fairies and dwarfs. Milton, according to Johnson’s biography, feared that the genre of the epic had become impossible on earth; Glanvill thought that Adam, “the medallion of god,” enjoyed both a telescopic and microscopic vision; Robert South notably wrote: “An Aristotle was but the fragment of an Adam, and Athens, the rudiments of Paradise.” In that dejected century, the absolute space that inspired the hexameters of Lucretius, the absolute space that had been a liberation for Bruno was a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He hated the universe and yearned to adore god, but God was less real to him than the hated universe. He lamented that the firmament did not speak; he compared our lives to the shipwrecked on a desert island. He felt the incessant weight of the physical world; he felt confusion, fear, and solitude; and he expressed it in other words: “Nature is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” That is the text of the Brunschvieg edition, but the critical edition of Tourneur (Paris, 1941), reveals that Pascal started to write the word effroyable: “a frightful sphere, the center of which is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere.”
Perhaps universal history is the history of the various intonations of a few metaphors.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “Pascal’s Sphere,” 1951, in Selected Non-Fictions, Weinberger (ed.), pp. 351-353.
Six centuries before the Christian era, the rhapsodist Xenophanes of Colophon, tired of the Homeric verses he recited from city to city, denounced the poets for giving the gods anthropomorphic traits and proposed to the Greeks a single God who was an eternal sphere. In Plato’s Timaeus we read that the sphere is the most perfect and most uniform shape, because all points on its surface are equidistant from the center; Olof Gigon (Ursprung der griechischen Philosophie, 183) understands Xenophanes as speaking analogically; God is spherical, because that form is the best, or the least bad, for representing divinity. Parmenides, forty years later, repeated the image: “Being is like the mass of a well-rounded sphere, whose force is constant from the center in any direction.” Caloero and Mondolfo argue that he envisioned an infinite, or infinitely growing sphere, and that those words have a dynamic meaning (Albertelli, Gli Eleati, 148). Parmenides taught in Italy; a few years after he died, the Sicilian Empedocles of Agrigento devised a laborious cosmogony; there is one stage in which the particles of earth, air, fire, and water form an endless sphere, “the round Sphairos, which rejoices in its circular solitude.”
Universal history followed its course, the too-human gods that Xenophanes attacked were reduced to poetic fictions or to demons, but it was said that one of them, Hermes Trimegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42, according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000, according to Iamblichus; 36,525, according to the priests of Thoth, who is also Hermes) on whose pages all things were written. Fragments of that illusory library, compiled or forged since the third century, form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum; in one of the books, or in one part of the Asclepius, which was also attributed to Trimegistus, the French theologian Alain de Lille — Alanus de Insulis — discovered, at the end of the twelfth century, this formula which the ages to come would not forget: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The Pre-Socratics spoke of an endless sphere; Albertelli (like Aristotle before him) thinks that such a statement is a contradictio in adjecto, for the subject and predicate negate each other; this may be so, but the formula in the Hermetic books enables us, almost, to envision that sphere. In the thirteenth century, the image reappeared in the symbolic Roman de la Rose, which attributed it to Plato, and in the encyclopedia Speculum Triplex; in the sixteenth, the last chapter of the last book of Pantagruel referred to “that intellectual sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere, which we call God.” For the medieval mind, the meaning was clear: God is in each one of his creatures, but is not limited by any one of them. “Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee,” said Solomon (I Kings 8:27); the geometrical metaphor of the sphere must have seemed like a gloss on those words.
Dante’s poem has preserved Ptolemaic astronomy, which ruled mankind’s imagination for fourteen hundred years. The earth is the center of the universe. It is an immobile sphere; around it nine concentric spheres revolve. The first seven are the planetary heavens (the heavens of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn); the eighth, the heaven of fixed stars; the ninth, the Crystalline Heaven, also called the Primum Mobile. This in turn is surrounded by the empyrean, which is made of light. This whole laborious apparatus of hollow, transparent, and revolving spheres (one system required fifty-five) had come to be a mental necessity; De hypothesibus motuum coelestium commentariolus [Commentary on the Hypothesis of Heavenly Motions] was the timid title that Copernicus, the disputer of Aristotle, gave to the manuscript that transformed our vision of the cosmos. For one man, Giordano Bruno, the breaking of the stellar vaults was a liberation. In La cena de la ceneri [The Feast of the Ashes] he proclaimed that the world is the infinite effect of an infinite cause and that the divinity is near, “because it is in us even more than we are in ourselves.” He searched for the words that would explain Copernican space to mankind, and on one famous page he wrote: “We can state with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere” (De la causa, principio e urco, V).
That was written exultantly in 1584, still in the light of the Renaissance; seventy years later not even a glimmer of that fervor remained, and men felt lost in time and space. In time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there cannot really be a when; in space, because every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, there cannot be a where. No one exists on a certain day, in a certain place; no one knows the size of his own face. In the Renaissance, humanity thought it had reached adulthood, and it said as much through the mouths of Bruno, Campanella, and Bacon. In the seventeenth century, humanity was discouraged by a feeling of old age; to justify itself, it exhumed the belief in a slow and fatal degeneration of all creatures because of Adam’s sin. (In the fifth chapter of Genesis, we read that “all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years”; in the sixth, that “there were giants in the earth in those days.”) The first Anniversary of John Donne’s elegy “Anatomy of the World” lamented the brief life and small stature of contemporary men, who were like fairies and dwarfs. Milton, according to Johnson’s biography, feared that the genre of the epic had become impossible on earth; Glanvill thought that Adam, “the medallion of god,” enjoyed both a telescopic and microscopic vision; Robert South notably wrote: “An Aristotle was but the fragment of an Adam, and Athens, the rudiments of Paradise.” In that dejected century, the absolute space that inspired the hexameters of Lucretius, the absolute space that had been a liberation for Bruno was a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He hated the universe and yearned to adore god, but God was less real to him than the hated universe. He lamented that the firmament did not speak; he compared our lives to the shipwrecked on a desert island. He felt the incessant weight of the physical world; he felt confusion, fear, and solitude; and he expressed it in other words: “Nature is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.” That is the text of the Brunschvieg edition, but the critical edition of Tourneur (Paris, 1941), reveals that Pascal started to write the word effroyable: “a frightful sphere, the center of which is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere.”
Perhaps universal history is the history of the various intonations of a few metaphors.
— Jorge Luis Borges, “Pascal’s Sphere,” 1951, in Selected Non-Fictions, Weinberger (ed.), pp. 351-353.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Poetic Spirit
Allegro
By Tomas Transtromer
After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spiritual, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.”
The music is a home of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.
— Tomas Transtromer, “Allegro,” in The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations, Robert Bly, p. 5.
Why Mira Can’t Come Back to Her Old House
By Mirabai
The colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira’s body; all other colors washed out.
Making love with the Dark One and eating little, those are my pearl and my carnelians.
Meditation beads and the forehead streak, those are my scarves and my rings.
That’s enough feminine wiles for me. My teachers taught me this.
Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain Energy night and day.
I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries.
I don’t steal money, I don’t hit anyone. What will you charge me with?
I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.
— Mirabai, in Ibid., p. 36.
Think While You are Alive
By Kabir
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think . . . and think . . . while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you are alive,
Do you think
Ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten —
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
— Kabir, in Ibid., p. 48.
My Spiritual State
By Ghalib
When I look out, I see no hope for change.
I don’t see how anything in my life can end well.
Their funeral date is already decided, but still
People complain that they can’t sleep.
When I was young, my love disasters made me burst out laughing.
Now even funny things seem sober to me.
I know the answer — that’s what keeps me quiet.
Beyond that it’s clear I know how to speak.
Why shouldn’t I scream? I can’t stop. Perhaps
The Great One notices Ghalib only when he stops screaming.
This is the spiritual state I am in:
About myself, there isn’t any news.
I do die; the longing for death is so strong it’s killing me.
Such a death comes, but the other death doesn’t come.
What face will you wear when you visit the Kaaba?
Ghalib, you are shameless even to think of that.
— Ghalib, in Ibid., p. 373.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Inner Thought
Change yourself, rather than working to change others.
Place the inner man in control of the outer.
Abandon the false before seeking the true.
Be loving and you will be loved.
Attend to the reason why you felt hurt, not to those who hurt you.
Set inner integrity before good works.
Place thinking before speaking.
Be a real person, then a social person.
Understand yourself, then try to know others
set self-awareness before self-gratification.
Destroy negative attitudes, not negative conditions.
Place small efforts before great determinations.
— Vernon Howard, Mystic Path to Cosmic Power, p. 127.
All we need is a decision to seek the light. When that is done, all else is done for us.
A sign of deepening insight: When you see how one psychological principle connects with another. You might, for example, see how “Resist not evil” connects with the law of not worshiping false gods. How? When we resist something, perhaps an unkind remark, the very resistance implies a belief that that remark can harm us. We are, therefore, worshiping a false and powerless god — the unkind remark. Non-resistance calls the bluff and destroys the falsity.
The first step toward harmonizing with universal laws is to hear of them. Let me present four simple and basic steps which readers found helpful in my previous book, Psycho-Pictography. Called “Your Four Golden Keys to New Freedom and Happiness,” they are:
1. A sincere desire for inner change: Self-transformation begins from the moment we earnestly wish to be a different kind of person.
2. Contact with workable principles: We must connect ourselves with a source of genuine help, perhaps a book, or an enlightened teacher, or with our own inner light.
3. Self-honesty: We must heroically face the facts about ourselves, even if disturbing, in order to break the chains.
4. Persistence: With endurance, happiness comes gradually but definitely, like a blinking light that finally glows permanently.
As we read and work with mystic principles found in a book, we experience a mysterious change within. What we formerly took as attractive words and phrases now turns into a very definite feeling. This means that we have seen beyond the words; the intuitive self has broken through to transform an intellectual idea into a living experience.
— Vernon Howard, Ibid., pp. 130-131.
Unfortunately, models and images of wisdom, goodness, love, and beauty aren’t easy to come by in popular culture and the mass media. Imagine watching the news and following the stream at the bottom of your screen as it moves along. “Leonardo’s lost notebooks recovered . . . but first, more on the latest celebrity scandal.” As a society, our priorities for the investment of attention are frequently out of alignment with our highest ideals.
There’s actually a neurological explanation for this. One of the paradoxes and challenges of the human mind is that we are conditioned by the brain’s reticular formation (a structure in the midbrain) to pay special attention to anything that seems new, different, or “sensational,” while allowing more timeless, less topical material — such as universal spiritual wisdom — to be forgotten. But matters of the spirit always eventually resurface precisely because they are timeless and universal, as we can see from the fact that all of the diverse societies of the globe, at some point in their development, have arrived at fundamental insights that are remarkably similar. Author Aldous Huxley called it “the perennial philosophy.” One research group found that at least eight of the ten commandments are common to all the world’s cultures, constituting the equivalent of a global statement of human values. As my secretary, the venerable Mary Hogan, put it: “We may root for different teams, but we all love baseball.”
— Michael J. Gelb, Da Vinci Decoded, “Introduction,” pp. xvi-xvii.
Place the inner man in control of the outer.
Abandon the false before seeking the true.
Be loving and you will be loved.
Attend to the reason why you felt hurt, not to those who hurt you.
Set inner integrity before good works.
Place thinking before speaking.
Be a real person, then a social person.
Understand yourself, then try to know others
set self-awareness before self-gratification.
Destroy negative attitudes, not negative conditions.
Place small efforts before great determinations.
— Vernon Howard, Mystic Path to Cosmic Power, p. 127.
All we need is a decision to seek the light. When that is done, all else is done for us.
A sign of deepening insight: When you see how one psychological principle connects with another. You might, for example, see how “Resist not evil” connects with the law of not worshiping false gods. How? When we resist something, perhaps an unkind remark, the very resistance implies a belief that that remark can harm us. We are, therefore, worshiping a false and powerless god — the unkind remark. Non-resistance calls the bluff and destroys the falsity.
The first step toward harmonizing with universal laws is to hear of them. Let me present four simple and basic steps which readers found helpful in my previous book, Psycho-Pictography. Called “Your Four Golden Keys to New Freedom and Happiness,” they are:
1. A sincere desire for inner change: Self-transformation begins from the moment we earnestly wish to be a different kind of person.
2. Contact with workable principles: We must connect ourselves with a source of genuine help, perhaps a book, or an enlightened teacher, or with our own inner light.
3. Self-honesty: We must heroically face the facts about ourselves, even if disturbing, in order to break the chains.
4. Persistence: With endurance, happiness comes gradually but definitely, like a blinking light that finally glows permanently.
As we read and work with mystic principles found in a book, we experience a mysterious change within. What we formerly took as attractive words and phrases now turns into a very definite feeling. This means that we have seen beyond the words; the intuitive self has broken through to transform an intellectual idea into a living experience.
— Vernon Howard, Ibid., pp. 130-131.
Unfortunately, models and images of wisdom, goodness, love, and beauty aren’t easy to come by in popular culture and the mass media. Imagine watching the news and following the stream at the bottom of your screen as it moves along. “Leonardo’s lost notebooks recovered . . . but first, more on the latest celebrity scandal.” As a society, our priorities for the investment of attention are frequently out of alignment with our highest ideals.
There’s actually a neurological explanation for this. One of the paradoxes and challenges of the human mind is that we are conditioned by the brain’s reticular formation (a structure in the midbrain) to pay special attention to anything that seems new, different, or “sensational,” while allowing more timeless, less topical material — such as universal spiritual wisdom — to be forgotten. But matters of the spirit always eventually resurface precisely because they are timeless and universal, as we can see from the fact that all of the diverse societies of the globe, at some point in their development, have arrived at fundamental insights that are remarkably similar. Author Aldous Huxley called it “the perennial philosophy.” One research group found that at least eight of the ten commandments are common to all the world’s cultures, constituting the equivalent of a global statement of human values. As my secretary, the venerable Mary Hogan, put it: “We may root for different teams, but we all love baseball.”
— Michael J. Gelb, Da Vinci Decoded, “Introduction,” pp. xvi-xvii.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Works of Rework
Perhaps I am not so very misguided, then, in deliberately making a lumber-room of my head with the present study, so long as that room is, as Gaye contends, coextensive with the world itself. No decomposing quotation is so vile that it can’t be taken in hand and turned to good account. Still, if I’m going to quote from long and illustrious line of lumber-into-treasure commonplace-holders, if I’m going to cite Horace and Wordsworth and Emerson and W. E. Henley and Saki and A. R. Ammons, there is no excuse for my having left out of this series the most adept and amazing commonplace-transfigurer there ever was, or will be. “He unfortunately worked up the rubbish as well as the gems,” Leslie Stephen writes, in an essay called “Pope as a Moralist,” but in another passage Stephen grants, as we all must, that Alexander Pope has “a probably unequalled power of coining aphorism out of common-place.” Of Pope’s Essay on Criticism the harsh Reverend Elwin says that all the classical doctrines of criticism in it “might have been picked up from his French manuals in a single morning,” and he concurs with De Quincey’s dismissal of it as “mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of common-places the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps.” And yet what an extraordinary multiplication table it is, and what lucky sewer rats we readers are! Tiny known quantities of sense, operated upon in accordance with known metrical law, yield in Pope’s arithmetic hands infinitely long and unrepeating decimals of truth:
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest
What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.
Not much has been more oft thought over the centuries than the notion that the writer writes what oft was thought, has exprest it with such politely imploded conviction as Pope exhibits here.1 At twenty-five, Pope possessed (this is Leslie Stephen again) “the rare art of composing proverbs in verse, which have become part of the intellectual furniture of all decently educated men.” Even De Quincey, in spite of the ornate scorn he reserves for the Essay, seems to have come into a few Queen Anne tea-tables from Pope’s estate. In the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he denounces certain works of political economy as being “the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” Compare Pope:
Still run on Poets in a raging Vein,
Ev’n to the Dregs and Squeezings of the Brain.
Not that Pope’s “dregs and squeezing” isn’t itself a second pressing: a footnote in the Twickenham edition calls our attention to a line in Oldham’s Satyrs upon the Jesuits that goes, “With all the dregs, and squeesings of his rage.” Mark Pattison writes that Pope was
“very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant, — ignorant, that is, of everything but the one thing which he labored with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images, and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonymes, and pretty turns of language. Whenever he found anything to his purpose, he booked it for use, and some time or other, often more than once, it made its appearance in his verse.”1 [1. “Pope and His Editors,” in Mark Pattison, Essays, vol. II, 1889].
We pardon Pope, most of the time, because he rehabilitates nearly every second-hand phrase that comes through his shop. He unscrews a line he likes, sorts and cleans its pieces, stores them, finds matches, does some seemingly casual beveling, drills a narrow caesural ventilation-hole, squirts the KrazyGlue of genius into several chinks, gives the prototypical whole a sudden uniting twist, and hands the world a tiny two-cylinder perpetual-motion machine — a heroic couplet. Even when we know his sources phrase by phrase, we must still remain in awe (following a week in a darkened room devoted to adjusting to the horrifying extent and specificity of the thefts) of his divine clockmaker’s gift. Dryden (in his “Preface to the Fables”) explains that “the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention, than to invent themselves; as is evident not only in our poetry, but in many of our manufactures.” And Samuel Wesley (a poet too minor to receive an entry of his own in Drabble’s Oxford Companion, though Swift gives him the honor of being the fourth fatality in The Battle of the Books),1 [1. Aristotle shoots Descartes with an arrow in the right eye; Homer’s horse tramples D’Avenant; then Homer gets John Denham with a long spear, and Samuel Wesley is slain by a kick of Homer’s horse’s heel.] in a passage from his Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) defends Dryden’s own frequent raids on the already articulated:
“If from the modern or the ancient Store
He borrows ought, he always pays ‘em more:
So much improv’d, each Thought, so fine appears,
Waller or Ovid scarce durst own ‘em theirs.
The Learned Goth has scowr’d all Europe’s Plains,
France, Spain, and fruitful Italy he drains,
From every Realm and every Language gains:
His Gains a Conquest are, and not a Theft;
He wishes still new Worlds of Wit were left . . .”
This is a sort of versification of Dryden’s own praise of Boileau, in the essay “On the Origin and Progress of Satire”:
“What he [Boileau] borrows from the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost as universally valuable.”
Samuel Butler, a few decades earlier, came up with one of the tripier casings for this old trope:
“Our modern Authors write Playes as they feed hogs in Westphalia, where but one eate’s peas, or akornes, and all the rest are feed upon his and one anothers excrement.”
I happened on Wesley’s Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry in the English Poetry Database simply because it mentions the “lumber-thoughts” of a poetical first draft. (Some you should keep, and some “the sponge should strike.”) But I liked the poem and paused over it, for it looked to be something Pope had read carefully:
“Draw the Main Strokes at first, ‘twill shew your Skill,
Life-Touches you may add whene’er you will.
Ev’n Chance will sometimes all our Art excel,
The angry Foam we ne’er can hit so well.
A sudden Thought, all beautiful and bright
Shoots in and stuns us with amazing Light;
Secure the Happy Moment e’er ‘tis past,
Not Time more swift, or Lightning flies so fast."
Any self-respecting source-seeker who reads Wesley’s Epistle just after a fresh run-through of Pope’s Essay on Criticism will notice that some of its phrases and ideas were reset a decade later in Pope’s precocious assemblage. Indeed, Pope’s use of Wesley extends beyond phrasing, to the metaphorical structure of whole sections….
— Nickolson Baker, The Size of Thought, pp. 322-327.
True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest
What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.
Not much has been more oft thought over the centuries than the notion that the writer writes what oft was thought, has exprest it with such politely imploded conviction as Pope exhibits here.1 At twenty-five, Pope possessed (this is Leslie Stephen again) “the rare art of composing proverbs in verse, which have become part of the intellectual furniture of all decently educated men.” Even De Quincey, in spite of the ornate scorn he reserves for the Essay, seems to have come into a few Queen Anne tea-tables from Pope’s estate. In the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he denounces certain works of political economy as being “the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” Compare Pope:
Still run on Poets in a raging Vein,
Ev’n to the Dregs and Squeezings of the Brain.
Not that Pope’s “dregs and squeezing” isn’t itself a second pressing: a footnote in the Twickenham edition calls our attention to a line in Oldham’s Satyrs upon the Jesuits that goes, “With all the dregs, and squeesings of his rage.” Mark Pattison writes that Pope was
“very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant, — ignorant, that is, of everything but the one thing which he labored with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images, and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonymes, and pretty turns of language. Whenever he found anything to his purpose, he booked it for use, and some time or other, often more than once, it made its appearance in his verse.”1 [1. “Pope and His Editors,” in Mark Pattison, Essays, vol. II, 1889].
We pardon Pope, most of the time, because he rehabilitates nearly every second-hand phrase that comes through his shop. He unscrews a line he likes, sorts and cleans its pieces, stores them, finds matches, does some seemingly casual beveling, drills a narrow caesural ventilation-hole, squirts the KrazyGlue of genius into several chinks, gives the prototypical whole a sudden uniting twist, and hands the world a tiny two-cylinder perpetual-motion machine — a heroic couplet. Even when we know his sources phrase by phrase, we must still remain in awe (following a week in a darkened room devoted to adjusting to the horrifying extent and specificity of the thefts) of his divine clockmaker’s gift. Dryden (in his “Preface to the Fables”) explains that “the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention, than to invent themselves; as is evident not only in our poetry, but in many of our manufactures.” And Samuel Wesley (a poet too minor to receive an entry of his own in Drabble’s Oxford Companion, though Swift gives him the honor of being the fourth fatality in The Battle of the Books),1 [1. Aristotle shoots Descartes with an arrow in the right eye; Homer’s horse tramples D’Avenant; then Homer gets John Denham with a long spear, and Samuel Wesley is slain by a kick of Homer’s horse’s heel.] in a passage from his Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) defends Dryden’s own frequent raids on the already articulated:
“If from the modern or the ancient Store
He borrows ought, he always pays ‘em more:
So much improv’d, each Thought, so fine appears,
Waller or Ovid scarce durst own ‘em theirs.
The Learned Goth has scowr’d all Europe’s Plains,
France, Spain, and fruitful Italy he drains,
From every Realm and every Language gains:
His Gains a Conquest are, and not a Theft;
He wishes still new Worlds of Wit were left . . .”
This is a sort of versification of Dryden’s own praise of Boileau, in the essay “On the Origin and Progress of Satire”:
“What he [Boileau] borrows from the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost as universally valuable.”
Samuel Butler, a few decades earlier, came up with one of the tripier casings for this old trope:
“Our modern Authors write Playes as they feed hogs in Westphalia, where but one eate’s peas, or akornes, and all the rest are feed upon his and one anothers excrement.”
I happened on Wesley’s Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry in the English Poetry Database simply because it mentions the “lumber-thoughts” of a poetical first draft. (Some you should keep, and some “the sponge should strike.”) But I liked the poem and paused over it, for it looked to be something Pope had read carefully:
“Draw the Main Strokes at first, ‘twill shew your Skill,
Life-Touches you may add whene’er you will.
Ev’n Chance will sometimes all our Art excel,
The angry Foam we ne’er can hit so well.
A sudden Thought, all beautiful and bright
Shoots in and stuns us with amazing Light;
Secure the Happy Moment e’er ‘tis past,
Not Time more swift, or Lightning flies so fast."
Any self-respecting source-seeker who reads Wesley’s Epistle just after a fresh run-through of Pope’s Essay on Criticism will notice that some of its phrases and ideas were reset a decade later in Pope’s precocious assemblage. Indeed, Pope’s use of Wesley extends beyond phrasing, to the metaphorical structure of whole sections….
— Nickolson Baker, The Size of Thought, pp. 322-327.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
End Pause
It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.
— Don DeLillo, from White Noise, in A Portable Apocalypse, Allan Appel, p. 20.
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment; in reality it is a constant court in perpetual session.
— Franz Kafka, in Ibid., p. 41.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in Ibid., p. 60.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work . . . I want to achieve it through not dying.
— Woody Allen, in Ibid., p. 58.
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.
— Joseph Heller, from Catch 22, in Ibid., p. 58.
The atom bomb, as the problem of mankind's very existence, is equaled by only one other problem: the threat of totalitarian rule (not simply dictatorship, Marxism, or racial theory), with its terroristic structure that obliterates all liberty and human dignity. By one, we lose life; by the other, a life that is not worth living.
— Karl Jaspers, from The Future of Mankind, in Ibid., p. 207.
— Don DeLillo, from White Noise, in A Portable Apocalypse, Allan Appel, p. 20.
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment; in reality it is a constant court in perpetual session.
— Franz Kafka, in Ibid., p. 41.
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in Ibid., p. 60.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work . . . I want to achieve it through not dying.
— Woody Allen, in Ibid., p. 58.
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.
— Joseph Heller, from Catch 22, in Ibid., p. 58.
The atom bomb, as the problem of mankind's very existence, is equaled by only one other problem: the threat of totalitarian rule (not simply dictatorship, Marxism, or racial theory), with its terroristic structure that obliterates all liberty and human dignity. By one, we lose life; by the other, a life that is not worth living.
— Karl Jaspers, from The Future of Mankind, in Ibid., p. 207.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Soul Death
Nihilism remains partial until it is realized that the reductio ad hominem [Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 186] is actually a reductio hominis. “The night brought on by the death of God is a night in which every individual identity perishes. When the heavens are darkened, and God disappears, man does not stand autonomous and alone. He ceases to stand. Or, rather, he ceases to stand out from the world and himself, ceases to be autonomous and apart. No longer can selfhood and self-consciousness stand purely and solely upon itself: no longer can a unique and individual identity stand autonomously upon itself. The death of transcendence of God embodies the death of all autonomous selfhood, an end of all humanity which is created in the image of the absolutely sovereign and transcendent God” [Altizer, Descent into Hell, pp. 153-154]. For the devout humanist, such loss of self is but another form of dehumanization to be vigorously resisted. The humanist, therefore, refuses to repeat the confession of the writer:
The meandering word dies by the pen, the writer by the same weapon turned back against him.
“What murder are you accused of?” Reb Achor asked Zillich, the writer.
“The murder of God,” he replied. “I will, however, add in my defense that I die along with him” [Edmond Jabès, The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book, Waldrop (tr.), p. 172].
Nihilism can be a sign of weakness or a mark of strength. Unable to accept loss and anxious about death, the partial nihilism of the modern humanistic atheist is a sign of weakness. For the writer who suffers crucifixion of selfhood, nihilism is the mark of the cross. On Golgotha, not only God dies; the self also disappears.
— Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology Erring, p. 33.
The meandering word dies by the pen, the writer by the same weapon turned back against him.
“What murder are you accused of?” Reb Achor asked Zillich, the writer.
“The murder of God,” he replied. “I will, however, add in my defense that I die along with him” [Edmond Jabès, The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book, Waldrop (tr.), p. 172].
Nihilism can be a sign of weakness or a mark of strength. Unable to accept loss and anxious about death, the partial nihilism of the modern humanistic atheist is a sign of weakness. For the writer who suffers crucifixion of selfhood, nihilism is the mark of the cross. On Golgotha, not only God dies; the self also disappears.
— Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology Erring, p. 33.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Along the Way
When living in the relative realm, one may practice good deeds in order to further one’s development toward natural benevolence. There are two kinds of good deeds. One is referred to as yang or apparent good deeds, in which everybody is aware of the fact that one has done something good: the other is yin or hidden good deeds, in which no one knows that one has done something good. With yang good deeds, the person himself benefits as a result of his good deeds in that he receives recognition and social prestige. However, this kind of activity is valuable only in the relative realm and can also hinder one’s spiritual development. Yin good deeds do not seek a reward or recognition from anyone. The practice of yin good deeds deeply enhances one’s spirit and is absolute behavior. There are ten rules to enhance the Spirit of Life:
1. Sincerely follow Tao, the path to eternal life. To turn one’s back to the Subtle Origin is to face darkness and degeneration of the soul.
2. Experience and cherish the pure happiness within your own soul. It is eternal and constant. The treasures of the world are deceptive and fleeting, causing the progressive erosion of one’s subtle, spiritual essence.
3. Be plain, simple, honest and practical when dealing with the world. It is better to be naïve than cunning. Better to be fooled than suspicious.
4. Consider righteousness before profit. To gain and lose virtue is no bargain.
5. Pay attention to the laws of the world. Behave with conscience and maintain dignity. In this way you protect the freedom for self-cultivation.
6. Plant yourself firmly in Tao. As the tide ebbs and flows, so does the great transformation of the ten thousand things sweep away all but the firmly rooted.
7. Become familiar with the law of cause and effect, and deeply penetrate the truth of the universal law of subtle energy response. To sow is to reap. Energies of the same frequency attract each other. Therefore, blind desires lead to blind alleys and righteousness leads to eternality.
8. Share happiness with others. By extending ourselves to others we enlarge our being. Selfless service is our sacred vow. Receiving by giving is the universal law of supply.
9. Unite yourself with Heaven and Earth. Be unconcerned with life and death. With clarity and self-awareness developed through self-cultivation transform your being, and thus end your bondage to the law of the great transformation.
10. Clearly and completely discern the heart of the unadorned teachings. Passed down through generations. They have come from our ancient Masters. Our Way is the gathering of the greatest simple truths. The wellspring of eternal life is the simplicity of Tao.
— Hua-Ching Ni, Tao: The Subtle Universal Law and the Integral Way of Life, “Spiritual Arts,” pp. 131-133.
1. Sincerely follow Tao, the path to eternal life. To turn one’s back to the Subtle Origin is to face darkness and degeneration of the soul.
2. Experience and cherish the pure happiness within your own soul. It is eternal and constant. The treasures of the world are deceptive and fleeting, causing the progressive erosion of one’s subtle, spiritual essence.
3. Be plain, simple, honest and practical when dealing with the world. It is better to be naïve than cunning. Better to be fooled than suspicious.
4. Consider righteousness before profit. To gain and lose virtue is no bargain.
5. Pay attention to the laws of the world. Behave with conscience and maintain dignity. In this way you protect the freedom for self-cultivation.
6. Plant yourself firmly in Tao. As the tide ebbs and flows, so does the great transformation of the ten thousand things sweep away all but the firmly rooted.
7. Become familiar with the law of cause and effect, and deeply penetrate the truth of the universal law of subtle energy response. To sow is to reap. Energies of the same frequency attract each other. Therefore, blind desires lead to blind alleys and righteousness leads to eternality.
8. Share happiness with others. By extending ourselves to others we enlarge our being. Selfless service is our sacred vow. Receiving by giving is the universal law of supply.
9. Unite yourself with Heaven and Earth. Be unconcerned with life and death. With clarity and self-awareness developed through self-cultivation transform your being, and thus end your bondage to the law of the great transformation.
10. Clearly and completely discern the heart of the unadorned teachings. Passed down through generations. They have come from our ancient Masters. Our Way is the gathering of the greatest simple truths. The wellspring of eternal life is the simplicity of Tao.
— Hua-Ching Ni, Tao: The Subtle Universal Law and the Integral Way of Life, “Spiritual Arts,” pp. 131-133.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Fictional Insight (3)
Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura (Excerpts)
40. To be “born again,” or “born from above,” or “born of the Spirit,” means to become healed; which is to say restored, restored to sanity. Thus it is said in the New Testament that Jesus casts out devils. He restores our lost faculties. Of our present debased state Calvin said, “(Man) was at the same time deprived of those supernatural endowments which had been given him for the hope of eternal salvation. Hence it follows, that he is exiled from the Kingdom of God, in such a manner that all the affections relating to the happy life of the soul are also extinguished in him, till he recovers them by the grace of God . . . All these things being restored by Christ, are esteemed adventitious and preternatural; and therefore we conclude that they had been lost. Again: soundness of mind and rectitude of heart were also destroyed; and this is the corruption of the natural talents. For although we retain some portion of understanding and judgment together with the will, yet we cannot say that our mind is perfect and sound. Reason . . . being a natural talent, it could not be totally destroyed, but is partly debilitated . . .” I say, “The Empire never ended.”
41. The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.
42. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.
43. Against the empire is posed the living information, the plasmate or physician, which we know as the Holy Spirit or Christ discorporate. These are the two principles, the dark (the Empire) and the light (the plasmate). In the end, Mind will give victory to the latter. Each of us will die or survive according to which he aligns himself and his efforts with. Each of us contains a component of each. Eventually one or the other component will triumph in each human. Zoroaster knew this, because the Wise Mind informed him. He was the first savior. Four have lived in all. A fifth is about to be born, who will differ from the others: he will rule and he will judge us.
44. Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought. There is no other road to salvation. However, this information — or more precisely the ability to read and understand this information, the universe as information — can only be made available to us by the holy Spirit. We cannot find it on our own. Thus it is said that we are saved by the grace of God and not by good works, that all salvation belongs to Christ, who, I say, is a physician.
….
49. The name of the healthy twin, hyperuniverse I, is Nommo [represented in a fish form, the early Christian fish]. The name of the sick twin, hyperuniverse II, is Yurugu. These names are known to the Dogon people of western Sudan in Africa.
50. The primordial source of all our religions lies with the ancestors of the Dogon tribe, who got their cosmogony and cosmology directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed invaders were mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breathe our atmosphere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton, and emanated from a planet in the star-system Sirius. Although they had no hands, but had, instead, pincer claws such as a crab has, they were great builders. They covertly influence our history toward a fruitful end.
— Philip K. Dick, Valis, "Appendix" (excerpts), pp. 229-239.
40. To be “born again,” or “born from above,” or “born of the Spirit,” means to become healed; which is to say restored, restored to sanity. Thus it is said in the New Testament that Jesus casts out devils. He restores our lost faculties. Of our present debased state Calvin said, “(Man) was at the same time deprived of those supernatural endowments which had been given him for the hope of eternal salvation. Hence it follows, that he is exiled from the Kingdom of God, in such a manner that all the affections relating to the happy life of the soul are also extinguished in him, till he recovers them by the grace of God . . . All these things being restored by Christ, are esteemed adventitious and preternatural; and therefore we conclude that they had been lost. Again: soundness of mind and rectitude of heart were also destroyed; and this is the corruption of the natural talents. For although we retain some portion of understanding and judgment together with the will, yet we cannot say that our mind is perfect and sound. Reason . . . being a natural talent, it could not be totally destroyed, but is partly debilitated . . .” I say, “The Empire never ended.”
41. The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.
42. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.
43. Against the empire is posed the living information, the plasmate or physician, which we know as the Holy Spirit or Christ discorporate. These are the two principles, the dark (the Empire) and the light (the plasmate). In the end, Mind will give victory to the latter. Each of us will die or survive according to which he aligns himself and his efforts with. Each of us contains a component of each. Eventually one or the other component will triumph in each human. Zoroaster knew this, because the Wise Mind informed him. He was the first savior. Four have lived in all. A fifth is about to be born, who will differ from the others: he will rule and he will judge us.
44. Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought. There is no other road to salvation. However, this information — or more precisely the ability to read and understand this information, the universe as information — can only be made available to us by the holy Spirit. We cannot find it on our own. Thus it is said that we are saved by the grace of God and not by good works, that all salvation belongs to Christ, who, I say, is a physician.
….
49. The name of the healthy twin, hyperuniverse I, is Nommo [represented in a fish form, the early Christian fish]. The name of the sick twin, hyperuniverse II, is Yurugu. These names are known to the Dogon people of western Sudan in Africa.
50. The primordial source of all our religions lies with the ancestors of the Dogon tribe, who got their cosmogony and cosmology directly from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed invaders were mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breathe our atmosphere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton, and emanated from a planet in the star-system Sirius. Although they had no hands, but had, instead, pincer claws such as a crab has, they were great builders. They covertly influence our history toward a fruitful end.
— Philip K. Dick, Valis, "Appendix" (excerpts), pp. 229-239.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Fictional Insight (2)
Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura (Excerpts)
30. The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypothesis of the information processed by the Mind.
31. We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.
….
36. In Summary: thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements — change — in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize. We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it — i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself).
37. We should be able to hear this information, or rather narrative, as a neutral voice inside us. But something has gone wrong. All creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can’t read outside and can’t hear inside. So I say, we have become idiots. Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangement of parts of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore we are language. Why, then, do we not know this? We do not even know what we are, let alone what the outer reality is of which we are parts. The origin of the word “idiot” is the word “private.” Each of us has become private, and no longer shares the common thought of the Brain, except at a subliminal level. Thus our real life and purpose are conducted below our threshold of consciousness.
38. From loss and grief the Mind has become deranged. Therefore we, as parts of the universe, the Brain, are partly deranged.
39. Out of itself the Brain has constructed a physician to heal it. This subform of the Macro-Brain is not deranged; it moves through the Brain, as a phagocyte moves through the cardio-vascular system of an animal, healing the derangement of the Brain in section after section. We know of its arrival here; we know it as Asklepios for the Greeks and as the Essenes for the Jews; as the Therapeutae for the Egyptians; as Jesus for the Christians.
— Philip K. Dick, Valis, "Appendix" (excerpts), pp. 229-239.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Fictional Insight (1)
Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura
1. One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend.
2. The Mind lets in the light, then the dark, in interaction; so time is generated. At the end Mind awards victory to light; time ceases and the Mind is complete.
3. He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.
4. Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.
5. One by one he draws us out of the world.
6. The Empire never ended.
7. The Head Apollo is about to return. St. Sophia is going to be born again; she was not acceptable before. The Buddha is in the park. Siddhartha sleeps (but is going to awaken). The time you have waited for has come.
8. The upper realm has plenary [plenipotentiary] powers.
9. He lived a long time ago, but he is still alive.
10. Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said, “That which is above is that which is below.” By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.
11. The great secret known to Apollonius of Tyana, Paul of Tarsus, Simon Magus, Asklepios, Paracelsus, Boehme and Bruno is that: we are moving backward in time. The universe in fact is contracting into a unitary entity which is completing itself. Decay and disorder are seen by us in reverse, as increasing. These healers learned to move forward in time, which is retrograde to us.
12. The Immortal One was known to the Greeks as Dionysos; to the Jews as Elijah; to the Christians as Jesus. He moves on when each human host dies, and thus is never killed or caught. Hence Jesus on the cross said, “Eli, Eli, lama Sabachthani,” to which some of those present correctly said, “The man is calling on Elijah.” Elijah had left him and he died alone.
13. Pascal said, “All history is one immortal man who continually learns.” This is the Immortal One whom we worship without knowing his name. “He lived a long time ago, but he is still alive,” and, “The Head Apollo is about to return.” The name changes.
14. The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three-dimensional and not in space and time. The information fed to us we hypostatize into the phenomenal world.
— Philip K. Dick, Valis, "Appendix" (excerpts), pp. 229-239.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Powerlessness
In his study of the form that masochism takes in modern man, Theodor Reik puts forth an interesting view. Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamic is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he can halt the process; he is helpless. This sense of helplessness generates a need to gain some control over the impending pain — any kind of control will do. This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery. So the person seizes control over the situation in the only way open to him: he connives to bring on the impending misery; he hastens it. This activity on his part promotes the false impression that he enjoys pain. Not so. It is simply that he cannot any longer endure the helplessness or the supposed helplessness. But in the process of gaining control over the inevitable misery he becomes, automatically, anhedonic (which means being unable or unwilling to enjoy pleasure). Anhedonia sets in stealthily. Over the years it takes control of him. For example, he learns to defer gratification; this is a step in the dismal process of anhedonia. In learning to defer gratification he experiences a sense of self-mastery; he has become stoic, disciplined; he does not give way to impulse. He has control. Control over himself in terms of his impulses and control over the external situation. He is a controlled and controlling person. Pretty soon he has branched out and is controlling other people, as part of the situation. He becomes a manipulator. Of course, he is not consciously aware of this; all he intends to do is lessen his own sense of impotence. But in his task of lessening this sense, he insidiously overpowers the freedom of others. Yet, he derives no pleasure from this, no positive psychological gain; all his gains are essentially negative.
— Philip K. Dick, Valis, p. 78.
— Philip K. Dick, Valis, p. 78.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Anonymity
C S. Lewis, concluding one of my least favorite books, Mere Christianity (revised edition, 1952), shrewdly associates the Christian surrender of the self with not seeking literary originality:
"Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self.... Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay...."
Setting aside all questions of merely personal distaste, I am fascinated by this passage, because it is the point-by-point reversal of the program of knowing the deep self that is the Gnostic (and literary) quest for immortality. Gnosis depends upon distinguishing the psyche, or soul, from the deep self, which pragmatically means that any strengthening of the psyche depends upon acquaintance with the original self, already one with God. Originality is as much the mark of historical Gnosticism as it is of canonical Western literature; that Lewis simultaneously deprecates both the self and originality confirms the Gnostic negative analysis of those who assert that they live by faith rather than by knowledge. Christian "faith" is pistis, a believing that something was, is, and will be so. Judaic "faith" is emunah, a trusting in the Covenant. Islam means "submission" to the will of Allah, as expressed through his messenger Muhammad, "the seal of the prophets." But Gnosis is not a believing that, a trusting in, or a submission. Rather, it is a mutual knowing, and a simultaneous being known, of and by God.
I cannot pretend that this is a simple process; it is far more elitist than C. S. Lewis's "mere Christianity," and I suspect that this elitism is why Gnosticism always has been defeated by orthodox Christian faith, in history. But I am writing spiritual autobiography, and not Gnostic theology, and so I return to personal history to explain how I understand Gnosis and Gnosticism....
— Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, pp. 22-23.
"Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self.... Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay...."
Setting aside all questions of merely personal distaste, I am fascinated by this passage, because it is the point-by-point reversal of the program of knowing the deep self that is the Gnostic (and literary) quest for immortality. Gnosis depends upon distinguishing the psyche, or soul, from the deep self, which pragmatically means that any strengthening of the psyche depends upon acquaintance with the original self, already one with God. Originality is as much the mark of historical Gnosticism as it is of canonical Western literature; that Lewis simultaneously deprecates both the self and originality confirms the Gnostic negative analysis of those who assert that they live by faith rather than by knowledge. Christian "faith" is pistis, a believing that something was, is, and will be so. Judaic "faith" is emunah, a trusting in the Covenant. Islam means "submission" to the will of Allah, as expressed through his messenger Muhammad, "the seal of the prophets." But Gnosis is not a believing that, a trusting in, or a submission. Rather, it is a mutual knowing, and a simultaneous being known, of and by God.
I cannot pretend that this is a simple process; it is far more elitist than C. S. Lewis's "mere Christianity," and I suspect that this elitism is why Gnosticism always has been defeated by orthodox Christian faith, in history. But I am writing spiritual autobiography, and not Gnostic theology, and so I return to personal history to explain how I understand Gnosis and Gnosticism....
— Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, pp. 22-23.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Still Still
Dōgen Zenji says, “To read words, unaware of the way of practice, is just like reading a medical prescription and overlooking to mix the compounds for it; it will be altogether worthless.” We just look at the prescription and forget to drink the medicine. We enjoy reading the prescription, saying, “Oh, this is wonderful medicine!” It is ridiculous, but we do this always. We think zazen is wonderful because Buddha says if we do zazen we become strong. From where does the strength come? Does it come from outside of you? We look at the scriptures and depend on them, and then we are really happy. But who must be strong, the scriptures? No, you must be strong.
— Dainin Katagiri, Return to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life, p. 107.
The six pāramitās or perfections that the bodhisattva practices are:
Generosity,
Moral conduct,
Patience,
Courage,
Meditation,
Wisdom.
The Eightfold Path consists of:
Right views,
Right intention,
Right speech,
Right action,
Right livelihood,
Right effort,
Right mindfulness,
Right concentration.
Buddha’s teaching of the four holy truths, or the Four Noble Truths, is as follows:
Life is suffering;
Suffering is caused by craving;
Suffering can cease;
The cessation of suffering comes about by following the Eightfold Path.
The Triple Treasure is:
I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the Dharma [Truth].
I take refuge in the Sangha [Community].
The Three Collective Pure Percepts are:
Refrain from evil.
Practice all that is good.
Purify the mind.
The Ten Prohibitory Percepts are:
Refrain from taking life.
Refrain from stealing.
Refrain from committing adultery.
Refrain from telling lies.
Refrain from intoxicants.
Refrain from misguided speech.
Refrain from extolling oneself while slandering others.
Refrain from being avaricious in the bestowal of the Dharma.
Refrain from being angry.
Refrain from abusing the Triple Treasure.
The six senses are — (a), six sense organs (b), six sense objects (c), and the five skandhas (d); as below:
(a) color, sound, smell, taste, touch, thoughts;
(b) eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, mind;
(c) visual object, auditory object, taste object, object of smell, tactile object, object of thought;
(d) form, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness.
— Dainin Katagiri, Return to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life, “Notes,” pp. 175-176 passim.
— Woody Allen, in The Paris Review, #136: “Whither Mirth?,” pp. 216-217.
— Dainin Katagiri, Return to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life, p. 107.
The six pāramitās or perfections that the bodhisattva practices are:
Generosity,
Moral conduct,
Patience,
Courage,
Meditation,
Wisdom.
The Eightfold Path consists of:
Right views,
Right intention,
Right speech,
Right action,
Right livelihood,
Right effort,
Right mindfulness,
Right concentration.
Buddha’s teaching of the four holy truths, or the Four Noble Truths, is as follows:
Life is suffering;
Suffering is caused by craving;
Suffering can cease;
The cessation of suffering comes about by following the Eightfold Path.
The Triple Treasure is:
I take refuge in the Buddha.
I take refuge in the Dharma [Truth].
I take refuge in the Sangha [Community].
The Three Collective Pure Percepts are:
Refrain from evil.
Practice all that is good.
Purify the mind.
The Ten Prohibitory Percepts are:
Refrain from taking life.
Refrain from stealing.
Refrain from committing adultery.
Refrain from telling lies.
Refrain from intoxicants.
Refrain from misguided speech.
Refrain from extolling oneself while slandering others.
Refrain from being avaricious in the bestowal of the Dharma.
Refrain from being angry.
Refrain from abusing the Triple Treasure.
The six senses are — (a), six sense organs (b), six sense objects (c), and the five skandhas (d); as below:
(a) color, sound, smell, taste, touch, thoughts;
(b) eyes, ears, nose, mouth, body, mind;
(c) visual object, auditory object, taste object, object of smell, tactile object, object of thought;
(d) form, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness.
— Dainin Katagiri, Return to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life, “Notes,” pp. 175-176 passim.
INTERVIEWER
Still, some artists put such an emphasis on their work, on creating something that will last, that they put it before everything else. That line by Faulkner — “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”ALLEN
I hate when art becomes religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art. I tried to get into that in Interiors. I always feel the artist is much too revered: it’s not fair and it’s cruel. It’s a nice but fortuitous gift — like a nice voice or being left-handed. That you can create is a kind of nice accident. It happens to have high value in society, but it’s not as noble an attribution as courage. I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks — laughable. Like casting against type, wow, what danger! Risks are where your life is on the line. The people who took risks against the Nazis or some of the Russian poets who stood up against the state — those people are courageous and brave, and that’s really an achievement. To be an artist is also an achievement, but you have to keep it in perspective. I’m not trying to undersell art. I think it’s valuable, but I think it’s overly revered. It is a valuable thing, but no more valuable than being a good schoolteacher, or being a good doctor. The problem is that being creative has glamour. People in the business end of film always say, “I want to be a producer, but a creative producer.” Or a woman I went to school with, who said, “Oh, yes, I married this guy. He’s a plumber but he’s very creative.” It’s very important for people to have that credential. Like if he wasn’t creative, he was less.— Woody Allen, in The Paris Review, #136: “Whither Mirth?,” pp. 216-217.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Symbolic Action
The third condition is ritual. Ritual in Buddhism is attaining kannō dōkō, which means “the interacting communion of appeals and response.” Ritual is constantly painting a portrait of our life, setting in motion the interactive communion between us and the universe, not between us and something small, between us and the universe. Without ritual we cannot do anything. The poem “To Paint the Portrait of the Bird,”1 by Jacques Prévert [1. Jacques Prévert, To Paint the Portrait of the Bird, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971). Copyright 1949 Editions Gallimard.], is a good example of the interacting communion of appeal and response that is ritual or the essential nature of repentance:
First paint a cage
with an open door.
Then paint
something pretty
something simple
something beautiful
something useful
for the bird.
Then place the canvas against a tree
in a garden
in a wood
or in a forest.
Hide behind the tree
without speaking
without moving . . .
Sometimes the bird comes quickly
but he may take long years
before deciding.
Don’t get discouraged.
Wait.
Wait years if necessary.
How fast or how slowly the bird comes
has nothing to do with the success
of the picture.
When the bird comes
if he comes
observe the most profound silence
till the bird enters the cage
and when he has entered
gently close the door with a brush.
Then
erase all the bars one by one
taking care not to touch any of the bird’s feathers.
Then paint the portrait of the tree
choosing the most beautiful of the branches
for the bird.
Paint also the green foliage and the wind’s freshness
the dust of the sun
and the noise of the creatures in the grass in the summer heat.
And then wait for the bird to decide to sing.
If the bird doesn’t sing
it’s a bad sign,
a sign that the painting is bad.
But if he sings it’s a good sign,
a sign that you can sign.
So, then, so very gently, you pull out
one of the bird’s feathers
and you write your name in a corner of the picture.
The cage, in the first line, means our whole body — the six senses, six sense organs, six sense objects and the five skandhas. This is what the whole world consists of; this is our cage. Everyone has an individual cage. We are nothing but the cage. The poet says, “First paint a cage with an open door.” “Open door” means we should accept the vastness of existence. Usually we don’t open the door. We make the cage and then shut ourselves off. But, if we do this, how can we attract the bird? “Bird” means the Truth, the same and one ground. How can we attract the truth if we close the door? So the poet tells us to paint a cage with the door open.
Next he says, “Then paint/something pretty/something simple/something beautiful/something useful/for the bird.” We have to paint something pretty, simple and beautiful, not for ourselves, not for the cage, but for the bird. “Something beautiful, something simple” means something beyond our intellectual sense. It means we have to see ourselves and also the vastness of space in which all sentient beings exist. This is our practice, constantly. Even if we don’t understand it, paint it, paint something pretty. Even if we don’t believe it is something beautiful, that’s all right, we are following the Buddha’s teaching and we should see the total picture. We should put ourselves in this position. This is to paint something beautiful.
“Then place the canvas against a tree/in a garden/in a wood/or in a forest./Hide behind the tree/without speaking/without moving . . ./Sometimes the bird comes quickly.” When we paint something beautiful, we shouldn’t attach to it. Leave the painting in the wood, in the forest and then hide ourselves. This is to practice the truth. When we do gassho, we have to practice samādhi. Samādhi is really silence. We must be behind the gassho, but we cannot move. If we move, even a little, immediately our intellect comes up and argues. That’s why the poet says. “Hide behind the tree/without speaking/without moving . . .”
Then the poet says, “Sometimes the bird comes quickly,” but strictly speaking, the bird is always there. The bird is there, but because we don’t always experience enlightenment through zazen we say “sometimes” it comes. However, Buddha’s compassion is open to everyone; there is always a bird whether we realize it or not. We don’t know when it will come. But according to this poet it doesn’t matter when it comes or how long it takes. How fast or how slowly the bird comes doesn’t matter, because that has nothing to do with the success of our life. Real success is just to put ourselves in zazen when we do zazen, to put ourselves in gassho when we do gassho, because compassion is open to everyone. “When the bird comes . . ./observe the most profound silence/till the bird enters the cage/and when he has entered/gently close the door with a brush.” Not with our hand, please, close the door with a brush. “Then”—and this practice is very important—“erase all the bars one by one/taking care not to touch any of the bird’s feathers.” This is egolessness, the practice of egolessness. How beautiful it is. If we want to paint the portrait of a bird we have to practice egolessness.
“Then paint the portrait of the tree/choosing the most beautiful of its branches/for the bird./Paint also the green foliage and the wind’s freshness/the dust of the sun.” When we do this, all things become alive. We can make our lives come alive. But without this practice, we cannot paint the autumn, the air, “the dust of the sun” or “the noise of the creatures in the grass in the summer heat.” We cannot.
“And then wait for the bird to decide to sing./If the bird doesn’t sing/it’s a bad sign,/a sign that the painting is bad.” This means that perhaps enlightenment is attained, or a Ph.D. degree or the degree of medical doctor, but our life doesn’t work. When it doesn’t work, we need to pay more attention to what that degree means or we have to pay attention to our own experience, until the bird starts to sing. When the bird starts to sing that is our experience, our life, so we can sign the painting. But don’t sign with arrogance. The poet says to sign your name in the corner of the picture. We shouldn’t show off, because the whole of life, the whole world is alive. We are just a corner, that’s enough. We are the whole world; the whole world is working. “One of the bird’s feathers” means take Buddha. Take one of the ideas of the universe that we believe, for instance, “the universe is the same and one ground,” and use that feather. With that feather we can write our name, not in the middle of the canvas, but in the corner of the picture. This is the poem, a very beautiful one. Throughout this poem we can see ritual in action.
— Dainin Katagiri, Return to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life, pp. 75-78.
First paint a cage
with an open door.
Then paint
something pretty
something simple
something beautiful
something useful
for the bird.
Then place the canvas against a tree
in a garden
in a wood
or in a forest.
Hide behind the tree
without speaking
without moving . . .
Sometimes the bird comes quickly
but he may take long years
before deciding.
Don’t get discouraged.
Wait.
Wait years if necessary.
How fast or how slowly the bird comes
has nothing to do with the success
of the picture.
When the bird comes
if he comes
observe the most profound silence
till the bird enters the cage
and when he has entered
gently close the door with a brush.
Then
erase all the bars one by one
taking care not to touch any of the bird’s feathers.
Then paint the portrait of the tree
choosing the most beautiful of the branches
for the bird.
Paint also the green foliage and the wind’s freshness
the dust of the sun
and the noise of the creatures in the grass in the summer heat.
And then wait for the bird to decide to sing.
If the bird doesn’t sing
it’s a bad sign,
a sign that the painting is bad.
But if he sings it’s a good sign,
a sign that you can sign.
So, then, so very gently, you pull out
one of the bird’s feathers
and you write your name in a corner of the picture.
The cage, in the first line, means our whole body — the six senses, six sense organs, six sense objects and the five skandhas. This is what the whole world consists of; this is our cage. Everyone has an individual cage. We are nothing but the cage. The poet says, “First paint a cage with an open door.” “Open door” means we should accept the vastness of existence. Usually we don’t open the door. We make the cage and then shut ourselves off. But, if we do this, how can we attract the bird? “Bird” means the Truth, the same and one ground. How can we attract the truth if we close the door? So the poet tells us to paint a cage with the door open.
Next he says, “Then paint/something pretty/something simple/something beautiful/something useful/for the bird.” We have to paint something pretty, simple and beautiful, not for ourselves, not for the cage, but for the bird. “Something beautiful, something simple” means something beyond our intellectual sense. It means we have to see ourselves and also the vastness of space in which all sentient beings exist. This is our practice, constantly. Even if we don’t understand it, paint it, paint something pretty. Even if we don’t believe it is something beautiful, that’s all right, we are following the Buddha’s teaching and we should see the total picture. We should put ourselves in this position. This is to paint something beautiful.
“Then place the canvas against a tree/in a garden/in a wood/or in a forest./Hide behind the tree/without speaking/without moving . . ./Sometimes the bird comes quickly.” When we paint something beautiful, we shouldn’t attach to it. Leave the painting in the wood, in the forest and then hide ourselves. This is to practice the truth. When we do gassho, we have to practice samādhi. Samādhi is really silence. We must be behind the gassho, but we cannot move. If we move, even a little, immediately our intellect comes up and argues. That’s why the poet says. “Hide behind the tree/without speaking/without moving . . .”
Then the poet says, “Sometimes the bird comes quickly,” but strictly speaking, the bird is always there. The bird is there, but because we don’t always experience enlightenment through zazen we say “sometimes” it comes. However, Buddha’s compassion is open to everyone; there is always a bird whether we realize it or not. We don’t know when it will come. But according to this poet it doesn’t matter when it comes or how long it takes. How fast or how slowly the bird comes doesn’t matter, because that has nothing to do with the success of our life. Real success is just to put ourselves in zazen when we do zazen, to put ourselves in gassho when we do gassho, because compassion is open to everyone. “When the bird comes . . ./observe the most profound silence/till the bird enters the cage/and when he has entered/gently close the door with a brush.” Not with our hand, please, close the door with a brush. “Then”—and this practice is very important—“erase all the bars one by one/taking care not to touch any of the bird’s feathers.” This is egolessness, the practice of egolessness. How beautiful it is. If we want to paint the portrait of a bird we have to practice egolessness.
“Then paint the portrait of the tree/choosing the most beautiful of its branches/for the bird./Paint also the green foliage and the wind’s freshness/the dust of the sun.” When we do this, all things become alive. We can make our lives come alive. But without this practice, we cannot paint the autumn, the air, “the dust of the sun” or “the noise of the creatures in the grass in the summer heat.” We cannot.
“And then wait for the bird to decide to sing./If the bird doesn’t sing/it’s a bad sign,/a sign that the painting is bad.” This means that perhaps enlightenment is attained, or a Ph.D. degree or the degree of medical doctor, but our life doesn’t work. When it doesn’t work, we need to pay more attention to what that degree means or we have to pay attention to our own experience, until the bird starts to sing. When the bird starts to sing that is our experience, our life, so we can sign the painting. But don’t sign with arrogance. The poet says to sign your name in the corner of the picture. We shouldn’t show off, because the whole of life, the whole world is alive. We are just a corner, that’s enough. We are the whole world; the whole world is working. “One of the bird’s feathers” means take Buddha. Take one of the ideas of the universe that we believe, for instance, “the universe is the same and one ground,” and use that feather. With that feather we can write our name, not in the middle of the canvas, but in the corner of the picture. This is the poem, a very beautiful one. Throughout this poem we can see ritual in action.
— Dainin Katagiri, Return to Silence: Zen Practice in Daily Life, pp. 75-78.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Those Real Myths
Apparently human beings whose souls have answered to God’s call cannot just be “on earth”; they must have a “heavenly” counterpart. Hence certain lightnings and stars represent their celestial “dimension,” as it were. The author reads the lightnings and stars as cosmically projected symbols of the spiritual aspect of saints on earth. The imagery of spatial transcendence is transparently symbolic of inner spirituality as the presence of “heaven” within human personality.
Our second witness is Jewish merkabah (“throne-chariot”) mysticism, which flourished within Judaism as a significant but underground movement from some time after Ezekiel right down through medieval cabalism to modern Hasidism. The great historian of this phenomenon in Judaism G. G. Scholem comments almost offhandedly on a shift in the mystics’ perception of the nature of the spiritual quest, a shift that took place so inconspicuously that it can only be dated as happening somewhere around 500 c.e. It was the moment when the Jewish mystics no longer spoke of the mystical ascent through the seven heavens, and described it rather as a descent.41 This revolution in imagery (and nothing is more revolutionary than the transformation of the fundamental metaphors by which we apprehend the world) marked the perception that the mystic did not in fact journey into heaven but penetrated the soul’s own depth. This shift was the seed that would, after many centuries of drifting, darkness, nurture, and growth, come to full flower in an inheritor of that mystical tradition—Sigmund Freud. It is this shift that led finally to the psychological mind-set of modern times, stripped, however, of a sense of the divine reality within. It was that shift which enabled Jung, standing on Freud’s shoulders (or toes), to recover a sense of the numinous reality behind the myth and symbol and to redirect us back to these ancient treasuries of truth, with this difference: we can now withdraw the unconscious projections which “change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face,” and locate the cosmic aspect of myth within ourselves—and, I would wish to add, in the inwardness of the events of our time and the forces of nature and history and institutional structures that impinge on us. We are, in short, capable of a “second reading” of the ancient texts, a reading in which the myth is understood to speak symbolically of the real but invisible spiritual dimension of personal and corporate earthly existence.
Why not, then, simply discard the myth in favor of our demythologized interpretation? The more obvious and general answer is that we cannot dispense with the myth because it says more than we can tell. It is not only lucid but opaque. It participates not only in the light of consciousness and reason but also in the darkness of mystery. It treasures things that we have not yet learned to comprehend and preserves them for a generation that might. Through a set of powerfully evocative symbols acknowledged as meaningful by a people, it presents an incredibly condensed story that depicts, through the indirect language of narrative, the nature of ultimate reality, the way things got how they are, the path to salvation, and the final meanings of life. All our “explanations” of myths are dispensable and time-bound and will soon be forgotten, but the myth lives on, fed by its continual interplay with the very reality it “presents.”
41. G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941, 1965), 46-47. Perhaps a similar phenomenon happened independently in gnosticism as well. Speaking of the same kind of mystical journey to heaven, the NHL Steles Seth says, “The way of ascent is the way of descent” (127: 21-22). This echoes an ancient saying of Heraclitus: “The way up and the way down are one and the same” (H. Diels, Die Fragments der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1912), 1:89, frag. 60). Perhaps that ancient insight was only now being vindicated. See also NHL Zost. 82:23-24 and the Teach. Silv. 116:27-117.:5; and 117:6-9—“Open the door for yourself that you may know what is. Knock on yourself that the Word may open for you.” The Greater Hekhalot repeatedly refers to the “descent” into the Merkabah, as do the “Hekhalot Fragments” (cited by Ithamar Greunwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980], p. 188). Another way of symbolizing the “descent” to God appears in Re’uyot Yehezkel, where Ezekiel is depicted as “standing on the River Chebar looking down at the water and the seven heavens were opened to him and he saw the Glory of the Holy One” (cited by Gruenwald, p. 135). The water serves as a mirror of the things in heaven. But that is tantamount to saying that the heavenly is revealed through the depths of the unconscious (“water”). See also T.B. Sanh. 91b—“So will the Holy One, blessed be He, bring the soul, [re]place it in the body, and judge them together, as it is written. He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that he may judge his people: He shall call to the heavens from above—this refers to the soul; and to the earth, that he may judge his people—to the body.” One could scarcely hope to find a more explicit equation of heaven with the “within” of a person.
— Walter Wink, Naming the Powers, pp. 141-143.
Our second witness is Jewish merkabah (“throne-chariot”) mysticism, which flourished within Judaism as a significant but underground movement from some time after Ezekiel right down through medieval cabalism to modern Hasidism. The great historian of this phenomenon in Judaism G. G. Scholem comments almost offhandedly on a shift in the mystics’ perception of the nature of the spiritual quest, a shift that took place so inconspicuously that it can only be dated as happening somewhere around 500 c.e. It was the moment when the Jewish mystics no longer spoke of the mystical ascent through the seven heavens, and described it rather as a descent.41 This revolution in imagery (and nothing is more revolutionary than the transformation of the fundamental metaphors by which we apprehend the world) marked the perception that the mystic did not in fact journey into heaven but penetrated the soul’s own depth. This shift was the seed that would, after many centuries of drifting, darkness, nurture, and growth, come to full flower in an inheritor of that mystical tradition—Sigmund Freud. It is this shift that led finally to the psychological mind-set of modern times, stripped, however, of a sense of the divine reality within. It was that shift which enabled Jung, standing on Freud’s shoulders (or toes), to recover a sense of the numinous reality behind the myth and symbol and to redirect us back to these ancient treasuries of truth, with this difference: we can now withdraw the unconscious projections which “change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face,” and locate the cosmic aspect of myth within ourselves—and, I would wish to add, in the inwardness of the events of our time and the forces of nature and history and institutional structures that impinge on us. We are, in short, capable of a “second reading” of the ancient texts, a reading in which the myth is understood to speak symbolically of the real but invisible spiritual dimension of personal and corporate earthly existence.
Why not, then, simply discard the myth in favor of our demythologized interpretation? The more obvious and general answer is that we cannot dispense with the myth because it says more than we can tell. It is not only lucid but opaque. It participates not only in the light of consciousness and reason but also in the darkness of mystery. It treasures things that we have not yet learned to comprehend and preserves them for a generation that might. Through a set of powerfully evocative symbols acknowledged as meaningful by a people, it presents an incredibly condensed story that depicts, through the indirect language of narrative, the nature of ultimate reality, the way things got how they are, the path to salvation, and the final meanings of life. All our “explanations” of myths are dispensable and time-bound and will soon be forgotten, but the myth lives on, fed by its continual interplay with the very reality it “presents.”
41. G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941, 1965), 46-47. Perhaps a similar phenomenon happened independently in gnosticism as well. Speaking of the same kind of mystical journey to heaven, the NHL Steles Seth says, “The way of ascent is the way of descent” (127: 21-22). This echoes an ancient saying of Heraclitus: “The way up and the way down are one and the same” (H. Diels, Die Fragments der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1912), 1:89, frag. 60). Perhaps that ancient insight was only now being vindicated. See also NHL Zost. 82:23-24 and the Teach. Silv. 116:27-117.:5; and 117:6-9—“Open the door for yourself that you may know what is. Knock on yourself that the Word may open for you.” The Greater Hekhalot repeatedly refers to the “descent” into the Merkabah, as do the “Hekhalot Fragments” (cited by Ithamar Greunwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1980], p. 188). Another way of symbolizing the “descent” to God appears in Re’uyot Yehezkel, where Ezekiel is depicted as “standing on the River Chebar looking down at the water and the seven heavens were opened to him and he saw the Glory of the Holy One” (cited by Gruenwald, p. 135). The water serves as a mirror of the things in heaven. But that is tantamount to saying that the heavenly is revealed through the depths of the unconscious (“water”). See also T.B. Sanh. 91b—“So will the Holy One, blessed be He, bring the soul, [re]place it in the body, and judge them together, as it is written. He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that he may judge his people: He shall call to the heavens from above—this refers to the soul; and to the earth, that he may judge his people—to the body.” One could scarcely hope to find a more explicit equation of heaven with the “within” of a person.
— Walter Wink, Naming the Powers, pp. 141-143.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Delightfully Defined
Patience, n.
A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Patriot, n.
One to whom interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Patriotism, n.
Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Peace, n.
In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Plagiarism, n.
A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Plan, v.t.
To bother about the best method od accomplishing an accidental result.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Platitude, n.
The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demitasse of milk-and-morality. The Pope’s-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Patriot, n.
One to whom interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Patriotism, n.
Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Peace, n.
In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Plagiarism, n.
A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Plan, v.t.
To bother about the best method od accomplishing an accidental result.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Platitude, n.
The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demitasse of milk-and-morality. The Pope’s-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The cackle surviving the egg. A desiccated epigram.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Definite Apposites
Faith, n.
Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Language, n.
The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s treasure.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Learning, n.
The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Lecturer, n.
One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Lexicographer, n.
A pestilent fellow, who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to consider “as one having authority,” whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statute. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor — whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, the bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that “it isn’t in the dictionary” — although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation — sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion — the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which the Creator had not created him to create.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Past, n.
That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one — the knowledge and the dream.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Language, n.
The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s treasure.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Learning, n.
The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Lecturer, n.
One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Lexicographer, n.
A pestilent fellow, who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to consider “as one having authority,” whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statute. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as “obsolete” or “obsolescent” and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor — whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary, the bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that “it isn’t in the dictionary” — although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible, and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation — sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion — the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation which the Creator had not created him to create.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Past, n.
That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one — the knowledge and the dream.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Making of Minds
Long before we understand the function of each hemisphere, it was recognized that people have at least two modes of understanding. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes called one mode “directed” and the other “free.” Indian spiritual teacher Rhadhakrishnan called one “rational” and the other “integral.” French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss referred to one as “positive” and the other as “mythic.” A graphic and poetic description of the “two minds” appears in the second-century Indian Buddhist text, the Lankavatara Sutra:
The discriminating mind is a dancer and a magician
with the objective world as his stage. Intuitive
mind is the wise jester who travels with the magi-
cian and reflects upon his emptiness and transiency.
— Wes “Scoop” Nisker, Crazy Wisdom, pp. 107-108.
RATE THE INTENSIVE above the extensive. The perfect does not lie in quantity, but in quality. All that is best is always scant, and rare, for mass in anything cheapens it. Even among men the giants have often been true pygmies. Some judge books by their thickness, as though they had been written to exercise the arms, instead of the mind. Bigness, alone, never gets beyond the mediocre, and it is the curse of the universal man, that in trying to be everything, he is nothing. It is quality that bestows distinction, and in heroic proportions if the substance is sublime.
— Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Wordly Wisdom, #27, Martin Fischer (tr.), p. 15.
DILIGENT, AND INTELLIGENT. Diligence quickly accomplishes what the intelligence has well thought out. Haste is the passion of fools, and as they know not the difficulties, they work without heed: wiser men, on the other hand, are likely to fail from overcaution; for of reflection is bred delay: and so their hesitation in acting loses them the fruits of their good judgment. Promptitude is the mother of fortune. He does much who leaves nothing for tomorrow. A magnificent motto: to make haste slowly.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #53, p. 30.
THE SENSE TO let things settle. Especially when the public, or the private, sea is most turbulent. There come whirlwinds into human traffic, storms of passion, when it is wise to seek a safe harbor with smoother waters: many times is an evil made worse by the remedies used; here leave things to nature, or there to God: the learned physician needs just as much wisdom in order not to prescribe, as to prescribe, and often the greater art lies in doing nothing; the way to quiet the turbulence of a mob is to withdraw your hand, and let it quiet itself, to concede today, may be the best way to succeed tomorrow; it takes little to muddy a spring, nor does it clear by being stirred, but by being left alone: there is no better remedy for turmoil, than to let it take its course, for so it comes to rest of itself.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #138, pp. 79-80.
A PROPER CONCEIT of yourself, and of your aims, especially at the start of life. All have a high opinion of themselves, particularly those with least reason; each dreams himself a fortune, and imagines himself a prodigy: hope wildly promises everything, and time then fulfills nothing: these things torment the spirit, as the imagined gives way before the truth, wherefore let the man of judgment correct his blunders, and even though hoping for the best, always expect the worst, in order to be able to accept with equanimity whatever comes. It is well, of course, to aim somewhat high, in order to near the mark; but not so high that you miss altogether a starting upon your life’s job; to make this proper estimate of yourself is absolutely necessary, for without experience it is very easy to confuse the conjectured with the fact; there is no greater panacea against all that is foolish, than understanding; wherefore let every man know what is the sphere of his abilities, and his place, and thus be able to make the picture of himself coincide with the actual.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #194, p. 114.
IN HEAVEN ALL is gladness. In hell all is sorrow. Upon this earth, since it lies between, sometimes the one, and sometimes the other. We have our being between two extremes, and so it partakes of both. Fortune should vary, not all being felicity, nor all adversity. This world is a zero, and by itself worth nothing, but joined to heaven worth everything: indifference to your lot is common sense, and not to be surprised by it, wisdom. Our life becomes more complicated as we go along, like a comedy, but toward its end it becomes simpler; keep in mind, therefore, the happy ending.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #211, p. 124.
ENJOY A LITTLE more, and strive a little less: others argue to the contrary; but happy leisure is worth more than drive, for nothing belongs to us, except time, wherein even he dwells who has no habitation: equally infelicitous to squander precious existence in stupid drudgery, as in an excess of noble business. Be not crushed under success, in order not to be crushed under envy: it is to trample upon life, and to suffocate the spirit; some would include hereunder knowledge, but he who is without knowledge, is without life.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #247, p. 145.
The discriminating mind is a dancer and a magician
with the objective world as his stage. Intuitive
mind is the wise jester who travels with the magi-
cian and reflects upon his emptiness and transiency.
— Wes “Scoop” Nisker, Crazy Wisdom, pp. 107-108.
RATE THE INTENSIVE above the extensive. The perfect does not lie in quantity, but in quality. All that is best is always scant, and rare, for mass in anything cheapens it. Even among men the giants have often been true pygmies. Some judge books by their thickness, as though they had been written to exercise the arms, instead of the mind. Bigness, alone, never gets beyond the mediocre, and it is the curse of the universal man, that in trying to be everything, he is nothing. It is quality that bestows distinction, and in heroic proportions if the substance is sublime.
— Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Wordly Wisdom, #27, Martin Fischer (tr.), p. 15.
DILIGENT, AND INTELLIGENT. Diligence quickly accomplishes what the intelligence has well thought out. Haste is the passion of fools, and as they know not the difficulties, they work without heed: wiser men, on the other hand, are likely to fail from overcaution; for of reflection is bred delay: and so their hesitation in acting loses them the fruits of their good judgment. Promptitude is the mother of fortune. He does much who leaves nothing for tomorrow. A magnificent motto: to make haste slowly.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #53, p. 30.
THE SENSE TO let things settle. Especially when the public, or the private, sea is most turbulent. There come whirlwinds into human traffic, storms of passion, when it is wise to seek a safe harbor with smoother waters: many times is an evil made worse by the remedies used; here leave things to nature, or there to God: the learned physician needs just as much wisdom in order not to prescribe, as to prescribe, and often the greater art lies in doing nothing; the way to quiet the turbulence of a mob is to withdraw your hand, and let it quiet itself, to concede today, may be the best way to succeed tomorrow; it takes little to muddy a spring, nor does it clear by being stirred, but by being left alone: there is no better remedy for turmoil, than to let it take its course, for so it comes to rest of itself.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #138, pp. 79-80.
A PROPER CONCEIT of yourself, and of your aims, especially at the start of life. All have a high opinion of themselves, particularly those with least reason; each dreams himself a fortune, and imagines himself a prodigy: hope wildly promises everything, and time then fulfills nothing: these things torment the spirit, as the imagined gives way before the truth, wherefore let the man of judgment correct his blunders, and even though hoping for the best, always expect the worst, in order to be able to accept with equanimity whatever comes. It is well, of course, to aim somewhat high, in order to near the mark; but not so high that you miss altogether a starting upon your life’s job; to make this proper estimate of yourself is absolutely necessary, for without experience it is very easy to confuse the conjectured with the fact; there is no greater panacea against all that is foolish, than understanding; wherefore let every man know what is the sphere of his abilities, and his place, and thus be able to make the picture of himself coincide with the actual.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #194, p. 114.
IN HEAVEN ALL is gladness. In hell all is sorrow. Upon this earth, since it lies between, sometimes the one, and sometimes the other. We have our being between two extremes, and so it partakes of both. Fortune should vary, not all being felicity, nor all adversity. This world is a zero, and by itself worth nothing, but joined to heaven worth everything: indifference to your lot is common sense, and not to be surprised by it, wisdom. Our life becomes more complicated as we go along, like a comedy, but toward its end it becomes simpler; keep in mind, therefore, the happy ending.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #211, p. 124.
ENJOY A LITTLE more, and strive a little less: others argue to the contrary; but happy leisure is worth more than drive, for nothing belongs to us, except time, wherein even he dwells who has no habitation: equally infelicitous to squander precious existence in stupid drudgery, as in an excess of noble business. Be not crushed under success, in order not to be crushed under envy: it is to trample upon life, and to suffocate the spirit; some would include hereunder knowledge, but he who is without knowledge, is without life.
— Baltasar Gracian, in Ibid., #247, p. 145.
Friday, January 7, 2011
Seeing HOW
One of the finest parallels to what has been said here is the description of his central experience given by Edward Maitland, the collaborator of Anna Kingsford. He has discovered that during reflection on an idea, related ideas become visible, so to speak, in a long series apparently reaching back to their source, which to him was the divine spirit. By means of concentration on this series, he tried to penetrate to their origin. He says: ‘I was absolutely without knowledge or expectation when I yielded to the impulse to make the attempt. I simply experimented on a faculty . . . being seated at my writing-table the while in order to record the results as they came, and resolved to retain my hold on my outer and circumferential consciousness, no matter how far towards my inner and central consciousness I might go. For I know not whether I should be able to regain the former if I once quited my hold of it, or to recollect the facts of the experience. At length I achieved my object, though only by a strong effort, the tension occasioned by the endeavor to keep both extremes of the consciousness in view at once being very great.
‘Once well started on my quest, I found myself traversing a succession of spheres or belts . . . the impression produced being that of mounting a vast ladder stretching from the circumference towards the centre of a system, which was at once my own system, the solar system, and the universal system, the three systems being at once diverse and identical…. Presently, by a supreme, and what I felt must be a final effort . . . I succeeded in polarizing the whole of the convergent rays of my consciousness into the desired focus. And at the same instant, as if through the sudden ignition of the rays thus fused into a unity, I found myself confronted with a glory of unspeakable whiteness and brightness, and of a luster so intense as well-nigh to beat me back…. But though feeling that I had to explore further, I resolved to make assurance doubly sure by piercing if I could the almost blinding luster, and seeing what it enshrined. With great effort I succeeded, and the glance revealed to me that which I had felt must be there…. It was the dual form of the Son . . . the unmanifest made manifest, the unformulated formulate, the unindividuate individuate, God as the Lord, proving through His duality that God is Substance as well as Force, Love as well as Will, Feminine as well as Masculine, Mother as well as Father.’ He found that God is two in one like man. Besides this he noticed something that our text also emphasizes, namely, ‘suspension of breathing’. He says ordinary breathing stopped and was replaced by an internal respiration, ‘as if by breathing of a distinct personality within and other than the physical organism’. He took this being to be the entelechy of Aristotle, and the inner Christ of the Apostle Paul, the ‘spiritual and substantial individuality engendered within the physical and phenomenal personality, and representing, therefore, the rebirth of man on a plane transcending the material’. This genuine experience contains all the essential symbols of our text. The phenomenon itself, that is, the vision of light, is an experience common to many mystics, and one that is undoubtedly of the greatest significance, because in all times and places it appears as the unconditional thing, which unites in itself the greatest energy and the profoundest meaning. Hildegarde of Bingen, an outstanding personality quite apart from her mysticism, expresses herself about her central vision in a similar way. ‘Since my childhood,’ she says, ‘I have always seen a light in my soul, but not with the outer eyes, nor through the thoughts of my heart; neither do the five outer senses take part in this vision…. The light I perceive is not of a local kind, but is much brighter than the cloud which bears the sun. I cannot distinguish height, breadth, or length of it…. What I see or learn in such a vision stays long in my memory. I see, hear, and know in the same moment…. I cannot recognize any sort of form in this light, although I sometimes see in it another light that is known to me as the living light…. While I am enjoying the spectacle of this light, all sadness and sorrow vanish from my memory….’
— C. G. Jung, Golden Flower, “Commentary by C. G. Jung,” R. Wilhelm & C. G. Jung, pp. 104-107.
At our point of time the I Ching responds to the need of further development in us. Occultism has enjoyed a renaissance in our times which is virtually without a parallel. The light of the western mind is nearly darkened by it. I am thinking now of our seats of learning and their representatives. I am a physician and deal with ordinary people, and therefore I know that the universities have ceased to act as disseminators of light. People have become weary of scientific specialization and rationalistic intellectualism. They want to hear truths which broaden rather than restrict them, which do not obscure but enlighten, which do not run off them like water, but penetrate them to the marrow. This search threatens to lead a large, if anonymous, public into wrong paths.
— C. G. Jung, “Appendix,” “In Memory of Richard Wilhelm,” in Ibid., p. 143.
‘Once well started on my quest, I found myself traversing a succession of spheres or belts . . . the impression produced being that of mounting a vast ladder stretching from the circumference towards the centre of a system, which was at once my own system, the solar system, and the universal system, the three systems being at once diverse and identical…. Presently, by a supreme, and what I felt must be a final effort . . . I succeeded in polarizing the whole of the convergent rays of my consciousness into the desired focus. And at the same instant, as if through the sudden ignition of the rays thus fused into a unity, I found myself confronted with a glory of unspeakable whiteness and brightness, and of a luster so intense as well-nigh to beat me back…. But though feeling that I had to explore further, I resolved to make assurance doubly sure by piercing if I could the almost blinding luster, and seeing what it enshrined. With great effort I succeeded, and the glance revealed to me that which I had felt must be there…. It was the dual form of the Son . . . the unmanifest made manifest, the unformulated formulate, the unindividuate individuate, God as the Lord, proving through His duality that God is Substance as well as Force, Love as well as Will, Feminine as well as Masculine, Mother as well as Father.’ He found that God is two in one like man. Besides this he noticed something that our text also emphasizes, namely, ‘suspension of breathing’. He says ordinary breathing stopped and was replaced by an internal respiration, ‘as if by breathing of a distinct personality within and other than the physical organism’. He took this being to be the entelechy of Aristotle, and the inner Christ of the Apostle Paul, the ‘spiritual and substantial individuality engendered within the physical and phenomenal personality, and representing, therefore, the rebirth of man on a plane transcending the material’. This genuine experience contains all the essential symbols of our text. The phenomenon itself, that is, the vision of light, is an experience common to many mystics, and one that is undoubtedly of the greatest significance, because in all times and places it appears as the unconditional thing, which unites in itself the greatest energy and the profoundest meaning. Hildegarde of Bingen, an outstanding personality quite apart from her mysticism, expresses herself about her central vision in a similar way. ‘Since my childhood,’ she says, ‘I have always seen a light in my soul, but not with the outer eyes, nor through the thoughts of my heart; neither do the five outer senses take part in this vision…. The light I perceive is not of a local kind, but is much brighter than the cloud which bears the sun. I cannot distinguish height, breadth, or length of it…. What I see or learn in such a vision stays long in my memory. I see, hear, and know in the same moment…. I cannot recognize any sort of form in this light, although I sometimes see in it another light that is known to me as the living light…. While I am enjoying the spectacle of this light, all sadness and sorrow vanish from my memory….’
— C. G. Jung, Golden Flower, “Commentary by C. G. Jung,” R. Wilhelm & C. G. Jung, pp. 104-107.
At our point of time the I Ching responds to the need of further development in us. Occultism has enjoyed a renaissance in our times which is virtually without a parallel. The light of the western mind is nearly darkened by it. I am thinking now of our seats of learning and their representatives. I am a physician and deal with ordinary people, and therefore I know that the universities have ceased to act as disseminators of light. People have become weary of scientific specialization and rationalistic intellectualism. They want to hear truths which broaden rather than restrict them, which do not obscure but enlighten, which do not run off them like water, but penetrate them to the marrow. This search threatens to lead a large, if anonymous, public into wrong paths.
— C. G. Jung, “Appendix,” “In Memory of Richard Wilhelm,” in Ibid., p. 143.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Be Now Here
In the Thomas Gospel, on the other hand, when the apostles ask, “When will the Kingdom come?” — Jesus says, “The Kingdom will not come by expectation. They will say ‘see here, see there.’ The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.” That’s Gnosticism.
Gnosticism is the Western
Counterpart of Buddhism.
Thomas says, in other words, that there is a revelation possible to you right now. It is here. So, “to be happy with Him forever in heaven” means to reach that depth now. It’s a totally different slant.
If you read Christian mythology
in the Gnostic way,
it makes universal sense.
— Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell Companion, Diane K. Osbon (sel. & ed.), pp. 174-175.
This bringing together of Joyce’ esthetic theory with the maya idea was a wonderful illumination for me. I just woke up one morning and said, “My god, I have finally got it after eighty years.” I have known the implications of esthetic arrest, but I’d never linked it up to the maya idea. It is your mental attitude that determines whether you experience the projecting or the revealing power. The world is there in both modes. It is not that the world changes, it’s your consciousness.
Esthetic arrest is the result of this change of focus. “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.” You see it in esthetic arrest. But to develop the inward depth experienced through this change of focus, those who seek to achieve fully the goal of life should set aside a sacred space. The sacred space, when you think of where it appears in traditional cultures, is for initiations and meditations. If you are so fulfilled already that no further initiations are necessary, then you can do without such a space. But, insofar as you’ve not struck the ultimate depth and are interested in enriching and building the interior, in addition to the external aspects of your life, then you have to have some place, some way, to practice this.
All the world will open up when you’ve achieved this inner depth, and your play in life will be informed by this radiance….
— Joseph Campbell, Ibid., pp. 252-253.
Participate joyfully
In the sorrows of the world.
The obvious lesson . . . is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think — and their name is legion — that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think — as do many — “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.
We cannot cure the world of sorrows,
but we can choose to live in joy.
— Joseph Campbell, Ibid., p. 289.
Gnosticism is the Western
Counterpart of Buddhism.
Thomas says, in other words, that there is a revelation possible to you right now. It is here. So, “to be happy with Him forever in heaven” means to reach that depth now. It’s a totally different slant.
If you read Christian mythology
in the Gnostic way,
it makes universal sense.
— Joseph Campbell, Joseph Campbell Companion, Diane K. Osbon (sel. & ed.), pp. 174-175.
This bringing together of Joyce’ esthetic theory with the maya idea was a wonderful illumination for me. I just woke up one morning and said, “My god, I have finally got it after eighty years.” I have known the implications of esthetic arrest, but I’d never linked it up to the maya idea. It is your mental attitude that determines whether you experience the projecting or the revealing power. The world is there in both modes. It is not that the world changes, it’s your consciousness.
Esthetic arrest is the result of this change of focus. “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.” You see it in esthetic arrest. But to develop the inward depth experienced through this change of focus, those who seek to achieve fully the goal of life should set aside a sacred space. The sacred space, when you think of where it appears in traditional cultures, is for initiations and meditations. If you are so fulfilled already that no further initiations are necessary, then you can do without such a space. But, insofar as you’ve not struck the ultimate depth and are interested in enriching and building the interior, in addition to the external aspects of your life, then you have to have some place, some way, to practice this.
All the world will open up when you’ve achieved this inner depth, and your play in life will be informed by this radiance….
— Joseph Campbell, Ibid., pp. 252-253.
Participate joyfully
In the sorrows of the world.
The obvious lesson . . . is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think — and their name is legion — that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think — as do many — “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.
We cannot cure the world of sorrows,
but we can choose to live in joy.
— Joseph Campbell, Ibid., p. 289.
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