Materialism:
1. Philosophy: The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.
2. The theory or attitude that physical well-being and worldly possessions constitute the greatest good and highest value in life.
The two above are one and the same thing, or that the second crass materialism of the age is the incarnaration of philosophical materialism. And so, the bankrupt prevalent ideology of the affluent West with its materially comfortably off but truthless populations is materialism in practice. Materialism is devoid of any sense of truth whatsoever as it relates to human experience and any sense of hierarchies of being; no state of consciousness is to be valued over another, everything simply is- to be human is simply to be a physical object in the midst of other physical objects, and one's worth as an individual is in direct proportion to the worth of one's objects, ie, to be a consumer. The consumer exists in sofar as he consumes. So there is, perhaps paradoxically, a value-system of being, and it involves the ascension of truth in terms of objects reaching towards an absolute value in money terms. Like under spiritual visions of existence, humanity reaches towards infinity, but now one with a money sign preceding this infinity.
Both capitalism, by which is included consumerism, & communism are the transmutation of materialism into the realm of history past, present & projected future; they are lines which meet very naturally within the finite, springing as they do from the same source of materialist philsophy.
The exclusive materialism of pure consumerism must inevitably lead to the leakage of all meaning from civilisation as materialism is an active philosophical corrosive; it is without any higher truths, and must deny and remove any such notions of being. Despite its adherents claims, it is simply nihilism(cleverly masked with a demented grin of idiot happiness), and if modern civilisation is to consistently see it through to its end, it will see itself through to its own end also, arriving as it must at this nihilistic end-point towards which all is drawn.
The Richard Dawkins & other re-heaters of this old philosophy, which one would imagine were something new on the intellectual horizon, should look with pride on the game-show/Big Brother, Scrictly Come Lobotomising cultural mores of the present, as this is the logical incarnation of the materialism which they exalt. Everything simply is, so one has any argument against anything from cultural infantilism to extermination camps. And, naturally, great art which tends to exalt life as intrinsically significant is wholly undesired. The game show & boy-band is much more satisfactory; products of the entertainment industry to be consumed by who else but the consumers. A clear example of the omnipresence of this ideology having insinuated intself into culture is the nonsensical notion that one cannot say one art work is greater than another, all is mere opinion...for example, Boyzone are as great as The Beatles; everything simply is with nothing of any greater intrinsic worth than any other. As said, nihilisim in fancy dress.
The famous angst of modern society springs from the dislocation of individual consciousness from an external world under the sway of materialism, which the individual rightly feels to be inconsistent with his self-evidently significant consciousness. Rather than saying, for example "This is the spiritual, intellectual arena in which I dwell" & getting on with it, the poor individual's consciousness turns in upon itself, and he becomes this indwelling, unhappy individual; a modern gnostic- living in a divided world, though in place of the gnostic's escape route of the Absolute, he simply has his own individual angst-ridden consiousness to dive into.
Materialism is solipsism within the physical domain, though comically, unlike ordinary solipsism where the individual mind asserts itself to be all there is, the assertion is coming from the mind that the physical is all there is. Also, materialists can be seen as a variation on the sect of the castrates, though with the mind & consciousness being the troublesome area of temptation that must be removed or explained away.
Perhaps if its adherents live to see society see this idea through to its end, a voice will be heard to echo TS Eliot's lines:
That is not it at all.
That is not what I meant at all.
To prolong this a little, and to end on a less sombre chord, a quote form the great film-director Andrei Tarkovsky:
"...it seems to me that the individual today stands at a crossroad, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, turn to God."
Saturday, 29 September 2007
Thursday, 27 September 2007
A Word
In a formally satisfying & strikingly thematic follow-on to the previous Words post, this post is about a word, & that word is hexasyllable which Dictionary.com describes thus:
hex·a·syl·la·ble /ˈhɛksəˌsɪləbəl/ [hek-suh-sil-uh-buhl]
–noun- a word of six syllables
Ironically, hexasyllable is a word of only five syllables, or a pentasyllable. Pleasingly, pentasyllable is itself a pentasyllable. Word is a word of one syllable, but, sadly, syllable is a word of three syllables, or trisyllable, which is itself a word of four syllables or quadrisyllable, while quadrisyllable, being comprised of five syllables, is, of course, an example of the pentasyllable we met earlier. Quadrivalvular is, incidentally, also a pentasyllable, meaning possessed of four valves, while valve is described by Reference.com as:
1. any device for halting or controlling the flow of a liquid, gas, or other material through a passage, pipe, inlet, outlet, etc.
2. a hinged lid or other movable part that closes or modifies the passage in such a device.
hex·a·syl·la·ble /ˈhɛksəˌsɪləbəl/ [hek-suh-sil-uh-buhl]
–noun- a word of six syllables
Ironically, hexasyllable is a word of only five syllables, or a pentasyllable. Pleasingly, pentasyllable is itself a pentasyllable. Word is a word of one syllable, but, sadly, syllable is a word of three syllables, or trisyllable, which is itself a word of four syllables or quadrisyllable, while quadrisyllable, being comprised of five syllables, is, of course, an example of the pentasyllable we met earlier. Quadrivalvular is, incidentally, also a pentasyllable, meaning possessed of four valves, while valve is described by Reference.com as:
1. any device for halting or controlling the flow of a liquid, gas, or other material through a passage, pipe, inlet, outlet, etc.
2. a hinged lid or other movable part that closes or modifies the passage in such a device.
Wednesday, 26 September 2007
Words
This is something of an offshoot of the Secondary Objectivity post, where Aldous Huxley describes places such as certain places possessed of a "numinous presence...the psychic presence of men's thoughts & feelings projected into objectivity & haunting the sacred place."
Similarly, words are psychic vessels or vortices which attain their significance through the focusing of human intelligence within these symbols, and which are nourished & deepened by the accumulated concentration of minds projected within these mental forms. In this is something of the sacredness of the Word, where the attuned mind isn't simply using a kind of utilitarian communication tool, but is immersing itself within a living network of psychic vortices which have attained a greater charge of significance through the inflowing of men's thoughts into these intellectual pathways. We are not talking about objective objects after all, but nodes within consciousness.
Similarly to an animal, a word or even language sickens & dies when life ceases to flow into its forms, though there is always the possibility of future resurrections when later minds renew these corpses of thought with the breath of consciousness.
"Corpses of thought" being a line in Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan to describe charred books within a burn out library.
Similarly, words are psychic vessels or vortices which attain their significance through the focusing of human intelligence within these symbols, and which are nourished & deepened by the accumulated concentration of minds projected within these mental forms. In this is something of the sacredness of the Word, where the attuned mind isn't simply using a kind of utilitarian communication tool, but is immersing itself within a living network of psychic vortices which have attained a greater charge of significance through the inflowing of men's thoughts into these intellectual pathways. We are not talking about objective objects after all, but nodes within consciousness.
Similarly to an animal, a word or even language sickens & dies when life ceases to flow into its forms, though there is always the possibility of future resurrections when later minds renew these corpses of thought with the breath of consciousness.
"Corpses of thought" being a line in Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan to describe charred books within a burn out library.
Tuesday, 25 September 2007
Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report
Seven CIA veterans have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and have called for a new investigation. “I think at simplest terms, there’s a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke,” said Raymond McGovern, 27-year veteran of the CIA, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates during the seventies. “There are a whole bunch of unanswered questions. And the reason they’re unanswered is because this administration will not answer the questions,” he said.
In his blurb for 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out,” edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, McGovern wrote: “It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. But the present volume confronts us with evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited. If this is true, it is not merely the case, as the Downing Street memos show, that the stated reason for attacking Iraq was a lie. It is also the case that the whole “war on terror” was based on a prior deception."
William Christison, a 29-year CIA veteran, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis also describes the 9/11 Commission Report as a “joke” and offers even more outspoken criticism. In a 2006 audio interview he said, "We very seriously need an entirely new very high level and truly independent investigation of the events of 9/11. I think you almost have to look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a joke and not a serious piece of analysis at all.”
Rest of article at link.
In his blurb for 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out,” edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, McGovern wrote: “It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. But the present volume confronts us with evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited. If this is true, it is not merely the case, as the Downing Street memos show, that the stated reason for attacking Iraq was a lie. It is also the case that the whole “war on terror” was based on a prior deception."
William Christison, a 29-year CIA veteran, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis also describes the 9/11 Commission Report as a “joke” and offers even more outspoken criticism. In a 2006 audio interview he said, "We very seriously need an entirely new very high level and truly independent investigation of the events of 9/11. I think you almost have to look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a joke and not a serious piece of analysis at all.”
Rest of article at link.
Good Not So Good
In our humble role of intellectual missionaries we are proud to bring you, the ignorant reader, the latest in our ever popular instalments of scientific knowledge, the most noble of all human disciplines, exalted as it is by its intrinsic intellectual rigour & vigour so sadly lacking in all other spheres of mental activity.
It has been revealed, which is to say proven, by a noted expert that good advice is next to useless, & is indeed in such close proximity to useless as to be one & the same. "There can be no doubt," said our scientific man, "that good advice is indeed next to useless, or to describe it with different words, not useful at all. In tests, various humans received various bits of expert advice designed to prove useful in the near-real situations in which they were to be placed, along with other humans who had been imparted placeboidal information of no practical benefit to the particular controlled situation, & it was unexpectedly found by our highly trained laboratory technicians that the latter uneducated agents performed as well, or indeed as badly, as the educated agents!"(We take the liberty of inserting an exclamation mark here, not to infer that our scientist showed intense excitement at this point, but that there was a slight dogmatic stress, somewhat unusual to his behavioural patterns, of which the reader would otherwise be unaware.)
"The good advice should," he went on, "have acted as a catalyst to ensure the higher efficiency of the educated subjects but this was not borne out by the results. We can but infer that good advice is of illusory worth."
A noted giver of good advice has said that similarly inclined persons as himself should not be too disheartened by the news as the pleasure in giving good advice is in the giving, & its practical worth is "irrelevant."
It has been revealed, which is to say proven, by a noted expert that good advice is next to useless, & is indeed in such close proximity to useless as to be one & the same. "There can be no doubt," said our scientific man, "that good advice is indeed next to useless, or to describe it with different words, not useful at all. In tests, various humans received various bits of expert advice designed to prove useful in the near-real situations in which they were to be placed, along with other humans who had been imparted placeboidal information of no practical benefit to the particular controlled situation, & it was unexpectedly found by our highly trained laboratory technicians that the latter uneducated agents performed as well, or indeed as badly, as the educated agents!"(We take the liberty of inserting an exclamation mark here, not to infer that our scientist showed intense excitement at this point, but that there was a slight dogmatic stress, somewhat unusual to his behavioural patterns, of which the reader would otherwise be unaware.)
"The good advice should," he went on, "have acted as a catalyst to ensure the higher efficiency of the educated subjects but this was not borne out by the results. We can but infer that good advice is of illusory worth."
A noted giver of good advice has said that similarly inclined persons as himself should not be too disheartened by the news as the pleasure in giving good advice is in the giving, & its practical worth is "irrelevant."
Monday, 24 September 2007
Slight Variation on Same Old Bullshit
"OK we explain we need to attack Iraq because they've got dreadful weapons which endanger us all. Afterwards when we don't find those weapons, eventually we hold our hands up & say we made a mistake.
After turning that place into hell on earth, we then claim we need to attack Iran, saying they don't have any of these dreadful weapons, but if they did, we'd all regret it."
"That's beautiful. Now we need an advertising slogan."
"How about the War on Terror."
"Again beautiful, but I think you'll find it's been done."
"How about "War...Making the world safer for you & your children."
"I like it, & we can target the intellectuals with that, but we'll need something shorter for the masses."
"War?"
"Bingo."
After turning that place into hell on earth, we then claim we need to attack Iran, saying they don't have any of these dreadful weapons, but if they did, we'd all regret it."
"That's beautiful. Now we need an advertising slogan."
"How about the War on Terror."
"Again beautiful, but I think you'll find it's been done."
"How about "War...Making the world safer for you & your children."
"I like it, & we can target the intellectuals with that, but we'll need something shorter for the masses."
"War?"
"Bingo."
Sunday, 23 September 2007
The Establishment & Its Lackeys
"The Establishment draws in recruits from outside as soon as they are ready to conform to its standards and become respectable. There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment—and nothing more corrupting".
Historian A J P Taylor
Which one could argue is something of a pithy summation of the mainstream media & its figures oozing in the glorification of hobnobbing with the greats of the political/intellectual/cultural establishment, even when the cultural establishment amounts to idiocy disseminators in the form of boy-bands or the political leaders being blatant puppets of sick ruling elites. Our happy intellectual knows no task too demeaning so as to retain his boot-licking place with The Establishment, & since consciousness so subtly follows one's actions, he, in the iedal case at least, no longer has the critical distance necessary to even be aware of the indignity of his position...he has wholly become the prostitute of his actions & so spouts the establishment propaganda without remorse. Which is ideal; no need to wrestle with troublesome issues like hypocrisy & self-lacerating guilt. He is one of the finest examples of the Slave Mentality. John Swinton, editor of the New York Tribune, called by his peers, "the dean of his profession," was asked on February 26th, 1936, to give a toast before the New York Press Association. He responded with the following statements:There is no such thing as an independent press in America, unless it is in the country towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.
"I am paid $150.00 a week for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should permit honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, like Othello, before twenty-four hours, my occupation would be gone.
"The business of the New York journalist is to destroy truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon; to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools and vessels for rich men behind the scenes. We are intellectual prostitutes."
As something of a counter-balance to this are the words of Marcus Aurelius:
"That men of a certain type should behave as they do is inevitable. To wish it otherwise were to wish the fig-tree would not yield its juice."
There are no shortages of lackeys under any regime & as WB Yeats more or less wrote, "Cast a cold eye on pitiful intellectual prostitutes. Horseman, pass by!"
Historian A J P Taylor
Which one could argue is something of a pithy summation of the mainstream media & its figures oozing in the glorification of hobnobbing with the greats of the political/intellectual/cultural establishment, even when the cultural establishment amounts to idiocy disseminators in the form of boy-bands or the political leaders being blatant puppets of sick ruling elites. Our happy intellectual knows no task too demeaning so as to retain his boot-licking place with The Establishment, & since consciousness so subtly follows one's actions, he, in the iedal case at least, no longer has the critical distance necessary to even be aware of the indignity of his position...he has wholly become the prostitute of his actions & so spouts the establishment propaganda without remorse. Which is ideal; no need to wrestle with troublesome issues like hypocrisy & self-lacerating guilt. He is one of the finest examples of the Slave Mentality. John Swinton, editor of the New York Tribune, called by his peers, "the dean of his profession," was asked on February 26th, 1936, to give a toast before the New York Press Association. He responded with the following statements:There is no such thing as an independent press in America, unless it is in the country towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.
"I am paid $150.00 a week for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should permit honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, like Othello, before twenty-four hours, my occupation would be gone.
"The business of the New York journalist is to destroy truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon; to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools and vessels for rich men behind the scenes. We are intellectual prostitutes."
As something of a counter-balance to this are the words of Marcus Aurelius:
"That men of a certain type should behave as they do is inevitable. To wish it otherwise were to wish the fig-tree would not yield its juice."
There are no shortages of lackeys under any regime & as WB Yeats more or less wrote, "Cast a cold eye on pitiful intellectual prostitutes. Horseman, pass by!"
Tuesday, 18 September 2007
Hard Times Ahead
A scientist has warned that in the coming months much of the northern hemisphere of the planet Earth can expect significant drops in temperature. This cooling of the culturally more significant half of the globe will result from an altering in the northern hemisphere's proximity to a nearby star - the details of which changes our scientist described as being "too tedious to go into." He says that as an intimately related consequence of the lowering in temperatures expected, humans could expect to feel "colder." This due to the nature of the human psycho-physical organism & its profound & subtle involvement with the environment which it inhabits.
Monday, 17 September 2007
Pilot who flew 2 planes used on 9/11 finds official story ludicrous
Former Air Force fighter pilot Russ Wittenberg, who flew over 100 combat missions in Vietnam, sat in the cockpit for Pan Am and United for over 30 years, and previously flew two of the actual airplanes that were allegedly hijacked on 9/11 (United Airlines Flight 175 & 93),
RUSS WITTENBERG: "I flew the two actual aircraft which were involved in 9/11... Fight number 175 and Flight 93, the 757 that allegedly went down in Shanksville and Flight 175 is the aircraft that's alleged to have hit the South Tower. I don't believe it's possible for... a so-called terrorist to train on a 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding it's design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns,.. pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G's...the airplane would literally fall out of the sky. I couldn't do it and I'm absolutely positive they couldn't do it."
Short video interview here.
RUSS WITTENBERG: "I flew the two actual aircraft which were involved in 9/11... Fight number 175 and Flight 93, the 757 that allegedly went down in Shanksville and Flight 175 is the aircraft that's alleged to have hit the South Tower. I don't believe it's possible for... a so-called terrorist to train on a 172, then jump in a cockpit of a 757-767 class cockpit, and vertical navigate the aircraft, lateral navigate the aircraft, and fly the airplane at speeds exceeding it's design limit speed by well over 100 knots, make high-speed high-banked turns,.. pulling probably 5, 6, 7 G's...the airplane would literally fall out of the sky. I couldn't do it and I'm absolutely positive they couldn't do it."
Short video interview here.
Sunday, 16 September 2007
Modern Britain - Suspect Nation
Excellent documentary here.
"The State now has powers that to probe & pry into our lives that the dictatorships of the past couldn't have dreamt of. A profound change is taking place...We should all be worried we are sleepwalking into a society where 24 hour surveillance of everyone is the norm."
Since Tony Blair’s New Labour government came to power in 1997, the UK civil liberties landscape has changed dramatically. ASBOs were introduced by Section 1 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and first used in 1999. The right to remain silent is no longer universal. The right to privacy, free from interception of communications has been severely curtailed. The ability to travel without surveillance (or those details of our journeys being retained) has disappeared.
Indeed, as Henry Porter (the Observer journalist famous for his recent email clash with Tony Blair over the paring down of civil liberties) reveals in this unsettling film, British citizens' movements are being watched, and recorded, more than ever before.
Here the fundamental State philosophy towards its citizens views being exactly that, ie ITS citizens, as opposed to the citizens' State. And with that in mind it is interesting to take a look at some thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche from Human, All Too Human:
Socialism is the visionary younger brother of an almost decrepit depostism whose heir it wants to be. It desires a wealth of executive power, as only despotism had it; indeed, it outdoes everything in the past by striving for the downright destruction of the individual, which it sees as an unjustified luxury of nature, & which it intends to improve unto an expedient organ of the community...It desires the Caesarean power state of this century...it needs the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the likes of which has never existed. And since it cannot even count any longer on the old religious piety towards the state, having rather always to work to eliminate piety, it can only hope to exist here & there for short periods of time by means of the most extreme terrorism. Therefore, it secretly prepares for reigns of terror, & drives the word "justice" like a nail into the heads of the semieducated masses, to rob them completely of their reason(after this reason has already suffered a great deal from its semieducation), & to give them a good conscience for the evil game they are supposed to play.
Socialism can serve as a rather brutal & forceful way to teach the danger of all accumulations of state power, & to that extent instill one with distrust of the state itself. When its rough voice chimes in with the battle cry "As much state as possible," it will at first make the cry noisier than ever; but soon the opposite cry will be heard with strength the greater: "As little state as possible."
Naively we may imagine that the US is a capitalist system where the above does necessarily not apply but the identical attitude of "the state" towards "its" citizens is clearly in operation, where the state, under the justification of a phoney war on terror, awards itself endless rights of observation over its citizens whose traditional rights such as habeus corpus are severely eroded. I use inverted commas over the state as it seems conveniently forgotten that the actions of the various states are on behalf of individuals or ruling elites rather than imaginary entities such as these states, even though highly complex bureaucratic edifices may convey the impression that such entities are indeed real.
Find Your Enemy
"The name of the game is to find your enemy. Your enemy's strategy is to pretend he doesn't exist" William Burroughs
And with that, an interesting video, The Money Masters. The accuracy of its immediate predictions may be debatable but still well worth a look.
"I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principles of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale" Thomas Jefferson
“The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin... But if you want to continue to be slaves of the bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit.”
Josiah Charles Stamp, English Economist President of the Bank of England in the 1920's.
And with that, an interesting video, The Money Masters. The accuracy of its immediate predictions may be debatable but still well worth a look.
"I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principles of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale" Thomas Jefferson
“The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin... But if you want to continue to be slaves of the bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit.”
Josiah Charles Stamp, English Economist President of the Bank of England in the 1920's.
Thursday, 13 September 2007
Loose Thoughts
A planet with two suns: one emits light & warmth, the other darkness & cold.
A planet where everyone speaks their own personal language. When two people wish to communicate a psychic fusion occurs where a second language is formed. If a third person wishes to join the conversation a third language is formed & so on.
A planet where everyone has a timepiece counting down to their moment of death...what kind of psychology develops?
A planet where great masses of slave populations are hypnotised by the hallucination machines of sick individuals united by their devotion to delusion- The Coalition of the Paranoid. Ultimately, of course, this hypothetical coalition is divided against itself & its members will begin tearing each other apart as soon as what they imagine to be their ultimate triumph is realised.
A planet where everyone speaks their own personal language. When two people wish to communicate a psychic fusion occurs where a second language is formed. If a third person wishes to join the conversation a third language is formed & so on.
A planet where everyone has a timepiece counting down to their moment of death...what kind of psychology develops?
A planet where great masses of slave populations are hypnotised by the hallucination machines of sick individuals united by their devotion to delusion- The Coalition of the Paranoid. Ultimately, of course, this hypothetical coalition is divided against itself & its members will begin tearing each other apart as soon as what they imagine to be their ultimate triumph is realised.
Sunday, 9 September 2007
Music & Flame
The existence of a piece of music can be said to resemble a flame from a match, or even a cigarette lighter. Like the flame one can only talk of it when it is alive, which is to say, present within the field of consciousness. Its life is one of instantaneous appearances & disappearances; births, deaths & resurrections. Perhaps one could describe life & universes in similar vein.
Saturday, 8 September 2007
Secondary Objectivity
Below from the Ritual, Symbol, Sacrament chapter of Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy:
If sacramental rites are constantly repeated in a spirit of faith & devotion, a more or less enduring effect is produced in the psychic medium, in which individual minds bathe & from which they have, so to speak, been crystallised out into more or less perfect development of the bodies with which they are associated. Within this psychic medium or non-personal substratum of individual minds, something which we may think of metaphorically as a vortex persists as an independent existence, possessing its own derived & secondary objectivity, so that, wherever the rites are performed, those whose faith & devotion are sufficiently intense actually discover something 'out there,' as distinct from the subjective something in their own imaginations. And so long as this projected psychic entity is nourished by the faith & love of its worshippers, it will possess, not merely objectivity, but power to get people's prayers answered...
The primitive notion that the gods feed on the sacrifices made to them is simply the crude expression of a profound truth. When their worship falls off, when faith & devotion lose their intensity, the devas(gods) sicken & die. Europe is full of old shrines, whose saints & Virgins & relics have lost the power & second-hand objectivity which they once possessed...but there are still certain churches in the West, cetain mosques & temples in the East, where even the most irreligious & un-psychic tourist cannot fail to be aware of some intensely "numinous" presence...it is the psychic presence of men's thoughts & feelings projected into objectivity & haunting the sacred place in the same way as thoughts & feelings of another kind, but of equal intensity, haunt the scenes of some past suffering or crime.
As a tangential offshoot of the above, I have personally found being at an art gallery looking at a masterpiece in the flesh to be a considerably deeper experience than looking at the same work in reproduction. A large part of the reason, I now believe, is that one isn't merely looking at the painting in a higher resloution, so to speak, or that one's heightened state of alertness has helped produce the more intensely satisfying experience, but that one also is, if one's attention is sufficient, able to lock into this secondary objectivity, or pathway of accumulated psychic force, arising from the gaze of preceding viewers of the piece, this including the gaze of the original artist who has created the work.
If sacramental rites are constantly repeated in a spirit of faith & devotion, a more or less enduring effect is produced in the psychic medium, in which individual minds bathe & from which they have, so to speak, been crystallised out into more or less perfect development of the bodies with which they are associated. Within this psychic medium or non-personal substratum of individual minds, something which we may think of metaphorically as a vortex persists as an independent existence, possessing its own derived & secondary objectivity, so that, wherever the rites are performed, those whose faith & devotion are sufficiently intense actually discover something 'out there,' as distinct from the subjective something in their own imaginations. And so long as this projected psychic entity is nourished by the faith & love of its worshippers, it will possess, not merely objectivity, but power to get people's prayers answered...
The primitive notion that the gods feed on the sacrifices made to them is simply the crude expression of a profound truth. When their worship falls off, when faith & devotion lose their intensity, the devas(gods) sicken & die. Europe is full of old shrines, whose saints & Virgins & relics have lost the power & second-hand objectivity which they once possessed...but there are still certain churches in the West, cetain mosques & temples in the East, where even the most irreligious & un-psychic tourist cannot fail to be aware of some intensely "numinous" presence...it is the psychic presence of men's thoughts & feelings projected into objectivity & haunting the sacred place in the same way as thoughts & feelings of another kind, but of equal intensity, haunt the scenes of some past suffering or crime.
As a tangential offshoot of the above, I have personally found being at an art gallery looking at a masterpiece in the flesh to be a considerably deeper experience than looking at the same work in reproduction. A large part of the reason, I now believe, is that one isn't merely looking at the painting in a higher resloution, so to speak, or that one's heightened state of alertness has helped produce the more intensely satisfying experience, but that one also is, if one's attention is sufficient, able to lock into this secondary objectivity, or pathway of accumulated psychic force, arising from the gaze of preceding viewers of the piece, this including the gaze of the original artist who has created the work.
Wednesday, 5 September 2007
Cogito Ergo Again
I think, therefore I am. This isn't quite the moment of triumph it may appear to have been in man's courageous historical battle to prove to himself that his existence is indeed provable to himself. I'll brazenly ignore the possible intricacies of the phrase in its original language & confine myself to pretending the words & meaning are accurately conveyed in the English, as perhaps they are.
Descartes could have written, "I run, therefore I am." Or perhaps, "I walk, therefore I am." Or even the exotic, "I fly Japanese kites, therefore I am." The I bit at the start of the linguistic construct engaged in the doing of anything, or even in the not doing of anything, tautologically is. I, were I in the vicinity at the time & acquainted with Descartes, would have suggested, "I am, therefore I am."
Descartes could have written, "I run, therefore I am." Or perhaps, "I walk, therefore I am." Or even the exotic, "I fly Japanese kites, therefore I am." The I bit at the start of the linguistic construct engaged in the doing of anything, or even in the not doing of anything, tautologically is. I, were I in the vicinity at the time & acquainted with Descartes, would have suggested, "I am, therefore I am."
Tuesday, 4 September 2007
Wise Saying
Let your ego work for you rather than you work for your ego.
Perhaps I should have titled this- 'Very Wise Saying' to stress for the less wise how wise the saying is. Though perhaps that might seem condescending. Not that they'd notice.
Perhaps I should have titled this- 'Very Wise Saying' to stress for the less wise how wise the saying is. Though perhaps that might seem condescending. Not that they'd notice.
Sunday, 2 September 2007
Thought, Being & Madness
The tragic & somewhat sad story of an earnest young man who was deeply affected by his encounter with the holy intellectual avenues of Western philosophy. To cut to the heart of the matter, the downfall of this deeply sensitive fellow was his very sensitivity to the ideas which he, like a lamb to the slaughter, fell prey; his naive honesty of spirit meaning he was not blessed with the defences to his soul such as those that protect a less honest man.
The idea in particular that proved fatal to his soundness of mind was the famous "Cogito ergo sum" of Rene Descartes(a Frenchman)-I think, therefore I am. Our youth was stunned by this idea; prior to this he did not question his own existence- the question simply hadn't arisen. Now, however, it appeared that his existence was bound up in his own thought processes. He became convinced, naturally enough, that were this statement to be true, the continued existence of his own self depended on a continuous process of thought; should this thought cease, then oblivion. He became terrified at the prospect of his instantaneous demise should thinking stop, and this very terror produced the most profound paranoia which unwittingly did produce the incessant stream of inner thought upon which he believed his very existence to depend.
Here I have a confession to make; for the sake of tension I intimated that this was a story of the tragic kind. Therefore it is to be expected that the reader took this in good faith to mean that this tale would have a unhappy, even if cathartic, conclusion. And up to the latest recounted point of the tale this expectation would appear to have been justified. However, I may have, in the interests of provoking a state of tension meritricious to a full artistic experience, been a little disingenuous as to the conclusion to the tale. We left our young man in a state of paranoia. Noone will argue with that. The inference, given the words uttered earlier by our author(me), was that the future of this unfortunate would continue indefinitely in like paranoid manner. There is a twist in the tale, though, which the psychologically acute may indeed have anticipated. This twist is that the very incessant stream of inner thought upon which he believed his very existence to depend, and which indeed did seem to produce the desired result- ie his continuous existence-, produced in time a state of satisfied complacency at his continued existence and the keeping at bay of the dreaded oblivion of non-existence. He congratulated himself on the success of his life or death mental endeavours. And naturally, this relaxation of his mental state caused the dissipating of the paranoia which produced the unending train of thought; and in sinking into this relaxed state of momentary linguistic cessation he was astonished to discover that in the interim between the last & next moments of thinking, rather than the terrible void of absolute nothingness, he had indeed continued to exist, and this very existence was of an intrinsically deeper & more satisfying essence than that which he had inhabited when he had been doing all the much feted thinking. It also seemed that his subsequent thoughts, after dipping into the well of inner silence, were of a much higher order than the incessant chatter which he had mistaken for true thinking in his earlier fight for survival.
The idea in particular that proved fatal to his soundness of mind was the famous "Cogito ergo sum" of Rene Descartes(a Frenchman)-I think, therefore I am. Our youth was stunned by this idea; prior to this he did not question his own existence- the question simply hadn't arisen. Now, however, it appeared that his existence was bound up in his own thought processes. He became convinced, naturally enough, that were this statement to be true, the continued existence of his own self depended on a continuous process of thought; should this thought cease, then oblivion. He became terrified at the prospect of his instantaneous demise should thinking stop, and this very terror produced the most profound paranoia which unwittingly did produce the incessant stream of inner thought upon which he believed his very existence to depend.
Here I have a confession to make; for the sake of tension I intimated that this was a story of the tragic kind. Therefore it is to be expected that the reader took this in good faith to mean that this tale would have a unhappy, even if cathartic, conclusion. And up to the latest recounted point of the tale this expectation would appear to have been justified. However, I may have, in the interests of provoking a state of tension meritricious to a full artistic experience, been a little disingenuous as to the conclusion to the tale. We left our young man in a state of paranoia. Noone will argue with that. The inference, given the words uttered earlier by our author(me), was that the future of this unfortunate would continue indefinitely in like paranoid manner. There is a twist in the tale, though, which the psychologically acute may indeed have anticipated. This twist is that the very incessant stream of inner thought upon which he believed his very existence to depend, and which indeed did seem to produce the desired result- ie his continuous existence-, produced in time a state of satisfied complacency at his continued existence and the keeping at bay of the dreaded oblivion of non-existence. He congratulated himself on the success of his life or death mental endeavours. And naturally, this relaxation of his mental state caused the dissipating of the paranoia which produced the unending train of thought; and in sinking into this relaxed state of momentary linguistic cessation he was astonished to discover that in the interim between the last & next moments of thinking, rather than the terrible void of absolute nothingness, he had indeed continued to exist, and this very existence was of an intrinsically deeper & more satisfying essence than that which he had inhabited when he had been doing all the much feted thinking. It also seemed that his subsequent thoughts, after dipping into the well of inner silence, were of a much higher order than the incessant chatter which he had mistaken for true thinking in his earlier fight for survival.
Saturday, 1 September 2007
Aldous Huxley Interview
Aspiration & Implementation
The bit of the thing that I want to talk about is what is coming after what I write here in this bit now. I hope it will be what I hope it is supposed to instead of it wanting to be it but it ending up being something else, not what it should but different. Which is important. So words to end up the the same as the thoughts making them want to be them the way they want to. Or that the execution will match the intellectual desire for accurate representation of the somewhat inchoate thought-vision by linguistic means. With the words doing & being it. But maybe later not now.
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