Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Discussion of the nature of Ultimate Reality and the path to Enlightenment.
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David Quinn
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by David Quinn »

Alex Jacob wrote:I do not see an avenue where I will ever be relieved of 'mental chaos' (uncertainty, discomfort, a sense of deficiency) and I have begin to get 'comfortable' with that.

Yep, that pretty much accords with my perception of you. Whatever distaste you have of being buffeted about by mental chaos is far outweighed by your fear of clarity and consciousness of truth. It's a case of "better the devil you know".

The reason why you like poets and soaring artists, as opposed to the directness of philosophers, is that you can use them to rise above the chaos for a short time, safe in the knowledge that you can sink back into the chaos once more, where you are comfortable.


Why doesn't it surprise me that you organize your critique through a location of supposed 'female' traits? When the QRS edifice is challenged it is the classic female characteristics that are trotted-out and condemned.
I saw it as an opportunity to illustrate the way in which feminine-mindedness has no potential for becoming conscious of truth. The masculine approach to wisdom is, after all, a key focus of this forum.

Also, it does not surprise me that you would focus on my admitted uncertainty, a lack of complete conclusiveness. And if I locate my 'problem' of uncertainty in a social context, and link it to a history, a movement within the world of ideas, and 'the Nietzschean paradox', that for you becomes the thrust for undermining my general thrust, since, we note, QRS-tianity is based on absolute certainties, an absolute ethical bedrock.

Your desire to locate the source of your uncertainty within historical and social movements is simply a way of making yourself even more comfortable with the chaos. Not only does it deflect attention away from the true source of your uncertainty - namely, your own fear of truth - but it absolves you from taking any responsibility for it.

To work the angle---and it is a working of an angle, the standart QRS-tian angle---of labelling someone's approach to religion or spirituality as 'feminine' is just the standard and easy way to discredit my views. If you---and it is a herd effort, I mean that in the strict Kierkegaardian sense---can get your definition to stick, you have validated your own judgment, and smugly you continue within your 'defective certainties'.
Instead of reacting defensively and projecting onto me all sorts of labels, I would rather you look within your own mind and discern the way in which you fear becoming clear about anything.

When YOU talk about someone not being able to use one's own mind to know what it true, that means, really, that you seek to coerce others to accept your 'herd agreements', David. There is a boyish coerciveness that is not too original going on here, it is a standard feature and tactic of y'all.
How do I coerce people? All I do is appeal to people's sense of logic.

I suppose, in a way, this is a form of coercion because I temporarily co-opt people's logical processes and use them to direct attention to their own fears and contradictory thought-processes. But that is no bad thing.

I would mention, in a Christian and Kierkegaardian sense that the mind that continues to engage with 'the paradox' is a mind still alive, still evolving. You guys though THINK you have it all worked out, and your whole endeavor is to get people to accept your shallow doctrines. Where in that is the real struggle of the individual, in a profound sense? How could you ever tie that to the Kierkegaardian recognition of sacrifice, commitment, the message and meaning of Christ's sacrifice in the Gospel narratives? How pathetic and cheap---and rather ugly at times---are your 'reasonings'!
There are essentially two stages of spiritual struggle. The first is the struggle to understand what God is - a process that is part intellectual and part experiential. The second is the struggle to become wholly in tune with God on a permanent basis and live perfectly truthfully at all times.

The first stage is the shorter and easier of the two, while the second stage is the work of a lifetime. Kierkegaard's focus was primarily on the second stage. He fully understood the nature of God, and thus his main concern was how to become more involved with God in one's personal life. That was the "paradox" as he saw it – namely, that the more one becomes involved with God, the more wretched one's life becomes. One's clash with the world becomes increasingly stronger and the world's response becomes increasingly more unforgiving as a result.

To Kierkegaard’s mind, Jesus fully embodied this paradox. Here was a man who was supposedly the greatest spiritual being who ever lived, believed by many to be the son of God no less, being whipped and persecuted by his society and forced to die alone on a cross.

This is the real paradox of spirituality.

As Kierkegaard notes:
Man has the natural tendency to think that if he only makes an effort he will be victorious. Christianity says that downfall is being victorious. Know this - if you manage to reach merely a modest degree of perfection, your downfall is certain; and the more you succeed, the more certain your downfall. To turn over thoughts like these for only one hour is more exhausting than enormous efforts in the hope of being victorious.
What you're talking about, on the other hand – namely, your own feeble attempts to grapple with your confused understandings - is a million miles away from this. You haven't completed the first stage of spiritual struggle, and by all appearances, you haven't even made a start. You're still in a pre-spiritual stage, which won't change until you start taking truth seriously and make a genuine attempt to leave your mental chaos behind.

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Trevor Salyzyn
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Trevor Salyzyn »

AJ,
However, I would only point out that as I have seen it, as it is explained here, your 'ethic' is simply to retreat from all earthly endeavors, perform no work, live on nothing, and work toward a nebulous 'enlightenment'.
When explaining Eastern philosophy, I used to jest that a hell of a lot of the ethic (be it Confucian, Buddhist, or Daoist) sounded a lot like a justification for laziness. Confucius said that a gentleman is not a tool, Lao Tzu that the entire world can be known without ever going outside, etc. So, jokingly I would tell people that I'm living up to, say, Lao Tzu's ideal (I've got a reputation for doing very little work among people who know me). Since it was written in poetry, it was hard to tell if my assessment was true -- so it served as, as I said, a joke.

Then I came across one of Lao Tzu's contemporaries, Zhuangzi, who wrote basically the same shit in prose. And I discovered through this that without a doubt Eastern mysticism promotes what most people would consider laziness. He sympathizes with an ancient tree that managed to avoid ever being cut down because it was so twisted that no carpenter would ever consider it useful. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that even from the earliest times, the ethic of many major philosophers has been what you describe -- namely, a retreat from all earthly endeavours, an evasion of work, a life without superfluities, and time spent working toward a nebulous enlightenment.

Spit and curse all you want, but this ethic you are pointing out is more often than not praised by philosophers. It is precisely these unlikely values that cause so much pain to philosophers, while assisting them in finding God: nobody sympathizes with someone from whom they never derive any utility. So, you are in the majority -- the irony here being that you constantly praise Nietzsche, who looked contemptuously upon your own herdly values.
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Alex Jacob
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Alex Jacob »

David.

The 'beauty' of the QRS-tian stance is that it can always and will always triumph absolutely over any other---simnply through the power of insistance. It is far less about reason and much more about a core (egoic) Will-to-Triumph. It is one of the reasons, I regret to inform you, why your 'movement' will never really get anywhere. You will get resistance, and you will interpret that as 'the World's resistance to Christ's message, the the message of the 'wise'. Intlligent people, I submit, will see through the Game, and the less intelligent will come under the influence of your unassailable 'Truth'.

It is a game more of enforcing labels and definitions much more than addressing real questions, in real contexts. It seems to me that it is just another True Believer stance, and that is why I reject it. It doesn't make any sense, and only leads to wasting time, to counter your assessments one-by-one. All the same ideas are repeated, and then repeated again, and it does no good: nothing can get through. Personally, my hope is that those who read see and recognize these tactics.
____________________________________________

Trevor wrote:

"Spit and curse all you want, but this ethic you are pointing out is more often than not praised by philosophers. It is precisely these unlikely values that cause so much pain to philosophers, while assisting them in finding God: nobody sympathizes with someone from whom they never derive any utility. So, you are in the majority -- the irony here being that you constantly praise Nietzsche, who looked contemptuously upon your own herdly values."

I appreciated your thoughtful post Trevor. What 'philosophers' recommend, or what consensus they share, does not mean a great deal to me, personally. You help to highlight a personal truth of sorts, and that is that I am interested more in a very specific period of quite recent history, and consider that the forumulation of values, a reencounter and recombination and practical reformulation of many different values, is what matters to me, personally.

I was asked to explain what 'values' I felt attracted, that had interested me, and that is all I did. All sorts of things could be said about it, and too about the value for taking time for other sorts of searching and discovery (not specifically working). Yet what and who interests me are those who work for their values in this world. As a universal ethic, retreat into non-activity seems a dead-end street. Also, Christianity, I don't think, could ever successfully represent non-activity since it is so tied to values of action in the world. (And neither could or does Judaism).

I do praise Nietzsche, because I think that in him the keys can be found. Not that he HAS the keys, but that he points one to, or draws one into, the very center of the conflict. It is philosophical, religious, mental, psychological and I supose aesthetic. And what we DO when we recognize what, in fact, we are, and where we are---that is when things get interesting. Nietzsche has, better than anyone else, made the nature of the struggle very clear.

Okay Diebert...are you happy with the result of your work to have 'delivered me over to mine enemies'? See how I am rent and torn and how I bleed?

;-)
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Alex Jacob wrote: Anyway, Diebert, what do you want me to do? What do you want me to say? Do you doubt my 'good faith' in this conversation with you? What about your faith? Are you getting from me the explanations you demand? How about this (again): Can I know what you think? What are your thoughts on these matters?
Alex Jacob wrote:Well, here on this forum and among the QRS-tians themselves there is a core, organizing group of ideas. These ideas are isolatable and examinable. They are constructs that, as I see things, depend on certain negations.
Alex Jacob to DQ wrote:If you take the life of Jesus seriously, if anyone does, and if you understand the life of Jesus as a continuation, and extension or a fulfillment of the Prophetic Tradition, I personally do not see how you could ever abstract it from the social context. Also, I am a Jew and not a Christian, you see.
Let me react on the above then, as it appears to be more promising than what you recently replied to me. The idea is to start driving the nails a bit deeper, like only Judas-type-friends can.

Your running gag about QRStianity seems to me close to bulls eye. The body of philosophy you call QRStianity - at least its general thrust and direction including but not limited to the associated websites and this forum would be closer to Christ itself. Does that shock you? And I think of the hanged-man on the stake type of Christ. With you as proverbial Jew, even literal, standing there mocking, doubting, essentially shouting: savior, why don't you save your self? Why don't you start this social movement against the Romans, who not delivering us? Why this death narrative - we curse you! You let us down!

Christ is here nothing but the embodiment of wisdom, a living changing spiritual form, not a dead letter. Why else Jesus could talk about being 'the way' and 'the truth'. Why else he encouraged people to follow 'him' and take up their own stake. Why else would he talk about abandoning family, even hating them in the sense of rejecting what they represent (an instinctual attachment, loyalty that works through blood to the point of even taking blood when threatened).

Which social movement building on this basically anti-social creature could have any grain of truth or realism in it? A Jesus who famously said: "The poor will always be with you" when criticizing his disciple who was worrying that blessed Mary spent too much valuable goods on her savior. In one sentence Jesus overthrows the whole equality-centered humanitarian socialist thinking. Because without wisdom all this social participation and good-doing is in vain and actually will keep the injustice very much alive. These same 'righteous' folks wouldn't hesitate to crucify the next truth or truth-teller who can only sigh: "How can I blame these poor well-intending folks who haven't got a clue what they're doing?".
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by samadhi »

Alex,

After my "debate" with David, I have a tremendous appreciation for what you've written in this thread. I never liked the philosophy but your ability to deconstruct and analyze it in a thoughtful way is truly impressive.

Thank you.
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Alex Jacob
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Alex Jacob »

Well you know, Diebert, there are as many Christs running around these days as those who interpret him. But to cut to the chase, the way I look at all scripture, from all the traditions, Christianity as well as Judaism and Vaishnavism (and for that matter any paths, or techniques, such as shamanism, interpretation of omens, any system of psychology, magic, all of it) is that one simply has to go into it, to jump into it, and see how it works, to see (if you will) how the Spirit quides one in it.

I have been thinking about the Gospels in a more standard or literal sense because I have been reading Kierkegaard whose 'take' on the whole deal is pretty classical. He takes the narratives as they are, and in a sense there is no depth to his reading. He reads the surface and interprets the surface. But if he had come along a little later in the century? It was just after SKs time, along with Darwin, that complete new disciplines of interpretation came into existence. It all radically changed things. Kierkegaard's intensity, his commitment, is admirable (though he describes himself as a 'poet' and though he shares all the defects he advocates against, and that's according to him). Yet to me, from my present perspective, I can't quite take it all seriously. There is much that I could say about that, but so little time and energy to do it. But the thing I want to say is that, now and from our current vantage and perspective, we simply have to reassess all the material that has come to us, analyse it and take it apart with all the modern tools we have at our disposal (depth interpretation, archaeological knowledge, philological analysis, comparison with other texts---the Essenes for example, and also after having exposed ourselves to the Jesus Seminar material(etc.), and ALSO considering the long-standing antipathy and conflict between Judaism and Christianity which is only now beginning to dissolve, and THEN we have to investigate our own faith, the very idea of what faith means, to whom and to what, as we go back over and through the Gospel narratives. So, with that on the table, I would say that some part of your analysis seems not quite accurate enough. Well, if you want to understand my position.

My way of approaching these narratives, as I have been saying, is through the very, very modern lens of social Christianity. The theorists who interest me, whose message strikes a note in me, all wrote in the first part of the 20th century, and these doctrines (what I understand of them) took form in that time. As reference then we could mention Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Subcommandante Marcos, the Liberation Theologians: a group of potent individuals with a stress, a particular focus. Not only social, also ecological. Not only toward humankind but toward all life---the planet. But, if you asked me, "Is that all you think? Is that all there is to it? Is that the ONLY way that divinity moves in humans?", I would answer that no, not at all. It could be entirely correct and in accord with someone's 'dharma' to walk away from all struggle and dedicate themselves soley to inner issues. The point is not to limit anything or to shut anyone down, or to invalidate their path, if it is genuine (and maybe if it is false too). I really take issue with the QRS-tians because it is they themselves who far too much limit what 'spirituality' is and can be.

In a very real sense it does not matter what the Jesus of the Gospels did or didn't do. One part of the narrative could nullify the other, as you point out. It is, truth be told, a confused document, and one with deep and strange undercurrents not the least the anti-semitic fuel found there. Jews traditionally had no other way to interpret Christianity except as a movement that led to unbelievable and enduring suffering for millions of Jews. All this talk of 'love' seemed really to have been about something completely different. You could take it as an admonition to go and live in a cave somewhere, or you could storm into the world and make your mark defending the poor, like Subcomandante Marcos. There are dozens of utterly confusing and contradictory currents that run through the Gospels, and it is the modern, depth understanding that is open to see this, to look at it, to understand it.

But it still does not at all completely diminish the power in it. Nor the peculiar power of the message of Christ as well as some strange spiritual force that moves in it. Deep archetypes? Ancient patterns of understanding? All the mythos of death and rebirth? The solar myths? One can approach it with a far wider of platform understanding, and one can extract a whole new focus. That is what I find facinating with social Christianity. I personally feel it is the direction things should go, taken at large, and it is also a mature step: that's it---mature. Realistic, evolved, awake, concerned, etc.

Now, I don't fully grasp what the QRS-tians are preaching, but I have seen them attack just about everything that comes their way as being, well, just look at David's post above. I am in a pre-spiritual pupal stage, I haven't even gotten to the beginning where 'real spirituality' begins. They stand so much on top of it all, but when you interrogate their actual values, their 'ethics'? Do you really find solid, valuable things there? I don't, not at all (or very little).

So, here we have a pretty intractable 'spiritual politics'! Yes! Of couse! Like Kierkagaardians in some pre-modern stage of understanding, religion and spirituality has to be one thing, an absolute thing, and a thing that you can wield---literally grab by its handles and clobber someone over the head with. But is that, in truth, what 20th and 21st century spirituality is about? Can we affirm that with real certainty?

And this brings me to my point, it underlines my own position, or condition if that makes you, or them, feel better: It is we ourselves who MUST interpret and reinterpret all of this. We have to wrestle with the spirits and even with the Gods knowing that the only thing that is really relevant is what is happening inside of us, what we are thinking and feeling, and what we are doing. You have noted, I suspect, that religions and religious types are always pretty possessive. If you get involved with religion you get involved with powers and forces and personalities that want to occupy you, inhabit you, take you over, direct you. But I think that we have to start from the position that WE have the power to make all relevant decisions. For example, I read the Bible, both Jewish and Christian, and I will now completely decide what it is I think is valuable and 'good' and will put aside what I don't.

Old models pass away, and are rejuvinated by new models. The more we are familiar with, the better we can participate in the creation of something new, relevant, deeply meaningful, important, valuable.

And so it seems to me that the pèople who carry these things forward---if there is something relevant to carry forward---can only do it to the degree that they are completely possessed of themselves, completely committed to themselves. For that reason someone could yell at me: You looser! You are such a beginner! and I could just shrug it off. You have to work with your own sense of values and in accord with your ethics.
_____________________________________________

(Thanks Samadhi...I appreciate the affirmation.)
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David Quinn
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by David Quinn »

Alex Jacob wrote:David.

The 'beauty' of the QRS-tian stance is that it can always and will always triumph absolutely over any other---simnply through the power of insistance. It is far less about reason and much more about a core (egoic) Will-to-Triumph. It is one of the reasons, I regret to inform you, why your 'movement' will never really get anywhere. You will get resistance, and you will interpret that as 'the World's resistance to Christ's message, the the message of the 'wise'. Intlligent people, I submit, will see through the Game, and the less intelligent will come under the influence of your unassailable 'Truth'.

It is a game more of enforcing labels and definitions much more than addressing real questions, in real contexts. It seems to me that it is just another True Believer stance, and that is why I reject it. It doesn't make any sense, and only leads to wasting time, to counter your assessments one-by-one. All the same ideas are repeated, and then repeated again, and it does no good: nothing can get through. Personally, my hope is that those who read see and recognize these tactics.
It could just as easily be said of you that you are a True Believer (in hiding within chaos and uncertainty), an enforcer of labels (you would easily have to be the biggest culprit of this in this place) and that your main concern is an egoic Will-to-Triumph (conquering those nasty philosophers) .

Meaningless, isn't it.

When it comes to offering generic, hollow criticism which connects to nothing at all, you are a proven master. No wonder Samadhi is warming to you. :)

I really take issue with the QRS-tians because it is they themselves who far too much limit what 'spirituality' is and can be.
Indeed, we limit it to wisdom and consciousness of truth. It's a frightful liberty, but there you go.

Naturally, a poetician doesn't have any use for consciousness of truth. So he has to change the very conception of spirituality to mean something other than truth, just so that he can feel a part of it. Enter Alex and his kind.

God isn't good enough for the poetician, it would seem. He needs to be beautified and changed, and adorned with human finery, before he will even deign to look at Him.

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bert
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by bert »

whether Religion claims to be apocalyptic or otherwise it remains anthropocentric. (the Greek Pantheism was at least honest and created not only the greatest men but the nearest yet to the Ideal State - whatever its drawbacks.) our panlogistic conceptions of God are never closely related to subjective significance: the conceptions have little qualitative difference from our own emotions, desires, functions,etc. the first requirement is a blind faith in the alledged miracle, mysteries and abracadabra of authority and its dogmatic teaching; to hold man captive from his instinctive search for Truth. in return for his slavery the wildest promises of eternal happiness(after death) are made. the trouble with the apostates is that they have no fecund substitute, and cease to believe much in anything, wheras vital belief (whatever its truth) is essential to any creative effort.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Alex Jacob wrote:Well you know, Diebert, there are as many Christs running around these days as those who interpret him. But to cut to the chase, the way I look at all scripture, from all the traditions, Christianity as well as Judaism and Vaishnavism (and for that matter any paths, or techniques, such as shamanism, interpretation of omens, any system of psychology, magic, all of it) is that one simply has to go into it, to jump into it, and see how it works, to see (if you will) how the Spirit quides one in it.
The thing is, jumping in is exactly what you do not seem to do at all. You appear to stand at crossroads and contemplating all these roads and methods as interpretations, all in conflict, all possible roads to perhaps all different type of destinations.

However, that point of view itself is a road taken and not as benevolent and tolerant as it tries to appear as at times. Can it be more conflicting with lets say a fundamentalist Christian road who after accepting faith in a risen Christ as reality has to reject all other roads, as only way to uphold inner consistency?

Can you remain on that crossroad or imagined 'helicopter view' and somehow 'respect' a faith that denounces unbelievers as hell-bound? By this whole idea of being 'above' such thing one is belittling the other faiths as too small, narrow, childish or just too false for one to engage in with your whole heart.

That's a judgment call however you want to name it. One has become the same type of fundamentalist as all the paths not taken. A neutral stand that wasn't so neutral at all, it was merely an escape hatch from the demands out there.
But the thing I want to say is that, now and from our current vantage and perspective, we simply have to reassess all the material that has come to us, analyse it and take it apart with all the modern tools we have at our disposal. (...) So, with that on the table, I would say that some part of your analysis seems not quite accurate enough.
Sure, analyze and include it all. Problem is that there is no neutral or objective analysis with these things. One has to have some a-priori gist of the orientation at stake. Each analysis contains such orientation, including all the erroneous ones.

For a wise man it shouldn't be all that relevant though, since the whole of creation sings the same song. How can he not find his truth even if it were tealeaves? It's all about the degree of clarity the teaching is expressed in that makes him choose the examples and the familiarity an audience has with it.
The point is not to limit anything or to shut anyone down, or to invalidate their path, if it is genuine (and maybe if it is false too). I really take issue with the QRS-tians because it is they themselves who far too much limit what 'spirituality' is and can be.
But any path taken shuts down other paths. It's what defines the taking! What is it to you that those roads not taken might constitute some spiritual alternative. To hell with them! Believe in the road you picked for yourself and just do not suggest that you accidentally drifted upon it. Take responsibility and argue why it's in your universe the best thing so others might be inspired to take a similar direction.
Jews traditionally had no other way to interpret Christianity except as a movement that led to unbelievable and enduring suffering for millions of Jews. All this talk of 'love' seemed really to have been about something completely different.
This is all about survivability of a religious ethnicity. The miracle is not how much they suffered in the face of realities around them, the miracle is that they survived at all. To me it seems no different than the odds of the survival of humanity and its second nature itself.
There are dozens of utterly confusing and contradictory currents that run through the Gospels, and it is the modern, depth understanding that is open to see this, to look at it, to understand it.
You take what you need and you leave what you don't understand. I'm deeply aware of the theological traditions and endless analysis and surely things crawled into the story that are alien to its original gist and intent. But if the core is strong and pure enough, like a buried pyramid in the desert, it won't matter how much graffiti and theft has been attempted by its changing owners. One cannot hide its form and dimensions for the ones looking for such things.
But it still does not at all completely diminish the power in it. Nor the peculiar power of the message of Christ as well as some strange spiritual force that moves in it. Deep archetypes? Ancient patterns of understanding? All the mythos of death and rebirth? The solar myths? One can approach it with a far wider of platform understanding, and one can extract a whole new focus.


All these things could perhaps be found or suspected but in the end it has to be about consciousness and the road toward understanding the deepest existential truths. Why? Because this has always been the deepest of the deepest. So any teaching worth its salt can be expected to be about this ultimately. On top of this rock all kind of structures can be built. But it's not about these structures and a wise architect will not forget to point that out constantly.
That is what I find facinating with social Christianity. I personally feel it is the direction things should go, taken at large, and it is also a mature step: that's it---mature. Realistic, evolved, awake, concerned, etc.
Decadent, tired, deluded, anti-life, mis-taken and a dead end overall. But deep red is the setting sun and some tragic beauty could be perceived with an artistic eye. And can even we Hyperboreans really escape the forces of decadence?
Now, I don't fully grasp what the QRS-tians are preaching, but I have seen them attack just about everything that comes their way as being
It looks that way because you're so all-inclusive. You seem to be in that stage that you embrace the whole world, identify with the whole vivid picture of what's going on. The moment you continue a path, any path, you'd see that identity, any identity will force you to carve your own truth, a truth hopefully reflecting the ultimate truths as you believe them to be. In that carving you bound to reject a lot of things.
You have noted, I suspect, that religions and religious types are always pretty possessive. If you get involved with religion you get involved with powers and forces and personalities that want to occupy you, inhabit you, take you over, direct you. But I think that we have to start from the position that WE have the power to make all relevant decisions. For example, I read the Bible, both Jewish and Christian, and I will now completely decide what it is I think is valuable and 'good' and will put aside what I don't.
Give it up already. Perhaps you just don't know what you're dealing with here? Your measly decision powers are a farce in the face of timeless truths staring you already in the face, animating all your actions as you go.
Old models pass away, and are rejuvinated by new models. The more we are familiar with, the better we can participate in the creation of something new, relevant, deeply meaningful, important, valuable.
There's an ongoing evolution and sometimes revolution for sure. The models slightly shift, adapt or even break down and reorganize before popping up again.
And so it seems to me that the pèople who carry these things forward---if there is something relevant to carry forward---can only do it to the degree that they are completely possessed of themselves, completely committed to themselves. For that reason someone could yell at me: You looser! You are such a beginner! and I could just shrug it off. You have to work with your own sense of values and in accord with your ethics.
One has to be possessed and committed for sure. But to your self? And one doesn't even know yet what that self is before the possession and commit have even started to do its work. Just like I said at the start of this post, you certainly do not commit, you refuse any possession, you avoid Kierkegaard's leap of faith, fearful as you are for getting into another cult. Instead you chose for a cult of your own personality. Your particular delusion lies exactly here: that you think you somehow managed to get away of cultism or fundamentalism, that you do not deny life, truth and way.
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Tomas »

.


The lack of capitalizing the first letter-word of a sentence leads me to place YOU on ignore list :-(

..........


bert - whether Religion claims to be apocalyptic or otherwise it remains anthropocentric. (the Greek Pantheism was at least honest and created not only the greatest men but the nearest yet to the Ideal State - whatever its drawbacks.) our panlogistic conceptions of God are never closely related to subjective significance: the conceptions have little qualitative difference from our own emotions, desires, functions,etc. the first requirement is a blind faith in the alledged miracle, mysteries and abracadabra of authority and its dogmatic teaching; to hold man captive from his instinctive search for Truth. in return for his slavery the wildest promises of eternal happiness(after death) are made. the trouble with the apostates is that they have no fecund substitute, and cease to believe much in anything, wheras vital belief (whatever its truth) is essential to any creative effort.


.
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Alex Jacob
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Alex Jacob »

Diebert wrote:

"The thing is, jumping in is exactly what you do not seem to do at all. You appear to stand at crossroads and contemplating all these roads and methods as interpretations, all in conflict, all possible roads to perhaps all different type of destinations."

The destination, friend, for right now, is precisely your own body, your mind, your feelings, the dreams you have, your activity in the world, your loves, your creations, your life. All of the processes of spirituality, all of ther contact with mysterious forces, omens, signs, spirits, always seems to have been about following the road of one's own self, in this life, now. After everything this is pretty much what I personally have come to. And that is what I talk about.

Though I personally feel there are metaphysical dimensions that could be considered---I have felt them, 'experiences' them---I suppose that I remain 'Jewish' insofar as 'the world to come' is not on my plate right now.

"Can it be more conflicting with lets say a fundamentalist Christian road who after accepting faith in a risen Christ as reality has to reject all other roads, as only way to uphold inner consistency?"

Well, that is the question, isn't it? Maybe there was a time, maybe there still is, that just the decision to feel, see, follow or recognize the 'risen Christ' was all that was needed, if only for the feeling of salvation since 'salvation' is rather hard to qualify. But it really seems to me that now, in our modernity, in our plus-que moderne, in the potential maturity that we face, the nature even of religious conversion is changing. And should change. And if it resists change, perhaps it should be made to change? Here, again, I think everything hinges on who handles it, who defines it, who sets the pattern. I think that this is a characteristic of the human spirit, and the 'Divine' cooperates with us: we give energy to and 'make real' what we hold in our minds and in our hearts, strangely enough. I have seen this too many times in living my life not to stop to deeply consider it.

The way I look at it, the 'typical' run-of-the-mill Christian conversion is often a pretty shallow affair. The elements that compprise that conversaion were spelled-out already in advance. So, you come to the crisis point, your previous identity crashes, and you come back into life and give birth to yourself again, and are ministered to by those who oversee this new person. But just for the sake of conversation, what if this 'conversion' experience were to take place in the social context of, say, revolutionary theology, in some rural community? What then are the elements of your conversion? What is the Ethic for the reborn person? Generally speaking, what we resist and seem to deride is the shallow nature of the typical Christian conversion experience. Often it is attended not by expansiveness but by a conservative constriction.

"But any path taken shuts down other paths. It's what defines the taking! What is it to you that those roads not taken might constitute some spiritual alternative. To hell with them! Believe in the road you picked for yourself and just do not suggest that you accidentally drifted upon it. Take responsibility and argue why it's in your universe the best thing so others might be inspired to take a similar direction."

Hey Diebert, do whatever the heck pleases you, man! And the QRS as well! Don't get too bent out of shape by anything I propose. If you don't like it, reject it!

On this forum the whole function and purpose of spirituality and religion is defined. It is spelled out. A selection is made and the selection is enforced. It has all these elements and is built-up with a series of ideas. I take issue with some of the ideas with which it constructs itself, and I propose other ones that might be combined with it, for example. I write not to convert you or anyone, necessarily, but along with you (and anyone who opines on any subject) try to construct possibilities, interpretive possibilities. This is what people have been doing since time immemorial, and we will continue to do it as long as we are here on this planet.

And that is exactly what I am trying to do: "To take responsibility and to argue why it's in your universe the best thing so others might be inspired to take a similar direction".

In my own way of seeing things I am enjoying a stunning success and I'm knockin' 'em dead left and right. (I think they see it differently though).

"You take what you need and you leave what you don't understand. I'm deeply aware of the theological traditions and endless analysis and surely things crawled into the story that are alien to its original gist and intent. But if the core is strong and pure enough, like a buried pyramid in the desert, it won't matter how much graffiti and theft has been attempted by its changing owners. One cannot hide its form and dimensions for the ones looking for such things."

There may be many, many things I don't understand. Who would ever claim (well, aside from the QRS-tians...) that they understand everything? That it's all figured out? But there may also be many things I DO understand but which I do not include in a specific post. I do think that I do understand something of what the QRS-tians are getting at, it is that I do not think it is really any sort of substantial thing. (Really, it looks like an immense egoiistic trip with a World Mission.)

If it were a substantial thing it could be talked about. But---and mark this---all that it is is a vague reference to enlightenment, but no one here (except Mikiel) ever talks in real and direct terms about whatever they are referring to. It is all allusion and veiled reference. And as I say when you examine the ethic that arises from this nebulous, indefined thing, it is that precisely that sends up warning flags for me.

Can I make this any more clear, Diebert?

Now, I ask you, what would you like to see from me? Please tell me specifically what you would like me to do, to satisfy you?
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by bert »

the ethical and the social are different profiles of true religion, and wise laws their concrete form. the Ideal is the aesthetic potential, the urge for constant improvement and spontaneity. the social and the ethical aesthetics are but different idioms and diverse directions of the same quality of sentiment. equity can be taught - by example - as a duty. there will be no social transformation until this becomes a pragmatic religion that gives salvation today, as well as tomorrow. the only alternative to worship is its service of the social and the humane. this does not cancel God; if we have a duty to God it must be by our appreciation of life to the full. have faith in yourself and your Soul will have faith in you. what the hell were you born for - to murder each other, to grasp more than you need? if so, then God is hate and you are his disciples - devils - I know no others. Man is now a normal chaos, an affair of bloody paradoxes, a madness of greed and hypocrisy and Earth has more meaning without him. this cold madness is the result of forced beliefs, lies, half-truths and bad laws taught to him through politico-religious hierarchies.
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Alex Jacob wrote: The destination, friend, for right now, is precisely your own body, your mind, your feelings, the dreams you have, your activity in the world, your loves, your creations, your life. All of the processes of spirituality, all of the contact with mysterious forces, omens, signs, spirits, always seems to have been about following the road of one's own self, in this life, now. After everything this is pretty much what I personally have come to. And that is what I talk about.
But you don't mention reason there, strangely enough, the stage beyond opinion. And even if you did, what you describe is the world as we know it. There are too many connections between an supposed 'outside' and one's own self to start making all kinds of artificial sounding distinctions between a destination leading inwards or outwards.
Generally speaking, what we resist and seem to deride is the shallow nature of the typical Christian conversion experience. Often it is attended not by expansiveness but by a conservative constriction.
Glad to see you wield some strong values here. Relatively spoken many conversion experiences do expand even when conservative constriction becomes the means to that. For example someone hopelessly attached to drugs and alcohol could find identity through conservative religion but no matter how shallow it looks from the dimensions you inhabit, it's still a form of sobering up to a higher degree of awareness of themselves in relation to everything else.
And that is exactly what I am trying to do: "To take responsibility and to argue why it's in your universe the best thing so others might be inspired to take a similar direction".
Sure thing, I must have misunderstood your hesitations about pathways, rejections and restricting limitations.
There may be many, many things I don't understand. But there may also be many things I DO understand but which I do not include in a specific post. I do not think that I do not understand what the QRS-tians are getting at, it is that I do not think it is really any sort of substantial thing. If it were a substantial thing it could be talked about. But---and mark this---all that it is is a vague reference to enlightenment, but no one here (except Mikiel) ever talks in real and direct terms about whatever they are referring to. It is all allusion and reference. And as I say when you examine the ethic that arises from this nebulous, indefined thing, it is that precisely that sends up warning flags for me. Can I make this any more clear, Diebert?
Fair enough. Could we examine the ethics in more detail then, those which turn you into such a red flag waver? It's not that one could somehow pin down this enlightenment substance but one certainly can pin down our responses to ethical issues and examine those.
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Alex Jacob »

Diebert wrote:

"Glad to see you wield some strong values here. Relatively spoken many conversion experiences do expand even when conservative constriction becomes the means to that. For example someone hopelessly attached to drugs and alcohol could find identity through conservative religion but no matter how shallow it looks from the dimensions you inhabit, it's still a form of sobering up to a higher degree of awareness of themselves in relation to everything else."

Recently, because I read Bob Dylan's book (Cronicles), and because I happened to listen to some of his music from his conversion phase, I noted that his Christian conversion seemed to take shape through a sort of 'constriction', a conservative retreat, if you will. I compared that to other lyrics from an earlier phase---equally if not more essentially Christian really, were really just as evangelical, just as 'spirited', just as preachy, but nothing like the certainties that he 'weilds' in his overt Christian phase.

I am almost embarrassed to mention any of this here, knowing the complete distain for anything topical, cultural, actual, but as I thought about it I though alot about the way that values are communicated, and how the underlying assumptions and hopes of belief systems filters in and gets expressed, and it is these things that move people. (Well, all the lowely slobs who have not ascended to the QRS-tian heights where they float about and spit on the human dogs below in pure, beautiful spiritual contempt).

I was also thinking about the Ginsberg poem Howl and Sunflower Sutra, and how odd in a way that these poems are so utterly Christian, indeed the whole era was almost universally moved by overy Christian moods and hopes and mission. (Pay no attention to me! This was the context of my parents, you see, and I am a child of my parents, but with time I will get over it, I will transcend it! I will still be me, but it will be a (somehow) purified me, a no longer me but still more me! Patience, QRS-tian brethren, patience!)

I guess it comes down to something like this, Diebert, and if this helps you to locate me more accurately, so be it: I really do not know, in any exact sense, what 'spiritual realization' is anymore. There was a time I thought I did. I am aware, say, of the Ramana Maharshis of the world, those who edge you toward that special knowledge of 'Self' that I think Mikiel (sp?) talks about. His experiences of the 'popping' of his ego-self remind me of discriptions by Poonja-Ji, by Andrew Cohen, and by a whole group of people who have spun out of that tradition. I had my experiences there, but I didn't stay there, it seems so incredibly middle class, so strangely philistine, so ingrown, so irrelevant to all things around it. But maybe that's the way to go? maybe that is where we're supposed to go? I have seen all these people come and go, some crash and burn and sully themselves, I guess others are still there, selling their wares, attracting disciples with all that middle-class fervor, a palpable sincerity.

And yet the way I do understand spirituality, the work of spiritualizing, is that I think we are in a very real sense being cultured, that we are a culture (like in a Petri dish). I do believe that there are some advanced beings, some advanced knowledge, some spiritual knowledge, some inner knowledge about the nature of things here in this place where we are. Yes, you only get there when you wake up, when you sober up. There are some people who have come to some realizations and who are very serious people, very committed people. They have heard a message and they respond to what they have heard. They have gotten their 'commands', their 'marching orders' and they do what they can. They recognize their mortal framework, and they know that Death is just ahead, and Death will consume them and end their project, but they hear a message, and they see it 'projected' onto the screen of their heart-mind, and they act in the way that circumstances allow.

To have this sense of commitment, this sense of responsibility, is to come into the Work of culture, of cultivating, and this operation happens on zillions of different levels, in all manner of places. The core Christian value that I can identify, and I mean the most central, the most defining core, the inner meaning of it all, is a kind of fearlessness in taking 'the message' (which is multifold, multiplex, it is less an idea as it is an essence quite difficult to define) into any and all different contexts, and fearlessly bringing to people: Knowledge that freedom and liberation are possibe (and this freedom operates on all imaginable levels, it is not one thing or one sort of freedom or realization but a potential, a potency), and to continue in a process of penetrating dull mind, dull emotions, mind made dull by addiction to error, egotism, what rubs off on all of us from the idiocy that surrounds us and also when we come into contact with our own 'immortal essence' that shifts the whole game.

The amazing feature of this Christian Spirit, a sort of indefinable alchemical quintessence, is that it can go into literal hells (physical or psychological or emotional hells, they are equal in a certain sense because they are places of excruciating suffering)(those who carry this spirit, who work with it, it seems, are always deeply aware of the nature of suffering and what suffering means), and whereever they go, they work change, they make it happen. No one quite knows what happened, or how it happened, but something happened!

Something is 'lifted', something is cleared and cleansed, something if purified, and through Grace something is 'blessed'. It is this art of blessing, of laying a blessing on someone who never could have believed it possible (charity in the Greek sense), and which blessing changes the entire direction of their life, that is the most potent thing going.

But it really does seem to me that this 'spirit', if you will, moves quite independently. I mean, those who are supposed to have it, don't. They TALK about it, but it ain't there. Yet those who really shouldn't have it, do have it. There is a whole cycle of Paradox that operates here.
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Alex Jacob wrote: I compared that to other [Dylan] lyrics from an earlier phase---equally if not more essentially Christian really, were really just as evangelical, just as 'spirited', just as preachy, but nothing like the certainties that he [Dylan] 'weilds' in his overt Christian phase.
How does it compare with his flirtations with the Chasidic movement? I'd say for Dylan his music and 'spirituals' are his own religion. And he must have realized it's always like this, that these things are near interchangeable when it comes to the subsistence they can offer someone.
I really do not know, in any exact sense, what 'spiritual realization' is anymore. There was a time I thought I did.
But that's just another type of spiritual realization essentially. It seems you cannot escape realizing, doesn't it?
And yet the way I do understand spirituality, the work of spiritualizing, is that I think we are in a very real sense being cultured, that we are a culture (like in a Petri dish). I do believe that there are some advanced beings, some advanced knowledge, some spiritual knowledge, some inner knowledge about the nature of things here in this place where we are.
That might be and even we could be part of many such beings in the sense our limbs or cells are part of our body. These sort of ideas are always deniable, reversible, though.
Knowledge that freedom and liberation are possible (and this freedom operates on all imaginable levels, it is not one thing or one sort of freedom or realization but a potential, a potency), and to continue in a process of penetrating dull mind, dull emotions, mind made dull by addiction to error, egotism, what rubs off on all of us from the idiocy that surrounds us and also when we come into contact with our own 'immortal essence' that shifts the whole game.
Raising awareness or consciousness, is how it's sometimes called.
The amazing feature of this Christian Spirit, a sort of indefinable alchemical quintessence, is that it can go into literal hells (physical or psychological or emotional hells, they are equal in a certain sense because they are places of excruciating suffering)(those who carry this spirit, who work with it, it seems, are always deeply aware of the nature of suffering and what suffering means), and whereever they go, they work change, they make it happen. No one quite knows what happened, or how it happened, but something happened!
The only thing I can imagine to happen in such cases is the insertion of a certain degree of consciousness, with the resulting wisdom having a viral, cleansing effect on almost everything or everyone touched [as a little yeast in dough]. This might happen at times under a Christian type of flag but I consider it quite rare or a result of contrasts: one eyed kings in blind alleys.
Something is 'lifted', something is cleared and cleansed, something if purified, and through Grace something is 'blessed'. It is this art of blessing, of laying a blessing on someone who never could have believed it possible (charity in the Greek sense), and which blessing changes the entire direction of their life, that is the most potent thing going.
"Grace travels outside karma", wrote Bono (U2). Forgiveness is another related term. This goes back to its core meaning of obliteration, doing away with and essentially emptiness. The world becomes undone in such instance. But for most it's just a glimpse, a drip.
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by bert »

Tomas wrote:.


The lack of capitalizing the first letter-word of a sentence leads me to place YOU on ignore list :-(

..........


bert - whether Religion claims to be apocalyptic or otherwise it remains anthropocentric. (the Greek Pantheism was at least honest and created not only the greatest men but the nearest yet to the Ideal State - whatever its drawbacks.) our panlogistic conceptions of God are never closely related to subjective significance: the conceptions have little qualitative difference from our own emotions, desires, functions,etc. the first requirement is a blind faith in the alledged miracle, mysteries and abracadabra of authority and its dogmatic teaching; to hold man captive from his instinctive search for Truth. in return for his slavery the wildest promises of eternal happiness(after death) are made. the trouble with the apostates is that they have no fecund substitute, and cease to believe much in anything, wheras vital belief (whatever its truth) is essential to any creative effort.


.
I'll write in 'normal' language, its been a while:

You know, I began doing this on purpose when I started getting to much mails from people with all sorts of questions and requests, in the past, on other forums. I knew people are easily interrupted when it comes to such fragile behaviour. I wanted more space for myself without giving in on the message - thus the invention. On this forum people "leave me alone", and I like it :-). Probably because of the general ignorance that is going on towards those things I talk about and my behaviour.
I've gotten erotic mails from woman I barely knew; hate mails of people whose reputation I've destroyed because they were ignorant; secret organisations who urged me to stop "threathening them",while I was just pointing out what they were telling and even added better perspective than they were able to, and by directing their flaws ; threathened with violence, they found out where I lived; worship mails; people who asked me to save them; to teach them, etc.

Now I write a lot of oracles and transcended perspectivisms - direct translations from The Mind.
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

bert wrote: I'll write in 'normal' language, its been a while:

(...) I've gotten erotic mails from woman I barely knew; hate mails of people whose reputation I've destroyed because they were ignorant; secret organisations who urged me to stop "threathening them",while I was just pointing out what they were telling and even added better perspective than they were able to, and by directing their flaws ; threathened with violence, they found out where I lived; worship mails; people who asked me to save them; to teach them, etc.
Are you sure you interpreted all those mails correctly? ;) Or perhaps bad choice of venue. But really, it's hard, perhaps even for you, to draw the line between oracling and fruity looping. I'll look forward to your perspective in the tongue of fallen angels.
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Alex Jacob »

"How long limp ye between opinions? If Yawey be God, follow him, but if Baal, then follow him!"
---Elijah
______________________________________________

I think Plato may have been very right when he wrote that you can't rely on the poets---who do often express profound things---to really even understand the ideas that they deal with in their work. If you ask them, you'll likely get gibberish or vagueness. Dylan wrote some tremendous songs and is a great musical artist, but it could be that we would both be very disappointed with his opinions and ideas about either Christianity or Judaism.

But I have to say that his book is really a wonderful book. Frankly I know nothing of his music after his first Christian album (Slow Train). I don't know if I would trust Dylan to really tell me (us) anything 'truthful', except as it would come through a song, and how interesting that everything he ever said (written, in interviews, in filmations) is always, it seems, a wall that is thrown up so that you can't get your hands on him. Very tricky. Very mercurial. And just like Mercury, he can channel the divine as well as anything else that happens to be out there. But you can never get 'the truth' from a mercury-type, or everything they say has to be carefully sifted through. Like in his book he says that he never wanted to be either a prophet or a spokesman, but I don't believe it for a second. Fact is, everything he is doing now is cementing his status as that which he supposedly never wanted to be.

In the old film clips of him (there are many on YouTube, and one in particular under the title Dylan Arguing) he acts like a wretched little Napolean. If you could, you'd punch the little shmuck, but of course you couldn't strike Bob Dylan.

It's all sort of funny, Dylan and his Christian conversion but then he shows up at synagog from time to time. And you are right about the interchangability. As the Great Thaw occurs between Christianity and Judaism, many people are making efforts to bridge the distance.

Abraham Heschel really worked to establsih a bridge, but most of the time Judaism speaks down to Christianity with a disdain, or contempt, like an older brother speaking to a snot-nosed upstart.

The thing about not having a clear idea anymore as to what spirituality is...is much more of a problem than either of us are admitting. Well, I guess I am the only one admitting it. You know of course that I can't go too far in admitting ignorance, for then, how could I continue to smite the QRS-tians? It amounts to a logical fallacy!

Actually, I will admit to the truth and will submit to their Guidance IF they will produce a Wonder in the sky, or make the Earth tremble. Then I'll believe!
___________________________________________

"Seduce my mind and you can have my body. Find my soul and I'm yours forever."

---Some girl writing in a girl's forum
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Trevor Salyzyn »

AJ,
Actually, I will admit to the truth and will submit to their Guidance IF they will produce a Wonder in the sky, or make the Earth tremble. Then I'll believe!
What do fireworks and earthquakes have to do with truth?
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by bert »

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:
bert wrote: I'll write in 'normal' language, its been a while:

(...) I've gotten erotic mails from woman I barely knew; hate mails of people whose reputation I've destroyed because they were ignorant; secret organisations who urged me to stop "threathening them",while I was just pointing out what they were telling and even added better perspective than they were able to, and by directing their flaws ; threathened with violence, they found out where I lived; worship mails; people who asked me to save them; to teach them, etc.
Are you sure you interpreted all those mails correctly? ;) Or perhaps bad choice of venue. But really, it's hard, perhaps even for you, to draw the line between oracling and fruity looping. I'll look forward to your perspective in the tongue of fallen angels.
I have little time - prepare my travel to Mallorca.

Fuller gives this essential perspective:
"The gods are not persons to be seen or spoken to, their utterances are delivered in oracles, and these are normally cryptic and difficult to understand.There is a pythoness in every one of us,and a Delphic cavern into which we must retire if we want to accomplish anything of worth"
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Alex Jacob »

"The gods are not persons to be seen or spoken to, their utterances are delivered in oracles, and these are normally cryptic and difficult to understand.There is a pythoness in every one of us,and a Delphic cavern into which we must retire if we want to accomplish anything of worth"

Nice quote bert...it's things like this that give one nice clues, the importance of listening-hearing.
_____________________________________________________

Different thoughts enter my head with my re-reading of Kierkegaard, things quite relevant to this conversation, and concerning the QRS-tians.

Everything hinges on the interpretation, and in SK's case the interpretation is radical. You have to arrive at an interpretation, you have to decide on one or force the issue, before you can push it all, radically, to an Either-Or. You make it life and death, and you hang everything on that interpretation-decision. In SK's case, the interpretation is 'standard', and in a certain sense without dimension. As I said before it is surface but not depth. He didn't have depth, he was limited to his context, and he came well before Nietzsche, Freud and Dostoevsky.

As I read the Gospels of the Jesus Seminar, with only certain pithy phrases attributable to Jesus, it's likely that little of the whole narrative that was constructed around him, well after his death, was really his. I note (and they also note) that whoever Jesus was, was not exactly the personage that the Gospels constructed of him. Big problem ladies and gentlemen! Big, huge, unavoidable problem! You make mistakes if you construct an Either-Or on incomplete data.

He made this extreme 'moral' decision to sacrifice a relationship with a real flesh-and-blood woman because he felt that this was 'God's will'. But we all know, don't we? that we often choose to attribute to a decision we make, for all sorts of reasons, some even occult and unconscious, to 'God' (or Fate, Chance, etc.) A 'depth interpretation' made in a post-Nietzschean, post-Freudian and post-Dostoevskian era could very well have rendered a totally different interpretation. 'Time's change and with them their demands'. And I am sure that not only did he sacrifice a relationship with a flesh and blood person, but he sacrificed an essential part of his connection to Life, all in the name of 'hating your life', and hating yourself, and your friends, your children, your mother and father. And how did he die, I ask? Was this not, perhaps, some literal form of suicide? Eternity was that real for him, wasn't it?

To be truthful---and supposedly there is an interest in 'truth' here, people keep saying this, they keep holding it up like a banner of war---if you examine this notion of 'hate' (not sure what the Greek verb is, don't have time to look it up) in relation to your very self, body, life, feelings, existence, anyone can plainly see that this hatred is suicidal, violent, demented (let's face it)) and will lead inexorably to mental disease, breakdown, fracturing, schizophenia, and more or less directly to psychosis, if taken to extremes.

We have depth interpretations, depth 'tools', that we can access and with them we can examine some of these false Christian doctrines that likely had very little do do with the figure Jesus Christ, the roving preacher, up around the Sea of Galilee way back when. In any case, I sincerely doubt it. I do not believe that this was his message, this is not what he was after, and so these are gross distortions, perverse distortions. And this is just one example (the cutting oneself off from a female relationship). The Christian distortion (and many outdated religious models of behavior) functions on many different levels, and a great deal of it starts from the original misconceptions, and the Paulene distortions.

And so now we come to our own dearly beloved QRS-tians who (here we approach 'ethics' Diebert) have cut themselves off, severed themselves from themselves and from life all in the name of connection to Self! There is Kafkaesque element here, brethren! It is all so obvious, all so raw. I think it may be true that these fellos are much more Kierkegaardians (I used the term Calvinist) than Nietzscheans, and the whole basis of their 'spirituality' only begins when the cuts have been made.

Up until that time, you see, you are in a 'pre-spiritual phase', you haven't even got to square one, but if you internalize the QRS-tian Either-Or you will have to PROVE it by severing a limb, something utterly radical. I am not at all sure that any of this is so much exaggeration. This God of Either-Or is very, very demanding, but I say that it ius essentially shallow and surface, for after all in a very real sense it is easier for a certain sort of mind (dramatic, atomized, psychologically predisposed to a sort of violence) to make a radical choice than a subtle choice. It is far easier, at least at the beginning, to cut someone out of your life than to actually deal with the ramifications and responsibilities of that relationship. And that is why I often refer to these folks here as Giant Boys.

They came to these radical choices most likely through a bad reading of Kierkegaard and so many others, they interpreted it extremely according to old traditions which have, I submit, been superceded. But they made the cuts, and you don't just recover from those cuts, they become life-long at a certain point, you can't go back and make the decision again. Put another way, the decisions we make at axial periods become our fate! And then you have to stand by your decisions, it's too costly to give them up, you get hardened in your decisions, and you have to keep insisting on the value of your decisions, and very importantly you have to recruit and get others to 'see things your way', accept your logic.

This is all the stuff of religious groups and cults. Extreme decisions that cost something, from which you cannot retreat.

But 'God' never asked for such a thing. Never, ever. Pay heed to what Alex Jacob is preaching to the Churches of America, Europe and Australia!

I do not deny that it is extremely delicious, and I mean really and truly de-licious---to get up on some Kierkegaardian or other religious pulpit and to level the most bitter attacks on the poor, drooling slobs who are the victims, the creations, of our present circumstances, our Brave New World. Those for whom there is really nothing BUT the sensations, the sensual life, the bite on the Freudian hook that advertising men dangle in front of us. The extreme of materialism.

It is also de-licious beyond compare to decry the way that women are coopted by advertising and market interests, and to what depth these forces pry open their private parts for all to see, how the world transforms them, reduces them, to sluts, and then dangles their sluttishness in front of all, but moreover gets them to accept it as normal. It is a sort of absolute degredation of the female in the name of 'liberation'. We see pretty clearly that the Forces of Seduction basically rule in our world right now, and where this will lead is anyone's guess. It ain't gonna end anytime soon, people. And these Kierkegaardian QRS-tians just love to point out how this is all seduction of the female, by feminizing forces, and taken in a certain way it makes sense: we are enticed and seduced by all the pleasure of overt sex away from the higher areas of mind. So far so good.

But it is the de-liciousness of this position which has always puzzled me, that asks questions. You see, there has to be a kind of 'normal' appreciation and enjoyment of sex, and the material life that we are a part of. I sincerely believe that it is very destructive to cut this out of oneself, and know psychologists who treat many persons who have spent long periods of time in religions and cults where sex is suppressed. And again, the Either-Or is often easier to enforce when the choice is dramatic, obvious, severe. To 'work' with one's sexuality, to come to grips with it, to know the extremes to which one can go and to see how all that can be an incredible dead-end is different from cutting oneself away from human relationships and ascending to an Absolutist Cloud.

But this peculiarly Christian decisiveness (yes boys, I am talking to you), this innate inclination to make radical decisions, extremist decisions---that is something that is part of our culture. It is a characteristic of our modernity, and I would mention at this point the extremism of those who were attracted to, for example, the Castanedian fantasy-doctrines. Or so many different cults. Or extreme Hindu cultism. The religion of Rev. Moon, the Hare Krishnas. The list of extreme (Christian! Kierkegaardian! Desperate! Over the top!) kinds of decisions are legion, and this extremism marks many generations. It is a defining point of culture.

I ask you, dear little ones, to consider what I am saying. How did this come about? How is it that so many people, under the slightest psychological provocation, will launch themselves into things so extreme? How did this get set up?
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Alex Jacob wrote: He [Kierkegaard] didn't have depth, he was limited to his context, and he came well before Nietzsche, Freud and Dostoevsky.
Well, we all are. The idea of timeless truth would be that every context becomes a natural limiter of it.
As I read the Gospels of the Jesus Seminar, with only certain pithy phrases attributable to Jesus, it's likely that little of the whole narrative that was constructed around him, well after his death, was really his.
This is still assuming there was a 'him' and a 'death'. When removing that last bit, it becomes way more complex to attribute this or that. Perhaps several people with (or at times without) insight worked on the story over time. What would that change for how for example Quinn uses the texts? I've joked before about a future archeological dig finding writings attributed to some 'QRS' deity or holy person/trinity of some kind by later reviews of the texts.
To be truthful---and supposedly there is an interest in 'truth' here, people keep saying this, they keep holding it up like a banner of war---if you examine this notion of 'hate' (not sure what the Greek verb is, don't have time to look it up) in relation to your very self, body, life, feelings, existence, anyone can plainly see that this hatred is suicidal, violent, demented (let's face it)) and will lead inexorably to mental disease, breakdown, fracturing, schizophenia, and more or less directly to psychosis, if taken to extremes.
Same could be said of love, it could lead to violence, attachment, miss-identification, fever, obsession, etc. But there's also a hate which is just another darker form of love, it's darker because it denies the love, refuses to name and tell it and this contradiction leads to sickness of all kinds. Hate in the original context is just a form of strong rejection, to break the attachment. Merely an unwinding, unbinding of things but since it doesn't deny the presence of the attachment but fully acknowledges it, the nature of the hate becomes totally different.
It is far easier, at least at the beginning, to cut someone out of your life than to actually deal with the ramifications and responsibilities of that relationship. And that is why I often refer to these folks here as Giant Boys.
Of course it might seem easier to avoid attachment and suffering. And since buddha (did he exist even?) already said life is suffering, it becomes clearly a form of avoidance of that type of life indeed. With that I mean a life purely defined by its stress and impact that it makes on your self. Birth, death, sex, ecstasy, weeping.
Put another way, the decisions we make at axial periods become our fate! And then you have to stand by your decisions, it's too costly to give them up, you get hardened in your decisions, and you have to keep insisting on the value of your decisions, and very importantly you have to recruit and get others to 'see things your way', accept your logic.
That decision seems to be made at a rather young age. I haven't seen examples yet where it all somehow miraculously came after the teen years. Often even during pre-teen years everything might have been there already waiting to flourish after all else is exhausted. This is just speculation on my part.
This is all the stuff of religious groups and cults. Extreme decisions that cost something, from which you cannot retreat.
Lots of things in life are like that.
But 'God' never asked for such a thing. Never, ever. Pay heed to what Alex Jacob is preaching to the Churches of America, Europe and Australia!
Did you ever make an extreme decision?
You see, there has to be a kind of 'normal' appreciation and enjoyment of sex, and the material life that we are a part of. I sincerely believe that it is very destructive to cut this out of oneself, and know psychologists who treat many persons who have spent long periods of time in religions and cults where sex is suppressed.
You assume a normal referential reality where it all makes sense. One could just as well reason that those patients were the ones that didn't make it -they might have collapsed under any peer pressure or life's demands for choice. It's all about vantage point, you know. Which makes this deduction rather meaningless.

And again, the Either-Or is often easier to enforce when the choice is dramatic, obvious, severe.
If you're using this term in Kierkegaardian terms, I think you misinterpret it wildly. The term has been discussed before here, perhaps you can find something of interest in the different comments.
I ask you, dear little ones, to consider what I am saying. How did this come about? How is it that so many people, under the slightest psychological provocation, will launch themselves into things so extreme? How did this get set up?
Life, Nature, is extreme to us. Consciousness is nothing but extremity which we're now so used to that we're flattening the world and its becoming.
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Trevor Salyzyn
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Trevor Salyzyn »

AJ, you should spend a bit more time on basic philosophic concepts. This over-abundance of what you consider poetry is, frankly speaking, empty rhetor that produces a bunch of fallacies. You should focus more on truth than wordcount, because your posts are becoming unreadable.
Everything hinges on the interpretation, and in SK's case the interpretation is radical. You have to arrive at an interpretation, you have to decide on one or force the issue, before you can push it all, radically, to an Either-Or. You make it life and death, and you hang everything on that interpretation-decision. In SK's case, the interpretation is 'standard', and in a certain sense without dimension. As I said before it is surface but not depth.
Special Pleading
As I read the Gospels of the Jesus Seminar, with only certain pithy phrases attributable to Jesus, it's likely that little of the whole narrative that was constructed around him, well after his death, was really his. I note (and they also note) that whoever Jesus was, was not exactly the personage that the Gospels constructed of him. Big problem ladies and gentlemen! Big, huge, unavoidable problem! You make mistakes if you construct an Either-Or on incomplete data.
Genetic Fallacy
The Christian distortion (and many outdated religious models of behavior)...
Appeal to Novelty
And so now we come to our own dearly beloved QRS-tians who (here we approach 'ethics' Diebert) have cut themselves off, severed themselves from themselves and from life all in the name of connection to Self! There is Kafkaesque element here, brethren! It is all so obvious, all so raw. I think it may be true that these fellos are much more Kierkegaardians (I used the term Calvinist) than Nietzscheans, and the whole basis of their 'spirituality' only begins when the cuts have been made.
Poisoning the Well
Up until that time, you see, you are in a 'pre-spiritual phase', you haven't even got to square one, but if you internalize the QRS-tian Either-Or you will have to PROVE it by severing a limb, something utterly radical. I am not at all sure that any of this is so much exaggeration.
Appeal to Consequences
This is all the stuff of religious groups and cults. Extreme decisions that cost something, from which you cannot retreat.
Appeal to Ridicule
and
Slippery Slope
It is also de-licious beyond compare to decry the way that women are coopted by advertising and market interests, and to what depth these forces pry open their private parts for all to see, how the world transforms them, reduces them, to sluts, and then dangles their sluttishness in front of all, but moreover gets them to accept it as normal. It is a sort of absolute degredation of the female in the name of 'liberation'. We see pretty clearly that the Forces of Seduction basically rule in our world right now, and where this will lead is anyone's guess. It ain't gonna end anytime soon, people. And these Kierkegaardian QRS-tians just love to point out how this is all seduction of the female, by feminizing forces, and taken in a certain way it makes sense: we are enticed and seduced by all the pleasure of overt sex away from the higher areas of mind. So far so good.
Poisoning the Well
How is it that so many people, under the slightest psychological provocation, will launch themselves into things so extreme?
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Alex Jacob
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Alex Jacob »

You are hereby---forthwith---relieved of the duty (chore) of reading my 'poems', Trevor. Why do you even bother? I did look over those fallacies, and though it is true that I emit rhetorical flourishes reminiscent of Mexican whore rinsed in cheap perfume, nevertheless underneath the rhetor there are substantial points. Frankly, if I were to bone up on my philosophical terms it would only sharpen my already sharp rhetorical sword into a dangerous, deadly weapon---more dangerous and deadly than it already is. You don't want to create a demon, do you? :-)
_____________________________________________

Really and truly, Diebert. I have a problem with the idea of Timeless Truths. Or, put another way, I do believe in certain ideas about timeless truths in front of which and with respect to which we are always in a process of revision. In that sense, truthfully, I personally do relate and comprehend the 'extremism' of the QRS-tians. I hope I have made that clear.

In fact, I am not even saying that this extremism is a 'bad thing', depending on hwo it functions. More than that, I am relating it to the evolution of the 'Will' of Christianity, refracted through some of the ideas of social Christianity, to indicate that, perhaps, our extremism needs revision. And I am deliberately contrasting one potential extremism (an either-or)('Either-Or as the door that opens to the Ideals' as SK wrote) with another.

"What would that change for how for example Quinn uses the texts?"

They use portions, I have gathered, to support a kind of spiritual extremism, the idea that one must come to 'hate everything'. They abstract it from its context, spin it a certain way, to support their project. I say this 'project' is stale in many ways, and I suggest ways that it could be freshened, to bring some life back into it.

Speaking of the Gospels: an interpretation came into existence---the standard Gospel fare. This was interpreted, say, in the Middle Ages, and the meanings of the interpretations were 'weilded'. If you wanted to focus on just one area you could focus on the extreme violence unleashed on diaspora Jews because of (the story about) what 'the Jews' did to Jesus. There you have an essentially incorrect, a surface interpretation, that leads to a distorted result. Obviously, it had some pretty terrifying results.

Now, if you go back and correct the distortion (it is all a story, a play, a morality tale with heroes, villians and marvellous backdrop), then you access a whole other story. A radically different story, with a radically different meaning, and different conclusions. And that meaning is fascinating, and completely challenging. The Gospel Narrative, therefor, is a multivalent telling of a tale with strange links to our present, discomfiting links. And if you know this (the more that is known the better) you can see the way that narratives are manipulated. It puts youi in a strange position vis-a-vis the whole thing.

"Hate in the original context is just a form of strong rejection, to break the attachment. Merely an unwinding, unbinding of things but since it doesn't deny the presence of the attachment but fully acknowledges it, the nature of the hate becomes totally different."

You think? I think you are not going far enough into an examination of what THAT 'hate' could have meant, and the way it was employed for some centuries. Your interpretation seems apologetic. There is an apologetic interpretation, and certainly 'breaking attachment' could be a positive outcome. But what about the dysfunctional aspect of that sort of hatred? Turning oneself against oneself?

Life may indeed be suffering. But there is another perspective where life is an unbelievable gift. We didn't invent all this, it was given to us to experience, and we can't even begin to fathom why or what it all means. I am always intrigued by the Jewish insistance that life must be blessed, despite its pains and shortcomings. It seems also infinitely more 'tragical' to take it in this way.

"That decision seems to be made at a rather young age."

You are right. Our age and 'ages' are defined by those who were formed in invisible currents, maybe while in the womb, who knows. CC wrote portentiously about the 'temporal modality' of each age.

"Lots of things in life are like that."

You are right of course, but it is when you have paid too dear a price for something, or when through 'unnecessary' misinterpretation, or because of fear or avarice, that you missed out on something---the pain of your loss stings more painfully. And you have to backtrack and discover where you took a wrong turn, and importantly to recognize the Idea under whose power you submitted yourself. If I am talking about anything worthy at all, this is my main point in all of this: to push forward the QUESTION and not so much a potentially bogus answer that sells itself as 'absolute truth'. Aren't we all now grown-up? Haven't we all seen the consequences of the improper wielding of Absolute Truths? (This, Trevor, is the Grandstanding Fallacy, and I want you to imagine me like Melvin Belli in a three peice suit guiding the emotions of a jury with old rhetorical tricks!)

"Did you ever make an extreme decision?"

My answer is a little complex. We live and breathe right now in an environment that struggles at every turn to seduce us, to convince us of certain truths, certain 'opinions'. We all see this. We see the way that mass culture controls us. I am supposing that we might like to 'reason' a way to greater freedom of decision, otherwise what the heck are we all doing here? But in our getting free, are we to then replace it with just another group of 'false' alternatives? We would just be tricking ourselves all over again, and potentially at a higher level.

I made many extreme decisions, in fact, some of them (in their way) like the extremes of the QRS, to be truthful. (You might not think so but in many ways I respect the QRS for their extremism). I am living in the aftermath of my extremism, and my choices have become my fate. Are you asking if I critique my own choices? If I have regrets?

I will look at the Kierkegaard stuff when I have the time...

(Trevor, don't tell me you read a post of mine AGAIN! You really must break the habit!)
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Trevor Salyzyn
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Re: Aesthetic experience as a 'mini-me' of enlightenment?

Post by Trevor Salyzyn »

AJ,
I did look over those fallacies, and though it is true that I emit rhetorical flourishes reminiscent of Mexican whore rinsed in cheap perfume, nevertheless underneath the rhetor there are substantial points.
Underneath the rhetor, all I hear is the constant hum of disagreement -- a disagreement founded on principle, rather than engagement with facts.
if I were to bone up on my philosophical terms it would only sharpen my already sharp rhetorical sword into a dangerous, deadly weapon---more dangerous and deadly than it already is.
If you were to avoid fallacies, your posts would be much shorter. Also, you might be forced to turn your attention on your own beliefs for long enough to decide whether or not they are true before posting.

I wouldn't recommend starting on yourself, though; so by all means, try using fallacies as a weapon. Point out these glaring flaws in the thoughts of others. You should discover that pointing out even a single fallacy is a much better weapon than a long post, filled with rhetor. Where one's opponent is a philosopher, rhetor is obsolete: aiming for fallacies is as immediate and effective as shooting a samurai with a gun right after his grand entrance.
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