Christians and me, Part II:

[Diebert van Rhijn]

• "Genius is a discussion forum that is passionately dedicated to the nature of Genius, Wisdom and Ultimate Reality and to the total annihilation of false values. It is an unconventional discussion forum suitable only for the brave hearted. It is for those who like their thoughts bloodied and dangerous."

Can you imagine this applied in cultural domains? Economic domains? Anywhere you place it, it is explosive.

But it isn't placed or applied anywhere else but with these contemplations around existence, reality and what's ultimately important or not. One could even say that reality itself is found to be this explosion. And what's then left to apply?

It might be true that I differ from some others at this forum who might have posted about improving lives or changing society with some "flame of wisdom". It's not something that can be reasonably supported in my view since it's impossible to know all consequences on longer term. It makes way more sense to worry if some "flame" could even stay on. Truly, deeply contemplating about things as the exception, more like a luxury only possible in special circumstance with all the rest becoming replication and reproduction of earlier conception. Plastic versions of baby Jesus or some Star Wars merchandise. The only differentiation is "spirit" or as the forum title has it genius: the spark or art of making something fundamentally relevant.

[Pam Seeback]

Alex: But if I am reading you correctly you are making a statement: It has to do with your desire to quench desire and not to return to the body.

As a natural effect of wisdom of the effects of body causation, yes.

But crawling and ambling and sucking my way through all this, I tend to think that we are bound by duty to inhabit our world, and our body, and we should not avoid this. And yet we almost have no choice but to desire to avoid all the trouble that comes to us through this desire.

So what you are prescribing for sentient beings is a sense of duty for a perpetual continuum of pain and pleasure (suffering).

Can I arrange for a more subtle body with a somewhat longer lifespan that will still allow me to cavort a little bit in and through the Magnificence of All Things?

Don't forget the flipside of cavorting...the Horror of All Things.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

But it isn't placed or applied anywhere else but with these contemplations around existence, reality and what's ultimately important or not. One could even say that reality itself is found to be this explosion. And what's then left to apply?

Waldo Frank is someone I encountered as I was lunging about, wounded, trying to find some solid ground after the merciless onslaughts at the hands of the Genius Brotherhood. He sketches out in 'The Rediscovery of America' (a remarkable book, 1930s or so) the agony of the European body and soul in a slow death begun in the 16th and 17th centuries (though dates mislead).

Whether you see it or not, or believe it or not, what we come from is a remarkable and likely unprecedented cultural achievement that is the life of the European soul and body, and it is our life too. It is still our life and we prove that through the interests we have and the language we use. We are not fully dead, yet, and I would suggest that we talk so much in the hope of resurrection. Or we keep ourselves from outright death through rehearsing life on a verbal level. It is a ghostly verbal activity and the *voices* are not fully dead.

That 'life' is what I have called, along with many others, 'our traditions'. Europe, even now, is perhaps awakening again to some sense of this life and to the realisation of what is being lost, or the pain of realising what has been lost. (Who knows what will happen there).

Frankly (no pun intended) I have never been convinced, not even slightly, that the Genius Brotherhood really understood just what we really are. True, they hold up certain personages (some religious figures, 'Diogenes', etc.), but they are detached from their context and artificially reattached to some other *project* (Zen Buddhism or heaven knows what). I am thinking here of David's usurpation (if you will permit this word) of Kierkegaard: remaking him as a proto-Zen monk.

To be able to talk about what is 'ultimately' important is to broach a very mature conversation, the most important conversation one can have. I am not at all convinced that there is anyone here now, nor have I encountered anyone in all the time spent here, who I'd say has this understanding and is thus capable of that conversation.

So, the Question is still open.

Our knowledge - metaphysics, physics, ethics, science, all of it - has to flow into a unity and the unity has to become the basis on which we construct our raison d'être. That is the Ground on which we construct everything else. Yet what is happening now, as I think most recognise or at least intuit, is that the ground has fallen away from underneath us. We tumble. We dissolve. And this creates various, strange, disjointed, absurd, lumbering, disconnections as we reel in our death throes. You are certainly versed enough in Nietzsche's ideas to understand 'death of God' and such, and to understand that death of God is death of man and the soul. Dissolution is psychosis is madness.

The word 'soul' though - I gather - is understood as a sort of bad joke. Soul? There is certainly no soul! But in the absence of this supporting idea, and the metaphysic that underpins it, I suggest that we lose oodles. There has to be something like a 'divine spark' for meaning, understanding and value to accrete around. In any case, and since I am speaking to Jupi's OP, to Christianity, to Kierkegaard and to real and bona fide demands of philosophy, to exigency, and to the real conditions of our present and ourselves in it, I suggest that these ideas have to be re-traversed. They are in no sense dealt on by the Brotherhood.

Person, personality, soul, state and church, life and community, have to function as a result of unity, don't you see? It can't just be 'placed' in some abstract and disconnected zone of contemplation. If these ideas (the ideas that the Genius Brotherhood proposes) are to be understood as really real they have to function really in the real world, at all levels as levers that move things. And not just in some abstract exercise which begins to look not like 'recovery of soul' but a symptom of 'dissolution of being'.

[Leyla Shen]

Sisyphus, anyone?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

"Enjoy the game, it's all we have".
_________________________________________

Ridiculously enough, I pulled this out of an opinion/article in this morning's NY Times in a section called 'The Stone'. The writer is Roy Scranton, a product of the New School of Social Research which fits, I guess, into the bizarre and incomprehensible liberalism of the NYTs. Served in Iraq and wrote about it, articles and stories. (A full view of his position to be found here).

(If there is any 'philosophical position' that needs to be 'deconstructed' it is that unutterably bizarre NYTs perspective). Still, there are some interesting points in the piece itself:

• "Nietzsche wasn’t himself a nihilist. He developed his idea of truth as a “mobile army of metaphors” into a more complex philosophy of perspectivism, which conceived of subjective truth as a variety of constructions arising out of particular perspectives on objective reality. The more perspectives we learn to see from, the more truth we have access to. This is different from relativism, with which it’s often confused, which says that all truth is relative and there is no objective reality. Fundamentally, Nietzsche was an empiricist who believed that beyond all of our interpretations there was, at last, something we can call the world — even if we can never quite apprehend it objectively. “Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience,” he writes. “Just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.”
  
  "Nietzsche’s positive philosophical project, what he called his “gay science,” was to create the conditions for the possibility of a human being who could comprehend the meaninglessness of our drive to make meaning, yet nonetheless affirm human existence, a human being who could learn “amor fati,” the love of one’s fate: this was his much-misunderstood idea of the “overman.” Nietzsche labored mightily to create this new human ideal for philosophy because he needed it so badly himself. A gloomy, sensitive pessimist and self-declared decadent who eventually went mad, he struggled all his life to convince himself that his life was worth living."

I find it interesting to contrast this - which we are all boringly familiar with and which boring perspective feeds a good deal of our so-called 'thinking' - with some clips out of Nabokovian metaphysics: in the end I believe a really more useful way of looking and seeing and possibly of being. The below comes from the mouth of the character Charles Kinbote which is out of the odd novel Pale Fire, in appearance a commentary on the metaphysical poem of John Shade. (I am revealing of course that I tend not to believe any longer in the specificities of religious/spiritual positions, and less in that mind of concrete that tends to form them. That life is too strange, too incomprehensible, too opaque and yet too luminous to be grasped through a description/interpretation and a mechanical set of motions. (What he carried under his arm was the manuscript of Shade's poem):

• "... and for a moment I found myself enriched
  with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals
  on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture
  in the bruised and branded sky."

___________________________________

One of the more marvellous statements from the toothy mouth of The Talking Ass:

• "Literacy will get you through times of skewed philosophy
  better than skewed philosophy will get you through times of no literacy".

(One of 10,000 choice sayings soon to be published by Zero Books as 'Loquentes Asinum: Mien Oeuvre')

___________________________________

Penicillin for your Sisyphus, Leyla?

[jupiviv]

I'll just respond to his latest post if it's all the same to our esteemed "Occidentalist".

Whether you see it or not, or believe it or not, what we come from is a remarkable and likely unprecedented cultural achievement that is the life of the European soul and body, and it is our life too. It is still our life and we prove that through the interests we have and the language we use. We are not fully dead, yet, and I would suggest that we talk so much in the hope of resurrection. Or we keep ourselves from outright death through rehearsing life on a verbal level. It is a ghostly verbal activity and the *voices* are not fully dead.

That's the problem with your entire output on this forum as I see it: X*100 quantities of nonsense prose to hack through before the elusive "X" - your actual point - is arrived at. And it just happens to be a white nationalist talking point.

This is not to say that your point in itself is completely invalid. Europeans were probably the first human beings to establish systems explicitly founded upon the principles of individualism and rational thought, as well as legal and ethical codes at least professedly derived from the latter. For that achievement alone, all of their racial siblings should be grateful towards them.

But, and this is *my* point, rationality is deeper than anything which would fall within the range of any culture. I use the word "culture" in its conventional sense of course, whereby any person, object or activity which is capable of shocking, rousing the interest of or pleasing a large enough number of people is "cultural". In a truly rational culture, 99% of what is called "culture" in the various extant cultures of the world would be demoted to "things people do in order to feel important, vindicated and happy; make others feel that way; make others feel the opposite way (in order to feel important, vindicated and happy in their knowledge of that fact); make money; kill time; or a combination of any or all of these".

The above also applies to "Occidentalism". You care nothing for valuing truth and upholding the primacy of the rational individual over masses, mavens, mores, maidens, matrons and Makers in the discernment of truth and virtue. The entirety of your response to anyone who says anything you dislike amounts to - "You belong to a different culture than mine, or are an apostate of it. This makes you inferior to me, which means that your actual arguments are irrelevant. Now I shall explore why your different culture or defiance of our shared culture makes you inferior to me."

It is ALL about YOU. Occidentville is wonderful and special. You reside in Occidentville. That means *you're* wonderful and special, despite how many x'mas eves you spent alone because mammy was out looking for Alabama black snake and daddy was puffing the magic dragon.

[Leyla Shen]

"Literacy will get you through times of skewed philosophy
better than skewed philosophy will get you through times of no literacy".

Insight penetrates both.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

"Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch." (Novalis)
__________________________________________

Another quote from Nabokov ('Speak, Memory'):

• "You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you can never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable".

I find it quite odd that Scranton - who may certainly have his reasons given his experience - has arrived at a near total pessimism that borders on apocalypticism. And even more strange that his message, with its mythological connection, appears in the NY Times. And even more strange than that is the degree that people seem to be losing their bearings within our 'reality', and a 'reality' which is blended and interwoven with an Imaginarium filled with symbols and images.

It is not the sort of thing I normally read, yet I am working to get through 'Pale Fire', a chess problem of a novel and one with many many layers. Again, all of this, or in any case a good deal of it, has a relationship to the dysfunctional intellectualism, the skewed religiosity, that is so wonderfully expressed by the Brotherhood of the Absolute.

Remember: I regard these declarative stances as the corollary of and correspondence to the 'false bottoms' mentioned above, and they become necessary when people sense that they have lost their bearings, and the ground under their feet, in 'our reality'. How to refer to it though? Hysterical modernity? To describe the problem is in a sense to have dominated it. Additionally: I tend to see these declarative stances as an evidence of and not a solution to forms of desperation.

It is curious to examine both 'rationality' and now 'insight' in the light of, well, all of this. The psychological danger of the present; the approached psychological borderline where madness is glimpsed and the fractured souls appear in the doorway; the apostolic Declarations of purveyors of Absolute Truths; rigorous, systematisation of thought; the regimentation of thinking, strangling imagination.

In a book that analyses Pale Fire ("Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery" by Brian Boyd) he refers to Popper's notions ...



My take on the above is something like this: If this is so we must accept that the Lord of the Realm, so to speak, is in essence a Trickster. And the key to the mysteries of the kingdom is the strangest turn of the mind possible. To comprehend the world may require going ever-so-slightly mad which means in my lexicon surrendering a tendency to desire to control. Or, to hold to some solidity of self as one faces something (The World) which is utterly strange and irreducible. The World in these senses is not reducible through rationality nor is it amenable to ratiocination, though this appears to be the case in those domains of material power and domination. Is it possible that we are seduced by this false certainty?

At a philosophical level, however (I would arrogantly assert at the level of 'true philosophy' which does not mean academic philosophy, and far less through the manoeuvres of GF Philosophy taken on the whole), a religious and spiritual stance, and an individual's choices in the face of the 'unquenchable, unattainable' world, is really up in the air. While not aesthetics per se it is certainly part and parcel of art.

[jupiviv]

"Literacy will get you through times of skewed philosophy
better than skewed philosophy will get you through times of no literacy".

Insight penetrates both.

Penetrating insight into skewed literacy will get you through times of no philosophy
better than insightful penetration of skewed philosophy will get you through times of no literacy.

Reason discards both.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

And what did you catch in that net?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Reason discards both.

Again, all of this, or in any case a good deal of it, has a relationship to the dysfunctional intellectualism, the skewed religiosity, that is so wonderfully expressed by the Brotherhood of the Absolute.

Remember: I regard these declarative stances as the corollary of and correspondence to the 'false bottoms' mentioned above, and they become necessary when people sense that they have lost their bearings, and the ground under their feet, in 'our reality'. How to refer to it though? Hysterical modernity? To describe the problem is in a sense to have dominated it. Additionally: I tend to see these declarative stances as an evidence of and not a solution to forms of desperation.

It is curious to examine both 'rationality' and now 'insight' in the light of, well, all of this. The psychological danger of the present; the approached psychological borderline where madness is glimpsed and the fractured souls appear in the doorway; the apostolic Declarations of purveyors of Absolute Truths; rigorous, systematisation of thought; the regimentation of thinking, strangling imagination.

[jupiviv]

@Alex: In retrospect, that x'mas eve comment was a bit much, x'mas eve being a special time for you Occidentalians and all that, and it actually *being* x'mas eve either today or tomorrow depending on time zones and all that. I sincerely and wholeheartedly apologise for implying that your mammy and daddy performed unholy rituals with the aid of dire reptiles on a day whose sanctity (whether religious, social or commercial) is acknowledged almost universally in your culture. I hope you will forgive me for that misconceived and cruel insult. I'm sure you have spent all of your infant x'mas eves snuggled between your parents and watching reruns of That 70s Show.

So in conclusion, Merry Christmas to you and everyone else reading! Have a good one - seriously.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

I admit it, I was deeply hurt. Thanks for the healing salve of good Christmas wishes.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

a relationship to the dysfunctional intellectualism, the skewed religiosity, that is so wonderfully expressed by the Brotherhood of the Absolute.

Intellect has always been dysfunctional: falsification of its own errors and knowing its own limitation is a feature of it, not a bug! Religiosity has always been skewed, perverted even. Naturally this will be expressed my every modern child looking for "truth". It's very good you recognized these things, if only you could start admitting part of your own intellectualism as being a form of pretence, flawed grandstanding and power tripping! Luring little boys in your net so you can feel a rush of your power when towering over them. That your own search for religiosity is flawed and insecure, a misunderstanding and misinterpreting for the most part. Only then you can truly feel "home" at the one place that isn't supposed to be a home: the desolate of the absolute...

Is it possible that we are seduced by this false certainty?

You already know my position on seduction: yes we are perpetually seduced by the false when it materializes as thing, certainty or image, as object of desire - all subversions, all impossibilities which draw us in, as subject. Getting to that insight one way or another is the start or reorientation towards wisdom and not some "possibility" at the end of some obscure discourse, the ones you are trying to present as relevant somehow.

In the spirit of Christmas, I'll present you some stuff you normally like, although this is rather too mainstream for your rebel taste perhaps. Like most Christmas diners: one just will have to suck it up out of politeness :-)

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (complete pdf) by Jacques Barzun (1907–2012).

Some samples, first one from the Guardian review: "Barzun arranges his answer by period. From 1500 to 1660 it was religion: the Protestant challenge to Catholicism that led men, suddenly given direct access to God, to redefine themselves and states. From 1660 to 1789 it was the pursuit of political freedom and individual rights, culminating in the French Revolution. From 1790 to 1920 it was the search for social and economic equality, exploding in the Russian Revolution. In the past century, it has been an uneasy amalgam of all three. Now, if his bleakest pronouncements are to be taken at face value, it is nothing at all: we are ruled by inertia. Entropy has replaced ideology. "

From the book itself:

Our five centuries present some ten or twelve such themes. They are not historical "forces" or "causes," but names for the desires, attitudes, purposes behind the events or movements, some embodied in lasting institutions. Pointing out this thematic unity and continuity is not to propose a new philosophy of history in the tradition of Marx, Spengler, or Toynbee. They saw history as moved by a single force toward a single goal. I remain an historian, that is, a storyteller who tries to unfold the intricate plot woven by the actions
of men, women, and teenagers (these last must not be forgotten), whose desires are the motive power of history. Material conditions interfere, results are unexpected, and there can be no single outcome.

Over our five centuries, the changes in social structure, economic life, and cultural expectations have worked fairly steadily toward emancipation and made individualism a common form of self-consciousness. The artist is the conspicuous and congenial example. But free play for the self is still a goal to be achieved and not a gift. Under any system, whoever wants self-fulfillment must exert willpower over a long stretch of time, besides possessing talent and knowing how to manage it. And as is plain from daily experience, many who make this effort fail nonetheless and complain of "subjection." Meanwhile, the great majority feel no wish for public fame or self-expression, which does not mean that they are denied respect or some scope for their modest powers. The society in which everybody finds his or her proper level and due recognition has yet to be designed and made to work.

Of course this is all written under the cultural assumption of self which in itself remains an ambiguous, ghostly entity. Possibly the very seductive temptress which made this age, as well this writing, possible. And I'm not even claiming ghosts do not "exist" - in terms of grand effects at least.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Intellect has always been dysfunctional: falsification of its own errors and knowing its own limitation is a feature of it, not a bug! Religiosity has always been skewed, perverted even. Naturally this will be expressed by every modern child looking for "truth". It's very good you recognized these things, if only you could start admitting part of your own intellectualism as being a form of pretence, flawed grandstanding and power tripping! Luring little boys in your net so you can feel a rush of your power when towering over them. That your own search for religiosity is flawed and insecure, a misunderstanding and misinterpreting for the most part. Only then you can truly feel "home" at the one place that isn't supposed to be a home: the desolate of the absolute...

What I recognise is (perhaps) less what you are presenting to me to be recognised and - as often happens - a recognition that you are making some prime declarative statements. Naturally, these form the core of your 'operative predicates'.

Yet it is noteworthy that you seem to recognise that within some specific narrative, religious and philosophical, as well as one that sets itself up as a grand solution to the problem of life (the Brotherhood of the Absolute), that it might be a 'net' to capture little boys. Now, it is true indeed that I have made substantial efforts to point out that something like this occurs - and for that I should not (according to your analysis) be slighted - but where I differ from you is that an oppositional stance is necessarily a desire to grandstand, pretend, or power-trip. Your reading of me is oh-so-cynical and really quite out of harmony with the Christmas spirit! I come - I have always come - bearing rich gifts.

I am having quite a marvellous experience with Pale Fire. It is a work of extraordinary dimension. I doubt much that The Usual Suspects will take the time to read any of these (short and accessible) snips, yet in my case I am (I admit it has taken some substantial time and effort) beginning to cobble together a different sort conceptual order in which the poetic act (handling words and meaning) ties in with metaphysics, and thus opens up wide and ample vistas. To suggest ways that wide and ample vistas can be opened, dear Diebert, is my 'pretence'.

From Shakespeare's 'Timon of Athens':

• I’ll example you with thievery:
  The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction
  Robs the vast sea; the moon’s an arrant thief,
  And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
  The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
  The moon into salt tears; the earth’s a thief,
  That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
  From general excrement: each thing’s a thief.

The idea of 'pale fire' and thievery, and reflected images, and those senses of overruling metaphysics, and structures of order, and our very lives:

• "In moments of happiness, of rapture, when my soul is laid bare,
  I suddenly feel that everything - Life, Patria, April - is but a muddled preface,
  and that the main text still lies ahead". (from a Nabokov story)

Become interesting ideas to consider. But note: there is an aspect to the 'dysfunctional religiosity' which I have so valiantly focussed on (public service) which has the tendency of removing a man from an intelligible world, a creative world, and placing him - as our own dear Jupi - in a 'rational world' and with a 'rationality' that - How did he put it? - 'discards' some whole aspect of being or a major aspect of the possibility of being. Don't you see Diebert? Power-tripping did you say? You've got it back-assward: I am establishing ways and means to resist what is the real powertripping: And this has to do with the ways that ideas are used in our present to reduce and limit our own selves. And as always I flank back to the notion - a paraphrase of Kierkegaard:

• "The point of view whose object is to show that Christianity is not a peep-hole restricting the vision to a single object, nor a way of thinking and feeling which admits only one state of mind, but on the contrary a permanent source of rejuvenation and life".

Now, why would I do this? Why should this effort be undertaken? Because ideas are operating in the present which undermine truth. "Aha", you'll say: "There is no truth! And I know this to be true! Because anything I might say about it is dysfunctional, perverted even, a falsification [through] its own errors", etc. This is what you said. But I am saying - apparently - that some things are truer than others even if I cannot make specific and absolute claims.

It seems to me vitally important to make the effort to locate them (truths). And to oppose the entire activity when it seeks to establish lies and untruths ... as truths.
____________________________________

The question of metaphysics and the 'ultimate Thule' is in no sense to be swept off the board:

• What is the mind’s ultima Thule? What substance must be regarded as first, and therefore as the seed of the universe? What is the eternal Something, of which the temporal is but a manifestation? Matter? Spirit? Matter and Spirit? Something behind both and from which they have sprung, neither Matter nor Spirit, but their Creator? Or is there in reality neither Matter nor Spirit, but only an agnostic Cause of the phenomena erroneously assigned by us to body and mind?
  
  After spending many years in profoundly investigating this problem, I have at last struck bottom. Unhesitatingly and unconditionally I adopt materialism, and declare it to be the sole and all-sufficient explanation of the universe. This affords the only thoroughly scientific system; and nowhere but in its legitimate conclusions can thought find suitable resting-place, the heart complete satisfaction, and life a perfect basis. Unless it accepts this system, philosophy will be but drift-wood, instead of the stream of thought whose current bears all truth. Materialism, thorough, consistent, and fearless, not the timid, reserved, and half-hearted kind, is the hope of the world.
  
  'The Final Science: or Spiritual Materialism', 1885 by John Henry Wilbrandt Stuckenberg 1835-1903

I find it super-strange - yet it still has to be well thought through - that some apparently large part of the Nazi manifestation had to do with the visualisation - the 'belief in' - a specific visualisation which can be said to be metaphysical:

• The Traditionalist School expositor Rene Guenon believed in the existence of ancient Thule on "initiatic grounds" "alone". According to its emblem, the Thule Society was founded on August 18, 1918.[40] It had close links to the Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP), later the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, the Nazi party). One of its three founding members was Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954). In his biography of Liebenfels (Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab, Munich 1985 - The Man who Gave Hitler the Ideas), the Viennese psychologist and author Wilhelm Dahm wrote: "The Thule Gesellschaft name originated from mythical Thule, a Nordic equivalent of the vanished culture of Atlantis. A race of giant supermen lived in Thule, linked into the Cosmos through magical powers. They had psychic and technological energies far exceeding the technical achievements of the 20th century. This knowledge was to be put to use to save the Fatherland and create a new race of Nordic Aryan Atlanteans. A new Messiah would come forward to lead the people to this goal." In his history of the SA (Mit ruhig festem Schritt, 1998 - With Firm and Steady Step), Wilfred von Oven, Joseph Goebbels' press adjutant from 1943 to 1945, confirmed that Pytheas' Thule was the historical Thule for the Thule Gesellschaft.

As you know I am very interested in Jonathan Bowden and the 'Alt-Right' position not so much because I desire to 'believe in' it, but because it is imperative to trace these ideas back, to sort through them, and to gain some sort of base in our physical reality that sanely reflects a correct take on metaphysics.

• I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
  By the false azure in the windowpane
  I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
  Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,
  And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
  Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
  Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
  Hang all the furniture above the grass,
  And how delightful when a fall of snow
  Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
  As to make chair and bed exactly stand
  Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

This is the opening lines of the poem that is at the center of the 'novel' Pale Fire. It has many layers of complexity which are compelling - and relevant - to what could be said to be suggested here but which is soundly avoided. A few suggestions:

Death, obviously. Icarus who slays himself through his overweening project. And thus ourselves. But then the fact of getting captured in images, and mortal results. Is this a Platonic suggestion? I think it is. But taken at another level, closest to home, more vital than exposition. Are not we in just such a world? And if we die, do we not also 'Live on, fly on, in the reflected sky'? We come into a world of supreme strangeness and mystery not to destroy the sense of it as such, but to touch it, to know it.

See, I'd suggest that the the ideas which are at the heart of this particular forum, in this particular location in cyberspace, are anchored and rooted in certain misunderstandings and misstatements about 'our reality'. Essentially, these are particular expositions on metaphysics. The 'challenge' is to either take them on and internalise them, or to resist them. I said that 'I would rewrite Genius Forum' and I am making good on that promise. Genius Forum is not really Genius Forum, Genius Forum is a whole school of thinking which has become dominant in our present. It leads away from truth ... to lived falsehood.

[SeekerOfWisdom]

After spending many years in profoundly investigating this problem, I have at last struck bottom. Unhesitatingly and unconditionally I adopt materialism, and declare it to be the sole and all-sufficient explanation of the universe. This affords the only thoroughly scientific system; and nowhere but in its legitimate conclusions can thought find suitable resting-place, the heart complete satisfaction, and life a perfect basis. Unless it accepts this system, philosophy will be but drift-wood, instead of the stream of thought whose current bears all truth. Materialism, thorough, consistent, and fearless, not the timid, reserved, and half-hearted kind, is the hope of the world.

Not really sure how else to comment on this but to say that you're wrong. The fact that you're even referring to an 'ism' and saying it's the right view is ridiculously ignorant. Mind telling us what your take on metaphysics is? (Without simply referring to a single word which doesn't reveal anything about your take on metaphysics.)

It seems to me vitally important to make the effort to locate them (truths).

Try thinking for yourself and being honest instead of idolizing others and focusing on useless (in terms of metaphysics) poems.

The 'challenge' is to either take them on and internalise them, or to resist them.

That's perhaps how the idiot reacts to any philosophy, accept it or deny it. Such a close minded way of looking at things. What you ought to do is internalize every idea as if it were true, contemplate that viewpoint in depth, and then learn from it, taking from it what is true or valuable and discarding what is delusional.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

You'll need to read more thoroughly, Seeker.

Superficial reading is a bane of the age we live in.

Reading right: it's a matter of 'life' and 'death' (metaphysically speaking).

[SeekerOfWisdom]

Tried it, seemed to be a lot of complaining and quoting, some very vague sentences, nothing really clear regarding materialism. You made one significant point that stood out regarding the "denial of self" undertaken by some on the forum, but really, read over your comments, where is the prior support for a statement like this "I have at last struck bottom. Unhesitatingly and unconditionally I adopt materialism, and declare it to be the sole and all-sufficient explanation of the universe."? If I'm wrong feel free to quote where you said anything of substance about how you came to the metaphysical conclusion of 'materialism', and please explain your version of that 'ism' to me. Try not to quote any poems. Leave behind your intellectual crutches and pretenses, afterward I'll point out your extremely obvious logical flaws and philosophical assumptions. Sounds like a fun exercise to me. (At least you have the virtue of not being an intellectual coward.)

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Seeker, I think he tried to point out to you that the part you were quoting was not his but Stuckenberg's.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Well, to be fair, open, honest and 'wise', it is true that he misread Stuckenberg's statement about materialism as being mine, when I was alluding/referencing this [metaphysical] notion of 'ultima Thule' (and thus making a reference to all metaphysics, its problematic nature, and more).

But I also really & truly & honestly think that we all need to improve our reading skills. It is a matter of 'life' and 'death'.

Come, let us imagine a wrestling match, in a palm oil pit, between an Australian Strongman and a silken skinned South American python. The Australian strongman gives orders to the Silken Slitherer to behave in certain ways, but Snakey knows that this is all part of a wrestler's game: to pin an opponent.

Snake knows [infernal wisdom] never to cooperate in projects which are designed to kill knowing and foil the imagination. Dead metaphors pour forth no wisdom. The wisdom fount is metaphysical to enunciation.

• "Never give power to what a man considers to be the source of his powertripping."

Pinning the opponent, Quinning the exponent: postponement.

• "You can't Kelly Jones ME".

The SNAKE is metaphysical to such games.

Seeker, what do you make of this?

"You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you can never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable".

[Diebert van Rhijn]

But I also really & truly & honestly think that we all need to improve our reading skills. It is a matter of 'life' and 'death'.

You're not exactly famous yourself for having good reading skills when it comes to reading what others are saying to you outside the odd book. It's a matter of being able to give the proper attention combined with a minimum of emotional attachments ("blinders"). Even then, first one has to establish the discussion is being entered with similar motives and expectations. Without, it all becomes vanity rather quickly.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

You're not exactly famous yourself for having good reading skills when it comes to reading what others are saying to you outside the odd book. It's a matter of being able to give the proper attention combined with a minimum of emotional attachments ("blinders"). Even then, first one has to establish the discussion is being entered with similar motives and expectations. Without, it all becomes vanity rather quickly.

I take that to mean that you assume everyone is reading from [what you are revealing as] the 'Odd Book'. Are you saying that y'all have access to a Reference Work that you have not shared with me? That is unfair!

A pitiable attempt at a joke...

I am more interested in the clinamen:

• From Lucretius in 'De Rerum Natura':
  
  "When atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything."

Still, you have hit on a crucial point, but a discomfiting one: That a great deal depends on motives and expectations. This dovetails with much that I desire to say: We cannot impose our limiting rules on communication, in any field, but especially when it comes to discussing 'the most important things that can be talked about'.

I am willing to get bloody over that point.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Without, it all becomes vanity rather quickly.

Actually, what it becomes is more like 'refusal to participate in your project'. What I have noticed here, just now, is that Seeker has taken issue with the way that things are said and he demands that things be said in another way. It is an ultimatum of sorts. You do things my way or I refuse to plumb your meanings.

The implications of exposing this problem, which I have termed 'powertripping' (a term stolen from you and bent to clinamenic purposes), has great bearing on everything that I have ever desired to say here. But it is not a merely personal conflict: we deal here on crucial issues that have to do with core definitions and predicates [about 'reality'].

What we see here - I suggest - is the way that powerplays, forced interpretation, coercion and a sort of intellectual barbarianism (I admit this is a 'swerve' as well, a modern swerve, a mass swerve), brashly charge in and seek to assert their will.

It is a game of power, for power-purposes, and has nothing to do with 'wisdom'. I hate to say it again but - once again - we note the intellectual tantrums of 'little boys'.

The 'little boy' has to be thwarted, and this is not done through pleasantries. It is a brutal work, a bloody work.

The web is established. The breeze carries in the 'flyboy'. The flyboy gets stuck in the filaments. Two choices - three perhaps - face us:

• 1) Diebert's method: coddling.
• 2) Gustav's method: enveloping in preparation for resurrectional transformation (boy to man).
• 3) Feasting on their juicy guts [the way of the world].

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

We cannot impose our limiting rules on communication...

Now, this is rather crucial: Not only can we not insist, through powerplaying, that others communicate to us in certain ways; we also establish that the Kosmos, the Entire World, Consciousness, Being and Meaning will not be controlled by our little self. The Arrogant little boy on his insignificant little planet does not dictate the Greater Meanings which rain down along with the Lucretian atoms. We don't tell the Universe what it is, and isn't, we learn to listen, and to hear.

Oh there is really a great deal in all this that can be tweaked out ...

[Diebert van Rhijn]

We cannot impose our limiting rules on communication, in any field, but especially when it comes to discussing 'the most important things that can be talked about'.

On the contrary, especially when discussing the "most important things" a lot of firm rules need to be in place! The reason for that is rather simple: the lack of (self-)imposed and agreed-on-rules will give way too much leeway for any participant to waver, hide or change goal posts, wrecking every ghost of chance the discussion might actually turn into actual exchange, which means something is gained and lost, some victory and some loss, something learned and some thing given up. So far you haven't shown much of flexibility although you probably think you have slivered a long way and taken all possible forms. In the end you are really saying five years exactly the same things. whatever your point exactly is, it comes across as something very fixed and crude, something obsessive and inflexible.

Actually, what it becomes is more like 'refusal to participate in your project'. What I have noticed here, just now, is that Seeker has taken issue with the way that things are said and he demands that things be said in another way. It is an ultimatum of sorts. You do things my way or I refuse to plumb your meanings.

It's interesting coming from you as in my view you have turned that into an art form, imposing your own scatter shot method of discussing subjects and declaring superiority or abandonment when certain answers are not forthcoming! The common issue of narcissistic personalities, a perception enlarged through the virtues of the virtual.

It is a game of power, for power-purposes, and has nothing to do with 'wisdom'. I hate to say it again but - once again - we note the intellectual tantrums of 'little boys'.

Well, I certainly didn't claim that we can avoid the power games. Personally I like to turn the game against itself, as to bend a conversation back onto itself, creating literary self-awareness of some kind. Well, as an ice skating figure of speech.

[*]2) Gustav's method: enveloping in preparation for resurrectional transformation (boy to man).

The only relevant adulthood, even in common human life cycles around us, boils down to recognizing emptiness of existence and the undeniability of causality. This means for the average man taking responsibilities, stop the rebelling, drop the egotism and take care of the need of others as ones own and extent ones concern to the community one is part of. This can only be done when feeling "empty" and less of a raging individual. The understandings are now based on commonalities and universalities -- less so on differences and unique paths.

The adult of adults just takes that one step further: realizing emptiness, causality and grasping the deepest commonalities and universal truths known to man. Of course It's understood we live in an infantilizing worlds where self and individualism are still being worshipped even at the stages when they are expired. Modernity worshipped "youth" for that reason, because it's tied with the whole eternally childish ideology, a holding on to death as much as to life.

The Arrogant little boy on his insignificant little planet does not dictate the Greater Meanings which rain down along with the Lucretian atoms. We don't tell the Universe what it is, and isn't, we learn to listen, and to hear.

But if you want a conversation about it with real human beings, in the sense of rational actors, it needs rationality and logic.