Musings, Critiques.

Diebert van Rhijn · Post by **Diebert van Rhijn** » Fri Oct 19, 2012 8:42 am

Alex Jacob wrote:One of your tactics is to tire out a given subject. You will go over and over and over it until, in the end, one has no more energy left. To mount another defense of a very simple observation becomes ridiculous. But, I resolve to do it in your case.

That's correct and I stated not long ago that I was going to try to out-output you and just admit it: you considered briefly giving it up! But your engines cannot be overheated or short-circuited or not within my time constrains. Something I knew deep down but I was tempted to try anyway, it's my bulldog stubbornness. Just go ahead, I won't be bothering you for a while responding to your critiques unless you radically change the topic and attitude into something that peaks my interest again.

Full circle, as four and half years ago you said:

Diebert, you remind me of the I-Ching hexagram Taming Power of the Small, and the 'minister' whose influence is to impede, to hold back. You draw me down, in a way, to answer your criticisms and doing this, the breeze diminishes, and the sails go flaccid. - Alex Jacob, april 2008

I'd call it: sobering up.

Alex Jacob · Post by **Alex Jacob** » Fri Oct 19, 2012 9:10 am

I hear and understand what you say. And I also believe that if we put our minds to it a more productive conversation would be possible.

Bobo · Post by **Bobo** » Fri Oct 19, 2012 11:57 am

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:I'd call it: sobering up.

There's this Sufi teacher of name, Inayat Khan, he had a vision once. As a matter of fact he had it just a few blocks from here at the same spot I visit on my walks. They built a freaking temple in his honor right next to it. What he exactly saw I don't know but he wrote later: There is nothing more intoxicating than our life itself and man loves this intoxication as much as the drunkard loves the intoxication of wine. .

This is where it's all about: before one can focus on the situation as it is (truth) one has to sober up first. It's not blindness which plagues man but seeing double, seeing in a haze of spirit.

I can't be sure what Inayat Khan meant by intoxication on the snippet you provided, but your interpretation may be off.

Inayat Khan wrote: May 1 (122)
Saying
You can have all good things - wealth, friends, kindness, love to give and love to receive - once you have
learned not to be blinded by them; learned to escape from disappointment and from repugnance at the idea
that things are not as you want them to be.
_____________________________________________
Complement
To begin with, the idea of "good things" must be altered; altered not to eliminate what we may call
valuable, but rather augmented to include many things we may not call valuable. What man calls
valuable must have some value, otherwise it would not be prized by him. The pursuit of wealth is
not wrong of itself, but becomes wrong when it displaces higher ideals. The ideal pursuit is an allinclusive
pursuit which does not neglect the sustenance for body, heart or soul.
So first we must include in the term wealth, not only material good, but intellectual gifts and the
treasures of the spirit. But besides that, it is important to possess these things, but not to be
possessed by them. So long as we pursue them, it is only to be possessed by them, but when in our
search for the Highest we come into temporary possession of goods, then it can not be said that we
possess them, for then God possesses them. So it is with friends. To possess friends we must
understand the highest friendship, and this is only possible with the realization of God. Otherwise
our so-called friends are as possessions, which we try to include in our thoughts of ownership until
we become owned by these thoughts. And the same is true concerning kindness, the faculty by
which and through which friends are attained and maintained. That kindness which is affected is
false, that which is the natural outburst of the heart is true.
And this right attitude in life becomes more than true when we consider love from any standpoint. It
is impossible for us to love all unless the spiritual love of God is in our heart. We may use the word
‘love’ and make claims, but there will be no life in it and it will fail when the test comes, for it will
be centered around the nufs. Use of the word ‘love’ is very different from the substance love.
Therefore the question arises whether we are blinded by our desires or ideals, or whether we control
them. When we control them, nothing can either elate us or disappoint us. Both these are forms of
intoxication - the former intoxication (of ideals) by light, the latter intoxication (of desires) by
darkness - and perhaps the latter may sometimes be preferable to the former which is sometimes so
blinding that one cannot easily recover the sight of heart and soul.
Finally we must consider the condition of things as the result of all thoughts of all beings. We
cannot control the thoughts of others. We might influence them in part, but God has given willpower
to all mankind. Through this thoughts are formed, and through these thoughts the material
affairs of the world are fixed.
The consequence is tremendous, that not only is each individual but one part of one to two billion
people, all of whose thoughts and whose karma is affecting the world, but the influence of the past
is still greater -
Not only our reverence for men of the past but constitutions, contracts and agreements of all sorts
bind us. It should be obvious therefore, that our own small individual wills are as nothing in this
whirlpool. And if you add to that the thoughts of plants, animals and rocks, of the planets and
interplanetary forces, of the unfathomed activities in the unseen, even the whole humanity does not
appear to be so great compared with the Universe. This should teach us true humility. Also it should
teach us resignation, but there is a true and a false resignation. The false is fatalism, the true is not to
be bound by any restrictions, to seek freedom by finding full scope for the spirit outside of these
material and mental bonds, This in itself will help the world more than anything else. Thus we can
become a Bodhisattva or Nabi.

...

The mystic desires what Omar Khayyam calls wine, the wine of Christ, after drinking which, no one
will ever thirst.
_____________________________________________
This is the love of God which appears as manifestation in Djabrut, that is to say, the sphere of heart.
Even on the earth plane it flows with every heart-pulsation. It is that which keeps us alive here and
which keeps us alive hereafter, and which impelled us heretofore on our way to manifestation. It is
that which every one desires, which is all joy and happiness. It is that which constitutes all delight
of Paradise. And what is that? It is nothing but Allah in the manner in which He presents Himself to
His creatures. Practice of Zikar brings it to us here and now. Every intoxication of soul is nothing
but this, and it cannot be compared to any delight of man

...

The emotional stir of things and the intoxication of the outer life are the great detriments. One who
has become accustomed to them grows to love complexities. Now heart is not complex although
heart may be considered as “involved”. That is to say, one cannot by simple analysis find heart.
Heart is simple but not analyzable. One cannot express the greater in terms of the smaller and still
understand the greater.

...

I place myself within the worlds of myself, created of myself for myself by myself, and as I have
delved deeper and deeper, identification changed and separation resulted. Awakening my heart, I
remember and return. The joys of the days are extended in forms unlimited, wonders and beauties -
the intoxication of life made sober through the wine of self, of love. And now, seeing and knowing
as one, myself vision and sought no longer; found within me as myself. Joy in all as all, the face
returns the sheen as mirror, an echo direct.

http://www.spiritual-learning.com/downl ... ofsaki.pdf

And Omar Khayyam wine intoxication:

Old Khayyám, say you, is a debauchee;
If only you were half so good as he!
He sins no sins but gentle drunkenness,
Great-hearted mirth, and kind adultery.

But yours the cold heart, and the murderous tongue,
The wintry soul that hates to hear a song,
The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye,
And all the little poisoned ways of wrong.

So I be written in the Book of Love,
I have no care about that book above;
Erase my name, or write it, as you please--
So I be written in the Book of Love.

What care I, love, for what the Sufis say?
The Sufis are but drunk another way;
So you be drunk, it matters not the means,
So you be drunk--and glorify your clay.

Drunken myself, and with a merry mind,
An old man passed me, all in vine-leaves twined;
I said, "Old man, hast thou forgotten God?"
"Go, drink yourself," he said, "for God is kind."

"Did God set grapes a-growing, do you think,
And at the same time make it sin to drink?
Give thanks to Him who foreordained it thus--
Surely He loves to hear the glasses clink!"

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Rub%C3%A1 ... llienne%29

Kunga · Post by **Kunga** » Fri Oct 19, 2012 1:19 pm

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:sobering up.

This makes these "Musings & Critiques" sound like trivial pursuits . WAKE THE FUCK UP PEOPLE :

[There are some] 22 sub-species of Grays... [In most cases] their digestive tract is useless. Nourishment is ingested by smearing a soupy mixture of biologicals on the epidermis. Food sources [include] Bovine cattle [and human] parts surgically removed by light technology [laser] and distilled into a high protein broth. These type of Greys have been referred to as being the "Orion Crusaders" or the 'Markabians'. Sources: Rigel, Ursa Major, Draconis, Reticulum. Draconians are Reptilian in nature; the elite have winged appendages on their backs...

The mass consciousness of the government agencies cooperating with the Rigelians have failed to realize that it is not to the aliens' advantage to give either the Soviets or the U.S. an advantage in the "arms race". These aliens have given the U.S. technology that is flawed. Much of the technology can only be operated by the Greys.

They control governments by picking up likely subjects and implanting them, manipulating their careers and elevating them within the societal structure to positions of power and/or a position as a leader of public opinion. When a human candidate becomes controlled by reason of inculcation therapy, they often knock the individual "out of his head" and store the human's consciousness/individuality [or soul/chakra matrix], while an artificially created intelligence is placed in the head of the candidate's body [via electronic intelligence implants] to carry forth covert operations against the human population.

Humans implanted as controls are indoctrinated into the belief that they are superior to other humans (leading to schisms within the 'body' of humanity, resulting in warfare as in the case of the racist Germanic atrocities in world wars I and II, eugenic population reduction policies, etc. - Branton). The aliens then give the humans technology OR help them to obtain weapons for use against each other (the old divide and conquer strategy, as in the case with the Nazi forces whose elite leaders maintained a treaty with the Ashtarian "Komogul-II" or "Gizeh" empire, a joint humanoid-reptiloid collective operating from beneath the deserts of Egypt. - Branton). All key personnel [in the NSA, etc.] are implanted and controlled by the alien species.

If the 'elite' are successful, they are used as "priests and caretakers" of the SLAVE planet. If they fail [Hitler] then they are betrayed and thrown to the wolves...

The first stage of their One World plan is to use biological warfare [ENGINEERED PLAGUES, etc.] to rid the planet of undesirables. (Note: It is interesting how plagues have often historically accompanied the appearances of 'comets'). The biological warfare is out of control. Decimation of population places the remaining population ultimately under their control...

They blanket couples for sexual thrills and are drawn to aberrants and sexual deviates (feeding off of their negative orgasmic sexual energy, as -- according to legends -- do the vampirial incubus and succubi 'demons' that have been recorded throughout history....

The Markabs use sex, pain, drugs and fear as obsessive elements with which to aberrate humans...

By coming to a thorough understanding of a hostile entities' ability to wear many faces, it unmasks and loses its ability to adversely influence...

http://www.thewatcherfiles.com/dulce/chapter30.htm

Tomas · Post by **Tomas** » Fri Oct 19, 2012 1:51 pm

Alex Jacob wrote:I hear and understand what you say. And I also believe that if we put our minds to it a more productive conversation would be possible.

Right, Alex. You better fill out your absentee ballot for Obama and his looney sidekick, Biden.

PS - Get on a plane and visit with David. Then, report back here.

Diebert van Rhijn · Post by **Diebert van Rhijn** » Fri Oct 19, 2012 7:12 pm

Bobo, I'm not really sure if I understand how you are suggesting the interpretation should go, just from the quotes. Let me explain my source, which is the book "The alchemy of happiness", from the chapter "Intoxication of Life (1)".

There are many things in life which are intoxicating, but if we considered the nature of life we would realize that there is nothing more intoxicating than our life itself. We can see the truth of this idea when we think of what we were yesterday and compare it with our condition today. Our unhappiness or happiness, our riches or poverty of yesterday are like a dream to us; it is only today's condition that counts.

This life of continual rise and fall and of continual changes is like running water, and man identifies himself with this running water, although in reality he does not know what he is. ... If one can look as a spectator at one's own life, one will find that it was nothing but an intoxication. What at one time gives man great satisfaction and pride, at another time humiliates him; what a person enjoys at one time, troubles him at another time; what at one time he values greatly, at another time he does not value at all.

The rest is online: here.

Alex Jacob · Post by **Alex Jacob** » Fri Oct 19, 2012 10:26 pm

"To think that at any moment the whole human world is swirling & writhing, swelling & bleeding, that babies are being born, maybe hundreds every second & thousands of people are gasping out their last breath, that thousands, hundreds of thousand, millions, are having sex, their bodies struggling for the pleasure of love; and too people are murdering, strangling, knifing, torturing, shooting & bombing, all hopped-up with adrenalin, sweating & gripped by the strange passions that possess them; that many people in the light of the sun or the moon or under a bare bulb or passing on the streets of the world just saw someone and felt the pang of love, or lust; that everywhere people are having arguments over money, or things, or hurt feelings or jealousy; that many people are grieved and convulsed in the depth of pain, that other people, millions of people, are completely happy: laughing, ecstatic, blissful; that people too are stealing things, breaking into some shack, putting a hand through a window, boarding a boat to steal it, rushing into a bank to rob it, joy-riding in a stolen car, running from the police; shooting drugs in their arms, or sniffing strange drugs, drinking in bars; bombs fall and explode & people are blown to bits or incinerated, that somewhere someone is planning murder, or planting flowers, climbing a mountain, dying in an airplane crash, walking in the desert, looking at the sky and thinking about 'life', about 'reality', or deep in meditation bliss; maybe some guru just touched someones forehead sending them into samadhi like Yogananda at 16; or monks are chanting and temple-church-shrine bells and cymbals are ringing; & people are having dreams where all the symbols of man appear, & some aboriginal man, the last undiscovered man in the Amazon, is telling a story about the birth of the world & the arrival of people into that world; & millions of televisions flicker with dramas & movies & advertisements; & many people are at their wit's end, or bored to tears, or exhausted after a day's labor or cutting bush with a machete, or digging in the ground & looking at the overturned dirt; that millions of kids are playing and their child's voices echo all around, that some are being punished & scolded, are eating rice or fish or beans, are studying in schools in hundreds of different languages; that my analogue somewhere is having a parallel thought, maybe exactly the same thought, the same general idea; that someone just fell off a bridge to their death, someone just tripped & fell, someone cut themselves with the kitchen knife, just dropped vegetables into a hot pan, poured boiling water of coffee, in a tea-cup, slaughtered a chicken, a pig, a goat, a cow, just made a resolution, just broke one, is having psychotic episode, is drunk, just got thrown out of their house or turned the key to go in, is having the surprise of their life, just got the worse news, just killed themselves, just took a shit, hit someone, caressed someone, won a prize, or lost everyone they ever loved in the whole world in an earthquake, a fire, a flood, an accident, or murder---And all this is just a drop in the bucket of astonishing almost inconceivable experience, the stuff that happens to you, the whole experience of life, & it's happening to 6 billion people who metabolize, breathe, sing, talk, think, desire..."

I had totally forgotten about that thread. I seem to remember that I wrote the above as a way to express that (I think) I understand what you blokes mean by human madness and 'intoxication' (delirium). And I think that at the least we are concerned for a cure or an alternative to that madness.

Kunga · Post by **Kunga** » Sat Oct 20, 2012 12:47 am

Very good Alex....seems all this activity is riddled with sufferring.....even pleasure has to end...it all ends....everything is impermanent...even impermanence....so what can we do ? Think of what it would be like if nobody did nothing. Think how peaceful that would be. Our ego is what fucks it all up.

Bobo · Post by **Bobo** » Sat Oct 20, 2012 2:25 am

Diebert, I first remembered Khayyam, then looked into how Khan may have used the word - intoxication. You say "before one can focus on the situation as it is (truth) one has to sober up first. It's not blindness which plagues man but seeing double, seeing in a haze of spirit.", while, on another snippet, Inayat Khan says that it is not double seeing that plagues man, and the sobering up may cause blindness. Maybe you know that you're sober when you can perform some backflips? : D

"Drunkards! so be it--yet, if all were wise,
All would be drunk like us, with dreaming eyes:
Poor sober world, so doleful all the day,
Leave mosque and mart, and join our Paradise.

There are no sorrows wine cannot allay,
There are no sins wine cannot wash away,
There are no riddles wine knows not to read,
There are no debts wine is too poor to pay.
"

Diebert van Rhijn · Post by **Diebert van Rhijn** » Sat Oct 20, 2012 6:30 am

Bobo, the reason for the quote was the notion of intoxication in the sense of lack of self-remembering. Everything else is like a blur, we're stumbling around like drunkards making sense. But even Khan talks here about the "truth of this idea". While the part you bolted seems to be about "controlling" desires or ideals, as a defense, and later he continues with outlining the difference between true and false resignation, like fatalism. Perhaps the idea is here that there's a good way and a bad way (a negative form) to approach all of this, like with everything else really. And I can certainly appreciate the warning signs of getting stuck half way; it's like being worse off compared to where you came from. And way less likely to get around it.

Alex Jacob · Post by **Alex Jacob** » Sat Oct 20, 2012 11:48 pm

Jamesh wrote: I don’t feel responsible for the minds or difficulties of other selves though. Their life is theirs. It is not my place to make any insistence on what they should. Why is it yours?

I think this is an interesting question. I am now reading some material that traces the history of religious conversion in the ancient world. I do not include the following Bible quotes with preaching in mind but only to point in a certain direction and to a cultural history to which we ALL belong. I realize with a good deal of clarity that I am, as is nearly everyone if not everyone who posts here, a sort of Gnostic. Harold Bloom, whose criticism of religion I admire also describes himself as a 'Gnostic' and I think the term means someone who stands before all this material---all the possible outlooks and interpretations of stark religion---from a certain, unique perspective. Maybe that perspective is a combination of self-awareness and subjective understanding? Or analytical tendency, curiosity, subjective understanding (experience?) and self-awareness? I have a feeling that this is why the label, not altogether absurd but rather incomplete, of 'postmodernist' has some relevancy here. To have a postmodern perspective is, in fact, a kind of gnosticism.

Here are just a few selections from Jeremiah, Amos and Hosea:

"This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people."

"Take warning, Jerusalem, or I will turn away from you and make your land desolate so no one can live in it."

"I brought you into a fertile land to eat its fruit and rich produce. But you came and defiled my land and made my inheritance detestable."

"Who is wise enough to understand this? Who has been instructed by the LORD and can explain it? Why has the land been ruined and laid waste like a desert that no one can cross?"

"My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge. "Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you as my priests; because you have ignored the law of your God, I also will ignore your children."

"Hear this word, you cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria, you women who oppress the poor and crush the needy and say to your husbands, "Bring us some drinks!"

"Woe to you who are complacent in Zion, and to you who feel secure on Mount Samaria, you notable men of the foremost nation, to whom the people of Israel come!"

We all know these kinds of declarations, and we all possibly resist them and resent them, especially when with the same energy and assertiveness people we do not at all admire or respect come at us with this finger-wagging. But it needs to be understood that in the ancient, pagan world---a world of local gods, regional gods the worship of which was largely ritualistic since an ethical component comparable in force to the Judaic really did not exist, was not defined (i.e. there could be only a very meagre theology of Orphism or one of the other cults that placed stress on certain doing in this world to achieve a blessed existence in an afterlife---there was nothing that was comparable to a theological system. But such systems are our heritage.

It is the energy and focus of 'prophetism'---and it is only found in prophetic (Judaic) literature---has been and in many ways still is a major engine that functions within us, within our personalities and psychologies, within our religious culture, within our demands on the present even in political terms or, say, in the way ecological facts and truths are communicated (apocalypticism).

If we jump quite a bit ahead and look at, say, The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth (his commentary on the content and meaning of Paul's epistle to the Romans), and if one does this 'judiciously' and fairly and not as a dogmatic exercise---at least this is so in my case---one is deeply impressed by the intensity of the moral imperative communicated. And what it asks for (from man) is a level of responsibility and 'sober awareness' that, as I am personally able to discern so far, is unmatched in any other tradition. True, the Barthian analysis is deeply oriented toward the 'spiritual' and does not deal on a major Christian thematic possibility, the political, but still there is a sort of force of intensity that, taken to heart, is one of the major basis of ethical and moral action in our world. I mean in our Occidental world, in our cultural and religious history.

What I note and what interests me greatly is the 'prophetic spirit', if you will (and if I am accurate) that operates and motivates Quinn, Rowden and Solway, but specifically Quinn since it is his religious philosophy that stands out here. Indeed, GF is a preaching platform for David Quinn! In this sense they are deeply connected with the Christian traditions and are responding to the same impulses that move in, say, a religious Christian. Indeed the love and respect of Kierkegaard and his Gospel (which expresses another level of analysis, no less intense, as is that of Karl Barth)(which incidentally had and still has a huge effect on Christian theology, as does Kierkegaard).

So, your question as to why I might feel responsible (if that is the word) to move or influence people through my writing can be approached. And all of our writing needs to be examined in this manner, and indeed as Diebert so interestingly pointed out, our beloved Nietzsche is a modern manifestation---so obviously!---of the prophetic spirit and he so clearly desires to move people, to reorient them, and to convert or perhaps reconvert them. I don't think that any of this can or should be dismissed so easily. One could interpret Nietzsche as a prophet of the terse but powerful saying of the 'christological' Jesus (of John): "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full."

My whole focus, if it isn't completely transparent yet, is based on remaining within very basic concerns that are, I think, best defined as a form of humanistic Christianity in the sense that I define Christianity, which is none-too-typical. Specifically, I am a bizarre crypto-Christian gnostic who also has very strong links to a form of Heroic Greek Paganism! The more that I see myself and understand myself, and this analysis is hard-won because it really does require lots of historical study, the more that I begin to (clearly) define a platform of concern. And that platform of concern is: human flesh, incarnated into this material manifestation, lost in it in some sense, and needing to gain sobriety and understanding so to 'wake up' and live well. Essentially, this is all I have to communicate. And all that I communicate revolves around this.

Now, why it occurs that on this particular forum I receive so much opposition is often quite beyond me! It is not that my position and ideas are not rationally communicated. There is something else that 'operates' here and I am at a loss to isolate and describe it.

But when you paraphrase me and mention the delusion into which you gather I think people may 'fall', and sort of dismiss it as a question of little value (if only to you personally), I notice that something---a defense---arises within me. Quinn has defined in some ultimate sense what is 'delusion', or I suppose. But the truth is that there is not much of an operative theology here. Read his Crossing the Road blog or the one on Perspectives: it is chintzy, almost Newage and bloodless preaching. You find this crap in self-help books! 'Take a little break from society and when you come back in you'll be tanned, rested and ready, and then you will transform the world with your spiritual fire'. Quinnism reduces itself to the absurd because it cannot operate within the only area or domain that really matters: human flesh ('sarz' in the Greek sense). Quinn renders himself impotent...and irrelevant...in just a few twists and turns. That is my view anyway. It is weak philosophy for the weak-spirited!

Do I give [a] fuck[?] I fairly intensely disliking going to work and I am trapped by the need for some form of constant external entertainment. I don’t live sustainably. I will die young from not respecting my body. I've nothing to lose---other than sanity.

It is very interesting that in the Ancient world, in the Greek language, there is a term for religious worshippers when religion is considered as a 'cure': the therepeutai are followers of a certain religious cult and the notion is that, coming under the influence of the god (Serapis or Orpheus or whomever), one's life is reorineted toward healing. Hence our word 'therapy'. In the Catholic religion a priest is called a Cura (related to 'cure') at least in Spanish (from Latin I gather). To convert to Catholicism was seen as 'taking the cure', and the Great Doctor was none other than 'you-know-who'. In this sense, a Grand Theology has a curative, organizing power and is very attractive, and even 'powerful'. I only find your declaration about yourself interesting in this sense, and in the context I am working in: that of Conversion. In your case, although it would not address the (obvious?) psychological material, joining a Gym and getting a personal trainer might represent a 'conversion'.

But what IS interesting in all this IS the fact that people seek and need 'conversion' when they are not happy with their lives or when their life-style (or this world of human woe, this entrapment in a body lost in Samsara) is harming them, when they do not feel alive or fulfilled.

Jimmy Swaggart laying it down!

It all sounds like I am making a bad joke, but all of our religious expressions need to be looked at with more sensitivity and intelligence. In some sense we are all seeking and needing 'conversion experiences' and in some sense our life is motivated by this need.

Joni Mitchell singing a Psalm of religious conversion.

Alex Jacob · Post by **Alex Jacob** » Sun Oct 21, 2012 12:18 am

Youngblood's Get Together.
John Trudell Look At Us.

(I am especially interested in 'the American Religion' in all its manifestations and that is why I toss our these 'popular songs'. They certainly fit into American traditions.)

One other song by Trudell: Beauty in a Fade.

Alex Jacob · Post by **Alex Jacob** » Sun Oct 21, 2012 1:09 am

I could see people hating this shit! But I find it interesting:

A Gnostic Poem by the Incredible String Band: The Head. And a Gnostic song: The Secret Temple. Even if you know the ISB this is sort of far-out, outside stuff...
_______________________________________________________________

Diebert wrote: Just go ahead, I won't be bothering you for a while responding to your critiques unless you radically change the topic and attitude into something that peaks my interest again.

I do so appreciate this. And since I won't be changing my topics or attitudes anytime soon I am assured of unimpeded pursuit of my ideas! It will be good for you to sit on the sidelines and hush up awhile! ;-)

Dennis Mahar · Post by **Dennis Mahar** » Sun Oct 21, 2012 9:59 am

I am now reading some material that traces the history of religious conversion in the ancient world. I do not include the following Bible quotes with preaching in mind but only to point in a certain direction and to a cultural history to which we ALL belong.

to which we ALL belong is erroneous thinking.

Context is decisive.
When context is distinguished we refer to the space which makes it possible for something to show up.
That space is Naked Presence.
That's your Nature, who you really are.
That's your authenticity.

Christian, Islamic, Capitalist, Communist, Buddhist, Gnostic, Existentialist, whatever,
These show up in the space Naked Presence.
They are inauthentic modes of being.
They are assumed identities lacking intrinsic nature.
They are activities.
They are storylines that are enrolled in.
The enrolment is actually about brainwashing children.

A Christian is 'in a neck of the woods' with other christians parlaying bullshit.
An Islamic is 'in a neck of the woods' with other Islamics parlaying bullshit.

These inauthentic identities threaten to burn the woods down altogether.
Religion is insanity.

Dennis Mahar · Post by **Dennis Mahar** » Sun Oct 21, 2012 9:59 am

I am now reading some material that traces the history of religious conversion in the ancient world. I do not include the following Bible quotes with preaching in mind but only to point in a certain direction and to a cultural history to which we ALL belong.

to which we ALL belong is erroneous thinking.

Context is decisive.
When context is distinguished we refer to the space which makes it possible for something to show up.
That space is Naked Presence.
That's your Nature, who you really are.
That's your authenticity.

Christian, Islamic, Capitalist, Communist, Buddhist, Gnostic, Existentialist, whatever,
These show up in the space Naked Presence.
They are inauthentic modes of being.
They are assumed identities lacking intrinsic nature.
They are activities.
They are storylines that are enrolled in.
The enrolment is actually about brainwashing children.

A Christian is 'in a neck of the woods' with other christians parlaying bullshit.
An Islamic is 'in a neck of the woods' with other Islamics parlaying bullshit.

These inauthentic identities threaten to burn the woods down altogether.
Religion is insanity.

Dennis Mahar · Post by **Dennis Mahar** » Sun Oct 21, 2012 10:01 am

You are getting it twice 'cos it might take that.

Alex Jacob · Post by **Alex Jacob** » Sun Oct 21, 2012 12:53 pm

The Laws of God

---A.E. Housman

THE laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

Dennis Mahar · Post by **Dennis Mahar** » Sun Oct 21, 2012 7:27 pm

Housman was asked 'Who are you talking to?.

He replied,
My writings are to the unborn.

A Christian ( born again) is rebirthed out of 'born of Mammon' or whatever the story is.

born out of one inauthenticity into another inauthenticity doesn't get authenticity.

A Christian to be authentic would shoulder the responsibility of introducing him/herself truthfully.

To do that he/she would say,

I'm speaking from the context of my inauthentic mode of being, my assumed identity...

Context is decisive.

Alex Jacob · Post by **Alex Jacob** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 1:35 pm

Since I am confined to my little thread and can't venture over the the Poatmodern Primer thread I'll only say: it MUST be a postmodernism conversation because, try as I might to understand it, it just gives me a headache!
_________________________________________

Dennis, what did you think about that song/poem by John Trudell 'Look At Us'? Do you consider his message 'authentic'?

Dan Rowden · Post by **Dan Rowden** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 8:42 pm

Alex, why are you so afraid to say why you believe in God? I know you're afraid to so so; I just wonder why.

Alex Jacob · Post by **Alex Jacob** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 10:39 pm

If the term Gnostic is one that can be used fairly, though everything depends on the definition of it, I cannot 'believe' any formal religious conception, especially those based on the ever-shifting blendings of idea and need that is the 'Mediterranean' (European-Near Eastern) heritage of Europe. Possibly the closest analogy to my understanding, borne of 'gnostic experience' would be a form of Brahmanism. Not so much that all things possible are 'God' as David states, but rather that the Force behind all manifestation, the eternal energy whatever it is, is Divinity. People seem to key into that vision or realization in different ways and in different historical situations, from the early Vedists to Whitman.

Yet I know when I speak to you, insofar as you are capable of conversation (and you are largely incapable because of your willed ignorance), that you associate me with the different manners in which different people express their more overt religiosity, be it Swaggart, Mitchell, The ISB or The Youngbloods. The 'crudest' manifestations are easy to condemn but as I say the Quinn, Solway and Rowden system has its own links to the same evangelization and arises from the same context. The Petacostals are usually from the lower strata: the abused and insulted classes. Their religious ecstacy arises in the context of their social pain. But this is exactly the context of you and David and Kevin. None-too-sophisticated, hardly literate, Australian yokels who have managed to read a little Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. But in truth you're just as dim-witted as that whole class of man that doesn't know how and cannot sufficiently organize their perceptions into sane and cogent discourse mostly because they are unaware of it. But you do something worse at least in many senses: you cut out of yourself your own human heart, and though you assume that having done this that you will no longer be chained to all the lower manifestations of stark emotionalism, you rather end up with no means at all to understand or appreciate all the higher ones. But in the end it seems you succumb to a similarly agonized, bitchy, pseudo-emotional bad humor and in this sense have fucked yourself out of everything! And you call that 'enlightenment'!

To work with people, that is to say humankind, and to have some kind of productive relationship to human processes means that you have to understand people. If there REALLY were some compassion for people and *gasp* love for them, not only would you be able to see people more realistically but you'd be able to see yourself more realistically.

And it is that difference in my view that makes all the difference!

Russell Parr · Post by **Russell Parr** » Mon Oct 22, 2012 11:49 pm

Alex Jacob wrote:Not so much that all things possible are 'God' as David states, but rather that the Force behind all manifestation, the eternal energy whatever it is, is Divinity.

Ah, so here is your Edifice, no? This is the God that Dan was referring to, as you believe in some form of inherent property of this "Force" that separates itself from the rest of reality. At least you're smart enough not to name this "Force."

And it is that difference in my view that makes all the difference!

You say this as if to disqualify the validity of everything you wrote before it. This is because you've clearly demonstrated that you believe that reality is purely subjective to perspective, making any and every 'point' you make ultimately pointless, destroying any 'reason' for you to do what you do, or say what you say.

Dennis Mahar · Post by **Dennis Mahar** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 12:35 am

Alex,

Dennis, what did you think about that song/poem by John Trudell 'Look At Us'? Do you consider his message 'authentic'?

On the surface, in the ordinary everyday conversation, the song looks to have just cause.

In the transformative conversation of 'what it means to be human' it is of the nature: inauthentic.
It's a victim statement.
It's taking the moral inventory of others.
It's dragging the past into the future.
It's divisive and fails to enrol all parties, only enrolling one side.

Focusing on others does not get the authentic experience of 'who am I?'

The authentic experience is 'don't know'.
The luxurious splendour of 'don't know'.

How often do we spray theory around completely ignoring 'don't know'.

Really, when we speak more than 'good morning' and 'pass the potatoes please' we get on a slippery slope.

Nevertheless from 'don't know', the surest steps are taken thru' the method of logical investigation.

Alex Jacob · Post by **Alex Jacob** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 12:51 am

But you read badly, Mr Bluerap. To use language or prepositions and to say 'a force behind' does not imply the 'separateness' you mention. And you likely do not understand the term Brahmanism. It turns into a language game---and on the foundation of language games is QRStianity built---but it seems to me that the possibility of anything at all ('manifestation') is the 'force' I am alluding to. My understanding is that, even in physics, no one is able to speak about the 'force' or power in anything or all things or as the origin of things. But if you wish to locate me within Mystery---I really don't mind---the mystery, which is also the divinity of everything, is in the existence of anything and everything and (most importantly) ourselves as conscious, perceiving beings within this manifestation.

Now, what will likely occur here next in the QRStian game, is to pick apart phrasing; dissect language; and devise argumentation on the basis of minuscia. That is after all the chosen field of the QRStians.

As to an 'Edifice', which is my term thrown back at me, while it may be a subjective description, it is an attempt to answer a question about how divinity is grasped by yours truly. Such a view has advantages and I suppose disadvantages. It allows for a general way of understanding all tendency toward over-arching religious or metaphysical description, and a way to understand how the human mind cobbles together endless limited descriptions of something intuited. The disadvantage is perhaps in its diffuseness. What exactly does it mean to say that a divine Brahmanic 'force' is the origin of all things and pervades all things?

I said 'the difference makes all the difference' in relation to the limitations in the typical QRStian formulations. To be too limited of vision is the difference that destroys the possibility of a 'sane' theology.

Alex Jacob · Post by **Alex Jacob** » Tue Oct 23, 2012 1:33 am

Dennis, it seems to me that though the poem Look At Us might be considered a 'victim statement' (that is certainly the position of the Sioux on the landscape of the Federal conquest of the West), it is also a great deal more than just that. But your point is taken: it is a lament; it is a statement about injustice and against it; it is also a means through which listeners might analyze their own experience both as perpetrators and as victims. It is a way and a means to 'locate' oneself as a physical, feeling and bodily entity within reality.

Yet essentially, for you, there is a 'more real real' about which you know, or at least one that you talk about. You locate that within a grand question Who Am I?

It is a curious position to take, really. I can only imagine it 'functioning' in a person who has retreated out of the world and who lives in a monastery. Which is, I gather, where you do live (not in an actual monastery but in a mental one).

It is not at all that your system of ideas is unintelligible, mind you. It is that it can only function in an abstract sphere. Just try to imagine this philosophy functioning at the core of a legal system or a municipal system.

Curiously, you state that from some initial position of 'don't know' that, on the basis of that and as a starting point, one might move logically toward something which you don't state (?) Is 'not knowing' uncertainty? Or a statement that nothing really CAN be known? Am I mistaken to understand it as a hyper-postmodernism? True, it might also be a position of humility taken in the face of any structure of ideas: I don't know. Or toward ethics in living: I don't know. Or in relation to 'meaning': I don't know.

Still it is a not-knowing that has all the force of a knowing!

What if you had to settle an issue of arbitration between the Federal government and the Sioux Nation? (For those unaware John Trudell is a Sioux and his life struggle has been against the US Federal government, and additionally his first wife and child were killed in the course of 1970s FBI wars on the reservations). What if you had to make some statements about the 'right' and the 'wrong' of human activities? On what basis could you? If the only 'solid point' (if you'll allow this) is 'Who I am' in some abstract (?) or ultimate (?) sense, in what way and on what basis could you administer the living of life for a social body? Essentially, based in your own discourse, you have no position. You could not take a position, either authentic or inauthentic.

I get the impression that you desire that 'all people' (that is: all human history, all organizations of ideas about man, in short EVERYTHING) dissolve themselves in the face of this core truth you hold and communicate. To me it is an untenable position, a highly abstract and idealistic position, but essentially erroneous (though it struggles against 'erroneousness'!) because it has no way to relate itself to life as it really is.

Is this, in the end, what my essential criticism of the QRStian ideas is? It may very well be.

GENIUS FORUMS

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