My need is too great for anyone to satisfy….Don Juan
A lyrical mystique pervades in parts that lay skillfully against the march of the beloved infinite regress of efficiency of west world which is given expression in a language that to me treats the object of language as a kind of abstract space or form. The use is correlative to the use of these elements in the visual art of America in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s. Objects are seen to become muddled in each other. Does the arm of this nude end here? Does it matter? The object looses its boundary. Man lives more in the infinite each minute. So? Well, he does it less and less from the standpoint of the finite. One despairs of the body, the medium of existential mass. The sensual genius revels in music as the medium. One such obviously recognizes the absurd and is making in the same movement a grasp for faith. I am here in my body, a finite articulation of the infinite. This is how I find myself fundamentally, the condition without which nothing. This is home.
Concept and culture.
Compare psyche and pneuma, Greek and Latin, animus and spiritus.
In preliterate culture breath (psyche) and life (pneuma) were more or less equivalent, while in literate culture we can speak of these in two senses, one in which they are equal and one where they are not.
The exodus is the mother of the myth of creation. The Jews were brought out of Egypt. The world was brought out of the cosmos, of infinity.
What leads to self realization, the bringing of the absolute to the front of the consciousness, is vibration, frequency, whether visual, audible, or mental; the entering of the state of consciousness returning on itself is inevitably accompanied by the occurrence of a precipitating encounter of the “individual” soul with a certain harmony that, like a rose bears its fragrance, bears the “fragrance” of Ultimate Reality.
Desani, March 14, 1973
Burn the seeds (of deeds) by high Samadhi only. The weakened klesa is stronger than the klesas/passion full blown because its expression is more subtle, harder to root out because they are harder to recognize.
The daemonic urge is the erotic in nature gone wild.
The medium of architecture and sculpture is existential mass.
Jan 30, 1973
My need is too great for anyone to satisfy….Don Juan
The unadulterated spirit is will. Will is power. The urge to go beyond the self, the daemonic urge, or romanticism, is a perversion of this power. Classicism to the extent that it elevates the intellect, or dwells on the distinction that can be made between the power of the mind, rationalism, and mere corporeality, sets up a tendency toward adulteration of the will. The next logical step from classicism is toward romanticism; one is respite for the other, in our history, in my personal life.
The daemonic spirit appeared through the movement of Christianity. Physical attraction, the daemonic urge, being suppressed was instead given prominence, life, perpetuated. What was natural was made evil. What was corrupted was faith, the opportunity for self actualization.
Romanticism – The daemonic spirit, erotic in nature, the sensuous genius of Don Juan, the music of Mozart.
The attempt of the soul to go beyond itself. The urge to see reality as greater than itself. The attributing to God what is properly shared by God/man when properly joined.
Music, absolutely speaking, gives perfect expression to romanticism, the post human force. Music is the most abstract medium.
Sculpture or architecture gives perfect expression to existential mass, pre-human force. It is the most concrete medium and is, as existential mass, the medium of architecture or sculpture. The only substance concrete enough to be worked for these. Music can not be a medium for sculpture.
Language, the word, gives perfect expression to the existential spirit; it is the medium most perfectly suited to express inwardness. The spirit, the void, is the beginning and end of force.
I feel the urge of romanticism, I give it perfect expression by making it into music.
I feel the urge of existential mass, I give it perfect expression by making it into sculpture or architecture.
An expression in language, in thought, is of inwardness. The perfect expression is one that expresses inwardness. Does every expression participate to a degree in this?
By virtue of regress a certain freedom – who can deny complexity which where is now, which time is there, on your beloved papers packed in their particularity, above below, between beyond?
What can I say that will stop the world, reveal the lives? The man centered universe? You expect an answer? You tempt a man who has elephants?
I do not make fun, but play; but loosing my pen my pen my pen the seed is extinguished.
Excited ideas carry away a place where presence in you is eternally presupposed. First meetings where the simplest seeds, just a transparent gaze of eyes into mind falling on most fertile furrows of honest openness where what now grows is rapidly evolving configuration tumbling cataclysmically in and about each other spontaneously like a waterfall of thought and emotion. Like light playing on light in the abyss, ecstatic revelation of the silent blackness behind that common nothingness around which our joined eyes play like solar flares and which alone could support our perpetual falling and simultaneously reflect our faces back and forth to each other in an infinite regress of images metamorphosing into worlds of progressive subtlety till finally I am a mere benumbed butterfly in the winter wind, chasing you, a fallen leaf blown into fluttering enticement.
The path we follow is in a sense the wake of our thoughts and emotions preceding us. This note is a part of that path, a sign post on the way.
“Thinking and the object of thought are the same for you will not find thought apart from being, nor either of them away from utterance.” Parmenides
We are what we seek in an artificial other, yet out of fear, perhaps, of being alone in the universe we are blinded by the nearness of the truth. Yet the thirst for the real is so great that finally all barriers fall as one embraces this last of a thousand demons, loneliness.
Bronowski
Errors can’t be taken out of observation. Stars or atoms; we can’t fix their location, boundaries. There is no scientific certainty. There is no God’s eye view. Errors are bound up in the nature of human knowledge. Fire electrons at atoms of thorium; we see a blurred outline. The act of observation inevitably shapes the observed.
Max Bohm stated that theoretical physics is actually the new philosophy
About 4.5 billion years till the sun dies.
Bodies stopped changing one million years past. Brains stopped changing about 100,000 years ago. Man’s evolution is perhaps in a way a closed chapter. But life itself? Consider that a billion years ago the worm was the most advanced form of life: at some time in the future a form of life will evolve that is a quantum leap above humanity. Perhaps it already is here but hidden.
Heisenberg. No events can be described with certainty.
Plank. The area of uncertainty in the atom is mapped out by the quantum.
It is true that any recognition whatsoever occurs only within certain tolerances. How the mind works. What if the mind is removed?
The theory of uncertainty fixes the fact that knowledge is limited. And understanding? And consciousness?
Measurement is not the same as understanding.
Hiroshima. 6th August, 1945, 8:15 a.m.
More Bronowski. Science does not turn people into unthinking, unfeeling monsters, psychotic invalids. The search for absolutes does. Hitler’s Germany is an example of what happens when people think they have certain knowledge. The scientific art is always on the verge of error and is therefore personal in that the witness sees himself as responsible for eliminating error, or for going further into it.
We must rid ourselves, all humanity, of the itch for absolutes.
Here is what I am perhaps looking to say. I am not so much the person John Hinds as I am a being in the primitive matter of the universe finding articulation through John’s activity. I am his spirit. He lives through me and I through him. It’s a matter of intention, ascending intensities, a continuum; John and his spirit are really one in one projecting simultaneously the universe. What an awesome task. Mind comes to matter to produce consciousness.
To supercharge with possibility sometimes with ambiguity in speech is to violate expectation, to startle, stun, silence. And then you are open, don’t know what to expect so the possibilities are endless. And whatever does happen is complete in and of itself because vulnerability asks for nothing more than what just comes out of each momentary necessity. This is the secret of real manipulation, for instance in advertising, or in the springing of the eternal trap by fear and panic, its eternal components. An exquisite move, whatever the medium (architecture, dance, painting, music, prose, poetry, philosophy) is merely one that provides a moment of surprise which provides what is really the object. Silence. In that openness, vulnerability, the message is given and it goes to the person because he has been stunned into vulnerability, into non-clinging. They have his attention and therefore his intention. Polarities and spin merge to a common purpose.
Ambiguity in speech is poetic. It makes for lightness which makes for uncertainty. There is also repetition, variation, transformation. Variation follows only when expectation is violated. Repetition is what is expected.
The silence, the sweet play of figures.
The wind sometimes blows so hard and so fast here, that it takes on a new meaning. It is fierce, awesome in its power to subdue everything in its way. Yet in the evening as the sun sets and the wind subsides, branches, grasses, dust, and birds respond to subtler forces than the departed winds. The dance continues in a different tone, at a different pace. Orchestration of the infinite.
Medieval world view was world as center of universe and man as center of world. Man was the measure of all things. Faith was depended on for an understanding of God. For Aristotle forms are perceived by the passive mind and abstracted then by active mind to become ideas. Nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses.
Descartes, educated by Jesuits, worked against the medieval scholasticism. Medieval man was in a quagmire as to how he could understand God, the infinite, from his finite view. Because of this quagmire mysticism sprang up to circumvent it. Mysticism does not attempt to explain. Descartes goal was to establish a new order. He was concerned with the real world and real problems.
Cartesian epistemology intends to take man from not knowing to knowing. He struggled against Meno’s paradox that if man is truly ignorant he can not come to knowledge. Descarte’s fundamental view of man in the knowing situation is that he starts with reason and many ideas, some true, some false. So it is not a moving from ignorance to knowledge but from confused knowledge to true knowledge. His philosophical task was how to think rightly in the mental journey to truth. He argues that there are some innate ideas from God, the source, and most, from experience through the senses. The method and its task are served previously by custom and habit because they work. The principle criteria was “what works”.
Descartes said, “Because we conceive of a possible state of order, there must be one.” This is why we should be concerned with searching after truth. He thought that realizing disorder is desiring order. Descartes accepts nothing as true which could not clearly be recognized to be so. (Distinct from this, but what occurs is the application of the doctrine of doubt.) He divides difficulties and proceeds from the simple to the complex. His method was mathematical in that he took the complex and divided it into simple parts, proved those, and then reconstructed. In this he has been accused of being reductionist.
Descartes was opposed by the Catholic church as he innocently advocated man’s return to himself for solution to consciousness crisis. If the people turned within for guidance, if he recognized thought over action, his thought, then the church would loose power over the realm of action.
Descartes’s method is not meant to find new wealth of knowledge but it is to form the mind and its confused data. He admits that one cannot live by the method. It is only a directional teaching or learning aid. It insists on radical subjectivism. He speaks in terms of “I” and “my mind”. This problem is alleviated by relegating the method first to the realm of thought and when truths are found to the realm of action. He thinks that radical subjectivism is man’s natural state. He must be such to function in society.
Descartes felt that numbers are something more than a mere quantitative metaphor, as the Pythagoreans. To him mathematics was an abstract, fundamental truth and he is fascinated by this in that we can all, eventually, agree on mathematical truths. He adopted this function as a procedure to aid us in coming to an agreement of truth in general and also to avoid the problem of radical subjectivism. He feels that objective means object for thought as it exists in my thought. The objective thought as it exists outside my thought is the “formal reality”. A chair, for instance, is a formal reality while as a chair in my mind it is an object for thought. He sought to establish whether something is indubitable because it is certain or vice versa.
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Something greatly distant engenders a longing to be joined. Bring yourself to this and finally achieve completion, salvation. Said of Christianity and the “Western” experience in General. See Camus, the Myth of Sisyphus, and also Kierkegaard and Sartre.
5/12/02. In this truth is the derivation of the “power” of the evangelicals, the “Imam”, the “guru”, indeed any teacher whatsoever. They thrive on false dichotomies.
The truth IS, reality is not a process but only seems so. Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, held to this idea. “The real is complete.” The value of the “pastor’s coin” derives from the opposite idea, that the real is process or, becoming. Salvation, enlightenment, are so much flim flam. Whatever knowledge or truth there is in the cosmos commingles or coexists with all that is and is immediate to any consciousness whatsoever. The task of the acolyte of true knowledge is just to put a handle on the void by the mere means of realization and with just a little twist turn emptiness to fullness. When realized one sees that it was always there – waiting. Nothing has changed yet all is new.
5/4/07. Take neither process nor completion for the absolute. The “real” is both. Completion is process! All process is additive to completion, the whole, the Real.
Yet, absolutes are only to be seized; must avoid clinging to comprehend the Ultimately Real. Buddhist philosophy.