Author: John

We are not the subject of the Real.  We are the object.  Its not what.  It’s who.  The subject is material, the object, spiritual.  Also, the Real is what we perceive. (Merleau-Ponty)  That’s good enough.  Question not whether It is Real.  Whether it is an ephemera, a dream, matters not.  It’s the hand we’ve been dealt.

Neither must one go through guilt to reach salvation. Heaven is within; its not a destination. This place we find ourselves actually is the promised land of the Bible. To become self-centered is the essence of the Christian fall from grace. Adam and Eve partaking of the forbidden fruit is a metaphor for this. It represents the move from living in the spirit to living in the material, to identify with the body instead of the spirit. From there we tend to project our being as an object onto the whole of reality. So reason pertains only to the material aspect, principle. When Pascal said “The heart has its reasons which reason can never understand.” he is saying the heart is the faculty of spirit. Clearly he places the heart above. Spirit over matter.

The subject of the Real is the soul, the person as a self-realizing spirit, and the role of the material in this play is as a mere facilitator –  it is the mechanism whereby the soul grows its self knowledge and more importantly, understanding. The emergence of Religion and Science in the forms they have taken are based on the person identifying not with the spirit but with his material side. Religion posits the source of Truth in an absolute other, material other – God as a thing (among things). It then places that material object on an ever receding horizon and sets man up to eternally chase after it, forever to end his longing in frustration. Science, similarly, posits the source of Truth in mere measurement – which is always measurement of ‘something’, a material object, again, on an ever receding horizon. It eternally reformulates its measurements to ostensibly close in on a final grand unifying theory.

Ultimately, these are infinite regresses of effort by man to define his material self in a spiritual world, doomed to failure. The more you cling to the Real, the more it slips from your grasp. How can one own Beauty? Truth? Its easier to own something like the color Red. Meaning, we chase after qualities of the Real hoping that we can fill the void at our center that is best filled with understanding that discovery is the action of the unknown, the unknowable.

Soren Kierkegaard: “Life is a mystery to live, not a mystery to solve.”

     NIGHT BASEBALL

Halo of light.
Small figures,
Moving mundane ritual.
Crickets chirrup.
Bats c r r a c k!

Gene pools encounter
In self predatory embrace
Of pedagogue time’s
Geologically
Choreographed cascade
Of tumult tormented evolutes
Chained
In perpetual awakening
To combat and
Death.

    April 27, 1991

__________________________________________________

    The voice of the void:  “Alive, I can’t die; Dead, I can’t be born.”

__________________________________________________

“The People’s Republic of China thus holds the key. Beijing realizes that the DPRK’s rogue regime is highly destabilizing regionally and bad for business throughout East Asia. Combine that with internal instability which could send refugees streaming north into Kirin and Liaoning provinces, is something PRC policy planners fear. If Beijing wanted to make the difference they could; China supplies half of DPRK’s food and 90 percent of oil supplies. The PRC could pull the plug on Pyongyang. But it won’t likely do so.”

This is a good article. I think the answer is obvious. China needs North Korea to keep the United States unbalanced, to sow confusion and discord so THEY can play the insectoid games of the great human hive that they are. Raw survival of the clan. Monetized. Militarized.

For some excellent background see here.  Exerpt:

“…there are radical differences among the three cultures. America is apocalyptic; Russia is messianic; and China is pragmatic. By apocalyptic, I mean that Americans define themselves with respect to an unattainable point in the future, the goal of a Christian pilgrimage whose endpoint always hovers beyond the horizon. In a recent essay for Tablet Magazine I tried to identify what was unique in American culture…

“China’s attitude towards the world is paranoid, but even paranoids have enemies: China fears Western attempts to promote independence in Tibet, or to radicalize the Uyghur Muslims in its extreme west, or to build up Taiwan as an alternative state….

“What appears in the West to be a courteous gesture to religious freedom (visits by the Dalai Lama) or hospitality to political refugees (official US funding of the World Uyghur Congress) are viewed in Beijing as evidence that the West is keeping open its options to attempt to destabilize and dismember China.”

     I heed this; I have all my things around me and I am at ease.

    With a cool hand on extreme urgency I stand waiting for something to happen to generate growth out of the plane of my faculties as I extend them into the world. I imagine tendril like growth, quickly along some avenues, slowly along others. An omnipresent consciousness monitors the growth, shifting emphasis here and there to accommodate the obstacles to growth and the places of peace and piety as well. There are places of aggression and places of vulnerability. The art of life consists in part on deft manipulation by the person, of these elements. How does one learn this art? Recognize that patterns arising out of the alternating currents of aggression and vulnerability are pulses in an ever generating play of self. We must live under the weight of our doing. If the body is our agency of primary activity, we will live by what the body learns to need. If the mind, or, say, the aesthetic sense of mind, dominates, the world will come to us in that guise. If we read and hear of opening spiritual doors and persistently travel the inward path, that too is a cloud around the self which, itself, is clean…

My mentor, G.V. Desani, taught that the mind was like a flawless white diamond on a colored surface. While it was perfectly clear in itself it reflects, takes up the color of the surface.

    Estragon:  We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist.

    Pozzo:  ….one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second … they give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.  On!

    Waiting for Godot
    Samuel Beckett

    “It seems to me that everything that exists is good — death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my living understanding, then all is well with me and nothing can harm me.”

    Siddhartha

…to have it all you must first lose it all. Discovery comes when you take a chance, which, ultimately is every event.

     The freshness of the new as experienced in personal existence in the living present is in direct proportion to the depth of personal surrender to the moment. The depth of discovery is merely the depth of involvement. Concentration.

December 12, 1976

The Buddha would have to say there is no abiding truth, reality, and yes, our very Soul. Consider! Please! The Real, the Truth, owe their existence to our belief (in them).

Collingwood says that knowledge is achieved by a dialectical process of question and answer.  Question and answer, he further says, corresponds to imagination and assertion.  He points out that these moments in dialectic, moments of imagination and of assertion, are ideal divisions and that they are really, if properly understood, indistinct in that each presupposes the other.

Art is not a judgement or assertion of the truth of the world, he says.  The aesthetic experience, or art, is therefore unaware of itself as knowledge because it is unaware of the ideal division that can be made in knowledge, i.e. between the moments of imagining and assertion.  Without this distinction art is pure imagination says Collingwood, and pure imagination is not a perfect expression of the Truth, though it does not miss completely.

In religion the imaginings of art are asserted.  Therefore religion is a dialectical development of art.  However religion does not distinguish between its assertion, which is embodied in symbol, i.e., God is the religious for absolute Reality, and what the symbol symbolizes.  The symbol, to religion IS what it conveys.  It is the Real, says Collingwood.  Because this distinction is not made religion is mythological.  When the distinction is made religion looses its mythological character; but it also ceases to be religious and becomes philosophical.  Why is this, according to Collingwood?

Religion is thought constantly going toward an object that is other than the thinker*;  God is other than man or he is not God.  When thought recognizes that the symbol of the Truth is not the Truth, but A way to the Truth, the Real, then the Real, as the object of thought, ceases to be other than the thinker.  So Collingwood says that philosophical thought is thought returning to itself.  To say, then, that God is only a symbol of the absolute is to reduce him to the level of all symbols, while, at the same time, it is to boost religion to the level of philosophy.

In my own thinking I agree with most of what Collingwood says.  The truth, the Real, being that by virtue of which all things are, is necessarily not fully exhausted by one symbol, i.e., God.  So religion is mythological.  Truth is embodied, rather, in every possible concept or symbol, which is precisely why philosophy can speak of it in so many different ways.  (e.g. the “divided line” of Plato; the “One” of Parmenides, etc.)  If a religious person comes to realize, then, the distinction between God as symbol and God as the Real, he is moving into the realm of philosophy where the Real is spoken of in perhaps as many ways as it manifests. It is a quality not a quantify. Many manifestations might participate in ‘red’ besides a blessed Rose.

If I approach someone, a mystic, say, and ask what is Truth?, he will, perhaps, give me many answers, all of which are true; he may even keep silent.  And if I understand the Truth, I understand.  But I understand just a little more than what he says, too.  That is, I understand that thing which he is talking about, the meaning behind the words, the meaning as separate from the symbols. His sayings are a new beginning.

*As stated previously in this blog Science and History are likewise dialectical developments of art and religion. As Kierkegaard would have it they are Stages on Life’s Way. For Collingwood they are thought constantly going toward an object that is other than the thinker. Science will ultimately give us a ‘grand unifying theory’; History will ultimately culminate in a cultural utopia; Religion will finally take us to heaven – all are absolute others.