Re: Mind's Eye Re: the law of our own growth

I get all that Molly, including the roadblocks.  Clarity is suspiciously Cartesian to me of course.  Detective investigations are full of roadblocks - you kind of need to know where they are to work round them.  Even more so in 'resistance fighter' mode.  I thought what you said on deep green the other day really penetrated key issues before the 'boys' club' took over - though part of the absurdity is we know what to do and are blocked because it means confrontation with the Establishment.  We could all just read Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything' and agree with it - it's the best compendium of what's going wrong (along with 'Shock Doctrine') I can think of.  Yet I was involved in teaching the material in the mid-80's and 20 years on things have only got worse.  Klein is a leader in this niche market.

I would prefer  to 'train' our people by sending them for a few months to stay with you or Tony - anywhere rather than business schools or what universities have become in the wider sense.  Knocking out a few trinkets under Allan's recycling rules would be better too, or walking a hundred yards of history with Andrew, flying over the US with Don noticing there is still space to hope and grow and being told 'that's your interpretation' by Gabby.  We have lost touch with what education is.

The self is a very old concept and subject to as much 'does it exist' criticism as god.  Neither fiction is rendered useless by any of this.  Yet like many (perhaps all) cultural concepts they may become Idols - we worry about stuff like big bang on the same grounds, or Marxism's historicist assumptions.  Much of what we need to do is as obvious as lead carbonate turning yellow when heated in a test tube in Earth standard laboratory conditions, or enzymes working better in supercritical carbon dioxide than they do in water - though what is going on is not obvious without relevant theory, except stuff like the yellowing to those with sight.

What can we look at directly?  Dark matter doesn't seem a good candidate - and the self is 'dark'.  The deep questions are not geodesic, but rather concern whether we ever escape the social-biological constructed to any radical subjectivism.  Black (or grey) holes are probably real, but we don't see them directly but rather through elaborate theory.  Molly has some elaborate paradigms (I tend to like them).  We have known for millennia one can make equally compelling and different arguments about essentially the same stuff in different generic frames.  One technique, proposed 2500 years back, is to take in all the argument in a kind of suspended belief system - leading, of course, to questions on just what such a suspended system could be.

From one frame of reference (Max has just caught me in his - giving me that 'walk overdue eye' - I shall accommodate from my 'it's cold and wet out there' perspective, giving up to his need soon), the idea of a discoverable, directive.self-judgemental self is the fascist leadership claim.  Moll can't really be accused of this - though I would if she was a reincarnation of Ayn Rand.  She is always encouraging others to find theirs, not follow hers.  I'm not into leaders of any kind or the authority of revealed introspection or laws of personal gr.owth or clarity.  For all my 'rebellion', what's obvious to me is we can't get on with what needs to be done and should be done.

Imagine Tony and I in a long, white-bright room.  We have two art suckers with us.  At the end of the room is his latest Vantablack on black canvas.  Tony is doing his Bohemian artist thing and I'm explaining the deep significance of the texture of the piece that cannot be seen (Vantablack is so black you can't see its texture).  I allow the art suckers to feel the texture after donning disposable gloves, explaining the piece is so valuable it will be irreparably damaged by human contamination.  They leave a large cheque, after a little protest from me that cash would be better, so Tony could nip out and get a large cache of cocaine inspiration (they take the hint he will soon be dead making his work more valuable).  Tony tosses the disposed gloves into a vat of clear expoxy and names this new work 'Forensic Evidence of a Black Deal'.  What 'self' is revealed here?  We wander off to get wasted or have other fun, passing a room with Molly teaching Sporal Dynamics (Irosh descent form) to a large throng.  She gets a cheque too.  We leave a note inviting her to lunch.

Elsewhere in the world there is a shortage of toilets.  Now that's pretty clear._

On Tuesday, December 9, 2014 12:45:27 AM UTC, Molly wrote:

You have such a wonderful way of obscuring a questions with a million details, while all true, all roadblocks to clarity, throwing up problem after problem instead of looking directly at self. What is true, is that everything you examine, Nei,l is a clear and true aspect of self, but like a geodesic form, cannot get to the center because it has multiple points. The form is important, and each point of the form. But the question points to a reduction to oneness and you can't seem to get there.

All of our assessments of others are judgments. My image of you is different than Gabby's and different than Allan's although we all love you. Why do we measure our own self image by our image of others (formed on judgment)? Why can't we form our own self image on our relationship with self instead of our relationship with other? I suspect not all of us are even aware of the definition or dimension of that relationship with self. I also suspect this is the crux of Rilke's insight.

On Monday, December 8, 2014 4:55:15 PM UTC-5, archytas wrote:

There are sunk costs in the old bildung ways and it could be there are no laws of growth as there are no laws in history (Popper's account).  Poetry circles are as unlikely to cure domestic violence as the world at war.  The ideas have to be alive somehow though.  So what do YOU really think Molly - I don't have you as a poetic guru on past evidence.

On Monday, December 8, 2014 6:33:09 PM UTC, archytas wrote:

Much has been said and little done on how they come to make the soul governable and produce the docile body.  Are we listening to depth or autism in Rilke?  Perhaps just Leibniz with flowers, the monads and incommensurability reconstituted?  His mother lost a daughter and used to dress him as a girl.  The clash between social and self evaluation is clearly like nature-nurture and not a case of taking sides.  Try to track the origins as outside in and inside out and you are unlikely to be able to stop.  The best societies produce the best individuals and the best individuals the best societies.  Science is based on demonstration to others - yet which others, given most people can't learn the language-games needed to know what most such demonstrations are about.   Replete with phlogiston theory one can rationalise for infinite time breathing on very ignorant oxygen.

Important to find out how we come to think how others work Molly.  I tend to look and smell people wearing make-up and perfume as whale killers and beagle torturers, but am yet to have any impact on the cosmetics industry.  The self is probably hidden far more 'securely' than the face under pancake crust. Most women are far more interested in a projected self that 'interests' and satisfies the demands and opinion of people other than me.  In a way one can hardly use shampoo without hearing the animal screams.  Just how much good honest looking is there anywhere - and rather than being at the heart of the matter, is Rilkeism already caught up in 'existing advertising' that makes thinking-pretending poetry has depth that makes the right impression on others in games of presenting the self in everyday life?  Make up for the New Ager?  Wittgenstein was apt to mention language like climbing a ladder in the clouds - such an apparatus would fall from the sky while we were looking for roots and origin.  Though, on the science side, I can only predict terminal velocity in such situations

No wheelchairs in our newsrooms seems an important issue on presentation of self - then one sees there is no news in them either!  Rilke and John Wayne dodged respective drafts.  Take a good look at ourselves and what would we find?  Perhaps that there is no decent society to return to, that one can live in true to decency ... tough one old friend.

 

On Monday, December 8, 2014 12:25:42 PM UTC, Molly wrote:

Sometimes I think we can only see ourselves in how we stack up against our judgment of others, an outside in perspective, and maybe, at the heart of what Rilke mentions here. I wonder if the fear of taking a good honest look at oneself is a typically western cultural construct, or simply a human journey roadblock. 

On Sunday, December 7, 2014 10:12:29 PM UTC-5, archytas wrote:

The New Agers were all over Rilke and my Persian poet like a rash in the past - though the latter may have written in Greek patois.  Tgat egat sig probably appeared in his text, meaning the sound made after watching German opera. René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke - Rumi had a long name too and was into the simultaneous destruction and recreation of the soul.

A bit of poetry is good for people who can't do science.  At least Rumi might offer Whirling Dervishes rather than interminable opera about heroes buried in acorns for us to recover from poetry reading.  I like a lot of Sufi ideas.

I actually have a lot in common with RP's 'conservatism'.  "Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other" (Rilke from Brainyquote).  These days safe sex has lost the gentle touch of romance and loyalty (maybe autism) and become disease prevention.  Yet are we to look down on the promiscuous?

  

On Sunday, December 7, 2014 8:31:52 PM UTC, Allan Heretic wrote:

Fortunately for us a pendulum swing eventually reverses direction. I think it is everones responsibility to change responsibly. Our souls owe that to humanity.

I know Gabby does not like my sig shit in view of her eye candy..  tgat is tough shit as it us doing exactly egat I intended it to do .. it is my simple attempt to change away from the pendulum swing toward violence toward others. The best way of leadership lies in ones actions.

Do not murder, rape, enslave or harm others

-----Original Message-----
From: RP Singh <1234rp@gmail.com>
To: Minds Eye <minds-eye@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 8:48 PM
Subject: Re: Mind's Eye Re: the law of our own growth

Oppression of women is decidedly wrong , but for a married person to fall in love with another is not character. You fall in love with a girl and marry her then you fall in love with another woman , divorce your wife and marry again or just have an extra-marital affair is decidedly wrong. Even if your wife is ordinary in body and mind you still owe her loyalty and respect. There is no dearth of beautiful people ,

but to love and respect your own partner even of ordinary countenance is character. To be faithful to your society is character and if there are shortcomings in your society you should try to remove them and that is what has been  done by great people in all societies. Even ordinary people can try to remove the abuses in their society according to their capabilities , and to convert to other religions is escaping the duty of bettering your society. You owe your family and society a duty to work for its betterment and to convert is escaping from that duty.

On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 11:55 PM, archytas <nwterry@gmail.com> wrote:

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.  Fancy something a little different then Tony?  Shall we 'admire' men who want women to live in black bags?  Flowers rarely ask tough questions - Rilke was one.

On Sunday, December 7, 2014 4:27:22 PM UTC, facilitator wrote:

Healthy growth also requires a time or doing nothing.   

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