Letters
- 2
"What is
Enlightenment?"
by Emanuel Kant
"Enlightenment is
man's
release from
his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of
his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this
tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of
resolution
and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! "Have
courage to use your own reason!" that is the motto of
Enlightenment.
Fanatical is a beautiful
word
as it means
"Fanned by divinity" and it could be isn't it? Enthusiasm "(en Theou)
means
"In God" and that's what remains when you are unplugged from the
Matrix.
It is cheaply to judge something of the frills for that's the way
criticasters
always attack someone who tells something that sounds unpleasantly. Why
don't you stumble at the length of Neo's coat? Preaching Knowledge is
just
as impossible like talking about God, nature, freedom, love or health
for
you only can point out what it is not.
Every suicide and every
dead
man by an
accident, every shot one and at least everyone killed by any sickness
is
untimely ripped from the Matrix. Nobody can add a day to his life, no
doctor
can lengthen the life of his patients. The only thing you can do is to
remove the obstacles that hinder a happy life: annoyance, hate, sorrow,
envy, deceit, wrath and all those other vices. And that so often abused
notion: stress, merely a compilation of the result of that vices. If
all
goes the way people expect and want they feel good, but every
frustration,
everything that goes in an other way yields some stress (from
distringere:
tear apart) and with marbles you can fill a bucket. And at least the
last
one can overflow the bucket. In this society mastering your emotions is
a virtue but the toll is high and murdering and with the symptoms
people
go to the doctor until death follows at least for the bucket remains
full.
If you don't understand the
symbolism
of the Matrix you are deaf to the message and it the same to the gospel
and you only can stumble at words, comma's and other frills and that's
the way all heretics and all prophets are attacked along history. If
talking
about the GoT is merely a pastime perhaps you can better exegete the
phone
book,
Thoreau has tried to be
neither
an adherent
nor a believer of nobody, but unfortunately he wasn't radical enough.
At
least he realized the craziness of the society he had to live in.He had
known the world and had found a corpse "Jesus" would say. There are
many
parallels in his writings and the gospels.
"There is a certain
class of
unbelievers
who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on
vegetable
food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once--for the
root
is faith--I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board
nails.
If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have
to say"
and
"Not that which goeth
into
the mouth
defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a
man (Matth 15:11)"
He experienced all those
talks
about healthy
food are bullshit. People have made rituals in feeding themselves. They
don't eat when they are hungry but when it is time to eat. They learned
to enjoy special foods dependent on the society wherein they are
brought
up. Like the traitor Cypher in The Matrix says when he eats a steak:
"The
Matrix tells me it is nice". People enjoy eating for they forgot to
enjoy
life. It's like I would make a ritual of refueling my car and would
forget
I only have to do it to enjoy my journey. Really it is a absolute crazy
spectacle to see people filling their stomachs sitting around a table
with
their tools and talking about nothing and to realize they only perform
strange rituals and I wonder why they didn't made a joint happening of
their excretion.
A human is a human, has ever
been
a human
and will ever be a human unless you want to believe those strange
evolutionists
will find the missing link ever. Science looks for the perpetuum mobile
and did found it, it is itself. Always people only had and still differ
with each other by their luggage, their acquired tricks to survive in a
society of superiors and inferiors. So the manual always existed too
and
only the luggage changed in the course of history and the only thing
you
need is to know your luggage before you can free yourself from it. The
menu is not the meal, the map is not the territory, happiness is a
destination
and not a journey. For my manic-depressive patients it seems to me the
door swings both ways but they only swing from the one apparent world
to
the other.
Both The Matrix and
Orwell's
1984 only
are extrapolations of the state every civilization always is in essence
and both are metaphors and have the same meaning. Every civilization
always
is in 1984 and has his own-shaped Matrix. Big Brother and The Matrix
are
equivalents like The Party and the Agents and their goal is Control.
And
like every civilian has internalized Big Brother or the Matrix for
everyone
is part of the system, everyone has dirty hands Sartre would say and
everyone
is jointly responsible for all misery in this crazy world. In 1984
Orwell
writes:
"You must get rid of
those
nineteenth-century
ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.’"
And in this world indeed
people
are convinced
of the idea man has no nature so he has to develop, what they name
ironically
their second nature, a character to serve and maintain their divided
world.
Righteous and honest people don't fit in this world for they are not of
this world. It is an illusion but I'm sure you believe it yourself you
are independent from the controlling forces Orwell describes and
perhaps
you really belief you control your own life. But your life is ruled by
man-made laws, rituals, customs, passions, fears, your uncomprehended
past
and by your selfconstructed self-image. In every step you make you are
ruled and controlled and you don't see it and you still wonder why you
do what you do.
"The worst of all when
you
are the slave-driver
of yourself. We are the slaves and prisoners of hour own opinion of
ourselves,
a fame won by our own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared
with
our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which
determines, or rather indicates, his fate",
writes Thoreau in "Walden.
We didn't label our
patients
with their
diagnoses for the white-coats did provide them with those labels for
people
have learned they have to know a name for their symptoms. The question
"why" they forgot already in their early childhood for all those
grown-ups
became so nervous if they asked why. We don't treat symptoms for to us
a symptom is a result of a way of living and if people don't want that
symptom they have to change their life. It is cowardly indeed to hear,
see and be silent and that's the reason we wrote the Elucidations of
The
Secret Words. The kernel is that righteous people are not sick and sick
people are not righteous or honest people are not sick and sick people
are not honest for that comes to the same thing. We have no more
symptoms.
Life will defeat Big Brother
or
The Matrix.
"Feebly, without
arguments,
with nothing
to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O’Brien had said,
he returned to the attack. ‘I don’t know—I don’t care. Somehow you will
fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.’ ‘We control
life,
Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something
called
human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against
us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or
perhaps
you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves
will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are
helpless,
like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are
outside—irrelevant.’
‘I don’t care. In the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will
see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces."’ (
1984)
It's funny to realize the
way
the meaning
of many words in this upside-down world is the opposite or the
reflection
of their original meaning. People talk about progress, evolution,
education,
individuation, Enlightenment, university, knowledge, freedom, peace and
building up and don't see it is retrogression, involution, drilling,
dividing,
Darkening, diversity, ignorance, slavery, war and destroying. That's it
is as seen from the original state or from the Kingdom. If you once
took
the wrong way the further you go the further you get from home and the
stronger the forces become to pull you back. In "The Imitatio Christi"
Thomas a Kempis writes:
" Every sin creates
its own
mental suffering.
Such a suffering is like suffering in hell; for the more you suffer,
the
more wickedly you become. That's what happens to sinners; the more they
suffer from their sins, the more wickedly they become. They fall into
sins
the longer the more to free themselves from their suffering."
You can replace mental
suffering by pain,
misery, symptoms or illness, it all comes to the same. If you ever
start
the end is nowhere and no more to be found and you have to go on
robbing
Peter to pay Paul and to conceal one lie with an other and every
problem
you solve evokes some others. That's the role of science too for they
merely
solve their self-created problems.
The only message of the GoT
is
that if
you want to be happy and go in to the Kingdom you have to listen to and
look to yourself compromiseless. The rest is comment and most of the
logia
only describe the resistance, unbelief, hate, lack of understanding and
disregarding people meet who came back from the Kingdom to point out
the
way to the others and there is nothing new under the sun,
I'm afraid you mix up
some
things. People
behave like puppets guided by a virtual puppet-player, like androids
guided
by The Matrix or adapted citizens guided by man-made rules and
requirements.
They don't think themselves but others do that for them and state the
way
they have to live. And God spoke: "where are you Adam?", but he only
sees
christians, lawyers, Americans, women, fathers, patients, scholars, and
almost countless others masks and complicated mixtures of them and many
many more androids, but there are no more men. And for generations and
generations people have excreted the work of their hands and behold all
is vanity and vexation of spirit and there is no profit under the sun.
But their idols are silver and gold ( and machines, computers, cars,
guns,
ships and planes, cities etc.) the work of men's hands….they that make
them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them. Working
is for the fools. Smohalla, Skokulk-chief spoke in 1850 the memorable
words:
"Our young men never
will
work. Men
who work cannot dream and wisdom comes to us in our dreams".
Every culture is a
mistake.
Always the problem is to
know
what is the
wheat and what the chaff. The Maker didn't create people but creates
them
continuously. He is the always-creating creator. In Job 34: 14-15 you
can
read:
"If he set his heart
upon
man, [if]
he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall
perish
together, and man shall turn again unto dust."
So you can consider the
whole
earth and
all life as a hologram maintained by all energy in the cosmos and so
the
center of the cosmos. The Maker is the holographer who made the eternal
and immutable laws of nature and even He cannot change them but He is
not
in need of that for He saw it was good, a perfect world in perfect
balance
with perfect men to enjoy his creation. All living creatures always
living
according their nature except the human race that thinks in its pride
it
knows better. People don't live according their nature but they are all
gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that
doeth
good, no, not one. They all behaved like androids and forgot who they
are
and that the meaning of their Maker is they only live to enjoy his
creation.
A writing, thinking human is
an
android
like you wrote a downgraded representation of the perfect human puppet.
Some 2000 years ago there
was a
movement
of former androids who became men again and experienced the blessedness
of that condition. They saw little children, little real humans,
transformed
into androids by their android parents and wanted to stop that madness
and so they wrote the GoT. The androids won and made christianity.
"In a dream, in a
vision of
the night,
when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; Then he
openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, That he may
withdraw
man [from] [his] purpose, and hide pride from man. He keepeth back his
soul from the pit, and his life from perishing by the sword"(Job 33:15).
That is the meaning of
your
dream. Everybody
has a drawer somewhere in his head filled with uncomprehended events of
the past. Sometimes they just escape and gnaw at the conscience and
people
hurry to lock them back in the drawer. All are offences (and
consequences
of them, sickness, emotions, accidents and so on) against the maxim:
"do
not to others what you do not want they do to you" and wherein you ran
away from your own responsibility by blaming the other or the
circumstances.
All that situations stay haunting you until you admit for yourself your
own share in it. You never can change the past, you only can nullify
the
results of the past. It is as easy as that. And if you are not willing
to face those situations and to admit to your self that you had been
wrong,
they will pursue you until your deathbed.
"Oh death, where art
thou
sting?" reminds
me to a autobiographic book, of a Switser Fritz Zorn, "The sting of
dying",
with the unforgettable intro:
"I am young, rich and
educated; I am
unhappy, neurotic and alone.
I am educated bourgeois
and my
whole
life I was honest.
My family is rather
degenerated
and
I guess I have a hereditary taint myself and I am affected by my family.
Of course I have cancer
what
results
from the foregoing as a matter of course."
He describes in a
striking way
his desperate
effort, from the moment he heard he had cancer, to get rid of his past
and in sight with the goal he failed.
"Impure and deformed
is the
look from
the willing. First when we desire nothing, first when our looking
becomes
pure contemplation, the soul of things opens: beauty. If I look at a
forest
I want to sell, rent, cut down, wherein I want to hunt, that I want to
impose with a mortgage, then I don't see the wood, but only what has to
do with my willing, with my plans and anxieties and with my purse. Then
it
consists of wood, it's young or old, sane or sick. Yet if I want
nothing
from it and straight away "thoughtless" deeply stare into the green,
first
then it is wood, is it nature, is it lovely, it gives wonder"
( Herman Hesse, Between East and West).
So indeed reality exists
independent of
what people think about it, but by their thinking they don't see what
they
see. They see purposes and self-interest and unfortunately they look to
their fellow men with the same look. In what way can I use the other
for
my own interests like pawns in a game of chess?
Indeed everyone thinks in
imagery but because
grown-ups have created a rational world they live in two different
worlds
and they are always conflicting. It is not possible for a man to ride
two
horses or draw two bows, and it is not possible for a servant to serve
two masters; or he will honor the one and insult the other. You cannot
run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. I think it's fascinating
the
way you describe the problem, that you are what you were as a child
before
language, but you have a lot more baggage. That is exactly the problem,
for you have to choose for the child or the baggage. Music, art and
poetry
only act as makeshifts to funny-up the life in the cage. Happy people
don't
need that. Whole nature every moment ifs full of music but people
prefer
their own creations. In the fairy-tale of The Nightingale one day the
emperor
got an artificial nightingale and "the music-master praised the bird in
the highest degree, and even asserted that it was better than a real
nightingale,
not only in its dress and the beautiful diamonds, but also in its
musical
power.
"For you must
perceive, my
chief lord
and emperor, that with a real nightingale we can never tell what is
going
to be sung, but with this bird everything is settled. It can be opened
and explained, so that people may understand how the waltzes are
formed,
and why one note follows upon another. "They all said "Oh!" and held up
their forefingers and nodded, but a poor fisherman, who had heard the
real
nightingale, said, "it sounds prettily enough, and the melodies are all
alike; yet there seems something wanting, I cannot exactly tell what."
The music-master wrote a work, in twenty-five volumes, about the
artificial
bird, which was very learned and very long, and full of the most
difficult
Chinese words; yet all the people said they had read it, and understood
it, for fear of being thought stupid and having their bodies trampled
upon".
Man-made music is so poor
compared with
all music nature make us a present.
There is only one miracle
and
that is creation
and life. God, how the universe came about, what happens after death
are
no miracles but questions people go into for they don't know who they
are.
To enjoy a theatre-play I don't need to know about neither the
stage-management
nor the side-scenes. To enjoy life I don't need to know neither about
my
liver and excretion nor about photosynthesis or the orbit of Mars. Only
when people feel lost in the world and wandering consume their mind,
they
feel the need to catalogue their threatening world.
Of course it is not
intentional
but it
is difficult to live in two different worlds. In this society you have
to serve your own interests to survive but by doing that you violate
the
universal interest. You can serve the interest of your own country but
that is at the expense of the world-community. You can serve the
interest
of your own family or peer-group but that always harms other groups. It
is such a roundabout way we saddle our kids with our own luggage, like
our parents did with us and so on, and we all have to get rid of it in
a painful and difficult like you name it maturing as individuals (nice
word for it means the opposite it indicates: individual means "not
divided").
So civilized people are no individuals but dividuals and the goal is to
become an individual again) Little kids are undivided and live in one
world,
their child paradise, and in the course of their education they become
divided. So it seems logically to stop that process. The problem is
they
don't fit in our world but you can blame this world for that. Herman
Hesse
makes the same mistake in his novel Siddharta as the enlightened
Siddharta
sees with madness his son going to the city with all its temptations to
make the same mistakes he made in his life. Earlier we were kids and we
have to become like the kids again and that's is a big roundabout for
you
have to unlearn all you learned.
Last week I paid a visit
to the
zoo and
saw the chimp in their cage playing with plastic barrels and they
enjoyed
it and were excited too. We placed our kids in a same artificial
environment
and have to keep them busy with artificial toys and TV, to not feel
bored.
I don't see the difference with the chimps. And we praise and reward
them
for their productivity and that's the way kids learn to please their
parents.
"Always busy with
punishment
and award
people are not able to rest in the predispositions they are endowed
with
originally"
Chuang Tzu spoke 2600
years ago
and Kahlil
Gibran:
"Your children are not
your
children.
They are the sons and daughters of the hankering of life to itself.
They
come by you, but they aren't yours and although they are with you, they
don't belong to you. You may give them of your love but not of your
thoughts.
You may house their bodies, but not their souls, for their souls stay
in
the tomorrows house you cannot visit not even in your dreams. You may
try
to become like them but don't try to make them like you are"
(from "The Prophet")
We are not limited by our
physical being
to be happy but by our own man-made rules, traditions, boundaries and
moral.
We don't need to fly for birds do that much more better; we don't need
to run for we never can equal the jaguar, it is poor the height we jump
compared with the flee and all this activities don't make us happy.
Olivier
Messiaen composed his "Reveil des oiseaux" and he needed a whole
orchestra
to make a feeble reflection of the sound of nature. The minimal music
composers
Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass simplified music and if you
extend
their trend to the vanishing point you have left the sound of nature.
In
the same way you can part with your luggage one by one until the same
vanishing
point and then you will find yourself. The Kingdom is within but almost
invisible by all conditionings and sometimes a spark of the divine can
break through that shield. Nature is not cruel for that's only a
judgement
of value of an acculturated person, for everything is like it is.
To collect wordly
knowledge is
a tiring
and naive occupation for it's all relative and that the reason that
naive
sage Lao Tzu spoke:
"To know and yet
(think) we
do not know
is the highest (attainment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is
a disease. It is simply by being pained at (the thought of) having this
disease that we are preserved from it. The sage has not the disease. He
knows the pain that would be inseparable from it, and therefore he does
not have it"(saying 71).
It's the same tendency
you can
read in
Isaiah 29:14:
"for the wisdom of
their
wise [men]
shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent [men] shall be
hid".
Tradutore traditore for
you
have to understand
the scriptures always are translated and adapted by learned, litterated
priests and they would dig their own grave if they wouldn't adapt it to
serve their own interests. So you have to read like: : "for the wordly
knowledge of their scholars shall perish and the understanding of their
prudent men shall be unhidden".
It's long ago we reached the
top
and were
amazed as we found we didn't look for and we want to share you with our
insights,
There are two types of
relationship. A
biological like I have with my biological brothers and sisters and a
congeniality
of mind. Saying 99:
"The disciples said to
him:
Thy brethren
and thy mother are standing outside. He said to them: Those here who do
the will of my Father, these are my brethren and my mother; these are
they
who shall enter into the kingdom of my Father".
We all are sons and
daughters
of God but
if we have to behave like that and do His will. If you follow your
"own"
will, your "own" passions and serve your "own" interests you don't
experience
you are a Son of God. So when Paul speaks about James, the brother of
the
Lord, he means it metaphorical. If you are the brother of the Lord, you
are like the Lord. So if you are a congenial of the Lord, you behave
like
the Lord. In 1-Cor.-46 you can read:
"After that, he was
seen of
above five
hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this
present,
but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James;
then
of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as
of
one born out of due time"
You can take it literally
like
a phantom
but it seems obvious to understand it metaphorical like they reached
enlightenment.
Unlike you want to compare it with the newborn christians who found
Jesus
in their hearts. In Marc-41 and Matth-40 James not yet bore that
epitheton
ornans for at that moment he was still a disciple.
Another nice example is the
miraculous
feeding of the four-thousand. It is a crazy story contrary to the laws
of nature like all wonders. In the Tractatus Theologico-politicus (
Ch.6
About Wonders) the arch-heretic Spinoza writes:
"For the mass thinks
the
force and providence
of God just then appears most distinct when they see something unusual
happening in nature, somewhat that is contrary to the idea it has by
virtue
of custom about nature, especially when this turns out to its own
profit
or benefit".
And he demonstrates every
"wonder" needs
a breaking of the eternal laws of nature. So no speaking snake or
donkey
of Bileam, no resuscitation of Lazare or Risen Lord. All are only
metaphors.
Philo, who stayed for
sometime
with the
Essenes, talks about 4000 of them. Wouldn't it be likely that the
miraculous
feeding means their joining to the messianic movement?
In Darwin's "The Origin
of
Species by means
of natural selection and survival of the fittest" he writes some 600x "
let we suppose" and "perhaps it is like" but people don't realize
evolution
is only a theory to explain and justify inequality between people and
science
still looks for the ever missing link. So archeologists try to
reconstruct
from the excretions like buildings and scriptures of ancient people not
only the way they lived but also why they lived that way. They even
don't
know why they live the life they do and with all their blind spots they
look in the past and promise their credulous followers they once will
find
the solution and they don't see they are a part of the problem
themselves.
It is like the reconstruction of a prehistoric animal from his
excrements.
History and archeology always are colored by the prejudices and
paradigms
of the historians and archeologists. How people can understand ancient
cults if they even don't understand their own cults? You are a believer
and I'm not, that's the difference,
I believe in nobody only
in
mySelf. There
no reason to accept Paul of Tarsus is a historical person though we
only
know about him from his own letters. Flavius Josephus doesn't report
about
him nor any of his contemporain historians. Paul has been the
sorcerer's
apprentice who didn't understood the incantation of the Master and so
didn't
found the Kingdom but the church mankind is saddled up with. At least
he
was honest to confess he didn't understand a word of it by the quote:
"For now we see
through a
glass, darkly;
but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even
as
also I am known"(1-Cor.13:12).
To me it sounds
reasonable to
keep your
mouth if you don't know precisely yourself. In 2-Peter 3 15-16 Peter
expresses
his doubts about the teaching of Paul as he mentions "in which are some
things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and
unstable
wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own
destruction".
There are so many contradictions, vaguenesses and compromises in his
writings
I nearly cannot believe right-thinking people take this scatterbrain
seriously,
I know for most of you it
is
sacrilege
to read the scriptures metaphorical, but I'm in good company with Philo
Alexandrinus and in his time he was ignored too by the literalists. In
Matthew 2, wise men from the east came to visit Jerusalem for they had
seen the star (of the King of the Jews) in the east. And they went to
Beth-lehem,
what means house of bread and metaphorical a wisdom-school and there
they
made acquaintance with the newborn messianic movement, "the child",
generated
by Maria( from the Aramic Mariam: love) and Joseph (God increases) and
they fell down and worshipped him. Metaphorical it means the new
messianic
movement brought back syncretically the essence of religion to its
kernel
by cleaning the scriptures of all the mess by which it was polluted by
priesthood and establishment and so it became a simple way to
enlightenment,
superior to the Eastern wisdom-scriptures. That's the reason the
learned
priest who became wise and founded the messianic movement realized they
had gone to the Absolute and experienced they were a dangerous threat
to
the establishment. So they had to escape with "the child" to Egypt
where
they were accommodated by the Alexandrian school of Philo. This school
didn't adhere to the letter of the law but expounded the Scripture
metaphorically
and with them they perfected the message for thirty years. There they
picked
up the metaphor of the Son of God, a creation of Philo. For like in the
Allegory of the Cave of Plato after you have reached enlightenment you
have to go back to free the chained ones and it takes much time to
decipher
the Matrix.
That's the reason too The
Matrix has so
many parallels with the gospels and perhaps you can consider it as a
new
contemporary gospel, a metaphor of a messianic movement. Look at : http://www.matrixfans.net/symbolism/
Otherwise it is extremely
curious Philo
who came every year to Jerusalem and died in 45 CE in his writings
nowhere
reports about Jesus and you never can explain that and the rest unless
you stop to conceive the gospels like historical reports and jesus as a
historical figure. It is as absurd to look at Snow-white, Puss in Boots
or David and Goliath as historical figures.
A nice quote of Charles
Lyell,
a friend
of Charles Darwin is:
"the solution of the
past is
in the
present and not the reverse".
So you only can
understand the
past if
you understand the present,
I couldn't have put all
those
falls needs
into words better than you did. Building friendships that bring
security
are such deaf words and I wonder what you do mean by that. All that
casual
conversation, stealing a march on each other, all that boring stories
and
nobody says he really want to say. Everybody considering the feelings
of
each other, everybody with his own secrets, everybody pleasing each
other,
everybody avoiding sensitive themes to prevent quarrels and everybody
refrains
from committing himself. If everybody really would say what he really
thinks
the party would be over soon. And so the conversation only moves at the
surface for honesty and breaking the implicit rules of the game are
corrected
merciless. It sounds to me very penuriously if ethnic food sharing has
to give a sense of place and tribe. At least for me food and eating are
anything but emotionally laden no more than my excretions. Neither
sleeping,
walking or loving nor eating in whatever ritual you will pour it can
give
the idea of universal Oneness. The experience of Oneness has nothing to
do with doing but with not-doing or being.
Does the past exist
concretely,
in space?
Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where
the
past is still happening?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then where does the past exist, if at
all?’ ‘In records. It is written down.’ ‘In records. And --?’ ‘In the
mind.
In human memories.’ (Orwell 1984)
There the past is written
and
continuously
changed, adapted, rewritten, idealized and repressed dependent on the
mood
people are in. Concerning the future it's all the same. Future only
exists
in the mind of people and is the extrapolation of their falsified past
and modified by their expectations and fears. Meister Eckehart spoke:
"Past and future
conceal God
from man's
face".
People let determine
their
to-day by the
luggage of their past and their insecure expectations for their future.
"I cannot help I am like I am and I cannot change" they say and then
I'm
used to say: "If you live that way you will die that way". Do you live
anxiously you will die anxiously, if you live easily you will die
easily.
Being determined by your sociobiology seems to me a new
predestination-doctrine
and evolution rather than an involution,
There are two ways to
render
myths harmless.
First you can sell them like fairy-tales, like we did with the myths of
Andersen and Grimm or you can rebuild them to a religion. Such is the
fate
of satirical books like Gullivers Travels and the worst you can do is
to
allow Disney to violate them to merely entertainment. Then carry them
over
to the scholars, the literals and word-fuckers and everybody is at sea.
There is no expedition sent out in search for the glass slipper of
Cinderella
but they do for the ark of Noah and the foreskin of jesus. And the
result
to take the Promised Land literally seems clear. Bruce Springsteen
didn't
mean Israel when he sang:
"Blow away the dreams
that
tear you
apart.
Blow away the dreams that
break
your
heart
Blow away the leis that
leave
you nothing
but brokenhearted
I believe in the promised
land".
There is another
beautiful
satire by Bernard
Mandeville, I can't help he is Dutch too, "The grumbling Hive". It is
still
very of current interest. In his time like always the establishment
knew
itself in danger, branded him as a heretic and named him Man Devil.
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/hive.html
The moral rules we follow
are
not to live
successfully with another in societies nor for interacting safely and
beneficially
with each other for rules always are issued by the prevailing class. No
kid, no slave, no employee, can establish a rule. So rules only are a
device
to point out his "own" place to everybody. And I wonder where you see
this
successful, safe and beneficial world. It must be a quite other world I
live in. Wouldn't it be possible you did turn the whole thing? Don't we
live in this unrighteous society just because we have all this rules?
And
don't we need every time more rules to hold all those people who try to
escape or to circumvent the law? And in this upside-down world fits the
upside-down ethic rule: "and as ye would that men should do to you, do
ye also to them likewise". So if I'm a masochist I have to torture my
fellow-men
and if a like presents I have to give them to others too, So one good
turn
deserves another and that's the way we are busy with each other. A
world
of do-ers always busy to please each other. To do nice is quite
different
from to be nice. The Wu-Wei of the Taoists is the opposite and
comparable
with the original only ethic principle: "Do NOT to others what you do
NOT
want them to do to you". The christian way leads outside, everytime
more
and more, achievements, production, more rules, punishment and reward
and
the Taoistic and the way of "Jesus" leads inside, less and less until
you
find rest you will be amazed, and you will reign over the All.
