A musical moment

 

The Farmer came walking.

 In my dream, my love and I were going somewhere together, and she briefly had to meet with someone, so I was left to my own devices for a bit. I had a guitar with me, one I had built. I noticed a barnyard nearby with a mixed group of animals, cows, donkeys, horses, sheep, and so I thought, "I'll go and visit the animals, and play some music together with them."

I wandered into the stall area, amidst the manure and flies, and several dogs came barking and wagging their tails. I wondered for a moment if they would threaten me, but they were smiling and friendly. I strummed a bit, and then began to move on from there. The barn was cluttered and I had to carefully weave my way out to avoid banging or scratching the guitar on posts and gear hanging from them.

As I made my way out, the Farmer came walking through to tend his animals. I thought, "Uh-oh, I'm kind of trespassing," but he walked on by me, saying in passing, "I'll bet that guitar makes some fine tones."

I was gratified and grateful that he didn't seem to mind my presence. "You can go on through wherever you want." he continued. There was a dirt road curving through the farm , so I said, "I'll just stay on the Road."

I'd seen what looked like a camp or settlement a distance away down the road a hundred yards or so; it made me think 'buffalo skinners' or gypsy-like migrants. So I said to the Farmer, "I'll go down and check out the pioneers down there."

"Okay, that's where our people are staying right now", he said. "Go ahead."

In the settlement, folks were arranged in a large rectangular open area, like a flea market, on the ground. There was an perimeter with single family groups defining the outer edge of the camp, and an inner grouping of many folk, with a wide path in between making a circular route around.

I began walking the path and playing and singing a song amongst the din of the crowd. I made a point of not locking eyes with anyone, while still being sure to look briefly at individuals and acknowledge them with a smile and a nod.

After I'd made a circuit, I stopped and was approached by a man holding a small folding card, about the size of an iphone, which I gathered was a talisman or channeling media which he used to download whatever he was to say or pronounce.

He started talking smack about my guitar, saying it wasn't real, pointing out its flaws. I then noticed did in fact have damage on one side, it had nail holes and scratches. Perhaps back at the animal stalls, I surmised, it had bumped against some sharp farm implements. I wasted no time in setting him straight about the bona fides of my instrument. "That's real nickel fret wire and that there is logarithmic scale for a baritone guitar."

He then proceeded to hold his little board up to my face and head, I guessed to do some juju on me.

But I brushed him gently aside and a giddy feeling of inspiration came over me. I began talking loudly about our need to lift our hearts and minds to the Spirit and the Light, addressing to the whole encampment, with elation, joy and freedom.

Suddenly, I remembered and said, "I'd better be getting back, I think someone might be looking for me."

And then I awoke. It was 5:43 a.m. when I looked at the clock. My love was sleeping soundly beside me. I lay there thinking about my dream for a while, until finally it was time to get up and let out the cat.

A Child of the Snows by G.K. Chesterton

 

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain.

Never we know but in sleet and in snow,
The place where the great fires are,
That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth
And the heart of the earth a star.

And at night we win to the ancient inn
Where the child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet where all souls meet
At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,
For the flame of the sun is flown,
The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,
And a Child comes forth alone.

 

What Does it Mean to Philosophize? by Gagdad Bob @ OneCosmos.blogspot.com

 

That's the title of an outstanding essay in Pieper's For the Love of Wisdom. Let's pick it apart, shall we?

First of all, -- and this is me speaking -- the conduct of any discipline, from physics at the bottom to theology at the top, is determined by its proper object. You don't use meditation or introspection to study rocks or chemicals, just as you don't use calipers to measure the soul. Different objects, different approaches.

Agreed. So, what is the object of philosophy? Correct: everything. However, not the sum of every single thing, rather, the singular unity of everything. Thus, philosophy (the verb) is guided by the implicit assumption, or axiom, or -- I would say -- recognition that we inhabit a cosmos, i.e., a single order ordered by a single principle. If this sounds obvious, it's because your mind has been Judeo-Christianized, ZAP. You're free!

Let's talk about this One Big Object we're chasing. First, it can't literally be a mere object, because this would exclude the larger world of subjectivity, personhood, and verticality more generally. If reality is a material object, then whoops!, there goes philosophy. I won't press the point, because we have too much goround to encircle. Either you get it or you don't.

Can we stipulate that only man can philosophize? This being the case, it points to a wall of separation between chimp and spirit. But if philosophy (the verb) is something only man can do, our philosophy (noun) surely must provide a sufficient reason for this exceedingly strange fact. To argue, for example, that it's but a case of "selfish genes" is just weaseling past the academic knaveyard.

Let's put it this way: reduction is fine as a method, but terrible as a metaphysic, i.e., when it is unironicaly expanded into a fool-blown Ism and all-encompassing vision of the whole. One is free to do this, but only if you put on 2-D glasses and go from 20/∞ to 20/Ø vision.

Suffice it to say that ideological blindness isn't just another form of vision, any more than a feminist is just another type of female; rather, the negation thereof. I challenge you to find any philo, much less sophia, in either.

I would put it this way: philosophy is the quintessential act of vertical transcendence; it is always at a right angle to (mere) existence, and opens out to the Absolute and (therefore) Infinitude.

This is obvious enough conceptually, i.e., in the abstract, but it is also concretely accessible experientially, at least if you're on the creative side. In fact, you needn't even be particularly creative, rather, just have a developed appreciation for the creativity of others. I can't play jazz, but am awed by the vibratory worlds to which it gives access. Taste goes a long way.

Yesterday we spoke of fake nous, which is more than a bad pun. Rather, as we know, we are surrounded by bad, inadequate, and even diabolical philosophies that can only be caricatures of the real thing:

it is common to all these sham-realizations that they not only fail to transcend the world but that they bring it ever more firmly and irrevocably under one dome; that they serve to confine man ever more within the world of work.

This is what the left means by all the robotic blather about "unity," which is just a synonym for totalitarian coercion. It's not the freedom to be different, rather, a ban on difference: no individuals allowed!

Such slackless and spurious forms of pseudo-philosophy result in "man's sealing himself off from the extraordinary." This is among the first things we want to say to leftist anthropoids swaddled in their own ideological diapers: that's not a proper philosophy worthy of man -- it's a prison!

I'm remurmuring those worthy words about how the Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.

But not necessarily, and certainly not inevitably. We can always draw the cave blinds open and let the Light stream in.

Yes, we have to grow up, but this hardly means we have to be pneumacognitively frozen in high school, or worse, college. There are always doors and windows, and best of all, a spiral staircase. Try it. It's there for a reason: because it leads somewhere. (Why would stairs lead nowhere? That's a nonstarter, a lead balloon if ever there was one.)

Now I'm remembering something Chesterton says about modern philosophies: they are doors with no home attached. You might say they are circumferences with no center, or radii with no point. Yes, utterly pointless. But enough about the DNC convention. Let's stop rambling and answer the flippin' question. Pieper is leading us to reason and calling us to join him.

I don't want to soil the page or plant words in his mouth, but Pieper essentially agrees that 1) there are two paths you can go by, and 2) there's still time to change the road you're on:

whither is the philosophizing person transported when transcending the [horizontal] world of work? Obviously he crosses a boundary: What kind of realm is this that lies beyond the boundary? And how is the realm into which the philosophical act penetrates related to the world that is surpassed and transcended through just this philosophical act?

Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow? And did you know your stairway lies on the whispering wind? This may be close enough for rock & roll, but we'll try to be a bit less airy-fairy and more specific tomorrow.

Posted by Gagdad Bob at 8/19/2020 09:43:00 AM

 

 

Anosognosia

Anosognosia  is a deficit of self-awareness, a condition in which a person with the disability is unaware of having it.

The term is from Ancient Greek ἀ- a-, "without", νόσος nosos, "disease" and γνῶσις gnōsis, "knowledge".  Thus: "without disease knowledge".  Anosognosia is not related to global mental confusion, cognitive flexibility, other major intellectual disturbances, or mere sensory/perceptual deficits. 

confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. People who confabulate present incorrect memories ranging from "subtle alterations to bizarre fabrications", and are generally very confident about their recollections, despite contradictory evidence.

agnoia implies having no spiritual or vertical direction at all, i.e., being lost in the cosmos.It is defined as "lack of knowledge," "ignorance, especially of divine things," and "moral blindness," 

Sturgeon's revelation is an adage that states that "ninety percent of everything is crap."

A similar adage appears in Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed, published in 1890. "Four-fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake." 

Sturgeon's law: "nothing is always absolutely so". I might rewrite that as: No thing is always absolutely so."

Voegelin: "an analysis of the phenomenon of consciousness has no instrument other than the concrete consciousness of the analyst. The quality of this instrument, then, and consequently the quality of the results, will depend on what I have called the horizon of consciousness; and the quality of the horizon will depend on the analyst's willingness to reach out into all the dimensions of the reality in which his conscious existence is an event; it will depend on his desire to know."

In other words, either we are open to the transcendent object or we are actually enclosed within our own genetic, neurological, cultural, ideological, and/or philodoxical horizons. There are only two possibilities, but if you keep thinking through your limited horizon you'll realize there is only one. Break through that glass ceiling!

"The resultant consciousness is a ceaseless action of expanding, ordering, articulating, and correcting itself; it is an event in the reality of which, as a part, it partakes. It is a permanent effort at responsive openness to the appeal of reality, at bewaring of premature satisfaction, and above all at avoiding the self-destructive phantasy of believing the reality of which it is a part to be an object external to itself that can be mastered by bringing it into the form of a system."

Related threads:

Dunning-Kruger

scotosis 

Apodictic

The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable. In certain situations, this illusion leads people to make confident but false explanations of their own behaviour (called "causal theories") or inaccurate predictions of their future mental states. 

 

 

 

 

Eric Buys writes at Mimetic Margins

A FAMILIAR SCENE BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

“Why don’t you girls get along with June anymore?” Regina’s mother asked. Regina and her two friends, Gretchen and Eve, stared at her in bewilderment. They were about to go on a shopping spree. For weeks they had gone out without June. “She has changed so much,” Regina answered. “Yes, she spoils the whole atmosphere of the group,” Eve added. “Quite frankly, mother, June has become this ordinary slut,” Regina concluded. Now it was her mother’s turn to stare at the three girls in bewilderment. And off they went.

About a month later, Gretchen accidently ended up next to June in the bus to school. The silence between them was awkward enough to make them talk to each other. Gretchen learned that her pretty companion had been going steady with Lysander for several months. And then it dawned on her: Regina had been gossiping about June being a slut because June had run away with Regina’s big crush, Lysander!

As soon as she had the chance Gretchen confronted Regina. “I talked to June and she is still the same old friend I knew!” she exclaimed. “You’re just jealous of her, that is the truth! You two are the same, you want that Lysander guy as much as she does! June in no way is a slut!” At that moment Eve stepped in to defend Regina and claimed both of them would turn their back on Gretchen if the latter didn’t change her opinion on June.

All of a sudden the clique of three were arguing about who betrayed who and they accused each other of being delusional. Their internal peace at the expense of an outcast had been broken. One of them had shown love for their external enemy, and had thus created internal enmity, within their own household. A new expulsion seemed imminent. Or would they all eventually be able to reconcile themselves with their former enemy?

RTWT : https://mimeticmargins.com/2019/11/05/the-point-yuval-harari-misses-of-myth-bringing-rene-girard-to-the-table/