Friday, April 3, 2015

Mind's Eye Re: Imagine That

Despite imagination Allan, I have never been able to regard meeting a bloke as a date. The way round this seems to be not dating in order to be gender balanced.  Never liked the performances anyway.  Tired today, i that 'after 'flu' way.  Looking forward to dog walk being less of a trudge and no throbbing pains in my left eye and head.  Instructions to buy Ginger Wine for hot toddies.

I agree all that Molly and it all expands into several books - though really one can only create the conditions for a trail every so often.  This would be worth talking through, though most spirits are too weak to try.

I'll try again if Max leaves me any energy and the toddies don't get too overwhelming.  May just let them.  Much of what needs saying is not in the public domain, which is odd given how easy much of it is.

On Friday, 3 April 2015 12:33:14 UTC+1, Molly wrote:
I will take my carbon dating as a compliment as I think the age of reason our downfall. We only seemed to have an inkling about how our extension through technology would bring us back through it where reasonable paradigms don't work for us, and as close as we can get to a working model is again mystic. Not to say reason is thrown aside. It must be integrated and given its mechanical function so we can move into something greater, having been hijacked for too long and used in the power and control games. We are more than mental, but are beaten with it until we give it all up to merely survive, our self image blown to smithereens 

For too long, no one recognized the magician of the beautiful, those that move naturally and leave beauty in their wake. We've lost our ability to recognize beauty, having been drenched in mundane by deteriorating culture and technology. But something has come of it. And there are those among us that move in action of the divine principle within, and those among us that can recognize the beauty that surrounds them and envelops us. If we can let go of the need to know why, and move along in this action, we can be taken where paradigms are no longer necessary. I am not sure if a group can be carried along, or if we, moving in action of the divine principle within, move with the world as it is in perfection, accepting the imperfection as inherent to the divine principle, knowing the imperfection is changing into perfection through the action. Maybe its always been like this. Maybe it always will be.

On Thursday, April 2, 2015 at 5:52:32 PM UTC-4, archytas wrote:
I had a nice afternoon.  Turned a bar in Manchester into an old-style tavern with folk singing and a free barrel of Old Peculiar.  The themes were about returning to Greek and Medieval notions of rationality, which have long struck me as in need of a few beers to get into.  Debate went so well I hardly needed to say anything.  

The Greeks were all over the place around the relevant time, in Italy and around the Med.  This was the time of the of what Hans Joas dubbed "cosmic religion" of late Antiquity, a fusion of Greek cosmological speculation. Babylonian astrology, Egyptian theology, Jewish thought and popular magic.  There were many attempts to translate this into political constitutions.  Most of this was put to the Roman sword, and intellectuals became mystic, aspiring to find new ways to transcend earthly systems entirely, rising through planetary spheres, purging themselves of materiality to pure reason - that human reason that is simply the action of a divine principle within us.  Rationality here becomes beyond spiritual to the mystical achievement of union with he divine.  In the absence of Molly, we did the internal warming of Old Peculiar and some Lancashire Folk.

So why look to the past like this?  The simple answer is that our present is still full of it.

The second area we looked at once the beer was going down was the Medieval.  You need to be half-cut to take what went on then.  One of the strongest features of this time concerns just how humans consider themselves superior and different to animals.  We are still taught this crap as kids - 'it's rationality stupid'.  Cue some cute pictures of animals problem solving and being very rational (lions hunting at night is a real killer).  And a run out for Allan's soul, with a slight twist.  What separates humans and animals is that humans can imagine they possess an immortal soul.  If the soul is the seat of reason, to say humans are in possession of one is to say we are rational creatures.

You need the top shelf now, as these forms of religiosity are the basis of bureaucracy and rationality.  Descartes becomes spiritual and mystic.  The question, of course, is whether we can escape.  It's bank holiday here on Friday.  This brings discussion of the archaeology of "heroic societies" other than just the Attic tragedy kind, as engines of the self-aggrandising story.  

By the end (people fly home Tuesday) we hope to be able to talk new economic, perhaps find some partnerships to write something different - or not write and think of different things to do.  After a couple of pints, I was imagining dating Molly and Allan in about 500 BC to 1500 AD.   

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