It’s a strange thing to realize that life actually belongs to each and everyone
That it is a gift to all
That a great part of it is what each makes of it
After the turmoil of ripening
And each with our own strength
Deciphering our self
And in our self
Ourselves
To make of music
The daily bread
And paint the air with color glass
And taste
Each soul
Like wine
And let go before it takes hold of one’s self too proud
So that there’s still enough freshness to go
Nowhere
But Ourselves
As if life were simply the joy of remembering
What others created
And creating what others will remember
For the simple pleasure of recreating our selves
Time is a marvelous weaver
eternity’s silk-worm
Weaving our lives in and out
as if we were tapestry,
needle and thread
all at the same time
To rest in the circle
And hold the whole from inside
Like One
And allow for the many to jump around
As if each man-note were in itself the whole
The whole of sound
The whole of life
The whole of music
Not in separation
But in harmonizing unity
To be
And not to be
That is the question!
Without pretending to compete with him
Whose ankles are above my head
But whose joy was no greater than mine!
I was watching the German detective series called Wallander last night and was struck by the description of the process of leaving the family out as he got deep into becoming a good policeman-detective that Wallander gives his daughter because what he was describing was exactly the same I observed in committing to the FOF Cult and what after leaving, led me to conclude that the need to belong to a community and develop in it is what every human being longs for consciously or unconsciously. I have not seen this stated so bluntly anywhere and I wonder if it’s because it is taken for granted or because there had never been such a strong failure in society to incorporate people into a community as there is today resulting precisely in the huge number of people looking for cults to fulfill that need.
I think need is closer than wish or up there in the level of wish that having a wife or husband stands. Of course these are not absolutes in the sense that people can survive without partner or community but the question is, is no family or community the ideal we are heading towards or the inevitable outcome that we’re doomed towards?
It is certainly not that what I consider ideal is the old system of authoritarian hierarchic communities in which there was no individual freedom but it is also not the inhuman individualism that we seem to be racing towards what I support.
The road towards becoming more human seems to be walked by the most horrific inhuman acts rather than a slow ascending towards an ideal. It’s as if we could not just put ourselves to the aim and slowly walk towards it, it’s more as if we were constantly moving a step away from the horrors and the mistakes and instead of seriously learning from other’s experiences, each nation had to commit the same horrific acts before it realizes that more humanism and democracy are the only possible answer to the absurdity of today’s reality.
I was also watching the BBC debate in the Intelligence Square about whether capitalism had failed in the Ukraine or not. What was beautiful to watch was people dialoguing about issues that matter. Someone suggested that the Swedish form of Capitalism would have been less harmful.
At the end of the debate the man sustaining that capitalism had failed, stated that as long as people don’t stand up for the truth in every level of society, for the truth, freedom and equality, no real change is possible. I’m paraphrasing. It was very good to watch that amount of clarity in what seemed a very public venue.
Something else that was quite amazing was that the program went all the way from Kiev to Medellín! Language makes a big difference and most people here can’t understand those programs but most of the other programs that are watched are managing to “unify” people, to “standardize” people. The tendency to copy other people’s acts is so powerful that more and more the people here behave like Americans or Europeans. It isn’t very positive. People here use to be kind and human and they are becoming efficiently professional but with little real human caring or kindness. The business mind-frame is permeating the whole of society like it has in America.
The impression I got in America was that people were kind as long as you didn’t need help! It’s a “professional” kindness that exerts itself only as long as there’s an interest in the interchange taking place. In Europe people are not kind even if there’s an economic interchange. Of course, they are all probably kind between each other but that impossibility to go beyond one’s own nationality to be able to be kind to no matter who is what is worth struggling for. There is no real kindness until there’s “objective” kindness, the rest is just programming… conditioning. The utilitarian mind-frame is appallingly negative particularly for those who practice it. The bottom-line I believe, is that it is a kind of impression that tends to fortify the instinctive center or as my horrible guru use to say, the king of clubs. Perhaps that is why he only managed to make a cult dedicated to feeding his own king of clubs. He was never able to free himself from his programming. But the FOF doesn’t matter now as much as people and I do believe that the concern in relation to society itself is worth exploring. It’s as if the whole of humanity had shifted from the divine to the abominable and were actually beginning to find itself back into the human before it can even consider the divine again while at the same time realizing that there’s nothing “just” human about the human.
Today I certainly have no interest in the “divine” if it’s not deeply rooted in the human but of course, there is nothing truly human that is not divine. Life itself is the culture I wish to develop in. It’s such an honor to have the opportunity to live. That which I use to take so for granted in my youth is now such a precious opportunity. To live, to work, to interact with other people through the enveloping forces that determine us and therefore our lives.
There’s a beautiful poetry festival here in Medellín with poets from sixty countries including Yevtushenko who was marvellous last night in the inauguration.
Yesterday an Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, was saved by global protests from being stoned to death.
But she may still be hanged — and, meanwhile, execution by stoning continues. Right now fifteen more people are on death row awaiting stoning in which victims are buried up to their necks in the ground and then large rocks are thrown at their heads.
The partial reprieve of Sakineh, triggered by the call from her children for international pressure to save her life, has shown that if enough of us come together and voice our horror, we may be able to save her life, and stop stoning once and for all. Sign the urgent petition now and send it onto everyone you know — let’s end this cruel slaughter NOW!
Sakineh was convicted of adultery, like all the other 12 women and one of the men awaiting stoning. But her children and lawyer say she is innocent and that she did not get a fair trial — they state her confession was forced from her and, speaking only Azerbaijani, she did not understand what was being asked of her in court.
Despite Iran’s signing of a UN convention that requires the death penalty only be used for the “most serious crimes” and despite the Iranian Parliament passing a law banning stoning last year, stoning for adultery continues.
Sakineh’s lawyer says the Iranian government “is afraid of Iranian public reaction and international attention” to the stoning cases. And after Turkey and Britain’s Foreign Ministers spoke out against Sakineh’s sentence, it was suspended.
Sakineh’s brave children are leading the international campaign to save their mother and stop stoning. Massive international condemnation now could finally stop this sickening punishment. Let’s join together today across the world to end this brutality. Sign the petition to save Sakineh and end stoning here:
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It’s such a beautiful irony of life to have me find the Poetry Festival of Medellín here and now! To spend the day with some of the best poets of the world and laugh at my writings not being able to find three poems worth showing.
It’s a good thing that I don’t expect to sell my writings because as Thot Plickens recently said no one would read them but it’s an even better thing to know that it would have been good if what I had to say had been said beautifully but that the lack of beauty does not discount what needed to be said. They are all saying the same thing in different words: We are One. We’re young enough to work on the beauty but not young enough to not understand the things that matter.
Tantas cosas Yevtushenko, tantas cosas, incluyendo tu nombre hermoso y tu, más hermoso que tu nombre. Pero lo verdaderamente hermoso no son tu o tu nombre sino la fuerza con que nos cuentas sobre la vida como si ni siquiera estuvieras hablando de ella, como si ya te vinieras despojando y eso te facilitara el ofrecérnosla más libre de ti mismo.
Casi te veo porque decir que te veo sería una mentira aunque bien nos miramos y al mismo tiempo ¿como no verte cuando una sola palabra es suficiente? Te veo un hombre; un ser humano.
Y es bello oírte gritar sin vacilaciones, contame Yevtushenko, cuanto te costó? ¿Cuantas veces tuviste que morir para poder vivir? ¿Cuantos cayeron en el camino? A cuantos de ti mismo y de los tuyos tuviste que dejar morir para existir? O eras ya un hombre cuando naciste?
Sería difícil creerte. Quizá nacemos Dioses pero hombres ya no nacen sino que se vuelven de andar pisando el barro y correr entre la maleza huérfanos de padre, madre, patria o tierra. Llegamos a ser hombres… y mujeres claro, no porque hayamos tenido algo sino porque nunca lo tuvimos y estamos teniendo que inventárnoslo.
Cada generación nace más huérfana, las familias se acabaron y las comunidades se extinguieron y cada hombre se posa sobre sí mismo desfigurado en una deformación que se vuelve modelo hasta que otra generación recuerda lo que alguna vez fue ser hombre. Cada joven busca a tientas referencias que no encuentra pero en este caos sin tregua se yergue fuerza.
No es “tradición, familia y propiedad”. Y menos la nación o multinacional. No habrá nada de eso después de la guerra. ¿Cuantos más muertos habremos de vivir antes de morir? Cuantos más vivos habremos de sufrir antes de vivir? Y te confieso desde ya que prefiero la guerra que esta paz cuando por guerra entienden cualquier protesta. No es acomodándonos para no luchar que vamos a cambiar. Vivo a veces en un estado de guerra sin violencia, otras, en un estado de violencia sin guerra y la mayoría en una guerra violenta en donde la gente se desangra sin que muera y me niego a aceptar que esta sea la paz por la cual hay que vivir mientras nos echan el cuento de que hay que aceptar pacíficamente el referendo y volvernos profesionalmente inhumanos como ellos.
La guerra entre nosotros, como las putas, se esconde en la trastienda, aunque ya ni las putas se esconden mucho más honestas que cualquiera. Unos ponen muertos que no vemos y otros matan en nombre nuestro. Pero la guerra más dulce es la que llevamos dentro, no siendo, muertos de miedo de morir, pero igualmente muertos de no vivir, no solo aquí, sino en la tierra entera. O acaso es menos violenta la paz en tus tierras? O en el mundo entero en donde la gente ya se suicida sin dar guerra?
Buen viaje Yevtushenko, esta gratitud es con firmeza. Vuelve con todas tus batallas para vivir más dulcemente mi guerra. Perdóname si te hablo con demasiada confianza pero si no es confianza lo que inspira tu entrega, de que se trata tu fuerza?
I got this ad this morning which shows how much science is moving into understanding the connection between the social sphere and the instinctive sphere. It’s wonderful that they are doing this because they will eventually have to admit that without a healthy society we can’t be individually healthy. They will also come to understand more exactly the power of the logos or life in its many expressions and be able to account exactly for how positive and negative activities affect our lives. People will understand better how a sick environment like that of a cult and all the regular cults called industries, corporations, governments, etc, based on hierarchic interchanges between people who cannot act humanly towards each other justified by their so called “position” are in themselves the greatest source of illness in our time.
We’re moving so fast towards greater freedom!
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I am a shepherd: some times I am able to sense , to feel all my flock of sheep without counting and checking them. It is a divine grace. But I am a shepherd , i have a job to do: watch the sheep, don’t stay all the day with the eyes turned up to pray God to give me the grace:no this i do morning and before sleeping and before eating. My job is to watch the sheep. I know that there are the black ones, that are the more genial to jump out of the pasture. When i catch one , after a while an other jump again. With these i have to choose places where them don’t can go too far away. Then there are the white ,more stupid. Them dont jump to go away, but are so stupid to get tangled and with them i have to find pasture without bramble and when i find a brambled one i have to be patient if i not want be brambled me too. Then there are the piebald ones. Every one is a type and a different problem. Yes, sometimes i do a stop myself to see if i am able to feel all the flock, but after i enjoy my life of shepherd: I marvel for the mystery of life, play the flute, and count the sheep. Not one to one, because if i do so i fall asleep. I count for colour, for mathematical set . My daughter learn this in primary school and teach me . My shepherd is just a worker, ( my real job is made and sell crafts). What i mean it is that self remember is a useful stop but the real Work is to do our Job like a real man and real self remember is a fruit of this kind of job. In” Views” G points :Have you try to self remember in this way ? And in this other ? Have you try with all you strength, intelligence, cleverness, slyness : With mind, with body with emotion ? O.K You can taste it for a while , but it don’t keep going. The important thing is that you be sure that You are not in the third state- And then that it is not enough do everything for keep it going. (so you have may be to find a continuous reminder like what he says in “The life is real…”).
But what i am sure from my experience and from experience of people like Fof people that to try to work to direct self remember make you a mad , and also a dangerous insane mad. God is too big for us, Sun is to shining for our eyes. So my God, my Sun is my life. I have to live a saint life. I have to support negativity from myself and others.(And all the five striving).I think to be just a ordinary man without lies to ourself, but take responsibility, became a real House keeper, a Friend, a Husband, a Father, a Citizen, a good worker is to become conscious.A lot of time we talk of conscience, but there have to be an object of conscience. Ecological conscience, political conscience, individual conscience. If i am not aware of my body i have the same the responsibility of my actions. When the night I may see all my past day for me is not really important the times i have try to self remember, but how I have done things. I feel that G want awake in us conscience. What i want to do if i became conscious? If i am not a man but a mutton I become a conscious mutton, good for be eaten…But if i am a man i could cook myself to be tasty and healthy and share
Thanks for your post. I agree, ecological, political and individual conscience seem necessary to be somewhat conscious!
I often think I’m like a dirty mirror with light only in a few spots. Then it rains and another part of the mirror gets cleaned and I become aware of new areas of consciousness.
Have you been out for a long time? I seldom think in terms of becoming conscious or more conscious these days. Just trying to recover a normal sense of myself has taken a long time but it’s beginning to feel very good. The neighbor this morning was listening to music we use to hear when I was young and I was thinking that the wonder of being back home was that in that invisible community that people of the same nation hold, we manage to embrace each other in a common memory that is comforting and re-structuring.
I don’t know where else people from different nations can meet if not in the common human… which is so uncommon!
You talk about self remembering but having been fellowshippers in a cult wouldn’t it be good for us to restate what we understand by such term?
The more I think about it the less it seems that self remembering as it was conceived by the Fellowship is actually self remembering.
In my experience this permanent awareness of myself trying to become indifferent to everything that was going on outside while pretending everything was perfect as it was simply resulted in numbness and self consciousness which has nothing to do with self remembering.
These days I try not to do that because it actually has the opposite effect: instead of making me more conscious of things it makes me very tense and disconnected from the outside world. What I’m trying to do is relax. Being relaxed allows me to be more perceptive and that I think is an aspect of being more conscious.
Thanks for sharing. It always makes a blog so much more fun!
Just i wish to tell have not been in the Fof,but in another cult using fourth way stuff.
And what i say, and what i believe that i had learn being free from group pressure on me it is that I have not at all to search to self remember during day activities. But some moments collect the wondering (over all to outside) attention to collect the gain from the efforts in the day to be faithful to myself, my wishes, my values and see my contradictions just a level of understanding.
Use emotions as a way to explore further the meaning of life.
It’s interesting that doctors are willing to amputate a leg when not doing so will kill the patient but the laws today and that is, society at large, is unable to amputate cults out of life although they tend to annihilate the people inside, psychologically first, then physically, through suicide or a slow deterioration of the body out of lack of vitality.
It shows how lost everyone is, including the so called leaders who cannot really respond for the people they have in charge. It’s an interesting period to be living in because next to the horrors are also the wonders and everything is changing so rapidly. The internet is an amazing leap into a more democratic world… So good to be out and about!
The great thing about having been in a cult must be the wonder of being out of it and allowing for life to flower again. It’s an amazing experience to be numbed to the world for so many years and then slowly let it be as if it opened up in one’s self. The wonder of people! The wonder of the things people do to survive their difficulties. And the possibility of creation. Nothing is more hurt in cults than one’s creativity. The cult eats away one’s self and with one’s self precisely one’s creativity. The lack of trust in one’s self doesn’t allow for creativity to develop and THAT is exactly what the cult has to manage against each member to make the dependency powerful enough to keep the member inside, working for it. Those in the inner circle develop a particular kind of creativity against other members which is what makes them hasnamusses acting against the well being of other human beings. It is a terrible tragedy for them as much as their victims. They are worse than people in concentration camps because in concentrations camps they kill the victims and physical death is more merciful than psychological death. To manipulate individuals to such a point that they no longer exist for themselves but for the guru and his agenda is a despicable crime.
How far are ex cult members including those in the fofblog and the other Fellowship that has nothing greater about it, away from deeply understanding and not avoiding this truth? How can people live with such truths and do nothing about it but reproduce a similar club in another context? I wonder what it is that keeps people from calling crime, crime and doing something to stop it. The lack of consciousness of the fact that we are all connected is what stops us. Those without consciousness think they can get away without getting involved, they can separate themselves from the horror and pretend it has nothing to do with them but their silence is what makes it possible and that is what makes us all accomplices of the crime.
The one beautiful thing about seeing how life is at my age, is realizing how incredibly naive people also are. One of the reasons that people don’t call crime, crime, is that they don’t want to see it, they want to believe that everything is fairly alright and under control by God if nobody else! They or us for I have also had a huge amount of this naivete. That innocence is beautiful because it remains in people even after they’ve much suffered. It doesn’t help a great deal which is perhaps why we end up suffering so much more but the power of such innocence is worth all the beauty. I don’t think it’s healthy to be that naïve because in its dark side it hides so much fear and at some point it’s good to face the horror and look at it straight in the face. Even the horror can be looked at and when one does it is not nearly as bad as one feared… if one is still innocent enough, as I am, to believe that everything can be recovered, everything can be healed, now or later, in this or another life.
One of the problems seems to be that life and not just organic life, is a lot more “organic” than I had ever realized. That actions people perform tend to repeat themselves and condition the inner world of individuals without people realizing that they are sculpting themselves from the outside in as much as from the inside out, hence the importance of “social” life.
It seems so obvious but the way it feels obvious today is very different to what I had always taken for granted. And the problem is that people do actions then we justify those actions and one way to justify our actions is repeating them over and over until they seem normal no matter how abnormal they actually are. And then if everyone seems to be doing the same thing it looks ever so normal. That’s how cults work but society also works very much like that. And the problem in the short run is that people are hardly responsible because they are all just aspects of our unconsciousness. Perhaps when someone starts screaming about it and is called crazy, it is because it takes a long time for others to come to terms with the fact that what is happening is actually not normal at all and that is precisely the role of whistleblowers.
This idea that life (social life, that that we call life and not just biological processes), is a lot more organic than we tend to perceive, seems relevant because being such it is under a lot more laws than at least I would have wanted to admit. Processes take a long time and the trouble with impatience is that it simply turns back against one’s self. That’s why anger, disappointment, frustration and all the other expressions of horror at the speed with which most people deal with problems like cults is just an expression of my own lack of understanding of the laws we’re under.
“Once there lived a wolf who slaughtered a great many sheep and reduced many people to tears.
“At length, I do not know why, he suddenly felt qualms of conscience and began to repent his life; so he decided to reform and to slaughter no more sheep.
“In order to do this seriously he went to a priest and asked him to hold a thanksgiving service.
“The priest began the service and the wolf stood weeping and praying in the church. The service was long. The wolf had slaughtered many of the priest’s sheep, therefore the priest prayed earnestly that the wolf would indeed reform. Suddenly the wolf looked through a window and saw that sheep were being driven home. He began to fidget but the priest went on and on without end.
“At last the wolf could contain himself no longer and he shouted:
“‘Finish it, priest! Or all the sheep will be driven home and I shall be left without supper
It’s a good story apprentice shepherd. It reminds me of us when we are in positions of power and can’t help humiliating those in a lower position for the simple pleasure of reinstating our own as if the ego needed to reassure itself consistently. The difference with real I is that it wouldn’t feel threatened and hence wouldn’t resort to getting reassured at other’s cost.
Elena post 16 “It’s interesting that doctors are willing to amputate a leg when not doing so will kill the patient but the laws today and that is, society at large, is unable to amputate cults out of life although they tend to annihilate the people inside, psychologically first, then physically, through suicide or a slow deterioration of the body out of lack of vitality.
It shows how lost everyone is, including the so called leaders who cannot really respond for the people they have in charge.”
Thinking about this I wonder if “leaders” are actually lost or whether in fact people in power are intentionally allowing for such things knowing religion will take care of making people passively accept the status quo. There are those layers in which people seem to jump from the actual facts to a “divine” determination that they are unwilling to challenge. That they perceive as the “facts” rather than the imposed conditions and it is precisely that “divine” what calls for its “hegemony” over the land.
What’s amazing is that social behavior does change when the level of being of the society changes just like individuals do. And the level of being of individuals does change after powerful experiences of love or death or other forms of suffering. In the social scale would we be looking for wars, great leaders, tremendous catastrophes for the change in level of being?
I do experience some difficulty using this System language remembering how it was manipulated, distorted and used against the members in the cult but reinstating it in its own integrity is also a healthy process.
I guess the importance of developing a strong individuality lies precisely in the fact that if the tendency to imitate and repeat other people’s behavior is so strong, unless the individuals are powerful enough to follow their own conscience, people would continue to repeat the old forms without ever adapting to new circumstances or innovating. The process seems to be somewhat guaranteed by new generations but at the same time there seems to be a powerful force holding the mold together so that the majority keep the sequence!!
This question of “one’s own conscience” is relevant because at some point in my development I realized that I had not really been following my own conscience but “interiorizing” the standard behavior and if other people WERE that way it was alright for me to behave likewise. Then I made the same mistake in the cult and probably in the fofblog too. I reproduced the standard rather than hold to my own conscience. I assume most people do that for that is also what I see in most people which is where will would come in to make a difference. And then will is such a difficult load to carry because when an individual starts acting different to others he or she will inevitably create rejection, for his or her actions question others and in that questioning there’s always friction which brings us to the realization that living in friction is our “natural” state.
I like this understanding because it has been in the agenda of certain “ways of life” to think that friction is NOT a natural and an extremely necessary social condition. The ideal of no friction means the fixed status quo where every relationship between people is unmovable and that is living death, like in cults. This is very important! Cults are frozen in “no friction” and that is their most deadly weapon against the soul of its members who are supposed to feel very grateful and content in the “all is well” environment. But “ALL IS WELL” only for as long as you sacrifice your self, surrender yourself completely. This is even more important because it addresses the question of master, pupil and reveals the fact that in any surrendering what we are dealing with is the I. It is the I that surrenders and with it all the centers and in surrendering to another person we give our selves up. This is what we have traditionally called “love” and what seems to have been so justified in our world. “Surrender to your husband, your job, your nation, sacrifice yourself for the well being of your family, your company, your nation” And in the end people, both men and women, simply give themselves up so that someone else does with their life what is to their convenience. I realize how difficult it is to make an affirmation such as this one for the question of the “cause” is always there. What “cause” are people surrendering to? There’s always a cause. Why did women tend to surrender to their husbands? Because they were protected? Economically? Physically? They and their children? Why do men and women now surrender to their company? And I mean surrender in the sense that not only work is done but also a certain emotional “surrenderance” is given and it’s in that emotional “gift” that the whole transaction is justified. Why do they surrender to their nation? And the question is: Why do we surrender to anything that acts against our own self or that of others?
Isn’t surrendering a purely instinctive necessity that has to be justified emotionally so that we manage to live up to it? Don’t we surrender mostly because it is necessary for survival? To fit in a family, community, nation, group, company, so that our instinctive needs are satisfied? Instinctive, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, sexual? But ironically in our imaginary picture what we’re surrendering to is something higher than our selves that we “love” when what we’re really surrendering to is something lower than our selves that is acting against not only our selves but humanity at large. All this is much to the point because the question of institutions then comes in: the institutions of marriage, class, nation, university, company, corporation, the government. And while they should all be legitimate institutions in their own right what we have is people taking advantage of the institution to justify their abuse through their position of power. They use the credibility of the institution to manipulate people into its sphere and then take advantage of their position to make personal profit not just economically but socially by remaining in positions of power. Isn’t this precisely what happens in cults? People taking advantage of the legitimacy of religion to enslave the members? But then is it not also true of governments themselves, isn’t the whole economic crisis of today due precisely because of this fact? Because people without power allow people in power to do as they wish with the institutions that govern our lives? They call it corruption in the newspapers.
Isn’t it interesting that we tend to say “instinctive needs” but seldom acknowledge our emotional, intellectual, spiritual or sexual needs as “needs”? This seems relevant because it shows that in the mind frame of our times the tendency to label instinctive needs as the only reason for social participation allows those in power to manipulate the offer of art, leisure, education to the upper classes while the lower classes can stick to religion, sport, brothels and drinking which ironically enough still keeps them more directly connected with themselves than the upper classes who have to distort themselves psychologically to hold and justify the show of being superior and separate to the rest of mankind.
Isn’t it a tremendous irony? That in the long run the upper classes and the people in power hurting and living on others end up being more psychologically damaged for the mere reason that to be able to live at the cost of other people they have to build up such a psychological makeup that in itself suffocates their own soul. The crust that they have to put up between themselves and the rest of mankind who they are exploiting, manipulating and abusing is all right for their external appearance but their inner soul suffocates without the connection.
Communism seems to be the ugly duckling today but the fact that the human being in Russia was not mature enough to carry out communism but instead reproduced an authoritarian dictatorial society with a centralized power doesn’t mean the ideal of community is still not worth considering. The U.S.S.R was not communist! It was a dictatorship. A “cult” on a huge scale. It doesn’t matter in reality how we call it, capitalism would suit me just as well if the privileges of the few were for the many and we know well that’s not the case. What I believe that needs to be understood today is that beyond the classes and nationalities, continues to be the human and where the human being gets lost, we’re no longer connected to our “divine” purpose, to our “selves”.
It’s tricky, isn’t it? Who would buy such language as “divine” today? Would economists take it into consideration even if they go to church? Would lawyers? Would Americans? Europeans? Russians? Chinese? Arabs?
This period seems to be one of transition from legitimate authority of the hierarchy to legitimate authority of the individual: From the king to the people: from royalty to democracy. As if we were turning ourselves outside in to be able to then turn ourselves inside out for in the long run the true individual will be as conscious of the whole as any true king ever was. It’s such an honor to be human.
I remember R Collin wrote about how a school works: There is a point where friction as to be managed to become regeneration. If the experiments fail :corruption instead happens(it is more complex, but this is my juice of it).
So it is on personal, social political scale.
A school is where people learns (anything) a cult is when people that are not learning has to find “something” to substitute that and the choice of self-calming is really enormous.
I had an automatic association with Elena story about leg and BT on Italian people: I copy here a piece:
““At the present time the beings of various parts of contemporary Italy actualize this property of giving-pleasure to-others in the following way: “The existence of the quadruped beings called ‘sheep’ and ‘goats,’ whose planetary bodies they also use for
their first food, they do not destroy all at once; but in order to give this ‘pleasure’ they do it ‘slowly’ and ‘gently’ over a period of many days; that is to say, one day they
take off one leg, then a few days later, a second leg, and so on, for as long as the sheep or goat still breathes. And
sheep and goats can breathe without the said parts of their common presence for a very long time because, in the main functions of the taking in of cosmic substances for the possibility of existing, these parts do not participate, though they do participate in the functions which actualize
those impulses giving self-sensations.”
You see connection with cult behaviour (and one could have this also outside the organisation).
Thank you very much for your post apprentice shepherd. It’s very good to have someone that actually hears what is being said and ads something to it. What an incredible change! Thank you.
I would like to hear your appreciation of the idea of friction and go into it more deeply. I think I was brought up thinking that friction wasn’t supposed to exist which was awfully difficult with a mother that shot herself when I was eight, that in the emotional sphere and also because in Colombia we still have a very strong influence from the Spanish nobility that thought that physical labor was for the lower classes so it is common for middle and upper middle classes and above to never have to deal with difficulties because somebody in a lower class should have to deal with them which is a great disadvantage when compared for example with American upbringing. So in the physical instinctive sphere there is also a “not get involved” attitude and leave it for the workers. On the other hand “the american way of life” also seemed to paint a world without problems and in the cult the attitude is that there are no problems unless you speak about them so SHUT UP! It’s amazing that so many of us actually bought it for so long.
Anyway in the System the idea of friction followed by the transformation of friction and regeneration is very clear but what I wanted to emphasize is that, don’t you find that in upper classes people pretend to avoid friction and that is a great disadvantage? One because just the attitude of not dealing with problems disables people, two, because when we don’t want to deal with a problem we end up buffering it, three because while we buffer the problem at the same time we make a huge drama of it instead of finding solutions and four because we end up living in an imaginary world. I think one could go on but let’s look at least at those.
Living with people in lower working classes I’ve noticed that they hardly make a fuss about almost anything and that’s wonderful! They do deal with it and most of the time don’t even consider things a problem, just a way of life that needs to be dealt with while at the same time, enjoying themselves. At least this is the case in Colombia where the families remain somewhat together. It also seems connected with being more or less in essence, doesn’t it?
In my biography my mother’s suicide seems to have had another opposite effect which was that I seem to have acquired an extreme behavior to friction as if I were trying to avoid things from getting so bad that they’d prompt anyone to such extreme “solution” but in fact reacting so extremely myself that I was the only one in danger of the problem!!! Which also took place in its own time, over twenty years ago, exactly today!!!
Deciphering one’s biography is such an adventure! Until I “survived” things just happened! Suicide just happened (of course, after twenty years of building up to it) and then I’ve spent the next thirty years trying to decipher what happened!! It’s quite funny isn’t it? And rather tragic too from another perspective for I imagine I’m no exception to the rule.
I’m not the subject here, I’m just using my biography to convey the point which is that our attitudes to friction do determine a great many things including the negativity of our reactions. For example, I didn’t even realize how negative I actually was until after I survived! In fact what prompted me to try to commit suicide was that negativity itself. That energy simply turned against me at some point and….
All this when looked from the cold analytical position. On the other side of it is of course the tragedy of an individual who suffers situations that don’t find resolution before they themselves become tragic. In other words, I’m saying that it was the negativity that led me to suicide and that we live in a world in which we are not dealing with the problems before they themselves become tragic. We are not being able to help each other soon enough because if we also understand that negativity is just the shield people put up before the world to try to cope with it not knowing any other way to do so, where we need to help people is in finding solutions that are less tragic. My biography has led me to become interested in the cases of suicide in Japan and Russia where there is an estimate of a hundred suicides daily and the recent suicides in the telecom company of Paris also begin to reveal a pattern of where people are today.
The point of all this writing is trying to help each other understand the problems and find solutions, is it not? Or where is your interest?
The other suicide cases that I’m much interested in is that in cults. It is really very tragic because cults are a little like young renegades. They scape the world trying to find another solution and end up more trapped than those outside for the simple reason that they isolate themselves from humanity. If cults are the “solution” people are finding today, where are we heading towards?
“One because just the attitude of not dealing with problems disables people, two, because when we don’t want to deal with a problem we end up buffering it, three because while we buffer the problem at the same time we make a huge drama of it instead of finding solutions and four because we end up living in an imaginary world. ”
Yes. I was ” italian cocco of mamma” mama’boy so she knotted my shoestring till up age. I wish to add (also if it is a corollary one point) that we learn to suffer (as synonymous of bear friction) for the wrong things. You could spent a lot of physical and psychological energy because you have buffer your real aim.
The comic of the situation is that the people as you tell about the lower working classes is less lunatic than intellectuals,but lacks the ability to develop it. In Italy the old socialist,communist people had a strong solidarity feeling between them. In my place the worker built their Theatre stone by stone.
Now we are involving anywhere…
Are we now involving each other anywhere or evolving everywhere? Or do both have to happen for either one to occur!!? I’m kidding you a little, I think you just misspelled the word!
It’s very good to hear your fresh voice. Thank you again.
This idea that lower classes lack the ability to develop it is of course an idea from the system. Have you ever thought about why that might be?
May be you are right and I am conditioned and there is to understand what means evolve, develop.
But i see that people (not just lower classes) that not have time or energy or inclination to intellectual food lacks that knowing that we can use from the people that have experienced before us to make more clear the big picture(life). I live in Italy: between me and and American there are 2000 years of culture that I without do nothing have in my brains-
I am not able to express better this:i am not at all nationalist, but for example Italian is a better language to express many things than English. And to know two 3,5 languages gives a different prospective view to understand if then you try to do something with it.
I guess the question for me is not so much whether we’re Italian or American but how human can an Italian or an American be? They are both such great cultures in their own way. They’ve both given us so much.
Italian is a much better language to express one’s self if one is Italian but a chinese would say the same thing about his language! A culture might be great because of its age but that doesn’t necessarily make the people of today from that culture more human than the other. It’s like saying that a saturn is better than a jovial which was also common in the cult but then we wouldn’t understand the wonder of diversity.
Talking of which, if you’d like to try some Italian, I might be able to understand you. Would you understand Spanish? Could be fun!
On the subject of lower classes having what is necessary I don’t think the question was formulated correctly, in fact, the idea in the System has nothing to do with lower classes but with people in essence and something I’ve been pondering about that is that in essence WE ARE while in true personality we know we are. Like in Adam and Eve’s story, after the apple they knew both good and evil like God!…to express it simply!
It’s as if the journey through the body were only a fifth of the journey and we would then need to travel the heart, the mind, movement and processes, fire and laws. And as if we had to become objective to ourselves while in essence we simply are one with the whole without having to think about it.
As if the journey were a slow dismantling of all the obstacles that we ourselves invented in the trip from essence to false personality which, as ego, is nothing more than the separation from the whole.
I like this story about (true) personality that know while the essence is. But it looks as when one knows something forget about being.
The devil has to be paid (nothing free in the world if not miracles about multiplication of fishes and bread) with the creation of object subject. The essence naked are dressed from who views her nakedness . I not see solution if not in a third that has nothing to do with the first born but call her mama and papa the heredity. I am already a fundamentalist Christian 🙂
Per me questi scambi sono un po’ provare il microfono: Seee.1,2 3 4 Do you listen me ? Buoni Gli alti ? Si sente lì ? c’è un po di ‘riverbero. Reverberation. Resonancia. Me gusta.
Un poco loco.:-)
Yes, that certainly happens if one is coming from the mind, I mean, forgetting to be when thinking about it, it’s a good observation because I didn’t even think about it, feeling that it’s a knowing in the realm of being rather than the mind. But then the same could be said about feeling. In true personality knowing and feeling are not the same as knowing and feeling in the ego.
I like to think about it as parts of a car. A great car deserves a great driver and a great driver tends to keep the car in great condition. The parts, when relating to the being are very different to the parts when subduing the being which is what I feel happens all of our lives before we actually make ourselves present in it.
The image of the carriage and the driver is the same in the System but actually experiencing it is what I feel is worth doing if we’re going to talk about it. Although I believe I’m a few lifetimes away from the kind of awakening I think is possible, the little I managed to actually work at the beginning of joining the Cult was wonderfully powerful. Then I turned the work against my self to bear the cult and instead of developing I almost drowned in the sea of psychological slavery. It’s a good thing I’m such a hard headed woman because I never managed to really belong and that was a blessing! There was always an element of distrust that kept questioning it. But that’s exactly what makes cults work so efficiently, that in the first period the member advances because of the love, enthusiasm and effort that he or she put into the work and then realizing that the cult is a cult and not a school takes the whole circle until one is mature enough to understand what one is no longer willing to put up with even if it kills one to leave it!. It took me seventeen years to realize what was so inhuman about it but I’m so glad that I’ve understood that this deeply that I don’t regret the losses. As I recover the sense of my self again which was seriously disturbed until fairly recently, I am also recovering the feeling that everything is possible, particularly the appreciation of beauty in our interchanges. I am so sorry I messed up so badly in my first participation in the fofblog, but I am so glad I was able to keep my self together in the second participation.
I only had to look up scambi which I should have guessed, for in Spanish it’s cambiar or intercambio so it might not be too difficult to keep up the game. For me it’s more an opportunity for you to express yourself without the inconvenience of not feeling too comfortable with the English, so if you mix them some I should be able to understand you more fully. That is only for when you’re “eager” to say what you need to say in Italian.I assume neither one of us has too much time for the dictionary so unless it’s essential we can do most of it in English.
Pero para probar, si hay algo lindo en nuestros idiomas es la calidez, así que te mando un fuerte abrazo. Que tengas un bello día! Gracias por estar por aquí.
i remember when i first join an internet english group that i wish to end with an abbraccio and in italian and spanish the arms,the braccia are well present in the word.
i confused about hug and tug so for many times i greet with tug. That was about language,but what i am sure that i save from the Teaching (i not believe in word System) it is that we are to find a common language.
Babele tower before confusion tongue is an interesting project. Un abbraccio!
A.P: “That was about language,but what i am sure that i save from the Teaching (i not believe in word System) it is that we are to find a common language.”
Am I understanding you correctly? That you don’t believe in using the words of the System but we can find a common language? It’s so easy to fall in common places with the system especially in the cult but for me it’s wonderful that one can verify it and once verified we should be able to apply it to other contexts.
I was very ill last night, shivering strongly and I thought about remembering myself and stopped shivering and was able to fall sleep. Woke up again from two to four but it was very good to remember how effective it actually is! Have you noticed that in relation to the instinctive center? Are these the words you don’t believe in? For me they are so wonderfully clear why would we need to invent others?
Have you read Steiner? He’s like the other side of the coin of The Work for me, funny that he and Gurdjieff disliked each other considerably!
About G dislike Steiner i were not so sure. Remember that Beelzebub is a Devil. If she despised at all a people he not bring attention on him talking about him two or three time.
It is the same about his book the Herald of coming Good that he say to not read …:-)
About the other issue it is very long and complex. In very (too much) short it is different. System is 2+2= 4
Teaching (dharma)(way) (truth) is DO it ! and if necessary 2+2= 1 or 3
some words are exact, because verified (istinctive function, brain ,storey) other G corrected in time.
“Sleep “is no the problem “self-calming” is the one ! But this is just a starting point from Ouspensky advice: leave the system ! Like Buddha: “Leave the raft when you are on the other side” but i guess that the other side is to be in the stream…
I’m again working as a private English teacher and in Colombia most people in the middle-upper classes know English well having studied it from kinder-garden but hardly anyone speaks it properly, so a lot of my job is to re-structure the bad habits and re-install the right constructions.
It has been very interesting to observe that even after knowing the right structures and answering correctly in the drill, for some period the student will go back to the old structures when relaxed not only in the bad constructions but in the accent. Observing this it seems very similar to what happens with people in cults… fortunately and unfortunately. Fortunately because no matter how brainwashed, the old structure will stay there even if latent, potentially available for recovery and unfortunately because once the indoctrination is adopted willingly, it will take a similar process for the member to deconstruct it and that is what is so difficult, fearful and painful. All the centers are affected in the process but much more delicate than the centers is the process endured by the self itself, the I, for the I is gradually dismantled in cults to guarantee member’s dependency and “re-mantling” it is a very delicate and long process depending on how extensive the damage is.
Just as the whole process in the cult takes place through the gradual re-conditioning of the centers, through separating them and their functions from the self, what is very interesting to observe, and extremely beautiful, is to realize that the recovery of the self also happens with the “re-conditioning” of the centers and through the activities, the I and the centers reconnect. Even if the person doesn’t know the meaning of the activity he or she is performing and depending on the activity, it will shed it’s life on the member, that is, the activity itself has a “life” or “power” of its own and reconstruct or continue to destroy his or her many layers, centers or dimensions. What’s interesting is that the activity will shed different degrees of “logos” or “life” depending on the person’s attention and intention. To verify this which seems to have a great deal to do with the octave of impressions, one simply needs to pay attention to the quality of different activities. Playing tennis for example is a very different experience to playing the piano and they are both equally gratifying for the respective centers but the same applies to all activities.
I think this is what I mean about knowledge in essence and true personality: that in essence we are and we do but are unconscious about our being and doing while in true personality we can understand the richness of being and doing. The difference is not in the levels of energy experienced in either conditions (states?), but in the degree of consciousness of them. In other words, an experience is not less great in essence than in true personality in terms of its energetic quality but in a mature human being the meaning of the action is much more profound to the I. And then again, it doesn’t mean that in essence the action is any less profound, simply that in essence it is a given that is taken for granted valued then only when it is subsequently lost in the process of living as if life itself where the process of making our selves objectively conscious of the life that arises from our connection with the world.
Perhaps the problem was in the word knowledge for what I’m really talking about is consciousness that has nothing to do with the knowledge we tend to think of in the intellectual center.
I guess I’m just shy to use such words but I also think that if we’ve worked and given any valuable steps it is fundamentally important to share our experiences not to show off how far we reached, which at least in my case is incipient to what is possible, but because other generations will profit from our information.
Elena very interesting observations on your actual job. So permit me to dissent only to the last part:”it is fundamentally important to share our experiences not to show off how far we reached, which at least in my case is incipient to what is possible, but because other generations will profit from our information.”
I am not enough in confidence with you
to write what i really etiquette this statement:
“nonsense” i ‘hope you could accept without take offence 🙂
The only profit other generation shall get is how much WE ourself profit from the information from experience,that is how much “knowledge “( your words ,now mine too for consciousness) actually writing and reading we ..get.. (sometimes i use the word steal,but that for another time). I apologize, but with people that have another word in her world ( suicide) the meaning of (last) will
scare me ! Italian is testamento that is the same that the Bibble books the covenant God Man (for a better world).
Hey i was trying to listen to Chomsky in religion you posted,but i cannot because his tune bring me in mind the Criminology expert of Rocky horror picture show:/time 1,06
You are crazy apprentice shepherd and a lot of fun and it’s O.K. now if we disagree, but before I was too vulnerable to bear anyone disagreeing with the little that was holding me up!
I don’t know what you’re saying about suicide. My mother committed suicide when I was almost nine years old and I tried to when I was 27, that is 25 years ago. The whole of my biography was marked by that, simply trying to overcome the impulse because once people try it is very difficult to stop them from finally managing. I’m nowhere close to that state now and overcoming the Fellowship was only half as difficult as overcoming that!
Life was never more beautiful than it is now!
I’d like you to look at the work I’ve been doing in the past few months. I should open a shop to sell my lamps and sculptures one of these days! You can look at them at:
I’ve no idea why you’re still coming here so often but if you can apologize for your destructive behavior you can participate again or leave but free your self either way. This blog isn’t pathologically adverse to people who disagree like the fofblog!
You don’t need to apologize for what you think of me, we can all think what we like but for the aggressiveness on this site which is very destructive to me, there are constructive ways of criticizing each other’s points of view. Here are the posts I banned. Should you repeat the same “tone” I should ban you again.
In repeating a similar behavior to the one I had in the fofblog I hope you realized how easy it is to get there when one isn’t at all well and one isn’t at all well when one’s behavior is clearly aiming at hurting others. What we need to learn is to disagree without hurting each other’s integrity.
Here are your posts that I stopped, the one by Steiner I think was repeated or just got dumped in with the rest and what I think is worth looking at besides the aggressions, is the impossibility to find a point of agreement. That is what shows the attitude and intention and the desire to get me so upset that I’ll retaliate and treat you as badly which was my pattern in the first fofblog participation. For me it’s over, I hope you don’t even need to explain yourself on it. My behavior was as bad as yours then, I could not control my anger and frustration at the people for not seriously helping to stop the Fellowship. It happens! But we’ve got to learn the lesson if we want to dialogue and to do so we need to like each other enough. Since I don’t think there is any such liking in you why bother to speak just to indulge in aggression?
Cheers!
2010/06/16 at 5:40 am
e: “…Have fun Ton in your world, I’m delighted not to be a part of it.”
Elena
gee elena, what happened to “WE are ONE” ?
you’re a fraud and a hypocrite and you can’t handle truth.
Life!
40 #
ton
2010/06/15 at 9:29 pm
let’s examine “the text” of your previous post a little further:
e: “This text by Steiner is very valuable in this exploration and contradicts nothing of what I’ve been saying…”
well i’m glad you can find “value” in it, good for you elena, i hope you will find additional “value” when you read the book from which the excerpt was taken… i hate to take things out of context, but that seems to be the custom here on your blog… and although the excerpt stands on it’s own, to do it proper justice it should be read within the context of the whole book. i really don’t understand why you think “the text” should contradict what you’re saying… why do you even suggest it? you really do take a contrary perspective on almost everything don’t you elena ?
e: “I’m happy to be able to state that I don’t consider myself an anthroposophist but a human being and that is because unfortunately in many an anthroposophist we still find the same authoritarian, classicist, racist, academic and economic sense of superiority that separates people from people…”
yes, and regarding “the same authoritarian, classist, racist academic and sense of superiority that separates people” — there’s a saying in my country — it takes one to know one. and i’m sure there are many “anthroposophists” who would be happy to be able to state that you do not consider yourself “one of them.” what, did you forget your “we are one” slogan again elena ? or do you only use it when it’s “convenient…” it sounds like you are quite an expert — how many “anthroposophists” do you really know elena ? i work with some and based on my personal experiences i can say it’s like any other “walk of life” — there are some “good” and some “bad” and sometimes the “good” are “bad” and sometimes the “bad” are “good.” (of course this is but a subjective and personal opinion… but at least i can freely admit to it being so and i don’t have to speak in ‘absolutes’ like you do here).
e: “…making of it nothing more than another decadent cult like the Fellowship of Friends…”
you really are an expert eh elena ? you seem to know this from the inside out… eh ? you compare apples and oranges and you say they are the same because both are round…. what does that say about you ?
Life!
40 #
ton
2010/06/15 at 7:46 pm
elena, the excerpt speaks for itself, i’ll leave the ‘disagreeing with’ and ‘critique’ of the text to you, since that seems to be your special preoccupation here…
what about “indirect personal attacks” is that ok elena, it seems that indirect personal attacks are allowed here on planet elena, because that’s exactly what you are doing in your post. what you write elena, is part of the “text” — “the text” is not only what you decide to cut and paste from other authors… and when i comment on what you write elena, that’s part of ‘the text’ as well — you can edit it out, but that doesn’t change the truth. you edit out my comments because they disagree with you and then you try to justify it with flimsy excuses AND YOU DON’T SEE THIS AS AN ATTACK ON ME?!? but it’s ok for you to attack me, right elena? at least as long as it’s ‘indirect’ rather than ‘direct’ — you feel “justified” because after all it is your blog and you DICTATE the rules, right ? that’s fine, just admit that you are dictating the rules and that anyone else who wishes to freely express an opinion is subject to your summary judgement…. AND you mistakenly place the blame on me for your banishment from the fofblog so you feel further justified in banning me here… so much for your idealized and lofty notions about the “public square” and “freedom of speech” elena…. this just proves what i’ve suspected about you all along, you’re nothing but a self-righteous fraud, a foolish hypocrite who acts like a spoiled petulant child. this is further proof that “we” — that’s you and i elena — are obviously not one, no matter how many times you repeat it, that will not make it true…. no elena, you and i are two very different people. although you would love to be able to live in this “we are one” fantasy by dictating that “we” should all think, and say, and do only what you approve of, i will continue to fight against a world where intolerant, narrow-minded people like you dictate what is and is not “valid.” you enjoy too much your own vain, pretentious, insincere, and hollow claptrap, elena.
Life!
40 #
ton
2010/06/15 at 3:55 am
lost somewhere in all of the “disagreeing” you do with the previous text, you questioned the author’s view of christianity… i see that much of what you disagree with is simply ‘reactionary’– ‘knee-jerk’ reaction on your part comes from a lack of understanding…. to help deepen your understanding and toward satisfying your stated ‘mandate’ to explore the ‘separation of state and religion,’ may i suggest a book, here’s an excerpt that pertains to some of what you’ve pondered here in the past… no reactionary response is required, you have nothing to prove elena.
“THE FACT that the Divine, the Word, the eternal Logos was no longer met only on a spiritual plane in the dark secrecy of the Mysteries but that in speaking about the Logos they were indicating the historical and human personality of Jesus, must have exercised the deepest influence upon those who acknowledged Christianity. Previously the Logos had been seen as reality only in different stages of human perfection. It was possible to observe the delicate, subtle differences in the spiritual life of the personality and to see in what manner and degree the Logos became living within the individual personalities seeking initiation. A higher degree of maturity had to be interpreted as a higher stage in the evolution of spiritual existence. The preparatory steps had to be sought in a past spiritual life. And the present life had to be regarded as the preparatory stage for future stages of spiritual evolution. The conservation of the spiritual power of the soul and the eternity of that power could be assumed from the Jewish esoteric teaching (The Zohar), “Nothing in the world is lost, nothing falls into the void, not even the words and voice of man; everything has its place and destination.” (see Note 72) The one personality was only a metamorphosis of the soul which changes from personality to personality. The single life of the personality was considered only as a link in the chain of development reaching forward and backward. Through Christianity this changing Logos is directed from the individual personality to the unique personality of Jesus. What previously had been distributed throughout the world was now united in a unique personality. Jesus became the unique God-Man. In Jesus something once was present which must appear to man as the greatest of ideals and with which in the course of man’s repeated earthly lives he ought in the future to be more and more united. Jesus took upon himself the apotheosis of the whole of humanity. In him was sought what formerly could be sought only in a man’s own soul. What had always been found as divine and eternal in the human personality had been taken from it. And all this eternal could be seen in Jesus. It is not the eternal part in the soul that conquers death and is raised as divine through its own power, but the one God who was in Jesus, will appear and raise the souls. From this it follows that an entirely new significance was given to personality. The eternal, immortal part had been taken from it. Only the personality as such was left. If eternity were not to be denied, immortality must be ascribed to the personality itself. The belief in the soul’s eternal metamorphosis became the belief in personal immortality. The personality gained infinite importance because it was the only thing in man to which he could cling. — Henceforth there is nothing between the personality and the infinite God. A direct relationship with Him must be established. Man was no longer capable of becoming divine himself in a greater or lesser degree; he was simply man, standing in a direct but outward relationship to God. Those who knew the ancient Mystery-conceptions were bound to feel that this brought quite a new note into the conception of the world. Many people found themselves in this position during the first centuries of Christianity. They knew the nature of the Mysteries; if they wished to become Christians they were obliged to come to terms with the old method. This brought them into difficult conflicts within their souls. They tried in the most varied ways to find a balance between the divergent world conceptions. This conflict is reflected in the writings of early Christian times, both of pagans attracted by the sublimity of Christianity and of those Christians who found it hard to give up the ways of the Mysteries. Christianity grew slowly out of Mystery wisdom. On the one hand Christian convictions were presented in the form of the Mystery truths, and on the other the Mystery wisdom was clothed in Christian words. Clement of Alexandria (died 217 A.D.), a Christian writer whose education had been pagan, provides an instance of this: “Thus the Lord did not hinder us from doing good while keeping the Sabbath, but allowed us to communicate of those divine mysteries, and of that holy light, to those who are able to receive them. He did not disclose to the many what did not belong to the many; but to the few to whom he knew that they belonged, who were capable of receiving and being moulded according to them. But secret things are entrusted to speech, not to writing, as God confided the unutterable mystery to the Logos, not to the written word.” — “God gave to the church some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” (see Note 73) By the most diverse means personalities tried to find the way from the ancient conceptions to the Christian ones. And each of them, believing he was on the right path, called the others heretics. Side by side with the latter, the Church grew stronger as an external institution. The more power it gained the more the path recognized as the right one by the decisions of councils took the place of personal investigation. It was for the Church to decide who deviated too far from the divine truth which it guarded. The concept of a “heretic” took firmer and firmer shape. During the first centuries of Christianity the search for the divine path was a much more personal matter than it became later. A long distance had to be traveled before Augustine’s conviction could become possible: “I should not believe the Gospel except as moved by the authority of the Church.” (see Note in Chapter 6)
The conflict between the method of the Mysteries and that of the Christian religion acquired a special stamp through the various “Gnostic” sects and writers. We may class as Gnostics all the writers of the first Christian centuries who sought for a deeper spiritual sense in Christian teachings. (A brilliant account of the development of Gnosis is given in G. R. S. Mead’s book mentioned above, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten.) We understand the Gnostics when we look upon them as saturated with the ancient wisdom of the Mysteries and striving to understand Christianity from that point of view. For them Christ is the Logos. As such He is above all of a spiritual nature. In His primal essence He cannot approach man from without. He must be awakened in the soul. But the historical Jesus must bear some relationship to this spiritual Logos. This was the crucial question for the Gnostics. Some settled it in one way, some in another. The essential point common to them all was that to arrive at a true understanding of the Christ-idea, mere historical tradition was not sufficient, but that it must be sought either in the wisdom of the Mysteries or in the Neoplatonic philosophy which was derived from the same source. The Gnostics had faith in human wisdom, and believed it capable of bringing forth a Christ by whom the historical Christ could be measured. In fact, through the former alone could the latter be understood and beheld in the right light.
From this point of view the doctrine given in the books of Dionysius the Areopagite is of special interest. It is true that there is no mention of these writings until the sixth century. But it matters little when and where they were written; the point is that they give an account of Christianity which is clothed in the language of Neoplatonic philosophy, and presented in the form of a spiritual vision of the higher world. In any case this is a form of presentation belonging to the first Christian centuries. In olden times this presentation was handed on in the form of oral tradition; in fact the most important things were not entrusted to writing. Christianity thus presented could be regarded as reflected in the mirror of the Neoplatonic world conception. Sense-perception dims man’s spiritual vision. He must go beyond the material world. But all human concepts are derived primarily from observation by the senses. What man observes with his senses he calls existent; what he does not so observe he calls non-existent. Therefore if he wishes to open up an actual view of the divine he must go beyond existence and non-existence, for as he conceives them these also have their origin in the sphere of the senses. In this sense God is neither existent nor non-existent. He is super-existent. Consequently He cannot be attained by means of ordinary perception, which has to do with existing things. We must be raised above ourselves, above our sense-observation, above our reasoning logic if we are to find the bridge to spiritual conception; then we are able to get a glimpse into the perspectives of the divine. — But this super-existent divinity has brought forth the Logos, the foundation of the universe, filled with wisdom. Man’s lower powers are able to reach Him. He is present in the structure of the world as the spiritual Son of God; He is the mediator between God and man. He may be present in man in various stages. For instance, He may be realized in an external institution, in which those variously imbued with His spirit are grouped into a hierarchy. A “Church” of this kind is the material reality of the Logos, and the power which lives in it lived personally in the Christ become flesh, in Jesus. Thus through Jesus the Church is united to God; in Him lies its meaning and crowning-point.
One thing was clear to all Gnosis: one must come to terms with the idea of Jesus as a personality. Christ and Jesus must be brought into relationship with each other. Divinity was taken from human personality and must be recovered in one way or another. It must be possible to find it again in Jesus. The mystic was dealing with a degree of divinity within himself, and with his own earthly material personality. The Christian was dealing with the latter and also with a perfect God, far above all that is humanly attainable. If we hold firmly to this conception a fundamentally mystical attitude of soul is only possible when the soul finds the higher spiritual element in itself and its spiritual eye is opened so that the light issuing from the Christ in Jesus falls upon it. The union of the soul with its highest powers is at the same time union with the historical Christ. For mysticism is a direct feeling and experience of the divine within the soul. But a God far transcending everything human can never dwell in the soul in the real sense of the word. Gnosis and all subsequent Christian mysticism represent the effort in one way or another to lay hold of that God and to apprehend Him directly in the soul. A conflict in this case was inevitable. In reality it was only possible for a man to find his own divine part; but this is a human-divine part, that is, a divine part at a certain stage of development. Yet the Christian God is a definite one, perfect in Himself. It was possible for a person to find in himself the power to strive upward to this God, but he could not say that what he experienced in his own soul at any stage of development was one with God. A gulf appeared between what it was possible to perceive in the soul and what Christianity described as divine. It is the gulf between knowledge and belief, between cognition and religious feeling. This gulf does not exist for a mystic in the old sense of the word. He knows that he can comprehend the divine only by degrees, and he also knows why this is so. It is clear to him that this gradual attainment is a real attainment of the true, living divinity and he finds it difficult to speak of a perfect, isolated divine principle. A mystic of this kind does not wish to recognize a perfect God, but he wishes to experience the divine life. He wishes to become divine himself; he does not wish to gain an external relationship to the Godhead. It is of the essence of Christianity that its mysticism in this sense starts with an assumption. The Christian mystic seeks to behold divinity within himself, but he must look to the historical Christ as his eyes do to the sun; just as the physical eye says to itself, By means of the sun I see what I have power to see, so the Christian mystic says to himself, I will intensify my innermost being in the direction of divine vision, and the light which makes such vision possible is given in the Christ who has appeared. He is, and through this I am able to rise to the highest within myself. In this the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages show how they differ from the mystics of the ancient Mysteries. (See my book, Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens. Berlin, 1901, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, Englewood, New Jersey, 1960, Volume 3 of the Centennial Edition of the Written Works of Rudolf Steiner, 1861–1961.)
2010/06/15 at 3:34 am
e: “Just for your information I will only allow posts that refer to the subject in question and not me personally to get through to the blog. That is why I passed the previous four. But I guess if you aren’t printing somebody else’s material, you’ve nothing of your own to say besides personally diminishing others.I’m so glad I’ve managed to stop you from your tactics!
Elena”
and of course you dictate the ‘subject’ in question… so much for ‘the public square’ eh elena? so you’ll ‘allow’ comments which you deem ‘worthy’ and edit out anything that does not ‘suit’ you… so much for tolerance, eh elena? you are the most intolerant person i’ve never met… all the preaching you do here means nothing because in actual fact you are a complete hippocrit… you represent the ‘nazi’ mentality that you so vociferously preach against… there is an old saying in my country… and this is a perfect example of “the kettle calling the pot black” — elena, you are someone who has dedicated hours, weeks, days months and years to filling the many, many volumes of your blogspace with the “printing of somebody else’s” material… and yet you criticize me for doing the same. your ‘critiques’ here are transparent attempts to build up a false sense of self-esteem by making yourself feel ‘smarter’ than others, to increase your own sense of self-aggrandizement by ‘arguing’ against ‘someone’ who doesn’t argue back. elena, your problem is that you don’t understand what the ‘subject’ is here on your blog… YOU ARE the subject, and that’s what you fail to recognize… that’s what i’ve been pointing out all along… and all this ‘stuff’ you spend so many hours and days and weeks and months culling and cutting and pasting from the web, it’s all being selected by and filtering THROUGH THE SUBJECT — that’s you… now i ask, what’s the object?
Life!
40 #
ton
2010/06/14 at 5:44 pm
e: “Thank you Ton for giving me an opportunity to clarify my understanding through these texts. I realize you probably didn’t offer them so that I would expand my self so lavishly but, c’est la vie!”
i expect nothing less from you than to “expand so lavishly” — as you are wont to do in any and all cases anyway… i could think of other words for this ‘tendency’ of yours… but never mind that, i’m glad you are able to find some food for thought… although it seems that you misjudge the “spirit” of the text in some cases… it’s an overview, not a defense of the various perspectives presented… it’s an attempt to put the philosophy of individualism (the concept of the “I”) into a developmental/ historical context… i thought you could take it for what it’s worth, but you seem to be much more carried away with and interested in your own critique than the developmental progression which the author identifies…. maybe this has to do with the ‘source’ — ?
e: “That is what you and I have been disagreeing about Ton.”
there’s a lot we do not agree on elena… i see you’re now editing out my comments from your blog… but of course there’s not enough room here for my comments, after all, you have so many, much more important things to ‘say’ — and heaven forbid that an actual human interaction might occur here in your own personal ivory tower… but i understand, isolation is more comfortable for you, so i’ll leave you to it.
True personality you mean? His whole system in my opinion is so very similar to the work if one is willing to understand them both. I do believe Steiner went much further than Gurdjieff, Ouspensky or Collin to apply the knowledge to life but their synthesis is of immense value even to understand Steiner who did exactly the opposite of what they did: expand on the system practically without giving a simple easy synthesis as they did. That’s awfully unfair because they did expand minutely in terms of inner processes which Steiner didn’t but Steiner expanded beautifully in agriculture, medicine, education, etc.
In Steiner it’s as if each of his ramifications in agriculture, dance, medicine etc were the extended dimensions of each center while in Rodney Collin what we have is the understanding of laws that can apply to every sphere.
They are all so wonderful and necessary! It’s interesting that both still develop cults and descending processes but that is also a law is it not?
Yes, i mean true one-
Steiner developed a cult ?
I read S many years ago (Theory ìf colours and Agriculture) and liked so much that things has a meaning connected to his form(the horn of a cow, a yellow pear from Jupiter etc)
What i not bought was the theosophy story of the world (saturn moon etc) but was so complex that i not go deeper.
I liked story about Jesus too-
Now i have read a book from an Italian (Augusto Timperanza: the seven key of the path, “Le 7chiavi del sentiero”. He studied with Thomasson then found some fanatical in the group and studied Steiner.
When i find time i shall translate(ahi ahi)some interesting thoughts of him
Sounds good, if you have them in your computer and wish to put them in Italian I might be game for it if you put one at a time!
Yes, the theosophy story of the world is pretty exotic but not more than Gurdjieff’s Belzebub. I do think other dimensions get that exotic in relation to what we are used to. What I liked about the theosophy story is that when looked at carefully, it does fit with the rest of his theory and it is not far from the theory of worlds if one wishes to adapt it. The “fragments” of the system don’t really expand on what all those worlds are about but I Steiner goes all the way to the roots and when the theories are practically applied in medicine, agriculture, nutrition and so many of the sciences people are delving into there’s beautiful coherence in them all. I find that tremendously exiting and even more so when, knowing Gurdjieff’s system it equally fits.
Sometimes I think that the value of all this systems is that, even if they were all just made up stories to give us a hint of what it’s like, they, like fairy tales, end up giving us a very good view of what the inner world of matter is like. I don’t think of matter and the spiritual as two opposite sides but rather as two, equally necessary sides of the same coin and more in terms of root and flower in one plant than even two sides of the same coin. If we water the plant out here the beautiful flower will give strong seeds to the following generation! You might think those “generations” are nonsense again but it’s good to disagree and still share.
It really is wonderful to be off and away from the computer. I’m having so much fun working on other things that my back is beginning to protest. Blogging, or the idea that there are humans with whom to share on the other side held me since I left the Fellowship cult and poor replacement as it might have been it was a thousand times better than the cult! Pity that the cult on the internet wasn’t too much better than the one inside and that I made so many mistakes along with the rest of us.
It’s good to feel alive again, alive and with perspectives. Tonight I sat outside and played the guitar for the little children from the neighborhood, five of them who sang along and made up stories about the people. Summer is beginning to move in and it was the first warm evening in the past two months. Here too it’s been raining a lot but not so badly.
I’m sorry for the people in Pakistan who are suffering such floods.
As time passes away from the cult one of the realizations that begins to become more pronounced is the understanding that ACTS determine our inner life as much as our external life and that is why the way people relate to each other, act towards each other and do things in definite contexts, matters.
What I’m finding is very new to me so this is more of an exploration than a finished work.
To take an example I would like to think about music.
There is an objective value to playing an instrument for the player. In regular society we do not quantify the value of an act like playing a piano in terms of the quality of energy that that action will give the player but in relation to understanding the octave of impressions, we would necessarily have to understand that there is an specific quality to the act that could be quantified if we had an instrument to measure the state of people’s soul! And don’t we measure that by the “state of being” of the individual? We do not have numbers to that yet but we should surely be able to add numbers to such states and say without doubt that a person who has just tried to commit suicide is in a “cero state of being” and what I mean by a “cero state of being” is that the individual in question has reached the lowest level that the “I” can reach. Yes, this is something I’ve been trying to express for the past four years. Clarifying these different spheres should surely help in psychoanalysis because what we don’t seem to have understood until recently (or was it only I?) is that what conditions our “states” is our I. It conditions them so precisely that one could almost affirm that the “I” of the individual is not really an objective object that can be measured and pointed at but that in itself it is a “state” and that that “state” is what is in a permanent process. This is beautiful! Beautiful because the urge of the rational mind to encapsulate the I into a definite form is an impossibility and the malleability of the I is it’s true mystery. The urge of the mind to reduce the idea of “being” to a fixed entity is what keeps it from understanding the wholeness of life. The fact that we are psychologically fixed in the objects we see keeps us from perceiving the movement they are in.
So if we are clear about the “I” as a “fluctuating state” and activity as an “actor” on such states, we can begin to view the objective quality of actions. Acts act on the individual as much as on the external world. It seems to me that we’ve been concentrating on the individuals to understand our lives but the individual is only an aspect of our lives while other individuals and what we do is an equally relevant aspect of our lives. We are ourselves only one of the many ingredients of our own life! I’m particularly interested in this analysis in relation to healing processes because as time passes away from the cult, I am convinced that we can significantly change not only our societies in the long run but our tactics of healing our selves and our communities. I might be discovering that “water is warm” as we say, for what I am saying is that for an individual to become “normal” he has to be “normal” and normality as viewed by traditional society as an individual that is able to perform “socially healthily”. The standardized concept of “normality” is that of a person able to “work”, “make money”, “have friends”, “participate”… but what these words mean for people in the different social classes and nationalities is very different. We seem to be generalizing what things are for all people but things are very different for people in different social classes to begin with. For people in the upper middle classes and above, to be normal means to work, to be creative, make money and have friends, all of which make you socially acceptable while for people in lower classes, to work means to work for others and accept the conditions of labour. To submit your life force to the production objects that will place the owners in a position of privilege that allows them to be “creative” in their lives even if they rarely do become such creative beings. Creativity is not necessary when you’re supposed to do a totally uncreative job. But being unable to “create” and to be “creative” is the most pervasive condition against the “I” for the “I” is in itself a “creative” entity. This is the main cause of suicide in companies like the Telecom of Paris today. “Being productive”, “earning a living” is not enough to keep the human being of today alive.
To be “normal and healthy” in the lower classes means to submit to conditions of repression of the individual necessity to create and accept the role of servant to other people’s creations and interests all your life. If you do not accept those conditions you will certainly be sacked or not get the job. In every single activity there is the potential for creativity but that potential is appropriated by the people in power and THAT is what makes us unequal as human beings today, THAT is what needs to change.) The other aspect of today’s suicide’s in companies is that people are moved from one place to another as if they were machines without connections and those radical “displacements” affect them so profoundly that they not only loose their social connections but their contact with their own self enough to take their own lives.
Going back to the activity of music, the way the activity fortifies the player’s inner self is significant. Do people think about this or is it just taken for granted? Is it simply obvious? That is, that playing an instrument has a particular quality of it’s own and reverts into the player’s being in a particular way?
A second sphere is the act of playing music in public. The Public ads a dimension to the experience that makes it of value not only for the player but for the listeners. There is a “community” element in the experience. The question with public experiences that I’m interested in exploring more deeply as I go along is the difference between a “mass” experience and a “community” experience to call it some how.
The third sphere of the act itself is that of it’s intention, its “aim”. In the cult there is a concert practically every week. The music is beautiful like it is in any other concert hall in the world but the EVENT is used to “legitimize the cult”. Understanding this is what I’m after: the way things are used to legitimize particular status quos that people are wishing to impose on other people. Art is used in cults to manipulate people but then when it’s not art it’s some other “ideal” what is used to legitimize it.
What were the aims of the cult?
“Awakening” was supposed to be the main aim. That was used to justify every renunciation members had to do to accomplish it. So what did people actually renounce to?
Their freedom to act from their own understanding?
Their own understanding in relation to their life and the world around them?
What were people actually escaping from?
Was it not the fact that we were equally submitted and powerless in regular society, no matter what class we belong to?
Don’t most cult members join cults because they are trying to take hold of their lives that in regular society has gotten out of their hands? That basically the dimensions of regular society are such that people preferred to let it aside and disconnect themselves from its processes and make up their own smaller version of a “community” that they thought they could handle? And wasn’t trying to avoid the “human national and international community” a trap of its own?
My hypothesis is that human beings need the community and that that is a legitimate need. That that NEED is being lived out unconsciously and therefore it is used and manipulated by people in different spheres of power to take advantage of other people but that if we become conscious and therefore absolutely clear about that NEED as a reality we will stop making up cults to live it out and rather address the real issues that being a community of human beings implies; That the problems of distribution can be more conscientiously solved if we are clear that the aim is to “help” each other out. When we look at history and the division of people in clans, nationalities, religions, etc, it’s clear that if we are going to talk about equality it can only be an equality in terms of our humaneness not in terms of our particular differences; That as human beings it is our responsibility with each other to guarantee the minimum conditions for life to develop.
The breach between beliefs and practical life becomes ever so clear when groups of people pretend to apply those ideals only to the people within their clan, nationality or race, academic status or social class and not to everyone. This inability to act with the same integrity towards all human beings and justify every atrocity when it is committed against others who do not belong to it, is the greatest aberration of our condition as human beings today. This equally happens on the scale of the individual. The supra efforts an individual is willing to make for the “loved” one are particularly interesting when that same individual is able to perform without the slightest care towards those that are not the “loved” one.
What is so difficult about this subject is that what is being questioned is how people “love” and nothing is more precious to people than what they “love” and what we need to come to realize is that our “love” is too biased to be “love” that what we’ve been calling “love” are simply our very personal identifications and that our “identifications” are just another aspect of our immaturity as human beings. That the emotional imbalance of people, when for example we fall in love and see no other aim than the loved one and deploy all our “arms” and selves towards the realization of that love, is basically that: emotional imbalance when it is followed by extreme carelessness in other areas. The ego thinks it is a great ego because it has a huge capacity to love THAT one individual above everything and everyone but LOVE is not in that uniqueness, that is just egoness out on “the ramp”. All those of us who “love” like that are mere beginners in the Art of Love, we are being trained to tackle our own energy and all the suffering that we go through is necessary to learn the lesson that love is not an arrow directed at an object but an “air” in which everyone is able to breathe with equal guarantees.
The same process can be observed in relation to our ideals. While for women, the main identification might be related to their “love”, for men the tendency to behave likewise but in relation to ideas in social contexts seems equally imbalanced. The analysis is tricky because if we were to take the case of “the real thing” the behaviour involved is equally unidirectional only that it is unidirectionally omnidirectional and THAT is the difference. In a state of integrity, a human being will maintain a unidirectional behaviour in everything he or she does but that “directionality” will be embedded in an “omnidirectionality” that maintains the balance within it. It is like a line born from within the sphere of the circle going or coming in and out of itself forming another circle at each step from the line. Circle, line, circle… like a child come out of the womb, like a human being embedded in his or her humaneness.
It is not easy to be such being. What is interesting about our struggles is that what reveals the state we are in is not what we are struggling for but how we are struggling for it. The words matter some but it is not the words but the acts what reveals our self.
And harsh words are in themselves harsh acts. It’s a very great lesson to understand the pervasiveness of one’s egoness.
The subject is wide open still. An exploration is just that and it is normal to explore the whole region before one actually gets to the point. It doesn’t make the treasure any less valuable.
Going back to the value of acts what I am trying to get to is to the idea that each act has a different quality of energy and that the way it affects the I is of absolute significance to the “state” of that “I”. That is one aspect of acts. The second aspect is that an act has a certain power of its own but it will act for or against the individual in accordance with the aim of the act itself. In the cult every individual tried to perform every act most conscientiously but all those acts turned against those very individuals because the acts were disconnected from the community and the individual performing them. This is important! The aim of each individual was supposed to be “awakening” so we were supposed to act with the greatest effort and intention but our effort and intention only went as far as the act itself. The individual had to severe himself from the action and perform it for the benefit of the cult and disconnect his own self from the “creativity” within the action or the cult. This is very tricky to explain or understand because while the act itself was done with intentionality, it was not a “free” act, it was conditioned by the guru’s guidelines. This is important because the guru maintained the power and weakened the power of the members precisely by limiting them in the action. The action which in itself is creative was reduced to an act of repetition without creativity and the challenge of the actor became to act the act as if it were an act of creativity without the creativity which in the long run weakened each and every individual attempting it.
It seems such an obvious thing and yet it hasn’t been obvious for me in fifty years so why would it be so obvious for others? That is, that human beings are like divine beings in their doing and each act is full of meaning?
Maybe that is why unconscious people in essence are not accountable, because we are still in “Paradise”, ignorant of what we’re doing!!! Isn’t that beautiful?
And then when we do know we become accountable and the price for each of our acts is ever so high. And yet there is a balance.
Wouldn’t that help explain that difficult idea of the System that man cannot do? Are we then already more than mere humans when we become accountable for our acts? Not that we’re really ever not accountable for every act ads up and one knows the price sooner or later, but it becomes increasingly expensive as one moves along and at the same time the pleasure in paying for it is so much greater, just as if one had actually accumulated enough money in the bank!
It is a very wonderful thing to feel the subtle “hidrogens” of “acts”. Does it happen to people as we get older? That we learn to tread gently that we might not fall so often?
It’s ironic that we learn to do that as our bodies are conditioned to do it so that we don’t actually fall in its weakness no matter how strong we’ve become. It really is a humbling experience how the body gets older and tired and weaker and still carries the whole of one’s life. It is heavy, and the body seems to enjoy the load like a donkey would, at least mine does, it doesn’t mind how the weight has bent its back and it knows that sooner than later there’ll be time to rest… yes, like donkeys or horses on the way back home, hurrying the step a little somewhat anxious to get there.
Asked to write a short piece on the topic of beginning again recently, I reflected on the possibility of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians re-starting in the coming days and weeks.
I wrote that – when it comes to trying something again – there’s often a little too much “can’t” in the world, and not enough “why not?”
It’s just my nature, but I find little else as frustrating as being told a problem isn’t solvable, or a goal unattainable.
I never understood why, in law school, professors rewarded students for spotting issues and problems – rather than for coming up with solutions.
Nor do I understand why bold, new thinking so often meets out-of-hand rejection. I just point to my friend who pitched several companies fifteen years ago with the design of a slim machine on which you could read books without paper. They laughed.
Coming up with reasons not to take chances is easy. Passing the buck, pinning the blame on someone else, saying you can’t – all easy.
But, in my book, trying and failing is no excuse for not starting again.
We tell our children to get back in the saddle when they fall off a bike and to get back in the batter’s box when they swing and miss.
Why do we accept anything less as adults – in matters as important as life and death, war and peace?
Sure, we’ve all heard why Middle East peace can’t happen. How there are no partners. How everything was tried ten years ago and it failed. We’ve been told that those of us who believe are few and far between and that our limited power can’t have an impact.
But why not?
That’s my thought for Mahmoud Abbas this weekend as he ponders whether to say yes or no to starting direct talks with Israel. Click here to read J Street’s statement from last week urging Abbas to enter direct negotiations.
Beginning anew means refusing to accept things as they are. It means believing that, with effort, the power of good, of hope and of peace can and will overcome the daunting power of the status quo.
New beginnings demand that we dream a better future and relentlessly ask why not.
Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will require President Abbas, Prime Minister Netanyahu and, yes, President Obama to lead, to take risks, to defy the naysayers … and to begin again.
Check out the animated video short, “Web Democracy,” by Post Modern Times for an interview with the author about the main ideas in this article. To view it, go to the PMT page on iClips and click on “Web Democracy” on the episodes list.
1. Networking a Green Democracy
In September 2000, I was invited to a unique gathering that brought together high-level Internet engineers with environmental activists and media professionals to strategize about the future of the Internet and the fate of the planet. In a beautiful retreat center surrounded by tall redwoods and Northern California mountains, we spent an intensive weekend discussing how new kinds of information technology could be used, not to make money, but to make our society more equitable and sustainable. Though you might think this sort of brainstorming session was common during the dot com boom years, that wasn’t the case. Activists and indy media pros rarely had direct access to top technologists. Since most funding for software development comes from big corporations, non-profit organizations and other social initiatives ended up using low-rent versions of tools built for business purposes. But for this gathering, we gave ourselves the freedom to ask if a different type of technology — created with social, rather than business, goals in mind — might incite a much deeper level of societal transformation. The conversation we started that weekend changed the direction of my life.
This possibility had inspired a tiny organization called Planetwork, which held a conference the previous May on the theme “Global Ecology and Information Technology.” At the time, these two subjects were an unlikely pairing. Few people saw a connection between the organic complexity of the natural world and the cold, corporate character of the military innovation called the Internet. But when I heard about the conference, I was thrilled that someone had made this linkage.
But then I always saw the Net differently than my dot com colleagues. During my twenties and early thirties I’d lived in New York’s East Village, splitting my time between community activism for peace groups and the homeless, and the downtown arts scene, hanging out with avant-gardists like Allen Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, and Richard Foreman. My day job was in book publishing, which was the family business. I got involved with the Web early on because of the opportunities it offered to create independent media, free from the control of global conglomerates, and led the launch of the Web’s first multimedia music zine, SonicNet.com, which in its early days was devoted to alternative rock and edge culture. My curiosity about the origins of digital media — “Where did hyperlinks come from?” “What was the first online community?” — led to my collaboration on an anthology that traces the history of computers as an expressive medium. From that research, I understood that the Internet’s potential went far beyond the basic combo of websites and email. But I hadn’t realized how profoundly the tools we use to communicate can effect how society operates, how people organize collaborative efforts, and how power is distributed among citizens. The meeting in the redwoods opened my eyes to amazing opportunities for a major societal shift.
Following the Planetwork conference, some of the organizers and participants convened about two dozen people for two days of blue sky conjecture, and I was invited. [1] Upon arrival, our hosts handed out a thought-provoking proposal that encouraged us to think outside the box. Consider this: There are easily 10 million Americans who feel strongly about the environment and want to do something that will make a difference. Is it possible to gather these people into a “green AOL” (at the time AOL was the largest online community), aggregate their purchasing power, and catalyze a network of green consumers that could help shift the market toward sustainable practices? Imagine what would happen if a coordinated green buying block was there to support new green and fair labor products and services, alternatives to the standard stuff offered by the market.
This kind of scenario was rarely, if ever, presented to high level IT pros, at least not by people from politics and media who might take their ideas seriously, and maybe even act upon them. Though quite a few engineers have progressive politics and sometimes — if they live in Berkeley — vote for the Green Party, their salaries come from industry or government clients who pay them to do engineering tasks that follow standard business models. They program systems that, in effect, support society as it is; they aren’t asked to envision society as it could be.
But when presented with the “green AOL” scenario, the techies in the room grew visibly excited and proposed a slew of extraordinary possibilities. What the techies realized — and what eventually dawned upon the rest of us — was that when you design communications systems using digital network technology, you are actually designing the behavior of the people who use the system. Most business IT is geared to make the people who use it more efficient as workers or consumers. Why not design communications tools that made people better, more engaged, citizens?
While most non-techies, and even many techies, rarely look at digital networks from this perspective, this potential was never lost on Douglas Engelbart, the visionary who invented interactive, collaborative computing in the 1960s. It was Engelbart’s lab at the Stanford Research Institute that gave us most of the ingredients that make the Web possible: sophisticated text editing, hyperlinks, online publishing, networked community, video conferencing, and the mouse. Unlike the businessmen who later turned interactive computing into a billion dollar industry, Englebart’s motive wasn’t to get rich (he didn’t), but rather to create a system that helped people to collaborate to solve the increasingly complex problems facing society. [2] He expected that there would always be a deliberate effort to improve our digital network tools based on the way people use them, and that society’s needs would be paramount in the development of these systems. [3]
After making amazing headway and launching a fully functioning prototype — which in some ways is still more advanced than today’s World Wide Web — Engelbart was in for a shock when public funding for his research dried up in the 70s. The purpose of digital media shifted to automating offices, rather than enabling increasingly sophisticated forms of collaboration to address complex problems. Tech innovation became driven by short-term market trends, and most people came to expect that high tech would always serve corporate and military interests.
But by that time, as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were first appearing on the scene, the key ingredients of today’s digital network were already baked into the system. Over the years, more and more people have noticed that the Web has certain democratic characteristics. They point to:
* How the Internet’s mesh-like, distributed architecture allows people to connect directly (peer-to-peer) rather than through centralized, hierarchical hubs;
* The way messages can flow in any direction, unlike the traditional “broadcast” model where information is sent to the masses from a centralized source;
* The fact that anyone anywhere can add a website to the network that can be seen by anyone else on the network at any time, and that each new website can potentially reach an international audience; and
* The way every digital file can be copied and replicated exactly, giving rise to the mantra “information wants to be free.”
The fact is, the folks who designed this system — west coast researchers like Engelbart and his team of grad students, many of whom took part in the Sixties counterculture [4] — knew what they were doing. The democratic potential of the Net did not appear by accident. Rather, the system these engineers designed embodied values that prized sharing, collaboration and transparency, and reflected a deep distrust of centralized, hierarchical authority. Military money may have paid for much of it, but the generals who signed the checks never fully grasped what they were funding. [5]
During our weekend retreat in the California redwoods, the techies — who aligned themselves with the Engelbart tradition — offered different approaches to mobilizing large numbers of people around shared objectives, and providing them with tools to coordinate their actions. The idea of a “green AOL,” though useful to consider as a conversation starter, was quickly rejected because a couple of us had worked with massive online communities like AOL and Prodigy, and were aware of the huge infrastructure and personnel expense necessary to support a single website with 10 million members (although that cost has come down quite a bit in the years since).
We began to explore other ways of connecting 10 million people online. As it turned out, there were several. The Net’s architects designed it that way. The techies brought up obscure, cutting-edge innovations that the rest of us had never heard of, but which have since become widespread, such as online social networking, Web page maps that displayed dynamic geo-spatial data, and personalized information delivery via online subscriptions. It took a while for most of us to grasp what these bizarre gizmos do — actually, it took a series of meetings every two months for over a year — but since then these abstract concepts have been made concrete thanks to Friendster, Google Maps, and RSS.
What the world hasn’t seen, however, are versions of these tools developed explicitly in the public interest to serve civil society. Imagine a Friendster (or, in today’s parlance, a Facebook) that connects you to a network of green shoppers in your community so you can coordinate purchases of local produce. Imagine using Google Maps to find farms in your area, and by clicking on the farm you could see how its water use is effecting the local water table. Imagine subscribing to RSS updates about water usage in your region that get sent when there is a drastic fall in water table level. And imagine being able to connect with all the other people in your community who have subscribed to that RSS update each time the water table drops to a danger point, so you can organize a community response to this environmental threat — and make sure to purchase produce only from farms that protect the water table.
This is a simplistic example, to be sure, but hopefully it makes a point: IT can be shaped to serve the public interest. We live in the era of databases. An extraordinary amount of information is already being captured on hard drives; every day it becomes easier and less expensive to do so. By linking computers to the Internet, that data becomes available to inform the public about how society manages its resources. It can also enable each of us to connect with others so we can self-organize into groups to take action.
These citizen action tools don’t exist today, but that’s not because of the engineering obstacles, which are relatively small. As the techies told us again and again at that redwoods summit, the challenge isn’t technical, it’s social. As a society, we simply do not make it a priority to design and deploy online systems that enable people to be more engaged in their communities.
2. Forming Groups
Of course, the democratic potential built into the Internet is being tapped in many ways. Groups like MoveOn, TrueMajority and Avaaz have waged many successful online campaigns, lobbying for legislation and changes in government policy, attracting millions of volunteers to their causes. Barack Obama stands on the threshold of becoming the next President of the United States, and if he does, his ability to attract donations over the Internet will be a big reason why.
But a more intriguing aspect of the web’s democratic potential is how it enables people with shared interests to spontaneously coalesce into groups of all sizes. In the subtitle of his book Here Comes Everybody, Internet analyst Clay Shirky calls it “the power of organizing without organizations.” The book describes how effective the Net is at attracting people to a project or cause. Shirky offers many examples of how simple tools like email, blogs, wikis and popular social networking sites (like Facebook and Flickr) give someone on a mission the ability to kick off and coordinate campaigns that can grow exponentially, engaging many thousands of people in a matter of weeks or months. Unlike in the pre-web days, these online efforts don’t cost a dollar in printing or mailing expenses. All they require is someone’s time.
Shirky tells how a Boston physician in 2002, after reading newspaper accounts of sex abuse by a Catholic priest, started a group in his basement called Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) to push for church reform. Nothing special about that. But within a few months, at its first convention, VOTF had 25,000 members. Thanks to the Internet the group was able to forward articles from the Boston Globe’s website to a steadily growing e-mail list. Some VOTF members had their own blog sites, where they reached even larger numbers of people, who in turn became VOTF members. As Shirky points out, it had always been possible to clip articles from the paper, Xerox them, and send them by snail mail to a group. But, as he says, “what we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large that it becomes a difference in kind.” [6] In addition, the low cost of aggregating information led to the formation of an activist website, BishopAccountability.org, which “collated accusations of abuse, giving a permanent home to what in the past would have been evanescent coverage.” Online social tools like websites for membership and e-mail for communications, enabled VOTF to “become a powerful force, all while remaining loosely (and largely electronically) coordinated.” A few years earlier, without the Internet, this would have been inconceivable.
Shirky is on the mark when he describes why digital networks have reduced obstacles to collective engagement:
“Technology didn’t cause the [sex] abuse scandal that began in 2002. The scandal was caused by the actions of the church, and many factors affected the severity of reaction in 2002, including the exposure of more of the church’s internal documents and the effectiveness of the Globe’s coverage. That combination was going to lead to substantial reaction in any case. What technology did do was alter the spread, force, and especially duration of that reaction, by removing two obstacles – locality of information, and barriers to group reaction.” [7]
Because of the Internet, people can circulate information more effectively, and gather more easily into group initiatives. But it would be a mistake to see the Internet as it currently exists as having fulfilled its potential. The obstacles that Shirky refers to may have been reduced, but they have not been removed. In the basic architecture of the Internet itself lie many untapped opportunities to extend its ability to support and amplify collective action. What we have today is pretty good, but it could be much better, exponentially so.
The fundamentals of the Internet encourage an open flow of information and connection, directly from one person to another (or to a group), without walls or intermediaries. But in practice, largely because of the online businesses that have been built upon the Net’s foundation, information and group formation can and do bump into walls.
Some walls are built by governments, as in China, where citizens are denied access to certain information. Other walls are more subtle, such as the wall erected by mainstream media to a news story that falls outside its narrow world view, even if that story generates considerable attention among an engaged group of bloggers and readers. Another wall could be imposed by the telecoms and cabal companies, if given their druthers to have a two-tier (or many-tiered) Internet that favors corporate product over independent voices. This threat has given rise to a “net neutrality” movement that has managed to protect the network to date, though future victories are not assured.
Another wall is the one that surrounds every online community, from MySpace to Twitter. When you join any of these sites, you fill out a profile from scratch. That profile information stays with the site, and you can’t take it with you when you go somewhere else online. For instance, when you leave Facebook and log into MySpace, all the information accumulated in your Facebook profile stays behind. Even though you’ve said on Facebook that one of your interests is environmental advocacy to preserve redwoods in northern California, no one on MySpace would know, unless you go through the tedious process of typing that same info into your MySpace profile, which most folks don’t. In fact, the profile you create on these sites isn’t even owned by you. That information is the site’s intellectual property. Their business models are based on the premise that they know what you want (thanks to your profile) so they can sell you things with laser-like efficiency. And they don’t want you to take that data away from them. Usually, they won’t even tell you what they plan to do with it.
But suppose that every time you joined a new online social network, without having to fill out yet another endless series of forms to describe yourself and your interests, people there automatically knew you were a rainforest activist (assuming you wanted them to know). Suppose that part of your “traveling profile” included testimonials from other activists you’ve worked with, so that people who meet you for the first time could see that among activists you have a good reputation. Imagine how much more effective that would make group formation for the environmental movement.
The technology to make this kind of “introduction” service exists today. In fact, there are a number of ways to do it. But don’t expect Facebook or MySpace to spearhead its creation. It’s just not part of their business model; their attention is elsewhere. In today’s climate, if the financial allure of a new digital service isn’t immediately apparent, it’s nearly impossible to steer significant resources towards its development, especially if more than three people in a garage are needed to create a launchable product. The “introduction” service would take more work than that, but not hugely so. Still, this kind of public interest tech is not easy to build a business model around – as a result, it doesn’t get done.
There’s a strange assumption that if an online tool is any good, it ought to make someone rich, even though history tells us otherwise: many of the key ingredients of our digital communications stew were developed in research labs by engineers who never profited from their innovations. For quite some time, though, digital research has been driven by the computer, telecommunications, and entertainment industries (which are increasingly blurring into the same, multi-headed hydra), helping them to advance their existing business practices. Meanwhile, few resources are available for innovating online social tools that make it easier for people to connect to information and each other so they can contribute to a sustainable future.
3. Digital Identity
Let’s return to that September, 2000, blue sky brainstorming session in the California redwoods. That weekend was so highly charged with possibility that the group reconvened every two or three months for a year and a half, switching back and forth between the Bay Area and New York, percolating a new world view based on the opportunities offered to civil society by applied IT innovation. Eventually the group was formally constituted as the Link Tank (“think tank” with a geek twist), though among ourselves we half-jokingly called it the Web Cabal. Some 50 people ultimately took part in these sessions, contributing to a radical vision of an egalitarian, sustainable society made possible by networked digital communications.
What made these summits special was having professional political activists and media makers in detailed discussion with senior engineers who really knew their stuff. These techies were architects of large IT systems that had scaled up to meet the needs of millions of users. Engineers like to solve problems. Usually, engineers are presented with problems like, “How can I protect my intellectual property, so that each time someone downloads my digital thingy, I get paid?” As you would expect, the engineer will then design a system meant to meet that objective. But the Link Tank asked its engineers a different kind of question, such as, “How can millions of people who care about the environment join collectively to take actions that will drive the marketplace to support more sustainable practices?”
As we discussed different scenarios, it became apparent that any system meant to connect one person to another because of their shared interests hinges on the personal “profile” of each participant. Your profile needs to say that you’re an environmental activist in order for other environmental activists to find you and make a connection. So how does that profile get created, and — most importantly — how much control do you have over it once it exists? After all, if your profile only sits on Facebook, and it isn’t even your property but rather is owned by Facebook, its utility is pretty limited. But if you could carry your profile with you across the Internet, like a kind of flag that you wave as you enter a website, and if you could control who has access to your profile information based on criteria that you set (for instance, if you only want to reveal your environmental activism to certified members of Greenpeace), that would greatly increase your opportunity to link with others.
After all, that’s basically how it works in meat space (or, as some refer to it, real life). You don’t leave your identity at the door when you go from one social milieu to another. If you walk into a work meeting and run into a cute girl you met at a Greenpeace rally, you don’t have to tell everyone present that you’re a member of Greenpeace. You always carry experiences from different parts of your life with you, and you can be selective about what aspects of your self that you reveal under different circumstances. Why should online be different? Especially since the underlying structure of the Internet allows for this kind of flexibility.
As we got deeper into it, during these Link Tank discussions we came to realize that digital identity may be the central issue facing civil society in the Internet age. It not only affects how people are able to connect to one another and form groups. It also has implications for how we link to news and information, how we access products and services, how we behave as consumers, and how we participate in our communities as citizens. Once your profile says certain things about you – for instance, that you are interested in green news stories, want to buy locally grown food, and want to participate in zoning efforts that protect the local water table – then it becomes possible to match you to those who feel similarly, as well as to information and services you can use. For some, this kind of personally targeted online experience is increasingly seen as the pinnacle of what the Internet has to offer.
At the same time, digital identity raises issues about privacy protection: who has information about you, what can they do with it, and what options are there to control what they do? What happens if some of the companies you do business with — like Amazon, Disney, and Google — combine the profile data they have about you into a shared file, and use it for purposes you don’t agree with, without your consent? Of even greater concern, what happens if the government gets hold of that information, what privacy protection do we have?
It turns out that identity is the one key ingredient that Engelbart and the other Internet architects didn’t cook into the system. Because so few people used those early networks, they simply didn’t have to worry about it then. If you were on the Internet when it launched the 1970s, everyone knew who you were. Profiles weren’t necessary, and if you acted in a dishonest way or did something to piss others off, they could always find you; they knew where you lived. It was only when the system scaled up to serve millions of people that the identity issue presented itself.
The vision that grew out of the Link Tank was captured in a paper I co-wrote with Jan Hauser and Steven Foster in 2003 called “The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet” [8]. We presented these ideas at a number of conferences, and in certain circles (geek utopian, to be sure) this paper got a lot of play. We figured that the next step was to raise funds for an initiative to nurture this vision and develop some prototypes. But it turned out that the progressive funding world (foundations, NGOs, liberal donors, university research initiatives) wasn’t ready to evaluate cutting-edge tech apps, let alone one based on the idea that the right kind of tech can propagate egalitarian and sustainable values in society. To many people, to this day, communications infrastructure is mistakenly viewed as “values agnostic.”
Nonetheless, a half dozen initiatives did get underway, led by idealistic programmers (and their friends), often at considerable personal and financial sacrifice since support from civil society was fitful at best. Diligently, with their eyes on the prize, they developed different aspects of what became known as “user-centric digital identity.” Privacy specialists made sure this system was secure: you have total control over your personal information, and no one else – including the government – can access it without your permission.
An organization called Identity Commons [9] was established to evangelize this vision, and to provide a venue for coordination. New technologies with arcane names like XDI [10], Higgins [11], i-names [12], Information Cards [13] and OpenID [14] began to get some traction, and a few prototypes — pieces of the whole user-centric digital identity puzzle — were completed. By 2006, these achievements, in turn, attracted the attention of major players with deep pockets.
Who showed up? Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Novell, Yahoo, Google, Verisign, PayPal, and a number of nimble start-up technology firms that came to realize how a trusted, user-based identity system is necessary if the Internet is going to support a wide range of next-generation products and services.
Fingers crossed, a truly visionary digital identity system will be produced by these efforts, and the intentions of the tech utopians who shepherded this vision over the years will be present in the final version. But without the direct involvement of civil society, which has such a great stake in the outcome, it’s hard to say what will happen. It should come as no surprise, however, that the first application of user-centric digital identity will be to enhance your online shopping experience, connecting you more efficiently to stuff you might want to buy — albeit in a less intrusive manner that gives you control over your personal data.
4. Decision Making at the Edges
People often say: society’s problems will not be solved by technology. This implies that you can somehow separate how society operates from the technology we use. It doesn’t recognize that society is shaped by the technology available to us.
In his book The Creation of the Media, Paul Starr offers an example everyone should know of the influence that technical innovation has on social organization. He traces how the emergence of newspapers in the North American colonies in the 18th century, coupled with the creation of a reliable postal service, provided the communications backbone that gave birth to modern representative democracy. Breakthroughs in printing led to the publication of journals, pamphlets and papers in larger numbers, at a lower cost. The postal service distributed these publications in a timely way, so readers across the colonies knew about recent events, removing the “locality of information” obstacle that Clay Shirky referred to. Post offices also encouraged group formation — removing Shirky’s second obstacle: they became social hubs where people read newspapers out loud. Custom held that new papers could be read by anyone who happened by the post office, which mirrors the attitude toward content sharing on today’s Net. In fact, a town’s printing press was often located beside the post office, and items from papers that arrived by post were copied verbatim by printers into their publications, an analog version of email forwarding. In its way, 18th-century communications tech offered an early version of the Internet’s barrier-reducing capabilities.
Armed with information about current affairs, and able to congregate into groups to discuss what they knew, some people in the colonies (white men with property, of course) felt strongly that they should be involved in the decisions made by government that effected their lives. So they chose representatives and sent them by coach to assemble with other representatives in formally constituted bodies to vote on decisions that effected their communities. They used the best technology for group assembly and decision making then available: horse and buggy, face-to-face dialog in public places, the circulation of printed materials to support claims and proposals, roll call votes or paper ballots, and the publication of decisions made so they could be read by other citizens. The result was a form of representative government, practiced in towns and cities across the colonies, that offered the most accountability between governors and the governed that a state had yet managed to achieve.
Today we’re still living with a government that, in its basics, is a product of cutting-edge 18th century technology. Of course, much has been layered on top of it. But dig deep enough and eventually you hit underlying, archaic assumptions that have gone unchallenged for centuries. Here are a few:
* Regional assemblies. Representative assemblies should be organized on the basis of where people live, rather than by specialized issue or project.
* Generalist representatives. Elected representatives are expected to have sound judgment about all subjects, and are empowered to make decisions even on subjects they know nothing about.
* Centralized information. For good decisions to be made, pertinent information must be gathered in a central location, so a small group of people with access to that information can propose a decision to the larger representative body, which votes on it. Widespread public access to that information, so it might be challenged or amended, is not essential to the process.
* Permanent bodies. Governing bodies composed of elected representatives — such as the Senate, Congress, state assemblies, city councils, etc. — should never be dissolved.
These assumptions are the product of the limitations of 18th-century technology. The framers of the Constitution took them for granted, which is no surprise, since no practical alternatives were available. But they also didn’t anticipate the long term consequences – government institutions that have become staggeringly bureaucratic, slow, obscure in their operations, unresponsive to citizen needs, and controlled by corporate interests.
The early democratic philosophers assumed that citizens would personally know, or at least have a passing acquaintance with, their elected leaders – there would always be a direct connection between the government and the people. Until the early 20th century, the White House doors were open to unannounced guests who stopped by to meet the President. But the number of seats in Congress today is the same as it was 100 years ago. It’s physically impossible for a U.S. Representative to press the flesh with even a fraction of his constituents, let alone have a meaningful chat with them. Government has become a TV spectacle, reduced to a sports contest that repeats every four years, like the World Cup, while the problems facing society – the environmental crisis, global food shortages, peak oil – are so complex that only specialists can begin to untangle them. Our elected representatives are ill matched to the tasks before them, and the current system leaves most citizens feeling disconnected, untrusting, and with the overwhelming sense that their actions make no difference.
As a techie might put it, our form of representative democracy doesn’t scale well.
At the Link Tank sessions, two dozen of us would gather in conference rooms in either the Bay Area or New York, exploring ways that digital networks enable connection between participants in group actions. We drew network diagrams on blackboards or white sheets, mapping various ways that people could link to one another. We kept returning to structures that allocated tasks and decisions to clusters at the edge of the network, where expertise was concentrated or an action’s effect was most likely to be felt, rather than bringing all important decisions back to a single, super-powerful hub at the center.
The intention behind these exercises was to find ways of empowering those with the most at stake – who usually have the greatest motivation to act, as well as the most relevant knowledge – so they can participate in making solutions to common problems. With digital networks, group formation can be far more fluid, transparent, and non-hierarchical. This opens up new possibilities for collaboration, new types of decision making structures, and the freeing up of creativity where it hadn’t been present before.
It’s an approach that hinges on the development of user-centric digital identity. With the right kind of personal profile, identifying expertise in a community becomes much simpler, as does linking people so they can collaborate.
Collaboration can take many forms. It can include: a loosely joined network of homeowners doing renovations who cooperatively purchase sustainable construction materials; a county zoning board tasked with protecting the water table; a car pooling initiative that connects people to drivers heading to the same destinations; or even an entire township that, following the Transition Town model, seeks to collectively lower its ecological footprint by instituting new sustainable practices. Digital networks present us with the opportunity to innovate new forms of collaboration for achieving shared objectives that could be far more effective than the tools we currently have at our disposal.
Try looking with fresh eyes at the decisions facing our communities and our nation, taking into account the tools we have to share information and convene groups to take action. If we re-wrote the Constitution from scratch, would our current type of representative democracy be the optimum choice for governing ourselves? Or would we use a different model more appropriate for our time?
Consider a county in northern New York State that wants to contribute to sustainability by reducing its ecological footprint. Suppose it tried an alternative approach to government designed based on assumptions quite different than the ones that hailed from the 18th century, discussed above – new possibilities suggested by the capabilities of the Internet. It might include:
* Issue Assemblies. Representative assemblies would be convened to focus on separate issues that impact sustainability, such as: transportation; energy; toxic clean ups; and local organic agriculture. Some assemblies – such as transportation and energy – might have the standing of government bodies, while others — like local organic agriculture — might be groups of consumers loosely organized into buying clubs to support local farmers.
* Expert Representatives. Elected representatives to the issue assemblies should be recognized experts with professional experience in their area of specialty.
* Distributed information. The information introduced into assembly discussions should be made available online, so everyone can see and comment upon it, allowing outside experts to participate in the decision making process.
* Temporary bodies. Once a particular issue is addressed — for example, implementing a new transportation plan for the county, or evaluating alternative energy sources to generate power for the region — the assembly is dissolved, keeping the group from calcifying into yet another sclerotic bureaucracy.
The social tools we have today — email, websites, wikis, blogs, etc. — aren’t adequate for the complexities this kind of system demands. But shouldn’t we be experimenting with new tools, testing different kinds of systems, to see what really might be possible?
One such experiment, called Smartocracy, was spearheaded by Link Tank member Brad deGraf in 2006. It uses digital networks to explore an alternative approach to democratic decision making, one that might prove more effective, though just as egalitarian, than the notion of “one person/one vote.” The concept is explained on the Smartocracy website: Collect $20 donations from 1,000 participants, and then use the Smartocracy system to collaboratively decide which deserving projects or institutions should receive grants from the pooled sum of $20,000. The site goes on to say:
“Democracy has a fundamental problem, namely that “one-person/one-vote” guarantees that the wisest among us will be devalued, in favor of the least-informed. Here [on Smartocracy], participants have equal weight, not in voting, but in deciding who to give their votes to. Instead of “one person/ one vote”, it’s “one person/ ten votes to give away”…. Each participant gets an equal number of votes (initially 10) for each decision to be made, to be exercised not by them but by their proxies. That simple change, from voting to delegating your vote, creates meritocracy in an equitable, natural way. The most highly respected participants are by definition on more people’s lists.” [15]
Instead of each participant casting a single vote, you get 10 votes to distribute to proxies who you trust. You might give three votes to one and seven to another. By doing so, you authorize these proxies to make decisions on your behalf. But by distributing your votes among several experts, rather than authorizing a single proxy to cast all your ballots, you help set the context for a conversation between several trusted experts, a team that is empowered to act in the interest of the entire group. Smartocracy is an ingenious approach to democratic collaboration. At the same time, it’s a logical extension of what digital networks have to offer.
In the years leading up to the Constitutional Convention, many flavors of representative government were tried, each growing out of local conditions and customs. Some were successful, others failed. From those experiments came the experience that guided the founders as they laid the foundation of American representative government. Today we need similar experiments. [16]
It’s worth mentioning that one outcome of this approach might be entirely new economic models that don’t rely on money to motivate people’s actions. Rather than receiving cash, participants in a collaboration could be rewarded in other ways. Online systems are particularly good at tracking a person’s contributions to a group effort, and at calculating appropriate compensation — which might be a service offered by another person in the network. This means that networks can be convened to meet shared objectives without having to raise massive funds to pay for it; if there’s enough will to get a project going, the group can find plenty of ways to reward participants other than with cash. (Not to linger on doomsday scenarios, but considering the questionable state of the global economic order, and the possibility that a series of environmental and resource crises could trigger a sudden collapse, this visionary approach to collaboration becomes even more relevant.)
Back in the days of the Link Tank, only a few seemed to grasp that the digital infrastructure carries implicit values about sharing and collaboration. But every day, this awareness dawns on more people. A generation has grown up with the Internet as part of the atmosphere it breathes. Through the Net, we viscerally experience our interconnection with others, each of us individual nodes in an intricate, interdependent network. At the same time, the environmental crisis calls us to become more conscious of our interdependence with all life on Earth — yet another network we are part of. The intricate collaborations of nature become models for our own behavior. The most beautiful ecosystems are the sum of many moving parts, working together in collaboration. We have much to learn from them.
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NOTES
[1] A group of 23 was initially convened in Ben Lomand, California, in September 2000 by Brad deGraf and Neil Sieling, with Planetwork’s Elizabeth Thompson and Jim Fournier. The others who participated were: Debra Amador, Juliette Beck, Jack Bradin, Bruce Cahan, Bonnie DeVarco, Andres Edwards, Steve Foster, Chris Gallagher, Lev Gonick, Jan Hauser, James Hung, Allen Hunt-Badiner, Michael Litz, Richard Perl, Christie Rothenberg , Greg Steltenpohl, Hardin Tibbs, Michael Tolson, Amie Weinberg, and Nate Zelnick. Ultimately, an additional two dozen people took part in the process, either by attending meetings or engaging in online discussions. Among them were: Jeffrey Axelrod, Owen Davis, Gerald de Jong, Tom Laskawy , Tom Munnecke, Robin Mudge, Ellen Pearlman, Jonathan Peizer, Richard White, and Duncan Work.
[4] As John Markoff describes in his engaging book, What The Dormouse Said (Viking, New York 2005)
[5] To fully appreciate the culture that gave rise to the networked personal computer, check out hypermedia pioneer Ted Nelson’s remarkable book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, published by Hugo’s Book Service in 1975, now unfortunately out of print.
[6] Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. The quotes in this paragraph are taken from page 149-152.
[7] Shirky, p. 153
[8] The ASN paper was first presented at the Planetwork conference in San Francisco in May, 2003 and appeared in First Monday in the August 2003 issue, accessible at http://www.firstmonday.org/Issues/issue8_8/jordan
[10] Wikipedia defines XDI as: “XDI (XRI Data Interchange) is a generalized, extensible service for sharing, linking, and synchronizing data over the Internet and other data networks using XML documents and XRIs (Extensible Resource Identifiers).” For more information, visit http://www.xdi.org
[11] The Higgins home page on the Eclipse website says “Higgins is a framework that enables users and applications to integrate identity, profile, and relationship information across multiple data sources and protocols. End-users can experience Higgins through the UI metaphor of Information Cards.” For more information, visit http://www.eclipse.org/higgins
[12] The i-names website explains: “URLs are for connecting web pages. Now get the address for connecting people and businesses in rich, long-lasting digital relationships: i-names. Whether you are an individual looking for a safe, lifetime personal address or a business seeking long-term, opt-in customer relationships, there’s an i-name for you.” For more information, visit http://www.inames.net
[13] The Information Card Foundation website explains: “You already know how to use cards in your wallet to present ID, to purchase things, to show you are a member of a club, or that you have a relationship with a merchant like Best Buy. Now what if it was just as easy to login or do business on-line as it is to present a card in the rest of your life? No more typing. No more filling in forms. And that is just the beginning. Just as media became a lot more flexible and useful in the digital world, now your cards can manage more things for you!” For more, visit the Information Card Foundation at http://www.informationcard.net
[14] On the OpenID website it says: “OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience. You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.” For more information, visit http://openid.net
[15] Though the Smartocracy system has been taken off line, information about it can be found here: http://smartocracy.net/ovrvw.html
[16] For more ideas about how digital networks could be used to revolutionize democratic practices, see the anthology Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy in the Internet Age, edited by Allison Fine, Micah Sifry, Andrew Rasiej, and Joshua Levy, and available as a free download at http://rebooting.personaldemocracy.com/
“Often we talked about visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, who believed that most of society’s difficulties were “problems of design.” Our current models for government, economics, media, and even religion were mostly based on flawed hierarchical models that bred division while consolidating power to the few at the top. Energetically speaking, we were “a house divided,” competing for money, land, space, jobs, fuel and other resources, creating an enormous amount of suffering. As our Reality Sandwich community continued to grow, members asked to meet and organize with others where they lived.”
From Reality SandwichThe Sacred Geometry of a Consciousness Movement
Jonathan Talat Phillips
Worth looking deeply into. While what it states is perfectly valid, the human ideal of going beyond national, social or family ties equally stands. A true family, society and nation cannot stand against the human being anywhere, just like a man cannot act against another’s humanity and remain human.
To recognize that there is a community of fate and responsibility at the level of
the entire world makes sense. But liberal cosmopolitanism does not provide the
proximate solidarities on the basis of which better institutions and greater democracy can
be built. Nations are the most important of such solidarities. Moreover, while
cosmopolitan ethics may explain why it is good for individuals to give to global charities,
they do not adequately explain the obligations those who benefit from living in rich
countries have to those whose lives are limited because of the way in which capitalism
and the world system of states have organized the distribution of both wealth and the
“illth” that is created by many efforts to pursue wealth.26 This is so because the benefits
derive from the embeddedness of individual lives in national histories and contexts. If for
example Americans are to pay reparations to countries damaged by the slave trade or
other injustices, it will be because the very possibility of life as an individual American
today rests on the unjust historical background. The remedy will depend not merely on a
global idea of equality or justice but on the mediating solidarity. This alone will make it a
felt and actionable collective responsibility.
Approaches to liberal cosmopolitanism that do not take seriously the work
nationalism does in the modern era and that do not work with a strong appreciation and
understanding of solidarity and subjectivity, are as apt to be pernicious as progressive in
actual politics. For nationalism is not only deeply imbricated in the social arrangements
of the modern era, it is basic to movements to challenge and improve those social
arrangements.
25 Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verson, 1997).
26 The useful concept of “illth” – the negative counterparts to wealth, like environmental degradation —
was introduced in 1860 by John Ruskin; see the title essay in Unto this Last and Other Writings (London:
Penguin, 1986). It remains inadequately integrated into economic thought. “Negative externalities”
addresses related problems but more narrowly from the perspective of the individual economic actor.
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The necessity of nations in contemporary global affairs is not something in itself
to be celebrated. They are starting points, institutional mechanisms, and frameworks of
struggle more than indicators of ultimate values or goals. In one of the common meanings
of the word, indeed, nationalism refers to a passionate attachment to one’s own nation
that underwrites outrageous prejudice against others. But we should not try to grasp the
phenomenon only through instances of passionate excess or successful manipulation by
demagogues. For nationalism is equally a discursive formation that facilitates mutual
recognition among polities that mediate different histories, institutional arrangements,
material conditions, cultures, and political projects in the context of intensifying
globalization. Nationalism offers both a mode of access to global affairs and a mode of
resistance to aspects of globalization. To wish it away is more likely to invite the
dominance of neoliberal capitalism than to usher in an era of world citizenship.
Not least of all, nationalism is a reminder that democracy depends on solidarity.
This may be achieved in various ways. It is never achieved outside of history and culture.
Democratic action, therefore, is necessarily the action of people who join with each other
in particular circumstances, recognizing and nurturing distinctive dimensions of
belonging together. Nationalist ideologies sometimes encourage the illusion that
belonging together is either natural or so ancient as to be prior to all contemporary
choices. But liberalism conversely encourages neglect of the centrality of solidarity and
especially the cultural constitution of historical specificity of persons – potential subjects
of liberal politics. More helpfully, we can recognize that solidarities, including but not
limited to national ones, are never simply given but have to be produced and reproduced.
This means they are subject to change; this change may be pursued in collective struggle.
Women and minority groups have been integrated into the political life of many modern
states not simply despite nationalism (though certainly despite certain versions of
nationalism), but through the transformation of nationalism. Nationalism then becomes in
part the history of such struggles.
Nationalism also underpins social institutions created in the course of historical
struggles, such as public schools, health care, and other dimensions of welfare states. It
may underpin struggles to defend such institutions – and the very idea of the public good
–against neoliberal privatization. The institutions differ from each other, and struggle is
necessarily about improving them not simply protecting them. The same is true of culture
and structures of social relations. These are constitutive for democracy, but they are also
subject to democratic action and change. For these reasons, the cultures of democracy
necessarily differ from each other. National solidarities are resources for democracy and
also arenas of democratic struggle.
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CONCLUSION
Acceleration of globalization in recent years has been greeted alternately, and
sometimes simultaneously, with hope and panic. It has brought pursuit of human rights
and pursuit of terrorists. Democracy has made headway in some settings, but hardly
everywhere as some hoped after 1989. Humanitarian emergencies have exacted a brutal
toll, though on the positive side they have also brought forward a considerable response.
Migration has been one force furthering global cosmopolitanism, but it is also met with
reinvigorated border controls and immigration restrictions. While it has sometimes been
portrayed as movement beyond the state, the growth of new nonstate global governance
institutions has been uneven and in some domains halting, and if many states are indeed
in crisis, states remain central political actors. The importance of the state is evident in
the problems attendant on weak states in Africa, the muscle-flexing of emerging powers
like India and China, and both the military and the political interventions of the USA. In
brief, globalization is real but not quite the uncontested and unambiguously positive
transformation some enthusiasts have suggested. And while new institutions outside or
beyond nation-states are important, nation-states themselves are called on to play central
roles in the context globalization. Indeed, much of the contemporary form of
globalization is produced and driven by nation-states—at least certain powerful nation-
states.
Globalization and the coming of postnational and transnational society are often
presented as matters of necessity. Globalization appears as an inexorable force—perhaps
of progress, perhaps simply of a capitalist juggernaut, but in any case irresistable.
European integration, for example, is often sold to voters as a necessary response to the
global integration of capital. In Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, a similar
economistic imaginary is deployed to suggest that globalization moves of itself, and
governments and citizens have only the option of adapting. Even where the globalist
imaginary is not overwhelmingly economistic, it commonly shares in the image of
progressive modernization and necessity. Many accounts of the impact and implications
of information technology exemplify this.
Alternatives to globalization, on the other hand, are generally presented in terms
of inherited identities and solidarities in need of defense. Usually this means nations and
cultural identities imagined on the model of nations; sometimes it means religions,
civilizations or other structures of identity presented by their advocates as received rather
than created. These are denigrated by proponents of transnational society who see the
national and many other local solidarities as backward or outmoded, impositions of the
past on the present.. A prime example is the way both nationalist economic protectionism
and Islamist movements are seen as simply the regressive opposite of globalization. In
each case, this obscures the often transnational organization of the resistance movements.
Likewise, the social imaginary of inherited cultural tradition and social identity is
prominent in ideologies of Hindutvah, essential Ethiopianness, the idea that an insult to
“Turkishness” should be a crime, and widespread notions of ‘cultural survival’.
This is doubly confusing. First, many of the supposed alternatives to globalization
are in fact responses to it and efforts to shape it. Second, there is a confusion between the
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fact of growing global connections – the minimalist core of globalization – and the
specific institutional and market forms of globalization that have predominated so far.
Like modernization theory two generations ago, accounts of globalization today tend to
imply a single developmental direction for change. But it makes more sense, as a variety
of scholars have recognized, to conceive of multiple modernities or projects outside the
simplistic contrast of the traditional and the modern. So too it is important to recognize
that contemporary struggles are not simply for and against globalization but struggles
over its form, over who benefits and who suffers, and over what existing solidarities and
values must be sacrificed to secure an attractive global order.
In many settings, the economistic/technological imaginary of modernist
globalization is embraced at the same time and by the same political leaders as
nationalist, religious or other imaginaries emphasizing inherited cultural identity. The
contradiction is avoided by assigning these to separate spheres. The Chinese phrase “ti-
yong” has long signaled this, a condensation of “Western learning for material
advancement; Eastern learning for spiritual essence”. Similarly divided imaginaries
inform many Asian, Middle Eastern, and other societies. Even in Canada, a recent
Financial Times article reported, “the country wants to become a lean global competitor
while maintaining traditional local values”.1
Like many countries, Canada seeks at once to project itself internationally as a
tourist destination and domestically as an object of political cathexis. Like many other
countries as well, it does so with both enthusiastic representations of its rich internal
diversity and an effort to articulate the claims of the whole over its parts. Nationalism
provides a prominent rhetoric to both the holistic and the sectional, sometimes separatist,
projects. It offers categories for understanding the demarcation of cultures, the ways in
which individuals belong to larger groups, and the ways in which such groups participate
in history. It also offers what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling” that link
categories of thought to emotional engagements.2
Feeling that one belongs to something larger and more permanent than oneself is
either a wonderful or a terrible thing. It is an inspiration for heroism and the composition
of sublime works of music and art. It is a motivation for morality and a solace amidst
suffering. Conversely it is sometimes the source of a claustrophobic sense of being
trapped or a crushing weight of responsibility. It makes some people silently quell doubts
and support dangerous policies of nationalist leaders, and makes others feel an obligation
to speak out. It is also the only way in which many people are able to feel that they
belong in the world.
This is not true of everyone. Some of us are happy eating at Parisian cafes,
basking on Bahian beaches and attending conferences in New Haven without thinking
much of national identity. Some hear Wagner without thinking of Germany or view
Diego Rivera as simply a great artist not a great Mexican. But if we imagine that
cosmopolitan inhabitation of the globe as a series of attractively heterogeneous sites is
1 Scott Morrison and Ken Warn, “Liberals strive to sharpen competitive edge,” Financial Times, June 11,
2001, “Canada Survey”, pp. 1-2.
2 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1965).
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readily available to everyone, we deeply misunderstand the actual and very hierarchical
structures of globalization.
Globalization has not put an end to nationalism—not to nationalist conflicts nor to
the role of nationalist categories in organizing ordinary people’s sense of belonging in the
world. Indeed, globalization fuels resurgence in nationalism among people who feel
threatened or anxious as much as it drives efforts to transcend nationalism in new
structures of political-legal organization or thinking about transnational connections.
Nationalism still matters, still troubles many of us, but still organizes something
considerable in who we are. Whether and how nationalism can mediate peaceful and
constructive connections of individuals to the larger world is a crucial question.
Nationalism’s contributions to social solidarity may never outweigh its frequent violence.
Yet seeking to bypass nationalism in pursuit of a rational universalism may reflect
equally dangerous illusions.
Elena:
This is an interesting and yet short conclusion. It is all so true. All of it. There is terrible danger in globalization for huge numbers of people without power and yet how will we reach the consciousness of the whole without the struggle? These are amazing times. We are crossing beyond our selves wether we like it or not . Everyone seems very much afraid of the fact that the “reigns” of the “play” are hardly in anyone’s hands. There are no kings, governments or powers that can hold the horses any more. It’s beautiful! There is nothing to be afraid of! The human being will flourish again and again and again for many centuries to come no matter how much many of us suffer as we go along.
Each nation must hold its integrity just like each individual and at the same time stick to the whole of humanity. The great community is great enough to have no fear. We just need to do our work, carefully, patiently… lovingly, taking everything into consideration, letting everyone participate, trusting each other.
We don’t need to be afraid of letting go of the little we each have. No one has enough but together there is enough for everyone. Many of us can sacrifice our selves should it be necessary. We all need to sacrifice a lot and not to be afraid to sacrifice everything.
Each human being has nothing more than his and her own work. Everything else belongs here. It must remain here, including an individual’s work. We all work to leave it behind, joyously, gratefully. We take the self that the work has sculpted in us, nothing else and no one can take that away from us.
We are beautiful beings. We are each more beautiful than we are even close to imagining. Life will take each one of us to where we each wish to go. We can each reach whatever we wish to reach by simply trusting our selves. Trust is the greatest force that a human being will ever find. Trust in his own self and in others. It is from trust that compassion and forgiveness can come, when one knows in one’s heart that beyond all aggression is a human being. No one has enough to survive on his own but together we can survive. We have all made mistakes. Huge mistakes. Individually and collectively. Individually and nationally. It is no time for charging each other with guilt. It is time for building and rebuilding a world where we can develop our love. We each have so much to give. Individually and collectively. A man and a woman’s work is pure gold. Each man and each woman are creating the world each day, weaving life each minute, through their work. We must all be allowed to work not only for a living but for life.
Life weaves itself in and out of our selves as if its threads entered in an out of our lives and we were both needle and thread, tapestry and hands. Life is an air that is both in and out of our selves. We are deeper than the grand canyon! Each one of us is deeper than the galaxy, deeper and lighter. Each one of us holds the Universe in our selves. Don’t be afraid to be your self.
Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court, and a Lament for American Protestantism
Monday May 10, 2010
Categories: Christianity, courts and law, religion and politics
President Obama has picked Elena Kagan, former dean of Harvard Law School and Solicitor General, to fill the next vacancy on the Supreme Court. Much will be said of Ms. Kagan over the coming weeks–praise and criticism of all sorts. But little will be in a form of lament, and that’s what I’d like to offer here. A lament for the passing of American Protestantism.
Ms. Kagan is Jewish. That means there will be six Roman Catholics and three Jews on the Supreme Court in a country that was once the largest Protestant nation in the world. These days, of course, the United States may still have the largest number of Protestants but the percentage of the population that is Protestant has slipped to a mere 50%, meaning that sometime in the near future, America will be a nation with a religious plurality and not a majority.
I’m not lamenting the loss of representation; I don’t think that Supreme Court picks should be ruled by affirmative action. Rather, the primary qualification should be that the person knows the law, understands the law, upholds the law, and possesses a certain sort of empathy for the way that the law impacts the lives of Americans. Accordingly, anyone–a Protestant, Jew, Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, or atheist–can be an excellent Supreme Court justice.
However, the faith in which one was raised or which one practices forms the basis of one’s worldview–the way in which a person interprets contexts and circumstances. It involves nuances regarding theology, outlook, moral choice, ethics, devotion, and community. All religious traditions provide these outlooks to their adherents, and they are present in both overt and subtle ways through our lives. I’m not lamenting the numerical absence of Protestants. Instead, I will miss the fact that there will be no one with Protestant sensibilities on the court, no one who understands the nuances of one of America’s oldest and most traditional religions–and the religion that deeply shaped American culture and law.
Historically, American Protestantism is a vast, diverse, argumentative set of traditions. Sociologists include a wide array of denominations under the moniker, from independent churches to Episcopalians and all sorts of Baptists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Congregationalists in between. Despite such theological diversity, most Protestants retain three general convictions that shape their worldview and impact the ways in which they engage the public square:
First, Protestants hold central the idea that nothing should or can impede individual conscience. From Martin Luther’s clarion call at the time of the Reformation, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” Protestants of all sorts emphasize the free expression of individual rights and conscience. Those individual rights can–and do–empower liberation and freedom against corrupt institutions and unjust states.
Second, Protestants believe that symbols like the cross and the flag mean something. Going back to the days when Protestants stripped churches of religious statues and painted over icons, they believed that symbols convey the meaning of the thing depicted. Crosses, icons, flags, paintings, and other representations cannot be separated from their theological or political intention. Thus, Protestants have historically fought over the power of symbols and their meaning in public space. As a result, they often argue for empty public space because they understand the internal power of symbols.
Third, Protestants (in partnership with free-thinking Enlightenment philosophers) created the concept of the separation of church and state in the 17th and 18th centuries. Indeed, some historians argue that the Constitution’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses–the phrases that guide the relationship between religion and politics–might well be the most important contributions of American Protestantism to Christian theology.
These three things–individual conscience, the power of symbols to inspire and convince, and the separation of church and state–are not merely areas of law to Protestants. No, these are the things that inflame the Protestant soul–the things we have fought over, left other churches and start new denominations to uphold, teach our children, sing of in our hymnody, of which we write books and hold theological debates, and why we do good on behalf of our neighbors. Protestants do not always agree on how these principles work out in the law, nor have Protestants always followed their own principles to their logical legal conclusions. But these are the things that guide Protestants, the insights that animate the followers of one of Christianity’s great traditions.
Elena Kagan will be a fine and fair justice. President Obama has made a thoughtful, considered choice. But, on this day, I am a little sad. Missing from the bench upcoming years will be someone who empathizes with the Protestant worldview in a visceral way. As religious cases multiply in an increasingly pluralistic world, I can’t help but think that losing the lived memory of American Protestantism will be a loss for all of us indeed.
Elena: It’s interesting that if protestantism opened the road for the separation of state and religion for crucially valid causes, it is now time to reopen the bridge between religion and the state which is no other than the understanding that the individual’s inner life is not separate from our social lives. That we cannot exploit each other economically and pretend that THAT has nothing to do with our evolution! And our “evolution” is as dependent on our inner life or religion as in our external life or society. Social economy is the reflection of our inner consciousness. Our inability to consciously respond for each other’s well being reflects itself in the greed of our economy. The “state” cannot be separate from the individual and THAT is what today’s states are. They are at the service of those in economic power and both are sanctified by the churches. There is no consciousness in any one of them.
One church, one state, one economic power, for the human being from the human being. We are One.
Crystal Sword
Thank you both for your posts, I much enjoyed the wonderings. Another aspect I’ve experienced about the days of the week is the possibility that they have been “organized” in such a way that in themselves they are meant to help us “pace” our selves. The fact that Sunday is a day of rest and prayer may not be a coincidence at all. It is as if Sunday were meant to remind us that there are other things that matter besides working and the fact that Sunday is becoming the “shopping day” in many cities does testify for an even more materialistic attachment. It is for me as if Sunday were meant to be a “living testimony” of the act of not being identified with “life” and it’s “necessities” as much as the opportunity to experience gratitude, “graciousness”.
I’ve thought that Christmas might also have a similar meaning but even more pronounced. The “shopping” Christmas, together with the “shopping” for every event we wish to celebrate might have deformed the “nobleness” of the event into a materialistic indulgence but the fact that we still keep the memory of the “ritual” is “encouraging”!
Perhaps what is happening in our times is the experience of essence or an immature development precisely because the majority of us cannot consciously perceive the deep connections between our selves and the planets, the constellations or stars even though it seems that earlier civilizations were much more “in tune” with them. In “tune” with them in essence but not real I perhaps?
It’s a very long thread to ponder on. Thanks for initiating it!
In astrological theory, not only the days of the week, but the hours of the day are dominated by the seven luminaries. If the first hour of a day is dominated by Saturn (), then the second hour is dominated by Jupiter (), the third by Mars (), and so on with the Sun (), Venus (), Mercury (), and the moon (), so that the sequence of planets repeats every seven hours. Therefore, the twenty-fifth hour, which is the first hour of the following day, is dominated by the Sun; the forty-ninth hour, which is the first hour of the next day, by the Moon. Thus, if a day is labelled by the planet which dominates its first hour, then Saturn’s day is followed by the Sun’s day, which is followed by the Moon’s day, and so forth, as shown below…..
And we pour our lives into cybernetic threads
And weave our time with words
Alone each day, more alone
With our selves
The separateness in the dimension of time
Dissolves in the dimension within
But coming to your door
Is equally sacred in both dimensions
For we are one, separate only in time
So easy to move in the extremes
From one’s self to one’s self
And lose one’s self in the self of time
And find one’s self in the selfless time
It is such an art to live
And I’m such a child
And yet if it’s time,
I’m almost ready to die
The paradox is such that only already gone
Can we actually be here
For there is no here
But there
And there we can’t stay for long
Without loosing our selves back to here
And there is no there or here
Just a oneness that moves in between
Everywhere at the same time
And life is such a poem of its own
Dying so gently to give us time enough
To let go
But the younger we can let go
The more deeply we are able to grasp the whole
Aaah…
To be so young to think that thought is more than humus for the soul in time
And attached to the mind to be so afraid to fly
to fall forever in eternity
to be without a trace of one’s self
left to time
And to lose the sense of self
And gain the being
Un-longed
For, for
Being cannot be longed for
Even if all of life is a calling it
Forth
We are in the threading
We are,
when seen from outside
Seven billion threads of light:
One human being
One life
……….At that point in the blog, the situation for me was very clear: We either moved on and acted legally against the Fellowship as a group of people willing to denounce the Fellowship or we remained talking about it without serious consequences to the Fellowship which is what they’ve actually managed. I was and am convinced that the first action was necessary. That if we were so conscious of the damages the Fellowship has on people we needed to act beyond the blog. In that particular post I write about a woman that committed suicide, one of the children of an fof member. At that point I was aggressively putting pressure on the need to act beyond the blog and posters began writing attacking me personally much more aggressively than before but not the issues involved and I answered back equally aggressive. That is what I am sorry for, not for my position. When I apologized I did not apologize for my understanding but for my negativity and aggression which I couldn’t control at the time. While I realize I failed personally to control myself I am convinced it was the people participating in the blog who failed to live up to what was needed: legal, public action against the Fellowship cult in particular and Cults in general. My personal failure is pitiful but the failure of so many ex-members to act seriously against the cult is despicable. That is why I am essentially happy to stand up for my position.
It is important to notice that when a group of people are not able to live up to the needs of a situation they buffer it by personally condemning and outlawing the person that is presenting the opposition that they cannot cope with, without ever actually dealing with the issues. This has been happening long before Christ. It’s a hard lesson to learn about our lives but it gives us an inkling into the reality of our state of being.
It is important to notice that when a group of people are not able to live up to the needs of a situation they buffer it by personally condemning and outlawing the person that is presenting the opposition that they cannot cope with, without ever actually dealing with the issues. This has been happening long before Christ. It’s a hard lesson to learn about our lives but it gives us an inkling into the reality of our state of being.
Another interesting aspect related to this is the use of laws to accomplish the act of banning the individual. There’s nothing more rigid about cults than LAWS and the laws within a cult are sanctified by the member’s attitude towards the guru: divine, infallible, omni-present. Then all aspects of their lives are gradually governed by the guru’s will whether his will stands for or against their well being.
What is fascinating to realize about these relationships between people in cults is that it slowly reveals the threads of our externalizing our psychological world in our social world and what is happening in cults is the longing for “community” that people are trying to actualize only that we are doing so from our innocence instead of our maturity. We fall in love with the guru like we fall in love with our loved one and surrender to him all aspects of our selves without realizing that in THAT context, it is necessary to keep one’s individuality. That “surrendering” one’s social “self” is an act of slavery and not a spiritual sacrifice that can bring anything positive.
The pattern is not so different in romantic relationships but we should actually go all the way and look into child parent relationships to untie the knots that condition these behaviours in the different instances of our lives.
As children we are dependent on our parents. Economically or instinctively, emotionally, intellectually… To take a quick, simple and rather easy look and start exploring the issue, it is common knowledge that children who are not well embraced and protected in the family tend to turn against their social entourage in later years as if the process were simply inverted as in a lemniscate. Individuals simply project in adulthood what they received in childhood if nothing interferes to change the process in their own individuality. Wouldn’t this make of us simple reflectors? We reflect in adulthood what we received in childhood?
I’m just throwing out ideas because I am myself exploring the issues.
One that comes to mind now is the possibility of looking at situations from the point of view of their “wholeness” and their “wholeness” is no other than their “holiness” and their “holiness” is no other than their “loveness”, “friendliness”.
People judge criminals who go out and shoot other people at random convinced that it is only the criminals fault that he killed the others but this is just lack of consciousness of our mutual interdependency. Such criminals are just reflecting on us what they have received from us. This kind of crime is very important to understand the state of our “social being”, of our social “beingness” because those people are simply expressing their own suffering and disconnectedness. Of course they need to be locked up and stopped but much more than that they need to be helped and we all need to help ourselves so as not to create such criminals.
Crime is the expression of our social illness. Crime from an individual is an individual protest of a social malady and as long as people continue to isolate the criminal without dealing with the causes of the crime they will continue to unconsciously separate themselves from other human beings instead of consciously embracing them. The problem is a problem of lovelessness or consciouslessness for consciousness is nothing but the ability to grasp the whole in each of its parts.
The problem of our unconsciousness is not one for blame or judgement. We are unconscious beings and life is precisely the road towards more consciousness. But accepting our unconsciousness does not mean that we settle for it. Within that unconsciousness it is necessary for us to find the means to question each other, struggle and argue with each other without separating from each other and this is so difficult because for that to be able to happen individuals must recognize their own wholeness and the wholeness of others in themselves. The understanding that We are One is an aspect of it. We are One is simply the social expression of I am. When in their personal work individuals find their own I willing to steer their will then they can begin to say “I am” and we can say that We are One only when we can refer to that same “I am” or “The Human” within each one of us and stir our social lives from that principle of life.
The times we’ve been living in are far from human. Capitalism isn’t human, communism isn’t human, fascism is inhuman and yet within each order there are aspects of human life that need to be considered.
In Capitalism individualism is king but a selfish king that is willing to make his or her fortune at the cost of many. In Communism, the State is king but it’s willing to make his fortune at the cost of individuality. In Fascism, the Fuhrer is king and is willing to make his fortune at the cost of life.
When I say “life” I don’t only mean people’s lives but “life”. Life is the endless creation of love. Love is the endless creation of life. Love and life are endless creation in each act. Consciousness is the realization of love in life. Consciousness is the conscious aspect of love. It is the incarnation of life in an individual. Each individual has, in their short period of life, the possibility to create and recreate “life” in each act. All human beings are creators of life consciously or unconsciously. The majority of human beings are creators not only of “lives” but of “life” most of the time, most of their lives. The fact that we are sick today and perceive our selves as somewhat wretched beings does not testify for the reality of our selves but only for the reality of our times. We are entering the maturity of the human being.
In Capitalism, Communism and Fascism there are aspects of life and aspects of “life destruction”. These aspects particular to each System need to be studied carefully so as to understand where they need to be “realigned”, “corrected”. In Fascism, individuals surrender to the Fuhrer like people in cults to the guru, in Capitalism people surrender to themselves without an inkling of the whole (like people in cults) and in Communism people surrender to the “whole” without an inkling of the whole or themselves, the State replaces the Fuhrer, (like people in cults: the Arc of Humanity). What is fascinating and horrifying about cults is that they incarnate every mistake we have made in no matter what System we’ve invented, THAT is why their people end up committing suicide en masse. It is a process of self-annihilation and when they’ve all self annihilated they then commit suicide en masse in the name of love and consciousness.
In Cults people give up any form of social participation that is questionable to the guru just like in fascism in relation to the Fuhrer. They surrender to themselves convinced that as long as they work, work, work, they will awaken regardless of anyone else, they have the attitude that as long as they make effort they will get to heaven just like capitalism does: as long as people are producing and making money, there is “life” even though there is as much lifelessness in the few that “make it” than in the many that make it for them and (in Cults) everyone is treated “equal” like in communism. “Equally” unconscious, “equally” undeveloped, “equally” a beggar without rights! The “Human” ideal is used against the individual demanding their “surrender” and rendering them slaves of the cult.
I’m just exploring but connecting our individuality to our social processes is as important as connecting our social processes to our inner processes or individuality. We are not just this or that. We Are. Everything IS. The problem with our unconscious individuality is that it perceives itself separately from the whole and therefore does not connect its creativity to life. The problem with our unconscious “sociability” is that it doesn’t connect to the human and therefore designs orders that act not only against a few but against the whole. Upper classes with money are no more conscious than lower classes without it. They each have their own problems and sufferings but while the suffering in lower classes seems closer to real suffering the suffering in upper classes seems to connect more precisely with forms of unnecessary suffering. In both classes the connection with “work” or “the activity” people do to develop themselves in, has the relevant impact. To a certain extent the fact that people have to work more and more consistently in the lower classes, gives them a more direct connection with the processes taking place while in upper classes there is a tendency to a dysfunctional discontinuity without aim. That “discontinuity” is what makes powers fall and eventually be replaced by other more democratic forms of power.
Consciousness cannot solve the problem. Only Conscience can. When we awaken to Divine Conscience, Real Consciousness emerges naturally. But Consciousness without Conscience is still the Consciousness of a machine. Consciousness leads to more rules and regulations; Conscience lead to what is right. There is one way and one way only: The Way of Conscience. Then true Love manifests in us and through us into the world because we become the Sons of the Living God.
“Only-he-will-be-caaled-and-will-become-the-Son-of-God-who-acquires-in-himself-Coscience.”
G. I. Gurdjieff,
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, p. 368
“Is it really a teaching, couldn’t it be an understanding of life and its laws – acceptance? Just pondering.”
A teaching or a learning?
Is it not a learning when you come to the steps of your many dimensions
after walking on your own self trust?
Others can tell us directions but only we ourselves can reach the heights of our different worlds enveloped in this one.
Wouldn’t acceptance also be an aspect of non-judgment reached through non identification? Another aspect of compassion in the highest sense of the word?
How would you connect objective morality and positive emotions? If trust in both one’s self and others is a positive emotion, how would you connect it? Trust in each other’s being? Each other’s self? Our humaneness?
“Life and its laws” and being aligned to them wouldn’t make one objective?
The System does not tell us the answer, it tells us to walk to the answer through self-remembering and external consideration besides the other tools. That is perhaps it’s greatest strength and weakness and why it has been misused so virulently in some fourth way cults and yet the answer it says, is in each one of us and that is already an answer! If we are each the truth, if we each have the being, how could we fail to be objectively moral with each other? We can and we do fail and yet love and life develops above the multiple mistakes.
Very good comments. I want to go straight to a paragraph in your comments that I consider it goes to the very heart of the Living Teaching Mr. Gurdjieff brought to us in his magnum opus Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. I quote this paragraph you wrote:
“How would you connect objective morality and positive emotions? If trust in both one’s self and others is a positive emotion, how would you connect it? Trust in each other’s being? Each other’s self? Our humaneness?”
As I see it and have been able to understand it, the answer to your questions is contained in what I consider to the most important paragraph in Belzebub’s Tales. I am not going to give the answer here nor quote the paragraph so readers can have the opportunity to ponder on this matter and give their opinion. I do this because that is what Mr. Gurdjeiif would have done. I know it because I once had a dream with him and here is the content of my dream:
“In the dream I was in a room with Mr. Gurdjieff and other people and I asked him a question. If I put my dream in words here is how it went. I said to Mr. Gurdjieff, “Sir, may I ask a theoretical question?” He looked at me and then said, ‘Yes, you may.’ ‘Most teachers say that when we attain liberation we blend directly with the Holy Prime-Source of everything existing. However, in Beelzebub it is taught that this was possible before the Choot-God-Letanical period but that after this cosmic event, it became impossible to blend directly with the Holy Sun Absolute. Sir, I want to know, which is the correct view?’ And do you know what his answer was? He said, ‘The answer to your question is in The Tales. Search for it.’
So Elena, in the spirit of my dream, my only teacher, and my only book, I will conclude my reply to your comments with these words:
Readers of this comments, the answer to the question posed by Elena is in Beelzebub. Search for it.
Thanks, Elena, for giving me the opportunity to share my dream and more importantly, to have the opportunity to direct people to my beloved book.
Thanks for sharing your dream and the lovely song that I much enjoyed.
I haven’t read Beelzebub in a long time so if you can remind me where to find the strivings question I’ll be happy to look at it. Some thoughts in the meantime.
Would you consider that the instinctive centre, in as much as it connects to the physical aspect of our selves is at the same time wonderfully connected to nature and its laws? If one were to grasp that reality in its full scope wouldn’t that alone be an amazing connectedness to the world around us? To nature yes but all of nature including the planets and galaxies! Sometimes when making love I’ve had an amazing feeling of connectedness with the cosmos but it is also there at dawn and sunset when the colours are so dim that they feel like the skin of light!
Attention for others to me is an expression of love. As I get older I realize that all we have for each other is time and it is precisely what we no longer have when we die. Everything else that is enveloped in time, all our gestures of love are possible because we are literally willing to give our self’s time to others. I’ve become a very good friend with time now that I’m old enough to realize that it is such a precious gift!
M:“is this really a doing or more a not doing – a kind of to “let be worked on”?”
The beautiful thing about it the few times I’ve managed to live it is that it is a being that can let it be done. Nothing requires more will than being but once being, there is no need to force things because they come to us like kittens for milk! A lot of doing also makes things happen but they often come like wolves looking for blood rather than milk. That too is alright because we learn as much about ourselves from the bleeding as from the milk. It is good to realize that we are not saints so that we can trim the fangs! I’ve lived in a time in which people are supposed to be perfectly inoffensive and must cut off all their strength to not protest for the absurdities but I think understanding the absurdities of one’s self as much as others is as necessary as keeping one’s strength to object when necessary.
Thank you for sharing, may you both have a bright sunny day!
Pondering on the above subject of being and doing I realized that there are different “doings” or rather there are similar “doings” that have completely different meaning and effect according to the being. For example, a man can play the guitar and play it well for a long time and that will give him a certain being as a guitarist as much as a musician while another man might pick the guitar up and after playing for only a few weeks, he will sense the effect the music has on him in a way that the other guitarist has never perceived. That is one aspect. The other aspect is that in the first player, the man’s attitude towards the guitar is that of someone “doing” the playing while the second man’s attitude is that of someone that knows that he is playing the guitar but the music is “playing” on him. The difference in “being” of both men is that although the second man doesn’t play the guitar very well he is aware of the quality of the impressions in a way that the other man is not. He does not feel the main actor of the scene, he allows the music to be the real agent and act on his own self as much as others. He is not as self-centred as the first player and that completely changes “everything” for the men as much as the energies in the universe that feed on these phenomenon. Although the more professional player might know how to make more sounds the beginner probably has greater experiences of beauty because he allows for the music to be without letting his own self interfere with it.
In a pervious post you asked me this question and I quote your words:
“Would you consider that the instinctive centre, in as much as it connects to the physical aspect of our selves is at the same time wonderfully connected to nature and its laws? If one were to grasp that reality in its full scope wouldn’t that alone be an amazing connectedness to the world around us? To nature yes but all of nature including the planets and galaxies! Sometimes when making love I’ve had an amazing feeling of connectedness with the cosmos but it is also there at dawn and sunset when the colours are so dim that they feel like the skin of light!”
Not only I consider instinctive centre to be connected with nature and its law but there is a very strong confirmation in Beelzebub’s Tales (BTTHG) that is so and I am going to illustrate with the cosmic law Solioonensius that is described in great details in the chapter Russia of BTTHG. It would be very interesting from the point of view of Objective Morality to examine this law as formulated in BTTHG. Here is how this law is formulated and what is said about it in the book (p. 623):
“The tension in all the planets acts also on the common presences of all beings arising and breeding on them, always engendering in the beings, besides desires and intentions of which they are not aware, the feeling called ‘sacred Iabolioonosar,’ or as your favorites would say, the feeling of religiousness, namely, that ‘being-feeling’ which at times appears in the desire and striving for, as I have already said, speedier self-perfecting in the sense of Objective-Reason.
“It is interesting that when this sacred feeling, or another similar to it, which was also engendered by a certain common cosmic actualization, proceeds in the common presences of your favorites, then they accept it as a symptom of certain of their numerous diseases, and in the given case, for example, they call this feeling ‘nerves.’
“It is necessary to remark that such an impulse inherent in the presence of all three-brained beings of our Great Universe formerly arose and became actualized almost normally in the majority of terrestrial beings of that time, namely, from the time of the removal of the organ Kundabuffer from the common presences of the three-brained beings of the planet Earth right up to the second Transapalnian-perturbation.
“But later, among the number of chief evils which flow from the conditions of ordinary being-existence established by them themselves, especially when in the presences of every terrestrial three-brained being, there began to become predominant the ‘evil-inner-God’ of theirs I mentioned, named there self-calming, then it occurred that in them under the influence of the action of Solioonensius, instead of the desire and striving for a speedier self-perfection a something began to arise such as they themselves characterize by the words ‘need of freedom,’ which chiefly serves the cause of the arising there of these same grievous processes of theirs similar to this last ‘Bolshevism.’”
Here is the whole thing, Elena. If we were normal beings, we would experience this law. However, because of our abnormality we have lost what is called in BTTHG the “instinctive-sensing-of-reality.” Now instead of experiencing the feeling of religiousness, what we experience is “need of freedom” and this “need of freedom” because of our abnormality translate into changing at all cost the external conditions of being-existence. And that is why we have the Lenin, the Stalin, and the Fidel, and so on, of this remote lunatic corner of the Universe called Planet Earth. Here I speak from experience because I was an aye witness of the Cuban Revolution.
But there is an even deeper meaning to this law and I will let you and the readers of this post to ponder on it.
In my next post here I will address two issues you also raised, the one about Love and Time and the one about making love. I will give you my take on these two matters and you will see that, like a friend in another Forum said:
“Many thanks for your comments Will. You certainly have an interesting and diverse set of opinions. :-)”
And there is one more thing you ought to know about me, Elena: I love to brag about me and I do not hide it. I am not shy, you can be sure of that. There is indeed very little humility in me and the reason for that is that I have found the sense and aim of my existence and when that is the case, one can understand what real humility means. Read the first chapter of BTTHG and you will see that it is all about bragging. Of course, I am not even to the knees of Mr. Gurdjieff but I am up to the knees of Mr. Mesa. He is a Devil; I am just a little devil or, as some people have called me, “incorrigible little crazy devil” or ilcd. You can be sure of one thing: Exchanging with me will never bore you.
You see, Elena, a man has the objective right to three weakness in life. In BTTHG we can see the three weaknesses Mr. Gurdjieff had. My first one is to brag about me. The other two I can tell you but only in private.
Thanks Will for responding to me as if the conversation were just between you and me but there is a misunderstanding for I am not talking or answering particularly to you in those posts but addressing M’s question and M who asked it. There is no disagreement or argument between us. You share your understanding and the rest of us share ours and the question moves along by the force of our many rows.
Will: “I do not know what you mean by the authors of the System. For me there is no System; there is only the Living Teaching Mr. Gurdjieff brought to us in Beelzebub’s Tales and regarding his book he said that there are no methods for understanding it. So, how can there be a System? Who are the authors of the System you refer to? Can you be more explicit here so I can comment more explicitly?”
If for you there is only one living Teaching for me that living Teaching would be all the Teachings in all of history in every culture and man.
We disagree about there being no methods to understanding anything, you and I or Mr. Gurdjieff and I, for we each have our own road to come to understanding through love and trust.
I am very glad that you are reminding us about Mr. Gurdjieff and his outlook on the world and ever so happy to be seeing him for what he was: another human being full of gifts and misgivings like the rest of us.
The System as presented by Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Rodney Collin is just one System amongst many others and it has its strengths and weaknesses like many others. For me they all work, they are all beautiful and terrible, difficult and possible as life is.
If I am out of place here and this site only approaches objective knowledge according to Gurdjieff’s understanding of the world please forgive my intrusion, I didn’t understand this site as a cult to Mr. Gurdjieff.
My very warm love to you Will. Brag about yourself all you must if that’s what you need and enjoy but let the questions flow down the river of miracles that we may catch a few fish and share the meal!
C:
What is philosophy if not a way of reflecting, not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our relationship to truth? … The movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules – that is philosophy.
Michel Foucault. (1997) [1980]. ‘The Masked Philosopher’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume One. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, Allen Lane, p. 327. Translation modified.
Random thoughts in response
‘What is philosophy?’ This is a question that Foucault raises on numerous occasions in various forms throughout his work. For all the variations in his response to this question, he always insisted that philosophy operated firmly within a historical context and could only manifest itself through quite specific historical practices and events and the way we engage historically with ourselves and others.
Philosophy, for Foucault, is not a question of stripping away historical accidents so that we can discover what is absolutely true for all time, rather it is a way of examining the ways in which people and systems of knowledge have made a division between the true and the false in very specific historical contexts. These divisions directly impact on the ways people conduct themselves in relation to themselves and others. Philosophy should also, in Foucault’s view, deal with the question of what is happening right now and with what our responsibilities are in relation to this very specific conjuncture.
And speaking of the current conjuncture specifically as it relates to the discipline of philosophy… Like other humanities disciplines, philosophy is under threat in that it is unable to produce the kind of ‘outcomes’ that are valued by neo-liberal systems of thought. Neo-liberalism (for those who came in late) is a form of thought which reduces all social relations to economic relations. As Foucault remarks: ‘It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society’. [1]
Much ink has flowed on the pernicious and all pervasive effects of neo-liberalism with, it seems, only a limited success in stemming its diffusion through all areas of social and cultural existence. The crisis over the announcement of the closure of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy and undergraduate programs in philosophy at Middlesex University in London on 26 April 2010 raises the problem of neo-liberal management culture yet again with particular acuteness. The suspension of staff and students and disciplinary hearings in reaction to their protests at the closure also have worrying implications for the continued existence of necessary social spaces for intellectual dissent and academic freedom. [2]
Academic culture and corporate culture are two very different entities and attempts to meld the two over the last twenty years in particular have had disastrous effects in terms of the maintenance of a healthy academic culture which can only make a worthwhile contribution to the social body precisely because it has different goals from the business, government and service sectors. A healthy society requires a balance between all four sectors. The university cannot be conveniently assimilated into the service sector, a currently popular strategy which seeks to reshape it primarily as an institution which ultimately focuses on providing ‘education services’.
The university is not simply about teaching and training people to engage in the work force and be compliant economic citizens or to serve the interests of industry and the maintenance of a healthy population with ‘useful’ forms of research. In addition to this, theoretical research aimed at pushing the boundaries of knowledge or questioning the structures of received knowledge serves the general community in other ways than the maintenance of economic relations. Criticism and analysis of social practices also keep repressive and questionable systems which seek to micromanage populations ‘for their own good’ in check. Philosophy sits (or ought to sit) squarely within this area of social critique and intellectual insight into the human experience.
But neo-liberalism is not the only problem that is faced by the discipline of philosophy in the current conjuncture. There are struggles over the definitions of what constitutes philosophy. Such definitional struggles as Pierre Bourdieu points out are struggles for power ‘over a vision of the natural and social world’[3] One of the most salient struggles in the English language world is the struggle between analytic philosophy and its ‘other’ which it describes as ‘continental’ philosophy.
To all appearances, analytic philosophy has over a long period of time and long before the current crisis, completely colonised the term ‘philosophy’ in university and other educational settings in the English language world. Philosophy departments in the UK, North America and Australia are almost unilaterally dedicated to this form of the discipline and any academics practising so-called ‘continental philosophy’ within those institutional settings are usually there as a grudging token concession to a style of thought that, it has to be recognised, has found immense popularity elsewhere. The very term ‘continental philosophy’ is constructed as the obverse of analytic philosophy. Even those using the term to describe their own practice do so by referring to analytic philosophy as the norm. (I will leave aside for the moment the question of non-analytic and non European practices of philosophy, which are usually relegated to departments of religion.)
Those who have disputed analytic definitions of philosophy have been forced to work in any other department except philosophy or have been forced to secede and create new departments. The scandalous split in philosophy at the University of Sydney into General Philosophy and Traditional Philosophy in the 1970s is a case in point, as is Eugene Kamenka’s secession from Philosophy at the Australian National University in the late 1960s to create the now sadly defunct History of Ideas unit. Middlesex was one of the very few departments labelled ‘philosophy’ which practised almost exclusively European style philosophy which makes its fragmentation and semi-demise even more of a loss.
‘Continental philosophy’ is something that clearly can only be treated with suspicion by ‘more rigorous’, ‘more scientific’ and less ‘politicised’ practices of analytic philosophy. In general, given this unfriendly reception, practitioners of post-War European styles of philosophy are more commonly found outside of philosophy departments in the English language world.
In a recent work, eminent analytic philosopher Michael Dummett while recognising this important and destructive fracture in the discipline of philosophy and calling for reconciliation, does nothing but add further fuel to the fire with the blurb on his book declaring that ‘Philosophy is a discipline that makes no observations, conducts no experiments, and needs no input from experience. It is an armchair subject, requiring only thought.’[3] It is a statement guaranteed to outrage the socially and historically oriented philosophers working in the wake of post War structuralist and poststructuralist philosophy.
This definition, if nothing else, draws attention to fundamental disagreements over what constitutes the proper subject matter and method of philosophy. In the analytic tradition, the categorisation of language practices and their rigorous logical deployment are paramount. Statements and concepts are rigidly sorted into a variety of categories – eg ethical statements, metaphysical statements, epistemological statements, mind versus body debates and so on and so forth. One then examines how chains of reasoning operate within these categories (often by reducing them to quasi-mathematical formulae). The ultimate goal is to arrive at an orderly system untainted by historical and political concerns which allows one to get to the ‘truth’. Only then after one has carefully ordered one’s categories can one make rigorous interventions from this elevated platform into matters of political and social concern. Analytic philosophy allows for difference in how truth might be interpreted in typical fashion by grouping activity in this area into different categories, for example: ‘the correspondence theory of truth’ or ‘the perspectivist notion of truth’. This fits in perfectly with the post Enlightenment model of science with its rigorous and rational methods (superior to all other methods) of uncovering a knowledge and truth independent of historical circumstance.
The methods of analytic philosophy also bear remarkable similarities to the eighteenth century project (as described by Foucault in The Order of Things) which sought to classify all knowledge into tables and to find a way to transparently match representations and things. If one could just get those tables right – then we could have true knowledge about and a true representation of things. These methods also resonate with the bureaucratic ideal of everything placed in an orderly manner in its right place, in the correct drawer of the filing cabinet.
Analytic philosophers criticise ‘Continental philosophy’ for its adulation of ‘great names’ and close textual studies of a variety of philosophers but it is unclear how far this differs from obligatory references to the ‘great names’ and the employment of ‘methods’ developed by thinkers in the analytical tradition. These great figures include the Greek philosophers of course, selected other European philosophers such as Descartes and Kant, Wittgenstein, Frege, Locke, Quine, Moore, Ryle, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Dennett as well as others.
Further, analytic philosophy arguably divorces the notion of philosophy from what is popularly and commonly understood by the term. Undergraduate students embarking hopefully on courses in philosophy departments are all too often disappointed by the rigidity and decontextualised nature of the offerings – with pre-prescribed and highly contrived set pieces for reflection operating somewhat like mathematical formulae. It is small wonder that students have turned en masse to psychology to provide them with the forms of reflection they crave, thereby regrettably further feeding into the power that psychology exerts in the direction of the pathologisation of all human experience and the reinforcement of mechanisms of social control. This is not to say, however, that there are not notable efforts by philosophers working within the analytic tradition, such as Alain de Botton, to try and make philosophy more publicly accessible. But I would argue that de Botton is the exception rather than the rule.
Students no doubt, also cannot help but notice a gender landscape that is overwhelmingly male in the delivery and practice of any kind of philosophy. Women are all too often relegated to the feminist ghetto away from the ‘serious’ work. One could further usefully embark on a discussion of the specific forms of masculinity that are represented in philosophy – and this applies to all forms of philosophy of whatever persuasion. Plato’s vision of the practice of philosophy as being the province of bearded males over 50 remains well and truly alive today.
I hasten to add, of course, that for all its pretensions to occupy the whole of the territory, analytic philosophy and the university departments which support its dissemination are under serious threat everywhere in the English language world. Departments have been merged with other humanities schools or have disappeared altogether. I welcome Dummett’s call for disciplinary reconciliation in order to make philosophy once again an institutional and intellectual force to be reckoned with. On the other hand, given the definitions he offers, it is more than clear that there remains much work to be done in persuading certain sectors (not all of them analytical) to adopt a far broader and more inclusive notion of the territory philosophy might cover. [5]
To be continued…
[1] Michel Foucault, (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics. Course at the Collège de France. 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 148.
[2] For ongoing up-to-date information on this situation see the Save Middlesex philosophy site and Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies blog
[3] Pierre Bourdieu (1987) Choses Dites, Paris: Minuit, p.171.
[4] Michael Dummett (2010) The Nature and Future of Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.
[5] I refuse under any circumstances to use the ghastly and ubiquitous term ‘philosophical enquiry’ so fondly used by analytical philosophers.
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Posted in Foucault, philosophy | Tagged analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, de Botton, dummett, feminism, masculinity, middlesex philosophy, neo-libereralism, truth, universities |
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Elena
I just found this site and am delighted with it. Thank you for putting your self into this.
In relation to the above article does it not seem to you as if the elements of conflict were necessary for people to push each other forward and beyond? When I look from the outside at the conflict between continental and analytical philosophy it is as if we were, on either side, blind people perceiving only a portion of the elephant.
Does the conflict not tell us about the moment in time that we human beings find ourselves in? The isolation of philosophy from the social historical processes seems as absurd as the limitation of philosophy to verifiable natural processes as if we were still simply unable to see the miraculous in each and every practice of life still trapped by the misery.
You mention how students are looking for answers in psychology “further feeding into the power that psychology exerts in the direction of the pathologisation of all human experience and the reinforcement of mechanisms of social control.” And I wonder if we should not be looking for answers in reuniting the different fields in one human knowledge that understands the place of each one? Although it is true that they are each rich enough to have their own space, don’t the many separations simply point to deepening our own schizophrenia?
I am not as versed in the language you’re using so I would somewhat innocently ask: Are psychology and philosophy not the realms of our inner life? Is psychology not also the connection between our selves and the world around and beyond? Is philosophy not also religion even if it humanized the divine?
Does it not seem to you that one of the problems with psychoanalysis today is that they are still pretending to analyze the individual without helping him or her understand how their family was molded by society? That in psychology we talk of individuals as if they could be disconnected from their entourage and in sociology we talk about people as if they could be disconnected from their individuality? That we pretend to hold the everlasting archetypes in psychology without realizing that the archetype was dehumanized in a very concrete world? Or a world of concrete should equally work!
Beyond asking for a space for continental philosophy and a reconciliation between both wouldn’t we be even more “philosophical” if we asked for a reunification of all the spheres of knowledge into a more coherently human experience in which less effort is wasted in specializing people into separating from each other? Isn’t one of the difficulties today that there are too many experts in too many fields but very few acting for the well-being of the whole? Very few willing to dare to question the fact that we’re living extremely inhuman lives and that the problem is not only in the economic inequality but in the system of hierarchies, authorities, gender?
Thank you again for sharing the conflict that I wholly support!
I do not understand what you are saying here. You asked me this question. Here is you post where you asked the question:
71. Elena – September 6, 2010
“Thanks for sharing your dream and the lovely song that I much enjoyed.
I haven’t read Beelzebub in a long time so if you can remind me where to find the strivings question I’ll be happy to look at it. Some thoughts in the meantime.
Would you consider that the instinctive centre, in as much as it connects to the physical aspect of our selves is at the same time wonderfully connected to nature and its laws? If one were to grasp that reality in its full scope wouldn’t that alone be an amazing connectedness to the world around us? To nature yes but all of nature including the planets and galaxies! Sometimes when making love I’ve had an amazing feeling of connectedness with the cosmos but it is also there at dawn and sunset when the colours are so dim that they feel like the skin of light!”
It is obvious that you are asking me a question.
Anyhow, here is Mr. Gurdjieff in his own words on how to put attention on Beelzebub:
“One thing I can tell you. Methods do not exist. I do not know any. But I can explain now everything simple. For example, in Beelzebub, I know there is everything one must know. It is a very interesting book. Everything is there. All that exists, all that existed, all that can exist. The beginning, the end, all the secrets of the creation of the world; all is there. But one must understand, and to understand depends on one’s individuality. The more man has been instructed in a certain way, the more he can see. Subjectively, everyone is able to understand according to the level he occupies, for it is an objective book, and everyone should understand something in it. One person understands one part, another a thousand times more. Now, find a way to put your attention on understanding all of Beelzebub. This will be your task, and it is a good way to fix a real attention. If you can put real attention on Beelzebub, you can have real attention in life. You didn’t know this secret. In Beelzebub there is everything, I have said it, even how to make an omelet. Among other things, it is explained; and at the same time there isn’t a word in Beelzebub about cooking. So, you put your attention on Beelzebub, another attention than that to which you are accustomed, and you will be able to have the same attention in life. (Gurdjieff International Review, Vol. II No.1, Fall 1998 Issue).
Thanks for sharing with me, even if it seems that you were never sharing with me. It is obvious that the sense and aim of my existence do not correspond to yours and that is perfectly within the fact that we are different, although not separated.
One more thing. You wrote:
“My very warm love to you Will. Brag about yourself all you must if that’s what you need and enjoy but let the questions flow down the river of miracles that we may catch a few fish and share the meal!”
My bragging is a matter of my self-individuality and my striving to manifest my individuality so I can attain the “Reason-of-Understanding.” The flowing of the questions down the river is a matter of how much are we interested in addressing the questions. Since you said that you have not read Beelzebub’s tales for a long time, I encourage you to read the fist chapter of the book with the title “The Arousing of Thought.’ As you will see, it is a celebration of bragging and that does not stop the questions addressed by Mr, Gurdjieff to flow down the river for some one thousand pages more. But only for those who decide to eat the red pepper pods of the poor Transcaucasian Kurd. The thing is that very few are willing to have a bad digestion.
In other words, Elena, how many of us are really interested in rowing?
Hi Will,
Thanks for reposting your posts here, I do like to keep a record of things that I consider of value but don’t like to post other people’s posts without their knowing or permission but for rare exceptions when they are very impersonal. We might as well post the rest in one block!
Comment by Crystal Sword 8 hours ago
I haven’t read Beelzebub in a long time so if you can remind me where to find the strivings question I’ll be happy to read it M.
I’ve been addressing everyone here including you Will but I was clearly talking to M in that post. I simply greeted you too.
I am still addressing everyone here and thank you as much as them for their contributions.
You tell me you are the devil and ask me if I am a witch and I ask you, have you seen the beauty? I have nothing to hide from anyone so it is a pleasure to answer whatever in public.
Thank you for your love, I take it gladly.
Crystal
Comment by Crystal Sword 8 hours ago
Hi Will, if you read the post carefully, you’ll notice that I’m actually addressing each of M’s paragraphs.
Thanks, have a great weekend! C.
Will Mesa
Hi Crystal, if you go back you will see that it was Will and not Mani who posted the strivings. But assuming that you are addressing Mani, in a Forum we all exchange and I can take any body’s question to anybody else and then answer. But the most important thing here is what I wrote about the Law Solioonensius. I quoted four long paragraphs about the law from Beelzebub’s Tales (BTTHG). The thing is that if we understood that law, we will understand this exchange you and I are having here today. Ponder on this.
About the matter of devils and witches, it is all in the chapter on understanding Justice of BTTHG, pages 1142-1143. I did not want to bring that to the blog on Objective Morality and that is why I asked you in private mail. After all, you accepted to be my friend and friends can correspondence in private. Did you not get the message in the video I dedicated to you about what friends are for? And once I saw the beauty and the three kinds of love, and then I saw them no more.
Anyhow, let’s follow the advice from Mani and let’s go back to the mater of Objective Morality.
You too have a great weekend. I certainly expect to have a good one because I am leaving for Miami for a long weekend to dance Salsa with the Cuban Sugar Girls. No website for me for few days. I had it!!! Maybe one of these days I go to Ituango and dance a Cumbia with you, I mean if the cartel from Medellin will allow us to do the dancing.
Anyhow love to you wherever you are!
Will
Hi again Will,
There’s something wonderfully healthy about the public sphere and we’ve only just met so if it’s alright, can we stay public?
Best wishes,
Elena
Isn’t what objectively happens in the undercurrent of what goes on?
Pondering on the above subject of being and doing I realized that there are different “doings” or rather there are similar “doings” that have completely different meaning and effect according to the being. For example, a man can play the guitar and play it well for a long time and that will give him a certain being as a guitarist as much as a musician while another man might pick the guitar up and after playing for only a few weeks, he will sense the effect the music has on him in a way that the other guitarist has never perceived. That is one aspect. The other aspect is that in the first player, the man’s attitude towards the guitar is that of someone “doing” the playing while the second man’s attitude is that of someone that knows that he is playing the guitar but the music is “playing” on him. The difference in “being” of both men is that although the second man doesn’t play the guitar very well he is aware of the quality of the impressions in a way that the other man is not. He does not feel the main actor of the scene, he allows the music to be the real agent and act on his own self as much as others. He is not as self-centred as the first player and that completely changes “everything” for the men as much as the energies in the universe that feed on these phenomenon. Although the more professional player might know how to make more sounds the beginner probably has greater experiences of beauty because he allows for the music to be without letting his own self interfere with it.
LIFE and love are inseparable from each other. Where there is life, there is love. Even the most rudimentary consciousness is always trying to burst out of its limitations and experience some kind of unity with other forms. Love pervades the universe. Though each form is separate from other forms, in reality they are all forms of the same unity of life. The latent sense for this hidden inner reality indirectly makes itself felt even in the world of illusion through the attraction which one form has for another form.
“makes itself felt even in the world of illusion through the attraction which one form has for another form.” Meher Baba
I wonder if Meher Baba ever made love to a woman. What is the world of illusion here? Go and tell an Africa boy who had only one little meal that his world is just a world of Maya. What are these Indian Gurus telling us? That is why the Living Teaching Mr. Gurdjieff brought us has been called Anti-Yoga. Did Mr. Baba ever know how to really love a woman? Here is the only test to know if a man have really loved a woman:
You are correct. Meher Baba followed Vedanta and Mr. Gurdjieff followed Tantra. In Vedanta all is Illusion; in Tantra all is Real. I follow Tantra because it corresponds to my cosmic type. But Vedanta is as valid as Tantra. Different ways for different types. I follow Mr. Gurdjieff when he said “When take, take; when give, give.” That is pure Tantra. I think Tantra is much more adapted to the Western mentality than Tantra. What do you think?
I was just about to post this chapter on love by Baba, it explains the relationship between the centers in a much more practical way than I’ve ever heard described before.
LIFE and love are inseparable from each other. Where there is life, there is love. Even the most rudimentary consciousness is always trying to burst out of its limitations and experience some kind of unity with other forms. Love pervades the universe Though each form is separate from other forms, in reality they are all forms of the same unity of life. The latent sense for this hidden inner reality indirectly makes itself felt even in the world of illusion through the attraction which one form has for another form.
The law of gravitation, to which all the planets and the stars are subject, is in its own way a dim reflection of the love which pervades every part of the universe. Even the forces of repulsion Reign of love in inanimate nature are in truth expressions of love, since things are repelled from each other because they are more powerfully attracted to some other things. Repulsion is a negative consequence of positive attraction. The forces of cohesion and affinity which prevail in the very constitution of matter are positive expressions of love. A striking example of love at this level is found in the attraction which the magnet exercises for iron. All these forms of love are of the lowest type, since they are necessarilyconditioned by the rudimentary consciousness in which they appear.
In the animal world love becomes more explicit in the form of conscious impulses which are directed towards different objects in the surroundings. This love is instinctive and it takes Love in the animal kingdom the form of gratifying different desires through the appropriation of suitable objects. When the tiger seeks to devour the deer he is in a very real sense in love with the deer. Sex-attraction is another form of love at this level. All the expressions of love at this stage have one thing in common, viz., they all seek to satisfy some bodily impulse or desire through the object of love.
Human love is much higher than all these lower forms of love because human beings have the fully developed form of consciousness. Though human love is continuous with the lower Human love has to adjust to reason sub-human forms of love, in a way, it is different from them, for henceforth its operations have to be carried on side by side with a new factor which is reason. Sometimes human love manifests itself as a force which is divorced from reason and runs parallel to it. Sometimes it manifests itself as a force which gets mixed up with reason and comes into conflict with it. Lastly, it expresses itself as a constituent of the harmonised whole where love and reason have been balanced and fused into an integral unity.
Thus human love can enter into three types of combination with reason. Three combinations of love and reason In the first type, the sphere of thought and the sphere of love are kept as separate as possible, i.e., the sphere of love is practically inaccessible to the operation of reason, and love is allowed little or no access to the objects ofthought. Complete separation between these two aspects of the spirit is of course never possible, but when there is an alternate functioning of love and reason (oscillating in their predominance) we have a love which is unillumined by reason or a reason which is unenlivened by love. In the second type, love and reason are both simultaneously operative but they do not work in harmony with each other. Though this conflict creates confusion, it is a necessary phase in the evolution of the higher state where there is a real synthesis of love and reason. In the third type of love this synthesis between love and reason is an accomplished fact with the result that both love as well as reason are so completely transformed that they precipitate the emergence of a new level of consciousness which, compared to the normal human consciousness, is best described as super-consciousness.
Human love makes its appearance in the matrix of ego-consciousness which has countless desires. Love is coloured by these factors in many ways. Just as we get an ever changing variety Qualitative variety in love of designs in a kaleidoscope by the various combinations of simpler elements, we find an almost limitless qualitative variety in the range of love owing to novel combinations of psychic factors. And just as there are infinite shades of colour in different flowers, so there are diverse delicate differences in human love.
Human love is encircled by a number of obstructive factors such as infatuation, lust, greed, anger and jealousy. Lower forms of love In one sense, even these obstructive factors are either forms of lower love or the inevitable side-results of these lower forms of love. Infatuation, lust and greed might be looked upon as perverted and lower forms of love. In infatuation a person is enamouredof a sensual object; in lust he develops a craving for sensations in relation to it; and in greed he desires to possess it. Of these three forms of lower love, greed has a tendency to extend from the original object to the means of obtaining it. Thus persons become greedy for money or power or fame, which can be instruments for possessing the different objects that are craved. Anger and jealousy come into existence when these lower forms of love are thwarted or threatened to be thwarted.
These lower forms of love obstruct the release of pure love. The stream of love can never become clear and steady until it is disentangled from these limiting and perverting forms of lower love. The lower is the enemy of the higher. The lower is the enemy of the higher If consciousness is caught in the rhythm of the lower it cannot emancipate itself from its self-created ruts, finding it difficult to get out of them and advance further. Thus the lower form of love continues to interfere with the development of the higher form, and has to be given up in order to allow for the untramelled appearance of the higher form of love.
The emergence of higher love from the shell of lower love is helped by the constant exercise of discrimination. Therefore, love has Love and infatuation to be carefully distinguished from the obstructive factors of infatuation, lust, greed and anger. In infatuation, the person is a passive victim of the spell of conceived attraction for the object. In love there is an active appreciation of the intrinsic worth of the object of love.
Love is also different from lust. In lust there is reliance upon the object of sense and consequent spiritual subordination of the soul to it, but love puts the soul intothat very act it finds that it has included the beloved in its own being.
Infatuation, lust and greed constitute a spiritual malady which is often rendered more virulent by the aggravating symptoms of anger and jealousy. Pure love, in sharp contradistinction, Pure love awakened through grace is the bloom of spiritual perfection. Human love is so tethered by these limiting conditions that the spontaneous appearance of pure love from within becomes impossible. So, when such pure love arises in the aspirant it is always a gift. Pure love arises in the heart of the aspirant in response to the descent of grace from the Master. When pure love is first received as a gift of the Master it becomes lodged in the consciousness of the aspirant like a seed in favourable soil, and in the course of time the seed develops into a plant and then into a full-grown tree.
The descent of the grace of the Master is conditioned, however, by the preliminary spiritual preparation of the aspirant. This preliminary spiritual preparation for grace is never Spiritual preparation for grace complete until the aspirant has built into his psychic make-up some divine attributes. When a person avoids backbiting and thinks more of the good points in others than of their bad points, and when he can practise supreme tolerance, and desires the good of others even at the cost of his own self, he is ready to receive the grace of the Master. One of the greatest obstacles hindering this spiritual preparation of the aspirant is worry. When, with supreme effort, this obstacle of worry is overcome, a way is paved for the cultivation of the divine attributes which constitute the spiritual preparation of the disciple. As soon as the disciple is readythe grace of the Master descends, for the Master, who is the ocean of divine love, is always on the look-out for the soul in whom his grace will fructify.
The kind of love which is awakened by the grace of the Master is a rare privilege. The mother who is willing to sacrifice all and to die for her child, and the Pure love is very rare martyr who is prepared to give up his very life for his country are indeed supremely noble, but they have not necessarily tasted this pure love which is born through the grace of the Master. Even the great yogis with long beards who, sitting in caves and mountains, are completely absorbed in deep samadhi, do not necessarily have this precious love.
Pure love awakened through the grace of the Master is more valuable than any other stimulus which may be utilised by the aspirant. Such love not only Pure love the best discipline combines in itself the merits of all the disciplines but excels them all in its efficacy to lead the aspirant to his goal. When this love is born the aspirant has only one desire, and that is to be united with the Divine Beloved. Such withdrawal of consciousness from all other desires leads to infinite purity; therefore nothing purifies the aspirant more completely than this love. The aspirant is always willing to offer everything for the Divine Beloved, and no sacrifice is too difficult for him. All his thoughts are turned away from the self and come to be exclusively centred on the Divine Beloved. Through the intensity of this evergrowing love he eventually breaks through the shackles of the self and becomes united with the Beloved. This is the consummation of love. When love has thus found its fruition it has become divine.
Divine love is qualitatively different from humanlove. Human love is for the many in the One and divine love is for the One in the many. Human love leads to innumerable complications and tangles, but divine love leads to integration and freedom. Divine love higher than human love In divine love the personal and the impersonal aspects are equally balanced, but in human love the two aspects are in alternating ascendency. When the personal note is predominant in human love it leads to utter blindness to the intrinsic worth of other forms. When, as in sense of duty, love is predominantly impersonal, it often makes one cold, rigid and mechanical. Sense of duty comes to the individual as an external constraint on behaviour, but in divine love there is unrestrained freedom and unbounded spontaneity. Human love in its personal and impersonal aspects is limited, but divine love with its fusion of the personal and the impersonal aspects is infinite in being and expression.
Even the highest type of human love is subject to the limitation of individual nature which persists till the seventh plane. Divine love arises after the disappearance of the individual mind and is free from the trammels of individual nature. In human love the duality of the lover and the beloved persists, In divine love the lover is united with Beloved but in divine love the lover and Beloved become one. At this stage the aspirant has stepped out of the domain of duality and become one with God, for divine love is God. When the lover and the Beloved are one, that is the end and the beginning.
It is for love that the whole universe sprang into existence and it is for the sake of love that it is kept going. God descends into the realm of illusion because the apparent duality of the Beloved and the lover is eventually contributory to His conscious enjoyment ofHis own divinity. Universe came into existence for sake of love The development of love is conditioned and sustained by the tension of duality. God has to suffer apparent differentiation into a multiplicity of souls in order to carry on the game of love. They are His own forms, and in relation to them He at once assumes the role of the Divine Lover and the Divine Beloved. As the Beloved, He is the real and the ultimate object of their appreciation. As the Divine Lover, He is their real and ultimate saviour drawing them back to Himself. Thus though the whole world of duality is only an illusion, that illusion has come into being for a significant purpose.
Love is the reflection of God’s unity in the world of duality. It constitutes the entire significance of creation. If love is excluded from life, all the souls in the world assume Dynamics of love complete externality to each other and the only possible relations and contacts in such a loveless world are superficial and mechanical. It is because of love that the contacts and relations between individual souls become significant. It is love which gives meaning and value to all the happenings in the world of duality. But, while love gives meaning to the world of duality, it is at the same time a standing challenge to duality. As love gathers strength, it generates creative restlessness and becomes the main driving power of that spiritual dynamic which ultimately succeeds in restoring to consciousness the original unity of being.
I prefer Orage’s essay On Love to what Baba wrote here. I find it more human and less spiritualized.And it corresponds more to the Living Teaching Mr. Gurdjieff brought to the West. Most of these Indian Gurus do no understand us Westerners. That is why in Beelzebub’s Tales there is a very strong criticism of Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism.
I think you’ve been here my Old Friend and as soon as I saw traces of your presence my heart leaped into another sphere of tranquility that it hasn’t had ever since you left.
In relation to the FOF Blog I also feel that all those of us who have touched each other and separated must eventually come together again; the sooner the better.
I have been the cause of many our separations and beyond regret which is ALL there, is also the understanding that in conflict there are elements that need to be overcome in both sides for there to be a reunification. The wonder of being together is the wonder of being together. Nothing can replace another’s presence and we are all needed for dinner.
I am also understanding that I could not stop writing like a madman or the madwoman that I have often been in the fofblog, because my sense of my own self was too weak to live without verifying itself. That I was too vulnerable to be on my own and rest. That I needed consistent reassurance to be. I am not trying to justify my mistakes, I clearly acknowledge that the excessive occupation of space, the aggressions and the behavior was out of place. I say this and an I still says, what was so out of place?
This I says, what was so out of place? That you were fighting against an evil that you had all met and most neglected to seriously stand up against? That there are still only 188 signatures in the petition although over 800 people have left in the past three years? Or was it that you insulted them as fascists? Sickos?
This is difficult for me. I do not regret screaming at people who I believe are behaving as fascists but I regret screaming at people. It is another form of fascism to scream at people and that I regret. I wish to say on my behalf that more than screaming at people I was screaming at the horror I know lives in the Fellowship of Friends cult and at the horror I myself lived and expanded on my own family. But I also wish to acknowledge that there was too much ego on my behalf and as I look at it without judgment I realize that there is only as much ego as lack of I. This is perhaps one of the most beautiful understandings I’ve come across in trying to grasp how it is that negative emotions arise: the understanding that all our “arguing”, “possessiveness”, and “separationism” is simply the reflection of our own self’s suffering concentrated in the ego. That the ego is just that: lack of love that expresses itself in lack of being which expresses itself in all forms of separation from others.
Thinking about this the idea that this or that is “mine” becomes very clear. What can be mine when as soon as time’s up it’ll remain here? And what more could one wish than to leave more than one found?
This idea that there is only as much ego as lack of I or real I must be clarified because the tendency in cults in all spheres of life or those wishing to establish separating hierarchies between people in the family, society or nations, is that they’ll justify abusing those with “less I” because they “deserve it” and this is far from right. This is the worst illness in the sphere of being and it amounts for most of the injustice in the world today. The idea that there is only as much ego as lack of I as I’m presenting it here is far from understanding the ego as it has usually been conceived as relating to egotism. It is true that the ego is egotistic but it is egotistic because it needs to defend its feeling of isolation and separation from the rest of the world. It is the ego what we come out with after leaving our homes. It is the ego what our parents plant in our lives. It is probably determined by karmic laws and the opportunity we have then is to rebuild our selves from that ego. To transform our personal suffering and the suffering of our parents as much as those who surrounded us in such a way that we can reunite ourselves through the understanding of their condition, that is, through compassion.
In this sense what I most regret about my first final participation in the fofblog is my lack of compassion. When I screamed at them in my last posts I was as separate as they were to me. And yet I ask. Was this not necessary for us all? In the suffering that we’ve all endured through our having to stand up for what we think is right, aren’t such separations necessary so that we each readjust our self to our selves? Is conflict not necessary for us to evolve? Is it not painful when we tell each other the truth about our selves? Can it be any other way? But must we hate each other for hurting each other with truths that we all need to hear?
Let me be clear that I am talking about my first participation and not when I rejoined recently. I am in nothing regretful of my recent participation. I entered with love and was banned without it. I do not regret my love.
It’s fine to post your answer here on the box instead of the reply under the comment so that we don’t have to go back up there because sometimes they get lost.
I enjoyed your differences on vedanta and tantra. I didn’t know they were called such. If I am more in the tantra world then Meher Baba is as real to me as Gurdjieff. I see things that fit their time and place and try not to judge everything and become cultish about anything anymore. I already took that road for too long and it led to hell but I respect anyone’s choice to still tread on it as long as they don’t harm anybody else or pretend to impose it on anybody else… which is rare for in our longing for unity we try to convince each other to join us.
We cannot disagree on what you prefer or not. You’ve worked hard on Gurdjieff’s book and your knowledge of it is welcome. I enjoy being reminded and even more realizing all the mistakes and faults he also made no matter how much I’ve followed the System.
I’m no longer anyone’s follower though. I’m not looking for instructors or guides nor do I feel I can instruct or guide anyone. Just people to share who I can listen to and who can hear what is said without judgment, lying, identification, imagination and negative emotions and with all the love or external consideration that we can amass. I am far from practicing these things still so it is necessary to practice with people so much more often!
Will: “Meher Baba followed Vedanta and Mr. Gurdjieff followed Tantra. In Vedanta all is Illusion; in Tantra all is Real. I follow Tantra because it corresponds to my cosmic type. But Vedanta is as valid as Tantra. Different ways for different types. I follow Mr. Gurdjieff when he said “When take, take; when give, give.” That is pure Tantra. I think Tantra is much more adapted to the Western mentality than Tantra. What do you think?”
I think that is what Mr. Gurdjieff said, that different systems apply to different people.
How do you understand “all is real” in tantra?
What does it mean to you that it corresponds to your cosmic type?
And if you care to expand, was does it mean to you that all is illusion?
On a note aside, since you’re such a lover of Gurdjieff’s work I am surprised you haven’t read Rodney Collin. His Theory of Celestial Influences is a masterpiece in my humble opinion, do look at it when you have the inclination and time.
Thanks for sharing Will. It’s fun to think about these things but my time is no longer so long and I would much enjoy not taking our energy away from the Objective Art site and side. There are some very interesting people contributing there. Having said that, it is fine also to share here what is here’s.
All is illusion is the central tenet of the teaching of Vedanta. The only reality is the Self or God. The classical example is a movie screen. The only reality is the screen; the figures projecting on the screen are all illusion. The most immediate consequence of this teaching is total renunciation, beginning with renunciation of sex.
For Tantra the converse is true. All is real and sex is as real as God.
The best example of Vedanta is Sri Aurobindo who left his wife for a spiritual adventure and wrote Life Divine in which he said: “No sex in Life Divine.” The best example of Tantra is Mr. Gurdjieff who at age eighty was still having sex with young women (read the book “Daddy Gurdjieff” by his son Leonid Stjoernval–you can find it at the Gurdjieff Internet Guide).
I love the Living teaching of Mr. Gurdjieff and I hate the Work. That is why I read only Beelzebub’s tales and books about life with Mr. Gurdjieff.
My cosmic type deals with the transformation of substances and energies and that is why I am an engineer. You cosmic type, from what I have seen in your blog, deals with the transformation of words and you love poetry. If we ever meet for dinner, you will sing me a poem and I will hold your white right hand in my two hands, send you all my Hanbledzoin, and then look at your face to see if there is something transforming in your eyes, like this:
Will
PS. I totally agree with you that we ought to move to the Forum Objectivec Art.
a comment on:
The kind of love which is awakened by the grace of the Master is a rare privilege. The mother who is willing to sacrifice all and to die for her child, and the Pure love is very rare martyr who is prepared to give up his very life for his country are indeed supremely noble, but they have not necessarily tasted this pure love which is born through the grace of the Master. Even the great yogis with long beards who, sitting in caves and mountains, are completely absorbed in deep samadhi, do not necessarily have this precious love.”
——————————
I wish humble love not this metaphysical love if metaphysical means far from me.
I wish The mother love that LIVES for her child !
I wish to see around me little humble examples that are close to my reach so i can copy it!
I like when he says:” obstructive factors are either forms of lower love or the inevitable side-results of these lower forms of love”.
Because this means try to do, try to do what your conscience tell you to do and observe the results. Not Mummojumbo about Love of Master is the biggest love, but instead good advices: what is “the preliminary spiritual preparation of the aspirant” ?
Look high, look down and go straight…
Thanks for your insights on this text. For me this text collects the whole structure of love in the jacks, queens and kings of centers beautifully and it is expressed so un-academically, vivid and wisely.
All forms of love inspire. I don’t think the love for the master is any less great than he expresses here but the idolatry for master, lover or child is what makes relationships in cults, marriages and families so sick. There’s a whole world of difference between love and blind idolatry.
Jesus said, “Among those born of women, from Adam until John the Baptist, there is no one so superior to John the Baptist that his eyes should not be lowered (before him). Yet I have said, whichever one of you comes to be a child will be acquainted with the kingdom and will become superior to John.”
The Gospel of Thomas
You’re dead
But you’ve been here all the time
as if it were impossible to die
and all that happened
were that we fused inside
for we’ve never been apart
I love you
even if you left before I was old enough to be
and had to die so many times before I came to life
I love you
even if you left long before I could
and looked for you in every living being
hoping you’d survived in every skin
longing for too long
to be at ease
I have loved you
if love is pain and wondering the skin of every lover
like balm in a soul that never knew how it felt to be that loved
And now that it is all over
And there’s no wish
I look at that treading of snails on rock
as if it were just
life
without regret
or demands
as if it had been what needed to be done
whether you had left or not
but with the excuse
Had you told me that it was mostly about digging
I might have bought myself a spade
Oh Mother
Not to dig your grave
But to dig you out of the grave
Instead
of doing it with my nails
Families were already dead long before you died
Even those who have them don’t know them
They don’t matter anymore
People are too busy working
for somebody else
But it’s clear to me
That it is better to have a parent
Than to have to replace one
With other’s selves until
Our little essence is bold enough
To live
I love you
All my pain’s been nothing
Compared to what you must’ve felt
To put two bullets in your head
When I was eight
“We are always together in this realm”
you told me recently beyond dreams
I know, I know,
And I’m so busy still
In this
but
how much more gratitude
Could I thank you with?
We are One
and in that Oneness
there’s no I or you
I didn’t know exactly how much the Arabs have sculpted our world.
Alchemy and chemistry in medieval Islam
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Alchemy and chemistry in Islam refers to the study of both traditional alchemy and early practical chemistry (the early chemical investigation of nature in general) by scientists in the medieval Islamic world. The word alchemy itself was derived from the Arabic word الكيمياء al-kimia, in turn derived from the Persian word کيميا kimia.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the focus of alchemical development moved to the Arab Empire and the Islamic civilization. Much more is known about Islamic alchemy as it was better documented; indeed, most of the earlier writings that have come down through the years were preserved as Arabic translations.[1]
The study of alchemy and chemistry often overlapped in the early Islamic world, but later there were disputes between the traditional alchemists and the practical chemists who discredited alchemy. Muslim chemists and alchemists were the first to employ the experimental scientific method (as practised in modern chemistry), while Muslim alchemists also developed theories on the transmutation of metals, the philosopher’s stone and the Takwin (artificial creation of life in the laboratory), like in later medieval European alchemy, though these alchemical theories were rejected by practical Muslim chemists from the 9th century onwards.
Contents [hide]
1 Contributions to alchemy
2 Beginnings of chemistry
3 Legacy
4 Chemical processes
5 Laboratory apparatus
6 Chemical substances
7 Chemical industries
8 Drinking industry
9 Glass industry
10 Hygiene industries
11 See also
12 References
13 External links
[edit]Contributions to alchemy
The Islamic world was a melting pot for alchemy. Islamic philosophers made great contributions to alchemical hermeticism. The most influential author in this regard was arguably Jābir ibn Hayyān (جابر بن حيان, Latin Geberus; usually rendered in English as Geber). He analyzed each Aristotelian element in terms of four basic qualities of hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness.[2] According to Jābir, in each metal two of these qualities were interior and two were exterior. For example, lead was externally cold and dry, while gold was hot and moist. Thus, Jabir theorized, by rearranging the qualities of one metal, a different metal would result.[2] By this reasoning, the search for the philosopher’s stone was introduced to Western alchemy.[3][4] Jabir developed an elaborate numerology whereby the root letters of a substance’s name in Arabic, when treated with various transformations, held correspondences to the element’s physical properties.
The elemental system used in medieval alchemy was developed by Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber). His original system consisted of seven elements, which included the five classical elements (aether, air, earth, fire and water), in addition to two chemical elements representing the metals: sulphur, ‘the stone which burns’, which characterized the principle of combustibility, and mercury, which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties. Shortly thereafter, this evolved into eight elements, with the Arabic concept of the three metallic principles: sulphur giving flammability or combustion, mercury giving volatility and stability, and salt giving solidity.[5][verification needed]
Muslim alchemists also developed theories on the transmutation of metals, the philosopher’s stone and the Takwin (artificial creation of life in the laboratory), like in later medieval European alchemy, though these alchemical theories were rejected by practical Muslim chemists from the 9th century onwards.
[edit]Beginnings of chemistry
Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber), considered the “father of chemistry”, introduced experimentation, invented the alembic still and retort, many chemical processes such as filtration, and many chemical substances such as distilled alcohol. He also established the perfumery industry.
Muhammad ibn Zakariya ar-Razi (Rhazes) isolated many chemical substances, produced many medications, and described many laboratory apparatus.
Early Islamic chemists such as Jabir ibn Hayyan, Al-Kindi (Latinized as Alkindus) and Al-Razi (Latinized as Rasis or Rhazes) contributed key chemical discoveries, including:
Distillation apparatus (such as the alembic, still, and retort) which were able to fully purify chemical substances.
The words elixir, alembic and alcohol are of Arabic origin.
The muriatic (hydrochloric), sulfuric, nitric and acetic acids.
Soda and potash.
Purified distilled alcohol.
Perfumery
Many more chemical substances and apparatus.
From the Arabic names of al-natrun and al-qalīy, Latinized into Natrium and Kalium, come the modern symbols for sodium and potassium.
The discovery that aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, could dissolve the noblest metal, gold, was to fuel the imagination of alchemists for the next millennium.
An early experimental scientific method for chemistry began emerging among early Muslim chemists. The first and most influential was the 9th century chemist, Jābir ibn Hayyān, who is “considered by many to be the father of chemistry”,[6][7][8][9] for introducing:
The experimental method; apparatus such as the alembic, still, and retort; and chemical processes such as liquefaction, purification, oxidisation and evaporation.[9]
Purification by crystallisation.[6]
Filtration.[10]
Pure distillation[10][not in citation given] (Impure distillation methods were known to the Babylonians, Greeks and Egyptians since ancient times, but Jābir was the first to introduce distillation apparatus and techniques which were able to fully purify chemical substances.)[citation needed]
The distillation and production of numerous chemical substances.
Jabir clearly recognized and proclaimed the importance of experimentation:
The first essential in chemistry is that thou shouldest perform practical work and conduct experiments, for he who performs not practical work nor makes experiments will never attain to the least degree of mastery.”[11]
The historian of chemistry E. J. Holmyard gives credit to Jabir for his part in the development of alchemy into an experimental science and he writes that Jabir’s importance to the history of chemistry is equal to that of Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier.[12] The historian Paul Kraus, who had studied most of Jabir’s extant works in Arabic and Latin, summarized the importance of Jabir ibn Hayyan to the history of chemistry by comparing his experimental and systematic works in chemistry with that of the allegorical and unintelligble works of the ancient Greek alchemists:[13]
“To form an idea of the historical place of Jabir’s alchemy and to tackle the problem of its sources, it is advisable to compare it with what remains to us of the alchemical literature in the Greek language. One knows in which miserable state this literature reached us. Collected by Byzantine scientists from the tenth century, the corpus of the Greek alchemists is a cluster of incoherent fragments, going back to all the times since the third century until the end of the Middle Ages.”
“The efforts of Berthelot and Ruelle to put a little order in this mass of literature led only to poor results, and the later researchers, among them in particular Mrs. Hammer-Jensen, Tannery, Lagercrantz, von Lippmann, Reitzenstein, Ruska, Bidez, Festugiere and others, could make clear only few points of detail…”
The study of the Greek alchemists is not very encouraging. An even surface examination of the Greek texts shows that a very small part only was organized according to true experiments of laboratory: even the supposedly technical writings, in the state where we find them today, are unintelligible nonsense which refuses any interpretation.
It is different with Jabir’s alchemy. The relatively clear description of the processes and the alchemical apparatuses, the methodical classification of the substances, mark an experimental spirit which is extremely far away from the weird and odd esotericism of the Greek texts. The theory on which Jabir supports his operations is one of clearness and of an impressive unity. More than with the other Arab authors, one notes with him a balance between theoretical teaching and practical teaching, between the `ilm and the `amal. In vain one would seek in the Greek texts a work as systematic as that which is presented for example in the Book of Seventy.”
Jabir’s teacher, Ja’far al-Sadiq, refuted Aristotle’s theory of the four classical elements and discovered that each one is made up of different chemical elements:
“I wonder how a man like Aristotle could say that in the world there are only four elements – Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. The Earth is not an element. It contains many elements. Each metal, which is in the earth, is an element.”[14]
Al-Sadiq also developed a particle theory, which he described as follows:
“The universe was born out of a tiny particle, which had two opposite poles. That particle produced an atom. In this way matter came into being. Then the matter diversified. This diversification was caused by the density or rarity of the atoms.”[14]
Al-Sadiq also wrote a theory on the opacity and transparency of materials. He stated that materials which are solid and absorbent are opaque, and materials which are solid and repellent are more or less transparent. He also stated that opaque materials absorb heat.[14]
Al-Kindi, who was a chemist and an opponent of alchemy, was the first to refute the study of traditional alchemy and the theory of the transmutation of metals into more precious metals such as gold or silver.[15] Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī,[16] Avicenna[17] and Ibn Khaldun were also opponents of alchemy who refuted the theory of the transmutation of metals.
Another influential Muslim chemist was al-Razi (Rhazes), who in his Doubts about Galen, was the first to prove both Aristotle’s theory of classical elements and Galen’s theory of humorism wrong using an experimental method. He carried out an experiment which would upset these theories by inserting a liquid with a different temperature into a body resulting in an increase or decrease of bodily heat, which resembled the temperature of that particular fluid. Al-Razi noted particularly that a warm drink would heat up the body to a degree much higher than its own natural temperature, thus the drink would trigger a response from the body, rather than transferring only its own warmth or coldness to it. Al-Razi’s chemical experiments further suggested other qualities of matter, such as “oiliness” and “sulfurousness”, or inflammability and salinity, which were not readily explained by the traditional fire, water, earth and air division of elements.[citation needed] Al-Razi was also the first to:
Distill petroleum.
Invent kerosene and kerosene lamps.
Invent soap bars and modern recipes for soap.
Produce antiseptics.
Develop numerous chemical processes such as sublimation.
In the 13th century Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī stated a version of the law of conservation of mass, noting that a body of matter is able to change, but is not able to disappear.[18]
From the 12th century, the writings of Jābir ibn Hayyān, al-Kindi, al-Razi and Avicenna became widely known in Europe during the Arabic-Latin translation movement and later through the Latin writings of a pseudo-Geber, an anonymous alchemist born in 14th century Spain, who translated more of Jabir’s books into Latin and wrote some of his own books under the pen name of “Geber”.
[edit]The Alchemists
There are more Islamic figures within chemistry than is generally acknowledged in the literature on the subject.
More recent research into the matter has provided a string outline. Regarding Muslim chemists beginning with the Umayyad Prince Khalid Ibn Yazid (Calid)(d.704), Ja’far al-Sadiq, Jabir Ibn Hayyan and Ibn Wahshiyya (.870) who wrote chemical works which were subsequently used by Al-Dimashqi in his Mineralogy. al-Razi and Muhammed ibn Umail al-Tamimi (wrote Miftah al-hikma al-‘uzma). Al-Farabi (d. 950) and Ibn Badis on Silver filling also wrote on chemistry, and were succeeded chronologically by a chemist from Spain, Al-Majriti (d. 1007), Ziryab, Abu al-Salt, Ibn al-Wafid of Toledo (Abenguefit) and Ibn ar-Tafiz (Artephius) of Córdoba in Islamic Spain[19].
In Baghdad and nearby, Al-Khwarizmi al-Khati (.1034) (not the mathematician), who wrote Ain al-San’a wa awn al-Sunâ (The essential of the Art and the Help for the Artisans), Ibn Sina, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī and Abu Mansur Muwaffaq of Herat. In the 12th century came to prominence the famous Seljuk vizier-scholar Al-Tughrai (d.1122) who wrote numerous works such as Kitab al-anwar wa’l mafatih. Later in the same century flourished Ahmad Ibn Imad ul-din, Abul Hasan ibn Musa ibn Arfa Ra’a (d. 1197) who is the author of Shudhur al-dahab (The Gold Spangle), Al-Nabarawi and al-Khazini. In the early 14th century Al-Simawi, Ibn Rassam, then the famed al-Jaldaki (c. 1342), Abul Ashba ibn Tammam (d.1361) and Hassan al-Rammah.[20]
[edit]Legacy
Alexander von Humboldt regarded the Muslim chemists as the true founders of chemistry.[21] Will Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization IV: The Age of Faith:
“Chemistry as a science was almost created by the Moslems; for in this field, where the Greeks (so far as we know) were confined to industrial experience and vague hypothesis, the Saracens introduced precise observation, controlled experiment, and careful records. They invented and named the alembic (al-anbiq), chemically analyzed innumerable substances, composed lapidaries, distinguished alkalis and acids, investigated their affinities, studied and manufactured hundreds of drugs. Alchemy, which the Moslems inherited from Egypt, contributed to chemistry by a thousand incidental discoveries, and by its method, which was the most scientific of all medieval operations.”[22]
Fielding H. Garrison wrote in the History of Medicine:
“The Saracens themselves were the originators not only of algebra, chemistry, and geology, but of many of the so-called improvements or refinements of civilization, such as street lamps, window-panes, firework, stringed instruments, cultivated fruits, perfumes, spices, etc…”[23]
Robert Briffault wrote in The Making of Humanity:
“Chemistry, the rudiments of which arose in the processes employed by Egyptian metallurgists and jewellers—combining metals into various alloys and ‘tinting’ them to resemble gold—processes long preserved as a secret monopoly of the priestly colleges, and clad in the usual mystic formulas, developed in the hands of the Arabs into a widespread, organized passion for research which led them to the invention of distillation, sublimation, filtration, to the discovery of alcohol, of nitric and sulfuric acids (the only acid known to the ancients was vinegar), of the alkalis, of the salts of mercury, of antimony and bismuth, and laid the basis of all subsequent chemistry and physical research.”[10]
George Sarton, the father of the history of science, wrote in the Introduction to the History of Science:
“We find in his (Jabir, Geber) writings remarkably sound views on methods of chemical research, a theory on the geologic formation of metals (the six metals differ essentially because of different proportions of sulfur and mercury in them); preparation of various substances (e.g., basic lead carbonatic, arsenic and antimony from their sulfides).”[24]
[edit]Chemical processes
File:Steam Distillation.JPG
Laboratory setup for steam distillation, invented by Avicenna in the 11th century.
Geber and Ahmad Ibn Imad ul-din invented the following chemical processes in the 8th century:
Pure distillation (al-taqtir) which could fully purify chemical substances with the alembic.
Filtration (al-tarshih).[10]
Purification by crystallization (al-tabalwur).[6]
Liquefaction, purification, oxidisation, and evaporation (tabkhir).[9]
Al-Razi invented the following chemical processes in the 9th century:
Dry distillation
Calcination (al-tashwiya).[25][26]
Other chemical processes introduced by Muslim chemists include:
Assation (or roasting), cocotion (or digestion), ceration, lavage, solution, mixture, and fixation.[27]
Destructive distillation was invented by Muslim chemists in the 8th century to produce tar from petroleum.[21]
Steam distillation was invented by Avicenna in the early 11th century for the purpose of producing essential oils.[28]
Water purification[29]
[edit]Laboratory apparatus
Distillation by alembic.
[edit]Distillation apparatus
The alembic was invented and named by the Muslim chemist Geber. The still was also invented by Geber as part of the alembic.[22]
The chemical retort used for distillation was invented by Geber as part of the alembic, and was widely used by later Muslim scientists. The retort was later introduced to the West by 1570.[30][not in citation given]
In the 11th century, Avicenna invented the refrigerated coil, which condenses aromatic vapours.[31][32] This was a breakthrough in distillation technology and he made use of it in his steam distillation process, which requires refrigerated tubing, to produce essential oils.[28]
[edit]Other chemistry equipment
Muslim chemists and engineers invented the cucurbit and aludel, and the equipment needed for melting metals such as furnaces and crucibles.[26]
In his Secretum secretorum (Latinized title), Al-Razi (Rhazes) described the following tools that were invented by him and his Muslim predecessors (Calid, Geber and al-Kindi) for melting substances (li-tadhwib): hearth (kur), bellows (minfakh aw ziqq), crucible (bawtaqa), the but bar but (in Arabic) or botus barbatus (in Latin), tongs (masik aq kalbatan), scissors (miqta), hammer (mukassir), file (mibrad).[25]
Al-Razi also described the following tools that were invented by him and his Muslim predecessors for the preparation of drugs (li-tadbir al-aqaqir): cucurbit and still with evacuation tube (qar aq anbiq dhu-khatm), receiving matras (qabila), blind still (without evacuation tube) (al-anbiq al-ama), Alembic al-inbiq, aludel (al-uthal), goblets (qadah), flasks (qarura or quwarir), rosewater flasks (ma wariyya), cauldron (marjal aw tanjir), earthenware pots varnished on the inside with their lids (qudur aq tanjir), water bath or sand bath (qadr), oven (al-tannur in Arabic, athanor in Latin), small cylindirical oven for heating aludel (mustawqid), funnels, sieves, filters, etc.[25]
From the list, more than twenty of these chemical apparatus were developed by Geber.[33]
[edit]Physics apparatus
See also: Islamic physics
Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the conical measure,[34] in order to find the ratio between the weight of a substance in air and the weight of water displaced, and to accurately measure the specific weights of the gemstones and their corresponding metals, which are very close to modern measurements.[35]
Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī also invented the laboratory flask and pycnometer in the early 11th century, and the hydrostatic balance and steelyard were invented by al-Khazini in the early 12th century. The earliest descriptions for these instruments are found in al-Khazini’s The Book of the Balance of Wisdom (1121).[36]
Biruni’s contemporary Ibn al-Haytham gave the first clear description[37] and correct analysis[38] of the camera obscura and pinhole camera.
[edit]Chemical substances
Aqua regia was first prepared by Geber.
Hydrochloric acid, a mineral acid, was first isolated by Geber.
Nitric acid, a mineral acid, was first isolated by Geber.
Sulfuric acid, a mineral acid, was first isolated by Geber.
Arsenic, a chemical element, was first isolated by Geber in the 8th century.
[edit]Acids
The only acid known to the ancients was vinegar. Using new equipment such as the alembic and processes such as pure distillation, Muslim chemists were the first to discover and isolate a variety of new acids, such as nitric acid and sulfuric acid.[10]
The important mineral acids—nitric, sulfuric and hydrochloric acids—were all first produced by Geber. These have remained some of the most common products in the chemical industry for over a thousand years.[26]
Acetic acid was also first concentrated from vinegar through distillation by Geber in the 8th century.[6] He is also credited with the discovery of citric acid (the sour component of lemons and other unripe fruits) and tartaric acid (from wine-making residues).[6]
[edit]Chemical elements
Several chemical elements were first discovered by Geber: arsenic, antimony and bismuth.[10][33][39] Geber was also the first to classify sulfur (‘the stone which burns’ that characterized the principle of combustibility) and mercury (which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties) as ‘elements’.[5]
Lead and tin were also first purified and clearly differentiated from one another by Arabic alchemists.[40]
[edit]Derivative and artificial substances
In the 10th century Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi wrote that he and his Muslim predecessors (Calid, Geber and al-Kindi) invented the following derivative and artificial chemical substances: lead(II) oxide (PbO), red lead (Pb3O4), tin(II) oxide (Isfidaj), copper acetate (Zaniar), copper(II) oxide (CuO), lead sulfide, zinc oxide, bismuth oxide, antimony oxide, iron rust, iron acetate, Daws (a contituent of steel), cinnabar (HgS), arsenic trioxide (As2O3), alkali (al-Qili), sodium hydroxide (caustic soda), and Qalimiya (anything that separates from metals during their purification).[41]
[edit]Distilled alcohol
The isolation of ethanol (alcohol) as a pure compound was first achieved by Muslim chemists who developed the art of distillation during the Abbasid caliphate, the most notable of whom were Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber), Al-Kindi (Alkindus) and al-Razi (Rhazes). The writings attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan (721-815) mention the flammable vapors of boiled wine. Al-Kindi (801-873) unambiguously described the distillation of wine.[42] This may have been for the purpose of separating alcoholic content from drinks due to the Islamic prohibition of alcohol consumption.
Muslim chemists were the first to produce fully purified distilled alcohol from the 8th century and manufactured them on a large scale from at least the 10th century, for use in medicine and the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, though it was rarely used for drinking due to the Islamic prohibition of alcohol consumption.[21][26] Alcohol was still consumed by non-Muslims in the Islamic world however.
Ahmad Y Hassan wrote:
“The distillation of wine and the properties of alcohol were known to Islamic chemists from the eighth century. The prohibition of wine in Islam did not mean that wine was not produced or consumed or that Arab alchemists did not subject it to their distillation processes. Jabir ibn Hayyan described a cooling technique which can be applied to the distillation of alcohol.”[42]
[edit]Medicinal substances
Muslim chemists and physicians discovered and produced at least 2,000 medicinal substances for use in medicine and the pharmaceutical sciences.[43]
Ibn al-Wafid of Toledo (Abenguefit), was among the most famous pharmacists and chemists during the Renaissance. His main work is Kitab al-adwiya al-mufrada (translated into Latin as De medicamentis simplicibus) was printed in Latin more than fifty times.
[edit]Natural substances
In the 10th century Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi classified the natural chemical substances that were discovered by him and his Muslim predecessors (mainly Calid, Geber, al-Kindi and al-Tamimi) as follows:[41]
Four spirits: mercury, sal ammoniac, arsenic, sulfur.
Seven fusible metals: gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, mercury.
Thirteen stones: marqashisha, maghnisiya, daws (a constituent of iron and steel), tutiya, lapis lazuli, malachite green, turquoise, hematite, arsenic oxide, lead sulfide, talq (mica and asbestos), gypsum, glass.
Six vitriols: black vitriol, alum, qalqand, qalqadis, qalqatar, suri.
Seven borates: borax, bread borax, natron, nitrate, sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate, sodium borate.
Thirteen salts: lead(II) acetate (sweet), magnesium sulfate (bitter), andarani salt, tabarzad, potassium nitrate, naphthenate, black salt (Indian), salt of egg, alkali (al-qali), salt of urine, calcium hydroxide (slaked lime), salt of oak ashes, natron.
[edit]Vegetable and animal substances
Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi writes that the only vegetable substance used by Muslim alchemists are the ashes of the Ushnan plant, from which they produced alkali metals and alkali salts. Razi also lists ten animal substances that were used by him and his contemporary alchemists: hair, skulls, brains, bile, blood, milk, urine, eggs, nacre (mother of pearl) and horn. He writes that hair, brains, bile, eggs, skulls and blood were used to prepare sal ammoniac.[41]
[edit]Other substances
Through their experiments with various chemical compounds, Arabic chemists first produced many other chemical substances, including:
Arsenic, alkali, alkali salt, rice vinegar, boraxes, potassium nitrate, sulfur and purified sal ammoniac by Geber.[26]
Aqua regia, alum, sal ammoniac, stones, sulfur, salts, and spirits of mercury, by Geber.[26]
Sal nitrum and vitriol by al-Razi.[26]
Ethanol, sulfuric acid, ammonia, mercury, camphor, pomades, and syrups.[29]
Lead carbonatic, arsenic, and antimony.[24]
Nitric and sulfuric acids, alkali, the salts of mercury, antimony, and bismuth.[10]
Geber was also the first to classify all seven classical metals: gold, silver, tin, lead, mercury, iron and copper.[26]
[edit]Chemical industries
A number of chemical substances and products were developed by Muslim chemists for use in the chemical industries.
[edit]Ceramics and pottery
Tin-glazed Hispano-Moresque ware with lusterware decoration, from Spain circa 1475.
Main article: Islamic pottery
From the eighth to eighteenth centuries, the use of glazed ceramics was prevalent in Islamic art, usually assuming the form of elaborate pottery.[44] Tin-opacified glazing was one of the earliest new technologies developed by the Islamic potters. The first Islamic opaque glazes can be found as blue-painted ware in Basra, dating to around the 8th century. Another significant contribution was the development of stonepaste ceramics, originating from 9th century Iraq.[45] The first industrial complex for glass and pottery production was built in Ar-Raqqah, Syria, in the 8th century.[46] Other centers for innovative ceramic pottery in the Islamic world included Fustat (from 975 to 1075), Damascus (from 1100 to around 1600) and Tabriz (from 1470 to 1550).[47]
Another innovation was the albarello, a type of maiolica earthenware jar originally designed to hold apothecaries’ ointments and dry drugs. The development of this type of pharmacy jar had its roots in the Islamic Middle East. Brought to Italy by Hispano-Moresque traders, the earliest Italian examples were produced in Florence in the 15th century.
The Hispano-Moresque style emerged in Andalusia in the 8th century, under the Fatimids. This was a style of Islamic pottery created in Islamic Spain, after the Moors had introduced two ceramic techniques to Europe: glazing with an opaque white tin-glaze, and painting in metallic lusters. Hispano-Moresque ware was distinguished from the pottery of Christendom by the Islamic character of it decoration.[48]
[edit]Cheese glue
In The Book of the Hidden Pearl, Geber described the first recipes for the manufacture of glue from cheese.[49]
[edit]Oil and petrolium products
From the 8th century the streets of Baghdad were the first to be paved with tar, derived from petroleum through destructive distillation. In the 9th century oil fields were exploited in the area around modern Baku, Azerbaijan, to produce the earliest naphtha. These fields were described by Masudi in the 10th century, and by Marco Polo in the 13th century, who described the output of those oil wells as hundreds of shiploads.[21]
Muslim chemists were the first to produce petrol from crude oil, using the process of distillation.[50][51]
Kerosene was produced from the distillation of petroleum and was first described by al-Razi (Rhazes) in 9th century Baghdad. In his Kitab al-Asrar (Book of Secrets), he described two methods for the production of kerosene. One method involved using clay as an absorbent, while the other method involved using ammonium chloride (sal ammoniac).[51][52] Al-Razi also described the first kerosene lamps (naffatah) used for heating and lighting in his Kitab al-Asrar (Book of Secrets). These were used in the oil lamp industry.[52]
Essential oils were first produced by Avicenna in the early 11th century, using steam distillation, for use in aromatherapy and the drinking and perfumery industries.[28]
[edit]Plated mail
Plated mail was invented by Geber in The Book of the Hidden Pearl for use in armours (jawasin), helmets (bid) and shields (daraq).[49]
[edit]Rosewater
Rosewater was first produced by Muslim chemists through the distillation of roses, for use in the drinking and perfumery industries.[26]
[edit]Drinking industry
[edit]Coffee
An Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans exported from Yemen to Ethiopia where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century, it had arrived in Makkah and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Greek named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve, then the Italian caffè, and then English coffee.[9][53]
[edit]Distilled and purified water
Arab chemists were the first to produce distilled water and purified water, used for water supply systems and for long journeys across deserts where the supplies were uncertain.[29] In the 10th century, Abu Mansur Muwaffaq of Herat wrote The foundations of the true properties of Remedies, where he described 585 drugs. He also described the distillation of sea-water for drinking[54].
Another Alchemist to mention distilled and purified water was Ibn ar-Tafiz (Artephius) of Córdoba in Islamic Spain.
Al-Tughrai the Seljuk Vizier also patronized new methods, techniques and processes used to distill water easily.
[edit]Soft drink
Sherbet, the first juiced and carbonated soft drink, made of crushed fruit, herbs, or flowers, has long existed as one of the most popular beverages from and of the Muslim world, winning over Western figures such as Lord Byron. Muslims developed a variety of juices to make their sharab, an Arabic word from which the Italian sorbetto, French sorbet and English sherbet were derived. Today, this juice is known by a multitude of names, is associated with numerous cultural traditions, and is produced by countries ranging from India to the United States of America.[55][56]
[edit]Syrups
The medieval Muslim sources contain many recipes for drink syrups that can be kept outside the refrigerator for weeks or months.[56]
[edit]Glass industry
[edit]Glass factories
The first industrial complex for glass and pottery production was built in Ar-Raqqah, Syria, in the 8th century. Extensive experimentation was carried out at the complex, which was two kilometres in length, and a variety of innovative high-purity glass were developed there. Two other similar complexes have also been discovered, and nearly three hundred new chemical recipes for glass are known to have been produced at all three sites.[46]
The first glass factories were thus built by Muslim craftsmen in the Islamic world. The first glass factories in Europe were later built in the 11th century by Egyptian craftsmen in Corinth, Greece.[26]
[edit]Clear, colourless and high-purity glass
The earliest examples of clear, colourless and high-purity glass were produced by Muslims in the 9th century, such as the quartz glass invented by Abbas Ibn Firnas. The Arab poet al-Buhturi (820-897) describes the clarity of such glass as follows:
“Its colour hides the glass as if it is standing in it without a container.”[57]
Coloured stained glass windows in the Nasir al-Mulk mosque in Shiraz, Iran.
[edit]Coloured and stained glass
Stained glass was first produced by Muslim architects in Southwest Asia using coloured glass rather than stone. In the 8th century, the Arab chemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber) scientifically described 46 original recipes for producing coloured glass in Kitab al-Durra al-Maknuna (The Book of the Hidden Pearl), in addition to 12 recipes inserted by al-Marrakishi in a later edition of the book.[58]
[edit]Gemstones and pearls
In his Kitab al-Durra al-Maknuna (The Book of the Hidden Pearl), Jabir described the first recipes for the manufacture of artificial pearls and for the purification of pearls that were discoloured from the sea or from grease.[49]
In The Book of the Hidden Pearl, Jabir described the first recipes for the dyeing and artificial colouring of gemstones and pearls.[49] Jabir also first described the production of high quality coloured glass cut into artificial gemstones.[57]
[edit]Mirrors
The parabolic mirror, earlier studied by Diocles and others, was described by Ibn Sahl in his On the Burning Instruments in the 10th century. It was later described again in Ibn al-Haytham’s On Burning Mirrors and Book of Optics (1021).[59]
Ibn al-Haytham also discussed concave and convex mirrors in both cylindrical and spherical geometries,[60] described spherical and parabolic mirrors,[61] carried out a number of experiments with mirrors, and solved the problem of finding the point on a convex mirror at which a ray coming from one point is reflected to another point.[62]
By the 11th century, clear glass mirrors were being produced in Moorish Spain.[21]
[edit]Silica and quartz glass
Silica glass and Quartz glass, a clear, colourless, high-purity glass, was invented by Abbas Ibn Firnas (810-887), who was the first to produce glass from sand and stones such as quartz.[63]
[edit]Hygiene industries
[edit]Cosmetics
Early forms of cosmetics had been used since ancient times, but these were usually created primarily for the purpose of beautification and often used harmful substances. This changed with Muslim cosmetologists who emphasized hygiene, due to religious requirements, and invented various healthy and hygienic cosmetics that are still used today.[64]
In the 9th century, Ziryab is known to have invented an early toothpaste, which he popularized throughout Islamic Spain.[65] The exact ingredients of this toothpaste are not currently known,[66] but it was reported to have been both “functional and pleasant to taste.”[65] For women, he opened a beauty parlour or “cosmetology school” near Alcázar, where he taught “the use of depilatories for removing body hair”, and he introduced new perfumes and cosmetics.[66] He also introduced under-arm deodorants.[67]
[edit]Soap
See also: Nabulsi soap
True soaps made from vegetable oils (such as olive oil), aromatic oils (such as thyme oil) and Sodium Lye (al-Soda al-Kawia) were first produced by Muslim chemists in the medieval Islamic world.[26] Due to washing and bathing being religious requirements for Muslims, they invented the recipe for true soap, which is still in use today, and they invented the soap bar.[9] The formula for soap used since then hasn’t changed and are identical to the current soap sold in modern times.
From the beginning of the 7th century soap was produced in Nablus (Palestine), Kufa (Iraq) and Basra (Iraq). Soaps, as we know them today, are descendants of historical Arabian Soaps. Arabian Soap was perfumed and colored, while some of the soaps were liquid and others were solid. They also had special shaving soap for shaving. It was commercially sold for 3 Dirhams (0.3 Dinars) a piece in 981 AD. A manuscript of Al-Razi (Rhazes) contains various modern recipes for soap. A recently discovered manuscript from the 13th century details more recipes for soap making, e.g. take some sesame oil, a sprinkle of potash, alkali and some lime, mix them all together, and boil. When cooked, they are poured into molds and left to set, leaving hard soap (soap bar).[64]
[edit]Perfumery
Islamic cultures contributed significantly to the development of perfumery in both perfecting the extraction of fragrances through steam distillation and by introducing new raw ingredients. Both the raw ingredients and distillation technology significantly influenced western perfumery and scientific developments, particularly chemistry.
As traders, Islamic cultures such as the Arabs and Persians had wider access to different spices, herbals, and other fragrance materials. In addition to trading them, many of these exotic materials were cultivated by the Muslims such that they could be successfully grown outside of their native climates. Two examples of this include jasmine, which is native to South and Southeast Asia, and various citrus fruits, which are native to East Asia. Both of these ingredients are still highly important in modern perfumery.
In Islamic culture, perfume usage has been documented as far back as the 7th century and its usage is considered a religious duty. Muhammad said:
“The taking of a bath on Friday is compulsory for every male Muslim who has attained the age of puberty and (also) the cleaning of his teeth with Siwak, and the using of perfume if it is available.”
—Sahih Bukhari Sahih al-Bukhari, 2:13:5.
Such rituals gave incentives to scholars to search and develop a cheaper way to produce incenses and in mass production. Two talented chemists, Jabir ibn Hayyan (born 722, Iraq), and al-Kindi (born 801, Iraq) established the perfume industry. Jabir developed many techniques, including distillation, evaporation and filtration, which enabled the collection of the odour of plants into a vapour that could be collected in the form of water or oil.[68] Al-Kindi, however, was the real founder of the perfume industry, as he carried out extensive research and experiments in combining various plants and other sources to produce a variety of scent products. He elaborated a vast number of ‘recipes’ for a wide range of perfumes, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. His work in the laboratory is reported by a witness who said:
“I received the following description, or recipe, from Abu Yusuf Ya’qub b. Ishaq al-Kindi, and I saw him making it and giving it an addition in my presence.
The writer goes on in the same section to speak of the preparation of a perfume called ghaliya, which contained musk, amber and other ingredients, and reveals a long list of technical names of drugs and apparatus.
Musk and floral perfumes were brought to Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries from Arabia, through trade with the Islamic world and with the returning Crusaders. Those who traded for these were most often also involved in trade for spices and dyestuffs. There are records of the Pepperers Guild of London, going back to 1179, which show them trading with Muslims in spices, perfume ingredients and dyes.[69]
[edit]Shampoo
Shampoo was first developed by the Bengali Muslim Sake Dean Mahomet. He introduced it to England when he opened “Mahomed’s Indian Vapour Baths” in Brighton seafront in 1759. He was later appointed as a “Shampooing Surgeon” to Kings George IV and William IV.[9]
I know Arabs have done much work in the field of Alchemy. Do you know that the word alchemy comes from the Arab and it refers to all mud coming down the Nile during extreme floods? Europeans later learned a lot from the Arabs and I learned from the Europeans. I will now share qwith you my experiments on alchemy in the laboratory I built in the garage of my house here in Flusinhin, New York, where I live.
Here is then for your Eyes of Mercury:
“The third independent component of Okidanokh has properties that go beyond anything contemporary science knows. It is the very substance of life. The fact that the device used to obtain the Okidanokh is named Lifechakan and it is compared to a dynamo is an important clue. Since a dynamo is a device used to obtain two of the three independent components, then, it follows that the third component is associated with Life. Another important clue is the fact that initiated beings of Egypt, direct descendents of the learned members of the Akhaldans, used the third part of Okidanokh “to preserve the planetary bodies of certain of them forever in a nondecaying and no decomposing state after the sacred Rascooarno.” (587). The important point is that the only way to detect the presence of the third independent component is by its effects, and these effects are very unusual.
I must confess that at some point in my search I became almost obsessed with detecting the presence of the third component in its external manifestations. Since I knew everything that has to be known about how to generate two of the independent components, I soon realized that this was not the way to go. I then resorted to alchemy.
Alchemy was not new to me. I had already done lots of reading on the subject. I had read the works of many famous European alchemists such as the English Roger Bacon, known in his times as “The Remarkable Doctor” and acknowledged today as the father of modern science. “Alchemy is the raising of vibrations,” is a formulation that I totally adhere to and that I have used as frame of reference in the work on myself. One of my favorite pastimes during the three years I lived in Paris was to go to the gothic cathedral of Notre Dame with Fulcanelly”s book THE MYSTERY OF THE CATHEDRALS. I spent many hours studying the many alchemy’s symbols found in different parts of the cathedral, particularly on the three front doors. The raven (the being-bird resembling the exterior form of Saturn’s three-brained beings), symbol of the putrefaction process, and the salamander, symbol of the calcination process, both shown on the central door, always impressed me. But what always impressed me the most was the face of the Alchemist, a small haute-relief statute visible from the stairs to the top of one of the two towers, showing an old man, wearing the adept hat, his eyes sternly fixed on the operation of transmutation.
I became convinced of the possibility of the transmutation of metals after I read how the lives of many alchemists had suddenly changed from poor to rich. It is said that after a mysterious trip to Spain, the fourteen-century French alchemist Nicolas Flamel returned to Paris and very soon became one of the richest and most generous philanthropist the city has ever seen. My conviction increased when I visited the museum of the alchemist in Paris. There I saw with my own eyes a coin that was silver on one side and gold on the other side (even a colorblind person like myself could see the difference).
In those days when I was obsessed with obtaining the third component of Okidanokh, very casually, I came across a short text on alchemy by the well-known Middle Ages alchemist Albertus Magnus, with the title “Compusitum de Composites” (“The Compound of Compounds”). From the moment I put my eyes on it, maybe because of my background in alchemy, I became quite taken by its content and style. Two things immediately grabbed my attention. The first was the unusual, even amazing, properties of what the author identifies as the Mercury of the Philosophers or prima materia. Here are some: one drop deposited over a sheet of hot copper, penetrates the metal leaving behind a white spot; put over hot charcoal, it produces white smoke; exposed to air, it freezes and looks like ice; during distillation, drops of this water do not travel along the same path, but some follow one path while others follow different paths. I reasoned that a substance with such properties would resemble very much to the third independent components of the Omnipresent-Okidanokh. The second thing that impressed me was how easy it looked from the description given in the text to obtain this substance.
I decided to build an alchemy laboratory in the garage of my house in Flushing. I built what is known as a distillation train: distilling flask, condenser, burner, funnel, thermometer, and measuring flask. I followed very carefully the instructions given by the American alchemist Frater Albertus in his remarkable book THE ALCHEMIST’S HANDBOOK (Manual for Practical Laboratory Alchemy). With the help of a friend of mine, a chemical engineer with extensive experience in chemical processes, I was able to procure the chemical compounds needed in the process of transmutation.
In a matter of few days, I was able to successfully process the first, second, and third waters described in the text. I became convinced of the success of my work when my wife and my daughter both agreed that the respective colors of the three waters corresponded to the colors described in the text (since I am colorblind, I had to relied on others). I knew, based on years of experience, that when my wife and my daughter agree on something this means that this something must necessarily be true. I must say, in passing, that their mutual agreement extended only to the color of the waters. As far as the possible results of my work, they were in complete disagreement. My wife was skeptic, while my daughter was more inclined to believe. In order to calm down my wife a little bit, from time to time I would say to her: “Wait until the gold appears and you start going to Bloomingdale’s, Lord and Taylor and Sack’s Fifth Avenue.” Of course, my wife did not believe my comment but may daughter laughed at it.
It was at the moment when I was ready to start fabrication of the fourth water that the devil, the details, made his appearance in person and with full power. The first instruction to be followed in this fabrication reads: “Take your third water, perfected to the third degree and put it in a long-necked flask (a matrass, as it was known in older times) which you will place in the belly of the horse for fourteen days, for putrefaction purposes.” Now, anyone who has read a little bit of alchemy knows that the belly of the horse is nothing more and nothing less that horse manure. This substance is widely used in alchemy because it is capable of keeping a very uniform internal temperature. Procuring the horse manure was not a big problem, although I had to go far from my home, to Long Island, and very early in the morning to collect it (for alchemy purposes, the collection of Nature’s substances must be made before sunrise, when the morning dew in summer days or the morning frost during winter days is at its maximum). I put the third water in a clean, hermetically sealed long-necked distillation flask and place it in a box filled with horse manure in a small and isolated corner of my house. I let it rest there for fourteen days, as indicated in the text. It was very important not to disturb the digestion in the belly of the horse or process of putrefaction.
At the end of the fourteen days period I removed the flask from the belly of the horse. Needless to say, I was very excited (of course, the skeptic and the believer were very excited too). Well, it is impossible for me to describe the joy and contentment I experienced when I verified that the process of putrefaction had taken place in total accordance to the text. All the impurities had fallen to the bottom of the long-necked flask and, as my wife and daughter agreed to, the water had turned from green to red, all in complete accordance to the indications in the text. I am convinced that I was given the possibility of witnessing one of the mysteries in the Great Mystery that is the Great Work of Alchemy. I have seen the Raven.
But I was not given the possibility of advancing to completion of the Great Mystery. After the fourth water, things got really tough. The thing to do was very simple. The fourth water is distilled very slowly and very patiently. This slowly process of distillation is what is known as the clarification process. The water so obtained, the fifth water, is the Mercury of the Philosophers, the prima materia or First Matter from which the final result of the transmutation process, the Philosopher’s Stone, is obtained (here I realized that the process closely conformed to the operation of the Law of Seven, the fifth water or prima materia corresponding to the fifth Stopinder and the Philosopher’s Stone to the sixth). No matter how hard I tried, and I tried very hard (maybe too hard because I burned several distilling flasks), I was not able to obtain water with the unusual properties already mentioned.”
And here is for your purified ears: the alchemy of music:
If you want Elena, you can come to my house in Flushing, New York and I will teach you alchemy in my laboratory.
The doors of my house are open to you
Beautiful eagle in the blue sky
As the doors of my soul are too
Delicious and sweet piece of pie.
I totally agree with you here and there is another take in relation to the alchemy I would like to teach you in my laboratory here in New York. And if you ever come, I will take you to the Metropilitan Museum so that we can together meditate in the room of the Lohans. You will love it.
Anyhow this is the last parragraph of my experience that I frogettom include. In it you will find why I agree with you:
“Simultaneously to this practical impossibility, I also had a close encounter of the suspicious kind with a neighbor. This neighbor began to pray on my affairs and was asking very impertinent questions. I began to suspect that he was suspecting I was making cocaine or crack. This suspicious had really begun during my last visit to the chemical supplier, when I overhead a behind-the-door conversation between two salesmen in which one was asking the other: “What do you think he is making?” One day I came to the full conviction that these happenings were clear indications pointing to the fact that I had to switch from exoteric to esoteric alchemy. I realized that the putrefaction I had been given the possibility of witnessing was in reality the putrefaction existing inside of me. I knew, based on my studies of alchemy, that this putrefaction or darkness contains in it the true light. I also knew that this true light must be extracted from the darkness in the way indicated in the Emerald Table: “You will separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the dense, methodically, with great industry.” So, I turned from exoteric to esoteric alchemy.”
How would you connect the different alchemies or the one alchemy in different spheres? and the exoteric and esoteric?
You invite me and tell me that when I come you’ll show me things but I am here and if you have anything you wish to show this is your opportunity. It is also fine not to show anything and simply share ourselves without making up excuses of why we enjoy being together or presenting little baits so that we come even closer! When there’s no agenda to be together then we settle in our selves, contented. Wouldn’t that be the alchemy of being? To let each other be without competing? What competes, cannot be real. To be delighted in each other’s presence and not have to justify that? To let each other give all of our light (and every human being has as much of it as any other no matter where they come from or what they do, if you give them the opportunity, they will each give as much light as anybody else. And “giving” the opportunity is not placing them in a pedestal but remaining there for them without closing doors and erecting walls of separation justifying the pedestal in which one’s ego has placed one’s self in the suffering of not being).
We want to be loved because we don’t know what being is. When we ARE, we love without wanting. The question of desire roots itself in “beinglessness”: the ego wants what it doesn’t have. When we achieve inside what the ego is looking for, we can take what is there with joy and gratitude but the ego is never satisfied, it has to deny. It is always putting everything and anything around itself down so that it can float above convinced that it shines in the mud. We are all there in different degrees and we are all out of there in different degrees. Life is life: the commitment to unity and the endless struggle against separationism, today, in our inner selves as much as in our communities and the world at large.
We are One, we’re just not conscious of our oneness and in that unconsciousness we separate each other from each other in our acts: that is suffering. When each of our acts connects us to each other then life pours its light in our selves and everything we do gives delight. Every job, every creation, every relationship is an act of giving, every individual in his and her own way is a giver. When we don’t deny each other what we are giving, then creation is possible because we are each endless creators. The whole system of injustice today does not come from the economic sphere but from the unconsciousness with which we treat each other’s being neglecting to acknowledge our humanity.
The system of hierarchies in which the political and economic spheres place people is a symptom of our unconsciousness, not the cause. The economic differences and the relationships of power cannot change until we are each more conscious of our Oneness as human beings.
I repeat the poem I dedicated to you and only you. Here is:
The doors of my house are open to you
Beautiful eagle in the blue sky
As the doors of my soul are too
Delicious and sweet piece of pie.
I am not a poet; I ma an engineer but my poem came to me because of you. But that is only one little aspect of the whole thing. What I would like is for you to ponder on my poem and to see what you see behind it. In fact, I am going to ask three questions about it:
1) Is my poem one of competition?
2) Is my poem one Ego-centerness?
3) Is my poem one of separatedness?
And then the most fundamental question:
What is behind my poem?
I would really appreciate, Elena, in the name of any relationship we may have, that you ponder on all this and then comeback and tell me what is it behind my litle poem. Than you will underdstand Will better and where Will comes from.
Now, I will wait for your answers to my questions. Of course, if you want to continue exchanging with me. I really want you to understand me and where I come from, as much as I really want to understand you and where you come from. Only in understanding each other, the possibility for the Third Force or Reconciling Force can emerge between us, or in any relationship for that matter. This is the real meaning of the Law of Three or the Law of Phenomena.
How would you connect the different alchemies or the one alchemy in different spheres? and the exoteric and esoteric?
You and I personally hardly matter if we can hold each other with respect and consideration which lead to friendship. I’m very glad you’re interested in such a friendship so we can move on to the things that matter in a dialogue in group and BE the words.
you say that Yon and I personally hardly matter. Well,once again I have to disagree with you here. We matter a lot personally to the point that if we do not attain self-individuality, we do not matter at all.
What have we become? We have become terminals in a network of bits. That is what you and I are here. I hate that even though that I fall prey to it.
I want to meet you in person, listen to the beats of you heart, instead to the bits of your cybermessages. I know it is impossible but that is the only real thing. This that we are doing here is just virtual reality. I want real reality. When Mr. Gurdjieff wanted to say something to someone, he invited this someone to have Turkish coffee with him in his pantry of food. Do you know what Turkish coffee means?
You ask me for the difference between exoteric and esoteric alchemies. I am going to tell you the difference now:
Exoteric alchemy is what we are doing here exchanging in cyberspace. Esoteric alchemy is when I can feel your heart beating in me.
When can I meet you in the flesh and the blood of your Being?
Words flow in the river of our lives and we each swim in the puddles of our being interpreting and reinterpreting until we actually understand what the other is trying to say.
I mean you and I hardly matter if we can be present because in our presence everything else is possible but without it, they are all descending octaves. Perhaps that is why “we can’t do” and are washed away in the current of events without being able to avoid it.
What I’m trying to say Will is that focusing the attention on who we are, what we’ve done, all the years and efforts we’ve put into things takes the attention away from what we’ve worked on for for so many years: life. Life in whatever its manifestations. We are important to the extent that we can be. If we are, we don’t need attention from others on our ego and can place our own attention in the questions at hand be they objective art, cults or taking the children to the park.
We have already met in flesh and blood perhaps more intimately than physically for such a powerful exchange of words does not generally happen in real life so quickly. Language is the blood of our psycho-spiritual life and the way we use it, when and how, tells as much or more about our selves than being together. They don’t replace each other though and actually sitting with each other without an agenda is “life at its best” so you’re welcome to visit me whenever you wish. I have a place on the Caribbean coast that you would be welcome with your family, to rest and enjoy. Here are some pictures:
Thanks for your warmth and interest Will, that sphere of “familiarity” is certainly a strength of our latin essence and yet we would much profit from deeply indulging in the “beyondness” from the “familiar” that Americans and Europeans enjoy while they would much profit from our “openness”. Aren’t we here to learn from each other’s strengths?
Thanks again for sharing, it’s good to talk without imposing each other on each other’s self.
Gracias por enviarme el link a tu lugar cerca del mar Caribe. Como Cubano, yo se apreciar y amar el mar Caribeño.
Estuve mas de una hora mirando todas las fotos de tu hermoso rincon Caribeño y es una especie de Paraiso Terrenal. Pronto me vas a tener por alla y pasaremos horas hablando de nuestras busquedas y nuestros ahenlos como seres humanos, sin cultos y sin prisiones, sino libres en nuestra humanidad.
Quiero decirte que de los seis reinos del Budismo, el de los dioses, el de los semidioses, el de los humanos, el de los animales, el de los espiritus ambrietos, y el de los infiernos, el unico que me interesa es el del reino humano. Los demas son muy tristes y aburridores, en particular para un Caribeño como yo que ama la vida y la Salsa, y por supuesto, el Conocimiento Objetivo, el cual no excluye lo otro sino que le dan una nueva dimension de vida.
En cuanto al “beyondness” de los Americanos y los Europeos, solo te digo que el Sr. Gurdjieff llamo a unos burros y a los otros pavos, pero no reales, sino ordinarios. Como un “gringo” una vez me dijo aqui en Nueva York, “Solo los Latinos pueden entender a Belcebu, porque solo los Latinos tienen la pasion para hecerlo.” Palabra de Gringo; alabados sean los Gringos.
Mucho te agadezo que me hayas invitado a entrar en tu casa y te prometo que un dia no muy lejano tu invitacion sera cumplida.
I’m glad you enjoyed the little portion of Ocean in view. It’s a good place to rest.
Around the “beyondness of Europeans and Americans I continue to believe that there’s so much to learn from them and them from us. If Gurdjieff was looking at their dark side when he called them donkeys and turkeys, he would have called us savages if he had talked about our dark side. Anyone’s dark side is black but everyone’s light side is luminous and what we have to overcome to make it shine is what gives it the quality of light. It’s easy to speak about other’s dark side but what would we do without the German music and philosophy? English literature and “tea”? American technology and “impulse”? Italian Art and taste? and all of their struggle? “chapeau” to all of them including Paris!
There’s no point in putting down those whose footprints we’re at the same time following. The good thing is that we’re following their human footprints and not their inhuman steps. It’s the struggle of generations.
I would like to keep this blog in English for now but very much enjoyed the Spanish “familiarity”. Un abrazo.
Hola Will,
Me alegra que te gustara esa pequeña porción de mar a la vista! Si vale la pena disfrutarlo. La primera vez que estuve allí me demoré tres días en acomodarme pero a los tres días entendí que en realidad nunca antes había descansado así.
Sobre el beyondness Europeo y Americano sigo pensando que hay tanto que aprenderles y ellos a nosotros. Gurdjieff puede haber estado mirando el lado oscuro de ellos pero si hubiera visto el nuestro nos habría llamado no solo burros y pavos sino “salvajes”. El lado oscuro de cualquiera es negro pero el lado claro de todos es luminoso y eso que tenemos que “saltar” para empezar a brillar es lo que hace más luminosa la luz! Es facil hablar de la oscuridad de los demás pero que haríamos sin la música Alemana? La literatura inglesa? La ciencia y la tecnología Americana? El arte italiano? Me les quito el sombrero a cada uno! Que hermosos!
Como latinos no tiene sentido rebajarlos y al mismo tiempo caminar sobre sus huellas. Lo bello es que vamos tras las huellas de lo humano y no tras los pasos de lo inhumano.
Que tengas un buen día, trabajo un rato y salgo de paseo! Elena
Are you familiar with the writings of Sophia Wellbeloved? She wrote at least two books about the Teaching and the Work. The principle one is “Gurdjieff, Astrology & Beelzebub’s Tales,” which is a transcription of her doctoral dissertation at King College in London. I have not read neither book because I tried to read the one about Astrology and I found it to be all dream on her part and I told her so when I had dinner with her in England two years ago. Anyhow, here is what she wrote in her other book with title “Gurdjieff-Key Concepts:
“ Women need neither the Work, nor psychological or religious teaching; they cannot achieve self-development in the way that Gurdjieff understand the phrase. Women already ‘know everything’, but this knowledge can be ‘almost a poison’ for them.’”
You being a woman and very intelligent one (I am in no way flattering your ego), I would like to know what you think about this and maybe start an exchange with you on this matter of Women and Men. I have my own opinions on the subject and they come from what Mr. Gurdjieff said.
I think women and men are very different and each have talents and weaknesses the other doesn’t have but that we all profit from a system to work on our selves and better understand life. I’m certainly glad that I found it, it’s been so much easier to live using one. I also think a system is just a tool that can be dropped at some point but I’m far from there for the time being.
I also think it’s pure bullshit that women cannot achieve self development in Gurdjieff’s or anybody else’s terms. It’s like saying that women cannot be because they’re women but we are! A system is just a harness for the soul and it is wonderful to tame one’s self in such a way that one can ride in other dimensions to live in this one more fully.
This week, the world’s wealthiest governments are negotiating a secretive deal that could cut off poor people from life-saving medicines. Millions rely on generic medicines to treat diseases like malaria and HIV. If this agreement goes forward, many peoples’ access to such drugs could be cut off, leaving those unable to afford name-brand medications to face death.
The treaty would set rules on “intellectual property” in a wide range of areas — from genetically modified crops to online file-sharing to drug patents. But four fifths of the world’s countries are excluded from the talks — including India and China. The negotiating governments are trying to rush through an agreement before public outcry can become too loud to ignore — but word is leaking out, and a tide of opposition is rising.
Our voices can tip this outrage over the edge. Public pressure has stopped unjust trade talks in previous years. Now, we can again ensure that no rotten deals are struck behind closed doors. Join the petition now for an open process and justice on essential medicines — Avaaz and partners will deliver it at next week’s negotiations in Tokyo if we reach 50,000 signers. Sign now and spread the word:
The so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement had been intentionally kept out of the public spotlight. But no longer: public health and internet freedom advocates are sounding the alarm, and China, India, and the European Parliament have all spoken out against it in recent weeks.
The proposed deal raises many concerns, but its most outrageous provision is its treatment of essential medicines. ACTA would treat many “generic” and “counterfeit” drugs identically, making cheap competition for name-brands subject to the same seize-and-destroy tactics applied to fake medicines.
Pharmaceutical giants claim that this is needed to protect consumer safety — but they themselves sell generic versions of medicines whose patents have expired. Generic medicines, which are often 90% less expensive, are not inherently more or less safe than name-brand drugs. The real differences are drug company profits — and poor people’s lives.
Mass citizen mobilisation has stopped similar moves by drug companies and rich country governments several times before. Let’s not allow a few countries to decide the fate of billions behind closed doors — sign the petition and spread the word:
Getting treatment when we are sick is something we all feel strongly about. Our vigilance this week can help fend off attempts to prevent medicines from reaching all who need them. Together, right now, we can begin to build a future in which each of us can equally overcome disease and stay healthy.
With hope for a better world,
Ben, Alex, David, Maria Paz, Iain and the whole Avaaz team
I’ve deleted your post for I don’t take scenes of men putting down men or women even from Gurdjieff. Maybe he fitted in the Middle East but you can’t get away with that around here. Please keep that information for your blog. The aim of this blog is different.
The subject you wish to pursue seems cultish to me. If you wish to understand why I am against cults you can go to this blog or the other blog you visited or the Fellowship blog. I’ve dedicated enough time to it.
We can continue talking to each other in the O.A. site if that is possible on the subjects that are presented there. I actually appreciate the information you’ve given on Gurdjieff. No wonder Ouspensky had to separate from him. You’ve told me you hate the System so I don’t really know how you expect us to understand each other for I have no interest in a cult for Gurdjieff, who according to all the material you’ve presented was a man who enjoyed diminishing and using power over his students. That doesn’t stop me from appreciating what he conveyed but it does give me relativity about his persona. I’ve lived that kind of scenario too closely to buy it again from you or Gurdjieff so please allow me to not indulge in that kind of argument here. We have had the tendency to blow these characters up into divine proportions and they were just human beings like you and me with much to resolve still. That is what I like about Ouspensky: that he had no pretense to be super human.
I am not interested in your personal attacks to me on these subject, think as you wish. I am not the subject here and if you can’t concentrate on the subject and not me or you I won’t publish your posts.
Thank you for your understanding, I hope we can overcome all difficulties in due time. In other opportunities, you’ve taken what we’ve talked about here to the O.A. site so you can continue to do that if you really think it is that significant when the opportunity presents itself in another dialogue. I very much enjoy the standards set in that blog.
Your post on women and prostitutes was unacceptable in your timing and context. I lost the interest. I can read between the lines as clearly as you write and you don’t fool me one second.
This will be my last post to you on this blog for the time being.
Thank you for your observations. Yes, I am far from understanding this well. I think your appreciation that it is a language and a knowledge that is out of time is a good place to start. When we can remember and actualize that part of our selves beyond time we can speak in an objective language but whether we are objective or not, life is objectively affecting us constantly. We might be unconscious of our objectivity but it is as real as our subjectivity: our I is in a constant process of “living”, our I is an objective reality even if we are unconscious of it. That is what makes each individual a human being. That is why each life is sacred.
What I wish to bring attention to is the fact that we live in an objective reality and how we interact with it makes us more or less objective. T.V and fast food all day will affect us in a totally different way than exercise and music, company and work. What we “do” helps us become more or less objective and if that is true then we can use our lives and all its reality to become more conscious which is what The Fourth Way is about. It is not like the yogi, monk or fakir, a way in which we separate from regular life and society.
It’s my impression that “unity” “wholeness” in our times, is perceived as some strange higher state in which an individual will suddenly experience unity but “life” has nothing to do with it. What I wonder is why aren’t we establishing the connection of all things precisely in our living reality? Our selves as individuals as much as societies together with the Earth and nature around us? Why discard anything instead of incorporating it and assuming responsibility for it?
It’s interesting that the more “democratic” we become, social hierarchy and authoritarism weaken while each individual has to take far more responsibility for him and her self and the world. As if we were “inverting” the process: In the times of Kings, what made the King “the King” was his ability to “protect” the people. Then Kingship became purely symbolic without objective and now that no one is really willing or able to respond for anyone else, each one has to respond for everything and acquire the consciousness of the king but we are presently like children blowing gurus into kings hoping they’ll tell us that we are no longer children but adults able to take responsibility for our future. But they don’t; they take advantage of our innocence, as lost as their followers.
The point is that we cannot be objectively conscious if we can’t be objectively conscious of other people as objective realities whether they have worked on themselves or not. We cannot abstract our selves from our times and its nuances, we cannot isolate our selves from each other and pretend that that is objective consciousness. When we “work” on our different “I”s internally, we work on incorporating them within our Real I, we can’t just throw them out. Likewise, when we look at other people’s realities we can incorporate them rather than discard them. It makes us more human, more conscious.
I realize this is long. I hope less confusing. Please feel free to cut it up or erase it if it’s not appropriate in this discussion.
Thank you Ton, I wonder why you waste your time visiting blogs in which you find no value hiding the fact that what you’re really afraid of is what is said that you can’t cope with or argue against and have to attack me personally to try to diminish the value of what you are unable to understand.
If anything has been proven in these blogs is that when people can’t hear what is being said, they’ll attack the writer personally instead of dealing with the subject. It’s the old law of the lower eating the higher. Another step in the process.
You teach me more each day what this is about, thank you again.
Entire societies, numbed by coercive psychological influence, are more likely to allow large-scale tragedies. Perhaps the most devastating example is the Holocaust. Cult mind control is totalitarian, and as such is anathema to democracy. Democracy is founded on the principle that humanity is rational; for democracy to work, people must be capable of using their critical faculties. Mind control works by bypassing rationality and eliminating free will. Without free will, all other basic human freedoms, such as freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, become utterly meaningless. Eventually if left unchecked, mind control would destroy all basic human freedoms and ruin democracy.
For information on mind control and cults, see http://www.factnet.org
dear elena,
i hope you will be able to recognize that i am writing this in response to what you said and that it is in fact based on what i “hear” in your post 121.
you’re welcome elena, i’m glad when i can teach you something about yourself.
dear elena, it’s my time to ‘waste’ as i choose. i wonder why it matters to you?
as for being afraid of what’s being said, you’re the one who does all the censoring, the blocking of email, etc….
one final ‘tidbit’ for you to chew on — this nonsense about ‘the lower eating the higher’ is simply…. how can i put this politely because i know how sensitive you are and i wouldn’t want to offend you… it’s simply effluent that’s still oozing from your followship/”4th way” brainwash… check yourself…. let go of the past.
No thanks Ton, I paid high for the things worth keeping, let go only of the cult and its vices.
Please don’t begin giving me instructions of what I need to do or “dear” me. I’m still allergic to gurus and their “dears”! If there’s any subject on which you’d like to expand here and add your work you’re welcome, otherwise please keep your personal sphere to your self, love is needed to penetrate that sphere and we don’t have that between us. The little we managed to acquire at some point was lavishly destroyed at another. It doesn’t just come out of magic.
We should use a few guidelines such as first, second and third line of work in whatever language you’d like to understand that. What matters in this particular blog is what we can share with each other from what we’ve worked on. How can we help each other better understand the difficulties in OUR world today. How can we dialogue without falling into the personal sphere and competing with each other? How can we look at our selves in the personal sphere and its reflection in our world perspective? What are the connections between how we use language and our psychology? And anything else that is an aspect of the whole but with US shining in the back ground our best light.
I doubt you’re game for any of that so please respect my guidelines and go to a blog where you do have the interest to build something that you’ve worked on and not destroy what you don’t care about.
“What are the connections between how we use language and our psychology? ”
your “doubt” — what does that say ?
and
“I paid high for the things worth keeping, let go only of the cult and its vices.”
“too much” invested to leave the cult is one of the most pervasive ‘rationales’ for staying in…. but just because you’re on the outside, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve left the cult, you continue to carry it with you as evidenced by the psychology of the language you use… the good news is:
“Abstract
A sample of 75 ex-members of cults or new religious movements completed two personality inventories: the short form of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and the Beck Sociotropy-Autonomy Scale. Compared to the norms, the sample exhibited elevated scores on neuroticism, sociotropy and autonomy. The elevated neuroticism scores increasingly approached the norm as a function of time out of the cult. Ex-members in contact with support groups showed reduced levels of neuroticism and sociotropy in comparison with those who were not. While it is not possible to draw firm conclusions from a study of this design, the results are consistent with the view that people with high autonomy scores are likely to leave or be ejected from cults or new religious movements and that doing so may cause psychological difficulties which are ameliorated by time and attendance at a support group.”
* Paul Martin, the director of a recovery center for victims of cultic abuse wrote, in the book Recovery from Cults, that “The ex-cultist has been traumatized, deceived, conned, used and often emotionally, physically, sexually, and mentally abused while serving the group and/or the leader. Like other trauma victims (for example, of criminal acts, rape, and serious illness), former cultists often reexperience the painful memories of their group involvement.”[1]
* The Report of the “Swedish Government’s Commission on New Religious Movements” (1998) states that the great majority of members of new religious movements derive positive experiences from their subscription to ideas or doctrines which correspond to their personal needs, and that withdrawal from these movements is usually quite undramatic, as these persons leave feeling enriched by a predominantly positive experience. Although the report describes that there are a small number of withdrawals that require support (100 out of 50,000+ people), the report did not recommend that any special resources be established for their rehabilitation, as these cases are very rare.[2]
* Margaret Singer, one of the most notable proponents of the brainwashing theories, noted that ex-cult members that she treated had severe emotional problems as described in her article Coming Out of the Cults.21 22 75% of the ex-cult members were deprogrammed and some scholars like David G. Bromley suggest that the emotional problems of the ex-cultists that she treated were not due to their involvement in cults but that they had a post-traumatic stress disorder due to the deprogramming sessions that they underwent. On the other hand, in a controversial survey done on former cult members by anti-cult popular authors Conway and Siegelman (neither of whom had a degree in psychology), those deprogrammed (voluntarily and involuntarily) reported a third less, and in many cases only half as many post-cult effects like depression, disorientation or sleep problems than those who were not deprogrammed. Also those deprogrammed reported markedly shorter recovery times than the walk-aways. 23
* According to Hadden and Bromley, proponents of the brainwashing model, such as Singer and others, lack empirical evidence to support their theory of brainwashing. They also affirm that there is lack of empirical support for alleged consequences of having been a member of a cult or sect, and that their accounts of what happens to ex-members is contradicted by substantial empirical evidence, such as the fact that the overwhelming proportion of people who get involved in NRMs (New Religious Movements?) do leave, most short of two years, and the overwhelming proportion of people leave of their own volition. They refer to a survey conducted by Stuart A. Wright in 1987 about people who voluntarily left new religions, which showed that the majority of all defectors or ex-members (67%) look back on their experience as something that made them wiser, rather than feeling angry, duped or showing other ill effects.14
* Stuart A. Wright explores the distinction between the apostate narrative and the role of the apostate, asserting that the former follows a predictable pattern, in which the apostate utilizes a “captivity narrative” that emphasizes manipulation, entrapment and being victims of “sinister cult practices”. These narratives provide a rationale for a “hostage-rescue” motif, in which cults are likened to POW camps and deprogramming as heroic hostage rescue efforts. He also makes a distinction between “leavetakers” and “apostates”, asserting that despite the popular literature and lurid media accounts of stories of “rescued or recovering ‘ex-cultists'”, empirical studies of defectors from NRMs “generally indicate favorable, sympathetic or at the very least mixed responses toward their former group.”[3]
* According to F. Derks and Jan van der Lans, a Dutch professor in the psychology of religion at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, there is no uniform post-cult trauma, but psychological and social problems upon resignation are not rare and their character and intensity are greatly dependent on the personal history, on the traits of the person, and on the reasons for and way of resignation. 6
* Gordon Melton, quoting studies by Lewis Carter and David G. Bromley, argues that the onus of pathology experienced by former members of new religions movements shifted from these groups to the coercive activities of the anti-cult movement. As a result of this study, the treatment (coerced or voluntary) of former members as people in need of psychological assistance largely ceased. These studies also claim that a lack of any widespread need for psychological help by former members of new religions has in itself become the strongest evidence refuting early sweeping condemnations of new religions as causes of psychological trauma.6,7,8 In a 1997 interview with Time Magazine Melton, asserts that anti-cult figures give too much credibility to the horror stories forwarded by “hostile” former cult members, which he says is “like trying to get a picture of marriage from someone who has gone through a bad divorce”.
* Marc Galanter, in a study of 237 members of the Unification Church, found that they had had a significantly higher degree of neurotic distress before conversion when compared to a control group, suggesting that symptoms of psychopathology had not been caused by cult involvement; 30% of these had sought professional help for emotional problems before conversion. Galanter further states that the process of joining, being a member, and leaving a new religious group is best described not as a matter of personal pathology but of social adaptation. For example, experiences that in a secular setting might be considered pathological, within some religious settings may be considered normal. While psychological categories were created to discuss dysfunctional behavior by an individual, the behavior of group members must be seen in light of group norms, meaning that what may be considered disturbed behavior in a secular setting may be perfectly functional and normal within a group context. On the basis of his analysis, Galanter suggested that reduced significance should be given to the abnormal behavior reported among ex-members. He also suggested an alternative means of understanding otherwise inexplicable behavior in members and ex-members without considering them as suffering from psychopathology.13.
* According to a book by Barker (1989) about new religious movements for the general public, the biggest worry about possible harm concerns the relatively few dedicated followers of a new religious movement (NRM). Barker also mentions that some former members may not take new initiatives for quite a long time after disaffiliation from the NRM. This generally does not concern the many superficial, or short-lived, or peripheral supporters of a NRM. She also wrote that ex-members who feel betrayed may have a problem trusting people. Membership in a cult usually does not last forever: 90% or more of cult members ultimately leave their group 2,4
* Psychiatrists David Hoffman and Paul Hamburg of the Harvard Medical School wrote in their article Psychotherapy of Cult members about their own psychiatric treatment of former members that the re-entry of former members into ordinary life is a difficult experience and compare the situation of former members to those of former hostages, prisoners, exiles, soldiers, or those emerging from divorce or death of a spouse.19
* According to David V. Barret (who is connected with the government subsidized institute INFORM, founded by Eileen Barker and based in London), in many cases the problems do not happen while in a cult, but when leaving a cult, which can be difficult for some members and may include a lot of trauma. Reasons for this trauma may include conditioning by the religious movement, avoidance of uncertainties about life and its meaning, having had powerful religious experiences, love for the founder of the religion, emotional investment, fear of losing salvation, bonding with other members, anticipation of the realization that time, money and efforts donated to the group were a waste, and the new freedom with its corresponding responsibilities, especially for people who lived in a community. Those reasons may prevent a member from leaving even if the member realizes that some things in the NRM are wrong.
* Len Oakes, a psychologist who was himself a member of a spiritual community writes in his book Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities in which he proposes his thesis about cult leader’s distinctiveness: psychopathology based on narcissistic personality, characterized by grandiosity, manipulativeness, a need for control of others and inner congruence, near-paranormal empathy, confidence, memory, autonomy, detachment, and islands of social and personal insight.” He writes that […]there is great trauma associated with leaving, even for the successful follower. He has invested his deepest hopes in the leader, and leaving is like another leaving of home. […]There is a tremendous culture shock of reentry to the outside world, and many leavers enter therapy. Not even wealth and renewed contact with one’s family of origin can insulate against this. And most of all, that sense of purpose—the sense of being engaged in something vital and important—is gone. A new direction will appear, but it takes much longer than is comfortable.'”18
* According to the Dutch religious scholar Reender Kranenborg who specialized in new religious movements and Hinduism, in some religious groups members have all their social contacts within the group, which makes disaffection and disaffiliation very traumatic. 5
* A study by Cheryl R. Taslimi in 1991 about former members of the Shiloh Community, a fundamentalist Jesus community, indicated that the former members experienced no ill effects of past membership, had integrated well on return to the larger community, and did not differ from the general population on a symptom checklist to assess psychological pathologies.15
* The magazine India Today wrote that former followers of the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba who became disaffected after reports about sexual abuse by the guru reported that losing faith “is a devastating experience that transports them from promised moksha to a private hell. A disillusionment that has three stages: denial, grief and outrage.”[4]
* Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad wrote that disillusionment in a guru may lead to a generalized form of cynicism.[5]
* Lonnie D. Kliever, a professor of Religious Studies at the Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas writes in his article about The Reliability of Apostate Testimony About New Religious Movements that he was requested by the Church of Scientology to give his opinion about apostasy. He further writes in the article that
The clear majority of those who leave of their own free will speak positively of certain aspects of their past experience. While readily acknowledging the ways a given religious movement failed to meet their personal expectations and spiritual needs, many voluntary defectors have found ways of salvaging some redeeming values from their previous religious associations and activities. But there are some voluntary apostates from new religious movements who leave deeply embittered and harshly critical of their former religious associations and activities. Their dynamics of separation from a once-loved religious group is analogous to an embittered marital separation and divorce. […] Long-term and heavily involved members of new religious movements who over time become disenchanted with their religion often throw all of the blame on their former religious associations and activities. […] They magnify small flaws into huge evils. They turn personal disappointments into malicious betrayals. They even will tell incredible falsehoods to harm their former religion.”20
* In an article published in 1986, Lucy DuPertuis, chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Guam who assisted James V. Downton with his book about the Divine Light Mission,[6] asserts that many of the people that left the Divine Light Mission “… drifted away not in disillusionment but in fulfillment.” DuPertuis had been a member of the Divine Light Mission.16
* Jan Groeveld, founder of the Australia based Cult Awareness & Information Centre wrote that time can provide healing in the case of a post-cult trauma.
See also
* Apostasy in purported cults and new religious movements.
* Brainwashing controversies in new religious movements
* Disengagement from religion
* Deprogramming
* Exit counseling
see
* reFOCUS: Recovering Former Cultists’ Support Network, Post cult trauma syndrome
* Traumatic Abuse in Cults: An Exploration of an Unfamiliar Social Problem long essay by Daniel Shaw
for an excellent article on the cult experience see:
After reading the first two paragraphs of your post I couldn’t bother to read any further. I’m not taking your preaching or point of view of the world any more, I can think for myself now and the same old blah blah blah that we’ve had here back and forth about this same subject was plenty. Are you really so idle that you spend your time coming to a blog to see the things that you find of no value to then tell me what is wrong with me and how I’m not yet out of the cult? Don’t you have somebody else you can save? I’m not looking for saviors. Is that too difficult for you to take?
Hi Ton Are you able to tell where in yourself verify some of these thing you told us ?
I wish to point something to ponder-
We learn in life notwithstanding and thanks to its pressures
In a cult is no very much different. I mean that i could learn something of real for me,for my life everywhere. And in the same time my truths shall always be relative .
So for example:
* According to David V. Barret (—, in many cases the problems do not happen while in a cult, but when leaving a cult, which can be difficult for some members…”
Well I went out from a place where i enter to find some answer and i go out to find a place (life) where a lot of my answers to my questions are wrong. But my questions thought the experience were a little changed and i know where some answers were bullshit.
But the limits of all this expert on cults are that (IMO) they not have the answer to the questions. In the best case they believe one could return to a state before the cult.
That is impossible. So it is very probable that I still use some words influenced from my last conditioning,but this is true also before and now.
So may be what could be more useful it were for me or for you Ton observe when this occurs.
Observation of myself is more difficult that observation of other. But to report observations on other is 99 % too much risky to give wrong results(also because my observation on other is not at all objective).( and to observe that we cannot refrain to do this is also a personal experience)
Instead share observation on myself could be help another to see difference and similitude.
I could assure you that is too much difficult to help a people that asks for help !:the contrary is about impossible.
Ps about Public square and soapbox. Moderation is a requisite in public square.
The difference between democracy and Tyranny is when the rules are not clearly stated an used differently . The margin of Tolerance is the largess of the shoulder of the moderator…
a. shepherd — there is some wisdom in the word you write —
“I could assure you that is too much difficult to help a people that asks for help !:the contrary is about impossible.”
our “moderator” here proves your point….
elena and i have a bit of history you see, we both posted to another blog and her engagement there, as it turned out, was a deafening cry for help. she manifested there in a way that indicated she was having a difficult time adjusting to “life” and being in her own skin — i pointed out aspects of her inflated ego, i made an effort to show her a side of herself which manifested in her postings. my “aim” was to point out a blind spot — would you agree that we should try to help another see aspects of themselves which they would otherwise remain unaware of and deny (?)
i’ve been reading the writings and rantings of elena for some time now, and on the positive side she is a very bright, articulate and idealistic young woman, but she is also very impressed with herself and she goes to great lengths in trying to impress others, she attempts to convince others, and herself, that she “knows it all” and whenever someone points out that she doesn’t know it all — she invariably reacts aggressively, she attacks those who do not agree with her point of view and she is often offended even by those who express another point of view which doesn’t agree with hers. she is one of the most intolerant persons i’ve never met…. and she backs up her intolerance with this ridiculous “oneness” doctrine she read about on the internet…. of course if she believes “we’re one” then we all should think and feel the same way right? she seems to believe that we should all think and feel just like she does, and that there is something wrong with anyone who doesn’t.
she feels that she always has to control the “conversation” and she needs to always be at the center of attention. her reactive nature caused her to be banned from the other blog… this banning is something she blames on others, as she still refuses to acknowledge and take responsibiltiy for her actions. now she has her own soapbox… er, i mean blog where she can have all that she had hoped for, afterall, this is her world, and anything she doesn’t agree with she “moderates.”
You surprise me a little more each time Ton. What a lovely version of yourself you’d like to give the world, putting others down to justify your behavior, pretending that you are here to help me when all you’ve consistently done is try to hurt me and convince me that I am crazy and have nothing of value to address? Do you even have a glimpse of how destructive your language is? I doubt it, you rejoice repeating it. Why do you step on your own tale so obviously Ton? Pity the facts don’t quite meet the imaginary picture but go ahead and live it through as you’d like.
In my second participation in the fofblog I was not once aggressive to anyone and apologized for the aggressive behavior I had had previously but of no worth. All this justification of my banning because of my behavior is actually hiding the deep differences in our positions in relation to the FOF Cult, members and ex-members as much as life in general. The questions I posed were too difficult for people to deal with and when I became aggressive towards the fofblog public it was a great excuse to ban me although the six or seven others that would consistently get together to play even more aggressive against me were never banned or called to attention. A moderator that limits himself to turn the pages but is willing to ban when he becomes bias enough is not a moderator but a puppet. We all needed help to dialogue and didn’t find it. The truth is all there for anyone willing to look at it. You keep trying to make me feel ashamed of myself but I am not, I am ashamed only of my aggressions and am happy to live with the consequences of our ideological differences. This does not mean that I wasn’t aggressive in my first participation, it means I was but so were many others and it was I who got banned.It also doesn’t mean that I was not psychologically fractured. I walk in and out of other dimensions permanently thankfully and don’t just remain in the average dimension of the formatory apparatus most of the time. Today, it’s very good to see the fofblog public slowly digesting and presenting material that corroborates what I was saying. Had I been in a better state I would have trickled the information down drop by drop so that it could have been taken graciously but I was fractured in my soul, not in my mind. That is, I was very vulnerable inwardly but not so much that I couldn’t think.
Telling you that you were manipulative like Robert wasn’t an aggression but the truth of the situation. Your whole behavior until I was banned again is shameful but you are unwilling to acknowledge it and excuse yourself. I have already studied our interaction carefully and continue to stand on every word I said but will look at it again in detail if it is of any use, now that I am further exploring the Art of the Dialogue.
I have banned only one person besides you, both were disrespectful and destructive and I will continue to do so. I have already given you the guidelines for this discussion, should you step out too far, I will surely ban you again. As I’ve said often, WHY do you even come here when you find nothing of value Ton? Nothing you’ve ever looked at on a positive note? How much more deranged can you get? Going around to blogs with your sarcasm and negativity without being able to add anything from your own beauty? How much more destructive do you want to be? Your participation is not helping you or anyone else. You are sucking your own energy out as much as the rest. I’ll put up with your constructive criticism but will ban you with another of your sarcasms. Take them elsewhere if you can’t control them.
That kind of sarcasm says more about you than everything else. I would highly appreciate it if you concentrate on the text and not Elena and her misgivings or you’ll forgive me for again ignoring your posts and soon banning you. The ability to do this is an aspect of remaining objective. Can you make such an effort and not continue to waste our time with personal pettiness? Can you step up into a dignified relationship between us?
Thank you apprentice shepherd for your post. It’s given me a clue on where to continue my exploration on the Art of the Dialogue.
The following is long and there is no need to read it in one go, you can take a week or a month, please pace yourself with freedom and don’t read it if the length is a detriment to your being. This blog is both dialogue and monologue. I’ve been struggling with myself for so long that don’t be surprised if you find I am actually talking to understand myself more than to be understood which is quite a surprise when it happens.
A.Shepherd: Where in yourself you’ve verified some of the things you told us?
With this sentence I understood one of the many problems.
It’s fairly easy to see the intentions and psychology of the people in a conversation by the way they use language.
For there to be a fruitful dialogue, sympathy is essential. Without sympathy it is usually not a dialogue but subtle or overt forms of aggression.
I am using sympathy in the sense I believe it is understood by Steiner, as an “openness” towards other people, a willingness to allow them “in” and also in the sense of a “positive” emotion as conceived in The Work, that is, an emotion that cannot turn sour. This preliminary is very significant because we will surely also have to deal with “everything” else including the qualities of being. It’s my understanding that states of openness such as sympathy are actually qualities of a healthy human being. They are “qualities of the self”, of the “I”.
Let me also clarify that I am mostly speaking under the structures presented by the Fourth Way System by Peter Ouspensky and by some of Rudolf Steiner’s concepts and approaches. I understand both systems as two sides of the same coin. It is a rare privilege to count with such a huge spectrum of knowledge in either one. I find them superior to regular psychology that hasn’t as fully clarified the different centres and the independent reality of the I and its consciousness; the concept of ego and real I; the connectedness between centers and the different states of consciousness.
When I talk about sympathy, I am both referring to the sympathy that is outwardly expressed by one’s manners towards another through the emotional and moving centre and sympathy as a “qualitative” characteristic of the self without the involvement of the emotional centre. The “qualities” of the self are aspects of being, something like the gestures of the spirit!
It is fairly easy to verify these things. When we walk down a street we can clearly see people who have a positive open “sympathetic” act and attitude towards the world and people who, on the other hand are tense, withdrawn, fearful. What we are seeing is their “state” or the state of the “I” independent of the sympathy or lack of sympathy in the emotional centre. The withdrawn individual might then meet up with you and greet you with great kindness and still have the inner state of his I withdrawn and unsympathetic towards life. In the Fellowship cult members walk around looking beautifully dressed up, with an act of sympathy but clearly withdrawn and tense. In cults the “conditioning” of people’s behaviour more easily reveals the inconsistencies of the overall scenario. Such “maladies” can better help us understand the human being.
So having clarified my understanding of sympathy, in a conversation the degree of sympathy in the people involved is the healthiest aspect of the conversation before they even say anything to each other. What the degree of sympathy is talking about is the “dialogue between their soul” to express it poetically but in fact it is the dialogue between their mutual selves. Their “I”s. This dialogue occurs in the sympathy of the relationship before they even begin to speak and if we understand the reality of such an instance we can more easily understand the reality of the I independent of functions. When two people love each other, like parents and children, lovers or friends, their “being” together is healing. There is an objective quality of energy being transmitted between them that has an effect on their I and their overall state. Likewise, when two people who don’t like each other are together, their lack of sympathy is also perceived and assimilated with negative results for the overall condition of each one. That “friction” works inside towards harmony if it can be overcome or greater chaos and separation if the people involved don’t have the being to find solutions to their conflict. This needs to be recognized before a conversation even begins. Our lives move in the struggle of our “selves” to find each other’s being. When we are separate from each other we cannot work together, when we are together life is a “recreation” of our harmony.
The next step that can help understand an “ascending” or “descending” dialogue is the “aim” of the conversation in each of the speakers. In conversations between families, friends and lovers, there’s often no other aim than to communicate with each other about regular practical things and it is in how the language is used that there’ll be an overall tone of sympathy or lack of sympathy. What is affected in the child from the overall tone of the conversation is nothing less than his I and sense of his self. In The Work, we don’t have a “sense” of self but we do find it in Steiner. The “quality” of the impressions that the child receives from his immediate surrounding act directly on his or her I and will have an “sculpting” effect in the psychological make-up. It is not the words that matter as much as the tone. Swear words can be used regularly by a loving mother and they’ll have no other effect than to convey a particular way of expressing herself without negatively affecting the children while “educated” language in a “hateful” mother will equally damage the psychological make-up of the child. In the “tone” Steiner tells us, is the spiritual vibration of the individual’s soul. (paraphrasing). This vision of “The Tone” opens an enormous road for us to understand how the world of our spiritual life expresses itself in the overall act of speaking more than in the words as ascribed to the mind. The “tone” is what reveals our conscious or unconscious intention. It’s the tone and not the words what conveys the relationship between the speakers and it’s the tone what carries the objective “quality” of the interaction or energy being transmitted between them. THAT qualitative energy is what will “lift” or “sink” the state of the I or self of the individuals involved. The words simply “accompany” the tone. By “tone” it is not only the “sound” of the voice but the “tone” in which the speaker uses the language even if it’s written language.
The tone and language used in a work environment is different to the one used within the family and it also changes between lovers, friends, acquaintances and enemies. There is a tone in conditions of regular “well-being” and another tone in conditions of conflict.
The argumentation and ideological content of a discussion does not reveal the condition of the participants as clearly as their behaviour towards each other. True that the argument will arise “opposition” or “complicity” but what will rise to a “dialogue”, is the respectful behaviour between the participants. It is the objective conditions of “participation” that guarantee a possible dialogue. To “respect” another is to be aware of his or herself and acknowledge it in each and every act. Respect is the quality of consciousness of one person to another. When an individual is lacking a “sense” of his own self, when his or her I or self is much fractured, his or her I IS too weak to experience or manifest respect. As another “quality” between people’s I, “respect” between them would tend to heal their I while lack of respect tends to weaken it. Respect of course is also an aspect of “consciousness” or “love”. It is “conscious sympathy” in which there is no identification but a permanent acknowledgement of the other persons being, that is, their presence.
I have a strong intuition that if we can “rationalize” the reality of our self and look at its manifestations in our lives we can tap into the source of regeneration. As long as we are acting from our false egos, the relationship between us creates suffering. Acknowledging each other’s SELF and acting that acknowledgement out in our lives can only lead to a more conscious and harmonious world.
In the Art of the Dialogue I will study carefully to show how people behave and use language to hurt and discard each other in their lack of consciousness and egotism. My aim is not to point and hurt others for being unconscious, I acknowledge that I am and have often been as unconscious as anyone else. The only difference is that I am clearly struggling towards unity while some are clearly struggling towards separation.
Hi Ton (and Elena) I know a little of the story of Sheik blog(by the way the first 7 discussion were magic: i see a lot of possibility of search there…)
However I believe you missed my point. Did you remember that story (told by G) when one people go to one to make peace and find himself yellow as a crazy to that people? 🙂
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. my “aim” was to point out a blind spot — would you agree that we should try to help another see aspects of themselves which they would otherwise remain unaware of and deny (?)
——————————–
After what is told are become “photograph” in the Fof I should change strategy (if not aim at all)
I give you a tentative of example
The Art of the Dialogue PART 2
(IN PRECARIOUS equilibrium on a TOO small soap box…)
I am a very bright, articulate and idealistic young man, but I also very impressed with myself and I go to great lengths in trying to impress others, I attempt to convince others, and myself, that I “knows not all,but something very well” and whenever someone points out that I don’t know it all — I invariably react aggressively, I attack those who do not agree with my point of view and I am often offended by those who express another point of view which doesn’t ever seen,ever listen any my views.
I am not cheating:just my way of react aggressively is done in my individual mode.
I joined many forum with the aim of learn and share my experiences and a lot of time i ended with the impression that : or all are more insane than me or that is true we live in a babel tongue circle and fourth way terms ,more time that not. hinder the communication.
This ridiculous “oneness” doctrine of course if we believes “we’re one” then we all should feel the same way right?(LOL) But it seems to me that we should all feel just like I do, and that there is something wrong with anyone who doesn’t.
I try to put the discussion on topic and may be other take that for control and need to be at the center of attention. I acknowledge that i am on my own soapbox(it is to be more visable) and I take responsibility for mine actions willy nilly.. what i lack it is the other approbation, the thanks for my sincerity for my sympathy…
I love you and you not love me ?
It is clear that the problem is you and you negation…or…wait..may be i an not able to love you…
By by(now if this is true i have to feel remorse of conscience: if this is just to receive a clap what you wait to clap me?
🙂
yes apprentice, there does seem to be a gap in understanding here, but thanks for your perspective — although i get the strong sense that you are not exactly a neutral observer — nevertheless i’ll go ahead with an interpretation: this example you chose from “art of dialogue” is to the point of much of what i’ve been attempting to do here with our friend, which is to get her to recognize and reclaim her own projections. this very often involves holding up a mirror for this woman, which sometimes means acting as she does in order to show (demonstrate) what is being “seen.” admittedly this has taken some absurd and wacky turns, it might appear like a dog chasing it’s own tail but i still hold onto the hope that some glimmer of truth may get through, and it may not be apparent now, maybe in a couple of years the light will come on, maybe in 5 years… or maybe not in this lifetime but i know that with reflection things look very differently.
if you want to know what a person is made of, you have to rub her a little bit — that is, scratch the surface to see what lies beneath… thanks for your post elena.
elena:
“I have already given you the guidelines for this discussion, should you step out too far, I will surely ban you again. As I’ve said often, WHY do you even come here when you find nothing of value Ton?”
in 119 it was actually you yourself elena, who suggested that i’m not finding anything of “value” here.
if you want my opinion, (i don’t think you really give a fig about my opinion, or the opinions of anyone else who happens to disagree with you), nevertheless here is my opinion elena; i think there is actually a great deal of interesting material here, but obviously you could care less about my opinion, you much prefer your own opinions, even to the extent that you willy nilly and carelessly substitute yours for mine…. that by the way, is another form of projection.
“Nothing you’ve ever looked at on a positive note? How much more deranged can you get? Going around to blogs with your sarcasm and negativity without being able to add anything from your own beauty? How much more destructive do you want to be? Your participation is not helping you or anyone else. You are sucking your own energy out as much as the rest. I’ll put up with your constructive criticism but will ban you with another of your sarcasms. Take them elsewhere if you can’t control them.”
i hope you can see yourself in this elena… you criticize me for my “tone” because you think i don’t pay you the proper homage…. and yet you don’t hear your own chiding tones, your own negativity towards me… since you’ve stopped reading anything i write how would you know that there’s nothing of “beauty”? maybe that’s more a reflection of you… if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what of that which she blithely ignores ?
The trouble is that you think you and I are very important and we really don’t matter a third of what you suppose. This bickering is nonsense and self adulation.
Ton: in 119 it was actually you yourself elena, who suggested that i’m not finding anything of “value” here.
No Ton, what shows that you don’t find anything of value is that you’ve never been willing to address the contents too busy beating me up.
Ton: “which sometimes means acting as she does in order to show (demonstrate) what is being “seen.””
You learnt so well that you beat me by a mile!
Life is good these days, I am walking out of those patterns and was in them much more powerfully than you, I had just left the cult and three long years is little to fully recover but… life is good these days.
Your opinion is of no importance to me when related to beating me up and pretending to teach me a lesson big guy. I won’t take anything from you in those terms but your opinion is wonderfully welcome if you can sit and look outside of the train and tell me what you see and how you see it. Not me but the world. It’s the world what’s worth looking at in any trip!
I imagine I have somehow hurt you deeply and it is from that hurt that you think it’s worth getting back at me. How many times do you need someone to apologize to forgive and let them be? Is it because we are unwilling to acknowledge the truths that we keep hanging on to the accounts? Or because we’re unwilling to struggle with our own self and grind the dead leaves of our decay?
You hold a strange system and are convinced that you can ask anyone to look at themselves when you hold up a mirror with hatred. I might have hurt all of you in the fofblog but it wasn’t hatred what inspired me but anger and frustration at our inability to help the people inside or ourselves. You have no idea how shocking it is for me that none of those living close to Oregon House don’t sit outside those gates and tell all the new and old students that they were seriously hurt by the Fellowship and Robert. Or how shocking to realize that most ex-members do nothing to help people they know are being psychologically annihilated. Even more shocking than that is the fact that they justify all that because they have friends in the inner circle who they don’t wish to “hurt”. When did we learn that it was better to let people annihilate themselves than kick them in the ass and shake them into being before they slid down the precipice?
You’re a strange guy Ton. Wasn’t it more comfortable to sit with the rest and pretend I didn’t exist than come here and beat me up day in and day out so that you could justify my getting banned if I went mad enough? Was it easier when it was just you and me and you didn’t have other witnesses than your FOF accomplices? You have never even tried to give your opinion on anything else. It wasn’t about dialoguing, the sentence had been placed and the only agenda was to silence the witness convincing her she was crazy! Tricky business! Are you now pretending that all you want is to show her the mirror so that she can see how ugly she is? Can’t you remember the evidence is all here?
Does it not shock you out of your self to see the extent you’ve been willing to take this? There’s something particularly strange about the guy who is willing to carry out the execution in the dark streets of big cities. Men able to hit without ever looking at who they are hurting, not one kind word even to greet them before they carry out their deed. Kindness. Where did you forget it? How did you learn to justify all that with the idea that you had to hold up a mirror to the woman you were unwilling to look at? And to think it all happened because I failed to address you and dismissed you rather than kick you like the rest for you’d been kind before. Nothing offended you more than the fact that I would not struggle with you to protect you from my arrogance.
Is it not love? Or is hatred not love backwards? When will you rest? What are you still owing me or I you that you can’t go or stay? Is it easier to hate me than to love me? You’ve been seating at the door for a long time now Ton, what are you waiting for? I can neither leave nor are you willing to come in so what is it that you want? It’s difficult to continue playing the bully when the lady’s got company so would you like to come in and pretend we are friends, work our selves into that or slip away when no one is looking?
I guess I’m angry but if you leave the bully outside, you can come in.
“The trouble is that you think you and I are very important and we really don’t matter a third of what you suppose.”
there you go again elena, you’re substituting your own thoughts for mine…
“This bickering is nonsense and self adulation.”
i can agree that the bickering is nonsense unless it leads to some realization(s). self-adulation ? maybe that’s an interesting thought.
“No Ton, what shows that you don’t find anything of value is that you’ve never been willing to address the contents…”
elena, you’ve said over and again that you don’t read what i post here, you don’t hear what i say, you dismiss my point of view, you could care less about my opinion.
“Ton: “which sometimes means acting as she does in order to show (demonstrate) what is being “seen.”” You learnt so well that you beat me by a mile!”
to out-elena elena, is no small task, i’m glad you recognize it.
“Your opinion is of no importance to me…”
dismissed again and again…
“…and pretending to teach me a lesson big guy. I won’t take anything from you in those terms but your opinion is wonderfully welcome if you can sit and look outside of the train and tell me what you see and how you see it. Not me but the world. It’s the world what’s worth looking at in any trip!”
elena i can’t teach you anything, you know it all…. something you don’t acknowledge here is that you are part of the world and especially in this (blog) world which you create, and that’s worth looking at… and yet you dismiss this.
“I imagine I have somehow hurt you deeply and it is from that hurt that you think it’s worth getting back at me. How many times do you need someone to apologize to forgive and let them be? Is it because we are unwilling to acknowledge the truths that we keep hanging on to the accounts? Or because we’re unwilling to struggle with our own self and grind the dead leaves of our decay?”
yes elena, it is hurtful to be continually dismissed and disregarded… isn’t it ? but i’m not looking for apologies, maybe a change in attitude… it sounds here a little like you’re trying to understand through empathy, that’s what i’m talking about.
“You hold a strange system and are convinced that you can ask anyone to look at themselves when you hold up a mirror with hatred. I might have hurt all of you in the fofblog but it wasn’t hatred what inspired me but anger and frustration at our inability to help the people inside or ourselves.”
i’m sorry you feel hatred elena, but this is not done out of hatred, do not mistake determination for hatred. you never hurt anyone on the fofblog, and i do understand your anger and frustration over a sense of being unable to do…. i understand this from the inside out since live with that too.
“You have no idea how shocking it is for me that none of those living close to Oregon House don’t sit outside those gates and tell all the new and old students that they were seriously hurt by the Fellowship and Robert. Or how shocking to realize that most ex-members do nothing to help people they know are being psychologically annihilated. Even more shocking than that is the fact that they justify all that because they have friends in the inner circle who they don’t wish to “hurt”. When did we learn that it was better to let people annihilate themselves than kick them in the ass and shake them into being before they slid down the precipice?”
yes elena i do have some idea.
“You’re a strange guy Ton. Wasn’t it more comfortable to sit with the rest and pretend I didn’t exist than come here and beat me up day in and day out so that you could justify my getting banned if I went mad enough?”
do you really think that i need to justify your banishment? do you really believe that’s what motivates me elena?
“Was it easier when it was just you and me and you didn’t have other witnesses than your FOF accomplices? You have never even tried to give your opinion on anything else. It wasn’t about dialoguing….”
elena you think of me as a criminal, but what is worse is that you ignore and disregard everything i’ve ever said… you still can’t even acknowledge that this is a dialogue.
“the sentence had been placed and the only agenda was to silence the witness convincing her she was crazy! Tricky business! Are you now pretending that all you want is to show her the mirror so that she can see how ugly she is? Can’t you remember the evidence is all here?”
yes elena the evidence is there, but obviously we interpret it differently… “silence the witness convincing her she was crazy!” elena that sounds a little crazy, or at least a little paranoid…. do you know the word histrionics?
“Does it not shock you out of your self to see the extent you’ve been willing to take this?”
like i said, to out-elena elena is no small task…
“There’s something particularly strange about the guy who is willing to carry out the execution in the dark streets of big cities. Men able to hit without ever looking at who they are hurting,”
more exageration and histrionics… this is not an “execution” elena, it’s a frank discussion and dialogue.
“not one kind word even to greet them before they carry out their deed. Kindness. Where did you forget it? How did you learn to justify all that with the idea that you had to hold up a mirror to the woman you were unwilling to look at? ”
dear elena, how many times have i said it, dear elena, how long have i suffered your own insensitivities, all with in the hope of breaking through… is this not a kind of kindness ? maybe it’s you who is unable to recognize it.
“And to think it all happened because I failed to address you and dismissed you rather than kick you like the rest for you’d been kind before. Nothing offended you more than the fact that I would not struggle with you to protect you from my arrogance.”
yes elena, at least you can acknowledge that you dismiss and disregard another in favor of yourself… but you fail to recognize that you have delivered more than a few kicks as well. i can take the kicks, i can take the disrespect and ignoring of my opinions, and you don’t need to feel like you should protect me from your arrogance, but you and i and everyone you know, will be better served when you find a way out of the trap of your own arrogance and…. that’s more than enough for now.
“The social leaders and agitators, for example, live in the illusion that they need only spread certain ideas or need only appeal to a class of man who is willing and disposed (provided ideas are there) to help forward the social impulse. It is an illusion to act in this way, for in so doing one forgets that if social forces are working, then anti-social forces are also present. What we must be able to do today is to look these things straight in the face without illusion.
We must ask ourselves: What is the relation between people with regard to social and anti-social forces? We need to see that the relationship between people is fundamentally a complicated matter. When one person meets another, I would say we must look into the situation radically. Meetings of course point to differences which vary according to specific circumstances; but we must fix our eyes on the common characteristics, we must clearly see the common elements in the meeting, in the confrontation between one person and another. We must ask ourselves: What really happens then, not merely in that which presents itself to the senses, but in the total situation, when one person stands opposite another, when one person meets another? Nothing less than that a certain force works from one person to the other. The meeting of one with another leads to the working of a certain force between them. We cannot confront another person in life with indifference, not even in mere thoughts and feelings, even though we may be separated from them by distance. If we have any kind of relation to other people, or any communication with them, then a force flows between us creating a bond. It is this fact which lies at the basis of social life and which, when broadened, is really the foundation for the social structure of humanity.”
Anyone can dear another one without there being any love in it. It is often used to patronize another person and this new tone you’re using is welcome but not trustworthy, as I said, it’s difficult to play the bully when the lady’s got company. I’ve grown up since before you were banned. In those days and all throughout those blogs I needed to be deared but not anymore. I guess I put up with you for so long because I needed company like those wives that can’t leave their husbands although they batter them every other day. There is a wonderful freedom when we take that final step and tell the man to get the hell out of our lives no matter how alone we might remain only to discover that our own company was always there.
You call it histrionics but the same principles apply to different situations, the same vibes play their turn and macho’s try to apply the same mechanisms that have succeeded for centuries and are only beginning to fail their masters.
You tell me that I don’t like men, this is one of your attacks when I photograph your sad behaviour but it’s not men what I don’t like but infra-men for Men, don’t go after a vulnerable woman to beat her up with the hatred you’ve been chasing me from the moment I put my feet in the fofblog again taking advantage of the fact that you had the whole public on your side. You challenge my histrionics only to stimulate them a little further like blowing on fire.
One of the funniest lies you’ve told here is that I didn’t hurt anyone in the fofblog! Even I know better! Had I not hurt anyone I wouldn’t have apologized!
I hurt you because I didn’t hurt you! Because I protected you and didn’t challenge you like the rest. That offended you because you thought I didn’t think you worthy of being challenged in your own insecurity but I did it because you had been kind.
I hurt Whalerider who I told to go and fuck himself because he hadn’t been fucked enough if he thought that the people like Eileen who committed suicide after begging for help in the Fellowship were not enough to storm La Bastille and pull the ground out of their feet.
I hurt Vena, Ames Gilbert, Bruce Levy, and everyone else I could scream at in my horror and I questioned our American individualism, all members and ex-members and then I laughed at everyone including the moderator in his face.
You might not know how to look at yourself Ton and see how cruel you can get but I’m getting better at it each day! The price was high and I regretted it deeply but not you or anybody else in the fofblog who are still stuck in buffering what actually happened between us ignoring the issues that we struggled about.
Again you state that you are not here to apologize or take my apologies probably because you’re not yet done. You still have a few beatings you’d like to get across and were you to take my apologies or give any they would be incoherent to justify the beating, wouldn’t they?.
You talk about apologies as if you had never tasted the grace of forgiveness or compassion and it is clear to me that you haven’t but in small gestures when I am able to take your insults without putting up a mirror to your face which is rare.
And you’re quite insistent about my expressing the things you think as if I had run over to your brain to steal them from you and have a tape about projection that only God knows what you intend to do with it pretending to dismiss everything I say because it was yours. Talk about biting your tail without ever being able to just stand there and take or give a straight blow so that you can actually exist. Is that why you took up the role of chasing me down the road with a whole blog on your side? I much prefer those who clearly stated their hatred and beat me out of the FOFBlog and never bothered to even look at me than those like you who pretend to be helping me while beating me up. THAT is what I call “SICK”.
We are not playing games here Ton. THIS IS OUR LIFE. Your incongruence is as bad as mine talking about the community and the wonders of unity while “fucking” the world out of its feet. Some people never fuck anyone else because they never hurt but others begin to understand what love is about after fucking and getting fucked enough. Are you there yet?
How about that for histrionics! The problem with arrogance is that it is an I in pain defending itself into being.
What is important about all this is that we begin to get an inkling of the fact that “knowing” what is right is not “being” right. That to be what we know we have to have the will to actualize the knowledge in our acts. You come here chasing me about my incoherence and become even more incoherent than I was chasing down a woman you know is vulnerable, alone and has just been banned from the only place she was holding on because she didn’t know were else to go after the cult. At least I was addressing people who’d been out for years and it was my screams against THEM that got me banned for very specific reasons. They were as violent as I was but the moderator was bias and the particular subject at the time was not in their taste. So what does that show us but that we don’t have the being to tell each other anything but take ourselves as we are with a great deal more humility than we’ve ever had? Is it not wonderful to get beaten down enough that one can actually sit with one’s self and be nothing more than what one is? Your beating me down Ton has not taught me anything but to close the doors to you and ban you which is a great lesson when we finally separate from those hurting us. I don’t regret screaming at people who were not willing to address the issues and screamed back with personal attacks. In the Art of Dialogue what we can learn is how people avoid the questions and destroy and ban an individual because they are unwilling to take the coherent actions if they were to listen. This is still the issue in all these blogs and life itself. They still kill people everyday for speaking the truth those in power don’t want to hear. What I regret about my arrogance and taking up of space is that it was given in pain because I was vulnerable, because when there isn’t enough of one’s self to respond to a situation, one’s ego responds in whatever way it can to hold itself and the screaming and the arrogance is only the extroverted expression of its weakness. Had I not been vulnerable I could have said the same things and walked out without screaming. So if you’re trying to convince me that I am not right about the deep issues, you’re not a step closer Ton. It is those issues what neither you nor anyone else in the FOFBLOG were willing to seriously address. Things such as:
Why can’t we take legal action when we know the Fellowship is hurting those inside and those who continue to join?
Why can’t we stand outside and make noise so that there is constant pressure against them?
Why do we pretend that we are not responsible for each other when we all built that cult up into what it is with our money and participation?
What makes us think that it is not a fascist gesture to look the other way so that one doesn’t have to get involved when one knows people are getting hurt?
The reality in cults today is the worst and most dangerous threat to human freedom. To avoid it is like avoiding the concentration camps in their times. To annihilate people psychologically is as cruel or more than annihilating them physically. To manipulate people to act against themselves because they are innocent enough to love a guru in the widespread fracturedness of the inhuman societies today is a crime. Society as it is organized leaves no place for love and humaneness and people are pouring their innocence into cults with the hope that they will be able to evolve with love. THAT is what Robert and those in the inner circle of every cult are taking advantage of to enslave people for a lifetime. Why do you and those in the FOFblog pretend to dismiss THAT trying to convince us that I am simply crazy?
You’ve been banging down the walls telling me that all I need is professional help and that you’re here to help me, THIS SICK “TO OUT Elena” of yours is SICK because you and all in the fofblog are “outing” me so that you don’t have to hear THAT; THAT TON: THAT WE HAVE TO STOP THE FELLOWSHIP CULT AND ALL THE OTHER CULTS WE CAN GET TO WITH IT. That it is OUR RESPONSIBILITY BECAUSE WE BUILT IT, FED IT, GAVE IT STRENGTH AND WALKING OUT OF IT NOW THAT IT IS SYSTEMATICALLY HURTING PEOPLE SIMPLY MAKES US AS SICK AS THEM. WE ARE ALLOWING IT KNOWING HOW AND WHY IT HURTS PEOPLE.
How much louder do you want me to scream? These vampires need to be gotten out of people’s lives.
If you’re not willing to address the issues, please leave me alone, we’ve had enough of each other and good is plenty.
I’ve just found the following piece of work at
http://www.doorstodialogue.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/doors-to-dialogue2.pdf that seems to be an excellent beginning in the exploration of Dialogue. It is written by an Anthroposophist and I would like to clarify that I don’t consider myself to be one or that Rudolf Steiner was the one and only Teacher of his times like Anthroposophists often do. If what Steiner himself seems to have stood for was that it is no longer one man but all men and women or human beings who hold enough of a mature I to be, it must also be true that he was as valuable as so many other of his contemporaries. I find great value in the following work because of the succinct synthesis that he gives us of our recent philosophical history and the clarification of the issues in question. Many aspects presented here are worth exploring in more detail further on. I realize this is long but it is just a glimpse at our recent spiritual history. If he misses Gurdjieff’s System, it is not surprising but we know better than to ignore it! In the Introduction to this event, even Gurdjieff is included.
I’m also including this text in the Art of Dialogue because it is easier to understand it if we can already place our selves where these men leave us.
Questions arise: If we human beings can now perceive our selves objectively can we not now deal with the world objectively? Now that we have “killed” our essence in cults and survived, can we not begin to perceive not only our selves but our lives objectively? Rather than “escape” out of “life” and “illusion” can the other dimension not penetrate beyond the illusion? Is life itself not the microcosmic picture of the heavens traditionally revealed to us by tragedy? Is it not possible to “incarnate” our will in the silk threaded hands of everyday life?
Now that we ARE, what can we “do” but “live”? “Live” objectively?
If we ARE, is life not a constant recreation of our selves? Is life not the dialogue between our selves and the world? And is such a dialogue not a consistent re-generation of “life”? Logos?
Would “pure thinking” not express itself in “pure action”? And pure action not be the incarnation of being? a regenerative process per se?
Far still today from all that beauty, but not as far as yesterday!
Anthroposophy and post-modern philosophy in dialogue. Observations on
the spiritualization of thinking7
Yesayahu Ben Aharon
Harduf, Israel
E-Mail: beh@harduf.org.il
Dear Friends,
firstly I would like to say what a great pleasure it is that I am able to be here with you, and to
add also that this is the first working visit that I have made to France. But strangely enough
though I don’t speak or read French I have always been closely following the developments of
French cultural-spiritual life in the twentieth century and also today. And particularly I am
engaged for many years with French thinking and Philosophy. And I would like in this lecture
to make you aware of the role that French thinking plays in the invisible spiritual drama of
our time.
I referred to what took place in the 20th Century behind the curtains of world events in
my books about The Spiritual Event of the 20th century and The New Experience of the
Supersensible, now translated also to French. Both books were written at the beginning of the
90′ of last century. There I described my spiritual-scientific research on the esoteric, super-
and sub- sensible realities graspable only by means of modern spiritual scientific research
methods. Until the 60′ very little light was created on the earth at all- and so much darkness.
Not that the darkness producing forces and events have diminished since then; on the
contrary, they increase exponentially; but the good news are that in all walks of life, thought,
science, art and social life, new forces of hope started to flow in the 60′ and in my books I
described the hidden sources out of which these spiritual forces are flowing. And some of
those rare and precious rays of light emanated from French creativity in the second half of the
last century.
During the whole European catastrophe of the 20th Century, before, between and after
the two world wars and during the cold war, there took place right here in France a very
intense and vital intellectual, but also cultural and political debate. The forces at work in
thinking, with all their ingenuity, were not yet strong enough to penetrate social and political
7
This is the original text of a lecture to the French Anthroposophical Society, held in Colmar 1st June, 2007.
17
realities. While many believed to be so “revolutionary” and radical they could never really
break through to new social ideas and social formations. Nevertheless, in the field of
Philosophy this was different. Here some true creativity took place which was indeed striving
to break new grounds.
The last century had enormous task coupled with the most grave and fateful results for
good or ill. This task can be described of course in various ways. However, for our purposes
tonight, because we are approaching this task from the point of view of the development of
thinking, we can, generally speaking, call it: the spiritualization of consciousness or more
specifically: spiritualization of the intellect (and thinking).
There is an expression used often by Rudolf Steiner. His whole impulse, the outmost
exertion of his will and love was poured into this deed. And his life long hopes and were that
free humans will do what he himself was striving to do: to transform themselves truly! He had
sincerely hoped that this will be achieved at least by a limited number of people already at the
beginning of the 20th century, that it would then be taken up by ever more people during the
course of the whole century, to reach a certain intensive culmination at the end of the century
and in a transformed manner will powerfully enter the global scene of the 21st century as
world-changing creative power.
It is not enough nowadays that one person does something alone even if he is the
greatest initiate, because others should no longer be simply led or pushed in his steps – unless
we are speaking of impulses of evil. The good can only spring forth from the depth of free
human hearts and minds, working together in mutual help and understanding. And if you look
at the world situation today, Anthroposophy included, from this point of view, you can surely
say: well, then, we are definitely only at the very beginning! We are all therefore kindly
invited to begin again, anew; if we understand truly what was said above, we are asked to see
ourselves as real beginners. Ever more people should understand that the Zeitgeist is now
seeking new beginners, and is quite loathsome and fed up with so many “knowers” that are
constantly creating such havoc in our social, spiritual an economic life.
This spiritualization of the intellect is the first and unavoidable step needed as
foundation for further transformations of human nature and society. It is the precondition for
the spiritualization of our social, cultural, political and economic life. This is our main entry
point, simply because we have become thinking beings in the last centuries; everything we do
start from thinking and wrong thinking is immediately a source of moral-social destructive
forces, and truthful thinking a building and healing power. For this reason Steiner referred to
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his so-called “non-Anthroposophical” book, The Philosophy of Freedom, as his most
important spiritual creation.
By means of this book, he said, if properly understood and practiced, each person can
begin without any former spiritual knowledge or belief; from her or his daily thinking
consciousness, daily perceiving consciousness, daily moral activity and social experiences.
Each can start here from where one stands in real life. And I have made the experience early
on with myself and now also with friends and students in Israel, that with the Philosophy of
Freedom, if you take it in the right manner, it is indeed the case that it gives us powerful
means to realise this spiritualization and bring it to consciousness.
And now this was my own spiritual scientific way of development from my 21st year of
life until my 35th. After starting from Steiner’s general Anthroposophical work I then
concentrated specifically on his philosophical-social work. For the building of the Harduf
community, on the one hand, and for my spiritual research on the other, I searched for the
hidden stream of becoming of Anthroposophy, for its living supersensible continuation. How
can Steiner’s starting point for thinking be continually updated, brought into the stream of the
developing Zeitgeist? This was my burning daily problem. I was also aware of the retarding
forces at work also inside his legacy. So I was conscious early on that I must create my own
way as I go alone and that it is not simply given out there. And when you search in this way
you have to find Michael’s foot steps in history and in present day spiritual, cultural and social
life. This is the reason why I was intensively following the new developments in the sciences,
arts, social life and also in thinking and philosophy in the course of the whole 20th Century.
Then I found, through life itself, through my work itself, that – this applies for my own
experience, one cannot generalize – that whenever and wherever I looked for a way to
continue after 1925 – after Steiner’s death – the way that would lead to a further development
of thinking and the spiritualization of the intellect, it was leading to the abyss opened with
the last two German thinkers- the (converted) Jew Edmund Husserl and his National Socialist
pupil Martin Heidegger, through the ruins of European culture in the second world war, and
into the 50′ and 60′ as I mentioned above. (You can read about my knowledge struggles in this
regard in the introduction I wrote to the German translation of my book: The New Experience
of the Supersensible.) And it was in this following in the tragic steps of Husserl and
Heidegger that I came to French Philosophy, because the French thinkers were the most
ardent and receptive pupils of German thought. Therefore, in order to introduce some central
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figures of French Philosophy I will have to briefly summarize the decisive turning point in
German spiritual history.
A German excursion
The first German thinker that was acutely aware that the time of German idealism and
Goethe’s time has gone forever and cannot be revived literally became mentally ill and lost his
mind in his efforts to find new, unforeseen venues to spiritualize thinking. This was of course
the great and tragic Nietzsche. And this is significant as historical symptom and clue to the
gathering storm leading to the German tragedy that precisely in those years – the end of the
80’s of the 19th century – Steiner was working on his philosophical dissertation Truth and
Science as basis for the Philosophy of Freedom. When the latter was publish in 1894 he
wrote to his close friend, Rosa Mayreder, how greatly he regrets the fact that Nietzsche can no
longer read it, because – so Steiner – “he would have truly understood it”. Now, Edmund
Husserl (1859-1938) was a contemporary of Steiner; he also studied philosophy in Vienna
under Franz Brentano one or two years after Steiner studied there probably in the winter
semester 18812. They almost met in Brentano’s classes, as it were. And as a matter of fact,
Karma couldn’t have spoken more clearly, because Husserl was striving to develop
Brentano’s thinking further and created his Phenomenology in the direction of Steiner’s
Philosophy of Freedom. But Husserl’s radicalism was not radical enough; he didn’t overcome
the deeper limits of traditional Kantian philosophy. This left a yawning gap, and abyss, in
German thinking before, during and after the First World War, which was the most decisive
time for European and German history. Now came the year in which German destiny and with
it Europe’s was to be decided: 1917. During this year Lenin is smuggled by Luddendorf in the
sealed train carriage from his exile in Zurich to Moscow to organize the Bolshevik revolution
in the East and the US enters the war from the West. Middle Europe’s fate was on the scales,
tipping rapidly to the worst and Steiner initiates social threefolding as last rescue effort.
Now Brentano dies in 1917; Steiner publishes a Nachruf to Brentano in his book Von
Seelenrätseln in which Philosophy, Anthropology and Anthroposophy are brought together
for the first time in fully modern and scientific way, without any Theosophical residues. (e.g.,
free from traditional occult conceptions and formulations). This book stated clearly: Steiner is
now ready to start his real life task as modern spiritual scientist and social innovator. But all
his new initiatives collapsed one after the other until his death in March 1925. The rest is
already external history…. After Steiner’s death Max Scheler, original and free pupil of
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Husserl who met and appreciated Steiner converts to Catholicism in 1927, in which Martin
Heidegger’s influential book Being and Time is published. Heidegger embodies in his destiny
as the last German thinker the destiny of his people. He could neither rest content – justifiably
– with phenomenology nor open to the new impulse working in the direction of the
Philosophy of Freedom. Therefore, he transformed Husserl’s phenomenology backward
instead of forward, to create a powerful and highly suggestive intellectual Umstülpung
(reversal inside out) of the Philosophy of Freedom in German intellectual life.
Between Husserl and Heidegger the tragedy of German spiritual life plays itself out in
the late 20′ and 30′, until Heidegger delivered his infamous Antrittsrede (rector’s address) as
newly elected Rector of Freiberg’s university in 1933, presenting himself as enthusiastic Nazi.
(He also later supported the excommunication of his aging teacher according Nuremberg’s
denaturalization racial laws from 1935; fortunately for him Husserl died in 1938). The
decision that fell already in 1917 was now made fully visible and with it the fate of Germany
and Europe as a whole.
Since Nietzsche’s and Steiner’s time it is rather a strong eitheror situation: thinking can
be either with the spirit of the time or be strongly against it, and Heidegger forcefully
mobilized his unquestionable greatness to oppose humanity’s development towards freedom.
But only an abstract intellectual or a fanatic religious believer would believe that he knows in
advance the difference between truth and falsehood nowadays. (And Anthroposophy is also
taken is this manner sometimes). Practically speaking precisely the case of Heidegger
demonstrates the real difficulties one faces when one strives through real experience to
discern the difference between the two, especially where they reflected and deflected by the
threshold. If you take the threshold level as mirror surface then one would appear as a sub-
threshold and polar brother-even twin- turned really upside down to create a counter-picture, a
mirror-opposite of its upper-threshold origin!
Here I would like to point your attention to a very significant fact that served my work
very well through the years: by struggling with present thinking in various fields one
discovers that one is highly rewarded not only by finding true Michaelic inspirations, but also
through the painful uncovering of adversarial streams; they can teach us also a great deal- and
first hand- concerning Michael’s true intentions precisely thanks to the fact that they strive to
do the very opposite!
Now when we look at it also from this point of view we may begin to understand this
great riddle, namely, why Heidegger became perhaps the most influential philosopher in 20th
21
Century’s European Philosophy and French Philosophy in particular, and why Levinas said –
and he was a close personal student of Heidegger in Freiburg: “we must admit, we were all
unfortunately Heidegger’s students”. (This isn’t the place to enter into Heidegger’s Philosophy
in any detail. This could provide however an interesting and timely study).
The French philosophical century
As was said above, since the twenties and thirties, between the wars and during the cold war
and later, we find the beginning of a great series of French thinkers that always begin by
assimilating German Philosophy. The most recent philosophical food supply for French
thinking comes from the great German fourfold Gotterdämmerung stream: Hegel, Nietzsche,
Husserl and Heidegger. Let us now invite and introduce shortly few of them. But kindly be
reminded that this introduction can only be episodic, sporadic and fragmentary, a flitting-
momentary inscription marked on a narrow and rapidly vanishing path….
Perhaps one beginning can be made with another born Jew, Henri Bergson,
contemporary of Steiner, resurrected from oblivion by Deleuze that used especially his early
book “Matter and Memory” from 1896 (two years after The Philosophy of Freedom) as one
of his major starting points. And then – more or less in the same generation – we have the
great phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty whose book The Phenomenology of
Perception is a fine study of sense-perception and perceptual consciousness, who latter was
increasingly pushing the limits of perception into the supersensible, striving to transform
sense-perception and body experience into spiritual experience. Then somewhat at the other
pole you can take the “dark” Maurice Blanchot whose writings on The Space of Literature
exerted strong fascination through the century, and then we are already with the greatly
influential Sartre!
Sartre transformed the fundamental ontology of Heidegger into phenomenological
existentialism and wrote his main work, Being and Nothingness during the war as reply to
Heidegger’s Being and Time from 1927. Just read for example the chapter on “the look of the
other” in this book, and you will find a most exact and brilliant phenomenological research of
the perception, being and relation of the other that is without precedent in the history of
philosophy or science. After the war we see the emergence of the stream of French
structuralism with among others Levi-Strauss and his school. They had a significantly fruitful
influence, right up until our times, in Anthropology, Sociology, myth study and ancient
cultures. But this was all prologue, setting the stage to what, since the 1960’s, will become the
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truly exciting 30 years – 60’s, 70’s and 80’s – in which one next to the other you see the
appearance of shining, most brilliant stars over the intellectual horizon of France, now world
renown, but then it was all beginning; I am sure you are all familiar with those remarkable
names…. names like?…. names like….? (No answer and laughter in the hall)
First let us name another Jew-born; yes, they are still all over the place despite some
efforts…. I mean Jacques Derrida, an Algérian borne French. He is now the rather famous,
but not always truly understood, founder of a philosophical stream that he called
deconstruction. Derrida was Foucault’s opponent, though more at friendship – from rather far
away – with Deleuze. His effort was directed towards deconstructing and dismantling the
centralistic-centralizing father-god, monotheistic forces working in past and present
philosophy and literature, not as a goal in itself, but as means of uncovering the peripheral
forces working in language and writing. He discovered and described some of the formative
strategies of decentralized, peripheral forces that in spiritual science are called “etheric
formative forces” and revealed the texture of the text, the weaving of the text through the
wrap and wool of language’s art of tapestry. The late Derrida is increasingly influenced by
Levinas and turns his attention to ethical, political and religious investigations, studying the
problems of radical alterity, the transcendental otherness of the other as unbridgeable
difference. He died in 9 October, 2004 and has an ever growing circle of influence extending far
away, for instance, he is felt strongly in the Americas. Derrida is one of few philosophers of
the 20th century that became known as cultural figure outside the philosophical milieu.
The concept of “postmodernism” is articulated for the first time as a philosophical
concept in Jean-François Lyotard’s The Post Modern Condition – A report on knowledge
from 1979. Inspired by Kant’s idea of the experience and cognition of the sublime (part of
Kant’s Critique of Judgment), he tried to create a non-positivist “eventful” concept of
knowledge and art and apply it to social and political thought.
We could have named here other names, for example, the truly brilliant Paul Virilio,
original thinker of modern and post-modern technology, military and urbanism and
architecture, whose writings have influenced many fields. And then how can we not mention
Jean Baudrillard who died last March, a sharp-minded observer and critic of electronic
communication and globalized media and TV, that also wrote a short and remarkable text on
the Spirit of Terrorism after the terror attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York at 11th
September, 2001.
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And then we come to Emmanuel Levinas (we mentioned him above in connection with
his teacher Heidegger). A Lithuanian born Jew that became after the war an orthodox Jew and
remained observant of the commandments and Tora for the rest of his life, is beside Derrida
the most widely known French –Philosopher of our time, and his influence is steadily
growing also now. He introduced innovatively and radically the concept of “the other” not
through phenomenology as developed by Husserl, Heidegger or Sartre, but through such
remarkable concepts as “the face of the other” and “the mortality of the other” to which I am
primordially responsible. This way, so Levinas believed, is the only way to create a contra-
Cain force, which is the true mission of Judaism that was suppressed by western philosophy,
Christianity and middle European culture. He sought to resurrect Abel and find the answer to
Cain’s primordial brother’s murder, which he experienced as repeated on European and Global
scale in the 20th century, especially in the annihilation of the Jews (original Abel’s sons) by
the German (modern Cain’s sons), and in every and each persecution of the weak wherever
they are. This constitutes the essence of his thought: I am my brother’s keeper! In this manner
Levinas tried to bring a new religious- moral impulse into the philosophical and cultural-
political discourses and consciousness of the post-Holocaust world.
And perhaps the last of these great figures to be mentioned now, because our time is
short, would be Alain Badiou who still lives and works today, a militant Leninist (actually
Maoist-Leninist), that begun as disciple of Sartre and the French philosopher-guru of
psychoanalysis, Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan, and was grooming himself to become life long
contender of Deleuze. He is the rather lonely and last star still shining in the twilight zone of a
truly wonderful French philosophical century. Badiou wrote an excellent students’
introduction to his thought called Ethics: An essay on the understanding of evil, and just to
give you an example of his varied fields of interest, he wrote the best book on St. Paul that I
read in recent literature; yes, this belongs to the strange and audacious symptomatic of our
time: A French non-repentant Maoist-Leninist writes best book on St. Paul!
And these are only the more clearly marked names in history which are but the more
strongly visible planets shining on the background of a whole spiritual-cultural European and
French historical constellation, caused by the destruction of Europe in the last century and the
vacuum created by the disappearance of German thinking. These are some of the more visible
representatives of dozens of creative and original thinkers, artists, and scientists in the 20th
century that lived in France. But now there was the one who was so daring and inspiring in
his originality that in a way he really towered them all, so much so, that Deleuze said: The
24
author that wrote The Archaeology of Knowledge makes it possible for us to hope that true
philosophy will again be possible. And he meant Michel Foucault.
“Foucault is closer to Goethe than to Newton”, Deleuze writes (in his fine book
Foucault) because as for Goethe “the light-being is a strictly indivisible condition, an a priori
that is uniquely able to lay visibilities open to sight and by the same stroke to the other
senses”, so is Foucault’s new concept of language and thinking: their essential being is the
imperceptible force that make all discourse visible and possible at all. And this is the reason
why Foucault could prepare and open the way for the truly most significant French thinker of
the 20th century, namely, Gilles Deleuze himself. Even the otherwise careful and rather
restrained Derrida, speaking at Deleuze’s funeral, exclaimed: “The author of Repetition and
Difference (one of Deleuze’s main books) is the sublime philosopher of the event”. Like a sun
which outshines all the intellectual French stars but also contextualizing them, giving them
their historical formation and placing thinking on its way in the trajectory and direction of its
future cosmic destination and constellation, Deleuze fully deserves Foucault’s statement: “the
whole philosophical 20th century will one day be called the Deleuzian century”. And
elsewhere: “…a lightening storm was produced which will bear the name of Deleuze: new
thought is possible; thought is again possible”.
It was Deleuze, alone and together with his collaborator and co-author Felix Guattari,
that actually pointed out philosophy’s future role and task, in all his writings. Aphoristically
speaking, let us pick one statement which can be inscribed – from the point of view presented
in this lecture – as symptomatic signpost in the evolution of philosophy. We find it in his last
book, written together with Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?. There we find this statement:
“The sole purpose of philosophy is to be worthy of the event.” This powerful transformation
of the role of philosophy by Deleuze is a result of a common project, to which each of the
above mentioned thinkers contributed, starting with Heidegger who was the first to thematize
the “event” as a central philosophical concept. Because of our limitations here suffice it to say
that with this concept Deleuze expresses a complicated and multi-levelled happening, which
he described and varied repeatedly in his works during three decades.
Translated somewhat into our words this “event” will be understood as pulsing systole
and diastole, a breathing of immanent life, the always occurring incarnation and excarnation
process in every single element of matter, space time and consciousness. Deleuze conceived
life and sensibility as existing everywhere in nature, culture and cosmos with and without
organic-bodily or material foundations. If we rephrase his statement in this sense we may
25
formulate it therefore thus: The sole purpose of philosophy is to be worthy of the ever
pulsating, breathing, vibrating movement of universal immanent life.
*******
Gilles Deleuze threw himself to his death out of the window of the third floor of his house as
he lay on his death bed on the evening of the 4th of November 1995. This happened just an
hour or two after another tragic event, that for us in Israel marked an important and painful
moment of self-knowledge, that is, the shocking murder of Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin;
Rabin and Deleuze passed-on together on that very same bitter evening of November 4th
1995, which added yet another sobering mark to the 20th century otherwise already to darkly
marked calendar of events!
Two almost simultaneously occurring events: In Israel a political murder, that put an
end to the last great attempt for peace – in the very narrow limits, of course, as the politicians
today understand the term peace, but nevertheless, it was subjectively a truly honest move on
Rabin’s part – to establish a so-called peace in Israel-Palestine; and then the suicide of Gilles
Deleuze after a prolonged illness. The end of the last “peace” attempt and the end of the last,
and greatest, philosophy of the 20th century came so strangely together, though of course
externally speaking they are totally unrelated to each other.
And yet, for me, I mean now personally, from my individual point of view at that time,
I couldn’t but experience these two events as inwardly related; this is not interpretation, no
speculation was at all involved; therefore I say emphatically that this was an experience. I
experienced that in a yet unknown manner both are connected to each other. However, this
would be going too far today to develop what came out when in the course of time I could
have researched the nature of the relationships between the two events, which would have
taken us into the esoteric-political direction, while today we are mainly occupying ourselves
with the fate of thinking and its spiritualization.
Riddles and problems of the spiritualization of thinking
Above we brought Guattari & Deleuze revolutionary restatement of the meaning and essence
of philosophy. Over against this newly assigned role of philosophy we will place now some
of Steiner’s statements. He says for example: now that the role of philosophy was fulfilled
(meaning at the end on the 19th century), “we must have the courage to let the lightening of
the will strike directly into thinking through the wholly singular being of the individual
person”. This will element can fire thinking and release it from its bodily fetters, freeing its
26
wings to soar and ascend into the open cosmic etheric universe. Then it will no longer be the
same “I” who thinks, but it will be the stream of cosmic thought that flows through my
transformed being. “IT thinks in me” will become a truthful experience and real supersensible
event. But precisely this remarkable spiritual achievement, namely, the “IT thinks” poses
serious problems of epistemology, identity, and of course ethics, which cannot be resolved by
means of present day philosophy and science.
The main problem here is, as a matter of fact, this: When IT thinks in me, who is this
“me” in and through which IT thinks? In the night, when IT really not only thinks in me but
builds and shapes the foundation of all my existence, my ordinary self-consciousness totally
withdraws and is wholly absent; I become unconscious in order to allow IT to take my
existence over, because my ordinary self cannot yet at all fulfill in spiritual self consciousness
the needed maintenance of my whole being. Therefore in the night, and also unconsciously
during the day, I am given to IT’s cosmic guidance and healing forces and beings.
I hope I succeeded in making this problem perhaps a little more problematic and
concrete for you: how can this depersonalization and over-personalization process be
experienced consciously? How does the one self- the ordinary-go out, and the other – the
Higher Self – come in, and who is the “one” (now already two but it will be multiplied greatly
the more the spiritualization process advances) that mutually recognizes, organizes, brings the
two- and the many- into harmonic composition? And in what sort of Self-consciousness
would this “IT thinks” become conscious?
The same problem can also be expressed in this manner. Steiner said that he regards
Descartes’ famous statement “I think therefore I am” as nothing less than “the greatest failure
in the evolution of modern thinking… because precisely there, where I think, I am not…
because ordinary thinking is mere empty picture, image, representation, and is bereft of any
real, substantial being”. Now this statement characterizes an essential existential as well as
philosophical experience of postmodernism as a whole and especially of the above mentioned
French philosophers.
Now what postmodern thought could achieve to a certain extent and in various ways
and different degrees, is part of this first aspect, namely, the “cosmization” of thinking and the
realization of “the thought of the outside” and the IT thinks inside (Foucault-Deleuze); but it
felt that it must sacrifice the reality of the subject, the individual, to achieve this. But with this
complete sacrifice we cannot concur; however, we must also admit, as was pointed out above,
that apart from Steiner’s own lived initiatory example, we don’t have other first-hand
27
descriptions of a successfully carried out experiential solution of this dilemma. Therefore we
may say: postmodern philosophy did develop in original and new manner some aspects
related to the spiritualization of thinking, but stopped at the threshold in relation to the deeper
problems of the “I”. Now, as we will see later in greater detail, the celebrated- though little
understood- statements of Foucault on the death of the subject, author, etc. can only be
understood as symptoms pointing to this unresolved problem.
Let me summarize briefly the first main stages in the process of the spiritualization of
thinking and then indicate the full meaning of Steiner’s understanding of “the sole purpose of
philosophy”. If the transformation of thinking through the “direct lightening of the will” takes
place and thinking becomes a singular event, when I have come thus far with spiritualizing
my own thinking, as a matter of fact I have caused nullification and emptying of my ordinary
soul and mind contents. Now because my ordinary experience of my self is nothing but the
sum-total of these contends, when they disappear, my ordinary self disappears as well. I
forget my subjective inner life; It goes as it were to sleep; but in its stead IT thinks flares up;
IT flows into the empty self-less place and IT thinks through this place as a wholly other, alter
Self. Now next the following may occur as a result: IT jolts now my otherwise unconscious
real Self – not the subjective conscious personal self that is already obliterated – out of the
physical body; and this real Self finds His self swimming and flying on the waves and in the
currents of the real world-wide-web, spread out and mingled with infinitely multiple and
diverse non-organic living cosmic forces, events, and beings. (The elementary precincts of
this world Deleuze called the realm of non-organic, immanent, infinite life; He explored it in
great detail especially in the second of the two volumes he coauthored with Guattari, the first
being Anti-Oedipus from 1972 and the second, Thousand Plateaus from 1980; both are
subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia).
In the words of the Philosophy of Freedom the same experience can also be described
from another aspect. When the thinker becomes one with the stream of “love in its spiritual
form that flows through thinking” he realizes and individualizes this experience as a “moral
intuition’, conceived freely out of the spiritual worlds, and brought down to earth through
individual deeds of love. This second side of the spiritualization of thinking has to do with the
free love to the earth, humanity, and physical life as a whole. But because of this, it must find
a connection between the two selves: the Higher Self experienced outside the body, and the
personal self, that receives the moral intuition, and whose role would be to protect it and make
it real on the earth.
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Now if taken from both sides, namely, from the cosmic experience of a Self as part of
non-organic world of life forces and beings, and as a source of moral intuition to be realized
on earth, Steiner following statement may be appreciated in its full weight. He says (in Oslo,
1912) that philosophy’s future purpose will be “to save human self-consciousness” in order
that self-consciousness will be at all remembered as humanity advances further in the course
of its present and future spiritualization process. If not, the spiritualization process will
continue, because the evolutionary time for this is due; however, it will lead humanity away
from its true Self and its true mission on the earth and in the universe. This means that
philosophy has truly something to be “worthy about”: the salvation and redemption of self-
consciousness for all future stages of spiritualization of humanity, without which human
consciousness will not be able to enter in healthy way into the spiritual worlds.
In Deleuze-Guattari’s vein we can now finally paraphrase the above statement from
their book What is Philosophy?. To the statement quoted above we may from our own side
reply: The sole task of philosophy is to be worthy of the event of spiritualization of self-
consciousness and remembering of the true “I”. (A detailed treatment of these problems is
the basis of my book The New Experience of the Supersensible).
The absent great dispute
Our characterization of philosophy’s “sole purpose” resounds strongly to meet Deleuze’s
challenge as a warning and admonition from the side of the Michaelic stream. This warning is
truly not given to foster pedantry and intellectualism but on the contrary, to balance the true
and real, but one-sided impulse of the postmodern spiritualization of thinking. It is precisely
because the spiritualization of thinking does advance further and becomes real, because
thinking has truly begun to merge with the stream of cosmic forces, that from Michaelic
spheres resounds this message, encouraging the thinker not to forsake the mysteries and
problems involved in the extremely complicated and contradictory relations between the
ordinary earthly subject and personality and the Cosmic Ego (also called the Christ) or Higher
Spirit Self. This task is something wholly new in human evolution and perhaps the most
crucial and immediate present and near future impulse, namely, to create a self-conscious
bridge between the earthly self and supersensible consciousness.
Philosophy understood in this way will offer the only means “to save the self-conscious
‘I’ – self consciousness as such – for supersensible consciousness”. In other words, when the
clairvoyant achieves true spiritual consciousness he must be able to look back and remember
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– in the first stage of spiritual development – his “I”, and this saving of self-consciousness can
only be achieved through spiritualized thinking in the direction indicated by the Philosophy of
Freedom.
Now, as we indicated above, it is precisely in connection with the concept of the “I” that
post-modern thinking has the greatest difficulties, because this problem cannot be addressed
by means of pure thinking alone, be it as spiritualized as possible. The “I” problem must be
approached from a polar and opposite side; and this side marks the place of real absence also
in Deleuze’s thinking, though, of course, as with so many aspects of Deleuze, also his absent
“I” is much more alive then many dead and frozen concepts concerning this “I”!
From this point of view I would like to turn your attention to the potential possibility of
a remarkably fruitful spiritual battle (concerning the problems of the “I”) and dialogue
(concerning pure thinking) that could take place, provided that Anthroposophical thinking has
advanced so far that such problems becomes its true living problems. I have as I said above
greatly benefiting from conducting this battle now for the last 30 years. And I would like to
try and ignite also in you perhaps also a little spark of enthusiasm for true spiritual battle, true
dialoged, of the spirits, minds and hearts.
Here a richly rewarding mutual “disjunctive synthesis” (to use Deleuze unique phrase)
could have taken place, but it never did, because what could traditional Anthroposophy bring
authentically to this field? Only true individual achievement, in the above sense, can stand
truthfully up to this challenge and face the real power of such postmodern achievements. Self-
transforming Anthroposophy benefits greatly from engaging postmodern philosophy (together
with the arts and sciences of course). This is so because this philosophy grapples rather
unconsciously with the same problems that one encounters if one really begins to realize the
first actual steps in developing supersensible consciousness.
In accordance with the medieval manner of discourse- that was much more civilized
(e.g. truthful) that ours, we may use the term “dispute” for the rare and unique combination of
dialogic battle or battled dialogue, namely, for a true combat of the spirits. It was the greatest
spiritual battle that was preordained but never fought in history, because the spiritual battle of
the 20th century, as I mentioned above, was decided for the worst early on. When at the
second half of the century and especially towards its end the great culmination of
Anthroposophy should have taken place, only the other stream was culminating, rather alone,
without meeting its true opposite; it was simply not present out there to fight, because its
decisive Michaelic battle was lost already in beginning of the 20th century.
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However, this was only the first century of Michael’s present Age- the first great battle
among three major once, and so many smaller once in-between! Presently we are humbly
striving to prepare some suitable starting points for the second great battle- the battle of the
21st century. Now in the moment that we are seriously working on self-transformation and
with it on true spiritualization of the intellect, we are strongly attracted to our rivals or their
legacy, because our living striving is asking for a true dialoguebattle, without which it cannot
at all thrive and develop further. And we will have then Deleuze’s leading being and the
beings of his colleagues as strongly awakening, reminding, truly challenging warning, as stark
temptation as well, at our side, so that we may realize on the earth now and in the next future
the great supersensible battle raging in the spiritual worlds closest to us between Michael and
his hosts and the adversarial – but always also helpful – spirits.
Some personal remarks
So we can say: Gilles Deleuze went farthest along the way to fulfil this task – the
spiritualization of thinking, but he accomplished it in a strongly one sided way. With
Deleuzian thinking we have before us at the end of the 20th century the best example how far
one could have travelled in the end of last century to bring this goal to a certain temporary
culmination. So that I have always said to myself, as I continued to study the development of
consciousness through the scientific, political, artistic, and philosophical together with the
Anthroposophical developments of last century, I had to say to myself again and again at the
end of the century – this was particularly strong in the nineties –the following: I said to
myself: here we have this wonderful line up of characters, thinkers, as well as artists and
scientists, throughout the whole of the century, so brilliant, so shiningly original, who strive
strongly to bring thinking further. Then I looked at my own efforts and I said to myself: in
order to develop my own Anthroposophical thinking further, I had to go through these schools
of thoughts, I really had to delve very deeply, without prejudice, into the work of many
individual thinkers, and I really had to struggle in order to transform each stage, each person’s
thinking, each decade, to arrive at what these developments, as part of the stream of the
ongoing spiritualization of the intellect could offer, enrich, challenge, also tempt and mislead.
I must confess that I experienced myself pretty much alone in this battle. I couldn’t find
anybody even amongst thinking anthroposophists, who, in that sense – I mean explicitly in
that sense – wished to engage with this struggle. This is why I say in that sense. There were
of course always those eager to refute each other, and were also eager to refute post-modern
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philosophy. This was always there. I wasn’t interested in refuting anything or anybody, I was
too occupied with trying to grapple with the deeper spiritual impulses at work through these
thinkers, which either corresponded to our time spirit or fought against it, or mixed the two in
so many bizarre ways. There I could find some important and hidden footsteps and clues that
guided me on the way of the spiritualization of thinking. And of course the same non-dispute
happens all the time also on the other side. One could not discover any wish to be even
slightly aware of Steiner’s contribution in those thinkers that I have mentioned: a conscious
un-knowing served well by the absence of presently engaged anthroposophists!
That was, and still is today, a strange situation. I always said to myself: what’s
happening here? It is as if I am observing a strange dramatic performance. The stage is set and
some players are busy performing; they speak and act wholly unaware of the grotesque
situation. They are not aware that the other players, their counterparts, aren’t even there! I
then understood that what I see is only a half-play, a spiritual dramatic piece cut in twain. I
observed that the real script isn’t played and that what is played isn’t the real script at all! I
said to myself, this should have been a whole scene of battle, but what we have is only a half.
The other group is not even there! It is playing no role what-so-ever in the script that they
themselves wrote; They wrote it bravely in spirit… with the strength given to them in the
supersensible Michaelic school in the sun sphere by the Michaelic beings, but on the earth
they ignored, also forgotten and in that sense also betrayed, the roles that they appointed for
themselves before birth.
I thought to myself, really that’s how it should have been from the beginning of the
century to its very end. A perpetual huge battle, most fruitful dialogue – because spiritually
seen a true, sincere dialogue is also a battle, a real brotherly dispute should take place between
thinkers deeply connected to Anthroposophy and those thinkers that I have mentioned above.
This was growing most clear the more the end of the century drew near.
This dispute was well prepared – as we shall presently see – in the middle Ages and was
predestined to take place in the 20th century. But we live in the age of freedom, in which all
former scripts are easily changed by the present decisions of the preset players! But some 800
years ago, in completely different spiritual and social conditions, this battle did take place,
namely, in the high Middle Ages. It would again be only briefly possible to indicate the
connection between these two disputes: the absent 20th century dispute, and the real one from
the middle ages. Let me briefly touch upon this particular historical as well as karmic
background, in order to outline also the present and future battles that face us now…
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The great medieval dispute
In the high scholasticism of the Middle Ages, beginning with the Platonic renaissance of the
12th Century but then developing in the 13th and 14th Centuries, there was a huge, enormous
philosophical, spiritual battle, also again mainly in this country, mainly in Paris and its
university. Here the great scholastics were mightily striving to unite Christian theology with
Aristotelian philosophy, under the leadership of Thomas von Aquinas and his older teacher
Albertus Magnus and their extended circle of students that belonged to the Dominican order.
They were engaged in fierce struggle on several fronts among which for our purposes here we
shall briefly name only one and also this will be only indicated in outline. One powerful
stream opposing comes from members of the Franciscan order. This order presents a series of
outstanding religious and philosophical teachers. In the 13th century they were headed by
“Doctor Seraphicus” as St. Bonaventura (born John of Fidanza) was called because of his
ecstatic religious-mystical devotion and temperament. He was personally initiated through a
miraculous cure at the hands of St Francis of Assisi himself. Bonaventura was a contemporary
and powerful opponent of Thomas’s effort to unite and thereby transform Christian theology
with his renewed Aristotelism. However for us the most interesting personality isn’t a
contemporary of Thomas but a thinker and theologian that was born shortly before Thomas
died and developed this thinking career in the wake of Thomas’ absence (Thomas died 1274
and he is allegedly born in 1266). He is also not such clear-cut opponent; He is even
considered to be a unique Realist in the scholastic traditions, and he considered himself, in
opposition to the main Franciscan tradition, as an independent pupil of Thomas and Aristotle,
more of an innovative successor than his enemy. And indeed in many original ways he
diverged and contradicted Thomas on important theological and philosophical matters that we
cannot afford to discuss now. I mean here the truly brilliant and original philosopher Johannes
Dons Scotus, also known as “Doctor Subtilis” because he enjoyed synthesizing varying and
opposing elements in surprisingly untraditional assemblages, and who is considered to be one
of the most important philosophers of the middle Ages as a whole.
Let us first mention some of the customary differences between the rivalling streams.
However let me immediately point from that if we would have the time for such study, I
would have turned your attention to the fact that many traditional differences must be
significantly modified, because especially in the case of Dons Scotus they are blurred and
made far more complicated – and very interesting indeed. (Let me also remark in parenthesis
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that the philosophy of being of Scotus, specifically his teaching on the categories and
meaning, was the subject of Heidegger’s Habilitation dissertation in Freiburg1915; for the
esoteric-karmic undercurrent running through our lecture this is also a symptomatically telling
fact).
The Aristotelians, or Dominicans, are known as Realists. What does it meant to be a
realist in the middle ages? It meant to still be able to experience thinking as part of cosmic
intelligence, on the one hand, and on the other – the Aristotelian side – to experience it
strongly connected with the human soul and spirit, with the thinking individual. The
Dominicans with Thomas at their head could still capture the last remnants of spiritual
content and substance, that came from the spiritual worlds in earlier epochs, but now they
were striving to grasp it firmly with their thinking as its becomes earthily and human. Above
all they were struggling with what already became a problem to Aristotle almost 2000 years
before: the riddle of the spiritual nature of the human being and the problem of his
immortality. Now in the high Christian Middle Ages the problem was formulated thus:
Religion promises the hope of salvation and immortality through faith in the revealed Divine
message of the Bible, but would it also possible to think and in thinking not only logically
prove or disprove but actually experience and realize the immortality of the individual human
soul?
Now their Franciscan opponents belong to the so-called Nominalism, because they
could no longer experience thinking’s true spiritual-universal being. And as an outcome of
this inability those of them that were trying to gain knowledge of spiritual matters- apart from
established religion- were searching it in more mystical-ecstatic ways. An interesting
corollary of this turn was the fact that precisely this avoidance of thinking in matters
pertaining to the deeper spiritual quest adorned it with a peculiar mystical and intuitive
brilliance, and endowed it with a lustre of the supersensible that – for more spiritually
inclined persons – temptingly surpasses and outshines the conscientious, painstaking and
seemingly dry labour and technique of thinking developed by the Dominicans, whom Steiner
refers to as at heart truly loyal to the cosmic intelligence ruled by Michael.
Another interesting trait of some of the leading figures among the more spiritually
inclined Franciscans was their effort to bypass Aristotelian-Platonic ideas with the help of the
otherwise marginalized Stoic traditions. The stoics have assimilated a rich and diverse
mixture of philosophical and religious elements right before and after Christ, taken also from
Gnostic and pagan traditions. Before neo-Platonism they were already keenly attentive to the
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awakening inward, individual soul life of the human personality and the growing darkens
surrounding its fate on earth and after death.
Steiner described this unsolvable problem for example in one of his Karma lectures. He
recounts a discussion between younger and older Dominicans. He speaks movingly and
intimately when he describes this event! The younger Dominican spoke to his older teacher:
look master, the ancient spiritual power- originally Michael’s- that still inspired the thinking
of Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Scotus Erigena, is dying out. People in the future will not
be able to experience it any more. And he said further: if things continue as they are, then
people will lose all spiritual substance and truthfulness in their thinking in the future. And this
thinking, the heavenly intelligence, which streams from Michael to the earth, will all fall pry
to Ahrimanic-demonic spirits that will use it to drag humanity into the abyss of materialism
and corruption. Michaelic cosmic intelligence, still administered by the gods in ancient time,
will be transformed into increasingly Ahrimanic thinking in the not so far future.
He went on to say that something has to happen now on earth through us, in the human
soul itself, to prepare a seed for future transformation that will be available when Michael
starts his new epoch; This seed must be prepared now in order to sprout to life in an age in
which otherwise only materialistic-intellectual thinking will prevail. He said: For now we
must hold apart the powers of faith and of thinking; but in the future this separation will no
longer serve humanity; and the new seed must be there at that future time to enable at least
few humans to spiritualize in their hearts and minds the fallen intelligence and connect it
again with true spiritual reality.
So we see how the great rival of the Nominalists, the “silent ox” (as Thomas von
Aquinas was nicknamed because of his outstanding bodily dimensions) tried with all his
strength to prove that when a person thinks through the Nous Poeitikus, the active intellect,
not the Nous Pathetikus, passive intellect, he may unite his soul so intimately with real spirit
substance that he may rightfully believe that after his death, though he will be carried to
Heaven on the wings of Christian salvation, he may find his individuality again endowed with
full self-consciousness, similar to the consciousness of intensive, active human self-
consciousness on the earth. But all this could only be hoped for, believed in, not yet fully
experienced in the individual soul. Individual immortality could become self-conscious
experience neither before nor after death. It wasn’t yet possible to experience that through the
actualization and realization of living, intuitive thinking, human individuality is transformed
and immortality become a reality as supersensible experience, and the human “I” can live as
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consciously eternal being in the spiritual world right here and now and therefore also after
death.
Steiner adds that it was not possible actually to achieve this at that time; he says that
indeed only the preparation for this could have been made. And that Thomas von Aquinas
died with this burning question, with this huge problem; he died with it because he could not
resolve it in his time. And Steiner formulates this question of Thomas thus: how can thinking
be redeemed? How can the Christ impulse (the spiritual “I” power) enter into thinking?
But what indeed is the so-called Christ impulse? What is this spiritual “I” power? It is
the power of transformation, the power of metamorphosis working in the individual human
soul, reaching also into thinking, leading it, transformed, from within, back to the spiritual
worlds, but in such a way that the eternal nature of the “I” will be realized in the process. If
the “I” is to become immortal, in other words, it must become so first here on the earth,
through human free activity. This is what is truly meant by “the Christ impulse”. This Thomas
couldn’t do in the 13th century, but Steiner realized and actualized this task at the end of the
19th century, when the new age of Michael begun. He expressed this self-realization in The
Philosophy of Freedom and all his subsequent spiritual-scientific work.
This may allow us to have a glimpse at what is working behind the curtains of human
history, and how karma works from one age to the other. The 20th century was supposed,
among other things, to become again a fruitful time of a great new dispute between the reborn
Dominicans (together with their more platonically inclined colleagues from the school of
Chartres) and the reborn Franciscans, that already in the 13th and 14th centuries experienced
thinking as fallen earthy-human element, and searched for redemption through other venues.
In the 13th century Nominalists and Franciscans said: thinking is only a human-earthly
faculty; thinking can only give names to sense-perceptible objects and to man-fabricated
concepts; If there is pan-or universal intelligence (and many of them did believe it) it doesn’t
enter human thinking; human thinking is as sinful as the whole human being and cannot
partake in the grace of having an actual, presently real, heavenly origin; Divinity in its real
essence is wholly transcendental; it is totally beyond human cognition; with his thinking no
human being can grasp supersensible reality nor find there his eternal individuality. Today
they say: the human subject, the earthly personality, has no significance; they proclaim the
death of the subject as in the Middle Ages they denied the immortality of the “I”; today the
very meaning of human personality as such is deemed unreachable and unknowable; Then the
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spiritual-universal reality of thinking was denied; today they deny that thinking can even
produce real single names…
The great dispute of the middle ages, then, was taking place in the 13th century between
Realists and Nominalists, but externally-historically, the Realists fought a seemingly lost
battle; inwardly, however, they prepared the ground for what is to come to light in the new –
now present – age of Michael. And we are still there at this beginning, though we are well
into the second Michaelic century! Nowadays ordinary humans like us must find the courage
to become again true beginners, try humbly but sincerely to take the first, and most
elementary step in this direction: Can we release the imprisoned heavenly intelligence and
transform it in our hearts so that thinking can break through to a genuine spiritual reality? Can
it become real event? Can we produce a real spiritual “I” in this process, and individual-
singular being? And what does it really mean to become neither single-private personality nor
abstract-general universal being, but truly “singular” being?
Return to the future
Returning to the future, let us now first go back to the end of the 19th century and the
beginning of the 20th century, to which we referred to earlier. Now Steiner publishes the
Philosophy of Freedom in 1894 as individual-singular- spiritual achievement, unaccepted and
unrecognized by general middle European culture. This was inauguration event, laying the
foundation stone on which the future spiritual life of humanity will be build. A first human
being was individually capable for the very first time in human history to realize in and
through the spiritualization of the intellect, in and through pure thinking, an actual production
and creation of the eternal, moral, spiritual substance of a human individuality as genuine
self-conscious spirit-reality. And he could achieve this remarkable deed as a free and modern
human being, without depending on any given mystical or atavistic supersensible
consciousness and esoteric traditions: A free deed of actualization and realization of new
selfhood through cosmic thinking. The power of transformation, transubstantiation,
metamorphosis, was so strongly individualized in the Middle Ages that an answer could have
been given now to the unresolved riddle and problem with which Thomas Aquinas died: How
can thinking be redeemed and with it and through it the human self? This is also, as I said
before, the main theme of my work published in 1995 with the title: The Modern Experience
of the Supersensible which I subtitled: the knowledge drama of the second coming. At the
beginning of the book I placed three quotations which for me summarizes the drama of the
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Cont….
37
century’s end, the culmination of the struggle to achieve, even if only an individual minuscule
seed of this vast human task. To these three I will add tonight also a quotation from Deleuze.
The first quotation is from Heidegger, celebrating man’s life-onto-death as expressing
the essence of his being; the second is Foucault’s famous statement concerning the
disappearance of the human being as we know it; the third demonstrated Deleuze’s real
struggle with the legacy of his Franciscan forerunners, trying mightily to solve the riddle of
individual immortality. The fourth is taken from Steiner’s last words written on his death bed
as concise future directive. The passages are arranged in a certain ascending order- from a
profound denial of everything that the Michaelic impulse of our time is striving for
(Heidegger), through the two greatest representatives of French postmodernism, Foucault and
Deleuze, to Steiner, who was there first in time but is and will be always the last one to be
understood by our culture.
Being held out into the nothing, as Dasein is … makes man a lieutenant of the nothing.
We are so finite that we cannot even bring ourselves originally before the nothing
through our own decision and will. So profoundly does finitude entrench itself in
existence that our most proper and deepest limitation refuses to yield to our freedom
(Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? 1929)
It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a
recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge,
and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
[… ] Then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand
at the edge of the sea. (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 1966)
Every event is like death, double and impersonal in its double…every mortal event is a
single event… it is this mobile and precise point, where all events gather together in one
that transmutation happens: this is the point at which death turns against death; where
dying is the negation of death, and the impersonality of dying not longer indicates only
the moment when I disappear outside of myself, but rather the moment when death
loses itself in itself, and also the figure which the most singular life takes on in order to
substitute itself for me. (Gilles Deleuze, “The event”, in Logic of Sense, 1969)
If this were all, freedom would light up in the human being for a single cosmic moment,
but in the very same moment the human being would dissolve away … We are here
pointing to the abyss of nothingness in human evolution which man must cross when he
becomes a free being. It is the working of Michael and the Christ-impulse which makes
it possible for him to leap across the gulf. (Rudolf Steiner, January 1925)
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In 1929 Heidegger named the human being as the Stattshalter des Nichts – a commander of
nothingness. And he said: the whole human existence is founded only on death, on finiteness.
That was the first “statement” through which the whole reversal of human history was made
philosophically conscious and politically and socially realized in so much ending and
annihilating of human lives. There can scarcely be a more profound Anti-Philosophy of
Freedom formulation than this one. Kindly remember what I said at the beginning:
Heidegger’s influence is arguably the most significant one in 20th century philosophy – at
least until Foucault prophecy would have been fulfilled (“the 20th century will one day be
called Deleuzian century”).
Now when Foucault writes 33 years after 1933 he says: the human subject, the “I” as
we know it is a momentary phenomenon, caused by the evolution of consciousness in the 19th
century, and is rapidly disappearing. This is somewhat better statement then Heidegger’s!
First, because Foucault isn’t speaking about the essence of the human being as being finite, as
Heidegger does; and second, because for him human essence is exactly this: the process of
open-ended becoming, of transformation, and in this sense not finite at all. He says: our
understanding of the human subject changes, it will be different in the future then today; so
he really means: the death of the 19th century concept of the subject is occurring in the 20th (he
never meant to announce the end of the human being). And this is a fact that can also be
supported from Anthroposophical perspective as I indicated above.
The third passage is a typically suggestive passage from the post-modern thinker who
experienced perhaps more than any other thinker in the last century that we are crossing the
threshold, that great eventualities await us on the other side, nay more, he knew very well that
we have already crossed and are living on the other, wholly unforeseen and uncharted and
infinite new frontiers. This one is Gilles Deleuze.
In Deleuze we find wonderful descriptions of what one can experience and express in
concepts and words, if one has spiritualized one’s thinking to a certain extent. One
experiences the essence of life: “We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and
nothing else. […] A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete
power, complete bliss.” The same experience has a flip twin, an “other” side that comes
organically woven with it. If one has come so far as to experience the essence of pure life, one
has begun at the same time also to lift into consciousness the unconscious and real, that is,
living, death processes that underlie ordinary thinking; death begins to rise to consciousness
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and with it death begins to reveal its true being, namely, the (veiled) gate to eternal cosmic
life.
When one is so far on the path that thinking becomes an experience of life in death and
death in life, one can experience truly that “this is the point at which death turns against death;
where dying is the negation of death”; And when, moreover, one experiences with one’s
released etheric body the cosmic, impersonal non-organic life forces, one knows also that “the
impersonality of dying not longer indicates only the moment when I disappear outside of
myself”, that means, consequently, if we turn the negative way of speaking to its positive
sense: The impersonality of dying indicates the moment in which the true I AM appears
outside my ordinary self. One comes then closest to the spiritual-scientific mystery of the “I”,
and only a hair breadth – grace’s breadth – separates one from being granted this experience.
While the mental-image, the Vor-stellung, of the “I” disappears, as we pointed out
above, and the IT, the impersonal life-forces of cosmic thinking begin to think through me,
the real “I” is resurrected and comes to consciousness in and through the impersonal cosmic
stream. This real “I” is a being of resurrection, and one can experience its reality at this stage
only through a gift of grace, neither through cosmic thinking nor through personal volition. IT
is the vehicle, or chalice, not the giver of the grace; the giver of the true “I” can only be the
being of humanity’s “I”, the Higher Self (the Christ).
And Deleuze, with everything that he brings with him from former life, can advance so
near – but “only” so near – to the cusp of this moment, to the threshold of this grace. And as a
matter of fact it is so, when one has really spiritualized thinking that far, so that one can
experience impersonal cosmic thinking, I really mean experience, not merely think the
abstract concept, then one really doesn’t find there again the mental-pictures of the ordinary
self, the subjective subject that thinks and therefore “he is”. In this moment, he is nothing, and
the IT is all; and therefore Deleuze could also not find it in his authentic experience of
crossing the threshold of life\death. But how close he stands there, on the threshold, facing
boldly the being of death and experience how death dies, but he doesn’t see into what really
death dies; he cannot produce enough fire to concoct and conduct the alchemical combination
that alone can fuse entirely – annihilating any difference in-between – absolute pure
immanent life with absolute death; he therefore doesn’t see what, or better who, faces him;
what happens at that very moment, which event takes this sacred place of time; he cannot
experience what he has at hand, namely, how “through the grace of the real ‘I’ life become
death and death become life” (In Christo Morimur; we die into the fullness of life). But how
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movingly close does he come to unravel His secret, when he experiences “the moment when
death loses itself in itself, and [becomes] the most singular life … in order to substitute itself
for me”.
The moment when this substitution occurs is the most sacred that one can experience
after ordinary death. The beginner-Initiates that we can become today may be granted the
grace of this sacred moment in the midst of physical life. They may truly grace-fully die…
and may experience in full consciousness exactly how this “most singular life” – the Higher
Self – “substitute itself for me”. Only in this manner can the battle of the middle Ages that
truly took place, and the battle of the culmination of the 20th century that remained almost
only virtual, be still realized in the course of the 21st century. This is indeed our humble
elementary mission.
Now what makes freedom into reality, not intellectual reality, but into moral-human and
at the same time supersensible achievement? It is precisely this moment that the Franciscans
say is principally impossible. In Deleuze’s case we can even see how this becomes manifest in
his individual – very personal – karma: Look at his fingers! And compare them with
Brentano’s hands that Steiner described as “philosopher’s hands” and then with Steiner’s own
hands. Hands and fingers do not reveal primarily past karma (as the head does) but especially
karma-in-the-stream-of becoming! – If your contemplate Deleuze’s fingers what would have
you experienced? He had to let his fingernails grow very long because he couldn’t stand the
physical sense of touch with his fingers; it was for him too painful! (What do the fingers
experience deeply, unconsciously when they touch? They sense our becoming and also
experience constantly the fire that burns at end-of-our-becoming, the so called second or soul
death; the fingers live and move and become, in other words, all the time beyond the
threshold, where our spiritual stream of karma weaves and shapes our present life out of
future lives).
But the leading Dominicans that knew that true freedom is indeed only temporarily
impossible have laboured hard to prepare this seed through their loyal and faithful devotion to
Michael’s future impulse. And this seed can now begin to take root and sprout from the earth
upward in the beginning of the second Michaelic century. Steiner went ahead and pioneered,
all alone, this individual deed through his sacrifice and toil for humanity. We are invited to be
as beginners as he was when he conceived and wrote this humble book, the seed for the
spiritualization of thinking, consciousness, and humanity and the earth in the future: The
Philosophy of Freedom. He made it possible. And even despite the fact that not his but
41
Heidegger’s concept of the human triumphed over Europe and the whole globe today,
Steiner’s deed made it possible that in the historical moment in which “freedom [lighted] up in
the human being for a single cosmic moment…”, it will not be lost, and that, in face of the
fiercest evil of annihilation, brought about by so many “commanders of annihilation” all over
the earth in the course of the whole 20th century, “…in the very same moment the human
being would [not any longer only] dissolve away…”. And therefore, indeed: “We are here
pointing to the abyss of nothingness in human evolution which man must cross when he
becomes a free being. It is the working of Michael and the Christ-impulse which makes it
possible for him to leap across the gulf.”
And though on the much hoped-for large scale this battle didn’t take place at the end of
the 20th century, I wanted to tell you that it still may become a fruitful and joyful seed of new
life in each of our hearts. This was the sole purpose of my sharing tonight, “to make
philosophy worthy of this event”. I wanted to inscribe it here in my first working visit to
France, Colmar and Alsace: to share with you some of my experiences in the last decades of
the last century, in order to encourage you too to begin and become beginners of the now
beginning new Michaelic century.
What I find interesting about these guys is that they are both right and wrong and can’t meet each other in the human but circle around the issue without being able to find it.
The last man who asks the question about finding solutions to fundamentalism rather than focusing on the differences is so much more centered on what matters.
Another way to look at your question could be: How is objectivity actualized in our lives?
What are facts? And “realities”? Are we not born to a “reality” that has been “objectified” no matter how subjective it in fact might be? But is it not from that objectified subjectivity that our psychological make up is structured on our essence?
The fact that we are born in pseudo democracies is an objective fact that makes our psychological make up completely different to what it would have been had we been born in the times of Kings. In those times the individual didn’t matter but the King had enough relevance for many to be willing to give their lives up for him. In the pseudo-democracies of our times the individual doesn’t matter as much as individualism but “institutions” are nevertheless able to supply a greater number of individuals with “things” that previously were the privilege only of the nobility. I personally don’t believe our lives are necessarily more “just” or “noble” than they were in those days, (the values have been shifted) what I think is that what democracy is offering is the possibility of acquiring the status of human beings with equal rights to that of kings, as if we were introverting in our social and psychological make up what we extroverted in the hierarchic structure of royalty. As if we “lived” monarchy externally to now become the “monarchs” of our lives. The shift of consciousness from the “clan” to the individual.
Every individual has a “right” to the qualities of royalty that are no other than the qualities of being human. Not power to “submit” others but power to submit one’s self to the whole. The objectified subjectivity that we seem to have “inherited” in our times seems to be the authoritarism of the dictator without the nobility of the King. In the struggle from the King to the individual what has given guarantees to the individuals is the “institutions” but within them the structures still function with more authoritarism than consciousness. Was the failure of monarchy the “failure” of the king? Or the gradual transference of authority from the King to the individual?
If we look at dialogue and speech within that framework we find that the King could Speak. Speech was one of his attributes.Then only those in power could speak and now, with the internet, we can all speak! We can all speak but we don’t all have a right to speak nor are we necessarily heard if we speak, nor can many avoid still being killed if they speak more than is desired by those who are questioned by their speech. “Speech” is still the right of whoever is the authority and we still move within frameworks of subjective hierarchic structures. What is subjective about them? Mostly the differences. All our illusory differences from each other are aspects of our subjectivity. The fact that we think we have more rights than others because we are blue, yellow and pink while others are magenta, beige and green, is one of the aspects that makes us subjective, the other is the objective position in which we happen to be to think that we have more rights than others. The “position” we happen to be in makes us as subjective as it “codifies”, if we become identified with it, i.e. if we are “white” in the South of the States in Pre-Lincoln’s time, there’s a strong tendency to identify with racist ideology. Identification with genre, family, society and nationality is what conditions our own subjectivity and when we are “fundamentalistically” identified with them we cannot see the human beyond the identification. The inhumanity and depersonalization of war today is an aspect of such identifications. People justify inhumanity because of their so called “superior” identifications. If the human beings of today carried their “identity” in their humaneness, the scale of destruction and self-destruction current today, and its justification to satisfy the greed of the few in every nation, could not take place. What “the few” are holding on to is the illusory objective qualities of the King: The economic and political power without the authority or the consciousness. What becomes “subject” to their control is the power of objective realities such as Speech that are in fact “qualities” inherent to every human being. How “Speech” is allocated reveals how the economy is distributed. As long as Speech is muzzelled to power, human beings will continue to live in the subjectivity of our pseudo-democracies. We do not let each other speak because we don’t acknowledge each other as human beings. By not acknowledging our humaneness, we justify every atrocity.
Speech is not only the possibility of greeting each other and saying hello. We can all almost “do” that. What we are still far from is understanding Speech as an objective reality with power of its own, with structural power to mould our psychological life and hence, our social life. Today only “educated” people can speak, only “authorities” in the “subject” can speak, only a few are given the microphone. The rest are “muzzled” in the identification with their status while we are all living the same “LIFE” or lifelessness, we are all suffering the same consequences of our unconsciousness but only a few are authorized to decide what to do about it: The so-called “political” or “economic” or “academic” authorities. The majority of us are identified with our “powerlessness”, conditioned by our “position” in the “play”. Nothing conditions individuals more than the fact that they have or don’t have a voice.
The “voice” or “Speech” is there but people cannot “access” it because they are themselves not conscious of Speech as the rightful quality of their humanity. They let others speak and think for them afraid of doing so for themselves. The situation today is such that it is easier for most to take an arm and shoot others indiscriminately than to scream or speak. That is how far we are from our humaneness or becoming objective about our selves.
“Good morning, could I please be late for work because they just killed two guys around here and I would like to leave a little later when things are more calm?”
What happened?
A guy killed another one then they killed him. This neighborhood is hot again.
You walk around as if you didn’t owe anything to anybody
have you ever looked at yourself?
what would a man give to have such peace sitting at the edge of his bed
I was in for five years
Let me look at your hand
I don’t understand. Why aren’t you bitter?
All this and you? How can you have such peace?
Three and a half bottles and four glasses of wine
Driving still down the avenues with an inner smile
so bright
And you and I,
I mean, you and I, how can we meet?
Why not?
Why couldn’t we meet?
Take all the dust off and here we are
just two human beings.
So I would like to continue thinking about what I’ve presented here so I’m going to repeat this post and then I’ll begin in another one taking perhaps just an area to develop.
Another way to look at your question could be: How is objectivity actualized in our lives?
What are facts? And “realities”? Are we not born to a “reality” that has been “objectified” no matter how subjective it in fact might be? But is it not from that objectified subjectivity that our psychological make up is structured on our essence?
The fact that we are born in pseudo democracies is an objective fact that makes our psychological make up completely different to what it would have been had we been born in the times of Kings. In those times the individual didn’t matter but the King had enough relevance for many to be willing to give their lives up for him. In the pseudo-democracies of our times the individual doesn’t matter as much as individualism but “institutions” are nevertheless able to supply a greater number of individuals with “things” that previously were the privilege only of the nobility. I personally don’t believe our lives are necessarily more “just” or “noble” than they were in those days, (the values have been shifted) what I think is that what democracy is offering is the possibility of acquiring the status of human beings with equal rights to that of kings, as if we were introverting in our social and psychological make up what we extroverted in the hierarchic structure of royalty. As if we “lived” monarchy externally to now become the “monarchs” of our lives. The shift of consciousness from the “clan” to the individual.
Every individual has a “right” to the qualities of royalty that are no other than the qualities of being human. Not power to “submit” others but power to submit one’s self to the whole. The objectified subjectivity that we seem to have “inherited” in our times seems to be the authoritarism of the dictator without the nobility of the King. In the struggle from the King to the individual what has given guarantees to the individuals is the “institutions” but within them the structures still function with more authoritarism than consciousness. Was the failure of monarchy the “failure” of the king? Or the gradual transference of authority from the King to the individual?
If we look at dialogue and speech within that framework we find that the King could Speak. Speech was one of his attributes.Then only those in power could speak and now, with the internet, we can all speak! We can all speak but we don’t all have a right to speak nor are we necessarily heard if we speak, nor can many avoid still being killed if they speak more than is desired by those who are questioned by their speech. “Speech” is still the right of whoever is the authority and we still move within frameworks of subjective hierarchic structures. What is subjective about them? Mostly the differences. All our illusory differences from each other are aspects of our subjectivity. The fact that we think we have more rights than others because we are blue, yellow and pink while others are magenta, beige and green, is one of the aspects that makes us subjective, the other is the objective position in which we happen to be to think that we have more rights than others. The “position” we happen to be in makes us as subjective as it “codifies”, if we become identified with it, i.e. if we are “white” in the South of the States in Pre-Lincoln’s time, there’s a strong tendency to identify with racist ideology. Identification with genre, family, society and nationality is what conditions our own subjectivity and when we are “fundamentalistically” identified with them we cannot see the human beyond the identification. The inhumanity and depersonalization of war today is an aspect of such identifications. People justify inhumanity because of their so called “superior” identifications. If the human beings of today carried their “identity” in their humaneness, the scale of destruction and self-destruction current today, and its justification to satisfy the greed of the few in every nation, could not take place. What “the few” are holding on to is the illusory objective qualities of the King: The economic and political power without the authority or the consciousness. What becomes “subject” to their control is the power of objective realities such as Speech that are in fact “qualities” inherent to every human being. How “Speech” is allocated reveals how the economy is distributed. As long as Speech is muzzelled to power, human beings will continue to live in the subjectivity of our pseudo-democracies. We do not let each other speak because we don’t acknowledge each other as human beings. By not acknowledging our humaneness, we justify every atrocity.
Speech is not only the possibility of greeting each other and saying hello. We can all almost “do” that. What we are still far from is understanding Speech as an objective reality with power of its own, with structural power to mould our psychological life and hence, our social life. Today only “educated” people can speak, only “authorities” in the “subject” can speak, only a few are given the microphone. The rest are “muzzled” in the identification with their status while we are all living the same “LIFE” or lifelessness, we are all suffering the same consequences of our unconsciousness but only a few are authorized to decide what to do about it: The so-called “political” or “economic” or “academic” authorities. The majority of us are identified with our “powerlessness”, conditioned by our “position” in the “play”. Nothing conditions individuals more than the fact that they have or don’t have a voice.
The “voice” or “Speech” is there but people cannot “access” it because they are themselves not conscious of Speech as the rightful quality of their humanity. They let others speak and think for them afraid of doing so for themselves. The situation today is such that it is easier for most to take an arm and shoot others indiscriminately than to scream or speak. That is how far we are from our humaneness or becoming objective about our selves.
Essence is I
Like a blanc page
with all my attributes
A whole human being in seed
the full structure
Connected to the cosmos
Walking on Earth
Growing in all dimensions
Including the one you see
Subject to every law
of absolute freedom
Of absolute being
Of Absolute
A child
life
In its purest form
Angel hair
Sprinkled from heaven
An infinity
In being
Were we not children enough to remember our self’s self?
The other being within, that had no name before we were ever baptised to this world?
Were we not there enough before mother and father, brothers and sisters, friends, enemies and people at large?
Don’t you remember Being without a name?
Did we not exist before we were given into the hands of man
Through mother and father
The legacy – complete?
Placed in a moment in time incarnating within our selves everything before us?
Nothing is more complete than a child than a human being
And then the gradual descent into multiplicities trying to find the image that would fit into the unknown world
Funny we thought the unknown world was elsewhere and not here when we lost contact with our selves and separated into individuals that we were supposed to not know and “fall” in love the less we knew them.
No wonder they call it the Fall for what else is it but the descent to desire? The fragmented world of everything one was not and wished to become?
Was not love precisely that recognition of the incomprehensible both within and without. Identifications in the mirrors of our beings meant to signal our complexes, identified with the pieces of people crystallized in imaginary pictures of what they might have become had they not been fortunate enough to fail?
They laugh above when we slide down in our exotic nudity only to dress it up and hide ourselves with textiles trying to reinvent our selves over and over again as if every fashion could make more of us become while at the same time the body inside comes undone.
Yes,
undone
Like the shell of every seed giving birth to the invisibility of our totality, dissolving our self in our selves, terrified of loosing the cover and protection that was once our identification.
Men and women suffering endlessly because the shell is almost gone and they haven’t yet accomplished a third of what dictated desire, loosing themselves without realizing that time is not money but love.
They’ll forgive us one day for having lived the lowest descent when time was money and not love and people desperately run out of their lives trying to make money without love.
They’ll thank us for having served our selves as victims of our own invention fixed in the world of matter without understanding the miracle of time to actualize our selves self every day of our lives
Time will come when every man extends a hand out and it is an extended hand not just an arm doing exercises to win the next competition betting our souls for how much more we get paid.
Time will come when movement is sacred
When food is sacred
When people are sacred
When music is life giving
When Art is life itself
When no one will die without having been embraced by the rest
We will walk out of our families, towns and nations into our selves
We will walk into families, towns and nations no matter what town or nation we find ourselves in, beyond our blood, one human being.
We are not too old to remember the great people
Every man and woman in each nation remembers the great people,
The human people
Nor too young to forget them, our essence
We are just right to be great people like the people before and after us
We are each and everyone right enough to be a human being
Time is love
It is love when we wake up in the morning and when we go to bed at night
And love when we sit besides each other
And there’s more love in each man and woman’s work than in the sheets of every bed
And more love in every meal than in a thousand drinks
There’s more love in each other’s company than in a million things.
Time is love
And life trickles through our hands in shades of blue and green
While children grow their little feet
And there’s no need to run a mile to be
But sit within
Time is love
And there’s no need of things to be
There’s plenty now and it’s not about more but about being able to look after what there is
Before we trash the whole of our nature making things that we don’t need to feed our greed
And the people
the young people and the old people and the children
all need us to help them be
No time will be as crazy as ours when nations throw away their communities and communities throw away their families and families throw away their children and old people so that men and women can make more money for somebody else’s greed. We will never be as crazy as today when we throw our lives out with our loved ones convinced that time is money in an individualism without reigns.
And I am not talking about America or Americans. We are all equally American and time is money was the reality of our lives everywhere. How much more damage can we do to our selves and our place? Our Earth?
The way they are talking about shame in the fofblog doesn’t come even close to understanding the manipulation on individuals that cults induce through shame.
The following article from wikipedia is fairly good in explaining the different instances of shame and particularly the fact that it is an aspect of the self. It’s through the authoritarism of the guru and the whole structure of power that shame is gradually introduced in the follower’s psyche. It is clear that most ex-members as much as members haven’t yet come to grips with the full reality of what is going on in cults. That is why they had to ban me, because they are so afraid of the truth about it that they had to silence it.
In cults the use of shame is much more related to the following article on shame and torture. THAT is what they need to understand to know why cults need to be stopped.
Just as isolation and humiliation makes the victims of torture helpless, isolation and sublimized humiliation make cultmembers equally helpless. It might all be dressed in silk but the effects are the same: absolute submission. Had they not been ABSOLUTELY submitted in Jonestown and the other cults that have finished with suicide, they would not have finished in such a way.
The Fellowship of Friends Cult, Pathway to Presence has EXACTLY the same mechanisms as these other cults. The highly indoctrinated members inside no longer exist for themselves but for the cult. THAT is already a form of death.
Continued shame achieves the gradual annihilation of the self. Brainwashing the individual implies the destruction of his own SENSE of his self and replacing it for the desired SENSE of his self that the brainwasher needs: the old personality connected to his own essence is totally replaced by the new personality without essence at the complete service of the brainwasher. They all disguise themselves behind a uniform because in unifying themselves they feel protected by the alter ego of the cult while having lost any trace of their own personal essence.
Shame
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about psychological, philosophical, and societal aspects of shame. For other uses, see Shame (disambiguation).
Eve covers herself and lowers her head in shame in Rodin’s sculpture “Eve after theFall”.
Shame is, variously, an affect, emotion, cognition, state, or condition. The roots of the word shame are thought to derive from an older word meaning to cover; as such, covering oneself, literally or figuratively, is a natural expression of shame.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Description
2 Shame vs. guilt and embarrassment
3 Subtypes
4 Social aspects
4.1 Shame campaign
5 See also
6 References
7 Further reading
8 External links
[edit]Description
Nineteenth century scientist Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, described shame affect as consisting of blushing, confusion of mind, downward cast eyes, slack posture, and lowered head, and he noted observations of shame affect in human populations worldwide.[2] He also noted the sense of warmth or heat (associated with the vasodilation of the face and skin) occurring in intense shame.
A “sense of shame” is the consciousness or awareness of shame as a state or condition. Such shame cognition may occur as a result of the experience of shame affect or, more generally, in any situation of embarrassment, dishonor, disgrace, inadequacy, humiliation, orchagrin.[3]
A condition or state of shame may also be assigned externally, by others, regardless of the one’s own experience or awareness. “To shame” generally means to actively assign or communicate a state of shame to another. Behaviors designed to “uncover” or “expose” others are sometimes used for this purpose, as are utterances like “Shame!” or “Shame on you!”
Finally, to “have shame” means to maintain a sense of restraint against offending others while to “have no shame” is to behave without such restraint.
[edit]Shame vs. guilt and embarrassment
Person hiding face and showing posture of shame (while wearing a Sanbenito andcoroza) in Goya’s sketch “For being born somewhere else”. The person has been shamed by the Spanish Inquisition.
The location of the dividing line between the concepts of shame, guilt, and embarrassment is not fully standardized.[4]
According to cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict, shame is a violation of cultural or social values while guilt feelings arise from violations of one’s internal values. Thus, it is possible to feel ashamed of thought or behavior that no one knows about and to feel guilty about actions that gain the approval of others.
Psychoanalyst Helen B. Lewis argued that “The experience of shame is directly about the self, which is the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done is the focus.”[5] Similarly, Fossum and Mason say in their book Facing Shame that “While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one’s actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person.”[6] Following this line of reasoning, Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman concludes that “Shame is an acutely self-conscious state in which the self is ‘split,’ imagining the self in the eyes of the other; by contrast, in guilt the self is unified.”[7]
Clinical psychologist Gershen Kaufman’s view of shame is derived from that of Affect Theory, namely that shame is one of a set of instinctual, short-duration physiological reactions to stimulation.[8][9] In this view, guilt is considered to be a learned behavior consisting essentially of self-directed blame or contempt, with shame occurring consequent to such behaviors making up a part of the overall experience of guilt. Here, self-blame and self-contempt mean the application, towards (a part of) one’s self, of exactly the same dynamic that blaming of, and contempt for, others represents when it is applied interpersonally. Kaufman saw that mechanisms such as blame or contempt may be used as a defending strategy against the experience of shame and that someone who has a pattern of applying them to himself may well attempt to defend against a shame experience by applying self-blame or self-contempt. This, however, can lead to an internalized, self-reinforcing sequence of shame events for which Kaufman coined the term “shame spiral.[8]
One view of difference between shame and embarrassment says that shame does not necessarily involve public humiliation while embarrassment does, that is, one can feel shame for an act known only to oneself but in order to be embarrassed one’s actions must be revealed to others. In the field of ethics (moral psychology, in particular), however, there is debate as to whether or not shame is a heteronomous emotion, i.e. whether or not shame does involve recognition on the part of the ashamed that they have been judged negatively by others. Immanuel Kant and his followers held that shame is heteronomous; Bernard Williams and others have argued that shame can be autonomous.[10][11] Shame may carry the connotation of a response to something that is morally wrong whereas embarrassment is the response to something that is morally neutral but socially unacceptable. Another view of shame and embarrassment says that the two emotions lie on a continuum and only differ in intensity.
[edit]Subtypes
Genuine shame: is associated with genuine dishonor, disgrace, or condemnation.
False shame: is associated with false condemnation as in the double-bind form of false shaming; “he brought what we did to him upon himself”. Author and TV personality John Bradshaw calls shame the “emotion that lets us know we are finite”.[12]
Secret shame: describes the idea of being ashamed to be ashamed, so causing ashamed people to keep their shame a secret. [13]
Toxic shame: describes false, pathological shame, and Bradshaw states that toxic shame is induced, inside children, by all forms of child abuse. Incest and other forms of child sexual abuse can cause particularly severe toxic shame. Toxic shame often induces what is known as complex trauma in children who cannot cope with toxic shaming as it occurs and who dissociate the shame until it is possible to cope with.[14]
Vicarious shame: In the 1990s, psychologists introduced the notion of vicarious shame, which refers to the experience of shame on behalf of another person. Individuals vary in their tendency to experience vicarious shame, which is related to neuroticism and to the tendency to experience personal shame. Extremely shame-prone people might even experience vicarious shame even to an increased degree, in other words: shame on behalf of another person who is already feeling shame on behalf of a third party (or possibly on behalf of the individual proper).
[edit]Social aspects
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Shame is considered one aspect of socialization in all societies. Shame is enshrouded in legal precedent as a pillar of punishment and ostensible correction. Shame has been linked to narcissism in the psychoanalytic literature. It is one of the most intense emotions. The individual experiencing shame may feel totally despicable, worthless and feel that there is no redemption. According to the anthropologistRuth Benedict, cultures may be classified by their emphasis of using either shame or guilt to regulate the social activities of their members. Shared opinions and expected behaviours that cause the feeling of shame (as well as an associated reproval) if violated by an individual are in any case proven to be very efficient in guiding behaviour in a group or society.
Shame is a common form of control used by those people who commit relational aggression. It is also used in the workplace as a form of overt social control or aggression. Shamery is also a central feature of punishment, shunning, or ostracism. In addition, shame is often seen in victims of child neglect, child abuse and a host of other crimes against children.
[edit]Shame campaign
A shame campaign is a tactic in which particular individuals are singled out because of their behavior or suspected crimes, often by marking them publicly, such as Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In the Philippines, Alfredo Lim popularized such tactics during his term as mayor of Manila. On July 1, 1997, he began a controversial “spray paint shame campaign” in an effort to stop drug use. He and his team sprayed bright red paint on two hundred squatter houses whose residents had been charged, but not yet convicted, of selling prohibited substances. Officials of other municipalities followed suit. Former Senator Rene A. Saguisag condemned Lim’s policy.[15]
Despite this criticism, the shame campaigns continued. In January 2005, Metro Manila Development Authority Chair Bayani Fernandoannounced shame campaign to target jaywalkers by splashing them with wet rags. Sen. Richard Gordon disagreed with the shame tactic, and Rep. Vincent Crisologo called this approach “martial law tactics”. Rep. Rozzano Rufino Biazon argued jaywalkers were being treated like cattle.[16][17]
[edit]
Understanding Shame and Humiliation in Torture
Although the use of torture in any form and for any reason has been banned by
international law, it is still practiced on a million people each year around the world.
(Pincock, 2003). Within the larger global context, where genocide, terrorism and war
have become the hallmarks of the 21st century, the practice of torture has acquired a new
place although, paradoxically enough, this century has also seen the vigorous human
rights movement. With the sophistication afforded by modernity, warfare no longer
deploys the same method to conquer or rule and so is the situation when it comes to
inflicting torture. Over the years physical torture has given way to increased intense
psychological torture out of a need to hide evidence of torture and also out of recognition
that psychological torture can be more effective for the torturer and more debilitating,
annihilating and silencing for the tortured. Furthermore, it seems that psychological
torture predominantly secures its effectiveness through the use of humiliation.
The purpose of the present paper is to understand this very unique relation between
torture and humiliation and the manner in which humiliation and shame are
systematically used for purposes of torture. In a way, the premise of the paper is that
torture acquires its efficacy primarily because it deploys humiliation and sets in motion
those psychological processes in the tortured that go far beyond the effects of physical
abuse and that are longstanding in their impact on the psyche.
Shame and Humiliation
Physical torture around the world has mostly been practiced in the form of
beating, electric shocks, submersion in water, suffocation, sleep-deprivation, burns, rape
Understanding Torture 3
and sexual assault. Psychological torture on the other hand, uses isolation, forced
witnessing of the tortures of loved ones, sham executions and most importantly
humiliation. (Pincock, 2003; Piwowarczyk, Moreno & Grodin, 2000)
Most recently, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal also reinforces the idea that
humiliation is frequently called in the service of torture. Lindner (2002) has defined
humiliation as, “the enforced lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that
damages or stripes away pride, honor and dignity. To be humiliated is to be placed
against your will and often in a deeply hurtful way, in a situation that is greatly inferior to
what you feel you should expect. Humiliation entails demeaning treatment that
transgresses established expectations. At its heart is the idea of pinning down, putting
down or holding to the ground. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of humiliation
as a process is that the victim is forced into passivity, acted upon, made helpless.” (p. 2)
This definition enables us to appreciate that acts of humiliation tear down the very core of
the individual by invoking a deep sense of shame that comes with forced passivity, in the
victim. The sexual nature of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison inflicted by the American
soldiers, for example, was particularly humiliating for the Iraqi prisoners as a result of the
shame that the acts invoked in the prisoners who belong to a cultural background where
homosexuality, in particular, is shameful and sexual acts, nudity and sexuality, in general,
are shrouded with shame and guilt. The acts of torture that were used in the prison were
in a way deliberated upon, keeping in mind, their impact on an Arab psyche which deeply
values masculinity and regards homosexuality as feminized masculinity. Further, the
specific kind of torture that was inflicted on the prisoners was rooted in the knowledge
Understanding Torture 4
that shame and humiliation carry a very strong and different psychological meaning in the
Arab world. (Puar, 2004)
Hartling, Rosen, Walker and Jordan (2000) have closely examined shame and
humiliation in an attempt to understand the differences and similarities in between the
two feelings. Although both the affects are considered to belong to the domain of self-
conscious emotions, it has been highlighted that while, “shame is a felt sense of being
unworthy of connection, humiliation might be thought of as a feeling associated with
being made to feel unworthy of connection.”(p. 3). The distinction between these two
feelings is important to register for it tells us how these feeling might be exploited in
situations of social control and particularly in torture. Recognizing that humiliation is
interpersonally situated and that shame is self-focused enables us to comprehend how
techniques of torture are designed to produce their effects. Typically torture techniques
tend to work because they convert the humiliation of the act perpetrated by the torturer
into a deep sense of shame of the tortured. It is the feeling of shame that is invoked that
produces the silencing impact of the humiliating act, so that often victims of torture are
unable to relate their experiences of humiliation for they feel so shamed. Shapiro (2003)
has also noted that “shame is a major psychological issue for survivors of torture” and
that “people are reluctant to speak directly of feeling ashamed, since to acknowledge
shame is (in their eyes) to admit that there is something to be ashamed of.” (p. 1131)
The feeling of shame necessarily brings with it the component of exposure and often
humiliating experiences become difficult to recount and are silencing in their impact
because of this fear of being exposed, in the victim. Victims of torture face this issue
grimly because the feeling of shame in such cases is closely linked to the idea of locus of
Understanding Torture 5
control. Prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp, for example, were deeply ashamed of
what had happened to them for there was an inherent feeling of how could they have let
that happen to themselves. In other words, humiliation reigns over the person since the
victim feels low in his/her own eyes for having allowed something horrible happen to
him and this feeling of perceived helplessness gets projected to the other and gets
converted into shame as seen through the eyes of the other. In a similar vein Trumbull
(2003), has conceptualized shame as a stressful reaction to a disavowed image of oneself
as seen through the gaze of another. Thus shame is a feeling that gets triggered off when
one sees oneself as compromised in another person’s eyes. This subtle nuance is
important to understand since it informs us that victims of torture internalize the
humiliation subjected by the perpetrator as shame within them that leads to severely
paralyzing psychological outcomes.
Impact of Humiliation and Torture
Clinical Implications: Both physical and psychological torture can lead to a huge array of
disturbing psychological outcomes in the victims through the mechanisms of humiliation
and shame. Hartling et al.(2000) have noted that such experiences deeply affect one’s
capacity to relate to others and form intimate and healthy relationships. Piwowarczyk et
al. (2000) have also highlighted that torture can destroy one’s fundamental capacities
such as the capacity to trust and form secure attachments. Interpersonal, social and
occupational dysfunctions are also common outcomes in survivors of torture.
Furthermore, the experience of torture can lead to a strong sense of depersonalization and
alienation and it has been found that survivors of torture tend to lead to personally
Understanding Torture 6
disconnected and disengaged lives. It is as though they stop participating actively in the
interpersonal world and become encapsulated in their trauma.
In terms of clear cut psychopathological syndromes depression has been cited the most as
an immediate and longstanding impact of torture. In fact shame has been found to be a
very strong predictor for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder as well. (Trumbull, 2003;
Piwowarczyk et al. 2000) Obsessive- compulsive disorder and paranoia have also been
implicated. (Shapiro, 2003)
Global Implications : Apart from how humiliation impacts people in rupturing the basic
fabric of their lives, deep and continued humiliation can also lead to antisocial,
revengeful and militant personalities. It is no longer just armchair speculation that the
September 11 attacks are not just plainly terrorist attacks but that they are a manifestation
of the deep vengeance and a reaction to the prolonged and sustained humiliation that the
Arab world has faced for decades at the hands of America. Being cut off from one’s own
feelings, as is often the case in survivors of torture, can lead to the birth of militant
ideologies that can perpetuate apocalyptic violence in the world.
Helping the Tortured
Understanding the processes of shame and humiliation and their interplay in the lives of
survivors can go a long way in enabling these people to pick up the threads of their lives.
Piwowarczyk et al. (2000) have outlined that one of the first crucial steps involved in
helping the tortured is to be able to identify torture clinically and carefully. One of the
biggest impediments to identification of torture is that the trauma of the torture erases or
impairs the memory of the trauma itself. Often victims of torture go through severe
Understanding Torture 7
dissociative disorders that make it very difficult to help these individuals. It is also
important to realize that torture and its practice is culturally situated and therefore the
help afforded to victims of torture should also be in consonance with their cultural
backgrounds. Certain cultures do not permit open communications about incidents of
shame and humiliation and so it is important for anyone working with a torture survivor
to ask questions around such incidents with cultural sensitivity and empathy. Any enquiry
about the torture should be done so as to not even remotely seem as an interrogative
experience that the victim has already endured. The process of recounting the humiliation
of torture should not become humiliating itself when done for clinical, legal or
assessment purposes.
Physicians and doctors are the people with whom torture survivors come in contact with
first. It is important to train these medical professionals in the detection of torture and see
physical symptoms in relation to torture and trauma. A lot of torture survivors are put on
psychiatric medication, but it is crucial that this population also be given
psychotherapeutic help. Within this realm, Hartling et al. (2000) have given pertinent
insights into the clinical processes between a therapist and a client with humiliation as a
core life them. These insights can be extrapolated and used in therapy with torture
survivors where the therapist has to be careful and sensitive enough to tune in to the
victim’s experience of humiliation and ensure that the therapeutic process does not
become humiliating in any way. Additionally, it is equally important for doctors or
clinicians or anyone else working with torture survivors to be aware of their own
resistances to hearing stories of torture that can unconsciously be communicated to the
victim and produce a muting effect. Frequently survivors of torture are exiled from their
Understanding Torture 8
own homeland and land up as refugees in foreign nations. It is cardinal to recognize the
added difficulties of such people who not only have to cope with the trauma of torture but
also deal with the added responsibility of adjusting themselves to an alien land. To this
effect, all kinds of legal help that affords this population safe and healthy asylum must be
garnered. Finally both qualitative and quantitative research should be carried out on the
impact of the torture with a specific focus on shame and humiliation as the mediating
processes between the experience of torture and the development of psychopathology in
order to better help survivors of torture.
Understanding Torture 9
References
Hartling, L.M., Rosen, W., Walker, M., Jordan, J.V. (2000). Shame and Humiliation :
From Isolation to Relational Transformation. Work in Progress.
Lindner, E. G. (2002). Humiliation or Dignity : Regional Conflicts in the Global Village.
Journal of Mental Health, Psychosocial Work and Counseling in Areas of Armed
Conflict, forthcoming.
Pincock, S. (2003). Exposing the Horror of Torture. The Lancet, 362, 1462-1463.
Piwowarczyk, L., Moreno, A., Grodin, M. ( 2000). Health Care of Torture Survivors.
JAMA, 284, 539-541,
Puar, J. K. (2004). Abu Ghraib : Arguing against Exceptionalism. Feminist Studies, 30,
522-534.
Shapiro, D. (2003). The Tortured, Not the Torturers, are Ashamed. Social Research, 70,
1131-1148.
Trumbull, D. (2003). Shame : An Acute Stress Response to Interpersonal Traumatization.
Psychiatry, 66, 53-64.
This is a marvellous piece of work by Foucault that places us in the context of where we’ve come from. It rests short to what is possible today but even so is a great start.
FOUCAULT.INFO
Michel Foucault. What is Enlightenment ?
“What is Enlightenment ?” (“Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?”), in Rabinow (P.), éd., The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 32-50.
Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to collect opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; there is not much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth century, editors preferred to question the public on problems that did not yet have solutions. I don’t know whether or not that practice was more effective; it was unquestionably more entertaining.
In any event, in line with this custom, in November 1784 a German periodical, Berlinische Monatschrift published a response to the question: Was ist Aufklärung ? And the respondent was Kant.
A minor text, perhaps. But it seems to me that it marks the discreet entrance into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either. And one that has been repeated in various forms for two centuries now. From Hegel through Nietzsche or Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any philosophy has failed to confront this same question, directly or indirectly. What, then, is this event that is called the Aufklärung and that has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today ? Let us imagine that the Berlinische Monatschrift still exists and that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy ? Perhaps we could respond with an echo: modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung ?
Let us linger a few moments over Kant’s text. It merits attention for several reasons.
To this same question, Moses Mendelssohn had also replied in the same journal, just two months earlier. But Kant had not seen Mendelssohn’s text when he wrote his. To be sure, the encounter of the German philosophical movement with the new development of Jewish culture does not date from this precise moment. Mendelssohn had been at that crossroads for thirty years or so, in company with Lessing. But up to this point it had been a matter of making a place for Jewish culture within German thought — which Lessing had tried to do in Die Juden — or else of identifying problems common to Jewish thought and to German philosophy; this is what Mendelssohn had done in his Phadon; oder, Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With the two texts published in the Berlinische Monatschrift the German Aufklärung and the Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history; they are seeking to identify the common processes from which they stem. And it is perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a common destiny — we now know to what drama that was to lead.
But there is more. In itself and within the Christian tradition, Kant’s text poses a new problem.
It was certainly not the first time that philosophical thought had sought to reflect on its own present. But, speaking schematically, we may say that this reflection had until then taken three main forms.
The present may be represented as belonging to a certain era of the world, distinct from the others through some inherent characteristics, or separated from the others by some dramatic event. Thus, in Plato’s Statesman the interlocutors recognize that they belong to one of those revolutions of the world in which the world is turning backwards, with all the negative consequences that may ensue.
The present may be interrogated in an attempt to decipher in it the heralding signs of a forthcoming event. Here we have the principle of a kind of historical hermeneutics of which Augustine might provide an example.
The present may also be analyzed as a point of transition toward the dawning of a new world. That is what Vico describes in the last chapter of La Scienza Nuova; what he sees ‘today’ is ‘a complete humanity … spread abroad through all nations, for a few great monarchs rule over this world of peoples’; it is also ‘Europe … radiant with such humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for the happiness of human life.’ [1]
Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung is entirely different: it is neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out.’ In his other texts on history, Kant occasionally raises questions of origin or defines the internal teleology of a historical process. In the text on Aufklärung, he deals with the question of contemporary reality alone. He is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday ?
I shall not go into detail here concerning this text, which is not always very clear despite its brevity. I should simply like to point out three or four features that seem to me important if we are to understand how Kant raised the philosophical question of the present day.
Kant indicates right away that the ‘way out’ that characterizes Enlightenment is a process that releases us from the status of ‘immaturity.’ And by ‘immaturity,’ he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives three examples: we are in a state of ‘immaturity’ when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be. (Let us note in passing that the register of these three critiques is easy to recognize, even though the text does not make it explicit.) In any case, Enlightenment is defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason.
We must also note that this way out is presented by Kant in a rather ambiguous manner. He characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process; but he also presents it as a task and an obligation. From the very first paragraph, he notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself. Significantly, Kant says that this Enlightenment has a Wahlspruch: now a Wahlspruch is a heraldic device, that is, a distinctive feature by which one can be recognized, and it is also a motto, an instruction that one gives oneself and proposes to others. What, then, is this instruction ? Aude sapere: ‘dare to know,’ ‘have the courage, the audacity, to know.’ Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. Men are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors.
A third difficulty appears here in Kant’s text in his use of the word “mankind”, Menschheit. The importance of this word in the Kantian conception of history is well known. Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in the process of Enlightenment ? In that case, we must imagine Enlightenment as a historical change that affects the political and social existence of all people on the face of the earth. Or are we to understand that it involves a change affecting what constitutes the humanity of human beings ? But the question then arises of knowing what this change is. Here again, Kant’s answer is not without a certain ambiguity. In any case, beneath its appearance of simplicity, it is rather complex.
Kant defines two essential conditions under which mankind can escape from its immaturity. And these two conditions are at once spiritual and institutional, ethical and political.
The first of these conditions is that the realm of obedience and the realm of the use of reason be clearly distinguished. Briefly characterizing the immature status, Kant invokes the familiar expression: ‘Don’t think, just follow orders’; such is, according to him, the form in which military discipline, political power, and religious authority are usually exercised. Humanity will reach maturity when it is no longer required to obey, but when men are told: ‘Obey, and you will be able to reason as much as you like.’ We must note that the German word used here is räsonieren; this word, which is also used in the Critiques does not refer to just any use of reason, but to a use of reason in which reason has no other end but itself: räsonieren is to reason for reasoning’s sake. And Kant gives examples, these too being perfectly trivial in appearance: paying one’s taxes, while being able to argue as much as one likes about the system of taxation, would be characteristic of the mature state; or again, taking responsibility for parish service, if one is a pastor, while reasoning freely about religious dogmas.
We might think that there is nothing very different here from what has been meant, since the sixteenth century, by freedom of conscience: the right to think as one pleases so long as one obeys as one must. Yet it is here that Kant brings into play another distinction, and in a rather surprising way. The distinction he introduces is between the private and public uses of reason. But he adds at once that reason must be free in its public use, and must be submissive in its private use. Which is, term for term, the opposite of what is ordinarily called freedom of conscience.
But we must be somewhat more precise. What constitutes, for Kant, this private use of reason ? In what area is it exercised ? Man, Kant says, makes a private use of reason when he is ‘a cog in a machine’; that is, when he has a role to play in society and jobs to do: to be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to be in charge of a parish, to be a civil servant, all this makes the human being a particular segment of society; he finds himself thereby placed in a circumscribed position, where he has to apply particular rules and pursue particular ends. Kant does not ask that people practice a blind and foolish obedience, but that they adapt the use they make of their reason to these determined circumstances; and reason must then be subjected to the particular ends in view. Thus there cannot be, here, any free use of reason.
On the other hand, when one is reasoning only in order to use one’s reason, when one is reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine), when one is reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be free and public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.
Now this leads us to a fourth question that must be put to Kant’s text. We can readily see how the universal use of reason (apart from any private end) is the business of the subject himself as an individual; we can readily see, too, how the freedom of this use may be assured in a purely negative manner through the absence of any challenge to it; but how is a public use of that reason to be assured ? Enlightenment, as we see, must not be conceived simply as a general process affecting all humanity; it must not be conceived only as an obligation prescribed to individuals: it now appears as a political problem. The question, in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason can take the public form that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in broad daylight, while individuals are obeying as scrupulously as possible. And Kant, in conclusion, proposes to Frederick II, in scarcely veiled terms, a sort of contract — what might be called the contract of rational despotism with free reason: the public and free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee of obedience, on condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself be in conformity with universal reason.
Let us leave Kant’s text here. I do not by any means propose to consider it as capable of constituting an adequate description of Enlightenment; and no historian, I think, could be satisfied with it for an analysis of the social, political, and cultural transformations that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding its circumstantial nature, and without intending to give it an exaggerated place in Kant’s work, I believe that it is necessary to stress the connection that exists between this brief article and the three Critiques. Kant in fact describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; now it is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped. Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise to dogmatism and heteronomy, along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the legitimate use of reason has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy can be assured. The critique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown up in Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the critique.
It is also necessary, I think, to underline the relation between this text of Kant’s and the other texts he devoted to history. These latter, for the most part, seek to define the internal teleology of time and the point toward which history of humanity is moving. Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining this history as humanity’s passage to its adult status, situates contemporary reality with respect to the overall movement and its basic directions. But at the same time, it shows how, at this very moment, each individual is responsible in a certain way for that overall process.
The hypothesis I should like to propose is that this little text is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise. No doubt it is not the first time that a philosopher has given his reasons for undertaking his work at a particular moment. But it seems to me that it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way, closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing and because of which he is writing. It is in the reflection on ‘today’ as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie.
And, by looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity.
I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling ‘postmodernity.’ And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the 18th century.
Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by ‘attitude,’ I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the ‘modern era’ from the ‘premodern’ or ‘postmodern,’ I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of ‘countermodernity.’
To characterize briefly this attitude of modernity, I shall take an almost indispensable example, namely, Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity is widely recognized as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century.
Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying when he defines modernity as ‘the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.’ [2] But, for him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time; modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the ‘heroic’ aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to ‘heroize’ the present .
I shall restrict myself to what Baudelaire says about the painting of his contemporaries. Baudelaire makes fun of those painters who, finding nineteenth-century dress excessively ugly, want to depict nothing but ancient togas. But modernity in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in introducing black clothing onto the canvas. The modern painter is the one who can show the dark frock-coat as ‘the necessary costume of our time,’ the one who knows how to make manifest, in the fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains with death. ‘The dress-coat and frock-coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public soul — an immense cortège of undertaker’s mutes (mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes…). We are each of us celebrating some funeral.’ [3] To designate this attitude of modernity, Baudelaire sometimes employs a litotes that is highly significant because it is presented in the form of a precept: ‘You have no right to despise the present.’
This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain or perpetuate it. It certainly does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting curiosity. That would be what Baudelaire would call the spectator’s posture. The flâneur, the idle, strolling spectator, is satisfied to keep his eyes open, to pay attention and to build up a storehouse of memories. In opposition to the flâneur, Baudelaire describes the man of modernity: ‘Away he goes, hurrying, searching …. Be very sure that this man … — this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert — has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity.’ … He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history.’ As an example of modernity, Baudelaire cites the artist Constantin Guys. In appearance a spectator, a collector of curiosities, he remains ‘the last to linger wherever there can be a glow of light, an echo of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a passion can pose before him, wherever natural man and conventional man display themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal.’ [4]
But let us make no mistake. Constantin Guys is not a flâneur; what makes him the modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire’s eyes is that, just when the whole world is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world. His transfiguration does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom; ‘natural’ things become ‘more than natural,’ ‘beautiful’ things become ‘more than beautiful,’ and individual objects appear ‘endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of their creator.’ [5] For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.
However, modernity for Baudelaire is not simply a form of relationship to the present; it is also a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself. The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here I shall not recall in detail the well-known passages on ‘vulgar, earthy, vile nature’; on man’s indispensable revolt against himself; on the ‘doctrine of elegance’ which imposes ‘upon its ambitious and humble disciples’ a discipline more despotic than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.
Let me add just one final word. This ironic heroization of the present, this transfiguring play of freedom with reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self — Baudelaire does not imagine that these have any place in society itself, or in the body politic. They can only be produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art.
I do not pretend to be summarizing in these few lines either the complex historical event that was the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, or the attitude of modernity in the various guises it may have taken on during the last two centuries.
I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation — one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject — is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude — that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era. I should like to characterize this ethos very briefly.
A. Negatively
This ethos implies, first, the refusal of what I like to call the ‘blackmail’ of the Enlightenment. I think that the Enlightenment, as a set of political, economic, social, institutional, and cultural events on which we still depend in large part, constitutes a privileged domain for analysis. I also think that as an enterprise for linking the progress of truth and the history of liberty in a bond of direct relation, it formulated a philosophical question that remains for us to consider. I think, finally, as I have tried to show with reference to Kant’s text, that it defined a certain manner of philosophizing.
But that does not mean that one has to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Enlightenment. It even means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach); or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality (which may be seen once again as good or bad). And w e do not break free of this blackmail by introducing ‘dialectical’ nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have been in the Enlightenment.
We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the ‘essential kernel of rationality’ that can be found in the Enlightenment and that would have to be preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.
This permanent critique of ourselves has to avoid the always too facile confusions between humanism and Enlightenment.
We must never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the development of European societies. As such, it includes elements of social transformation, types of political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalization of knowledge and practices, technological mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word, even if many of these phenomena remain important today. The one I have pointed out and that seems to me to have been at the basis of an entire form of philosophical reflection concerns only the mode of reflective relation to the present.
Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies; these themes always tied to value judgments have obviously varied greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved. Furthermore they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. In the seventeenth century there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in general; there was a Christian humanism opposed to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time when people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.
From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple too diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a fact that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.
Now in this connection I believe that this thematic which so often recurs and which always depends on humanism can be opposed by the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy: that is a principle that is at the heart of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself. From this standpoint I am inclined to see Enlightenment and humanism in a state of tension rather than identity.
In any case it seems to me dangerous to confuse them; and further it seems historically inaccurate. If the question of man of the human species of the humanist was important throughout the eighteenth century this is very rarely I believe because the Enlightenment considered itself a humanism. It is worthwhile too to note that throughout the nineteenth century the historiography of sixteenth-century humanism which was so important for people like Saint-Beuve or Burckhardt was always distinct from and sometimes explicitly opposed to the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century had a tendency to oppose the two at least as much as to confuse them.
In any case I think that just as we must free ourselves from the intellectual blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment we must escape from the historical and moral confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment. An analysis of their complex relations in the course of the last two centuries would be a worthwhile project an important one if we are to bring some measure of clarity to the consciousness that we have of ourselves and of our past.
B. Positively
Yet while taking these precautions into account we must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are saying thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves.
This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given lo us as universal necessary obligatory what place is occupied by whatever is singular contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints ? The point in brief is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that lakes the form of a possible transgression.
This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological — and not transcendental — in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.
But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take. This means that the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.
I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial transformations that have been made in the correlation of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century.
I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.
Still, the following objection would no doubt be entirely legitimate: if we limit ourselves to this type of always partial and local inquiry or test, do we not run the risk of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we may well not be conscious, and over which we may have no control ?
To this, two responses. It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again .
But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency. The work in question has its generality, its systematicity, its homogeneity, and its stakes.
(a) Its Stakes
These are indicated by what might be called ‘the paradox of the relations of capacity and power.’ We know that the great promise or the great hope of the eighteenth century, or a part of the eighteenth century, lay in the simultaneous and proportional growth of individuals with respect to one another. And, moreover, we can see that throughout the entire history of Western societies (it is perhaps here that the root of their singular historical destiny is located — such a peculiar destiny, so different from the others in its trajectory and so universalizing, so dominant with respect to the others), the acquisition of capabilities and the struggle for freedom have constituted permanent elements. Now the relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of autonomy are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed. And we have been able to see what forms of power relation were conveyed by various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with economic aims, or institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of communication): disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of normalization exercised in the name of the power of the state, demands of society or of population zones, are examples. What is at stake, then, is this: How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations ?
(b) Homogeneity
This leads to the study of what could be called ‘practical systems.’ Here we are taking as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that men give of themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their knowledge, but rather what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms of rationality that organize their ways of doing things (this might be called the technological aspect) and the freedom with which they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game, up to a certain point (this might be called the strategic side of these practices). The homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses is thus ensured by this realm of practices, with their technological side and their strategic side.
(c) Systematicity
These practical systems stem from three broad areas: relations of control over things, relations of action upon others, relations with oneself. This does not mean that each of these three areas is completely foreign to the others. It is well known that control over things is mediated by relations with others; and relations with others in turn always entail relations with oneself, and vice versa. But we have three axes whose specificity and whose interconnections have to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of ethics. In other terms, the historical ontology of ourselves has to answer an open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries which may be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all address the questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge ? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations ? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions ?
(d) Generality
Finally, these historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense that they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and discourses. And yet, at least at the level of the Western societies from which we derive, they have their generality, in the sense that they have continued to recur up to our time: for example, the problem of the relationship between sanity and insanity, or sickness and health, or crime and the law; the problem of the role of sexual relations; and so on.
But by evoking this generality, I do not mean to suggest that it has to be retraced in its metahistorical continuity over time, nor that its variations have to be pursued. What must be grasped is the extent to which what we know of it, the forms of power that are exercised in it, and the experience that we have in it of ourselves constitute nothing but determined historical figures, through a certain form of problematization that defines objects, rules of action, modes of relation to oneself. The study of modes of problematization (that is, of what is neither an anthropological constant nor a chronological variation) is thus the way to analyze questions of general import in their historically unique form.
A brief summary, to conclude and to come back to Kant.
I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment. It seems to me that Kant’s reflection is even a way of philosophizing that has not been without its importance or effectiveness during the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquiries. These inquiries have their methodological coherence in the at once archaeological and genealogical study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of rationality and as strategic games of liberties; they have their theoretical coherence in the definition of the historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations to things, to others, to ourselves, have been problematized. They have their practical coherence in the care brought to the process of putting historico-critical reflection to the test of concrete practices. I do not know whether it must be said today that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.
Notes:
[1] Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd ed., (1744), abridged trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 370, 372.
[2] Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 13.
[3] Charles Baudelaire, ‘On the Heroism of Modern Life,’ in The Mirror of Art, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1955), p. 127.
[4] Baudelaire, Painter, pp. 12, Il.
[5] Ibid., p. 12.
“As Wallerstein has noted, ‚in ‘world-systems’ we are dealing with a spatial/
temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units, one that represents an
integrated zone of activity and institutions which obey certain systemic rules.‛48 An
increasingly important element of such an institutional configuration involves the monetary
system, which has an individual micro-dimension in addition to the macropolitics of curren-
cies. The core of such a system consists of individuals with significant positive monetary
balances, who exploit everyone else outside the core through a mode of accumulation that has
no efficiency-based economic justification.49 Although the monetary social hierarchy is not
structurally entirely fixed, such individuals have negligible personal risk of downward social
mobility due to the continuous upward redistribution of wealth through compound interest.
The periphery includes the vast majority of the world’s population who have no realistic
opportunity to escape negative monetary net worth – either personal or government debt –
through their own productive efforts. These individuals are subject to constant exploitation
through resource transfers corresponding to interest payments on unrepayable debt. The
semi-periphery consists of individuals whose structural position based on the net effect of
exploiting the periphery and being exploited by the core remains indeterminate. ”
Elena: It’s absolutely fascinating to observe that the money dynamics behaves exactly like the psychology of the different classes.
“In fact, he limits itself to stating that only “reasoned examination” and “public debate” can establish what is just and what is not.”
It’s interesting that at least Sen directs the problem towards the public sphere.- back to the community. At the same time it’s astonishing that what is just or not is not even questioned. And then it’s clear that as long as people concentrate on what is not instead of what is, we won’t be able to find our way out of the present conflicts. Is there enough food to feed everyone? Where is it and how do we get it to people who need it?
It doesn’t matter who the food belongs to, it belongs more to those who need it.
Wouldn’t that be a way of looking at justice? Not on the negative side of things but on the positive side? What is there and where does it need to be? Then we wouldn’t be parting from the individual or national but from the global. What is there globally and where does it need to be? Everything belongs to US. Anyone who steals from US is a crook. Anyone who has more than he needs is a thief. Anyone who takes what others need is a criminal.
It’s a different kind of morality is it not? It’s not about communism but humanism. It’s a question of consciousness. It’s inevitable to realize that the System as it is working today is a comedy! Who can believe or trust in the crooks in power?
The shift towards consciousness seems to relate to the capacity to perceive from the whole to the part instead of from the part to the whole. Individualism moves from the part to the whole and cannot grasp reality with the necessary integrity. Consciousness needs to be in the individual, in each individual but each individual must be conscious of the whole. We all want that in our hearts, we are just very much afraid of our loneliness.
Is it not just a struggle from the instinctive to consciousness? There is enough for everyone. There is enough for everyone if a few stop stealing what is everyone’s. There is enough to take care of our selves and live decent lives helping each other out. There is enough if we’re willing to share what we have without taking advantage of each other.
Why is it difficult to understand love? Love as an aspect of life? They were wrong those who said we were a bunch of criminals out to get each other. We are not. We simply aren’t a bunch of criminals. They perhaps were criminal enough to generalize such ideas to justify themselves but human beings are not a bunch of criminals.
The superiority complexes in high classes and so called “developed nations” are just that: superiority complexes.
There is nothing superior in them. They are as human as the rest. It hasn’t been easy for anyone, anywhere, we’ve all suffered everywhere but it’s possible to start helping each other and minimize our suffering. It is a wonderful thing to help each other. Nothing makes a man happier than other people’s well being as a result of his or her actions. That kind of happiness is not the superficial happiness that people experience from owning things but a happiness that comes from the experience of grace. Positive emotions are possible in this world. We have been marked by what seems centuries of negative emotions but I think they were even happier than us in the middle ages and they’ll be happier than us at the end of this century. In our times our outlook seems to be particularly dark, we don’t know how to experience positive emotions. The disconnectedness from religion may be one possible cause but disconnecting from religion was a necessary step in our evolution. Religion became increasingly connected to powers outside of our selves, a God that petted our heads, at best, while in the decadence of leadership, those in power take from the whole. The transition from “conscious kings” to true democracy is an ongoing process. We are only half way in between.
God as an outside force disconnected from our every day life acts against our consciousness. The realm of the divine is inside each one of us. That is what people today are so afraid of. Taking the light step from the physical dimension to a dimension of consciousness. Letting go of the ego and being the whole. It is a comprehensible fear and a journey that we each must take in our own time for it is absolutely real and cannot be any other way. We can inspire each other to take that step. We can help each other trust our selves enough and take that step. We can love each other enough so that others love their own self enough and take that step. There is much suffering in egoness and it’s through suffering our own egoness that we come to our selves. No one has ever hurt us as much as our egoness. But when we open the door of trust in our self, egoness weakens and our perception of the whole becomes possible.
Justice is possible. We, as human beings, can make justice possible in our world. We can make it possible through actualizing consciousness in our daily lives. The whole belongs to all of us. The whole of Earth belongs to all of us. The whole of life belongs to all of us. The whole of joy, of grace, of gratitude, of light belongs to all of us. We are each blessed with the whole. To be blessed is not an aspect of religion but an aspect of life. To be blessed is an aspect of being human not of being in a religion even if in every true religion they know how blessed human beings are. We are not blessed by superior beings. We are not blessed by popes or gurus. We are blessed because within our selves the dimension of consciousness beats with the same power that life beats in every creature. The dimension of consciousness or a divine dimension is in itself a blessing and it is inside each one of us. All we need from each one of us is to let it actualize itself in our daily lives.
We all know what life was supposed to be when we were children and how it became what it is and it is in our power to understand where our parent’s suffering kept them from actualizing the life we knew was possible. The greatest compassion is realized when we assume responsibility for our times through the understanding of our parent’s suffering. Each parent is the actualization of the state of consciousness of his and her times. Each LIFE, each human life, is the actualization of the state of consciousness of his and her times. Each child inherits the state of consciousness of all human beings and it is his and her task to carry it one generation ahead, actualizing consciousness in his and her daily practice through the transformation of the suffering that he and she inherited from her and his peers. Our legacy is the suffering of all of mankind in that given time and the job of each generation is to create less suffering for future generations.
Happiness is possible in our world. The experience of grace and gratitude, the joy of being, the unfathomable experience of light and delight is possible for each one of us. We are One. We are One and in our Oneness we are also our individual selves. Life trickles down each of our beings like water out of our hands. We can separate from each other in our unconsciousness or unite with each other in consciousness and actualize our selves every second of our lives. We actualize our selves in the weaving of time. Each conscious act is a thread towards our realization.
We actualize our selves in the consciousness of our totality when we allow for the whole to embrace our “individual-nesses”. We must recover the power of the “wholes”. The whole of Speech and its power. The whole of community and its power. The whole of humaneness and its power. We must gather together again not in churches, senates or parliaments but in the Public Square, conscious of our equality, having gotten rid of the hierarchies that have for so long kept us from our wholeness.
Love is possible in our Earth. When we recover our communities and stop hurting each other producing not so many “items” but creating and recreating what is necessary and joyful we can recover our love life. The family is important for children but the community is even more important for the people. We must all be parents of every child and youth. Young people don’t trust us because they know better! We let them down this far making misery of life when life is everything but miserable! Will they have the strength to be more human than we managed to be?
It is never late to be. No matter the age, no matter the difficulty, it is always possible for anyone to actualize their own self and belong to the whole. When we actualize our selves we take responsibility from that moment on and change the whole of our world. It takes will to be and the effort of being is what makes us more human. It is the actualization of the divine realm in our physical practical lives. We all know what it is like to be no matter who, where, when or what we are. We have all tasted our selves as children and the taste of childhood is the taste of our conscious essence. The integrity of our selves in childhood is not only something we can “remember”, it’s something we can actualize. The gradual study of how we lost that integrity helps recover it. But it is a fact that IT is always there within us and all we need is to dare to be our selves again.
Children, young people and old people are suffering a lot more than is necessary. We need to help each other so that we can then help them. We need to help them even if we can’t help each other.
We are One and life trickles through our lives like water through our hands.
For Amartya Sen, a consensus around rejecting injustice is preferable to a general theory of justice. Although his critique of the Rawlsian approach may be useful, his arguments for a comparative approach to justice are not completely persuasive.
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0.
0. Unlocatable Justice (PDF – 190.8 kb)by Emmanuelle Bénicourt
Reviewed: Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice, Harvard University Press, 2009. (The edition reviewed is the French translation, L’idée de justice, trans. By Paul Chemla, Flammarion, 2010, 558 pp., 25 euros.)
Since it was first published in 1971, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice has been an essential reference for anyone interested in justice or ethics. Amartya Sen’s Idea of Justice, which has just appeared in French translation, takes a clear position in the debate initiated by Rawls. Sen limits himself, however, to what he calls “a theory of justice in the broad sense”, the purpose of which is not to “achieve a perfectly just world” but rather “to remove clear injustices” (p. xiii; Fr. p. 13). The work actually rehearses a number of arguments that Sen has developed over the past thirty years. Some of these, and most notably the critiques of Rawls’ theory, are much more fully developed here than in his previous writings, however.
According to Sen, there are two distinct ways of approaching the question of justice: one, which he calls transcendental institutionalism and associates with the names of Kant, Rousseau, Locke, and Rawls, “concentrates its attention on what it identifies as perfect justice” by focusing “primarily on getting the institutions right” (p. 6; Fr. p. 20). The other method — said to be that of Smith, Condorcet, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill — seeks to link justice to comparisons of different ways of life, concrete behaviors, and human interactions in a variety of institutional contexts. Sen, a critic of transcendental institutionalism, prefers this second or “comparative” approach.
Criticizing Rawls
Sen acknowledges that Rawls drew attention to the intrinsic importance of liberty (in itself and not as a means to an end). In his view, however, although “it is indeed possible to accept that liberty must have some kind of priority, but total unrestrained priority is almost certainly an overkill” (p. 65; Fr. p. 96). This critique was previously presented inInequality Reexamined (1992) and Development as Freedom (1999). In The Idea of Justice, however, Sen distances himself even more from Rawls’ theory by challenging the very ground of the principles of justice. For instance, he doubts that individuals placed in what Rawls called “the original position”, in which they do not know their future place in society, can in fact agree on a set of principles to govern just institutions, on which a fully just society must rest (p. 57; Fr. p. 87). There is in fact no reason for individuals to choose, as Rawls does, “the most extensive system of liberty” as the first principle of justice. One must therefore confront “Arrow’s impossibility theorem”, which states that there is no rule for deducing a consistent collective preference regarding a set of options from individual preferences with respect to those same options. Indeed, because individual interests are at least in part contradictory, individual members of a society may not agree on the priority ordering of the various problems the society faces. Hence there is no one option superior to all others. For Sen, however, the search for such a superior option is at the heart of the transcendental individualist approach. The problem of choosing an ethical criterion, or hierarchical principles of justice capable of guiding choice among alternative actions and institutions, remains. Sen proposes a different solution, however.
Rejecting an Explicit Definition of Justice
For Sen, there is no need to define precisely what justice is in order to decide what is just or not just. He “sees no reason at all why”, in order to judge that option X is better than option Y, one needs to invoke a completely different option Z that would supposedly be “the best of all”. “The possibility of having an identifiably perfect alternative does not indicate that it is necessary, or indeed useful, to refer to it in judging the relative merits of two other alternatives. […] There would be something deeply odd in a general belief that a comparison of any two alternatives cannot be sensibly made without a prior identification of a supreme alternative. There is no analytical connection there at all” (p. 102; Fr. pp. 137-8). Sen explains this by saying that the knowledge that Everest is the highest mountain in the world is of no use in comparing the heights of Kilimanjaro and McKinley. A possible response to this is that, in comparing two mountains, the standard of measurement is simple and well-known (height), so that it is sufficient to specify what one is looking for (the taller mountain or the less tall one). In justice, specifying the standard of measurement (liberty, or collective happiness) is itself part of the problem in deciding whether one situation, rule, or action is better than another. As John Stuart Mill forcefully showed in Utilitarianism, it is precisely the existence of a criterion, a standard, that makes it possible to compare alternatives (see Mill, 1861, p. 158).
Criteria of Classification
Sen denies that it is necessary to know “the best option” in order to compare two other options. This may well be true. But he does not propose a unique criterion for making the comparison. For him, it is sufficient to have “a theory of practical reason to accommodate a framework for reasoning with the body of a capacious theory — that, at any rate, is the approach to the theory of justice that this work pursues” (p. 89; Fr. p. 123). But a “reasoned debate” does not necessarily lead to consensus — in this case, to a decision as to what is just and what is not. Even without such a standard or criterion, Sen believes that one can nevertheless agree about certain aspects of injustice: “For the emergence of a shared and useful understanding of many substantive issues of rights and duties (and also of rights and wrongs), there is no need to insist that we must have agreed complete orderings or universally accepted full partitions of the just, strictly separated from the unjust; for example, a common resolve to fight for the abolition of famines, or genocide, or terrorism, or slavery, or untouchability, or illiteracy, or epidemics, etc., does not require that there be a similarly extensive agreement on the appropriate formulae for inheritance rights, or income tax schedules, or levels of minimum wages, or copyrights laws” (pp. 144-145; Fr. p. 187). Yet if there is no reason why a group of diverse individuals should converge on Rawls’s principles of justice, it is not clear why there should be any consensus about ridding the world of famines, untouchability, epidemics, etc. Indeed, as Sen himself concedes: “Even when all the parties involved have their own complete orderings of justice that are not congruent, the ‘intersection’ between the rankings — that is, the sharedbeliefs of the different parties — will yield a partial ranking with different extents of articulation (depending on the extent of similarity among the orderings)” (pp. 104-105; Fr. p. 141). In other words, agreement will be only as extensive as the degree of commonality among the individual classifications. Extrapolating, one can even say that if the individuals share the same concept of justice, the ranking will be complete. But if their views partially diverge, there is no guarantee that they will agree any more about famine, genocide, or epidemics than they do about income tax schedules. More than that, even if they do agree about the injustice of such scourges, they may not agree about the means of combating them. Does the “capability approach” that Sen stresses in the final part of the book offer an answer to these objections?
Capability
For Sen, “the idea of capability … gives a central role to a person’s actual ability to do the different things that she values doing. … A person’s advantage in terms of opportunities is judged to be lower than that of another if she has less capability — less real opportunity — to achieve those things that she has reason to value” (p. 253, p. 231; p. 284, 279). Sen here refrains from stating any explicit criterion of well-being or justice. Indeed, he insists on the absence of such a criterion and points to “the absurdity of the argument that is sometimes presented, which claims that the capability approach would be usable — and “operational” — only if it [came] with a set of “given” weights on the distinct functionings in some fixed list of relevant capabilities. The search for given, pre-determined weights is not only conceptually ungrounded, but it also overlooks the fact that the valuations and weights to be used may reasonably be influenced by our own continued scrutiny and by the reach of public discussion” (p. 242; Fr. p. 296-297). Thus the decision is left to individual scrutiny and public debate — but that is all we learn about the content that Sen ascribes to the notion of justice. When Sen seeks to refine this concept, he writes that “the capability approach points to an informational focus in judging and comparing overall individual advantages, and does not, on its own, propose any specific formula about how that information may be used. […] The capability perspective does point to the central relevance of the inequality of capabilities in the assessment of social disparities, but it does not, on its own, propose any specific formula for policy decisions” (p. 232; Fr. p. 285). This may prove disappointing to the reader who expects to find in Sen’s work what the introduction promises, namely, a reflection intended to show what should be done to promote justice and eliminate injustice. Sen’s use of technical terminology from social choice theory makes reading The Idea of Justicesomewhat heavy-going (and the difficulty is compounded for the French reader by the rather heavy hand of the translator). Perhaps this is the price to be paid for understanding such a subtle and complex thinker. Although the work suggests new ways of thinking about various ethical doctrines and raises a number of critical questions, and although it does touch on many issues essential to any reflection on the nature of justice (such as the criteria by which one situation is judged to be better than another), Sen does not place himself on the same terrain as the philosophers whose work he challenges. Unlike Rawls (1971) and Bentham (1823), he does not seek to present a complete and fully developed theory of justice to which one might subscribe after examining its arguments. In fact, he limits itself to stating that only “reasoned examination” and “public debate” can establish what is just and what is not.
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer with the support of the Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
It’s so strange to me that these men limit themselves to talk about the illness without even hinting a possible cure. As if we were doomed for ever and society couldn’t move an inch to get out of the absurd pattern that we are in. As soon as we jump from our egocentrism to our “exocentrism”, that is, viewing the world from the whole to the part and not from the part to the imaginary picture of the whole, it’ll be possible to turn our world upside down and upwards!
Even so they formulate the illness beautifully and that makes every word worthy.
The texts get disorganized when moved so it might be better to go to their site and read it there or copy it there and read it elsewhere for more comfort.
“It is also
this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine
let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive
vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its
terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility. !
Jason Read 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009
file:///var/folders/bV/bVvO33opEz4w-3WiEQgS6++++TM/-Tmp-/WebKitPDFs-7A9ZMI/2465-9072-4-PB.pdf
ARTICLE
A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus:
Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity
Jason Read, The University of Southern Maine
ABSTRACT: This article examines Michel Foucault’s critical investigation of neoli-
beralism in the course published as Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège
de France, 1978-1979. Foucault’s lectures are interrogated along two axes. First, ex-
amining the way in which neoliberalism can be viewed as a particular production of
subjectivity, as a way in which individuals are constituted as subjects of “human
capital.” Secondly, Foucault’s analyses is augmented and critically examined in light
of other critical work on neoliberalism by Wendy Brown, David Harvey, Christian
Laval, Maurizo Lazzarato, and Antonio Negri. Of these various debates and discus-
sions, the paper argues that the discussion of real subsumption in Marx and Negri is
most important for understanding the specific politics of neoliberalism. Finally, the
paper argues that neoliberalism entails a fundamental reexamination of the tools of
critical thought, an examination of how freedom can constitute a form of subjection.
Keywords: Foucault, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, real subsumption, subjectivi-
ty.
In the opening pages of David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism we find the
following statement “Neoliberalism… has pervasive effects on ways of thought to
the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us
interpret, live in, and understand the world.”1
1
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
While Harvey’s book presents a great
deal of research on neoliberalism, presenting its origins in such academic institutions
as the “Chicago School,” its spread in the initial experiments in Chile, and its return
to the countries of its origin through the regimes of Reagan and Thatcher, as well as
its effects on China and the rest of the world, the actual process by which it became
hegemonic, to the point of becoming common sense, is not examined. While it might
be wrong to look for philosophy in a work which is primarily a work of history, a
“brief” history at that, aimed at shedding light on the current conjuncture, it is worth
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
26
pointing out this lacuna since it intersects with a commonly accepted idea about
“neoliberalism,” that it is as much a transformation in ideology as it is a transforma-
tion of ideology. Neoliberalism, in the texts that have critically confronted it, is gen-
erally understood as not just a new ideology, but a transformation of ideology in
terms of its conditions and effects. In terms of its conditions, it is an ideology that is
generated not from the state, or from a dominant class, but from the quotidian expe-
rience of buying and selling commodities from the market, which is then extended
across other social spaces, “the marketplace of ideas,” to become an image of society.
Secondly, it is an ideology that refers not only to the political realm, to an ideal of the
state, but to the entirety of human existence. It claims to present not an ideal, but a
reality; human nature. As Fredric Jameson writes, summing up this connection and
the challenge it poses: “The market is in human nature’ is the proposition that can-
not be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is the most crucial terrain of
ideological struggle in our time.”2
The nexus between the production of a particular conception of human nature, a
particular formation of subjectivity, and a particular political ideology, a particular
way of thinking about politics is at the center of Michel Foucault’s research. As much
as Foucault characterized his own project as studying “…the different modes by
which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects,” this process has always in-
tersected with regimes of power/knowledge.
A critical examination of neoliberalism must address this transformation of
its discursive deployment, as a new understanding of human nature and social exis-
tence rather than a political program. Thus it is not enough to contrast neoliberalism
as a political program, analyzing its policies in terms of success or failure. An ex-
amination of neoliberalism entails a reexamination of the fundamental problematic
of ideology, the intersection of power, concepts, modes of existence and subjectivity.
It is in confronting neoliberalism that the seemingly abstract debates of the last thirty
years, debates between poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and neo-Marxists
such as Antonio Negri about the nature of power and the relation between “ideolo-
gies” or “discourses” and material existence, cease to be abstract doctrines and be-
come concrete ways of comprehending and transforming the present. Foucault’s lec-
tures on neoliberalism do not only extend his own critical project into new areas,
they also serve to demonstrate the importance of grasping the present by examining
the way in which the truth and subjectivity are produced.
Homo Economicus: The Subject of Neoliberalism
3
2
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991), 263.
3
Michel Foucault, ”The Subject and Power,” Afterward to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structu-
Thus, it would appear that Foucault’s
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36.
27
work takes up exactly what writers on neoliberalism find to be so vexing: the man-
ner in which neoliberalism is not just a manner of governing states or economies, but
is intimately tied to the government of the individual, to a particular manner of liv-
ing. However, it is well known that Foucault’s research primarily views this relation
from ancient Greece through the nineteenth century, leaving modern developments
such as neoliberalism unaddressed. While this is the general pattern of Foucault’s
work, in the late seventies he devoted a year of his lectures at the Collège de France to
the topic of neoliberalism. These lectures, published as The Birth of Biopolitics, are
something of an anomaly in part because of this shift into the late-twentieth century
and also because unlike other lecture courses, at least those that have been published
in recent years, on “abnormals,” “psychiatric power” and “the hermeneutics of the
subject,” the material from these lectures never made it into Foucault’s published
works.
In order to frame Foucault’s analysis it is useful to begin with how he sees the
distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism. For Foucault, this difference has to
do with the different ways in which they each focus on economic activity. Classical
liberalism focused on exchange, on what Adam Smith called mankind’s tendency to
“barter, truck, and exchange.” It naturalized the market as a system with its own ra-
tionality, its own interest, and its own specific efficiency, arguing ultimately for its
superior efficiency as a distributor of goods and services. The market became a space
of autonomy that had to be carved out of the state through the unconditional right of
private property. What Foucault stresses in his understanding, is the way in which
the market becomes more than just a specific institution or practice to the point
where it has become the basis for a reinterpretation and thus a critique of state pow-
er. Classical liberalism makes exchange the general matrix of society. It establishes a
homology: just as relations in the marketplace can be understood as an exchange of
certain freedoms for a set of rights and liberties.4 Neoliberalism, according to Fou-
cault, extends the process of making economic activity a general matrix of social and
political relations, but it takes as its focus not exchange but competition.5
ralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: Universi-
ty of Chicago Press, 1982), 208.
4
As Foucault writes on this point: “The combination of the savage and exchange is, I
think, basic to juridical thought, and not only to eighteenth century theories of right—we
constantly find the savage exchange couple from the eighteenth century theory of right to
the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both the juridical thought
of the eighteenth century and the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the savage is essentially a man who exchanges.”(Michel Foucault, Society Must Be De-
fended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Pica-
dor, 2003), 194)
5
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans.
Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 12.
What the
two forms of liberalism, the “classical” and “neo” share, according to Foucault, is a
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
28
general idea of “homo economicus,” that is, the way in which they place a particular
“anthropology” of man as an economic subject at the basis of politics. What changes
is the emphasis from an anthropology of exchange to one of competition. The shift
from exchange to competition has profound effects: while exchange was considered
to be natural, competition is understood by the neo-liberals of the twentieth century
to be an artificial relation that must be protected against the tendency for markets to
form monopolies and interventions by the state. Competition necessitates a constant
intervention on the part of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions of the
market.6
What is more important for us is the way in which this shift in “anthropolo-
gy” from “homo economicus” as an exchanging creature to a competitive creature,
or rather as a creature whose tendency to compete must be fostered, entails a general
shift in the way in which human beings make themselves and are made subjects.
First, neoliberalism entails a massive expansion of the field and scope of economics.
Foucault cites Gary Becker on this point: “Economics is the science which studies
human behavior as relationship between ends and scarce means which have alter-
nate uses.”
7
Everything for which human beings attempt to realize their ends, from
marriage, to crime, to expenditures on children, can be understood “economically”
according to a particular calculation of cost for benefit. Secondly, this entails a mas-
sive redefinition of “labor” and the “worker.” The worker has become “human capi-
tal”. Salary or wages become the revenue that is earned on an initial investment, an
investment in one’s skills or abilities. Any activity that increases the capacity to earn
income, to achieve satisfaction, even migration, the crossing of borders from one
country to another, is an investment in human capital. Of course a large portion of
“human capital,” one’s body, brains, and genetic material, not to mention race or
class, is simply given and cannot be improved. Foucault argues that this natural lim-
it is something that exists to be overcome through technologies; from plastic surgery
to possible genetic engineering that make it possible to transform one’s initial in-
vestment. As Foucault writes summarizing this point of view: “Homo economicus is
an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.”8
Foucault’s object in his analysis is not to bemoan this as a victory for capitalist
ideology, the point at which the “ruling ideas” have truly become the ideas of the
“ruling class,” so much so that everyone from a minimum wage employee to a
C.E.O. considers themselves to be entrepreneurs. Nor is his task to critique the fun-
damental increase of the scope of economic rationality in neo-liberal economics: the
assertion that economics is coextensive with all of society, all of rationality, and that
it is economics “all the way down.” Rather, Foucault takes the neo-liberal ideal to be
a new regime of truth, and a new way in which people are made subjects: homo eco-
6
Ibid, 139.
7
Ibid, 235.
8
Ibid., 226.
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36.
29
nomicus is fundamentally different subject, structured by different motivations and
governed by different principles, than homo juridicus, or the legal subject of the state.
Neoliberalism constitutes a new mode of “governmentality,” a manner, or a mentali-
ty, in which people are governed and govern themselves. The operative terms of this
governmentality are no longer rights and laws but interest, investment and competi-
tion. Whereas rights exist to be exchanged, and are some sense constituted through
the original exchange of the social contract, interest is irreducible and inalienable, it
cannot be exchanged. The state channels flows of interest and desire by making de-
sirable activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly, counting on the fact
that subjects calculate their interests. As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism
would seem paradoxically to govern without governing; that is, in order to function
its subjects must have a great deal of freedom to act—to choose between competing
strategies.
The new governmental reason needs freedom; therefore, the new art of govern-
ment consumes freedom. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of
government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in the sense of
the imperative: “be free,” with the immediate contradiction that this imperative
may contain…[T]he liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed
in the eighteenth century entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship
with freedom. Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the es-
tablishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on
threats, etcetera.9
These freedoms, the freedoms of the market, are not the outside of politics, of go-
vernmentality, as its limit, but rather are an integral element of its strategy. As a
mode of governmentality, neoliberalism operates on interests, desires, and aspira-
tions rather than through rights and obligations; it does not directly mark the body,
as sovereign power, or even curtail actions, as disciplinary power; rather, it acts on
the conditions of actions. Thus, neoliberal governmentality follows a general trajec-
tory of intensification. This trajectory follows a fundamental paradox; as power be-
comes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also becomes more intense, saturating the
field of actions, and possible actions.
10
Foucault limits his discussion of neoliberalism to its major theoretical texts
and paradigms, following its initial formulation in post-war Germany through to its
most comprehensive version in the Chicago School. Whereas Foucault’s early ana-
9
Ibid., 63.
10
Jeffrey Nealon has developed the logic of intensification in Foucault, arguing that this can
be seen in the transition from disciplinary power to biopower; the former operates
through specific sites and identities, while the latter operates on sexuality, which is dif-
fuse throughout society, coextensive with subjectivity (Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond
Foucault: Power and its Intensification Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press),
2008, 46). A similar point could be raised with respect to neoliberalism.
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
30
lyses are often remembered for their analysis of practical documents, the description
of the panopticon or the practice of the confessional, the lectures on “neoliberalism”
predominantly follow the major theoretical discussions. This is in some sense a limi-
tation of the lecture course format, or at least a reflection that this material was never
developed into a full study. Any analysis that is faithful to the spirit and not just the
letter of Foucault’s text would focus on its existence as a practice and not just a
theory diffused throughout the economy, state, and society. As Thomas Lemke ar-
gues, neoliberalism is a political project that attempts to create a social reality that it
suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social relations while
fostering those same relations.11 The contemporary trend away from long term labor
contracts, towards temporary and part-time labor, is not only an effective economic
strategy, freeing corporations from contracts and the expensive commitments of
health care and other benefits, it is an effective strategy of subjectification as well. It
encourages workers to see themselves not as “workers” in a political sense, who
have something to gain through solidarity and collective organization, but as “com-
panies of one.” They become individuals for whom every action, from taking
courses on a new computer software application to having their teeth whitened, can
be considered an investment in human capital. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher
write: “Corporations’ massive recourse to subcontracting plays a fundamental role
in this to the extent that it turns the workers’ desire for independence…into a ‘busi-
ness spirit’ that meets capital’s growing need for satellites.”12
Because Foucault brackets what could be considered the “ideological” di-
mension of neoliberalism, its connection with the global hegemony of not only capi-
talism, but specifically a new regime of capitalist accumulation, his lectures have lit-
tle to say about its historical conditions. Foucault links the original articulation of
neoliberalism to a particular reaction to Nazi Germany. As Foucault argues, the orig-
inal neo-liberals, the “Ordo-liberals,” considered Nazi Germany not to be an effect of
capitalism. But the most extreme version of what is opposed to capitalism and the
market—planning. While Foucault’s analysis captures the particular “fear of the
state” that underlies neoliberalism, its belief that any planning, any intervention
against competition, is tantamount to totalitarianism. It however does not account
for the dominance of neoliberalism in the present, specifically its dominance as a
particular “technology of the self,” a particular mode of subjection. At the same time,
Foucault offers the possibility of a different understanding of the history of neolibe-
Neoliberalism is not
simply an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term, or a belief that one could elect
to have or not have, but is itself produced by strategies, tactics, and policies that
create subjects of interest, locked in competition.
11
Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxis, 14, 3
(2002), 60.
12
Eric Alliez and Michel Feher, The Luster of Capital, trans. Alyson Waters, Zone, 1, 2, (1987),
349.
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36.
31
ralism when he argues that neoliberalism, or the neo-liberal subject as homo economi-
cus, or homo entrepreneur, emerges to address a particular lacunae in liberal economic
thought, and that is labor. In this sense neoliberalism rushes to fill the same void, the
same gap, that Marx attempted to fill, without reference to Marx, and with very dif-
ferent results.13 Marx and neo-liberals agree that although classical economic theory
examined the sphere of exchange, the market, it failed to enter the “hidden abode of
production” examining how capital is produced. Of course the agreement ends
there, because what Marx and neo-liberals find in labor is fundamentally different:
for Marx labor is the sphere of exploitation while for the neo-liberals, as we have
seen, labor is no sooner introduced as a problem than the difference between labor
and capital is effaced through the theory of “human capital.”14 Neoliberalism scram-
bles and exchanges the terms of opposition between “worker” and “capitalist.” To
quote Etienne Balibar, “The capitalist is defined as worker, as an ‘entrepreneur’; the
worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital.”15
13
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 221.
14
In The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault argues that Marx filled this void with an “anthropolo-
gy” of labor. This is similar to the critique that Foucault develops in “Truth and Juridical
Forms,” in which he argues that Marx posited labor as the “concrete essence of man.” As
Foucault writes: “So I don’t think we can simply accept the traditional Marxist analysis,
which assumes that, labor being man’s concrete essence, the capitalist system is what
transforms labor into profit, into hyperprofit or surplus value. The fact is capitalism pe-
netrates much more deeply into our existence. That system, as it was established in the
nineteenth century, was obliged to elaborate a set of political techniques, techniques of
power, by which man was tied to something like labor—a set of techniques by which
people’s bodies and time would become labor power and labor time so as to be effective-
ly used and thereby transformed into hyper profit” (Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridi-
cal Forms,” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Three, trans.
Robert Hurley et al. Ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 86). This idea, of
“capillary power relations” that turn man into a subject of labor, is an idea which Fou-
cault sometimes develops as a critique and at other times attributes to Marx, see for ex-
ample “Les Mailles du pouvoir”, in Dits et Écrits Tome IV: 1980-198, ed. D. Defert and F.
Ewald (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994) and less explicitly Discipline and Punish.
15
Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After
Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 53.
Labor is no longer limited
to the specific sites of the factory or the workplace, but is any activity that works to-
wards desired ends. The terms “labor” and “human capital” intersect, overcoming
in terminology their longstanding opposition; the former becomes the activity and
the latter becomes the effects of the activity, its history. From this intersection the
discourse of the economy becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which
every action–crime, marriage, higher education and so on–can be charted according
to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure; it can be seen as an in-
vestment. Thus situating Marx and neoliberalism with respect to a similar problem
makes it possible to grasp something of the politics of neoliberalism, which through
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
32
a generalization of the idea of the “entrepreneur,” “investment” and “risk” beyond
the realm of finance capital to every quotidian relation, effaces the very fact of ex-
ploitation. Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of “capitalism with-
out capitalism,” a way of maintaining not only private property but the existing dis-
tribution of wealth in capitalism while simultaneously doing away with the anta-
gonism and social insecurity of capitalism, in this case paradoxically by extending
capitalism, at least its symbols, terms, and logic, to all of society. The opposition be-
tween capitalist and worker has been effaced not by a transformation of the mode of
production, a new organization of the production and distribution of wealth, but by
the mode of subjection, a new production of subjectivity. Thus, neoliberalism entails a
very specific extension of the economy across all of society; it is not, as Marx argued,
because everything rests on an economic base (at least in the last instance) that the
effects of the economy are extended across of all of society, rather it is an economic
perspective, that of the market, that becomes coextensive with all of society. As
Christian Laval argues, all actions are seen to conform to the fundamental economic
ideas of self-interest, of greatest benefit for least possible cost. It is not the structure
of the economy that is extended across society but the subject of economic thinking,
its implicit anthropology.16
In the Grundrisse, Marx does not use the term “human capital,” but fixed cap-
ital, a term generally used to refer to machinery, factories, and other investments in
the means of production to refer to the subjectivity, the subjective powers of the
worker. In general Marx understood the progression of capital to be a process by
which the skills, knowledge, and know-how of workers were gradually incorporated
into machinery, into fixed capital, reducing the laborer to an unskilled and ultimate-
ly replaceable cog in a machine. This is “proletarianization” the process by which
capitalism produces its gravediggers in a class of impoverished workers who have
nothing to lose but their chains. In the Grundrisse, however, Marx addresses a fun-
Resisting the Present: Towards a Criticism of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is thus a “restoration” not only of class power, of capitalism as the on-
ly possible economic system, it is a restoration of capitalism as synonymous with ra-
tionality. Thus, the question remains, why now, or at least why over the last thirty
years has capitalism taken this neo-liberal turn? If Foucault’s invocation of the spec-
ter of Nazi Germany is insufficient to account for the specific historical formation of
capitalism, the opposition to Marx does little to help clarify the dominance of neoli-
beralism now. Somewhat paradoxically this question can be at least partially ans-
wered by looking at one of the few points of intersection between Marx and neolibe-
ralism.
16
Christian Laval, L’homme économique: Essai sur les racines du néolibéralisme (Paris: Galli-
mard, 2007), 17.
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36.
33
damentally different possibility, capital’s exploitation of not just the physical powers
of the body, but the general social knowledge spread throughout society and embo-
died in each individual. This is what Marx refers to as the “general intellect”—the
diffused social knowledge of society. This knowledge, the capacity to use various
languages, protocols, and symbolic systems, is largely produced outside of work. As
Marx writes: “The saving of labor time is equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time
for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the pro-
ductive power of labor as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint
of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital,
this fixed capital being man himself.”17
For Antonio Negri there is a direct relationship between real subsumption as
a transformation of the capitalist mode of production and neoliberalism as a trans-
formation of the presentation of capitalism. It is not simply that neoliberalism works
to efface the fundamental division between worker and capitalist, between wages
and capital, through the production of neo-liberal subjectivity. After all this opposi-
tion, this antagonism has preexisted neoliberalism by centuries. Neoliberalism is a
discourse and practice that is aimed to curtail the powers of labor that are distri-
buted across all of society—at the exact moment in which all of social existence be-
comes labor, or potential labor, neoliberalism constructs the image of a society of ca-
pitalists, of entrepreneurs. As production moves from the closed space of the factory
to become distributed across all of social space, encompassing all spheres of cultural
and social existence, neoliberalism presents an image of society as a market, effacing
Marx’s deviation from the standard termi-
nology of his own corpus, terminology that designates the worker as labor power (or
living labor), the machine or factory as fixed capital, and money as circulating capi-
tal, is ultimately revealing. It reveals something of a future that Marx could barely
envision, a future that has become our present: the real subsumption of society by
capital. This subsumption involves not only the formation of what Marx referred to
as a specifically capitalist mode of production, but also the incorporation of all sub-
jective potential, the capacity to communicate, to feel, to create, to think, into pro-
ductive powers for capital. Capital no longer simply exploits labor, understood as
the physical capacity to transform objects, but puts to work the capacities to create
and communicate that traverse social relations. It is possible to say that with real
subsumption capital has no outside, there is no relationship that cannot be trans-
formed into a commodity, but at the same time capital is nothing but outside, pro-
duction takes place outside of the factory and the firm, in various social relation-
ships. Because of this fundamental displacement subjectivity becomes paramount,
subjectivity itself becomes productive and it is this same subjectivity that must be
controlled.
17
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nico-
laus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 712.
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
34
production altogether.18 This underscores the difference between neoliberalism as a
form of power and the disciplinary power at work in the closed spaces of the factory.
If disciplinary power worked by confining and fixing bodies to the production appa-
ratuses, neoliberal power works by dispersing bodies and individuals through pri-
vatization and isolation. Deregulation, the central term and political strategy of neo-
liberalism, is not the absence of governing, or regulating, but a form of governing
through isolation and dispersion.19 As more and more wealth is produced by the col-
lective social powers of society, neoliberalism presents us with an image of society
made up of self-interested individuals. For Negri, neoliberalism and the idea of hu-
man capital is a misrepresentation of the productive powers of society. “The only
problem is that extreme liberalization of the economy reveals its opposite, namely
that the social and productive environment is not made up of atomized individu-
als…the real environment is made up of collective individuals.”20 In Negri’s analysis,
the relation between neoliberalism and real subsumption takes on the characteristics
of a Manichean opposition. We are all workers or we are all capitalists: either view
society as an extension of labor across all social spheres, from the factory to the
school to the home, and across all aspects of human existence, from the work of the
hands to the mind, or view society as a logic of competition and investment that en-
compasses all human relationships. While Negri’s presentation has an advantage
over Foucault’s lectures in that it grasps the historical formation of neoliberalism
against the backdrop of a specific transformation of capital, in some sense following
Foucault’s tendency to present disciplinary power and biopower against the back-
drop of specific changes in the economic organization of society, it does so by almost
casting neoliberalism as an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term. It would ap-
pear that for Negri real subsumption is the truth of society, and neoliberalism is only
a misrepresentation of that truth. As Thomas Lemke has argued, Foucault’s idea of
governmentality, is argued against such a division that posits actual material reality
on one side and its ideological misrepresentation on the other. A governmentality is
a particular mentality, a particular manner of governing, that is actualized in habits,
perceptions, and subjectivity. Governmentality situates actions and conceptions on
the same plane of immanence.21
18
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1994), 226.
19
Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, trans.
James Newell (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 99.
20
Ibid., 206.
21
Lemke, 54.
Which is to say, that any criticism of neoliberalism
as governmentality must not focus on its errors, on its myopic conception of social
existence, but on its particular production of truth. For Foucault, we have to take se-
riously the manner in which the fundamental understanding of individuals as go-
verned by interest and competition is not just an ideology that can be refused and
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36.
35
debunked, but is an intimate part of how our lives and subjectivity are structured.
Despite Negri’s tendency to lapse back into an opposition between labor and
ideology, his object raises important questions echoed by other critics of neoliberal-
ism. What is lost in neoliberalism is the critical distance opened up between different
spheres and representations of subjectivity, not only the difference between work
and the market, as in Marxism, but also the difference between the citizen and the
economic subject, as in classical liberalism. All of these differences are effaced as one
relation; that of economic self-interest, or competition, replaces the multiple spaces
and relations of worker, citizen, and economic subject of consumption. To put the
problem in Foucault’s terms, what has disappeared in neoliberalism is the tactical
polyvalence of discourse; everything is framed in terms of interests, freedoms and
risks.22 As Wendy Brown argues, one can survey the quotidian effects or practices of
governmentality in the manner in which individualized/market based solutions ap-
pear in lieu of collective political solutions: gated communities for concerns about
security and safety; bottled water for concerns about water purity; and private
schools (or vouchers) for failing public schools, all of which offer the opportunity for
individuals to opt out rather than address political problems.23 Privatization is not
just neoliberalism’s strategy for dealing with the public sector, what David Harvey
calls accumulation by dispossession, but a consistent element of its particular form
of governmentality, its ethos, everything becomes privatized, institutions, structures,
issues, and problems that used to constitute the public.24 It is privatization all the
way down. For Brown, neoliberalism entails a massive de-democratization, as terms
such as the public good, rights and debate, no longer have any meaning. “The model
neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her or himself among various social, po-
litical, and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize
these options.”25
Foucault’s development, albeit partial, of account of neoliberalism as go-
vernmentality has as its major advantage a clarification of the terrain on which neo-
Thus, while it is possible to argue that neoliberalism is a more flexi-
ble, an open form of power as opposed to the closed spaces of disciplines, a form of
power that operates on freedoms, on a constitutive multiplicity, it is in some sense
all the more closed in that as a form of governmentality, as a political rationality, it is
without an outside. It does not encounter any tension with a competing logic of
worker or citizen, with a different articulation of subjectivity. States, corporations,
individuals are all governed by the same logic, that of interest and competition.
22
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage, 1978), 101.
23
Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and Democrati-
zation,” Political Theory, 34, 6 (2006), 704.
24
David Harvey, 154.
25
Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework: Critical
Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2005), 43.
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
36
liberalism can be countered. It is not enough to simply oppose neoliberalism as ide-
ology, revealing the truth of social existence that it misses, or to enumerate its vari-
ous failings as policy. Rather any opposition to neoliberalism must take seriously its
effectiveness, the manner in which it has transformed work subjectivity and social
relationships. As Foucault argues, neoliberalism operates less on actions, directly
curtailing them, then on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibil-
ity. The reigning ideal of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so
much limit what one can do, neoliberal thinkers are famously indifferent to prescrip-
tive ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational investment,
but limit the sense of what is possible. Specifically the ideal of the fundamentally
self-interested individual curtails any collective transformation of the conditions of
existence. It is not that such actions are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a
sovereign or the structures of disciplinary power, they are not seen as possible,
closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals. It is perhaps no acci-
dent that one of the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Mar-
garet Thatcher, used the slogan, “there is no alternative,” legitimating neoliberalism
based on the stark absence of possibilities. Similarly, and as part of a belated re-
sponse to the former Prime Minister, it also perhaps no accident that the slogan of
the famous Seattle protests against the IMF and World Bank was, “another world is
possible,” and it is very often the sense of a possibility of not only another world, but
of another way of organizing politics that is remembered, the image of turtles and
teamsters marching hand and hand, when those protests are referred to.26
26
Maurizio Lazzarato, Les révolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), 19.
It is also
this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine
let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive
vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its
terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility.
Naked in the public square
Freedom Watch
By HARVEY SILVERGLATE AND JAMES TIERNEY | June 25, 2008
In the finest Puritan tradition, Middlesex District Attorney Gerald Leone is crusading to save Harvard Square from the shock and awe of the nude human form. The next act of this absurd political-theater production will return to Cambridge District Court this Friday, at considerable expense to taxpayers.
Naked in the public square
By HARVEY SILVERGLATE AND JAMES TIERNEY | June 25, 2008 It’s possible the DA recognizes that, despite his victory at the SJC, the lewdness prosecution is eventually doomed. If Ora is convicted and her lawyer, Daniel Beck, was to take the case to federal court, the charges would likely not withstand a First Amendment challenge. Plus, as Beck told Singleton in a recently filed brief, the lewdness complaint never should have been issued against Ora in the first place, since those charges in Massachusetts have been successfully prosecuted only when the cases involved “overtly sexual behavior in public”; a defendant who “exposed himself to a targeted person . . . , usually minors (so-called flashing)”; or a defendant who “exposed himself in the attempt or commission of a sexual assault.”
According to Beck, the evidence the clerk heard when issuing the complaint against Ora wasn’t consistent with any of those situations. And if the SJC requires “alarm or shock,” what Ora did doesn’t stack up, either. Beck is rightly asking the judge to throw out the case (again).
This may be why the DA has supplemented the charges against Ora by seeking a new complaint for “indecent exposure,” on the assumption that somehow the proof needed for that charge would be lower than for “open and gross lewdness.” This application, too, will be heard on Friday. But since Ora’s conduct is likely constitutionally protected, it doesn’t matter whether it’s described as lewdness or indecency. The Middlesex County DA is grasping at straws, playing with words, and wasting taxpayer money.
Harvey Silverglate is a criminal-defense and civil-liberties lawyer and writer. James F. Tierney is an incoming law student at the University of Chicago and was Silverglate’s research assistant this year.
Most of the street performers in the Square are innocuous, but some can be edgy. On June 25, 2005, street performer and political activist Ria Ora danced naked in the Pit. It wasn’t gratuitous nudity; she purported to be denouncing the commercialization of Christmas on the half-year anniversary of that holiday.
But Ora’s nude dancing apparently offended an employee of the Out of Town News kiosk, who called the cops. The officers arrested Ora and persuaded the Cambridge District Court clerk to issue a complaint against her for “open and gross lewdness.”
Judge Severlin Singleton III dismissed the charges the first time around, reasoning that the lewdness law as written is “[a] blanket prohibition against public nudity” that unconstitutionally “proscribes expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.” When the DA appealed, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) reversed Singleton’s decision. That appellate ruling not only prolongs the case against Ora, it makes it harder for adventurous street performers to express themselves.
According to the SJC, the lewdness law may be invoked only if two conditions co-exist: the “lewdness” (in the Ora case, nudity) is “imposed on an unsuspecting or unwilling audience,” and “the display of nudity [is] intentional, done in a manner to produce alarm or shock, and actually [produces] alarm or shock.”
Almost all street-performance art, including art that is conceivably offensive to some audience member, is by its nature “imposed on an unsuspecting or unwilling audience.” But why should we single out Ora’s performance — given the Square’s off-beat atmosphere — as being particularly alarming or shocking, and leave it unprotected under the First Amendment?
The SJC has given the DA another chance to fit the facts into a narrowed reading of the law, but successful prosecution still seems unlikely. Many forms of expression, after all, “produce alarm or shock” — including nudity in such familiar contexts as movies — but are nonetheless protected.
In one famous example, a young anti-war protester, Paul Cohen, was convicted in 1968 for wearing a jacket emblazoned with FUCK THE DRAFT inside the Los Angeles Courthouse. The US Supreme Court threw out his conviction in Cohen v. California, in part because the justices recognized that his use of “fuck,” shocking though it may be to an involuntary audience, was integral to his forceful political message. As Justice John Marshall Harlan observed in Cohen, perceptions of offense are always subjective; indeed, “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”
The SJC’s attempt to determine whether a public act is alarming or shocking, and therefore potentially lewd and prosecutable, does not seem to jibe with Cohen’s recognition that shocking the audience is one function of free expression — not a ground for censorship. Still, the SJC’s definitions will govern the “open and gross lewdness” prosecution on Friday.
This poem was taken from facebook, I don’t know if Dan wrote it but there’s no other signature
Dan
The Power of Emptiness
The “void” or “ psychological emptiness” is a strange
phenomenon,
It appears spontaneously, in the pause between two
thoughts,
As the old thought ends its course and disappears,
Its end is the gate, natural silence ensues.
Insist in being with it, as much as you can,
The mind is completely silent, we are attentive – a clear
consciousness,
All meanings, boundaries disappear – us and the Infinite
are “One”;
Practically, we have a new mind – always fresh.
Being in the pause – I become infinite!
It separates two worlds. I leave the limited world
And enter Boundlessness, through total melting;
The whole being is calm – a constant sparkle.
There is no time, no space – just everlasting Eternity;
I move in direct contact with life, in a permanent present.
I am Pure Energy, without motivations,
The simplicity of existence integrates us completely.
We really encounter Life only through this “now”,
Free from the old, we are able to embrace the new.
All this beauty vanishes, when another thought appears,
It comes from the knowing mind – an old recording.
Let it play its game, do not oppose any resistance,
Encounter it as it is, without any purpose,
It will certainly disappear, and “emptiness” ensues again,
Another opportunity to encounter it practically.
We find the real meaning of Life through this “void”,
It is a boundary line between the two worlds:
On the one side the limited, where the “ego” is the
master.
On the other, the Infinite, where Love is the master.
Emptiness also separates Light from the darkness,
The permanent chaos through struggle, contradictions and
conflicts,
From the harmonious being, equilibrium and joy;
The whole egocentrism perishes, by encountering the
void.
Peace, divine order becomes our nature
It changes our way of being, without effort or will,
Only through this psychological void, we become honest
and humane,
The Purity of the Energy – makes titans out of pigmies .
Let this “psychological emptiness” be your guide,
In everything you encounter on your spiritual path.
If it is not the starting point, we easily get deceived,
Only through emptiness – we become Love!
Porque no he tenido hogar me he tenido que volver el hogar de mi misma.
Y sin embargo gozo con las calles, las casas y los edificios como si fueran todos mi hogar y reconociera en los corredores soleados y las matas verdes de alegría algo más profundo que la casa, más esencial que la nación, al ser humano que palpita en el espacio público.
Donde poner tanto gozo? Con quien compartirlo? lo guardo entonces en los pliegues de mi sonrisa interior, el corazón que late más lentamente a medida que se ensancha su capacidad de abrazar en un aliento el palpitar de la vida.
Soy feliz! Not happy sino feliz! Es extraño que en inglés no podemos decir que somos felices con la misma palabra y que la felicidad sea algo completamente diferente para los angloparlantes que para los hispanos.
Hablamos de felicidad cuando el alma vibra con su propia existencia abierta como una flor que en su color invita al sol a posarse, mientras la abeja liba en su seno.
Feliz! De que el mundo sea! Feliz! De que seamos! Feliz! De vivir y morir, vivir muriendo y morir viviendo. Me admiro ante el aliento con que otros viven y mueren, corren y recorren sus propios caminos, dejan que alcen vuelo sus almas y aterrizan en las mañanas en sus lechos para vivir un día más, las pequeñas cosas de cada día.
Es hermoso vivir! Y morir. No pienso correrle a la muerte aunque no tenga afán de encontrarla. Ya nos intuímos en el cuerpo que ella alienta, oscureciéndose. Siempre ha estado allí como el ruedo detrás de la falda de la vida.
Gozo. Goza mi alma. Goza y se regocija de gozar, sola y en silencio. Como se dirá gozar en inglés? No lo se aunque sepa más ingles que español pero este goce que sentimos en Español no existe en el diccionario británico, no entienden mis hermanos angloparlantes lo que digo cuando goza mi alma. En todo Shakespeare no han gozado como El Quijote! Talvez más pero nunca igual. Quizá el sol nunca alcanzó a calentarles tanto las pantorrillas para gozar con la hoja de plátano, el descascarado arbol de guayaba o el frondoso mango. Sus plantas tendrán y sus almas gozarán como las nuestras cuando en la adultes recuerdan los caminos de la niñez que ya talaron. Humanos al fín de cuentas, aunque pocos lo recuerden, gozamos todos con la misma certeza, el aliento de la niñez.
There’s something very strange about the fact that in English we cannot express something like gozo without saying I. The fact that the I is implicit in the form of the verb gives the soul of a Spanish speaker a very different dimension of the experience. I enjoy, I speak, I walk, I live are very different to gozo, habla, camino, vivo. It is inevitably less self centered than I enjoy, I speak…
The fact that gozo implies that I enjoy but is not explicit about it, allows me to feel that there’s something rather general about it, wonderfully general, like a “state” of joy to which I am a part but that that state of joy is in itself an even more objective reality than my self. I enjoy, I speak, seems to center around the I more than the act while gozo, hablo, centers around the act more than the individuality. A very different emotion and experience is connected with the words.
In the US this “I am””I do” is very active while in England the I is less emphatic and the “could” and “would” soften it a great deal: could I come with you? Would you like me to work here? I would like to come, I would very much enjoy it…
I heard an English lady in an interview the other day and she said, “the lady gives very extreme examples that might work in America but England is different” talking about the woman who pays drug-addicts to get a vasectomy. I immediately realized that she was talking about the particular subjectivity of the people in each country. I also understood why it is very difficult for American or Europeans to take my language. There is something about how the language is spoken that will not help people understand each other and together with the kind of language a whole different approach to life is contained in it and that also makes it very difficult for people from different nations to understand each other. Only when we’re able to go beyond our nationalities into a more objective human reality, will we be able to communicate with each other. This cannot happen by itself, we must want it to happen and make it happen. New generations through the internet might some day come closer to that when they actually meet.
We live such different lives. The people in Medellín where I live, live inhuman lives. Women and men are killed easily by the men they owe money to for a hundred or two hundred dollars so that others become afraid and pay. Teenagers are killed by older teenagers if they are a little too strong so that they won’t be the ones killing them when they get old enough. The gang leaders are so because they’ve killed the most people.
People are killed everyday in miserable crimes and the news don’t even talk about them. The politicians are corrupt and so is most everybody else with power connections. The few who are not are counted and quickly taken care of by the sicarios, the teenage hired killers.
There is tremendous suffering in this country. The inhumanity and absurdity of things is experienced daily. The ignorance, the human poverty, the fear of the people and the hopelessness. The people pray and leave their destiny to God, like in cults.
When will we start working seriously towards a more human world?
The effort is the same but the reward much more dignified.
The suffering is as much but the quality of life much more genuine.
In the low income neighborhoods of Medellin, the system of debt is called the Daily Pay. People borrow small sums for an urgency and then have to pay a little everyday.Most people are borrowing. If they don’t pay they are killed not so much because the little they owe matters but because the lenders need to reassure everyone that they cannot not pay. The mother of a friend of my neighbour was stabbed brutally because she owed a hundred dollars. A man who sells hot dogs told me that he ended up working to pay the debt without enough to keep anything for himself and so left the neighbourhood before they killed him. There is much fear and tension.
Apparently the Daily Pay system was started by paramilitary who wanted to invest all the money they get from drug trafficking.
What is interesting about this video when one compares the experiment with what happens in cults is that it doesn’t matter if people are dressed up and their ego puffed up, given concerts every week and good food, as long as they are willing to obey others as authorities and alienate themselves from the rest of the world, they’ll end up in a process of self annihilation. At least in prisons people keep up their hatred towards the establishment as long as possible but in cults, they end up “loving” or becoming completely emotionally dependent victims. The perpetrators of the brainwashing become convinced that it is justified. That their mistreatment is what they are meant to do. In cults the forms this takes are different. Those in the inner circle who represent the authority don’t express outward violence, they impose emotional violence through indifference. The individuals who don’t play the game are socially ignored, nothing is shared with them and they are allowed to pay but not to participate. All these things happened to me because I never played the game even when I married Girard Haven, the second in command. I opposed him in every meal and kept holding up the system but everything was used to their advantage.
I was talking about this experiment two or three years ago in the fofblog and they are only just beginning to bear to listen to the information in this material. What people don’t want to understand is that cults submit people with triffles, pretty things and comfort but the long term effect is exactly the same as if they were being submitted in a prison camp. The mass suicide in cults is the final effect of the organization. Self annihilation is the result. In prison camps people don’t seem to come to such self annihilating mechanism, they hold out or become aggressive towards others but not themselves as clearly as in cults. This is what I’ve been saying for three years and this is exactly what they were not willing to listen to in the fofblog. It is a very painful reality to accept but it is there absolutely clear for those who understand the mechanisms.
Supporting laws that protect such cults is acting against the well being of humanity. Religion everywhere has used these mechanisms and cults, as microcosmic reflections of the outside world turn the same mechanism inside out and use them to their agenda. People are being used, manipulated and annihilated without there being anyone willing to stop it in the United States. France is beginning to act seriously against these organizations and apparently Germany too but they are still protected in most parts of the world.
My criticism of the United States and its position in relation to cults is what led to my being banned from the fofblog besides my frustration and negativity at realizing that these people couldn’t hear what I was saying. We reached a critical point and were unable to move beyond it. They were still not ready to move beyond it when they allowed me in again. They were hoping I had settled for their truths and was going to “behave” like in a cult and release them from confronting the problem, only to find that they were doubly confronted, banning me a second time. My friend Ton acted like these people in the experiment and took the role of “submitting” me trying to convince me that I was crazy and couldn’t know enough or know with enough authority what I was saying but I know what I’ve been saying all the time and there’s nothing crazy about it. I studied the mechanisms of such psychological processes when I was eighteen in The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich. What is amazing is that I fell in the trap like everybody else but at least I got out of it. Too many are still inside. The madness is in those that hide themselves from seeing the truth about cults and in not wanting to see the truth about themselves: their own beauty and humanity, their own self.
The tragedy of our times is that people have stranded from their essence so badly that they have become systematically used to acting against their own self. They no longer trust themselves enough to protest or exist in their own right just like the prisoners in the experiment. They live within the folds of positions of power or victims of power without questioning the role. Their “being” or rather, the “state” of their being is expressed in their inability to allow their own consciousness to extend beyond the role into the sphere of the human being and our freedom to choose our destiny. In as much as they don’t feel free, they, we, continue to submit to the status quo everywhere without being able to act differently just like the prisoners in the experiment. The lack of social cohesion is what keeps us tied to the role, incapable of acting against the status quo and those in positions of authority. The need to belong, the self protecting mechanism of the instinctive center, keeps us tied to the least dangerous behavior trying to survive at all cost by keeping a low profile rather than speaking up against the status quo and those in power.
Submitting and accepting the status quo keeps our consciousness tied to the identifications established by the programming that we’ve come to inherit. We act and react like our parents acted and reacted, very few people step out of the mold of their own family because they cannot free themselves from their identifications with their own family. That identification conforms part of the imaginary picture of themselves. People need to free themselves not only from the identifications they hold in relation to their family, we must free our selves from the identifications that the social environment in which we grew up implanted in our outer skin or personality and also free ourselves from the identification with our “nationality”. The human stands beyond all these identifications. Each of our acts is conditioned by each of these identifications. When the act is not born in the human it is an act that re-enacts the identification implanted in us by our family, social environment and nation. It is the repetition of the mechanism without consciousness and it is in these sense that it is “mechanical”, a reaction and not an action. It is also in this sense that “man cannot do”. Mechanical man cannot “do” because he is living out the “instinctive” aspect of a human being’s life not different to an animal and becomes a social being that is merely acting and reacting to survive within that society accepting its status quo without questioning it or his own self. It is only when a human being is capable of freeing his own self from his or her programming and is able to act according to his or her consciousness that real “ACTS” or “doing” actually becomes possible.
Evolution cannot take place through repetition of conditioned behavior just like creativity is not there when an artist copies another great artist. A human being can only “evolve” and hence “create” from his and her own self, from Real I. This is the only difference between human beings and animals in terms of their evolution. Animals cannot experience a creative act, they are, like unconscious human beings, repeating the conditioned behavior that they were submitted to. The possibilities of surviving without that conditioned behavior are null. The human being might not have the possibility of surviving for long when he or she frees him or herself from the conditioned behavior, it is the pattern in history that such individuals are persecuted and crucified as quickly as possible. These men and women in history or “our life” are, like the “I”s within an individual, forces of consciousness for the rest of us helping us towards greater freedom.
There is nothing particularly different in these individuals than in the rest of the human beings. Everyone is capable of freeing him and herself from his or her identifications from the family, the particular society and the national conditionings. Freeing one’s self from ones family, particular society and nationality does not mean separating one’s self from one’s family, society or nationality, or turning against them as happens in cults. It means freeing one’s self from the conditionings within these spheres that have fallen into a descending octave and turned against the human spirit. Every individual vivifies or vilifies the human spirit in each one of his and her acts no matter who or where he or she is acting. Every individual acts against his or her own self or that of others in every act or acts for the well being of his or her own self and that of others in each act. Conditioned by our identifications we fail to act up to the well being of our selves or others until we free our selves from our identifications and begin to act according to our consciousness no matter the consequences.
Every single human being is the man in Plato’s cavern pointing at the light outside, the moment we free ourselves from our identifications. The shadows on the wall are our identifications and those who become free of them can see the tragedy of the situation.
“Tragedy” in the fact that human beings live, not like animals who do not harm each other willingly but like inhuman beings who hurt each other generation after generation unable to bring their instinct above their individualism into consciousness of the whole: the whole of mankind: humanity. We are equal not because we have the same amounts of money or because we belong to the same family or nationality, we are equal because we are each and everyone of us a human being. Each individual is merely a cell of mankind. In our lack of consciousness we act against each other. Consciously we cannot move a finger against anyone else or our selves. This world that we share is the stage in which we are playing out our evolution or the possibility of surviving our own destructive capacities. We are all in the same theater no matter how lonely we think we are, no matter how individualistic we pretend to be. Nations have their own role in our evolution just like the different centers in our body have a role. Each nation is developing aspects of our selves. Each one has its own greatness. But just like a leg is not a man, a nation is not the whole of the human being nor should it stand as the chosen one against others. It no longer matters what nation we belong to if we cannot be human towards each other. The difficulties we are facing cannot be resolved by only one nation. Hunger, violence, the climate change, the unnecessary production of millions and millions of items that we not only don’t need but are harming us is a world wide problem that we need to resolve in every nation. The absurd treatment of our natural resources, the contamination of land and people with chemicals are all aspects of our unconscious behavior in the individualism of the many to exploit what is there for everyone for their personal interest. It is not only the problem of those in power. Those in power are, just like those in the video, as unconscious of what they are doing as those under their power. It is not US victims against those perpetrators, we are all equally unconscious of the situation, we are all playing the roles we were placed in without being able or willing to free our selves from our conditionings. It is not a great man or a great woman who can free us at this point. Each individual must begin to act out their own consciousness and remove themselves from situations in which they are abusing themselves or others. People must stop working in factories that exploit them not only economically but humanly. It is their human integrity what is suffering a lot more than their pocket. In these factories people lose their humaneness because their creativity is shunned and their submission is not only given by the fact that they are paid less, it is given by the fact that they are placed in positions in which they cannot develop their creative life. Ironically, people in lower classes have to resort to great creativity to make something of their lives and the social cohesion within them does not distort them psychologically as badly as people in the upper classes who become even more trapped in the status quo. In both classes people are equally identified with their programming but in the lower classes the mechanisms are less rigid and allow for more freedom as well as condition the people to more humane contact. This is why in the long run, people in the lower classes tend to replace the people in the upper classes that stagnate in their decadence.
When looked at from a very different perspective, if we were to guess that the process of acquiring consciousness of our selves as human beings were revealed in our political history and our struggle for greater democracy, we would be able to understand that the characteristics of every social struggle is leading not only towards more individual consciousness but towards the individual’s consciousness of the whole. When we mature in this process, we will be unable to continue acting towards the world’s resources with the same unconsciousness and abuse with which we have been acting. Cars can no longer be the means of transporting each other. Or at least not cars that produce so much damage. The car, more than anything else, expresses the levels of individual unconsciousness that we’ve managed to reach in the United States and gradually everywhere else. Not cars or industries or anything that harms us or others in the short or long term. Our unwillingness to develop great public transportation is an aspect of our misunderstanding of the Public Sphere or the sphere of Our Selves. The world, that is, these Earth with each and all its resources belongs to ALL of us and no man or nation has the right to use any of them for his or its personal interests if we are to act consciously not from our little individualistic self but from the consciousness of our humanity.
People everywhere are beginning to understand this reality. We need to help each other so very much, in every part of the world.
I am a little tired to correct this today, I will try to do so tomorrow, please forgive me the mistakes.
What makes you think that We is identification? or I, you, they, Us? The identification is not in the language but in the individual my friend.
Is this man with his purely instinctive understanding of civilization what you call civilization? And the fact that we are dependent on each other, not friendly?
Yes, there’s a huge inner step that needs to be taken to understand that we are not only dependent on each other but that we can rely and trust each other and that the oil in the world is for all of us, to use for our benefit and not to cause great damage to our selves and nature. The car industry is the expression of such individualistic mentality and the damages it creates needs to be stopped. Not only the environmental damages but the psychological underpinnings of a culture that was created with it in which individualism was taken to inhuman extremes rendering people more selfish and self centered than is in our human nature only for the purpose of selling more cars. The public service was not developed as coherently and efficiently as it could have been developed so that the car producers could sell more cars.
In terms of the Work, it is an over-extension of the moving instinctive center in society, acting against the well being of the human being, in other words: uncivilized.
Civilization is the balance of all areas of life for the well being of humanity. A “civil” individual is one who is conscious enough for each of his or her acts to be not only for his or her personal benefit but for the well being of the whole. The lack of consciousness in people who do business to benefit only themselves knowing that their business is harmful to others is obvious. It’s the difference between acting from the “ego” or selfish and false identity or acting from the “I” or conscious identity. Every individual man and woman is putting his and her personal imprint in the rest of society in each and every one of his and her acts. The fact that this reality is barely perceived by most people is an aspect of our levels of consciousness today. People think their acts affect only themselves, that they don’t “count” for the rest of society and this is precisely an aspect of the generalized state of depression of so many individuals in our societies. The more connected, the more reliable interdependency between an individual and his or her group of people and society, the higher the level of self-trust and capacity for joy.
In our times there’s an schizophrenic behavior in our societies in which politics, science, economy, religion and the arts are not working together but making tremendous independent efforts for the privilege of those in economic power for whom everyone else is working. This reveals the state of our consciousness as human beings. It is not that those in economic power KNOW what they are doing, they are acting as unconsciously as the rest and are as much the victims of such status quo as the rest. Having more “things”, having more “money” but being equally separated from the whole is equally “depressing”. In rich societies like that of Sweden and in the small pockets of high income groups in every nation, we can verify that balanced well being does not come from owning more things. There are more or less balanced well beings in every niche of society and it does not depend on the economic conditioning but on the freedom from any such conditionings: not because one is rich one has to mistreat others, not because one is economically in disadvantage, one has to submit to power. There is an individual inner freedom when individuals understand that their humaneness is above their economic, academic, national or family upbringing.
If we were talking about an individual, we would be seeing a man whose mind acted randomly separated from his or her body and emotional life, which is in fact the case of most human beings today. We are split in our lives because there is no coherence or harmony between the individual and society. Individuals are struggling to survive in a society that acts against their well being and society is struggling to survive with individuals that are not conscious of each other’s connectedness, interdependency and humaneness. Men run around looking for more and more women to have sex with, without investing themselves in the family leaving women and children to fend for themselves. Women run around trying to make sense of the madness, making their own living in a world that still takes more money out of their pay check than men, trying to participate in society like men do, taking as much energy out of the family as men have and leaving the children to fend for themselves without being able to. These are the saddest aspects of “OUR” present madness.
The crisis of the “state”, the “governments” today, is that they allowed for the moving, instinctive aspects of society to grow phenomenally allowing its few representatives to acquire excesses that belong to the whole, which made them very “fat” but equally sick. They die because their heart is not strong enough to hold that amount of greed: no heart is.
Globalization means that we are moving towards one government and the people of each nation are so identified with themselves that they are struggling to keep their individualism but a conscious unity of human beings should not deform the essence of any nationality, on the contrary, it should empower it and allow it to flourish just like the support of a family for its children allows them to develop more fully in society. The full support of all humans for the qualities of the people of each nation should allow us to develop all the dimensions within us in this Earthly Sphere. We live very difficult times in which almost nothing is of any value but the greatness of the human being is present in the culture of every nation.
The nations in power today have become so by exploiting the resources of all the world. Their richness does not belong to them only but to all of us and we should all be grateful for what we’ve given each other: the resources to develop and the capacity to develop those resources into new and greater developments for democracy. We are talking today, you and I, because of these developments. It is a very beautiful phenomena!
We can look at this condition from the point of view of judging and condemning our selves and the actions of those who have most powerfully developed such levels of individualism or we can look at it from the point of view that every step that has been taken by each and every individual and nation was necessary for the development of our consciousness, including every mistake that was and is being made. Falling is part of the process of learning to walk. I am today personally inclined for the latter.
We live very interesting times Ton. The consciousness I am expressing is also current in our times. There are many efforts being made to close the gaps between our multiple centers and our consciousness, individually as much as socially.
Thanks for your post. I realize this is long and you don’t have the time or the interest for such long thoughts but I thank you for giving me the opportunity to develop what I am working on.
“What makes you think that We is identification? or I, you, they, Us? The identification is not in the language but in the individual my friend.”
apparently you don’t know the first thing about ‘identification’ so here’s a clue: any thought you espouse and attach yourself to with such fundamental conviction — as you do here over and again — this is a form of ‘identification — and, “my friend,” language is an expression of thought, therefore it does reflect an individual’s identifications.
from ‘such long thoughts’ as you identify with here (this sounds like something you read in a rodney collin book) — “such long thoughts” as you express here are not so much ‘thinking’ but rather, “such long thoughts” represent reactionary impulses, regurgitations and ‘philosphical’ pablum mixed up with narcisstic indulgences — it’s obvious in your writings that you don’t understand, nor do you recognize your own identifications.
the “royal we” you are so fond of speaking of, is a continual strand of arrogance which runs thoughout whatever it is you ‘think’ you’re ‘doing’ here –you insistently claim to speak for the imaginary “WE” and “US” and now you’re implying that you are not identified with this notion which you’ve concocted for yourself?! that you’re not identified with the imaginary and very lofty ‘royal’ perspective you’ve worked so long to cultivate!?! i don’t know what’s more absurd and preposterous, speaking (writing) as often as you do in terms of “the royal we,” or now, the implication that you’re not “identified” with this notion. just ridiculous.
when you say, or write, or think “I,” you of course have an idea about “yourself” and “naturally” you identify with it. when you say “you” (about me for example), unless it’s an honest and open-minded question, you’re assuming with arrogantly imagined omniscience, that you know what i am about, you identify with your ‘thoughts’ about the other, so you cannot hear the other, you can never really know what the other is about, you only ‘know’ your idea about the other, and you are not even aware of the process… that’s identification. for example you write: ” I realize this is long and you don’t have the time or the interest for such long thoughts but I thank you for giving me the opportunity to develop what I am working on.” even if you did bother to listen to what derrick jensen said in the video, it’s obvious you didn’t take it in, you obviously didn’t bother keeping an open mind and so you didn’t understand…. based on your response, your “long thought,” you simply (mechanically) went into your typical reactionary-defiant ‘program’ because it was “ton” who posted the link…
hopefully one day you will realize that maturity means coming to the realization that your own point of view, that is, the point of view you identify with, is but one of many possible points of view — to remain open-minded enough to hear another is / will be a huge step forward for you… listening is not easy for someone who thinks they already know it all… nor is listening easy for someone who is negatively predisposed toward another. think of listening to another as a temporary act of self-surrender, and as such, real listening is a true act of unconditional love.
I only just watched the first video and was gladly surprised that we coincide on a few things. That is the man you present and I. Not too many though, he is certainly not the model I would like to follow but thanks anyway.
It’s sad to observe the fact that you haven’t moved an inch after all these years. There is more here than you are willing to look at and I can’t be bothered with your personal attacks any more than you with the issues that I present.
Life is good these days, a lot of work and much appreciation. My sincere thanks for the many times you’ve come here Ton. It’s been good to know that you’re there. After leaving the fellowship and its numbness even the insults felt good to get out of the trance of being in a cult. I don’t think I’ll read any more of your posts though because I don’t see any dialogue in them, it takes a lot of sympathy to be able to dialogue and there’s little of that between us.
I just bothered to listen to the music and enjoyed it so bothered to read a little more of your post.
Ton: apparently you don’t know the first thing about ‘identification’ so here’s a clue:
Elena: here is your superiority complex act towards me that I’m not interested in.
Ton: any thought you espouse and attach yourself to with such fundamental conviction —
Elena: My dear Ton, to believe deeply in the beauty and unity of our selves, to believe it beyond any doubt and to stand up for it is not fundamentalism but it is fundamental, that is, it is the foundation that I wish to live my life with.
As I understand fundamentalism it is the excesses that we are willing to indulge in when people are not willing to listen to us and I as much as you have missed the mark widely in that regard. The only difference between us is that I apologized and you are not willing, you love attacking women or at least me and I happen to be one, you can’t hear me, dialogue with me or acknowledge anything I say. It use to hurt when I was more vulnerable, now I realize it’s not my problem.
Ton: as you do here over and again — this is a form of ‘identification — and, “my friend,” language is an expression of thought, therefore it does reflect an individual’s identifications.
Elena: I believe you must begin to differentiate between identification and identity, between the law of accident and the law of destiny, between false and true personality. From your point of view no one can stand up for what they believe because they are identified, falling prey of the dominant accepted behavior in the status quo of our times in which people are supposed to passively accept everything established. We are all so afraid of being killed for what we believe but heroes aren’t. There are such few of them. I’m as afraid as you are of standing up for what I believe and being hurt for it but the Fellowship, the fofblog and you are making me stronger each day. If you dared to think for yourself and stand up for what you believe you would not always be speaking through other people’s videos or texts. You are a man Ton. Inside you is all the beauty you need, to trust your self. Why won’t you let your self be? Why are you unwilling to speak for your self without needing to attack everything I say? It is more than fine if we disagree, but disagreeing doesn’t mean that we have to be aggressive towards each other or feel superior to each other. I don’t feel superior for believing in what I believe and stating it. We are equal Ton. We are equally human. There is nothing about you or me that is superior. We have each had our plays, our lives have developed in their own particular way, we’ve both struggled and worked and understood some things. Wether we agree or not is not the issue. What matters is that this time that we share together is a positive experience for both of us and there is nothing positive about playing your superiority act in sentences like:
Ton: “apparently you don’t know the first thing about ‘identification’ so here’s a clue”:
With a sentence like that as an opening, you intend to disqualify not what I am saying but me and pretend that you are superior. If you enjoy feeling superior to women who don’t agree with you that is your game Ton but I’m not interested in it so if you really wish me to pay attention again to your posts, it might happen if I don’t come across these sentences again.
Good luck Ton. I hope you’re enjoying other aspects of your life. This “rubbing” should make us stronger. Thank you for your intention to participate here.
It’s interesting to note that criminal organizations choose the same basic structures to function than non criminal organizations: a leader, an inner circle and an outer circle and the “rest of the world” that doesn’t matter. If we make the parallel between how social organizations and individuals function, a criminal organization is to society what the malfunctioning of any particular center is to the individual. “Center” as in instinctive, moving, emotional, sexual or intellectual. Organized crime is the equivalent of a cancer in an individual. It uses the same tactics and techniques as those in “legalized” power and acts against the status quo, subverting it.
But it is also interesting to note that for those in power, the masses of people don’t matter either. The recent collapse of the economy and its ongoing effects have simply revealed that those in power were working only for themselves and their profits without the slightest concern for the rest. Those in power or the banking elites that are in fact so much in power that the governments bail them out. They were, after all, allowed to exist with their consent.
What I believe we are witnessing is the collapse of legitimate authority and frightening as that might seem to so many people it is not nearly as frightening if we can trust each other and our ability to resolve problems and difficulties as human beings. What is happening is that the possibility of others choosing our destiny is coming to an end whether we like it or not. Each individual is to be confronted with the fact that he and she has to respond for herself and others and not expect the governments to do so. There might be tremendous chaos for some time but we’ll be better off when the crisis is over. In the long run what is fearsome to many is that the goods of the world can no longer belong to a few in particular but need to be shared amongst us all if we are to survive. Arms are too lethal for us to use them and although some states might take that road down to destruction, they’ll be as damaged by it as the rest. It’s another form of suicide.
The question of authority has become the question of who owns what whether they have the authority or not. The economic shift from those in power to those in economic power simply presents a crisis of authority but the fact that the “institutionalized world” is so “dis-institutionalized” reveals that the crisis is not only economic, that is, instinctive, but political, that is, that the sphere of social identity, the “I” of society, is in a deep crisis. People are beginning to realize that no “leader” can respond for the whole of society and that what is required is the consciousness of responsability of each and every individual. Everyone everywhere is so disconnected to the whole that everyone is acting out his and her personal fantasy in isolation. People are living out the “programming” without thinking about it and the fact that it is conducing to destruction not only of the Earth as a livable planet but of human beings as humans. The drug cartels, the way wars are perpetrated from a helicopter full of military shooting civilians, shows how, at both ends of the spectrum, those in power have absolutely no human conscience of what they are actually doing. Both feel equally justified to kill innocent people for their personal advantage.
The programming is: individualism: you must fend for yourself and only yourself and as long as you can do that, you’re O.K. You can have and do everything you can as long as you can get away with it at no matter whose cost. That is the dark side of individualism. The light side is that each individual is mature enough to care and protect himself, that individuals don’t have to depend on the state or family to support themselves. That the world is an open venue full of opportunities for individuals able to take them.
But what we don’t seem to have taken into consideration is that the success of a few independent individuals in the capitalist system is the exception to the rule and not the rule. They are the “gaps” that the system cannot control and as such they are used to justify the system but the system is actually against the individuals en masse. Nature acts under the same laws, only one sperm out of millions reaches the goal but human beings can act counter to nature and benefit the whole if the few don’t have the power to appropriate what belongs to the whole. To act counter to nature does not mean to act against nature, it means to act not like animals or cells but like human beings.
So if temples were abodes for the Gods and we were meant to build them wouldn’t all of our actions have the potential of being abodes for the Gods? The creation of music and all art as much as the manufacture of goods? There seems to be a division between art and the manufacture of goods as if the things built for the instinctive centre were not as “noble” as those made for the emotional centre and then the schism is altogether established with the sex center but in practice aren’t these centers the ones that can be most transformed? The centers and everything in life that applies to them?
I not only understand religion as what is possible in the temple or what is possible in our actual lives but also as what is possible in other dimensions within our selves. Perhaps the temple was necessary as a preliminary step to understand our own inner cosmos?
Men seem to see the outer world while women tend to see the inner world. The family would be the inner world of society and society the outer world of the family. So the family would have a feminine element to it while society has more of a yang element?
In our patriarchal society does the tendency to destroy the family in actual practice reveal the inability that the masculine genre has to live his own inner life? Does the inability to develop a more coherent society reveal the inability of the feminine genre to act in the social sphere too identified with the family?
Has feminism supported the masculine outlook and practice in society or has it brought a more balanced outlook? At first glance it would seem that it has tended to support the masculine institutions rather than bring the feminine element into them but I guess if women weren’t even able to vote or get paid, there is more general balance but I’m not too convinced.
Consumerism. Is it an aspect of the masculine drive towards the external or an aspect of feminine frustration?
Is consumerism an aspect of productionism? Is productionism a mechanical production without consciousness? People gone into a make, make, make, effort, effort, effort, without aim?
The whole “madness” of the world today, is it not precisely because people are “doing” without even thinking about what it is that they are doing? LIke young people gone mad?
We are horrified by a woman being stoned to death in a country that we’ll never even visit. We are already human enough to be horrified by that. It is too late for us to not become more human each day… much to our fortune.
The Public Square 
It’s a strange thing to realize that life actually belongs to each and everyone
That it is a gift to all
That a great part of it is what each makes of it
After the turmoil of ripening
And each with our own strength
Deciphering our self
And in our self
Ourselves
To make of music
The daily bread
And paint the air with color glass
And taste
Each soul
Like wine
And let go before it takes hold of one’s self too proud
So that there’s still enough freshness to go
Nowhere
But Ourselves
As if life were simply the joy of remembering
What others created
And creating what others will remember
For the simple pleasure of recreating our selves
Time is a marvelous weaver
eternity’s silk-worm
Weaving our lives in and out
as if we were tapestry,
needle and thread
all at the same time
To rest in the circle
And hold the whole from inside
Like One
And allow for the many to jump around
As if each man-note were in itself the whole
The whole of sound
The whole of life
The whole of music
Not in separation
But in harmonizing unity
To be
And not to be
That is the question!
Without pretending to compete with him
Whose ankles are above my head
But whose joy was no greater than mine!
I was watching the German detective series called Wallander last night and was struck by the description of the process of leaving the family out as he got deep into becoming a good policeman-detective that Wallander gives his daughter because what he was describing was exactly the same I observed in committing to the FOF Cult and what after leaving, led me to conclude that the need to belong to a community and develop in it is what every human being longs for consciously or unconsciously. I have not seen this stated so bluntly anywhere and I wonder if it’s because it is taken for granted or because there had never been such a strong failure in society to incorporate people into a community as there is today resulting precisely in the huge number of people looking for cults to fulfill that need.
I think need is closer than wish or up there in the level of wish that having a wife or husband stands. Of course these are not absolutes in the sense that people can survive without partner or community but the question is, is no family or community the ideal we are heading towards or the inevitable outcome that we’re doomed towards?
It is certainly not that what I consider ideal is the old system of authoritarian hierarchic communities in which there was no individual freedom but it is also not the inhuman individualism that we seem to be racing towards what I support.
The road towards becoming more human seems to be walked by the most horrific inhuman acts rather than a slow ascending towards an ideal. It’s as if we could not just put ourselves to the aim and slowly walk towards it, it’s more as if we were constantly moving a step away from the horrors and the mistakes and instead of seriously learning from other’s experiences, each nation had to commit the same horrific acts before it realizes that more humanism and democracy are the only possible answer to the absurdity of today’s reality.
I was also watching the BBC debate in the Intelligence Square about whether capitalism had failed in the Ukraine or not. What was beautiful to watch was people dialoguing about issues that matter. Someone suggested that the Swedish form of Capitalism would have been less harmful.
At the end of the debate the man sustaining that capitalism had failed, stated that as long as people don’t stand up for the truth in every level of society, for the truth, freedom and equality, no real change is possible. I’m paraphrasing. It was very good to watch that amount of clarity in what seemed a very public venue.
Something else that was quite amazing was that the program went all the way from Kiev to Medellín! Language makes a big difference and most people here can’t understand those programs but most of the other programs that are watched are managing to “unify” people, to “standardize” people. The tendency to copy other people’s acts is so powerful that more and more the people here behave like Americans or Europeans. It isn’t very positive. People here use to be kind and human and they are becoming efficiently professional but with little real human caring or kindness. The business mind-frame is permeating the whole of society like it has in America.
The impression I got in America was that people were kind as long as you didn’t need help! It’s a “professional” kindness that exerts itself only as long as there’s an interest in the interchange taking place. In Europe people are not kind even if there’s an economic interchange. Of course, they are all probably kind between each other but that impossibility to go beyond one’s own nationality to be able to be kind to no matter who is what is worth struggling for. There is no real kindness until there’s “objective” kindness, the rest is just programming… conditioning. The utilitarian mind-frame is appallingly negative particularly for those who practice it. The bottom-line I believe, is that it is a kind of impression that tends to fortify the instinctive center or as my horrible guru use to say, the king of clubs. Perhaps that is why he only managed to make a cult dedicated to feeding his own king of clubs. He was never able to free himself from his programming. But the FOF doesn’t matter now as much as people and I do believe that the concern in relation to society itself is worth exploring. It’s as if the whole of humanity had shifted from the divine to the abominable and were actually beginning to find itself back into the human before it can even consider the divine again while at the same time realizing that there’s nothing “just” human about the human.
Today I certainly have no interest in the “divine” if it’s not deeply rooted in the human but of course, there is nothing truly human that is not divine. Life itself is the culture I wish to develop in. It’s such an honor to have the opportunity to live. That which I use to take so for granted in my youth is now such a precious opportunity. To live, to work, to interact with other people through the enveloping forces that determine us and therefore our lives.
There’s a beautiful poetry festival here in Medellín with poets from sixty countries including Yevtushenko who was marvellous last night in the inauguration.
“Man’s destiny is but one celestial rythm”
http://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/
Dear Friends,
Yesterday an Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, was saved by global protests from being stoned to death.
But she may still be hanged — and, meanwhile, execution by stoning continues. Right now fifteen more people are on death row awaiting stoning in which victims are buried up to their necks in the ground and then large rocks are thrown at their heads.
The partial reprieve of Sakineh, triggered by the call from her children for international pressure to save her life, has shown that if enough of us come together and voice our horror, we may be able to save her life, and stop stoning once and for all. Sign the urgent petition now and send it onto everyone you know — let’s end this cruel slaughter NOW!
http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_stoning/?vl
Sakineh was convicted of adultery, like all the other 12 women and one of the men awaiting stoning. But her children and lawyer say she is innocent and that she did not get a fair trial — they state her confession was forced from her and, speaking only Azerbaijani, she did not understand what was being asked of her in court.
Despite Iran’s signing of a UN convention that requires the death penalty only be used for the “most serious crimes” and despite the Iranian Parliament passing a law banning stoning last year, stoning for adultery continues.
Sakineh’s lawyer says the Iranian government “is afraid of Iranian public reaction and international attention” to the stoning cases. And after Turkey and Britain’s Foreign Ministers spoke out against Sakineh’s sentence, it was suspended.
Sakineh’s brave children are leading the international campaign to save their mother and stop stoning. Massive international condemnation now could finally stop this sickening punishment. Let’s join together today across the world to end this brutality. Sign the petition to save Sakineh and end stoning here:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_stoning/?vl
In hope and determination,
Alice, David, Milena, Ben and the whole Avaaz team
SOURCES:
Iranians still facing death by stoning despite ‘reprieve’, The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/08/iran-death-stoning-adultery
Britain condemns planned Iran stoning as ‘medieval’, AFP:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hjVdkvkzicGeInqw2R10rCKrqs3A
Support the Avaaz community! We’re entirely funded by donations and receive no money from governments or corporations. Our dedicated team ensures even the smallest contributions go a long way — donate here.
Who knows why I’ve been writing in English for so long!
I guess because I loved in English.
It’s such a beautiful irony of life to have me find the Poetry Festival of Medellín here and now! To spend the day with some of the best poets of the world and laugh at my writings not being able to find three poems worth showing.
It’s a good thing that I don’t expect to sell my writings because as Thot Plickens recently said no one would read them but it’s an even better thing to know that it would have been good if what I had to say had been said beautifully but that the lack of beauty does not discount what needed to be said. They are all saying the same thing in different words: We are One. We’re young enough to work on the beauty but not young enough to not understand the things that matter.
Tantas cosas Yevtushenko, tantas cosas, incluyendo tu nombre hermoso y tu, más hermoso que tu nombre. Pero lo verdaderamente hermoso no son tu o tu nombre sino la fuerza con que nos cuentas sobre la vida como si ni siquiera estuvieras hablando de ella, como si ya te vinieras despojando y eso te facilitara el ofrecérnosla más libre de ti mismo.
Casi te veo porque decir que te veo sería una mentira aunque bien nos miramos y al mismo tiempo ¿como no verte cuando una sola palabra es suficiente? Te veo un hombre; un ser humano.
Y es bello oírte gritar sin vacilaciones, contame Yevtushenko, cuanto te costó? ¿Cuantas veces tuviste que morir para poder vivir? ¿Cuantos cayeron en el camino? A cuantos de ti mismo y de los tuyos tuviste que dejar morir para existir? O eras ya un hombre cuando naciste?
Sería difícil creerte. Quizá nacemos Dioses pero hombres ya no nacen sino que se vuelven de andar pisando el barro y correr entre la maleza huérfanos de padre, madre, patria o tierra. Llegamos a ser hombres… y mujeres claro, no porque hayamos tenido algo sino porque nunca lo tuvimos y estamos teniendo que inventárnoslo.
Cada generación nace más huérfana, las familias se acabaron y las comunidades se extinguieron y cada hombre se posa sobre sí mismo desfigurado en una deformación que se vuelve modelo hasta que otra generación recuerda lo que alguna vez fue ser hombre. Cada joven busca a tientas referencias que no encuentra pero en este caos sin tregua se yergue fuerza.
No es “tradición, familia y propiedad”. Y menos la nación o multinacional. No habrá nada de eso después de la guerra. ¿Cuantos más muertos habremos de vivir antes de morir? Cuantos más vivos habremos de sufrir antes de vivir? Y te confieso desde ya que prefiero la guerra que esta paz cuando por guerra entienden cualquier protesta. No es acomodándonos para no luchar que vamos a cambiar. Vivo a veces en un estado de guerra sin violencia, otras, en un estado de violencia sin guerra y la mayoría en una guerra violenta en donde la gente se desangra sin que muera y me niego a aceptar que esta sea la paz por la cual hay que vivir mientras nos echan el cuento de que hay que aceptar pacíficamente el referendo y volvernos profesionalmente inhumanos como ellos.
La guerra entre nosotros, como las putas, se esconde en la trastienda, aunque ya ni las putas se esconden mucho más honestas que cualquiera. Unos ponen muertos que no vemos y otros matan en nombre nuestro. Pero la guerra más dulce es la que llevamos dentro, no siendo, muertos de miedo de morir, pero igualmente muertos de no vivir, no solo aquí, sino en la tierra entera. O acaso es menos violenta la paz en tus tierras? O en el mundo entero en donde la gente ya se suicida sin dar guerra?
Buen viaje Yevtushenko, esta gratitud es con firmeza. Vuelve con todas tus batallas para vivir más dulcemente mi guerra. Perdóname si te hablo con demasiada confianza pero si no es confianza lo que inspira tu entrega, de que se trata tu fuerza?
I got this ad this morning which shows how much science is moving into understanding the connection between the social sphere and the instinctive sphere. It’s wonderful that they are doing this because they will eventually have to admit that without a healthy society we can’t be individually healthy. They will also come to understand more exactly the power of the logos or life in its many expressions and be able to account exactly for how positive and negative activities affect our lives. People will understand better how a sick environment like that of a cult and all the regular cults called industries, corporations, governments, etc, based on hierarchic interchanges between people who cannot act humanly towards each other justified by their so called “position” are in themselves the greatest source of illness in our time.
We’re moving so fast towards greater freedom!
First Impact Factor for Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: 4.203 and a ranking of 9/70 in Psychology
Dear Miss Elena …
We are delighted to announce that Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience has recently achieved its 2009 ISI Science Citation Index Impact Factor of 4.203.
As an online only journal publishing highly cited, original papers in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience, SCAN has achieved an excellent first competitive ranking of 9/70 in Psychology and continues to thrive in to 2010, recently publishing a special issue on Cultural Neuroscience.
For Authors…
Why not contribute to this up and coming journal?
Visit our instructions to authors page to find out how to submit your paper. SCAN offers rapid online publication of all articles, open access options and online submission making it an ideal choice for your next paper.
For Readers…
To read more from the journal visit the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience homepage where you can read FREE articles, find subscription rates or fill in our Library recommendation form. Or simply sign in (or register) to My Account to read a sample issue.
There has never been a better time to get involved with this thriving journal!
I hope that this information was useful to you, please do forward this email on to anyone else who you think would also be interested.
With best wishes,
Laura Brannagan
Oxford Journals
Poem…a
Vengo a tu lado oscuro de la luna
porque está soleado!
I come to your dark side of the moon
because it’s sunny!
I hold your soul in my soul
I rock your soul in my soul
until the seasons change
Perro loco aullando bajo la lluvia
sales a saludarme como si no nos vieramos desde antier!
Mi amigo fiel
de suave piel
si no es amor lo que brilla en tus ojos
que el desamor se vuelva ley!
I am a shepherd: some times I am able to sense , to feel all my flock of sheep without counting and checking them. It is a divine grace. But I am a shepherd , i have a job to do: watch the sheep, don’t stay all the day with the eyes turned up to pray God to give me the grace:no this i do morning and before sleeping and before eating. My job is to watch the sheep. I know that there are the black ones, that are the more genial to jump out of the pasture. When i catch one , after a while an other jump again. With these i have to choose places where them don’t can go too far away. Then there are the white ,more stupid. Them dont jump to go away, but are so stupid to get tangled and with them i have to find pasture without bramble and when i find a brambled one i have to be patient if i not want be brambled me too. Then there are the piebald ones. Every one is a type and a different problem. Yes, sometimes i do a stop myself to see if i am able to feel all the flock, but after i enjoy my life of shepherd: I marvel for the mystery of life, play the flute, and count the sheep. Not one to one, because if i do so i fall asleep. I count for colour, for mathematical set . My daughter learn this in primary school and teach me . My shepherd is just a worker, ( my real job is made and sell crafts). What i mean it is that self remember is a useful stop but the real Work is to do our Job like a real man and real self remember is a fruit of this kind of job. In” Views” G points :Have you try to self remember in this way ? And in this other ? Have you try with all you strength, intelligence, cleverness, slyness : With mind, with body with emotion ? O.K You can taste it for a while , but it don’t keep going. The important thing is that you be sure that You are not in the third state- And then that it is not enough do everything for keep it going. (so you have may be to find a continuous reminder like what he says in “The life is real…”).
But what i am sure from my experience and from experience of people like Fof people that to try to work to direct self remember make you a mad , and also a dangerous insane mad. God is too big for us, Sun is to shining for our eyes. So my God, my Sun is my life. I have to live a saint life. I have to support negativity from myself and others.(And all the five striving).I think to be just a ordinary man without lies to ourself, but take responsibility, became a real House keeper, a Friend, a Husband, a Father, a Citizen, a good worker is to become conscious.A lot of time we talk of conscience, but there have to be an object of conscience. Ecological conscience, political conscience, individual conscience. If i am not aware of my body i have the same the responsibility of my actions. When the night I may see all my past day for me is not really important the times i have try to self remember, but how I have done things. I feel that G want awake in us conscience. What i want to do if i became conscious? If i am not a man but a mutton I become a conscious mutton, good for be eaten…But if i am a man i could cook myself to be tasty and healthy and share
Hi shepherd,
Thanks for your post. I agree, ecological, political and individual conscience seem necessary to be somewhat conscious!
I often think I’m like a dirty mirror with light only in a few spots. Then it rains and another part of the mirror gets cleaned and I become aware of new areas of consciousness.
Have you been out for a long time? I seldom think in terms of becoming conscious or more conscious these days. Just trying to recover a normal sense of myself has taken a long time but it’s beginning to feel very good. The neighbor this morning was listening to music we use to hear when I was young and I was thinking that the wonder of being back home was that in that invisible community that people of the same nation hold, we manage to embrace each other in a common memory that is comforting and re-structuring.
I don’t know where else people from different nations can meet if not in the common human… which is so uncommon!
You talk about self remembering but having been fellowshippers in a cult wouldn’t it be good for us to restate what we understand by such term?
The more I think about it the less it seems that self remembering as it was conceived by the Fellowship is actually self remembering.
In my experience this permanent awareness of myself trying to become indifferent to everything that was going on outside while pretending everything was perfect as it was simply resulted in numbness and self consciousness which has nothing to do with self remembering.
These days I try not to do that because it actually has the opposite effect: instead of making me more conscious of things it makes me very tense and disconnected from the outside world. What I’m trying to do is relax. Being relaxed allows me to be more perceptive and that I think is an aspect of being more conscious.
Thanks for sharing. It always makes a blog so much more fun!
Just i wish to tell have not been in the Fof,but in another cult using fourth way stuff.
And what i say, and what i believe that i had learn being free from group pressure on me it is that I have not at all to search to self remember during day activities. But some moments collect the wondering (over all to outside) attention to collect the gain from the efforts in the day to be faithful to myself, my wishes, my values and see my contradictions just a level of understanding.
Use emotions as a way to explore further the meaning of life.
“but some moments collect the wondering…”
That’s all beautifully put, thank you apprentice shepherd.
It’s interesting that doctors are willing to amputate a leg when not doing so will kill the patient but the laws today and that is, society at large, is unable to amputate cults out of life although they tend to annihilate the people inside, psychologically first, then physically, through suicide or a slow deterioration of the body out of lack of vitality.
It shows how lost everyone is, including the so called leaders who cannot really respond for the people they have in charge. It’s an interesting period to be living in because next to the horrors are also the wonders and everything is changing so rapidly. The internet is an amazing leap into a more democratic world… So good to be out and about!
The great thing about having been in a cult must be the wonder of being out of it and allowing for life to flower again. It’s an amazing experience to be numbed to the world for so many years and then slowly let it be as if it opened up in one’s self. The wonder of people! The wonder of the things people do to survive their difficulties. And the possibility of creation. Nothing is more hurt in cults than one’s creativity. The cult eats away one’s self and with one’s self precisely one’s creativity. The lack of trust in one’s self doesn’t allow for creativity to develop and THAT is exactly what the cult has to manage against each member to make the dependency powerful enough to keep the member inside, working for it. Those in the inner circle develop a particular kind of creativity against other members which is what makes them hasnamusses acting against the well being of other human beings. It is a terrible tragedy for them as much as their victims. They are worse than people in concentration camps because in concentrations camps they kill the victims and physical death is more merciful than psychological death. To manipulate individuals to such a point that they no longer exist for themselves but for the guru and his agenda is a despicable crime.
How far are ex cult members including those in the fofblog and the other Fellowship that has nothing greater about it, away from deeply understanding and not avoiding this truth? How can people live with such truths and do nothing about it but reproduce a similar club in another context? I wonder what it is that keeps people from calling crime, crime and doing something to stop it. The lack of consciousness of the fact that we are all connected is what stops us. Those without consciousness think they can get away without getting involved, they can separate themselves from the horror and pretend it has nothing to do with them but their silence is what makes it possible and that is what makes us all accomplices of the crime.
The one beautiful thing about seeing how life is at my age, is realizing how incredibly naive people also are. One of the reasons that people don’t call crime, crime, is that they don’t want to see it, they want to believe that everything is fairly alright and under control by God if nobody else! They or us for I have also had a huge amount of this naivete. That innocence is beautiful because it remains in people even after they’ve much suffered. It doesn’t help a great deal which is perhaps why we end up suffering so much more but the power of such innocence is worth all the beauty. I don’t think it’s healthy to be that naïve because in its dark side it hides so much fear and at some point it’s good to face the horror and look at it straight in the face. Even the horror can be looked at and when one does it is not nearly as bad as one feared… if one is still innocent enough, as I am, to believe that everything can be recovered, everything can be healed, now or later, in this or another life.
One of the problems seems to be that life and not just organic life, is a lot more “organic” than I had ever realized. That actions people perform tend to repeat themselves and condition the inner world of individuals without people realizing that they are sculpting themselves from the outside in as much as from the inside out, hence the importance of “social” life.
It seems so obvious but the way it feels obvious today is very different to what I had always taken for granted. And the problem is that people do actions then we justify those actions and one way to justify our actions is repeating them over and over until they seem normal no matter how abnormal they actually are. And then if everyone seems to be doing the same thing it looks ever so normal. That’s how cults work but society also works very much like that. And the problem in the short run is that people are hardly responsible because they are all just aspects of our unconsciousness. Perhaps when someone starts screaming about it and is called crazy, it is because it takes a long time for others to come to terms with the fact that what is happening is actually not normal at all and that is precisely the role of whistleblowers.
This idea that life (social life, that that we call life and not just biological processes), is a lot more organic than we tend to perceive, seems relevant because being such it is under a lot more laws than at least I would have wanted to admit. Processes take a long time and the trouble with impatience is that it simply turns back against one’s self. That’s why anger, disappointment, frustration and all the other expressions of horror at the speed with which most people deal with problems like cults is just an expression of my own lack of understanding of the laws we’re under.
It’s good to think about these things again.
“Once there lived a wolf who slaughtered a great many sheep and reduced many people to tears.
“At length, I do not know why, he suddenly felt qualms of conscience and began to repent his life; so he decided to reform and to slaughter no more sheep.
“In order to do this seriously he went to a priest and asked him to hold a thanksgiving service.
“The priest began the service and the wolf stood weeping and praying in the church. The service was long. The wolf had slaughtered many of the priest’s sheep, therefore the priest prayed earnestly that the wolf would indeed reform. Suddenly the wolf looked through a window and saw that sheep were being driven home. He began to fidget but the priest went on and on without end.
“At last the wolf could contain himself no longer and he shouted:
“‘Finish it, priest! Or all the sheep will be driven home and I shall be left without supper
It’s a good story apprentice shepherd. It reminds me of us when we are in positions of power and can’t help humiliating those in a lower position for the simple pleasure of reinstating our own as if the ego needed to reassure itself consistently. The difference with real I is that it wouldn’t feel threatened and hence wouldn’t resort to getting reassured at other’s cost.
Elena post 16 “It’s interesting that doctors are willing to amputate a leg when not doing so will kill the patient but the laws today and that is, society at large, is unable to amputate cults out of life although they tend to annihilate the people inside, psychologically first, then physically, through suicide or a slow deterioration of the body out of lack of vitality.
It shows how lost everyone is, including the so called leaders who cannot really respond for the people they have in charge.”
Thinking about this I wonder if “leaders” are actually lost or whether in fact people in power are intentionally allowing for such things knowing religion will take care of making people passively accept the status quo. There are those layers in which people seem to jump from the actual facts to a “divine” determination that they are unwilling to challenge. That they perceive as the “facts” rather than the imposed conditions and it is precisely that “divine” what calls for its “hegemony” over the land.
What’s amazing is that social behavior does change when the level of being of the society changes just like individuals do. And the level of being of individuals does change after powerful experiences of love or death or other forms of suffering. In the social scale would we be looking for wars, great leaders, tremendous catastrophes for the change in level of being?
I do experience some difficulty using this System language remembering how it was manipulated, distorted and used against the members in the cult but reinstating it in its own integrity is also a healthy process.
I guess the importance of developing a strong individuality lies precisely in the fact that if the tendency to imitate and repeat other people’s behavior is so strong, unless the individuals are powerful enough to follow their own conscience, people would continue to repeat the old forms without ever adapting to new circumstances or innovating. The process seems to be somewhat guaranteed by new generations but at the same time there seems to be a powerful force holding the mold together so that the majority keep the sequence!!
This question of “one’s own conscience” is relevant because at some point in my development I realized that I had not really been following my own conscience but “interiorizing” the standard behavior and if other people WERE that way it was alright for me to behave likewise. Then I made the same mistake in the cult and probably in the fofblog too. I reproduced the standard rather than hold to my own conscience. I assume most people do that for that is also what I see in most people which is where will would come in to make a difference. And then will is such a difficult load to carry because when an individual starts acting different to others he or she will inevitably create rejection, for his or her actions question others and in that questioning there’s always friction which brings us to the realization that living in friction is our “natural” state.
I like this understanding because it has been in the agenda of certain “ways of life” to think that friction is NOT a natural and an extremely necessary social condition. The ideal of no friction means the fixed status quo where every relationship between people is unmovable and that is living death, like in cults. This is very important! Cults are frozen in “no friction” and that is their most deadly weapon against the soul of its members who are supposed to feel very grateful and content in the “all is well” environment. But “ALL IS WELL” only for as long as you sacrifice your self, surrender yourself completely. This is even more important because it addresses the question of master, pupil and reveals the fact that in any surrendering what we are dealing with is the I. It is the I that surrenders and with it all the centers and in surrendering to another person we give our selves up. This is what we have traditionally called “love” and what seems to have been so justified in our world. “Surrender to your husband, your job, your nation, sacrifice yourself for the well being of your family, your company, your nation” And in the end people, both men and women, simply give themselves up so that someone else does with their life what is to their convenience. I realize how difficult it is to make an affirmation such as this one for the question of the “cause” is always there. What “cause” are people surrendering to? There’s always a cause. Why did women tend to surrender to their husbands? Because they were protected? Economically? Physically? They and their children? Why do men and women now surrender to their company? And I mean surrender in the sense that not only work is done but also a certain emotional “surrenderance” is given and it’s in that emotional “gift” that the whole transaction is justified. Why do they surrender to their nation? And the question is: Why do we surrender to anything that acts against our own self or that of others?
Isn’t surrendering a purely instinctive necessity that has to be justified emotionally so that we manage to live up to it? Don’t we surrender mostly because it is necessary for survival? To fit in a family, community, nation, group, company, so that our instinctive needs are satisfied? Instinctive, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, sexual? But ironically in our imaginary picture what we’re surrendering to is something higher than our selves that we “love” when what we’re really surrendering to is something lower than our selves that is acting against not only our selves but humanity at large. All this is much to the point because the question of institutions then comes in: the institutions of marriage, class, nation, university, company, corporation, the government. And while they should all be legitimate institutions in their own right what we have is people taking advantage of the institution to justify their abuse through their position of power. They use the credibility of the institution to manipulate people into its sphere and then take advantage of their position to make personal profit not just economically but socially by remaining in positions of power. Isn’t this precisely what happens in cults? People taking advantage of the legitimacy of religion to enslave the members? But then is it not also true of governments themselves, isn’t the whole economic crisis of today due precisely because of this fact? Because people without power allow people in power to do as they wish with the institutions that govern our lives? They call it corruption in the newspapers.
Isn’t it interesting that we tend to say “instinctive needs” but seldom acknowledge our emotional, intellectual, spiritual or sexual needs as “needs”? This seems relevant because it shows that in the mind frame of our times the tendency to label instinctive needs as the only reason for social participation allows those in power to manipulate the offer of art, leisure, education to the upper classes while the lower classes can stick to religion, sport, brothels and drinking which ironically enough still keeps them more directly connected with themselves than the upper classes who have to distort themselves psychologically to hold and justify the show of being superior and separate to the rest of mankind.
Isn’t it a tremendous irony? That in the long run the upper classes and the people in power hurting and living on others end up being more psychologically damaged for the mere reason that to be able to live at the cost of other people they have to build up such a psychological makeup that in itself suffocates their own soul. The crust that they have to put up between themselves and the rest of mankind who they are exploiting, manipulating and abusing is all right for their external appearance but their inner soul suffocates without the connection.
Communism seems to be the ugly duckling today but the fact that the human being in Russia was not mature enough to carry out communism but instead reproduced an authoritarian dictatorial society with a centralized power doesn’t mean the ideal of community is still not worth considering. The U.S.S.R was not communist! It was a dictatorship. A “cult” on a huge scale. It doesn’t matter in reality how we call it, capitalism would suit me just as well if the privileges of the few were for the many and we know well that’s not the case. What I believe that needs to be understood today is that beyond the classes and nationalities, continues to be the human and where the human being gets lost, we’re no longer connected to our “divine” purpose, to our “selves”.
It’s tricky, isn’t it? Who would buy such language as “divine” today? Would economists take it into consideration even if they go to church? Would lawyers? Would Americans? Europeans? Russians? Chinese? Arabs?
This period seems to be one of transition from legitimate authority of the hierarchy to legitimate authority of the individual: From the king to the people: from royalty to democracy. As if we were turning ourselves outside in to be able to then turn ourselves inside out for in the long run the true individual will be as conscious of the whole as any true king ever was. It’s such an honor to be human.
I remember R Collin wrote about how a school works: There is a point where friction as to be managed to become regeneration. If the experiments fail :corruption instead happens(it is more complex, but this is my juice of it).
So it is on personal, social political scale.
A school is where people learns (anything) a cult is when people that are not learning has to find “something” to substitute that and the choice of self-calming is really enormous.
I had an automatic association with Elena story about leg and BT on Italian people: I copy here a piece:
““At the present time the beings of various parts of contemporary Italy actualize this property of giving-pleasure to-others in the following way: “The existence of the quadruped beings called ‘sheep’ and ‘goats,’ whose planetary bodies they also use for
their first food, they do not destroy all at once; but in order to give this ‘pleasure’ they do it ‘slowly’ and ‘gently’ over a period of many days; that is to say, one day they
take off one leg, then a few days later, a second leg, and so on, for as long as the sheep or goat still breathes. And
sheep and goats can breathe without the said parts of their common presence for a very long time because, in the main functions of the taking in of cosmic substances for the possibility of existing, these parts do not participate, though they do participate in the functions which actualize
those impulses giving self-sensations.”
You see connection with cult behaviour (and one could have this also outside the organisation).
Thank you very much for your post apprentice shepherd. It’s very good to have someone that actually hears what is being said and ads something to it. What an incredible change! Thank you.
I would like to hear your appreciation of the idea of friction and go into it more deeply. I think I was brought up thinking that friction wasn’t supposed to exist which was awfully difficult with a mother that shot herself when I was eight, that in the emotional sphere and also because in Colombia we still have a very strong influence from the Spanish nobility that thought that physical labor was for the lower classes so it is common for middle and upper middle classes and above to never have to deal with difficulties because somebody in a lower class should have to deal with them which is a great disadvantage when compared for example with American upbringing. So in the physical instinctive sphere there is also a “not get involved” attitude and leave it for the workers. On the other hand “the american way of life” also seemed to paint a world without problems and in the cult the attitude is that there are no problems unless you speak about them so SHUT UP! It’s amazing that so many of us actually bought it for so long.
Anyway in the System the idea of friction followed by the transformation of friction and regeneration is very clear but what I wanted to emphasize is that, don’t you find that in upper classes people pretend to avoid friction and that is a great disadvantage? One because just the attitude of not dealing with problems disables people, two, because when we don’t want to deal with a problem we end up buffering it, three because while we buffer the problem at the same time we make a huge drama of it instead of finding solutions and four because we end up living in an imaginary world. I think one could go on but let’s look at least at those.
Living with people in lower working classes I’ve noticed that they hardly make a fuss about almost anything and that’s wonderful! They do deal with it and most of the time don’t even consider things a problem, just a way of life that needs to be dealt with while at the same time, enjoying themselves. At least this is the case in Colombia where the families remain somewhat together. It also seems connected with being more or less in essence, doesn’t it?
In my biography my mother’s suicide seems to have had another opposite effect which was that I seem to have acquired an extreme behavior to friction as if I were trying to avoid things from getting so bad that they’d prompt anyone to such extreme “solution” but in fact reacting so extremely myself that I was the only one in danger of the problem!!! Which also took place in its own time, over twenty years ago, exactly today!!!
Deciphering one’s biography is such an adventure! Until I “survived” things just happened! Suicide just happened (of course, after twenty years of building up to it) and then I’ve spent the next thirty years trying to decipher what happened!! It’s quite funny isn’t it? And rather tragic too from another perspective for I imagine I’m no exception to the rule.
I’m not the subject here, I’m just using my biography to convey the point which is that our attitudes to friction do determine a great many things including the negativity of our reactions. For example, I didn’t even realize how negative I actually was until after I survived! In fact what prompted me to try to commit suicide was that negativity itself. That energy simply turned against me at some point and….
All this when looked from the cold analytical position. On the other side of it is of course the tragedy of an individual who suffers situations that don’t find resolution before they themselves become tragic. In other words, I’m saying that it was the negativity that led me to suicide and that we live in a world in which we are not dealing with the problems before they themselves become tragic. We are not being able to help each other soon enough because if we also understand that negativity is just the shield people put up before the world to try to cope with it not knowing any other way to do so, where we need to help people is in finding solutions that are less tragic. My biography has led me to become interested in the cases of suicide in Japan and Russia where there is an estimate of a hundred suicides daily and the recent suicides in the telecom company of Paris also begin to reveal a pattern of where people are today.
The point of all this writing is trying to help each other understand the problems and find solutions, is it not? Or where is your interest?
The other suicide cases that I’m much interested in is that in cults. It is really very tragic because cults are a little like young renegades. They scape the world trying to find another solution and end up more trapped than those outside for the simple reason that they isolate themselves from humanity. If cults are the “solution” people are finding today, where are we heading towards?
“One because just the attitude of not dealing with problems disables people, two, because when we don’t want to deal with a problem we end up buffering it, three because while we buffer the problem at the same time we make a huge drama of it instead of finding solutions and four because we end up living in an imaginary world. ”
Yes. I was ” italian cocco of mamma” mama’boy so she knotted my shoestring till up age. I wish to add (also if it is a corollary one point) that we learn to suffer (as synonymous of bear friction) for the wrong things. You could spent a lot of physical and psychological energy because you have buffer your real aim.
The comic of the situation is that the people as you tell about the lower working classes is less lunatic than intellectuals,but lacks the ability to develop it. In Italy the old socialist,communist people had a strong solidarity feeling between them. In my place the worker built their Theatre stone by stone.
Now we are involving anywhere…
Are we now involving each other anywhere or evolving everywhere? Or do both have to happen for either one to occur!!? I’m kidding you a little, I think you just misspelled the word!
It’s very good to hear your fresh voice. Thank you again.
This idea that lower classes lack the ability to develop it is of course an idea from the system. Have you ever thought about why that might be?
May be you are right and I am conditioned and there is to understand what means evolve, develop.
But i see that people (not just lower classes) that not have time or energy or inclination to intellectual food lacks that knowing that we can use from the people that have experienced before us to make more clear the big picture(life). I live in Italy: between me and and American there are 2000 years of culture that I without do nothing have in my brains-
I am not able to express better this:i am not at all nationalist, but for example Italian is a better language to express many things than English. And to know two 3,5 languages gives a different prospective view to understand if then you try to do something with it.
I guess the question for me is not so much whether we’re Italian or American but how human can an Italian or an American be? They are both such great cultures in their own way. They’ve both given us so much.
Italian is a much better language to express one’s self if one is Italian but a chinese would say the same thing about his language! A culture might be great because of its age but that doesn’t necessarily make the people of today from that culture more human than the other. It’s like saying that a saturn is better than a jovial which was also common in the cult but then we wouldn’t understand the wonder of diversity.
Talking of which, if you’d like to try some Italian, I might be able to understand you. Would you understand Spanish? Could be fun!
On the subject of lower classes having what is necessary I don’t think the question was formulated correctly, in fact, the idea in the System has nothing to do with lower classes but with people in essence and something I’ve been pondering about that is that in essence WE ARE while in true personality we know we are. Like in Adam and Eve’s story, after the apple they knew both good and evil like God!…to express it simply!
It’s as if the journey through the body were only a fifth of the journey and we would then need to travel the heart, the mind, movement and processes, fire and laws. And as if we had to become objective to ourselves while in essence we simply are one with the whole without having to think about it.
As if the journey were a slow dismantling of all the obstacles that we ourselves invented in the trip from essence to false personality which, as ego, is nothing more than the separation from the whole.
Such a great adventure!
I like this story about (true) personality that know while the essence is. But it looks as when one knows something forget about being.
The devil has to be paid (nothing free in the world if not miracles about multiplication of fishes and bread) with the creation of object subject. The essence naked are dressed from who views her nakedness . I not see solution if not in a third that has nothing to do with the first born but call her mama and papa the heredity. I am already a fundamentalist Christian 🙂
Per me questi scambi sono un po’ provare il microfono: Seee.1,2 3 4 Do you listen me ? Buoni Gli alti ? Si sente lì ? c’è un po di ‘riverbero. Reverberation. Resonancia. Me gusta.
Un poco loco.:-)
Hi apprentice shepherd,
Yes, that certainly happens if one is coming from the mind, I mean, forgetting to be when thinking about it, it’s a good observation because I didn’t even think about it, feeling that it’s a knowing in the realm of being rather than the mind. But then the same could be said about feeling. In true personality knowing and feeling are not the same as knowing and feeling in the ego.
I like to think about it as parts of a car. A great car deserves a great driver and a great driver tends to keep the car in great condition. The parts, when relating to the being are very different to the parts when subduing the being which is what I feel happens all of our lives before we actually make ourselves present in it.
The image of the carriage and the driver is the same in the System but actually experiencing it is what I feel is worth doing if we’re going to talk about it. Although I believe I’m a few lifetimes away from the kind of awakening I think is possible, the little I managed to actually work at the beginning of joining the Cult was wonderfully powerful. Then I turned the work against my self to bear the cult and instead of developing I almost drowned in the sea of psychological slavery. It’s a good thing I’m such a hard headed woman because I never managed to really belong and that was a blessing! There was always an element of distrust that kept questioning it. But that’s exactly what makes cults work so efficiently, that in the first period the member advances because of the love, enthusiasm and effort that he or she put into the work and then realizing that the cult is a cult and not a school takes the whole circle until one is mature enough to understand what one is no longer willing to put up with even if it kills one to leave it!. It took me seventeen years to realize what was so inhuman about it but I’m so glad that I’ve understood that this deeply that I don’t regret the losses. As I recover the sense of my self again which was seriously disturbed until fairly recently, I am also recovering the feeling that everything is possible, particularly the appreciation of beauty in our interchanges. I am so sorry I messed up so badly in my first participation in the fofblog, but I am so glad I was able to keep my self together in the second participation.
I only had to look up scambi which I should have guessed, for in Spanish it’s cambiar or intercambio so it might not be too difficult to keep up the game. For me it’s more an opportunity for you to express yourself without the inconvenience of not feeling too comfortable with the English, so if you mix them some I should be able to understand you more fully. That is only for when you’re “eager” to say what you need to say in Italian.I assume neither one of us has too much time for the dictionary so unless it’s essential we can do most of it in English.
Pero para probar, si hay algo lindo en nuestros idiomas es la calidez, así que te mando un fuerte abrazo. Que tengas un bello día! Gracias por estar por aquí.
i remember when i first join an internet english group that i wish to end with an abbraccio and in italian and spanish the arms,the braccia are well present in the word.
i confused about hug and tug so for many times i greet with tug. That was about language,but what i am sure that i save from the Teaching (i not believe in word System) it is that we are to find a common language.
Babele tower before confusion tongue is an interesting project. Un abbraccio!
one that i propose it is this:
A.P: “That was about language,but what i am sure that i save from the Teaching (i not believe in word System) it is that we are to find a common language.”
Am I understanding you correctly? That you don’t believe in using the words of the System but we can find a common language? It’s so easy to fall in common places with the system especially in the cult but for me it’s wonderful that one can verify it and once verified we should be able to apply it to other contexts.
I was very ill last night, shivering strongly and I thought about remembering myself and stopped shivering and was able to fall sleep. Woke up again from two to four but it was very good to remember how effective it actually is! Have you noticed that in relation to the instinctive center? Are these the words you don’t believe in? For me they are so wonderfully clear why would we need to invent others?
Have you read Steiner? He’s like the other side of the coin of The Work for me, funny that he and Gurdjieff disliked each other considerably!
About G dislike Steiner i were not so sure. Remember that Beelzebub is a Devil. If she despised at all a people he not bring attention on him talking about him two or three time.
It is the same about his book the Herald of coming Good that he say to not read …:-)
About the other issue it is very long and complex. In very (too much) short it is different. System is 2+2= 4
Teaching (dharma)(way) (truth) is DO it ! and if necessary 2+2= 1 or 3
some words are exact, because verified (istinctive function, brain ,storey) other G corrected in time.
“Sleep “is no the problem “self-calming” is the one ! But this is just a starting point from Ouspensky advice: leave the system ! Like Buddha: “Leave the raft when you are on the other side” but i guess that the other side is to be in the stream…
Don’t know if I understand what you mean but I’m definitely not in the other side and the stick much helps to walk!
I read somewhere that Gurdjieff visited the Goetheanum and Steiner asked him to leave. Their theories are not at all far from each other though.
I’m again working as a private English teacher and in Colombia most people in the middle-upper classes know English well having studied it from kinder-garden but hardly anyone speaks it properly, so a lot of my job is to re-structure the bad habits and re-install the right constructions.
It has been very interesting to observe that even after knowing the right structures and answering correctly in the drill, for some period the student will go back to the old structures when relaxed not only in the bad constructions but in the accent. Observing this it seems very similar to what happens with people in cults… fortunately and unfortunately. Fortunately because no matter how brainwashed, the old structure will stay there even if latent, potentially available for recovery and unfortunately because once the indoctrination is adopted willingly, it will take a similar process for the member to deconstruct it and that is what is so difficult, fearful and painful. All the centers are affected in the process but much more delicate than the centers is the process endured by the self itself, the I, for the I is gradually dismantled in cults to guarantee member’s dependency and “re-mantling” it is a very delicate and long process depending on how extensive the damage is.
Just as the whole process in the cult takes place through the gradual re-conditioning of the centers, through separating them and their functions from the self, what is very interesting to observe, and extremely beautiful, is to realize that the recovery of the self also happens with the “re-conditioning” of the centers and through the activities, the I and the centers reconnect. Even if the person doesn’t know the meaning of the activity he or she is performing and depending on the activity, it will shed it’s life on the member, that is, the activity itself has a “life” or “power” of its own and reconstruct or continue to destroy his or her many layers, centers or dimensions. What’s interesting is that the activity will shed different degrees of “logos” or “life” depending on the person’s attention and intention. To verify this which seems to have a great deal to do with the octave of impressions, one simply needs to pay attention to the quality of different activities. Playing tennis for example is a very different experience to playing the piano and they are both equally gratifying for the respective centers but the same applies to all activities.
I think this is what I mean about knowledge in essence and true personality: that in essence we are and we do but are unconscious about our being and doing while in true personality we can understand the richness of being and doing. The difference is not in the levels of energy experienced in either conditions (states?), but in the degree of consciousness of them. In other words, an experience is not less great in essence than in true personality in terms of its energetic quality but in a mature human being the meaning of the action is much more profound to the I. And then again, it doesn’t mean that in essence the action is any less profound, simply that in essence it is a given that is taken for granted valued then only when it is subsequently lost in the process of living as if life itself where the process of making our selves objectively conscious of the life that arises from our connection with the world.
Perhaps the problem was in the word knowledge for what I’m really talking about is consciousness that has nothing to do with the knowledge we tend to think of in the intellectual center.
I guess I’m just shy to use such words but I also think that if we’ve worked and given any valuable steps it is fundamentally important to share our experiences not to show off how far we reached, which at least in my case is incipient to what is possible, but because other generations will profit from our information.
Elena very interesting observations on your actual job. So permit me to dissent only to the last part:”it is fundamentally important to share our experiences not to show off how far we reached, which at least in my case is incipient to what is possible, but because other generations will profit from our information.”
I am not enough in confidence with you
to write what i really etiquette this statement:
“nonsense” i ‘hope you could accept without take offence 🙂
The only profit other generation shall get is how much WE ourself profit from the information from experience,that is how much “knowledge “( your words ,now mine too for consciousness) actually writing and reading we ..get.. (sometimes i use the word steal,but that for another time). I apologize, but with people that have another word in her world ( suicide) the meaning of (last) will
scare me ! Italian is testamento that is the same that the Bibble books the covenant God Man (for a better world).
Hey i was trying to listen to Chomsky in religion you posted,but i cannot because his tune bring me in mind the Criminology expert of Rocky horror picture show:/time 1,06
so i have to see the scene so i missed him.
You are crazy apprentice shepherd and a lot of fun and it’s O.K. now if we disagree, but before I was too vulnerable to bear anyone disagreeing with the little that was holding me up!
I don’t know what you’re saying about suicide. My mother committed suicide when I was almost nine years old and I tried to when I was 27, that is 25 years ago. The whole of my biography was marked by that, simply trying to overcome the impulse because once people try it is very difficult to stop them from finally managing. I’m nowhere close to that state now and overcoming the Fellowship was only half as difficult as overcoming that!
Life was never more beautiful than it is now!
I’d like you to look at the work I’ve been doing in the past few months. I should open a shop to sell my lamps and sculptures one of these days! You can look at them at:
http://web.me.com/publicsquare7/publicsquare7/Photos_2.html
I put them in up in my Rio Cedro site in photos 2 because I don’t know how to set up a new page yet but that’ll come.
Keep up your good humor, I can do with a lot of it!
Hello Ton,
I’ve no idea why you’re still coming here so often but if you can apologize for your destructive behavior you can participate again or leave but free your self either way. This blog isn’t pathologically adverse to people who disagree like the fofblog!
You don’t need to apologize for what you think of me, we can all think what we like but for the aggressiveness on this site which is very destructive to me, there are constructive ways of criticizing each other’s points of view. Here are the posts I banned. Should you repeat the same “tone” I should ban you again.
In repeating a similar behavior to the one I had in the fofblog I hope you realized how easy it is to get there when one isn’t at all well and one isn’t at all well when one’s behavior is clearly aiming at hurting others. What we need to learn is to disagree without hurting each other’s integrity.
Here are your posts that I stopped, the one by Steiner I think was repeated or just got dumped in with the rest and what I think is worth looking at besides the aggressions, is the impossibility to find a point of agreement. That is what shows the attitude and intention and the desire to get me so upset that I’ll retaliate and treat you as badly which was my pattern in the first fofblog participation. For me it’s over, I hope you don’t even need to explain yourself on it. My behavior was as bad as yours then, I could not control my anger and frustration at the people for not seriously helping to stop the Fellowship. It happens! But we’ve got to learn the lesson if we want to dialogue and to do so we need to like each other enough. Since I don’t think there is any such liking in you why bother to speak just to indulge in aggression?
Cheers!
2010/06/16 at 5:40 am
e: “…Have fun Ton in your world, I’m delighted not to be a part of it.”
Elena
gee elena, what happened to “WE are ONE” ?
you’re a fraud and a hypocrite and you can’t handle truth.
Life!
40 #
ton
2010/06/15 at 9:29 pm
let’s examine “the text” of your previous post a little further:
e: “This text by Steiner is very valuable in this exploration and contradicts nothing of what I’ve been saying…”
well i’m glad you can find “value” in it, good for you elena, i hope you will find additional “value” when you read the book from which the excerpt was taken… i hate to take things out of context, but that seems to be the custom here on your blog… and although the excerpt stands on it’s own, to do it proper justice it should be read within the context of the whole book. i really don’t understand why you think “the text” should contradict what you’re saying… why do you even suggest it? you really do take a contrary perspective on almost everything don’t you elena ?
e: “I’m happy to be able to state that I don’t consider myself an anthroposophist but a human being and that is because unfortunately in many an anthroposophist we still find the same authoritarian, classicist, racist, academic and economic sense of superiority that separates people from people…”
yes, and regarding “the same authoritarian, classist, racist academic and sense of superiority that separates people” — there’s a saying in my country — it takes one to know one. and i’m sure there are many “anthroposophists” who would be happy to be able to state that you do not consider yourself “one of them.” what, did you forget your “we are one” slogan again elena ? or do you only use it when it’s “convenient…” it sounds like you are quite an expert — how many “anthroposophists” do you really know elena ? i work with some and based on my personal experiences i can say it’s like any other “walk of life” — there are some “good” and some “bad” and sometimes the “good” are “bad” and sometimes the “bad” are “good.” (of course this is but a subjective and personal opinion… but at least i can freely admit to it being so and i don’t have to speak in ‘absolutes’ like you do here).
e: “…making of it nothing more than another decadent cult like the Fellowship of Friends…”
you really are an expert eh elena ? you seem to know this from the inside out… eh ? you compare apples and oranges and you say they are the same because both are round…. what does that say about you ?
Life!
40 #
ton
2010/06/15 at 7:46 pm
elena, the excerpt speaks for itself, i’ll leave the ‘disagreeing with’ and ‘critique’ of the text to you, since that seems to be your special preoccupation here…
what about “indirect personal attacks” is that ok elena, it seems that indirect personal attacks are allowed here on planet elena, because that’s exactly what you are doing in your post. what you write elena, is part of the “text” — “the text” is not only what you decide to cut and paste from other authors… and when i comment on what you write elena, that’s part of ‘the text’ as well — you can edit it out, but that doesn’t change the truth. you edit out my comments because they disagree with you and then you try to justify it with flimsy excuses AND YOU DON’T SEE THIS AS AN ATTACK ON ME?!? but it’s ok for you to attack me, right elena? at least as long as it’s ‘indirect’ rather than ‘direct’ — you feel “justified” because after all it is your blog and you DICTATE the rules, right ? that’s fine, just admit that you are dictating the rules and that anyone else who wishes to freely express an opinion is subject to your summary judgement…. AND you mistakenly place the blame on me for your banishment from the fofblog so you feel further justified in banning me here… so much for your idealized and lofty notions about the “public square” and “freedom of speech” elena…. this just proves what i’ve suspected about you all along, you’re nothing but a self-righteous fraud, a foolish hypocrite who acts like a spoiled petulant child. this is further proof that “we” — that’s you and i elena — are obviously not one, no matter how many times you repeat it, that will not make it true…. no elena, you and i are two very different people. although you would love to be able to live in this “we are one” fantasy by dictating that “we” should all think, and say, and do only what you approve of, i will continue to fight against a world where intolerant, narrow-minded people like you dictate what is and is not “valid.” you enjoy too much your own vain, pretentious, insincere, and hollow claptrap, elena.
Life!
40 #
ton
2010/06/15 at 3:55 am
lost somewhere in all of the “disagreeing” you do with the previous text, you questioned the author’s view of christianity… i see that much of what you disagree with is simply ‘reactionary’– ‘knee-jerk’ reaction on your part comes from a lack of understanding…. to help deepen your understanding and toward satisfying your stated ‘mandate’ to explore the ‘separation of state and religion,’ may i suggest a book, here’s an excerpt that pertains to some of what you’ve pondered here in the past… no reactionary response is required, you have nothing to prove elena.
“THE FACT that the Divine, the Word, the eternal Logos was no longer met only on a spiritual plane in the dark secrecy of the Mysteries but that in speaking about the Logos they were indicating the historical and human personality of Jesus, must have exercised the deepest influence upon those who acknowledged Christianity. Previously the Logos had been seen as reality only in different stages of human perfection. It was possible to observe the delicate, subtle differences in the spiritual life of the personality and to see in what manner and degree the Logos became living within the individual personalities seeking initiation. A higher degree of maturity had to be interpreted as a higher stage in the evolution of spiritual existence. The preparatory steps had to be sought in a past spiritual life. And the present life had to be regarded as the preparatory stage for future stages of spiritual evolution. The conservation of the spiritual power of the soul and the eternity of that power could be assumed from the Jewish esoteric teaching (The Zohar), “Nothing in the world is lost, nothing falls into the void, not even the words and voice of man; everything has its place and destination.” (see Note 72) The one personality was only a metamorphosis of the soul which changes from personality to personality. The single life of the personality was considered only as a link in the chain of development reaching forward and backward. Through Christianity this changing Logos is directed from the individual personality to the unique personality of Jesus. What previously had been distributed throughout the world was now united in a unique personality. Jesus became the unique God-Man. In Jesus something once was present which must appear to man as the greatest of ideals and with which in the course of man’s repeated earthly lives he ought in the future to be more and more united. Jesus took upon himself the apotheosis of the whole of humanity. In him was sought what formerly could be sought only in a man’s own soul. What had always been found as divine and eternal in the human personality had been taken from it. And all this eternal could be seen in Jesus. It is not the eternal part in the soul that conquers death and is raised as divine through its own power, but the one God who was in Jesus, will appear and raise the souls. From this it follows that an entirely new significance was given to personality. The eternal, immortal part had been taken from it. Only the personality as such was left. If eternity were not to be denied, immortality must be ascribed to the personality itself. The belief in the soul’s eternal metamorphosis became the belief in personal immortality. The personality gained infinite importance because it was the only thing in man to which he could cling. — Henceforth there is nothing between the personality and the infinite God. A direct relationship with Him must be established. Man was no longer capable of becoming divine himself in a greater or lesser degree; he was simply man, standing in a direct but outward relationship to God. Those who knew the ancient Mystery-conceptions were bound to feel that this brought quite a new note into the conception of the world. Many people found themselves in this position during the first centuries of Christianity. They knew the nature of the Mysteries; if they wished to become Christians they were obliged to come to terms with the old method. This brought them into difficult conflicts within their souls. They tried in the most varied ways to find a balance between the divergent world conceptions. This conflict is reflected in the writings of early Christian times, both of pagans attracted by the sublimity of Christianity and of those Christians who found it hard to give up the ways of the Mysteries. Christianity grew slowly out of Mystery wisdom. On the one hand Christian convictions were presented in the form of the Mystery truths, and on the other the Mystery wisdom was clothed in Christian words. Clement of Alexandria (died 217 A.D.), a Christian writer whose education had been pagan, provides an instance of this: “Thus the Lord did not hinder us from doing good while keeping the Sabbath, but allowed us to communicate of those divine mysteries, and of that holy light, to those who are able to receive them. He did not disclose to the many what did not belong to the many; but to the few to whom he knew that they belonged, who were capable of receiving and being moulded according to them. But secret things are entrusted to speech, not to writing, as God confided the unutterable mystery to the Logos, not to the written word.” — “God gave to the church some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” (see Note 73) By the most diverse means personalities tried to find the way from the ancient conceptions to the Christian ones. And each of them, believing he was on the right path, called the others heretics. Side by side with the latter, the Church grew stronger as an external institution. The more power it gained the more the path recognized as the right one by the decisions of councils took the place of personal investigation. It was for the Church to decide who deviated too far from the divine truth which it guarded. The concept of a “heretic” took firmer and firmer shape. During the first centuries of Christianity the search for the divine path was a much more personal matter than it became later. A long distance had to be traveled before Augustine’s conviction could become possible: “I should not believe the Gospel except as moved by the authority of the Church.” (see Note in Chapter 6)
The conflict between the method of the Mysteries and that of the Christian religion acquired a special stamp through the various “Gnostic” sects and writers. We may class as Gnostics all the writers of the first Christian centuries who sought for a deeper spiritual sense in Christian teachings. (A brilliant account of the development of Gnosis is given in G. R. S. Mead’s book mentioned above, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten.) We understand the Gnostics when we look upon them as saturated with the ancient wisdom of the Mysteries and striving to understand Christianity from that point of view. For them Christ is the Logos. As such He is above all of a spiritual nature. In His primal essence He cannot approach man from without. He must be awakened in the soul. But the historical Jesus must bear some relationship to this spiritual Logos. This was the crucial question for the Gnostics. Some settled it in one way, some in another. The essential point common to them all was that to arrive at a true understanding of the Christ-idea, mere historical tradition was not sufficient, but that it must be sought either in the wisdom of the Mysteries or in the Neoplatonic philosophy which was derived from the same source. The Gnostics had faith in human wisdom, and believed it capable of bringing forth a Christ by whom the historical Christ could be measured. In fact, through the former alone could the latter be understood and beheld in the right light.
From this point of view the doctrine given in the books of Dionysius the Areopagite is of special interest. It is true that there is no mention of these writings until the sixth century. But it matters little when and where they were written; the point is that they give an account of Christianity which is clothed in the language of Neoplatonic philosophy, and presented in the form of a spiritual vision of the higher world. In any case this is a form of presentation belonging to the first Christian centuries. In olden times this presentation was handed on in the form of oral tradition; in fact the most important things were not entrusted to writing. Christianity thus presented could be regarded as reflected in the mirror of the Neoplatonic world conception. Sense-perception dims man’s spiritual vision. He must go beyond the material world. But all human concepts are derived primarily from observation by the senses. What man observes with his senses he calls existent; what he does not so observe he calls non-existent. Therefore if he wishes to open up an actual view of the divine he must go beyond existence and non-existence, for as he conceives them these also have their origin in the sphere of the senses. In this sense God is neither existent nor non-existent. He is super-existent. Consequently He cannot be attained by means of ordinary perception, which has to do with existing things. We must be raised above ourselves, above our sense-observation, above our reasoning logic if we are to find the bridge to spiritual conception; then we are able to get a glimpse into the perspectives of the divine. — But this super-existent divinity has brought forth the Logos, the foundation of the universe, filled with wisdom. Man’s lower powers are able to reach Him. He is present in the structure of the world as the spiritual Son of God; He is the mediator between God and man. He may be present in man in various stages. For instance, He may be realized in an external institution, in which those variously imbued with His spirit are grouped into a hierarchy. A “Church” of this kind is the material reality of the Logos, and the power which lives in it lived personally in the Christ become flesh, in Jesus. Thus through Jesus the Church is united to God; in Him lies its meaning and crowning-point.
One thing was clear to all Gnosis: one must come to terms with the idea of Jesus as a personality. Christ and Jesus must be brought into relationship with each other. Divinity was taken from human personality and must be recovered in one way or another. It must be possible to find it again in Jesus. The mystic was dealing with a degree of divinity within himself, and with his own earthly material personality. The Christian was dealing with the latter and also with a perfect God, far above all that is humanly attainable. If we hold firmly to this conception a fundamentally mystical attitude of soul is only possible when the soul finds the higher spiritual element in itself and its spiritual eye is opened so that the light issuing from the Christ in Jesus falls upon it. The union of the soul with its highest powers is at the same time union with the historical Christ. For mysticism is a direct feeling and experience of the divine within the soul. But a God far transcending everything human can never dwell in the soul in the real sense of the word. Gnosis and all subsequent Christian mysticism represent the effort in one way or another to lay hold of that God and to apprehend Him directly in the soul. A conflict in this case was inevitable. In reality it was only possible for a man to find his own divine part; but this is a human-divine part, that is, a divine part at a certain stage of development. Yet the Christian God is a definite one, perfect in Himself. It was possible for a person to find in himself the power to strive upward to this God, but he could not say that what he experienced in his own soul at any stage of development was one with God. A gulf appeared between what it was possible to perceive in the soul and what Christianity described as divine. It is the gulf between knowledge and belief, between cognition and religious feeling. This gulf does not exist for a mystic in the old sense of the word. He knows that he can comprehend the divine only by degrees, and he also knows why this is so. It is clear to him that this gradual attainment is a real attainment of the true, living divinity and he finds it difficult to speak of a perfect, isolated divine principle. A mystic of this kind does not wish to recognize a perfect God, but he wishes to experience the divine life. He wishes to become divine himself; he does not wish to gain an external relationship to the Godhead. It is of the essence of Christianity that its mysticism in this sense starts with an assumption. The Christian mystic seeks to behold divinity within himself, but he must look to the historical Christ as his eyes do to the sun; just as the physical eye says to itself, By means of the sun I see what I have power to see, so the Christian mystic says to himself, I will intensify my innermost being in the direction of divine vision, and the light which makes such vision possible is given in the Christ who has appeared. He is, and through this I am able to rise to the highest within myself. In this the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages show how they differ from the mystics of the ancient Mysteries. (See my book, Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens. Berlin, 1901, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, Englewood, New Jersey, 1960, Volume 3 of the Centennial Edition of the Written Works of Rudolf Steiner, 1861–1961.)
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA008/English/RPC1961/GA008_index.html
Life!
40 #
ton
2010/06/15 at 3:34 am
e: “Just for your information I will only allow posts that refer to the subject in question and not me personally to get through to the blog. That is why I passed the previous four. But I guess if you aren’t printing somebody else’s material, you’ve nothing of your own to say besides personally diminishing others.I’m so glad I’ve managed to stop you from your tactics!
Elena”
and of course you dictate the ‘subject’ in question… so much for ‘the public square’ eh elena? so you’ll ‘allow’ comments which you deem ‘worthy’ and edit out anything that does not ‘suit’ you… so much for tolerance, eh elena? you are the most intolerant person i’ve never met… all the preaching you do here means nothing because in actual fact you are a complete hippocrit… you represent the ‘nazi’ mentality that you so vociferously preach against… there is an old saying in my country… and this is a perfect example of “the kettle calling the pot black” — elena, you are someone who has dedicated hours, weeks, days months and years to filling the many, many volumes of your blogspace with the “printing of somebody else’s” material… and yet you criticize me for doing the same. your ‘critiques’ here are transparent attempts to build up a false sense of self-esteem by making yourself feel ‘smarter’ than others, to increase your own sense of self-aggrandizement by ‘arguing’ against ‘someone’ who doesn’t argue back. elena, your problem is that you don’t understand what the ‘subject’ is here on your blog… YOU ARE the subject, and that’s what you fail to recognize… that’s what i’ve been pointing out all along… and all this ‘stuff’ you spend so many hours and days and weeks and months culling and cutting and pasting from the web, it’s all being selected by and filtering THROUGH THE SUBJECT — that’s you… now i ask, what’s the object?
Life!
40 #
ton
2010/06/14 at 5:44 pm
e: “Thank you Ton for giving me an opportunity to clarify my understanding through these texts. I realize you probably didn’t offer them so that I would expand my self so lavishly but, c’est la vie!”
i expect nothing less from you than to “expand so lavishly” — as you are wont to do in any and all cases anyway… i could think of other words for this ‘tendency’ of yours… but never mind that, i’m glad you are able to find some food for thought… although it seems that you misjudge the “spirit” of the text in some cases… it’s an overview, not a defense of the various perspectives presented… it’s an attempt to put the philosophy of individualism (the concept of the “I”) into a developmental/ historical context… i thought you could take it for what it’s worth, but you seem to be much more carried away with and interested in your own critique than the developmental progression which the author identifies…. maybe this has to do with the ‘source’ — ?
e: “That is what you and I have been disagreeing about Ton.”
there’s a lot we do not agree on elena… i see you’re now editing out my comments from your blog… but of course there’s not enough room here for my comments, after all, you have so many, much more important things to ‘say’ — and heaven forbid that an actual human interaction might occur here in your own personal ivory tower… but i understand, isolation is more comfortable for you, so i’ll leave you to it.
It looks to me that “personality” for Steiner it is “individuality” in G words.
True personality you mean? His whole system in my opinion is so very similar to the work if one is willing to understand them both. I do believe Steiner went much further than Gurdjieff, Ouspensky or Collin to apply the knowledge to life but their synthesis is of immense value even to understand Steiner who did exactly the opposite of what they did: expand on the system practically without giving a simple easy synthesis as they did. That’s awfully unfair because they did expand minutely in terms of inner processes which Steiner didn’t but Steiner expanded beautifully in agriculture, medicine, education, etc.
In Steiner it’s as if each of his ramifications in agriculture, dance, medicine etc were the extended dimensions of each center while in Rodney Collin what we have is the understanding of laws that can apply to every sphere.
They are all so wonderful and necessary! It’s interesting that both still develop cults and descending processes but that is also a law is it not?
try
Yes, i mean true one-
Steiner developed a cult ?
I read S many years ago (Theory ìf colours and Agriculture) and liked so much that things has a meaning connected to his form(the horn of a cow, a yellow pear from Jupiter etc)
What i not bought was the theosophy story of the world (saturn moon etc) but was so complex that i not go deeper.
I liked story about Jesus too-
Now i have read a book from an Italian (Augusto Timperanza: the seven key of the path, “Le 7chiavi del sentiero”. He studied with Thomasson then found some fanatical in the group and studied Steiner.
When i find time i shall translate(ahi ahi)some interesting thoughts of him
Sounds good, if you have them in your computer and wish to put them in Italian I might be game for it if you put one at a time!
Yes, the theosophy story of the world is pretty exotic but not more than Gurdjieff’s Belzebub. I do think other dimensions get that exotic in relation to what we are used to. What I liked about the theosophy story is that when looked at carefully, it does fit with the rest of his theory and it is not far from the theory of worlds if one wishes to adapt it. The “fragments” of the system don’t really expand on what all those worlds are about but I Steiner goes all the way to the roots and when the theories are practically applied in medicine, agriculture, nutrition and so many of the sciences people are delving into there’s beautiful coherence in them all. I find that tremendously exiting and even more so when, knowing Gurdjieff’s system it equally fits.
Sometimes I think that the value of all this systems is that, even if they were all just made up stories to give us a hint of what it’s like, they, like fairy tales, end up giving us a very good view of what the inner world of matter is like. I don’t think of matter and the spiritual as two opposite sides but rather as two, equally necessary sides of the same coin and more in terms of root and flower in one plant than even two sides of the same coin. If we water the plant out here the beautiful flower will give strong seeds to the following generation! You might think those “generations” are nonsense again but it’s good to disagree and still share.
It really is wonderful to be off and away from the computer. I’m having so much fun working on other things that my back is beginning to protest. Blogging, or the idea that there are humans with whom to share on the other side held me since I left the Fellowship cult and poor replacement as it might have been it was a thousand times better than the cult! Pity that the cult on the internet wasn’t too much better than the one inside and that I made so many mistakes along with the rest of us.
It’s good to feel alive again, alive and with perspectives. Tonight I sat outside and played the guitar for the little children from the neighborhood, five of them who sang along and made up stories about the people. Summer is beginning to move in and it was the first warm evening in the past two months. Here too it’s been raining a lot but not so badly.
I’m sorry for the people in Pakistan who are suffering such floods.
The objective value of acts.
As time passes away from the cult one of the realizations that begins to become more pronounced is the understanding that ACTS determine our inner life as much as our external life and that is why the way people relate to each other, act towards each other and do things in definite contexts, matters.
What I’m finding is very new to me so this is more of an exploration than a finished work.
To take an example I would like to think about music.
There is an objective value to playing an instrument for the player. In regular society we do not quantify the value of an act like playing a piano in terms of the quality of energy that that action will give the player but in relation to understanding the octave of impressions, we would necessarily have to understand that there is an specific quality to the act that could be quantified if we had an instrument to measure the state of people’s soul! And don’t we measure that by the “state of being” of the individual? We do not have numbers to that yet but we should surely be able to add numbers to such states and say without doubt that a person who has just tried to commit suicide is in a “cero state of being” and what I mean by a “cero state of being” is that the individual in question has reached the lowest level that the “I” can reach. Yes, this is something I’ve been trying to express for the past four years. Clarifying these different spheres should surely help in psychoanalysis because what we don’t seem to have understood until recently (or was it only I?) is that what conditions our “states” is our I. It conditions them so precisely that one could almost affirm that the “I” of the individual is not really an objective object that can be measured and pointed at but that in itself it is a “state” and that that “state” is what is in a permanent process. This is beautiful! Beautiful because the urge of the rational mind to encapsulate the I into a definite form is an impossibility and the malleability of the I is it’s true mystery. The urge of the mind to reduce the idea of “being” to a fixed entity is what keeps it from understanding the wholeness of life. The fact that we are psychologically fixed in the objects we see keeps us from perceiving the movement they are in.
So if we are clear about the “I” as a “fluctuating state” and activity as an “actor” on such states, we can begin to view the objective quality of actions. Acts act on the individual as much as on the external world. It seems to me that we’ve been concentrating on the individuals to understand our lives but the individual is only an aspect of our lives while other individuals and what we do is an equally relevant aspect of our lives. We are ourselves only one of the many ingredients of our own life! I’m particularly interested in this analysis in relation to healing processes because as time passes away from the cult, I am convinced that we can significantly change not only our societies in the long run but our tactics of healing our selves and our communities. I might be discovering that “water is warm” as we say, for what I am saying is that for an individual to become “normal” he has to be “normal” and normality as viewed by traditional society as an individual that is able to perform “socially healthily”. The standardized concept of “normality” is that of a person able to “work”, “make money”, “have friends”, “participate”… but what these words mean for people in the different social classes and nationalities is very different. We seem to be generalizing what things are for all people but things are very different for people in different social classes to begin with. For people in the upper middle classes and above, to be normal means to work, to be creative, make money and have friends, all of which make you socially acceptable while for people in lower classes, to work means to work for others and accept the conditions of labour. To submit your life force to the production objects that will place the owners in a position of privilege that allows them to be “creative” in their lives even if they rarely do become such creative beings. Creativity is not necessary when you’re supposed to do a totally uncreative job. But being unable to “create” and to be “creative” is the most pervasive condition against the “I” for the “I” is in itself a “creative” entity. This is the main cause of suicide in companies like the Telecom of Paris today. “Being productive”, “earning a living” is not enough to keep the human being of today alive.
To be “normal and healthy” in the lower classes means to submit to conditions of repression of the individual necessity to create and accept the role of servant to other people’s creations and interests all your life. If you do not accept those conditions you will certainly be sacked or not get the job. In every single activity there is the potential for creativity but that potential is appropriated by the people in power and THAT is what makes us unequal as human beings today, THAT is what needs to change.) The other aspect of today’s suicide’s in companies is that people are moved from one place to another as if they were machines without connections and those radical “displacements” affect them so profoundly that they not only loose their social connections but their contact with their own self enough to take their own lives.
Going back to the activity of music, the way the activity fortifies the player’s inner self is significant. Do people think about this or is it just taken for granted? Is it simply obvious? That is, that playing an instrument has a particular quality of it’s own and reverts into the player’s being in a particular way?
A second sphere is the act of playing music in public. The Public ads a dimension to the experience that makes it of value not only for the player but for the listeners. There is a “community” element in the experience. The question with public experiences that I’m interested in exploring more deeply as I go along is the difference between a “mass” experience and a “community” experience to call it some how.
The third sphere of the act itself is that of it’s intention, its “aim”. In the cult there is a concert practically every week. The music is beautiful like it is in any other concert hall in the world but the EVENT is used to “legitimize the cult”. Understanding this is what I’m after: the way things are used to legitimize particular status quos that people are wishing to impose on other people. Art is used in cults to manipulate people but then when it’s not art it’s some other “ideal” what is used to legitimize it.
What were the aims of the cult?
“Awakening” was supposed to be the main aim. That was used to justify every renunciation members had to do to accomplish it. So what did people actually renounce to?
Their freedom to act from their own understanding?
Their own understanding in relation to their life and the world around them?
What were people actually escaping from?
Was it not the fact that we were equally submitted and powerless in regular society, no matter what class we belong to?
Don’t most cult members join cults because they are trying to take hold of their lives that in regular society has gotten out of their hands? That basically the dimensions of regular society are such that people preferred to let it aside and disconnect themselves from its processes and make up their own smaller version of a “community” that they thought they could handle? And wasn’t trying to avoid the “human national and international community” a trap of its own?
My hypothesis is that human beings need the community and that that is a legitimate need. That that NEED is being lived out unconsciously and therefore it is used and manipulated by people in different spheres of power to take advantage of other people but that if we become conscious and therefore absolutely clear about that NEED as a reality we will stop making up cults to live it out and rather address the real issues that being a community of human beings implies; That the problems of distribution can be more conscientiously solved if we are clear that the aim is to “help” each other out. When we look at history and the division of people in clans, nationalities, religions, etc, it’s clear that if we are going to talk about equality it can only be an equality in terms of our humaneness not in terms of our particular differences; That as human beings it is our responsibility with each other to guarantee the minimum conditions for life to develop.
The breach between beliefs and practical life becomes ever so clear when groups of people pretend to apply those ideals only to the people within their clan, nationality or race, academic status or social class and not to everyone. This inability to act with the same integrity towards all human beings and justify every atrocity when it is committed against others who do not belong to it, is the greatest aberration of our condition as human beings today. This equally happens on the scale of the individual. The supra efforts an individual is willing to make for the “loved” one are particularly interesting when that same individual is able to perform without the slightest care towards those that are not the “loved” one.
What is so difficult about this subject is that what is being questioned is how people “love” and nothing is more precious to people than what they “love” and what we need to come to realize is that our “love” is too biased to be “love” that what we’ve been calling “love” are simply our very personal identifications and that our “identifications” are just another aspect of our immaturity as human beings. That the emotional imbalance of people, when for example we fall in love and see no other aim than the loved one and deploy all our “arms” and selves towards the realization of that love, is basically that: emotional imbalance when it is followed by extreme carelessness in other areas. The ego thinks it is a great ego because it has a huge capacity to love THAT one individual above everything and everyone but LOVE is not in that uniqueness, that is just egoness out on “the ramp”. All those of us who “love” like that are mere beginners in the Art of Love, we are being trained to tackle our own energy and all the suffering that we go through is necessary to learn the lesson that love is not an arrow directed at an object but an “air” in which everyone is able to breathe with equal guarantees.
The same process can be observed in relation to our ideals. While for women, the main identification might be related to their “love”, for men the tendency to behave likewise but in relation to ideas in social contexts seems equally imbalanced. The analysis is tricky because if we were to take the case of “the real thing” the behaviour involved is equally unidirectional only that it is unidirectionally omnidirectional and THAT is the difference. In a state of integrity, a human being will maintain a unidirectional behaviour in everything he or she does but that “directionality” will be embedded in an “omnidirectionality” that maintains the balance within it. It is like a line born from within the sphere of the circle going or coming in and out of itself forming another circle at each step from the line. Circle, line, circle… like a child come out of the womb, like a human being embedded in his or her humaneness.
It is not easy to be such being. What is interesting about our struggles is that what reveals the state we are in is not what we are struggling for but how we are struggling for it. The words matter some but it is not the words but the acts what reveals our self.
And harsh words are in themselves harsh acts. It’s a very great lesson to understand the pervasiveness of one’s egoness.
The subject is wide open still. An exploration is just that and it is normal to explore the whole region before one actually gets to the point. It doesn’t make the treasure any less valuable.
Going back to the value of acts what I am trying to get to is to the idea that each act has a different quality of energy and that the way it affects the I is of absolute significance to the “state” of that “I”. That is one aspect of acts. The second aspect is that an act has a certain power of its own but it will act for or against the individual in accordance with the aim of the act itself. In the cult every individual tried to perform every act most conscientiously but all those acts turned against those very individuals because the acts were disconnected from the community and the individual performing them. This is important! The aim of each individual was supposed to be “awakening” so we were supposed to act with the greatest effort and intention but our effort and intention only went as far as the act itself. The individual had to severe himself from the action and perform it for the benefit of the cult and disconnect his own self from the “creativity” within the action or the cult. This is very tricky to explain or understand because while the act itself was done with intentionality, it was not a “free” act, it was conditioned by the guru’s guidelines. This is important because the guru maintained the power and weakened the power of the members precisely by limiting them in the action. The action which in itself is creative was reduced to an act of repetition without creativity and the challenge of the actor became to act the act as if it were an act of creativity without the creativity which in the long run weakened each and every individual attempting it.
It seems such an obvious thing and yet it hasn’t been obvious for me in fifty years so why would it be so obvious for others? That is, that human beings are like divine beings in their doing and each act is full of meaning?
Maybe that is why unconscious people in essence are not accountable, because we are still in “Paradise”, ignorant of what we’re doing!!! Isn’t that beautiful?
And then when we do know we become accountable and the price for each of our acts is ever so high. And yet there is a balance.
Wouldn’t that help explain that difficult idea of the System that man cannot do? Are we then already more than mere humans when we become accountable for our acts? Not that we’re really ever not accountable for every act ads up and one knows the price sooner or later, but it becomes increasingly expensive as one moves along and at the same time the pleasure in paying for it is so much greater, just as if one had actually accumulated enough money in the bank!
It is a very wonderful thing to feel the subtle “hidrogens” of “acts”. Does it happen to people as we get older? That we learn to tread gently that we might not fall so often?
It’s ironic that we learn to do that as our bodies are conditioned to do it so that we don’t actually fall in its weakness no matter how strong we’ve become. It really is a humbling experience how the body gets older and tired and weaker and still carries the whole of one’s life. It is heavy, and the body seems to enjoy the load like a donkey would, at least mine does, it doesn’t mind how the weight has bent its back and it knows that sooner than later there’ll be time to rest… yes, like donkeys or horses on the way back home, hurrying the step a little somewhat anxious to get there.
From J Street
Beginning again.
Asked to write a short piece on the topic of beginning again recently, I reflected on the possibility of direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians re-starting in the coming days and weeks.
I wrote that – when it comes to trying something again – there’s often a little too much “can’t” in the world, and not enough “why not?”
It’s just my nature, but I find little else as frustrating as being told a problem isn’t solvable, or a goal unattainable.
I never understood why, in law school, professors rewarded students for spotting issues and problems – rather than for coming up with solutions.
Nor do I understand why bold, new thinking so often meets out-of-hand rejection. I just point to my friend who pitched several companies fifteen years ago with the design of a slim machine on which you could read books without paper. They laughed.
Coming up with reasons not to take chances is easy. Passing the buck, pinning the blame on someone else, saying you can’t – all easy.
But, in my book, trying and failing is no excuse for not starting again.
We tell our children to get back in the saddle when they fall off a bike and to get back in the batter’s box when they swing and miss.
Why do we accept anything less as adults – in matters as important as life and death, war and peace?
Sure, we’ve all heard why Middle East peace can’t happen. How there are no partners. How everything was tried ten years ago and it failed. We’ve been told that those of us who believe are few and far between and that our limited power can’t have an impact.
But why not?
That’s my thought for Mahmoud Abbas this weekend as he ponders whether to say yes or no to starting direct talks with Israel. Click here to read J Street’s statement from last week urging Abbas to enter direct negotiations.
Beginning anew means refusing to accept things as they are. It means believing that, with effort, the power of good, of hope and of peace can and will overcome the daunting power of the status quo.
New beginnings demand that we dream a better future and relentlessly ask why not.
Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will require President Abbas, Prime Minister Netanyahu and, yes, President Obama to lead, to take risks, to defy the naysayers … and to begin again.
Why not?
Shabbat Shalom, and have a great weekend,
– Jeremy
Jeremy Ben-Ami
President
J Street
August 13, 2010
http://www.iclips.net/watch/post-modern-times
web democracy! Creating community!
http://www.iclips.net/watch/post-modern-times
Noetic Institute. These people seem to understand that We are One!
From Reality Sandwich
People talking about things that matter at last!
Check out the animated video short, “Web Democracy,” by Post Modern Times for an interview with the author about the main ideas in this article. To view it, go to the PMT page on iClips and click on “Web Democracy” on the episodes list.
1. Networking a Green Democracy
In September 2000, I was invited to a unique gathering that brought together high-level Internet engineers with environmental activists and media professionals to strategize about the future of the Internet and the fate of the planet. In a beautiful retreat center surrounded by tall redwoods and Northern California mountains, we spent an intensive weekend discussing how new kinds of information technology could be used, not to make money, but to make our society more equitable and sustainable. Though you might think this sort of brainstorming session was common during the dot com boom years, that wasn’t the case. Activists and indy media pros rarely had direct access to top technologists. Since most funding for software development comes from big corporations, non-profit organizations and other social initiatives ended up using low-rent versions of tools built for business purposes. But for this gathering, we gave ourselves the freedom to ask if a different type of technology — created with social, rather than business, goals in mind — might incite a much deeper level of societal transformation. The conversation we started that weekend changed the direction of my life.
This possibility had inspired a tiny organization called Planetwork, which held a conference the previous May on the theme “Global Ecology and Information Technology.” At the time, these two subjects were an unlikely pairing. Few people saw a connection between the organic complexity of the natural world and the cold, corporate character of the military innovation called the Internet. But when I heard about the conference, I was thrilled that someone had made this linkage.
But then I always saw the Net differently than my dot com colleagues. During my twenties and early thirties I’d lived in New York’s East Village, splitting my time between community activism for peace groups and the homeless, and the downtown arts scene, hanging out with avant-gardists like Allen Ginsberg, Bernadette Mayer, and Richard Foreman. My day job was in book publishing, which was the family business. I got involved with the Web early on because of the opportunities it offered to create independent media, free from the control of global conglomerates, and led the launch of the Web’s first multimedia music zine, SonicNet.com, which in its early days was devoted to alternative rock and edge culture. My curiosity about the origins of digital media — “Where did hyperlinks come from?” “What was the first online community?” — led to my collaboration on an anthology that traces the history of computers as an expressive medium. From that research, I understood that the Internet’s potential went far beyond the basic combo of websites and email. But I hadn’t realized how profoundly the tools we use to communicate can effect how society operates, how people organize collaborative efforts, and how power is distributed among citizens. The meeting in the redwoods opened my eyes to amazing opportunities for a major societal shift.
Following the Planetwork conference, some of the organizers and participants convened about two dozen people for two days of blue sky conjecture, and I was invited. [1] Upon arrival, our hosts handed out a thought-provoking proposal that encouraged us to think outside the box. Consider this: There are easily 10 million Americans who feel strongly about the environment and want to do something that will make a difference. Is it possible to gather these people into a “green AOL” (at the time AOL was the largest online community), aggregate their purchasing power, and catalyze a network of green consumers that could help shift the market toward sustainable practices? Imagine what would happen if a coordinated green buying block was there to support new green and fair labor products and services, alternatives to the standard stuff offered by the market.
This kind of scenario was rarely, if ever, presented to high level IT pros, at least not by people from politics and media who might take their ideas seriously, and maybe even act upon them. Though quite a few engineers have progressive politics and sometimes — if they live in Berkeley — vote for the Green Party, their salaries come from industry or government clients who pay them to do engineering tasks that follow standard business models. They program systems that, in effect, support society as it is; they aren’t asked to envision society as it could be.
But when presented with the “green AOL” scenario, the techies in the room grew visibly excited and proposed a slew of extraordinary possibilities. What the techies realized — and what eventually dawned upon the rest of us — was that when you design communications systems using digital network technology, you are actually designing the behavior of the people who use the system. Most business IT is geared to make the people who use it more efficient as workers or consumers. Why not design communications tools that made people better, more engaged, citizens?
While most non-techies, and even many techies, rarely look at digital networks from this perspective, this potential was never lost on Douglas Engelbart, the visionary who invented interactive, collaborative computing in the 1960s. It was Engelbart’s lab at the Stanford Research Institute that gave us most of the ingredients that make the Web possible: sophisticated text editing, hyperlinks, online publishing, networked community, video conferencing, and the mouse. Unlike the businessmen who later turned interactive computing into a billion dollar industry, Englebart’s motive wasn’t to get rich (he didn’t), but rather to create a system that helped people to collaborate to solve the increasingly complex problems facing society. [2] He expected that there would always be a deliberate effort to improve our digital network tools based on the way people use them, and that society’s needs would be paramount in the development of these systems. [3]
After making amazing headway and launching a fully functioning prototype — which in some ways is still more advanced than today’s World Wide Web — Engelbart was in for a shock when public funding for his research dried up in the 70s. The purpose of digital media shifted to automating offices, rather than enabling increasingly sophisticated forms of collaboration to address complex problems. Tech innovation became driven by short-term market trends, and most people came to expect that high tech would always serve corporate and military interests.
But by that time, as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were first appearing on the scene, the key ingredients of today’s digital network were already baked into the system. Over the years, more and more people have noticed that the Web has certain democratic characteristics. They point to:
* How the Internet’s mesh-like, distributed architecture allows people to connect directly (peer-to-peer) rather than through centralized, hierarchical hubs;
* The way messages can flow in any direction, unlike the traditional “broadcast” model where information is sent to the masses from a centralized source;
* The fact that anyone anywhere can add a website to the network that can be seen by anyone else on the network at any time, and that each new website can potentially reach an international audience; and
* The way every digital file can be copied and replicated exactly, giving rise to the mantra “information wants to be free.”
The fact is, the folks who designed this system — west coast researchers like Engelbart and his team of grad students, many of whom took part in the Sixties counterculture [4] — knew what they were doing. The democratic potential of the Net did not appear by accident. Rather, the system these engineers designed embodied values that prized sharing, collaboration and transparency, and reflected a deep distrust of centralized, hierarchical authority. Military money may have paid for much of it, but the generals who signed the checks never fully grasped what they were funding. [5]
During our weekend retreat in the California redwoods, the techies — who aligned themselves with the Engelbart tradition — offered different approaches to mobilizing large numbers of people around shared objectives, and providing them with tools to coordinate their actions. The idea of a “green AOL,” though useful to consider as a conversation starter, was quickly rejected because a couple of us had worked with massive online communities like AOL and Prodigy, and were aware of the huge infrastructure and personnel expense necessary to support a single website with 10 million members (although that cost has come down quite a bit in the years since).
We began to explore other ways of connecting 10 million people online. As it turned out, there were several. The Net’s architects designed it that way. The techies brought up obscure, cutting-edge innovations that the rest of us had never heard of, but which have since become widespread, such as online social networking, Web page maps that displayed dynamic geo-spatial data, and personalized information delivery via online subscriptions. It took a while for most of us to grasp what these bizarre gizmos do — actually, it took a series of meetings every two months for over a year — but since then these abstract concepts have been made concrete thanks to Friendster, Google Maps, and RSS.
What the world hasn’t seen, however, are versions of these tools developed explicitly in the public interest to serve civil society. Imagine a Friendster (or, in today’s parlance, a Facebook) that connects you to a network of green shoppers in your community so you can coordinate purchases of local produce. Imagine using Google Maps to find farms in your area, and by clicking on the farm you could see how its water use is effecting the local water table. Imagine subscribing to RSS updates about water usage in your region that get sent when there is a drastic fall in water table level. And imagine being able to connect with all the other people in your community who have subscribed to that RSS update each time the water table drops to a danger point, so you can organize a community response to this environmental threat — and make sure to purchase produce only from farms that protect the water table.
This is a simplistic example, to be sure, but hopefully it makes a point: IT can be shaped to serve the public interest. We live in the era of databases. An extraordinary amount of information is already being captured on hard drives; every day it becomes easier and less expensive to do so. By linking computers to the Internet, that data becomes available to inform the public about how society manages its resources. It can also enable each of us to connect with others so we can self-organize into groups to take action.
These citizen action tools don’t exist today, but that’s not because of the engineering obstacles, which are relatively small. As the techies told us again and again at that redwoods summit, the challenge isn’t technical, it’s social. As a society, we simply do not make it a priority to design and deploy online systems that enable people to be more engaged in their communities.
2. Forming Groups
Of course, the democratic potential built into the Internet is being tapped in many ways. Groups like MoveOn, TrueMajority and Avaaz have waged many successful online campaigns, lobbying for legislation and changes in government policy, attracting millions of volunteers to their causes. Barack Obama stands on the threshold of becoming the next President of the United States, and if he does, his ability to attract donations over the Internet will be a big reason why.
But a more intriguing aspect of the web’s democratic potential is how it enables people with shared interests to spontaneously coalesce into groups of all sizes. In the subtitle of his book Here Comes Everybody, Internet analyst Clay Shirky calls it “the power of organizing without organizations.” The book describes how effective the Net is at attracting people to a project or cause. Shirky offers many examples of how simple tools like email, blogs, wikis and popular social networking sites (like Facebook and Flickr) give someone on a mission the ability to kick off and coordinate campaigns that can grow exponentially, engaging many thousands of people in a matter of weeks or months. Unlike in the pre-web days, these online efforts don’t cost a dollar in printing or mailing expenses. All they require is someone’s time.
Shirky tells how a Boston physician in 2002, after reading newspaper accounts of sex abuse by a Catholic priest, started a group in his basement called Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) to push for church reform. Nothing special about that. But within a few months, at its first convention, VOTF had 25,000 members. Thanks to the Internet the group was able to forward articles from the Boston Globe’s website to a steadily growing e-mail list. Some VOTF members had their own blog sites, where they reached even larger numbers of people, who in turn became VOTF members. As Shirky points out, it had always been possible to clip articles from the paper, Xerox them, and send them by snail mail to a group. But, as he says, “what we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large that it becomes a difference in kind.” [6] In addition, the low cost of aggregating information led to the formation of an activist website, BishopAccountability.org, which “collated accusations of abuse, giving a permanent home to what in the past would have been evanescent coverage.” Online social tools like websites for membership and e-mail for communications, enabled VOTF to “become a powerful force, all while remaining loosely (and largely electronically) coordinated.” A few years earlier, without the Internet, this would have been inconceivable.
Shirky is on the mark when he describes why digital networks have reduced obstacles to collective engagement:
“Technology didn’t cause the [sex] abuse scandal that began in 2002. The scandal was caused by the actions of the church, and many factors affected the severity of reaction in 2002, including the exposure of more of the church’s internal documents and the effectiveness of the Globe’s coverage. That combination was going to lead to substantial reaction in any case. What technology did do was alter the spread, force, and especially duration of that reaction, by removing two obstacles – locality of information, and barriers to group reaction.” [7]
Because of the Internet, people can circulate information more effectively, and gather more easily into group initiatives. But it would be a mistake to see the Internet as it currently exists as having fulfilled its potential. The obstacles that Shirky refers to may have been reduced, but they have not been removed. In the basic architecture of the Internet itself lie many untapped opportunities to extend its ability to support and amplify collective action. What we have today is pretty good, but it could be much better, exponentially so.
The fundamentals of the Internet encourage an open flow of information and connection, directly from one person to another (or to a group), without walls or intermediaries. But in practice, largely because of the online businesses that have been built upon the Net’s foundation, information and group formation can and do bump into walls.
Some walls are built by governments, as in China, where citizens are denied access to certain information. Other walls are more subtle, such as the wall erected by mainstream media to a news story that falls outside its narrow world view, even if that story generates considerable attention among an engaged group of bloggers and readers. Another wall could be imposed by the telecoms and cabal companies, if given their druthers to have a two-tier (or many-tiered) Internet that favors corporate product over independent voices. This threat has given rise to a “net neutrality” movement that has managed to protect the network to date, though future victories are not assured.
Another wall is the one that surrounds every online community, from MySpace to Twitter. When you join any of these sites, you fill out a profile from scratch. That profile information stays with the site, and you can’t take it with you when you go somewhere else online. For instance, when you leave Facebook and log into MySpace, all the information accumulated in your Facebook profile stays behind. Even though you’ve said on Facebook that one of your interests is environmental advocacy to preserve redwoods in northern California, no one on MySpace would know, unless you go through the tedious process of typing that same info into your MySpace profile, which most folks don’t. In fact, the profile you create on these sites isn’t even owned by you. That information is the site’s intellectual property. Their business models are based on the premise that they know what you want (thanks to your profile) so they can sell you things with laser-like efficiency. And they don’t want you to take that data away from them. Usually, they won’t even tell you what they plan to do with it.
But suppose that every time you joined a new online social network, without having to fill out yet another endless series of forms to describe yourself and your interests, people there automatically knew you were a rainforest activist (assuming you wanted them to know). Suppose that part of your “traveling profile” included testimonials from other activists you’ve worked with, so that people who meet you for the first time could see that among activists you have a good reputation. Imagine how much more effective that would make group formation for the environmental movement.
The technology to make this kind of “introduction” service exists today. In fact, there are a number of ways to do it. But don’t expect Facebook or MySpace to spearhead its creation. It’s just not part of their business model; their attention is elsewhere. In today’s climate, if the financial allure of a new digital service isn’t immediately apparent, it’s nearly impossible to steer significant resources towards its development, especially if more than three people in a garage are needed to create a launchable product. The “introduction” service would take more work than that, but not hugely so. Still, this kind of public interest tech is not easy to build a business model around – as a result, it doesn’t get done.
There’s a strange assumption that if an online tool is any good, it ought to make someone rich, even though history tells us otherwise: many of the key ingredients of our digital communications stew were developed in research labs by engineers who never profited from their innovations. For quite some time, though, digital research has been driven by the computer, telecommunications, and entertainment industries (which are increasingly blurring into the same, multi-headed hydra), helping them to advance their existing business practices. Meanwhile, few resources are available for innovating online social tools that make it easier for people to connect to information and each other so they can contribute to a sustainable future.
3. Digital Identity
Let’s return to that September, 2000, blue sky brainstorming session in the California redwoods. That weekend was so highly charged with possibility that the group reconvened every two or three months for a year and a half, switching back and forth between the Bay Area and New York, percolating a new world view based on the opportunities offered to civil society by applied IT innovation. Eventually the group was formally constituted as the Link Tank (“think tank” with a geek twist), though among ourselves we half-jokingly called it the Web Cabal. Some 50 people ultimately took part in these sessions, contributing to a radical vision of an egalitarian, sustainable society made possible by networked digital communications.
What made these summits special was having professional political activists and media makers in detailed discussion with senior engineers who really knew their stuff. These techies were architects of large IT systems that had scaled up to meet the needs of millions of users. Engineers like to solve problems. Usually, engineers are presented with problems like, “How can I protect my intellectual property, so that each time someone downloads my digital thingy, I get paid?” As you would expect, the engineer will then design a system meant to meet that objective. But the Link Tank asked its engineers a different kind of question, such as, “How can millions of people who care about the environment join collectively to take actions that will drive the marketplace to support more sustainable practices?”
As we discussed different scenarios, it became apparent that any system meant to connect one person to another because of their shared interests hinges on the personal “profile” of each participant. Your profile needs to say that you’re an environmental activist in order for other environmental activists to find you and make a connection. So how does that profile get created, and — most importantly — how much control do you have over it once it exists? After all, if your profile only sits on Facebook, and it isn’t even your property but rather is owned by Facebook, its utility is pretty limited. But if you could carry your profile with you across the Internet, like a kind of flag that you wave as you enter a website, and if you could control who has access to your profile information based on criteria that you set (for instance, if you only want to reveal your environmental activism to certified members of Greenpeace), that would greatly increase your opportunity to link with others.
After all, that’s basically how it works in meat space (or, as some refer to it, real life). You don’t leave your identity at the door when you go from one social milieu to another. If you walk into a work meeting and run into a cute girl you met at a Greenpeace rally, you don’t have to tell everyone present that you’re a member of Greenpeace. You always carry experiences from different parts of your life with you, and you can be selective about what aspects of your self that you reveal under different circumstances. Why should online be different? Especially since the underlying structure of the Internet allows for this kind of flexibility.
As we got deeper into it, during these Link Tank discussions we came to realize that digital identity may be the central issue facing civil society in the Internet age. It not only affects how people are able to connect to one another and form groups. It also has implications for how we link to news and information, how we access products and services, how we behave as consumers, and how we participate in our communities as citizens. Once your profile says certain things about you – for instance, that you are interested in green news stories, want to buy locally grown food, and want to participate in zoning efforts that protect the local water table – then it becomes possible to match you to those who feel similarly, as well as to information and services you can use. For some, this kind of personally targeted online experience is increasingly seen as the pinnacle of what the Internet has to offer.
At the same time, digital identity raises issues about privacy protection: who has information about you, what can they do with it, and what options are there to control what they do? What happens if some of the companies you do business with — like Amazon, Disney, and Google — combine the profile data they have about you into a shared file, and use it for purposes you don’t agree with, without your consent? Of even greater concern, what happens if the government gets hold of that information, what privacy protection do we have?
It turns out that identity is the one key ingredient that Engelbart and the other Internet architects didn’t cook into the system. Because so few people used those early networks, they simply didn’t have to worry about it then. If you were on the Internet when it launched the 1970s, everyone knew who you were. Profiles weren’t necessary, and if you acted in a dishonest way or did something to piss others off, they could always find you; they knew where you lived. It was only when the system scaled up to serve millions of people that the identity issue presented itself.
The vision that grew out of the Link Tank was captured in a paper I co-wrote with Jan Hauser and Steven Foster in 2003 called “The Augmented Social Network: Building Identity and Trust into the Next Generation Internet” [8]. We presented these ideas at a number of conferences, and in certain circles (geek utopian, to be sure) this paper got a lot of play. We figured that the next step was to raise funds for an initiative to nurture this vision and develop some prototypes. But it turned out that the progressive funding world (foundations, NGOs, liberal donors, university research initiatives) wasn’t ready to evaluate cutting-edge tech apps, let alone one based on the idea that the right kind of tech can propagate egalitarian and sustainable values in society. To many people, to this day, communications infrastructure is mistakenly viewed as “values agnostic.”
Nonetheless, a half dozen initiatives did get underway, led by idealistic programmers (and their friends), often at considerable personal and financial sacrifice since support from civil society was fitful at best. Diligently, with their eyes on the prize, they developed different aspects of what became known as “user-centric digital identity.” Privacy specialists made sure this system was secure: you have total control over your personal information, and no one else – including the government – can access it without your permission.
An organization called Identity Commons [9] was established to evangelize this vision, and to provide a venue for coordination. New technologies with arcane names like XDI [10], Higgins [11], i-names [12], Information Cards [13] and OpenID [14] began to get some traction, and a few prototypes — pieces of the whole user-centric digital identity puzzle — were completed. By 2006, these achievements, in turn, attracted the attention of major players with deep pockets.
Who showed up? Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Novell, Yahoo, Google, Verisign, PayPal, and a number of nimble start-up technology firms that came to realize how a trusted, user-based identity system is necessary if the Internet is going to support a wide range of next-generation products and services.
Fingers crossed, a truly visionary digital identity system will be produced by these efforts, and the intentions of the tech utopians who shepherded this vision over the years will be present in the final version. But without the direct involvement of civil society, which has such a great stake in the outcome, it’s hard to say what will happen. It should come as no surprise, however, that the first application of user-centric digital identity will be to enhance your online shopping experience, connecting you more efficiently to stuff you might want to buy — albeit in a less intrusive manner that gives you control over your personal data.
4. Decision Making at the Edges
People often say: society’s problems will not be solved by technology. This implies that you can somehow separate how society operates from the technology we use. It doesn’t recognize that society is shaped by the technology available to us.
In his book The Creation of the Media, Paul Starr offers an example everyone should know of the influence that technical innovation has on social organization. He traces how the emergence of newspapers in the North American colonies in the 18th century, coupled with the creation of a reliable postal service, provided the communications backbone that gave birth to modern representative democracy. Breakthroughs in printing led to the publication of journals, pamphlets and papers in larger numbers, at a lower cost. The postal service distributed these publications in a timely way, so readers across the colonies knew about recent events, removing the “locality of information” obstacle that Clay Shirky referred to. Post offices also encouraged group formation — removing Shirky’s second obstacle: they became social hubs where people read newspapers out loud. Custom held that new papers could be read by anyone who happened by the post office, which mirrors the attitude toward content sharing on today’s Net. In fact, a town’s printing press was often located beside the post office, and items from papers that arrived by post were copied verbatim by printers into their publications, an analog version of email forwarding. In its way, 18th-century communications tech offered an early version of the Internet’s barrier-reducing capabilities.
Armed with information about current affairs, and able to congregate into groups to discuss what they knew, some people in the colonies (white men with property, of course) felt strongly that they should be involved in the decisions made by government that effected their lives. So they chose representatives and sent them by coach to assemble with other representatives in formally constituted bodies to vote on decisions that effected their communities. They used the best technology for group assembly and decision making then available: horse and buggy, face-to-face dialog in public places, the circulation of printed materials to support claims and proposals, roll call votes or paper ballots, and the publication of decisions made so they could be read by other citizens. The result was a form of representative government, practiced in towns and cities across the colonies, that offered the most accountability between governors and the governed that a state had yet managed to achieve.
Today we’re still living with a government that, in its basics, is a product of cutting-edge 18th century technology. Of course, much has been layered on top of it. But dig deep enough and eventually you hit underlying, archaic assumptions that have gone unchallenged for centuries. Here are a few:
* Regional assemblies. Representative assemblies should be organized on the basis of where people live, rather than by specialized issue or project.
* Generalist representatives. Elected representatives are expected to have sound judgment about all subjects, and are empowered to make decisions even on subjects they know nothing about.
* Centralized information. For good decisions to be made, pertinent information must be gathered in a central location, so a small group of people with access to that information can propose a decision to the larger representative body, which votes on it. Widespread public access to that information, so it might be challenged or amended, is not essential to the process.
* Permanent bodies. Governing bodies composed of elected representatives — such as the Senate, Congress, state assemblies, city councils, etc. — should never be dissolved.
These assumptions are the product of the limitations of 18th-century technology. The framers of the Constitution took them for granted, which is no surprise, since no practical alternatives were available. But they also didn’t anticipate the long term consequences – government institutions that have become staggeringly bureaucratic, slow, obscure in their operations, unresponsive to citizen needs, and controlled by corporate interests.
The early democratic philosophers assumed that citizens would personally know, or at least have a passing acquaintance with, their elected leaders – there would always be a direct connection between the government and the people. Until the early 20th century, the White House doors were open to unannounced guests who stopped by to meet the President. But the number of seats in Congress today is the same as it was 100 years ago. It’s physically impossible for a U.S. Representative to press the flesh with even a fraction of his constituents, let alone have a meaningful chat with them. Government has become a TV spectacle, reduced to a sports contest that repeats every four years, like the World Cup, while the problems facing society – the environmental crisis, global food shortages, peak oil – are so complex that only specialists can begin to untangle them. Our elected representatives are ill matched to the tasks before them, and the current system leaves most citizens feeling disconnected, untrusting, and with the overwhelming sense that their actions make no difference.
As a techie might put it, our form of representative democracy doesn’t scale well.
At the Link Tank sessions, two dozen of us would gather in conference rooms in either the Bay Area or New York, exploring ways that digital networks enable connection between participants in group actions. We drew network diagrams on blackboards or white sheets, mapping various ways that people could link to one another. We kept returning to structures that allocated tasks and decisions to clusters at the edge of the network, where expertise was concentrated or an action’s effect was most likely to be felt, rather than bringing all important decisions back to a single, super-powerful hub at the center.
The intention behind these exercises was to find ways of empowering those with the most at stake – who usually have the greatest motivation to act, as well as the most relevant knowledge – so they can participate in making solutions to common problems. With digital networks, group formation can be far more fluid, transparent, and non-hierarchical. This opens up new possibilities for collaboration, new types of decision making structures, and the freeing up of creativity where it hadn’t been present before.
It’s an approach that hinges on the development of user-centric digital identity. With the right kind of personal profile, identifying expertise in a community becomes much simpler, as does linking people so they can collaborate.
Collaboration can take many forms. It can include: a loosely joined network of homeowners doing renovations who cooperatively purchase sustainable construction materials; a county zoning board tasked with protecting the water table; a car pooling initiative that connects people to drivers heading to the same destinations; or even an entire township that, following the Transition Town model, seeks to collectively lower its ecological footprint by instituting new sustainable practices. Digital networks present us with the opportunity to innovate new forms of collaboration for achieving shared objectives that could be far more effective than the tools we currently have at our disposal.
Try looking with fresh eyes at the decisions facing our communities and our nation, taking into account the tools we have to share information and convene groups to take action. If we re-wrote the Constitution from scratch, would our current type of representative democracy be the optimum choice for governing ourselves? Or would we use a different model more appropriate for our time?
Consider a county in northern New York State that wants to contribute to sustainability by reducing its ecological footprint. Suppose it tried an alternative approach to government designed based on assumptions quite different than the ones that hailed from the 18th century, discussed above – new possibilities suggested by the capabilities of the Internet. It might include:
* Issue Assemblies. Representative assemblies would be convened to focus on separate issues that impact sustainability, such as: transportation; energy; toxic clean ups; and local organic agriculture. Some assemblies – such as transportation and energy – might have the standing of government bodies, while others — like local organic agriculture — might be groups of consumers loosely organized into buying clubs to support local farmers.
* Expert Representatives. Elected representatives to the issue assemblies should be recognized experts with professional experience in their area of specialty.
* Distributed information. The information introduced into assembly discussions should be made available online, so everyone can see and comment upon it, allowing outside experts to participate in the decision making process.
* Temporary bodies. Once a particular issue is addressed — for example, implementing a new transportation plan for the county, or evaluating alternative energy sources to generate power for the region — the assembly is dissolved, keeping the group from calcifying into yet another sclerotic bureaucracy.
The social tools we have today — email, websites, wikis, blogs, etc. — aren’t adequate for the complexities this kind of system demands. But shouldn’t we be experimenting with new tools, testing different kinds of systems, to see what really might be possible?
One such experiment, called Smartocracy, was spearheaded by Link Tank member Brad deGraf in 2006. It uses digital networks to explore an alternative approach to democratic decision making, one that might prove more effective, though just as egalitarian, than the notion of “one person/one vote.” The concept is explained on the Smartocracy website: Collect $20 donations from 1,000 participants, and then use the Smartocracy system to collaboratively decide which deserving projects or institutions should receive grants from the pooled sum of $20,000. The site goes on to say:
“Democracy has a fundamental problem, namely that “one-person/one-vote” guarantees that the wisest among us will be devalued, in favor of the least-informed. Here [on Smartocracy], participants have equal weight, not in voting, but in deciding who to give their votes to. Instead of “one person/ one vote”, it’s “one person/ ten votes to give away”…. Each participant gets an equal number of votes (initially 10) for each decision to be made, to be exercised not by them but by their proxies. That simple change, from voting to delegating your vote, creates meritocracy in an equitable, natural way. The most highly respected participants are by definition on more people’s lists.” [15]
Instead of each participant casting a single vote, you get 10 votes to distribute to proxies who you trust. You might give three votes to one and seven to another. By doing so, you authorize these proxies to make decisions on your behalf. But by distributing your votes among several experts, rather than authorizing a single proxy to cast all your ballots, you help set the context for a conversation between several trusted experts, a team that is empowered to act in the interest of the entire group. Smartocracy is an ingenious approach to democratic collaboration. At the same time, it’s a logical extension of what digital networks have to offer.
In the years leading up to the Constitutional Convention, many flavors of representative government were tried, each growing out of local conditions and customs. Some were successful, others failed. From those experiments came the experience that guided the founders as they laid the foundation of American representative government. Today we need similar experiments. [16]
It’s worth mentioning that one outcome of this approach might be entirely new economic models that don’t rely on money to motivate people’s actions. Rather than receiving cash, participants in a collaboration could be rewarded in other ways. Online systems are particularly good at tracking a person’s contributions to a group effort, and at calculating appropriate compensation — which might be a service offered by another person in the network. This means that networks can be convened to meet shared objectives without having to raise massive funds to pay for it; if there’s enough will to get a project going, the group can find plenty of ways to reward participants other than with cash. (Not to linger on doomsday scenarios, but considering the questionable state of the global economic order, and the possibility that a series of environmental and resource crises could trigger a sudden collapse, this visionary approach to collaboration becomes even more relevant.)
Back in the days of the Link Tank, only a few seemed to grasp that the digital infrastructure carries implicit values about sharing and collaboration. But every day, this awareness dawns on more people. A generation has grown up with the Internet as part of the atmosphere it breathes. Through the Net, we viscerally experience our interconnection with others, each of us individual nodes in an intricate, interdependent network. At the same time, the environmental crisis calls us to become more conscious of our interdependence with all life on Earth — yet another network we are part of. The intricate collaborations of nature become models for our own behavior. The most beautiful ecosystems are the sum of many moving parts, working together in collaboration. We have much to learn from them.
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NOTES
[1] A group of 23 was initially convened in Ben Lomand, California, in September 2000 by Brad deGraf and Neil Sieling, with Planetwork’s Elizabeth Thompson and Jim Fournier. The others who participated were: Debra Amador, Juliette Beck, Jack Bradin, Bruce Cahan, Bonnie DeVarco, Andres Edwards, Steve Foster, Chris Gallagher, Lev Gonick, Jan Hauser, James Hung, Allen Hunt-Badiner, Michael Litz, Richard Perl, Christie Rothenberg , Greg Steltenpohl, Hardin Tibbs, Michael Tolson, Amie Weinberg, and Nate Zelnick. Ultimately, an additional two dozen people took part in the process, either by attending meetings or engaging in online discussions. Among them were: Jeffrey Axelrod, Owen Davis, Gerald de Jong, Tom Laskawy , Tom Munnecke, Robin Mudge, Ellen Pearlman, Jonathan Peizer, Richard White, and Duncan Work.
[2] See http://www.bootstrap.org/chronicle/chronicle.html
[3] See http://www.bootstrap.org/augdocs/augment-81010.html
[4] As John Markoff describes in his engaging book, What The Dormouse Said (Viking, New York 2005)
[5] To fully appreciate the culture that gave rise to the networked personal computer, check out hypermedia pioneer Ted Nelson’s remarkable book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, published by Hugo’s Book Service in 1975, now unfortunately out of print.
[6] Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. The quotes in this paragraph are taken from page 149-152.
[7] Shirky, p. 153
[8] The ASN paper was first presented at the Planetwork conference in San Francisco in May, 2003 and appeared in First Monday in the August 2003 issue, accessible at http://www.firstmonday.org/Issues/issue8_8/jordan
[9] Visit the Identity Commons at http://www.idcommons.org
[10] Wikipedia defines XDI as: “XDI (XRI Data Interchange) is a generalized, extensible service for sharing, linking, and synchronizing data over the Internet and other data networks using XML documents and XRIs (Extensible Resource Identifiers).” For more information, visit http://www.xdi.org
[11] The Higgins home page on the Eclipse website says “Higgins is a framework that enables users and applications to integrate identity, profile, and relationship information across multiple data sources and protocols. End-users can experience Higgins through the UI metaphor of Information Cards.” For more information, visit http://www.eclipse.org/higgins
[12] The i-names website explains: “URLs are for connecting web pages. Now get the address for connecting people and businesses in rich, long-lasting digital relationships: i-names. Whether you are an individual looking for a safe, lifetime personal address or a business seeking long-term, opt-in customer relationships, there’s an i-name for you.” For more information, visit http://www.inames.net
[13] The Information Card Foundation website explains: “You already know how to use cards in your wallet to present ID, to purchase things, to show you are a member of a club, or that you have a relationship with a merchant like Best Buy. Now what if it was just as easy to login or do business on-line as it is to present a card in the rest of your life? No more typing. No more filling in forms. And that is just the beginning. Just as media became a lot more flexible and useful in the digital world, now your cards can manage more things for you!” For more, visit the Information Card Foundation at http://www.informationcard.net
[14] On the OpenID website it says: “OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience. You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.” For more information, visit http://openid.net
[15] Though the Smartocracy system has been taken off line, information about it can be found here: http://smartocracy.net/ovrvw.html
[16] For more ideas about how digital networks could be used to revolutionize democratic practices, see the anthology Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy in the Internet Age, edited by Allison Fine, Micah Sifry, Andrew Rasiej, and Joshua Levy, and available as a free download at http://rebooting.personaldemocracy.com/
“Often we talked about visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, who believed that most of society’s difficulties were “problems of design.” Our current models for government, economics, media, and even religion were mostly based on flawed hierarchical models that bred division while consolidating power to the few at the top. Energetically speaking, we were “a house divided,” competing for money, land, space, jobs, fuel and other resources, creating an enormous amount of suffering. As our Reality Sandwich community continued to grow, members asked to meet and organize with others where they lived.”
From Reality SandwichThe Sacred Geometry of a Consciousness Movement
Jonathan Talat Phillips
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. (Albert Einstein)
NATIONS MATTER:
CULTURE, HISTORY, AND THE COSMOPOLITAN DREAM
Click to access nations_matter_book.pdf
Worth looking deeply into. While what it states is perfectly valid, the human ideal of going beyond national, social or family ties equally stands. A true family, society and nation cannot stand against the human being anywhere, just like a man cannot act against another’s humanity and remain human.
If this is in the internet and publicly available I imagine it can be published here.
NATIONS MATTER:
CULTURE, HISTORY, AND THE COSMOPOLITAN DREAM
Click to access nations_matter_book.pdf
Conclusion
To recognize that there is a community of fate and responsibility at the level of
the entire world makes sense. But liberal cosmopolitanism does not provide the
proximate solidarities on the basis of which better institutions and greater democracy can
be built. Nations are the most important of such solidarities. Moreover, while
cosmopolitan ethics may explain why it is good for individuals to give to global charities,
they do not adequately explain the obligations those who benefit from living in rich
countries have to those whose lives are limited because of the way in which capitalism
and the world system of states have organized the distribution of both wealth and the
“illth” that is created by many efforts to pursue wealth.26 This is so because the benefits
derive from the embeddedness of individual lives in national histories and contexts. If for
example Americans are to pay reparations to countries damaged by the slave trade or
other injustices, it will be because the very possibility of life as an individual American
today rests on the unjust historical background. The remedy will depend not merely on a
global idea of equality or justice but on the mediating solidarity. This alone will make it a
felt and actionable collective responsibility.
Approaches to liberal cosmopolitanism that do not take seriously the work
nationalism does in the modern era and that do not work with a strong appreciation and
understanding of solidarity and subjectivity, are as apt to be pernicious as progressive in
actual politics. For nationalism is not only deeply imbricated in the social arrangements
of the modern era, it is basic to movements to challenge and improve those social
arrangements.
25 Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verson, 1997).
26 The useful concept of “illth” – the negative counterparts to wealth, like environmental degradation —
was introduced in 1860 by John Ruskin; see the title essay in Unto this Last and Other Writings (London:
Penguin, 1986). It remains inadequately integrated into economic thought. “Negative externalities”
addresses related problems but more narrowly from the perspective of the individual economic actor.
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The necessity of nations in contemporary global affairs is not something in itself
to be celebrated. They are starting points, institutional mechanisms, and frameworks of
struggle more than indicators of ultimate values or goals. In one of the common meanings
of the word, indeed, nationalism refers to a passionate attachment to one’s own nation
that underwrites outrageous prejudice against others. But we should not try to grasp the
phenomenon only through instances of passionate excess or successful manipulation by
demagogues. For nationalism is equally a discursive formation that facilitates mutual
recognition among polities that mediate different histories, institutional arrangements,
material conditions, cultures, and political projects in the context of intensifying
globalization. Nationalism offers both a mode of access to global affairs and a mode of
resistance to aspects of globalization. To wish it away is more likely to invite the
dominance of neoliberal capitalism than to usher in an era of world citizenship.
Not least of all, nationalism is a reminder that democracy depends on solidarity.
This may be achieved in various ways. It is never achieved outside of history and culture.
Democratic action, therefore, is necessarily the action of people who join with each other
in particular circumstances, recognizing and nurturing distinctive dimensions of
belonging together. Nationalist ideologies sometimes encourage the illusion that
belonging together is either natural or so ancient as to be prior to all contemporary
choices. But liberalism conversely encourages neglect of the centrality of solidarity and
especially the cultural constitution of historical specificity of persons – potential subjects
of liberal politics. More helpfully, we can recognize that solidarities, including but not
limited to national ones, are never simply given but have to be produced and reproduced.
This means they are subject to change; this change may be pursued in collective struggle.
Women and minority groups have been integrated into the political life of many modern
states not simply despite nationalism (though certainly despite certain versions of
nationalism), but through the transformation of nationalism. Nationalism then becomes in
part the history of such struggles.
Nationalism also underpins social institutions created in the course of historical
struggles, such as public schools, health care, and other dimensions of welfare states. It
may underpin struggles to defend such institutions – and the very idea of the public good
–against neoliberal privatization. The institutions differ from each other, and struggle is
necessarily about improving them not simply protecting them. The same is true of culture
and structures of social relations. These are constitutive for democracy, but they are also
subject to democratic action and change. For these reasons, the cultures of democracy
necessarily differ from each other. National solidarities are resources for democracy and
also arenas of democratic struggle.
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CONCLUSION
Acceleration of globalization in recent years has been greeted alternately, and
sometimes simultaneously, with hope and panic. It has brought pursuit of human rights
and pursuit of terrorists. Democracy has made headway in some settings, but hardly
everywhere as some hoped after 1989. Humanitarian emergencies have exacted a brutal
toll, though on the positive side they have also brought forward a considerable response.
Migration has been one force furthering global cosmopolitanism, but it is also met with
reinvigorated border controls and immigration restrictions. While it has sometimes been
portrayed as movement beyond the state, the growth of new nonstate global governance
institutions has been uneven and in some domains halting, and if many states are indeed
in crisis, states remain central political actors. The importance of the state is evident in
the problems attendant on weak states in Africa, the muscle-flexing of emerging powers
like India and China, and both the military and the political interventions of the USA. In
brief, globalization is real but not quite the uncontested and unambiguously positive
transformation some enthusiasts have suggested. And while new institutions outside or
beyond nation-states are important, nation-states themselves are called on to play central
roles in the context globalization. Indeed, much of the contemporary form of
globalization is produced and driven by nation-states—at least certain powerful nation-
states.
Globalization and the coming of postnational and transnational society are often
presented as matters of necessity. Globalization appears as an inexorable force—perhaps
of progress, perhaps simply of a capitalist juggernaut, but in any case irresistable.
European integration, for example, is often sold to voters as a necessary response to the
global integration of capital. In Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, a similar
economistic imaginary is deployed to suggest that globalization moves of itself, and
governments and citizens have only the option of adapting. Even where the globalist
imaginary is not overwhelmingly economistic, it commonly shares in the image of
progressive modernization and necessity. Many accounts of the impact and implications
of information technology exemplify this.
Alternatives to globalization, on the other hand, are generally presented in terms
of inherited identities and solidarities in need of defense. Usually this means nations and
cultural identities imagined on the model of nations; sometimes it means religions,
civilizations or other structures of identity presented by their advocates as received rather
than created. These are denigrated by proponents of transnational society who see the
national and many other local solidarities as backward or outmoded, impositions of the
past on the present.. A prime example is the way both nationalist economic protectionism
and Islamist movements are seen as simply the regressive opposite of globalization. In
each case, this obscures the often transnational organization of the resistance movements.
Likewise, the social imaginary of inherited cultural tradition and social identity is
prominent in ideologies of Hindutvah, essential Ethiopianness, the idea that an insult to
“Turkishness” should be a crime, and widespread notions of ‘cultural survival’.
This is doubly confusing. First, many of the supposed alternatives to globalization
are in fact responses to it and efforts to shape it. Second, there is a confusion between the
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fact of growing global connections – the minimalist core of globalization – and the
specific institutional and market forms of globalization that have predominated so far.
Like modernization theory two generations ago, accounts of globalization today tend to
imply a single developmental direction for change. But it makes more sense, as a variety
of scholars have recognized, to conceive of multiple modernities or projects outside the
simplistic contrast of the traditional and the modern. So too it is important to recognize
that contemporary struggles are not simply for and against globalization but struggles
over its form, over who benefits and who suffers, and over what existing solidarities and
values must be sacrificed to secure an attractive global order.
In many settings, the economistic/technological imaginary of modernist
globalization is embraced at the same time and by the same political leaders as
nationalist, religious or other imaginaries emphasizing inherited cultural identity. The
contradiction is avoided by assigning these to separate spheres. The Chinese phrase “ti-
yong” has long signaled this, a condensation of “Western learning for material
advancement; Eastern learning for spiritual essence”. Similarly divided imaginaries
inform many Asian, Middle Eastern, and other societies. Even in Canada, a recent
Financial Times article reported, “the country wants to become a lean global competitor
while maintaining traditional local values”.1
Like many countries, Canada seeks at once to project itself internationally as a
tourist destination and domestically as an object of political cathexis. Like many other
countries as well, it does so with both enthusiastic representations of its rich internal
diversity and an effort to articulate the claims of the whole over its parts. Nationalism
provides a prominent rhetoric to both the holistic and the sectional, sometimes separatist,
projects. It offers categories for understanding the demarcation of cultures, the ways in
which individuals belong to larger groups, and the ways in which such groups participate
in history. It also offers what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling” that link
categories of thought to emotional engagements.2
Feeling that one belongs to something larger and more permanent than oneself is
either a wonderful or a terrible thing. It is an inspiration for heroism and the composition
of sublime works of music and art. It is a motivation for morality and a solace amidst
suffering. Conversely it is sometimes the source of a claustrophobic sense of being
trapped or a crushing weight of responsibility. It makes some people silently quell doubts
and support dangerous policies of nationalist leaders, and makes others feel an obligation
to speak out. It is also the only way in which many people are able to feel that they
belong in the world.
This is not true of everyone. Some of us are happy eating at Parisian cafes,
basking on Bahian beaches and attending conferences in New Haven without thinking
much of national identity. Some hear Wagner without thinking of Germany or view
Diego Rivera as simply a great artist not a great Mexican. But if we imagine that
cosmopolitan inhabitation of the globe as a series of attractively heterogeneous sites is
1 Scott Morrison and Ken Warn, “Liberals strive to sharpen competitive edge,” Financial Times, June 11,
2001, “Canada Survey”, pp. 1-2.
2 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1965).
159
readily available to everyone, we deeply misunderstand the actual and very hierarchical
structures of globalization.
Globalization has not put an end to nationalism—not to nationalist conflicts nor to
the role of nationalist categories in organizing ordinary people’s sense of belonging in the
world. Indeed, globalization fuels resurgence in nationalism among people who feel
threatened or anxious as much as it drives efforts to transcend nationalism in new
structures of political-legal organization or thinking about transnational connections.
Nationalism still matters, still troubles many of us, but still organizes something
considerable in who we are. Whether and how nationalism can mediate peaceful and
constructive connections of individuals to the larger world is a crucial question.
Nationalism’s contributions to social solidarity may never outweigh its frequent violence.
Yet seeking to bypass nationalism in pursuit of a rational universalism may reflect
equally dangerous illusions.
Elena:
This is an interesting and yet short conclusion. It is all so true. All of it. There is terrible danger in globalization for huge numbers of people without power and yet how will we reach the consciousness of the whole without the struggle? These are amazing times. We are crossing beyond our selves wether we like it or not . Everyone seems very much afraid of the fact that the “reigns” of the “play” are hardly in anyone’s hands. There are no kings, governments or powers that can hold the horses any more. It’s beautiful! There is nothing to be afraid of! The human being will flourish again and again and again for many centuries to come no matter how much many of us suffer as we go along.
Each nation must hold its integrity just like each individual and at the same time stick to the whole of humanity. The great community is great enough to have no fear. We just need to do our work, carefully, patiently… lovingly, taking everything into consideration, letting everyone participate, trusting each other.
We don’t need to be afraid of letting go of the little we each have. No one has enough but together there is enough for everyone. Many of us can sacrifice our selves should it be necessary. We all need to sacrifice a lot and not to be afraid to sacrifice everything.
Each human being has nothing more than his and her own work. Everything else belongs here. It must remain here, including an individual’s work. We all work to leave it behind, joyously, gratefully. We take the self that the work has sculpted in us, nothing else and no one can take that away from us.
We are beautiful beings. We are each more beautiful than we are even close to imagining. Life will take each one of us to where we each wish to go. We can each reach whatever we wish to reach by simply trusting our selves. Trust is the greatest force that a human being will ever find. Trust in his own self and in others. It is from trust that compassion and forgiveness can come, when one knows in one’s heart that beyond all aggression is a human being. No one has enough to survive on his own but together we can survive. We have all made mistakes. Huge mistakes. Individually and collectively. Individually and nationally. It is no time for charging each other with guilt. It is time for building and rebuilding a world where we can develop our love. We each have so much to give. Individually and collectively. A man and a woman’s work is pure gold. Each man and each woman are creating the world each day, weaving life each minute, through their work. We must all be allowed to work not only for a living but for life.
Life weaves itself in and out of our selves as if its threads entered in an out of our lives and we were both needle and thread, tapestry and hands. Life is an air that is both in and out of our selves. We are deeper than the grand canyon! Each one of us is deeper than the galaxy, deeper and lighter. Each one of us holds the Universe in our selves. Don’t be afraid to be your self.
Article on Kagan and protestantism-
http://blog.beliefnet.com/christianityfortherestofus/2010/05/elena-kagan-the-supreme-court-and-a-lament-for-american-protestantism.html
Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court, and a Lament for American Protestantism
Monday May 10, 2010
Categories: Christianity, courts and law, religion and politics
President Obama has picked Elena Kagan, former dean of Harvard Law School and Solicitor General, to fill the next vacancy on the Supreme Court. Much will be said of Ms. Kagan over the coming weeks–praise and criticism of all sorts. But little will be in a form of lament, and that’s what I’d like to offer here. A lament for the passing of American Protestantism.
Ms. Kagan is Jewish. That means there will be six Roman Catholics and three Jews on the Supreme Court in a country that was once the largest Protestant nation in the world. These days, of course, the United States may still have the largest number of Protestants but the percentage of the population that is Protestant has slipped to a mere 50%, meaning that sometime in the near future, America will be a nation with a religious plurality and not a majority.
I’m not lamenting the loss of representation; I don’t think that Supreme Court picks should be ruled by affirmative action. Rather, the primary qualification should be that the person knows the law, understands the law, upholds the law, and possesses a certain sort of empathy for the way that the law impacts the lives of Americans. Accordingly, anyone–a Protestant, Jew, Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, or atheist–can be an excellent Supreme Court justice.
However, the faith in which one was raised or which one practices forms the basis of one’s worldview–the way in which a person interprets contexts and circumstances. It involves nuances regarding theology, outlook, moral choice, ethics, devotion, and community. All religious traditions provide these outlooks to their adherents, and they are present in both overt and subtle ways through our lives. I’m not lamenting the numerical absence of Protestants. Instead, I will miss the fact that there will be no one with Protestant sensibilities on the court, no one who understands the nuances of one of America’s oldest and most traditional religions–and the religion that deeply shaped American culture and law.
Historically, American Protestantism is a vast, diverse, argumentative set of traditions. Sociologists include a wide array of denominations under the moniker, from independent churches to Episcopalians and all sorts of Baptists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Congregationalists in between. Despite such theological diversity, most Protestants retain three general convictions that shape their worldview and impact the ways in which they engage the public square:
First, Protestants hold central the idea that nothing should or can impede individual conscience. From Martin Luther’s clarion call at the time of the Reformation, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” Protestants of all sorts emphasize the free expression of individual rights and conscience. Those individual rights can–and do–empower liberation and freedom against corrupt institutions and unjust states.
Second, Protestants believe that symbols like the cross and the flag mean something. Going back to the days when Protestants stripped churches of religious statues and painted over icons, they believed that symbols convey the meaning of the thing depicted. Crosses, icons, flags, paintings, and other representations cannot be separated from their theological or political intention. Thus, Protestants have historically fought over the power of symbols and their meaning in public space. As a result, they often argue for empty public space because they understand the internal power of symbols.
Third, Protestants (in partnership with free-thinking Enlightenment philosophers) created the concept of the separation of church and state in the 17th and 18th centuries. Indeed, some historians argue that the Constitution’s Establishment and Free Exercise clauses–the phrases that guide the relationship between religion and politics–might well be the most important contributions of American Protestantism to Christian theology.
These three things–individual conscience, the power of symbols to inspire and convince, and the separation of church and state–are not merely areas of law to Protestants. No, these are the things that inflame the Protestant soul–the things we have fought over, left other churches and start new denominations to uphold, teach our children, sing of in our hymnody, of which we write books and hold theological debates, and why we do good on behalf of our neighbors. Protestants do not always agree on how these principles work out in the law, nor have Protestants always followed their own principles to their logical legal conclusions. But these are the things that guide Protestants, the insights that animate the followers of one of Christianity’s great traditions.
Elena Kagan will be a fine and fair justice. President Obama has made a thoughtful, considered choice. But, on this day, I am a little sad. Missing from the bench upcoming years will be someone who empathizes with the Protestant worldview in a visceral way. As religious cases multiply in an increasingly pluralistic world, I can’t help but think that losing the lived memory of American Protestantism will be a loss for all of us indeed.
Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/christianityfortherestofus/2010/05/elena-kagan-the-supreme-court-and-a-lament-for-american-protestantism.html#ixzz0xUV3LQXh
Elena: It’s interesting that if protestantism opened the road for the separation of state and religion for crucially valid causes, it is now time to reopen the bridge between religion and the state which is no other than the understanding that the individual’s inner life is not separate from our social lives. That we cannot exploit each other economically and pretend that THAT has nothing to do with our evolution! And our “evolution” is as dependent on our inner life or religion as in our external life or society. Social economy is the reflection of our inner consciousness. Our inability to consciously respond for each other’s well being reflects itself in the greed of our economy. The “state” cannot be separate from the individual and THAT is what today’s states are. They are at the service of those in economic power and both are sanctified by the churches. There is no consciousness in any one of them.
One church, one state, one economic power, for the human being from the human being. We are One.
Enjoying other blogs.
On the days of the week:
Translated from http://www.zeno.org/Goetzinger-1885/A/Wochentage
Crystal Sword
Thank you both for your posts, I much enjoyed the wonderings. Another aspect I’ve experienced about the days of the week is the possibility that they have been “organized” in such a way that in themselves they are meant to help us “pace” our selves. The fact that Sunday is a day of rest and prayer may not be a coincidence at all. It is as if Sunday were meant to remind us that there are other things that matter besides working and the fact that Sunday is becoming the “shopping day” in many cities does testify for an even more materialistic attachment. It is for me as if Sunday were meant to be a “living testimony” of the act of not being identified with “life” and it’s “necessities” as much as the opportunity to experience gratitude, “graciousness”.
I’ve thought that Christmas might also have a similar meaning but even more pronounced. The “shopping” Christmas, together with the “shopping” for every event we wish to celebrate might have deformed the “nobleness” of the event into a materialistic indulgence but the fact that we still keep the memory of the “ritual” is “encouraging”!
Perhaps what is happening in our times is the experience of essence or an immature development precisely because the majority of us cannot consciously perceive the deep connections between our selves and the planets, the constellations or stars even though it seems that earlier civilizations were much more “in tune” with them. In “tune” with them in essence but not real I perhaps?
It’s a very long thread to ponder on. Thanks for initiating it!
Crystal Sword
There’s also an interesting compilation of data in wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week-day_names
In astrological theory, not only the days of the week, but the hours of the day are dominated by the seven luminaries. If the first hour of a day is dominated by Saturn (), then the second hour is dominated by Jupiter (), the third by Mars (), and so on with the Sun (), Venus (), Mercury (), and the moon (), so that the sequence of planets repeats every seven hours. Therefore, the twenty-fifth hour, which is the first hour of the following day, is dominated by the Sun; the forty-ninth hour, which is the first hour of the next day, by the Moon. Thus, if a day is labelled by the planet which dominates its first hour, then Saturn’s day is followed by the Sun’s day, which is followed by the Moon’s day, and so forth, as shown below…..
And if I throw stones
I might as well pick them up
And build my house
Where all can meet
And if they run
Those that are being chased
And adorn themselves with things
Convinced for a time that that’s it
Let them run and shine
With all their things
That they too shall find
A place to be in me.
Such a faithful enemy
is more loving than the best of friends!
You’ve been freed to leave
why do you stay?
To see your self?
or my self in thee?
Here’s a gift for you
that you may be pleased.
Oneness
And we pour our lives into cybernetic threads
And weave our time with words
Alone each day, more alone
With our selves
The separateness in the dimension of time
Dissolves in the dimension within
But coming to your door
Is equally sacred in both dimensions
For we are one, separate only in time
So easy to move in the extremes
From one’s self to one’s self
And lose one’s self in the self of time
And find one’s self in the selfless time
It is such an art to live
And I’m such a child
And yet if it’s time,
I’m almost ready to die
The paradox is such that only already gone
Can we actually be here
For there is no here
But there
And there we can’t stay for long
Without loosing our selves back to here
And there is no there or here
Just a oneness that moves in between
Everywhere at the same time
And life is such a poem of its own
Dying so gently to give us time enough
To let go
But the younger we can let go
The more deeply we are able to grasp the whole
Aaah…
To be so young to think that thought is more than humus for the soul in time
And attached to the mind to be so afraid to fly
to fall forever in eternity
to be without a trace of one’s self
left to time
And to lose the sense of self
And gain the being
Un-longed
For, for
Being cannot be longed for
Even if all of life is a calling it
Forth
We are in the threading
We are,
when seen from outside
Seven billion threads of light:
One human being
One life
……….At that point in the blog, the situation for me was very clear: We either moved on and acted legally against the Fellowship as a group of people willing to denounce the Fellowship or we remained talking about it without serious consequences to the Fellowship which is what they’ve actually managed. I was and am convinced that the first action was necessary. That if we were so conscious of the damages the Fellowship has on people we needed to act beyond the blog. In that particular post I write about a woman that committed suicide, one of the children of an fof member. At that point I was aggressively putting pressure on the need to act beyond the blog and posters began writing attacking me personally much more aggressively than before but not the issues involved and I answered back equally aggressive. That is what I am sorry for, not for my position. When I apologized I did not apologize for my understanding but for my negativity and aggression which I couldn’t control at the time. While I realize I failed personally to control myself I am convinced it was the people participating in the blog who failed to live up to what was needed: legal, public action against the Fellowship cult in particular and Cults in general. My personal failure is pitiful but the failure of so many ex-members to act seriously against the cult is despicable. That is why I am essentially happy to stand up for my position.
It is important to notice that when a group of people are not able to live up to the needs of a situation they buffer it by personally condemning and outlawing the person that is presenting the opposition that they cannot cope with, without ever actually dealing with the issues. This has been happening long before Christ. It’s a hard lesson to learn about our lives but it gives us an inkling into the reality of our state of being.
It is important to notice that when a group of people are not able to live up to the needs of a situation they buffer it by personally condemning and outlawing the person that is presenting the opposition that they cannot cope with, without ever actually dealing with the issues. This has been happening long before Christ. It’s a hard lesson to learn about our lives but it gives us an inkling into the reality of our state of being.
Another interesting aspect related to this is the use of laws to accomplish the act of banning the individual. There’s nothing more rigid about cults than LAWS and the laws within a cult are sanctified by the member’s attitude towards the guru: divine, infallible, omni-present. Then all aspects of their lives are gradually governed by the guru’s will whether his will stands for or against their well being.
What is fascinating to realize about these relationships between people in cults is that it slowly reveals the threads of our externalizing our psychological world in our social world and what is happening in cults is the longing for “community” that people are trying to actualize only that we are doing so from our innocence instead of our maturity. We fall in love with the guru like we fall in love with our loved one and surrender to him all aspects of our selves without realizing that in THAT context, it is necessary to keep one’s individuality. That “surrendering” one’s social “self” is an act of slavery and not a spiritual sacrifice that can bring anything positive.
The pattern is not so different in romantic relationships but we should actually go all the way and look into child parent relationships to untie the knots that condition these behaviours in the different instances of our lives.
As children we are dependent on our parents. Economically or instinctively, emotionally, intellectually… To take a quick, simple and rather easy look and start exploring the issue, it is common knowledge that children who are not well embraced and protected in the family tend to turn against their social entourage in later years as if the process were simply inverted as in a lemniscate. Individuals simply project in adulthood what they received in childhood if nothing interferes to change the process in their own individuality. Wouldn’t this make of us simple reflectors? We reflect in adulthood what we received in childhood?
I’m just throwing out ideas because I am myself exploring the issues.
One that comes to mind now is the possibility of looking at situations from the point of view of their “wholeness” and their “wholeness” is no other than their “holiness” and their “holiness” is no other than their “loveness”, “friendliness”.
People judge criminals who go out and shoot other people at random convinced that it is only the criminals fault that he killed the others but this is just lack of consciousness of our mutual interdependency. Such criminals are just reflecting on us what they have received from us. This kind of crime is very important to understand the state of our “social being”, of our social “beingness” because those people are simply expressing their own suffering and disconnectedness. Of course they need to be locked up and stopped but much more than that they need to be helped and we all need to help ourselves so as not to create such criminals.
Crime is the expression of our social illness. Crime from an individual is an individual protest of a social malady and as long as people continue to isolate the criminal without dealing with the causes of the crime they will continue to unconsciously separate themselves from other human beings instead of consciously embracing them. The problem is a problem of lovelessness or consciouslessness for consciousness is nothing but the ability to grasp the whole in each of its parts.
The problem of our unconsciousness is not one for blame or judgement. We are unconscious beings and life is precisely the road towards more consciousness. But accepting our unconsciousness does not mean that we settle for it. Within that unconsciousness it is necessary for us to find the means to question each other, struggle and argue with each other without separating from each other and this is so difficult because for that to be able to happen individuals must recognize their own wholeness and the wholeness of others in themselves. The understanding that We are One is an aspect of it. We are One is simply the social expression of I am. When in their personal work individuals find their own I willing to steer their will then they can begin to say “I am” and we can say that We are One only when we can refer to that same “I am” or “The Human” within each one of us and stir our social lives from that principle of life.
The times we’ve been living in are far from human. Capitalism isn’t human, communism isn’t human, fascism is inhuman and yet within each order there are aspects of human life that need to be considered.
In Capitalism individualism is king but a selfish king that is willing to make his or her fortune at the cost of many. In Communism, the State is king but it’s willing to make his fortune at the cost of individuality. In Fascism, the Fuhrer is king and is willing to make his fortune at the cost of life.
When I say “life” I don’t only mean people’s lives but “life”. Life is the endless creation of love. Love is the endless creation of life. Love and life are endless creation in each act. Consciousness is the realization of love in life. Consciousness is the conscious aspect of love. It is the incarnation of life in an individual. Each individual has, in their short period of life, the possibility to create and recreate “life” in each act. All human beings are creators of life consciously or unconsciously. The majority of human beings are creators not only of “lives” but of “life” most of the time, most of their lives. The fact that we are sick today and perceive our selves as somewhat wretched beings does not testify for the reality of our selves but only for the reality of our times. We are entering the maturity of the human being.
In Capitalism, Communism and Fascism there are aspects of life and aspects of “life destruction”. These aspects particular to each System need to be studied carefully so as to understand where they need to be “realigned”, “corrected”. In Fascism, individuals surrender to the Fuhrer like people in cults to the guru, in Capitalism people surrender to themselves without an inkling of the whole (like people in cults) and in Communism people surrender to the “whole” without an inkling of the whole or themselves, the State replaces the Fuhrer, (like people in cults: the Arc of Humanity). What is fascinating and horrifying about cults is that they incarnate every mistake we have made in no matter what System we’ve invented, THAT is why their people end up committing suicide en masse. It is a process of self-annihilation and when they’ve all self annihilated they then commit suicide en masse in the name of love and consciousness.
In Cults people give up any form of social participation that is questionable to the guru just like in fascism in relation to the Fuhrer. They surrender to themselves convinced that as long as they work, work, work, they will awaken regardless of anyone else, they have the attitude that as long as they make effort they will get to heaven just like capitalism does: as long as people are producing and making money, there is “life” even though there is as much lifelessness in the few that “make it” than in the many that make it for them and (in Cults) everyone is treated “equal” like in communism. “Equally” unconscious, “equally” undeveloped, “equally” a beggar without rights! The “Human” ideal is used against the individual demanding their “surrender” and rendering them slaves of the cult.
I’m just exploring but connecting our individuality to our social processes is as important as connecting our social processes to our inner processes or individuality. We are not just this or that. We Are. Everything IS. The problem with our unconscious individuality is that it perceives itself separately from the whole and therefore does not connect its creativity to life. The problem with our unconscious “sociability” is that it doesn’t connect to the human and therefore designs orders that act not only against a few but against the whole. Upper classes with money are no more conscious than lower classes without it. They each have their own problems and sufferings but while the suffering in lower classes seems closer to real suffering the suffering in upper classes seems to connect more precisely with forms of unnecessary suffering. In both classes the connection with “work” or “the activity” people do to develop themselves in, has the relevant impact. To a certain extent the fact that people have to work more and more consistently in the lower classes, gives them a more direct connection with the processes taking place while in upper classes there is a tendency to a dysfunctional discontinuity without aim. That “discontinuity” is what makes powers fall and eventually be replaced by other more democratic forms of power.
Consciousness cannot solve the problem. Only Conscience can. When we awaken to Divine Conscience, Real Consciousness emerges naturally. But Consciousness without Conscience is still the Consciousness of a machine. Consciousness leads to more rules and regulations; Conscience lead to what is right. There is one way and one way only: The Way of Conscience. Then true Love manifests in us and through us into the world because we become the Sons of the Living God.
“Only-he-will-be-caaled-and-will-become-the-Son-of-God-who-acquires-in-himself-Coscience.”
G. I. Gurdjieff,
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, p. 368
On objective morality
“Is it really a teaching, couldn’t it be an understanding of life and its laws – acceptance? Just pondering.”
A teaching or a learning?
Is it not a learning when you come to the steps of your many dimensions
after walking on your own self trust?
Others can tell us directions but only we ourselves can reach the heights of our different worlds enveloped in this one.
Wouldn’t acceptance also be an aspect of non-judgment reached through non identification? Another aspect of compassion in the highest sense of the word?
How would you connect objective morality and positive emotions? If trust in both one’s self and others is a positive emotion, how would you connect it? Trust in each other’s being? Each other’s self? Our humaneness?
“Life and its laws” and being aligned to them wouldn’t make one objective?
The System does not tell us the answer, it tells us to walk to the answer through self-remembering and external consideration besides the other tools. That is perhaps it’s greatest strength and weakness and why it has been misused so virulently in some fourth way cults and yet the answer it says, is in each one of us and that is already an answer! If we are each the truth, if we each have the being, how could we fail to be objectively moral with each other? We can and we do fail and yet love and life develops above the multiple mistakes.
Thanks for sharing.
Dear Elena,
Very good comments. I want to go straight to a paragraph in your comments that I consider it goes to the very heart of the Living Teaching Mr. Gurdjieff brought to us in his magnum opus Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. I quote this paragraph you wrote:
“How would you connect objective morality and positive emotions? If trust in both one’s self and others is a positive emotion, how would you connect it? Trust in each other’s being? Each other’s self? Our humaneness?”
As I see it and have been able to understand it, the answer to your questions is contained in what I consider to the most important paragraph in Belzebub’s Tales. I am not going to give the answer here nor quote the paragraph so readers can have the opportunity to ponder on this matter and give their opinion. I do this because that is what Mr. Gurdjeiif would have done. I know it because I once had a dream with him and here is the content of my dream:
“In the dream I was in a room with Mr. Gurdjieff and other people and I asked him a question. If I put my dream in words here is how it went. I said to Mr. Gurdjieff, “Sir, may I ask a theoretical question?” He looked at me and then said, ‘Yes, you may.’ ‘Most teachers say that when we attain liberation we blend directly with the Holy Prime-Source of everything existing. However, in Beelzebub it is taught that this was possible before the Choot-God-Letanical period but that after this cosmic event, it became impossible to blend directly with the Holy Sun Absolute. Sir, I want to know, which is the correct view?’ And do you know what his answer was? He said, ‘The answer to your question is in The Tales. Search for it.’
So Elena, in the spirit of my dream, my only teacher, and my only book, I will conclude my reply to your comments with these words:
Readers of this comments, the answer to the question posed by Elena is in Beelzebub. Search for it.
Thanks, Elena, for giving me the opportunity to share my dream and more importantly, to have the opportunity to direct people to my beloved book.
That’s what friends are for:
Your friend,
Will
Thanks for sharing your dream and the lovely song that I much enjoyed.
I haven’t read Beelzebub in a long time so if you can remind me where to find the strivings question I’ll be happy to look at it. Some thoughts in the meantime.
Would you consider that the instinctive centre, in as much as it connects to the physical aspect of our selves is at the same time wonderfully connected to nature and its laws? If one were to grasp that reality in its full scope wouldn’t that alone be an amazing connectedness to the world around us? To nature yes but all of nature including the planets and galaxies! Sometimes when making love I’ve had an amazing feeling of connectedness with the cosmos but it is also there at dawn and sunset when the colours are so dim that they feel like the skin of light!
Attention for others to me is an expression of love. As I get older I realize that all we have for each other is time and it is precisely what we no longer have when we die. Everything else that is enveloped in time, all our gestures of love are possible because we are literally willing to give our self’s time to others. I’ve become a very good friend with time now that I’m old enough to realize that it is such a precious gift!
M:“is this really a doing or more a not doing – a kind of to “let be worked on”?”
The beautiful thing about it the few times I’ve managed to live it is that it is a being that can let it be done. Nothing requires more will than being but once being, there is no need to force things because they come to us like kittens for milk! A lot of doing also makes things happen but they often come like wolves looking for blood rather than milk. That too is alright because we learn as much about ourselves from the bleeding as from the milk. It is good to realize that we are not saints so that we can trim the fangs! I’ve lived in a time in which people are supposed to be perfectly inoffensive and must cut off all their strength to not protest for the absurdities but I think understanding the absurdities of one’s self as much as others is as necessary as keeping one’s strength to object when necessary.
Thank you for sharing, may you both have a bright sunny day!
Pondering on the above subject of being and doing I realized that there are different “doings” or rather there are similar “doings” that have completely different meaning and effect according to the being. For example, a man can play the guitar and play it well for a long time and that will give him a certain being as a guitarist as much as a musician while another man might pick the guitar up and after playing for only a few weeks, he will sense the effect the music has on him in a way that the other guitarist has never perceived. That is one aspect. The other aspect is that in the first player, the man’s attitude towards the guitar is that of someone “doing” the playing while the second man’s attitude is that of someone that knows that he is playing the guitar but the music is “playing” on him. The difference in “being” of both men is that although the second man doesn’t play the guitar very well he is aware of the quality of the impressions in a way that the other man is not. He does not feel the main actor of the scene, he allows the music to be the real agent and act on his own self as much as others. He is not as self-centred as the first player and that completely changes “everything” for the men as much as the energies in the universe that feed on these phenomenon. Although the more professional player might know how to make more sounds the beginner probably has greater experiences of beauty because he allows for the music to be without letting his own self interfere with it.
Thank you for sharing.
Dear Elena,
Here I am again riding the Pale Horse
In a pervious post you asked me this question and I quote your words:
“Would you consider that the instinctive centre, in as much as it connects to the physical aspect of our selves is at the same time wonderfully connected to nature and its laws? If one were to grasp that reality in its full scope wouldn’t that alone be an amazing connectedness to the world around us? To nature yes but all of nature including the planets and galaxies! Sometimes when making love I’ve had an amazing feeling of connectedness with the cosmos but it is also there at dawn and sunset when the colours are so dim that they feel like the skin of light!”
Not only I consider instinctive centre to be connected with nature and its law but there is a very strong confirmation in Beelzebub’s Tales (BTTHG) that is so and I am going to illustrate with the cosmic law Solioonensius that is described in great details in the chapter Russia of BTTHG. It would be very interesting from the point of view of Objective Morality to examine this law as formulated in BTTHG. Here is how this law is formulated and what is said about it in the book (p. 623):
“The tension in all the planets acts also on the common presences of all beings arising and breeding on them, always engendering in the beings, besides desires and intentions of which they are not aware, the feeling called ‘sacred Iabolioonosar,’ or as your favorites would say, the feeling of religiousness, namely, that ‘being-feeling’ which at times appears in the desire and striving for, as I have already said, speedier self-perfecting in the sense of Objective-Reason.
“It is interesting that when this sacred feeling, or another similar to it, which was also engendered by a certain common cosmic actualization, proceeds in the common presences of your favorites, then they accept it as a symptom of certain of their numerous diseases, and in the given case, for example, they call this feeling ‘nerves.’
“It is necessary to remark that such an impulse inherent in the presence of all three-brained beings of our Great Universe formerly arose and became actualized almost normally in the majority of terrestrial beings of that time, namely, from the time of the removal of the organ Kundabuffer from the common presences of the three-brained beings of the planet Earth right up to the second Transapalnian-perturbation.
“But later, among the number of chief evils which flow from the conditions of ordinary being-existence established by them themselves, especially when in the presences of every terrestrial three-brained being, there began to become predominant the ‘evil-inner-God’ of theirs I mentioned, named there self-calming, then it occurred that in them under the influence of the action of Solioonensius, instead of the desire and striving for a speedier self-perfection a something began to arise such as they themselves characterize by the words ‘need of freedom,’ which chiefly serves the cause of the arising there of these same grievous processes of theirs similar to this last ‘Bolshevism.’”
Here is the whole thing, Elena. If we were normal beings, we would experience this law. However, because of our abnormality we have lost what is called in BTTHG the “instinctive-sensing-of-reality.” Now instead of experiencing the feeling of religiousness, what we experience is “need of freedom” and this “need of freedom” because of our abnormality translate into changing at all cost the external conditions of being-existence. And that is why we have the Lenin, the Stalin, and the Fidel, and so on, of this remote lunatic corner of the Universe called Planet Earth. Here I speak from experience because I was an aye witness of the Cuban Revolution.
But there is an even deeper meaning to this law and I will let you and the readers of this post to ponder on it.
In my next post here I will address two issues you also raised, the one about Love and Time and the one about making love. I will give you my take on these two matters and you will see that, like a friend in another Forum said:
“Many thanks for your comments Will. You certainly have an interesting and diverse set of opinions. :-)”
And there is one more thing you ought to know about me, Elena: I love to brag about me and I do not hide it. I am not shy, you can be sure of that. There is indeed very little humility in me and the reason for that is that I have found the sense and aim of my existence and when that is the case, one can understand what real humility means. Read the first chapter of BTTHG and you will see that it is all about bragging. Of course, I am not even to the knees of Mr. Gurdjieff but I am up to the knees of Mr. Mesa. He is a Devil; I am just a little devil or, as some people have called me, “incorrigible little crazy devil” or ilcd. You can be sure of one thing: Exchanging with me will never bore you.
You see, Elena, a man has the objective right to three weakness in life. In BTTHG we can see the three weaknesses Mr. Gurdjieff had. My first one is to brag about me. The other two I can tell you but only in private.
Now you begin to get familiar with me.
Thanks for sharing.
Hasta la vista, Clear Elena. I will be back.
Will
Thanks Will for responding to me as if the conversation were just between you and me but there is a misunderstanding for I am not talking or answering particularly to you in those posts but addressing M’s question and M who asked it. There is no disagreement or argument between us. You share your understanding and the rest of us share ours and the question moves along by the force of our many rows.
Will: “I do not know what you mean by the authors of the System. For me there is no System; there is only the Living Teaching Mr. Gurdjieff brought to us in Beelzebub’s Tales and regarding his book he said that there are no methods for understanding it. So, how can there be a System? Who are the authors of the System you refer to? Can you be more explicit here so I can comment more explicitly?”
If for you there is only one living Teaching for me that living Teaching would be all the Teachings in all of history in every culture and man.
We disagree about there being no methods to understanding anything, you and I or Mr. Gurdjieff and I, for we each have our own road to come to understanding through love and trust.
I am very glad that you are reminding us about Mr. Gurdjieff and his outlook on the world and ever so happy to be seeing him for what he was: another human being full of gifts and misgivings like the rest of us.
The System as presented by Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and Rodney Collin is just one System amongst many others and it has its strengths and weaknesses like many others. For me they all work, they are all beautiful and terrible, difficult and possible as life is.
If I am out of place here and this site only approaches objective knowledge according to Gurdjieff’s understanding of the world please forgive my intrusion, I didn’t understand this site as a cult to Mr. Gurdjieff.
My very warm love to you Will. Brag about yourself all you must if that’s what you need and enjoy but let the questions flow down the river of miracles that we may catch a few fish and share the meal!
p.d. I said “rows” as in rowing!
From another interesting blog:
C:
What is philosophy if not a way of reflecting, not so much on what is true and what is false, as on our relationship to truth? … The movement by which, not without effort and uncertainty, dreams and illusions, one detaches oneself from what is accepted as true and seeks other rules – that is philosophy.
Michel Foucault. (1997) [1980]. ‘The Masked Philosopher’. In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume One. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, Allen Lane, p. 327. Translation modified.
Random thoughts in response
‘What is philosophy?’ This is a question that Foucault raises on numerous occasions in various forms throughout his work. For all the variations in his response to this question, he always insisted that philosophy operated firmly within a historical context and could only manifest itself through quite specific historical practices and events and the way we engage historically with ourselves and others.
Philosophy, for Foucault, is not a question of stripping away historical accidents so that we can discover what is absolutely true for all time, rather it is a way of examining the ways in which people and systems of knowledge have made a division between the true and the false in very specific historical contexts. These divisions directly impact on the ways people conduct themselves in relation to themselves and others. Philosophy should also, in Foucault’s view, deal with the question of what is happening right now and with what our responsibilities are in relation to this very specific conjuncture.
And speaking of the current conjuncture specifically as it relates to the discipline of philosophy… Like other humanities disciplines, philosophy is under threat in that it is unable to produce the kind of ‘outcomes’ that are valued by neo-liberal systems of thought. Neo-liberalism (for those who came in late) is a form of thought which reduces all social relations to economic relations. As Foucault remarks: ‘It is a matter of making the market, competition, and so the enterprise, into what could be called the formative power of society’. [1]
Much ink has flowed on the pernicious and all pervasive effects of neo-liberalism with, it seems, only a limited success in stemming its diffusion through all areas of social and cultural existence. The crisis over the announcement of the closure of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy and undergraduate programs in philosophy at Middlesex University in London on 26 April 2010 raises the problem of neo-liberal management culture yet again with particular acuteness. The suspension of staff and students and disciplinary hearings in reaction to their protests at the closure also have worrying implications for the continued existence of necessary social spaces for intellectual dissent and academic freedom. [2]
Academic culture and corporate culture are two very different entities and attempts to meld the two over the last twenty years in particular have had disastrous effects in terms of the maintenance of a healthy academic culture which can only make a worthwhile contribution to the social body precisely because it has different goals from the business, government and service sectors. A healthy society requires a balance between all four sectors. The university cannot be conveniently assimilated into the service sector, a currently popular strategy which seeks to reshape it primarily as an institution which ultimately focuses on providing ‘education services’.
The university is not simply about teaching and training people to engage in the work force and be compliant economic citizens or to serve the interests of industry and the maintenance of a healthy population with ‘useful’ forms of research. In addition to this, theoretical research aimed at pushing the boundaries of knowledge or questioning the structures of received knowledge serves the general community in other ways than the maintenance of economic relations. Criticism and analysis of social practices also keep repressive and questionable systems which seek to micromanage populations ‘for their own good’ in check. Philosophy sits (or ought to sit) squarely within this area of social critique and intellectual insight into the human experience.
But neo-liberalism is not the only problem that is faced by the discipline of philosophy in the current conjuncture. There are struggles over the definitions of what constitutes philosophy. Such definitional struggles as Pierre Bourdieu points out are struggles for power ‘over a vision of the natural and social world’[3] One of the most salient struggles in the English language world is the struggle between analytic philosophy and its ‘other’ which it describes as ‘continental’ philosophy.
To all appearances, analytic philosophy has over a long period of time and long before the current crisis, completely colonised the term ‘philosophy’ in university and other educational settings in the English language world. Philosophy departments in the UK, North America and Australia are almost unilaterally dedicated to this form of the discipline and any academics practising so-called ‘continental philosophy’ within those institutional settings are usually there as a grudging token concession to a style of thought that, it has to be recognised, has found immense popularity elsewhere. The very term ‘continental philosophy’ is constructed as the obverse of analytic philosophy. Even those using the term to describe their own practice do so by referring to analytic philosophy as the norm. (I will leave aside for the moment the question of non-analytic and non European practices of philosophy, which are usually relegated to departments of religion.)
Those who have disputed analytic definitions of philosophy have been forced to work in any other department except philosophy or have been forced to secede and create new departments. The scandalous split in philosophy at the University of Sydney into General Philosophy and Traditional Philosophy in the 1970s is a case in point, as is Eugene Kamenka’s secession from Philosophy at the Australian National University in the late 1960s to create the now sadly defunct History of Ideas unit. Middlesex was one of the very few departments labelled ‘philosophy’ which practised almost exclusively European style philosophy which makes its fragmentation and semi-demise even more of a loss.
‘Continental philosophy’ is something that clearly can only be treated with suspicion by ‘more rigorous’, ‘more scientific’ and less ‘politicised’ practices of analytic philosophy. In general, given this unfriendly reception, practitioners of post-War European styles of philosophy are more commonly found outside of philosophy departments in the English language world.
In a recent work, eminent analytic philosopher Michael Dummett while recognising this important and destructive fracture in the discipline of philosophy and calling for reconciliation, does nothing but add further fuel to the fire with the blurb on his book declaring that ‘Philosophy is a discipline that makes no observations, conducts no experiments, and needs no input from experience. It is an armchair subject, requiring only thought.’[3] It is a statement guaranteed to outrage the socially and historically oriented philosophers working in the wake of post War structuralist and poststructuralist philosophy.
This definition, if nothing else, draws attention to fundamental disagreements over what constitutes the proper subject matter and method of philosophy. In the analytic tradition, the categorisation of language practices and their rigorous logical deployment are paramount. Statements and concepts are rigidly sorted into a variety of categories – eg ethical statements, metaphysical statements, epistemological statements, mind versus body debates and so on and so forth. One then examines how chains of reasoning operate within these categories (often by reducing them to quasi-mathematical formulae). The ultimate goal is to arrive at an orderly system untainted by historical and political concerns which allows one to get to the ‘truth’. Only then after one has carefully ordered one’s categories can one make rigorous interventions from this elevated platform into matters of political and social concern. Analytic philosophy allows for difference in how truth might be interpreted in typical fashion by grouping activity in this area into different categories, for example: ‘the correspondence theory of truth’ or ‘the perspectivist notion of truth’. This fits in perfectly with the post Enlightenment model of science with its rigorous and rational methods (superior to all other methods) of uncovering a knowledge and truth independent of historical circumstance.
The methods of analytic philosophy also bear remarkable similarities to the eighteenth century project (as described by Foucault in The Order of Things) which sought to classify all knowledge into tables and to find a way to transparently match representations and things. If one could just get those tables right – then we could have true knowledge about and a true representation of things. These methods also resonate with the bureaucratic ideal of everything placed in an orderly manner in its right place, in the correct drawer of the filing cabinet.
Analytic philosophers criticise ‘Continental philosophy’ for its adulation of ‘great names’ and close textual studies of a variety of philosophers but it is unclear how far this differs from obligatory references to the ‘great names’ and the employment of ‘methods’ developed by thinkers in the analytical tradition. These great figures include the Greek philosophers of course, selected other European philosophers such as Descartes and Kant, Wittgenstein, Frege, Locke, Quine, Moore, Ryle, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Dennett as well as others.
Further, analytic philosophy arguably divorces the notion of philosophy from what is popularly and commonly understood by the term. Undergraduate students embarking hopefully on courses in philosophy departments are all too often disappointed by the rigidity and decontextualised nature of the offerings – with pre-prescribed and highly contrived set pieces for reflection operating somewhat like mathematical formulae. It is small wonder that students have turned en masse to psychology to provide them with the forms of reflection they crave, thereby regrettably further feeding into the power that psychology exerts in the direction of the pathologisation of all human experience and the reinforcement of mechanisms of social control. This is not to say, however, that there are not notable efforts by philosophers working within the analytic tradition, such as Alain de Botton, to try and make philosophy more publicly accessible. But I would argue that de Botton is the exception rather than the rule.
Students no doubt, also cannot help but notice a gender landscape that is overwhelmingly male in the delivery and practice of any kind of philosophy. Women are all too often relegated to the feminist ghetto away from the ‘serious’ work. One could further usefully embark on a discussion of the specific forms of masculinity that are represented in philosophy – and this applies to all forms of philosophy of whatever persuasion. Plato’s vision of the practice of philosophy as being the province of bearded males over 50 remains well and truly alive today.
I hasten to add, of course, that for all its pretensions to occupy the whole of the territory, analytic philosophy and the university departments which support its dissemination are under serious threat everywhere in the English language world. Departments have been merged with other humanities schools or have disappeared altogether. I welcome Dummett’s call for disciplinary reconciliation in order to make philosophy once again an institutional and intellectual force to be reckoned with. On the other hand, given the definitions he offers, it is more than clear that there remains much work to be done in persuading certain sectors (not all of them analytical) to adopt a far broader and more inclusive notion of the territory philosophy might cover. [5]
To be continued…
[1] Michel Foucault, (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics. Course at the Collège de France. 1978-1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 148.
[2] For ongoing up-to-date information on this situation see the Save Middlesex philosophy site and Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies blog
[3] Pierre Bourdieu (1987) Choses Dites, Paris: Minuit, p.171.
[4] Michael Dummett (2010) The Nature and Future of Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.
[5] I refuse under any circumstances to use the ghastly and ubiquitous term ‘philosophical enquiry’ so fondly used by analytical philosophers.
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Posted in Foucault, philosophy | Tagged analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, de Botton, dummett, feminism, masculinity, middlesex philosophy, neo-libereralism, truth, universities |
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Elena
I just found this site and am delighted with it. Thank you for putting your self into this.
In relation to the above article does it not seem to you as if the elements of conflict were necessary for people to push each other forward and beyond? When I look from the outside at the conflict between continental and analytical philosophy it is as if we were, on either side, blind people perceiving only a portion of the elephant.
Does the conflict not tell us about the moment in time that we human beings find ourselves in? The isolation of philosophy from the social historical processes seems as absurd as the limitation of philosophy to verifiable natural processes as if we were still simply unable to see the miraculous in each and every practice of life still trapped by the misery.
You mention how students are looking for answers in psychology “further feeding into the power that psychology exerts in the direction of the pathologisation of all human experience and the reinforcement of mechanisms of social control.” And I wonder if we should not be looking for answers in reuniting the different fields in one human knowledge that understands the place of each one? Although it is true that they are each rich enough to have their own space, don’t the many separations simply point to deepening our own schizophrenia?
I am not as versed in the language you’re using so I would somewhat innocently ask: Are psychology and philosophy not the realms of our inner life? Is psychology not also the connection between our selves and the world around and beyond? Is philosophy not also religion even if it humanized the divine?
Does it not seem to you that one of the problems with psychoanalysis today is that they are still pretending to analyze the individual without helping him or her understand how their family was molded by society? That in psychology we talk of individuals as if they could be disconnected from their entourage and in sociology we talk about people as if they could be disconnected from their individuality? That we pretend to hold the everlasting archetypes in psychology without realizing that the archetype was dehumanized in a very concrete world? Or a world of concrete should equally work!
Beyond asking for a space for continental philosophy and a reconciliation between both wouldn’t we be even more “philosophical” if we asked for a reunification of all the spheres of knowledge into a more coherently human experience in which less effort is wasted in specializing people into separating from each other? Isn’t one of the difficulties today that there are too many experts in too many fields but very few acting for the well-being of the whole? Very few willing to dare to question the fact that we’re living extremely inhuman lives and that the problem is not only in the economic inequality but in the system of hierarchies, authorities, gender?
Thank you again for sharing the conflict that I wholly support!
Dear Elena,
I do not understand what you are saying here. You asked me this question. Here is you post where you asked the question:
71. Elena – September 6, 2010
“Thanks for sharing your dream and the lovely song that I much enjoyed.
I haven’t read Beelzebub in a long time so if you can remind me where to find the strivings question I’ll be happy to look at it. Some thoughts in the meantime.
Would you consider that the instinctive centre, in as much as it connects to the physical aspect of our selves is at the same time wonderfully connected to nature and its laws? If one were to grasp that reality in its full scope wouldn’t that alone be an amazing connectedness to the world around us? To nature yes but all of nature including the planets and galaxies! Sometimes when making love I’ve had an amazing feeling of connectedness with the cosmos but it is also there at dawn and sunset when the colours are so dim that they feel like the skin of light!”
It is obvious that you are asking me a question.
Anyhow, here is Mr. Gurdjieff in his own words on how to put attention on Beelzebub:
“One thing I can tell you. Methods do not exist. I do not know any. But I can explain now everything simple. For example, in Beelzebub, I know there is everything one must know. It is a very interesting book. Everything is there. All that exists, all that existed, all that can exist. The beginning, the end, all the secrets of the creation of the world; all is there. But one must understand, and to understand depends on one’s individuality. The more man has been instructed in a certain way, the more he can see. Subjectively, everyone is able to understand according to the level he occupies, for it is an objective book, and everyone should understand something in it. One person understands one part, another a thousand times more. Now, find a way to put your attention on understanding all of Beelzebub. This will be your task, and it is a good way to fix a real attention. If you can put real attention on Beelzebub, you can have real attention in life. You didn’t know this secret. In Beelzebub there is everything, I have said it, even how to make an omelet. Among other things, it is explained; and at the same time there isn’t a word in Beelzebub about cooking. So, you put your attention on Beelzebub, another attention than that to which you are accustomed, and you will be able to have the same attention in life. (Gurdjieff International Review, Vol. II No.1, Fall 1998 Issue).
Thanks for sharing with me, even if it seems that you were never sharing with me. It is obvious that the sense and aim of my existence do not correspond to yours and that is perfectly within the fact that we are different, although not separated.
One more thing. You wrote:
“My very warm love to you Will. Brag about yourself all you must if that’s what you need and enjoy but let the questions flow down the river of miracles that we may catch a few fish and share the meal!”
My bragging is a matter of my self-individuality and my striving to manifest my individuality so I can attain the “Reason-of-Understanding.” The flowing of the questions down the river is a matter of how much are we interested in addressing the questions. Since you said that you have not read Beelzebub’s tales for a long time, I encourage you to read the fist chapter of the book with the title “The Arousing of Thought.’ As you will see, it is a celebration of bragging and that does not stop the questions addressed by Mr, Gurdjieff to flow down the river for some one thousand pages more. But only for those who decide to eat the red pepper pods of the poor Transcaucasian Kurd. The thing is that very few are willing to have a bad digestion.
In other words, Elena, how many of us are really interested in rowing?
Yes, my very warm love to you too, Elena.
Will
Hi Will,
Thanks for reposting your posts here, I do like to keep a record of things that I consider of value but don’t like to post other people’s posts without their knowing or permission but for rare exceptions when they are very impersonal. We might as well post the rest in one block!
Comment by Crystal Sword 8 hours ago
I haven’t read Beelzebub in a long time so if you can remind me where to find the strivings question I’ll be happy to read it M.
I’ve been addressing everyone here including you Will but I was clearly talking to M in that post. I simply greeted you too.
I am still addressing everyone here and thank you as much as them for their contributions.
You tell me you are the devil and ask me if I am a witch and I ask you, have you seen the beauty? I have nothing to hide from anyone so it is a pleasure to answer whatever in public.
Thank you for your love, I take it gladly.
Crystal
Comment by Crystal Sword 8 hours ago
Hi Will, if you read the post carefully, you’ll notice that I’m actually addressing each of M’s paragraphs.
Thanks, have a great weekend! C.
Will Mesa
Hi Crystal, if you go back you will see that it was Will and not Mani who posted the strivings. But assuming that you are addressing Mani, in a Forum we all exchange and I can take any body’s question to anybody else and then answer. But the most important thing here is what I wrote about the Law Solioonensius. I quoted four long paragraphs about the law from Beelzebub’s Tales (BTTHG). The thing is that if we understood that law, we will understand this exchange you and I are having here today. Ponder on this.
About the matter of devils and witches, it is all in the chapter on understanding Justice of BTTHG, pages 1142-1143. I did not want to bring that to the blog on Objective Morality and that is why I asked you in private mail. After all, you accepted to be my friend and friends can correspondence in private. Did you not get the message in the video I dedicated to you about what friends are for? And once I saw the beauty and the three kinds of love, and then I saw them no more.
Anyhow, let’s follow the advice from Mani and let’s go back to the mater of Objective Morality.
You too have a great weekend. I certainly expect to have a good one because I am leaving for Miami for a long weekend to dance Salsa with the Cuban Sugar Girls. No website for me for few days. I had it!!! Maybe one of these days I go to Ituango and dance a Cumbia with you, I mean if the cartel from Medellin will allow us to do the dancing.
Anyhow love to you wherever you are!
Will
Hi again Will,
There’s something wonderfully healthy about the public sphere and we’ve only just met so if it’s alright, can we stay public?
Best wishes,
Elena
Isn’t what objectively happens in the undercurrent of what goes on?
Pondering on the above subject of being and doing I realized that there are different “doings” or rather there are similar “doings” that have completely different meaning and effect according to the being. For example, a man can play the guitar and play it well for a long time and that will give him a certain being as a guitarist as much as a musician while another man might pick the guitar up and after playing for only a few weeks, he will sense the effect the music has on him in a way that the other guitarist has never perceived. That is one aspect. The other aspect is that in the first player, the man’s attitude towards the guitar is that of someone “doing” the playing while the second man’s attitude is that of someone that knows that he is playing the guitar but the music is “playing” on him. The difference in “being” of both men is that although the second man doesn’t play the guitar very well he is aware of the quality of the impressions in a way that the other man is not. He does not feel the main actor of the scene, he allows the music to be the real agent and act on his own self as much as others. He is not as self-centred as the first player and that completely changes “everything” for the men as much as the energies in the universe that feed on these phenomenon. Although the more professional player might know how to make more sounds the beginner probably has greater experiences of beauty because he allows for the music to be without letting his own self interfere with it.
Love
LIFE and love are inseparable from each other. Where there is life, there is love. Even the most rudimentary consciousness is always trying to burst out of its limitations and experience some kind of unity with other forms. Love pervades the universe. Though each form is separate from other forms, in reality they are all forms of the same unity of life. The latent sense for this hidden inner reality indirectly makes itself felt even in the world of illusion through the attraction which one form has for another form.
Meher Baba
“makes itself felt even in the world of illusion through the attraction which one form has for another form.” Meher Baba
I wonder if Meher Baba ever made love to a woman. What is the world of illusion here? Go and tell an Africa boy who had only one little meal that his world is just a world of Maya. What are these Indian Gurus telling us? That is why the Living Teaching Mr. Gurdjieff brought us has been called Anti-Yoga. Did Mr. Baba ever know how to really love a woman? Here is the only test to know if a man have really loved a woman:
Hi Will,
Thanks for the song.
Meher Baba and Gurdjieff do not fight in their approach, they are different systems but not understandings.
Sorry your comment was delayed.
Hi Elena,
You are correct. Meher Baba followed Vedanta and Mr. Gurdjieff followed Tantra. In Vedanta all is Illusion; in Tantra all is Real. I follow Tantra because it corresponds to my cosmic type. But Vedanta is as valid as Tantra. Different ways for different types. I follow Mr. Gurdjieff when he said “When take, take; when give, give.” That is pure Tantra. I think Tantra is much more adapted to the Western mentality than Tantra. What do you think?
Will
I was just about to post this chapter on love by Baba, it explains the relationship between the centers in a much more practical way than I’ve ever heard described before.
“Printed by permission of Avatar Meher Baba Public Perpetual Charitable Trust”. and taken from
http://www.discoursesbymeherbaba.org/v1-156.php
Love
LIFE and love are inseparable from each other. Where there is life, there is love. Even the most rudimentary consciousness is always trying to burst out of its limitations and experience some kind of unity with other forms. Love pervades the universe Though each form is separate from other forms, in reality they are all forms of the same unity of life. The latent sense for this hidden inner reality indirectly makes itself felt even in the world of illusion through the attraction which one form has for another form.
The law of gravitation, to which all the planets and the stars are subject, is in its own way a dim reflection of the love which pervades every part of the universe. Even the forces of repulsion Reign of love in inanimate nature are in truth expressions of love, since things are repelled from each other because they are more powerfully attracted to some other things. Repulsion is a negative consequence of positive attraction. The forces of cohesion and affinity which prevail in the very constitution of matter are positive expressions of love. A striking example of love at this level is found in the attraction which the magnet exercises for iron. All these forms of love are of the lowest type, since they are necessarilyconditioned by the rudimentary consciousness in which they appear.
In the animal world love becomes more explicit in the form of conscious impulses which are directed towards different objects in the surroundings. This love is instinctive and it takes Love in the animal kingdom the form of gratifying different desires through the appropriation of suitable objects. When the tiger seeks to devour the deer he is in a very real sense in love with the deer. Sex-attraction is another form of love at this level. All the expressions of love at this stage have one thing in common, viz., they all seek to satisfy some bodily impulse or desire through the object of love.
Human love is much higher than all these lower forms of love because human beings have the fully developed form of consciousness. Though human love is continuous with the lower Human love has to adjust to reason sub-human forms of love, in a way, it is different from them, for henceforth its operations have to be carried on side by side with a new factor which is reason. Sometimes human love manifests itself as a force which is divorced from reason and runs parallel to it. Sometimes it manifests itself as a force which gets mixed up with reason and comes into conflict with it. Lastly, it expresses itself as a constituent of the harmonised whole where love and reason have been balanced and fused into an integral unity.
Thus human love can enter into three types of combination with reason. Three combinations of love and reason In the first type, the sphere of thought and the sphere of love are kept as separate as possible, i.e., the sphere of love is practically inaccessible to the operation of reason, and love is allowed little or no access to the objects ofthought. Complete separation between these two aspects of the spirit is of course never possible, but when there is an alternate functioning of love and reason (oscillating in their predominance) we have a love which is unillumined by reason or a reason which is unenlivened by love. In the second type, love and reason are both simultaneously operative but they do not work in harmony with each other. Though this conflict creates confusion, it is a necessary phase in the evolution of the higher state where there is a real synthesis of love and reason. In the third type of love this synthesis between love and reason is an accomplished fact with the result that both love as well as reason are so completely transformed that they precipitate the emergence of a new level of consciousness which, compared to the normal human consciousness, is best described as super-consciousness.
Human love makes its appearance in the matrix of ego-consciousness which has countless desires. Love is coloured by these factors in many ways. Just as we get an ever changing variety Qualitative variety in love of designs in a kaleidoscope by the various combinations of simpler elements, we find an almost limitless qualitative variety in the range of love owing to novel combinations of psychic factors. And just as there are infinite shades of colour in different flowers, so there are diverse delicate differences in human love.
Human love is encircled by a number of obstructive factors such as infatuation, lust, greed, anger and jealousy. Lower forms of love In one sense, even these obstructive factors are either forms of lower love or the inevitable side-results of these lower forms of love. Infatuation, lust and greed might be looked upon as perverted and lower forms of love. In infatuation a person is enamouredof a sensual object; in lust he develops a craving for sensations in relation to it; and in greed he desires to possess it. Of these three forms of lower love, greed has a tendency to extend from the original object to the means of obtaining it. Thus persons become greedy for money or power or fame, which can be instruments for possessing the different objects that are craved. Anger and jealousy come into existence when these lower forms of love are thwarted or threatened to be thwarted.
These lower forms of love obstruct the release of pure love. The stream of love can never become clear and steady until it is disentangled from these limiting and perverting forms of lower love. The lower is the enemy of the higher. The lower is the enemy of the higher If consciousness is caught in the rhythm of the lower it cannot emancipate itself from its self-created ruts, finding it difficult to get out of them and advance further. Thus the lower form of love continues to interfere with the development of the higher form, and has to be given up in order to allow for the untramelled appearance of the higher form of love.
The emergence of higher love from the shell of lower love is helped by the constant exercise of discrimination. Therefore, love has Love and infatuation to be carefully distinguished from the obstructive factors of infatuation, lust, greed and anger. In infatuation, the person is a passive victim of the spell of conceived attraction for the object. In love there is an active appreciation of the intrinsic worth of the object of love.
Love is also different from lust. In lust there is reliance upon the object of sense and consequent spiritual subordination of the soul to it, but love puts the soul intothat very act it finds that it has included the beloved in its own being.
Infatuation, lust and greed constitute a spiritual malady which is often rendered more virulent by the aggravating symptoms of anger and jealousy. Pure love, in sharp contradistinction, Pure love awakened through grace is the bloom of spiritual perfection. Human love is so tethered by these limiting conditions that the spontaneous appearance of pure love from within becomes impossible. So, when such pure love arises in the aspirant it is always a gift. Pure love arises in the heart of the aspirant in response to the descent of grace from the Master. When pure love is first received as a gift of the Master it becomes lodged in the consciousness of the aspirant like a seed in favourable soil, and in the course of time the seed develops into a plant and then into a full-grown tree.
The descent of the grace of the Master is conditioned, however, by the preliminary spiritual preparation of the aspirant. This preliminary spiritual preparation for grace is never Spiritual preparation for grace complete until the aspirant has built into his psychic make-up some divine attributes. When a person avoids backbiting and thinks more of the good points in others than of their bad points, and when he can practise supreme tolerance, and desires the good of others even at the cost of his own self, he is ready to receive the grace of the Master. One of the greatest obstacles hindering this spiritual preparation of the aspirant is worry. When, with supreme effort, this obstacle of worry is overcome, a way is paved for the cultivation of the divine attributes which constitute the spiritual preparation of the disciple. As soon as the disciple is readythe grace of the Master descends, for the Master, who is the ocean of divine love, is always on the look-out for the soul in whom his grace will fructify.
The kind of love which is awakened by the grace of the Master is a rare privilege. The mother who is willing to sacrifice all and to die for her child, and the Pure love is very rare martyr who is prepared to give up his very life for his country are indeed supremely noble, but they have not necessarily tasted this pure love which is born through the grace of the Master. Even the great yogis with long beards who, sitting in caves and mountains, are completely absorbed in deep samadhi, do not necessarily have this precious love.
Pure love awakened through the grace of the Master is more valuable than any other stimulus which may be utilised by the aspirant. Such love not only Pure love the best discipline combines in itself the merits of all the disciplines but excels them all in its efficacy to lead the aspirant to his goal. When this love is born the aspirant has only one desire, and that is to be united with the Divine Beloved. Such withdrawal of consciousness from all other desires leads to infinite purity; therefore nothing purifies the aspirant more completely than this love. The aspirant is always willing to offer everything for the Divine Beloved, and no sacrifice is too difficult for him. All his thoughts are turned away from the self and come to be exclusively centred on the Divine Beloved. Through the intensity of this evergrowing love he eventually breaks through the shackles of the self and becomes united with the Beloved. This is the consummation of love. When love has thus found its fruition it has become divine.
Divine love is qualitatively different from humanlove. Human love is for the many in the One and divine love is for the One in the many. Human love leads to innumerable complications and tangles, but divine love leads to integration and freedom. Divine love higher than human love In divine love the personal and the impersonal aspects are equally balanced, but in human love the two aspects are in alternating ascendency. When the personal note is predominant in human love it leads to utter blindness to the intrinsic worth of other forms. When, as in sense of duty, love is predominantly impersonal, it often makes one cold, rigid and mechanical. Sense of duty comes to the individual as an external constraint on behaviour, but in divine love there is unrestrained freedom and unbounded spontaneity. Human love in its personal and impersonal aspects is limited, but divine love with its fusion of the personal and the impersonal aspects is infinite in being and expression.
Even the highest type of human love is subject to the limitation of individual nature which persists till the seventh plane. Divine love arises after the disappearance of the individual mind and is free from the trammels of individual nature. In human love the duality of the lover and the beloved persists, In divine love the lover is united with Beloved but in divine love the lover and Beloved become one. At this stage the aspirant has stepped out of the domain of duality and become one with God, for divine love is God. When the lover and the Beloved are one, that is the end and the beginning.
It is for love that the whole universe sprang into existence and it is for the sake of love that it is kept going. God descends into the realm of illusion because the apparent duality of the Beloved and the lover is eventually contributory to His conscious enjoyment ofHis own divinity. Universe came into existence for sake of love The development of love is conditioned and sustained by the tension of duality. God has to suffer apparent differentiation into a multiplicity of souls in order to carry on the game of love. They are His own forms, and in relation to them He at once assumes the role of the Divine Lover and the Divine Beloved. As the Beloved, He is the real and the ultimate object of their appreciation. As the Divine Lover, He is their real and ultimate saviour drawing them back to Himself. Thus though the whole world of duality is only an illusion, that illusion has come into being for a significant purpose.
Love is the reflection of God’s unity in the world of duality. It constitutes the entire significance of creation. If love is excluded from life, all the souls in the world assume Dynamics of love complete externality to each other and the only possible relations and contacts in such a loveless world are superficial and mechanical. It is because of love that the contacts and relations between individual souls become significant. It is love which gives meaning and value to all the happenings in the world of duality. But, while love gives meaning to the world of duality, it is at the same time a standing challenge to duality. As love gathers strength, it generates creative restlessness and becomes the main driving power of that spiritual dynamic which ultimately succeeds in restoring to consciousness the original unity of being.
I prefer Orage’s essay On Love to what Baba wrote here. I find it more human and less spiritualized.And it corresponds more to the Living Teaching Mr. Gurdjieff brought to the West. Most of these Indian Gurus do no understand us Westerners. That is why in Beelzebub’s Tales there is a very strong criticism of Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism.
I think you’ve been here my Old Friend and as soon as I saw traces of your presence my heart leaped into another sphere of tranquility that it hasn’t had ever since you left.
In relation to the FOF Blog I also feel that all those of us who have touched each other and separated must eventually come together again; the sooner the better.
I have been the cause of many our separations and beyond regret which is ALL there, is also the understanding that in conflict there are elements that need to be overcome in both sides for there to be a reunification. The wonder of being together is the wonder of being together. Nothing can replace another’s presence and we are all needed for dinner.
I am also understanding that I could not stop writing like a madman or the madwoman that I have often been in the fofblog, because my sense of my own self was too weak to live without verifying itself. That I was too vulnerable to be on my own and rest. That I needed consistent reassurance to be. I am not trying to justify my mistakes, I clearly acknowledge that the excessive occupation of space, the aggressions and the behavior was out of place. I say this and an I still says, what was so out of place?
This I says, what was so out of place? That you were fighting against an evil that you had all met and most neglected to seriously stand up against? That there are still only 188 signatures in the petition although over 800 people have left in the past three years? Or was it that you insulted them as fascists? Sickos?
This is difficult for me. I do not regret screaming at people who I believe are behaving as fascists but I regret screaming at people. It is another form of fascism to scream at people and that I regret. I wish to say on my behalf that more than screaming at people I was screaming at the horror I know lives in the Fellowship of Friends cult and at the horror I myself lived and expanded on my own family. But I also wish to acknowledge that there was too much ego on my behalf and as I look at it without judgment I realize that there is only as much ego as lack of I. This is perhaps one of the most beautiful understandings I’ve come across in trying to grasp how it is that negative emotions arise: the understanding that all our “arguing”, “possessiveness”, and “separationism” is simply the reflection of our own self’s suffering concentrated in the ego. That the ego is just that: lack of love that expresses itself in lack of being which expresses itself in all forms of separation from others.
Thinking about this the idea that this or that is “mine” becomes very clear. What can be mine when as soon as time’s up it’ll remain here? And what more could one wish than to leave more than one found?
This idea that there is only as much ego as lack of I or real I must be clarified because the tendency in cults in all spheres of life or those wishing to establish separating hierarchies between people in the family, society or nations, is that they’ll justify abusing those with “less I” because they “deserve it” and this is far from right. This is the worst illness in the sphere of being and it amounts for most of the injustice in the world today. The idea that there is only as much ego as lack of I as I’m presenting it here is far from understanding the ego as it has usually been conceived as relating to egotism. It is true that the ego is egotistic but it is egotistic because it needs to defend its feeling of isolation and separation from the rest of the world. It is the ego what we come out with after leaving our homes. It is the ego what our parents plant in our lives. It is probably determined by karmic laws and the opportunity we have then is to rebuild our selves from that ego. To transform our personal suffering and the suffering of our parents as much as those who surrounded us in such a way that we can reunite ourselves through the understanding of their condition, that is, through compassion.
In this sense what I most regret about my first final participation in the fofblog is my lack of compassion. When I screamed at them in my last posts I was as separate as they were to me. And yet I ask. Was this not necessary for us all? In the suffering that we’ve all endured through our having to stand up for what we think is right, aren’t such separations necessary so that we each readjust our self to our selves? Is conflict not necessary for us to evolve? Is it not painful when we tell each other the truth about our selves? Can it be any other way? But must we hate each other for hurting each other with truths that we all need to hear?
Let me be clear that I am talking about my first participation and not when I rejoined recently. I am in nothing regretful of my recent participation. I entered with love and was banned without it. I do not regret my love.
Of Love Alone
Sitting looking at pictures
Without faces
Your image in my heart
In the realm of poetry
Without words
Silence speaks
When two hearts
Become connected
There’s no space in between
The petals of my spirit
Come out to yours
In colours
Each word
A feeling petal
A colour of thoughts
I touch the rainbow
Of your smile
In the rain of your laughter
I dance in the puddles
Of your absence
A song of love
Of love
Alone
A song
Hi Will,
It’s fine to post your answer here on the box instead of the reply under the comment so that we don’t have to go back up there because sometimes they get lost.
I enjoyed your differences on vedanta and tantra. I didn’t know they were called such. If I am more in the tantra world then Meher Baba is as real to me as Gurdjieff. I see things that fit their time and place and try not to judge everything and become cultish about anything anymore. I already took that road for too long and it led to hell but I respect anyone’s choice to still tread on it as long as they don’t harm anybody else or pretend to impose it on anybody else… which is rare for in our longing for unity we try to convince each other to join us.
We cannot disagree on what you prefer or not. You’ve worked hard on Gurdjieff’s book and your knowledge of it is welcome. I enjoy being reminded and even more realizing all the mistakes and faults he also made no matter how much I’ve followed the System.
I’m no longer anyone’s follower though. I’m not looking for instructors or guides nor do I feel I can instruct or guide anyone. Just people to share who I can listen to and who can hear what is said without judgment, lying, identification, imagination and negative emotions and with all the love or external consideration that we can amass. I am far from practicing these things still so it is necessary to practice with people so much more often!
Have a lovely day!
Will: “Meher Baba followed Vedanta and Mr. Gurdjieff followed Tantra. In Vedanta all is Illusion; in Tantra all is Real. I follow Tantra because it corresponds to my cosmic type. But Vedanta is as valid as Tantra. Different ways for different types. I follow Mr. Gurdjieff when he said “When take, take; when give, give.” That is pure Tantra. I think Tantra is much more adapted to the Western mentality than Tantra. What do you think?”
I think that is what Mr. Gurdjieff said, that different systems apply to different people.
How do you understand “all is real” in tantra?
What does it mean to you that it corresponds to your cosmic type?
And if you care to expand, was does it mean to you that all is illusion?
On a note aside, since you’re such a lover of Gurdjieff’s work I am surprised you haven’t read Rodney Collin. His Theory of Celestial Influences is a masterpiece in my humble opinion, do look at it when you have the inclination and time.
Thanks for sharing Will. It’s fun to think about these things but my time is no longer so long and I would much enjoy not taking our energy away from the Objective Art site and side. There are some very interesting people contributing there. Having said that, it is fine also to share here what is here’s.
Elena,
All is illusion is the central tenet of the teaching of Vedanta. The only reality is the Self or God. The classical example is a movie screen. The only reality is the screen; the figures projecting on the screen are all illusion. The most immediate consequence of this teaching is total renunciation, beginning with renunciation of sex.
For Tantra the converse is true. All is real and sex is as real as God.
The best example of Vedanta is Sri Aurobindo who left his wife for a spiritual adventure and wrote Life Divine in which he said: “No sex in Life Divine.” The best example of Tantra is Mr. Gurdjieff who at age eighty was still having sex with young women (read the book “Daddy Gurdjieff” by his son Leonid Stjoernval–you can find it at the Gurdjieff Internet Guide).
I love the Living teaching of Mr. Gurdjieff and I hate the Work. That is why I read only Beelzebub’s tales and books about life with Mr. Gurdjieff.
My cosmic type deals with the transformation of substances and energies and that is why I am an engineer. You cosmic type, from what I have seen in your blog, deals with the transformation of words and you love poetry. If we ever meet for dinner, you will sing me a poem and I will hold your white right hand in my two hands, send you all my Hanbledzoin, and then look at your face to see if there is something transforming in your eyes, like this:
Will
PS. I totally agree with you that we ought to move to the Forum Objectivec Art.
Good, let’s do that. Thanks for the answers.
a comment on:
The kind of love which is awakened by the grace of the Master is a rare privilege. The mother who is willing to sacrifice all and to die for her child, and the Pure love is very rare martyr who is prepared to give up his very life for his country are indeed supremely noble, but they have not necessarily tasted this pure love which is born through the grace of the Master. Even the great yogis with long beards who, sitting in caves and mountains, are completely absorbed in deep samadhi, do not necessarily have this precious love.”
——————————
I wish humble love not this metaphysical love if metaphysical means far from me.
I wish The mother love that LIVES for her child !
I wish to see around me little humble examples that are close to my reach so i can copy it!
I like when he says:” obstructive factors are either forms of lower love or the inevitable side-results of these lower forms of love”.
Because this means try to do, try to do what your conscience tell you to do and observe the results. Not Mummojumbo about Love of Master is the biggest love, but instead good advices: what is “the preliminary spiritual preparation of the aspirant” ?
Look high, look down and go straight…
Hi Apprentice Shepherd,
Thanks for your insights on this text. For me this text collects the whole structure of love in the jacks, queens and kings of centers beautifully and it is expressed so un-academically, vivid and wisely.
All forms of love inspire. I don’t think the love for the master is any less great than he expresses here but the idolatry for master, lover or child is what makes relationships in cults, marriages and families so sick. There’s a whole world of difference between love and blind idolatry.
Thanks for sharing.
Jesus said, “Among those born of women, from Adam until John the Baptist, there is no one so superior to John the Baptist that his eyes should not be lowered (before him). Yet I have said, whichever one of you comes to be a child will be acquainted with the kingdom and will become superior to John.”
The Gospel of Thomas
You’re dead
But you’ve been here all the time
as if it were impossible to die
and all that happened
were that we fused inside
for we’ve never been apart
I love you
even if you left before I was old enough to be
and had to die so many times before I came to life
I love you
even if you left long before I could
and looked for you in every living being
hoping you’d survived in every skin
longing for too long
to be at ease
I have loved you
if love is pain and wondering the skin of every lover
like balm in a soul that never knew how it felt to be that loved
And now that it is all over
And there’s no wish
I look at that treading of snails on rock
as if it were just
life
without regret
or demands
as if it had been what needed to be done
whether you had left or not
but with the excuse
Had you told me that it was mostly about digging
I might have bought myself a spade
Oh Mother
Not to dig your grave
But to dig you out of the grave
Instead
of doing it with my nails
Families were already dead long before you died
Even those who have them don’t know them
They don’t matter anymore
People are too busy working
for somebody else
But it’s clear to me
That it is better to have a parent
Than to have to replace one
With other’s selves until
Our little essence is bold enough
To live
I love you
All my pain’s been nothing
Compared to what you must’ve felt
To put two bullets in your head
When I was eight
“We are always together in this realm”
you told me recently beyond dreams
I know, I know,
And I’m so busy still
In this
but
how much more gratitude
Could I thank you with?
We are One
and in that Oneness
there’s no I or you
Only in this realm
can I love you
I didn’t know exactly how much the Arabs have sculpted our world.
Alchemy and chemistry in medieval Islam
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Alchemy and chemistry in Islam refers to the study of both traditional alchemy and early practical chemistry (the early chemical investigation of nature in general) by scientists in the medieval Islamic world. The word alchemy itself was derived from the Arabic word الكيمياء al-kimia, in turn derived from the Persian word کيميا kimia.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the focus of alchemical development moved to the Arab Empire and the Islamic civilization. Much more is known about Islamic alchemy as it was better documented; indeed, most of the earlier writings that have come down through the years were preserved as Arabic translations.[1]
The study of alchemy and chemistry often overlapped in the early Islamic world, but later there were disputes between the traditional alchemists and the practical chemists who discredited alchemy. Muslim chemists and alchemists were the first to employ the experimental scientific method (as practised in modern chemistry), while Muslim alchemists also developed theories on the transmutation of metals, the philosopher’s stone and the Takwin (artificial creation of life in the laboratory), like in later medieval European alchemy, though these alchemical theories were rejected by practical Muslim chemists from the 9th century onwards.
Contents [hide]
1 Contributions to alchemy
2 Beginnings of chemistry
3 Legacy
4 Chemical processes
5 Laboratory apparatus
6 Chemical substances
7 Chemical industries
8 Drinking industry
9 Glass industry
10 Hygiene industries
11 See also
12 References
13 External links
[edit]Contributions to alchemy
The Islamic world was a melting pot for alchemy. Islamic philosophers made great contributions to alchemical hermeticism. The most influential author in this regard was arguably Jābir ibn Hayyān (جابر بن حيان, Latin Geberus; usually rendered in English as Geber). He analyzed each Aristotelian element in terms of four basic qualities of hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness.[2] According to Jābir, in each metal two of these qualities were interior and two were exterior. For example, lead was externally cold and dry, while gold was hot and moist. Thus, Jabir theorized, by rearranging the qualities of one metal, a different metal would result.[2] By this reasoning, the search for the philosopher’s stone was introduced to Western alchemy.[3][4] Jabir developed an elaborate numerology whereby the root letters of a substance’s name in Arabic, when treated with various transformations, held correspondences to the element’s physical properties.
The elemental system used in medieval alchemy was developed by Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber). His original system consisted of seven elements, which included the five classical elements (aether, air, earth, fire and water), in addition to two chemical elements representing the metals: sulphur, ‘the stone which burns’, which characterized the principle of combustibility, and mercury, which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties. Shortly thereafter, this evolved into eight elements, with the Arabic concept of the three metallic principles: sulphur giving flammability or combustion, mercury giving volatility and stability, and salt giving solidity.[5][verification needed]
Muslim alchemists also developed theories on the transmutation of metals, the philosopher’s stone and the Takwin (artificial creation of life in the laboratory), like in later medieval European alchemy, though these alchemical theories were rejected by practical Muslim chemists from the 9th century onwards.
[edit]Beginnings of chemistry
Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber), considered the “father of chemistry”, introduced experimentation, invented the alembic still and retort, many chemical processes such as filtration, and many chemical substances such as distilled alcohol. He also established the perfumery industry.
Muhammad ibn Zakariya ar-Razi (Rhazes) isolated many chemical substances, produced many medications, and described many laboratory apparatus.
Early Islamic chemists such as Jabir ibn Hayyan, Al-Kindi (Latinized as Alkindus) and Al-Razi (Latinized as Rasis or Rhazes) contributed key chemical discoveries, including:
Distillation apparatus (such as the alembic, still, and retort) which were able to fully purify chemical substances.
The words elixir, alembic and alcohol are of Arabic origin.
The muriatic (hydrochloric), sulfuric, nitric and acetic acids.
Soda and potash.
Purified distilled alcohol.
Perfumery
Many more chemical substances and apparatus.
From the Arabic names of al-natrun and al-qalīy, Latinized into Natrium and Kalium, come the modern symbols for sodium and potassium.
The discovery that aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, could dissolve the noblest metal, gold, was to fuel the imagination of alchemists for the next millennium.
An early experimental scientific method for chemistry began emerging among early Muslim chemists. The first and most influential was the 9th century chemist, Jābir ibn Hayyān, who is “considered by many to be the father of chemistry”,[6][7][8][9] for introducing:
The experimental method; apparatus such as the alembic, still, and retort; and chemical processes such as liquefaction, purification, oxidisation and evaporation.[9]
Purification by crystallisation.[6]
Filtration.[10]
Pure distillation[10][not in citation given] (Impure distillation methods were known to the Babylonians, Greeks and Egyptians since ancient times, but Jābir was the first to introduce distillation apparatus and techniques which were able to fully purify chemical substances.)[citation needed]
The distillation and production of numerous chemical substances.
Jabir clearly recognized and proclaimed the importance of experimentation:
The first essential in chemistry is that thou shouldest perform practical work and conduct experiments, for he who performs not practical work nor makes experiments will never attain to the least degree of mastery.”[11]
The historian of chemistry E. J. Holmyard gives credit to Jabir for his part in the development of alchemy into an experimental science and he writes that Jabir’s importance to the history of chemistry is equal to that of Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier.[12] The historian Paul Kraus, who had studied most of Jabir’s extant works in Arabic and Latin, summarized the importance of Jabir ibn Hayyan to the history of chemistry by comparing his experimental and systematic works in chemistry with that of the allegorical and unintelligble works of the ancient Greek alchemists:[13]
“To form an idea of the historical place of Jabir’s alchemy and to tackle the problem of its sources, it is advisable to compare it with what remains to us of the alchemical literature in the Greek language. One knows in which miserable state this literature reached us. Collected by Byzantine scientists from the tenth century, the corpus of the Greek alchemists is a cluster of incoherent fragments, going back to all the times since the third century until the end of the Middle Ages.”
“The efforts of Berthelot and Ruelle to put a little order in this mass of literature led only to poor results, and the later researchers, among them in particular Mrs. Hammer-Jensen, Tannery, Lagercrantz, von Lippmann, Reitzenstein, Ruska, Bidez, Festugiere and others, could make clear only few points of detail…”
The study of the Greek alchemists is not very encouraging. An even surface examination of the Greek texts shows that a very small part only was organized according to true experiments of laboratory: even the supposedly technical writings, in the state where we find them today, are unintelligible nonsense which refuses any interpretation.
It is different with Jabir’s alchemy. The relatively clear description of the processes and the alchemical apparatuses, the methodical classification of the substances, mark an experimental spirit which is extremely far away from the weird and odd esotericism of the Greek texts. The theory on which Jabir supports his operations is one of clearness and of an impressive unity. More than with the other Arab authors, one notes with him a balance between theoretical teaching and practical teaching, between the `ilm and the `amal. In vain one would seek in the Greek texts a work as systematic as that which is presented for example in the Book of Seventy.”
Jabir’s teacher, Ja’far al-Sadiq, refuted Aristotle’s theory of the four classical elements and discovered that each one is made up of different chemical elements:
“I wonder how a man like Aristotle could say that in the world there are only four elements – Earth, Water, Fire, and Air. The Earth is not an element. It contains many elements. Each metal, which is in the earth, is an element.”[14]
Al-Sadiq also developed a particle theory, which he described as follows:
“The universe was born out of a tiny particle, which had two opposite poles. That particle produced an atom. In this way matter came into being. Then the matter diversified. This diversification was caused by the density or rarity of the atoms.”[14]
Al-Sadiq also wrote a theory on the opacity and transparency of materials. He stated that materials which are solid and absorbent are opaque, and materials which are solid and repellent are more or less transparent. He also stated that opaque materials absorb heat.[14]
Al-Kindi, who was a chemist and an opponent of alchemy, was the first to refute the study of traditional alchemy and the theory of the transmutation of metals into more precious metals such as gold or silver.[15] Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī,[16] Avicenna[17] and Ibn Khaldun were also opponents of alchemy who refuted the theory of the transmutation of metals.
Another influential Muslim chemist was al-Razi (Rhazes), who in his Doubts about Galen, was the first to prove both Aristotle’s theory of classical elements and Galen’s theory of humorism wrong using an experimental method. He carried out an experiment which would upset these theories by inserting a liquid with a different temperature into a body resulting in an increase or decrease of bodily heat, which resembled the temperature of that particular fluid. Al-Razi noted particularly that a warm drink would heat up the body to a degree much higher than its own natural temperature, thus the drink would trigger a response from the body, rather than transferring only its own warmth or coldness to it. Al-Razi’s chemical experiments further suggested other qualities of matter, such as “oiliness” and “sulfurousness”, or inflammability and salinity, which were not readily explained by the traditional fire, water, earth and air division of elements.[citation needed] Al-Razi was also the first to:
Distill petroleum.
Invent kerosene and kerosene lamps.
Invent soap bars and modern recipes for soap.
Produce antiseptics.
Develop numerous chemical processes such as sublimation.
In the 13th century Nasīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī stated a version of the law of conservation of mass, noting that a body of matter is able to change, but is not able to disappear.[18]
From the 12th century, the writings of Jābir ibn Hayyān, al-Kindi, al-Razi and Avicenna became widely known in Europe during the Arabic-Latin translation movement and later through the Latin writings of a pseudo-Geber, an anonymous alchemist born in 14th century Spain, who translated more of Jabir’s books into Latin and wrote some of his own books under the pen name of “Geber”.
[edit]The Alchemists
There are more Islamic figures within chemistry than is generally acknowledged in the literature on the subject.
More recent research into the matter has provided a string outline. Regarding Muslim chemists beginning with the Umayyad Prince Khalid Ibn Yazid (Calid)(d.704), Ja’far al-Sadiq, Jabir Ibn Hayyan and Ibn Wahshiyya (.870) who wrote chemical works which were subsequently used by Al-Dimashqi in his Mineralogy. al-Razi and Muhammed ibn Umail al-Tamimi (wrote Miftah al-hikma al-‘uzma). Al-Farabi (d. 950) and Ibn Badis on Silver filling also wrote on chemistry, and were succeeded chronologically by a chemist from Spain, Al-Majriti (d. 1007), Ziryab, Abu al-Salt, Ibn al-Wafid of Toledo (Abenguefit) and Ibn ar-Tafiz (Artephius) of Córdoba in Islamic Spain[19].
In Baghdad and nearby, Al-Khwarizmi al-Khati (.1034) (not the mathematician), who wrote Ain al-San’a wa awn al-Sunâ (The essential of the Art and the Help for the Artisans), Ibn Sina, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī and Abu Mansur Muwaffaq of Herat. In the 12th century came to prominence the famous Seljuk vizier-scholar Al-Tughrai (d.1122) who wrote numerous works such as Kitab al-anwar wa’l mafatih. Later in the same century flourished Ahmad Ibn Imad ul-din, Abul Hasan ibn Musa ibn Arfa Ra’a (d. 1197) who is the author of Shudhur al-dahab (The Gold Spangle), Al-Nabarawi and al-Khazini. In the early 14th century Al-Simawi, Ibn Rassam, then the famed al-Jaldaki (c. 1342), Abul Ashba ibn Tammam (d.1361) and Hassan al-Rammah.[20]
[edit]Legacy
Alexander von Humboldt regarded the Muslim chemists as the true founders of chemistry.[21] Will Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization IV: The Age of Faith:
“Chemistry as a science was almost created by the Moslems; for in this field, where the Greeks (so far as we know) were confined to industrial experience and vague hypothesis, the Saracens introduced precise observation, controlled experiment, and careful records. They invented and named the alembic (al-anbiq), chemically analyzed innumerable substances, composed lapidaries, distinguished alkalis and acids, investigated their affinities, studied and manufactured hundreds of drugs. Alchemy, which the Moslems inherited from Egypt, contributed to chemistry by a thousand incidental discoveries, and by its method, which was the most scientific of all medieval operations.”[22]
Fielding H. Garrison wrote in the History of Medicine:
“The Saracens themselves were the originators not only of algebra, chemistry, and geology, but of many of the so-called improvements or refinements of civilization, such as street lamps, window-panes, firework, stringed instruments, cultivated fruits, perfumes, spices, etc…”[23]
Robert Briffault wrote in The Making of Humanity:
“Chemistry, the rudiments of which arose in the processes employed by Egyptian metallurgists and jewellers—combining metals into various alloys and ‘tinting’ them to resemble gold—processes long preserved as a secret monopoly of the priestly colleges, and clad in the usual mystic formulas, developed in the hands of the Arabs into a widespread, organized passion for research which led them to the invention of distillation, sublimation, filtration, to the discovery of alcohol, of nitric and sulfuric acids (the only acid known to the ancients was vinegar), of the alkalis, of the salts of mercury, of antimony and bismuth, and laid the basis of all subsequent chemistry and physical research.”[10]
George Sarton, the father of the history of science, wrote in the Introduction to the History of Science:
“We find in his (Jabir, Geber) writings remarkably sound views on methods of chemical research, a theory on the geologic formation of metals (the six metals differ essentially because of different proportions of sulfur and mercury in them); preparation of various substances (e.g., basic lead carbonatic, arsenic and antimony from their sulfides).”[24]
[edit]Chemical processes
File:Steam Distillation.JPG
Laboratory setup for steam distillation, invented by Avicenna in the 11th century.
Geber and Ahmad Ibn Imad ul-din invented the following chemical processes in the 8th century:
Pure distillation (al-taqtir) which could fully purify chemical substances with the alembic.
Filtration (al-tarshih).[10]
Purification by crystallization (al-tabalwur).[6]
Liquefaction, purification, oxidisation, and evaporation (tabkhir).[9]
Al-Razi invented the following chemical processes in the 9th century:
Dry distillation
Calcination (al-tashwiya).[25][26]
Other chemical processes introduced by Muslim chemists include:
Assation (or roasting), cocotion (or digestion), ceration, lavage, solution, mixture, and fixation.[27]
Destructive distillation was invented by Muslim chemists in the 8th century to produce tar from petroleum.[21]
Steam distillation was invented by Avicenna in the early 11th century for the purpose of producing essential oils.[28]
Water purification[29]
[edit]Laboratory apparatus
Distillation by alembic.
[edit]Distillation apparatus
The alembic was invented and named by the Muslim chemist Geber. The still was also invented by Geber as part of the alembic.[22]
The chemical retort used for distillation was invented by Geber as part of the alembic, and was widely used by later Muslim scientists. The retort was later introduced to the West by 1570.[30][not in citation given]
In the 11th century, Avicenna invented the refrigerated coil, which condenses aromatic vapours.[31][32] This was a breakthrough in distillation technology and he made use of it in his steam distillation process, which requires refrigerated tubing, to produce essential oils.[28]
[edit]Other chemistry equipment
Muslim chemists and engineers invented the cucurbit and aludel, and the equipment needed for melting metals such as furnaces and crucibles.[26]
In his Secretum secretorum (Latinized title), Al-Razi (Rhazes) described the following tools that were invented by him and his Muslim predecessors (Calid, Geber and al-Kindi) for melting substances (li-tadhwib): hearth (kur), bellows (minfakh aw ziqq), crucible (bawtaqa), the but bar but (in Arabic) or botus barbatus (in Latin), tongs (masik aq kalbatan), scissors (miqta), hammer (mukassir), file (mibrad).[25]
Al-Razi also described the following tools that were invented by him and his Muslim predecessors for the preparation of drugs (li-tadbir al-aqaqir): cucurbit and still with evacuation tube (qar aq anbiq dhu-khatm), receiving matras (qabila), blind still (without evacuation tube) (al-anbiq al-ama), Alembic al-inbiq, aludel (al-uthal), goblets (qadah), flasks (qarura or quwarir), rosewater flasks (ma wariyya), cauldron (marjal aw tanjir), earthenware pots varnished on the inside with their lids (qudur aq tanjir), water bath or sand bath (qadr), oven (al-tannur in Arabic, athanor in Latin), small cylindirical oven for heating aludel (mustawqid), funnels, sieves, filters, etc.[25]
From the list, more than twenty of these chemical apparatus were developed by Geber.[33]
[edit]Physics apparatus
See also: Islamic physics
Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the conical measure,[34] in order to find the ratio between the weight of a substance in air and the weight of water displaced, and to accurately measure the specific weights of the gemstones and their corresponding metals, which are very close to modern measurements.[35]
Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī also invented the laboratory flask and pycnometer in the early 11th century, and the hydrostatic balance and steelyard were invented by al-Khazini in the early 12th century. The earliest descriptions for these instruments are found in al-Khazini’s The Book of the Balance of Wisdom (1121).[36]
Biruni’s contemporary Ibn al-Haytham gave the first clear description[37] and correct analysis[38] of the camera obscura and pinhole camera.
[edit]Chemical substances
Aqua regia was first prepared by Geber.
Hydrochloric acid, a mineral acid, was first isolated by Geber.
Nitric acid, a mineral acid, was first isolated by Geber.
Sulfuric acid, a mineral acid, was first isolated by Geber.
Arsenic, a chemical element, was first isolated by Geber in the 8th century.
[edit]Acids
The only acid known to the ancients was vinegar. Using new equipment such as the alembic and processes such as pure distillation, Muslim chemists were the first to discover and isolate a variety of new acids, such as nitric acid and sulfuric acid.[10]
The important mineral acids—nitric, sulfuric and hydrochloric acids—were all first produced by Geber. These have remained some of the most common products in the chemical industry for over a thousand years.[26]
Acetic acid was also first concentrated from vinegar through distillation by Geber in the 8th century.[6] He is also credited with the discovery of citric acid (the sour component of lemons and other unripe fruits) and tartaric acid (from wine-making residues).[6]
[edit]Chemical elements
Several chemical elements were first discovered by Geber: arsenic, antimony and bismuth.[10][33][39] Geber was also the first to classify sulfur (‘the stone which burns’ that characterized the principle of combustibility) and mercury (which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties) as ‘elements’.[5]
Lead and tin were also first purified and clearly differentiated from one another by Arabic alchemists.[40]
[edit]Derivative and artificial substances
In the 10th century Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi wrote that he and his Muslim predecessors (Calid, Geber and al-Kindi) invented the following derivative and artificial chemical substances: lead(II) oxide (PbO), red lead (Pb3O4), tin(II) oxide (Isfidaj), copper acetate (Zaniar), copper(II) oxide (CuO), lead sulfide, zinc oxide, bismuth oxide, antimony oxide, iron rust, iron acetate, Daws (a contituent of steel), cinnabar (HgS), arsenic trioxide (As2O3), alkali (al-Qili), sodium hydroxide (caustic soda), and Qalimiya (anything that separates from metals during their purification).[41]
[edit]Distilled alcohol
The isolation of ethanol (alcohol) as a pure compound was first achieved by Muslim chemists who developed the art of distillation during the Abbasid caliphate, the most notable of whom were Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber), Al-Kindi (Alkindus) and al-Razi (Rhazes). The writings attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan (721-815) mention the flammable vapors of boiled wine. Al-Kindi (801-873) unambiguously described the distillation of wine.[42] This may have been for the purpose of separating alcoholic content from drinks due to the Islamic prohibition of alcohol consumption.
Muslim chemists were the first to produce fully purified distilled alcohol from the 8th century and manufactured them on a large scale from at least the 10th century, for use in medicine and the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, though it was rarely used for drinking due to the Islamic prohibition of alcohol consumption.[21][26] Alcohol was still consumed by non-Muslims in the Islamic world however.
Ahmad Y Hassan wrote:
“The distillation of wine and the properties of alcohol were known to Islamic chemists from the eighth century. The prohibition of wine in Islam did not mean that wine was not produced or consumed or that Arab alchemists did not subject it to their distillation processes. Jabir ibn Hayyan described a cooling technique which can be applied to the distillation of alcohol.”[42]
[edit]Medicinal substances
Muslim chemists and physicians discovered and produced at least 2,000 medicinal substances for use in medicine and the pharmaceutical sciences.[43]
Ibn al-Wafid of Toledo (Abenguefit), was among the most famous pharmacists and chemists during the Renaissance. His main work is Kitab al-adwiya al-mufrada (translated into Latin as De medicamentis simplicibus) was printed in Latin more than fifty times.
[edit]Natural substances
In the 10th century Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi classified the natural chemical substances that were discovered by him and his Muslim predecessors (mainly Calid, Geber, al-Kindi and al-Tamimi) as follows:[41]
Four spirits: mercury, sal ammoniac, arsenic, sulfur.
Seven fusible metals: gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, mercury.
Thirteen stones: marqashisha, maghnisiya, daws (a constituent of iron and steel), tutiya, lapis lazuli, malachite green, turquoise, hematite, arsenic oxide, lead sulfide, talq (mica and asbestos), gypsum, glass.
Six vitriols: black vitriol, alum, qalqand, qalqadis, qalqatar, suri.
Seven borates: borax, bread borax, natron, nitrate, sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate, sodium borate.
Thirteen salts: lead(II) acetate (sweet), magnesium sulfate (bitter), andarani salt, tabarzad, potassium nitrate, naphthenate, black salt (Indian), salt of egg, alkali (al-qali), salt of urine, calcium hydroxide (slaked lime), salt of oak ashes, natron.
[edit]Vegetable and animal substances
Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi writes that the only vegetable substance used by Muslim alchemists are the ashes of the Ushnan plant, from which they produced alkali metals and alkali salts. Razi also lists ten animal substances that were used by him and his contemporary alchemists: hair, skulls, brains, bile, blood, milk, urine, eggs, nacre (mother of pearl) and horn. He writes that hair, brains, bile, eggs, skulls and blood were used to prepare sal ammoniac.[41]
[edit]Other substances
Through their experiments with various chemical compounds, Arabic chemists first produced many other chemical substances, including:
Arsenic, alkali, alkali salt, rice vinegar, boraxes, potassium nitrate, sulfur and purified sal ammoniac by Geber.[26]
Aqua regia, alum, sal ammoniac, stones, sulfur, salts, and spirits of mercury, by Geber.[26]
Sal nitrum and vitriol by al-Razi.[26]
Ethanol, sulfuric acid, ammonia, mercury, camphor, pomades, and syrups.[29]
Lead carbonatic, arsenic, and antimony.[24]
Nitric and sulfuric acids, alkali, the salts of mercury, antimony, and bismuth.[10]
Geber was also the first to classify all seven classical metals: gold, silver, tin, lead, mercury, iron and copper.[26]
[edit]Chemical industries
A number of chemical substances and products were developed by Muslim chemists for use in the chemical industries.
[edit]Ceramics and pottery
Tin-glazed Hispano-Moresque ware with lusterware decoration, from Spain circa 1475.
Main article: Islamic pottery
From the eighth to eighteenth centuries, the use of glazed ceramics was prevalent in Islamic art, usually assuming the form of elaborate pottery.[44] Tin-opacified glazing was one of the earliest new technologies developed by the Islamic potters. The first Islamic opaque glazes can be found as blue-painted ware in Basra, dating to around the 8th century. Another significant contribution was the development of stonepaste ceramics, originating from 9th century Iraq.[45] The first industrial complex for glass and pottery production was built in Ar-Raqqah, Syria, in the 8th century.[46] Other centers for innovative ceramic pottery in the Islamic world included Fustat (from 975 to 1075), Damascus (from 1100 to around 1600) and Tabriz (from 1470 to 1550).[47]
Another innovation was the albarello, a type of maiolica earthenware jar originally designed to hold apothecaries’ ointments and dry drugs. The development of this type of pharmacy jar had its roots in the Islamic Middle East. Brought to Italy by Hispano-Moresque traders, the earliest Italian examples were produced in Florence in the 15th century.
The Hispano-Moresque style emerged in Andalusia in the 8th century, under the Fatimids. This was a style of Islamic pottery created in Islamic Spain, after the Moors had introduced two ceramic techniques to Europe: glazing with an opaque white tin-glaze, and painting in metallic lusters. Hispano-Moresque ware was distinguished from the pottery of Christendom by the Islamic character of it decoration.[48]
[edit]Cheese glue
In The Book of the Hidden Pearl, Geber described the first recipes for the manufacture of glue from cheese.[49]
[edit]Oil and petrolium products
From the 8th century the streets of Baghdad were the first to be paved with tar, derived from petroleum through destructive distillation. In the 9th century oil fields were exploited in the area around modern Baku, Azerbaijan, to produce the earliest naphtha. These fields were described by Masudi in the 10th century, and by Marco Polo in the 13th century, who described the output of those oil wells as hundreds of shiploads.[21]
Muslim chemists were the first to produce petrol from crude oil, using the process of distillation.[50][51]
Kerosene was produced from the distillation of petroleum and was first described by al-Razi (Rhazes) in 9th century Baghdad. In his Kitab al-Asrar (Book of Secrets), he described two methods for the production of kerosene. One method involved using clay as an absorbent, while the other method involved using ammonium chloride (sal ammoniac).[51][52] Al-Razi also described the first kerosene lamps (naffatah) used for heating and lighting in his Kitab al-Asrar (Book of Secrets). These were used in the oil lamp industry.[52]
Essential oils were first produced by Avicenna in the early 11th century, using steam distillation, for use in aromatherapy and the drinking and perfumery industries.[28]
[edit]Plated mail
Plated mail was invented by Geber in The Book of the Hidden Pearl for use in armours (jawasin), helmets (bid) and shields (daraq).[49]
[edit]Rosewater
Rosewater was first produced by Muslim chemists through the distillation of roses, for use in the drinking and perfumery industries.[26]
[edit]Drinking industry
[edit]Coffee
An Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans exported from Yemen to Ethiopia where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century, it had arrived in Makkah and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Greek named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London. The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve, then the Italian caffè, and then English coffee.[9][53]
[edit]Distilled and purified water
Arab chemists were the first to produce distilled water and purified water, used for water supply systems and for long journeys across deserts where the supplies were uncertain.[29] In the 10th century, Abu Mansur Muwaffaq of Herat wrote The foundations of the true properties of Remedies, where he described 585 drugs. He also described the distillation of sea-water for drinking[54].
Another Alchemist to mention distilled and purified water was Ibn ar-Tafiz (Artephius) of Córdoba in Islamic Spain.
Al-Tughrai the Seljuk Vizier also patronized new methods, techniques and processes used to distill water easily.
[edit]Soft drink
Sherbet, the first juiced and carbonated soft drink, made of crushed fruit, herbs, or flowers, has long existed as one of the most popular beverages from and of the Muslim world, winning over Western figures such as Lord Byron. Muslims developed a variety of juices to make their sharab, an Arabic word from which the Italian sorbetto, French sorbet and English sherbet were derived. Today, this juice is known by a multitude of names, is associated with numerous cultural traditions, and is produced by countries ranging from India to the United States of America.[55][56]
[edit]Syrups
The medieval Muslim sources contain many recipes for drink syrups that can be kept outside the refrigerator for weeks or months.[56]
[edit]Glass industry
[edit]Glass factories
The first industrial complex for glass and pottery production was built in Ar-Raqqah, Syria, in the 8th century. Extensive experimentation was carried out at the complex, which was two kilometres in length, and a variety of innovative high-purity glass were developed there. Two other similar complexes have also been discovered, and nearly three hundred new chemical recipes for glass are known to have been produced at all three sites.[46]
The first glass factories were thus built by Muslim craftsmen in the Islamic world. The first glass factories in Europe were later built in the 11th century by Egyptian craftsmen in Corinth, Greece.[26]
[edit]Clear, colourless and high-purity glass
The earliest examples of clear, colourless and high-purity glass were produced by Muslims in the 9th century, such as the quartz glass invented by Abbas Ibn Firnas. The Arab poet al-Buhturi (820-897) describes the clarity of such glass as follows:
“Its colour hides the glass as if it is standing in it without a container.”[57]
Coloured stained glass windows in the Nasir al-Mulk mosque in Shiraz, Iran.
[edit]Coloured and stained glass
Stained glass was first produced by Muslim architects in Southwest Asia using coloured glass rather than stone. In the 8th century, the Arab chemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber) scientifically described 46 original recipes for producing coloured glass in Kitab al-Durra al-Maknuna (The Book of the Hidden Pearl), in addition to 12 recipes inserted by al-Marrakishi in a later edition of the book.[58]
[edit]Gemstones and pearls
In his Kitab al-Durra al-Maknuna (The Book of the Hidden Pearl), Jabir described the first recipes for the manufacture of artificial pearls and for the purification of pearls that were discoloured from the sea or from grease.[49]
In The Book of the Hidden Pearl, Jabir described the first recipes for the dyeing and artificial colouring of gemstones and pearls.[49] Jabir also first described the production of high quality coloured glass cut into artificial gemstones.[57]
[edit]Mirrors
The parabolic mirror, earlier studied by Diocles and others, was described by Ibn Sahl in his On the Burning Instruments in the 10th century. It was later described again in Ibn al-Haytham’s On Burning Mirrors and Book of Optics (1021).[59]
Ibn al-Haytham also discussed concave and convex mirrors in both cylindrical and spherical geometries,[60] described spherical and parabolic mirrors,[61] carried out a number of experiments with mirrors, and solved the problem of finding the point on a convex mirror at which a ray coming from one point is reflected to another point.[62]
By the 11th century, clear glass mirrors were being produced in Moorish Spain.[21]
[edit]Silica and quartz glass
Silica glass and Quartz glass, a clear, colourless, high-purity glass, was invented by Abbas Ibn Firnas (810-887), who was the first to produce glass from sand and stones such as quartz.[63]
[edit]Hygiene industries
[edit]Cosmetics
Early forms of cosmetics had been used since ancient times, but these were usually created primarily for the purpose of beautification and often used harmful substances. This changed with Muslim cosmetologists who emphasized hygiene, due to religious requirements, and invented various healthy and hygienic cosmetics that are still used today.[64]
In the 9th century, Ziryab is known to have invented an early toothpaste, which he popularized throughout Islamic Spain.[65] The exact ingredients of this toothpaste are not currently known,[66] but it was reported to have been both “functional and pleasant to taste.”[65] For women, he opened a beauty parlour or “cosmetology school” near Alcázar, where he taught “the use of depilatories for removing body hair”, and he introduced new perfumes and cosmetics.[66] He also introduced under-arm deodorants.[67]
[edit]Soap
See also: Nabulsi soap
True soaps made from vegetable oils (such as olive oil), aromatic oils (such as thyme oil) and Sodium Lye (al-Soda al-Kawia) were first produced by Muslim chemists in the medieval Islamic world.[26] Due to washing and bathing being religious requirements for Muslims, they invented the recipe for true soap, which is still in use today, and they invented the soap bar.[9] The formula for soap used since then hasn’t changed and are identical to the current soap sold in modern times.
From the beginning of the 7th century soap was produced in Nablus (Palestine), Kufa (Iraq) and Basra (Iraq). Soaps, as we know them today, are descendants of historical Arabian Soaps. Arabian Soap was perfumed and colored, while some of the soaps were liquid and others were solid. They also had special shaving soap for shaving. It was commercially sold for 3 Dirhams (0.3 Dinars) a piece in 981 AD. A manuscript of Al-Razi (Rhazes) contains various modern recipes for soap. A recently discovered manuscript from the 13th century details more recipes for soap making, e.g. take some sesame oil, a sprinkle of potash, alkali and some lime, mix them all together, and boil. When cooked, they are poured into molds and left to set, leaving hard soap (soap bar).[64]
[edit]Perfumery
Islamic cultures contributed significantly to the development of perfumery in both perfecting the extraction of fragrances through steam distillation and by introducing new raw ingredients. Both the raw ingredients and distillation technology significantly influenced western perfumery and scientific developments, particularly chemistry.
As traders, Islamic cultures such as the Arabs and Persians had wider access to different spices, herbals, and other fragrance materials. In addition to trading them, many of these exotic materials were cultivated by the Muslims such that they could be successfully grown outside of their native climates. Two examples of this include jasmine, which is native to South and Southeast Asia, and various citrus fruits, which are native to East Asia. Both of these ingredients are still highly important in modern perfumery.
In Islamic culture, perfume usage has been documented as far back as the 7th century and its usage is considered a religious duty. Muhammad said:
“The taking of a bath on Friday is compulsory for every male Muslim who has attained the age of puberty and (also) the cleaning of his teeth with Siwak, and the using of perfume if it is available.”
—Sahih Bukhari Sahih al-Bukhari, 2:13:5.
Such rituals gave incentives to scholars to search and develop a cheaper way to produce incenses and in mass production. Two talented chemists, Jabir ibn Hayyan (born 722, Iraq), and al-Kindi (born 801, Iraq) established the perfume industry. Jabir developed many techniques, including distillation, evaporation and filtration, which enabled the collection of the odour of plants into a vapour that could be collected in the form of water or oil.[68] Al-Kindi, however, was the real founder of the perfume industry, as he carried out extensive research and experiments in combining various plants and other sources to produce a variety of scent products. He elaborated a vast number of ‘recipes’ for a wide range of perfumes, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. His work in the laboratory is reported by a witness who said:
“I received the following description, or recipe, from Abu Yusuf Ya’qub b. Ishaq al-Kindi, and I saw him making it and giving it an addition in my presence.
The writer goes on in the same section to speak of the preparation of a perfume called ghaliya, which contained musk, amber and other ingredients, and reveals a long list of technical names of drugs and apparatus.
Musk and floral perfumes were brought to Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries from Arabia, through trade with the Islamic world and with the returning Crusaders. Those who traded for these were most often also involved in trade for spices and dyestuffs. There are records of the Pepperers Guild of London, going back to 1179, which show them trading with Muslims in spices, perfume ingredients and dyes.[69]
[edit]Shampoo
Shampoo was first developed by the Bengali Muslim Sake Dean Mahomet. He introduced it to England when he opened “Mahomed’s Indian Vapour Baths” in Brighton seafront in 1759. He was later appointed as a “Shampooing Surgeon” to Kings George IV and William IV.[9]
Dear Elena,
I know Arabs have done much work in the field of Alchemy. Do you know that the word alchemy comes from the Arab and it refers to all mud coming down the Nile during extreme floods? Europeans later learned a lot from the Arabs and I learned from the Europeans. I will now share qwith you my experiments on alchemy in the laboratory I built in the garage of my house here in Flusinhin, New York, where I live.
Here is then for your Eyes of Mercury:
“The third independent component of Okidanokh has properties that go beyond anything contemporary science knows. It is the very substance of life. The fact that the device used to obtain the Okidanokh is named Lifechakan and it is compared to a dynamo is an important clue. Since a dynamo is a device used to obtain two of the three independent components, then, it follows that the third component is associated with Life. Another important clue is the fact that initiated beings of Egypt, direct descendents of the learned members of the Akhaldans, used the third part of Okidanokh “to preserve the planetary bodies of certain of them forever in a nondecaying and no decomposing state after the sacred Rascooarno.” (587). The important point is that the only way to detect the presence of the third independent component is by its effects, and these effects are very unusual.
I must confess that at some point in my search I became almost obsessed with detecting the presence of the third component in its external manifestations. Since I knew everything that has to be known about how to generate two of the independent components, I soon realized that this was not the way to go. I then resorted to alchemy.
Alchemy was not new to me. I had already done lots of reading on the subject. I had read the works of many famous European alchemists such as the English Roger Bacon, known in his times as “The Remarkable Doctor” and acknowledged today as the father of modern science. “Alchemy is the raising of vibrations,” is a formulation that I totally adhere to and that I have used as frame of reference in the work on myself. One of my favorite pastimes during the three years I lived in Paris was to go to the gothic cathedral of Notre Dame with Fulcanelly”s book THE MYSTERY OF THE CATHEDRALS. I spent many hours studying the many alchemy’s symbols found in different parts of the cathedral, particularly on the three front doors. The raven (the being-bird resembling the exterior form of Saturn’s three-brained beings), symbol of the putrefaction process, and the salamander, symbol of the calcination process, both shown on the central door, always impressed me. But what always impressed me the most was the face of the Alchemist, a small haute-relief statute visible from the stairs to the top of one of the two towers, showing an old man, wearing the adept hat, his eyes sternly fixed on the operation of transmutation.
I became convinced of the possibility of the transmutation of metals after I read how the lives of many alchemists had suddenly changed from poor to rich. It is said that after a mysterious trip to Spain, the fourteen-century French alchemist Nicolas Flamel returned to Paris and very soon became one of the richest and most generous philanthropist the city has ever seen. My conviction increased when I visited the museum of the alchemist in Paris. There I saw with my own eyes a coin that was silver on one side and gold on the other side (even a colorblind person like myself could see the difference).
In those days when I was obsessed with obtaining the third component of Okidanokh, very casually, I came across a short text on alchemy by the well-known Middle Ages alchemist Albertus Magnus, with the title “Compusitum de Composites” (“The Compound of Compounds”). From the moment I put my eyes on it, maybe because of my background in alchemy, I became quite taken by its content and style. Two things immediately grabbed my attention. The first was the unusual, even amazing, properties of what the author identifies as the Mercury of the Philosophers or prima materia. Here are some: one drop deposited over a sheet of hot copper, penetrates the metal leaving behind a white spot; put over hot charcoal, it produces white smoke; exposed to air, it freezes and looks like ice; during distillation, drops of this water do not travel along the same path, but some follow one path while others follow different paths. I reasoned that a substance with such properties would resemble very much to the third independent components of the Omnipresent-Okidanokh. The second thing that impressed me was how easy it looked from the description given in the text to obtain this substance.
I decided to build an alchemy laboratory in the garage of my house in Flushing. I built what is known as a distillation train: distilling flask, condenser, burner, funnel, thermometer, and measuring flask. I followed very carefully the instructions given by the American alchemist Frater Albertus in his remarkable book THE ALCHEMIST’S HANDBOOK (Manual for Practical Laboratory Alchemy). With the help of a friend of mine, a chemical engineer with extensive experience in chemical processes, I was able to procure the chemical compounds needed in the process of transmutation.
In a matter of few days, I was able to successfully process the first, second, and third waters described in the text. I became convinced of the success of my work when my wife and my daughter both agreed that the respective colors of the three waters corresponded to the colors described in the text (since I am colorblind, I had to relied on others). I knew, based on years of experience, that when my wife and my daughter agree on something this means that this something must necessarily be true. I must say, in passing, that their mutual agreement extended only to the color of the waters. As far as the possible results of my work, they were in complete disagreement. My wife was skeptic, while my daughter was more inclined to believe. In order to calm down my wife a little bit, from time to time I would say to her: “Wait until the gold appears and you start going to Bloomingdale’s, Lord and Taylor and Sack’s Fifth Avenue.” Of course, my wife did not believe my comment but may daughter laughed at it.
It was at the moment when I was ready to start fabrication of the fourth water that the devil, the details, made his appearance in person and with full power. The first instruction to be followed in this fabrication reads: “Take your third water, perfected to the third degree and put it in a long-necked flask (a matrass, as it was known in older times) which you will place in the belly of the horse for fourteen days, for putrefaction purposes.” Now, anyone who has read a little bit of alchemy knows that the belly of the horse is nothing more and nothing less that horse manure. This substance is widely used in alchemy because it is capable of keeping a very uniform internal temperature. Procuring the horse manure was not a big problem, although I had to go far from my home, to Long Island, and very early in the morning to collect it (for alchemy purposes, the collection of Nature’s substances must be made before sunrise, when the morning dew in summer days or the morning frost during winter days is at its maximum). I put the third water in a clean, hermetically sealed long-necked distillation flask and place it in a box filled with horse manure in a small and isolated corner of my house. I let it rest there for fourteen days, as indicated in the text. It was very important not to disturb the digestion in the belly of the horse or process of putrefaction.
At the end of the fourteen days period I removed the flask from the belly of the horse. Needless to say, I was very excited (of course, the skeptic and the believer were very excited too). Well, it is impossible for me to describe the joy and contentment I experienced when I verified that the process of putrefaction had taken place in total accordance to the text. All the impurities had fallen to the bottom of the long-necked flask and, as my wife and daughter agreed to, the water had turned from green to red, all in complete accordance to the indications in the text. I am convinced that I was given the possibility of witnessing one of the mysteries in the Great Mystery that is the Great Work of Alchemy. I have seen the Raven.
But I was not given the possibility of advancing to completion of the Great Mystery. After the fourth water, things got really tough. The thing to do was very simple. The fourth water is distilled very slowly and very patiently. This slowly process of distillation is what is known as the clarification process. The water so obtained, the fifth water, is the Mercury of the Philosophers, the prima materia or First Matter from which the final result of the transmutation process, the Philosopher’s Stone, is obtained (here I realized that the process closely conformed to the operation of the Law of Seven, the fifth water or prima materia corresponding to the fifth Stopinder and the Philosopher’s Stone to the sixth). No matter how hard I tried, and I tried very hard (maybe too hard because I burned several distilling flasks), I was not able to obtain water with the unusual properties already mentioned.”
And here is for your purified ears: the alchemy of music:
If you want Elena, you can come to my house in Flushing, New York and I will teach you alchemy in my laboratory.
Regards,
Will
It’s an interesting approach to alchemy.
Another take on it is the alchemy of impressions and yet another is the alchemy of inner transformation.
Thanks for your experiences Will and the invitation is very lovely. Who knows when I’ll head towards New York again but thanks for the open door.
The doors of my house are open to you
Beautiful eagle in the blue sky
As the doors of my soul are too
Delicious and sweet piece of pie.
I totally agree with you here and there is another take in relation to the alchemy I would like to teach you in my laboratory here in New York. And if you ever come, I will take you to the Metropilitan Museum so that we can together meditate in the room of the Lohans. You will love it.
Anyhow this is the last parragraph of my experience that I frogettom include. In it you will find why I agree with you:
“Simultaneously to this practical impossibility, I also had a close encounter of the suspicious kind with a neighbor. This neighbor began to pray on my affairs and was asking very impertinent questions. I began to suspect that he was suspecting I was making cocaine or crack. This suspicious had really begun during my last visit to the chemical supplier, when I overhead a behind-the-door conversation between two salesmen in which one was asking the other: “What do you think he is making?” One day I came to the full conviction that these happenings were clear indications pointing to the fact that I had to switch from exoteric to esoteric alchemy. I realized that the putrefaction I had been given the possibility of witnessing was in reality the putrefaction existing inside of me. I knew, based on my studies of alchemy, that this putrefaction or darkness contains in it the true light. I also knew that this true light must be extracted from the darkness in the way indicated in the Emerald Table: “You will separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the dense, methodically, with great industry.” So, I turned from exoteric to esoteric alchemy.”
Hi Will,
How would you connect the different alchemies or the one alchemy in different spheres? and the exoteric and esoteric?
You invite me and tell me that when I come you’ll show me things but I am here and if you have anything you wish to show this is your opportunity. It is also fine not to show anything and simply share ourselves without making up excuses of why we enjoy being together or presenting little baits so that we come even closer! When there’s no agenda to be together then we settle in our selves, contented. Wouldn’t that be the alchemy of being? To let each other be without competing? What competes, cannot be real. To be delighted in each other’s presence and not have to justify that? To let each other give all of our light (and every human being has as much of it as any other no matter where they come from or what they do, if you give them the opportunity, they will each give as much light as anybody else. And “giving” the opportunity is not placing them in a pedestal but remaining there for them without closing doors and erecting walls of separation justifying the pedestal in which one’s ego has placed one’s self in the suffering of not being).
We want to be loved because we don’t know what being is. When we ARE, we love without wanting. The question of desire roots itself in “beinglessness”: the ego wants what it doesn’t have. When we achieve inside what the ego is looking for, we can take what is there with joy and gratitude but the ego is never satisfied, it has to deny. It is always putting everything and anything around itself down so that it can float above convinced that it shines in the mud. We are all there in different degrees and we are all out of there in different degrees. Life is life: the commitment to unity and the endless struggle against separationism, today, in our inner selves as much as in our communities and the world at large.
We are One, we’re just not conscious of our oneness and in that unconsciousness we separate each other from each other in our acts: that is suffering. When each of our acts connects us to each other then life pours its light in our selves and everything we do gives delight. Every job, every creation, every relationship is an act of giving, every individual in his and her own way is a giver. When we don’t deny each other what we are giving, then creation is possible because we are each endless creators. The whole system of injustice today does not come from the economic sphere but from the unconsciousness with which we treat each other’s being neglecting to acknowledge our humanity.
The system of hierarchies in which the political and economic spheres place people is a symptom of our unconsciousness, not the cause. The economic differences and the relationships of power cannot change until we are each more conscious of our Oneness as human beings.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Elena,
I repeat the poem I dedicated to you and only you. Here is:
The doors of my house are open to you
Beautiful eagle in the blue sky
As the doors of my soul are too
Delicious and sweet piece of pie.
I am not a poet; I ma an engineer but my poem came to me because of you. But that is only one little aspect of the whole thing. What I would like is for you to ponder on my poem and to see what you see behind it. In fact, I am going to ask three questions about it:
1) Is my poem one of competition?
2) Is my poem one Ego-centerness?
3) Is my poem one of separatedness?
And then the most fundamental question:
What is behind my poem?
I would really appreciate, Elena, in the name of any relationship we may have, that you ponder on all this and then comeback and tell me what is it behind my litle poem. Than you will underdstand Will better and where Will comes from.
Regards,
Will
As I said, thanks for the open door. It sounds different to the post in the other blog does it not?
Good, thank you.
Now, I will wait for your answers to my questions. Of course, if you want to continue exchanging with me. I really want you to understand me and where I come from, as much as I really want to understand you and where you come from. Only in understanding each other, the possibility for the Third Force or Reconciling Force can emerge between us, or in any relationship for that matter. This is the real meaning of the Law of Three or the Law of Phenomena.
Hi Will,
How would you connect the different alchemies or the one alchemy in different spheres? and the exoteric and esoteric?
You and I personally hardly matter if we can hold each other with respect and consideration which lead to friendship. I’m very glad you’re interested in such a friendship so we can move on to the things that matter in a dialogue in group and BE the words.
Hi Elena,
you say that Yon and I personally hardly matter. Well,once again I have to disagree with you here. We matter a lot personally to the point that if we do not attain self-individuality, we do not matter at all.
What have we become? We have become terminals in a network of bits. That is what you and I are here. I hate that even though that I fall prey to it.
I want to meet you in person, listen to the beats of you heart, instead to the bits of your cybermessages. I know it is impossible but that is the only real thing. This that we are doing here is just virtual reality. I want real reality. When Mr. Gurdjieff wanted to say something to someone, he invited this someone to have Turkish coffee with him in his pantry of food. Do you know what Turkish coffee means?
You ask me for the difference between exoteric and esoteric alchemies. I am going to tell you the difference now:
Exoteric alchemy is what we are doing here exchanging in cyberspace. Esoteric alchemy is when I can feel your heart beating in me.
When can I meet you in the flesh and the blood of your Being?
Your living Will
Hi Will,
Words flow in the river of our lives and we each swim in the puddles of our being interpreting and reinterpreting until we actually understand what the other is trying to say.
I mean you and I hardly matter if we can be present because in our presence everything else is possible but without it, they are all descending octaves. Perhaps that is why “we can’t do” and are washed away in the current of events without being able to avoid it.
What I’m trying to say Will is that focusing the attention on who we are, what we’ve done, all the years and efforts we’ve put into things takes the attention away from what we’ve worked on for for so many years: life. Life in whatever its manifestations. We are important to the extent that we can be. If we are, we don’t need attention from others on our ego and can place our own attention in the questions at hand be they objective art, cults or taking the children to the park.
We have already met in flesh and blood perhaps more intimately than physically for such a powerful exchange of words does not generally happen in real life so quickly. Language is the blood of our psycho-spiritual life and the way we use it, when and how, tells as much or more about our selves than being together. They don’t replace each other though and actually sitting with each other without an agenda is “life at its best” so you’re welcome to visit me whenever you wish. I have a place on the Caribbean coast that you would be welcome with your family, to rest and enjoy. Here are some pictures:
http://web.me.com/publicsquare7/publicsquare7/Pajarito.html
I’m the one with the old lady.
Thanks for your warmth and interest Will, that sphere of “familiarity” is certainly a strength of our latin essence and yet we would much profit from deeply indulging in the “beyondness” from the “familiar” that Americans and Europeans enjoy while they would much profit from our “openness”. Aren’t we here to learn from each other’s strengths?
Thanks again for sharing, it’s good to talk without imposing each other on each other’s self.
Querida Elena,
Gracias por enviarme el link a tu lugar cerca del mar Caribe. Como Cubano, yo se apreciar y amar el mar Caribeño.
Estuve mas de una hora mirando todas las fotos de tu hermoso rincon Caribeño y es una especie de Paraiso Terrenal. Pronto me vas a tener por alla y pasaremos horas hablando de nuestras busquedas y nuestros ahenlos como seres humanos, sin cultos y sin prisiones, sino libres en nuestra humanidad.
Quiero decirte que de los seis reinos del Budismo, el de los dioses, el de los semidioses, el de los humanos, el de los animales, el de los espiritus ambrietos, y el de los infiernos, el unico que me interesa es el del reino humano. Los demas son muy tristes y aburridores, en particular para un Caribeño como yo que ama la vida y la Salsa, y por supuesto, el Conocimiento Objetivo, el cual no excluye lo otro sino que le dan una nueva dimension de vida.
En cuanto al “beyondness” de los Americanos y los Europeos, solo te digo que el Sr. Gurdjieff llamo a unos burros y a los otros pavos, pero no reales, sino ordinarios. Como un “gringo” una vez me dijo aqui en Nueva York, “Solo los Latinos pueden entender a Belcebu, porque solo los Latinos tienen la pasion para hecerlo.” Palabra de Gringo; alabados sean los Gringos.
Mucho te agadezo que me hayas invitado a entrar en tu casa y te prometo que un dia no muy lejano tu invitacion sera cumplida.
Un abrazo fraterno,
Will
Hi Will,
I’m glad you enjoyed the little portion of Ocean in view. It’s a good place to rest.
Around the “beyondness of Europeans and Americans I continue to believe that there’s so much to learn from them and them from us. If Gurdjieff was looking at their dark side when he called them donkeys and turkeys, he would have called us savages if he had talked about our dark side. Anyone’s dark side is black but everyone’s light side is luminous and what we have to overcome to make it shine is what gives it the quality of light. It’s easy to speak about other’s dark side but what would we do without the German music and philosophy? English literature and “tea”? American technology and “impulse”? Italian Art and taste? and all of their struggle? “chapeau” to all of them including Paris!
There’s no point in putting down those whose footprints we’re at the same time following. The good thing is that we’re following their human footprints and not their inhuman steps. It’s the struggle of generations.
I would like to keep this blog in English for now but very much enjoyed the Spanish “familiarity”. Un abrazo.
Hola Will,
Me alegra que te gustara esa pequeña porción de mar a la vista! Si vale la pena disfrutarlo. La primera vez que estuve allí me demoré tres días en acomodarme pero a los tres días entendí que en realidad nunca antes había descansado así.
Sobre el beyondness Europeo y Americano sigo pensando que hay tanto que aprenderles y ellos a nosotros. Gurdjieff puede haber estado mirando el lado oscuro de ellos pero si hubiera visto el nuestro nos habría llamado no solo burros y pavos sino “salvajes”. El lado oscuro de cualquiera es negro pero el lado claro de todos es luminoso y eso que tenemos que “saltar” para empezar a brillar es lo que hace más luminosa la luz! Es facil hablar de la oscuridad de los demás pero que haríamos sin la música Alemana? La literatura inglesa? La ciencia y la tecnología Americana? El arte italiano? Me les quito el sombrero a cada uno! Que hermosos!
Como latinos no tiene sentido rebajarlos y al mismo tiempo caminar sobre sus huellas. Lo bello es que vamos tras las huellas de lo humano y no tras los pasos de lo inhumano.
Que tengas un buen día, trabajo un rato y salgo de paseo! Elena
Dear Elena,
Are you familiar with the writings of Sophia Wellbeloved? She wrote at least two books about the Teaching and the Work. The principle one is “Gurdjieff, Astrology & Beelzebub’s Tales,” which is a transcription of her doctoral dissertation at King College in London. I have not read neither book because I tried to read the one about Astrology and I found it to be all dream on her part and I told her so when I had dinner with her in England two years ago. Anyhow, here is what she wrote in her other book with title “Gurdjieff-Key Concepts:
“ Women need neither the Work, nor psychological or religious teaching; they cannot achieve self-development in the way that Gurdjieff understand the phrase. Women already ‘know everything’, but this knowledge can be ‘almost a poison’ for them.’”
You being a woman and very intelligent one (I am in no way flattering your ego), I would like to know what you think about this and maybe start an exchange with you on this matter of Women and Men. I have my own opinions on the subject and they come from what Mr. Gurdjieff said.
Be well,
Will
Hi Will,
I think women and men are very different and each have talents and weaknesses the other doesn’t have but that we all profit from a system to work on our selves and better understand life. I’m certainly glad that I found it, it’s been so much easier to live using one. I also think a system is just a tool that can be dropped at some point but I’m far from there for the time being.
Thanks for sharing, how is it for you?
I also think it’s pure bullshit that women cannot achieve self development in Gurdjieff’s or anybody else’s terms. It’s like saying that women cannot be because they’re women but we are! A system is just a harness for the soul and it is wonderful to tame one’s self in such a way that one can ride in other dimensions to live in this one more fully.
Bad medicine
I’ve just signed a petition at Avaaz.org. Please check out the link below and help if you would like to.
http://www.avaaz.org/en/acta/98.php?CLICKTF
Here’s the original email:
Dear friends,
This week, the world’s wealthiest governments are negotiating a secretive deal that could cut off poor people from life-saving medicines. Millions rely on generic medicines to treat diseases like malaria and HIV. If this agreement goes forward, many peoples’ access to such drugs could be cut off, leaving those unable to afford name-brand medications to face death.
The treaty would set rules on “intellectual property” in a wide range of areas — from genetically modified crops to online file-sharing to drug patents. But four fifths of the world’s countries are excluded from the talks — including India and China. The negotiating governments are trying to rush through an agreement before public outcry can become too loud to ignore — but word is leaking out, and a tide of opposition is rising.
Our voices can tip this outrage over the edge. Public pressure has stopped unjust trade talks in previous years. Now, we can again ensure that no rotten deals are struck behind closed doors. Join the petition now for an open process and justice on essential medicines — Avaaz and partners will deliver it at next week’s negotiations in Tokyo if we reach 50,000 signers. Sign now and spread the word:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/acta/98.php?CLICKTF
The so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement had been intentionally kept out of the public spotlight. But no longer: public health and internet freedom advocates are sounding the alarm, and China, India, and the European Parliament have all spoken out against it in recent weeks.
The proposed deal raises many concerns, but its most outrageous provision is its treatment of essential medicines. ACTA would treat many “generic” and “counterfeit” drugs identically, making cheap competition for name-brands subject to the same seize-and-destroy tactics applied to fake medicines.
Pharmaceutical giants claim that this is needed to protect consumer safety — but they themselves sell generic versions of medicines whose patents have expired. Generic medicines, which are often 90% less expensive, are not inherently more or less safe than name-brand drugs. The real differences are drug company profits — and poor people’s lives.
Mass citizen mobilisation has stopped similar moves by drug companies and rich country governments several times before. Let’s not allow a few countries to decide the fate of billions behind closed doors — sign the petition and spread the word:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/acta/98.php?CLICKTF
Getting treatment when we are sick is something we all feel strongly about. Our vigilance this week can help fend off attempts to prevent medicines from reaching all who need them. Together, right now, we can begin to build a future in which each of us can equally overcome disease and stay healthy.
With hope for a better world,
Ben, Alex, David, Maria Paz, Iain and the whole Avaaz team
SOURCES:
European Parliament passes anti-ACTA declaration:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/09/european-parliament-passes-anti-acta-declaration.ars
Threat to online free expression from imminent international accord:
http://en.rsf.org/threat-to-online-free-expression-25-01-2010,36198
EU, US Consumer Groups Issue Resolution On Enforcement; Demand Role In ACTA:
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2009/06/23/eu-us-consumer-groups-issue-resolution-on-enforcement-demand-role-in-acta/
IP Enforcement through Anti-Counterfeit Laws: The ACTA Negotiations and Their Implications:
http://www.southcentre.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1355:sb49&catid=144:south-bulletin-individual-articles&Itemid=287〈=e
More ACTA talks this week:
http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2010/09/more-acta-talks-this-week.php
Bitkom Blasts ACTA:
hhttp://www.techeye.net/internet/bitkom-blasts-acta
Hi Will,
I’ve deleted your post for I don’t take scenes of men putting down men or women even from Gurdjieff. Maybe he fitted in the Middle East but you can’t get away with that around here. Please keep that information for your blog. The aim of this blog is different.
For the time being your posts will be moderated.
Thank you.
Sorry Will,
The subject you wish to pursue seems cultish to me. If you wish to understand why I am against cults you can go to this blog or the other blog you visited or the Fellowship blog. I’ve dedicated enough time to it.
We can continue talking to each other in the O.A. site if that is possible on the subjects that are presented there. I actually appreciate the information you’ve given on Gurdjieff. No wonder Ouspensky had to separate from him. You’ve told me you hate the System so I don’t really know how you expect us to understand each other for I have no interest in a cult for Gurdjieff, who according to all the material you’ve presented was a man who enjoyed diminishing and using power over his students. That doesn’t stop me from appreciating what he conveyed but it does give me relativity about his persona. I’ve lived that kind of scenario too closely to buy it again from you or Gurdjieff so please allow me to not indulge in that kind of argument here. We have had the tendency to blow these characters up into divine proportions and they were just human beings like you and me with much to resolve still. That is what I like about Ouspensky: that he had no pretense to be super human.
I am not interested in your personal attacks to me on these subject, think as you wish. I am not the subject here and if you can’t concentrate on the subject and not me or you I won’t publish your posts.
Thank you for your understanding, I hope we can overcome all difficulties in due time. In other opportunities, you’ve taken what we’ve talked about here to the O.A. site so you can continue to do that if you really think it is that significant when the opportunity presents itself in another dialogue. I very much enjoy the standards set in that blog.
Your post on women and prostitutes was unacceptable in your timing and context. I lost the interest. I can read between the lines as clearly as you write and you don’t fool me one second.
This will be my last post to you on this blog for the time being.
Thank you for your observations. Yes, I am far from understanding this well. I think your appreciation that it is a language and a knowledge that is out of time is a good place to start. When we can remember and actualize that part of our selves beyond time we can speak in an objective language but whether we are objective or not, life is objectively affecting us constantly. We might be unconscious of our objectivity but it is as real as our subjectivity: our I is in a constant process of “living”, our I is an objective reality even if we are unconscious of it. That is what makes each individual a human being. That is why each life is sacred.
What I wish to bring attention to is the fact that we live in an objective reality and how we interact with it makes us more or less objective. T.V and fast food all day will affect us in a totally different way than exercise and music, company and work. What we “do” helps us become more or less objective and if that is true then we can use our lives and all its reality to become more conscious which is what The Fourth Way is about. It is not like the yogi, monk or fakir, a way in which we separate from regular life and society.
It’s my impression that “unity” “wholeness” in our times, is perceived as some strange higher state in which an individual will suddenly experience unity but “life” has nothing to do with it. What I wonder is why aren’t we establishing the connection of all things precisely in our living reality? Our selves as individuals as much as societies together with the Earth and nature around us? Why discard anything instead of incorporating it and assuming responsibility for it?
It’s interesting that the more “democratic” we become, social hierarchy and authoritarism weaken while each individual has to take far more responsibility for him and her self and the world. As if we were “inverting” the process: In the times of Kings, what made the King “the King” was his ability to “protect” the people. Then Kingship became purely symbolic without objective and now that no one is really willing or able to respond for anyone else, each one has to respond for everything and acquire the consciousness of the king but we are presently like children blowing gurus into kings hoping they’ll tell us that we are no longer children but adults able to take responsibility for our future. But they don’t; they take advantage of our innocence, as lost as their followers.
The point is that we cannot be objectively conscious if we can’t be objectively conscious of other people as objective realities whether they have worked on themselves or not. We cannot abstract our selves from our times and its nuances, we cannot isolate our selves from each other and pretend that that is objective consciousness. When we “work” on our different “I”s internally, we work on incorporating them within our Real I, we can’t just throw them out. Likewise, when we look at other people’s realities we can incorporate them rather than discard them. It makes us more human, more conscious.
I realize this is long. I hope less confusing. Please feel free to cut it up or erase it if it’s not appropriate in this discussion.
dear elena, you really should change the name of this place, it is in no way a public square — how about elena’s sandbox ?
or better still, elena’s soapbox.
Hi Ton,
Thank you for your post. I’m sorry you see nothing of value nor give anything of value. It’s common these days.
LIfe is gentle around here, I hope for you too.
elena, it’s your problem if you’re unable to value truth.
Thank you Ton, I wonder why you waste your time visiting blogs in which you find no value hiding the fact that what you’re really afraid of is what is said that you can’t cope with or argue against and have to attack me personally to try to diminish the value of what you are unable to understand.
If anything has been proven in these blogs is that when people can’t hear what is being said, they’ll attack the writer personally instead of dealing with the subject. It’s the old law of the lower eating the higher. Another step in the process.
You teach me more each day what this is about, thank you again.
Entire societies, numbed by coercive psychological influence, are more likely to allow large-scale tragedies. Perhaps the most devastating example is the Holocaust. Cult mind control is totalitarian, and as such is anathema to democracy. Democracy is founded on the principle that humanity is rational; for democracy to work, people must be capable of using their critical faculties. Mind control works by bypassing rationality and eliminating free will. Without free will, all other basic human freedoms, such as freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, become utterly meaningless. Eventually if left unchecked, mind control would destroy all basic human freedoms and ruin democracy.
For information on mind control and cults, see http://www.factnet.org
This is the most important information I’ve seen in the past four years
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1087742888040457650#
Here is Tom Cruise and Scientology
http://factnet.org/?p=225
dear elena,
i hope you will be able to recognize that i am writing this in response to what you said and that it is in fact based on what i “hear” in your post 121.
you’re welcome elena, i’m glad when i can teach you something about yourself.
dear elena, it’s my time to ‘waste’ as i choose. i wonder why it matters to you?
as for being afraid of what’s being said, you’re the one who does all the censoring, the blocking of email, etc….
one final ‘tidbit’ for you to chew on — this nonsense about ‘the lower eating the higher’ is simply…. how can i put this politely because i know how sensitive you are and i wouldn’t want to offend you… it’s simply effluent that’s still oozing from your followship/”4th way” brainwash… check yourself…. let go of the past.
No thanks Ton, I paid high for the things worth keeping, let go only of the cult and its vices.
Please don’t begin giving me instructions of what I need to do or “dear” me. I’m still allergic to gurus and their “dears”! If there’s any subject on which you’d like to expand here and add your work you’re welcome, otherwise please keep your personal sphere to your self, love is needed to penetrate that sphere and we don’t have that between us. The little we managed to acquire at some point was lavishly destroyed at another. It doesn’t just come out of magic.
We should use a few guidelines such as first, second and third line of work in whatever language you’d like to understand that. What matters in this particular blog is what we can share with each other from what we’ve worked on. How can we help each other better understand the difficulties in OUR world today. How can we dialogue without falling into the personal sphere and competing with each other? How can we look at our selves in the personal sphere and its reflection in our world perspective? What are the connections between how we use language and our psychology? And anything else that is an aspect of the whole but with US shining in the back ground our best light.
I doubt you’re game for any of that so please respect my guidelines and go to a blog where you do have the interest to build something that you’ve worked on and not destroy what you don’t care about.
“What are the connections between how we use language and our psychology? ”
your “doubt” — what does that say ?
and
“I paid high for the things worth keeping, let go only of the cult and its vices.”
“too much” invested to leave the cult is one of the most pervasive ‘rationales’ for staying in…. but just because you’re on the outside, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve left the cult, you continue to carry it with you as evidenced by the psychology of the language you use… the good news is:
“Abstract
A sample of 75 ex-members of cults or new religious movements completed two personality inventories: the short form of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and the Beck Sociotropy-Autonomy Scale. Compared to the norms, the sample exhibited elevated scores on neuroticism, sociotropy and autonomy. The elevated neuroticism scores increasingly approached the norm as a function of time out of the cult. Ex-members in contact with support groups showed reduced levels of neuroticism and sociotropy in comparison with those who were not. While it is not possible to draw firm conclusions from a study of this design, the results are consistent with the view that people with high autonomy scores are likely to leave or be ejected from cults or new religious movements and that doing so may cause psychological difficulties which are ameliorated by time and attendance at a support group.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V9F-3YB56N0-1T&_user=10&_coverDate=09%2F30%2F1995&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1487717503&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d1c77207f80e4123e276f8cb2679967d&searchtype=a
and
“Viewpoints:
* Paul Martin, the director of a recovery center for victims of cultic abuse wrote, in the book Recovery from Cults, that “The ex-cultist has been traumatized, deceived, conned, used and often emotionally, physically, sexually, and mentally abused while serving the group and/or the leader. Like other trauma victims (for example, of criminal acts, rape, and serious illness), former cultists often reexperience the painful memories of their group involvement.”[1]
* The Report of the “Swedish Government’s Commission on New Religious Movements” (1998) states that the great majority of members of new religious movements derive positive experiences from their subscription to ideas or doctrines which correspond to their personal needs, and that withdrawal from these movements is usually quite undramatic, as these persons leave feeling enriched by a predominantly positive experience. Although the report describes that there are a small number of withdrawals that require support (100 out of 50,000+ people), the report did not recommend that any special resources be established for their rehabilitation, as these cases are very rare.[2]
* Margaret Singer, one of the most notable proponents of the brainwashing theories, noted that ex-cult members that she treated had severe emotional problems as described in her article Coming Out of the Cults.21 22 75% of the ex-cult members were deprogrammed and some scholars like David G. Bromley suggest that the emotional problems of the ex-cultists that she treated were not due to their involvement in cults but that they had a post-traumatic stress disorder due to the deprogramming sessions that they underwent. On the other hand, in a controversial survey done on former cult members by anti-cult popular authors Conway and Siegelman (neither of whom had a degree in psychology), those deprogrammed (voluntarily and involuntarily) reported a third less, and in many cases only half as many post-cult effects like depression, disorientation or sleep problems than those who were not deprogrammed. Also those deprogrammed reported markedly shorter recovery times than the walk-aways. 23
* According to Hadden and Bromley, proponents of the brainwashing model, such as Singer and others, lack empirical evidence to support their theory of brainwashing. They also affirm that there is lack of empirical support for alleged consequences of having been a member of a cult or sect, and that their accounts of what happens to ex-members is contradicted by substantial empirical evidence, such as the fact that the overwhelming proportion of people who get involved in NRMs (New Religious Movements?) do leave, most short of two years, and the overwhelming proportion of people leave of their own volition. They refer to a survey conducted by Stuart A. Wright in 1987 about people who voluntarily left new religions, which showed that the majority of all defectors or ex-members (67%) look back on their experience as something that made them wiser, rather than feeling angry, duped or showing other ill effects.14
* Stuart A. Wright explores the distinction between the apostate narrative and the role of the apostate, asserting that the former follows a predictable pattern, in which the apostate utilizes a “captivity narrative” that emphasizes manipulation, entrapment and being victims of “sinister cult practices”. These narratives provide a rationale for a “hostage-rescue” motif, in which cults are likened to POW camps and deprogramming as heroic hostage rescue efforts. He also makes a distinction between “leavetakers” and “apostates”, asserting that despite the popular literature and lurid media accounts of stories of “rescued or recovering ‘ex-cultists'”, empirical studies of defectors from NRMs “generally indicate favorable, sympathetic or at the very least mixed responses toward their former group.”[3]
* According to F. Derks and Jan van der Lans, a Dutch professor in the psychology of religion at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, there is no uniform post-cult trauma, but psychological and social problems upon resignation are not rare and their character and intensity are greatly dependent on the personal history, on the traits of the person, and on the reasons for and way of resignation. 6
* Gordon Melton, quoting studies by Lewis Carter and David G. Bromley, argues that the onus of pathology experienced by former members of new religions movements shifted from these groups to the coercive activities of the anti-cult movement. As a result of this study, the treatment (coerced or voluntary) of former members as people in need of psychological assistance largely ceased. These studies also claim that a lack of any widespread need for psychological help by former members of new religions has in itself become the strongest evidence refuting early sweeping condemnations of new religions as causes of psychological trauma.6,7,8 In a 1997 interview with Time Magazine Melton, asserts that anti-cult figures give too much credibility to the horror stories forwarded by “hostile” former cult members, which he says is “like trying to get a picture of marriage from someone who has gone through a bad divorce”.
* Marc Galanter, in a study of 237 members of the Unification Church, found that they had had a significantly higher degree of neurotic distress before conversion when compared to a control group, suggesting that symptoms of psychopathology had not been caused by cult involvement; 30% of these had sought professional help for emotional problems before conversion. Galanter further states that the process of joining, being a member, and leaving a new religious group is best described not as a matter of personal pathology but of social adaptation. For example, experiences that in a secular setting might be considered pathological, within some religious settings may be considered normal. While psychological categories were created to discuss dysfunctional behavior by an individual, the behavior of group members must be seen in light of group norms, meaning that what may be considered disturbed behavior in a secular setting may be perfectly functional and normal within a group context. On the basis of his analysis, Galanter suggested that reduced significance should be given to the abnormal behavior reported among ex-members. He also suggested an alternative means of understanding otherwise inexplicable behavior in members and ex-members without considering them as suffering from psychopathology.13.
* According to a book by Barker (1989) about new religious movements for the general public, the biggest worry about possible harm concerns the relatively few dedicated followers of a new religious movement (NRM). Barker also mentions that some former members may not take new initiatives for quite a long time after disaffiliation from the NRM. This generally does not concern the many superficial, or short-lived, or peripheral supporters of a NRM. She also wrote that ex-members who feel betrayed may have a problem trusting people. Membership in a cult usually does not last forever: 90% or more of cult members ultimately leave their group 2,4
* Psychiatrists David Hoffman and Paul Hamburg of the Harvard Medical School wrote in their article Psychotherapy of Cult members about their own psychiatric treatment of former members that the re-entry of former members into ordinary life is a difficult experience and compare the situation of former members to those of former hostages, prisoners, exiles, soldiers, or those emerging from divorce or death of a spouse.19
* According to David V. Barret (who is connected with the government subsidized institute INFORM, founded by Eileen Barker and based in London), in many cases the problems do not happen while in a cult, but when leaving a cult, which can be difficult for some members and may include a lot of trauma. Reasons for this trauma may include conditioning by the religious movement, avoidance of uncertainties about life and its meaning, having had powerful religious experiences, love for the founder of the religion, emotional investment, fear of losing salvation, bonding with other members, anticipation of the realization that time, money and efforts donated to the group were a waste, and the new freedom with its corresponding responsibilities, especially for people who lived in a community. Those reasons may prevent a member from leaving even if the member realizes that some things in the NRM are wrong.
* Len Oakes, a psychologist who was himself a member of a spiritual community writes in his book Prophetic Charisma: The Psychology of Revolutionary Religious Personalities in which he proposes his thesis about cult leader’s distinctiveness: psychopathology based on narcissistic personality, characterized by grandiosity, manipulativeness, a need for control of others and inner congruence, near-paranormal empathy, confidence, memory, autonomy, detachment, and islands of social and personal insight.” He writes that […]there is great trauma associated with leaving, even for the successful follower. He has invested his deepest hopes in the leader, and leaving is like another leaving of home. […]There is a tremendous culture shock of reentry to the outside world, and many leavers enter therapy. Not even wealth and renewed contact with one’s family of origin can insulate against this. And most of all, that sense of purpose—the sense of being engaged in something vital and important—is gone. A new direction will appear, but it takes much longer than is comfortable.'”18
* According to the Dutch religious scholar Reender Kranenborg who specialized in new religious movements and Hinduism, in some religious groups members have all their social contacts within the group, which makes disaffection and disaffiliation very traumatic. 5
* A study by Cheryl R. Taslimi in 1991 about former members of the Shiloh Community, a fundamentalist Jesus community, indicated that the former members experienced no ill effects of past membership, had integrated well on return to the larger community, and did not differ from the general population on a symptom checklist to assess psychological pathologies.15
* The magazine India Today wrote that former followers of the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba who became disaffected after reports about sexual abuse by the guru reported that losing faith “is a devastating experience that transports them from promised moksha to a private hell. A disillusionment that has three stages: denial, grief and outrage.”[4]
* Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad wrote that disillusionment in a guru may lead to a generalized form of cynicism.[5]
* Lonnie D. Kliever, a professor of Religious Studies at the Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas writes in his article about The Reliability of Apostate Testimony About New Religious Movements that he was requested by the Church of Scientology to give his opinion about apostasy. He further writes in the article that
The clear majority of those who leave of their own free will speak positively of certain aspects of their past experience. While readily acknowledging the ways a given religious movement failed to meet their personal expectations and spiritual needs, many voluntary defectors have found ways of salvaging some redeeming values from their previous religious associations and activities. But there are some voluntary apostates from new religious movements who leave deeply embittered and harshly critical of their former religious associations and activities. Their dynamics of separation from a once-loved religious group is analogous to an embittered marital separation and divorce. […] Long-term and heavily involved members of new religious movements who over time become disenchanted with their religion often throw all of the blame on their former religious associations and activities. […] They magnify small flaws into huge evils. They turn personal disappointments into malicious betrayals. They even will tell incredible falsehoods to harm their former religion.”20
* In an article published in 1986, Lucy DuPertuis, chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Guam who assisted James V. Downton with his book about the Divine Light Mission,[6] asserts that many of the people that left the Divine Light Mission “… drifted away not in disillusionment but in fulfillment.” DuPertuis had been a member of the Divine Light Mission.16
* Jan Groeveld, founder of the Australia based Cult Awareness & Information Centre wrote that time can provide healing in the case of a post-cult trauma.
See also
* Apostasy in purported cults and new religious movements.
* Brainwashing controversies in new religious movements
* Disengagement from religion
* Deprogramming
* Exit counseling
see
* reFOCUS: Recovering Former Cultists’ Support Network, Post cult trauma syndrome
* Traumatic Abuse in Cults: An Exploration of an Unfamiliar Social Problem long essay by Daniel Shaw
for an excellent article on the cult experience see:
http://www.csj.org/pub_csj/csj_vol15_no2_98/cutexperiencetext.htm
Hi Ton,
After reading the first two paragraphs of your post I couldn’t bother to read any further. I’m not taking your preaching or point of view of the world any more, I can think for myself now and the same old blah blah blah that we’ve had here back and forth about this same subject was plenty. Are you really so idle that you spend your time coming to a blog to see the things that you find of no value to then tell me what is wrong with me and how I’m not yet out of the cult? Don’t you have somebody else you can save? I’m not looking for saviors. Is that too difficult for you to take?
Go have fun Ton, move on or move out.
Maybe somebody else will enjoy your repetitions.
Hi Ton Are you able to tell where in yourself verify some of these thing you told us ?
I wish to point something to ponder-
We learn in life notwithstanding and thanks to its pressures
In a cult is no very much different. I mean that i could learn something of real for me,for my life everywhere. And in the same time my truths shall always be relative .
So for example:
* According to David V. Barret (—, in many cases the problems do not happen while in a cult, but when leaving a cult, which can be difficult for some members…”
Well I went out from a place where i enter to find some answer and i go out to find a place (life) where a lot of my answers to my questions are wrong. But my questions thought the experience were a little changed and i know where some answers were bullshit.
But the limits of all this expert on cults are that (IMO) they not have the answer to the questions. In the best case they believe one could return to a state before the cult.
That is impossible. So it is very probable that I still use some words influenced from my last conditioning,but this is true also before and now.
So may be what could be more useful it were for me or for you Ton observe when this occurs.
Observation of myself is more difficult that observation of other. But to report observations on other is 99 % too much risky to give wrong results(also because my observation on other is not at all objective).( and to observe that we cannot refrain to do this is also a personal experience)
Instead share observation on myself could be help another to see difference and similitude.
I could assure you that is too much difficult to help a people that asks for help !:the contrary is about impossible.
Ps about Public square and soapbox. Moderation is a requisite in public square.
The difference between democracy and Tyranny is when the rules are not clearly stated an used differently . The margin of Tolerance is the largess of the shoulder of the moderator…
a. shepherd — there is some wisdom in the word you write —
“I could assure you that is too much difficult to help a people that asks for help !:the contrary is about impossible.”
our “moderator” here proves your point….
elena and i have a bit of history you see, we both posted to another blog and her engagement there, as it turned out, was a deafening cry for help. she manifested there in a way that indicated she was having a difficult time adjusting to “life” and being in her own skin — i pointed out aspects of her inflated ego, i made an effort to show her a side of herself which manifested in her postings. my “aim” was to point out a blind spot — would you agree that we should try to help another see aspects of themselves which they would otherwise remain unaware of and deny (?)
i’ve been reading the writings and rantings of elena for some time now, and on the positive side she is a very bright, articulate and idealistic young woman, but she is also very impressed with herself and she goes to great lengths in trying to impress others, she attempts to convince others, and herself, that she “knows it all” and whenever someone points out that she doesn’t know it all — she invariably reacts aggressively, she attacks those who do not agree with her point of view and she is often offended even by those who express another point of view which doesn’t agree with hers. she is one of the most intolerant persons i’ve never met…. and she backs up her intolerance with this ridiculous “oneness” doctrine she read about on the internet…. of course if she believes “we’re one” then we all should think and feel the same way right? she seems to believe that we should all think and feel just like she does, and that there is something wrong with anyone who doesn’t.
she feels that she always has to control the “conversation” and she needs to always be at the center of attention. her reactive nature caused her to be banned from the other blog… this banning is something she blames on others, as she still refuses to acknowledge and take responsibiltiy for her actions. now she has her own soapbox… er, i mean blog where she can have all that she had hoped for, afterall, this is her world, and anything she doesn’t agree with she “moderates.”
You surprise me a little more each time Ton. What a lovely version of yourself you’d like to give the world, putting others down to justify your behavior, pretending that you are here to help me when all you’ve consistently done is try to hurt me and convince me that I am crazy and have nothing of value to address? Do you even have a glimpse of how destructive your language is? I doubt it, you rejoice repeating it. Why do you step on your own tale so obviously Ton? Pity the facts don’t quite meet the imaginary picture but go ahead and live it through as you’d like.
In my second participation in the fofblog I was not once aggressive to anyone and apologized for the aggressive behavior I had had previously but of no worth. All this justification of my banning because of my behavior is actually hiding the deep differences in our positions in relation to the FOF Cult, members and ex-members as much as life in general. The questions I posed were too difficult for people to deal with and when I became aggressive towards the fofblog public it was a great excuse to ban me although the six or seven others that would consistently get together to play even more aggressive against me were never banned or called to attention. A moderator that limits himself to turn the pages but is willing to ban when he becomes bias enough is not a moderator but a puppet. We all needed help to dialogue and didn’t find it. The truth is all there for anyone willing to look at it. You keep trying to make me feel ashamed of myself but I am not, I am ashamed only of my aggressions and am happy to live with the consequences of our ideological differences. This does not mean that I wasn’t aggressive in my first participation, it means I was but so were many others and it was I who got banned.It also doesn’t mean that I was not psychologically fractured. I walk in and out of other dimensions permanently thankfully and don’t just remain in the average dimension of the formatory apparatus most of the time. Today, it’s very good to see the fofblog public slowly digesting and presenting material that corroborates what I was saying. Had I been in a better state I would have trickled the information down drop by drop so that it could have been taken graciously but I was fractured in my soul, not in my mind. That is, I was very vulnerable inwardly but not so much that I couldn’t think.
Telling you that you were manipulative like Robert wasn’t an aggression but the truth of the situation. Your whole behavior until I was banned again is shameful but you are unwilling to acknowledge it and excuse yourself. I have already studied our interaction carefully and continue to stand on every word I said but will look at it again in detail if it is of any use, now that I am further exploring the Art of the Dialogue.
I have banned only one person besides you, both were disrespectful and destructive and I will continue to do so. I have already given you the guidelines for this discussion, should you step out too far, I will surely ban you again. As I’ve said often, WHY do you even come here when you find nothing of value Ton? Nothing you’ve ever looked at on a positive note? How much more deranged can you get? Going around to blogs with your sarcasm and negativity without being able to add anything from your own beauty? How much more destructive do you want to be? Your participation is not helping you or anyone else. You are sucking your own energy out as much as the rest. I’ll put up with your constructive criticism but will ban you with another of your sarcasms. Take them elsewhere if you can’t control them.
That kind of sarcasm says more about you than everything else. I would highly appreciate it if you concentrate on the text and not Elena and her misgivings or you’ll forgive me for again ignoring your posts and soon banning you. The ability to do this is an aspect of remaining objective. Can you make such an effort and not continue to waste our time with personal pettiness? Can you step up into a dignified relationship between us?
The Art of the Dialogue. Part One
Thank you apprentice shepherd for your post. It’s given me a clue on where to continue my exploration on the Art of the Dialogue.
The following is long and there is no need to read it in one go, you can take a week or a month, please pace yourself with freedom and don’t read it if the length is a detriment to your being. This blog is both dialogue and monologue. I’ve been struggling with myself for so long that don’t be surprised if you find I am actually talking to understand myself more than to be understood which is quite a surprise when it happens.
A.Shepherd: Where in yourself you’ve verified some of the things you told us?
With this sentence I understood one of the many problems.
It’s fairly easy to see the intentions and psychology of the people in a conversation by the way they use language.
For there to be a fruitful dialogue, sympathy is essential. Without sympathy it is usually not a dialogue but subtle or overt forms of aggression.
I am using sympathy in the sense I believe it is understood by Steiner, as an “openness” towards other people, a willingness to allow them “in” and also in the sense of a “positive” emotion as conceived in The Work, that is, an emotion that cannot turn sour. This preliminary is very significant because we will surely also have to deal with “everything” else including the qualities of being. It’s my understanding that states of openness such as sympathy are actually qualities of a healthy human being. They are “qualities of the self”, of the “I”.
Let me also clarify that I am mostly speaking under the structures presented by the Fourth Way System by Peter Ouspensky and by some of Rudolf Steiner’s concepts and approaches. I understand both systems as two sides of the same coin. It is a rare privilege to count with such a huge spectrum of knowledge in either one. I find them superior to regular psychology that hasn’t as fully clarified the different centres and the independent reality of the I and its consciousness; the concept of ego and real I; the connectedness between centers and the different states of consciousness.
When I talk about sympathy, I am both referring to the sympathy that is outwardly expressed by one’s manners towards another through the emotional and moving centre and sympathy as a “qualitative” characteristic of the self without the involvement of the emotional centre. The “qualities” of the self are aspects of being, something like the gestures of the spirit!
It is fairly easy to verify these things. When we walk down a street we can clearly see people who have a positive open “sympathetic” act and attitude towards the world and people who, on the other hand are tense, withdrawn, fearful. What we are seeing is their “state” or the state of the “I” independent of the sympathy or lack of sympathy in the emotional centre. The withdrawn individual might then meet up with you and greet you with great kindness and still have the inner state of his I withdrawn and unsympathetic towards life. In the Fellowship cult members walk around looking beautifully dressed up, with an act of sympathy but clearly withdrawn and tense. In cults the “conditioning” of people’s behaviour more easily reveals the inconsistencies of the overall scenario. Such “maladies” can better help us understand the human being.
So having clarified my understanding of sympathy, in a conversation the degree of sympathy in the people involved is the healthiest aspect of the conversation before they even say anything to each other. What the degree of sympathy is talking about is the “dialogue between their soul” to express it poetically but in fact it is the dialogue between their mutual selves. Their “I”s. This dialogue occurs in the sympathy of the relationship before they even begin to speak and if we understand the reality of such an instance we can more easily understand the reality of the I independent of functions. When two people love each other, like parents and children, lovers or friends, their “being” together is healing. There is an objective quality of energy being transmitted between them that has an effect on their I and their overall state. Likewise, when two people who don’t like each other are together, their lack of sympathy is also perceived and assimilated with negative results for the overall condition of each one. That “friction” works inside towards harmony if it can be overcome or greater chaos and separation if the people involved don’t have the being to find solutions to their conflict. This needs to be recognized before a conversation even begins. Our lives move in the struggle of our “selves” to find each other’s being. When we are separate from each other we cannot work together, when we are together life is a “recreation” of our harmony.
The next step that can help understand an “ascending” or “descending” dialogue is the “aim” of the conversation in each of the speakers. In conversations between families, friends and lovers, there’s often no other aim than to communicate with each other about regular practical things and it is in how the language is used that there’ll be an overall tone of sympathy or lack of sympathy. What is affected in the child from the overall tone of the conversation is nothing less than his I and sense of his self. In The Work, we don’t have a “sense” of self but we do find it in Steiner. The “quality” of the impressions that the child receives from his immediate surrounding act directly on his or her I and will have an “sculpting” effect in the psychological make-up. It is not the words that matter as much as the tone. Swear words can be used regularly by a loving mother and they’ll have no other effect than to convey a particular way of expressing herself without negatively affecting the children while “educated” language in a “hateful” mother will equally damage the psychological make-up of the child. In the “tone” Steiner tells us, is the spiritual vibration of the individual’s soul. (paraphrasing). This vision of “The Tone” opens an enormous road for us to understand how the world of our spiritual life expresses itself in the overall act of speaking more than in the words as ascribed to the mind. The “tone” is what reveals our conscious or unconscious intention. It’s the tone and not the words what conveys the relationship between the speakers and it’s the tone what carries the objective “quality” of the interaction or energy being transmitted between them. THAT qualitative energy is what will “lift” or “sink” the state of the I or self of the individuals involved. The words simply “accompany” the tone. By “tone” it is not only the “sound” of the voice but the “tone” in which the speaker uses the language even if it’s written language.
The tone and language used in a work environment is different to the one used within the family and it also changes between lovers, friends, acquaintances and enemies. There is a tone in conditions of regular “well-being” and another tone in conditions of conflict.
The argumentation and ideological content of a discussion does not reveal the condition of the participants as clearly as their behaviour towards each other. True that the argument will arise “opposition” or “complicity” but what will rise to a “dialogue”, is the respectful behaviour between the participants. It is the objective conditions of “participation” that guarantee a possible dialogue. To “respect” another is to be aware of his or herself and acknowledge it in each and every act. Respect is the quality of consciousness of one person to another. When an individual is lacking a “sense” of his own self, when his or her I or self is much fractured, his or her I IS too weak to experience or manifest respect. As another “quality” between people’s I, “respect” between them would tend to heal their I while lack of respect tends to weaken it. Respect of course is also an aspect of “consciousness” or “love”. It is “conscious sympathy” in which there is no identification but a permanent acknowledgement of the other persons being, that is, their presence.
I have a strong intuition that if we can “rationalize” the reality of our self and look at its manifestations in our lives we can tap into the source of regeneration. As long as we are acting from our false egos, the relationship between us creates suffering. Acknowledging each other’s SELF and acting that acknowledgement out in our lives can only lead to a more conscious and harmonious world.
In the Art of the Dialogue I will study carefully to show how people behave and use language to hurt and discard each other in their lack of consciousness and egotism. My aim is not to point and hurt others for being unconscious, I acknowledge that I am and have often been as unconscious as anyone else. The only difference is that I am clearly struggling towards unity while some are clearly struggling towards separation.
Hi Ton (and Elena) I know a little of the story of Sheik blog(by the way the first 7 discussion were magic: i see a lot of possibility of search there…)
However I believe you missed my point. Did you remember that story (told by G) when one people go to one to make peace and find himself yellow as a crazy to that people? 🙂
——————————-
. my “aim” was to point out a blind spot — would you agree that we should try to help another see aspects of themselves which they would otherwise remain unaware of and deny (?)
——————————–
After what is told are become “photograph” in the Fof I should change strategy (if not aim at all)
I give you a tentative of example
The Art of the Dialogue PART 2
(IN PRECARIOUS equilibrium on a TOO small soap box…)
I am a very bright, articulate and idealistic young man, but I also very impressed with myself and I go to great lengths in trying to impress others, I attempt to convince others, and myself, that I “knows not all,but something very well” and whenever someone points out that I don’t know it all — I invariably react aggressively, I attack those who do not agree with my point of view and I am often offended by those who express another point of view which doesn’t ever seen,ever listen any my views.
I am not cheating:just my way of react aggressively is done in my individual mode.
I joined many forum with the aim of learn and share my experiences and a lot of time i ended with the impression that : or all are more insane than me or that is true we live in a babel tongue circle and fourth way terms ,more time that not. hinder the communication.
This ridiculous “oneness” doctrine of course if we believes “we’re one” then we all should feel the same way right?(LOL) But it seems to me that we should all feel just like I do, and that there is something wrong with anyone who doesn’t.
I try to put the discussion on topic and may be other take that for control and need to be at the center of attention. I acknowledge that i am on my own soapbox(it is to be more visable) and I take responsibility for mine actions willy nilly.. what i lack it is the other approbation, the thanks for my sincerity for my sympathy…
I love you and you not love me ?
It is clear that the problem is you and you negation…or…wait..may be i an not able to love you…
By by(now if this is true i have to feel remorse of conscience: if this is just to receive a clap what you wait to clap me?
🙂
yes apprentice, there does seem to be a gap in understanding here, but thanks for your perspective — although i get the strong sense that you are not exactly a neutral observer — nevertheless i’ll go ahead with an interpretation: this example you chose from “art of dialogue” is to the point of much of what i’ve been attempting to do here with our friend, which is to get her to recognize and reclaim her own projections. this very often involves holding up a mirror for this woman, which sometimes means acting as she does in order to show (demonstrate) what is being “seen.” admittedly this has taken some absurd and wacky turns, it might appear like a dog chasing it’s own tail but i still hold onto the hope that some glimmer of truth may get through, and it may not be apparent now, maybe in a couple of years the light will come on, maybe in 5 years… or maybe not in this lifetime but i know that with reflection things look very differently.
if you want to know what a person is made of, you have to rub her a little bit — that is, scratch the surface to see what lies beneath… thanks for your post elena.
elena:
“I have already given you the guidelines for this discussion, should you step out too far, I will surely ban you again. As I’ve said often, WHY do you even come here when you find nothing of value Ton?”
in 119 it was actually you yourself elena, who suggested that i’m not finding anything of “value” here.
if you want my opinion, (i don’t think you really give a fig about my opinion, or the opinions of anyone else who happens to disagree with you), nevertheless here is my opinion elena; i think there is actually a great deal of interesting material here, but obviously you could care less about my opinion, you much prefer your own opinions, even to the extent that you willy nilly and carelessly substitute yours for mine…. that by the way, is another form of projection.
“Nothing you’ve ever looked at on a positive note? How much more deranged can you get? Going around to blogs with your sarcasm and negativity without being able to add anything from your own beauty? How much more destructive do you want to be? Your participation is not helping you or anyone else. You are sucking your own energy out as much as the rest. I’ll put up with your constructive criticism but will ban you with another of your sarcasms. Take them elsewhere if you can’t control them.”
i hope you can see yourself in this elena… you criticize me for my “tone” because you think i don’t pay you the proper homage…. and yet you don’t hear your own chiding tones, your own negativity towards me… since you’ve stopped reading anything i write how would you know that there’s nothing of “beauty”? maybe that’s more a reflection of you… if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, what of that which she blithely ignores ?
Hi Ton,
The trouble is that you think you and I are very important and we really don’t matter a third of what you suppose. This bickering is nonsense and self adulation.
Ton: in 119 it was actually you yourself elena, who suggested that i’m not finding anything of “value” here.
No Ton, what shows that you don’t find anything of value is that you’ve never been willing to address the contents too busy beating me up.
Ton: “which sometimes means acting as she does in order to show (demonstrate) what is being “seen.””
You learnt so well that you beat me by a mile!
Life is good these days, I am walking out of those patterns and was in them much more powerfully than you, I had just left the cult and three long years is little to fully recover but… life is good these days.
Your opinion is of no importance to me when related to beating me up and pretending to teach me a lesson big guy. I won’t take anything from you in those terms but your opinion is wonderfully welcome if you can sit and look outside of the train and tell me what you see and how you see it. Not me but the world. It’s the world what’s worth looking at in any trip!
I imagine I have somehow hurt you deeply and it is from that hurt that you think it’s worth getting back at me. How many times do you need someone to apologize to forgive and let them be? Is it because we are unwilling to acknowledge the truths that we keep hanging on to the accounts? Or because we’re unwilling to struggle with our own self and grind the dead leaves of our decay?
You hold a strange system and are convinced that you can ask anyone to look at themselves when you hold up a mirror with hatred. I might have hurt all of you in the fofblog but it wasn’t hatred what inspired me but anger and frustration at our inability to help the people inside or ourselves. You have no idea how shocking it is for me that none of those living close to Oregon House don’t sit outside those gates and tell all the new and old students that they were seriously hurt by the Fellowship and Robert. Or how shocking to realize that most ex-members do nothing to help people they know are being psychologically annihilated. Even more shocking than that is the fact that they justify all that because they have friends in the inner circle who they don’t wish to “hurt”. When did we learn that it was better to let people annihilate themselves than kick them in the ass and shake them into being before they slid down the precipice?
You’re a strange guy Ton. Wasn’t it more comfortable to sit with the rest and pretend I didn’t exist than come here and beat me up day in and day out so that you could justify my getting banned if I went mad enough? Was it easier when it was just you and me and you didn’t have other witnesses than your FOF accomplices? You have never even tried to give your opinion on anything else. It wasn’t about dialoguing, the sentence had been placed and the only agenda was to silence the witness convincing her she was crazy! Tricky business! Are you now pretending that all you want is to show her the mirror so that she can see how ugly she is? Can’t you remember the evidence is all here?
Does it not shock you out of your self to see the extent you’ve been willing to take this? There’s something particularly strange about the guy who is willing to carry out the execution in the dark streets of big cities. Men able to hit without ever looking at who they are hurting, not one kind word even to greet them before they carry out their deed. Kindness. Where did you forget it? How did you learn to justify all that with the idea that you had to hold up a mirror to the woman you were unwilling to look at? And to think it all happened because I failed to address you and dismissed you rather than kick you like the rest for you’d been kind before. Nothing offended you more than the fact that I would not struggle with you to protect you from my arrogance.
Is it not love? Or is hatred not love backwards? When will you rest? What are you still owing me or I you that you can’t go or stay? Is it easier to hate me than to love me? You’ve been seating at the door for a long time now Ton, what are you waiting for? I can neither leave nor are you willing to come in so what is it that you want? It’s difficult to continue playing the bully when the lady’s got company so would you like to come in and pretend we are friends, work our selves into that or slip away when no one is looking?
I guess I’m angry but if you leave the bully outside, you can come in.
dear elena, is this not love ?
“The trouble is that you think you and I are very important and we really don’t matter a third of what you suppose.”
there you go again elena, you’re substituting your own thoughts for mine…
“This bickering is nonsense and self adulation.”
i can agree that the bickering is nonsense unless it leads to some realization(s). self-adulation ? maybe that’s an interesting thought.
“No Ton, what shows that you don’t find anything of value is that you’ve never been willing to address the contents…”
elena, you’ve said over and again that you don’t read what i post here, you don’t hear what i say, you dismiss my point of view, you could care less about my opinion.
“Ton: “which sometimes means acting as she does in order to show (demonstrate) what is being “seen.”” You learnt so well that you beat me by a mile!”
to out-elena elena, is no small task, i’m glad you recognize it.
“Your opinion is of no importance to me…”
dismissed again and again…
“…and pretending to teach me a lesson big guy. I won’t take anything from you in those terms but your opinion is wonderfully welcome if you can sit and look outside of the train and tell me what you see and how you see it. Not me but the world. It’s the world what’s worth looking at in any trip!”
elena i can’t teach you anything, you know it all…. something you don’t acknowledge here is that you are part of the world and especially in this (blog) world which you create, and that’s worth looking at… and yet you dismiss this.
“I imagine I have somehow hurt you deeply and it is from that hurt that you think it’s worth getting back at me. How many times do you need someone to apologize to forgive and let them be? Is it because we are unwilling to acknowledge the truths that we keep hanging on to the accounts? Or because we’re unwilling to struggle with our own self and grind the dead leaves of our decay?”
yes elena, it is hurtful to be continually dismissed and disregarded… isn’t it ? but i’m not looking for apologies, maybe a change in attitude… it sounds here a little like you’re trying to understand through empathy, that’s what i’m talking about.
“You hold a strange system and are convinced that you can ask anyone to look at themselves when you hold up a mirror with hatred. I might have hurt all of you in the fofblog but it wasn’t hatred what inspired me but anger and frustration at our inability to help the people inside or ourselves.”
i’m sorry you feel hatred elena, but this is not done out of hatred, do not mistake determination for hatred. you never hurt anyone on the fofblog, and i do understand your anger and frustration over a sense of being unable to do…. i understand this from the inside out since live with that too.
“You have no idea how shocking it is for me that none of those living close to Oregon House don’t sit outside those gates and tell all the new and old students that they were seriously hurt by the Fellowship and Robert. Or how shocking to realize that most ex-members do nothing to help people they know are being psychologically annihilated. Even more shocking than that is the fact that they justify all that because they have friends in the inner circle who they don’t wish to “hurt”. When did we learn that it was better to let people annihilate themselves than kick them in the ass and shake them into being before they slid down the precipice?”
yes elena i do have some idea.
“You’re a strange guy Ton. Wasn’t it more comfortable to sit with the rest and pretend I didn’t exist than come here and beat me up day in and day out so that you could justify my getting banned if I went mad enough?”
do you really think that i need to justify your banishment? do you really believe that’s what motivates me elena?
“Was it easier when it was just you and me and you didn’t have other witnesses than your FOF accomplices? You have never even tried to give your opinion on anything else. It wasn’t about dialoguing….”
elena you think of me as a criminal, but what is worse is that you ignore and disregard everything i’ve ever said… you still can’t even acknowledge that this is a dialogue.
“the sentence had been placed and the only agenda was to silence the witness convincing her she was crazy! Tricky business! Are you now pretending that all you want is to show her the mirror so that she can see how ugly she is? Can’t you remember the evidence is all here?”
yes elena the evidence is there, but obviously we interpret it differently… “silence the witness convincing her she was crazy!” elena that sounds a little crazy, or at least a little paranoid…. do you know the word histrionics?
“Does it not shock you out of your self to see the extent you’ve been willing to take this?”
like i said, to out-elena elena is no small task…
“There’s something particularly strange about the guy who is willing to carry out the execution in the dark streets of big cities. Men able to hit without ever looking at who they are hurting,”
more exageration and histrionics… this is not an “execution” elena, it’s a frank discussion and dialogue.
“not one kind word even to greet them before they carry out their deed. Kindness. Where did you forget it? How did you learn to justify all that with the idea that you had to hold up a mirror to the woman you were unwilling to look at? ”
dear elena, how many times have i said it, dear elena, how long have i suffered your own insensitivities, all with in the hope of breaking through… is this not a kind of kindness ? maybe it’s you who is unable to recognize it.
“And to think it all happened because I failed to address you and dismissed you rather than kick you like the rest for you’d been kind before. Nothing offended you more than the fact that I would not struggle with you to protect you from my arrogance.”
yes elena, at least you can acknowledge that you dismiss and disregard another in favor of yourself… but you fail to recognize that you have delivered more than a few kicks as well. i can take the kicks, i can take the disrespect and ignoring of my opinions, and you don’t need to feel like you should protect me from your arrogance, but you and i and everyone you know, will be better served when you find a way out of the trap of your own arrogance and…. that’s more than enough for now.
“The social leaders and agitators, for example, live in the illusion that they need only spread certain ideas or need only appeal to a class of man who is willing and disposed (provided ideas are there) to help forward the social impulse. It is an illusion to act in this way, for in so doing one forgets that if social forces are working, then anti-social forces are also present. What we must be able to do today is to look these things straight in the face without illusion.
We must ask ourselves: What is the relation between people with regard to social and anti-social forces? We need to see that the relationship between people is fundamentally a complicated matter. When one person meets another, I would say we must look into the situation radically. Meetings of course point to differences which vary according to specific circumstances; but we must fix our eyes on the common characteristics, we must clearly see the common elements in the meeting, in the confrontation between one person and another. We must ask ourselves: What really happens then, not merely in that which presents itself to the senses, but in the total situation, when one person stands opposite another, when one person meets another? Nothing less than that a certain force works from one person to the other. The meeting of one with another leads to the working of a certain force between them. We cannot confront another person in life with indifference, not even in mere thoughts and feelings, even though we may be separated from them by distance. If we have any kind of relation to other people, or any communication with them, then a force flows between us creating a bond. It is this fact which lies at the basis of social life and which, when broadened, is really the foundation for the social structure of humanity.”
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19181212p01.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder
Hello Ton,
Anyone can dear another one without there being any love in it. It is often used to patronize another person and this new tone you’re using is welcome but not trustworthy, as I said, it’s difficult to play the bully when the lady’s got company. I’ve grown up since before you were banned. In those days and all throughout those blogs I needed to be deared but not anymore. I guess I put up with you for so long because I needed company like those wives that can’t leave their husbands although they batter them every other day. There is a wonderful freedom when we take that final step and tell the man to get the hell out of our lives no matter how alone we might remain only to discover that our own company was always there.
You call it histrionics but the same principles apply to different situations, the same vibes play their turn and macho’s try to apply the same mechanisms that have succeeded for centuries and are only beginning to fail their masters.
You tell me that I don’t like men, this is one of your attacks when I photograph your sad behaviour but it’s not men what I don’t like but infra-men for Men, don’t go after a vulnerable woman to beat her up with the hatred you’ve been chasing me from the moment I put my feet in the fofblog again taking advantage of the fact that you had the whole public on your side. You challenge my histrionics only to stimulate them a little further like blowing on fire.
One of the funniest lies you’ve told here is that I didn’t hurt anyone in the fofblog! Even I know better! Had I not hurt anyone I wouldn’t have apologized!
I hurt you because I didn’t hurt you! Because I protected you and didn’t challenge you like the rest. That offended you because you thought I didn’t think you worthy of being challenged in your own insecurity but I did it because you had been kind.
I hurt Whalerider who I told to go and fuck himself because he hadn’t been fucked enough if he thought that the people like Eileen who committed suicide after begging for help in the Fellowship were not enough to storm La Bastille and pull the ground out of their feet.
I hurt Vena, Ames Gilbert, Bruce Levy, and everyone else I could scream at in my horror and I questioned our American individualism, all members and ex-members and then I laughed at everyone including the moderator in his face.
You might not know how to look at yourself Ton and see how cruel you can get but I’m getting better at it each day! The price was high and I regretted it deeply but not you or anybody else in the fofblog who are still stuck in buffering what actually happened between us ignoring the issues that we struggled about.
Again you state that you are not here to apologize or take my apologies probably because you’re not yet done. You still have a few beatings you’d like to get across and were you to take my apologies or give any they would be incoherent to justify the beating, wouldn’t they?.
You talk about apologies as if you had never tasted the grace of forgiveness or compassion and it is clear to me that you haven’t but in small gestures when I am able to take your insults without putting up a mirror to your face which is rare.
And you’re quite insistent about my expressing the things you think as if I had run over to your brain to steal them from you and have a tape about projection that only God knows what you intend to do with it pretending to dismiss everything I say because it was yours. Talk about biting your tail without ever being able to just stand there and take or give a straight blow so that you can actually exist. Is that why you took up the role of chasing me down the road with a whole blog on your side? I much prefer those who clearly stated their hatred and beat me out of the FOFBlog and never bothered to even look at me than those like you who pretend to be helping me while beating me up. THAT is what I call “SICK”.
We are not playing games here Ton. THIS IS OUR LIFE. Your incongruence is as bad as mine talking about the community and the wonders of unity while “fucking” the world out of its feet. Some people never fuck anyone else because they never hurt but others begin to understand what love is about after fucking and getting fucked enough. Are you there yet?
How about that for histrionics! The problem with arrogance is that it is an I in pain defending itself into being.
What is important about all this is that we begin to get an inkling of the fact that “knowing” what is right is not “being” right. That to be what we know we have to have the will to actualize the knowledge in our acts. You come here chasing me about my incoherence and become even more incoherent than I was chasing down a woman you know is vulnerable, alone and has just been banned from the only place she was holding on because she didn’t know were else to go after the cult. At least I was addressing people who’d been out for years and it was my screams against THEM that got me banned for very specific reasons. They were as violent as I was but the moderator was bias and the particular subject at the time was not in their taste. So what does that show us but that we don’t have the being to tell each other anything but take ourselves as we are with a great deal more humility than we’ve ever had? Is it not wonderful to get beaten down enough that one can actually sit with one’s self and be nothing more than what one is? Your beating me down Ton has not taught me anything but to close the doors to you and ban you which is a great lesson when we finally separate from those hurting us. I don’t regret screaming at people who were not willing to address the issues and screamed back with personal attacks. In the Art of Dialogue what we can learn is how people avoid the questions and destroy and ban an individual because they are unwilling to take the coherent actions if they were to listen. This is still the issue in all these blogs and life itself. They still kill people everyday for speaking the truth those in power don’t want to hear. What I regret about my arrogance and taking up of space is that it was given in pain because I was vulnerable, because when there isn’t enough of one’s self to respond to a situation, one’s ego responds in whatever way it can to hold itself and the screaming and the arrogance is only the extroverted expression of its weakness. Had I not been vulnerable I could have said the same things and walked out without screaming. So if you’re trying to convince me that I am not right about the deep issues, you’re not a step closer Ton. It is those issues what neither you nor anyone else in the FOFBLOG were willing to seriously address. Things such as:
Why can’t we take legal action when we know the Fellowship is hurting those inside and those who continue to join?
Why can’t we stand outside and make noise so that there is constant pressure against them?
Why do we pretend that we are not responsible for each other when we all built that cult up into what it is with our money and participation?
What makes us think that it is not a fascist gesture to look the other way so that one doesn’t have to get involved when one knows people are getting hurt?
The reality in cults today is the worst and most dangerous threat to human freedom. To avoid it is like avoiding the concentration camps in their times. To annihilate people psychologically is as cruel or more than annihilating them physically. To manipulate people to act against themselves because they are innocent enough to love a guru in the widespread fracturedness of the inhuman societies today is a crime. Society as it is organized leaves no place for love and humaneness and people are pouring their innocence into cults with the hope that they will be able to evolve with love. THAT is what Robert and those in the inner circle of every cult are taking advantage of to enslave people for a lifetime. Why do you and those in the FOFblog pretend to dismiss THAT trying to convince us that I am simply crazy?
You’ve been banging down the walls telling me that all I need is professional help and that you’re here to help me, THIS SICK “TO OUT Elena” of yours is SICK because you and all in the fofblog are “outing” me so that you don’t have to hear THAT; THAT TON: THAT WE HAVE TO STOP THE FELLOWSHIP CULT AND ALL THE OTHER CULTS WE CAN GET TO WITH IT. That it is OUR RESPONSIBILITY BECAUSE WE BUILT IT, FED IT, GAVE IT STRENGTH AND WALKING OUT OF IT NOW THAT IT IS SYSTEMATICALLY HURTING PEOPLE SIMPLY MAKES US AS SICK AS THEM. WE ARE ALLOWING IT KNOWING HOW AND WHY IT HURTS PEOPLE.
How much louder do you want me to scream? These vampires need to be gotten out of people’s lives.
If you’re not willing to address the issues, please leave me alone, we’ve had enough of each other and good is plenty.
Cont….
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century’s end, the culmination of the struggle to achieve, even if only an individual minuscule
seed of this vast human task. To these three I will add tonight also a quotation from Deleuze.
The first quotation is from Heidegger, celebrating man’s life-onto-death as expressing
the essence of his being; the second is Foucault’s famous statement concerning the
disappearance of the human being as we know it; the third demonstrated Deleuze’s real
struggle with the legacy of his Franciscan forerunners, trying mightily to solve the riddle of
individual immortality. The fourth is taken from Steiner’s last words written on his death bed
as concise future directive. The passages are arranged in a certain ascending order- from a
profound denial of everything that the Michaelic impulse of our time is striving for
(Heidegger), through the two greatest representatives of French postmodernism, Foucault and
Deleuze, to Steiner, who was there first in time but is and will be always the last one to be
understood by our culture.
Being held out into the nothing, as Dasein is … makes man a lieutenant of the nothing.
We are so finite that we cannot even bring ourselves originally before the nothing
through our own decision and will. So profoundly does finitude entrench itself in
existence that our most proper and deepest limitation refuses to yield to our freedom
(Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? 1929)
It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a
recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge,
and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
[… ] Then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand
at the edge of the sea. (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, 1966)
Every event is like death, double and impersonal in its double…every mortal event is a
single event… it is this mobile and precise point, where all events gather together in one
that transmutation happens: this is the point at which death turns against death; where
dying is the negation of death, and the impersonality of dying not longer indicates only
the moment when I disappear outside of myself, but rather the moment when death
loses itself in itself, and also the figure which the most singular life takes on in order to
substitute itself for me. (Gilles Deleuze, “The event”, in Logic of Sense, 1969)
If this were all, freedom would light up in the human being for a single cosmic moment,
but in the very same moment the human being would dissolve away … We are here
pointing to the abyss of nothingness in human evolution which man must cross when he
becomes a free being. It is the working of Michael and the Christ-impulse which makes
it possible for him to leap across the gulf. (Rudolf Steiner, January 1925)
38
In 1929 Heidegger named the human being as the Stattshalter des Nichts – a commander of
nothingness. And he said: the whole human existence is founded only on death, on finiteness.
That was the first “statement” through which the whole reversal of human history was made
philosophically conscious and politically and socially realized in so much ending and
annihilating of human lives. There can scarcely be a more profound Anti-Philosophy of
Freedom formulation than this one. Kindly remember what I said at the beginning:
Heidegger’s influence is arguably the most significant one in 20th century philosophy – at
least until Foucault prophecy would have been fulfilled (“the 20th century will one day be
called Deleuzian century”).
Now when Foucault writes 33 years after 1933 he says: the human subject, the “I” as
we know it is a momentary phenomenon, caused by the evolution of consciousness in the 19th
century, and is rapidly disappearing. This is somewhat better statement then Heidegger’s!
First, because Foucault isn’t speaking about the essence of the human being as being finite, as
Heidegger does; and second, because for him human essence is exactly this: the process of
open-ended becoming, of transformation, and in this sense not finite at all. He says: our
understanding of the human subject changes, it will be different in the future then today; so
he really means: the death of the 19th century concept of the subject is occurring in the 20th (he
never meant to announce the end of the human being). And this is a fact that can also be
supported from Anthroposophical perspective as I indicated above.
The third passage is a typically suggestive passage from the post-modern thinker who
experienced perhaps more than any other thinker in the last century that we are crossing the
threshold, that great eventualities await us on the other side, nay more, he knew very well that
we have already crossed and are living on the other, wholly unforeseen and uncharted and
infinite new frontiers. This one is Gilles Deleuze.
In Deleuze we find wonderful descriptions of what one can experience and express in
concepts and words, if one has spiritualized one’s thinking to a certain extent. One
experiences the essence of life: “We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and
nothing else. […] A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete
power, complete bliss.” The same experience has a flip twin, an “other” side that comes
organically woven with it. If one has come so far as to experience the essence of pure life, one
has begun at the same time also to lift into consciousness the unconscious and real, that is,
living, death processes that underlie ordinary thinking; death begins to rise to consciousness
39
and with it death begins to reveal its true being, namely, the (veiled) gate to eternal cosmic
life.
When one is so far on the path that thinking becomes an experience of life in death and
death in life, one can experience truly that “this is the point at which death turns against death;
where dying is the negation of death”; And when, moreover, one experiences with one’s
released etheric body the cosmic, impersonal non-organic life forces, one knows also that “the
impersonality of dying not longer indicates only the moment when I disappear outside of
myself”, that means, consequently, if we turn the negative way of speaking to its positive
sense: The impersonality of dying indicates the moment in which the true I AM appears
outside my ordinary self. One comes then closest to the spiritual-scientific mystery of the “I”,
and only a hair breadth – grace’s breadth – separates one from being granted this experience.
While the mental-image, the Vor-stellung, of the “I” disappears, as we pointed out
above, and the IT, the impersonal life-forces of cosmic thinking begin to think through me,
the real “I” is resurrected and comes to consciousness in and through the impersonal cosmic
stream. This real “I” is a being of resurrection, and one can experience its reality at this stage
only through a gift of grace, neither through cosmic thinking nor through personal volition. IT
is the vehicle, or chalice, not the giver of the grace; the giver of the true “I” can only be the
being of humanity’s “I”, the Higher Self (the Christ).
And Deleuze, with everything that he brings with him from former life, can advance so
near – but “only” so near – to the cusp of this moment, to the threshold of this grace. And as a
matter of fact it is so, when one has really spiritualized thinking that far, so that one can
experience impersonal cosmic thinking, I really mean experience, not merely think the
abstract concept, then one really doesn’t find there again the mental-pictures of the ordinary
self, the subjective subject that thinks and therefore “he is”. In this moment, he is nothing, and
the IT is all; and therefore Deleuze could also not find it in his authentic experience of
crossing the threshold of life\death. But how close he stands there, on the threshold, facing
boldly the being of death and experience how death dies, but he doesn’t see into what really
death dies; he cannot produce enough fire to concoct and conduct the alchemical combination
that alone can fuse entirely – annihilating any difference in-between – absolute pure
immanent life with absolute death; he therefore doesn’t see what, or better who, faces him;
what happens at that very moment, which event takes this sacred place of time; he cannot
experience what he has at hand, namely, how “through the grace of the real ‘I’ life become
death and death become life” (In Christo Morimur; we die into the fullness of life). But how
40
movingly close does he come to unravel His secret, when he experiences “the moment when
death loses itself in itself, and [becomes] the most singular life … in order to substitute itself
for me”.
The moment when this substitution occurs is the most sacred that one can experience
after ordinary death. The beginner-Initiates that we can become today may be granted the
grace of this sacred moment in the midst of physical life. They may truly grace-fully die…
and may experience in full consciousness exactly how this “most singular life” – the Higher
Self – “substitute itself for me”. Only in this manner can the battle of the middle Ages that
truly took place, and the battle of the culmination of the 20th century that remained almost
only virtual, be still realized in the course of the 21st century. This is indeed our humble
elementary mission.
Now what makes freedom into reality, not intellectual reality, but into moral-human and
at the same time supersensible achievement? It is precisely this moment that the Franciscans
say is principally impossible. In Deleuze’s case we can even see how this becomes manifest in
his individual – very personal – karma: Look at his fingers! And compare them with
Brentano’s hands that Steiner described as “philosopher’s hands” and then with Steiner’s own
hands. Hands and fingers do not reveal primarily past karma (as the head does) but especially
karma-in-the-stream-of becoming! – If your contemplate Deleuze’s fingers what would have
you experienced? He had to let his fingernails grow very long because he couldn’t stand the
physical sense of touch with his fingers; it was for him too painful! (What do the fingers
experience deeply, unconsciously when they touch? They sense our becoming and also
experience constantly the fire that burns at end-of-our-becoming, the so called second or soul
death; the fingers live and move and become, in other words, all the time beyond the
threshold, where our spiritual stream of karma weaves and shapes our present life out of
future lives).
But the leading Dominicans that knew that true freedom is indeed only temporarily
impossible have laboured hard to prepare this seed through their loyal and faithful devotion to
Michael’s future impulse. And this seed can now begin to take root and sprout from the earth
upward in the beginning of the second Michaelic century. Steiner went ahead and pioneered,
all alone, this individual deed through his sacrifice and toil for humanity. We are invited to be
as beginners as he was when he conceived and wrote this humble book, the seed for the
spiritualization of thinking, consciousness, and humanity and the earth in the future: The
Philosophy of Freedom. He made it possible. And even despite the fact that not his but
41
Heidegger’s concept of the human triumphed over Europe and the whole globe today,
Steiner’s deed made it possible that in the historical moment in which “freedom [lighted] up in
the human being for a single cosmic moment…”, it will not be lost, and that, in face of the
fiercest evil of annihilation, brought about by so many “commanders of annihilation” all over
the earth in the course of the whole 20th century, “…in the very same moment the human
being would [not any longer only] dissolve away…”. And therefore, indeed: “We are here
pointing to the abyss of nothingness in human evolution which man must cross when he
becomes a free being. It is the working of Michael and the Christ-impulse which makes it
possible for him to leap across the gulf.”
And though on the much hoped-for large scale this battle didn’t take place at the end of
the 20th century, I wanted to tell you that it still may become a fruitful and joyful seed of new
life in each of our hearts. This was the sole purpose of my sharing tonight, “to make
philosophy worthy of this event”. I wanted to inscribe it here in my first working visit to
France, Colmar and Alsace: to share with you some of my experiences in the last decades of
the last century, in order to encourage you too to begin and become beginners of the now
beginning new Michaelic century.
Thank you very much!
What I find interesting about these guys is that they are both right and wrong and can’t meet each other in the human but circle around the issue without being able to find it.
The last man who asks the question about finding solutions to fundamentalism rather than focusing on the differences is so much more centered on what matters.
Another way to look at your question could be: How is objectivity actualized in our lives?
What are facts? And “realities”? Are we not born to a “reality” that has been “objectified” no matter how subjective it in fact might be? But is it not from that objectified subjectivity that our psychological make up is structured on our essence?
The fact that we are born in pseudo democracies is an objective fact that makes our psychological make up completely different to what it would have been had we been born in the times of Kings. In those times the individual didn’t matter but the King had enough relevance for many to be willing to give their lives up for him. In the pseudo-democracies of our times the individual doesn’t matter as much as individualism but “institutions” are nevertheless able to supply a greater number of individuals with “things” that previously were the privilege only of the nobility. I personally don’t believe our lives are necessarily more “just” or “noble” than they were in those days, (the values have been shifted) what I think is that what democracy is offering is the possibility of acquiring the status of human beings with equal rights to that of kings, as if we were introverting in our social and psychological make up what we extroverted in the hierarchic structure of royalty. As if we “lived” monarchy externally to now become the “monarchs” of our lives. The shift of consciousness from the “clan” to the individual.
Every individual has a “right” to the qualities of royalty that are no other than the qualities of being human. Not power to “submit” others but power to submit one’s self to the whole. The objectified subjectivity that we seem to have “inherited” in our times seems to be the authoritarism of the dictator without the nobility of the King. In the struggle from the King to the individual what has given guarantees to the individuals is the “institutions” but within them the structures still function with more authoritarism than consciousness. Was the failure of monarchy the “failure” of the king? Or the gradual transference of authority from the King to the individual?
If we look at dialogue and speech within that framework we find that the King could Speak. Speech was one of his attributes.Then only those in power could speak and now, with the internet, we can all speak! We can all speak but we don’t all have a right to speak nor are we necessarily heard if we speak, nor can many avoid still being killed if they speak more than is desired by those who are questioned by their speech. “Speech” is still the right of whoever is the authority and we still move within frameworks of subjective hierarchic structures. What is subjective about them? Mostly the differences. All our illusory differences from each other are aspects of our subjectivity. The fact that we think we have more rights than others because we are blue, yellow and pink while others are magenta, beige and green, is one of the aspects that makes us subjective, the other is the objective position in which we happen to be to think that we have more rights than others. The “position” we happen to be in makes us as subjective as it “codifies”, if we become identified with it, i.e. if we are “white” in the South of the States in Pre-Lincoln’s time, there’s a strong tendency to identify with racist ideology. Identification with genre, family, society and nationality is what conditions our own subjectivity and when we are “fundamentalistically” identified with them we cannot see the human beyond the identification. The inhumanity and depersonalization of war today is an aspect of such identifications. People justify inhumanity because of their so called “superior” identifications. If the human beings of today carried their “identity” in their humaneness, the scale of destruction and self-destruction current today, and its justification to satisfy the greed of the few in every nation, could not take place. What “the few” are holding on to is the illusory objective qualities of the King: The economic and political power without the authority or the consciousness. What becomes “subject” to their control is the power of objective realities such as Speech that are in fact “qualities” inherent to every human being. How “Speech” is allocated reveals how the economy is distributed. As long as Speech is muzzelled to power, human beings will continue to live in the subjectivity of our pseudo-democracies. We do not let each other speak because we don’t acknowledge each other as human beings. By not acknowledging our humaneness, we justify every atrocity.
Speech is not only the possibility of greeting each other and saying hello. We can all almost “do” that. What we are still far from is understanding Speech as an objective reality with power of its own, with structural power to mould our psychological life and hence, our social life. Today only “educated” people can speak, only “authorities” in the “subject” can speak, only a few are given the microphone. The rest are “muzzled” in the identification with their status while we are all living the same “LIFE” or lifelessness, we are all suffering the same consequences of our unconsciousness but only a few are authorized to decide what to do about it: The so-called “political” or “economic” or “academic” authorities. The majority of us are identified with our “powerlessness”, conditioned by our “position” in the “play”. Nothing conditions individuals more than the fact that they have or don’t have a voice.
The “voice” or “Speech” is there but people cannot “access” it because they are themselves not conscious of Speech as the rightful quality of their humanity. They let others speak and think for them afraid of doing so for themselves. The situation today is such that it is easier for most to take an arm and shoot others indiscriminately than to scream or speak. That is how far we are from our humaneness or becoming objective about our selves.
I got a phone call this morning.
“Good morning, could I please be late for work because they just killed two guys around here and I would like to leave a little later when things are more calm?”
What happened?
A guy killed another one then they killed him. This neighborhood is hot again.
You walk around as if you didn’t owe anything to anybody
have you ever looked at yourself?
what would a man give to have such peace sitting at the edge of his bed
I was in for five years
Let me look at your hand
I don’t understand. Why aren’t you bitter?
All this and you? How can you have such peace?
Three and a half bottles and four glasses of wine
Driving still down the avenues with an inner smile
so bright
And you and I,
I mean, you and I, how can we meet?
Why not?
Why couldn’t we meet?
Take all the dust off and here we are
just two human beings.
So I would like to continue thinking about what I’ve presented here so I’m going to repeat this post and then I’ll begin in another one taking perhaps just an area to develop.
Another way to look at your question could be: How is objectivity actualized in our lives?
What are facts? And “realities”? Are we not born to a “reality” that has been “objectified” no matter how subjective it in fact might be? But is it not from that objectified subjectivity that our psychological make up is structured on our essence?
The fact that we are born in pseudo democracies is an objective fact that makes our psychological make up completely different to what it would have been had we been born in the times of Kings. In those times the individual didn’t matter but the King had enough relevance for many to be willing to give their lives up for him. In the pseudo-democracies of our times the individual doesn’t matter as much as individualism but “institutions” are nevertheless able to supply a greater number of individuals with “things” that previously were the privilege only of the nobility. I personally don’t believe our lives are necessarily more “just” or “noble” than they were in those days, (the values have been shifted) what I think is that what democracy is offering is the possibility of acquiring the status of human beings with equal rights to that of kings, as if we were introverting in our social and psychological make up what we extroverted in the hierarchic structure of royalty. As if we “lived” monarchy externally to now become the “monarchs” of our lives. The shift of consciousness from the “clan” to the individual.
Every individual has a “right” to the qualities of royalty that are no other than the qualities of being human. Not power to “submit” others but power to submit one’s self to the whole. The objectified subjectivity that we seem to have “inherited” in our times seems to be the authoritarism of the dictator without the nobility of the King. In the struggle from the King to the individual what has given guarantees to the individuals is the “institutions” but within them the structures still function with more authoritarism than consciousness. Was the failure of monarchy the “failure” of the king? Or the gradual transference of authority from the King to the individual?
If we look at dialogue and speech within that framework we find that the King could Speak. Speech was one of his attributes.Then only those in power could speak and now, with the internet, we can all speak! We can all speak but we don’t all have a right to speak nor are we necessarily heard if we speak, nor can many avoid still being killed if they speak more than is desired by those who are questioned by their speech. “Speech” is still the right of whoever is the authority and we still move within frameworks of subjective hierarchic structures. What is subjective about them? Mostly the differences. All our illusory differences from each other are aspects of our subjectivity. The fact that we think we have more rights than others because we are blue, yellow and pink while others are magenta, beige and green, is one of the aspects that makes us subjective, the other is the objective position in which we happen to be to think that we have more rights than others. The “position” we happen to be in makes us as subjective as it “codifies”, if we become identified with it, i.e. if we are “white” in the South of the States in Pre-Lincoln’s time, there’s a strong tendency to identify with racist ideology. Identification with genre, family, society and nationality is what conditions our own subjectivity and when we are “fundamentalistically” identified with them we cannot see the human beyond the identification. The inhumanity and depersonalization of war today is an aspect of such identifications. People justify inhumanity because of their so called “superior” identifications. If the human beings of today carried their “identity” in their humaneness, the scale of destruction and self-destruction current today, and its justification to satisfy the greed of the few in every nation, could not take place. What “the few” are holding on to is the illusory objective qualities of the King: The economic and political power without the authority or the consciousness. What becomes “subject” to their control is the power of objective realities such as Speech that are in fact “qualities” inherent to every human being. How “Speech” is allocated reveals how the economy is distributed. As long as Speech is muzzelled to power, human beings will continue to live in the subjectivity of our pseudo-democracies. We do not let each other speak because we don’t acknowledge each other as human beings. By not acknowledging our humaneness, we justify every atrocity.
Speech is not only the possibility of greeting each other and saying hello. We can all almost “do” that. What we are still far from is understanding Speech as an objective reality with power of its own, with structural power to mould our psychological life and hence, our social life. Today only “educated” people can speak, only “authorities” in the “subject” can speak, only a few are given the microphone. The rest are “muzzled” in the identification with their status while we are all living the same “LIFE” or lifelessness, we are all suffering the same consequences of our unconsciousness but only a few are authorized to decide what to do about it: The so-called “political” or “economic” or “academic” authorities. The majority of us are identified with our “powerlessness”, conditioned by our “position” in the “play”. Nothing conditions individuals more than the fact that they have or don’t have a voice.
The “voice” or “Speech” is there but people cannot “access” it because they are themselves not conscious of Speech as the rightful quality of their humanity. They let others speak and think for them afraid of doing so for themselves. The situation today is such that it is easier for most to take an arm and shoot others indiscriminately than to scream or speak. That is how far we are from our humaneness or becoming objective about our selves.
Essence is I
Like a blanc page
with all my attributes
A whole human being in seed
the full structure
Connected to the cosmos
Walking on Earth
Growing in all dimensions
Including the one you see
Subject to every law
of absolute freedom
Of absolute being
Of Absolute
A child
life
In its purest form
Angel hair
Sprinkled from heaven
An infinity
In being
Were we not children enough to remember our self’s self?
The other being within, that had no name before we were ever baptised to this world?
Were we not there enough before mother and father, brothers and sisters, friends, enemies and people at large?
Don’t you remember Being without a name?
Did we not exist before we were given into the hands of man
Through mother and father
The legacy – complete?
Placed in a moment in time incarnating within our selves everything before us?
Nothing is more complete than a child than a human being
And then the gradual descent into multiplicities trying to find the image that would fit into the unknown world
Funny we thought the unknown world was elsewhere and not here when we lost contact with our selves and separated into individuals that we were supposed to not know and “fall” in love the less we knew them.
No wonder they call it the Fall for what else is it but the descent to desire? The fragmented world of everything one was not and wished to become?
Was not love precisely that recognition of the incomprehensible both within and without. Identifications in the mirrors of our beings meant to signal our complexes, identified with the pieces of people crystallized in imaginary pictures of what they might have become had they not been fortunate enough to fail?
They laugh above when we slide down in our exotic nudity only to dress it up and hide ourselves with textiles trying to reinvent our selves over and over again as if every fashion could make more of us become while at the same time the body inside comes undone.
Yes,
undone
Like the shell of every seed giving birth to the invisibility of our totality, dissolving our self in our selves, terrified of loosing the cover and protection that was once our identification.
Men and women suffering endlessly because the shell is almost gone and they haven’t yet accomplished a third of what dictated desire, loosing themselves without realizing that time is not money but love.
They’ll forgive us one day for having lived the lowest descent when time was money and not love and people desperately run out of their lives trying to make money without love.
They’ll thank us for having served our selves as victims of our own invention fixed in the world of matter without understanding the miracle of time to actualize our selves self every day of our lives
Time will come when every man extends a hand out and it is an extended hand not just an arm doing exercises to win the next competition betting our souls for how much more we get paid.
Time will come when movement is sacred
When food is sacred
When people are sacred
When music is life giving
When Art is life itself
When no one will die without having been embraced by the rest
We will walk out of our families, towns and nations into our selves
We will walk into families, towns and nations no matter what town or nation we find ourselves in, beyond our blood, one human being.
We are not too old to remember the great people
Every man and woman in each nation remembers the great people,
The human people
Nor too young to forget them, our essence
We are just right to be great people like the people before and after us
We are each and everyone right enough to be a human being
Time is love
It is love when we wake up in the morning and when we go to bed at night
And love when we sit besides each other
And there’s more love in each man and woman’s work than in the sheets of every bed
And more love in every meal than in a thousand drinks
There’s more love in each other’s company than in a million things.
Time is love
And life trickles through our hands in shades of blue and green
While children grow their little feet
And there’s no need to run a mile to be
But sit within
Time is love
And there’s no need of things to be
There’s plenty now and it’s not about more but about being able to look after what there is
Before we trash the whole of our nature making things that we don’t need to feed our greed
And the people
the young people and the old people and the children
all need us to help them be
No time will be as crazy as ours when nations throw away their communities and communities throw away their families and families throw away their children and old people so that men and women can make more money for somebody else’s greed. We will never be as crazy as today when we throw our lives out with our loved ones convinced that time is money in an individualism without reigns.
And I am not talking about America or Americans. We are all equally American and time is money was the reality of our lives everywhere. How much more damage can we do to our selves and our place? Our Earth?
Time is love
And death is eternity
The way they are talking about shame in the fofblog doesn’t come even close to understanding the manipulation on individuals that cults induce through shame.
The following article from wikipedia is fairly good in explaining the different instances of shame and particularly the fact that it is an aspect of the self. It’s through the authoritarism of the guru and the whole structure of power that shame is gradually introduced in the follower’s psyche. It is clear that most ex-members as much as members haven’t yet come to grips with the full reality of what is going on in cults. That is why they had to ban me, because they are so afraid of the truth about it that they had to silence it.
In cults the use of shame is much more related to the following article on shame and torture. THAT is what they need to understand to know why cults need to be stopped.
Just as isolation and humiliation makes the victims of torture helpless, isolation and sublimized humiliation make cultmembers equally helpless. It might all be dressed in silk but the effects are the same: absolute submission. Had they not been ABSOLUTELY submitted in Jonestown and the other cults that have finished with suicide, they would not have finished in such a way.
The Fellowship of Friends Cult, Pathway to Presence has EXACTLY the same mechanisms as these other cults. The highly indoctrinated members inside no longer exist for themselves but for the cult. THAT is already a form of death.
Continued shame achieves the gradual annihilation of the self. Brainwashing the individual implies the destruction of his own SENSE of his self and replacing it for the desired SENSE of his self that the brainwasher needs: the old personality connected to his own essence is totally replaced by the new personality without essence at the complete service of the brainwasher. They all disguise themselves behind a uniform because in unifying themselves they feel protected by the alter ego of the cult while having lost any trace of their own personal essence.
Shame
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about psychological, philosophical, and societal aspects of shame. For other uses, see Shame (disambiguation).
Eve covers herself and lowers her head in shame in Rodin’s sculpture “Eve after theFall”.
Shame is, variously, an affect, emotion, cognition, state, or condition. The roots of the word shame are thought to derive from an older word meaning to cover; as such, covering oneself, literally or figuratively, is a natural expression of shame.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Description
2 Shame vs. guilt and embarrassment
3 Subtypes
4 Social aspects
4.1 Shame campaign
5 See also
6 References
7 Further reading
8 External links
[edit]Description
Nineteenth century scientist Charles Darwin, in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, described shame affect as consisting of blushing, confusion of mind, downward cast eyes, slack posture, and lowered head, and he noted observations of shame affect in human populations worldwide.[2] He also noted the sense of warmth or heat (associated with the vasodilation of the face and skin) occurring in intense shame.
A “sense of shame” is the consciousness or awareness of shame as a state or condition. Such shame cognition may occur as a result of the experience of shame affect or, more generally, in any situation of embarrassment, dishonor, disgrace, inadequacy, humiliation, orchagrin.[3]
A condition or state of shame may also be assigned externally, by others, regardless of the one’s own experience or awareness. “To shame” generally means to actively assign or communicate a state of shame to another. Behaviors designed to “uncover” or “expose” others are sometimes used for this purpose, as are utterances like “Shame!” or “Shame on you!”
Finally, to “have shame” means to maintain a sense of restraint against offending others while to “have no shame” is to behave without such restraint.
[edit]Shame vs. guilt and embarrassment
Person hiding face and showing posture of shame (while wearing a Sanbenito andcoroza) in Goya’s sketch “For being born somewhere else”. The person has been shamed by the Spanish Inquisition.
The location of the dividing line between the concepts of shame, guilt, and embarrassment is not fully standardized.[4]
According to cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict, shame is a violation of cultural or social values while guilt feelings arise from violations of one’s internal values. Thus, it is possible to feel ashamed of thought or behavior that no one knows about and to feel guilty about actions that gain the approval of others.
Psychoanalyst Helen B. Lewis argued that “The experience of shame is directly about the self, which is the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done is the focus.”[5] Similarly, Fossum and Mason say in their book Facing Shame that “While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one’s actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person.”[6] Following this line of reasoning, Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman concludes that “Shame is an acutely self-conscious state in which the self is ‘split,’ imagining the self in the eyes of the other; by contrast, in guilt the self is unified.”[7]
Clinical psychologist Gershen Kaufman’s view of shame is derived from that of Affect Theory, namely that shame is one of a set of instinctual, short-duration physiological reactions to stimulation.[8][9] In this view, guilt is considered to be a learned behavior consisting essentially of self-directed blame or contempt, with shame occurring consequent to such behaviors making up a part of the overall experience of guilt. Here, self-blame and self-contempt mean the application, towards (a part of) one’s self, of exactly the same dynamic that blaming of, and contempt for, others represents when it is applied interpersonally. Kaufman saw that mechanisms such as blame or contempt may be used as a defending strategy against the experience of shame and that someone who has a pattern of applying them to himself may well attempt to defend against a shame experience by applying self-blame or self-contempt. This, however, can lead to an internalized, self-reinforcing sequence of shame events for which Kaufman coined the term “shame spiral.[8]
One view of difference between shame and embarrassment says that shame does not necessarily involve public humiliation while embarrassment does, that is, one can feel shame for an act known only to oneself but in order to be embarrassed one’s actions must be revealed to others. In the field of ethics (moral psychology, in particular), however, there is debate as to whether or not shame is a heteronomous emotion, i.e. whether or not shame does involve recognition on the part of the ashamed that they have been judged negatively by others. Immanuel Kant and his followers held that shame is heteronomous; Bernard Williams and others have argued that shame can be autonomous.[10][11] Shame may carry the connotation of a response to something that is morally wrong whereas embarrassment is the response to something that is morally neutral but socially unacceptable. Another view of shame and embarrassment says that the two emotions lie on a continuum and only differ in intensity.
[edit]Subtypes
Genuine shame: is associated with genuine dishonor, disgrace, or condemnation.
False shame: is associated with false condemnation as in the double-bind form of false shaming; “he brought what we did to him upon himself”. Author and TV personality John Bradshaw calls shame the “emotion that lets us know we are finite”.[12]
Secret shame: describes the idea of being ashamed to be ashamed, so causing ashamed people to keep their shame a secret. [13]
Toxic shame: describes false, pathological shame, and Bradshaw states that toxic shame is induced, inside children, by all forms of child abuse. Incest and other forms of child sexual abuse can cause particularly severe toxic shame. Toxic shame often induces what is known as complex trauma in children who cannot cope with toxic shaming as it occurs and who dissociate the shame until it is possible to cope with.[14]
Vicarious shame: In the 1990s, psychologists introduced the notion of vicarious shame, which refers to the experience of shame on behalf of another person. Individuals vary in their tendency to experience vicarious shame, which is related to neuroticism and to the tendency to experience personal shame. Extremely shame-prone people might even experience vicarious shame even to an increased degree, in other words: shame on behalf of another person who is already feeling shame on behalf of a third party (or possibly on behalf of the individual proper).
[edit]Social aspects
This article may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (September 2007)
This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations.
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Shame is considered one aspect of socialization in all societies. Shame is enshrouded in legal precedent as a pillar of punishment and ostensible correction. Shame has been linked to narcissism in the psychoanalytic literature. It is one of the most intense emotions. The individual experiencing shame may feel totally despicable, worthless and feel that there is no redemption. According to the anthropologistRuth Benedict, cultures may be classified by their emphasis of using either shame or guilt to regulate the social activities of their members. Shared opinions and expected behaviours that cause the feeling of shame (as well as an associated reproval) if violated by an individual are in any case proven to be very efficient in guiding behaviour in a group or society.
Shame is a common form of control used by those people who commit relational aggression. It is also used in the workplace as a form of overt social control or aggression. Shamery is also a central feature of punishment, shunning, or ostracism. In addition, shame is often seen in victims of child neglect, child abuse and a host of other crimes against children.
[edit]Shame campaign
A shame campaign is a tactic in which particular individuals are singled out because of their behavior or suspected crimes, often by marking them publicly, such as Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In the Philippines, Alfredo Lim popularized such tactics during his term as mayor of Manila. On July 1, 1997, he began a controversial “spray paint shame campaign” in an effort to stop drug use. He and his team sprayed bright red paint on two hundred squatter houses whose residents had been charged, but not yet convicted, of selling prohibited substances. Officials of other municipalities followed suit. Former Senator Rene A. Saguisag condemned Lim’s policy.[15]
Despite this criticism, the shame campaigns continued. In January 2005, Metro Manila Development Authority Chair Bayani Fernandoannounced shame campaign to target jaywalkers by splashing them with wet rags. Sen. Richard Gordon disagreed with the shame tactic, and Rep. Vincent Crisologo called this approach “martial law tactics”. Rep. Rozzano Rufino Biazon argued jaywalkers were being treated like cattle.[16][17]
[edit]
© Susmita Thukral
Understanding Shame and Humiliation in Torture
© Susmita Thukral
ORLJ 4859, Fall 2004
Dr. Evelin Lindner, Ph. D.
Teachers College, Columbia University
Understanding Torture 2
Understanding Shame and Humiliation in Torture
Although the use of torture in any form and for any reason has been banned by
international law, it is still practiced on a million people each year around the world.
(Pincock, 2003). Within the larger global context, where genocide, terrorism and war
have become the hallmarks of the 21st century, the practice of torture has acquired a new
place although, paradoxically enough, this century has also seen the vigorous human
rights movement. With the sophistication afforded by modernity, warfare no longer
deploys the same method to conquer or rule and so is the situation when it comes to
inflicting torture. Over the years physical torture has given way to increased intense
psychological torture out of a need to hide evidence of torture and also out of recognition
that psychological torture can be more effective for the torturer and more debilitating,
annihilating and silencing for the tortured. Furthermore, it seems that psychological
torture predominantly secures its effectiveness through the use of humiliation.
The purpose of the present paper is to understand this very unique relation between
torture and humiliation and the manner in which humiliation and shame are
systematically used for purposes of torture. In a way, the premise of the paper is that
torture acquires its efficacy primarily because it deploys humiliation and sets in motion
those psychological processes in the tortured that go far beyond the effects of physical
abuse and that are longstanding in their impact on the psyche.
Shame and Humiliation
Physical torture around the world has mostly been practiced in the form of
beating, electric shocks, submersion in water, suffocation, sleep-deprivation, burns, rape
Understanding Torture 3
and sexual assault. Psychological torture on the other hand, uses isolation, forced
witnessing of the tortures of loved ones, sham executions and most importantly
humiliation. (Pincock, 2003; Piwowarczyk, Moreno & Grodin, 2000)
Most recently, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal also reinforces the idea that
humiliation is frequently called in the service of torture. Lindner (2002) has defined
humiliation as, “the enforced lowering of a person or group, a process of subjugation that
damages or stripes away pride, honor and dignity. To be humiliated is to be placed
against your will and often in a deeply hurtful way, in a situation that is greatly inferior to
what you feel you should expect. Humiliation entails demeaning treatment that
transgresses established expectations. At its heart is the idea of pinning down, putting
down or holding to the ground. Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of humiliation
as a process is that the victim is forced into passivity, acted upon, made helpless.” (p. 2)
This definition enables us to appreciate that acts of humiliation tear down the very core of
the individual by invoking a deep sense of shame that comes with forced passivity, in the
victim. The sexual nature of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison inflicted by the American
soldiers, for example, was particularly humiliating for the Iraqi prisoners as a result of the
shame that the acts invoked in the prisoners who belong to a cultural background where
homosexuality, in particular, is shameful and sexual acts, nudity and sexuality, in general,
are shrouded with shame and guilt. The acts of torture that were used in the prison were
in a way deliberated upon, keeping in mind, their impact on an Arab psyche which deeply
values masculinity and regards homosexuality as feminized masculinity. Further, the
specific kind of torture that was inflicted on the prisoners was rooted in the knowledge
Understanding Torture 4
that shame and humiliation carry a very strong and different psychological meaning in the
Arab world. (Puar, 2004)
Hartling, Rosen, Walker and Jordan (2000) have closely examined shame and
humiliation in an attempt to understand the differences and similarities in between the
two feelings. Although both the affects are considered to belong to the domain of self-
conscious emotions, it has been highlighted that while, “shame is a felt sense of being
unworthy of connection, humiliation might be thought of as a feeling associated with
being made to feel unworthy of connection.”(p. 3). The distinction between these two
feelings is important to register for it tells us how these feeling might be exploited in
situations of social control and particularly in torture. Recognizing that humiliation is
interpersonally situated and that shame is self-focused enables us to comprehend how
techniques of torture are designed to produce their effects. Typically torture techniques
tend to work because they convert the humiliation of the act perpetrated by the torturer
into a deep sense of shame of the tortured. It is the feeling of shame that is invoked that
produces the silencing impact of the humiliating act, so that often victims of torture are
unable to relate their experiences of humiliation for they feel so shamed. Shapiro (2003)
has also noted that “shame is a major psychological issue for survivors of torture” and
that “people are reluctant to speak directly of feeling ashamed, since to acknowledge
shame is (in their eyes) to admit that there is something to be ashamed of.” (p. 1131)
The feeling of shame necessarily brings with it the component of exposure and often
humiliating experiences become difficult to recount and are silencing in their impact
because of this fear of being exposed, in the victim. Victims of torture face this issue
grimly because the feeling of shame in such cases is closely linked to the idea of locus of
Understanding Torture 5
control. Prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp, for example, were deeply ashamed of
what had happened to them for there was an inherent feeling of how could they have let
that happen to themselves. In other words, humiliation reigns over the person since the
victim feels low in his/her own eyes for having allowed something horrible happen to
him and this feeling of perceived helplessness gets projected to the other and gets
converted into shame as seen through the eyes of the other. In a similar vein Trumbull
(2003), has conceptualized shame as a stressful reaction to a disavowed image of oneself
as seen through the gaze of another. Thus shame is a feeling that gets triggered off when
one sees oneself as compromised in another person’s eyes. This subtle nuance is
important to understand since it informs us that victims of torture internalize the
humiliation subjected by the perpetrator as shame within them that leads to severely
paralyzing psychological outcomes.
Impact of Humiliation and Torture
Clinical Implications: Both physical and psychological torture can lead to a huge array of
disturbing psychological outcomes in the victims through the mechanisms of humiliation
and shame. Hartling et al.(2000) have noted that such experiences deeply affect one’s
capacity to relate to others and form intimate and healthy relationships. Piwowarczyk et
al. (2000) have also highlighted that torture can destroy one’s fundamental capacities
such as the capacity to trust and form secure attachments. Interpersonal, social and
occupational dysfunctions are also common outcomes in survivors of torture.
Furthermore, the experience of torture can lead to a strong sense of depersonalization and
alienation and it has been found that survivors of torture tend to lead to personally
Understanding Torture 6
disconnected and disengaged lives. It is as though they stop participating actively in the
interpersonal world and become encapsulated in their trauma.
In terms of clear cut psychopathological syndromes depression has been cited the most as
an immediate and longstanding impact of torture. In fact shame has been found to be a
very strong predictor for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder as well. (Trumbull, 2003;
Piwowarczyk et al. 2000) Obsessive- compulsive disorder and paranoia have also been
implicated. (Shapiro, 2003)
Global Implications : Apart from how humiliation impacts people in rupturing the basic
fabric of their lives, deep and continued humiliation can also lead to antisocial,
revengeful and militant personalities. It is no longer just armchair speculation that the
September 11 attacks are not just plainly terrorist attacks but that they are a manifestation
of the deep vengeance and a reaction to the prolonged and sustained humiliation that the
Arab world has faced for decades at the hands of America. Being cut off from one’s own
feelings, as is often the case in survivors of torture, can lead to the birth of militant
ideologies that can perpetuate apocalyptic violence in the world.
Helping the Tortured
Understanding the processes of shame and humiliation and their interplay in the lives of
survivors can go a long way in enabling these people to pick up the threads of their lives.
Piwowarczyk et al. (2000) have outlined that one of the first crucial steps involved in
helping the tortured is to be able to identify torture clinically and carefully. One of the
biggest impediments to identification of torture is that the trauma of the torture erases or
impairs the memory of the trauma itself. Often victims of torture go through severe
Understanding Torture 7
dissociative disorders that make it very difficult to help these individuals. It is also
important to realize that torture and its practice is culturally situated and therefore the
help afforded to victims of torture should also be in consonance with their cultural
backgrounds. Certain cultures do not permit open communications about incidents of
shame and humiliation and so it is important for anyone working with a torture survivor
to ask questions around such incidents with cultural sensitivity and empathy. Any enquiry
about the torture should be done so as to not even remotely seem as an interrogative
experience that the victim has already endured. The process of recounting the humiliation
of torture should not become humiliating itself when done for clinical, legal or
assessment purposes.
Physicians and doctors are the people with whom torture survivors come in contact with
first. It is important to train these medical professionals in the detection of torture and see
physical symptoms in relation to torture and trauma. A lot of torture survivors are put on
psychiatric medication, but it is crucial that this population also be given
psychotherapeutic help. Within this realm, Hartling et al. (2000) have given pertinent
insights into the clinical processes between a therapist and a client with humiliation as a
core life them. These insights can be extrapolated and used in therapy with torture
survivors where the therapist has to be careful and sensitive enough to tune in to the
victim’s experience of humiliation and ensure that the therapeutic process does not
become humiliating in any way. Additionally, it is equally important for doctors or
clinicians or anyone else working with torture survivors to be aware of their own
resistances to hearing stories of torture that can unconsciously be communicated to the
victim and produce a muting effect. Frequently survivors of torture are exiled from their
Understanding Torture 8
own homeland and land up as refugees in foreign nations. It is cardinal to recognize the
added difficulties of such people who not only have to cope with the trauma of torture but
also deal with the added responsibility of adjusting themselves to an alien land. To this
effect, all kinds of legal help that affords this population safe and healthy asylum must be
garnered. Finally both qualitative and quantitative research should be carried out on the
impact of the torture with a specific focus on shame and humiliation as the mediating
processes between the experience of torture and the development of psychopathology in
order to better help survivors of torture.
Understanding Torture 9
References
Hartling, L.M., Rosen, W., Walker, M., Jordan, J.V. (2000). Shame and Humiliation :
From Isolation to Relational Transformation. Work in Progress.
Lindner, E. G. (2002). Humiliation or Dignity : Regional Conflicts in the Global Village.
Journal of Mental Health, Psychosocial Work and Counseling in Areas of Armed
Conflict, forthcoming.
Pincock, S. (2003). Exposing the Horror of Torture. The Lancet, 362, 1462-1463.
Piwowarczyk, L., Moreno, A., Grodin, M. ( 2000). Health Care of Torture Survivors.
JAMA, 284, 539-541,
Puar, J. K. (2004). Abu Ghraib : Arguing against Exceptionalism. Feminist Studies, 30,
522-534.
Shapiro, D. (2003). The Tortured, Not the Torturers, are Ashamed. Social Research, 70,
1131-1148.
Trumbull, D. (2003). Shame : An Acute Stress Response to Interpersonal Traumatization.
Psychiatry, 66, 53-64.
This is a marvellous piece of work by Foucault that places us in the context of where we’ve come from. It rests short to what is possible today but even so is a great start.
FOUCAULT.INFO
Michel Foucault. What is Enlightenment ?
“What is Enlightenment ?” (“Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?”), in Rabinow (P.), éd., The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 32-50.
Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to collect opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; there is not much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth century, editors preferred to question the public on problems that did not yet have solutions. I don’t know whether or not that practice was more effective; it was unquestionably more entertaining.
In any event, in line with this custom, in November 1784 a German periodical, Berlinische Monatschrift published a response to the question: Was ist Aufklärung ? And the respondent was Kant.
A minor text, perhaps. But it seems to me that it marks the discreet entrance into the history of thought of a question that modern philosophy has not been capable of answering, but that it has never managed to get rid of, either. And one that has been repeated in various forms for two centuries now. From Hegel through Nietzsche or Max Weber to Horkheimer or Habermas, hardly any philosophy has failed to confront this same question, directly or indirectly. What, then, is this event that is called the Aufklärung and that has determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today ? Let us imagine that the Berlinische Monatschrift still exists and that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy ? Perhaps we could respond with an echo: modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung ?
Let us linger a few moments over Kant’s text. It merits attention for several reasons.
To this same question, Moses Mendelssohn had also replied in the same journal, just two months earlier. But Kant had not seen Mendelssohn’s text when he wrote his. To be sure, the encounter of the German philosophical movement with the new development of Jewish culture does not date from this precise moment. Mendelssohn had been at that crossroads for thirty years or so, in company with Lessing. But up to this point it had been a matter of making a place for Jewish culture within German thought — which Lessing had tried to do in Die Juden — or else of identifying problems common to Jewish thought and to German philosophy; this is what Mendelssohn had done in his Phadon; oder, Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele. With the two texts published in the Berlinische Monatschrift the German Aufklärung and the Jewish Haskala recognize that they belong to the same history; they are seeking to identify the common processes from which they stem. And it is perhaps a way of announcing the acceptance of a common destiny — we now know to what drama that was to lead.
But there is more. In itself and within the Christian tradition, Kant’s text poses a new problem.
It was certainly not the first time that philosophical thought had sought to reflect on its own present. But, speaking schematically, we may say that this reflection had until then taken three main forms.
The present may be represented as belonging to a certain era of the world, distinct from the others through some inherent characteristics, or separated from the others by some dramatic event. Thus, in Plato’s Statesman the interlocutors recognize that they belong to one of those revolutions of the world in which the world is turning backwards, with all the negative consequences that may ensue.
The present may be interrogated in an attempt to decipher in it the heralding signs of a forthcoming event. Here we have the principle of a kind of historical hermeneutics of which Augustine might provide an example.
The present may also be analyzed as a point of transition toward the dawning of a new world. That is what Vico describes in the last chapter of La Scienza Nuova; what he sees ‘today’ is ‘a complete humanity … spread abroad through all nations, for a few great monarchs rule over this world of peoples’; it is also ‘Europe … radiant with such humanity that it abounds in all the good things that make for the happiness of human life.’ [1]
Now the way Kant poses the question of Aufklärung is entirely different: it is neither a world era to which one belongs, nor an event whose signs are perceived, nor the dawning of an accomplishment. Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way, as an Ausgang, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out.’ In his other texts on history, Kant occasionally raises questions of origin or defines the internal teleology of a historical process. In the text on Aufklärung, he deals with the question of contemporary reality alone. He is not seeking to understand the present on the basis of a totality or of a future achievement. He is looking for a difference: What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday ?
I shall not go into detail here concerning this text, which is not always very clear despite its brevity. I should simply like to point out three or four features that seem to me important if we are to understand how Kant raised the philosophical question of the present day.
Kant indicates right away that the ‘way out’ that characterizes Enlightenment is a process that releases us from the status of ‘immaturity.’ And by ‘immaturity,’ he means a certain state of our will that makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for. Kant gives three examples: we are in a state of ‘immaturity’ when a book takes the place of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of our conscience, when a doctor decides for us what our diet is to be. (Let us note in passing that the register of these three critiques is easy to recognize, even though the text does not make it explicit.) In any case, Enlightenment is defined by a modification of the preexisting relation linking will, authority, and the use of reason.
We must also note that this way out is presented by Kant in a rather ambiguous manner. He characterizes it as a phenomenon, an ongoing process; but he also presents it as a task and an obligation. From the very first paragraph, he notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself. Significantly, Kant says that this Enlightenment has a Wahlspruch: now a Wahlspruch is a heraldic device, that is, a distinctive feature by which one can be recognized, and it is also a motto, an instruction that one gives oneself and proposes to others. What, then, is this instruction ? Aude sapere: ‘dare to know,’ ‘have the courage, the audacity, to know.’ Thus Enlightenment must be considered both as a process in which men participate collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally. Men are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary actors.
A third difficulty appears here in Kant’s text in his use of the word “mankind”, Menschheit. The importance of this word in the Kantian conception of history is well known. Are we to understand that the entire human race is caught up in the process of Enlightenment ? In that case, we must imagine Enlightenment as a historical change that affects the political and social existence of all people on the face of the earth. Or are we to understand that it involves a change affecting what constitutes the humanity of human beings ? But the question then arises of knowing what this change is. Here again, Kant’s answer is not without a certain ambiguity. In any case, beneath its appearance of simplicity, it is rather complex.
Kant defines two essential conditions under which mankind can escape from its immaturity. And these two conditions are at once spiritual and institutional, ethical and political.
The first of these conditions is that the realm of obedience and the realm of the use of reason be clearly distinguished. Briefly characterizing the immature status, Kant invokes the familiar expression: ‘Don’t think, just follow orders’; such is, according to him, the form in which military discipline, political power, and religious authority are usually exercised. Humanity will reach maturity when it is no longer required to obey, but when men are told: ‘Obey, and you will be able to reason as much as you like.’ We must note that the German word used here is räsonieren; this word, which is also used in the Critiques does not refer to just any use of reason, but to a use of reason in which reason has no other end but itself: räsonieren is to reason for reasoning’s sake. And Kant gives examples, these too being perfectly trivial in appearance: paying one’s taxes, while being able to argue as much as one likes about the system of taxation, would be characteristic of the mature state; or again, taking responsibility for parish service, if one is a pastor, while reasoning freely about religious dogmas.
We might think that there is nothing very different here from what has been meant, since the sixteenth century, by freedom of conscience: the right to think as one pleases so long as one obeys as one must. Yet it is here that Kant brings into play another distinction, and in a rather surprising way. The distinction he introduces is between the private and public uses of reason. But he adds at once that reason must be free in its public use, and must be submissive in its private use. Which is, term for term, the opposite of what is ordinarily called freedom of conscience.
But we must be somewhat more precise. What constitutes, for Kant, this private use of reason ? In what area is it exercised ? Man, Kant says, makes a private use of reason when he is ‘a cog in a machine’; that is, when he has a role to play in society and jobs to do: to be a soldier, to have taxes to pay, to be in charge of a parish, to be a civil servant, all this makes the human being a particular segment of society; he finds himself thereby placed in a circumscribed position, where he has to apply particular rules and pursue particular ends. Kant does not ask that people practice a blind and foolish obedience, but that they adapt the use they make of their reason to these determined circumstances; and reason must then be subjected to the particular ends in view. Thus there cannot be, here, any free use of reason.
On the other hand, when one is reasoning only in order to use one’s reason, when one is reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine), when one is reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be free and public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another.
Now this leads us to a fourth question that must be put to Kant’s text. We can readily see how the universal use of reason (apart from any private end) is the business of the subject himself as an individual; we can readily see, too, how the freedom of this use may be assured in a purely negative manner through the absence of any challenge to it; but how is a public use of that reason to be assured ? Enlightenment, as we see, must not be conceived simply as a general process affecting all humanity; it must not be conceived only as an obligation prescribed to individuals: it now appears as a political problem. The question, in any event, is that of knowing how the use of reason can take the public form that it requires, how the audacity to know can be exercised in broad daylight, while individuals are obeying as scrupulously as possible. And Kant, in conclusion, proposes to Frederick II, in scarcely veiled terms, a sort of contract — what might be called the contract of rational despotism with free reason: the public and free use of autonomous reason will be the best guarantee of obedience, on condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself be in conformity with universal reason.
Let us leave Kant’s text here. I do not by any means propose to consider it as capable of constituting an adequate description of Enlightenment; and no historian, I think, could be satisfied with it for an analysis of the social, political, and cultural transformations that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding its circumstantial nature, and without intending to give it an exaggerated place in Kant’s work, I believe that it is necessary to stress the connection that exists between this brief article and the three Critiques. Kant in fact describes Enlightenment as the moment when humanity is going to put its own reason to use, without subjecting itself to any authority; now it is precisely at this moment that the critique is necessary, since its role is that of defining the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate in order to determine what can be known, what must be done, and what may be hoped. Illegitimate uses of reason are what give rise to dogmatism and heteronomy, along with illusion; on the other hand, it is when the legitimate use of reason has been clearly defined in its principles that its autonomy can be assured. The critique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown up in Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the critique.
It is also necessary, I think, to underline the relation between this text of Kant’s and the other texts he devoted to history. These latter, for the most part, seek to define the internal teleology of time and the point toward which history of humanity is moving. Now the analysis of Enlightenment, defining this history as humanity’s passage to its adult status, situates contemporary reality with respect to the overall movement and its basic directions. But at the same time, it shows how, at this very moment, each individual is responsible in a certain way for that overall process.
The hypothesis I should like to propose is that this little text is located in a sense at the crossroads of critical reflection and reflection on history. It is a reflection by Kant on the contemporary status of his own enterprise. No doubt it is not the first time that a philosopher has given his reasons for undertaking his work at a particular moment. But it seems to me that it is the first time that a philosopher has connected in this way, closely and from the inside, the significance of his work with respect to knowledge, a reflection on history and a particular analysis of the specific moment at which he is writing and because of which he is writing. It is in the reflection on ‘today’ as difference in history and as motive for a particular philosophical task that the novelty of this text appears to me to lie.
And, by looking at it in this way, it seems to me we may recognize a point of departure: the outline of what one might call the attitude of modernity.
I know that modernity is often spoken of as an epoch, or at least as a set of features characteristic of an epoch; situated on a calendar, it would be preceded by a more or less naive or archaic premodernity, and followed by an enigmatic and troubling ‘postmodernity.’ And then we find ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the sequel to the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we are to see it as a rupture or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the 18th century.
Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by ‘attitude,’ I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the ‘modern era’ from the ‘premodern’ or ‘postmodern,’ I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of ‘countermodernity.’
To characterize briefly this attitude of modernity, I shall take an almost indispensable example, namely, Baudelaire; for his consciousness of modernity is widely recognized as one of the most acute in the nineteenth century.
Modernity is often characterized in terms of consciousness of the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment. And this is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying when he defines modernity as ‘the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.’ [2] But, for him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time; modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the ‘heroic’ aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to ‘heroize’ the present .
I shall restrict myself to what Baudelaire says about the painting of his contemporaries. Baudelaire makes fun of those painters who, finding nineteenth-century dress excessively ugly, want to depict nothing but ancient togas. But modernity in painting does not consist, for Baudelaire, in introducing black clothing onto the canvas. The modern painter is the one who can show the dark frock-coat as ‘the necessary costume of our time,’ the one who knows how to make manifest, in the fashion of the day, the essential, permanent, obsessive relation that our age entertains with death. ‘The dress-coat and frock-coat not only possess their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is an expression of the public soul — an immense cortège of undertaker’s mutes (mutes in love, political mutes, bourgeois mutes…). We are each of us celebrating some funeral.’ [3] To designate this attitude of modernity, Baudelaire sometimes employs a litotes that is highly significant because it is presented in the form of a precept: ‘You have no right to despise the present.’
This heroization is ironical, needless to say. The attitude of modernity does not treat the passing moment as sacred in order to try to maintain or perpetuate it. It certainly does not involve harvesting it as a fleeting and interesting curiosity. That would be what Baudelaire would call the spectator’s posture. The flâneur, the idle, strolling spectator, is satisfied to keep his eyes open, to pay attention and to build up a storehouse of memories. In opposition to the flâneur, Baudelaire describes the man of modernity: ‘Away he goes, hurrying, searching …. Be very sure that this man … — this solitary, gifted with an active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert — has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for that quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity.’ … He makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history.’ As an example of modernity, Baudelaire cites the artist Constantin Guys. In appearance a spectator, a collector of curiosities, he remains ‘the last to linger wherever there can be a glow of light, an echo of poetry, a quiver of life or a chord of music; wherever a passion can pose before him, wherever natural man and conventional man display themselves in a strange beauty, wherever the sun lights up the swift joys of the depraved animal.’ [4]
But let us make no mistake. Constantin Guys is not a flâneur; what makes him the modern painter par excellence in Baudelaire’s eyes is that, just when the whole world is falling asleep, he begins to work, and he transfigures that world. His transfiguration does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom; ‘natural’ things become ‘more than natural,’ ‘beautiful’ things become ‘more than beautiful,’ and individual objects appear ‘endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of their creator.’ [5] For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not by destroying it but by grasping it in what it is. Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.
However, modernity for Baudelaire is not simply a form of relationship to the present; it is also a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself. The deliberate attitude of modernity is tied to an indispensable asceticism. To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration: what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme. Here I shall not recall in detail the well-known passages on ‘vulgar, earthy, vile nature’; on man’s indispensable revolt against himself; on the ‘doctrine of elegance’ which imposes ‘upon its ambitious and humble disciples’ a discipline more despotic than the most terrible religions; the pages, finally, on the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art. Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.
Let me add just one final word. This ironic heroization of the present, this transfiguring play of freedom with reality, this ascetic elaboration of the self — Baudelaire does not imagine that these have any place in society itself, or in the body politic. They can only be produced in another, a different place, which Baudelaire calls art.
I do not pretend to be summarizing in these few lines either the complex historical event that was the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, or the attitude of modernity in the various guises it may have taken on during the last two centuries.
I have been seeking, on the one hand, to emphasize the extent to which a type of philosophical interrogation — one that simultaneously problematizes man’s relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject — is rooted in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude — that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era. I should like to characterize this ethos very briefly.
A. Negatively
This ethos implies, first, the refusal of what I like to call the ‘blackmail’ of the Enlightenment. I think that the Enlightenment, as a set of political, economic, social, institutional, and cultural events on which we still depend in large part, constitutes a privileged domain for analysis. I also think that as an enterprise for linking the progress of truth and the history of liberty in a bond of direct relation, it formulated a philosophical question that remains for us to consider. I think, finally, as I have tried to show with reference to Kant’s text, that it defined a certain manner of philosophizing.
But that does not mean that one has to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Enlightenment. It even means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism (this is considered a positive term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach); or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality (which may be seen once again as good or bad). And w e do not break free of this blackmail by introducing ‘dialectical’ nuances while seeking to determine what good and bad elements there may have been in the Enlightenment.
We must try to proceed with the analysis of ourselves as beings who are historically determined, to a certain extent, by the Enlightenment. Such an analysis implies a series of historical inquiries that are as precise as possible; and these inquiries will not be oriented retrospectively toward the ‘essential kernel of rationality’ that can be found in the Enlightenment and that would have to be preserved in any event; they will be oriented toward the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary,’ that is, toward what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects.
This permanent critique of ourselves has to avoid the always too facile confusions between humanism and Enlightenment.
We must never forget that the Enlightenment is an event, or a set of events and complex historical processes, that is located at a certain point in the development of European societies. As such, it includes elements of social transformation, types of political institution, forms of knowledge, projects of rationalization of knowledge and practices, technological mutations that are very difficult to sum up in a word, even if many of these phenomena remain important today. The one I have pointed out and that seems to me to have been at the basis of an entire form of philosophical reflection concerns only the mode of reflective relation to the present.
Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies; these themes always tied to value judgments have obviously varied greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved. Furthermore they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. In the seventeenth century there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in general; there was a Christian humanism opposed to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time when people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.
From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple too diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a fact that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.
Now in this connection I believe that this thematic which so often recurs and which always depends on humanism can be opposed by the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy: that is a principle that is at the heart of the historical consciousness that the Enlightenment has of itself. From this standpoint I am inclined to see Enlightenment and humanism in a state of tension rather than identity.
In any case it seems to me dangerous to confuse them; and further it seems historically inaccurate. If the question of man of the human species of the humanist was important throughout the eighteenth century this is very rarely I believe because the Enlightenment considered itself a humanism. It is worthwhile too to note that throughout the nineteenth century the historiography of sixteenth-century humanism which was so important for people like Saint-Beuve or Burckhardt was always distinct from and sometimes explicitly opposed to the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century had a tendency to oppose the two at least as much as to confuse them.
In any case I think that just as we must free ourselves from the intellectual blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment we must escape from the historical and moral confusionism that mixes the theme of humanism with the question of the Enlightenment. An analysis of their complex relations in the course of the last two centuries would be a worthwhile project an important one if we are to bring some measure of clarity to the consciousness that we have of ourselves and of our past.
B. Positively
Yet while taking these precautions into account we must obviously give a more positive content to what may be a philosophical ethos consisting in a critique of what we are saying thinking and doing through a historical ontology of ourselves.
This philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits. But if the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given lo us as universal necessary obligatory what place is occupied by whatever is singular contingent and the product of arbitrary constraints ? The point in brief is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that lakes the form of a possible transgression.
This entails an obvious consequence: that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method. Archaeological — and not transcendental — in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.
But if we are not to settle for the affirmation or the empty dream of freedom, it seems to me that this historico-critical attitude must also be an experimental one. I mean that this work done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of contemporary reality, both to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take. This means that the historical ontology of ourselves must turn away from all projects that claim to be global or radical. In fact we know from experience that the claim to escape from the system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions.
I prefer the very specific transformations that have proved to be possible in the last twenty years in a certain number of areas that concern our ways of being and thinking, relations to authority, relations between the sexes, the way in which we perceive insanity or illness; I prefer even these partial transformations that have been made in the correlation of historical analysis and the practical attitude, to the programs for a new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century.
I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings.
Still, the following objection would no doubt be entirely legitimate: if we limit ourselves to this type of always partial and local inquiry or test, do we not run the risk of letting ourselves be determined by more general structures of which we may well not be conscious, and over which we may have no control ?
To this, two responses. It is true that we have to give up hope of ever acceding to a point of view that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits. And from this point of view the theoretical and practical experience that we have of our limits and of the possibility of moving beyond them is always limited and determined; thus we are always in the position of beginning again .
But that does not mean that no work can be done except in disorder and contingency. The work in question has its generality, its systematicity, its homogeneity, and its stakes.
(a) Its Stakes
These are indicated by what might be called ‘the paradox of the relations of capacity and power.’ We know that the great promise or the great hope of the eighteenth century, or a part of the eighteenth century, lay in the simultaneous and proportional growth of individuals with respect to one another. And, moreover, we can see that throughout the entire history of Western societies (it is perhaps here that the root of their singular historical destiny is located — such a peculiar destiny, so different from the others in its trajectory and so universalizing, so dominant with respect to the others), the acquisition of capabilities and the struggle for freedom have constituted permanent elements. Now the relations between the growth of capabilities and the growth of autonomy are not as simple as the eighteenth century may have believed. And we have been able to see what forms of power relation were conveyed by various technologies (whether we are speaking of productions with economic aims, or institutions whose goal is social regulation, or of techniques of communication): disciplines, both collective and individual, procedures of normalization exercised in the name of the power of the state, demands of society or of population zones, are examples. What is at stake, then, is this: How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations ?
(b) Homogeneity
This leads to the study of what could be called ‘practical systems.’ Here we are taking as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that men give of themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their knowledge, but rather what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms of rationality that organize their ways of doing things (this might be called the technological aspect) and the freedom with which they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game, up to a certain point (this might be called the strategic side of these practices). The homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses is thus ensured by this realm of practices, with their technological side and their strategic side.
(c) Systematicity
These practical systems stem from three broad areas: relations of control over things, relations of action upon others, relations with oneself. This does not mean that each of these three areas is completely foreign to the others. It is well known that control over things is mediated by relations with others; and relations with others in turn always entail relations with oneself, and vice versa. But we have three axes whose specificity and whose interconnections have to be analyzed: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of ethics. In other terms, the historical ontology of ourselves has to answer an open series of questions; it has to make an indefinite number of inquiries which may be multiplied and specified as much as we like, but which will all address the questions systematized as follows: How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge ? How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations ? How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions ?
(d) Generality
Finally, these historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense that they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and discourses. And yet, at least at the level of the Western societies from which we derive, they have their generality, in the sense that they have continued to recur up to our time: for example, the problem of the relationship between sanity and insanity, or sickness and health, or crime and the law; the problem of the role of sexual relations; and so on.
But by evoking this generality, I do not mean to suggest that it has to be retraced in its metahistorical continuity over time, nor that its variations have to be pursued. What must be grasped is the extent to which what we know of it, the forms of power that are exercised in it, and the experience that we have in it of ourselves constitute nothing but determined historical figures, through a certain form of problematization that defines objects, rules of action, modes of relation to oneself. The study of modes of problematization (that is, of what is neither an anthropological constant nor a chronological variation) is thus the way to analyze questions of general import in their historically unique form.
A brief summary, to conclude and to come back to Kant.
I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment. It seems to me that Kant’s reflection is even a way of philosophizing that has not been without its importance or effectiveness during the last two centuries. The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.
This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquiries. These inquiries have their methodological coherence in the at once archaeological and genealogical study of practices envisaged simultaneously as a technological type of rationality and as strategic games of liberties; they have their theoretical coherence in the definition of the historically unique forms in which the generalities of our relations to things, to others, to ourselves, have been problematized. They have their practical coherence in the care brought to the process of putting historico-critical reflection to the test of concrete practices. I do not know whether it must be said today that the critical task still entails faith in Enlightenment; I continue to think that this task requires work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty.
Notes:
[1] Giambattista Vico, The New Science, 3rd ed., (1744), abridged trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 370, 372.
[2] Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 13.
[3] Charles Baudelaire, ‘On the Heroism of Modern Life,’ in The Mirror of Art, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1955), p. 127.
[4] Baudelaire, Painter, pp. 12, Il.
[5] Ibid., p. 12.
At the Intersection of Sovereignty and Biopolitics: The Di-Polaric Spatializations of Money
http://ej.lib.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/3055/3197
“As Wallerstein has noted, ‚in ‘world-systems’ we are dealing with a spatial/
temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units, one that represents an
integrated zone of activity and institutions which obey certain systemic rules.‛48 An
increasingly important element of such an institutional configuration involves the monetary
system, which has an individual micro-dimension in addition to the macropolitics of curren-
cies. The core of such a system consists of individuals with significant positive monetary
balances, who exploit everyone else outside the core through a mode of accumulation that has
no efficiency-based economic justification.49 Although the monetary social hierarchy is not
structurally entirely fixed, such individuals have negligible personal risk of downward social
mobility due to the continuous upward redistribution of wealth through compound interest.
The periphery includes the vast majority of the world’s population who have no realistic
opportunity to escape negative monetary net worth – either personal or government debt –
through their own productive efforts. These individuals are subject to constant exploitation
through resource transfers corresponding to interest payments on unrepayable debt. The
semi-periphery consists of individuals whose structural position based on the net effect of
exploiting the periphery and being exploited by the core remains indeterminate. ”
Elena: It’s absolutely fascinating to observe that the money dynamics behaves exactly like the psychology of the different classes.
money as debt- Wow! There goes the whole of this place! No wonder we’re what we are today! Just unconscious bums letting others play their game!
“In fact, he limits itself to stating that only “reasoned examination” and “public debate” can establish what is just and what is not.”
It’s interesting that at least Sen directs the problem towards the public sphere.- back to the community. At the same time it’s astonishing that what is just or not is not even questioned. And then it’s clear that as long as people concentrate on what is not instead of what is, we won’t be able to find our way out of the present conflicts. Is there enough food to feed everyone? Where is it and how do we get it to people who need it?
It doesn’t matter who the food belongs to, it belongs more to those who need it.
Wouldn’t that be a way of looking at justice? Not on the negative side of things but on the positive side? What is there and where does it need to be? Then we wouldn’t be parting from the individual or national but from the global. What is there globally and where does it need to be? Everything belongs to US. Anyone who steals from US is a crook. Anyone who has more than he needs is a thief. Anyone who takes what others need is a criminal.
It’s a different kind of morality is it not? It’s not about communism but humanism. It’s a question of consciousness. It’s inevitable to realize that the System as it is working today is a comedy! Who can believe or trust in the crooks in power?
The shift towards consciousness seems to relate to the capacity to perceive from the whole to the part instead of from the part to the whole. Individualism moves from the part to the whole and cannot grasp reality with the necessary integrity. Consciousness needs to be in the individual, in each individual but each individual must be conscious of the whole. We all want that in our hearts, we are just very much afraid of our loneliness.
Is it not just a struggle from the instinctive to consciousness? There is enough for everyone. There is enough for everyone if a few stop stealing what is everyone’s. There is enough to take care of our selves and live decent lives helping each other out. There is enough if we’re willing to share what we have without taking advantage of each other.
Why is it difficult to understand love? Love as an aspect of life? They were wrong those who said we were a bunch of criminals out to get each other. We are not. We simply aren’t a bunch of criminals. They perhaps were criminal enough to generalize such ideas to justify themselves but human beings are not a bunch of criminals.
The superiority complexes in high classes and so called “developed nations” are just that: superiority complexes.
There is nothing superior in them. They are as human as the rest. It hasn’t been easy for anyone, anywhere, we’ve all suffered everywhere but it’s possible to start helping each other and minimize our suffering. It is a wonderful thing to help each other. Nothing makes a man happier than other people’s well being as a result of his or her actions. That kind of happiness is not the superficial happiness that people experience from owning things but a happiness that comes from the experience of grace. Positive emotions are possible in this world. We have been marked by what seems centuries of negative emotions but I think they were even happier than us in the middle ages and they’ll be happier than us at the end of this century. In our times our outlook seems to be particularly dark, we don’t know how to experience positive emotions. The disconnectedness from religion may be one possible cause but disconnecting from religion was a necessary step in our evolution. Religion became increasingly connected to powers outside of our selves, a God that petted our heads, at best, while in the decadence of leadership, those in power take from the whole. The transition from “conscious kings” to true democracy is an ongoing process. We are only half way in between.
God as an outside force disconnected from our every day life acts against our consciousness. The realm of the divine is inside each one of us. That is what people today are so afraid of. Taking the light step from the physical dimension to a dimension of consciousness. Letting go of the ego and being the whole. It is a comprehensible fear and a journey that we each must take in our own time for it is absolutely real and cannot be any other way. We can inspire each other to take that step. We can help each other trust our selves enough and take that step. We can love each other enough so that others love their own self enough and take that step. There is much suffering in egoness and it’s through suffering our own egoness that we come to our selves. No one has ever hurt us as much as our egoness. But when we open the door of trust in our self, egoness weakens and our perception of the whole becomes possible.
Justice is possible. We, as human beings, can make justice possible in our world. We can make it possible through actualizing consciousness in our daily lives. The whole belongs to all of us. The whole of Earth belongs to all of us. The whole of life belongs to all of us. The whole of joy, of grace, of gratitude, of light belongs to all of us. We are each blessed with the whole. To be blessed is not an aspect of religion but an aspect of life. To be blessed is an aspect of being human not of being in a religion even if in every true religion they know how blessed human beings are. We are not blessed by superior beings. We are not blessed by popes or gurus. We are blessed because within our selves the dimension of consciousness beats with the same power that life beats in every creature. The dimension of consciousness or a divine dimension is in itself a blessing and it is inside each one of us. All we need from each one of us is to let it actualize itself in our daily lives.
We all know what life was supposed to be when we were children and how it became what it is and it is in our power to understand where our parent’s suffering kept them from actualizing the life we knew was possible. The greatest compassion is realized when we assume responsibility for our times through the understanding of our parent’s suffering. Each parent is the actualization of the state of consciousness of his and her times. Each LIFE, each human life, is the actualization of the state of consciousness of his and her times. Each child inherits the state of consciousness of all human beings and it is his and her task to carry it one generation ahead, actualizing consciousness in his and her daily practice through the transformation of the suffering that he and she inherited from her and his peers. Our legacy is the suffering of all of mankind in that given time and the job of each generation is to create less suffering for future generations.
Happiness is possible in our world. The experience of grace and gratitude, the joy of being, the unfathomable experience of light and delight is possible for each one of us. We are One. We are One and in our Oneness we are also our individual selves. Life trickles down each of our beings like water out of our hands. We can separate from each other in our unconsciousness or unite with each other in consciousness and actualize our selves every second of our lives. We actualize our selves in the weaving of time. Each conscious act is a thread towards our realization.
We actualize our selves in the consciousness of our totality when we allow for the whole to embrace our “individual-nesses”. We must recover the power of the “wholes”. The whole of Speech and its power. The whole of community and its power. The whole of humaneness and its power. We must gather together again not in churches, senates or parliaments but in the Public Square, conscious of our equality, having gotten rid of the hierarchies that have for so long kept us from our wholeness.
Love is possible in our Earth. When we recover our communities and stop hurting each other producing not so many “items” but creating and recreating what is necessary and joyful we can recover our love life. The family is important for children but the community is even more important for the people. We must all be parents of every child and youth. Young people don’t trust us because they know better! We let them down this far making misery of life when life is everything but miserable! Will they have the strength to be more human than we managed to be?
It is never late to be. No matter the age, no matter the difficulty, it is always possible for anyone to actualize their own self and belong to the whole. When we actualize our selves we take responsibility from that moment on and change the whole of our world. It takes will to be and the effort of being is what makes us more human. It is the actualization of the divine realm in our physical practical lives. We all know what it is like to be no matter who, where, when or what we are. We have all tasted our selves as children and the taste of childhood is the taste of our conscious essence. The integrity of our selves in childhood is not only something we can “remember”, it’s something we can actualize. The gradual study of how we lost that integrity helps recover it. But it is a fact that IT is always there within us and all we need is to dare to be our selves again.
Children, young people and old people are suffering a lot more than is necessary. We need to help each other so that we can then help them. We need to help them even if we can’t help each other.
We are One and life trickles through our lives like water through our hands.
For Amartya Sen, a consensus around rejecting injustice is preferable to a general theory of justice. Although his critique of the Rawlsian approach may be useful, his arguments for a comparative approach to justice are not completely persuasive.
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0. Unlocatable Justice (PDF – 190.8 kb)by Emmanuelle Bénicourt
Reviewed: Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice, Harvard University Press, 2009. (The edition reviewed is the French translation, L’idée de justice, trans. By Paul Chemla, Flammarion, 2010, 558 pp., 25 euros.)
Since it was first published in 1971, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice has been an essential reference for anyone interested in justice or ethics. Amartya Sen’s Idea of Justice, which has just appeared in French translation, takes a clear position in the debate initiated by Rawls. Sen limits himself, however, to what he calls “a theory of justice in the broad sense”, the purpose of which is not to “achieve a perfectly just world” but rather “to remove clear injustices” (p. xiii; Fr. p. 13). The work actually rehearses a number of arguments that Sen has developed over the past thirty years. Some of these, and most notably the critiques of Rawls’ theory, are much more fully developed here than in his previous writings, however.
According to Sen, there are two distinct ways of approaching the question of justice: one, which he calls transcendental institutionalism and associates with the names of Kant, Rousseau, Locke, and Rawls, “concentrates its attention on what it identifies as perfect justice” by focusing “primarily on getting the institutions right” (p. 6; Fr. p. 20). The other method — said to be that of Smith, Condorcet, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill — seeks to link justice to comparisons of different ways of life, concrete behaviors, and human interactions in a variety of institutional contexts. Sen, a critic of transcendental institutionalism, prefers this second or “comparative” approach.
Criticizing Rawls
Sen acknowledges that Rawls drew attention to the intrinsic importance of liberty (in itself and not as a means to an end). In his view, however, although “it is indeed possible to accept that liberty must have some kind of priority, but total unrestrained priority is almost certainly an overkill” (p. 65; Fr. p. 96). This critique was previously presented inInequality Reexamined (1992) and Development as Freedom (1999). In The Idea of Justice, however, Sen distances himself even more from Rawls’ theory by challenging the very ground of the principles of justice. For instance, he doubts that individuals placed in what Rawls called “the original position”, in which they do not know their future place in society, can in fact agree on a set of principles to govern just institutions, on which a fully just society must rest (p. 57; Fr. p. 87). There is in fact no reason for individuals to choose, as Rawls does, “the most extensive system of liberty” as the first principle of justice. One must therefore confront “Arrow’s impossibility theorem”, which states that there is no rule for deducing a consistent collective preference regarding a set of options from individual preferences with respect to those same options. Indeed, because individual interests are at least in part contradictory, individual members of a society may not agree on the priority ordering of the various problems the society faces. Hence there is no one option superior to all others. For Sen, however, the search for such a superior option is at the heart of the transcendental individualist approach. The problem of choosing an ethical criterion, or hierarchical principles of justice capable of guiding choice among alternative actions and institutions, remains. Sen proposes a different solution, however.
Rejecting an Explicit Definition of Justice
For Sen, there is no need to define precisely what justice is in order to decide what is just or not just. He “sees no reason at all why”, in order to judge that option X is better than option Y, one needs to invoke a completely different option Z that would supposedly be “the best of all”. “The possibility of having an identifiably perfect alternative does not indicate that it is necessary, or indeed useful, to refer to it in judging the relative merits of two other alternatives. […] There would be something deeply odd in a general belief that a comparison of any two alternatives cannot be sensibly made without a prior identification of a supreme alternative. There is no analytical connection there at all” (p. 102; Fr. pp. 137-8). Sen explains this by saying that the knowledge that Everest is the highest mountain in the world is of no use in comparing the heights of Kilimanjaro and McKinley. A possible response to this is that, in comparing two mountains, the standard of measurement is simple and well-known (height), so that it is sufficient to specify what one is looking for (the taller mountain or the less tall one). In justice, specifying the standard of measurement (liberty, or collective happiness) is itself part of the problem in deciding whether one situation, rule, or action is better than another. As John Stuart Mill forcefully showed in Utilitarianism, it is precisely the existence of a criterion, a standard, that makes it possible to compare alternatives (see Mill, 1861, p. 158).
Criteria of Classification
Sen denies that it is necessary to know “the best option” in order to compare two other options. This may well be true. But he does not propose a unique criterion for making the comparison. For him, it is sufficient to have “a theory of practical reason to accommodate a framework for reasoning with the body of a capacious theory — that, at any rate, is the approach to the theory of justice that this work pursues” (p. 89; Fr. p. 123). But a “reasoned debate” does not necessarily lead to consensus — in this case, to a decision as to what is just and what is not. Even without such a standard or criterion, Sen believes that one can nevertheless agree about certain aspects of injustice: “For the emergence of a shared and useful understanding of many substantive issues of rights and duties (and also of rights and wrongs), there is no need to insist that we must have agreed complete orderings or universally accepted full partitions of the just, strictly separated from the unjust; for example, a common resolve to fight for the abolition of famines, or genocide, or terrorism, or slavery, or untouchability, or illiteracy, or epidemics, etc., does not require that there be a similarly extensive agreement on the appropriate formulae for inheritance rights, or income tax schedules, or levels of minimum wages, or copyrights laws” (pp. 144-145; Fr. p. 187). Yet if there is no reason why a group of diverse individuals should converge on Rawls’s principles of justice, it is not clear why there should be any consensus about ridding the world of famines, untouchability, epidemics, etc. Indeed, as Sen himself concedes: “Even when all the parties involved have their own complete orderings of justice that are not congruent, the ‘intersection’ between the rankings — that is, the sharedbeliefs of the different parties — will yield a partial ranking with different extents of articulation (depending on the extent of similarity among the orderings)” (pp. 104-105; Fr. p. 141). In other words, agreement will be only as extensive as the degree of commonality among the individual classifications. Extrapolating, one can even say that if the individuals share the same concept of justice, the ranking will be complete. But if their views partially diverge, there is no guarantee that they will agree any more about famine, genocide, or epidemics than they do about income tax schedules. More than that, even if they do agree about the injustice of such scourges, they may not agree about the means of combating them. Does the “capability approach” that Sen stresses in the final part of the book offer an answer to these objections?
Capability
For Sen, “the idea of capability … gives a central role to a person’s actual ability to do the different things that she values doing. … A person’s advantage in terms of opportunities is judged to be lower than that of another if she has less capability — less real opportunity — to achieve those things that she has reason to value” (p. 253, p. 231; p. 284, 279). Sen here refrains from stating any explicit criterion of well-being or justice. Indeed, he insists on the absence of such a criterion and points to “the absurdity of the argument that is sometimes presented, which claims that the capability approach would be usable — and “operational” — only if it [came] with a set of “given” weights on the distinct functionings in some fixed list of relevant capabilities. The search for given, pre-determined weights is not only conceptually ungrounded, but it also overlooks the fact that the valuations and weights to be used may reasonably be influenced by our own continued scrutiny and by the reach of public discussion” (p. 242; Fr. p. 296-297). Thus the decision is left to individual scrutiny and public debate — but that is all we learn about the content that Sen ascribes to the notion of justice. When Sen seeks to refine this concept, he writes that “the capability approach points to an informational focus in judging and comparing overall individual advantages, and does not, on its own, propose any specific formula about how that information may be used. […] The capability perspective does point to the central relevance of the inequality of capabilities in the assessment of social disparities, but it does not, on its own, propose any specific formula for policy decisions” (p. 232; Fr. p. 285). This may prove disappointing to the reader who expects to find in Sen’s work what the introduction promises, namely, a reflection intended to show what should be done to promote justice and eliminate injustice. Sen’s use of technical terminology from social choice theory makes reading The Idea of Justicesomewhat heavy-going (and the difficulty is compounded for the French reader by the rather heavy hand of the translator). Perhaps this is the price to be paid for understanding such a subtle and complex thinker. Although the work suggests new ways of thinking about various ethical doctrines and raises a number of critical questions, and although it does touch on many issues essential to any reflection on the nature of justice (such as the criteria by which one situation is judged to be better than another), Sen does not place himself on the same terrain as the philosophers whose work he challenges. Unlike Rawls (1971) and Bentham (1823), he does not seek to present a complete and fully developed theory of justice to which one might subscribe after examining its arguments. In fact, he limits itself to stating that only “reasoned examination” and “public debate” can establish what is just and what is not.
Translated by Arthur Goldhammer with the support of the Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
It’s so strange to me that these men limit themselves to talk about the illness without even hinting a possible cure. As if we were doomed for ever and society couldn’t move an inch to get out of the absurd pattern that we are in. As soon as we jump from our egocentrism to our “exocentrism”, that is, viewing the world from the whole to the part and not from the part to the imaginary picture of the whole, it’ll be possible to turn our world upside down and upwards!
Even so they formulate the illness beautifully and that makes every word worthy.
The texts get disorganized when moved so it might be better to go to their site and read it there or copy it there and read it elsewhere for more comfort.
“It is also
this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine
let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive
vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its
terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility. !
Jason Read 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009
file:///var/folders/bV/bVvO33opEz4w-3WiEQgS6++++TM/-Tmp-/WebKitPDFs-7A9ZMI/2465-9072-4-PB.pdf
ARTICLE
A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus:
Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity
Jason Read, The University of Southern Maine
ABSTRACT: This article examines Michel Foucault’s critical investigation of neoli-
beralism in the course published as Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège
de France, 1978-1979. Foucault’s lectures are interrogated along two axes. First, ex-
amining the way in which neoliberalism can be viewed as a particular production of
subjectivity, as a way in which individuals are constituted as subjects of “human
capital.” Secondly, Foucault’s analyses is augmented and critically examined in light
of other critical work on neoliberalism by Wendy Brown, David Harvey, Christian
Laval, Maurizo Lazzarato, and Antonio Negri. Of these various debates and discus-
sions, the paper argues that the discussion of real subsumption in Marx and Negri is
most important for understanding the specific politics of neoliberalism. Finally, the
paper argues that neoliberalism entails a fundamental reexamination of the tools of
critical thought, an examination of how freedom can constitute a form of subjection.
Keywords: Foucault, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, real subsumption, subjectivi-
ty.
In the opening pages of David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism we find the
following statement “Neoliberalism… has pervasive effects on ways of thought to
the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us
interpret, live in, and understand the world.”1
1
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
While Harvey’s book presents a great
deal of research on neoliberalism, presenting its origins in such academic institutions
as the “Chicago School,” its spread in the initial experiments in Chile, and its return
to the countries of its origin through the regimes of Reagan and Thatcher, as well as
its effects on China and the rest of the world, the actual process by which it became
hegemonic, to the point of becoming common sense, is not examined. While it might
be wrong to look for philosophy in a work which is primarily a work of history, a
“brief” history at that, aimed at shedding light on the current conjuncture, it is worth
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
26
pointing out this lacuna since it intersects with a commonly accepted idea about
“neoliberalism,” that it is as much a transformation in ideology as it is a transforma-
tion of ideology. Neoliberalism, in the texts that have critically confronted it, is gen-
erally understood as not just a new ideology, but a transformation of ideology in
terms of its conditions and effects. In terms of its conditions, it is an ideology that is
generated not from the state, or from a dominant class, but from the quotidian expe-
rience of buying and selling commodities from the market, which is then extended
across other social spaces, “the marketplace of ideas,” to become an image of society.
Secondly, it is an ideology that refers not only to the political realm, to an ideal of the
state, but to the entirety of human existence. It claims to present not an ideal, but a
reality; human nature. As Fredric Jameson writes, summing up this connection and
the challenge it poses: “The market is in human nature’ is the proposition that can-
not be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is the most crucial terrain of
ideological struggle in our time.”2
The nexus between the production of a particular conception of human nature, a
particular formation of subjectivity, and a particular political ideology, a particular
way of thinking about politics is at the center of Michel Foucault’s research. As much
as Foucault characterized his own project as studying “…the different modes by
which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects,” this process has always in-
tersected with regimes of power/knowledge.
A critical examination of neoliberalism must address this transformation of
its discursive deployment, as a new understanding of human nature and social exis-
tence rather than a political program. Thus it is not enough to contrast neoliberalism
as a political program, analyzing its policies in terms of success or failure. An ex-
amination of neoliberalism entails a reexamination of the fundamental problematic
of ideology, the intersection of power, concepts, modes of existence and subjectivity.
It is in confronting neoliberalism that the seemingly abstract debates of the last thirty
years, debates between poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and neo-Marxists
such as Antonio Negri about the nature of power and the relation between “ideolo-
gies” or “discourses” and material existence, cease to be abstract doctrines and be-
come concrete ways of comprehending and transforming the present. Foucault’s lec-
tures on neoliberalism do not only extend his own critical project into new areas,
they also serve to demonstrate the importance of grasping the present by examining
the way in which the truth and subjectivity are produced.
Homo Economicus: The Subject of Neoliberalism
3
2
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991), 263.
3
Michel Foucault, ”The Subject and Power,” Afterward to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structu-
Thus, it would appear that Foucault’s
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36.
27
work takes up exactly what writers on neoliberalism find to be so vexing: the man-
ner in which neoliberalism is not just a manner of governing states or economies, but
is intimately tied to the government of the individual, to a particular manner of liv-
ing. However, it is well known that Foucault’s research primarily views this relation
from ancient Greece through the nineteenth century, leaving modern developments
such as neoliberalism unaddressed. While this is the general pattern of Foucault’s
work, in the late seventies he devoted a year of his lectures at the Collège de France to
the topic of neoliberalism. These lectures, published as The Birth of Biopolitics, are
something of an anomaly in part because of this shift into the late-twentieth century
and also because unlike other lecture courses, at least those that have been published
in recent years, on “abnormals,” “psychiatric power” and “the hermeneutics of the
subject,” the material from these lectures never made it into Foucault’s published
works.
In order to frame Foucault’s analysis it is useful to begin with how he sees the
distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism. For Foucault, this difference has to
do with the different ways in which they each focus on economic activity. Classical
liberalism focused on exchange, on what Adam Smith called mankind’s tendency to
“barter, truck, and exchange.” It naturalized the market as a system with its own ra-
tionality, its own interest, and its own specific efficiency, arguing ultimately for its
superior efficiency as a distributor of goods and services. The market became a space
of autonomy that had to be carved out of the state through the unconditional right of
private property. What Foucault stresses in his understanding, is the way in which
the market becomes more than just a specific institution or practice to the point
where it has become the basis for a reinterpretation and thus a critique of state pow-
er. Classical liberalism makes exchange the general matrix of society. It establishes a
homology: just as relations in the marketplace can be understood as an exchange of
certain freedoms for a set of rights and liberties.4 Neoliberalism, according to Fou-
cault, extends the process of making economic activity a general matrix of social and
political relations, but it takes as its focus not exchange but competition.5
ralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: Universi-
ty of Chicago Press, 1982), 208.
4
As Foucault writes on this point: “The combination of the savage and exchange is, I
think, basic to juridical thought, and not only to eighteenth century theories of right—we
constantly find the savage exchange couple from the eighteenth century theory of right to
the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both the juridical thought
of the eighteenth century and the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the savage is essentially a man who exchanges.”(Michel Foucault, Society Must Be De-
fended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Pica-
dor, 2003), 194)
5
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans.
Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 12.
What the
two forms of liberalism, the “classical” and “neo” share, according to Foucault, is a
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
28
general idea of “homo economicus,” that is, the way in which they place a particular
“anthropology” of man as an economic subject at the basis of politics. What changes
is the emphasis from an anthropology of exchange to one of competition. The shift
from exchange to competition has profound effects: while exchange was considered
to be natural, competition is understood by the neo-liberals of the twentieth century
to be an artificial relation that must be protected against the tendency for markets to
form monopolies and interventions by the state. Competition necessitates a constant
intervention on the part of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions of the
market.6
What is more important for us is the way in which this shift in “anthropolo-
gy” from “homo economicus” as an exchanging creature to a competitive creature,
or rather as a creature whose tendency to compete must be fostered, entails a general
shift in the way in which human beings make themselves and are made subjects.
First, neoliberalism entails a massive expansion of the field and scope of economics.
Foucault cites Gary Becker on this point: “Economics is the science which studies
human behavior as relationship between ends and scarce means which have alter-
nate uses.”
7
Everything for which human beings attempt to realize their ends, from
marriage, to crime, to expenditures on children, can be understood “economically”
according to a particular calculation of cost for benefit. Secondly, this entails a mas-
sive redefinition of “labor” and the “worker.” The worker has become “human capi-
tal”. Salary or wages become the revenue that is earned on an initial investment, an
investment in one’s skills or abilities. Any activity that increases the capacity to earn
income, to achieve satisfaction, even migration, the crossing of borders from one
country to another, is an investment in human capital. Of course a large portion of
“human capital,” one’s body, brains, and genetic material, not to mention race or
class, is simply given and cannot be improved. Foucault argues that this natural lim-
it is something that exists to be overcome through technologies; from plastic surgery
to possible genetic engineering that make it possible to transform one’s initial in-
vestment. As Foucault writes summarizing this point of view: “Homo economicus is
an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.”8
Foucault’s object in his analysis is not to bemoan this as a victory for capitalist
ideology, the point at which the “ruling ideas” have truly become the ideas of the
“ruling class,” so much so that everyone from a minimum wage employee to a
C.E.O. considers themselves to be entrepreneurs. Nor is his task to critique the fun-
damental increase of the scope of economic rationality in neo-liberal economics: the
assertion that economics is coextensive with all of society, all of rationality, and that
it is economics “all the way down.” Rather, Foucault takes the neo-liberal ideal to be
a new regime of truth, and a new way in which people are made subjects: homo eco-
6
Ibid, 139.
7
Ibid, 235.
8
Ibid., 226.
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36.
29
nomicus is fundamentally different subject, structured by different motivations and
governed by different principles, than homo juridicus, or the legal subject of the state.
Neoliberalism constitutes a new mode of “governmentality,” a manner, or a mentali-
ty, in which people are governed and govern themselves. The operative terms of this
governmentality are no longer rights and laws but interest, investment and competi-
tion. Whereas rights exist to be exchanged, and are some sense constituted through
the original exchange of the social contract, interest is irreducible and inalienable, it
cannot be exchanged. The state channels flows of interest and desire by making de-
sirable activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly, counting on the fact
that subjects calculate their interests. As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism
would seem paradoxically to govern without governing; that is, in order to function
its subjects must have a great deal of freedom to act—to choose between competing
strategies.
The new governmental reason needs freedom; therefore, the new art of govern-
ment consumes freedom. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of
government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in the sense of
the imperative: “be free,” with the immediate contradiction that this imperative
may contain…[T]he liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed
in the eighteenth century entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship
with freedom. Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the es-
tablishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on
threats, etcetera.9
These freedoms, the freedoms of the market, are not the outside of politics, of go-
vernmentality, as its limit, but rather are an integral element of its strategy. As a
mode of governmentality, neoliberalism operates on interests, desires, and aspira-
tions rather than through rights and obligations; it does not directly mark the body,
as sovereign power, or even curtail actions, as disciplinary power; rather, it acts on
the conditions of actions. Thus, neoliberal governmentality follows a general trajec-
tory of intensification. This trajectory follows a fundamental paradox; as power be-
comes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also becomes more intense, saturating the
field of actions, and possible actions.
10
Foucault limits his discussion of neoliberalism to its major theoretical texts
and paradigms, following its initial formulation in post-war Germany through to its
most comprehensive version in the Chicago School. Whereas Foucault’s early ana-
9
Ibid., 63.
10
Jeffrey Nealon has developed the logic of intensification in Foucault, arguing that this can
be seen in the transition from disciplinary power to biopower; the former operates
through specific sites and identities, while the latter operates on sexuality, which is dif-
fuse throughout society, coextensive with subjectivity (Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond
Foucault: Power and its Intensification Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press),
2008, 46). A similar point could be raised with respect to neoliberalism.
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
30
lyses are often remembered for their analysis of practical documents, the description
of the panopticon or the practice of the confessional, the lectures on “neoliberalism”
predominantly follow the major theoretical discussions. This is in some sense a limi-
tation of the lecture course format, or at least a reflection that this material was never
developed into a full study. Any analysis that is faithful to the spirit and not just the
letter of Foucault’s text would focus on its existence as a practice and not just a
theory diffused throughout the economy, state, and society. As Thomas Lemke ar-
gues, neoliberalism is a political project that attempts to create a social reality that it
suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social relations while
fostering those same relations.11 The contemporary trend away from long term labor
contracts, towards temporary and part-time labor, is not only an effective economic
strategy, freeing corporations from contracts and the expensive commitments of
health care and other benefits, it is an effective strategy of subjectification as well. It
encourages workers to see themselves not as “workers” in a political sense, who
have something to gain through solidarity and collective organization, but as “com-
panies of one.” They become individuals for whom every action, from taking
courses on a new computer software application to having their teeth whitened, can
be considered an investment in human capital. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher
write: “Corporations’ massive recourse to subcontracting plays a fundamental role
in this to the extent that it turns the workers’ desire for independence…into a ‘busi-
ness spirit’ that meets capital’s growing need for satellites.”12
Because Foucault brackets what could be considered the “ideological” di-
mension of neoliberalism, its connection with the global hegemony of not only capi-
talism, but specifically a new regime of capitalist accumulation, his lectures have lit-
tle to say about its historical conditions. Foucault links the original articulation of
neoliberalism to a particular reaction to Nazi Germany. As Foucault argues, the orig-
inal neo-liberals, the “Ordo-liberals,” considered Nazi Germany not to be an effect of
capitalism. But the most extreme version of what is opposed to capitalism and the
market—planning. While Foucault’s analysis captures the particular “fear of the
state” that underlies neoliberalism, its belief that any planning, any intervention
against competition, is tantamount to totalitarianism. It however does not account
for the dominance of neoliberalism in the present, specifically its dominance as a
particular “technology of the self,” a particular mode of subjection. At the same time,
Foucault offers the possibility of a different understanding of the history of neolibe-
Neoliberalism is not
simply an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term, or a belief that one could elect
to have or not have, but is itself produced by strategies, tactics, and policies that
create subjects of interest, locked in competition.
11
Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxis, 14, 3
(2002), 60.
12
Eric Alliez and Michel Feher, The Luster of Capital, trans. Alyson Waters, Zone, 1, 2, (1987),
349.
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36.
31
ralism when he argues that neoliberalism, or the neo-liberal subject as homo economi-
cus, or homo entrepreneur, emerges to address a particular lacunae in liberal economic
thought, and that is labor. In this sense neoliberalism rushes to fill the same void, the
same gap, that Marx attempted to fill, without reference to Marx, and with very dif-
ferent results.13 Marx and neo-liberals agree that although classical economic theory
examined the sphere of exchange, the market, it failed to enter the “hidden abode of
production” examining how capital is produced. Of course the agreement ends
there, because what Marx and neo-liberals find in labor is fundamentally different:
for Marx labor is the sphere of exploitation while for the neo-liberals, as we have
seen, labor is no sooner introduced as a problem than the difference between labor
and capital is effaced through the theory of “human capital.”14 Neoliberalism scram-
bles and exchanges the terms of opposition between “worker” and “capitalist.” To
quote Etienne Balibar, “The capitalist is defined as worker, as an ‘entrepreneur’; the
worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital.”15
13
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 221.
14
In The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault argues that Marx filled this void with an “anthropolo-
gy” of labor. This is similar to the critique that Foucault develops in “Truth and Juridical
Forms,” in which he argues that Marx posited labor as the “concrete essence of man.” As
Foucault writes: “So I don’t think we can simply accept the traditional Marxist analysis,
which assumes that, labor being man’s concrete essence, the capitalist system is what
transforms labor into profit, into hyperprofit or surplus value. The fact is capitalism pe-
netrates much more deeply into our existence. That system, as it was established in the
nineteenth century, was obliged to elaborate a set of political techniques, techniques of
power, by which man was tied to something like labor—a set of techniques by which
people’s bodies and time would become labor power and labor time so as to be effective-
ly used and thereby transformed into hyper profit” (Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridi-
cal Forms,” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Three, trans.
Robert Hurley et al. Ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 86). This idea, of
“capillary power relations” that turn man into a subject of labor, is an idea which Fou-
cault sometimes develops as a critique and at other times attributes to Marx, see for ex-
ample “Les Mailles du pouvoir”, in Dits et Écrits Tome IV: 1980-198, ed. D. Defert and F.
Ewald (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994) and less explicitly Discipline and Punish.
15
Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After
Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 53.
Labor is no longer limited
to the specific sites of the factory or the workplace, but is any activity that works to-
wards desired ends. The terms “labor” and “human capital” intersect, overcoming
in terminology their longstanding opposition; the former becomes the activity and
the latter becomes the effects of the activity, its history. From this intersection the
discourse of the economy becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which
every action–crime, marriage, higher education and so on–can be charted according
to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure; it can be seen as an in-
vestment. Thus situating Marx and neoliberalism with respect to a similar problem
makes it possible to grasp something of the politics of neoliberalism, which through
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
32
a generalization of the idea of the “entrepreneur,” “investment” and “risk” beyond
the realm of finance capital to every quotidian relation, effaces the very fact of ex-
ploitation. Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of “capitalism with-
out capitalism,” a way of maintaining not only private property but the existing dis-
tribution of wealth in capitalism while simultaneously doing away with the anta-
gonism and social insecurity of capitalism, in this case paradoxically by extending
capitalism, at least its symbols, terms, and logic, to all of society. The opposition be-
tween capitalist and worker has been effaced not by a transformation of the mode of
production, a new organization of the production and distribution of wealth, but by
the mode of subjection, a new production of subjectivity. Thus, neoliberalism entails a
very specific extension of the economy across all of society; it is not, as Marx argued,
because everything rests on an economic base (at least in the last instance) that the
effects of the economy are extended across of all of society, rather it is an economic
perspective, that of the market, that becomes coextensive with all of society. As
Christian Laval argues, all actions are seen to conform to the fundamental economic
ideas of self-interest, of greatest benefit for least possible cost. It is not the structure
of the economy that is extended across society but the subject of economic thinking,
its implicit anthropology.16
In the Grundrisse, Marx does not use the term “human capital,” but fixed cap-
ital, a term generally used to refer to machinery, factories, and other investments in
the means of production to refer to the subjectivity, the subjective powers of the
worker. In general Marx understood the progression of capital to be a process by
which the skills, knowledge, and know-how of workers were gradually incorporated
into machinery, into fixed capital, reducing the laborer to an unskilled and ultimate-
ly replaceable cog in a machine. This is “proletarianization” the process by which
capitalism produces its gravediggers in a class of impoverished workers who have
nothing to lose but their chains. In the Grundrisse, however, Marx addresses a fun-
Resisting the Present: Towards a Criticism of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is thus a “restoration” not only of class power, of capitalism as the on-
ly possible economic system, it is a restoration of capitalism as synonymous with ra-
tionality. Thus, the question remains, why now, or at least why over the last thirty
years has capitalism taken this neo-liberal turn? If Foucault’s invocation of the spec-
ter of Nazi Germany is insufficient to account for the specific historical formation of
capitalism, the opposition to Marx does little to help clarify the dominance of neoli-
beralism now. Somewhat paradoxically this question can be at least partially ans-
wered by looking at one of the few points of intersection between Marx and neolibe-
ralism.
16
Christian Laval, L’homme économique: Essai sur les racines du néolibéralisme (Paris: Galli-
mard, 2007), 17.
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36.
33
damentally different possibility, capital’s exploitation of not just the physical powers
of the body, but the general social knowledge spread throughout society and embo-
died in each individual. This is what Marx refers to as the “general intellect”—the
diffused social knowledge of society. This knowledge, the capacity to use various
languages, protocols, and symbolic systems, is largely produced outside of work. As
Marx writes: “The saving of labor time is equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time
for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the pro-
ductive power of labor as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint
of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital,
this fixed capital being man himself.”17
For Antonio Negri there is a direct relationship between real subsumption as
a transformation of the capitalist mode of production and neoliberalism as a trans-
formation of the presentation of capitalism. It is not simply that neoliberalism works
to efface the fundamental division between worker and capitalist, between wages
and capital, through the production of neo-liberal subjectivity. After all this opposi-
tion, this antagonism has preexisted neoliberalism by centuries. Neoliberalism is a
discourse and practice that is aimed to curtail the powers of labor that are distri-
buted across all of society—at the exact moment in which all of social existence be-
comes labor, or potential labor, neoliberalism constructs the image of a society of ca-
pitalists, of entrepreneurs. As production moves from the closed space of the factory
to become distributed across all of social space, encompassing all spheres of cultural
and social existence, neoliberalism presents an image of society as a market, effacing
Marx’s deviation from the standard termi-
nology of his own corpus, terminology that designates the worker as labor power (or
living labor), the machine or factory as fixed capital, and money as circulating capi-
tal, is ultimately revealing. It reveals something of a future that Marx could barely
envision, a future that has become our present: the real subsumption of society by
capital. This subsumption involves not only the formation of what Marx referred to
as a specifically capitalist mode of production, but also the incorporation of all sub-
jective potential, the capacity to communicate, to feel, to create, to think, into pro-
ductive powers for capital. Capital no longer simply exploits labor, understood as
the physical capacity to transform objects, but puts to work the capacities to create
and communicate that traverse social relations. It is possible to say that with real
subsumption capital has no outside, there is no relationship that cannot be trans-
formed into a commodity, but at the same time capital is nothing but outside, pro-
duction takes place outside of the factory and the firm, in various social relation-
ships. Because of this fundamental displacement subjectivity becomes paramount,
subjectivity itself becomes productive and it is this same subjectivity that must be
controlled.
17
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nico-
laus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 712.
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
34
production altogether.18 This underscores the difference between neoliberalism as a
form of power and the disciplinary power at work in the closed spaces of the factory.
If disciplinary power worked by confining and fixing bodies to the production appa-
ratuses, neoliberal power works by dispersing bodies and individuals through pri-
vatization and isolation. Deregulation, the central term and political strategy of neo-
liberalism, is not the absence of governing, or regulating, but a form of governing
through isolation and dispersion.19 As more and more wealth is produced by the col-
lective social powers of society, neoliberalism presents us with an image of society
made up of self-interested individuals. For Negri, neoliberalism and the idea of hu-
man capital is a misrepresentation of the productive powers of society. “The only
problem is that extreme liberalization of the economy reveals its opposite, namely
that the social and productive environment is not made up of atomized individu-
als…the real environment is made up of collective individuals.”20 In Negri’s analysis,
the relation between neoliberalism and real subsumption takes on the characteristics
of a Manichean opposition. We are all workers or we are all capitalists: either view
society as an extension of labor across all social spheres, from the factory to the
school to the home, and across all aspects of human existence, from the work of the
hands to the mind, or view society as a logic of competition and investment that en-
compasses all human relationships. While Negri’s presentation has an advantage
over Foucault’s lectures in that it grasps the historical formation of neoliberalism
against the backdrop of a specific transformation of capital, in some sense following
Foucault’s tendency to present disciplinary power and biopower against the back-
drop of specific changes in the economic organization of society, it does so by almost
casting neoliberalism as an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term. It would ap-
pear that for Negri real subsumption is the truth of society, and neoliberalism is only
a misrepresentation of that truth. As Thomas Lemke has argued, Foucault’s idea of
governmentality, is argued against such a division that posits actual material reality
on one side and its ideological misrepresentation on the other. A governmentality is
a particular mentality, a particular manner of governing, that is actualized in habits,
perceptions, and subjectivity. Governmentality situates actions and conceptions on
the same plane of immanence.21
18
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1994), 226.
19
Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, trans.
James Newell (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 99.
20
Ibid., 206.
21
Lemke, 54.
Which is to say, that any criticism of neoliberalism
as governmentality must not focus on its errors, on its myopic conception of social
existence, but on its particular production of truth. For Foucault, we have to take se-
riously the manner in which the fundamental understanding of individuals as go-
verned by interest and competition is not just an ideology that can be refused and
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36.
35
debunked, but is an intimate part of how our lives and subjectivity are structured.
Despite Negri’s tendency to lapse back into an opposition between labor and
ideology, his object raises important questions echoed by other critics of neoliberal-
ism. What is lost in neoliberalism is the critical distance opened up between different
spheres and representations of subjectivity, not only the difference between work
and the market, as in Marxism, but also the difference between the citizen and the
economic subject, as in classical liberalism. All of these differences are effaced as one
relation; that of economic self-interest, or competition, replaces the multiple spaces
and relations of worker, citizen, and economic subject of consumption. To put the
problem in Foucault’s terms, what has disappeared in neoliberalism is the tactical
polyvalence of discourse; everything is framed in terms of interests, freedoms and
risks.22 As Wendy Brown argues, one can survey the quotidian effects or practices of
governmentality in the manner in which individualized/market based solutions ap-
pear in lieu of collective political solutions: gated communities for concerns about
security and safety; bottled water for concerns about water purity; and private
schools (or vouchers) for failing public schools, all of which offer the opportunity for
individuals to opt out rather than address political problems.23 Privatization is not
just neoliberalism’s strategy for dealing with the public sector, what David Harvey
calls accumulation by dispossession, but a consistent element of its particular form
of governmentality, its ethos, everything becomes privatized, institutions, structures,
issues, and problems that used to constitute the public.24 It is privatization all the
way down. For Brown, neoliberalism entails a massive de-democratization, as terms
such as the public good, rights and debate, no longer have any meaning. “The model
neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her or himself among various social, po-
litical, and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize
these options.”25
Foucault’s development, albeit partial, of account of neoliberalism as go-
vernmentality has as its major advantage a clarification of the terrain on which neo-
Thus, while it is possible to argue that neoliberalism is a more flexi-
ble, an open form of power as opposed to the closed spaces of disciplines, a form of
power that operates on freedoms, on a constitutive multiplicity, it is in some sense
all the more closed in that as a form of governmentality, as a political rationality, it is
without an outside. It does not encounter any tension with a competing logic of
worker or citizen, with a different articulation of subjectivity. States, corporations,
individuals are all governed by the same logic, that of interest and competition.
22
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage, 1978), 101.
23
Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and Democrati-
zation,” Political Theory, 34, 6 (2006), 704.
24
David Harvey, 154.
25
Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework: Critical
Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2005), 43.
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
36
liberalism can be countered. It is not enough to simply oppose neoliberalism as ide-
ology, revealing the truth of social existence that it misses, or to enumerate its vari-
ous failings as policy. Rather any opposition to neoliberalism must take seriously its
effectiveness, the manner in which it has transformed work subjectivity and social
relationships. As Foucault argues, neoliberalism operates less on actions, directly
curtailing them, then on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibil-
ity. The reigning ideal of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so
much limit what one can do, neoliberal thinkers are famously indifferent to prescrip-
tive ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational investment,
but limit the sense of what is possible. Specifically the ideal of the fundamentally
self-interested individual curtails any collective transformation of the conditions of
existence. It is not that such actions are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a
sovereign or the structures of disciplinary power, they are not seen as possible,
closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals. It is perhaps no acci-
dent that one of the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Mar-
garet Thatcher, used the slogan, “there is no alternative,” legitimating neoliberalism
based on the stark absence of possibilities. Similarly, and as part of a belated re-
sponse to the former Prime Minister, it also perhaps no accident that the slogan of
the famous Seattle protests against the IMF and World Bank was, “another world is
possible,” and it is very often the sense of a possibility of not only another world, but
of another way of organizing politics that is remembered, the image of turtles and
teamsters marching hand and hand, when those protests are referred to.26
26
Maurizio Lazzarato, Les révolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), 19.
It is also
this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine
let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive
vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its
terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility.
Naked in the public square
Freedom Watch
By HARVEY SILVERGLATE AND JAMES TIERNEY | June 25, 2008
In the finest Puritan tradition, Middlesex District Attorney Gerald Leone is crusading to save Harvard Square from the shock and awe of the nude human form. The next act of this absurd political-theater production will return to Cambridge District Court this Friday, at considerable expense to taxpayers.
Naked in the public square
By HARVEY SILVERGLATE AND JAMES TIERNEY | June 25, 2008 It’s possible the DA recognizes that, despite his victory at the SJC, the lewdness prosecution is eventually doomed. If Ora is convicted and her lawyer, Daniel Beck, was to take the case to federal court, the charges would likely not withstand a First Amendment challenge. Plus, as Beck told Singleton in a recently filed brief, the lewdness complaint never should have been issued against Ora in the first place, since those charges in Massachusetts have been successfully prosecuted only when the cases involved “overtly sexual behavior in public”; a defendant who “exposed himself to a targeted person . . . , usually minors (so-called flashing)”; or a defendant who “exposed himself in the attempt or commission of a sexual assault.”
According to Beck, the evidence the clerk heard when issuing the complaint against Ora wasn’t consistent with any of those situations. And if the SJC requires “alarm or shock,” what Ora did doesn’t stack up, either. Beck is rightly asking the judge to throw out the case (again).
This may be why the DA has supplemented the charges against Ora by seeking a new complaint for “indecent exposure,” on the assumption that somehow the proof needed for that charge would be lower than for “open and gross lewdness.” This application, too, will be heard on Friday. But since Ora’s conduct is likely constitutionally protected, it doesn’t matter whether it’s described as lewdness or indecency. The Middlesex County DA is grasping at straws, playing with words, and wasting taxpayer money.
Harvey Silverglate is a criminal-defense and civil-liberties lawyer and writer. James F. Tierney is an incoming law student at the University of Chicago and was Silverglate’s research assistant this year.
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/63885-Naked-in-the-public-square/?page=2#TOPCONTENT#ixzz142N0pSwX
Most of the street performers in the Square are innocuous, but some can be edgy. On June 25, 2005, street performer and political activist Ria Ora danced naked in the Pit. It wasn’t gratuitous nudity; she purported to be denouncing the commercialization of Christmas on the half-year anniversary of that holiday.
But Ora’s nude dancing apparently offended an employee of the Out of Town News kiosk, who called the cops. The officers arrested Ora and persuaded the Cambridge District Court clerk to issue a complaint against her for “open and gross lewdness.”
Judge Severlin Singleton III dismissed the charges the first time around, reasoning that the lewdness law as written is “[a] blanket prohibition against public nudity” that unconstitutionally “proscribes expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.” When the DA appealed, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) reversed Singleton’s decision. That appellate ruling not only prolongs the case against Ora, it makes it harder for adventurous street performers to express themselves.
According to the SJC, the lewdness law may be invoked only if two conditions co-exist: the “lewdness” (in the Ora case, nudity) is “imposed on an unsuspecting or unwilling audience,” and “the display of nudity [is] intentional, done in a manner to produce alarm or shock, and actually [produces] alarm or shock.”
Almost all street-performance art, including art that is conceivably offensive to some audience member, is by its nature “imposed on an unsuspecting or unwilling audience.” But why should we single out Ora’s performance — given the Square’s off-beat atmosphere — as being particularly alarming or shocking, and leave it unprotected under the First Amendment?
The SJC has given the DA another chance to fit the facts into a narrowed reading of the law, but successful prosecution still seems unlikely. Many forms of expression, after all, “produce alarm or shock” — including nudity in such familiar contexts as movies — but are nonetheless protected.
In one famous example, a young anti-war protester, Paul Cohen, was convicted in 1968 for wearing a jacket emblazoned with FUCK THE DRAFT inside the Los Angeles Courthouse. The US Supreme Court threw out his conviction in Cohen v. California, in part because the justices recognized that his use of “fuck,” shocking though it may be to an involuntary audience, was integral to his forceful political message. As Justice John Marshall Harlan observed in Cohen, perceptions of offense are always subjective; indeed, “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”
The SJC’s attempt to determine whether a public act is alarming or shocking, and therefore potentially lewd and prosecutable, does not seem to jibe with Cohen’s recognition that shocking the audience is one function of free expression — not a ground for censorship. Still, the SJC’s definitions will govern the “open and gross lewdness” prosecution on Friday.
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/63885-Naked-in-the-public-square/#ixzz142L351Dw
This poem was taken from facebook, I don’t know if Dan wrote it but there’s no other signature
Dan
The Power of Emptiness
The “void” or “ psychological emptiness” is a strange
phenomenon,
It appears spontaneously, in the pause between two
thoughts,
As the old thought ends its course and disappears,
Its end is the gate, natural silence ensues.
Insist in being with it, as much as you can,
The mind is completely silent, we are attentive – a clear
consciousness,
All meanings, boundaries disappear – us and the Infinite
are “One”;
Practically, we have a new mind – always fresh.
Being in the pause – I become infinite!
It separates two worlds. I leave the limited world
And enter Boundlessness, through total melting;
The whole being is calm – a constant sparkle.
There is no time, no space – just everlasting Eternity;
I move in direct contact with life, in a permanent present.
I am Pure Energy, without motivations,
The simplicity of existence integrates us completely.
We really encounter Life only through this “now”,
Free from the old, we are able to embrace the new.
All this beauty vanishes, when another thought appears,
It comes from the knowing mind – an old recording.
Let it play its game, do not oppose any resistance,
Encounter it as it is, without any purpose,
It will certainly disappear, and “emptiness” ensues again,
Another opportunity to encounter it practically.
We find the real meaning of Life through this “void”,
It is a boundary line between the two worlds:
On the one side the limited, where the “ego” is the
master.
On the other, the Infinite, where Love is the master.
Emptiness also separates Light from the darkness,
The permanent chaos through struggle, contradictions and
conflicts,
From the harmonious being, equilibrium and joy;
The whole egocentrism perishes, by encountering the
void.
Peace, divine order becomes our nature
It changes our way of being, without effort or will,
Only through this psychological void, we become honest
and humane,
The Purity of the Energy – makes titans out of pigmies .
Let this “psychological emptiness” be your guide,
In everything you encounter on your spiritual path.
If it is not the starting point, we easily get deceived,
Only through emptiness – we become Love!
Poem for a dear friend
We sit in the room
you look out of the window
wondering where life is
The dog
wagging its tail
the ball in its mouth
inviting to play
Life, is still out of the window
Rays of sunshine
fall on your hair
beautiful
your skin fair
lights up
in the smile of your heart
Your eyes
still outside
Is it art what ennobles our lives
or us who ennoble our art?
The artist rests in his bed
and lives for eternity in our self
lit up by the work
Every excuse is worth sharing our time
but the door is open wide
Nothing is enough if there’s nobody there
Love grows on trees
when there’s someone to pick the fruit
This umbrella is small my friend
but please take it with you
for the rain
Porque no he tenido hogar me he tenido que volver el hogar de mi misma.
Y sin embargo gozo con las calles, las casas y los edificios como si fueran todos mi hogar y reconociera en los corredores soleados y las matas verdes de alegría algo más profundo que la casa, más esencial que la nación, al ser humano que palpita en el espacio público.
Donde poner tanto gozo? Con quien compartirlo? lo guardo entonces en los pliegues de mi sonrisa interior, el corazón que late más lentamente a medida que se ensancha su capacidad de abrazar en un aliento el palpitar de la vida.
Soy feliz! Not happy sino feliz! Es extraño que en inglés no podemos decir que somos felices con la misma palabra y que la felicidad sea algo completamente diferente para los angloparlantes que para los hispanos.
Hablamos de felicidad cuando el alma vibra con su propia existencia abierta como una flor que en su color invita al sol a posarse, mientras la abeja liba en su seno.
Feliz! De que el mundo sea! Feliz! De que seamos! Feliz! De vivir y morir, vivir muriendo y morir viviendo. Me admiro ante el aliento con que otros viven y mueren, corren y recorren sus propios caminos, dejan que alcen vuelo sus almas y aterrizan en las mañanas en sus lechos para vivir un día más, las pequeñas cosas de cada día.
Es hermoso vivir! Y morir. No pienso correrle a la muerte aunque no tenga afán de encontrarla. Ya nos intuímos en el cuerpo que ella alienta, oscureciéndose. Siempre ha estado allí como el ruedo detrás de la falda de la vida.
Gozo. Goza mi alma. Goza y se regocija de gozar, sola y en silencio. Como se dirá gozar en inglés? No lo se aunque sepa más ingles que español pero este goce que sentimos en Español no existe en el diccionario británico, no entienden mis hermanos angloparlantes lo que digo cuando goza mi alma. En todo Shakespeare no han gozado como El Quijote! Talvez más pero nunca igual. Quizá el sol nunca alcanzó a calentarles tanto las pantorrillas para gozar con la hoja de plátano, el descascarado arbol de guayaba o el frondoso mango. Sus plantas tendrán y sus almas gozarán como las nuestras cuando en la adultes recuerdan los caminos de la niñez que ya talaron. Humanos al fín de cuentas, aunque pocos lo recuerden, gozamos todos con la misma certeza, el aliento de la niñez.
There’s something very strange about the fact that in English we cannot express something like gozo without saying I. The fact that the I is implicit in the form of the verb gives the soul of a Spanish speaker a very different dimension of the experience. I enjoy, I speak, I walk, I live are very different to gozo, habla, camino, vivo. It is inevitably less self centered than I enjoy, I speak…
The fact that gozo implies that I enjoy but is not explicit about it, allows me to feel that there’s something rather general about it, wonderfully general, like a “state” of joy to which I am a part but that that state of joy is in itself an even more objective reality than my self. I enjoy, I speak, seems to center around the I more than the act while gozo, hablo, centers around the act more than the individuality. A very different emotion and experience is connected with the words.
In the US this “I am””I do” is very active while in England the I is less emphatic and the “could” and “would” soften it a great deal: could I come with you? Would you like me to work here? I would like to come, I would very much enjoy it…
I heard an English lady in an interview the other day and she said, “the lady gives very extreme examples that might work in America but England is different” talking about the woman who pays drug-addicts to get a vasectomy. I immediately realized that she was talking about the particular subjectivity of the people in each country. I also understood why it is very difficult for American or Europeans to take my language. There is something about how the language is spoken that will not help people understand each other and together with the kind of language a whole different approach to life is contained in it and that also makes it very difficult for people from different nations to understand each other. Only when we’re able to go beyond our nationalities into a more objective human reality, will we be able to communicate with each other. This cannot happen by itself, we must want it to happen and make it happen. New generations through the internet might some day come closer to that when they actually meet.
We live such different lives. The people in Medellín where I live, live inhuman lives. Women and men are killed easily by the men they owe money to for a hundred or two hundred dollars so that others become afraid and pay. Teenagers are killed by older teenagers if they are a little too strong so that they won’t be the ones killing them when they get old enough. The gang leaders are so because they’ve killed the most people.
People are killed everyday in miserable crimes and the news don’t even talk about them. The politicians are corrupt and so is most everybody else with power connections. The few who are not are counted and quickly taken care of by the sicarios, the teenage hired killers.
There is tremendous suffering in this country. The inhumanity and absurdity of things is experienced daily. The ignorance, the human poverty, the fear of the people and the hopelessness. The people pray and leave their destiny to God, like in cults.
When will we start working seriously towards a more human world?
The effort is the same but the reward much more dignified.
The suffering is as much but the quality of life much more genuine.
In the low income neighborhoods of Medellin, the system of debt is called the Daily Pay. People borrow small sums for an urgency and then have to pay a little everyday.Most people are borrowing. If they don’t pay they are killed not so much because the little they owe matters but because the lenders need to reassure everyone that they cannot not pay. The mother of a friend of my neighbour was stabbed brutally because she owed a hundred dollars. A man who sells hot dogs told me that he ended up working to pay the debt without enough to keep anything for himself and so left the neighbourhood before they killed him. There is much fear and tension.
Apparently the Daily Pay system was started by paramilitary who wanted to invest all the money they get from drug trafficking.
Prison camps and cults.
We are One
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=677084988379129606#
What is interesting about this video when one compares the experiment with what happens in cults is that it doesn’t matter if people are dressed up and their ego puffed up, given concerts every week and good food, as long as they are willing to obey others as authorities and alienate themselves from the rest of the world, they’ll end up in a process of self annihilation. At least in prisons people keep up their hatred towards the establishment as long as possible but in cults, they end up “loving” or becoming completely emotionally dependent victims. The perpetrators of the brainwashing become convinced that it is justified. That their mistreatment is what they are meant to do. In cults the forms this takes are different. Those in the inner circle who represent the authority don’t express outward violence, they impose emotional violence through indifference. The individuals who don’t play the game are socially ignored, nothing is shared with them and they are allowed to pay but not to participate. All these things happened to me because I never played the game even when I married Girard Haven, the second in command. I opposed him in every meal and kept holding up the system but everything was used to their advantage.
I was talking about this experiment two or three years ago in the fofblog and they are only just beginning to bear to listen to the information in this material. What people don’t want to understand is that cults submit people with triffles, pretty things and comfort but the long term effect is exactly the same as if they were being submitted in a prison camp. The mass suicide in cults is the final effect of the organization. Self annihilation is the result. In prison camps people don’t seem to come to such self annihilating mechanism, they hold out or become aggressive towards others but not themselves as clearly as in cults. This is what I’ve been saying for three years and this is exactly what they were not willing to listen to in the fofblog. It is a very painful reality to accept but it is there absolutely clear for those who understand the mechanisms.
Supporting laws that protect such cults is acting against the well being of humanity. Religion everywhere has used these mechanisms and cults, as microcosmic reflections of the outside world turn the same mechanism inside out and use them to their agenda. People are being used, manipulated and annihilated without there being anyone willing to stop it in the United States. France is beginning to act seriously against these organizations and apparently Germany too but they are still protected in most parts of the world.
My criticism of the United States and its position in relation to cults is what led to my being banned from the fofblog besides my frustration and negativity at realizing that these people couldn’t hear what I was saying. We reached a critical point and were unable to move beyond it. They were still not ready to move beyond it when they allowed me in again. They were hoping I had settled for their truths and was going to “behave” like in a cult and release them from confronting the problem, only to find that they were doubly confronted, banning me a second time. My friend Ton acted like these people in the experiment and took the role of “submitting” me trying to convince me that I was crazy and couldn’t know enough or know with enough authority what I was saying but I know what I’ve been saying all the time and there’s nothing crazy about it. I studied the mechanisms of such psychological processes when I was eighteen in The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich. What is amazing is that I fell in the trap like everybody else but at least I got out of it. Too many are still inside. The madness is in those that hide themselves from seeing the truth about cults and in not wanting to see the truth about themselves: their own beauty and humanity, their own self.
The tragedy of our times is that people have stranded from their essence so badly that they have become systematically used to acting against their own self. They no longer trust themselves enough to protest or exist in their own right just like the prisoners in the experiment. They live within the folds of positions of power or victims of power without questioning the role. Their “being” or rather, the “state” of their being is expressed in their inability to allow their own consciousness to extend beyond the role into the sphere of the human being and our freedom to choose our destiny. In as much as they don’t feel free, they, we, continue to submit to the status quo everywhere without being able to act differently just like the prisoners in the experiment. The lack of social cohesion is what keeps us tied to the role, incapable of acting against the status quo and those in positions of authority. The need to belong, the self protecting mechanism of the instinctive center, keeps us tied to the least dangerous behavior trying to survive at all cost by keeping a low profile rather than speaking up against the status quo and those in power.
Submitting and accepting the status quo keeps our consciousness tied to the identifications established by the programming that we’ve come to inherit. We act and react like our parents acted and reacted, very few people step out of the mold of their own family because they cannot free themselves from their identifications with their own family. That identification conforms part of the imaginary picture of themselves. People need to free themselves not only from the identifications they hold in relation to their family, we must free our selves from the identifications that the social environment in which we grew up implanted in our outer skin or personality and also free ourselves from the identification with our “nationality”. The human stands beyond all these identifications. Each of our acts is conditioned by each of these identifications. When the act is not born in the human it is an act that re-enacts the identification implanted in us by our family, social environment and nation. It is the repetition of the mechanism without consciousness and it is in these sense that it is “mechanical”, a reaction and not an action. It is also in this sense that “man cannot do”. Mechanical man cannot “do” because he is living out the “instinctive” aspect of a human being’s life not different to an animal and becomes a social being that is merely acting and reacting to survive within that society accepting its status quo without questioning it or his own self. It is only when a human being is capable of freeing his own self from his or her programming and is able to act according to his or her consciousness that real “ACTS” or “doing” actually becomes possible.
Evolution cannot take place through repetition of conditioned behavior just like creativity is not there when an artist copies another great artist. A human being can only “evolve” and hence “create” from his and her own self, from Real I. This is the only difference between human beings and animals in terms of their evolution. Animals cannot experience a creative act, they are, like unconscious human beings, repeating the conditioned behavior that they were submitted to. The possibilities of surviving without that conditioned behavior are null. The human being might not have the possibility of surviving for long when he or she frees him or herself from the conditioned behavior, it is the pattern in history that such individuals are persecuted and crucified as quickly as possible. These men and women in history or “our life” are, like the “I”s within an individual, forces of consciousness for the rest of us helping us towards greater freedom.
There is nothing particularly different in these individuals than in the rest of the human beings. Everyone is capable of freeing him and herself from his or her identifications from the family, the particular society and the national conditionings. Freeing one’s self from ones family, particular society and nationality does not mean separating one’s self from one’s family, society or nationality, or turning against them as happens in cults. It means freeing one’s self from the conditionings within these spheres that have fallen into a descending octave and turned against the human spirit. Every individual vivifies or vilifies the human spirit in each one of his and her acts no matter who or where he or she is acting. Every individual acts against his or her own self or that of others in every act or acts for the well being of his or her own self and that of others in each act. Conditioned by our identifications we fail to act up to the well being of our selves or others until we free our selves from our identifications and begin to act according to our consciousness no matter the consequences.
Every single human being is the man in Plato’s cavern pointing at the light outside, the moment we free ourselves from our identifications. The shadows on the wall are our identifications and those who become free of them can see the tragedy of the situation.
“Tragedy” in the fact that human beings live, not like animals who do not harm each other willingly but like inhuman beings who hurt each other generation after generation unable to bring their instinct above their individualism into consciousness of the whole: the whole of mankind: humanity. We are equal not because we have the same amounts of money or because we belong to the same family or nationality, we are equal because we are each and everyone of us a human being. Each individual is merely a cell of mankind. In our lack of consciousness we act against each other. Consciously we cannot move a finger against anyone else or our selves. This world that we share is the stage in which we are playing out our evolution or the possibility of surviving our own destructive capacities. We are all in the same theater no matter how lonely we think we are, no matter how individualistic we pretend to be. Nations have their own role in our evolution just like the different centers in our body have a role. Each nation is developing aspects of our selves. Each one has its own greatness. But just like a leg is not a man, a nation is not the whole of the human being nor should it stand as the chosen one against others. It no longer matters what nation we belong to if we cannot be human towards each other. The difficulties we are facing cannot be resolved by only one nation. Hunger, violence, the climate change, the unnecessary production of millions and millions of items that we not only don’t need but are harming us is a world wide problem that we need to resolve in every nation. The absurd treatment of our natural resources, the contamination of land and people with chemicals are all aspects of our unconscious behavior in the individualism of the many to exploit what is there for everyone for their personal interest. It is not only the problem of those in power. Those in power are, just like those in the video, as unconscious of what they are doing as those under their power. It is not US victims against those perpetrators, we are all equally unconscious of the situation, we are all playing the roles we were placed in without being able or willing to free our selves from our conditionings. It is not a great man or a great woman who can free us at this point. Each individual must begin to act out their own consciousness and remove themselves from situations in which they are abusing themselves or others. People must stop working in factories that exploit them not only economically but humanly. It is their human integrity what is suffering a lot more than their pocket. In these factories people lose their humaneness because their creativity is shunned and their submission is not only given by the fact that they are paid less, it is given by the fact that they are placed in positions in which they cannot develop their creative life. Ironically, people in lower classes have to resort to great creativity to make something of their lives and the social cohesion within them does not distort them psychologically as badly as people in the upper classes who become even more trapped in the status quo. In both classes people are equally identified with their programming but in the lower classes the mechanisms are less rigid and allow for more freedom as well as condition the people to more humane contact. This is why in the long run, people in the lower classes tend to replace the people in the upper classes that stagnate in their decadence.
When looked at from a very different perspective, if we were to guess that the process of acquiring consciousness of our selves as human beings were revealed in our political history and our struggle for greater democracy, we would be able to understand that the characteristics of every social struggle is leading not only towards more individual consciousness but towards the individual’s consciousness of the whole. When we mature in this process, we will be unable to continue acting towards the world’s resources with the same unconsciousness and abuse with which we have been acting. Cars can no longer be the means of transporting each other. Or at least not cars that produce so much damage. The car, more than anything else, expresses the levels of individual unconsciousness that we’ve managed to reach in the United States and gradually everywhere else. Not cars or industries or anything that harms us or others in the short or long term. Our unwillingness to develop great public transportation is an aspect of our misunderstanding of the Public Sphere or the sphere of Our Selves. The world, that is, these Earth with each and all its resources belongs to ALL of us and no man or nation has the right to use any of them for his or its personal interests if we are to act consciously not from our little individualistic self but from the consciousness of our humanity.
People everywhere are beginning to understand this reality. We need to help each other so very much, in every part of the world.
I am a little tired to correct this today, I will try to do so tomorrow, please forgive me the mistakes.
re: “we” identification
and civilization is not “our” friend…
Hi Ton,
What makes you think that We is identification? or I, you, they, Us? The identification is not in the language but in the individual my friend.
Is this man with his purely instinctive understanding of civilization what you call civilization? And the fact that we are dependent on each other, not friendly?
Yes, there’s a huge inner step that needs to be taken to understand that we are not only dependent on each other but that we can rely and trust each other and that the oil in the world is for all of us, to use for our benefit and not to cause great damage to our selves and nature. The car industry is the expression of such individualistic mentality and the damages it creates needs to be stopped. Not only the environmental damages but the psychological underpinnings of a culture that was created with it in which individualism was taken to inhuman extremes rendering people more selfish and self centered than is in our human nature only for the purpose of selling more cars. The public service was not developed as coherently and efficiently as it could have been developed so that the car producers could sell more cars.
In terms of the Work, it is an over-extension of the moving instinctive center in society, acting against the well being of the human being, in other words: uncivilized.
Civilization is the balance of all areas of life for the well being of humanity. A “civil” individual is one who is conscious enough for each of his or her acts to be not only for his or her personal benefit but for the well being of the whole. The lack of consciousness in people who do business to benefit only themselves knowing that their business is harmful to others is obvious. It’s the difference between acting from the “ego” or selfish and false identity or acting from the “I” or conscious identity. Every individual man and woman is putting his and her personal imprint in the rest of society in each and every one of his and her acts. The fact that this reality is barely perceived by most people is an aspect of our levels of consciousness today. People think their acts affect only themselves, that they don’t “count” for the rest of society and this is precisely an aspect of the generalized state of depression of so many individuals in our societies. The more connected, the more reliable interdependency between an individual and his or her group of people and society, the higher the level of self-trust and capacity for joy.
In our times there’s an schizophrenic behavior in our societies in which politics, science, economy, religion and the arts are not working together but making tremendous independent efforts for the privilege of those in economic power for whom everyone else is working. This reveals the state of our consciousness as human beings. It is not that those in economic power KNOW what they are doing, they are acting as unconsciously as the rest and are as much the victims of such status quo as the rest. Having more “things”, having more “money” but being equally separated from the whole is equally “depressing”. In rich societies like that of Sweden and in the small pockets of high income groups in every nation, we can verify that balanced well being does not come from owning more things. There are more or less balanced well beings in every niche of society and it does not depend on the economic conditioning but on the freedom from any such conditionings: not because one is rich one has to mistreat others, not because one is economically in disadvantage, one has to submit to power. There is an individual inner freedom when individuals understand that their humaneness is above their economic, academic, national or family upbringing.
If we were talking about an individual, we would be seeing a man whose mind acted randomly separated from his or her body and emotional life, which is in fact the case of most human beings today. We are split in our lives because there is no coherence or harmony between the individual and society. Individuals are struggling to survive in a society that acts against their well being and society is struggling to survive with individuals that are not conscious of each other’s connectedness, interdependency and humaneness. Men run around looking for more and more women to have sex with, without investing themselves in the family leaving women and children to fend for themselves. Women run around trying to make sense of the madness, making their own living in a world that still takes more money out of their pay check than men, trying to participate in society like men do, taking as much energy out of the family as men have and leaving the children to fend for themselves without being able to. These are the saddest aspects of “OUR” present madness.
The crisis of the “state”, the “governments” today, is that they allowed for the moving, instinctive aspects of society to grow phenomenally allowing its few representatives to acquire excesses that belong to the whole, which made them very “fat” but equally sick. They die because their heart is not strong enough to hold that amount of greed: no heart is.
Globalization means that we are moving towards one government and the people of each nation are so identified with themselves that they are struggling to keep their individualism but a conscious unity of human beings should not deform the essence of any nationality, on the contrary, it should empower it and allow it to flourish just like the support of a family for its children allows them to develop more fully in society. The full support of all humans for the qualities of the people of each nation should allow us to develop all the dimensions within us in this Earthly Sphere. We live very difficult times in which almost nothing is of any value but the greatness of the human being is present in the culture of every nation.
The nations in power today have become so by exploiting the resources of all the world. Their richness does not belong to them only but to all of us and we should all be grateful for what we’ve given each other: the resources to develop and the capacity to develop those resources into new and greater developments for democracy. We are talking today, you and I, because of these developments. It is a very beautiful phenomena!
We can look at this condition from the point of view of judging and condemning our selves and the actions of those who have most powerfully developed such levels of individualism or we can look at it from the point of view that every step that has been taken by each and every individual and nation was necessary for the development of our consciousness, including every mistake that was and is being made. Falling is part of the process of learning to walk. I am today personally inclined for the latter.
We live very interesting times Ton. The consciousness I am expressing is also current in our times. There are many efforts being made to close the gaps between our multiple centers and our consciousness, individually as much as socially.
Thanks for your post. I realize this is long and you don’t have the time or the interest for such long thoughts but I thank you for giving me the opportunity to develop what I am working on.
elena ‘my friend’ —
“What makes you think that We is identification? or I, you, they, Us? The identification is not in the language but in the individual my friend.”
apparently you don’t know the first thing about ‘identification’ so here’s a clue: any thought you espouse and attach yourself to with such fundamental conviction — as you do here over and again — this is a form of ‘identification — and, “my friend,” language is an expression of thought, therefore it does reflect an individual’s identifications.
from ‘such long thoughts’ as you identify with here (this sounds like something you read in a rodney collin book) — “such long thoughts” as you express here are not so much ‘thinking’ but rather, “such long thoughts” represent reactionary impulses, regurgitations and ‘philosphical’ pablum mixed up with narcisstic indulgences — it’s obvious in your writings that you don’t understand, nor do you recognize your own identifications.
the “royal we” you are so fond of speaking of, is a continual strand of arrogance which runs thoughout whatever it is you ‘think’ you’re ‘doing’ here –you insistently claim to speak for the imaginary “WE” and “US” and now you’re implying that you are not identified with this notion which you’ve concocted for yourself?! that you’re not identified with the imaginary and very lofty ‘royal’ perspective you’ve worked so long to cultivate!?! i don’t know what’s more absurd and preposterous, speaking (writing) as often as you do in terms of “the royal we,” or now, the implication that you’re not “identified” with this notion. just ridiculous.
when you say, or write, or think “I,” you of course have an idea about “yourself” and “naturally” you identify with it. when you say “you” (about me for example), unless it’s an honest and open-minded question, you’re assuming with arrogantly imagined omniscience, that you know what i am about, you identify with your ‘thoughts’ about the other, so you cannot hear the other, you can never really know what the other is about, you only ‘know’ your idea about the other, and you are not even aware of the process… that’s identification. for example you write: ” I realize this is long and you don’t have the time or the interest for such long thoughts but I thank you for giving me the opportunity to develop what I am working on.” even if you did bother to listen to what derrick jensen said in the video, it’s obvious you didn’t take it in, you obviously didn’t bother keeping an open mind and so you didn’t understand…. based on your response, your “long thought,” you simply (mechanically) went into your typical reactionary-defiant ‘program’ because it was “ton” who posted the link…
hopefully one day you will realize that maturity means coming to the realization that your own point of view, that is, the point of view you identify with, is but one of many possible points of view — to remain open-minded enough to hear another is / will be a huge step forward for you… listening is not easy for someone who thinks they already know it all… nor is listening easy for someone who is negatively predisposed toward another. think of listening to another as a temporary act of self-surrender, and as such, real listening is a true act of unconditional love.
Hi Ton,
I know very little but I can trust what I know.
I only just watched the first video and was gladly surprised that we coincide on a few things. That is the man you present and I. Not too many though, he is certainly not the model I would like to follow but thanks anyway.
It’s sad to observe the fact that you haven’t moved an inch after all these years. There is more here than you are willing to look at and I can’t be bothered with your personal attacks any more than you with the issues that I present.
Life is good these days, a lot of work and much appreciation. My sincere thanks for the many times you’ve come here Ton. It’s been good to know that you’re there. After leaving the fellowship and its numbness even the insults felt good to get out of the trance of being in a cult. I don’t think I’ll read any more of your posts though because I don’t see any dialogue in them, it takes a lot of sympathy to be able to dialogue and there’s little of that between us.
I wish you well in your journey.
Thank you M. for this video.
Hi Ton,
I just bothered to listen to the music and enjoyed it so bothered to read a little more of your post.
Ton: apparently you don’t know the first thing about ‘identification’ so here’s a clue:
Elena: here is your superiority complex act towards me that I’m not interested in.
Ton: any thought you espouse and attach yourself to with such fundamental conviction —
Elena: My dear Ton, to believe deeply in the beauty and unity of our selves, to believe it beyond any doubt and to stand up for it is not fundamentalism but it is fundamental, that is, it is the foundation that I wish to live my life with.
As I understand fundamentalism it is the excesses that we are willing to indulge in when people are not willing to listen to us and I as much as you have missed the mark widely in that regard. The only difference between us is that I apologized and you are not willing, you love attacking women or at least me and I happen to be one, you can’t hear me, dialogue with me or acknowledge anything I say. It use to hurt when I was more vulnerable, now I realize it’s not my problem.
Ton: as you do here over and again — this is a form of ‘identification — and, “my friend,” language is an expression of thought, therefore it does reflect an individual’s identifications.
Elena: I believe you must begin to differentiate between identification and identity, between the law of accident and the law of destiny, between false and true personality. From your point of view no one can stand up for what they believe because they are identified, falling prey of the dominant accepted behavior in the status quo of our times in which people are supposed to passively accept everything established. We are all so afraid of being killed for what we believe but heroes aren’t. There are such few of them. I’m as afraid as you are of standing up for what I believe and being hurt for it but the Fellowship, the fofblog and you are making me stronger each day. If you dared to think for yourself and stand up for what you believe you would not always be speaking through other people’s videos or texts. You are a man Ton. Inside you is all the beauty you need, to trust your self. Why won’t you let your self be? Why are you unwilling to speak for your self without needing to attack everything I say? It is more than fine if we disagree, but disagreeing doesn’t mean that we have to be aggressive towards each other or feel superior to each other. I don’t feel superior for believing in what I believe and stating it. We are equal Ton. We are equally human. There is nothing about you or me that is superior. We have each had our plays, our lives have developed in their own particular way, we’ve both struggled and worked and understood some things. Wether we agree or not is not the issue. What matters is that this time that we share together is a positive experience for both of us and there is nothing positive about playing your superiority act in sentences like:
Ton: “apparently you don’t know the first thing about ‘identification’ so here’s a clue”:
With a sentence like that as an opening, you intend to disqualify not what I am saying but me and pretend that you are superior. If you enjoy feeling superior to women who don’t agree with you that is your game Ton but I’m not interested in it so if you really wish me to pay attention again to your posts, it might happen if I don’t come across these sentences again.
Good luck Ton. I hope you’re enjoying other aspects of your life. This “rubbing” should make us stronger. Thank you for your intention to participate here.
It’s interesting to note that criminal organizations choose the same basic structures to function than non criminal organizations: a leader, an inner circle and an outer circle and the “rest of the world” that doesn’t matter. If we make the parallel between how social organizations and individuals function, a criminal organization is to society what the malfunctioning of any particular center is to the individual. “Center” as in instinctive, moving, emotional, sexual or intellectual. Organized crime is the equivalent of a cancer in an individual. It uses the same tactics and techniques as those in “legalized” power and acts against the status quo, subverting it.
But it is also interesting to note that for those in power, the masses of people don’t matter either. The recent collapse of the economy and its ongoing effects have simply revealed that those in power were working only for themselves and their profits without the slightest concern for the rest. Those in power or the banking elites that are in fact so much in power that the governments bail them out. They were, after all, allowed to exist with their consent.
What I believe we are witnessing is the collapse of legitimate authority and frightening as that might seem to so many people it is not nearly as frightening if we can trust each other and our ability to resolve problems and difficulties as human beings. What is happening is that the possibility of others choosing our destiny is coming to an end whether we like it or not. Each individual is to be confronted with the fact that he and she has to respond for herself and others and not expect the governments to do so. There might be tremendous chaos for some time but we’ll be better off when the crisis is over. In the long run what is fearsome to many is that the goods of the world can no longer belong to a few in particular but need to be shared amongst us all if we are to survive. Arms are too lethal for us to use them and although some states might take that road down to destruction, they’ll be as damaged by it as the rest. It’s another form of suicide.
The question of authority has become the question of who owns what whether they have the authority or not. The economic shift from those in power to those in economic power simply presents a crisis of authority but the fact that the “institutionalized world” is so “dis-institutionalized” reveals that the crisis is not only economic, that is, instinctive, but political, that is, that the sphere of social identity, the “I” of society, is in a deep crisis. People are beginning to realize that no “leader” can respond for the whole of society and that what is required is the consciousness of responsability of each and every individual. Everyone everywhere is so disconnected to the whole that everyone is acting out his and her personal fantasy in isolation. People are living out the “programming” without thinking about it and the fact that it is conducing to destruction not only of the Earth as a livable planet but of human beings as humans. The drug cartels, the way wars are perpetrated from a helicopter full of military shooting civilians, shows how, at both ends of the spectrum, those in power have absolutely no human conscience of what they are actually doing. Both feel equally justified to kill innocent people for their personal advantage.
The programming is: individualism: you must fend for yourself and only yourself and as long as you can do that, you’re O.K. You can have and do everything you can as long as you can get away with it at no matter whose cost. That is the dark side of individualism. The light side is that each individual is mature enough to care and protect himself, that individuals don’t have to depend on the state or family to support themselves. That the world is an open venue full of opportunities for individuals able to take them.
But what we don’t seem to have taken into consideration is that the success of a few independent individuals in the capitalist system is the exception to the rule and not the rule. They are the “gaps” that the system cannot control and as such they are used to justify the system but the system is actually against the individuals en masse. Nature acts under the same laws, only one sperm out of millions reaches the goal but human beings can act counter to nature and benefit the whole if the few don’t have the power to appropriate what belongs to the whole. To act counter to nature does not mean to act against nature, it means to act not like animals or cells but like human beings.
So if temples were abodes for the Gods and we were meant to build them wouldn’t all of our actions have the potential of being abodes for the Gods? The creation of music and all art as much as the manufacture of goods? There seems to be a division between art and the manufacture of goods as if the things built for the instinctive centre were not as “noble” as those made for the emotional centre and then the schism is altogether established with the sex center but in practice aren’t these centers the ones that can be most transformed? The centers and everything in life that applies to them?
I not only understand religion as what is possible in the temple or what is possible in our actual lives but also as what is possible in other dimensions within our selves. Perhaps the temple was necessary as a preliminary step to understand our own inner cosmos?
Men seem to see the outer world while women tend to see the inner world. The family would be the inner world of society and society the outer world of the family. So the family would have a feminine element to it while society has more of a yang element?
In our patriarchal society does the tendency to destroy the family in actual practice reveal the inability that the masculine genre has to live his own inner life? Does the inability to develop a more coherent society reveal the inability of the feminine genre to act in the social sphere too identified with the family?
Has feminism supported the masculine outlook and practice in society or has it brought a more balanced outlook? At first glance it would seem that it has tended to support the masculine institutions rather than bring the feminine element into them but I guess if women weren’t even able to vote or get paid, there is more general balance but I’m not too convinced.
Consumerism. Is it an aspect of the masculine drive towards the external or an aspect of feminine frustration?
Is consumerism an aspect of productionism? Is productionism a mechanical production without consciousness? People gone into a make, make, make, effort, effort, effort, without aim?
The whole “madness” of the world today, is it not precisely because people are “doing” without even thinking about what it is that they are doing? LIke young people gone mad?
We are horrified by a woman being stoned to death in a country that we’ll never even visit. We are already human enough to be horrified by that. It is too late for us to not become more human each day… much to our fortune.
New Page,