Religion/philosophy

Consumption Junction

Friday night I went to see Keanu’s new movie, Constantine, which is based on a comic book by Alan Moore, the creator of The Watchmen and From Hell. It was enjoyable, although you shouldn’t expect to leave feeling overwhelmed by it. The religious dimension to the film was interesting. I liked the idea that heaven and hell exist as parallel realities behind our everyday reality, and that some people are part angel or demon.

Afterwards, we walked over to Borders and I purchased the Baltazar Gracian (pronounced gray-thian) book of aphorisms, The Art of Worldly Wisdom. As a compilation of experience and advice it will make a nice companion to other similar books in my library like the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, and Nietzsche.


Psychology

It seems like everyone has an escape mechanism, an addiction of some sort. The desire for or relief from sensation. Something to dampen, mute, or divert. Addiction is the eroticism of feeling itself, not just bodily sensation, but also emotional sensation. Many choose to feel anything rather than nothing and push themselves up or down with sensation. When emotion drains away what do you have left? More to the point, when you strip away the emotion what is left of you? Our feelings and emotions anchor consciousness.

Questions:

  1. What do you use to escape?
  2. Where do you seek relief? In activity? In knowledge? In memory?
  3. Why do you seek escape? What from?

Many of my habits have a impulsive nature. For example, a number of my activities have to do with desires for control, predictability, and stability. Why do I read the news so often? Why do I try to know as much as I can about so many different things? The thirst for knowledge and understanding can represent a desire for control, especially control of experience. I do not deal well with unknowns. Knowledge is not power, although it provides the sensation of power and control. But, what can be known and what are the limitations of knowledge? What we try to know dispels the maddening intangibility of the unknown. It lends a false sense of definition and order to a universe of incomprehensibility.

I feel the same way about history and the past. People who fear powerlessness idealize the past and imbue it with sentiment and importance at the expense of the elusive being of the present (action-oriented responsibility?) and the yet to be of the future (forethought-oriented responsibility?). In a real sense, the past is powerless to your own perception and can be manipulated and fetishized. The past imposes few responsibilities, while the future and present dictate volition.

I’m not sure if I’m making myself clear. I’ve just been thinking out loud. Here are some semi-related psychology links I found today that are worth reading:

  1. A psychoanalysis of gambling and gambling addiction
  2. For the Worst of Us, the Diagnosis May Be ‘Evil’ Dr. Stone represents another attempt at defining the incomprehensible, in this case “Evil”:

    Researchers have found that some people who commit violent crimes are much more likely than others to kill or maim again, and one way they measure this potential is with a structured examination called the psychopathy checklist.

    As part of an extensive, in-depth interview, a trained examiner rates the offender on a 20-item personality test. The items include glibness and superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, proneness to boredom and emotional vacuity. The subjects earn zero points if the description is not applicable, two points if it is highly applicable, and one if it is somewhat or sometimes true.


More O.W.

I’m keep coming across good passages from Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character. Bear with me:

On the self and others, individualism and universalism:

It is easy to give proofs. Only brutalised criminals and insane persons take absolutely no interest in their fellow men; they live as if they were alone in the world, and the presence of strangers has no effect on them. But for him who possesses a self there is a self in his neighbour, and only the man who has lost the logical and ethical centre of his being behaves to a second man as if the latter were not a man and had no personality of his own. “I” and “thou” are complementary terms. A man soonest gains consciousness of himself when he is with other men. This is why a man is prouder in the presence of other men than when he is alone, whilst it is in his hours of solitude that his self-confidence is damped. Lastly, he who destroys himself destroys at the same time the whole universe, and he who murders another commits the greatest crime because he murders himself in his victim. Absolute selfishness is, in practice, a horror, which should rather be called nihilism; if there is no “thou,” there is certainly no “I”, and that would mean there is nothing.

There is in the psychological disposition of the man of genius that which makes it impossible to use other men as a means to an end. And this is it: he who feels his own personality, feels it also in others. For him the Tat-tvam-asi is no beautiful hypothesis, but a reality. The highest individualism is the highest universalism.


Knowledge as taxidermy

I saw this at Kottke.org and it seemed a question worth answering. Edge: World Question Center asks What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?

I read several of the answers from the panel and the pervasive self-importance annoyed me. These are some of our ‘greatest minds’? I kept thinking the same thing: that most people use knowledge to reduce reality to something they can grasp. Scientists amass knowledge and develop systematic theories of the universe. Religious-minded individuals submit their desire for truth to a heavenly authority rendering their reality comprehensible. It says a lot about humanity, this desire to know. Does it represent a fear of mystery or powerlessness, a need to control experience? Why is it always so important to know? What do animals think when they look at the sky, or when they die?

If I was to answer the question, “What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?”, I would answer that I believe there is no way of knowing. That the ‘truth’ of wherever/whatever/whoever/whenever we are will always remain out of reach. Is that such a bad thing? Can knowledge blind your understanding?


I like lists and bullets

I haven’t been inspired to write long entries and I find little notes to be more helpful lately.

  • Soundtrack for today:
    1. Pantera – This Love You have to love caveman lyrics like: “You keep this love, fist, scar, break”
    2. Notorious B.I.G – Hypnotize It just came on the radio. Nice sampling.
  • Christmas wishlist:
    1. XM MyFi
    2. Treadmill (I have a spare tire that needs puncturing especially if I even think about going to my 10 year high school reunion.)
    3. Books by or about Otto Weininger. I’ve always been perversely fascinated with history’s heretics.
  • Provocative William Blake quotations:
    • Active Evil is better than Passive Good.
    • Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
    • The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.

Selections from the Hagakure:

This is a nice passage:

    “To hate injustice and stand on righteousness is a difficult thing. Furthermore, to think that being righteous is the best one can do and to do one’s utmost to be righteous will, on the contrary, brig many mistakes. The Way is in a higher place then righteousness. This is very difficult to discover, but it is the highest wisdom. When seen from this standpoint, things like righteousness are rather shallow. If one does not understand this on his own, it cannot be known. There is a method of getting to this Way, however, even if one cannot discover it by himself. This is found in consultation with others. Even a person who has not attained this Way sees others front the side. It is like the saying from the game of go: “He who sees from the side has eight eyes.” The saying, “Thought by thought we see our own mistakes,” also means that the highest Way is in discussion with others. Listening to the old stories and reading books are for the purpose of sloughing off one’s own discrimination and attaching oneself to that of the ancients.”

Herbert’s “Dune”

  1. Dune, Prophecy, Eugenics and Islam
  2. Islamic themes in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”
  3. George Lucas also ripped off Frank Herbert

Question of the day

If there was a book that disclosed all the existential secrets of the universe, would you read it? Would you read it if you knew that the information enclosed within could potentially drive you insane? Which is stronger, your desire for self-preservation or wanting… to know.


Bin Ladin’s Former ‘Bodyguard’ Interviewed on Al-Qa’ida Strategies

Bin Ladin’s Former ‘Bodyguard’ Interviewed on Al-Qa’ida Strategies via Cryptome.org:

(Abu-Jandal) Most of my answers were on Al-Qa’ida ideology and structure and why it deals in this way. The answers were to the point. They used to put forth rather strange questions. One question said: As far as we are concerned, 80 percent of what you said is true, but does Al-Qa’ida have chemical plants and nuclear weapons? I recall that my answer to them was that Usama Bin Ladin has a weapon that is far superior to all the US weapons. What is this weapon, the asked? I told them: “Among the believers are men, who have been true to their covenant to God: of them some have completed their vow (to the extreme), and some (still) wait: But they have never changed (their determination) in the least.” (Koranic verse) The US arsenal is full of weapons, but it does not have the men.

Continue reading →


Imam Ali and Jesus Christ

Like many of you I’ve been watching the Iraq and Najaf coverage with interest. It is challenging to try to read between the lines about what is happening. You have to sift through so many news reports to distill a semblance of what is actually going on, and you have to do a significant amount of research to achieve the most rudimentary amount of context. It seems like media coverage is impossible to obtain from a disinterested and contextual point of view. Anyway, whenever you see the Shiia marching with their portraits of Sadr you may have also noticed the presence of depictions of Imam Ali, the fourth Caliph of Islam, who the Shiia regard as the true successor of Muhammad. Ali was betrayed and killed much like another famous religious figure. See the image below for a visual comparison of popular depictions of Ali (left) and Jesus Christ (right).