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Look to yourselfMy advice to you would be to concentrate on thinking about why you have difficulty recognising the existence of your own brain. — universeness
My advice to you is to inquire into the significance of this piece of meat you obsess about. Notice that it doesn't have as much control as it thinks over basic functions like the circulation of blood, including heart-rate, the digestive system, body temperature, reproductive system, - all the important stuff is controlled elsewhere, leaving the brain to play fingers on keyboards and make funny noises at other brains. -
Coronavirushow it affects society and particularly the health care system. — Benkei
I think we need to adapt our society as fast as the virus adapts its DNA. In particular, there are intersections with climate change measures that seem like obviously sensible precautions. Big reduction in international travel, a big move to level up access to basic hygiene, food, and medicine worldwide, routine hand washing and mask wearing when in close contact. A lot more care over domestic animal hygiene, and more protection for wilderness. There's probably more...
But at the moment, the priorities are saving travel and tourism, levelling down, profiting from vaccine sales, and 'getting back to normal'. :death: -
CoronavirusHere's a non-technical overview of the possibilities for the further evolution of covid. That it becomes rapidly insignificant to humans does not seem the most likely scenario.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03619-8 -
Look to yourselfI don't like to employ anything invented in the theistic mind. But I could employ terms like single-minded and no psychological conflict when describing pure evil. — universeness
Well if you have to speak of evil, then you seem to be already in a theological discourse, in which case you need to understand the way that language works. The term 'pure evil' is at best paradoxical, and liable to lead to contradiction. "How can evil be anything but impure?", I might ask.
I hate fascism but I do not lack insight into its doctrine. — universeness
I have been using insight in a restricted sense of inward seeing or understanding of oneself in a specifically undivided way. I'm sorry if that was not clear in the context. I do not suppose you are seeing the doctrine of fascism in yourself and as yourself? -
Look to yourselfIf a person becomes too 'single-minded' and they have very little or no 'psychological conflict' then they can lose all empathy/compassion for others. — universeness
Again we are not of one mind here. I say 'single-minded', and you hear 'bully' or 'tyrant'. But a tyrant is not single-minded but is deeply conflicted, dependent for his identity on having power over others, because he has no self-understanding. It is the lack of insight that leads to the loss of empathy. -
Should Whoopi Goldberg be censored?I suspect that folks sometimes confuse being censored with being censured. If there is no censorship, you can say stupid and hurtful things, and when you do, or when you don't, you can be called stupid and hurtful. When you call someone out for being stupid and hurtful, and say you don't want to support them or work with them, you are censuring them not censoring them.
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Look to yourselfTell that to the heroin addict. — Dijkgraf
Firstly, the myth of the heroin addict is not all it's cracked up to be. After Vietnam, GI heroin addicts were generally able to give up the habit without too much trouble.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/01/02/144431794/what-vietnam-taught-us-about-breaking-bad-habits
But that aside, the point I am making is that people are conflicted. An addict will typically honestly claim to want to stop but by their action show that they want to continue. when you want to do something, then it is very hard not to do it. It is the ending of psychological conflict that is required; when one is single-minded, there is no conflict, and things become fairly straightforward. -
Look to yourselfWe all have these three voices due to having a triune brain. — universeness
I don't much like brainspeak. I have never seen or felt my brain and I am not convinced I have one. Nor do i believe that you or anyone else is more experienced wrt their own brain.
Defeating any kind of addiction is a mammoth task. — universeness
Alas, you have not understood me; it is so simple, that almost no one does. No one has defeated anyone or anything, and no task has been performed. There is literally nothing easier than not doing what one does not want to do. -
Look to yourselfI have "me" and "myself" on the ropes — universeness
I am a little sad to read this. Whenever I try to to operate on myself, to judge myself or force myself to do or to stop doing or feeling something, what is happening is a fragmentation of the person, and the provoking of conflict. It is counter-productive. Please, you have told us that you are a boxing match, a violent damaging sport; ring the bell for the end of the last round, and call it a draw.
I have told this story before here, but...
I was a smoker from the age of 11 until my 60's. Many times i tried to stop and managed once for 6 months, but always fell back. Always there was this conflict: 'I want to stop smoking' but 'I want a cigarette.' and the more I forced myself not to smoke, the more I felt I deserved the reward of a cigarette. And the more I had a cigarette the more I condemned myself as a weak-willed foolish self-indulgent person.
This went on until I had an insight. I have described the situation as though from the outside, but when I say 'insight' I mean an understanding that is not separate from what is understood. I understood the conflict as a whole, and from within. And in the moment of that understanding, there was a change without effort; if I want to smoke, I do not want to not smoke, and vice versa. And from that moment, I have not wanted a cigarette, ever, at all. It is finished.
Of course one cannot force oneself to have such an insight that ends the conflict, gritting one's teeth and urging oneself on does not help, and nor does fighting oneself - even as one wins, one loses. It is a matter of looking without judgement, of looking at oneself without separating oneself between what is seeing and what is seen.
On the outside, the world can be worked on, improved perhaps, cleaned and tidied and so on, but working inwardly does not make sense; insight and understanding is what can heal and transform. -
Look to yourselfI think you have the answer in your title, to this the most important question of philosophy: -- "How shall we live?"
If you have the great good fortune to be already a kind and decent human being, then whether you are a protestor or a politician, a doctor or a plumber, a big cheese or a glass of fresh milk, whatever you naturally wish to do will spread joy and comfort around the world. No worries, and no measurement required.
Alas, it is the mean spirited that spend their lives waiting for the best deal in the accumulation of virtue, and calculating how their act will influence the world. For damaged people like me, full of fear and greed and anger, it would be futile to try and heal the world; we must look for healing ourselves. -
POLL: Why is the murder rate in the United States almost 5 times that of the United Kingdom?The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose. — James Baldwin
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BrexitThey won't be able to get that Cunt out. — The Opposite
'They' ( conservative MPs) are debating quietly when to make their move. What no one wants is a leadership contest that The Cunt wins, because then he is safe for year. So are the numbers stacking up now, or do they wait for.... whatever, the Met report, the Gray report, possible prosecutions, the next scandal, a wave of mass starvation, WW3? -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism.Likewise, Physics. "Shut up and calculate" is the discipline imposed on novices; only when the calculus has been mastered can one begin to discuss the mysteries within understanding.
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The Secret History of Western Esotericism.The Shadow is hidden in moral knowledge. — frank
Why do you say that? Consider the 10 commandments - an explicit enumeration of the dimensions of the shadow, surely?
Perhaps I need to explain my own aphorism. Moral knowledge is esoteric because it requires an initiation, which is described in the OT as 'The Fall'. It means nothing to the uninitiated, who think it must be a species of desire or some such. -
The Decline of Intelligence in Modern HumansOne could cite this thread as evidence for its thesis. *runs away giggling foolishly.*
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The Secret History of Western Esotericism.I want to consider for a moment what I will call 'altered states.' We might understand that there is something it is like to be a bat, that we cannot access because we ain't bats and ain't never been bats. Similarly, there is something it is like to be drunk, that one who has never consumed alcohol cannot access. One can talk about the symptoms, slurred speech, unsteady gait, disinhibition, and so on, but the beetle in the box of ecstatic drunkenness is esoteric, and a mystery impenetrable to teetotal sobriety.
And what is true of alcohol, is even more so true of hallucinogens like LSD. The more so because prior beliefs and social setting so radically alter the experience, from heavenly to hellish, and from life-changing to rather dull, from a sense of unity with the world, to total paranoia. I describe, but only initiates will 'be able to relate to' what I say.
Moral knowledge is esoteric knowledge. -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism.Well if you want, you can listen from the other end. I must say I am more frustrated at the extra members only casts that I cannot access without actually joining the mystery cult. They are staying esoteric!
But seriously, I think even the episodes I have heard already offer a new understanding of modern esoteric revivals, and also the rather bowdlerised history of philosophy that dismisses all this as "irrational". -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism.#12 on the mysteries which are distinguished from ...
#13 & #14 on mysticism.
These are particularly useful efforts at disambiguation - #13 and #14 really good. And then we arrive at #15 The birth of philosophy, which turns out to be a messy affair and saturated with the body-fluids of religion mythology cults and initiations.
#16 Pythagoras. As you have never seen him, devoid of mathematics and the interpretation of Plato and later commentators. -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism.The question still remains, how does one deal with the irrational with reason? — ChatteringMonkey
I think that is a false question. Reason declares her other to be irrational, and then deals with her accordingly. Nor is the question of belief important. Think of the golden amulet worn on a particular finger by married folks. No supernatural belief is required for a wedding ring to be important and significant, and those who've not been initiated into the mysteries of marriage cannot really understand, because they have not experienced.
#8, and #9 discuss esoteric orientalism.
#10 is about the beginnings of astronomy/astrology
#11 introduces Judaism -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism.That's something that is lacking in Western philosophy, which tends to focus on mind/pure thought (forgetting the body), and which gets a whole lot more attention in eastern philosophy (rites, meditation, etc.). So I do think this is an important topic, but I would rather want to explore it from a psychological/physiological naturalist point of view, rather than from a magical supra-natural point of view... if that makes sense. — ChatteringMonkey
The esoteric as whatever Western philosophy neglects or denies, is almost a tautology. But I wonder how a naturalist account of the supernatural, or a rational account of the irrational can possibly work. I'll have to wait and see I suppose... -
I am starting my Math bachelors degree next week, any pointers?looking for some pointers. — Zolenskify
1. don't be afraid to say "I don't understand" or to ask stupid questions.
2. Keep a sugary snack handy as brain food.
3. Have loads of fun!
4. Ignore me and listen to fdrake.
5. Congratulations! -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism.Don't make me come down to NY and lay some Tao upside your head. — T Clark
I haven't checked, but my guess is that it'll be #150 - #200 before we get to the time when Chinese philosophy had any significant impact on the West. Where we are at the moment is Classical Greece and the oriental influences are Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, and Judea. The Near East, not the Far East. Lao Tzu was contemporaneous give or take a few centuries, but the influence can only have been very tenuous and indirect gossip along a precursor of the silk road. -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism.Not particularly. Take your time,; I zone out at times into old-man reverie. I'm expecting comments to range back and forth as people catch up or overtake - the thought police are going to be low profile here, I hope.
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The Secret History of Western Esotericism.https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4732/pg4732.html
I leave this Here for those who prefer text, to introduce #11 of the podcast, https://shwep.net/podcast/the-long-secret-history-of-judaism-part-i/
I'll comment or not later.
Isn't that the world we live in? — Noble Dust
Just so! -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism.
Episode 7: We’re Together In Dreams: Dreaming and Western EsotericismEach and every person on Earth, including you, gentle listener, enters into radically altered states of consciousness, ands visions on a regular basis. we've all experienced the kind of impossible occurrences in which magic specialises.
Freud is prefigured but not discussed here. Now Freud has reached the nadir of his popularity and is now being allowed a small place in psychological discussion by some. But the connection between dreams and mythology is the explicit foundation on which Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis are built. So the notion that dreams are an esoteric communication (a communication in need of interpretation) should be comprehensible to all of us.
The west interpreting the east in a western way. — Noble Dust
That is shaping up to be a major theme of the series from #3 onwards, but if Aryan supremacy was the glamour of the last century leading to a distortion of Greek history I think the glamour for us will be more to do with atheistic superiority. -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism.Incidentally, when I was reading around The Golden Bough, back in the psychedelic ages, it was well understood that Frazer, far from making the distinction between magic and religion absolute, merely refrained from explicitly adding Jesus to the long list of lamed Kings sacrificed to the gods, so as not to frighten the horses - leaving the intelligent reader to make the obvious connections. Robert Graves had no such qualms, and his King Jesus is worth a look as is everything I've ever come across of his, even the science fiction.
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The Secret History of Western Esotericism.I do appreciate the more scholarly angle he is taking on the topic, he really does a good job. But I don't know how much I can handle of this particular topic, maybe it really doesn't deserve this much attention. — ChatteringMonkey
A podcast about the clever ways folk get things wrong. — Banno
I would appreciate particularly the sceptical response to Episode 5: Methodologies for the Study of Magic. However the warning about glamour particularly applies to the sceptic if they assume a superior position. One of the aspects of magic discussed is that of its normativity - magic as foreign/illegitimate religion. The high priests of science have cast out all the demons? Then why are we not in heaven already? -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism.Since there are ≈
≈
365 days in a year, ignoring the 1/4 day,
a week should have 5 days! (5 goes into 365) — Agent Smith
Why "should" there be a week of any length? But better numerologists than you, also ignoring the 1/4, choose a year of 364 days and then an extra day that is no day. This gives 13 28day months, each comprising exactly 4 7day weeks. And hence the commonplace tradition of contracts and indentures that were for 'a year and a day' (Also the duration of the voyage of The Owl and the Pussycat). -
The Secret History of Western Esotericism....Does this forum have an ignore feature? — emancipate
You just have to summon the appropriate Demiurge and instruct them to cast a shadow of ignorance in the direction required. but I haven't got to that podcast yet, so I have no details.
If you click on the link, each podcast has a reading list and some notes and the odd link.
Part of the significance that I want to look at or for in the thread discussion is how the perennial new-age spiritual revival relates to recent, particularly right wing, history, from The Nazis to to QAnon. And perhaps in this context, a little health warning is in order. Beware the Glamour!
Glamour -- "Mental illusion when intensified by desire, occurring on the astral plane. ... The emanatory astral reactions which each human being initiates ever surround him and through this fog and mist he looks out upon a distorted world." — Google, channelling Alice Bailey
The curiosity of such a fog is that it manifests as clarity - the deeper one is en-fogged, the more certain one is of the clarity of one's vision. Glamour is the source of all fundamentalism. -
Ad Interim Philosophya poor second. — Agent Smith
Yes. That is the way of looking that I am criticising; looking at philosophy as a poor second to science. Idolatry of the Fact. -
Ad Interim PhilosophyThis is the model of philosophy as science we haven't done yet. It's amazingly popular considering what a travesty it is of anything resembling philosophy. Rather, while science consists of models or pictures of the world, philosophy offers ways of looking. To the philistine, there is only one 'right' way to look at things.
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Morality and Ethics of Men vs WomenI'd like to suggest a bit of discussion about the difficulties of addressing questions like this.
First, most of the site members are male, and rather few of them have made any study of feminist philosophies or women philosophers in general.
Second, most societies for most of history have been male dominated. I think it is safe to say, that if power does not necessarily corrupt, it at least tends to distort. It is very easy to come up with a list like 's showing that the extremes of virtue and vice, or talent and creativity, or any other vague metric are almost exclusively male. One might consider where Joan of Arc, Bloody Mary, Elizabeth1, fit in, but the list of females in power is so short, that the statistics are always going to be suspect when generalised. The argument for the mediocrity of a group that has always been excluded on the basis of their mediocrity is - weak. {And therefore unworthy of a male :wink: }
For another example of the circularity, it is often maintained that there have been no great female artists. Once we know this, we need not waste our time looking at women's art. Therefore it is not bought, does not hang in prestigious galleries, and no one really sees it. and the absence from the prestigious galleries proves that women's art is universally mediocre. But now spend some time looking at this gallery: https://www.facebook.com/female.artists.in.history/ - just look at how much of it there is throughout history, and the almost inescapable conclusion is that the trope of female mediocrity is itself part of the social system that keeps women in a state of subservience.
It might be an idea, if one is looking for a possible difference in the morality and ethics of men and women, to look at a couple of women philosophers' writings. For example, compare and contrast the moral philosophies of Jean Paul Sartre, and Iris Murdoch - a pair of C20th novelists and philosophers.
{I'm not sure, but I think that is the first mention in the thread of an actual woman philosopher; and that rather exemplifies the whole difficulty - that folks are content with their prejudices and do not want to challenge themselves, especially on a topic that impinges so directly on their own identity.} -
CoronavirusI had covid back when there was only one version, then 2 astra jabs and a pfizer boost and a few weeks earlier, the flu jab. And when I get offered another booster, I'll be there for it, because my mild covid was no fun at all.
And at the moment I have an ordinary cold - sore throat runny nose temperature, and that's not very much fun... but that's sod's law. -
CoronavirusGo drinking with your buddies. — Agent Smith
Daughter visited this weekend and mentioned that the alcoholics in the hospital where she works routinely steal and drink the hand sanitiser. Now that's dedication. -
Impossible to Prove Time is RealSometimes we live no particular way but our own
And sometimes we visit your country and live in your home
Sometimes we ride on your horses, sometimes we walk alone
Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own — Hunter/Garcia
Therefore, there are some times. -
Should hinge propositions be taken as given/factual for a language game to make sense ?Although, it seems, we can make more sense of the question, "Do bishops move diagonally?" - than we can of the question, "Do I have hands?" — Sam26
There are circumstances; phantom limbs, numbness or paralysis, alien limb syndrome, perhaps some virtual reality aps, where the possession of a hand becomes a real question. But these situations where the question becomes real and meaningful, are outside the realm in which one discusses philosophy. If I don't know whether this is my hand or not, I won't be going to a philosophy site to find out. Here we assume that we each know how many hands we got if not which orifice we speak out of. -
The Ethics of a Heart TransplantThis seems really straightforward to me. It is never the business of medics to be in moral judgement of their patients. everyone is equally entitled to the best treatment available, and rationing if necessary should be decided on who is likely to have the most benefit. That is a hard enough calculation on its own without bringing in moral judgements.
The penalty for various crimes is laid out by law, and it almost never includes the forfeit of the right to medical care. And nor should it. The connection with the death penalty is obvious - it is a death penalty with a random element added. And the same problem arises, that convictions can be overturned and found to have been wrong.
The victim's mother came forward, and made an argument that this man should not have received the transplanted heart. He did not deserve it. — Cobra
So if the man is later exonerated, this woman is responsible for the death of an innocent man. Should she in turn forfeit her right to treatment? Let's not go there.
unenlightened
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