Road to holy: faith and commitment
Along the way, in an attempt to resolve my questions about life future, who has been of the most use?
Steven bachelor?
Carlos Castaneda?
Suzuki roshi?
Edgar Cayce?
Michael Murphy?
Is there any difference between traveling to a foreign country and reading a book?
There might be a connection reading a book and living a life while you're reading a book that doesn't exist with being involved in computers and Facebook. Can reading a book ever be quite as dangerous as trying to cross the street in Agra,, India? Or walking down a dark alley in Naples, Italy?
Does "the universe" care in the least about my love for my wife?
What's out there
beyond the farthest star
Twinkle twinkle
Last star
Is where you are.
How does the fate of the entire universe rest on a commitment I make to my wife?
How does a commitment change me?
Is a commitment to Heron the same as a commitment in marriage to Deb?
How about the commitment of Raskolnikov to kill the old pawnbroker?
What time do all of these commitments have in common, or do they have anything in common?
Do they change a person, or does anything change a person?
"But what is worship, thought I? Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth- pagans and all included- can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! but what is worship?- to do the will of God- THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?- to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me- THAT is the will of God.
Queequeg is my fellow man. "
Emerson:
Life only avails, not the having lived.
Power ceases in the instant of repose...
-i'm packing my bags for a long trip.
-Page 33 Campbell.
Question give us wings.
Answers bring us back to earth.
Asking "who am I? Why am I here?"
Is not a sign of ignorance or confusion,
but rather
An acknowledgment of constant striving.
A never-ending search for wakefulness:
An alarm clock,
A hair shirt,
A string around my finger.
My feeling that people don't know who I "usually"
am when I travel is similar to the shedding
of personalities of spiritual travelers as
Mt Analogue
or of fortunes sharpe adversite,
The worst kind of infortune is this,
A man that hath been in prosperite,
And it remember when it passed is.
Troilus and Creseide.
Bk. iii. Line 1625
Commitment
act or instance of committing, putting in charge, keeping, or trust.
Promise or agreement to do something in the future.
Being bound emotionally/intellectually to course of action or to others.
Perpetration, in negative manner as inclined more mistake.
State of being pledged or engaged.
Treat of sincerity and focused purpose.
The act of being locked away.
Commitments have consequences
Is the act of making a commitment the reason for change or does change,come through the working out of the consequences?
Make yourself necessary to someone
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Eric Fromm
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do.
Goethe
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting may be intolerable. So, for every 10 Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast beaters. by the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert Heinlein
What does it mean to have a life full of meaning?
Is that all anybody wants? Life full of meaning?
Is the idea that we make a commitment and the commitment suffices for meaning?
Is what we really want to live moment? To not want to think about anything but right now?
Come, we live in a complex world. And all this complexity is not simple.
I have a hard time believing that the best at Albert camus could come up with is that Sisyphus is somehow happy.
That's absurd.
I am reading two books at the moment question. One of the books is crime and punishment by Dostoyevsky and the other when is the golf omnibus by PG Woodhouse.
It's very difficult to imagine two more different ways of looking at the world.
I don't know that a person who believes in God can ever be called a philosopher
Whether or not there is a God is a door through which the religious person does not want to enter.
Believing God is like a bomb shelter into which a mind, pressured by doubt, can take refuge.
How can a man make a commitment to philosophy and likewise remain a man of faith?
What would Albert camus say the statement of Celia Todd, in the story tangled hearts, by PG Woodhouse, when she says "do you think," she said, "that true love can exist between a man and a woman if the woman feels more and more every day that she wants to hit the man over the head with a brick?"
Is that absurd?
What does camus think of love?
"I have a feeling that one of these days he will go too far, and something will crack."
Barrow pg. 22 –are the laws of nature simply statistical statements?
Chance is the common factor behind the observed stability and consistency of many macroscopic phenomena.
How does the Holocaust fit in the statistical model? Or Maos great leap ? Or Stalins purges?
Why does evil to happen so easily and on such a great scale, compared to like amount of good?
It's as if you keep flipping coins and they keep coming up tails time after time after time. Statistically an impossibility.
Does the world expect billions and billions of small kindnesses to statistically cancel out these huge evils?
Do those other instances call into question the uniqueness of the Holocaust?
I could see that Elie wiesel's insistence upon reminding the world that the Holocaust existed so that it should never be forgotten is completely valid. Who remembers Stalin, or Mao, now? fewer people deny the Holocaust than can imagine purges of Joseph Stalin.
Jewish unwillingness to forget might very well save us all.
is Jew shot in roumania may not be any different from a cossack shot in Siberia but one might very well be remembered and as a consequence serve as a memoir for the other.
Elie wiesel's commitment to remember.
I am reading "night" by Elie Wiesel.
So much blame.
I look down at my cat and I think, Lucy, you are completely innocent!
It is we who have to carry the burden.
Lucy, you can just sit there, just sit there, just sit there...
Work your magic, little fuzzy beast, be innocent!
One day, you will be gone.
One day, I will be gone.
Will there be any difference?
If my world is my invention and your world is your invention, why does 2+2=4 work for both of us?
Come now, I shall tell—and convey home the tale once you have heard—/just which ways of inquiry alone there are for understanding:/ the one, that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be,/ is the path of conviction, for
Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
Parmenides
Here the unargued identification of the subject of Parmenides' discourse as “whatever can be thought of or spoken of” prefigures Owen's identification of it as “whatever can be thought and talked about,” with both proposals deriving from fr. 2.7–8. There follows in Russell's History an exposition of the problems involved in speaking meaningfully about (currently) non-existent subjects, such as George Washington or Hamlet, after which Russell restates the first stage of Parmenides' argument as follows: “if a word can be used significantly it must mean something, not nothing, and therefore what the word means must in some sense exist” (Russell 1945, 50). So influential has Russell's understanding been, thanks in no small part to Owen's careful development of it, that it is not uncommon for the problem of negative existential statements to be referred to as “Parmenides' paradox.”
Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy Parmenides. 3.2
This pertains to whether and how things can change. can we change? Does commitment change us? Does commitment create new realities?
Is there a relationship between commitment and Parmenides's "convictions"?
Can George Washington be said to come into existence?
That is, can the entity "George Washington" be said to come into existence from a state of non- being and so that we can now talk about him, where before we couldn't. Maybe he simply existed always and forever in some other universe and simply appeared now in ours, not needing to have been created anew.
It's possible that Parmenides's second way of looking at the world, the world of the senses, exists because it is the way we see the world of the day to day. The "way of the senses" is simply the veneer on the "way of conviction."
Along the way, in an attempt to resolve my questions about life future, who has been of the most use?
Steven bachelor?
Carlos Castaneda?
Suzuki roshi?
Edgar Cayce?
Michael Murphy?
Is there any difference between traveling to a foreign country and reading a book?
There might be a connection reading a book and living a life while you're reading a book that doesn't exist with being involved in computers and Facebook. Can reading a book ever be quite as dangerous as trying to cross the street in Agra,, India? Or walking down a dark alley in Naples, Italy?
Does "the universe" care in the least about my love for my wife?
What's out there
beyond the farthest star
Twinkle twinkle
Last star
Is where you are.
How does the fate of the entire universe rest on a commitment I make to my wife?
How does a commitment change me?
Is a commitment to Heron the same as a commitment in marriage to Deb?
How about the commitment of Raskolnikov to kill the old pawnbroker?
What time do all of these commitments have in common, or do they have anything in common?
Do they change a person, or does anything change a person?
"But what is worship, thought I? Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth- pagans and all included- can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! but what is worship?- to do the will of God- THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?- to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me- THAT is the will of God.
Queequeg is my fellow man. "
Emerson:
Life only avails, not the having lived.
Power ceases in the instant of repose...
-i'm packing my bags for a long trip.
-Page 33 Campbell.
Question give us wings.
Answers bring us back to earth.
Asking "who am I? Why am I here?"
Is not a sign of ignorance or confusion,
but rather
An acknowledgment of constant striving.
A never-ending search for wakefulness:
An alarm clock,
A hair shirt,
A string around my finger.
My feeling that people don't know who I "usually"
am when I travel is similar to the shedding
of personalities of spiritual travelers as
Mt Analogue
or of fortunes sharpe adversite,
The worst kind of infortune is this,
A man that hath been in prosperite,
And it remember when it passed is.
Troilus and Creseide.
Bk. iii. Line 1625
Commitment
act or instance of committing, putting in charge, keeping, or trust.
Promise or agreement to do something in the future.
Being bound emotionally/intellectually to course of action or to others.
Perpetration, in negative manner as inclined more mistake.
State of being pledged or engaged.
Treat of sincerity and focused purpose.
The act of being locked away.
Commitments have consequences
Is the act of making a commitment the reason for change or does change,come through the working out of the consequences?
Make yourself necessary to someone
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
Eric Fromm
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be, you do.
Goethe
Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting may be intolerable. So, for every 10 Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast beaters. by the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
Robert Heinlein
What does it mean to have a life full of meaning?
Is that all anybody wants? Life full of meaning?
Is the idea that we make a commitment and the commitment suffices for meaning?
Is what we really want to live moment? To not want to think about anything but right now?
Come, we live in a complex world. And all this complexity is not simple.
I have a hard time believing that the best at Albert camus could come up with is that Sisyphus is somehow happy.
That's absurd.
I am reading two books at the moment question. One of the books is crime and punishment by Dostoyevsky and the other when is the golf omnibus by PG Woodhouse.
It's very difficult to imagine two more different ways of looking at the world.
I don't know that a person who believes in God can ever be called a philosopher
Whether or not there is a God is a door through which the religious person does not want to enter.
Believing God is like a bomb shelter into which a mind, pressured by doubt, can take refuge.
How can a man make a commitment to philosophy and likewise remain a man of faith?
What would Albert camus say the statement of Celia Todd, in the story tangled hearts, by PG Woodhouse, when she says "do you think," she said, "that true love can exist between a man and a woman if the woman feels more and more every day that she wants to hit the man over the head with a brick?"
Is that absurd?
What does camus think of love?
"I have a feeling that one of these days he will go too far, and something will crack."
Barrow pg. 22 –are the laws of nature simply statistical statements?
Chance is the common factor behind the observed stability and consistency of many macroscopic phenomena.
How does the Holocaust fit in the statistical model? Or Maos great leap ? Or Stalins purges?
Why does evil to happen so easily and on such a great scale, compared to like amount of good?
It's as if you keep flipping coins and they keep coming up tails time after time after time. Statistically an impossibility.
Does the world expect billions and billions of small kindnesses to statistically cancel out these huge evils?
Do those other instances call into question the uniqueness of the Holocaust?
I could see that Elie wiesel's insistence upon reminding the world that the Holocaust existed so that it should never be forgotten is completely valid. Who remembers Stalin, or Mao, now? fewer people deny the Holocaust than can imagine purges of Joseph Stalin.
Jewish unwillingness to forget might very well save us all.
is Jew shot in roumania may not be any different from a cossack shot in Siberia but one might very well be remembered and as a consequence serve as a memoir for the other.
Elie wiesel's commitment to remember.
I am reading "night" by Elie Wiesel.
So much blame.
I look down at my cat and I think, Lucy, you are completely innocent!
It is we who have to carry the burden.
Lucy, you can just sit there, just sit there, just sit there...
Work your magic, little fuzzy beast, be innocent!
One day, you will be gone.
One day, I will be gone.
Will there be any difference?
If my world is my invention and your world is your invention, why does 2+2=4 work for both of us?
Come now, I shall tell—and convey home the tale once you have heard—/just which ways of inquiry alone there are for understanding:/ the one, that [it] is and that [it] is not not to be,/ is the path of conviction, for
Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
Parmenides
Here the unargued identification of the subject of Parmenides' discourse as “whatever can be thought of or spoken of” prefigures Owen's identification of it as “whatever can be thought and talked about,” with both proposals deriving from fr. 2.7–8. There follows in Russell's History an exposition of the problems involved in speaking meaningfully about (currently) non-existent subjects, such as George Washington or Hamlet, after which Russell restates the first stage of Parmenides' argument as follows: “if a word can be used significantly it must mean something, not nothing, and therefore what the word means must in some sense exist” (Russell 1945, 50). So influential has Russell's understanding been, thanks in no small part to Owen's careful development of it, that it is not uncommon for the problem of negative existential statements to be referred to as “Parmenides' paradox.”
Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy Parmenides. 3.2
This pertains to whether and how things can change. can we change? Does commitment change us? Does commitment create new realities?
Is there a relationship between commitment and Parmenides's "convictions"?
Can George Washington be said to come into existence?
That is, can the entity "George Washington" be said to come into existence from a state of non- being and so that we can now talk about him, where before we couldn't. Maybe he simply existed always and forever in some other universe and simply appeared now in ours, not needing to have been created anew.
It's possible that Parmenides's second way of looking at the world, the world of the senses, exists because it is the way we see the world of the day to day. The "way of the senses" is simply the veneer on the "way of conviction."
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