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334 views
Nov 12
BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE are very intimately related to desire; and perhaps, if we can understand these two issues, we can see how desire works and understand its complexities.
One of the things, it seems to me, that most of us eagerly accept and take for granted is the question of beliefs. I am not attacking beliefs. What we are trying to do is to find out why we accept beliefs; and if we can understand the motives, the causation of acceptance, then perhaps we may be able not only to understand why we do it, but also be free of it. One can see how political and religious beliefs, national and various other types of beliefs, do separate people, do create conflict, confusion, and antagonism – which is an obvious fact; and yet we are unwilling to give them up. There is the Hindu belief the Christian belief, the Buddhist – innumerable sectarian and national beliefs, various political ideologies, all contending with each other, trying to convert each other. One can see, obviously, that belief is separating people, creating intolerance; is it possible to live without belief? One can find that out only if one can study oneself in relationship to a bel1ef. Is it possible to live in this world without a belief – not change beliefs, not substitute one belief for another, but be entirely free from all beliefs, so that one meets life anew each minute? This, after all, is the truth: to have the capacity of meeting everything anew, from moment to moment, without the conditioning reaction of the past, so that there is not the cumulative effect which acts as a barrier between oneself and that which is. Read more... (3157 words, 1 image, estimated 12:38 mins reading time)
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327 views
Nov 07
I SHOULD LIKE TO discuss the problem of action. This may be rather abstruse and difficult at the beginning but I hope that by thinking it over we shall be able to see the issue clearly, because our whole existence, our whole life, is a process of action.
Most of us live in a series of actions, of seemingly unrelated, disjointed actions, leading to disintegration, to frustration. It is a problem that concerns each one of us, because we live by action and without action there is no life, there is no experience, there is no thinking. Thought is action; and merely to pursue action at one particular level of consciousness, which is the outer, merely to be caught up in outward action without understanding the whole process of action itself, will inevitably lead us to frustration, to misery.
Our life is a series of actions or a process of action at different levels of consciousness. Consciousness is experiencing, naming and recording. That is consciousness is challenge and response, which is experiencing, then terming or naming, and then recording, which is memory. This process is action, is it not? Consciousness is action; and without challenge, response, without experiencing, naming or terming, without recording, which is memory, there is no action. Read more... (2295 words, 1 image, estimated 9:11 mins reading time)
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537 views
Nov 05
THE PROBLEMS OF the world are so colossal, so very complex, that to understand and so to resolve them one must approach them in a very simple and direct manner; and simplicity, directness, do not depend on outward circumstances nor on our particular prejudices and moods. As I was pointing out, the solution is not to be found through conferences, blueprints, or through the substitution of new leaders for old, and so on, The solution obviously lies in the creator of that problem, in the creator of the mischief, of the hate and of the enormous misunderstanding that exists between human beings, The creator of this mischief, the creator of these problems, is the individual, you and I, not the world as we think of it. The world is your relationship with another. The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. Read more... (2770 words, 1 image, estimated 11:05 mins reading time)
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438 views
Sep 07
 The secret in Ibn ‘Arabi and Derrida
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about.
The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always completely unknown to us.
– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being’
‘Hie words secret and sire pepper the texts of Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi. Both writers seem to be differently obsessed with their power, keen to delineate the (non)meanings of these words, even to examine the motives of those who would unlock them. Both writers seem to be aware of the possible futility of the secret – which, like Kundera’s brides and glory-hunters, only leads from ‘veil to veil’. Both writers appear to situate the ’secret’ at the heart of their oeuvre, as the ultimate metaphor for what they have to say. Read more... (3675 words, 1 image, estimated 14:42 mins reading time)
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533 views
Jul 12
The meaning of infinity in Sufi and deconstructive hermeneutics
We may conclude this history of hermeneutics with the following remark. The initial purpose of hermeneutics was to explain the word of God. This purpose was eventually expanded into an attempt to regulate the process of explaining the word of man. In the nineteenth century we learned, first from Hegel and then more effectively from Nietzsche, that God is dead. In the twentieth century, Kojeve and his students, like Foucault, have informed us that man is dead, thereby as it were opening the gates into an abyss of postanthropological deconstruction. As the scope of hermeneutics has expanded. then, the two original sources of meaning, God and man, have vanished, taking with them the cosmos or world and leaving us with nothing but our own garrulity, which we choose to call the philosophy of language. linguistic philosophy, or one of their synonyms. If nothing is real, the real is nothing; there is no difference between the written lines of a text and the blank spaces between them. — Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics Read more... (10890 words, 1 image, estimated 43:34 mins reading time)
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733 views
Jun 26
 True observation must be carried on from a superior dimension. The mind cannot be studied with the mind. It must be observed from some point, outside of, and yet superior to the mind. This process might be likened to the triangulations made in surveying, when the height of a mountain needs to be known without dragging chain every step of the way to the top. Two sightings can be made from a common base line to the top of the mountain, giving two different angles as the inside angles of the triangle. With this the two sighting-distances will be known, from which a perpendicular line,—from the apex of the mountain to its center within the mountain along the same base line, or plane,—will give the height.
That base line is the point of reference, and point from which all validity emanates. It begins as a short line, entirely separate from the mountain. It is outside the mountain. From it an imaginary string is drawn or dropped to the center of the mountain on the same level as the plain. The only other way to measure the height of the mountain with the same accuracy would be the drilling and measuring of a hole from the top, meeting a similar horizontal hole drilled on the level of the plain. Read more... (1260 words, 5 images, estimated 5:02 mins reading time)
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1,361 views
Mar 07
Question: There have been enlightened masters who have had great charisma and who’ve also been capable of magic, manifestation and so on. People have reported very powerful physical, emotional and mental experiences not only in the master’s presence, but even thousands of miles away. What’s that all about?
Tony Parsons: [...] It’s about someone who has a lot of charisma and the gift of manifestation or magic. It’s about nothing more than anything else of any relevance inside the wheel of life. Someone recently told me that she looked into the eyes of a so-called master and vanished for a moment. But if it meant anything, why was she still asking questions? Nothing of any relevance is happening here with these phenomena that is any different or more liberating than selling hamburgers in the market place. The difficulty arises when people believe that these kind of events somehow vindicate some sort of personal enlightenment… they then also come to revere these people, and this creates a schism. They see these apparently magnificent beings and immediately come to believe that they can never attain such a level of importance. This is another way in which awakening is avoided. It is of course the infinite expression again wishing to have this experience, but so is my response to this question, and so is your sitting there and hearing it. [...] Read more... (1212 words, 1 image, estimated 4:51 mins reading time)
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