Christianity

[henry quirk]

how can you know yourself?

Be a good gatekeeper to your head; test and retest every assumption, every belief, regularly; where you find alien roots, excise them.

See, Mannie gets it...

[Nick_A]

how can you know yourself?

Be a good gatekeeper to your head; test and retest every assumption, every belief, regularly; where you find alien roots, excise them.

Is your head yourself? If not, what is yourself and what can know it?

[Alexis Jacobi]

Nietzsche’s response to having lost faith,
but not being able to live without it,
was to invent the figure of a new creator'
someone who could bring together Man and World once again.
In order to do this, man had to begin to think through his own existence:
the heaviest burden of all.
___________________________________

It was a metaphor for the garbage in a head and how it gets there, guy, not an advertisement for Castaneda.

I think you might misunderstand my intention in quoting Castaneda. It does not matter to me that Castaneda said what he said, and though I know that the scene he managed and directed in LA resulted in the explosion I referred to, I do not suggest being closed to the idea that he presented, and that you also presented since, it seems, you have read Castaneda. I simply point out that he is restating a type of demonology. And if what I say is true, and I think it is, then it points to the fact that certain ideas -- or are they senses or beliefs that operate under ideas? -- constantly occur and recur.

What could possibly be wrong in my focusing on what is really happening, on what is really going on, and why do I sense a certain pique in what you wrote? If this is not the purpose of the conversation we have been having, what the heck is it then?

The actual purpose, my purpose in any case, is to bring the conversation we are having into the real and actual light of day. To see that it is ultra-contemporary, and also to see that -- and let's face this fact -- people are on the edge of personal and social madness. It seems to be getting that weird now. Everything is explosive. And it is not at all impossible, and it is even probable, that just around the corner (in time) some derailing event may impinge on all of us.

I have no idea, ultimately, what IC gets or doesn't get. He comes from his structured, defined, rather conventional and even classical Christian perspective. He is an apologist for something quite specific, and conventional, as against others who come from different, but not altogether unrelated or incommensurate positions, understandings and involvements.

So it seems to me thart the purpose, one purpose in any case, is to see all of this as best we are able.

Castaneda is completely relevant to post-Sixties evolutions in -- what shall I call them? -- spiritual ideas. Notions about what spirituality is. Notions about what our potential and purposes are. There is something utterly revolutionary and also deviously subversive in all that Castaneda did. I do not say *subversive* as a synonym for 'bad'. One has to look objectively at what people choose to believe. And also how they choose to deceive themselves. I know numerous people who were directly involved in CC's LA trip and who will tell you about how they deceived themselves.

We buy into deceptions and through them we self-deceive at great cost.

Amy Wallace told me that she kept a pithy phrase of mine on a sticky-note above her writing desk all during her writing of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. There was nothing much to it really and yet it summed it all up nicely:

A Ponzi scheme of the mind.

But here is the curious twist: To see that it was just such a Ponzi scheme, and that it ended quite badly for some (even many) does not mean that there is nothing of value in those books. Isn't that a puzzle? How wisdom and error sometimes intertwine?

The Event

Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

[Immanuel Can]

how can you know yourself?

Be a good gatekeeper to your head; test and retest every assumption, every belief, regularly; where you find alien roots, excise them.

Is your head yourself? If not, what is yourself and what can know it?

Who's asking?

[henry quirk]

I think you might misunderstand my intention in quoting Castaneda.

Mebbe so. If so, my apologies.

[Nick_A]

Is your head yourself? If not, what is yourself and what can know it?

Who's asking?

It could be either you or your personality. They both can ask a question

[Immanuel Can]

Is your head yourself? If not, what is yourself and what can know it?

Who's asking?

It could be either you or your personality. They both can ask a question

If there's no "Nick" to ask the question, then I must conclude that the question is not being asked, or at least, not being asked by anyone, so doesn't need to be answered.

But if there is a "Nick," then Nick no longer needs to ask that question: he already knows.

In short, you know very well how you know you're a self. Just get in touch with what you already know.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I think you might misunderstand my intention in quoting Castaneda.

Mebbe so. If so, my apologies.

No apology needed nor asked for!

Let us join our voices together in a resonant requiem aeternam deo. We can sing it against the grain, can't we? You as 'deist' and myself as lyric tenor of neo-theism, or, alternatively, as dramatic fraud. (Please help me decide). (OK, tenore buffo is also a possibility).

I'll take the middle tones if you'll man the organ.

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo ("Grant eternal rest unto him"). Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"

[RCSaunders]

how can you know yourself? ...you would have to split into two...a knower and the known.

Mirrors!

I lose track of what people are talking about at times if it does not seem pertinent to what interests me or seems important. Though I enjoy RC and admire his forcefulness I find I have little use for his over-all assertions.

However, what DontAskMe asked is a very good question taken in-and-of itself. How can a person know himself? It might not be the topic that fits into this on-going conversation about Christianity, but the question is a very good one. It is possible to be so involved in and invested in oneself (attached to what one imagines oneself to be or stuck in one vision or version of oneself) that one cannot 'get outside of oneself enough' to see oneself. This is a fact.

I think it should be mentioned here that *getting outside of oneself* has been, and still is, one of the techniques of spiritual self-investigation. Take for example the type of human potential movement that A. Huxley got involved with or inspired in California. And we all know how he came to his realizations if anyone had read The Doors of Perception.

There is now developing a whole cultural movement where psychedelic drugs like mushrooms (see the 'trendy new hallucinogenic' -- toad venom).

Now, the interesting thing, from my perspective, is to become aware of 'shattering perspectives'. This would be another aspect or episode in the processes in which *the horizon was erased*. The loss of ground under one's feet. The incapacity to know where one is located. To be adrift in a netherworld between a collapsing metaphysic and the uncertain definition of another metaphysics.

I do not think any of this is a small matter.

Just for the heck of it a quote from Doors of Perception:

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.”

The observation that every individual consciousness is totally subjective therefore impossible for anyone to know by direct experience what anyone else's conscious experience is seems fundamental to me (though the whole of the psuedo-science of psychology ignores it), and hardly a great insight one is required to poison their brain with chemicals to discover (like Huxley).

The only conscious experience you can know is your own, and no one else can know what your conscious experience is. You can tell each other what you experience, but each will only be able interpret the others' experience in terms of their own. You can tell someone else, "this tastes like cinnamon to me," but he can have no idea what that means unless he has tasted cinnamon and then can only know what it tastes like to him, but never what it tastes like to you.

Does that seem profound to you?

[henry quirk]

No apology needed nor asked for!

Well, apologies, as I reckon it, are only meaningful when offered without prompt. If you gotta ask for one, what you get probably ain't worth spit. Also: apologies are as much for the giver as for the receiver. It's the recognition of I done wrong. A little honest humble pie fortifies the soul.

[Nick_A]

Who's asking?

It could be either you or your personality. They both can ask a question

If there's no "Nick" to ask the question, then I must conclude that the question is not being asked, or at least, not being asked by anyone, so doesn't need to be answered.

But if there is a "Nick," then Nick no longer needs to ask that question: he already knows.

In short, you know very well how you know you're a self. Just get in touch with what you already know.

Matthew 6:

25 Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment? 26 Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of much more value than they? 27 And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto [a]the measure of his life? 28 And why are ye anxious concerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: 29 yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these..............

The inner man is what a person is born with. During life they acquire a personality which they call themselves. The human condition asserts that the conditioned self does not express the essence or the inner man. Not even Solomon had a personality which cold express the inner man. Yet the essence of the lily is manifested in the lilies of the field.

Henry wrote that in Castaneda the inner man and outer man are not one. Something corrupts the personality. Plato desribed the same thing in the Chariot analogy. But who can understand when they deny it or explain it by pop psychology?

[Alexis Jacobi]

The observation that every individual consciousness is totally subjective therefore impossible for anyone to know by direct experience what anyone else's conscious experience is seems fundamental to me (though the whole of the pseudo-science of psychology ignores it), and hardly a great insight one is required to poison their brain with chemicals to discover (like Huxley).

There is a funny story but I do not know if it is true. The musician Captain Beefheart when struggling for money sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door in LA. He happened to knock on the door of Aldous Huxley who, as it happened, answered his own door. (I know a pun applies here but I will omit it). You may or may not know that in the later part of his life Huxley lived in California. If I remember correctly I think Beefheart was so overawed he did not know what to say. And Huxley was not in the market for a new vacuum. As often happens one thinks of what to say or what should have been said well after the fact.

The only conscious experience you can know is your own, and no one else can know what your conscious experience is. You can tell each other what you experience, but each will only be able interpret the others' experience in terms of their own. You can tell someone else, "this tastes like cinnamon to me," but he can have no idea what that means unless he has tasted cinnamon and then can only know what it tastes like to him, but never what it tastes like to you.

Does that seem profound to you?

I've read a good deal of Huxley and I have a great appreciation for him. So I regard his ideas about our solitude and subjectivity as just one element in his ideas that have value. Proper Studies had a certain effect on me. I thought Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited were highly worthy.

How do you know if a psychedelic entheogen is a poison? I am curious on what you base the assertion. Have you ingested any such substance and suffered a consequence? How do you know?

[Dubious]

Mirrors!

I lose track of what people are talking about at times if it does not seem pertinent to what interests me or seems important. Though I enjoy RC and admire his forcefulness I find I have little use for his over-all assertions.

However, what DontAskMe asked is a very good question taken in-and-of itself. How can a person know himself? It might not be the topic that fits into this on-going conversation about Christianity, but the question is a very good one. It is possible to be so involved in and invested in oneself (attached to what one imagines oneself to be or stuck in one vision or version of oneself) that one cannot 'get outside of oneself enough' to see oneself. This is a fact.

I think it should be mentioned here that *getting outside of oneself* has been, and still is, one of the techniques of spiritual self-investigation. Take for example the type of human potential movement that A. Huxley got involved with or inspired in California. And we all know how he came to his realizations if anyone had read The Doors of Perception.

There is now developing a whole cultural movement where psychedelic drugs like mushrooms (see the 'trendy new hallucinogenic' -- toad venom).

Now, the interesting thing, from my perspective, is to become aware of 'shattering perspectives'. This would be another aspect or episode in the processes in which *the horizon was erased*. The loss of ground under one's feet. The incapacity to know where one is located. To be adrift in a netherworld between a collapsing metaphysic and the uncertain definition of another metaphysics.

I do not think any of this is a small matter.

Just for the heck of it a quote from Doors of Perception:

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.”

The observation that every individual consciousness is totally subjective therefore impossible for anyone to know by direct experience what anyone else's conscious experience is seems fundamental to me (though the whole of the psuedo-science of psychology ignores it), and hardly a great insight one is required to poison their brain with chemicals to discover (like Huxley).

The only conscious experience you can know is your own, and no one else can know what your conscious experience is. You can tell each other what you experience, but each will only be able interpret the others' experience in terms of their own. You can tell someone else, "this tastes like cinnamon to me," but he can have no idea what that means unless he has tasted cinnamon and then can only know what it tastes like to him, but never what it tastes like to you.

Does that seem profound to you?

To me, at least, it's common sense. No amount of profundity is required to figure that out. What is pseudo through and through is the dumb mystical claptrap people never cease to believe in giving all the pathetic boobs out there some value added consolation of identifiable intent which all the weak-spirited and weak-minded are so desperate for. There's not enough mental muscle to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as it really exists, so let's create vast regions of absurdity to lessen the impact. Nothing is ever absurd if enough people believe and accept it without any afterthought whether these belief leprechauns possess any validity. If life is a tale told by an idiot it's only because the idiots keep telling it and proving it.

[Immanuel Can]

The inner man is what a person is born with.

Then you know what a "self" is. You have a "Nick." He may get older and smarter, and he may not: either way, he's still Nick, not Marcy or Rufus or Mo or Ravinder.

That's a "self."

[henry quirk]

The inner man is what a person is born with.

Then you know what a "self" is. You have a "Nick." He may get older and smarter, and he may not: either way, he's still Nick, not Marcy or Rufus or Mo or Ravinder.

That's a "self."

Yep. Gotta watch out for worms. Like I say: they get into your head and reorganize.