Obvious wrote:Answer this question, coward.
Do you speak to your god and does he speak back to you?
The Lion God Bellows: "Coward! Where are you?"
Coward: "I heard your thundering voice but was naked and without argument so I hid!"
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Interestingly, we all 'speak' to our god, all the time, always, and 'god' always speaks back. Also interesting: we are forced to bend thoughts to the dictates of our language, to rely on prepositions, pronouns, and all the rest. We live within our
being, our physical-psychic awareness, and I suggest that we don't really know what that is and can't say very much about it at all. We 'dialogue' through our being with our own being, and all surrounding being as we 'operate' our consciousness, as our own dreams speak to us showing us things, giving us reflections of ourselves within a world of being-mind-intelligence that
we do not understand at all, yet we are here. I would further suggest that there are many mysteries to our own self, our own existence and being, that we close ourselves off too through the power of our declarations about reality: what it is, what it is not.
Some people pray, or recite mantra, or interact with 'life' and 'the world' in very different ways than we allow when we are tied to our predicates. But to move in 'the world' in that way requires an almost poetical sensibility. 'Poetical sensibility' is one of the best ways to state it but there are others, too.
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Here is a most interesting statement! I suggest that this is a 'core' of what appears nearly a metaphysical platform, in any case it is an element of a Grand Declaration about Life and Reality. Let's examine it:
Obvious wrote:The indigenous Australian aborigines had a very sophisticated philosophy known as the Dreamtime, which focused on visual, symbolic and generally non-representational art as well as dance and the oral tradition. To the first Australians human beings were story-tellers who had to find the meaning of their own existence in the stories that they told. These stories also had to tell them how to live in a harsh and unforgiving landscape and the fact that they did so successfully for almost 60,000 years meant that these were very very good stories. These were not childish stories of gods to worship as we would understand the practice and there was certainly no myth of immortality. The stories were all about the ever-changing tides of natural events which governed their daily lives and how they should adapt to them in order to survive. Nature was not to be tamed but to be comprehended, so even in our modern era we have much to learn from these primitive folk. However the most profound thing that we can learn from these remarkable people lies in the way they defined the meaning of life itself. To the Australian aborigine the meaning of life could only be defined in terms of the journey and never in terms of the destination. The simple beauty and nuance of this perspective never fails to move me. When the Europeans invaded this continent they judged these people as sub-human and systematically set about the task of slaughtering nearly all of them. They did this in god's name.
Wow. A couple of thoughts: One, this is drenched in
ressentiment and the turning against one's own self Bowden refers to when he speaks of The Grammar of Self-Intolerance. Through self-contempt and self-hatred one brands
ONESELF as the enemy, the deviant, the destroyer, and it is this self that must be in turn destroyed! This is how radical liberalism functions in our present, this is an important part of its underbelly/understructure. One has to be willing to turn round and face this self-directed animus, to understand how it drives and also moulds perception.
Yet too, there is in this remarkable paragraph both a reference to an operational, functional mytho-magical system (shamanic or primitive or perhaps 'original' to man, as the case may be), and thus to a complete and functioning spiritual/mythological and also theistic system for being in the world, receiving messages from the world and from life, interacting with 'greater consciousness', with the consciousness of dreamtime. The declaration makes reference to a system, and yet all other declarations are violently removed from the table of consideration, in favour of one of the materialist brand which turns against all representations of divinity or 'god'. And so what we have here mostly is a romantic view of Aborigines (though it could be any 'primitive other') which is understood through an essentially romantic lens! Romantic is the precise sense of the word. But too one senses the 'radical liberal' animus, the undermining tendency, and the hatred-of-self. I suggest that all of this needs to be deeply considered. All these elements seem to contaminate perception, not clarify it.
By this declaration, to my ears, Noble Obvious has undermined much of his own platform; has proposed some viable avenues for our own spirituality and 'relationship' to Creative Soul and Being, and to new language-means to speak about it.
(The question and problem of European imperialism, the myopia of Christian view, and much else though are all things that can be and of course have to be discussed and dealt with).
Lacewing wrote:Well, I suppose I am guilty of this in the sense that I think we're making all of this up somehow... and that we don't "know" anything really, except what we make up. BUT... I treasure it.
And I think there's value, even if fleeting... and even if only for the experience. And I've been finding a new kind of freedom and joy from
NOT NEEDING TO KNOW. Just being. Dancing with all of it. Making stuff up, while knowing it's made up, is great fun. It takes the pressure off. Seeing how things work and flow... and playing the game, is an exhilarating challenge. Learning to love more and more because there are no conditions that must be met, is joyful beyond words. And riding the invisible dragon of one's energy and power, brings a whole new dimension to everything, and seems to open up new worlds to explore.
I suggest this is a pure metaphysical declaration, and it is as much of an
imposition as any mythology, any god-story, and any shared Social Agreement with ethical praxis implied or stated. It is essentially an emotional declaration, one that arises out of feelings, a way to be in the world, a way to feel good and comfortable, a way to deal with and overcome some of the angst of, perhaps, more demanding philosophical predicates. Curiously, I have a sense that Swamp Dog Hobbles has heard these note with his super-sensitive Swamp Dog ears:
Hobbles wrote:Emotionally you are a theist, but rationally you are atheistic.
Atheism in this sense would (to my mind) mean a necessary rejection of an Old Story that no longer functions. It means that a language-system no longer functions well enough to define 'what we mean' when we attempt utterance. Atheism, to my mind, makes complete sense as a declaration about the non-viability of a descriptive model.
I sometimes wonder if the statement
'God is dead ... and we killed him' has more to do with undermining of language and cogent description.
Thanks for giving me some good giggles yesterday. I wish you well.