From Up On Frederick's Stone

I have started reading Ishmael, after several years of being recommended to read it. Some initial critiques:

–Takers vs. Leavers is a narrative founded on a paradigm held by the Takers.
–Nature is not some uncontrolling state. Humans are only doing the atrocities of what nature did but better.
–Trial-and-error is how all learning happens. Yes, trial-and-error with civilization leads to disastrous consequences, but is there really another way?
–The sin of man is not order but control.
–Man is a part of nature and so is technological advancement. No, it is not necessary for us to destroy and conquer, but
–Misanthropy is still an anthropic narrative because a human conceived of it. We have no way of positively knowing what it’s like to not be a human.


Do not give me chrismatic promises of freedom upon death; let the pangs of starvation riddle through me. For then I would be honest.

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Lack and living converge at their farthest reaches.

Extreme wealth is a poverty, extreme poverty is a wealth.
Sleep deprivation turns waking into dreaming, narcolepsy turns dreaming into waking.
Extreme formality becomes a vanity, extreme vanity becomes a formality.

Becoming polarized, you polarize another.
Becoming polarized, you become its opposite.

What is it that binds opposites together? Why do they become each other? Why do they perpetuate each other? Is this codependent regeneration cyclical, metamorphical, necessary? Is it that the two are one? Is it that there is something that binds the two together? Is it that the middle neutral is the ground? When you tend toward an extreme, do you simply become aware of its opposite because of forces pulling in that direction? Does extreme wealth feel like poverty because you’ve slated your reality so far from a natural state that the memory of lack asserts itself continually? Is it the striving for more, the greed that feels like a poverty? Is it the desiring or the opposition that perpetuates these cycles?

Focus does not determine causality. I am not the self.
An anger which is cool, reactive and nonreactive. A piercing silently and affirmation. Angry for myself.

I do not speak much of God not because I think God cannot be spoken of, nor because I do not wish to speak of God, but because I find that speaking of him publicly encourages blasphemy. Either I will act as a drunk or a museum curator, so as to guard the pearls from the swine. Besides, too many people want to separate from the real world. Speaking of secular things and pagan spiritualities encourages people to touch into their natural dispositions. Ironically, “truth” is the best idol. A believer does not believe in their reality—for them, it is.

Good planning and good sentiment do not have to be express.

Plato grasps onto the Idea.
Aristotle grasps onto substance.
Kant grasps onto affinity, without clearly realizing it.
Phaedrus grasps onto Quality.

An excellent pairing: the film, Princess Mononoke, with the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I ought to write a book that is thoroughly mythically charged. The starkness of high mountains, the sheer momentum of thought, the arrow of the infinite. Terra incognita of madness. False monisms trying to give birth to the universe. Gray tan browness of pine, tallened to the redwood stature. Wizened ages passed and forlorn. Ah, the muse returns, arrives in this surging presence.

There is a difference between compulsive attachment and healthy attachment. When I listen at church to Christian prayers, scripture readings, songs, I often am perturbed or taken aback by the sense in which there is a dominating pressure being exerted on me. I will describe this as an ontological pressure, in that the intent of the congregants is to press their thoughts or ideals onto the embodied world. Sometimes, though, I see breaks in this pressure, where truly it can be said that there is a spirit of grace tangible.

The people who criticize me for being proud also happen to be those who have terrible stress over their imperfections. To them, humility means acting subservient. Ironically, pride is an obsession with one’s image. How then could a humble person spend all their time thinking about if they are lowly enough? To them, a person free from self-debasement is haughty and disgusting. They veil their arrogance behind appearances of agreeability.

I will not conform to controlling and being controlled. This is not love but is a dictator setting snares all around the mind.

Why is it that I seem so radically different to each person I interact with? Am I such a mirror as to be whomever I look upon?

I will be henceforth amalgamating more things on my primary blog page. “Reflects” tends to be where I update most of my thoughts, and the home page is where I tend to place most of my longer or critical thoughts. However, this is my blog and if I’m always adding to Reflects, then what’s my blog but a collection of high-quality pieces, or at least high formalism. So I’m going to treat the home page as a place for many of my thoughts, which will often be titled by the date of their entry.

There is a problematic dilemma I want to avoid, however, which is the incessant inclusion of garble. By the way, di-lemma is just that: two lemmas. It’s a catch-22, properly speaking. If I keep talking, I get my thoughts out there for posterity. If I keep talking, then there is no clear separation between the philosophical mouthwash and the highly stylized, the crafted. As much I would like to keep an air of presentation afloat, it does not seem convenient to me. It’s easier to focus on saying what I wish to say and formulating into nice styles afterward. Sometimes I’ll generate highly qualitized pieces, but that’s not today. Today, I’ll give you scratchwork, sketches, etc. Tomorrow is another day.

Expect transitions from my other social media accounts to be centralized here. I will offer no links, however. This is a free-floating endeavor.


February 3, 2021
SLO

Like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem stands as a monument demarcating the limits of rational thought. It stands there at the edge of the cliff of the mind. The theorem boils down to showing that a rational system of thought can either be consistent but incomplete or complete but inconsistent. Think about it like this. If you try to keep your room clean, you will always have something untidy to clean. But if you accept your whole room as it is, it will be disorganized. If you try to be consistent in your cleaning, your attempts will be incomplete. If you try to be complete in your approach to cleaning, your room will be inconsistently organized.

Here, I offer a few excerpts from the Hindu Upanishads that I love, and that resonate very much with Christianity, predating it. Notice the similarities. A word of advice to my reader. If you were to eat the food from another culture and it reminds you of home, wouldn’t it be inappropriate to freak out and reject the entire meal? Just because something similar but not quite the same does not mean it is poison. Do not remain prejudiced toward a stranger’s culture, lest you dishonor your host and discard the friendship that is greater than food.

Last week, my girlfriend and I watched My Octopus Teacher. It was one of the most beautiful films I have watched—one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. It is a documentary, brilliant with long shots of pristine underwater photography. A middle-aged male, South African photographer had become worn and frayed from many years of civilized life, perhaps angry and apathetic toward his family, overall disheveled. To rescue his and his family’s wellbeing from the cult of productivity that had pained them so much, he decided he needed to return to nature. To step back into the cold Atlantic waters that neighbored his childhood home. Not only neighbored, but quite literally bashed against and spilled through the doors during storm surges. His early life was shaped by the intertidal zone of the Storm Coast, nature’s nurture for him was the bouldered waters, the sea palm kelp forests, the deep churning cobalt blue on copper. And so, in the great course of all human epics, he returned to the world of past times to find his self’s axis.