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Posted by Michael Sympson on 18/12/2001, 20:06:24
I think every visitor to an East-Asian country has made his own observations on the alive and kicking subculture of superstition and day to day nonsense there. From a Western perspective, it is easy to single out: Feng Shui, mantras, meditation, karma, Zen, nirvana, haikus, Taoist aphrodisiacs, "holistic" medicine, and on the high end, acupuncture and the Eastern equivalent to political fundamentalism: the so called "Asian values" (which are conveniently forgotten each and every time, when it is time to brush the teeth, step on a gas pedal, agonize as good middle-class citizen on which school to send the kids, or use the most favoured toy - the cell phone - to check out on the stock exchange.)
A friend of mine said that meditation introduces happiness among Buddhist monks. It is "good dope," inexpensive and with no bad side-effects. Some monks may even maintain that "jhana" is better than sex, because it goes on for hours and "frees the mind from attachments." My answer to this is simple: Why should I want to be dissociated from my attachments? That's what makes me the person I am; it gives meaning to my life; it is the stuff that matters. If it causes pain and occasional unhappiness - well that's the price for being alive. But systematically vegetating and withdrawing ... if nothing else, is pretty boring, isn't it?
As I said, easy to single out these things in the East - but what about the cons back home? With the volatile type of the compulsive gambler - (aka stockbroker and currency dealer) on the hub's hub of social ambitions, what is to be expected? It must be teeming! And it does. The circumstances of my life have taught me to travel light, and take no nonsense. (A little piece of plastic is all the luggage you need - but I am not there yet.) So, now and then, I step to my bookcase, sweep the shelves and retire the phonies. Not as a test of time; just the realization that the black hole at the end of the road is approaching fast. No time to waste. Some people in my situation, go see their pastor on Sunday. Others make appointments with their therapists. I look for the book that will keep me company.
1. Children of the 60s had had no difficulties to classify Freud as a "guru." Basically that's what Freud had been. He doped his clients with cocaine into hysteria and exorcised hysteria as a profitable neurosis. (For the record: in his entire lifetime, despite of his claims, Freud did not cure even one single patient - including the "Wolfman." But it created an industry. C. G. Jung, Reich, Sartre, Heidegger, Frye, Derrida have already been seen off my premises. I look at Levi Strauss. A perfectly respectable anthropologist who turned his trade into a kind of cargo-cult science - and that is that. If it is science I look for - I read Sforza-Cavelli.
2. The making of Hitler and Himmler must have been easy: Madame Blavatsky did all the thinking. But before we say "ah, that's why," let's look at the man behind. This terrible little professor in his Swiss chalet with a view, who rose on his toes, clenched little fists and squawked from the top of his lungs into an empty room. "It is perfectly clear to me," said an other champion of soap-box rhetorics, "that Nietzsche was quite mad and not just in a figurative sense: his incoherence, the leaps between thoughts, comparisons without telling what he is comparing, the way he starts a rodomontade without bringing it to an end ... this positively demented obsession with his own own brilliant superiority!" (Tolstoy)
3. "Every author creates his own pedigree." (Borges) Dostoyevsky chose Eugne Sue, Byron, Ann Radcliffe, Jean Jaques Rousseau, and Samuel Richardson. Why? Because they educated their audience in the pleasures of the simple life of the poor (but secretly disposed of their children in the orphanages) and made it a trade, to exaggerate emotions to a point that provokes a Pavlovian reflex of conventional compassion. Even the great Charles Dickens, with a very conscious look at sales-figures, couldn't resist. There is a connection between Dostoyevsky's cheap shots, and Stalin's and Himmler's infatuation with babies, or Lenin's sobbing in the opera.
4. Unfortunately, sincerity is not a benchmark for intellectual prowess and spunk no substitute for integrity. Spengler wrote enormously influential books; Witgenstein gave up on thinking straight altogether - since then Europe's intelligentsia prefers to speak in oracles. Of course one could argue we need the weirdos to add color to our culture - for every king a court jester. But Dostoyevsky's monumental admission-list to the secured ward is not even funny. This author went strictly by the book, (C. G. Carus' book that is "Psyche," 1846) and scampers along the sinner's mile for senile dementia, hysteria, and at least 4 cases of epilepsy towards a photo finish with Jeeesus spilled all over the place. Thank you, but no; thanks.
5. Or Hamsun's "Mysteries." I have read a lot, so inevitably, I have read a lot of crap - but "Mysteries" really takes the biscuit. Hamsun of course could do much better than that; and he did. It just rattles me to hear so many people hail obvious nonsense as a "masterpiece." Even Hamsun's Nobel piece, the "Growth of the Soil" is basically an extremely well written manifesto of blood and soil for the radical right - this man was not messing about. Consequently, Goebbels saw to it that every German soldier carried a copy of it to war. After 1945, for dear survival, Hamsun's imitators turned to writing children's books (sic!). Imagine that!
So here I am: standing in front of my bookcase. I flip through "Pan" and "Growth of the Soil," and suck my teeth. What am I going to do?
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Posted by Lale on 21/12/2001, 17:48:06, in reply to "In front of my bookcase ..."
Do you mean to say you don't believe in any of these? I guess I don't either but I am scared to write them all off, just in case.
These systems, or methods, or cures have been tested for centuries. Some of them must have some merit. Who knows, if I got rid of that junk in the corner that is sucking up all my energy maybe I would become less lazy and more efficient?
When I was just desperate to get rid of my migraine headaches, I tried a few far-eastern stuff. Now, my migraines are manageable, maybe thanks to those things.
What about Karate and Tae-kwon-do, they seem to be efficient fighting/self-defense techniques?
And Tai-Chi. That's definitely healthy, no?
Meditation, that's another thing. Everyone should meditate. There are a million reasons to meditate. Not to detach like you say, but simply to regroup.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 21/12/2001, 20:46:35, in reply to "Re: In front of my bookcase ..."
Indeed I do. When younger, especially during the 60s, I went through my phases, as apparently everyone else. I took Zen seriously, studied the Buddhist sriptures from the "Pali"- canon, the "small vessel." But my association - as a guinea-pig, I needed the money - with Roland Fischer's research program (see my review on Plotin) taught me a lesson or two.
Later, during my stay in China I found myself confronted with nonsense (not to use the other word) on an absolutely staggering scale. There is really nothing to it. Lale: the West has practiced sorcery for millennia, does this make it a credible method, just because it is old? Every system of ignorance is "old." That's one of its selling points.
Even acupuncture teeters on the brink - nobody, including the Chinese, does actually know what it does and how. The wife of a friend had excruciating headaches, located in the central nerve that goes from the temples, through the cheek to the jawbone. Even now, medicine has neither a cure nor something to alleviate effectively the pain. She was ready to try everything. The needles went in and half of her face was instantly numb, the jaw dropped (literally). Needles went out, and the situation was as before - no change.
I am not aware to have included the martial arts in my list, as I didn't include Japanese architecture, tea etiquette and hygiene, Asian cuisine, the Chinese abbacus and a few other things which are simply implements from a different culture. Civilization is the sum total of human activity - the end of civilization would be the end of everything. Culture on the other hand, is the WAY people do things. If 2 people do the same thing in 2 different ways, then you have 2 different cultures, and I am not taking issue with that, even if there are differences in the efficiency.
(Example: East and West invented printing roughly at the same time - the third century AD. The Chinese used it to rub texts on their recently invented paper, but continued to use their cumbersome ideographs. The frivolous West used the technique to flatter female vanities and imprint decorative patterns on textiles. Books continued to be copied by hand on papyrus and the expensive parchment. In the end it took a Gutenberg to bring all the ingredients together: the Western alphabet, Chinese/Arab paper, the Korean invention of movable letters cast in metal (the alloy is Gutenberg's own invention - the Korean's used steel, the Chinese clay and wood, and it is noteworthy that the Koreans just had reinvented the Western Alphabet for themselves) and the age-old oil-press. Combined this created an instrument that revolutionized civilization and culture.)
The haiku is included, because it is one of my pet-hates. It is almost infallibly a sign for mediocrity of penmanship, if a Western person is falling back on this form. It may have its place in Japan, but that's where it should stay for good.
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Posted by Andres Natal on 28/12/2001, 7:13:00, in reply to "Re: In front of my bookcase ..."
Krishnamurti had a beautful thought regarding the Western confusion over the concept of "divine extinction" which the Buddhist's call "Nirvana".
"It is not the simple extinguishing of a candle," said Krishnamuti; "it is the putting out of a flame--because day has at last arrived."
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