- @adambn can .htaccess contain hebrew characters (for 301 redirects from URLs containing hebrew to new english only URLs)? in reply to adambn #
- new series about reading illustrated yoga asana practices – starting with breath & repetition: http://bit.ly/abrTcF #
- going to cleanse my body on the outside by showering and on the inside with yoga #
- @msurman re: Pics from drumbeat Toronto: http://bit.ly/9i0PyO [me: looks like a soft, open and happy gathering of people … beautiful!] in reply to msurman #
- on WordPress: when I use it I love it, when I partake in it I hate it #
- I have put off this next reading for some days… a challenging and important chapter… here goes nothing #
- "…[on] the doctrine that says,'Science is not concerned with values. Science is concerned only with facts' … #
- the Metaphysics of Quality asks: which values is science unconcerned with? … #
- A scientist may argue rationally that the moral question 'Is it all right to murder your neighbor?" is not a scientific question. #
- But can he argue that the moral question, 'Is it all right to fake your scientific data?' is not a scientific question? #
- … What the Metaphysics of Quality makes clear is that it is only social values and morals … that sciences is unconcerned with. #
- There are important historic reasons for this: … [to] the ancient Greek belief that thought is independent of society … ancient Greeks #
- such as Socrates & Pythaguras paved the way for the fundamental principle behind science: that truth stands independently of social opinion. #
- It is determines by direct observation & experiment,not by hearsay. Religious authority always has attacked this principle as heresy… #
- The defenders who fought to protect science from church control argued that science is not concerned with morals. Intellectuals would leave #
- morals for the church to decide… But the Metaphysics of Quality makes clear is that this political battle …was in fact a moral battle. #
- It was the battle of a higher, intellectual level of evolution to keep itself from being devoured by a lower, social level of evolution. #
- Once this political battle is resolved, the Metaphysics ofQuality can then go back and re-ask the question, #
- 'Just exactly how independent is science, in fact, from society?' The answer it gives is, 'not at all'. #
- A science in which social patterns are of no account is as unreal and absurd as a society in which biological patterns are of no account. #
- … If the observer is totally objectiveand records only what he observes, then where does he observe a hypothesis?… #
- Our scientific description of nature is always culturally derived. Nature tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear. #
- … Descarte's 'I think therefore I am' was a historically shattering declaration of independence of the intellectual … from the social… #
- If Descartes had said 'The 17th century culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am' he would have been correct. #
- The Metaphysics of Quality resolves the relationship between intellect and society, subject and object, mind and matter by embedding them #
- all in a larger system of understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological values; Subjects are social and intellectual values. #
- …They have a matter-of-fact evolutionary relationship. That evolutionary relationship is also a moral one. #
- The intellect's evolutionary purpose has never been to discover an ultimate meaning of the universe. That is a relatively recent fad. #
- It's historical purpose has been to help a society find food,detect danger, and defeat enemies. It can do this well or poorly, depending on #
- the concepts it invents for this purpose. #
- … Knowledge has grown away from this historic purpose and become an end in itself, just as society has grown away from it's original #
- purpose of preserving physical human beings … and this growing away … towards greater Quality is a moral growth. #
- But those original purposes are still there. And when things get lost … it is useful to remember that point of departure. #
- The Metaphysics of Quality suggests that the social chaos of the 20th century can be relieved by going back to this point of departure… #
- Intellect can support static patterns of society without fear of domination by carefully distinguishing those moral issues that are #
- social-biological from those that are intellectual-social… what's at issue here .. [is] a clash of 2 entirely different codes of morals #
- in which society is caught in the middle… You have a society-vs.-biology cored of morals and… an intellect-vs.-society code of morals. #
- … In the battle of society against biolog, the new 20th century intellectuals have taken biology's side. #
- Society can handle biology alone by means of prisons & guns & police & the military. But when the intellectuals in control of society take #
- biology's side against society, then society is caught in a cross fire from which it has no protection. #
- … The Metaphysics of Quality says … what's good in life isn't defined by society or intellect or biology. What's good is freedom from #
- domination by any static pattern, but that freedom doesn't have to be obtained by the destruction of the patterns themselves. #
- … The Hippie revolution of the 60's was a moral revolution against both society and intellectuality … children of well-to-do … people #
- of the world who suddenly turned upon their parents & schools & society with a hatred no one could have believed existed… #
- The reason this movement has been so hard to understand is that "understanding" itself, static intellect, was it's enemy. #
- Whatever the intellectuals of the 20's had fought to create,the flower children of the 60's fought to destroy… #
- Drugs that destroyed one's ability to reason were almost a sacrament. #
- Oriental religions such as Zen & Vedanta that promised release from the prison of intellect were taken up as gospel. #
- …By the end of the 60's the intellectualism of the 20's found itself in an impossible trap. #
- If it continued to advocate more freedom from Victorian social restraint, all it would get was more Hippies. #
- If, on the other hand, it advocated more constructive social conformity in opposition to the Hippies, all it would get was more Victorians, #
- in the form of the reactionary right. This political whip-saw was invincible and cut down one of the last of the great intellectual liberal #
- leaders of the New Deal period, Hubert Humphrey, the Democractic candidate for president … the great intellectual revolution of #
- the first half of the 20th century, the dream of a 'Great Society' made humane by man's intellect, was killed, #
- hoist on its own petard of freedom from social constraint. #
- … this 'Dynamic' 60's revolution made a disastrous mistake that destroyed it before it really got started. #
- The Hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns left just 2 directions to go: toward biological quality & toward Dynamic Quality. #
- The revolutionaries of the 60's thoughts that since both are antisocial & anti-intellectual…they must be the same. That was a mistake. #
- …When biological quality and Dynamic Quality are confused the result … [is] an extremely destructive form of degeneracy of the sort #
- seen in the Manson murders, the Jonestown madness & the increase of crim and drug addiction throughout the country. #
- In the early 70's,as people began to see this, they dropped away from the movement #
- and the Hippie revolution, like the intellectual revolution of the 20's, became a moral rebellion that failed. #
- Today…the overall picture is one of moral movements gone bankrupt… the result has been a drop in both social and intellectual quality. #
- The end of the 20th century in America seems to be an intellectual, social, and economic rust-belt, a whole society that has given up on #
- Dynamic improvementand is slowly trying to slip back to Victorianism,the last static ratchet-latch. #
- More Dynamic foreign cultures are overtaking it and actually invading it because it's nowincapableofcompeting. #
- What's coming out of the urban slums …[is] the oldbiological might-makes-right morality of prehistoric brigandage that primitive #
- societies were set up to overcome." #
- are early adopters the Pied Pipers of Facebook? http://bit.ly/b0Gyvw #
- second article in series on reading illustrated yoga practices – this time on sequences: http://bit.ly/abDx0m #
- "…the Metaphysics of Quality says that what is meant by 'human rights' is usually the moral code of intellect-vs.-society, the moral right #
- of intellect to be free of social control. Freedom of speech; freedom of assembly, of travel; government by consent… #
- According to the Metaphysics of Quality these 'human rights' have not just a sentimental basis, but a rational, metaphysical basis. #
- They are essential to the evolution of a higher level of life from a lower level of life. They are for real. #
- But what the Metaphysics of Quality also makes clear is that this intellect-vs.-society code … is not the same as the society-vs.-biology #
- codes of morals that go back to a prehistoric time. They are completely separate levels of morals. They should never be confused… #
- Is society good or is society evil? … in one level society is the higher evolutionary pattern and in the other it is the lower. #
- Unless u separate these 2 levels of moral codes u get a paralyzing confusion…[that] dominates all thoughts about morality & society today. #
- … There are no chains more vicious than the chains of biological necessity into which every child is born. Society exists primarily to #
- free people from these biological chains..has done that job so stunningly well intellectuals forget..&turn on it..with shameful ingratitude. #
- [because of this] Today we are living in an intellectual and technologiical paradise and a moral and social nightmare. #
- the 20th century intellectual faith in man's basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is disastrously naive… a devastating fiction… #
- cannibalism,not cooperation, was a pre-society norm… American Indians …ambushe & tortured [other tribes]… #
- … maybe it is man's basic goodness which invented social institutions to repress this kind of biological savagery in the first place. #
- .. the Metaphysics of Quality concludes that the old Puritan & Victorian social codes should not be followed [or attacked] blindly… #
- They should be dusted off and re-examined, fairly and impartially, to see what they were trying… and actually did accomplish towards #
- building a stronger society. We must understand that #
- when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, #
- but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good. #
- These moral bads and goods are not just 'customs'. They are as real as rocks and trees. #
- … the Metaphysics of Quality concludes that [the destructive sympathy by intellectuals toward lawlessness in the 60's] was really stupid. #
- … The idea that biological crimes can be ended by intellect alone, that you can talk crime to death, doesn't work… #
- The instrument of conversation between society & biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and hhis gun. #
- All the laws of history…Constitutions & the Bills of Rights & Declarations of Independence are … instructions to the military & police. #
- …'racism' … goes all the way back to square one, to the subject-object metaphysics wherein man is an object who possesses … culture… #
- it goes on to reason that because it is immoral to speak against a people because of their genetic characteristics it is therefore also #
- immoral to speak against a people because of their cultural characteristics…& Science sayd there is morality outside of cultural morality #
- , therefore any moral censorship of minority patterns of crime … is itself immoral. That is the paralysis… #
- the Metaphysics of Quality says… that to say a cultural pattern is an integral part of a biological person is like saying #
- the Lotus123 program is an integral part of an IBM computer.Not so. Cultures are not the source of all morals,only a limited set of morals. #
- Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life. #
- A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and #
- a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not. #
- It is immoral to speak against a people because of the color of their skin, or any other genetic characteristic… #
- But it is not immoral to speak against a person because of his cultural characteristics… these are changeable and they do matter. #
- … The fight to sustain social codes isn't a war of blacks vs. whites… or poor people vs. rich … or…stupid people against intelligent #
- ..It's a war of biology vs. society…and intellect, to end the paralysis of society, has to know whose side it is on, and support that side #
- Where biological values r undermining social values, intellectuals must identify social behavior..& support it alltheway without restraint. #
- Intellectuals must … limit and destroy destructive biological patterns with complete moral ruthlessness the way a doctor destroys germs." #
- "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet" http://huff.to/cthiyz #
- "minimum wage" is a socially acceptable alternative to slavery #
- a shakuhachi recording from this morning: http://bit.ly/d06Wce #
- a 3rd part in the series about reading asana illustrations – this time covering alternating between 2 sides : http://bit.ly/bsRjeR #
- "No one wants to admit it, but that's really the reason the insane get locked up. It's not just that they have absurd ideas that no one else #
- believes. What makes them 'insane' is that they have these ideas and are a nuisance to somebody else. #
- The only thing that's illegitimate is the cover-up, the pretense that you're trying to help them by getting rid of them. #
- … As long as you're stuck with the old conventions,insanity is going to be a 'misunderstanding of the object by the subject'. #
- The object is real, the subject is mistaken. The only problem is how to change the subject's mind back to a correct comprehension… #
- But with a Metaphysics of Quality the empirical experience … is an experience of value patterns produced by a number of sources… #
- When an insane person – or a hypnotized person or a person from a primitive culture, advances some explanation of the universe that is #
- completely at odds with current scientific reality, we do not have to believe he has jumped off the end of the empirical world. #
- He is just a person who is valuing intellectual patterns that, because they are outside the range of our own culture, #
- we perceive to have very low quality. Some biological or social or Dynamicm force has altered his judgment of quality. #
- It has caused him to filter out what we call normal cultural intellectual patterns just as ruthlessly as our culture filters out his. #
- Obviously no culture wants its legal patterns violated…That's what mental hospitals are partly for. And also heresy trials. #
- They protect the culture from foreign ideas that if allowed to grow unchecked could destroy the culture itself. #
- … [he] had seen that the psychiatrists were … required to deal with insanity as cultural representatives… priests saving heretics. #
- Psychiatrists seemed to fear the taint of insanity, much as inquisitors once feared succumbing to the devil. #
- Psychiatrists were not allowed to practice psychiatry if they were insane. #
- It was required that they literally did not know what they were talking about. #
- To this… they could counter that you don't have to be infected with pneumonia in order to know how to cure it and you don't have to be #
- infected with insanity to know how to cure it either. But the rebutal to that goes to the core of the whole problem. #
- Pneumonia is a biological pattern…scientifically variable. Insanity…is an intellectual pattern…it has no physical/biological reality. #
- No scientific intrsument can be produced…to show who is insane and who is sane. The scientific laws of the universe r invented by sanity. #
- There is no way by which sanity, using the instruments of its own creation, can measure that which is outside itself and its creations. #
- Insanity isn't an 'object' of observation. It's an alteration of observation itself. #
- …Insanity always exists in relation to others. It is a social and intellecual deviation, not a biological deviation. #
- The only test for insanity is conformity to a cultural status quo. That is why the psychiatric profession bears such a resemblance to the #
- old preisthoods. Both use physical restraint and abuse as ways of enforcing the status quo. That being said, it follows that #
- the assignment of medical doctors to treat insanity is a misuse of their training….[they] are trained to look at things from an inorganic #
- and biological perspective… their cures are biological:shock,drugs, lobotomies, and physical restraints… #
- … [he] had seen that if you want to get out of an insane asylum…is 2 persuade them that u fully understand that they know more than u do #
- and that you are fully ready to accept their intellectual authority. That is how heretics keep from getting burned. They recant. #
- …In time this strategy has brought [him] enough smiles to get out. It made him less honest…more of a conformist… #
- It wasn't a happy solution, to always role-play with people he had once been honest with. It made it impossible to ever really share #
- anything with them. Now he was more isolated than he had been in the insane asylum… #
- Now, years later, his resentment … had lessened…somebody has to deal with the degenerate forms of society and intellect. #
- The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you #
- don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do… #
- is stay out of their way." #
- my greatest Microsoft memory – Eddie Brickell's Good Times – came with Win95 – multimedia demo: http://bit.ly/701E0j #
- originally assembled this PC (I'm working on now) to be my Ubuntu based home made RAID server http://bit.ly/bBARNn .. but now #
- it's my primary workstation and I'm kinda kicking myself for not getting better hardware (processor & memory) at least RAID is super fast 🙂 #
- an advanced Yoga energy experiment combining asana and structured breathing: http://bit.ly/d0LZt3 #
- when you hug someone – try bringing your hearts together 🙂 instead of the more common hearts-apart variation #
- "Anthropologists,when they are not being self-consciously 'objective',tend to be very interested in new things… #
- …Anthropologists see over & over again that insanity is culturally defined… each culture has different criteria for what constitutes it. #
- … Anthropologists found that schizophrenia is strongest among those whose ties with the cultural traditions are weakest… #
- …psychoses, which are an extreme form of culture shock, emerge… because the cultural definition of values … has been changed… #
- pshychiatry can't really deal with all of this because it is pinioned to a subject-object truth system which declares that #
- 1 particular intellectual pattern is real & all others are illusions. Psychiatry is forced 2take this position in contradicition 2history, #
- which shows…that 1 era's illusions become another era's truth…in contradiction 2georaphy… 1 area's truth are another area's illusions. #
- … not only does insanity vary from culture 2 culture, but sanity itself also varies from culture 2 culture … #
- …in the psychiatric wards… what the patients showed wasn't any one common characteristic but an absence of one. #
- What was absent was the kind of standard social role-playing that 'normal' people get into …the insane see this role-playing & resent it. #
- …Ur static value system filters out the undesirable opinions & preserves the desirable ones…it isnt just opinions that get filtered out. #
- It's also data. #
- We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past 'facts' which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not #
- fit the pattern we don't throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact… a contradictory fact has 2keep hammering…sometimes for centuries #
- , before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time b4 they see it 2. #
- Just as the biological immune system will destroy a life-saving skin graft with the same vigor with which it will fight pneumonia, #
- so will a cultural immune system fight off a beneficial new kind of understanding with the same kind of vigor it uses to destroy crime. #
- … there's nothing immoral in a culturenotbeing ready to accept something Dynamic. Static latching is necessary to sustain the gains the #
- culture has made in the past. The solution is… to look for those factors that will make the new information acceptable: the keys. #
- The Dharmakaya light…a huge area of human experience cut off by cultural filtering… #
- he didn't think of this light as some sort of supernatural occurence that had no grounding in physical reality … #
- nobody c's it bcause the cultural definition of what is real&what is unreal filtersout Dharmakaya light from 20th century American 'reality' #
- just as surely as time is filtered out of Hopi reality, and green-yellow differences mean nothing to the Natchez. #
- …he thought that the light was nothing more than an involuntary widening of the iris of the eyes … makes things look brighter… #
- but despite filtering by the cultural immune system, refernces to this occur in many places, scattered, disconnected and unrelated. #
- Lamps are sometimes used as symbols of learning.Why should they be? A torch…symbol of idealistic inspiration… 'I've seen the light' … #
- When a cartoonist want to show someone getting a great idea he puts an electric bulb over the character's head. Everybody understands…Why? #
- In a Metaphysics of Quality…this light is important because it often appears associated with undefined auspiciousness…Dynamic Quality. #
- It signals a Dynamic intrusion upon a static situation. When there is letting go of static patterns the light occurs. #
- It is often accompanied by a feeling of relaxation because static patterns have been jarred loose… #
- it was probably the light that infants see when their world is still fresh and whole,before consciousness differentiates it into patterns; #
- a light into which everything fades at death … the breakup of static patterns of the person's intellect #
- as it returned into the pure Dynamic Quality from which it had emerged in infancy… #
- …when he had wandered freely outside the limits of cultural reality, this light had been a valued companion.." #
- there's a subtle element of denial & resistance in looking for a 'reason' to explain something objectionable – a false hope for causality? #
- @raymondpirouz re:Apple (1) yes kicking off with "Open" is cynical; (2) they can make a case with hypocritical thinking; (3) they did in reply to raymondpirouz #
- @raymondpirouz re:Apple – they are arrogant: "to provide the most advanced and innovative platform…the best apps the world has ever seen" in reply to raymondpirouz #
- @raymondpirouz re:Apple – they have marked their greatest contender – "Open"… in reply to raymondpirouz #
- @raymondpirouz re:Apple – but, lucky for them, "Open" still hasn't pulled it's act together… to do that it needs an injection of "design" in reply to raymondpirouz #
- @raymondpirouz the core values of "openness" are the greatest threat to Apple… but those values have yet to manifest as good products! in reply to raymondpirouz #
- the book is nearing the end… I'm going for a 2nd reading today… this one is close to my heart… #
- "'What makes people sane?' … the way to really deal with insanity … is to turn the tables and talk about truth instead. #
- If objects r the ultimate reality then there's only 1 true intellectual construction of things: that which corresponds 2the objective world. #
- But if truth is defined as a high-quality set of intellectual value patterns, then insanity can be defined as just a low-quality set of #
- intellectual value patterns, and you get a whole different picture of it. #
- When the culture asks 'Why doesnt this person see things the way we do?" you can answer that he doesnt c them because he doesn't value them. #
- He's gone into illegal value patterns because the illegal patterns resolve value conflicts that the culture's unable to handle. #
- … In a subject-object world trance and hypnosis are big time platypi. That's why there's this prejudice… #
- … They're best nudged as close as possible to the empirical trash heap called 'the occult' … #
- But since they do exist, what you have is an empirically observable case of empiricism being overthrown. #
- The irony is that there are times when the culture actually fosters trance and hypnosis to further its purposes. #
- When you enter a movie theatre you know that all you are going to see is 24 shadows per second …an illusions of moving people & objects. #
- Yet despite this knowledge u laugh when the 24 shadows per second tell jokes and cry when the shadows show actors faking death. #
- U know they r an illusion yet u enter the illusion&become part of it&while the illusion is taking place u r not aware that it is an illusion #
- This is hypnosis. It is trance. It's also a form of temporary insanity. But it's also a powerful force for cultural reinforcement… #
- … in the case of permanent insanity the exists to the theater have been blocked, usually because of the knowledge that the show outside is #
- so much worse. #
- the insane person is running a private unapproved film which he happensto like better than the current cultural one. #
- If U want him to run the film everyone else is seeing,the solution would be to find ways to prove to him that it would be valuable to do so. #
- Contrarians sometimes just seem to savagely attack every kind of static moral patern they can find… as though … a kind of revenge… #
- The Cheyenne had a whole society of contrarians to assimilate the phenomenon within their social fabric… #
- [they] rode their horses sitting backward, entered teepees backward…Members seemed to enter the contrary society when they felt #
- a great wrong, a great injustice, had been done to them and apparently it was felt that this was a way of resolving the injustice. #
- …When u add a concept of 'Dynamic Quality' toa rational understanding of the world, you can add a lot to an understanding of contrarians. #
- Some of them aren't just being negative toward static moral patterns, they are actively pursuing a Dynamic goal. #
- ..negative contrarian streaks…sometimes it's a degenerative negativism…sometimes an ego pattern…sometimes a static pattern of it's own #
- … But sometimes it's Dynamic, where your whole being senses that the static situation is an enemy of life itself. #
- That's what drives the really creative people… the feeling that if they don't break out of this jailhouse… they're going to die. #
- They're way too energetic and aggressive to be decadent. They're fighting for some kind of Dynamic freedom from the static patterns. #
- …It's often confused with degeneracy but it's actually a form of moral regeneration… #
- … in addition to the usual solutions to insanity – stay locked up or learn to conform – there was a third one #
- , to reject all movies, private and cultural, and head for Dynamic Quality itself, which is no movie at all… #
- … evolution doesn't take place only within societies, it takes place within individuals too… #
- Sometimes the insane & the contrarians & the ones who are closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. #
- … They have taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle … they're solving problems for the culture as well." #
- "Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress #
- Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. #
- Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself." #
- "What's wrong with insanity is that she's outside any culture… a culture of one. That's what had to be reconciled… #
- At a hospital they'd just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust… they wouldn't see .. that she is adjusting. #
- …insanity is the adjustment…[it] isn't necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in the right direction. #
- … the problem of 'curing' an insane person is like the problem of 'curing' a moslem … or 'curing' communist …or 'curing' a republican #
- … You're not going to make progress by telling them how wrong they are… #
- The important thing was to support her delusions and then slowly wean her away from them rather than fight them. #
- The catch here,that almost any philosopher would spot, is the word 'delusion'. It's always the other person who's 'deluded'… #
- Delusions can be held by whole groups… as long as we're not a part of that group. If we're a member…[they] become a 'minority-opinion'. #
- .. A person isn't considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way … then it's a religion. #
- … It sounds quite blasphemous to put religion and insanity on an equal footing for comparison,but his point was… to illuminate insanity. #
- … The current subject-object point of view of religion, conventionally muted so as not to stir up the fanatics, is that #
- religious mysticism and insanity are the same. #
- Religious mysticism is one of those dellusions that isn't called insane only because there are so many people involved… #
- The Metaphysics of Quality … says the subject-object people are almost right when they identify religious-mysticism with insanity… #
- Both lunatics and mystics have freed themselves from the conventional static intellectual patterns of their culture. The only difference is #
- that the lunatic has shifted over to a private static pattern of his own, #
- whereas the mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of pure Dynamic Quality … #
- as long as the psychiatric approach is encased within a subject-object metaphysical understanding it will always seek a patterned solution #
- to insanity, never a mystic one… When Socrates says in one of his dialogues, #
- 'Our greatest blessings cometo us by way of madness provided the madness is given us by divine gift', #
- the psychiatric profession doesn't know what in the world he is talking about… #
- The Metaphysics of Quality suggests [there is another] solution to insanity… to dissolve all static patterns, both sand and insane #
- and find the base of all reality, Dynamic Quality, that is independent of them all. #
- The Metaphysics of Quality says that it is immoral for sane people to force cultural conformity by suppressing the Dynamic drives that #
- produce insanity. Such oppression is a lower form of evolution trying to devour a higher one. #
- Once this theoretical structure is available, it offers solutions to some mysteries in the present treatment of the insane… #
- For example… The value ofshock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. #
- It's value is that it destroys all patterns… cultural & private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a Dynamic state. #
- All the shock does is duplicate the effects of hitting the patient over the head with a baseball bat. It simply knocks him senseless. #
- In fact it was to imitate the effect of hitting someone over the head… without the risk of skull injury that Ugo Cerletti developed [it] #
- … but what goes unrecognized .. is the fact that this senseless unpatterened state is a valuable state of existence… #
- psychiatrists of course don't know what to do with it,and so the patient often slips back into lunacy and has to be knocked senseless again. #
- But sometimes the patient, in a moment of Zen wisdom,sees the superficiality of both his own contrary patterns and the cultural patterns, #
- sees that one gets him electrically clubbed… and the other sets him free from the institution… #
- and thereupon makes a wise mystic decision to get the hell ouf of there by whatever avenue is available. #
- … Another mystery in the treatment of the insane …is the value of peace and quiet and isolation… Leave them alone… #
- Ironically the one thing that the mental hospitals and doctors to best is the one thing they never take credit for… #
- They know it works, but there's no way of justifying that because the whole cultural set they have to operate in says #
- that doing nothing is the same as doing something wrong… what sometimes occurs in an insane asylum but occurs deliberately #
- in a mystic retreat is a natural human process called dhyana in sanskrit. In our culture … ambiguously called 'meditation'. #
- Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries&ashrams…so r the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm&austerity&silence. #
- The Western treatment of dhyana is a beautiful example of how the static patterns of a culture can make something not exist… #
- People in this culture are hypnotized into thinking they do not meditate when in fact they do. #
- … boats… seaside cottages… lake cabins… hiking trails… golf courses… It's the need for dhyana that is behind all these. #
- Vacations too…how perfectly named that is… an emptying out…of all the static clutter…settling into an undefined sort of tranquility. #
- …sectarian religion was a static fallout from Dynamic Quality … none of them told the whole truth… #
- There's an adage that, 'Nothing disturbs a bishop quite so much as the presence of a saint in the parish'… #
- The saint's Dynamic understanding makes him unpredictable and uncontrollable but the bishop's got a whole calendar of static ceremonies… #
- In all religions bishops tend to gild Dynamic Quality …because their cultures require it … #
- but these become like gold vines that cling to a tree, shut out its sunlight and eventually strangle it." #
- an Irish-German gift to the world – great band great album great fun!!! ♫ http://blip.fm/~pjpei #
- using breath to generate heat in yoga asana practices: http://bit.ly/dDohKL #
- "… once this integration occursand Dynamic Quality is identified with religious mysticism it produces an avalanche of information… #
- a lot of this religious mysticisim is just low-grade 'yelping about God'… but if you search for the sources… interesting things turn up. #
- …The logical order of things which the philosophers study is derived from 'mythos'. #
- The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible. #
- Most of this old religious talk is nonsense, of course, but nonsense or not, it is the parent of our modern scientific talk. #
- … Digging back into ancient Greek history, to the time when this mythos-to-logos transition was taking place … #
- the ancient rhetoricians of Greec, the Sophists, had taught what they called arete, which was a synonym for Quality. #
- …It is said that by following linguistic analysis u could go even further back into the mythos…Ancient Greek wasn't an original language #
- It was descended from a much earlier one … the Proto-Indo-European language … it has left no fragments but has been derived … #
- from similarities between such languages as Sanskrit, Greek and English which have … a common prehistoric tongue. #
- After thousands of years of separation from Greek & English the Hindi word for 'mother' is still 'ma'. #
- Yoga both looks like and is translated as 'yoke'…. an Indian rajah's title sounds like regent… #
- The Proto-Indo-European root of arete was the morpheme rt. There besides arete, was a treasure room of other derived 'rt' words: #
- aristocrat, art, rhetoric, worth, rite, ritual, wright, right (handed), & right (correct)… #
- All of these words except arithmetic seemed to have a vague thesaurus-like similarity to Quality… #
- in aristocrat&arithmetic Rt meant first…in art&wright it seemed to mean 'created' and 'of beauty'…'ritual' suggested repetitive order… #
- the word right has two meanings: 'right-handed' and 'moral and esthetic correctness'… #
- When all these meanings were strung together a fuller picture of the rtmorpheme emerged. #
- Rt referred to the 'first, created, beautiful repetitive order of moral and esthetic correctness.' #
- … condemntation of left-handedness as 'sinister' is an almost universal anthropological characetristic… #
- even today when legal oaths are taken … people shake hands …a president is inaugurated … it is mandatory that he raise his right hand. #
- Prehistoric rt is still with us. #
- There was just one thing wrong with this… the meanings… suggested 'importance' … that was social and procedural and manufactured… #
- Rt meant 'quality'…but … static, not Dynamic… then his mind dredged up a word he hadn't thought… of for a long time… Rta. #
- Rta [sanskrit] was the 'cosmic order of things'… the Sanskrit language was considered the most faithful to the Proto-Indo-European root… #
- …Rta, from the oldest portion of the Rg Veda, which was the oldest known writing of the Indo-Aryan language… #
- Varuna… was the chief support of rta … [a] ominiscent god …[of] unswerving adherance to high principles… #
- The physical order of the universe is also the moral order of the universe. Rta is both… It was the oldest idea known to man. #
- Rta also meant ritual … a decay [during the Brahmanas Hindu period] of Dynamic Quality into static quality… #
- then came the Upanisadic period &the flowering of Indian philosophy. Dynamic quality reemerged within the static patterns of Indian thought. #
- Rta…almost ceased to be used in Sanskrit…but under the name of dharma [it] occupies averyimportant place inthe later Indian view of life #
- The more usual meaning of dharma is religious merit…but it is sometimes used as a purely moral concept & stands for right/virtuous conduct #
- Dharma is duty… not external duty which is arbitrarily imposed by others…neither internal…arbitrarily decided by 1's own consciousness #
- …Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of 'rightness' which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of all life… #
- Within the Hindu tradition dharma is relative & dependent on the conditions of society… it is the bond which holds society together. #
- … But within modern Buddhist thought dharma becomes the phenomenal world – the object of perception, thought or understanding. #
- A chair, for example, is notcomposed of atoms of substance, it is composed of dharmas. #
- This statement is absolute jabberwocky 2a conventional subject-object metaphysics. How canachair b composed of individual littlemoralorders? #
- But if 1 applies the Metaphysics of Quality & sees that a chair is an inorganic static pattern and sees that all static patterns are #
- composed of valueand that value is synonymous with morality then it all begins to make sense. #
- …this was one answer…to why workmen in the Far East are able to maintain quality levels that compare so favorably to those in the West. #
- If one comes from a cultural tradition where an electronic assembly is primarily a moral order rather than just a neutral pile of substance, #
- it is easier to feel an ethical responsibility for doing good work on it… #
- Oriental social cohesiveness… resulted from the working out, centuries ago, of the problem of dharma&the way…it combines freedom&ritual #
- In the West progress seems to proceed by a series of spasms of alternating freedom and ritual. A revolution of freedom against old rituals #
- produces a new order, which soon becomes another old ritual for the next generation to revolt against, on and on. #
- The Zen monk's daily life is nothing but one ritual after another, hour after hour, day after day, all his life. They don't tell hime to #
- shatter those static patterns to discover the unwritten dharma.They want him to get those patterns perfect. #
- The explanation for this contradiction is the belief that you do not free yourself from static patterns by fighting them with other contrary #
- static patterns. That is …'bad karma chasing its tail'. You free yourself from static patterns by putting them to sleep… #
- You master them… you get to used to them you completely forget them and they are gone. #
- There in the center of the most monotonous boredom of static ritualistic patterns the Dynamic freedom is found. #
- … The danger has always been that the rituals, the static patterns are mistaken for what they merely represent #
- and are allowed to destroy the Dynamic Quality they were originally intended to preserve. #
- … If ritual always comes first & intellectual principles always come later,then ritual cannot always b a decadent corruption of intellect. #
- Their sequence in history suggests that principles emerged from ritual, not the other way around… #
- That is, we don't perform religious rituals because we believe in God. We believe in God because we perform religious rituals." #
- Congratulations http://www.ubuntu.com/ Ubuntu 10.04 is out, easily upgraded two computers! #
- two more short readings and that will be the end of my recent quote-floods… #
- "From the static point of view the whole escape into Dynamic Quality seems like a death experience.It's a movement from something 2 nothing. #
- How can 'nothing' be any different from death? … Allthe Buddha could say was,'See for yourself' … #
- enlightment is distributed in all parts of the world… but some cultures accept it and others screen out recognition of it. #
- The Metaphysics of Quality translated karma as 'evolutionary garbage'…the pain,the suffering that results from clinging to static patterns #
- … the only exit from the suffering is to detach yourself from these static patterns, that is, to 'kill' them. #
- A common way taken to kill them is suicide, but suicide only kills biological patterns. #
- That's like destorying a computer because you can't stand the program it is running. #
- the social and intellectual patterns that caused the suicide have to be carried on by others. #
- From an evolutionary point of view it's really a backward and therefore immoral step. #
- Another immoral way of killing the static patterns is to pass the patterns to someone else …a 'karma dump' #
- … you invent a devil group, Jews or blacksor whites or capitalists … then say that group is responsible for all your suffering. #
- If you take all this karmic garbage and make yourself feel better by passing it on to others that's normal. That's the way the world works. #
- But if you manage to absorb it and not pass it on, that's the highest moral conduct of all. That really advances everything, not just you… #
- … some of the great moral figures of history – Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi … that's what they were really involved in, #
- the cleansing of the world through the absorption of karmic garbage. They didn't pass it on." #
- "Then he remembered when he had been walking down a dirt road…on the Northern Cheyenne reservation… #
- with…John Wooden Leg, the tribe's chief and a woman … they were all walking down the road … #
- when one of those raggedy nondescript dogs that call Indian reservations home came onto the road and walked pleasantly in front of them. #
- … [the woman] asked John 'What kind of dog is that?'. John thought about it and said, 'That's a good dog.' #
- …if he were looking for proof that 'substance' is a cultural heritage from an ancientGreece rather then an absolute reality, he should #
- simply look at non-Greek-derived cultures. If the 'reality' of substance was missing… that would prove he was right. #
- … the woman… wanted 2 know what genetic,substantive pigeonhole of canine classification this object walking b4 them could be placed in. #
- But John Wooden Leg never understood the question. He wasn't joking when he said 'That's a good dog'. #
- He probably thought she was worried the dog might bite her. #
- .. John had distinguished the dog according to it's Quality, rather then according to its substance. #
- That indicated he considered Quality more important. #
- …American Indian mysticismis not something alien from American culture. It's a deep submerged hidden root of it. #
- Americans don't have to go to the orient to learn what this mysticism stuff is about. It's been right here in America all along. #
- In the Orient they dress it up with rituals & incense & pagodas & chants…& huge organizational enterprises that bring in …millions of $ #
- …American Indians haven't done this. Their way is not to be organized atall. They don't charge anything, they don't make a big fuss, #
- and that's what makes people underrate them. #
- … The Dakota Indian considers goodness to be a noun rather then an adjective. #
- He will tell someone, 'Take care of your goodness, rather than 'Be Good'. #
- Good is a noun. That was it. #
- Good as a noun rather than as an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about." #
- The End! #
- TED http://www.ted.com has stagnated from dynamic & inspiring to predictably (static) over-intellectualized #
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