Barfly. A mediocre film about a mediocre poet, but it did have some good lines in it, like this one. I confess, the older I get, the more I echo the sentiment expressed.
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I started rereading The Lord of the Rings recently and was struck by a set of simple yet profound lines Gandalf speaks to Frodo in the second chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring:
“I wish it need not happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black…” It would be overly generous to say that our time, here and now, is beginning to look black because the beginning part is already far behind us. Our time is black. Full stop. Like Frodo, we may wish it had not happened in our time, but it has, and this in and of itself is more significant than most dare contemplate. We had no decision about being alive during this time, but we have the immense power to decide what to do with the time we have been given. Curse or blessing goes far deeper than a matter of perspective. The "Solution" to Thanatos and Eros Lies in Our Assumptions about Beings and Relationships1/14/2024 Thanatos was the fatherless Greek god of death, the son of the primordial goddess Nyx (Night) and brother of Hypnos (Sleep). Unlike the Keres — female death spirits who personified violent death — Thanatos was the god of peaceful death, but he was still regarded as hateful and ruthless. His indiscriminate motivation to end life included both mortals and gods.
In Christianity, Thanatos is the fourth and final Apocalyptic horseman in the Book of Revelations. Riding a pale horse, he is the only horseman given an explicit name (Death in English translations) and is the only rider who arrives without carrying a weapon. The Romans took Thanatos from Greece and named him Mors, which remains the root English words such as mortal, mortification, and morbid. Thanatos remains in English in terms like thanatophobia, the fear of things related to death, and thanatology, the study of human death. Sigmund Freud used the name Thanatos to refer to the death instinct, which he psychoanalytically defined as the drive toward death and self-destruction. On the flip side, the Greeks personified love as Eros, a primordial god involved in creating the cosmos with Tartarus, Gaia, and Chaos. Accounts of the Eros’s origins vary, but it remains clear that Eros primarily represented carnal love in the forms of lust, desire, and sex. Eros remains in the English language in erotic and all other associated words. Freud included Eros in his theory of life and death drives as a counterpart to Thanatos, and he associated the god of love with life and survival instincts like sexuality, procreation, and species preservation. As interesting as Freud’s theory of life and death drives may be, Thanatos and Eros remain fundamentally spiritual “problems” requiring spiritual solutions, solutions Freud’s theories barely acknowledge, let alone address, which helps explain why his theory is virtually useless when applied to the current and ongoing collapse of the West where Eros has joined Thanatos by becoming a death drive. Put another way, Freud’s theory of life and death instincts has become inapplicable to the West because the West is severely in the grips of a death instinct spiral in which Eros no longer counterbalances or thwarts Thanatos but serves instead to exacerbate the relentless drive to self-destruction. Freud believed that both Thanatos and Eros were bound to life, with Thanatos being an internal force in an organism desiring the abolition of the organism’s unity to return to an inorganic state and Eros being an external force that motivated an organism to form higher unities and, in turn, become a higher unity within itself. Freud actively sought to avoid falling upon vitalist and religious explanations and supported his theory by referring to the behavior of cells. Many refer to Freud’s theory of life and death drives as the pleasure and pain principle, but it is worth remembering that Freud believed that the fulfillment of the pleasure principle is death. As interesting as Freud’s musings on Thanatos and Eros are, they are of little help today. His dynamics of Eros and Thanatos can be summarized in the following way: Each living being has an innate capacity and tendency for self-destruction and the dissolution of its own unity. Yet libidinal (erotic) energy is injected into all living beings externally. Once the level of this erotic energy reaches a certain level, it activates the pleasure principle, motivating the being to transfer its libido to the outside world via another living being, which it uses as its object. This process then neutralizes the object’s tendency towards self-destruction. As noted above, I don’t believe Eros neutralizes the object’s tendency toward self-destruction. On the contrary, I suspect Eros now does little more than exacerbate an object’s tendency toward self-destruction. This “breakdown” in Freud’s theory seems to lie in his subject/object conceptualizations and the supposed transferring of energy between subject and object. I also question the notion of Eros being a primarily external force. Thanatos and Eros are fundamentally spiritual “problems” requiring spiritual solutions; solutions each of us must strive to discover, learn, and apply as best as we can in this era of dominant death drives. It is interesting to note that Freud’s theory of life and death drives rests upon relationships. In this sense, I believe he is looking somewhat in the right direction, but his exclusion of the spiritual/religious critically limits the depth of his theorizing. The “solution” to Thanatos and Eros lies in relationships. That much is clear; however, our assumptions about the fundamental reality and nature of these relationships ultimately determine whether we are moving toward the solution. The current death spiral of the West suggests that we are moving away from the “solution” rather than toward it, which should prompt us to deeply re-examine our assumptions about Beings and their relationships. I am not a car guy. Although I appreciate the finer points of high-end, luxury automobiles, I have always viewed cars from the practical and pragmatic perspective of “often necessary things that transport me from Point A to Point B.” With that in mind, when it comes to cars, I have eschewed luxury in favor of economy, style in favor of sturdiness, and status in favor of serenity. I am fifty-two years old and have owned a total of four automobiles, all of which I affectionately refer to as “indestructible Jap economy shitboxes” (hat tip to the John Goodman character in the film, The Gambler — see scene below. My first car — a 1992 Honda Civic hatchback with a manual transmission— was also the only new car I ever purchased. It is also the first and only time I took out a loan for anything. I bought the car in Canada when I was twenty-one and drove it until I was thirty-two. I put nearly 300,000 kilometers into it before selling it for 500 dollars in Sarasota, Florida. My Civic was extremely reliable and practical partly because I purchased it “barebones,” without air-conditioning or any other frills or extras. (The lack of air-conditioning helps explain the low price I managed to sell it for in Florida, where air-conditioning is “kind of” a necessity.) My next car was a used 1996 Suzuki Esteem with an automatic transmission, which I purchased for 2000 dollars from a friend in Florida in 2003. The Esteem was of much lower quality and less practical than the Civic because it was a sedan, but it had air-conditioning and took me and my wife from Point A to Point B reliably and consistently. We used the car to move from Florida to New York City in 2005 and kept the car in New York for a couple of years before the transmission froze up. Incompetent mechanics drained the transmission fluid but forgot to fill it back up again, and I ended up driving around for more than four months — four months! — with no transmission oil before the poor car finally threw in the towel. The excellent public transportation in New York City ensured that we did not need a car, so I sold the Esteem as it was instead of repairing it. I did not purchase another car until we moved to Toronto, Canada in 2011. Once in Toronto, I bought a used 2008 Nissan Versa hatchback with an automatic transmission (I prefer manual transmissions, but my wife likes automatic and well…) The Versa was another solid Japanese economy car, so much so that it probably transcended the economy category. We drove the car for over two years, and before moving to England in 2014, I sold the Versa to my mother for a family discount price. My mother still drives the car today! My fourth and current car — a 2002 Suzuki Wagon R — is a veritable indestructible shitbox that ranks solidly in the “don’t laugh, it’s paid for” category. Although it is a monstrously cheap, clunky, and ugly little vehicle, the Wagon R is by far the most practical and reliable car I have owned. It was thirteen years old when I bought it for the equivalent of 3000 dollars in 2016, but it had less than 50,000 kilometers on it. The previous owner, an elderly gentleman, purchased the car brand new after he retired and used it to run local errands and do the grocery shopping. So, even though the car was old timewise, it was in virtually brand-new condition otherwise. When I bought this “tin can on wheels”, I figured I would own it for a couple of years before graduating to something more “serious.” That was nearly eight years ago. The odometer currently sits at 135,000. The car has never required anything beyond routine maintenance. I can’t kill this tin can, even though I’ve used it to transport everything from a cement mixer to lumber. At this rate, the little tin can on wheels will probably stay with me for another eight years, which will devastate my “status” among the car-owning public but elevate the “status” of my bank account in terms of money saved on car payments, repairs, etc. Oddly enough, I adopted the advice Goodman’s character espouses in the scene below long before I watched the film from which the scene originates. Nevertheless, the F.U. position the Goodman character outlines in the scene pretty much describes my approach to material obligations and personal finance, minus the offensive tagline. Oh, and I’ve never been up 2.5 million…ever. (Warning: Strong language!) To "feel for yourself" the alternative (even just as a thought-experiment) is what I realized when reading the Fourth Gospel prior to doing Lazarus Writes. There is an imaginable alternate history of Christianity and individual (and family) based religion. So there would be no status or power fights - but also no Christian societies.
The above comes from a comment Dr. Charlton left on his Notions blog. Needless to say, I am on the side of this “imaginable alternate history of Christianity and individual (family) based religion, the reality of which was brought home to me by The Fourth Gospel and, oddly enough, Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor. It was in The Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov that I first encountered the idea of Jesus’ work being corrected, which immediately raised the question about the essence of Jesus’s work. As Dr. Charlton points out, this essence permeates the Fourth Gospel and also appears in Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor. I present, yet again, my personal encapsulation of what this uncorrected Christianity is, with augmented parts added by yours truly in bold: Thou didst desire man's free love, that he should follow Thee freely into heaven, enticed and taken captive by Thee. In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, and with free heart actively choose resurrection and everlasting life, having only Thy image before him as his guide. For me, this exemplifies the essence of Jesus came into the world to do and the Truth he revealed. Notice the complete absence of things like churches, society, dogmas, doctrines, and so forth. Yes, the ancient rigid law is mentioned, but it is immediately overridden. The passage above not only communicates the core of Jesus’ work but also reveals why and how the simple truth of Jesus’ work was “corrected”, a theme Berdyaev frequently addresses throughout his works: Truth may be dangerous to everyday life. Christian truth might even become very dangerous – might cause the collapse of nations and civilizations. Hence pure Christian truth has been distorted and adapted to man’s everyday life; the work of Christ has been corrected…. The essentiality of Jesus’ work as presented in the Fourth Gospel is next-worldly in focus. This next-worldly focus does indeed make authentic Christian truth dangerous, not to individuals and families, but to systems, that is societies and civilizations, which are very much this-worldly in focus. As Dr. Charlton notes above, no Christian societies. Living the truth of the Fourth Gospel, the same truth Dostoevsky captures in The Grand Inquisitor through the emphasis on freedom, would be the death knell of conventional conceptualizations of this-worldly Christian nations and civilizations. The prevention of such system failure entailed the distortion and adaptation of Jesus’ truth to the mundane reality of everyday life in this world and the development of Christian societies. Such a development was not entirely negative because it aligned with an earlier stage of human consciousness when spirituality was far more communal. It could be argued that the distorting and adapting of Jesus’s work also preserved it to some degree. All the same, the Fourth Gospel essence was demoted in favor of communal, societal considerations — kingdoms, nations, empires, and civilization. The rigid law was re-introduced, albeit in a different form. But why the incessant maintaining of this correction of Jesus’ work through the centuries? Berdyaev offers the following insight: Truth is spiritually revolutionary; so is spirit, although in a different way from that in which revolution is applied to politics. And objectivization weakens or even completely destroys this destructive, anarchic quality of truth, which is spirit, since spirit is the truth of being. Therefore, the work of Christ was corrected and adapted to the level of millions upon millions of men. And, Truth is not of the world, but of the spirit: it is known only in transcending the objective world. Truth is the end of this objective world, it demands our consent to this end. Such is the truth of Christianity, freed of its social adaptations and deformations... To which I will add the following from Dr. Charlton: It is likely that such a thing would not have been possible for the men of 2000 years ago, since they existed communally including at the spiritual level - but it seems like the Only possibility of men of 2024 - at least in the West. It is worth noting that in this time and place, it is not Christian truth that is ending Christian nations and civilizations, but the opposite, which immediately spawns the knee jerk reaction to reinstitute Christian nations and civilizations, but such reactions sorely miss the point for the simple reason that returning to a national/civilizational focus would amount to little more than returning to a corrected version of Jesus’ work. Moreover, reverting to a top-down, communally-based correction of Jesus’ work appears impossible given the state of men’s consciousness in 2024. Such a reversion would likely not work even if it were successfully implemented. So, where does that leave us? The corrections of Jesus’ work are coming apart at the seams, as are nations and the civilization founded upon these corrections. There are no Christian nations left in the West. This leaves Christians with two possible options. The first involves saving and resurrecting the corrections to Jesus’ work, replete with all of their institutional, societal, and civilizational aspects. The second rests upon the realization that for the first time in millennia, Christians have the opportunity to contemplate and engage in Jesus’ work in its original, authentic, and uncorrected form -- and see what develops... As Berdyaev notes, it could be that… ...original and authentic Christianity, based upon truth which had been neither objectivized nor socialized, would be a personalistic revolution in the world. The ever-increasing interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) started me thinking about conventional low-tech forms of artificial intelligence (ai). What are low-tech forms of ai? Well, things like plagiarism, fake research, and parroting all qualify as low-tech artificial intelligence.
Claiming someone else’s ideas and work as your own is prevalent in the System. Plagiarism can make you appear far more intelligent than you actually may be. If your unethical behavior is tolerated or remains undiscovered, you can utilize this low-tech artificial intelligence to raise your status or further your career. Don't believe me? Ask a System apparatchik like an ivy-league university president. Fake research — providing researchers with predetermined, desired results and findings and then asking them to develop research that supports such predetermined findings — is another example of low-tech System artificial intelligence. And then there is parroting, which Dr. Charlton describes as a modern person's ability “to interact on subjects far beyond his comprehension by algorithmically implementing a predetermined set of rules — recognizing inputs from a chart (whether external or internalized), then matching and selecting 'appropriate' predetermined responses, then ordering and setting them out as a kind of mosaic of 'points.'" The System is rife with low-tech ai. Perhaps it would not be far from the truth to say that the System has run on low-tech ai for decades. Is it any wonder then that the System is now pushing high-tech AI? And is it simply a coincidence that high-tech, ooh-la-la AI seems like little more than a technological repackaging of the same low-tech ai forms the System has relied on for decades — those low-tech forms, once again being plagiarism, fake research, and parroting? What do I think of the high-tech AI the System is currently pushing? Well, it strikes me as a master plagiarizer, adept fake researcher, and uber-proficient parrot. How can you resolve the problem of evil that emerges when God is assumed to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent?
Short answer — you can’t. Well, you can, but that requires mindbending scholastic and philosophical acrobatics. However, even after you painstakingly dot all the i’s and cross every single t, you are inevitably left with an inherently unsatisfying and, I dare say, disappointing argument. Of course, most orthodox thinkers find such acrobatic resolutions completely satisfactory, and that’s fine. I mean, if the assumption of Omnigod is non-negotiable, then philosophical gymnastics are not only expected but required. Nevertheless, it would probably behoove orthodox thinkers wrestling with theodicy to consider the views of their heterodox brothers, particularly Nikolai Berdyaev, who formulated a more satisfactory theodicy, one that subtly challenges the Omnigod assumption yet still manages to maintain many orthodox bulwarks. Berdyaev’s resolution for the problem of evil resides in the primacy of freedom, freedom over which God has little or no control. Though this conceptualization limits God’s omni capabilities, it also exonerates and vindicates Him from all responsibility for the existence of evil. Berdyaev argues in favor of the existence of Jacob Boehme’s Ungrund — the Divine Nothing that is still Something — from which the Creator God emerges and, subsequently, creates the cosmos. In The Destiny of Man, Berdyaev writes, "From this point of view, it may be said that freedom is not created by God: it is rooted in the Nothing, in the UNGRUND from all eternity. The opposition between God the Creator and freedom is secondary: in the primeval mystery of the Divine Nothing this opposition is transcended, for both God and freedom are manifested out of the UNGRUND. God the Creator cannot be responsible for freedom which gave rise to evil. Man is the child of God and the child of freedom - of nothing, of non-being. Meonic freedom (το μη ον —that which is not, or nothingness) consented to God's act of creation; non-being freely accepted being." In a nutshell, God emerged from freedom, a primordial nothingness that is not nothingness because it is freedom, and it is from this primordial nothingness that He creates. Hence, everything God creates comes infused with what Berdyaev calls meonic freedom. God, Berdyaev argues, is all-powerful over the parts He creates (being), but he has no power over the uncreated freedom from which he creates, the freedom that remains in his creations (meonic freedom, or non-being). Berdyaev postulates that this uncreated freedom is the source of good and evil or, more precisely, that it offers beings the potential for good or evil. Berdyaev’s theodicy succeeds where orthodox theodicies fail — uncreated freedom convincingly absolves God of evil. Since God did not create the primordial Divine Nothing from which He emerged and from which He creates, He cannot be held responsible for the potential for evil inherent in His Creation. I suppose the same applies to the presence of good; however, Berdyaev argues that God exemplifies mastery over uncreated freedom by using His solely for good, while we exhibit significantly less mastery. Though Berdyaev’s theodicy sets limits on God’s omni-powers, it still aligns (more or less) with many orthodox tenets, such as the Trinity and creation out of nothing (sort of, because the Ungrund is a nothing that is not nothing). Following orthodox beliefs, Berdyaev does not believe God created from eternally existing elements. He also believes God is omni in everything except freedom. Though I find Berdyaev’s theodicy far more cogent than traditional theodicies, I do not regard it as conclusive. Overall, I believe he takes many steps in the right direction, yet like his orthodox brethren, he is, in the end, far too wedded to convention and ultimately fails to push his breakthrough in the direction it wishes to go — the assumption of eternally existing Beings and pluralism. But I’ll leave that for another post. If, as I believe, things came to a point in 2020, then discerning good and evil has never been easier.
It has never been easier to recognize that virtually all governments in the West have been structurally corrupted, that major corporations have been critically converged, that media have become inherently censurable, that education is fundamentally culpable, that organized Christianity has been hopelessly contaminated, that healthcare has been intrinsically degraded, that the arts have been intentionally debased, and that all the other things that comprise Western societies have, as a whole, become quagmires of immense material and spiritual decay (with the material being a part of the spiritual). All of this is, or at least should be, easy to discern, implying that what remains of the good should also be easy to discern. Unfortunately, this is not the case. While the bulk of easily discernible evil is on full display in virtually everything exterior, the realm of detectable good has withered considerably in the external world, making it increasingly difficult to perceive, let alone identify. The dominance of evil in the external does not imply that good does not exist “out there,” only that finding genuine, authentic, sincere good in the external world has become increasingly difficult. Unlike previous generations, we cannot enjoy the luxury of autopilot mode when it comes to our societies and civilization. We cannot go with the flow and remain comfortable in the assurance that all of the components of our societies and civilization, though flawed, are net good. We must face the uncomfortable truth that our societies and civilization are net evil, make that our starting point, and travel forward from there. Things coming to a point has made us freer, and for most, that’s precisely what makes it hard. New World Island's latest audio, posted during the holiday season. Enjoy! A short while ago, Dr. Charlton posted some intriguing thoughts about the primal self and theosis:
My assumption is that we have a primal self - which could also be called our real, true or divine self; and it is this which is eternal, and has existed from eternity. My primal self is "encased" within a mortal and temporarily-incarnated self; which is (approximately) our body and our personality - that which other people observe, and which interacts with The World. The process called theosis describes the transformation of my primal self, across a timescale of eternity; but at present intended to be achieved by interaction-with, and learning-from, the experiences of my mortal self in this world. So -- if I succeed in my God-given task of learning from the experiences God has set-up for me in this mortal world; then it is my primal self that is positively-transformed by this learning. And it is this process of positive transformation of the primal self that can be called theosis. This model may explain why it is that theosis is not necessarily (or usually) observable in a Christian individual. Dr. Charlton’s post started me thinking about the nature of “learning from the experiences God has set up for me in this mortal world,” and I have arrived at a tentative intuition -- the bulk of the mortal life learning that directly impacts the primal self is probably non-symbolic, or more precisely beyond the symbolic (as far as I know, Dr. Charlton has more-or-less stated the same on his blog). During our mortal lives, we rely on symbols to serve as intermediaries between the subject and reality. Put another way, symbols – including language – point us in the direction of reality without being reality themselves. Well-motivated interpretations of symbols can help orientate us toward the truth and direct us to what we need to learn and understand; however, the essence of that learning and understanding must transcend the symbolic and be directly known. The primal self is positively transformed by experiences of direct knowing – not the symbols that may have guided us to the experiences of direct knowledge. This may help to explain why “what is happening is that the primal self is being transformed positively and eternally - but the bodily behavior and actions, and personality level motivations and thoughts; are Not (or not usually) being transformed.” Symbols may lead us to experiences of direct knowing, but it is difficult to imagine how direct knowledge can be “translated back” into the symbolic without losing its essence, or why this process would even be necessary. As noted above, this is a tentative intuition; however, I believe it may warrant some consideration, particularly when we factor in our current milieu of accelerated and ubiquitous symbol corruption, i.e., the expropriation, subversion, and inversion of symbols as intermediaries between subjects and reality, most frequently via the promulgation of the symbolic as reality (exacerbated by the increased use of AI and other virtuality technologies). |
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