Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburger

[john]

Joined: 19 Jul 2006
Posts: 564

Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 7:35 pm Post subject:
All -

A lot of these titles (including mine) might not be construed as actually having anything to do with archaeology.

Despite the fact that 10k years from now they WILL be archaeology - but I'm not going into that hall of mirrors right now.

I happen to believe that ALL recorded thought or expression - Hematite, anyone? - is fair game, and that limiting archaeology to physical science, i.e. excluding what in fact can only be theory as to what people believed or thought, does not meet the intent of this forum.

However, one must achieve a balance. Getting a mass of posts from the believers in the Zardarkian empire on Betelgeuse, descended from the original Irish Heroes, doesn't help either.

So, I am proposing a thread in the Everything Else sector.

Copping a beautiful phrase - and, I hope, permission from Minimalist -
it will be called "Sacred Cows Make the Best Hamburger".

For a start, let, move the reading lists to there, and see what happens.


john
_________________
"Man is a marvellous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is sort of a low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm."

Mark Twain



Some more moral guides..........

Machiavelli , "The Prince".

Mr. Orwell, "Animal Farm".

H.S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas".

Just to name a few.

john
___

[john]

And this from Ishtar -

"The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test", Ken Kesey.

"On the Road", Jack Keroauc

"Autobiography of a Yogi", Paramahansa Yogananda

"The Mill on the Floss", George Elliot

"The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" by Sogyal Rimpoche.

"Bonfire of the Vanities", Tom Wolfe
_________________
Ishtar

[john]

I'll add to that anything and all from Loren Eisely,

Gary Snyder's translation of Han Shan's "Cold Mountain Poems",

and O. Spengler's "Decline and Fall of the West".

With a special attention to Heraclitus.


john

[Ishtar]

What about music? Can we have that in this thread too?

[War Arrow]

Lawrence Miles - 'This Town Will Never Let Us Go' (Mad Norwegian Press)
Supposedly a science-fiction novel set in a non-descript contemporary English new town, although how much of it should be taken for science fiction is pretty much up to the reader. It's about culture and ritual behaviour more than anything, and perhaps about how appearance and meaning may be more significant than whatever object or person carries that appearance or meaning. Possibly one of the greatest things I've ever read, to be quite frank about it.

DH Lawrence - 'Apocalypse' (continuing the Lawrence theme here) A novella length essay he wrote whilst in the process of dying, Apocalypse lays down Lawrence's take on religion and belief through the ages and manages to present a near unassailable argument for his views with both clarity and an impeccable sense of reason whilst giving the impression that he's struggling with the urge to set down his pen and go and punch the nearest available cleric off his feet.

Carl Sagan - 'The Demon-Haunted World' In which the much missed Dr. Sagan effortlessly pulls apart all the mumbo-jumbo of the world whilst somehow still managing to come across as an evidently warm, considerate and likeable human being. This book possibly did change my life.

Richard Dawkins - pretty much everything, but especially 'The God Delusion' which follows up The Demon-Haunted World with brass knuckles. To be fair though, 'Climbing Mount Improbable' is possibly the better book - it dealing with some of the more complex issues of evolutionary theory in a way that is positively inspirational.

[Minimalist]

Walter M. Miller: A Canticle for Leibowitz 1960


A thought-provoking little book.

[kbs2244]

No intent to insult anyones moral compass.
And certianly nothing wrong with learning form others mistakes.
And those "others" may be fictional.

[Beagle]

Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan.

[War Arrow]

Walter M. Miller: A Canticle for Leibowitz 1960


A thought-provoking little book.

Weirdly enough, I had never heard of that book or its author up until about three weeks ago, and this is the third or fourth time I've seen it mentioned somewhere.

[Minimalist]

Walter M. Miller: A Canticle for Leibowitz 1960


A thought-provoking little book.

Weirdly enough, I had never heard of that book or its author up until about three weeks ago, and this is the third or fourth time I've seen it mentioned somewhere.

"pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels–bring home for Emma"

[john]

What about music? Can we have that in this thread too?

Ishtar -

As far as I'm concerned, any and all forms of communication are legit. We have hypothetical Neandertal flutes, yes? And we have 70,000 year old necklaces made of seashells. And we have hematite.

My point is, we have several hundred thousand years of history which, like it or not, has created our neural framework.

Both our default behavior and our unique behavior are born from this neural patterning.

I will make the argument that we are hermaphroditic in the particular sense that we are both ruled by instinct and have the ability to make a counter-instinctive choice, which, for lack of better words, is created by the voice in our head or our perception of the pattern of a flock of birds in the wind.

cf: the I Ching.

I believe the real roots of the I Ching are in the (Shamanic) Paleolithic, were fomalised in the Neolithic, and, unfortunately, categorized with the advent of the written word.

Just for arugmenta.

john

[Ishtar]

Cool. I respect your argumenta!

It's quite interesting, actually, this thing about the formation of neural pathways between East and West.

One of the difficulties I first had when I started going to India and wanting to understand the Vedic philosophy was that, as the saying goes there, "she thinks like a Westerner." This is a real problem for Westerners wanting to understand Eastern philosophy and it is caused not so much by what we've been conditioned with (the software) but the container for that conditioning (the hardware).

I'm not sure how much this is recognised by Western science. I don't want to do them a disservice, but I'm not sure that they understand that the actual neural pathways themselves, and not just the what's put into them in terms of ideas and philosophies, are built from birth, and not so much before birth. So it's not a case of ideas going into a ready formed container but more about the ideas forming the actual shape of the container, synapses being built as and when and to accommodate each new idea.

So this is the cause of a fundamental difference between Occidental and Oriental thinking. You can 't just say 'Oh well, just replace idea a) with idea b)', because you don't have a container for idea b) and also idea a)'s container fights against having a container for idea b). (I'm not explaining this very well, am 1?)

It's taken me a long, long time to adapt my synapses to theirs and partly because (as an adult) my containers were already fully formed when I got there. I still can't tell you what the difference actually is...in words. But I think there may be an aspect - I can't say how much of one - of Western neural pathways being formed by linear thinking (a straight line with a beginning and an end) and Eastern neural pathway being formed by circular thinking (everything goes round in cycles and is thus, circular).

It's something like that anyway.

[john]

Konrad Lorenz has an interesting body of work on "imprinting".

i.e., the hardwired response.

Now, his example had to do with goose families, among other critters.

However, I would include human society within the ken of his understanding.

For example, "The Hawk's Well" of W.B. Yeats.

Or damn near anything by Mr. Blake.

john