Scientific and shamanic perspectives mark 2

The study of religious or heroic legends and tales. One constant rule of mythology is that whatever happens amongst the gods or other mythical beings was in one sense or another a reflection of events on earth. Recorded myths and legends, perhaps preserved in literature or folklore, have an immediate interest to archaeology in trying to unravel the nature and meaning of ancient events and traditions.

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Ishtar
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Post by Ishtar »

Thanks, John. My copy has not arrived yet, so I will have to rely on your excerpt for now.
john wrote:Ishtar and War Arrow -

From The Special View of History:

"The Contents

(the note by way of preface, introduction or summary)

The idea is in the shortest compass, to get down to a schema to cover everything, as it presents itself inside and out at this juncture of man and the world. The assumption is that everything's been turned about, and yet that that it is true is not as known as anyone of us might think it is; indeed, I don't know that an one of us is caught up and going at the speed or at the depth of both the knowledge of reality we now possess, and thus the speed and depth of the reality itself, especially as that reality is busy inside anyone of us.
OK, with my professional trainer in written communications hat on, can I say that if this is the kind of writing the bicameral side have been relying on for the last one hundred years, no wonder no-one’s been listening? Only a poet would get this. But it’s not the poet who needs to read it. Next time I take a class, I’m going to use this as a textbook case of how to lose an audience before you’ve even won it. This is a classic example of why starting the story in the middle never works, and why all the most successful stories have a beginning, middle and end, in that order.

In order to engage and convince, Olson needs to lay out his stall and make his case for the claims he’s making. He also needs to define what he means by certain terms like “the assumption is that everything’s been turned about” and “especially as that reality is busy inside any one of us.” As it is, I feel as if I’m come in halfway through a late night, drunken conversation between James Joyce and Abramelin the Mage.

Except as none of us will ever be satisfied, we are quite making it,
What ?
except for that I am persuaded that at this point of the 20th century it might be possible for man to cease to be estranged, as Heraclitus said he was in 500 B.C., from that with which he is most familiar. At least I take Heraclitus' dictum as the epigraph of this book. For all I know increased my impression that man lost something about 500 B.C. and only got it back about 1905 A.D.
Now that’s an interesting point and one with which I can agree. I used to think that it was Christianity that caused this loss. But now I think it happened several hundred years before Christianity. The easy answer is that it was religion in general that caused man to lose his connection with the gods (which I assume Olson is talking about, or at least the loss of that kind of holistic consciousness). But that doesn’t tie up either because Zoroastrianism is probably older than that (although the dates are uncertain), and Hinduism, the religion that stemmed from the old shamanic Vedas, I trace to the Puranas which are also older than 500 BC.
The other epigraph is a methodological one. Keats, more than Goethe or Melville, faced with The Man of Power, got to the heart of it. He took the old humanism by its right front. It wasn't the demonism of Genius he saw was the hooker (almost nobody yet has caught up with Keats on the same subject - he was almost the only man who has yet seen the subjective tragedy as no longer so interesting), but the very opposite, the Sublime in the Egotistical, the very character of Genius, its productive power. And as he walked home from the mummer's play Christmas 1818 it struck him he believed in nothing else, I mean Negative Capability. When a man is "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...
Yes, I agree with that. Modern science cannot bear uncertainty.

I once had a conversation with Didier Danthois. He practises what’s known as ‘sacred clowning’. In other words, he’s a clown but the sort of techniques he uses are shamanic, and perhaps reminiscent of the original jesters who were actually philosophers who used their comic skills to bring about deep, profound realisations in their audience. Anyway, all of this is too long a preamble to a very simple point. He said to me: “Life is a mystery. That is what it is. That is its very nature – a mystery. So when you try to solve the mystery, you destroy it. You knock all the beauty of it.”

But because we have lost touch with what Olson calls the “inner reality”, in which state we always knew (on a level deeper than words) who we were, where we had come from and why we are here, we try to solve that same problem through the narrow lens of the cognitive mind – and if we can’t see something through that lens, then we say that it doesn’t exist. That's the modern scientific approach.

It’s as if we are trying to measure and quantify the beauty of a sunset with a ruler.

CLOWN MEDICINE

In the vast expanse of inner listening
The sacred clown comes home.
Open, vulnerable,
with no great ambitions or fears,
with no questions
and specially no answers to give…
…A timeless presence filling the air
touches all…
with that little spark of wonder,
for what is about to be born.

http://www.sacred-clown-as-healer.co.uk/index2.html
So: so far as man goes, the attempt here is to establish in what sense man need not any longer be estranged from that with which he is most familiar. That would be the content, and is the reality in whose face anyone of us has to take a stance. And that the stance which yields the possibility of acts which are allowably historic, in other words produce, have to be negatively capable in Keat's sense that they have to be, they have to be uncertain.

Or what we would call today relative. It will be seen within how thoroughly I take it Whitehead has written the metaphysic of the reality we have acquired, and because I don't know that yet the best minds realize how thoroughly the absolute or ideal has been tucked into where it belongs - where it got out of, in the 5th century B.C. and thereafter - I call attention to Whitehead's analysis of the Consequent as the relative of relatives, and that the Primordial - the absolute - is prospective, that events are absolute only because they have a future, not from any past.
John, please correct me if I’m wrong. But I think he’s saying here that the only the Primordial Cause can be regarded as absolute and that everything else is relative. Therefore modern science’s search for absolutes is a lost cause before it even begins.

Of course, he may not be saying that, in which case I've invented a whole new idea!

Which leaves me with one last condensation of what is to follow - that history itself, because it has now been turned about as everything else has, can be shown to be of two kinds, and that of these two kinds, one is negatively capable and the other is power. Men can and do wilfully set in motion egotistical, sublime events. They have effect which looks like use. But in the schema here presented, these are power, and history as primordial and prospective is seen to demand the recognition that the other history, what I would call anti-history, is not good enough.

The subject, then, is actual wilful man.
I guess he means the Fall – which is described in scriptures as when man took his free will to decide to disobey God – the essence of the Garden of Eden story. This is seen by most religionists and atheists (who are two sides of the same coin, imo) as going against religion. But I see it as when religion got in the way, interceded itself between man and his gods/ spirits who he was working with in a friendly and mutually beneficent partnership of equals. In order for man to break away from that relationship, he had to deny half of his consciousness, his awareness. And after time, the law of use-it-or-lose-it kicked in, and he could no longer get himself back to the Garden, as Neil Young would say.

John, I hope I’ve managed to understand this correctly, and also to translate it into terms that are plainer. But if I have made a mistake, or missed a subtlety of meaning, I’m sure you’ll let me know.

I still think Olson needs to make his case, and I hope he does at some point.
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Post by War Arrow »

Er... initial impressions suggest that I may be in WAY over my head on this one, though I'll reserve judgement until I can get hold of a copy (once Abebooks send me my forgotten password), though I'll tentatively state that the last paragraph suggested the start of something I might be able to get to grips with.

Either Ishtar has a good point or this is string theory for someone who's just realised that other planets also have moons, if you see what I mean.
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Post by john »

Ishtar wrote:Thanks, John. My copy has not arrived yet, so I will have to rely on your excerpt for now.
john wrote:Ishtar and War Arrow -

From The Special View of History:

"The Contents

(the note by way of preface, introduction or summary)

The idea is in the shortest compass, to get down to a schema to cover everything, as it presents itself inside and out at this juncture of man and the world. The assumption is that everything's been turned about, and yet that that it is true is not as known as anyone of us might think it is; indeed, I don't know that an one of us is caught up and going at the speed or at the depth of both the knowledge of reality we now possess, and thus the speed and depth of the reality itself, especially as that reality is busy inside anyone of us.
OK, with my professional trainer in written communications hat on, can I say that if this is the kind of writing the bicameral side have been relying on for the last one hundred years, no wonder no-one’s been listening? Only a poet would get this. But it’s not the poet who needs to read it. Next time I take a class, I’m going to use this as a textbook case of how to lose an audience before you’ve even won it. This is a classic example of why starting the story in the middle never works, and why all the most successful stories have a beginning, middle and end, in that order.

In order to engage and convince, Olson needs to lay out his stall and make his case for the claims he’s making. He also needs to define what he means by certain terms like “the assumption is that everything’s been turned about” and “especially as that reality is busy inside any one of us.” As it is, I feel as if I’m come in halfway through a late night, drunken conversation between James Joyce and Abramelin the Mage.

Except as none of us will ever be satisfied, we are quite making it,
What ?
except for that I am persuaded that at this point of the 20th century it might be possible for man to cease to be estranged, as Heraclitus said he was in 500 B.C., from that with which he is most familiar. At least I take Heraclitus' dictum as the epigraph of this book. For all I know increased my impression that man lost something about 500 B.C. and only got it back about 1905 A.D.
Now that’s an interesting point and one with which I can agree. I used to think that it was Christianity that caused this loss. But now I think it happened several hundred years before Christianity. The easy answer is that it was religion in general that caused man to lose his connection with the gods (which I assume Olson is talking about, or at least the loss of that kind of holistic consciousness). But that doesn’t tie up either because Zoroastrianism is probably older than that (although the dates are uncertain), and Hinduism, the religion that stemmed from the old shamanic Vedas, I trace to the Puranas which are also older than 500 BC.
The other epigraph is a methodological one. Keats, more than Goethe or Melville, faced with The Man of Power, got to the heart of it. He took the old humanism by its right front. It wasn't the demonism of Genius he saw was the hooker (almost nobody yet has caught up with Keats on the same subject - he was almost the only man who has yet seen the subjective tragedy as no longer so interesting), but the very opposite, the Sublime in the Egotistical, the very character of Genius, its productive power. And as he walked home from the mummer's play Christmas 1818 it struck him he believed in nothing else, I mean Negative Capability. When a man is "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...
Yes, I agree with that. Modern science cannot bear uncertainty.

I once had a conversation with Didier Danthois. He practises what’s known as ‘sacred clowning’. In other words, he’s a clown but the sort of techniques he uses are shamanic, and perhaps reminiscent of the original jesters who were actually philosophers who used their comic skills to bring about deep, profound realisations in their audience. Anyway, all of this is too long a preamble to a very simple point. He said to me: “Life is a mystery. That is what it is. That is its very nature – a mystery. So when you try to solve the mystery, you destroy it. You knock all the beauty of it.”

But because we have lost touch with what Olson calls the “inner reality”, in which state we always knew (on a level deeper than words) who we were, where we had come from and why we are here, we try to solve that same problem through the narrow lens of the cognitive mind – and if we can’t see something through that lens, then we say that it doesn’t exist. That's the modern scientific approach.

It’s as if we are trying to measure and quantify the beauty of a sunset with a ruler.

CLOWN MEDICINE

In the vast expanse of inner listening
The sacred clown comes home.
Open, vulnerable,
with no great ambitions or fears,
with no questions
and specially no answers to give…
…A timeless presence filling the air
touches all…
with that little spark of wonder,
for what is about to be born.

http://www.sacred-clown-as-healer.co.uk/index2.html
So: so far as man goes, the attempt here is to establish in what sense man need not any longer be estranged from that with which he is most familiar. That would be the content, and is the reality in whose face anyone of us has to take a stance. And that the stance which yields the possibility of acts which are allowably historic, in other words produce, have to be negatively capable in Keat's sense that they have to be, they have to be uncertain.

Or what we would call today relative. It will be seen within how thoroughly I take it Whitehead has written the metaphysic of the reality we have acquired, and because I don't know that yet the best minds realize how thoroughly the absolute or ideal has been tucked into where it belongs - where it got out of, in the 5th century B.C. and thereafter - I call attention to Whitehead's analysis of the Consequent as the relative of relatives, and that the Primordial - the absolute - is prospective, that events are absolute only because they have a future, not from any past.
John, please correct me if I’m wrong. But I think he’s saying here that the only the Primordial Cause can be regarded as absolute and that everything else is relative. Therefore modern science’s search for absolutes is a lost cause before it even begins.

Of course, he may not be saying that, in which case I've invented a whole new idea!

Which leaves me with one last condensation of what is to follow - that history itself, because it has now been turned about as everything else has, can be shown to be of two kinds, and that of these two kinds, one is negatively capable and the other is power. Men can and do wilfully set in motion egotistical, sublime events. They have effect which looks like use. But in the schema here presented, these are power, and history as primordial and prospective is seen to demand the recognition that the other history, what I would call anti-history, is not good enough.

The subject, then, is actual wilful man.
I guess he means the Fall – which is described in scriptures as when man took his free will to decide to disobey God – the essence of the Garden of Eden story. This is seen by most religionists and atheists (who are two sides of the same coin, imo) as going against religion. But I see it as when religion got in the way, interceded itself between man and his gods/ spirits who he was working with in a friendly and mutually beneficent partnership of equals. In order for man to break away from that relationship, he had to deny half of his consciousness, his awareness. And after time, the law of use-it-or-lose-it kicked in, and he could no longer get himself back to the Garden, as Neil Young would say.

John, I hope I’ve managed to understand this correctly, and also to translate it into terms that are plainer. But if I have made a mistake, or missed a subtlety of meaning, I’m sure you’ll let me know.

I still think Olson needs to make his case, and I hope he does at some point.
Ishtar -

Olson is dead.

I will admit that I threw everybody into the deep end of the pool without warning. Olson is in full gallop in The Special View of History, and typically, expects all to be fully cognizant of the precursor arguments which led him there.

Persons of genius can be maddening.

Now, back to the seventies.

"What's it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What's it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
Then I guess it's wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there's a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there's something much more,
Something even non-believers can believe in.
I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you've missed you're nothing, Alfie.
When you walk let your heart lead the way
And you'll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie
would you tell me what's it all about?
what's it all about? Alfie, Alfie, Alfie.
What's it all about? Whats this all about?
what's it all about Alfie? tell me
what's it all about Alfie? what's it all about Alfie?
just tell me yeah. what's it all about?
what's it all about?"

With this oddball connection we proceed to.........

Alfie.

Alfred North Whitehead.

http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/process.htm

http://www3.sympatico.ca/rlubbock/ANW.html

http://www.integralworld.net/hargens.html

If you want to understand Olson, read Parmenides, Heraclitus, Alfie, Keats, and Melville just for starters.


All of whom have their undersong of roots and underground rivers, oceanic and cosmic and temporal currents as expressed in the now, the Tao, the non/objective.

In short, the Shamanic, no matter the metaphor.

As you said "The search for absolutes is a lost cause."

Precisely.

This is the heart of Keats' Negative Capability,

As well as - for example -

Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."


"Mistah Kurz, he dead."



hoka hey


john


ps

By the way, a lot of Alfie's arguments would appear to revolve around "Christianity".

Nothing could be further from the truth.

And,

Speaking for myself, I am emphatically not a "Christian".

Despite the emotional pressure to grow up and

Accept a handy set of beliefs,

I find myself most happy as a dis - or - un

Believer

As this strikes closest, for me,

To the

(Un) Real.


j
Last edited by john on Sat Jul 05, 2008 10:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"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
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Post by john »

War Arrow wrote:Er... initial impressions suggest that I may be in WAY over my head on this one, though I'll reserve judgement until I can get hold of a copy (once Abebooks send me my forgotten password), though I'll tentatively state that the last paragraph suggested the start of something I might be able to get to grips with.

Either Ishtar has a good point or this is string theory for someone who's just realised that other planets also have moons, if you see what I mean.
War Arrow -

This from Olson -

http://www.plu.edu/~jonesrp/doc/olson-kingfishers.pdf


enjoy!


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
Ishtar
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Post by Ishtar »

This - from one of John's links is so good, I've got to copy and paste some of it here. (my bolding)


The moment I was born, I knew that William James was right. The world of the new-born baby is indeed "All one great blooming, buzzing confusion". I was alarmed and baffled by the tumult that raged around and inside me. Intuition told me, "Here's something that matters greatly." Had I possessed language, I would have demanded "What the devil's going on here?" That's the prime philosophical question, and I've been trying out different answers ever since.

I have come to believe that Alfred North Whitehead can tell me what it's all about. In my view the writings of Whitehead point at the most hopeful and all-embracing philosophy of all time. Whitehead aimed for nothing less than the refutation of gloomy scientific materialism. He hoped to reconstruct the moral universe without disrupting the beneficence of science. The structure he devised is not everything a devout religious believer would wish. Nor has his eloquence yet overswept Western culture and conquered it. Nonetheless, when they become better known, his insights will replace the nihilism, and correct the moral slackness of our times.

Once you have allowed Whitehead's powerful engine of hope to transform your attitude to life you will never again need to consult another philosopher. Those sinister philosophical miseries of the 20th century--you know who I mean: malignant Heidegger, disjointed Wittgenstein, cross-eyed Husserl, sour Sartre--you can consign their jeremiads to the fire. They failed to salute the quantum and relativistic earthquakes of our century and so they're dust, history, trash. Forget 'em.

In one of his many definitions Whitehead frames philosophy as a rational system. "Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience--everything of which we are aware, which we enjoy, perceive, will or think--can be interpreted." And he adds, "The teleology of the universe is directed to the production of Beauty".

Whitehead says that the first thing you've got to understand is that science is deluded: the world isn't made of atoms, electrons, gravity, or whatever. There is only one kind of entity; and even that perishes as soon as it comes into being. That entity is an aesthetic moment of choice, of feeling.

There are no fundamental "things," or "objects" in the world of Whitehead. Whitehead's ontology, or parts-list of the universe, contains only processes.

Life, the Universe and Everything consists of myriads of little emotions. Only feelings exist; no particles exist; and all the feelings have the same form: that of the human mind. Atoms, electrons, bodies and brick walls arise later. He once remarked to a friend that Immanuel Kant had written his books in the wrong order: he should have started with his aesthetic Critique of Judgment. Whitehead follows his own advice. He founds his world on aesthetics, and treats physics as superstructure.

Whitehead's cosmos suggests a musical performance; a free-wheeling jazz festival; an ensemble of countless players, some good, some bad, all improvising as hard as they can go. They play, not for the glory of God, or to celebrate some spiritual ideal of Art; they play only because they enjoy it. Unfortunately the musicians don't always agree on which chords to strike, and they even disagree about what tunes they want to play. And so ugly fights frequently break out amongst the artists, and they smash their instruments over each others' heads. Often they smash each others' heads. But rising like a wraith among the screeches, squawks and thwacks, you will hear the cadences and counterpoint of supernal music, almost too lovely to bear. It is the proper task of the true philosopher to lead you to experience that intangible beauty, to understand it, and to intensify it. ...

For more, read here: http://www3.sympatico.ca/rlubbock/ANW.html
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Post by Ishtar »

and this ....

The doctrine of The Jewel Net of Indra forms the core of Hua-Yen Buddhism. It teaches that the cosmos is like an infinite network of glittering jewels, all different. In each one we can see the images of all the others reflected. Each image contains an image of all the other jewels; and also the image of the images of the images, and so ad infinitum. The myriad reflections within each jewel are the essence of the jewel itself, without which it does not exist. Thus, every part of the cosmos reflects, and brings into existence, every other part. Nothing can exist unless it enfolds within its essence the nature of everything else.

The same thought runs through Whitehead's philosophy, although he avoids the gorgeous imagery of the Orient. He prefers to present his ideas in obscure, grey, academic terminology. He calls his version of the Jewel Net the Doctrine of Internal Relations, or Solidarity; and he claims he got it from John Locke. He states that the cosmos is a network of 'actual occasions', which are pulses of feeling and acts of choice. Every factor of experience must call on all the others in order to express itself. Each occasion is a process which perishes as soon as it has asserted itself. Once dead, it forms the base, and sets the limits, for the deeds of its successors. The nodes of Whitehead's solidarity network are active, and the pattern never ceases to change.

Whitehead's sober view, and the vivid Jewel Net, both illustrate the bootstrap model of reality. In a turmoil that never ends, the entire cosmos renews itself, instant by instant. It is a self-actuated circuit: what mathematicians call a recursive process. It calls to mind Ouroboros, the worm of myth, [it's actually a serpent - Ish] which thrives by consuming its own tail.

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Post by john »

Ishtar -

Its a beautiful midsummer day, with the exception I'm on day three of a bastard case of the stomach flu. Better, today though.

I know the following is long, and dry.

However its got some jewels in it, to use your term.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/parmenides/


hoka hey,


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
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Post by Ishtar »

John,


Before I even got this paragraph, I was thinking "classic shamanic journey", and the paragraph confirms it:

Parmenides' proem is no epistemological allegory of enlightenment but a topographically specific description of a mystical journey to the halls of Night. In Hesiod, the “horrible dwelling of dark Night” (Th. 744) is where the goddesses Night and Day alternately reside as the other traverses the sky above the Earth. Both Parmenides' and Hesiod's conception of this place have their precedent in the Babylonian mythology of the sun god's abode. This abode also traditionally served as a place of judgment, and this fact tends to confirm that when Parmenides' goddess tells him that no ill fate has sent him ahead to this place (fr. 1.26-27a), she is indicating that he has miraculously reached the place to which travel the souls of the dead.
John, I'm sorry about your 'flu. I too can't write much because my RSI is bad at the moment, but I will carry on reading your link.

Ironically, I used to use Parmenides as my avatar on another discussion board, as I know about him and the theories about his philosophy. But I wanted to move from theories to practice, which is why I began to learn how to do the shamanic journey. I wanted to experience what these people were talking about instead of just reading about it. That is what I do now, and so I only have a mild interest, maybe a curiosity to hear what they're saying. But the thing for me is to have the direct experience ... after that, other people's words do seem dry and I doubt one person has come by the true divine ecstatic experience of the shamanic journey through reading them.
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Post by john »

Ishtar wrote:John,


Before I even got this paragraph, I was thinking "classic shamanic journey", and the paragraph confirms it:

Parmenides' proem is no epistemological allegory of enlightenment but a topographically specific description of a mystical journey to the halls of Night. In Hesiod, the “horrible dwelling of dark Night” (Th. 744) is where the goddesses Night and Day alternately reside as the other traverses the sky above the Earth. Both Parmenides' and Hesiod's conception of this place have their precedent in the Babylonian mythology of the sun god's abode. This abode also traditionally served as a place of judgment, and this fact tends to confirm that when Parmenides' goddess tells him that no ill fate has sent him ahead to this place (fr. 1.26-27a), she is indicating that he has miraculously reached the place to which travel the souls of the dead.
John, I'm sorry about your 'flu. I too can't write much because my RSI is bad at the moment, but I will carry on reading your link.

Ironically, I used to use Parmenides as my avatar on another discussion board, as I know about him and the theories about his philosophy. But I wanted to move from theories to practice, which is why I began to learn how to do the shamanic journey. I wanted to experience what these people were talking about instead of just reading about it. That is what I do now, and so I only have a mild interest, maybe a curiosity to hear what they're saying. But the thing for me is to have the direct experience ... after that, other people's words do seem dry and I doubt one person has come by the true divine ecstatic experience of the shamanic journey through reading them.

Ishtar -

I'm not Parmenides, nor Olson, nor Keats , nor Heraclitus, nor a thousand generations of Shamans.

I'm just john.

My point here is you must give up all the historic/religious/ political Teleology which has been inflicted upon you,

In order to move freely in the Shamanic.

"To live outside the Law

You must be honest"

Perhaps Bob Dylan's greatest insight, ever.


hoka hey

john

ps

And I'm not B. Dylan either.

j
"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
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Post by Ishtar »

We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the mystic
Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic.

And when that fog horn blows you know I will be coming home
And when that fog horn whistle blows I got to hear it
I don't have to fear it
I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And together we will float into the mystic

Come on ....

Van Morrison
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