A Thousand Peaceful Cities

"I'm concerned with the spiritual aspect," Mr. Trąba started to giggle unexpectedly and in a very peculiar manner. "I'm concerned with the spiritual aspect, plus practice, of course.  Training is the way of life.  Moreover, one mustn't forget that this," Mr Trąba raised the crossbow to his shoulder, "is the weapon of the ancient Chinese.  And the ancient Chinese say that when you shoot at your target, you must free yourself from trivial thoughts of the necessity of hitting it.  The shot must have a spiritual scope, whereas the shooter must remain in intense tension until the shot falls upon the target like a ripe fruit falling, like snow from a bamboo leaf..."

(H)

Truth is a pathless land.

"I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organised; nor should any organisation be formed to lead or coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organise a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organise it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallised; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others."

--Jiddu Krishnamurti, from this speech

This reminds me of don Juan's statement about all paths leading nowhere. 

Li Tuan

"Her hands of white jade by a window of snow
Are glimmering on a golden-fretted harp--
And to draw the quick eye of Chou Yu,
She touches a wrong note now and then."
-Li Tuan

(J; courtesy of James Monaco)

1939 and 1999

Two articles about 1939 and 1999, two very important years in American movies.

(J)

movies and power

"[Movies] function, not by literally presenting us with the world, but by permitting us to view it unseen. This is not a wish for power, . . . but a wish not to need power, not to have to bear its burdens."

--Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film

Again, the responsibility ("burden") of power, agency.

(J)

Emotions and responsibility

". . . we will not . . . be in a position to understand much less to change ourselves until we have learned to accept this responsibility [for our emotions], to view the passions as our own and our doing, and to ask, not 'What causes me to feel this?' but always 'What reason do I have for doing this?"

--from Robert C. Solomon's The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion

I am nearly finished with this book, and I will certainly discuss it more--this is just a taste. This shift he describes in one's approach to the emotions completely turned me on my head when I read it. In the days following, I have already noticed a distinct change in my attitude towards my emotions, particularly paying more attention to the strategies employed by different emotions, but with a greater sense of responsibility, assuming that each reaction or habit is at heart my own doing. This is been my opinion on the matter for a few years, but Solomon's book has really helped to clear much of my confusion about putting this conviction into practice.

(J)

Divine Darkness

J (4/21/12):

Here is Alan Watts' translation of Pseudo-Dionysius' Mystical Theology.

Note (1) in particular stood out to me:

(1) Unknowing, or agnosia, is not ignorance or nescience as ordinarily understood, but rather the realization that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One, and that therefore it is only truly to be approached by agnosia, or by that which is beyond and above knowledge. There are two main kinds of darkness: the subdarkness and the super-darkness, between which lies, as it were, an octave of light. But the nether-darkness and the Divine Darkness are not the same darkness, for the former is absence of light, while the latter is excess of light. The one symbolizes mere ignorance, and the other a transcendent unknowing - a superknowledge not obtained by means of the discursive reason. [italics mine]

I love encountering images like these in the writings of these early theologians: the Darkness that is the "excess of light," a luminous presence so intense that it becomes a form of darkness, of "super-darkness."

---

H (4/21/12):

One quick reaction (only because I can apply what I've learned in the Marias' book):

 "that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One" is an extreme form of nomalism (originating in Medieval Scholasticism), one that William of Occam (Ockham) wrote about.  His theory was that only faith could give us access to theological truths (that is, bring us closer to God) and that reason had nothing to do with theology and God; reason is only used for science.