Myron

A commonplace book

[itsjustmyron]

English is a phallogocentric language

In critical theory and deconstruction, phallogocentrism is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the privileging of the masculine (phallus) in the construction of meaning. The word is a portmanteau of the older terms phallocentrism (focusing on the masculine point of view) and logocentrism (focusing on language in assigning meaning to the world).

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Breathing

Breathing is more or less affected by stooping, standing, or reclining. Faith and courage induce deep breathing. The respiration of the optimist is usually regular, slow, and deep. The victims of fear and fright are always shallow breathers, the respiratory action being quick and irregular.

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Cheerfulness

Cheerfulness causes the mouth and the eyes to become highly expressive of pleasure, the upper lips are elevated and the teeth are thus displayed. Joy brightens the eyes, expands the nostrils, raises the angles of the mouth, elevates the eyebrows, and energizes the vocal muscles, imparting a peculiar and characteristic expression to the voice.

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“He who is only brave has but a spasm, he who is only bold has but a temperament, he who is only courageous has but a virtue; but the man who is dogged in the pursuit of truth has greatness.”

— Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la Mer

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The fluidity of language

Science originally meant “knowledge” (nescience still means absence of knowledge).

Auto originally meant “something that had a soul”.

The word intention is from the two Latin words “in,” towards, and “tendere,” to stretch, and it therefore means a “reaching out in a certain direction.”

Early use of ‘inflame’ was literal (“to set on fire”), but its figurative senses (“to make angry” or “to enrage”) quickly followed and became its most common meanings.

In Sanskrit, the selective concentrative power is called “Vach,” which means “Voice,” and is the root of the Latin word “Vox,” having the same meaning. 

See” is figurative, denoting vision as well as comprehension.

“Ambition” is derived from ambo ire, meaning going about to collect votes.

“Style” is derived from “stylus” which the ancients used to write upon their waxen tablet.

“Interval” designated the space between stakes or palisades which strengthened the rampart in Roman camps the inter vallos spatium. Came to denote time as well as space.

“edify” is to build;

“faran” for “fares” meaning to go or proceed as a traveller. Fare (welfare, warfare, seafaring) is now only employed in the figurative sense. A figurative name for food in general.

[itsjustmyron]

Happiness does not come automatically. It is not a gift that good fortune bestows upon us and a reversal of fortune takes back. It depends on us alone. One does not become happy overnight, but with patient labor, day after day. Happiness is constructed, and that requires effort and time. In order to become happy, we have to learn how to change ourselves.

—Luca and Francesco Cavalli-sforza

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Light is the dance, and doubly sweet the lays When for the dear delight another pays

But, ah, I dream! —the appointed hour is fled, And hope, too long with vein delusion fed

She seems attentive to their pleaded vows, Her heart detesting what her ear allows

Should second love a pleasing flame inspire, And the chaste queen connubial rites require; Dismiss’d with honour, let her hence repair To great Icarius, whose paternal care Will guide her passion, and reward her choice With wealthy dower, and bridal gifts of choice.

Then swelling sorrows burst their former bounds, With echoing grief afresh the some resounds; Till Pallas, piteous of her plaintive cries, In slumber closed her silver-streaming eyes.

A length of days his soul with prudence crown’d, A length of days had bent him to the ground.

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Emerson on the quest for self-knowledge

Direct giving is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, eternal youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical power, and prophecy. The boy believes there is a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches believe in imputed merit. But, in strictness, we are not much cognizant of direct serving. Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.

Each man is, by secret liking, connected with some district of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is, as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries, of lichens; Van Mons, of pears; Dalton of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines; Newton, of fluxions.

(From Representative Men)

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J. Krishnamurti

One of my first direct contacts with Eastern spirituality was my meeting with J. Krishnamurti in late 1968. At the time Krishnamurti came to UC Santa Cruz to give a series of lectures he was seventy-three and had an absolutely stunning appearance. His sharp Indian features, the contrast between his dark skin and his white, perfectly combed hair, his elegant European clothes, his dignified countenance, his measured, flawless English, and—above all—the intensity of his concentration and entire presence left me absolutely spellbound. At that time, Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan had just come out, and when I saw Krishnamurti I could not help comparing his appearance to the mythical figure of that Yaqui sage.

The impact of Krishnamurti’s physical appearance and charisma was enhanced and deepened by what he said. Krishnamurti was a very original thinker who rejected all spiritual authority and traditions. His teachings were quite close to those of Buddhism, but he never used any terms from Buddhism or from any other branch of traditional Eastern thought. The task he set himself was extremely difficult—to use language and reasoning in order to lead his audience beyond language and reasoning—and the way in which he went about it was highly impressive.

Krishnamurti would select a well-known existential problem—fear, desire, death, time—as the topic of a particular lecture, and he would begin his talk with something like the following words: ‘Let us go into this together. I am not going to tell you anything; I have no authority; we are going to explore this question together.” He would then show the futility of all conventional ways of eliminating (for example) fear, where- upon he would ask slowly, with great intensity, and with an acute sense of drama: “Is it possible for you, at this very moment, right here, to get rid of fear? Not to suppress it, or deny it, or resist it, but to get rid of it once and for all? This is our task tonight—to get rid of fear completely, totally, once and for all. If we cannot do that, my lecture will be useless.”

Now the stage was set; the audience was rapt and utterly attentive. “So let us examine this question,” Krishnamurti would continue, “without judging, without condemning, without justifying. What is fear? Let us go into this together, you and the speaker. Let us see whether we can really communicate, being at the same level, at the same intensity, at the same time. Using the speaker as a mirror, can you find the answer to this extraordinarily important question: What is fear?” And then he would begin to weave an immaculate web of concepts. He would show that in order to understand fear you have to understand desire; to understand desire you have to understand thought; and therefore time, and knowledge, and the self, and so on and so forth. Krishnamurti would present a brilliant analysis of how these basic existential problems are interrelated—not theoretically but experientially. He would not merely confront you with the results of his analysis but urge and persuade you to get involved

in the analyzing process yourself. At the end you would come away with the strong and clear feeling that the only way to solve any of your existential problems was to go beyond thought, beyond language, beyond time—to achieve. as he put it in the title of one of his best books, Freedom from the Known.

I remember that I was fascinated as well as deeply disturbed by Krishnamurti’s lectures. After each evening talk Jacqueline and I stayed up for several hours more, sitting at our fireplace and discussing what Krishnamurti had said. This was my first direct encounter with a radical spiritual teacher, and I was immediately faced with a serious problem. I had just embarked on a promising scientific career, in which I had considerable emotional involvement. and now Krishnamurti told me with all his charisma and persuasion to stop thinking, to liberate myself from all knowledge. to leave reasoning behind. What did this mean for me? Should I give up my scientific career at this early stage, or should I remain a scientist and abandon all hope of attaining spiritual self-realization?

I longed to ask Krishnamurti for advice, but he did not allow any questions at his lectures. nor would he see anybody afterward. We made several attempts to see him but were told firmly that Krishnamurti did not wish to be disturbed. It was a lucky coincidence—or was it?—that finally brought us an audience. It turned out that Krishnamurti had a French secretary, and after the last lecture Jacqueline, who is a native of Paris, managed to strike up a conversation with this man. They hit it off well, and as a result we ended up seeing Krishnamurti in his apartment the following morning.

I was rather intimidated when I finally sat face to face with the Master, but I did not lose any time. I knew what I had come for. ‘How can I be a scientist,” I asked, ‘‘and still follow your advice of stopping thought and attaining freedom from the known?” Krishnamurti did not hesitate for a moment. He answered my question in ten seconds, in a way that completely solved my problem. “First you are a human being,” he said; “then you are a scientist. First you have to become free, and this freedom cannot be achieved through thought. It is achieved through meditation—the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.” Once I had reached this understanding of life as a whole, he told me, I would be able to specialize and work as a scientist without any problems. And, of course, there was no question of abolishing science. Switching to French Krishnamurti added, “J’adore la science. C'est merveilleux!”’

After this brief but decisive meeting I did not see Krishnamurti again until six years later, when I was invited along with several other scientists to spend a week in discussion with him at his educational center at Brockwood Park, south of London. His appearance was still very striking, even though he had lost some of his intensity. During that week I came to know Krishnamurti much better, including some of his shortcomings. When he spoke he was again very powerful and charismatic, but I was disappointed by the fact that we could never really draw Krishnamurti into a discussion. He would speak, but he would not listen. On the other hand, I had many exciting discussions with my fellow scientists—David Bohm, Karl Pribram, and George Sudarshan, among others.

Thereafter I all but lost touch with Krishnamurti. I always acknowledged his decisive influence on me, and I would often hear about him from various people, but I did not attend an- other lecture nor did I read any of his other books. Then, in January 1983, I found myself in Madras in southern India at a conference of the Theosophical Society opposite Krishnamurti's estate, and since Krishnamurti happened to be there and gave an evening lecture I went to pay my respects. The beautiful park with its huge old trees was packed with people, mostly Indian, who sat quietly on the ground and waited for the beginning of a ritual that most of them had participated in many times before. At eight o'clock Krishnamurti appeared, dressed in Indian clothes, and walked slowly but with great assurance toward the prepared platform. It was wonderful to see him, at eighty-eight, making his entrance the way he had done for more than half a century. climbing the stairs to the platform without any help, sitting down on a cushion, and folding his hands in the traditional Indian salute to begin his talk.

Krishnamurti spoke for seventy-five minutes without any hesitation and with almost the same intensity I had witnessed fifteen years before. The topic of the evening was desire and he laid out his web as clearly and skillfully as he had always done. This was a unique opportunity for me to gauge the evolution of my own understanding from the time I had first met him, and I felt for the first time that I clearly understood his method and his personality. His analysis of desire was clear and beautiful.

Perception causes a sensory response, he said; then thought intervenes—“I want... ," “I don't want... .” “I wish . . ."—and thus desire is generated. It is not caused by the object of desire and will persist with varying objects as long as thought intervenes. Therefore, to free oneself from desire cannot be achieved by suppressing or avoiding sensory experience (the way of the ascetic). The only way to be free from desire is to be free from thought.

What Krishnamurti did not say is how freedom from thought can be achieved. Like the Buddha. he offered a brilliant analysis of the problem, but unlike the Buddha he did not show a clear path toward liberation. Perhaps, I wondered, Krishnamurti himself had not gone far enough on this path? Perhaps he had not sufficiently freed himself from all conditioning to lead his disciples to full self-realization?

After the lecture I was invited to join Krishnamurti and several other people for dinner. Understandably, he was quite exhausted from his lecture and not in the mood for any discussion. Nor was I. I had come simply to show my gratitude, and had been richly rewarded. I told Krishnamurti the story of our first meeting and thanked him once more for his decisive influence and help, being well aware that this would probably be our last encounter, as indeed it turned out to be.

The problem that Krishnamurti had solved for me, Zen-like with one stroke, is the problem most physicists face when confronted with the ideas of mystical traditions—how can one transcend thinking without losing one’s commitment to science? It is the reason, I believe, that so many of my colleagues feel threatened by my comparisons between physics and mysticism. Perhaps it will help them to know that I, too, felt the same threat. I felt it with my whole being, but it appeared at an early stage of my career and I had the great fortune that the person who made me realize the threat also helped me to transcend it.

—Fritjof Capra, Uncommon wisdom: conversations with remarkable people

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The judgment can be regarded either as a mere capacity for reflecting on a given representation according to a certain principle, to produce a possible concept, or as a capacity for making determinate a basic concept by means of a given empirical representation. In the first case it is the reflective, in the second the determining judgment. To reflect (or to deliberate) is to compare and combine given representations with other representations or with one’s cognitive powers, with respect to a concept which is thereby made possible. The reflective judgment is called the critical faculty.

—Kant, Critique of Judgement (CJ)

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(T)he imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is very powerful in creating another nature, as it were, out of the material that actual nature gives it. We entertain ourselves with it when experience becomes too commonplace, and by it we remold experience, always indeed in accordance with analogical laws, but yet also in accordance with principles which occupy a higher place in reason . . . Thus we feel our freedom from the law of association (which attaches to the empirical employment of imagination), so that the material supplied to us by nature in accordance with this law can be worked up into something different which surpasses nature.

—Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment

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This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze. This much only we can assert: the image 1s a product of the empirical faculty of reproductive imagination; the schema of sensible concepts, such as figures in space, is a product and as it were, a monogram, of pure 4 priori imagination, through which, and in accordance with which, images themselves first become possible. These images can be connected with the concept only by means of the schema to which they belong.

—Kant

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This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all. Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

—The Guest House, Rumi

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Time and Education begets experience; Experience begets memory; Memory begets Judgment and Fancy; Judgment begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the Ornaments of a Poem. The Ancients therefore fabled not absurdly in making memory the Mother of the Muses. For memory is the World (though not really yet so as in a looking glass) in which the Judgment, the severer Sister, busieth herself in a grave and rigid examination of all the parts of Nature, and in registring by Letters their order, causes, uses, difference, and resemblances; Whereby the Fancy, when any work of Art is to be performed findes her materials at hand and prepared for use.

—Thomas Hobbes

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Imagination, a licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and impatient of restraint, has always endeavored to baffle the logician, to perplex the confines of distinction, and burst the enclosures of regularity.

—Samuel Johnson

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Faculty talk

The idea that cognition depends on distinct “faculties” or capacities for performing specific mental operations dates back to early Greek philosophy. These faculties typically included at least sensation, imagination, and intellection (or semantic variants of these). In the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, when “psychology” was first splitting off from philosophy and becoming a distinct discipline, philosophers still used faculty talk in their accounts of knowledge. With the rise of sophisticated neurophysiological accounts of human cognition, many have come to regard faculty talk as an inadequate substitute for “genuine” scientific understanding of cognition.

Johnson, M. (2013). The Body in the Mind The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Those [philosophers] who have accepted the dualism have established a hierarchy between body and soul which permits of considering as negligible the part of the self which cannot be saved. They have denied death, either by integrating it with life or by promising to man immortality. Or, again they have denied life, considering it as a veil of illusion beneath which is hidden the truth of Nirvana.

—Simone de Beauvoir, The ethics of ambiguity