Subj : Back again
To   : RICHARD M. MEIC
From : Frank Masingill
Date : Fri Jul 13 2001 01:10 pm

 > Need I go on?  There is no arrogance involved here.  It is a simple fact
 > that we humans today understand more about reality than the humans a
 > century or more ago.

    Read "Debate of a Man Contemplating Suicide with his Soul" of circa 
2,000-2,500 BCE and seriously tell me if our understanding of "Reality" exceeds 
his.  Not about our automobiles and bathtubs and his inferior technology but 
about the "It" reality in which both he and we participates and in which the 
tension in consciousness look quite similar.  True, the mystery of the ultimate 
reality surounding him and that same mystery surrounding us was mediated in 
society in different modes and the "cosmos" was experienced as full of gods and 
we dwell in a "dedininized" universe where horizons have receded a bit further 
but would our automobiles, airplanes and the nuclear bomb have supplied him 
with the solution to the mystery that would have permitted his Soul to win the 
existential argument so that he would have felt no longer the desire to die and 
thus help the gods to bring better order into the world so that "it would no 
longer stench like "bird droppings?"

    We are not very far, you know, from men standing naked in front of ditches 
while producers of the "Brave New World" shot their naked bodies into mass 
graves.  Not far, indeed!!  In fact, if your blood does not run cold when you 
read some of the thought on these very Fidonet echoes then it may be that you 
could be overlooking something in that era of modernity that might make one 
hesitant to declare that we have captured "Reality."

    I tend to agree with John that it is not emotion and passion we need to get 
rid of.  They just need to be turned in the direction of the Heraclitian Common 
and the rationality of the humanity that philosophy and the spiritual eruptions 
that have occurred throughout the world along the lines incorporated in Plato's 
"Big Lie" as the greatest truth of all - that "all men or brothers."  
(Voegelin)  Such myths through the refinement of philosophy certainly have not 
harmed men, whereas the rigidity of doctrine and ideology in the pursuit of 
perfection on earth turn men into devils.  This has been the observation of my 
short lifetime as I yearrned and prayed for the "open soul in an open society" 
(Bergson, William James and Whitehead).

Frank

---
 * Origin: Frank's House (1:396/45.12)

.