Aphorisms and Observations – Page 27

Notes After a Meditation Session

The discursive mind loves the dust it kicks up. We love distraction, diversion, dissipation, and diremption, even as we sense their nullity and the need to attain interior silence. This is one reason why meditation is so hard. We love to ride the wild horse of the mind. It is much easier than swimming upstream to the Source.

Or to unmix the metaphors, it is much easier to ride than rein in that crazy horse. But we have the reins in our hands, and it is just a matter of having the will to yank back on them. (10 September 1997)

At Funerals

At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going home to the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? He who loves the things of this world as if they are ultimate realities ought perhaps to hope that death is annihilation.

Pyrrhonist or Syncretist?

Avoid all beliefs or embrace all beliefs? There is the syncretic option. I do not advocate it, or the Pyrrhonist one either.

A Passion Wanting Purification

A passion for philosophy serving personal ambition is a passion wanting purification.

Compound Interest

Either you pay it, or it pays you.

Not Plausibly Deniable

This ephemeral world is not plausibly deniable like God and the soul. Paradoxical! The more real appears less real and the less real more real.

Here is a good animated introduction to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. About eight minutes in length.

Higher Remediation

My friends in the teaching trenches tell stories that lead me to believe that so-called 'higher education' is now little more than 'higher remediation.'

Reliably Inconclusive

Such is philosophical argumentation. Philosophers arrive at conclusions, but the conclusions they arrive at are inconclusive.

Accept No Substitutes!

The ersatz immortality of progeny is a poor substitute for the genuine article, as is 'literary' immortality. Ditto for the miserable after-existence of a merely intentional object in the fallible and flickering memories of a few acquaintances not known for the justice of their assessments, acquaintances themselves slated for the Reaper's scythe.

Moral Progress

It is a sign of moral progress when, considering one's peccadilloes, one begins to wonder about the appropriateness of the diminutive suffix.

On the Logical Independence of Person and Proposition

If the Father of Lies speaks a truth per accidens, it is still a truth. And if the Father of Lights speaks a falsehood per impossibile, it is still a falsehood.

The Marvellous Powers We Misuse

Thought, speech, free action, sexual generation.

Don’t Harbor the Negative

When negative thoughts drift into port, note them, but don't let them drop anchor. Let them drift out again.

Thinking Concretely About Death

When my death seems 'acceptable,' a 'natural' occurrence, I wonder whether I am thinking about it concretely and honestly enough. I wonder whether I am really confronting my own utter destruction as a subject for whom there is a world, as opposed to myself as an object in the world. If I view myself as object, I can 'hold myself in reserve' and imagine that I as subject will somehow survive destruction. I can think of death as a drastic transition rather than as annihilation — which it may well be.

If you say it is certain that death is annihilation, then I pronounce you a dogmatic fool.

‘Liberals’ Lack Standards

And when they have them they tend to be double standards.