Aphorisms and Observations – Page 27

Compensation

To compensate us for loss of hearing, old age grants us the wisdom to appreciate that most of what is said is not worth hearing in the first place.

We speak of formative influences; why not also of deformative influences? Parents and siblings, family and friends, church and school, the rude impacts of nature, the softer ones of language and culture — all contribute to our formation but to our deformation as well. The learning of a craft is a formation, but as Nietzsche sagely observes, "Every craft makes crooked." If so, every formation is a deformation.

A Goal of Meditation

To bring the soul into the field of awareness and not merely believe in it like the religionist or reason about it like the philosopher.

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.

Category: Aphorisms and Observations