And so, that nothing in heaven should be wanting in your concern for us, you send those blessed spirits to serve us, assigning them as our guardians and our teachers.
He has given his angels charge over you to guard you in all your ways. These words should fill you with respect, inspire devotion and instill confidence; respect for the presence of angels, devotion because of their loving service, and confidence because of their protection. And so the angels are here; they are at your side, they are with you, present on your behalf. They are here to protect you and to serve you. But even if it is God who has given them this charge, we must nonetheless be grateful to them for the great love with which they obey and come to help us in our great need.
So let us be devoted and grateful to such great protectors; let us return their love and honor them as much as we can and should. Yet all our love and honor must go to him, for it is from him that they receive all that makes them worthy of our love and respect.
(—from, Second readingFrom a sermon by Saint Bernard, abbot
That they might guard you in all your ways, 2Oct, Feast of the Guardian Angels)
Angel of God my guardian dear
To whom God’s love commits me here
Ever this day (or night) be at my side
To light and guard, to rule and guide,
Amen
Plotinus
A main channel through whom Plato's ideas influenced the middle ages, Plotinus (204-270 CE) and his disciple Porphyry combined Plato's rationalism with mysticism to produce a powerfully influential version of neo-Platonism. Plotinus' works were edited and collected by Porphyry into six books of nine chapters each, known as the Enneads (Greek for "The Nines").
Plato had suggested, in Book VI of the Republic, that the Form of the Good was supreme in the world of the Forms. In fact, he said,What gives truth to the objects of knowledge, and to the knowing mind the power to know, is the Form of the Good. As it is the cause of knowledge and truth, think of it also as being the object of knowledge. Both knowledge and truth are beautiful, but you will be right to think of the Good as other and more beautiful than they. As in the visible world light and sight are rightly considered sunlike, but it is wrong to think of them as the sun, so here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as Good-like, but wrong to think of either as the Good, for the Good must be honored even more than they. ... [A]s for the objects of knowledge, not only is their being known due to the Good, but also their real being, though the Good is not being but superior to and beyond being in dignity and power" (Republic 508e-509c).Plotinus' philosophy may be seen as a set of variations on this Platonic theme. He refers to the Supreme Form more frequently as The One than as The Good, and emphasizes its aspects of Unity, Intelligence, and Soul or Life. Everything that is emantes from the One, and is drawn back toward it. For humans, the "flight of the alone to the alone," as Plotinus called it, is marked by rational inquiry (since the forms are rational and known by the rational mind). but it is also marked by a mystical experience which transcends reason, as the soul goes into itself and returns to Unity with its source. This element of mysticism in Plotinus was a major source of inspiration for medieval Christian mystics and theologians. Recent scholars like Jules Brehier have speculated that Plotinus may have been influenced by direct acquaintance with Hindu mysticism. Whether he was or not, his mystical teachings are certainly similar to those of the Upanisads, and seem to reflect a similar mystical experience.
The Enneads contain a chapter on Beauty (I.6) which was highly influential in the Middle Ages. After considering other theories of what beauty is, Plotinus concludes that it is formal Unity. When diverse or similar parts are unified by one form, the Soul recognizes and takes pleasure in the form of Unity. This may happen when we view a painting or a sculpture, listen to a piece of music, or follow an elegant mathematical proof. In all these cases, we are drawn toward Unity, and the form of Beauty Itself. We must get there by stages: like people emerging from a dark cave into sunlight, we must become accustomed to the light. In the following passage, Plotinus combines ideas from Plato's allegory of the Cave with themes from the Symposium:
http://users.rowan.edu/~clowney/Aesthetics/philos_artists_onart/plotinus.htmLike anyone just awakened the soul cannot look at bright objects. It must be persuaded to look first at beautiful habits, then the works of beauty produced not by craftsmen's skill but by the virtue of men known for their goodness, then the souls of those known for beautiful deeds . . . Only the mind's eye can contemplate this mighty beauty . . . So ascending, the soul will come to Mind . . . and to the intelligible realm where Beauty dwells (Enneads I.6.9).Bibliography: John Haldane, entry in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. David Cooper, Blackwell, 1992, 1995
The mind-fuckery continues up until the film's closing moments, when Seyfried's hacker confronts Owen's cop on the waterfront. Sal has clearly changed, and his understanding of how his information-gathering system works has been completely upended, leading to the type of larger philosophical crisis that often faces the protagonists of Niccol's films. How do you continue to live when your sense of reality has been so warped by technology?
For Seyfried's character -- and perhaps for Niccol himself -- the answers begin with rethinking our conception of privacy. "It's not that I have something to hide," she tells Sal before walking away at the end of the film. "I have nothing I want you to see." It's a familiar line of criticism that's been articulated by activists, politicians, and writers regarding a wide range of cyber-security scandals from Edward Snowden to Cambridge Analytica. "That's the punch in the gut at the end of the film, hopefully," says Niccol. "That's the false choice we're always given: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
(--from, THE DIRECTOR OF NETFLIX'S 'ANON' EXPLAINS THE BRAIN-SCRAMBLING ENDING, By DAN JACKSON, Published On 05/04/20 18@danielvjackson https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/anon-netflix-ending-explained-andrew-niccol-interview#So much depends on the word "nothing."
In terms of religious practice, Shintō aims at the cultivation of heightened openness. In other words, one strives to capture “the mood of things” (mono no kokoro) or feel the tangible world, thereby realizing a profound sympathetic resonance with one’s environment. To be affectively and cognitively attuned to the things around us is the most intimate form of knowledge — that is, to know the heart-mind (kokoro) of a thing (mono).
Thus, mono no ke and mono no kokoro provide the background against which mono no aware emerges as an aesthetic notion. Mono no aware, then, represents a refined sensibility indicating a sincere heart capable of resonating with the vital energy of things in a constantly changing world.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/weai/exeas/resources/pdf/buddhism-japanese-aesthetics.pdfStill, here.
Nishitani has further developed this multiple Zen perspective of “non-doing” (mu-i) in dialogue with Western philosophers including Nietzsche and Heidegger. Jan van Bragt, in his translation of Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness, has skillfully rendered the opposing term u-i (samskrta) here as “being-at-doing.” This being-at-doing, according to Nishitani, is a matter of karma; in other words, the vicious circle of volitional action and the disposi- tions that both result from these willful acts and compel us on to further acts. This existence Nishitani has further developed this multiple Zen perspective of “non-doing” (mu-i) in dialogue with Western philosophers including Nietzsche and Heidegger. Jan van Bragt, in his translation of Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness, has skillfully rendered the opposing term u-i (samskrta) here as “being-at-doing.” This being-at-doing, according to Nishitani, is a matter of karma; in other words, the vicious circle of volitional action and the disposi- tions that both result from these willful acts and compel us on to further acts. This existence as being-at-doing has “the character of an inexhaustible task that has been imposed on us, which means that we can maintain our existence in time only under the form of constantly doing something. Being in time consists essen- tially in being obliged to ceaselessly to be doing something.”38 This ceaseless cycle of compulsory/volitional activity and debt can only come to an end by abandoning “the standpoint of karma,” and by a conversion from being-at-doing to non-doing (mu-i).
And yet, as we might expect, Nishitani stresses that this conversion does not settle down on “the field of nirvana,” but rather comes full circle in a 360-degree spiraling return to what he calls “the field of samsara-sive-nirvana” (RN 275/250). The “great negation” of emptiness or sunyata does not put an end to all activity, but clears the ground for a radically different kind of ceaseless activ- ity, one no longer centered on the ego and producing karmic debt. On the field of samsara-sive-nirvana, “constant doing is constant non-doing,” and “all being- at-doing. . . takes the shape of non-doing.” Now “all our work takes on the char- acter of play,” for here “working and playing become manifest fundamentally and at bottom as sheer, elemental doing,” or what Buddhism calls “playful samadhi” (Jp. yuge-zammai) (RN 277–79/252–53). Nishitani uses the image of the child to depict the “dharmic naturalness” (Jp. jinen-hôni) of an innocent activity that is at once play and elemental earnestness; “for the child is never more earnest than when engaged in play” (RN 281/255). The child at earnest play serves as an image for the “radical spontaneity” that characterizes life after the extinction of the will.
(—from, Zen After Zarathustra:The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation Between Nietzsche and Buddhism, by Bret W. Davis Today, the meditation is on Pirsig: https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/51240137/Davis_Zen_After_Zarathustra.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1537609572&Signature=NQ87Y5GVXTBRDsQbExpeZS%2FP89Y%3D&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B%20filename%3DZen_After_Zarathustra_The_Problem_of_the.pdfThese days, Pirsig redounds to the prevailing arrogance in Washington.
“Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.” ― Zen and the Art of Motorcycle MaintenanceThe ever-giving gift of social quality!
Anecdote of the Jar
BY WALLACE STEVENS
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar" from Collected Poems. Copyright 1923, 1951, 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
“Shanah tovah” (שנה טובה), “Good year,” u’metuka” (ומתוקה), “and sweet!”
Gemar chatimah tovah” (גמר חתימה טובה), “A good final sealing!”You cant take Bensonhurst out of someone born there.
There were personal reasons, too, for my investigation. I wanted to understand why it had to be as bad as it was — why she wasn’t just doubted but hated, not simply mocked but exiled — and why it had always lingered on my conscience like an article of unfinished business, something I had meant to do but hadn’t. I wanted to look directly at the dark things that are revealed when episodes of brutality unfold and all pretense of civilization temporarily fades, and I wanted to understand them completely.
Otherwise, I thought, they could at any time pull me under. And I could watch mutely while something like this happened again.Her concluding paragraphs are sober:
Because there will always be opportunities to do evil and evil opportunists. There will always be acts of cruelty prepackaged with plausible deniability, or the easy cover of crowds to disperse responsibility. There will always be people nobody believes: people with lesser reputations, people who struggle with addiction, people without much capital, social or otherwise, to credit them. And there will always be cases of offenses that are real and true but hard to prosecute, which means that justice in the world — if it’s to exist at all — will have to take some other form than the formalized and official, and peace will have to arise from some other reckoning than a proper settling of accounts.
This is my imperfect offering toward that end: a record of what happened, and the willingness to have been troubled by it all these years. It still troubles me now — it will always be unresolved — and I hope that it troubles you, because the moral conscience at ease accomplishes nothing.
(-- from, She reported her rape. Her hometown turned against her. Can justice ever be served? By Elizabeth Bruenig, in Arlington Texas. Opinion piece, The Washington Post, 19Sept2018 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/?utm_term=.4da39e678ceeIt is a long read. It's a longer meditation.
School of Truth
O fool, do something, so you won't just stand there looking dumb.
If you are not traveling and on the road, how can you call yourself a guide?
In the School of Truth, one sits at the feet of the Master of Love.
So listen, son, so that one day you may be an old father, too!
All this eating and sleeping has made you ignorant and fat;
By denying yourself food and sleep, you may still have a chance.
Know this: If God should shine His lovelight on your heart,
I promise you'll shine brighter than a dozen suns.
And I say: wash the tarnished copper of your life from your hands;
To be Love's alchemist, you should be working with gold.
Don't sit there thinking; go out and immerse yourself in God's sea.
Having only one hair wet with water will not put knowledge in that head.
For those who see only God, their vision
Is pure, and not a doubt remains.
Even if our world is turned upside down and blown over by the wind,
If you are doubtless, you won't lose a thing.
O Hafiz, if it is union with the Beloved that you seek,
Be the dust at the Wise One's door, and speak!
(—Hafiz, Sufi poet. From: 'Drunk On the Wind of the Beloved' Translated by Thomas Rain Crowe)
Perfect virtue produces nothing. — Zhuangzi
Many people resort to the so-called paranoid–schizoid stage of development, in which they will follow a guru-like leader whom they invest with magical powers for good, and at the same time find scapegoats whom they blame for the disaster and regard as wholly evil. 2(Loc.166)Then:
My wager is that if the enigma of the Other has been largely ignored by the mainstream metaphysical tradition –going back to Parmenides and Plato who defined the Other in relation to the Same –it resurfaces again and again throughout our western cultural history in the guise of strangers, gods and monsters who will not go away and continue to command our attention. Preoccupied with the Rule of Reason, most western philosophers since Parmenides have banished the puzzlements provoked by ‘strangeness’ to the realm of Unreason, namely the cultural unconscious of myth, art and religion. And in the process of this estrangement, the Other passed from the horizon of reflective understanding into the invisible, unspeakable, unthinkable dark.
It is my conviction that the Other may be brought back onto the horizon of philosophical understanding again in light of a number of recent explorations of the Self–Other relation in psychoanalytic theory, deconstruction, anthropology and phenomenological hermeneutics. It is also my conviction that the project of enlightenment will remain unenlightened until it comes to terms with the strangers, gods and monsters that it has all too often ostracized or ignored. And it is here that I will also be proposing a second movement from philosophy back to its others (art, religion, psychoanalysis). Understanding and pre-understanding need to get back into dialogue with each other. That is one of the guiding hypotheses of this work.
*
One example of how this might be achieved is, I suggest, a new hermeneutic
understanding of ‘melancholy’. If melancholic dread and anxiety is indeed one of the characteristic maladies of humanity, it is incumbent on philosophers to take this seriously. One of the best ways in which this may be done is by looking at the formative myths which epitomize this fundamental experience of alienation. Foremost here is the myth of Saturn, the monster who castrates his father and seeks to devour his own children. Though ignored by mainstream philosophy and metaphysics for centuries, certain thinkers in our own time –from Klibansky and Heidegger to Kristeva and Ricoeur –have sought to revisit the hidden meanings of this mythic monster and remind us how dread before death and loss can veer manically between abjection and elation unless we come to terms with it. Such reckoning implies both an acknowledgement and a working-through of this estranging mood, so that we may tame the monster and be less ‘driven’ by it. Once again, art, religion and psychoanalysis offer indispensable means of achieving this task. But so, I submit, does philosophy. To go on evading the monster of angst within us is a recipe for obsessional neurosis and existential inauthenticity. To face the Saturnine monster and acknowledge that it is an intregral part of us is to accept the truth that we are strangers-to-ourselves and that we need not fear such strangeness or ‘act it out’ by projecting such fear onto Others.
.
The story of Hamlet, which we explore below in both its Shakespearean and Joycean retellings, dramatizes the options faced by the melancholic soul. Confronting the terrors of death –triggered by the untimely loss of his father –the tortured Dane finds himself vacillating between mania and despair. One moment he apotheosizes his dead father as a demi-god (Hyperion), the next he recoils in horror from his ghostly apparition. The anguished Prince is a well-seasoned traveller on the peaks and troughs of strangeness. But what every melancholic –from heroic Danes to existential Daseins –must ultimately accept is this: the lost thing is really lost and the only cure lies in true mourning, that is, in the readiness to let go of the other we hold captive within or scapegoat without. The key is to let the other be other so that the self may be itself again. I will be suggesting that one of the best aids in this task is narrative understanding: a working-through of loss and fear by means of cathartic imagination and mindful acknowledgement.
.
*
Letting the other be other in the right way is, of course, no easy task. Our contemporary culture in particular exploits our deep ambiguity towards the death instinct, displacing our fearful fascination onto spectacular stories of horror, monstrosity and violence.
.
Julia Kristeva captures this point well in a dialogue we conducted on the subject in Paris in 1991:
.The media propagate the death instinct. Look at the films people like to watch after a long tiring day: a thriller or a horror film, anything less is considered boring. We are attracted to this violence. So the great moral work which grapples with the problem of identity also grapples with this contemporary experience of death, violence and hate.And Kristeva goes on to suggest, quite correctly in my view, that this expresses itself in extremist forms of identity politics:
Nationalisms, like fundamentalisms, are screens in front of this violence, fragile screens, see-through screens, because they only displace that hatred, sending it to the other, to the neighbour, to the rival ethnic group. The big work of our civilization is to try to fight this hatred. 3
(—from, STRANGERS, GODS AND MONSTERS, Interpreting otherness, by Richard Kearney, 2003, Routledge, kindle, Loc. 214-251)
The solar system is an almost perfect symbol of this concept of Reality; which finds at once its most rigid and most beautiful expression in Dante’s “Paradiso.” 182 The Absolute Godhead is conceived as removed by a vast distance from the material world of sense; the last or lowest of that system of dependent worlds or states which, generated by or emanating from the Unity or Central Sun, become less in spirituality and splendour, greater in multiplicity, the further they recede from their source. That Source—the Great Countenance of the Godhead—can never, say the Kabalists, be discerned by man. It is the Absolute of the Neoplatonists, the Unplumbed Abyss of later mysticism: the Cloud of Unknowing wraps it from our sight. Only by its “emanations” or manifested attributes can we attain knowledge of it. By the outflow of these same manifested attributes and powers the created universe exists, depending in the last resort on the latens Deitas: Who is therefore conceived as external to the world which He illuminates and vivifies.
St. Thomas Aquinas virtually accepts the doctrine of Emanations when he writes: 183 “As all the perfections of Creatures descend in order from God, who is the height of perfection, man should begin from the lower creatures and ascend by degrees, and so advance to the knowledge of God. . . . And because in that roof and crown of all things, God, we find the most perfect unity, and everything is stronger and more excellent the more thoroughly it is one; it follows that diversity and variety increase in things, the further they are removed from Him who is the first principle of all.” Suso, whose mystical system, like that of most Dominicans, is entirely consistent with Thomist philosophy, is really glossing Aquinas when he writes: “The supreme and superessential Spirit has ennobled man by illuminating him with a ray from the Eternal Godhead. . . . Hence from out the great ring which represents the p. 98 Eternal Godhead there flow forth . . . little rings, which may be taken to signify the high nobility of natural creatures.” 184
(—from Chapter V, Mysticism and Theology, in Mysticism, by Evelyn Underhill, [1911], at sacred-texts.com )http://www.sacred-texts.com/myst/myst/myst08.htmThe beyond center is the within of within.