Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness: Begun 2009.04.12

Raymond M. Smullyan

Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness

Indiana University Press

601 North Morton Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA

2003.

Began, today, with an 'accidental' on-line find while researching Tachibana Akemi on the web.

[YtbF]

This find is an example of what I have called a 'synchronicity-petite'. Not powerful enough to be a full bodied synchronicity, but so weirdly wonderful I feel compelled to note them. How did this example come to be? Well, it began with my innocent choice to acknowledge the source of the image I have substituted for my mug on this blog, which is clipped from a painting by Tachibana Akemi. (Sadly, I am no longer able to find it on-line.) Tachibana has also written one of my favourite all time poems, 'Solitary Pleasures.' During my search I was surprised at how few Google hits I got for the poem, but that one of the five or so included one of my all time favourite philosophical writers, Raymond M. Smullyan. And while that is a delightful surprise, even more delightful was his having cited it within an overview of Canadian psychologist and philosopher Richard M. Bucke's idea of Cosmic Consciousness, and American philosopher/p

oet Walt Whitman's equivalent ideas as expressed in Leaves of Grass. And so I began to read the book that someone has scanned on line. See it at Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness, which is honestly available from Indiana University Press. (So I have yet another book to purchase.) But the most amusing thing about this find was an observation Bucke made about Whitman's reading habits, because he describes exactly what I do when perusing books, and what just happened here! Smullyan begins by citing Tachibana:

It is a pleasure

When, in a book which by chance

I am perusing

I come on a character

Who is exactly like me.

(Tachibana Tr. Keen 1935, pp.174-75).

Then Smullyan continues:

Well, I also like to come across characters just like me, and so I was delighted to come across the following observation by Bucke about the reading habits of Walt Whitman:

Though he would sometimes not touch a book for a week, he generally spent a part (though not a large part) of each day in reading. Perhaps he would read on an average a couple of hours a day. He seldom read any book deliberately through, and there was no more (apparent) system about his reading than

anything else that he did; that is to say, there was no system about it at all. If he sat in the library an hour, he would have a half dozen volumes about him, on the table, on chairs and on the floor. He seemed to read a few pages here and a few pages there, and pass from place to place, from volume to volume, doubtless pursuing some clue or thread of his own. Sometimes (though very seldom) he would get sufficiently interested in a volume to read it all.

(Bucke 1956, p219) (p.123)

What makes this book even more intriguing, is that Bucke's idea of Cosmic Consciousness, that Smullyan explores, corresponds to CG Jung's ideas of the development of consciousness. See, for example, The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann. Then, even more amusingly (to me), Smullyan very gently chastises Bucke for excluding a few historical figures from a list of those who exhibited Cosmic Consciousness, such as Havelock Ellis, when neither refer to Jung. The timing of this read corresponds beautifully with the lecture I'm currently

reading, "VII: The Development of Personality," from CW17 The Development of Personality.

And, I guess, I may have to post the great little poem

"Solitary Pleasures".

So, why not now?

Exactly. Here it is:

It is a pleasure

when, spreading out some paper,

I take brush in hand

And write far more skilfully

Than I could have expected.

It is a pleasure

When, after a hundred days

Of twisting my words

Without success, suddenly

A poem turns out nicely.

It is a pleasure

When, rising in the morning

I go outside and

Find that a flower has bloomed

That was not there yesterday.

It is a pleasure

When, a most infrequent treat,

We've fish for dinner

And my children cry with joy

"Yum-yum!" and gobble it down.

It is a pleasure

When, in a book which by chance

I am perusing,

I come on a character

Who is exactly like me.

It is a pleasure

When, without receiving help,

I can understand

The meaning of a volume

Reputed most difficult

It is a pleasure

When, in these days of delight

In all things foreign,

I come across a man who

Does not forget our Empire.

Tachibana Akemi (1812-68); tr. Donald Keene.

(Perhaps from Anthology of Japanese Literature.

New York: Grove Press, 1935.

The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters of George Orwell V2: Begun 2009.03.28

George Orwell

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 2: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943.

Penguin Books 1970. (No ISBN in my copy.)

Began March 28th, 2009

[YtbF]

I stumbled across this while looking for Spengler in a local used book store called Renaissance Books. This is a book I will be dipping into occasionally, with a finished-reading date far in the future, despite Orwell being one of my favourite authors.

This is a book I will pop into when I want a quick read.

I randomly flipped to 'The Meaning of a Poem.' The poem Orwell writes about is "Felix Randal" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

FELIX RANDAL the farrier, O he is dead then? my duty all ended,

Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome

Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some

Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?

Sickness broke him. Impatient he cursed at first, but mended

Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some

Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom

Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!

This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.

My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,

Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;

How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,

When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,

Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!

(p157-8)

The Development of Personality: CW of CG Jung Vol.17: Finished 2009.04.26

C.G. Jung

The Development of Personality CW Vol.17

Princeton University Press 1981

ISBN: 0691018383 / 9780691018386 / 0-691-01838-3

Began March 1, 2009

Finished April 26, 2009

☆☆☆☆☆

Filled with stimulating ideas.

(All citations published with permission of the publisher.)

For example:

If one studies the origins of modern empirical psychology one is profoundly impressed by the fight which the earliest investigators had to wage against the firmly entrenched scholastic way of thinking. Philosophic thought, powerfully influenced by theology ('queen of sciences'), had a decidedly deductive tendency, and over it there reigned a mass of naïve, idealistic preconceptions which were bound sooner or later to lead to a reaction. This reaction took the form of the materialism of the nineteenth century, from whose outlook we are not yet completely freed even today. The success of the empirical method is so undeniable that the splendour of its victory has even begotten a materialistic philosophy, which in reality is more a psychological reaction than a justifiable scientific theory. The materialistic outlook is an exaggerated reaction against the medieval idealism and has nothing to do with the empirical method as such (par. 127).

And:

Of the unconscious we can know nothing directly, but indirectly we can perceive the effects that come into consciousness. If everything in consciousness were, as it seems, subject to our will and choice, then we could not discover anywhere an objective criterion by which to test our self knowledge (par112).

And:

...No doubt theory is the best cloak for lack of experience and ignorance, but the consequences are depressing: bigotedness, superficiality, and scientific sectarianism (intro. p.7).

And:

... It sometimes happens that even important contents disappear from consciousness without the slightest trace of repression. They vanish automatically, to the great distress of the person concerned and not at all on account of some conscious interest which has engineered the loss and rejoices over it. I am not speaking here of normal forgetting, which is only a natural lowering of energy-tension; I am thinking rather of cases where a motive, a word, image, or person vanishes without a trace from the memory, to reappear later at some important juncture. ... For, in the last resort we are conditioned not only by the past, but by the future, which is sketched out in us long beforehand and gradually evolves out of us. This is especially the case with a creative person who does not at first see the wealth of possibilities within him, although they are all lying there ready. So it may easily happen that one of these still unconscious aptitudes is called awake by a 'chance' remark or by some other incident, without the conscious mind knowing exactly what has happened, or even that anything has awakened at all. Only after a comparatively long incubation period does the result hatch out. The initial cause or stimulus often remains permanently submerged. A content that is not yet conscious behaves exactly like an ordinary complex. It irradiates the conscious mind and causes the conscious contents associated with it either to become supercharged, os that they are retained in consciousness with remarkable tenacity, or else to do just the opposite, become liable to disappear suddenly, not through repression from above, but through attraction from below. One may even be led to the discovery of certain hitherto unconscious contents through the existence of what one might call 'lacunae,' or eclipses of consciousness. It is therefore well worth while to look a bit more closely when you have the vague feeling of having overlooked or forgotten something. Naturally, if you assume that the unconscious consists mainly of repressions, you cannot imagine any creative activity in the unconscious, and you logically arrive at the conclusion that eclipses are nothing but secondary effects following a repression. [Tom: again, an example of that logic follows from an assumption, regardless of the truth or appropriateness of that assumption.] You then find ourself on a steep slope. The explanation through repression is carried to inordinate lengths, and the creative element is completely disregarded. Causalism is exaggerated out of all proportion and the creation of culture is interpreted as a bogus substitute activity This view is not only splenetic, it also devalues whatever good there is in culture. It then looks as if culture were only a long-drawn sigh over the loss of paradise, with all its infantilism, barbarity, and primitiveness. In truly neurotic manner it is suggested that a wicked patriarch in the dim past forbade infantile delights on pain of castration. Thus, somewhat too drastically and with too little psychological tact, the castration myth becomes the aetiological culture-myth. This leads one to a specious explanation of our present cultural 'discontent,'* and one is perpetually smelling out regrets from some lost paradise which one ought to have had. That the sojourn in this barbarous little kindergarten is considerably more discontenting and uncomfortable than any culture up to 1933 is a fact, which the weary European has had ample opportunity to verify for himself during the last few years. I suspect that the 'discontent' has very personal motivations. Also, one can easily throw dust into one's own eyes with theories. The theory of repressed infantile sexual-practice to divert one's attention from the actual reasons for the neurosis, that is to say, from all the slacknesses, carelessnesses, callousnesses, greedinesses, spitefulnesses, and sundry other selfishnesses for whose explanation no complicated theories of sexual repression are needed. People should know that not only the neurotic, but everybody, naturally prefers (so long as he lacks insight) never to seek the causes of any inconvenience in himself, but to push them as far away from himself as possible in space and time. Otherwise he would run the risk of having to make a change for the better. Compared with this odious risk it seems infinitely more advantageous either to put the blame on to somebody else, or, if the fault lies undeniably with oneself, at least to assume that it somehow arose of its own accord in early infancy. One cannot of course quite remember how, but if one could remember, then the entire neurosis would vanish on the spot. The efforts to remember give the appearance of strenuous activity, and furthermore have the advantage of being a beautiful red herring. For which reason it may seem eminently desirable, from this point of view also, to continue to hunt the trauma as long as possible.

This far from unwelcome argument requires no revision of the existing attitude and no discussion of present-day problems. There can of course be no doubt that many neuroses begin in childhood traumatic experiences, and that nostalgic yearnings for the irresponsibilities of infancy are a daily temptation to certain patients. But it remains equally true that hysteria, for instance, is only too ready to manufacture traumatic experiences where these are lacking, so that the patient deceives both himself and the doctor. Moreover it still has to be explained why the same experience words traumatically with one child and not with another.

Naïveté is out of place in psychotherapy. The doctor, like the educator, must always keep his eyes open to the possibility of being consciously or unconsciously deceived, not merely by his patient, but above all by himself. The tendency to live in illusion and to believe in a fiction of oneself — in the good sense or in the bad — is almost insuperably great. The neurotic is one who falls victim to his own illusions. But anyone who is deceived, himself deceives. Everything can then serve the purposes of concealment and subterfuge. The psychotherapist should realize that so long as he believes in a theory and in a definite method he is likely to be fooled by certain cases, namely by those clever enough to select a safe hiding-place for themselves behind the trappings of the theory, and then to use the method so skillfully as to make the hiding-place undiscoverable (par 200-2).

*Cf. Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents,Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, XXI (1961; first pub. 1930).

The lecture "The Development of Personality"

is particularly powerful! I wonder if Jung was reacting to something, as there is a great deal of impatience, even anger, in his writing.

For example:

... Our age has been extravagantly praised as the "century of the child." This boundless expansion of the kindergarten amounts to forgetfulness of the problems of adult education divined by the genius Schiller. Nobody will deny or underestimate the importance of childhood; the severe and often life-long injuries caused by stupid upbringing at home or in school are too obvious, and the need for more reasonable pedagogic methods is far too urgent. But if this evil is to be attacked at the root, one must in all seriousness face the question of how such idiotic and bigoted methods of education ever came to be employed, and still are employed. Obviously, for the sole reason that there are half-baked educators who are not human beings at all, but walking personifications of method. Anyone who wants to educate must himself be educated. But the parrot-like book-learning and mechanical use of methods that is still practised today is no education either for the child or the educator (par 284)....

And:

The fact is that the high ideal of educating the personality is not for children: for what is usually meant by personality — a well-rounded psychic whole that is capable of resistance and abounding in energy — is an adult ideal. It is only in an age like ours, when the individual is unconscious of the problem of adult life, or — what is worse — when he consciously shirks them, that people could wish to foist this ideal on to childhood. I suspect our contemporary pedagogical and psychological enthusiasm for the child of dishonourable intentions: we talk about the child, but we should mean the child in the adult. For in every adult there lurks a child — an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole. But the man of today is far indeed from this wholeness. Dimly suspecting his own deficiencies, he seizes upon child education and fervently devotes himself to child psychology, fondly supposing that something must have gone wrong in his own upbringing and childhood development that can be weeded out in the next generation. This intention is highly commendable, but comes to grief on the psychological fact that we cannot correct in a child a fault that we ourselves still commit. Children are not half as stupid as we imagine. They notice only too well what is genuine and what is not (par 286)....

At times Jung moves firmly into the realm of the poetical! (No wonder he is almost unknown in the empirically obsessed age we find ourselves living within.)

Our personality develops in the course of our life from germs that are hard or impossible to discern, and it is only our deeds that reveal who we are. We are like the sun, which nourishes the life of the earth and brings forth every kind of strange, wonderful, and evil thing; we are like the mothers who bear in their wombs untold happiness and suffering. At first we do not know what deeds or misdeeds, what destiny, what good and evil we have in us, and only the autumn can show what the spring has engendered, only in the evening will it be seen what the morning began (par 290).

He has interesting comments on 'Marriage as a Psychological Relationship':

So far as reason or calculation or the so-called loving care of the parents does not arrange the marriage, and the pristine instincts of the children are not vitiated by false education or the hidden influences of accumulated and neglected parental complexes, the marriage choice will normally follow the unconscious motivations of instinct. Unconsciousness results in non-differentiation, or unconscious identity. The practical consequence of this is that one person presupposes in the other a psychological structure similar to his own. Normal sex life, as a shared experience with apparently similar aims, further strengthens the feeling of unity and identity. This state is described as one of complete harmony, and is extolled as a great happiness ("one heart and one soul") — not without good reason, since the return to that original condition of unconscious oneness is like a return to childhood. Hence the childish gestures of all lovers. Even more is it a return to the mother's womb, into the teeming depths of an as yet unconscious creativity. it is, in truth, a genuine and incontestable experience of the Divine, where transcendent force obliterates and consumes everything individual; a real communion with life and the impersonal power of fate. The individual will for self-possession is broken: the woman becomes the mother, the man the father, and thus both are robbed of their freedom and made instruments of the life urge (par 330).

Divisadero: Finished 2009.03.14

Michael Ondaatje

Divisadero

McClelland & Stewart, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-7710-6872-0 (0-7710-6872-7)

Began February 18, 2009;

Finished March 14, 2009.

☆☆☆☆☆

Beautifully written.

Almost every sentence sings the English language fantastic.

The story is both very simple and complicated.

Simple because the mysteries are open,

but complicated because the mysteries are of the human heart expressed with an emotive sensuality that is nigh incomparable.

Truly, one of the most exquisitely beautifully written books,

of either prose or poetry, with which the English language has been blessed.

Ondaatje has done the impossible,

and surpassed the beauty of his Booker prize winning Anil's Ghost and The English Patient.

This book demands that you start reading it again from beginning,

to inhale anew its power to renew and revitalize the possibility of life in text.

The 'smallest possible space' is where Anna wishes to be now. The truth of her life comes out only in places like this. There are times when she needs to hide in a stranger's landscape, to the still undiminished violence of her bloodied and naked self between her father and Coop, the moment of violence that deformed her, all of them. Anna, who keeps herself at a distance from those who show anger or violence, just as she is still fearful of true intimacy. Her past is hidden from everyone. She has never turned to a lover or friends when they speak about families (and she always inquires of their families) and spoken of her childhood. The terrible beating of Coop, the weapon of glass entering her father's shoulder as she tried to kill him. Even now she cannot enter that afternoon's episode with safety. A wall of black light holds her away from it. But she can imagine her sister riding her horse in the Sierras, wearing small bells on her wrist to warn wildlife of her approach, conscious of all the possibilities of danger. Just as she herself works in archives and discovers every past but her own, again and again.

She and Rafael keep between them a formality that makes them careful with each other. They have stepped into this friendship the way solitaries in medieval times might have bundled together for the night before journeying on towards a destination of marriage or war. So that Anne is not aware that the casualness in Rafael she witnesses is inconsistent with his nature (save for the territorial precision with which he flicked that bee of his guitar in her presence a few days earlier), while he knows scarcely a thing about her. Who is she? This woman who had led him into this medicine cabinet of a room where most of her possessions exist — books, journals, passport, a carefully folded map, archival tapes, even the soap she has brought with her from her other world. As if this orderly collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts

(76-6).

So he stayed with her and married her?

They never married, but she was his wife, yes. He stayed and lived in the caravan with her. My mother told me he had had another wife, before the war, but she referred to it only once. The war was a chasm for most. There was one life before and one life afterwards. Many decided not to back to what they had been.

It's a good excuse. The war

(82).

With the stepfather's unexpected death, in spite of some inherited wealth, Odile Segura and the boy reduced their way of life. There had been little protecting the boy's world save for that careful man. Now Lucien became more cautious and secretive. In classrooms, the others heard his closeted speech patterns. He has spent too long conversing with just himself. As he grew older he had private words, as if collected twig by twig from an open field. He spoke a few sentences to himself about a trusted gate, or an animal's nervousness on entering a boat, and that spoken scene would become indelible to him. Already he protected himself with words, with the small and partial clarity they brought

(196).

To Whom it May Concern: Finished 2009.02.16

Priscila Uppal

To Whom It May Concern

DoubleDay Canada (Random House) 2009

ISBN: 978-0-385-65993-2 (0-385-65993-8)

Began January 20, 2009;

Finished February 16, 2009.

☆☆☆☆

A delightful and beautifully written book.

Often poetical.

The characters are interesting as they

struggle to accept, with whole hearts,

the particular nature of their physically

circumscribed lives.

Wonderful. Highly recommended.

Dorothy is an 18 year old high school student who collects the stories of strangers in her journal that she calls 'Soundscape Diaries'. She is deaf. Her high school friend Kite, also deaf, has gone to have a cochlear implant to restore the hearing he lost as a very young child. She speculates on what hearing is:

... Dorothy thinks about Kite … already in his paper gown in a hospital bed, being monitored and hooked up to monitors, undergoing his own renovations, a new receptacle of sounds. Like other students, she's heard horror stories about those who are overwhelmed, like blown-out speakers, and choose to turn off their implants, unable to get used to those distracting, disruptive, disturbing noises the hearing population accepts and ignores; toilets flushing, cars honking, cellphones ringing, cash registers reeling, police sirens wailing, lawnmowers buzzing, dogs barking, balloons bursting, faucets dripping, vacuums screeching, crows cawing, snowplows beeping, sprinklers sputtering, winds howling, airplanes zooming, engines rumbling, cameras clicking …the endless onslaught of sound. But oh, how she hopes he will hear his mother's voice, his brother's laughter, a nurse's comforting sighs, robins at sunrise, a cat's purr, and music — his favourite rock bands, but also Mozart, which Mrs. Kotek says makes her believe that God exists. She is aware that if Kite hears only pleasant things, he won't won't truly understand what sound is. Nevertheless, why is it that, according to what she has been led to believe, the most horrible sounds are also the loudest

(p.260-1)

The Decline of the West: Began 2009.01.01

Oswald Spengler

The Decline of the West
Knopf, 1962 Abridged.

Began January 2009

[YtbF]

This is a fascinating and very difficult book.

The knowledge required to properly assess the

ideas is broad and esoteric.

A challenging read, but worth while.

I've had to return it to the library.

And my to date short search of the used book stores has not turned up anything - yet.