Mine (Not Yours)

No, it really should inspire a touch of shame: anything you call "mine" is essentially an extension of your self.

Call it an example of the ontology of terror.

This About Sums It Up

Study: Americans Get Majority Of Exercise While Drunk

A Return

No, it isn't indecision. There is certainly a taste of harmless envy present, though, when I witness anyone within the spotlight of my associations find the one thing they're to do with their life and monomaniacally charge with horns lowered towards the prize. I'm not so lucky in this sense, which on most days is another way of saying I'm too lucky for words to capture. I love everything that life has to offer, which means to choose to specialize in one thing is a betrayal against everything else. I quite literally haven't been bored in close to ten years -- since the mad insatiable thought of reading everything first entered my mind.

A bit of background as a partway method to mitigate the guilt I feel for my two-month blog exile. I have started the 18 month trek beyond theorizing about future clients actually seeing them. It all started about five weeks ago. These are for the most part relatively moderate to high functioning individuals who take an hour of their time to seek the listening eyes and occasional words from stranger with whom they have no outside contact. Little ol' me. Insert mischievous smile.

The first weeks were, obviously, the most emotionally jangling. A touch with terror wouldn't be an inappropriate nominal phrase. Although I had another counselor with me for the first two sessions I met these individuals (as a handover of sorts to another newbie in the shrink trade), the first session after, where I was alone with them for the first time, was the purest experience of possibility I had ever experienced -- and with this, obviously, came anxiety, of which possibilities are its fuel. My biggest difficulty was gaining a concrete memory: I quite literally had a hard time remembering sometimes important details they had told me minutes ago. That's how my anxiety functions. My exterior is cool and collected, and there are rarely any nerves bouncing to cause me physiological feelings of nervousness. No, my head goes fuzzy. I see the individual in the flesh before me and am lost in the dizziness of trying to think of what to say next.

But things did get better. And to use the greatest amount of literary downplay I can muster (it's called litotes, dear autodidacts) in expressing my feelings about myself as a counselor, I can see myself doing this sorta thing, you know?

I like very much where I'm at, tagged as a therapist who spends his free hours drenched in some ungodly subject purely incongruous with shrink-think, the flesh-and-blood puzzles of current clients in my mental background for needed stimulation. It surely is no coincidence that I chose a profession that demands more than any other that I focus on other things, lest the perpetual threat of burnout catch my younger days; God knows other things (rather than one thing) is precisely what encapsulates my interests most. But despite all this security and previously unexperienced vocational contentment, which manifests itself at times as pure overflowing joy and other times as a more subtle feeling that I'm a badass guru who can solve the problems of the world, the thought still touches me gently on the shoulder from time to time:

What do you want to be tomorrow, John? I'd like to be a theologian, joyfully crushed in the academic cliche of juggling my time between books and teaching (with counseling as a practical refresher). Then the other demons tap my shoulder. Write a novel! Focus on poetry! Look into journalism (yes, the silliest persuader yet)! Occasionally the drunkest of them all will pop up belatedly and demand that I twist my time to pursuing literature in grad school.

But there's a daddy demon behind them all. He stays stuck behind the Ozian curtain, voice breathy and seductive, a background radiation to my thoughts that I'm barely aware of save when I capture myself completely: stop enjoying the moment. Turn your unmitigated love of life to a useful activity of some sort. Kill the present through some grand teleology. Make plans. You'll be a better person. -- And that's always where the line is broken and I wake from my self-dream blinking at the bewildering simplicity of life. It's really a question of competition. And often the fight isn't against anyone out there, but my own invented self. Pardon the abstruse philosophical interlude, but Kierkegaard had it down pat: sin is the self's refusal to be its own self, or (and here I'm pushed to the stage) the self that wants to be its own self, created from its own implacable imagination. I want to be my own invention when I'm lost in thoughts of possible realities rather than attending to the singular purpose that constantly unveils moment by moment.

I really wish my blog had a simpler theme than the incessantly repeated (theistic) existential call. Become who you are and everything else becomes nothing else. Find a meaning in life. Pause for the silence to unveil your values, and with it you just might find your self swept in with the metaphysical mix. Then (at last perhaps) nothing will bother you. All distractions will be swept up under your gaze towards your particular (and unreplicable) good. I can only think of Nietzsche via Zarathustra on two separate preachy occasions:

Higher than love of the neighbor is love of the farthest and the future; higher yet than the love of human beings I esteem the love of things and ghosts. This ghost that runs after you, my brother, is more beautiful than you; why do you not give him your flesh and your bones? But you are afraid and run to your neighbor.

"This is my way; where is yours?" -- thus I answered those who asked me "the way." For the way -- that does not exist."

The poison of our times is that we're at the pinnacle of idealizing our very ideals. We don't just believe in some special principle or idea for our lives and thereby progress; we believe in the idea of progressing, and so our plans take a hollow turn. We take up work not because it's the type of work that's best for us as individuals, but because it's work, and work means a chance to get ahead, the more money or less effort the better. Our rosy roles are good enough, and so for eight hours a day (outside work and sleep) we're left freefloating in nihilistic recreation. The cultural commons are truly Godsends: marriage and children keep us committed, as if forcing our selves before us, and we always have the morning coffee for a transitory sanctuary to praise this world through our wakening states. But we still have plenty of time to lose ourselves in goals not sanctified by a higher power (or, if you prefer, atheists, our Heideggerian authenticity). Turn instead to the love of your own ghost, to the self that hovers over your own immediate self (in the Mephistopholean words of Kierkegaard), and then all will make sense.

Which brings me back to me. Earlier last week I remember the prayer I made so clearly. Repeating the minimalistic intercessory method of Frank Laubach, I asked very directly but with all the heart in the world (not without fear, not without pause): God, what must I do? And you're likely to know the answer if you know me with any depth, which flashed with such an immediacy that my neurons jangled in their cerebral dance just to keep up.

Write.

Of course, I pushed it off, fully conscious of my guilt, and leaned for Tolstoy. I wasn't incapable of writing. It wasn't something that brought with it the terrible literary nausea that beginner's self doubt so incisively instills (note: many great writers are arrogant for a reason). I just, you know, sort of, like, didn't do it. And now here's the downspirited dog, drenched from rain and the pain that comes with a day of useless wandering, back to warm house of self expression through letters organized in a certain fashion, healing myself fully by the very act of writing these pretty complaints.

I wonder sometimes if the only book I could ever write would be composed of false reasons for why I never wrote. A man wakes up in solitude at two in the morning, drowned in the sound of an air conditioner which sings like a fake waterfall, the itch present for the first time twenty-two years since birth. Sixty years later and he is no further along than he was before, life roaring polyphonically in the foreground (career, marriage, children, house, car, etc.), the initial itch left alone yet still contaminating his thoughts in a deep and inexplicable way, like a lover one never quite releases from the heart. Two hundred pages later, with added explosions and sex for the publishers, and there's really something there. Actually, Proust did just this (with a different precipitating event and without the vampiric wishes of publishers, sex not withstanding), and crammed it into a mere four thousand pages, the reverberations of praise still lavished upon him by those rarities who still take reading seriously.

Ah, at least you, dear reader, are entertained. Call this whole virtual literary space my own Proustian blog project. If I wasn't who I was, I'd most certainly enjoy reading about who I think I was here. A bit like a dreamer's soap opera, where hero and villain occupy the same smiling face but constantly change clothes to keep the old ladies and conservative Caucasian housewives bent forward in suspense.

You really can't change the channel now, can you?

How to Change Your Life (Musically)

The Buckleys -- father and son -- were prodigies with purely unparalleled approaches to music. For one, each had tight, dizzying vibratos, father comfortable in his tenor range, with a sometimes frightening half-growling of lyrics best revealed in the minimal environment of a drumless guitar/electric/bass trio; son a master of the falsetto, voice angelic, soulful, most at home with a simple electric accompaniment.

And as the irony of the universe typically unfolds, they died far too early, robbing the world of eccentric aesthetic lights. Tim at twenty-eight by a foolish overdose of heroin after an imbecilic dare from a so-called friend; Jeff only two years older after a strangely inspired urge to swim in a river in full clothing without a smiling return. The question always resounds, applicable to all except Bob Dylan and a handful of other still-living prodigies: why do the good die so young, and aesthetic cripples live on in their wake? I can hear the harrowing echo even in written form as I wrote those very words.

These are two songs that have, quite simply, changed my life. And each, because of the yearning of beauty coupled with them, are rarely not accompanied with prayers on my part: oh Lord, let me move the world with words or voice or actions in a similar way. Let my life be a song sung with such passion.

Listen and let your prayers resonate the same. The electric surge and shiver of life. That's the main feeling attached to these performances, the same dive beyond self, the same yearning beyond words. There is no day too terrible that isn't completely turned on its head during the sublime experience of such unseen souls.

Nailed It

Church Today

The problem with the church today? More a ground for ideological display. More applicable to the imagination, for less to the intellect, precious few through the intellect toward the legs. Church has become a culturally sanctified theater of ideas.

Real spirituality existed during the earliest days of Christianity, when believers choked on persecution and the title of "Christian" carried with it by necessity a fighting spirit. Then Constantine converted, circa 312 A.C.E.; then Christianity was the "official" religion, and out of nationalism and respect for Roman authority it became translated to fashion, and thus became anesthetized and died in its sleep. Today one is no longer a Christian against the majority, martyrs in the exact sense Christ has in mind when he spoke of taking up one's cross, a holistic phrase of which social misunderstanding or ostracism is a part, but with the majority. One is a Christian as a social sitting, a form of defense against the initial coldness of being alone and the eventual ineffable discovery of the warmth of God.

Are you a Christian? Oh, my apologies for such a shocking statement. This is America in the 21st century. Of course you are. You live in a Christian nation, you know. You go to church and read your Bible, and while at church perchance once or twice a week you make semihonest efforts to follow the prayers that Pastor & Co. recite. Most importantly, you have the right contempt -- toward the non-religious, toward homosexuals, toward other religions, toward the culturally different. Right is what has been passed along the hands of tradition. Wrong is the unhanded-down.

Loving your enemies? Self sacrifice? No, no, that's all covered by grace. We're all just miserable sinners, after all: not perfect, just forgiven, waiting for the eventual happy death from this miserable world when things will be taken care of come resurrection. Imagine if instead of all the self-deprecating complaints of undeserved grace and admissions of imperfection everyone used his time in an honest attempt at growing in the love of God. No more "I'm a sinner, I'm going to fail" and all the useless wailing over past mistakes, but rather, "Lord, let me love, let me live, give me life, let me resonate your life and love through my very presence!" It's not terrifyingly hard to see that this popular method of self-deprecation is really just laziness planting clandestine seeds of unwillingness to change.

I doubt there are more than a handful individuals in any church who claim themselves as Christians and actually act consistently and as a matter of principle beyond their feelings. "Feelings" here is a euphemism for the flesh, and salvation is founded in spirit (both Holy and human, working in unison) continually trumping the flesh, for "it is the spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all" (John 6:63, ESV). It's the death of the spirit (that central executive element of human personality), of genuine self-assertion through freedom and going against the grain of the inclination and outbursts of the flesh, among self-titled Christians that is responsible for the notoriety of the church -- and for why unbelief is on an unprecedented surge in recent years. When feelings rule, immediate dislikes rule, and this means hatred, contempt, and indifference, love left hopelessly stillborn. All this because the members within the church are too afraid (or simply ignorant because of the fear of the ecclesiastical superiors who run the show), using grace like a cheap whore rather than a realization leading to repentance, and prefer instead to sit in the tepid waters of orthodoxy rather than work beyond the mind to where life dwells. For heaven's sake, theologians, we have enough orthodoxy. What we need is orthopraxy -- right action -- and a theology that actually emphasizes the indispensable requirement of movement in spiritual life.

What is a Christian? He who continually commits suicide to his lower self, founded in flesh and immediate wants washing him along, in the name of Christ. You cannot float in the river of inclination. You cannot let your hatreds and dislikes rule. You must find ground beneath the waters and stand, turn your back and walk against the current toward the divine destination you were initially floating away from. This is to experience the barbs of temptation. Struggle. The hardness of the way. You can change at any time, and the walk to the shore of divinity is always a finite distance, while the corruption of riding along is an endless journey of silent despair, colder and more inhabitable with each soul murdering mile.

Told Ya'

No Palestinian state by 2012, Israeli envoy says (Washington Times)

Israel's hard-line foreign minister said Tuesday there was "no chance" a Palestinian state would be established by 2012 — a message that threatened to cloud the latest visit by President Obama's Mideast envoy.

The comments by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman drew swift Palestinian condemnations and could put Israel at odds with the international community, which has set a 2012 target for brokering a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

"As an optimist, I see no chance that a Palestinian state will be established by 2012," Mr. Lieberman said at a news conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. "We can express interest, we can dream, but in reality, we are still far from reaching understandings and agreements on establishing an independent state by 2012."

Exposing Israeli Apartheid (CBS, 60 Minutes)

I was slightly shocked to find this very well done 60 Minutes report on the Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. It gives me hope that the media are slowly coming around to being critical of a state that has contemptuously ignored (with the United States' help through the United Nations) international law for the last forty plus years. The key note here, dark and despairing in its implication and spoken with candor by Palestinians themselves, is that Israel is making it clear that any chance for a two state solution is becoming impossible. It should be noted that this video was made months before Israel's invasion of Gaza, where according to Amnesty International approximately 1400 innocent Palestinians were killed intentionally, of which 300 were children. The kill count is heavily in favor of the Israeli government -- which is an important distinction, given that there are hugely significant groups of Israeli citizens who oppose and criticize the coldblooded hegemony of their government.

This documentary is, all things considered, the nicer side of a revolting murder of Palestinian rights.

One line summarized the entire occupation with haunting concision: "Arabs tried to save their homes, but the Israelis had the guns." Add to this the unimaginable religious idiocy by an Israeli who makes no apologies for perpetuating the building of illegal settlements. There is no better current example of the easiness of killing the soul of another human being in the name of God.

Sports

As I write this, the USA soccer team is still perhaps clouded in the pain of their loss against Ghana in the World Cup. We went further than any other time I remember watching, and catching this rare, four year interval event makes me think of how The World Cup is truly an excellent event, simply because it unifies the world like no other sporting medium (aside from the Olympics) can do. When countries play against each other, respect and appreciation are almost impossible not to experience; we're dealing with the face-off between histories, cultures, trial and errors and overcomings writ large, rather than corporate-sponsored single stars and cocky states. With an event like this, only the staunchest jingoist could possibly fail to see his own team as a translucent image behind which the entire world beams in recognition.

But this isn't how the vast majority of sporting events function.

Especially in the age of social networking, the virtual sight isn't hard at all to come by. You can easily imagine a one-liner by a friendless friend on Facebook who said that she "won the game," although you may have no idea which sport she was referring to. In almost every single situation, the "win" part always stands out to me. Our sports-centric culture enjoys the mad memes that basketball, football, soccer, baseball, or whatever is all about exercise, the refinement of the physical nature of the human being, the athletic excellence of the individual, and such and so on. We're hardly honest enough to call it what it all really is: a collection of almost ridiculously trivial physical acts qualified by the same old ancient drive toward winning, of seeing the other team (albeit perhaps with noble feelings projected their way) in the inferior slot.

Yes, we're playing the power card yet again, and if you can imagine any sporting event being any bit of sensationalistic fun without the idea of winning against another person or team, you've got it wrong, but not (as will be argued below) not quite all wrong. As a recreation assistant for a church years back (easy, lazy, check please), we had a nicely thought out basketball organization called Upward. Kids would compete in teams as usual, with each player assessed for talent so as to create as closely as possible teams of approximate ability. What made the game both admirable and absurd was the underpinned theme that was often made public: there are no winners. Scores weren't kept. The closest you could do was keep track for yourself, which always led to a sense of injustice when both teams went off the court as cute little egalitarians ready to consume the cheap snacks altruistic parents had blessed upon them. I remember watching these games (quite a few, in fact), and how odd it was that my mind naturally turned from determining which team was winning to which player was the best. I'd find myself involuntarily seeking the team outlier, who scored half of the time and often had the flashy moves.

If I hadn't done this, what would the sport become? What would it be without comparison and overcoming, with one kid ripping it up over everyone else, or the others in the team who hold a moment of excellence through a steal or a well-shot score? The purely objective act of throwing a ball through a hoop. And that, of course, is a quintessential bore. It is quite simply close to impossible to take away the point tally without reducing sports to an unenthusiastic pass of the time. There just isn't much of a point of lobbing around a spherical rubber object unless I somehow know that it's a mediator for my (our) victory, and even where no score is explicit, there could easily hide a better-than-thou spirit with every chug of the ball, focusing our sights on the best player on the team in all his kinetic excellence.

Almost. There is a spiritual element to overcoming, which lies in the way to freedom and breaking the shackles that would try to hold us down. An animal may fight to win, but a human being can fight in order to progress according to the ideals he holds. If you can prune sports to overcoming, suddenly it goes from the most animalistic to one of the most spiritual of activities. Not about competition and winning, but rather about liberty, sweat-soaked and smelly it may be. And this, I think, is what it is all about for the players on the field, and an excellent reason against spectator sports. The longer you watch and root for a certain collection of individuals, the more likely you are to be drawn into the brutish push for us over them.

It's the people watching on the outside who corrupt the game to an activity of winning. It's the asshole Uncle Chuck, perpetually decked out in his Rockets jersey, shouting at opposing fans in stadiums, propagandizing his relatives with how good his team is. It's the corporations who are looking for a recognizable name to attach to their logo for the sake of money. It's the machismo father who forces his child into football and screams bloody murder for his own son's team that they might annihilate the opposition. This is where gold turns to straw and power becomes the goal, and with this comes an understanding of the pervasive irrationality behind rooting for your own side. The conversational words of Chomsky encapsulate the whole thing on this point:

Spectator sports also have other useful functions too. For one thing, they're a great way to build up chauvinism -- you start by developing these totally irrational loyalties early in life, and they translate very nicely to other areas. I mean, I remember very well in high school having a sudden kind of Erlebnis, you know, a sudden insight, and asking myself, why do I care if my high school football team wins? I don't know anybody on the team. They don't know me. I wouldn't know what to say to them if I met them. Why do I care? Why do I get all excited if the football team wins and all downcast if it loses? And it's true, you do: you're taught from childhood that you've got to worry about the Philadelphia Phillies, where I was.... But the point is, this sense of irrational loyalty to some sort of meaningless community is training for subordination to power, and for chauvinism.

The consequences are obvious enough: the more emphasis you place on your team, the less you place on other teams in general, the more they become the enemy, and in time the more anyone who opposes becomes an enemy by definition. It's extremely easy to imagine how this exclusiveness can turn into a type of anti-cosmopolitan and herdlike personality (or magnify an already present seedling), where everything associated with my group is by definition superior or better than anything associated with them, whether we're talking about the family, the nation, or the collection of our own skin cells. Thus,

All of this stuff builds up extremely anti-social aspects of human psychology. I mean, they're there; there's no doubt that they're there. But they're emphasized, and exaggerated, and brought out by spectator sports: irrational competition, irrational loyalty to power systems, passive acquiescence to quite awful values, really. In fact, it's hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things.

The formula is simple : the moment a team becomes my team and the goal is to beat everyone else, then the animal drive returns, qualified by consciousness yes, but still the same brutal push for conquering the other guy. Sports is sanctified insofar as the opposition reflects the faces of the persons seeking to overcome it. The moment the mirror becomes a window and the opposition gains flesh and blood, then the drive to be greater (rather than great) blooms, and by then the mountain treads downward. It thus becomes about seeing the other team insubordinate, and hence reflexively your team the best in the world, rather than the athletic charge against a faceless existential force which would try to conquer you. It's precisely this latter perspective that can allow two teams to struggle against one another for ninety exhausting minutes, with anxiety and sweat and the uncertainty of hope, and upon finishing humbly, happily greet each other for playing such a grand game. And it's this same perspective that allows us to root for anyone, and woe unto the shallow self whose respect is constrained by anything less.

Stewart, At His Best

Apologies from myself and the flagging muse, but graduate school has kicked in, which means a momentary hiatus from the blogosphere. But I couldn't pass the chance to forward one of Jon Stewart's classic sarcastic performances, which trucks out in seven mere minutes yet another shade of the absurdity of BP's oil-soaked sighs:

The Spilling Fields -- BP Ad Campaign

For anyone with a conscience, Green technology sure is looking good now. To modify a quote from the notorious Nixon: I guess we're* all Environmentalists now.

*"We're" here implies a brain, which would exclude many either on the political scene or fanatic for it.

Why Have I Laughed Hysterically Today?

An experimental Google search:

Type in "should I have" and wait for the results to automatically fill:

a baby

another baby

a baby quiz

an abortion

kids

a third child

an affair

another baby quiz

children

my gallbladder removed

The dialectic of American ambivalence as channeled through Google: to multiply or not to multiply, or get down with someone with whom I could extramaritally multiply, or an abortion, or, you know, what do do with that damn gallbladder?

Oh, shoot me with harmless little bullets of uncertain joy.

Journalistic Jitters, Israel Style

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com hits the nail right on the head. So hard and precise, in fact, that I must quote three-fourths of the article (sans updates, which are hefty and very much worth peeking into) in its entirety, keeping his original emphases intact.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What Does Israel Fear From Media Coverage?
Glenn Greenwald

The New York Times, today:

A day after Israeli commandoes raided an aid flotilla seeking to breach the blockade of Gaza, Israel held hundreds of activists seized aboard the convoy on Tuesday . . . .Reuters reported that Israel was holding hundreds of activists incommunicado in and around the port city of Ashdod, refusing to permit journalists access to witnesses who might contradict Israel's version of events.

Physically blocking journalists from reporting on their conduct is what Israel does (as well as others); recall this from The New York Times on January 6, 2009, regarding Israel's war in Gaza:

Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza

Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The reporters were to be permitted in to cover firsthand the Israeli war on Hamas in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against the two-month-old Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.

Each time, they were turned back on security grounds, even as relief workers and other foreign citizens were permitted to cross the border. On Tuesday the reporters were told to not even bother going to the border.

And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.

Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one the government is seeking to entirely control the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy.

Isn't it strange how Plucky, Democratic Israel goes to such extreme lengths to prevent any media coverage of what they do, any journalistic interference with their propaganda machine, in light of the fact that -- as always -- They Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong? Is physically blocking the media from covering what happens the act of a government that is in the right? Thomas Jefferson answered that question quite some time ago:

Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues of truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.

Within Chaos

Sucked up

In this mucked up life

I drink my tea

Unhappily

To the tinfoil sounds

Of background idiocy

And ever vaguely

The footprints about me

Abound in a soiled snow

Soon melted by catastrophe

With each man approximate

Spoken through the drug of pride

A self-claimed captain

No ship can swiftly sail

On the tides of our times

Still I drink my tea

Now vaguely merrily

To the unworded howls

In the hearts around me

And ever strangely

The call of a slowly

Spoken stillness

Resounds within me

And I am free

More Sins From Israel

Faith

Thomas a Kempis, in one of his less misanthropic moments, wrote:

What good does it to speak learnedly about the Trinity if, lacking humility, you displease the Trinity? Indeed it is not learning that makes a man holy and just, but a virtuious life makes him pleasing to God. I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it. For what would it profit us to know the whole Bible by heart and the principles of all the philosophers if we live without grace and the love of God? ... all is vanity, except to love God and serve Him alone.

Plato defined the beginning of wisdom as wonder, Descartes doubt. It's clear we've taken the latter extreme too seriously in molding our quest to know anything in life. If wisdom begins in wonder, what one discovers has a certain playfulness about it. We can philosophize as a way of clarifying misconceptions, but we are still capable of holding that the greatest things in life can be taken for what they are before reason is on the scene. Learning about the world, which can be the broadest definition of the philosophical mind, functions as a sort of aesthetic: we intend to learn as a way of discovering the goodness of the universe, which we presuppose from the beginning. If wisdom begins in doubt, however, then everything we aim to know functions as a life jacket to save us from the anxiety of knowing nothing. This attitude presupposes the necessity of insight to lead us how to live.

Kempis proves that the mind is secondary, and this point provides all the resources for the invisible selves in society who have no time or inclination for "learned" things. Life is more than thinking about life. We must first properly exist before the mind can likewise have its proper standing in relation to the self. But this is impossible without the mind ascertaining something that the heart, as it were, already knows. Perhaps this is why all great truths carry the ring of epiphany, and all epiphany the feeling that comes when one recognizes (replaces in cognition) something one knew before but had forgotten along life's way. As Pascal has said, "the heart has its reasons its own mind knows not." The task of initially learning how to live means convincing the mind what the heart (or something very deep in the self) already knows.

What is the point of preaching? To point out what we as sophisticated adults once knew as charming children. It isn't properly insight or understanding that we need, unless we have fooled ourselves through our reason and thus need a proper rational counterbalance which undoes the damage already done. This is most certainly the case more and more often with a society whose more intellectually prone members are continually blooming towards rationalism and consequently away from intuition. To realize that God exists and that in a paradoxical sense all is right despite the immediate madness that surrounds us isn't grasped solely through the mind, although the mind is involved in the process. The mystique of faith is precisely that God has implanted a conviction in human beings that is very much a power in their lives -- a power that is both impervious to doubt and incapable of proving itself. We have too often understood faith as relating to cognition, to correct belief, rather than something beyond (or before) this; and once again, basic beliefs come with the deal, but are not defined by it. The act of coming to faith isn't specifically a reception of information, but rather analogous to a man who hears an old song he had been somehow missing for years, and upon hearing he says "that's it! I knew it went something like that."

It's important to keep the order that Anselm has presented intact: faith seeks understanding. Understanding can never seek faith. Reason only invites an infinite number of reasons, and this is the nature of the reasoning mind. Understanding can, however, clear away misunderstandings about faith, and this is the task for the philosopher, the theologian, the apologist. But faith essentially remains ineffable, a given that precedes comprehension and reason. Indeed, it is part of the wonder of wisdom for the heart set correctly to the rhythm of the universe.

A Night With Kierkegaard

Sickness Unto Death:

-self as self-relating relation of temporal and eternal

Upbuilding Discourses:

-soul as contradiction of temporal and eternal

Concept of Anxiety:

-self as synthesis of psyche(soul) and body, constituted by spirit

Ergo: soul not the eternal

-perhaps the soul is the original contradiction/relation, without second relation -- the "immediate relation"

-second relation (relation's relating to itself) is the spirit/self -- "relation as becoming"

How can man be a self and also the soul of which the self is part?

Answer: he is a soul as he is a body -- as a synthesis, peripherally. Authentically self through spirit; inauthentically (passively) without spirit (spiritlessness).

I am my body essentially because I have senses and am constituted by matter.

I am a soul because I have consciousness, meaning, reason, possibility, etc., and am constituted immaterially.

*I am simultaneously both, however, but only through spirit or freedom, which is my self in the deepest sense, and comprehensively all these elements are my self in the broadest sense.

Dualism: one over the other; Cartesian "ghost in the machine", soul controlling the body.

Is eternity identified as God or the soul?

-If God, then the soul must be other than eternity

-If the soul, then the soul is eternity

UD:

Soul as a contradiction of temporal and eternal

CA:

Self as synthesis of soul and body

Ergo: Self is a self-relating relation of a contradiction of temporality and eternity and a body

(temporality--->soul<---eternity)----->self<-----body

Soul as subject to temporality by virtue of being associated with a self which exists by definition within time.

-As if the soul were defined according to temporality and eternity *after* spirit defined selfhood.

Could it be that God provides salvation for the soul in the sense that He provides us with possibilities?

-When I have possibilities, I breathe.

-Too much possibility is a form of despair; absurd to think the soul fully exists during despair. It is dampened in despair.

--This points to the soul as more than eternity/possibility/infinity; if it were such, then losing the self in these extremes would mean the fulness of the soul. However, the soul is dampened by despair; ergo, the soul is not this.

:. Soul is found in a balance as well -- contradiction/synthesis

Perhaps the soul is the self in a more peripheral form:

(1)Spirit, (2) soul, (3) body

(1) Relation self-relating (active), (2) the relation (immediate), (3) an element in the relation

If the body is an element in the original relation, what is the other element? Soul.

How can the soul be a part of the synthesis and also the synthesis?

The soul must be a *different* synthesis than the synthesis for the self. Cannot be the "self in a more peripheral form."

"According to Kierkegaard’s anthropology, man is a paradox, an inter-esse which is composed of contradictory aspects (body and soul, time and eternity, necessity and possibility)*. The self is a third, synthetic element which founds these opposite aspects and holds them together. This means that the self is the opposite of an immediate given self (defined by Kierkegaard as a synthesis between these contradictory aspects). Only the awareness of the contradiction makes subjectivity concrete. The more self-development, the more contradictory existence, and the other way around" (Moonen, "Touching From a Distance: In Search of the Self in Henry and Kierkegaard")

*"Man is always both aspects at the same time, so there is no dualism involved: man cannot be one aspect without the other. If he is not capable of understanding the significance of temporality, then eternity in him will also fade."

"Freedom means to be capable" ( appendix to CA)

We must eschew the belief that we are more our souls than our bodies. It is not the case as Lewis said, and virtually every half-thinking contemporary Christian believes, that we properly don't have souls but rather are souls which have bodies. To be one is to be the other; to place emphasis on one is to deemphasize the other, to negate the other, and in doing so we lose both.

Purpose Still Wins the Day

This is a scintillating economic study which unveils two findings:

1) Financial reward works when commensurate with "simple, straightforward tasks" (i.e., non-cognitive).

2) It doesn't work at all when the work involves cognitive tasks (conceptualization), even to the point where higher rewards negatively correlate with job output; i.e., the higher the reward, the lower the job performance.

Conclusion: there is a place for purpose and meaning in work which transcends simple stimulus-reward contingencies.

Quite a kick in the pants for unmitigated capitalism and self-interest, which is always good when ideological egos of its hucksters have inflated to the size they are. This could explain quite well why I'm working on a two year degree so I can make $12,000 less than the average Bachelor's degree salary. Just sayin'.