"But man forgets reality and remembers words."

[andrewducker]

thishardenedarm recently posted a section of a book he loves. freemore recently started posting about perceptions of reality. I felt I should answer both at once with a short excerpt from one of my favourite novels, "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny.

Lord of Light is about the crew of a colony ship, long-landed on a distant planet, empowered by vast technology, warring over the future of the planet and its colonists. It's a story of great battles, mutant powers and strange aliens. It's also a book of philosophy, facing Buddhism against Hinduism, freedom against control and gnosticism against received wisdom.

The style is not to everyone's taste - it is deliberately rhythmic, and I suspect the book would work best in many ways if it were spoken aloud. He deliberately mimics the sound of a religious parable being read which fits the story wonderfully.

The opening lines are:

"His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never laimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could."

The excerpt is from about 50 pages in, and concerns a lecture about reality, given to a group of monks to distract them while the murder of a god is concealed.

"Names are not important," he said. "To speak is to name names, but to speak is not important. A thing happens once that has never happened before. Seeing it, a man looks upong reality. He cannot tell others what he has seen. Others wish to know, however, so they question him saying 'What is it like, this thing you have seen?' So he tries to tell them. Perhaps he has seen the very first fire in the world. He tells them, 'It is red, like a poppy, but through it dance other colors. It has no form, like water, flowing everywhere. It is warm, like the sun of summer, only warmer. It exists for a time upon a piece of wood, and then the wood is gone, as though it were eaten, leaving behind it that which is black and can be sifted like sand. When the wood is gone, it too is gone.' Therefore the hearers must think reality is like a poppy, like water, like the sun, like that which eats and excretes. They think it is like to anything that they are told it is like by the man who has known it. But they have not looked upon fire. They cannot really know it. They can only know of it. But fire comes again into the world, many times. More men look upon fire. After a time, fire is as common as grass and clouds and the air they breathe. They see that, while it is like a poppy, it is not a poppy, while it is like water, it is not water, while it is like the sun, it is not the sun, and while it is like that which eats and passes wastes, it is not that which eats and passes wastes, but something different from each of these apart or all of these together. So they look upon this new thing and they make a new word to call it. They call it 'fire'."

"If they come upon one who still has not seen it and they speak to him of fire, he does not know what they mean. So they, in turn, fall back upon telling him what fire is like. As tey do so, they know from their own experience that what they are telling him is not the truth, but only a part of it. They know that this man will never know reality from their words, though all the words in the world are theirs to use. He must look at upon the fire, smell of it, warm his hands by it, stare into its heart, or remain forever ignorant. Therefore, 'fire' does not matter, 'eart' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I'do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon his great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as man saw them when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking that he knows them in the naming. The thing that has never happened before is still happening. It is still a miracle. The great burning blossom squats, flowing, upon the limb of the world, excreting the ash of the world, and being none of the things I have names an at the same time all of them, and this is reality - the Nameless."

*a few paragraphs elided to avoid spamming your friends list*

The Nameless, of which we are all a part, does dream form. Ad what is the highest attribute any form may possess? It is beauty. The Nameless then, is an artist. The problem, therefore is not one of good and evil, but one of aesthetics. ... To struggle against the dreamers who dream ugliness, be they men or gods, cannot but be the will of the Nameless This struggle will also bear suffering, and so one's karmic burden will be lightened thereby, just as it would be by enduring the ugliness; but this suffering is productive of a higher end in the light of the eternal values of which the sages so often speak.

"You must ask me, then, 'How am I to know that which is beautiful and that which is ugly, and be moved to act thereby?' This question, I say, you must answer for yourself. To do this, first forget what I have spoken, for I have said nothing. Dwell now upon the Nameless."

Comments

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

I actually read this a couple of years ago. I was a big Amber fan in my teens, and I went on a bit of a Zelazney nostalgia fest, and took in some new stuff, and read this. Perfectly truthfully, I liked reading it at the time, and remember it as kind of colorful. But I kept, abstracted not one fresh idea from it.

This is good, because it reminds me of my trajectory away from sci-fi stuff. Like yourself, I liked that stuff precisely for these kind of passages, for the ideas and the cleverness and the insight they gave. So, progressively, I went from sc-fi to more explicitly ideas-y literature (I remember Camus was my first step) and then from there to non-fiction, to Philosophy and Theory and, along the way, the Wisdom literature of several cultures.

So to revisit the above paragraph....Well, politely, nothing new. Indeed the whole thing about Naming (as you probably know) is a direct steal from the first two verses of the Tao Te Ching (http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html there are better translations, but this is the best I could find at short notice), which says the whole thing much more pithily, less clumsily, with more grace and less portent.

So the question that arises for me is the old “why hamburger when you've got steak thing.” Why read sci-fi for this kind of content, why like it for this, when this is done much better by the stuff it steals it from? If you want to play with your head, if you want the bracing sting of the world seen afresh, stripped of convention, read Nietzsche, not Zelazney. On the territory of ideas or vision or wisdom, there are other writers who trade solely in that stuff, who simply do it better, purer, further back and faster; its an uncut, unmixed, much better high.

SO for me, the only thing that remains to lure me back to sci-fi and to fiction in general is story. If someone can either entertain me and beguile the hours (Gaiman certainly did that, but so did Dan Brown, and from both I took nothing fresh away by way of vision or idea, but the hours passed quicker) or, much more rarely, if they can put an idea to do dramatic work, like Philip K. Dick does, or actually do a kind of philosophy/fiction like Proust or Henry James.

So in sum, its not so much a high art/ low art thing for me. I either want my boredom beguiling (in which case I'll do mission impossible 3, Gaiman or Zelazney) or I want answers, wisdom, inspiration, vision, in which case I will go straight to the source: the masters, a taste of whom you can often find, for sure in the entertainers and story-tellers, like in the passage you quoted, but its dilute and un-nourishing and, for me, does nothing.

[andrewducker]

Well, politely, nothing new. Indeed the whole thing about Naming (as you probably know) is a direct steal from the first two verses of the Tao Te Ching

Of course it's a steal from the Tao Te Ching - it's an attempt to make clear one of the basics of Buddhist teachings - the book being a replay of the clash between Buddhism and Hinduism, only with added mutants and high-tech, as I mentioned.

So the question that arises for me is the old "why hamburger when you've got steak thing." Why read sci-fi for this kind of content, why like it for this, when this is done much better by the stuff it steals it from?

Because I actually love this book for its story - it's a wonderful adventure story, zigzagging back and forth in flashback, with great characters and a thoroughly enjoyable plot. The overlay of some basic philosophy informs the rest of it and stops it being pure action, which I appreciate, but it's not the basic reason for reading the book.

What I've read about Nietzsche hasn't drawn me to him at all - and like most philosophy books I tend to find that when I look closely I see a central core with an interesting idea or two, plus either vast amounts of layers on top of that which seem (to me) to be deliberately obfuscatory in order to hide the simplicity of the ideas and make the writer look cleverer than they are, or ridiculous assumptions put in there to justify the writer's assumptions (Descartes, I'm looking at you). As such most of it appears to me not as steak, but rather as one of those unlikely creations that top chefs come up with in order to prove that their tastes are much more rarified than those of us mere mortals. Mmmm, baked doves legs in a otter-nose sauce.

I want answers, wisdom, inspiration, vision, in which case I will go straight to the source: the masters

I tend to not go looking for that much any more. I grew more and more disappointed in pretty much every place I went look for answers, until I stopped to ask the question "What do I mean by 'Answer'?", the answers to which helped me far more than anything else. The 'masters' generally seem to want me to believe in something, a thought I find laughable at best. Of course, If you can point me at someone I might find more useful then I'd be obliged.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

If you can point me at someone I might find more useful then I'd be obliged.

*points at Andy*

[andrewducker]

Yes, yes, you bloody annoying woman - I continue to think for myself. But other people are remarkably good at thinking of things I haven't that I might find useful. Hence me continuing to talk to them at all, horrors that they are.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

:-) other people have got to be good for something, I suppose!

I far prefer to think thigns through as much as possible for myself - but of course you get input, and useful input at that, from all sorts of sources.

I made a deliberate decision NOT to study any formal philosophies a long long time ago, and haven't seen anything to make me think that that was a bad decision. I looked at enough to come to the opinion that most of it seems either obvious, silly or playing with words. All of which are fine pastimes, of course, but I'd rather have the fun of doing it all myself. Bit like playing chess and deliberately NOT studying any strategy guides/analysis/books of good openings etc... Just the rules and the players.

[andrewducker]

When it comes to the basics I'm well aware of my own limitations in thinking of different possibilities, and that while I've come up with numerous things myself there are some ideas I never would have come up with by myself.

Back when I was much more concerned about these things I spent more time reading about it as well as thinking about it. Nowadays I've got answers to most things that I'm more or less happy with, so I'm happy to just chat about things or think about them myself. Especially as the more conclusions I came to the less patience I had with people who seemed to be holding onto silly ideas for no good reason.

[freemoore.livejournal.com]

What was your answer to "what do I mean by 'Answer'?"

[andrewducker]

That I needed to think about exactly what the question _meant_. Looking (for instance) for the answer to life, the universe and everything is silly, because "Life, the universe and everything" isn't a question.

Lots of "the big questions" turn out to either have very simple answers, or not actually have definitive answers at all.

[freemoore.livejournal.com]

Have you tried the other thing? The not-questioning/not-answering, experiencing the awareness-beyond-thinking which I was on about?

It's the same injunction as at the end of your quote: "Dwell now upon the Nameless". As discussed above, the content of this excerpt matches the pattern of someone describing a perception they've had to someone who hasn't had the perception. Like the best of the writing I've seen on the topic, it ends with the injunction to do some contemplation yourself.

To read such a passage and just say that it's like lots of other passages in mystical literature is to say something true but partial; to get the point you have to see that it's an instruction, and then follow the instruction, and then see the results.

What might not be apparent otherwise is that it's absolutely one of the most worthwhile ways you could possibly spend ten minutes a day. You don't have to believe that, but you could see it for yourself. Is there anything which would make you think that that was worth trying?

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Seems we are talking about the difference between the experience and a description of it. You can get so caught in the descriptions that you lose the ability to *experience*. In a way you end up describing it to yourself *as it is happening*. Which means you miss a great deal of what's going on...

I've learned recently to get out of this, at least for while, and to pay attention and experience. Very big change and utterly to my benefit in so many ways.

[andrewducker]

Um, yes, of course. Losing myself in being is one of my favourite things. It's one of the reasons I've loved dancing for years - the ability it bestows upon me to lose myself utterly - I've literally lost several minutes before with no idea of what happened during that time (I have memories later of there being music, but they tend to be vague).

[freemoore.livejournal.com]

no, not losing yourself - throughout meditation you're completely aware, more intensely so than usual if anything. It's about the only thing I've managed to corroborate with anyone else who's meditated for a while; it's more awareness, not less.

I've a feeling that this is crucial, but I also feel like I'm losing my grip on the subject matter, so I should probably stop there for a while. Alternatively, this might just be the point where the discussion gets interesting!

[andrewducker]

Sorry, my brain was _completely_ out of gear last night, having a terrible headache and not enough sleep. As such I answered a completely different question from the one you asked.

Nope - not been doing meditation, largely because I've not bumped into a source that seperated meditation from some kind of religious practice. If you could point me to a simple introduction I'll give it a go.

[freemoore.livejournal.com]

No worries. I'll get back to you with that, I've got a good short summary somewhere, no religion required. Practice required - that's the essence of it - but nothing unreasonable.

meditation link

[freemoore.livejournal.com]

http://www.integralworld.net/index.html?meditation.html

there's a fair bit to read there.

I use a much-simplified variation on the 'Transpersonal Witness Exercise' as follows:
Sitting comfortably, feet on the floor, hands on thighs, relaxed, back straight as comfortably possible, eyes closed.

silently repeat the mantra 'I am not this body, I am aware of this body; I am not these thoughts, I am aware of these thoughts' for about 20 minutes. During this time your attention will wander off into streams of thought. Don't worry about it; just, when you notice that you're not thinking the mantra anymore, return to it.

For me, the point of this is to loosen the ties between my identity and my thoughts and body (sometimes I add 'I am not these feelings, I am aware of these feelings' as a third phrase) while maintaining association with them. The point is very much NOT to dissociate; meditation is not an exercise in escapism. It's a gentle freeing of the awareness from the usual objects of awareness.

I'll leave you to it! Better to do ten minutes a day than one hour-long session in a week; it's the regularity, the 'practice' aspect, that gives most benefit.

let me know how you get on :)

cheers
andy

some thoughts

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

Taoism aint Buddhism; if you werent quoting that bit of bowlderised mysticism because you liked the book for it, then why quote it at such length; what's so wrong with Descatres, father of the scientific method aka systematic rational thinking (yes there was a time when that was a radical idea). Have you read him? He's one of the giants whose shoulders you are most defintely and rather complacently on; masters: there werent' many thinkers who changed the course of human thought, some did, I think they are worth reading; its about illumination rather than belief, I like to see with as much light as possible, i have the humility to think that others may have seen better or further and I want a look; or as Waddington put it, its Tools For Thought - the more you have, the better you can think, mental prosthetics; I don't on the whole find that so laughable; except for Beckett.

Re: some thoughts

[andrewducker]

You're right about Taoism - I keep forgetting that China had three schools of thought, not two... My point still stands though, that's he's (in the context of the story) putting across these beliefs as the viewpoint of one of the sides, so it's not surprising that they're familliar. And I quoted that particular piece because (a) I liked the writing style in it and (b) as I said at the intro it was also in response to two posts written by freemore on a similar subject. (You'd probably find those interesting, they're right at the top of his page if you take a look).

Descartes was doing well, up until he decided that God had to exist (and using the ontological argument, of all ridiculous things). And I wasn't objecting to him in toto - just objecting to people putting making huge assumptions in order to satisfy their pre-existing beliefs and giving him as an example.

Nor was I saying that I was averse to reading various thinkers (I used pretty much exactly your argument in favour of it when replying to channelpenguin above), merely that I'd become disappointed with every avenue I'd started to look in, frequently before I'd got very far with it - hence me asking for any recommendations.

But I find that what I want is modern thinking moving on from various points I've already got to. Recommending Descartes as the founder of rational thinking is a bit (to me) like recommending that I read the works of Darwin in order to understand genetics - I'm happy to take rationalism, empiricism, the multiplicity of viewpoints of the postmodern world, etc. as read and move on from there.

Hmm, I think that in some ways what I'm getting at here (and we've really abandoned the original topic in any form, not that I'm too fretted about that) is that an awful lot of the work of philosophers, as we moved into the modern age, was to shovel vast amounts of pre-rationalist nonsense out of the way as they went about the modernist task of finding The Answers, up to the point of post/late-modernism where we reach things like absurdism, ultra-subjectivity and various other schools which delight in pointing out that the modernist movement also has no clothes.

It's moving on from that point that I'm most interested in - that point being where Western Society seems to have become stuck for the last 100 (or so) years, having gone from "X is right because God says so" to "God is dead, and we are going to find the answers for ourselves" and ending up at "There are no answers - how about this fish on a bicycle instead?". What I'm looking for is something that starts _there_ and moves on - any suggestions?

Re: some thoughts

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

Descartes kick started rationality with a truely radical via negativa, he doubted everything it was possible to doubt, reducing the scope of certainty to the bare nub of the cogito. In doing so he opened the possibility that there was NO connection between perciever and percieved, or that the relation between words and thing, mind and world was purely arbitrary. In short he opened an abyss, and the space for what you rightly call ultra-subjectivity (way way way ahead of his time). This A. would have got him into a LOT of trouble and B. He needed to close the gap so he could found his Method on it. ergo God. As far as ends justifying means go, I think he was pretty justifed. God, in this scheme, is nothing more than the formal Guarantor of the relationship between mind and world; this allows the scientific method to get off the ground. If you don't understand that context, you dont understand Descartes.

You see, I think its worth knowing that, knowing that you can find some of the bigger roots of Idealism, Rationalism and Empiricism (and, yes Beckett, the sundered cogito is _very_ beckett) back to this one thinker, this one thought; I think its worth knowing the function that God served for a while (like a piece of scaffolding to be abandoned once the building is in place)in human thought. I think your "previously on Human Thought" style assumption that you can jump in at the end of the Series and wing it is a little questionable. However if you do want a quick one volume "up to speed" on that, "The Passion of The Western Mind" does as good a job as any. (Richard Tarnas I think, just ignore the epilogue).

The fish thing was funny. Ethics is very in, and particularly the ethics of Naming and politicisng (or not) events - who claims ownership, mastery of current events. Thats Badiou and Zizek. I really like Zizek, you may not. There is a lot of politics and ethics around. Particularly virtue ethics, Aristotle is back. Agamben is very in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Agamben particualrly his notions of Homo Sacer and states of exception (the way terror laws and refugee laws are altering the Subject, re-defining the human being as a unit of administration (aka Homo Sacer)and potential exclusion from the state body). I havent read him, but i know i should...

I could produce a list of great white males (read Middlemarch by George Eliot!) dead and alive but to little point I think. I would just keep reading with an open mind outside of your usual haunts.

Re: some thoughts

[andrewducker]

This A. would have got him into a LOT of trouble and B. He needed to close the gap so he could found his Method on it. ergo God. As far as ends justifying means go, I think he was pretty justifed.

Justified at the time, possibly. But having admitted his work is fudged, why wouldn't I want to read a work written at a time when the fudging wasn't necessary? I'm interested in the idea for itself after all, not the history of it.

And I've bookmarked stuff on Zizek and Agamben. I've had Zizek recommended before and he looks interesting. My brain seems to have shut down though, so it'll have to wait until tomorrow.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

You two are on the same page in a way - I'll throw this in because |I suspect neither of you have thought of it. You're both aying in a way that you want the ebst source of crytallised ideas. You want the priginal source, the original font. Andy's happy to go with the condensed version, add water stur, drink and look fro the next bit. Anyone who's ever done reasearch knows you need a bit of both; often the opriginal source will be hopelesly duilute if you only take it from the condensed packet; but sometimes (as with his example of darwin I think) you can take the Coles Notes versrion and get on, becaue our lifes are finite.

But I'm far less N than you two. i don't just want either pure or reconstituted ideas. I like, enjoy, absorb, learn from *applied* ideas and it occurs to me now that that's what SF is - the literature of applied ideas. When I teach I make everything into an example - I can't convey meaning any better way, and frankly I'd assert that 9 out of 10 students can't learn any better way. It's utterly clear to me among my students that the more abstract they are, the more likely they are to prefer "philosophy of law" to actual law - which involves applying ideas to cases , at its root, the science of application of principles to fact paradigms. But very few do - jurisprudence is deeply unpopular in fact,a dn not just because (before you say it) it's not seena s "commercial" or "job-getting".

I like ideas too but they're highly non absorbable to me - like calcium from milk allegedly - except in contexts where they make sense to me. In law, the context is solving a policy problem. In fiction, it's telling a story... geting me involved with a character,. with their goals , with their passion. I'm far more intersted in reading what Ayn Rand tells me about libertarianism through Roark in The Fountainhead than I am in reading Mill and Locke - and that doesn't make me anti intellectual or stupid (cos I'm nto) - it makes me a concretist, contextual thinker.

Finally there is something a bit worryingly necrophiliac/feudal about the idea that ideas can only (or "only properly") be absorbed as the narratives of the first thinkers to attach them to their name. Ideas, I think, are a societal construction - (discuss). I eg can understand utilitarianism vs individual rights in a currentcontext - eg euthanasia - without neding to have read every philosopher you have - and I'm not entirely convinmced your analysis will be stronger if you have read the originals whereas I learnt the ideas from an sf book, a lecture, a textbook or my own hard thought. cwertainly we stand on teh shoulders of gianst, but the point about giant is that what they state is so important that it becomes accessible as part of the generic culture without the need to go back to the priginal.

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

(see post above for some points)

actually most of all I want to know what is going on, and for me that generally means knowing the Context in which anything is occuring. Im all for cliff notes, the gist, (indeed I am mister wingit) as long as it illuminates where stuff comes from and why its happening.

I agree about the dramatisation of ideas. I like ideas themselves for entertainment, but also I like it when they are well dramtised. Personally I think Terry Pratchett does it better than almost all your sci-fi greats. particularly his brilliant one about the independent life of stories which has twenty times more elegance, class and wit than either Dawkins or Dennett on memes.

I dont think its about feudalism, its generally about time. There isnt the time to go back to the start on most things. If you have the time, you generally find things are much more complex and nunaced than the cliff notes. Its usually worth it. Often what passes into common wisdom is the most easily digestible part of things, the pap.

(Oh and Andy, read Life and Death (or Intercourse) by Andrea Dworkin, if you really want a heartfelt change-your-life recommendation. Forget the geezers.)

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Gerrover here lad, I've made soup!

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

leaving now

[freemoore.livejournal.com]

added you, then made the two posts public anyway. Hiya. enjoy. :)

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

That really was quite good. And you made about four or five typos :).

Thank you for introducing me to a book to remove from the local library in times future...