” Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them,” Ephesians 5: 11
Category Archives: Art and Ideas
Bohemian Hermeticism and Dissidence in the Velvet Revolution
“J.C. Could you please tell us briefly the great alchemical myth of the founding of Prague by the pagan princess prophetess, Libuse and her ploughman husband, Premysl?
L.A. This is very significant. Libuse is the Czech version of the Delphic Sibyl. She was a virgin ruler of the people here perhaps more than twelve hundred years ago. They were not satisfied with a woman ruler and demanded a king. From her fortress presumed now to be at Vysehrad she went into a trance. She ordered her soldiers to follow her white horse through the forest to the future king. The horse led the soldiers to the ploughman, Premysl. They presented him with fine clothes and an invitation to become king. He set free his oxen who disappeared into the earth or according to other versions ascended into the sky. Then he placed his ploughman’s staff into the ground and it immediately took root, blossomed and flowered. According to some versions at the time he was approached he was using his iron plough blade as a table for his lunch. All of these items have Hermetic import. He went on to become a great ruler. The country blossomed and flowered.
I personally went to the place where this happened. During a rain storm I used my screw driver to dig up some sacred mud. As I dug, my screw driver became mysteriously deformed. I got some mud and made a cup which for me embodies the sacredness of the Holy Grail.
It is believed that Libuse still sleeps under the hilltop fortress of Vysehrad and will awaken when Bohemia is in greatest danger. During the Velvet Revolution, on the 17th of November, 1989, thousands of students spontaneously assembled at Prague’s south end, upon Vysehrad’s temenos, the sacred precinct of Libuse. They lit candles and held an all night vigil as if to invoke her help. Then followed the miraculous bloodless revolution. The communists quit. The Russians went home. Democracy was restored.
J.C. Is this myth alive for the Czech youth today?
L.A. Consciously no it is not. But unconsciously this myth is a vital part of contemporary Czech culture. Its origins might only have emerged from the romanticism of the 19th century Czech National Revival. There are older versions of this myth. According to some the knights of St.Wenceslas sleep inside the sacred hollow mountain of Blanik or beneath the castle fortress of Melnik waiting to come to the aid of Bohemia in its hour of greatest need. Other versions have nothing to do with St.Wenceslas. This collective memory although not clear is yet alive and sleeps in the Czech landscape. The recent Czech Olympic Hockey victory is an aspect of this egregore of Wenceslas and his knights coming to the aid of Bohemia. For a moment his sleeping soldiers awoke to become the victorious Hockey players.
J.C. Is Vysehrad a sacred location even in spite of its doubtful historic authenticity as Libuse’s fortress?
L.A. Yes it is. I believe the actual site of her central fortress was Sarka, where we visited earlier today, just west of Prague. It is close to White Mountain and the Star Palace. Although barren the land here still resonates with a potent mystic charge.
J.C. Bohemians are often pictured as people who glory in cheap beer, free love and bad poetry. What does it mean to be a Bohemian Hermeticist?
L.A. There is a popular misconception of Bohemians as Gypsies. One frequently meets the image of the gypsy fortune tellers or occult magicians. Their life style is strange and very different from Czech Hermetic vision. The roots of Czech Bohemian Hermeticism emerge from Jan Hus and Komenski. It finds expression as Rosicrucian philosophy and general esoteric tradition for example the work of Jacob Boehme….”
A fascinating interview displaying the intersection of mysticism and dissidence during the Velvet Revolution. the non-violent sloughing off of communist rule in Czechoslovakia.
Obama Backs Off From Holder’s Remarks
“One post, by Stephan Tawney on the American Pundit blog, said that “our attorney general is black, both major parties are led by black men, the president is black.”
“And yet,” Tawney wrote, “we’re apparently a ‘nation of cowards’ on race.”
Obama was asked whether he agreed with Holder. He hesitated for five seconds before responding.
“I’m not somebody who believes that constantly talking about race somehow solves racial tensions,” Obama said. “I think what solves racial tensions is fixing the economy, putting people to work, making sure that people have health care, ensuring that every kid is learning out there. I think if we do that, then we’ll probably have more fruitful conversations.”
That’s from the International Herald Tribune.
Comment:
Nice to hear that President Obama agrees with the Mind-Body Politic.
But then again, we have a strange and well-documented way of being a wee bit ahead on a few things (check out the tab ‘articles’). And on that note of unbecoming self-satisfaction, I will return to my labors tweaking this blog.
Libertarian Living: Facing the Starch Facts
“People should be thought of as “starch-eaters;” just like cats are “meat-eaters.” Until recently, except for a small number of wealthy aristocrats, members of the human species have obtained the bulk of their calories from starch. After the mid 1800s with the creation of colossal wealth during the industrial revolution and the harnessing of fossil fuels, millions, and then billions, of people were able to eat from a table piled high with meat, fowl, and dairy, once available only to royalty. Look around you – the consequences are obvious – everyday people appear rotund like the kings and queens pictured in old paintings. Look a little further and you will discover the Starch Solution……
Tubers (potatoes, sweet potato, cassava), winter squashes (pumpkin, butternut, hubbard), legumes (beans, peas, lentils), and grains (barley, corn, rice, wheat) serve as organs for storing starch. Green and yellow vegetables, such as broccoli, cauliflower, and asparagus, accumulate relatively little starch, and fruits are made up of simple sugars, not complex ones. All animal foods, including beef, chicken, fish, shellfish, eggs, milk, and cheese, contain no starch at all.
While easily providing the abundance of calories needed for winning marathons, starches do not promote excess weight gain. That is because the human body efficiently regulates carbohydrates from starches, burning them off, rather than storing them, when consumed in excess. How effective is our body’s regulation? Obesity has been unknown among billions of Asians with a wide variety of activity levels who have followed traditional diets based on rice. However, these people’s immunity immediately disappears when they switch to meals based on meat and dairy foods, because the human body unsuccessfully balances for excess fat consumption – storing these calories in the abdomen, buttocks, and thighs. The fat you eat is the fat you wear…”
More by John McDougall
Chesterton on Suicidal Optimism
“The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.” –
– G. K. Chesterton, Introduction to The Defendant
Thomas Sowell: Feedback From Reality Vital For Survival
“Human beings have been making mistakes and committing sins as long as there have been human beings. The great catastrophes of history have usually involved much more than that. Typically, there has been an additional and crucial ingredient – some method by which feedback from reality has been prevented, so that a dangerous course of action could be blindly continued to at fatal conclusion.”
Thomas Sowell, “The Vision of the Annointed
Buckminster Fuller On the Creation of Corporate Giants
“As a consequence of all the foregoing, a half-millennium after Roland a new and overwhelmingly greater form of invisible seagoing and land-strutting giants appeared on planet Earth. This was a legally contrived, abstract giant —”legal” because the physically uncontradictable “topsword” king decreed it was legal. Having the most favored privileges accorded real humans, the giant, abstract, corporate “man” is inventively created in 1390 in England. (The corporate “human” may have been invented in ancient Babylon to cover the potentates’ voyaging venture, but we have as yet no written record of such.) “His” abstract name is the “Merchant Venturers Society.” This composite man was formed by the king of England with a small group of his very powerful friends, who lorded over their king-deeded vastlands.
By royal prerogative, the venture-financing riskers could not be held liable for any losses of the venture. With limited liability, individuals might sue the company but not the human individuals who underwrote the venture If the enterprise failed and went bankrupt, its shareholders lost their ventured stake but were not to be held responsible in any way for its debts. The creditors of the company were the losers, and not the shareholders. Bankruptcy could reflect no credit stigma upon the companies’ shareholders. The shareholders were held absolutely blameless for any misfortunes of their ships’ crew or for damage caused by collision of their ship with another ship. If the ship and its cargo were lost, the shareholders lost their original shares, but no more. As long as the ship operated successfully, the shareholders shared its trading profits
Whether the ship was lost or not, the banker who loaned the gold for the merchant ship’s trading held the life-support-producing lands and their cattle as collateral. Since many voyages ended in disaster, the banker occupied a long-time, steadily profitable position in the overall merchant venturing—and as yet does.
Naturally, the shareholder’s limited-liability advantage, granted by sovereign decree, encouraged a swift expansion of such enterprises…….
….Employing her sovereign power, Elizabeth limited the losses of its chartered riskers to their initial monetary or equivalent capital stakes, while continuing their right to receive their proportional profit dividends for as long as the venturing company might exist—in perpetuity.
Known later in England as “Ltd.” (for “limited liability”), in France as “Societe en Commandite,” in Germany as “Kommanditgesellschaft,” and as “Corporation” under the U.S.A.’s “Inc.” (for incorporated) status, this newborn abstract legal giant was to be treated as a human personality, empowered to do anything humans can do but also accredited to operate as an abstract, legal entity able to enter or leave any nation without a passport. As such it was able to employ millions of people and any amount of money, tools, buildings, and equipment, and to perform its giant acts anywhere about the oceanic world exclusively for the profit in perpetuity only of its shareholders.
When the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.A. Constitution was passed in the post-Civil War railroad-expansion days, the U.S. Supreme Court required that the individual states grant the corporation all the privileges and protection granted to human citizens. A hundred years later, in 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a corporation had the same rights of free speech as all U.S. citizens…..”
Grunch of Giants, Chapter III, Buckminster Fuller
Group Mind and the Stopping of Thoughts…
“John McMurtry writes that the first rule of the “Group-Mind” is that it cannot adopt itself as an object of critical reflection:
“When the most self-evident line of thought has been blinkered out across a people, only an a priori thought system can account for it. As with other great problems of our era, the group-mind disconnects by stopping thought before it arises.”
Christian ascesis is the practice of giving attention to thoughts as they first appear, thus it is a practice wholly at odds with a priorism and with all forms of mechanical, psychic or associative activity which masquerades as “thought.” According to Father Sylvan, a hundred, a thousand times a day, thoughts that challenge or contradict assumptions and beliefs, thoughts that might provoke self-questioning or discomfort about some fact or emotion or received wisdom, thoughts that might force one to confront one’s own laziness, anger, lack of love, lack of integrity — such thoughts are continually circling the perimeter of the mind and sometimes even penetrate its arena. And yet they come to nothing, they are quickly repelled, conveniently forgotten, dispersed, and covered over by compulsive action, rationalization, explanation, or emotional reaction. Father Sylvan calls this incessant activity of covering over the Question the “First Dispersal of the Soul.” It means that the force of attention is wasted, degraded by absorption into one part or another of the psycho-physical organism, and rendered useless for the growth of the soul. Man becomes trapped in an “automatism of non-redemptive experience,” which he likens to
The struggle of Christian ascesis is to contain the energy of the Question within oneself so that the Soul can come into being. Thus, the existence of the Soul is not a given, not an a priori assumption. It is an energy formed through the confrontation with question and contradiction, an energy that has to be sought, recognized, collected and accumulated – “pondered in the heart.” This is why “God can only speak to the soul,” according to Father Sylvan, “and only when the soul exists.”
Comment:
This is a fascinating post. The teaching of Philokalia is not different from that of Raja Yoga texts, or, for that matter, from the writings of Jiddu Krishnamurthi, if you put aside the doctrinal content and focus on the psychological observation. Thoughts that arise in the mind involuntarily seem to correspond to the samskaras of Hinduism and Buddhism, those predispositions and unconscious impulses which attract us to the situations in which karma (fate, moira) plays out.
What has all this to do with politics and the markets?
Much….
i) Being “embodied minds,” the nature of our thinking alters what we perceive – both in the past and in the present. That alteration in perception allows us to strategize action, anticipate problems, and to form coalitions, none of which we would be able to do if we remained obsessed with rigid mental constructs.
ii) Self-awareness of our own internal contradictions permits us to be more generous in our assessments of our antagonists and cures us of the rancid self-righteousness and inflamed dogmatism with which we approach every issue….That, in turn, gives our opponents space to rethink their own self-righteousness…..and draws thoughful people out of neutrality…
Libertarian Living: Depression Era Cooking With Clara
Household thrift is back in fashion. The latest rage is nonagenarian Clara, with her recipes for tasty recipes from the Depression. A Youtube of her cooking pasta with peas and potatoes is quite the rage on the net.
I found it mildly amusing, because that’s just how I’ve been cooking in non-Depression America. Sometimes, it was because I wasn’t making enough money. Sometimes (for instance, when I was in graduate school), there just wasn’t enough time to do anything more. Sometimes, I’ve had the time but lacked the inclination to do more. But a lot of the time, it’s because I like simple hearty food. I like being able to experiment and cook different ways. I like making do with whatever’s around….or on sale….or in season.
That makes for some unhappy endings, once in a while. But you also end up with delicious surprises. And the best taste is the feeling of being self-reliant. Maybe that’s due for a come-back too.
To give you an idea, for about 4 years of my life (all told), I lived on a food budget that never went above $45/month and mostly hovered around $25-30. That included a couple of meals outside, vitamin supplements, and even some “luxuries,” like tea and chocolate.
No tricks. Indian cooking is relatively cheap, although labor intensive. You can use fairly inexpensive vegetables and the rest is mostly rice, lentils (dals), and spices. If you buy those at an Indian store, they won’t cost you very much.
Mind you, this isn’t the Indian cooking you get in upscale restaurants, which is usually Mughalai (Moghal -style). Mughalai is typical of the wealthy and is also often Westernized to suit palates in America. It’s delicious, but all those butter sauces are incredibly fattening, and so are the stuffed parathas. And the rich spices and additions can add up to good money.
My own cooking tended to pick up on the lighter, simpler South Indian recipes, like rasam (a delicious, very thin tomato, onion, pepper and tamarind soup that’s very healthy for you), sambhar (a soup of dhal), and vegetable poriyal.
To that, add a few simple stir-fries, salads, vegetable soups and spreads, some hummus and pita, a few tins of tuna, mackerel or salmon, and of course, rice, and you have a repertoire that shouldn’t take you more than 20 minutes, will save you megabucks, and shed a few pounds for you too.
You can say a lot about the downside of recessions (and even depressions), but they can be excellent for your body.
Fellow Counterpuncher (do I qualify any longer?), poet, and chronicler of torture programs Douglas Valentine also shares my culinary predilections. He writes:
“That’s funny. I like cook shows. I do a lot of cooking too. Yesterday I made my special pea and lentil soup with carrots, celery and garlic, bay leaves and sometimes spices. Um, good, and good for you…”
Slumdog Slams Slumdwellers
“It is no secret that Slumdog is meant to reflect life in Dharavi, the vast sprawl of slums at the heart of Mumbai. The film depicts Dharavi as a feral wasteland, with little evidence of order, community or compassion. Other than the children, the no-one is even remotely well-intentioned. Hustlers and petty warlords run amok, and even Jamal’s schoolteacher is inexplicably callous. This is a place of sheer evil and decay.
But nothing is further from the truth. Dharavi teems with dynamism, and is a hub of small-scale industries, whose estimated annual turnover is between US$50 to $100 million. Nor is Dharavi bereft of governing structures and productive social relations. Residents have built strong collaborative networks, often across potentially volatile lines of caste and religion. Many cooperative societies work together with NGOs to provide residents with essential services such as basic healthcare, schooling and waste disposal, often compensating for the formal government’s woeful inadequacy in meeting their needs. Although these under-resourced organizations have touched only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, their efforts must be acknowledged, along with the fact that slum-dwellers, despite their grinding poverty, have lives of value and dignity, and a resourcefulness that stretches far beyond the haphazard, individualistic survival-of-the-fittest sort shown in Slumdog.
In the end, Slumdog presents a profoundly dehumanizing view of the poor, with all its troubling political implications. Since there are no internal resources, and none capable of constructive voice or action, all “solutions” must arrive externally.”
Comment:
This is a short but really perceptive piece that reflects the way I felt about the film, as well as about other works on India’s urban poor, like the book, City of Joy. In addition, City of Joy – which is about Calcultta – seems to imply that it takes a foreigner to get something going among the poor in India.
Despite the strong appeal of both works, and they do have a good deal of charm, they’re ultimately a little patronizing. Slumdog also makes the fundamental mistake of showing poverty as almost inseparable from crime, when simple observation will tell you otherwise.
You’d think, with all the revelations about Wall Street, people would have figured that out.