As an essay on uncertainty ZAMM is a good piece. To suggest that the
Motorcycle Maintenance of the Narator has the same value as the trial
of Phaedrus would seem to miss the point. The maintenance allows the
*space* for Pahedrus to emerge, yet the *obsessive* nature of the
narrator and his *unattractiveness* are evident. It goes to the
romance I guess. If we really only have three-score years and ten who
the hell wants to spend that much of it greasy, sweaty and pissing
everyone around them off?
Riding around the world with your child at your back, unaware that
they can see nothing. I can think of no better illustration of hell.
The delusion of sharing...
If everything is sacred nothing is sacred.
There is morality and it is a human construct. Then, one hopes, we are
human and that, as such, human constructs should have value.
Everything IS. Yet if you have passed though this life and not just
*known* that everything is not the same then perhaps it is time to
slow down and just "feel" the world around you.
Walk into a church (any denomination) and see if it feels the same as
a cinema or a pub. We have always known that there were special
places, all cultures have their sacred sites. We demean ourselves with
the delusion that a copse of woods behind our house holds the same
value as, say, stonehenge, newgrange, glastonbury tor...
There is SOMETHING behind the *all*.
I quite like a lot of the concepts of Eastern Mysticism. The wisdom
embodied in the I Ching, writings by authors like Kalil Gibran. It
offers an aside to the world that we have built in the west. There is
beauty and truth in our own cultures and backgrounds too. Christianity
is the predominant religion in those regions of the world that have
developed "high technology" (as we now see it)
The society and the values it holds as it's "morality" work in
synergy. Any culture that allows personal desires to become the
preminant moral value will be destroyed by it neighbours. The first
step towards this madness of nihilism is to start to suggest that
everything has the same value. It doesn't.
You can kill people as efficiently and as beautifully as you like,
it's still wrong. Animal are nice but they are not people. Arguably
this is "subjective" what is not subjective is that the value you
place upon each WILL HAVE AN EFFECT.
We can accept that human choices in sexuality are valueless decisions
yet, without technological intervention, there can be no offspring of
a union that does not encompass both sexes. That is not to place a
negative value upon the decision but to accept that the decision has
an EFFECT.
As a society we have entered a phase where the choice of single adults
to have offspring is being raised about the right of nature to require
that parents be capable of forming a bond with another human being...
These are choices and they are not valueless. The payload of the
values will be seen over a period of time and the wisdom of previous
generations may well emerge.
The state of technology in our society is a direct result of value
decisions of ancestors. Many of those value decisions were impelled by
the environments in which those decisions were made. The importance of
timekeeping (in Western Europe) creates the techology which enabled an
industrial revolution. The decision to impose an *notional* time upon
society later releases a value...
"Which way should I go" asked Alice
"That depends entirely upon where you want to go" replied the cat.
"But I don't know where I want to go" cried Alice
"Then any direction will do" said the cat.
regards,
Ian
"Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of God."
On Tue, 13 Jun 2000 18:21:08 -0500, you wrote:
>More gratings
>
>"If you say that everything is moral then that means morality is everything, which reduces to
>everything is everything, which means nothing." (Struan - after Pirsig)
>
>
>Which with Zen reductions becomes:
>
>Everything is.
>
>...if punctuated properly with a slap up side the head.
>
>3WD
>
>
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