Hey MOQers:
They say that intelligence is being able to read between the lines. So here
I give you just the lines, without commentary for now.
"Its like a hall of mirrors at a cannival where some mirrors distort you one
way and some distort you another. Already he'd seen three completely
different mirror reflections this week: from Rigel, who reflected an image
of some kind of moral degenerate; from Lila, who reflected a tedious old
nerd; and now Redford who was probably going to cast him into some sort of
heroic image. Each person you come to is a different mirror. ... Maybe
mirrors are all you ever get. First the mirrors of your parents, then
friends and teachers, then bosses and officials, priests and ministers, and
maybe writers and painters too. ... But what controls all these mirrors is
the culture: the Giant, the gods; and if you run afoul of the culture it
will start throwing up reflection that try to destroy you." P254
"SOM presumes that all these mirrors are subjective and therefore unreal and
unimportant, but that presumption, like so many others, seems to
deliberately ignore the obvious." P255
"But in a value-structured universe celebrity comes roaring to the front of
reality as a huge fundamental parameter. It becomes an organizing force of
the whole social level of evolution. ... It was crazy. People going over
Niagara Falls in a barrel and killing themselves just for the celebrity of
it. Assassins murdering for it. Maybe the real reason nations declared war
was to increase their celebrity status. ... That's what writing was invented
for. When you read the Rig Veda, the oldest religious literature of the
Hindus, what are they talking about? .. This is interpreted as devotion to
God, but the celebrity is obvious." P256
"All the badges and trophies, all the blue ribbons, all the promotion up the
business ladder, all the elections to "high office", all the compliments and
flattery of tea parties and cocktail parties (And DMB adds, all the internet
discussion groups) are celebrity enhancements. All the feuding and battling
for prestige among academic and scientists. All the offense at "insults".
All the face of the Orient. Celebrity. Celebrity. ... In fact you can
measure the quality of a university by comparing the relative strengths of
the celebrity patterns and the intellectual patterns." P257
"But there is another way - in diametric opposition to that of social duty
and the popular cult. From the standpoint of the way of duty, anyone in
exile from the community is a nothing. From the other point of view,
however, this exile is the first step of the quest. ... The image of man
within is not to be confounded with the garments. We think of ourselves as
Americans, children of the twentieth century, Occidentals, civilized
Christians. Yet such designations do not tell what it is to be man, they
denote only the accidents of geography, birth-date, and income. What is the
core of us? What is the basic character of our being? The asceticism of the
medieval saints and of the yogis of India, the Hellenistic mystery
initiations, the ancient philosophies of the East and of the West, are
techniques for the shifting of the emphasis of individual consciousness away
from the garments. No man can return fron such exercises and take very
seriuosly himself as Mr So-and-so of Such-and-such a township, USA - Society
and duties drop away." JC's Hero 385-6
"All of which is far indeed from the contemporary view; for the democratic
ideal of the self-determining individual, the invention of the power-driven
machine, and the development of the scientific method of research, have so
transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols
has collapsed. In the fateful, epoch-announcing words of Nietzches's
Zarathustra: "Dead are all the Gods". It is the hero cycle of the modern
age, the wonder story of mankind's coming to maturity. ... It is not only
that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and
microscope: there is no such society any more as the the gods once supported
The social unit is not the carrier of religious content, but an
economic-political organization in hard and unremitting competition for
material supremacy and resources. Isolated societies, dream-bounded within a
mythologically charged horizon, no longer exist except as areas to be
exploited. And within the progressive societies themselves, every laast
vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality, and art is in
full decay" JC 387
"he lines of communication between the conscious and unconscoius zones of
the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two. The
hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo.
Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also where light was,
there is now darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to
bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul." JC 388
"The metaphysics of substance makes it difficult to see the Giant." Lila
P217
Keyboard slapping courtesy of DMB.
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