XPost: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, alt.philosophy.taoism, alt.philosophy.zen   
   From: tanghuyen@gmail.com   
      
   On 8/29/2016 2:49 PM, Ned Ludd wrote:   
      
   > The graveyard of ideas   
   > is necessarily spacious,   
   > and never diminishes.   
   > It has many ornate headstones:   
   > Monuments to tortured logic,   
   > and testaments to twisted reason.   
   > Occasionally a mausoleum   
   > dots the landscape, some great edifice   
   > of notions, holding sway, looming   
   > over the nearby acreage.   
   > The doors are rusted, windows gray   
   > and barred, opaque to any light,   
   > without or within, darkness.   
   > Each grave is tended faithfully,   
   > for each idea has a handmaiden,   
   > dressed in white, purporting to be   
   > pure reason, yet beneath her robes   
   > so sparkling white, a festering   
   > mass of emotion endlessly seethes.   
   > She tends her little plot and mossy stone   
   > with meticulous devotion,   
   > preserving the dead remains with undimmed   
   > ferocity, faithful to her bruised heart.   
   > Semper Fidelis, motto of warriors,   
   > is her guidestone, watchword, credo.   
   > For what is reason but faith in order.   
   > In springtime the grasses grow,   
   > obscuring the decaying graves.   
   > Her heart shudders at the relentless   
   > destruction of her cherished idea,   
   > hidden beneath the swelling sea of green.   
   > She will never leave, but rather die   
   > with her dying dream, reason lost   
   > for love of one precious thing,   
   > in the endlessness of things.   
   >   
   > - Ned (from "Tissue of Lies")   
      
   Neddie dear, you are again a realist and   
   literalist of heart and of mind, a rare sight to   
   one who takes things as clouds passing in the   
   sky and water sliding off a duck's back. You   
   lock yourself up hermetically in the bubble of   
   ideas, eagerly, as if they were ends in   
   themselves, a golden cage of your own   
   concoction, glistening to itself in Onanistic   
   privacy and wholly oblivious to anything   
   external, specially anything as vile as reality,   
   which to others may be what said ideas refer   
   to, beyond themselves and their lofty circles.   
      
   Ah! Poor finger, without moon to point to!   
   How lonely! How desolate!   
      
   May I refer to what I said recently, that there   
   is a vicious circle, in that if one does not   
   know oneself, how does one get to know that   
   one does not know oneself? Here, if one does   
   not know any externality, how does one get   
   to know that one does not know any   
   externality? That said, the Stoic God in the   
   end of any world cycle returns to himself   
   alone, separate from any externality, as   
   Seneca says in his Letter 9:   
      
   "What kind of life will a wise man have if he is   
   abandoned by his friends and hurled into   
   prison or isolated in some foreign country or   
   detained on a long voyage or cast out onto a   
   desert shore? It will be like the life of Zeus, at   
   the time when the world is dissolved and the   
   gods have been blended together into one,   
   when nature comes to a stop for a while; he   
   reposes in himself given over to his thoughts.   
   The wise man's behaviour is just like this: he   
   retires into himself, and is with himself." A. A.   
   Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic   
   Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge   
   University Press, 1987, I, 277, item O, from   
   Seneca, Letter 9.16 (SVF 2. 1065), text on II,   
   276: "qualis tamen futura est vita sapientis,   
   si sine amicis relinquatur in custodiam   
   coniectus vel in aliqua gente aliena destitutus   
   vel in navigatione longa retentus aut in   
   desertum litus eiectus? qualis est Iovis, cum   
   resoluto mundo et dis in unum confusis   
   paulisper cessante natura acquiescit sibi   
   cogitationibus suis traditus. tale quiddam   
   sapiens facit: in se reconditur, secum est."   
      
   It is just after this self-withdrawal that God   
   extends himself again, expresses himself   
   again, squirts into us and we thereby ooze into   
   existence, to begin another world-cycle, in   
   mutual recognition and gratefulness. All is well   
   that ends well ...   
      
   Great minds ...   
      
   Tang Huyen   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)