I treat this blog as if it were the book I finally write, my ongoing journal, and the akashic records, unsure if there is even anyone "out there." Not unlike being stranded on a desert island with thousands of empty bottles, notepaper, and pens.
I am a scholar and a philosopher, possessing a Ph.D., and with different interests that tend towards, I suppose, "existential questions," but go in other directions as well. Sometimes I even attempt to define a perspective that I find representative of my own thinking. My sources are so much more articulate than I am. I also do this for my own education and edification. I don't know if these "bottles with messages inside" go anywhere other than the other side of the island.
If anything, I am a "zen practitioner" (with emphasis on the lower case "z") and a Daoist (at the stages preceding the "fall into magic", as it appears to me). Here is something most interesting from Daodejing: "Making This Life Significant"; A Philosophical Translation by Ames and Hall (2003), a source my wife used in her doctoral dissertation:
"Wuzhi, often translated as 'no-knowledge,' actually means the absence of a certain kind of knowledge--the kind of knowledge that is dependent upon ontological presence; that is, the assumption that there is some unchanging reality behind appearance. Knowledge grounded in a denial of ontological presence involves 'acosmotic' thinking: the type of thinking that does not presuppose a single-ordered ('One behind the many') world, and its intellectual accoutrements. It is, therefore, unprincipled knowing. Such knowing does not appeal to rules or principles determining the existence, the meaning, or the activity of a phenomenon. Wuzhi
provides one with a sense of the de of a thing--its particular uniqueness and focus--rather than yielding an understanding of that thing in relation to some concept or natural kind or universal. [...]
[I have an affinity for brackets.] Knowledge, as unprinciped knowing, is the acceptance of the world on its own terms without recourse to rules of discrimination that separate one sort of thing from another. Rules of thumb, habits of mind and action, established customs, fixed standards, received methods, stipulated concepts and categories, commandments, principles, laws of nature, conventions--all of these prejudices require us to intervene [...] resulting as 'a hardening of the categories.' Having stored past experience and organized it in terms of fixed standards or principles, we then recall, anticipate, and participate in a world patterned by these discriminations." (40-41)
I sit here among the palm trees, in a the gentle breeze, waves lapping on the shore, pondering my navel, writing strange little messages, putting them in the bottles, one by one, and setting them afloat in the great universal sea.
I am a scholar and a philosopher, possessing a Ph.D., and with different interests that tend towards, I suppose, "existential questions," but go in other directions as well. Sometimes I even attempt to define a perspective that I find representative of my own thinking. My sources are so much more articulate than I am. I also do this for my own education and edification. I don't know if these "bottles with messages inside" go anywhere other than the other side of the island.
If anything, I am a "zen practitioner" (with emphasis on the lower case "z") and a Daoist (at the stages preceding the "fall into magic", as it appears to me). Here is something most interesting from Daodejing: "Making This Life Significant"; A Philosophical Translation by Ames and Hall (2003), a source my wife used in her doctoral dissertation:
"Wuzhi, often translated as 'no-knowledge,' actually means the absence of a certain kind of knowledge--the kind of knowledge that is dependent upon ontological presence; that is, the assumption that there is some unchanging reality behind appearance. Knowledge grounded in a denial of ontological presence involves 'acosmotic' thinking: the type of thinking that does not presuppose a single-ordered ('One behind the many') world, and its intellectual accoutrements. It is, therefore, unprincipled knowing. Such knowing does not appeal to rules or principles determining the existence, the meaning, or the activity of a phenomenon. Wuzhi
provides one with a sense of the de of a thing--its particular uniqueness and focus--rather than yielding an understanding of that thing in relation to some concept or natural kind or universal. [...]
[I have an affinity for brackets.] Knowledge, as unprinciped knowing, is the acceptance of the world on its own terms without recourse to rules of discrimination that separate one sort of thing from another. Rules of thumb, habits of mind and action, established customs, fixed standards, received methods, stipulated concepts and categories, commandments, principles, laws of nature, conventions--all of these prejudices require us to intervene [...] resulting as 'a hardening of the categories.' Having stored past experience and organized it in terms of fixed standards or principles, we then recall, anticipate, and participate in a world patterned by these discriminations." (40-41)
I sit here among the palm trees, in a the gentle breeze, waves lapping on the shore, pondering my navel, writing strange little messages, putting them in the bottles, one by one, and setting them afloat in the great universal sea.
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