Oct 19 2012: Always keep a notepad and pen ready. Whenever you come across an idea, make a short note of it using key words that come to your mind. Then whenever you have time/inclination/inspiration and sitting alone, meditate on the idea, and develop the key words into meaningful phrases and finally sentences. Then connect various ideas together.
If you want to be a fiction writer, make notes on short episodes, observations and imaginative bits and then build a larger picture.
Another technique is to start with a key concept and meditate on what it really means in relation to its family of related concepts.
Plato's entire work is based upon Socrates asking key questions like :what is Justice?
Finally you have to build up inspiration by trying and experimenting.
"The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine".....Robert Bresson
Oct 18 2012: One can change, but 'we' can no longer live without money because it is the spearhead of the force of necessity, and because what was once free is no longer so.
Money is that ‘necessary illusion’ by which the edifice of civilizations is built. This edifice is virtual – that is, it is a synthetic construct in contrast to raw, primordial nature. What is the purpose of civilization? It is to develop technologies (and money is the fuel for this) that serve as tools and enablers for those few individuals who through their art, intellect and creativity, challenge this “virtual reality” edifice to expose its true colors (which is to entice and entrap) and thereby find and realize for themselves what is transcendentally real and which is the highest freedom. Thus money that represents the force of necessity is the counterpart of the force of freedom not only in an abstract sense but also in the most pragmatic sense. ( Money versus Free)
For a vast majority, technologies are for the purpose of entertainment and pleasure, and for still another minority, technologies are there to fulfill their subliminal urges for destruction – which is the inevitable ‘ends’ of all technologies.
Thus technology as a ‘means’ or tool can be used both for creating and destroying (this process is the core of the script that ‘runs’ temporal reality), but just as an end in itself, or just for entertainment, means inevitable destruction.
"'My grandmother taught me respect for the environment and the old Navajo way of discipline and about the Beautyway. She said that all Creation begins at the center from within. If you look at the center of a loom, the colors of a new design will show themselves to you and each design will come only once. She said that the yellow poles that hold up a loom must be strong or the loom will sag and the rug will be crooked. A human has to live between the yellow poles of his life too -- not too poor, not too rich -- to stay in harmony...Navajo weaver Jesse Monongye
Sep 29 2012: "Tour of the invisible" is a compact set of questions and hints to explore or inquire into those things that are not sensed by our sensory systems (or derived from them) for people with an open mind. The focal distinction of visible vs invisible although is a good opening move towards metaphysics, a more profound but abstract is the tangible vs intangible distinction. And if one wants to go further, one should go back to study the brilliant works of :
Plato's metaphysics: World of appearances vs the realm of eternal essences.
Kierkegaard ( the father of Existentialism) : Sheer poetic prose about the Temporal and Eternal, Finite and Infinite, Necessity and Freedom - a difficult to comprehend work but very rewarding to those determined to find out.
Ancient/ modern (ex.Jung) Seers and Visionaries: Find out on your own, but mainly it is about 'seeing' the hidden nature of not only oneself and human nature and purpose, but also the larger picture of reality - what it is all about.
"I say one must be a seer, make oneself seer. The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate disordering of the senses. In every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessence's"............Arthur Rimbaud
Sep 25 2012: All you need is the WILL to accomplish anything and not so called "brain". The brain will work where the Will makes it work. Keep your imagination open and not limit it to science - it could be a default red-herring so keep your options open - find out by experiment, trial and error where your heart lies. Try not to jump to easy options like 'highly paid jobs' - in the pursuit of money you may well kill your will. This world needs more people in 'humanities' rather than science, math or commerce, but there is little or no money in 'humanities'.
"Your work is to discover your work - and then with all your heart to give yourself to it"...Buddha
"Our will is for our own good, but we do not always know what that is."...Roussou
Sep 24 2012: The ultimate goal of any society is primarily - Liberty, which is creating social institutions which enable individuals to express and attain their potential so that they are able in turn to enhance those institutions. In other words the first and foremost goal of society is to maximize freedom of the individual. The primary institutions are those of Justice, law and order so that the liberty so granted is not abused by an individual. The secondary goals are those of Fraternity and Equality - but these are unattainable without the primary goal.
The most important relationship in a social setup, therefore, is that between the individual and the social system or construct, that is, to what extent does the social system as an institution support individual creativity and empowerment to further enhance the quality and efficiency of the institutions of the system. Therefore, the individual entity versus the social institutions as the counter entity is the crucial relationship that enhances and also inhibits each other's development. And without a balanced system that is led by creative individuals, a social structure cannot sustain and once it starts slipping, there is no knowing where it ends up. Leadership is thus the key. Redefined this way, the ultimate challenge of a society is to recognize and promote leaders that have vision.
"In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students."
............Edward Abbey
"The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first and deadly afterwards."......Walter Bagehot
Sep 15 2012: Faith consists in making oneself believe, through the power of one's own reason OR intuition to undertake a worthy and challenging task that common sense/social reason says is impossible. Faith is against all odds, just as existence is against all odds - therefore is entirely individual and solitary, and yet is meaningful only in action. Just 'having faith' without it being put to test is useless and meaningless. Ultimately, faith in the strongest terms is tested in life and death situations where one's entire being and the values one holds to be absolute are at stake.
AS an example of what I mean study the dialogs of Plato about the trial and death of Socrates.
Sep 15 2012: There are two kinds of creativity in the human context but only one kind of ‘primordial creation’. The primordial creation - that which is the ‘cause’ of the existence of space-time itself, whether you call it ‘from nothing’ or from the ‘absolute and eternal’ itself is a matter of technical terms – the difference is that when we conceive of the physical cosmos, the term ‘created out of nothing’ by a force or creator that it itself absolute and eternal makes more sense than to say that the physical, that is, matter appeared spontaneously by itself without any consciousness or force behind it, or without any rhyme or reason, or having no Logos or no underlying principle that brought it into existence. But when on the basis of experience or vision we sense and conceive of non-physical reality or Spirit, it becomes clear that existence has a primordial unified or singular source that is eternal and absolute, and therefore this source and underlying principal is the creator of the space-time temporality, as well as the presence in time, of the eternal and infinite – this presence or force is Spirit. Thus Spirit is both temporal as well as eternal.
Human creativity is always expressed in terms of whatever was already there but is not merely a recombination of existing parts or pieces, but genuine art is always a new synthesis of existing fragments in a unique pattern that has a ‘moving impact’ upon the target subject.
As an example in music we can say that a new beat or rhythm is a recombination of existing pieces of musical beats or rhythms – which is also creative, but a melody is never just a recombination – it is much more than that – it has a wholesome uniqueness that is pure creativity – in which something has been brought into existence from nothing – that is to say that the melody itself was never in existence until it was created.
"The greatness of art is to find not that which is common but that which is unique", Issac B.Singer
Sep 14 2012: A genuine individual is one who not grounded by ethnocentrism, one who has taken at least a few steps outside the cultural matrix of values in which he/she was born and raised - especially stepped outside the now global culture of diffuse but definitive imposed values by the global culture - most of these are actually junk values for a genuine individual who desires an autonomy of thought and action that defines who he/she is and it is in that autonomous and creative action that the individual transcends culture and even death.
This is possible when one starts by undergoing a critical examination of one's cherished values - the source of these values - whether internal or socially imposed and their contrast to value systems of different kinds of people or cultures.
"Mass culture is a constant assault upon this autonomy. This assault causes despair of the Kierkegaardian kind - and this despair is not a mood but a structure that belongs to a seized garrison - not an accidental feature but part of it, fundamental to it. It is the goal of mass culture to bury any rebellious movements and to take that part of the culture where we have begun to reflect and understand and to reverse this and make it unconscious. The parts of our culture that we can understand and reflect on are just those tiny garrisons - surrounded by the mass of the culture."..Rick Roderick ( Philosophy and Human Values)
Sep 13 2012: Anne, you have tried to relate several metaphysical concepts all at once that are very difficult to grasp unless one can bring about a fusion of art and intellect - the domain of poets or creative writers.
Nevertheless the important thing you are pointing out is that all living creatures, and especially human beings are not merely physical entities having finite boundaries and chemical processes but have non-physical dimensions that make us magical - something that has been slowly forgotten in the progress of civilizations and in the deployment of all our energies towards the physical. Today any talk of metaphysics is laughed at and ridiculed, so one has to be simultaneously cautious and creative in the use of metaphysical concepts. Firstly we need to sort out the broad relationship between the concepts. The funny thing is that today many metaphysical concepts have lost their potency and have to be extrapolated from physical concepts or understood as analogies from them. For example when you use the word 'energy' - it is basically a physical concept that is analogous to the originally metaphysical concepts of 'spirit' and 'will' - both of which are almost meaningless today. Similarly, today 'soul' has become meaningless and so we have to understand it in terms of 'essence' or 'substance' or 'potential'. Also 'mind' and 'consciousness' have both been elbowed out by 'brain' and 'neuro-chemistry'. The malaise is deep because by the domination of science in all our thinking, we tend to reject any 'intangible' or 'abstract' concept or ideas as nonsense. Thus only 'tangible' or 'measurable' or 'quantifiable' things are accepted as valid. The challenge for art-intellect has become stupendous, if not impossible - the other side of the equation is that the greater the challenge, the greater the potential for creativity amounting to magic.
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A comment on Conversation: What motivates you?
A comment on Conversation: What does it take to become a writer?
If you want to be a fiction writer, make notes on short episodes, observations and imaginative bits and then build a larger picture.
Another technique is to start with a key concept and meditate on what it really means in relation to its family of related concepts.
Plato's entire work is based upon Socrates asking key questions like :what is Justice?
Finally you have to build up inspiration by trying and experimenting.
"The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine".....Robert Bresson
A comment on Conversation: Can we change, can we live without money?
Money is that ‘necessary illusion’ by which the edifice of civilizations is built. This edifice is virtual – that is, it is a synthetic construct in contrast to raw, primordial nature. What is the purpose of civilization? It is to develop technologies (and money is the fuel for this) that serve as tools and enablers for those few individuals who through their art, intellect and creativity, challenge this “virtual reality” edifice to expose its true colors (which is to entice and entrap) and thereby find and realize for themselves what is transcendentally real and which is the highest freedom. Thus money that represents the force of necessity is the counterpart of the force of freedom not only in an abstract sense but also in the most pragmatic sense. ( Money versus Free)
For a vast majority, technologies are for the purpose of entertainment and pleasure, and for still another minority, technologies are there to fulfill their subliminal urges for destruction – which is the inevitable ‘ends’ of all technologies.
Thus technology as a ‘means’ or tool can be used both for creating and destroying (this process is the core of the script that ‘runs’ temporal reality), but just as an end in itself, or just for entertainment, means inevitable destruction.
"'My grandmother taught me respect for the environment and the old Navajo way of discipline and about the Beautyway. She said that all Creation begins at the center from within. If you look at the center of a loom, the colors of a new design will show themselves to you and each design will come only once. She said that the yellow poles that hold up a loom must be strong or the loom will sag and the rug will be crooked. A human has to live between the yellow poles of his life too -- not too poor, not too rich -- to stay in harmony...Navajo weaver Jesse Monongye
A comment on Talk: John Lloyd: An animated tour of the invisible
Plato's metaphysics: World of appearances vs the realm of eternal essences.
Kierkegaard ( the father of Existentialism) : Sheer poetic prose about the Temporal and Eternal, Finite and Infinite, Necessity and Freedom - a difficult to comprehend work but very rewarding to those determined to find out.
Ancient/ modern (ex.Jung) Seers and Visionaries: Find out on your own, but mainly it is about 'seeing' the hidden nature of not only oneself and human nature and purpose, but also the larger picture of reality - what it is all about.
"I say one must be a seer, make oneself seer. The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate disordering of the senses. In every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessence's"............Arthur Rimbaud
A comment on Conversation: I am very confused. What should i do?
"Your work is to discover your work - and then with all your heart to give yourself to it"...Buddha
"Our will is for our own good, but we do not always know what that is."...Roussou
A comment on Conversation: Does society have an ultimate goal?
The most important relationship in a social setup, therefore, is that between the individual and the social system or construct, that is, to what extent does the social system as an institution support individual creativity and empowerment to further enhance the quality and efficiency of the institutions of the system. Therefore, the individual entity versus the social institutions as the counter entity is the crucial relationship that enhances and also inhibits each other's development. And without a balanced system that is led by creative individuals, a social structure cannot sustain and once it starts slipping, there is no knowing where it ends up. Leadership is thus the key. Redefined this way, the ultimate challenge of a society is to recognize and promote leaders that have vision.
"In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students."
............Edward Abbey
"The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first and deadly afterwards."......Walter Bagehot
A comment on Conversation: Is Faith inherently irrational?
AS an example of what I mean study the dialogs of Plato about the trial and death of Socrates.
A reply on Conversation: The Something out of Nothing Paradox is Outdated
Human creativity is always expressed in terms of whatever was already there but is not merely a recombination of existing parts or pieces, but genuine art is always a new synthesis of existing fragments in a unique pattern that has a ‘moving impact’ upon the target subject.
As an example in music we can say that a new beat or rhythm is a recombination of existing pieces of musical beats or rhythms – which is also creative, but a melody is never just a recombination – it is much more than that – it has a wholesome uniqueness that is pure creativity – in which something has been brought into existence from nothing – that is to say that the melody itself was never in existence until it was created.
"The greatness of art is to find not that which is common but that which is unique", Issac B.Singer
A comment on Conversation: Is it possible for an individual to be without ethnocentrism?
This is possible when one starts by undergoing a critical examination of one's cherished values - the source of these values - whether internal or socially imposed and their contrast to value systems of different kinds of people or cultures.
"Mass culture is a constant assault upon this autonomy. This assault causes despair of the Kierkegaardian kind - and this despair is not a mood but a structure that belongs to a seized garrison - not an accidental feature but part of it, fundamental to it. It is the goal of mass culture to bury any rebellious movements and to take that part of the culture where we have begun to reflect and understand and to reverse this and make it unconscious. The parts of our culture that we can understand and reflect on are just those tiny garrisons - surrounded by the mass of the culture."..Rick Roderick ( Philosophy and Human Values)
A comment on Conversation: Is our Soul our Energy, our conscious and unconscious Mind and our Imagination?
Nevertheless the important thing you are pointing out is that all living creatures, and especially human beings are not merely physical entities having finite boundaries and chemical processes but have non-physical dimensions that make us magical - something that has been slowly forgotten in the progress of civilizations and in the deployment of all our energies towards the physical. Today any talk of metaphysics is laughed at and ridiculed, so one has to be simultaneously cautious and creative in the use of metaphysical concepts. Firstly we need to sort out the broad relationship between the concepts. The funny thing is that today many metaphysical concepts have lost their potency and have to be extrapolated from physical concepts or understood as analogies from them. For example when you use the word 'energy' - it is basically a physical concept that is analogous to the originally metaphysical concepts of 'spirit' and 'will' - both of which are almost meaningless today. Similarly, today 'soul' has become meaningless and so we have to understand it in terms of 'essence' or 'substance' or 'potential'. Also 'mind' and 'consciousness' have both been elbowed out by 'brain' and 'neuro-chemistry'. The malaise is deep because by the domination of science in all our thinking, we tend to reject any 'intangible' or 'abstract' concept or ideas as nonsense. Thus only 'tangible' or 'measurable' or 'quantifiable' things are accepted as valid. The challenge for art-intellect has become stupendous, if not impossible - the other side of the equation is that the greater the challenge, the greater the potential for creativity amounting to magic.