I'm Back

After almost two years of being away from this blog, I'm back. 

During my time away, mostly during Covid, I kept my head down writing. I have now three manuscripts that I believe are ready to send to a publisher.  So I hope to get into the swing of publishing and promoting my work once again. 

I have also during the last year taken three long trips: 

1. Five weeks exploring Egypt and Jordan,

2. Six weeks trekking across Northern Spain for the third time, and then down into Portugal to Lisbon,

3. Ten weeks in Southeast Asia--Singapore, Malasia, Thailand.

It was exciting for me to visit these places while there are still relatively few tourists traveling due to the pandemic. I hope to be posting pictures and descriptions of my travels in the coming weeks. 

2/15/21: From Will Durant’s Our Oriental Heritage

“The highest truth is this: God is present in all beings. They are His multiple forms. There is no other God to seek…. It is a man-making religion that we want. . . . Give up these weakening mysticisms, and be strong . . . For the next fifty years. . . . Let all other gods disappear from our minds. This is the only God that is awake, our own race, everywhere His hands, everywhere His feet, Everywhere His ears; He covers everything. . . . The first of all worships is the worship of those all around us. . . . He alone serves God who serves all other beings.”  --Vivekananada  

4/10/20: Martin Luther and the Reformation

I’ve been reading Durant’s Story of Civilization V1, The Reformation. It seems there were two key figures that launched the Reformation in Germany, Luther and Erasmus. Although I admire Erasmus much more than Luther, in philosophy and approach, I must admit I found the following summation of Luther both enlightening and a beautiful piece of writing. 

Those years were among the most momentous in history, and Luther had been their strident and dominant voice. His faults were many. He lacked appreciation of the historic role that the Church had played in civilizing northern Europe, lacked understanding of mankind’s hunger for symbolic and consolatory myths, lacked the charity to deal justly with his Catholic or Protestant foes. He freed his followers from an infallible pope, but subjected them to an infallible book; and it has been easier to change the popes than the book. He retained the most cruel and incredible dogmas of medieval religion, while allowing almost all its beauty to be stamped out in its legends and its art, and bequeathed to Germany a Christianity no truer than the old one, far less joyous and comforting, only more honest in its teaching and personnel. He became almost as intolerant as the Inquisition, but his words were harsher than his deeds. He was guilty of the most vituperative writing in the history of literature. He taught Germany the theological hatred that incarnadined its soil until a hundred years after his death. 

And yet his faults were his success. He was a man of war because the situation seemed to demand war, because the problems he attacked had for centuries resisted all the methods of peace. His whole life was a battle—against the sense of guilt, against the Devil, the Pope, the Emperor, Zwingli, even against the friends who would have compromised his revolt into a gentlemanly protest politely heard and carefully forgotten. What could a milder man have done against such handicaps and powers? No man of philosophic breadth, no scientific mind restricting belief to the evidence, no genial nature making generous allowances for the enemy, would have flung down so world-shaking a challenge, or would have marched so resolutely, as if in blinders, to his goal. If his predestinarian theology was as repugnant to reason and human kindness as any myth or miracle in the medieval faith, it was by this passionate irrationality that it moved the hearts of men. It is hope and terror that make men pray, not the evidence of things seen. 

It remains that with the blows of his rude fist he smashed the cake of custom, the shell of authority, that had blocked the movement of the European mind. If we judge greatness by influence—which is the least subjective test that we can use—we may rank Luther with Copernicus, Voltaire, and Darwin as the most powerful personalities in the modern world. More has been written about him than about any other modern man except Shakespeare and Napoleon. His influence on philosophy was tardy and indirect; it moved the fideism of Kant, the nationalism of Fichte, the voluntarism of Schopenhauer, the Hegelian surrender of the soul to the state. His influence on German literature and speech was as decisive and pervasive as that of the King James Bible on language and letters in England. No other German is so frequently or so fondly quoted. Along with Carlstadt and others, he affected the moral life and institutions of Western man by breaking away from clerical celibacy, and pouring into secular life the energies that had been diverted to monastic asceticism, idleness, or piety. His influence lessened as it spread; it was immense in Scandinavia, transitory in France, superseded by Calvin’s in Scotland, England, and America. But in German it was supreme; no other thinker or writer cut so deep a mark in German history, and his countrymen loved him no less because he was the most German German of them all. 

Thoughts from The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

“The only mythology that is valid today is the mythology of the planet—and we don’t have such a mythology. The closest thing I know to a planetary mythology is Buddhism, which sees all beings as Buddha beings. The only problem is to come to the recognition of that. There is nothing to do.  The task is only to know what is, and then to act in relation to the brotherhood of all of these beings.”

The USA was the first nation to be founded on the basis of reason, by eighteenth-century deists who believed in a God but not the bible. They did not believe in a Fall. They did not think the mind of man was cut off from God. The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God. Reason puts you in touch with God. Consequently, for these men, there is no special revelation anywhere, and none is needed, because the mind of man cleared of its fallibilities is sufficiently capable of the knowledge of God. All people in the world are thus capable because all people in the world are capable of reason. And because all men are capable of reason, everybody’s mind is capable of true knowledge, you don’t have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.

Notes from Destination Earth: A New Philosophy of Travel by Nicos Hadjicostis

While preparing for my five-week trip to South America, I've taken some time to review my notes from Nicos Hadjicostis's wonderful book on traveling:

-As Sri Aurobindo says, there is a universal principle at work by which the difficulties one has to solve are proportionate to the things one must learn. The rarer and novel the difficulties, the more precious and long-lasting the gifts they bear. Every difficulty can teach us something new about ourselves and our relationships with other people. Through tangled and complicated situations, we are forced to become more awake and muster the totality of our energies and capabilities channeling them into new fields of action and play. In doing so, we come to touch the world at points we never knew existed. 

-The more the world-traveler explores and knows our planet, the more he comes to feel that he is an integral part of one huge human family. The human qualities and traits he shares with this family are felt to be stronger than all the differences that apparently set him apart from other people. 

-Stunning landscapes exist as such because of their contrast to boring or uninteresting ones. Beautiful cities and villages are judged as being so because they are compared with the ugly cities and non-picturesque villages that outnumber them. 

The mutual dependence of ugliness and beauty, pleasantness and unpleasantness, makes our world what it is. Interdependent origination is actually one of the central tenets of Buddhist philosophy. It is the notion that nothing possesses its own irreducible self-nature, but everything depends on something else for its existence. These inter dependent opposites are the building blocks from which our world is constructed. It is meaningless, if not impossible, to attempt to shy away from the negative pole of reality. That said, most things in the world lie between the spaces defined by the extreme opposites and include qualities of both. One may thus cultivate the ability to see qualities of beauty and harmony in things that seem ugly or imperfect. 

More notes from Destination Earth: A New Philosophy of Travel by Nicos Hadjicostis

Equality

For the universal soul all things and all contacts of things carry in them an essence of delight best described by the Sanskrit aesthetic term “rasa,” which means at once sap or essence of a thing and its taste. It is because we do not seek the essence of the thing in its contact with us, but look only to the manner in which it affects our desires and fears, our cravings and shrinkings, that grief and pain, imperfect and transient pleasure or indifference, that is to say, blank inability to seize the essence, are the forms taken by the Rasa. If we could be entirely disinterested in mind and heart and impose that detachment on the nervous being, the progressive elimination of these imperfect and perverse forms of Rasa would be possible and the true essential taste of the inalienable delight of existence in all its variations would be within our reach. –Sri Aurobindo

It is difficult to bear the unpleasant sensations that violently attack our senses, such as a foul smell, a disturbing sound, or the urban pollution that steals the air we breathe. When it comes to sights, unpleasant sensations exist on an even grander scale: A street full of uncollected garbage in Naples; a poor shantytown in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro; the ugly, overdeveloped waterfront of a Spanish coastal town set against an otherwise pristine backdrop of crystal-clear waters. All of them are disturbing and painful sights, the unfortunate results of human actions.

In order to confront these unpleasant sensations of the world, we must adopt the attitude of equality toward all sensations. We must force all of our senses to experience everything in its raw form, without any interference from the analytical and judging functions of the mind. Yogis have been practicing equality toward all sensations for millennia now. The idea is to capture the rasa, the substance, the existential quality of each and every sensation, without the mind immediately superimposing a judgement on it. All sensations are equal as sensations in as much as they are variations on an infinite spectrum of sensations. Yet from this infinity of real or possible sensations, we encounter and experience only the very few that cross our path in the limited world we live in day to day. Each new sensation that appears sin one’s life when on travels, whether pleasurable, painful, or neutral, becomes a new valuable acquisition in our library of experiences. By forcing our mind to stand back, we may return to the primal mode of experiencing our world, like a newborn, who sees and feels everything with ta freshness and intensity, unblemished by the clouding of mental judgments. 

It is not easy to smell a foul odor and not react in disgust, or make the characteristic involuntary grimace. Yet it is only by refraining from reacting in this way that one may experience the foul smell in an unmediated, direct manner. A foul smell is still a smell of a very special kind that is interesting exactly because it is new and unique. It is only through a willful exertion that one may begin to see the world as it truly is and not through the filters of one’s upbringing, prejudices, and already formed tastes. 

The Traveler-Hermit and the Inner Journey

It might be strange to compare the life of a world-traveler, who is on the move and interacting with thousands of people, with the life of a spiritual hermit. Yet, paradoxically, the two have more in common than meets the eye. 

Just as a hermit, the world-traveler is “alone” most of the time. Not in the ordinary sense of the word, for he is almost always surrounded by people. However, even while he interacts with the world, he does so more as a student of life than as a participant in the everyday socializing in which the majority of humanity is immersed. Thus, although the traveler is fully in the world, he is not of the world. His interactions have the character of those of an explorer and they do not really take him out of his state of aloneness. But time-wise, these interactions are only a part of his life. When not traveling and interacting with people, he spends many hours a day reading and studying, just as a hermit does. Then he has to gather all his experiences, make sense of them, and reflect on their meaning and significance, just a hermit meditates on the meaning and significance of his inner experiences. Finally, he has to allow all these new elements to act upon him and transform him into another person. 

It is this element of inner transformation that makes the traveler and hermit so similar. While moving in the outer world, the traveler also works on his inner world. For the journey is always twofold—it has an outer and an inner aspect. The outer journey turns out to be an instrument that serves the much more important and central inner journey. Although the outer aspect is more easily communicable, the true content and meaning of the double journey becomes clear only when the inner dimensions sheds its revealing light on the whole endeavor. Only after the outer events become part of a greater reality and find their place in the grander scheme of things does the traveler feel that something new and fresh has been gained. 

Doing and Becoming

The dichotomy of the outer and inner journey is mirrored in another bipolarity that sheds further light on the travel mode of being: sedentary life pertains to Doing, whereas travel life pertains to Becoming.

A person living a normal life with regular regimented timetable, a fixed place of residence and work, a routine taking care of family matters, and occasional holidays once or twice a year, is preoccupied with doing things. He does work, he does shopping, he does socializing. His daily program is full of things to do. Even if some time is put aside or stolen from other activities for a hobby or for studying and self-improvement, these activities are, as a rule, not central to a life immersed in society—they are a footnote in the margin of one’s life. 

Travel life is very different. The traveler has nothing to do. He may choose to sit on a bench in a park all day and simply observe the world pass by. Even while he explores places or interacts with foreign cultures or studies, there is nothing compulsory about these activities. There is nothing  he must do or accomplish by some deadline (apart perhaps from some self-imposed but flexible date he may have set for himself to complete his exploration of a country.

However, although he is not working in the sense of having a conventional job, and is not doing anything by the usual standards of society, something else is actually going on: With every contact, event, experience that comes into his life, he is transformed. Even by simply wandering effortlessly between countries as a vagabond and interacting with the various peole of different cultures or passively enjoying new landscapes, he opens himself to change. This is because just by moving from place to place, he is by default in the school of life. Almost every interaction and experience of a traveler is unique and thus holds a power and value that surpasses anything a sedentary life has to offer. By being in the journey, the traveler ceases to do and is becoming. 

A Quote from Will Durant, a Pulitzer Prize Winning Historian

While reading the introduction to Will Durant’s book, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of all Time, I found the following quote from Will Durant particularly interesting: 

In 1968, shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize for literature, Will Durant and his wife, Ariel, gave a television interview in their home in Los Angeles, CA. The interviewer, who fancied himself an intellectual, posed to Durant the following question:

If I were to ask you to name the person who has most influenced the 20^thcentury, would it be Karl Marx?

Durant paused for a moment and then replied:

Well, if you use the word in its largest sense, we would have to give the greatest share of influence to the technical inventors, like Edison. Doubtless the development of electricity has transformed the world even more than any Marxian propaganda. Then, if you think in terms of ideas, I think the influence of Darwin is still greater than the influence of Marx, but in a different field. The basic phenomenon of our time is not Communism; it’s the decline of religious belief, which has all sort of effects on morals and even on politics because religion has been a tool of politics. But today in Europe it ceases to be a tool, it has very little influence in determining political decisions—whereas 500 years ago, the pope was superior in influence to any civil ruler on earth. 

I find this fascinating on many levels, but mostly when I see how the Church’s influence has declined over the last two hundred years. To think that people were still being burned at the stake for heresy in the eighteenth century, and now the Church has almost no influence on most people’s lives. I hope I live long enough to see the Age of Enlightenment finally bury Christianity and all it’s bastard cousins once and for all.