From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Apr 22 2003 - 08:36:39 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>>>Well, I don't know about Shea or Robert A Wilson (though I know Wilson is
>>>supposed to have cryonics sympathies), but Castenda is strictly a bogus
>>>mysticist. I read about all his books when I was much younger, but I
>>>cannot even imagine finding any of his ideas reasonable today.
>>>
>>>
>
>Quite so.
>
Not exactly. He's an anthropologist using a fictional form for
reporting on field studies. (Or at least that's where he started. I
never got past the second volume, but properly interpreted he's making
accurate, though not literal, statements about the relationship between
the known and the unknown. Somewhat interesting, but not really very
deep unless you are asserting that this is the view of one group of
people [they were supposed to be field notes].) I understand that he
was a student of Garfinkle in UCLA, and was a bit surprised by the
popularity of the fictional version.
>>To quote Robert Anton Wilson,
>>
>>"Reality may not only be weirder than we think, but weirder than we can
>>think."
>>
>>
>Not only stolen by Wilson but mangled. The original famous quip (by J. B.
>S. Haldane decades earlier) was:
>
>`The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we
>*can* suppose.'
>
That was intentional, and you were expected to recognize the
paraphrase. (It is, as you justly note, famous.) If you take Wilson at
face value, you are misunderstanding him. He deeply admires James
Joyce, esp. Finnegan's Wake. As a result, he tries to make everything
multi-ordinal. I fequently feel that he goes a bit beyond optimum in
this direction, but that's my aesthetic. If you look at all carefully,
you will find a large number of "mangled" quotes. This is an attempt to
represent the mind as a processing of culture. It is intentionally not
a perfect mirror, as the mind does not create a perfect reflection of
culture. And it intentionally contains a large percentage of "famous"
ideas. That is the mind acting as a mirror of culture.
>>"If you think you know what the hell's going on, you're probably full of
>>s***"
>>
>>
>If you think people can turn into birds and balls of light, you're
>*definitely* full of shit.
>
>Damien Broderick
>
OTOH, there may well be ideas which are best expressed via that
metaphor. (I don't know the context, but if you are referring to either
Castenada or Wilson, suspect that metaphor rather than an attempt to
depict physical reality is what's going on.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Apr 22 2003 - 08:46:36 MDT