posted September 22, 2009 09:47 AM         

Instead, I have discovered something too simple to overlook, but too solid to confront and dismantle by the power of analysis alone. I have discovered what, to many men, men of action, requires no introduction, and is far too obvious to be given more than a moment's thought. I have discovered a world so substantial, dense, and close to home, that I can only marvel now at not having seen it. But, then, I was a philosopher, a thinker, and my entire orientation and way of being inclined me to look upon things with suspicious, far away eyes; to see beyond, around, over, beneath, and through things; -- in short, not to see things at all; to be blind. What I discovered is only the world. And that, behind this world, there was no deeper reality, which only the mind, soul, or spirit may touch. Behind this world, if such an expression has any place in use, there is only action. I discovered action.

Like so many before me, hamstrung by thought or crippled by insight, I emerged from the adolescence of philosophy with a profound conviction in the inadequacy and ineffectuality of pure contemplation. The truth, I found, was infinitely more plain and prosaic than philosophy, -- or, god forbid, poetry, -- would have it. The truth, which Abraham Lincoln articulated to my perfect satisfaction, is "When I do good I feel good, and when I do bad I feel bad,". These feelings, that something was not right with the world, were not mistaken or illogical impressions. They were not unconscious symbols of a frustrated perception, unable to conceive of the great and eternal, underlying order of natural and man-made events. No! These simple feelings, which I had looked upon with suspicion, and thought to annihilate by the power of pure insight, were, in fact, telling the truth. What the tragic Prince Hamlet discovered, I discovered. I only hoped it was not too late for me "to take arms against a sea of troubles, and, by opposing, end them"; to take action. And to be the man of principles, who lives by them, rather than the man of philosophies, who lives only in his head; and struggles desperately to reduce all principles to phantoms, when they ought to be raised to manifestations!

My friends, the material world is only false insomuchas it exists to bear the fruit of our selfish intentions. But where your intentions align with your highest principles, and your actions proceed therefrom, then, the material realm is a reality you can accept and enter into positive -- even amiable -- relations with.

posted September 22, 2009 09:56 AM         

~The Tao of Pooh

posted September 22, 2009 11:22 AM         

From "Experience":

quote:

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"People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into reality, for contact with which we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists. In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate, -- no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principle debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me, -- neither better nor worse. So it is with this calamity; it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, There at least is a reality that will not dodge us.

I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in their focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective nature? Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at one time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? or if he laugh or giggle? or if he apologize? or is infected with egotism? or thinks of his dollar? or cannot go buy food? or has gotten a child in his boyhood? Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life? Of what use, if the brain is too cold or too hot, and the man does not care enough for results to stimulate him to experiment, and hold him up in it? or if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception without due outlet? Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment, if the same old law-breaker is to keep them? What cheer can the religious sentiment yeild, when that is suspected to be secretly dependent on the seasons of the year and the state of the blood? I knew a witty physician who found the creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. Very mortifying is the reluctant experience that some unfriendly excess or imbecility neutralizes the promise of genius. We see young men who owe us a new world, so readily and lavishly they promise, but never acquit the debt; they die young and dodge the account; or if they live they lose themselves in the crowd.

Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth they are all creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass; but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over everything of time, place and condition, and is inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications the moral sentiment avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to bias the moral judgements, yet to fix the measure of activity and enjoyment.... Temperament puts all divinity to rout."

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posted September 22, 2009 04:34 PM         

Every philosophy does have a season, and they are circular. Our morals and values go from puritanical to radically hedonistic and back again. What? oh, that didn't work, let's try this again, for x years until it morphs back into the thing it was before.

posted September 24, 2009 10:54 AM         

AG, what a cool link.

posted September 24, 2009 08:38 PM         

(Only) Halfway To Everywhere

You could be so energy
electricity
You could be lightening
You could be anything
A master peice
A revolutionary
You can see what you want to see
Can you let it be?
Learn or teach

I'm only halfway to everywhere
I'm only halfway to everywhere

posted September 25, 2009 10:26 AM         

"I walk among men as among the fragments of the future -- that future which I envisage. And this is all my creating and striving; that I create and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful accident. And how could I bear to be a man if man were not also a creator and guesser of riddles and redeemer of accidents?"