the universe will not be controlled by the likes of us
the title is a brilliant phrase uttered on the intertubes by AdamSelene @ theoildrum.com. this space accumulates other such short, poetic, and found-elsewhere insights into the limits of human cognition. it is a project dedicated to Wes Jackson’s vision of an “ignorance-based worldview.” a brilliant phrase uttered by his friend Wendell Barry in a letter.Archive for August, 2009
casting down the mighty from their thrones
Arvo Pärt’s Magnificat (1989), eerily and beautifully aligned with industrial scenes from 1950s urban America. not sure what to think of this yet, and i’m not sure how i even came across this (suddenly, i was watching it, having looked for something else). skyscrapers and gigantic industrial machinery, and the continuous flurry of human activity pushing these things along through the universe, have frightened me for some time now (they are like Sysiphus, multiplied into hordes). but this juxtaposition of post-modern choral music and post-war industry somehow seems to have something new to say about the problem of the human relationship to technology, the self, the universe, and God. what this something new is, i don’t know yet…
but speaking of which, i received this excellent photo from my friend Andrew of what he calls a ‘post-modern Sysiphus’:
a post-modern Sysiphus
songs from the metaxy
the prophet Jeremiah (Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel) was a contemporary of Heraclitus, as were Lao Tse, Zoroaster, and the Buddha. all of them participated in bringing about what's been called a Great Leap of Being, of which we need another.
lately i’ve been reading Heraclitus through Richard Geldard. to my joy, what the back cover of his book (Remembering Heraclitus) promised turned out to be true; through Geldard, i have advanced my appreciation and understanding of Heraclitus as “one of the principle sources of Western mystical thinking.”
here are some of Heraclitus’ fragments:
3. Listening to the Logos, and not to me, it is wise to agree that all things are One.
13. To God all things are beautiful, good, and just, but human beings have supposed some things to be unjust, others just.
15. Nature prefers to hide.
16. They do not apprehend how being in conflict it [the Logos] still agrees with itself; there is an opposing coherence, as in the tensions of the bow and the lyre.
39. You would not find out the limits of the soul, even by traveling along every path, so deep a Logos does it have.
53. I searched my nature.
And a thought from Geldard, inspired by his study of Heraclitus: Consciousness is not a part of us (generated, for example, by the brain); we are part of consciousness (the Greater Consciousness, the Logos). Just as any given radio can transform the flux and flow of all-pervasive electromagnetic waves into something locally coherent (a particular song, at a particular volume, in whatever room the radio resides), our central nervous systems are that which transforms Consciousness into little-c consciousness, our consciousness – a local coherence, or resolution, of peculiar being.
