Scripture is never clear. There is no bible or spiritual text which is not disputed over life-times of believers, and the dispute is often and always ironic to the death!
The Tanakh, or Old Testament, was written by many authors over a period of 1000 years. This is a book of infinite inspiration and contradiction. It is glossed and tortured and translated in ever "new" ways. While its main purpose was to preserve the power of the priests against the kings, it shares a million minor agendas which continue to entertain and beguile.
Of the 27 books of the New Testament, there is a certain provenance to none of them. Many of the contemporaneous texts were curiously omitted without explanation provided by the anonymous Councilors meeting at Nicea in the fourth century after the Subject of the gospels stopped teaching.
Of the legendary "founders" of the great Religions, not one is alleged to have written a word -- Abraham, Buddha, Jesus -- all silent and absent from stone, papyrus, or clay. Mohammad and Smith appear to have written texts -- on leaves, skins, tablets -- but they each claim that an Angel (the same one, Gabriel), not God or Allah (again the same), dictated the text to them.
We have only recently discovered and authenticated long-lost but referenced "gospels", such as the gospel of Judas, Thomas, and several female writers.
St Paul, of course, is a historical figure and his letters -- actually penned by him -- have been preserved. Accord, the work of St Augustine, with his gospel of grace and invention of a trinity. What is significant is that in subsequent iterations, changes were made to the texts by so-called Believers with the intent to deceive others!
During this formative time Jews and Christians were maintaining graven images in the hearths of their homes, and continued to bury their dead with as many as 30 different deities. Even after the attempt to collate an "official" scripture 300 years after Jesus by order of the Mother of Constantine--that pagan Emperor who died as a non-believer--the copyists continued to use widely varying translations.
Of particular significance is the fact that the myth of inerrant "oral tradition" has been completely exploded. Most "traditions" trace back only a few generations. Most texts are interpolated and falsified, almost none are "copied" accurately verbatim and without new purposes and agendas. Translations are impossible. And memories? They are false.
Scripture is not history. It is fascinating. But it is not Truth.
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memory. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Remembering...how everything is familiar but little is left.
Journal of Forgetting. September 23, 2008
1. I never forget anything. At the least, I certainly don't remember forgetting anything. What I learned was so small, so skeletal, so spacial. A patch of steam already cooled. The wisp of smoke rising imperceptibly, caught in the lungs with a small cough.
2. I have no regrets. At the least, I have no regrets that I regret. I owe this redemption to the fact that there is so little I remember to regret.
3. The inhabitant within this body is not claiming it; it has not tilled the soil, or soiled its till; it has not homesteaded itself; it has lightly lived, as if free; not formidable, not a threat, and not very familiar. It was new every day, and in every day dream. Within the bounds of its dreams at night, it was a surprise.
4. Most people are a danger to themselves. They raise up a Golden Horde of ghosts against themselves. They fret over each passerby, not realizing, they ARE the passerby.
5. I have forgotten more than I ever knew. There was music – I heard it played, and then it was gone.
6. Why is everything “strangely familiar” and infinitely wonderful? A “foreign exchange student” is always a member of the family living in the house.
7. Why is there curiosity?
8. I vaguely remember everything. Deja vu is a bell which rings across the symphony of my life. As I hear it, I remember what it was and anticipate what it will be, now.
9. I remember, and I succumb. I forget and folly is victorious. I find myself constantly in a victory parade looking neither left nor right, leading to isolation.
10. Between fight and flight, between amygdala and cortex, between perpetual question and instantaneous answer, I remember not knowing.
11. There is a place to sit in every situation, especially when you are mentally on your feet. There is a dance, you can feel it, especially when at rest inside it. You can gather the zone of “interest” around you, breathing into the spell of presence, the attention of attention, appointing the inctus in the morphological space created by the rhythm of conversations and glances. The facial geography opening and closing curtains and continents of discovery and reassurance.
12. What other people think they are thinking is a gong. It waits to be struck. They wheel it out and you can either ignore it and hurt their feelings, make them feel unimportant or irrelevant. Or you can strike it hard and shatter or offend them. Or you can give it an appreciative bong of attention, and they will resonate gently, and lives will go on in this vibration, this “ing-ing” of the gong.
13. There is no such thing as “conversation”. Communication is an abstract and theoretical concept. The worm – the world’s great conqueror – is always stretching, ready to contract or extend, sometimes immediately in response to a stimulus, and sometimes simply as a result of being able to.
14. The key to understanding communication is to not get locked into the ideological trap of dyadism. Understand that the act of speaking and listening is almost never stimulus/response, A interacting with B. It is almost always a tribe encountering another tribe, everything interacting with everything, and nothing being nothing, and the passage of time drawn across the many strings of the bowed universe.
15. Suddenly someone is talking about something. Extraordinary.
16. All understanding has a hard shell and a soft underbelly.
17. Once you define your terms you have defeated any hope for communication. You have begun to spin a web. You are casting a concrete net and you will only catch the lies and flies whose interest is carrion. Misunderstandings will be laid and maggots born. The nibblers will have their way.
18. I remember I have work to do. I am here for some purpose. This is clear to me, and I have surrounded myself with obligations freely undertaken with an informed understanding of the foreseeable consequences. But this gets ugly. Now I am surrounded by the obligations of my purposed commitments, and they imprison me. I am no longer free. And the rut of commitments cut me off from the surrounding possibilities, of which I am no longer aware. I am walled off. My purpose has blinded me to what I can do.
19. I do not know what I am doing, how I can do it, or why I am doing it.
20. A Singularity is always the result of time working on a plurality.
21. I tell anyone who will listen that communication is impossible.
1. I never forget anything. At the least, I certainly don't remember forgetting anything. What I learned was so small, so skeletal, so spacial. A patch of steam already cooled. The wisp of smoke rising imperceptibly, caught in the lungs with a small cough.
2. I have no regrets. At the least, I have no regrets that I regret. I owe this redemption to the fact that there is so little I remember to regret.
3. The inhabitant within this body is not claiming it; it has not tilled the soil, or soiled its till; it has not homesteaded itself; it has lightly lived, as if free; not formidable, not a threat, and not very familiar. It was new every day, and in every day dream. Within the bounds of its dreams at night, it was a surprise.
4. Most people are a danger to themselves. They raise up a Golden Horde of ghosts against themselves. They fret over each passerby, not realizing, they ARE the passerby.
5. I have forgotten more than I ever knew. There was music – I heard it played, and then it was gone.
6. Why is everything “strangely familiar” and infinitely wonderful? A “foreign exchange student” is always a member of the family living in the house.
7. Why is there curiosity?
8. I vaguely remember everything. Deja vu is a bell which rings across the symphony of my life. As I hear it, I remember what it was and anticipate what it will be, now.
9. I remember, and I succumb. I forget and folly is victorious. I find myself constantly in a victory parade looking neither left nor right, leading to isolation.
10. Between fight and flight, between amygdala and cortex, between perpetual question and instantaneous answer, I remember not knowing.
11. There is a place to sit in every situation, especially when you are mentally on your feet. There is a dance, you can feel it, especially when at rest inside it. You can gather the zone of “interest” around you, breathing into the spell of presence, the attention of attention, appointing the inctus in the morphological space created by the rhythm of conversations and glances. The facial geography opening and closing curtains and continents of discovery and reassurance.
12. What other people think they are thinking is a gong. It waits to be struck. They wheel it out and you can either ignore it and hurt their feelings, make them feel unimportant or irrelevant. Or you can strike it hard and shatter or offend them. Or you can give it an appreciative bong of attention, and they will resonate gently, and lives will go on in this vibration, this “ing-ing” of the gong.
13. There is no such thing as “conversation”. Communication is an abstract and theoretical concept. The worm – the world’s great conqueror – is always stretching, ready to contract or extend, sometimes immediately in response to a stimulus, and sometimes simply as a result of being able to.
14. The key to understanding communication is to not get locked into the ideological trap of dyadism. Understand that the act of speaking and listening is almost never stimulus/response, A interacting with B. It is almost always a tribe encountering another tribe, everything interacting with everything, and nothing being nothing, and the passage of time drawn across the many strings of the bowed universe.
15. Suddenly someone is talking about something. Extraordinary.
16. All understanding has a hard shell and a soft underbelly.
17. Once you define your terms you have defeated any hope for communication. You have begun to spin a web. You are casting a concrete net and you will only catch the lies and flies whose interest is carrion. Misunderstandings will be laid and maggots born. The nibblers will have their way.
18. I remember I have work to do. I am here for some purpose. This is clear to me, and I have surrounded myself with obligations freely undertaken with an informed understanding of the foreseeable consequences. But this gets ugly. Now I am surrounded by the obligations of my purposed commitments, and they imprison me. I am no longer free. And the rut of commitments cut me off from the surrounding possibilities, of which I am no longer aware. I am walled off. My purpose has blinded me to what I can do.
19. I do not know what I am doing, how I can do it, or why I am doing it.
20. A Singularity is always the result of time working on a plurality.
21. I tell anyone who will listen that communication is impossible.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Remembering the Planning, Forgetting the Gotten
So often I work with detailed and fairly fast-moving plans involving inter-connected pieces. For example, I need to do A which requires B and C and C requires D and E to complete, and now A has been set aside, and now I need to do X Y Z....Meanwhile, I am hanging onto A in my memory, although it was never done, I am remembering my Plan or intention. Soon enough, that "memory" becomes what I remember. At numerous points, then, I can actually "remember" A, although I never did it. Scarey. Meanwhile, my memory of what actually took place, what actually happened while I was making the over-run Plans, starts dimming. Memories fade quite rapidly as new details and observations take up attention. What I actually "got" out of the whole layered process insofar as it is either unintended or simply superceded, then fades. My work is completely over-run: Even I do not recognize the results of what I do.
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