2. The Antichrist: The Four Great Errors

My old teacher expresses displeasure at the fact "The most general formula at the basis of every religion and morality is: "Do this and this, refrain from this and this- and you will be happy! Otherwise..." Every morality, every religion is this imperative- I call it the great original sin of reason, immortal unreason."

This I have to agree with based on my understandings, that true action must originate from within man and from his active will and not from what he calls "Immortal Unreason."

My old teacher then goes on to discuss about our "inner facts". The will, the consciousness and the ego (the "subject') are in fact non-existent. Something which we "latch onto" in pursuit of our excited cause-creating drive because we want to have a reason for feeling as we do. He states something quite interesting and which I feel inclined to agree with (at a certain level)- the fact that we only possess 'General Feelings' and are consistently and continuously engaged and involved in the "play and counter-play of our organs". To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing and gives moreover a feeling of power.

Even while I sit here typing, focusing on the task at hand, my stomach is warm, I feel comfortable, my legs are tingling due to a lack of blood. This whole jibble-jabble of multiple feelings and sensations constitute our 'general feelings' which in our minds are felt first before termed and hence given meaning.

I realize that they are registered as generally positive or non-positive before my mind analyzes it and gives it reason. For example, true, I am hungry and this is negative but I am doing something of a higher calling (applying myself mentally in place of fulfilling my hunger). So then my hunger becomes more positive than negative.

But my old teacher goes on to posit that the will is but a convenient invention. Men were thought of as "free" so that they could become guilty; consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness.

This point leaves me a little upset and perplexed and I will be back to write more about this in a bit, I hope.

1. The Antichrist: Hello Again, Teacher

Is what I said to my newly acquired book. And it strikes me so strongly how I used to be intelligent but not discerning. Rereading and rethinking. Absolutely devouring this book.

So many things to challenge, to counter. Yet, I also recognise the need just to sit back and read and to accept his views.

Let me begin with a fast one for now. "By saying "God sees into the heart" it denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes GOD for the enemy of life...the saint in whom God takes pleasure is the ideal castrate..life is at an end where the "kingdom of God" begins.."

Well, I refute. Firstly and quite simply, it is suffice to say that I am delineating from the Christian theological point of view and/or argument. As always, my approach is one of an all-encompassing morality and religion. The "kingdom of God" begins when men is living. When man realizes that he has to live as man, life and the achievement of the "kingdom of God" then goes had in hand.

And secondly to me, the saint is the man who exercises himself in betterment, with the end goal of personal and species betterment. True, he may not be exercising his will to power as Nietzsche advocates. But he is exercising his will, this cannot be refuted. Language and ideas are the weapons of the weak, so he argues. True enough, I can give him that. But resistance is still resistance, weak or otherwise. It may not last, it may be stamped out but it is still an exercise in will. And when we are stripped bare of all and compared with all, we are similar in this respect, our possession of a will. It is our basal weapon. But I am not done here yet. So it may be a little dodgy. I should not be even cross-examining his arguments on organised religion right? Since I am coming from the angle of general philosophy. So let's just leave these refutations as that.

But he does touch on some regarding the will. And I feel inclined to challenge.

Will carry on this thread tomorrow. Can't wait.

Tuesdays with Morrie

Everyone has read it. I never felt the need to read it. But oh well...so I picked it up from the school library.

Hmm....I am not impressed. But something there did make me think a little, or rather made me reflect.

So Morrie is telling Mitch that he wants to be happy at the specific moment when he passes. Even when the pain is all engulfing, he wants to be able to detach himself from the moment so that his last thoughts are not those of fear and suffering.

But before this, he had shared with Mitch that we all needed to stop living in fear. As life is full of possible negative consequences, pain and suffering is then an irrevocable possibility of every action.

This then led me to think about what I had realized about the beauty of life, the irreversibility of time and the fragility of that moment when our minds were "open".

But then, to be able to achieve detachment as Buddha preaches, I don't know.

Normally my entries are very impersonal and objective, but for once, I am going to break out of my shell and share a bit of my personal feelings. Because it is the "mortal", "ego" side of me that is holding me back from the ability to love fully and in turn to be able to free myself (detach fully).

We can consider any kind of pain. As I had theorized before, since I now understood the beauty of real man and moral reality and moral truth, I also stated that it is entirely impossible to live based on my understandings of the moral truth since we have to function in the world of social reality which is still very real.

What is holding me back? Pain. More specifically, my fear of pain and suffering. Which is human, I guess. To truly be unafraid, we have to look it in the face and live in the moment. We have to live with our emotions on our sleeves consistently.

But of course, the problem here is that (merging with Eugene's theory), not all of us are playing at the same game level. We are not all playing at the level of the moral game, most probably the other is playing at the level of the "ego" game.

I think this is what perpetuates our fear of pain and suffering, thus we will never be able to experience fully what love is (for example) and then since we can never fully grasp what it is to love (unless we surrender fully to the experience and allow our minds to be open to it), then we can never detach ourselves from what we do not understand.

Of course, to bridge this gap and incongruity in playing levels, "free agents" are then necessary.

So yet again, I realised the vast spiritual, philosophical and mental challenge that Buddha was able to overcome as he loved fully and in turn could detach himself fully.

Progression

From the brilliant "Outsider" to the drawn-out and dreary "Nauseau", I naturally progress to Viktor Frankl's "Man's search for Meaning".

Now for a mere 11 bucks, I have laid my hands on a book which makes me go "wow!" continuously. I mean, it is truly fresh to see a psychological approach based on a philosophy which is by no means baseless. Who can doubt the cauldron of extreme conditions that produced it.

Now there is really too much to say about this book. So I'll just draw out some snippets.

"There is nothing in the world that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life. There is much wisdom in the words of Nitezsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.""

"For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefor, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment."

"In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life , he can only respond by being responsible."

"Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"

"What is demanded of man is not, to endure the meaningless of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. LOGOS is deeper than logic."

"To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but freedom to take a stand towards the conditions."

7. Time and Space: So I learn about something called "Absolute Time"

And obviously this means that I have to reconsider what I think I know.

WHAT IS ABSOLUTE TIME

Newton introduced the idea of absolute time. Although he understood that clocks weren't perfect and measuring time was subject to human error, Newton believed in an absolute time that was similar to a universal, omnipotent God-like time, one that was the same for everyone, everywhere. In other words, someone standing at the North Pole on Earth would experience time the same way as someone standing on Mars.


Luckily, it is debunked. We are getting nearer to a picture here.

WHY TIME BEING ABSOLUTE MAKES SENSE

First of all, a clear understanding of the concept of time (2) is necessary.

Time is reckoned by noting the intervals that occur by the motion of material things.

Historically, this has meant how many times the sun is at its highest point in the sky (days), the moon at the same phase (month), and the passing of the seasons (year).

Recognition of the passage of time is always in relation to something material.


WHY TIME IS NOT ABSOLUTE BUT SPECIFIC ABSOLUTE, THUS NOT A UNIVERSAL ABSOLUTE

Every material thing can also be said to have an absolute character, providing we choose the appropriate reference frame to consider with.

when time is measured within a system, it is a constant to this system. This is a specific absolute, not a universal absolute.

A "moving" system is the same as a "resting" system from the perspective of those doing the measuring within the system.

To further explain this: What is the universal fact to be witnessed by all observers who are part of an inertial frame?

It is that all things that are at rest in that system will stay that way and that things that are set in motion will continue that motion in a straight line with a constant speed unless acted upon by external forces (Newton's first law of motion).

An inertial frame is a frame of reference in which bodies are not accelerated from the perspective of within the system.

Yet, the whole inertial frame of reference will be accelerated relative to something else.

The important point here is that gravity accelerates all material things (including light) equally together, so that an inertial observer will notice that all things move equally and together within his system, even though his entire system will be accelerating relative to something else.

His space-time region will be perceived as being flat and isotropic.

From http://home.pacbell.net/skeptica/time.html


NOW TO FINALISE, TILO, LADDIE AND MYSELF WILL TAKE A GO AT IT

**Now consider I am standing still and looking at Laddie and Tilo run towards me. I can measure the time at which they take to reach me. Time is then absolute since I am not moving.

But consider the same scenario when I am running away from them as they run towards me. Suddenly the same time to reach me becomes pulled out and stretched.

Time has become relative to the speed at which Tilo and Laddie and me are moving at.

In actual reality, we all are constantly in motion since our earth is in motion in relation to itself and also in relation to the universe. Just like how Tilo and Laddie's positions and mine are never truly fixed in the second scenario.

Thus through this simple illustration, we can see that Absolute time is not possible on both Earth and Mars.**

6. Time and Space: St Augustine on TIME

St Augustine agrees with Plato that time begins with the creation.

Like Aristotle, St Augustine questions whether the past or future really exist.

Surely only the present actually exists and this is instantaneous, only measured by its passing.

Yet, like Aristotle, St Augustine says how can it be that past and future time do not exist.

He tried to answer the apparent contradiction by claiming that past time can only be thought of as past if one is thinking of it in the present. He identifies three times:-

The present of things past is memory, the present of things present is sight, and the present of things future is expectation.


time does not exist without an intelligent being who is able to think in the present about things past, present and future.

5. Time and Space: WOW! Hypercube animation of Nonlinear Time

This is a hyper cube. Use the URL below to watch the hyper cube in motion. Just like time in flux the way it really is. You will notice that your mind's eye tries to hold onto a reference point because it is natural to our 3 dimensional perception but somehow when the hyper cube moves, the reference point is lost and the hypercube seems to bend and warp, just like nonlinear time.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

watch this..holy Shite! Now this is a representation!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP_d14zi8jk