from Spiritual Journal, 8/21/01
Oct. 5th, 2001 06:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsyche10:00 p.m.
"To define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast, and for this reason the universe, the all, seems to defy definition."
--Alan Watts, The Book, p. 141
This may be why critics of my demarcation poem were dissatisfied with the direction it took. The protagonist fell into the naming trap, just as the one who had come before her and from whom she strove to extricate herself.
10:28 p.m.
"Grant that the statement 'Everything is energy' conveys no more information than 'Everything is everything.' [...] This relativity, or interdependence, of the two [that is, mass/non-mass] is as close to a metaphysical unity underlying difference as anyone can wish."
--Alan Watts, The Book, pp. 145-6
This goes back to my church's first tenet and also the second(?) one. It goes back to why I feel that E=mc^2 has especial religious import and relevance for me. This is a description of why I find hard science to be, at its core, innately metaphysical. This is why I consider Albert Einstein, that venerable scientist, a bona fide modern-day mystick.
10:50 p.m.
"As a devout Christian you would be saying day after day the prayer, 'Our Father who art in heaven,' and eventually it gets you: you are relating emotionally to IT as to an idealized father--male, loving but stern, and a personal being quite other than yourself."
--Alan Watts, The Book, p. 152
Yet, before that:
"You were probably brought up in a culture where the presiding image of IT has for centuries been God the Father, whose pronoun is He, because IT seems too impersonal and She would, of course, be inferior."
--also p. 152
The last phrase, taken within the context of the book, is obviously made tongue-in-cheek. Yet this goes back to my sincere belief that the gender dichotomy is one of the greatest agents of our societal dis-ease.
It also goes back to why Westerners un- or subconsciously equate the body as the Other, matter as feminine, and why women--feminized human nature--is the cause of the Biblical Fall [from grace].
Perhaps here I have found new value in the Genesis fable that I have, since becoming a feminist, come to abhor. But it only works as an archetypal myth--not as literal happenstance. To believe that the story is concrete history--an event that actually happened--is to give into the ancient illusion of fundamental dualism, this time between/among the sexes.
"To define is to limit, to set boundaries, to compare and to contrast, and for this reason the universe, the all, seems to defy definition."
--Alan Watts, The Book, p. 141
This may be why critics of my demarcation poem were dissatisfied with the direction it took. The protagonist fell into the naming trap, just as the one who had come before her and from whom she strove to extricate herself.
10:28 p.m.
"Grant that the statement 'Everything is energy' conveys no more information than 'Everything is everything.' [...] This relativity, or interdependence, of the two [that is, mass/non-mass] is as close to a metaphysical unity underlying difference as anyone can wish."
--Alan Watts, The Book, pp. 145-6
This goes back to my church's first tenet and also the second(?) one. It goes back to why I feel that E=mc^2 has especial religious import and relevance for me. This is a description of why I find hard science to be, at its core, innately metaphysical. This is why I consider Albert Einstein, that venerable scientist, a bona fide modern-day mystick.
10:50 p.m.
"As a devout Christian you would be saying day after day the prayer, 'Our Father who art in heaven,' and eventually it gets you: you are relating emotionally to IT as to an idealized father--male, loving but stern, and a personal being quite other than yourself."
--Alan Watts, The Book, p. 152
Yet, before that:
"You were probably brought up in a culture where the presiding image of IT has for centuries been God the Father, whose pronoun is He, because IT seems too impersonal and She would, of course, be inferior."
--also p. 152
The last phrase, taken within the context of the book, is obviously made tongue-in-cheek. Yet this goes back to my sincere belief that the gender dichotomy is one of the greatest agents of our societal dis-ease.
It also goes back to why Westerners un- or subconsciously equate the body as the Other, matter as feminine, and why women--feminized human nature--is the cause of the Biblical Fall [from grace].
Perhaps here I have found new value in the Genesis fable that I have, since becoming a feminist, come to abhor. But it only works as an archetypal myth--not as literal happenstance. To believe that the story is concrete history--an event that actually happened--is to give into the ancient illusion of fundamental dualism, this time between/among the sexes.