Good Versus Evil, Film at 11

In the battle of Good versus Evil, who wins?

In Herman Melville’s works, Good and Evil often play a large role and they are pitted against each other. However, in many of his works, in the battle of Good and Evil, paradoxically, Evil somehow wins. This was one reason why his books were attacked as “immoral,” and “evil,” in his time. Melville was no Satanist. He was raised Christian, but his belief kept waxing and towards the end of his life, there was little remaining of it.

Nevertheless, he read extensively in the Bible, in particular, Song of Songs, Solomon and Ecclesiastes. All of these were written by or were about King Solomon, the son of King David. He also read extensively in the Book of Mormon. Biblical and other Christian religious allegories are sprinkled liberally throughout his books, in particular, the 600 page poem Clarel, about a journey to the Holy Land.

When Good and Evil go to war and Evil wins, this poses a serious problem for most religious people, in particular the Abrahamic religions which believe in an activist God. For if God exists and is an activist, when Good and Evil go to war, in most if not all cases, Good is supposed to win over Evil, as God is always thought to be stronger than the Devil. After all, no religion suggests that the Devil rules the world. All Abrahamic religions hold that God rules the world. The Devil tries to intrude and do his mischief of course, but when they go mano to mano, God ought to be able to deal with The Evil One quite handily.

Therefore, if there is a fight between Good and Evil and Evil wins, something has gone horribly wrong, and this poses a dilemma for most religious people. Melville interpreted this to mean either that there was no God at all or that if He existed, He was more or less sleeping on the job, and perhaps he ought even to be fired!

The religious have all sorts of explanations for how an activist God allows bad things to happen. They say he is testing us. They say that the Good people are not so good. This is reminiscent of how Puritanical feminists say Nice Guys (TM) are not really so nice after all, this is why women treat them like crap (and this is not the only way that feminists are similar to modern Comstocks). For instance, the Abrahamic Orthodox Jews said that the Jews rebelled against and defied God, and God responded with the Holocaust to punish Jewish rebellion. The solution is for the Jews to act better.

As you can gather, these explanations are quite weak when they are not grasping for truth and morally repugnant. I think we ought to just reject them all for now as lacking evidence and so strange as to seem false on their face.

So we move to Melville’s moral dilemma. We can either go towards atheism or agnosticism, or we go move into Deism. My father was actually a Deist, at least towards the end of his life, but he always hated Christianity and generally refused to go to church much to my mother’s chagrin. Deism was popular around the time of the US Revolutionary War, but it no longer has much popularity. After all, it is rather depressing to feel that you are on your own.

Another possibility is some sort of modified Deism. When I was working as a linguist for an Indian tribe, I asked a prominent anthropologist, Sylvia Broadbent, about the religious beliefs of the local Indians. They are now all fundamentalist Christians, but this is a modern thing. They also insist that they believe in a Great Creator, but this is another modern addition, as I deduced after a while. After the Indians became Christianized, many Indians across the US decided that they believed in a Great Creator, a notion that they took from Plains Indians tribes who apparently did have this notion pre-contact.

Yet pre-contact, there is little evidence that California Indians were much more than animists who believed that the world was alive with magic and spirits which could be manipulated by those who could do so. They did believe in life after death. Souls went to the West, to the Land of the Dead.

However, there was little belief in an almighty God. Broadbent felt that there was some notion of a Creator God, but this was more Deistic than anything else. Broadbent described the theory as Deux Obtusa, or the Lazy God. This was sort of the idea that God created the world, but He has not done a whole heck of a lot ever since. He mostly just sits up there in Heaven taking bong hits. Every now and then, when he is not too stoned, he wakes up and intervenes in our world a bit. Then he goes back to the bong. I like the notion of a lazy God, and even though I am a Christian, this is the sort of a God that I believe in.

How can we reckon that Evil often defeats Good? We can say that we live in a naturalistic world, and bad things happen to good people, by chance more than by design. And in a naturalistic world, a lazy God could indeed exist.

Run of the Mind – Book Review

Repost from the old site.

I received this book, Run of the Mind, by Vijendra Rao, to review and frankly, I was not expecting much. Many of the writers I read on the net are ok, but many are also flawed in some way or another. Plus, I am hard to please as far as writing goes, being a severe critic, especially of my own work, the result of which is a chronic case of writer’s block.

So, I was expecting no more than a mediocre to average text. When I received some advance reviews of this book, raving about a “literary genius” and “the voice of the new India” and “a great writer”, I was still cynical. I figured these were friends of the authors who were engaging in the usual hyperbole, and I don’t like hyperbole in book reviews.

But when I started dipping into this book, I was just stunned. This was some really fine writing here! As I turned the pages, I was often dazzled by his style and a glimpse into a brilliant and wise mind at work. Various influences come to mind, including Milan Kundera. At his best, Rao can actually be compared with Kundera.

There was something else here, metaphysical wisdom, the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of the India. We here in the West can get awfully arrogant. But when it comes down to it, people are the same everywhere.

And when it comes to the really important questions in life, the philosophical questions about morality, the meaning of life, death, the timeless truths of the human experience, all of our Western science has really taught us very little. For centuries, Christianity was actually a block on the study of the deepest questions of our existence.

But in the East, where Buddhism and Hinduism encouraged spiritual exploration rather than thwarting it, I think humanity has progressed further on the metaphysical wisdom scale. As modern science tests out such Eastern mysteries as yoga and meditation, we are learning that these funny folks with dots on their heads and thousands of Gods have really been onto something all of these centuries.

As one who believes in the superiority of the West, I found this book a humbling experience. Even most Leftists are ethnocentric. Reading Run of the Mind and seeing how the Indians have done an end-run around the scientific West in terms of wisdom and gleaning the meaning of the timeless essences of the human experience was a challenge to my Western ethnocentrism.

I came away with a new-found respect for India, a much-maligned society that combines, paradoxically, outrageous poverty and oppression with the wisdom of ages.

Rao is an Indian journalist from Mysore, a large city in the state of Karnataka, in the South of India. He is a Hindu and a bit of an Indian nationalist, though not of the Hindu ultranationalist type. He is a Brahmin, but is not a casteist.

In this book, we see the injured pride typical of Indian and Chinese and Arab nationalists, the pride of what were once the greatest cultures on Earth, since surpassed by the West.

High-caste Hindu nationalists like Rao tend to be hostile to British colonialism, but that feeling is not universal amongst Indians. The Brahmins were insulted when the British told them their culture was backwards and demanded that they change it.

On the other hand, lower-caste Indians and especially Dalits often think colonialism as the best thing that ever happened to India, for it directly attacked the caste system as cruel, backwards and uncivilized. As you can see, hostility towards British colonialism is not universal at all amongst Indians.

Rao’s book is a series of essays he wrote for Indian papers that he worked. Given the often-dazzling prose, it is amazing that he often banged these out in the hour or two before work at the office in the morning.

Although gourmets of fine writing like me can appreciate this book as merely an exercise in great writing, most non-Indians are likely to find this book alienating. The subject of most essays is situated in modern Indian society, with references to Indian politicians, actors, musicians, authors and Hindu Gods. If you don’t know these topics, you lack a frame of reference.

The subjects of a number of these essays are located specifically within modern-day Mysore and Karnataka. For these reasons, I feel that this book will be of most interest to Indians, especially Indian expats in the US and Britain, and in particular those from Southern India, especially those from Karnataka and Mysore.

On the other hand, anyone who appreciates metaphysical and philosophical wisdom and wonderful prose may also want to dip into this delightful book, as one savors and admires a glass of fine wine.

Rao, like many great writers, is not an easy writer at all. Hemingway he is not. Quite a few times, I found myself having to reread sentences to figure out what he was trying to say. Those who enjoy stimulating their minds with mental puzzles will appreciate the workout, others may just be frustrated and put the book down in exasperation. Depends how one likes one’s prose.

Run of the Mind is unfortunately available only as an e-book at the moment, but it is still an affordable $12. Rao’s work is as good as, and often better than, many authors crowding the shelves of our American chain bookstores. This author deserves to be bound, published and on a shelf. Interested publishers and agents may contact Rao via me through the email address on this blog.

The Run of the Mind e-book can be purchased here, at White Cottage Publishing, for the moment.

The best way to give you a feel for this book is to excerpt some wondrous tidbits from it, reprinted below:

*****

The more the ego is sought to be dressed with the robes of exclusivity, the more naked it stands.

*****

Why does wisdom elude us? Just when we have felt we are ascending, we slide. It is a tempting need of the soul to fly free of the body that has got habituated to harlotry. All of us are accustomed to hosting such transient nobility as our mind’s guest.

It is he in whose mind nobility has found a permanent home that gets through the life’s examinations. Is it any wonder than that the number of candidates succeeding in this tedious examination is so few? The examination is undoubtedly tough, but it is an examination where we are allowed to be accompanied by the guide.

*****

Belief in the mortality of doctors is a sure way of gaining freedom from the fear of death. In this state of fearlessness, love of life sustains the will to transit into non-life.

*****

The rat race for power has wiped out the ideological distinctions of our political parties and reduced their leaders to one mangled mass of unidentifiable bodies without life, soul or character. … the need felt in secular circles (of intellectuals, not politicians) for propagating secularism has the similar potential to reduce India to a land of cultural zombies, uniform in their lack of distinctness.

*****

Mysteries appear most enchanting when not disrobed of the shroud of non-inquisitiveness. Probing quest of the senses and the mind divests phenomena of their element of mystery and parades them shamelessly as naked facts, insipid shreds of information and commonplace knowledge.

*****

Greed kicks reason out of its habitat.

*****

Mangoes don’t seem to smile any more. Or, do they? They pluck the fruits and incubate them. Why young mangoes, even children hasten to maturity prematurely these days. They are plucked from their childhood and subjected to treatments with a view on the yield.

*****

Absence of commercial activity means not only innocence and longer life, but also no knowledge or need for arithmetic. Where there is no arithmetic, there is no counting. No counting results in birthdays not being kept track of. Where there are no birthdays, there are no annual reminders of the wear and tear of life. The time one gains by merging with nature is both relative and absolute.

*****

Time, like light, exists as both wave and particles. We don’t feel that the person who borrowed money from us has done us justice in returning the amount in installments, whereas his timely repayment in one large chunk – just the way he borrowed it from us – gives us immense satisfaction.

This is the difference between living in a city and living on the countryside. Time, broken into so many fractions over the day, and over a life span, does not mean the same when spent in a village in its undivided whole.

*****

LIFE, the eternal journey through space and time, also seems a race against them. Much of man’s inability to be elsewhere when he wants to be, and his sheer mortality, are both absolute limits that space and time place on his existence.

*****

Man, in turning the middleman in celestial transactions, has put a spoke in the water cycle’s wheel.

*****

Knowledge is the veil of the ignorant.

*****

The torch that the heart holds out to light memory lane is not bright enough to illuminate the path. It is like an arduous drive in insufficient light through an unpaved way on a moonless night.

*****

Sorrow has lost its intensity. The mind pathetically attempts to relive those intense moments. Like the woefully futile effort of the lover to maximise the benefit of coition; like the banal attempt of an incomplete soul to reap a higher quality of meditative yield.

*****

How we crave for solitude and when solitude is granted, we take liberties with ourselves! We drop our guard and shed all inhibitions. We become our true selves. When we are alone we have nobody before whom to guard our image.

The heavy payload of sin is launched on to the space vehicle of solitude and with the power of our greed as the fuel, is dispatched on to another orbit, outside our mind. But, the guilt is all the time circling around us like the satellite propelled by the negative energy that we keep emitting all through our lives. Thievery is a very private act. Solitude is its only accomplice.

*****

Modern existence has left us with malnourished sorrow, a peculiar state characterised by a sense of latent incapacity for feeling. It is not happiness alone that we always feel is not enough; the shallowness of our experience of sorrow leaves us unfulfilled as well.

*****

New Year resolves are marked by a pronounced denial of warranty. The dead weight of the discarded resolutions is lighter only than the guilt that their discarding induces. Drinks are gulped less in celebration of ushering in the New Year than in downing the guilt associated with the celebration of nothingness which, every preceding year, to most of us, would mean.

*****

Behind All Ideology Lies “Religion”

A comment by John R:

From Carl Jung’s essay Concerning the Archetypes, With Special Reference to the Anima Concept:

Now religious ideas, as history shows, are charged with an extremely suggestive, emotional power. Among them I naturally reckon all s, everything that we learn from the history of religion, and anything that has an “-ism” attached to it. The latter is only a modern variant of the denominational religions.

A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating collective representation. His very materialism, atheism, communism, socialism, liberalism, intellectualism, existentialism, or what not, testifies against his innocence. Somewhere or other, overtly or covertly, he is possessed by a supraordinate idea. […]

“Any one who alleges that he is not can immediately be suspected of having exchanged a known form of belief for a variant which is less known both to himself and to others. Instead of theism he is a devotee of atheism, instead of Dionysus he favors the more modern Mithras, and instead of heaven he seeks paradise on earth.

“A man without a dominating collective representation would be a thoroughly abnormal phenomenon. But such a person exists only in the fantasies of isolated individuals who are deluded about themselves. They are mistaken not only about the existence of religious ideas, but also and more especially about their intensity.

The archetype behind a religious idea has, like every instinct, its specific energy, which it does not lose even if the conscious mind ignores it. Just as it can be assumed with the greatest probability that every man possess all the average human functions and qualities, so we may expect the presence of normal religious factors, and this expectation does not prove fallacious.

Any one who succeeds in putting off the mantle of faith can do so only because another lies close to hand. No one can escape the prejudice of being human.

There Were No Beginnings, There Will Be No Endings

“Science has found that nothing can disappear without a trace. Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation…” Werner Von Braun (Nichols 1962).

“This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts.” Giordano Bruno.

“It never starts it never stops it just goes it never zeroes.”  Robert Lindsay, 1979, from an unpublished work of fiction.

As you can see, the notion of beginnings and endings, of births and deaths, is illusory. As something may not come out of nothing (story of my life), yet something may not turn into nothing either. Nothingness may not birth any something, and something may not turn into nothing. It seems that this is occurring all the time, but this is mere illusion.

Instead births or beginnings are simply one form of energy and matter transforming into other, usually more salient one. Endings, deaths, dissolutions, are nothing of the sort. Something has merely transformed into something else, as we saw with beginnings.

Bruno, burned at the stake for heresy by the Inquisition in 1600 as a martyr to science, in part for upholding Copernican astronomy, was ahead of his time. The universe was infinite, as he put it, “many worlds.” All matter was made of atoms. Our world was not the center of the universe or of anything but that it only seems that way.

No position, not up or down or this way or that, is set, as all is relative to the positions of other entities. Life was probably not unique here, and had probably sprung up in many other places in the universe. Comets were the remains of stars, not messages from the Gods. In a sense, everything is connected to everything, prefiguring particle physics. Space was infinite (Bruno is almost the father of infinity) and if Space was infinite, than so must be Time.

And logically, if all of this is true, then Christianity is “wholly false.”

Although he did believe in God, it was a diminished God. This from a Dominican friar who spent most of his time in monasteries!

For the logical cul de sac in italics above, he burned with fire. 13 years later, Galileo barely saved his own skin from similar holy heat.

If space is infinite, then so must be time.

Here we look to the early Jewish Kabbalists, studying in the 1300s-1400s. After centuries of study, they determined that God was “endless bright White Light, extending as far as one can see in every direction.” Or infinitival White Light. Furthermore, God is “that which cannot be known.” Going beyond that, God was “that thought of which man may not even properly entertain.” In other words, God is beyond our mental grasp. He is the Inconceivable.

It is now the hour for a brief discussion about Time. I haven’t read Kant yet, and maybe I can’t, but we will dabble anyway.

First of all, the future simply does not exist. You are all aware of this, right? Quit shaking your heads. The. Future. Does. Not. Exist. Say it until you are blue in the face. What is fascinating about the future is that we all know it doesn’t exist, yet we spend all of our lives pretending that it does exist.

Tomorrow I will…In the future I will…Pretty soon I’m going to…I have an appointment on the…I will be graduating on the…I’ll meet you at the restaurant at two…I’m looking forward to the future.

For something that doesn’t exist, we sure spend a lot of time thinking and talking about it! Worst of all, we prepare for it!

Now we have hopefully established the nonexistence of the future. At some point, sure, the future will exist. For instance, it will probably be 11 PM here in 31 minutes, assuming the world does not blow up. But at exactly that moment 31 minutes from now that the future supposedly exists, it won’t even be the future anymore! It will be another present moment. Follow? Of course you do.

What follows after the end of the last paragraph is that the present does indeed exist. You’d be hard to find a philosopher to disagree with that statement. A poststructuralist might, but they disagree with everything. Ah, so the present exists! But the future does not? Surely not. So we are left with only half of time. Every present moment, plus all of the past.

The next thing we need to ask is if the past exists. This is a very important question. I always figured it did, but a friend told me recently that the past does not exist. It used to exist, but it doesn’t anymore! But of course. He must be correct, no? At one time the past existed, but now it no longer does. How does it exist?

In memories, movies, books, etc. Which are merely objects in the present that made recordings of the past when the past was happening. Now we have eliminated the other half of time, and all we have left are second hands slamming on the clock, beginning and ending so quickly, nearly simultaneously, that we can scarcely put our finger on any moment and call it NOW.

Which now brings us to a rather carpe diem moment, eh? To live logically, we should all act like 80 IQ ghetto types, living for each second and nothing before or after existing. Thank God we don’t all think like philosophers.

There is another view, which is also very present-centric. This one holds once again that the present moment is salient, but that the past and future both exist, but they only exist as part of the present and of each other.

In other words, what has brought us to this present moment? Think about it. The entirety of the weight of the past, tumbling onto our hour like a rock slide, has brought us here, to this most auspicious of bright moments. The past made the present, so it is here with us as the vehicle that brought us here and also as the sculptor which made the present moment what it is.

As the future will in part be determined by the present, and hence also the past, the future also exists in the present, as a potentiality. The past also exists in the future, as the past and present vehicles drive towards the future and create it. Whether or not the present or future exist in the past is more problematic, but perhaps they do, as the earlier seeds that grew the trees of today and tomorrow.

One notion, popularized by Time Theorist Guy Murchie, is that all of the past that has already happened and all of the future that will occur, is, at this moment, all simultaneously present in this, our present moment. The Eternal Now. That’s a bit hard to swallow, but I like the mouth feel.

And that will be it for now, as we are out of Time.

References

Bruno, Giordano. 1584. On Cause, Principle, and Unity (De la causa, principio, et Uno).

Murchie, Guy. 1961. Music of the Spheres: The Material Universe from Atom to Quasar, Simply Explained. Cambridge: Riverside Press.

Nichols, William, ed. 1962. The Third Book of Words to Live By (pp.119-120). New York: Simon and Schuster.

“Road to Nowhere” Talking Heads

One of my all-time favorite bands.

Saw them at UCLA in February 1979 at the beginning of the punk explosion, when punk was truly cutting edge. The Talking Heads were the shit then. No one had heard of them, and anyone who had was hip.

They did “Psycho Killer” and it brought down the house, except it was outdoors.

There were UCLA students in the crowd. Some sat behind us. Guys who looked stoned and were already feminized and pacified, warm, floppy shells of men, though feminism was hardly even born yet, but they were students, and college will turn the best of men to school pusses.

The women were sort of masculine, as they must be when the males are feminized, otherwise you have a half-filled whole, and nature abhors a vacuum. To complete the circle, the female must become masculine to the very degree that the male has become feminine.

A guy named Lao Tzu figured this out 2000 years before, but even he was too late. It’s so obvious. It’s the way of the circle. A half is never whole. The male and the female are each halves, broken humans. Only through linkage can we fill in the colors and make the circle whole to set the wheel spinning so the cycle can go on. A male is empty without a female, and vice versa. Joined, each is made whole and the emptiness is filled in again.

Heard this in a coffee shop the other day, Starfucks. Well, at least they play good music.

The guys working there were feminized, as they always are in such places. The chicks dig the feminized guys, but the probably never fuck them, the danger necessary for sex that the female requires being lacking. Once again, an unfilled whole. Feminine plus feminine doesn’t fill in the circle with the Number 2 pencil. It just makes a half moon.

I was listening to the song. I was sure I’d heard it before. Some guy my age was in there bobbing his head, along with his daughter. She couldn’t have been much more than 13 or 14, but she was looking at me in that way, half hate, half stare can’t stop, so I knew she was a woman-in-girl, true girls having no sexual world. The guy was a square, but he was bobbing his head. I was moving to where the sound was coming from, where they lurked. We were all bobbing our heads to the music, but no one said a word.

I thought it was Talking Heads, but I wasn’t sure.

Googled it and there it was. 1985, a bad year, but there was lots of sex and tons of drugs, so really, no matter how fucked of a year it was, the palliatives always alchemize it somehow golden, which is all you can do to a shitty year. 1985, in three years David Byrne’s band would break up, true genius being a flash in the pan of youth, as Weininger notes.

The real geniuses are always young, and the greatest bands flash and burn Roman candle-like and smash to bits pretty quick, the Super Collider Reactor of multiple geniuses being too much for the temporal universe of flesh and blood, so they go out in fire not ice, but they are kind enough to leave us the greatness flashes, like those human images burned into walls after Hiroshima, daguerreotypes of genius before they go.

We’re on the road to nowhere, says the song. Well sure we are.

David Byrne says its meaningless and silly, the song.

Like Hell it is. Bout as vapid as the trails of life. Where do they lead? To the bones, or increasingly, the urn and if you’re lucky, a hole in a rock.

We’re on the road to nowhere.

Where are we headed? To nowhere, to death, to a personal Black Hole sucking away whole universes in a pinpoint, at Warp Speed, faster than light.

Well, of course.

Meaningless, my ass, David.

What’s left to do? All there is to do is dance. Get up and dance to the music, fools. For too soon we drop our last.