Today, in blazing heat in the middle of the Mohave desert, I ate an iced tropical fruit salad, topped with freshly whipped cream.
What a delight served up with a silver spoon by one hundred thousand generations of ancestral endeavor.
Asante sana Bwana 'mkubwa!!
03.16.07.2006
If you gave more details regarding this dish you pleasured (and the point of your post in general), I wouldn’t call this thread a demonstration of absurdity. Allow me to elaborate:
The earliest known date when the availability of ice could be stored anywhere around a climate condition of “blazing heat” is recorded around 400 BCE when the Persians developed what we could call “ancient freezers”.Since 100,000 generations does not even equal 100,000 years, your estimate is so far off that it’s comical. That early humans as far back as even 10,000 BCE could conceive bringing ice into a “blazing hot” environment just to fancy a delightful dish is ridiculous.
Now, if you would like to change your post and say that you are honoring the ingenuity of the ancient Persians… by all means, type away without any further word from me.
No Persian could have ever made ice if our first ancestor never made that first quantum leap in consciousness and stopped thinking like an ape. The Step from him (or her) to making ice and landing on the moon was long and arduos - two millions years and more long in fact. Each step allowed our brain to grow a micron larger in cubic capacity, allowing more neurons to connect, until LO! - it was eventually intelligent enough for that ancient Persian to have a bright idea. Of course he never made ice, Nature did that for him in the winter. Then what he did was dig a shallow pond on the shade side of his adobe house, and dig a basement just below that. Then every morning throughout winter he would float the night’s harvest of ice into his cellar and use it throughout the summer to cool his house and drink iced tea.
Thus it is that I revere all our anceters all the way back down the line, and say a prayer in their honor for all the luxuries and delights I enjoy today.
Shall you and I agree to respect the wisdom of our more recent ancestors -(circa 4000 BC) who also worshipped the first pair, and also dain to call them Adam and Eve?
So, when are we going to break out the joss sticks?
I’ve got my tripod ready.
You should know. Ancestral reverence is the keystone opf Confucian precepts. I know that the Cantonese in Hong Kong keep their ancestral bones stored in urns and taken out to be polished once a year.
Before that, while the bodies are still decomposing, they light fire crackers at the grasve sites to keep hungry ghosts at bay. Roman Catholics light candles. My daughter wants my skull when I am gone. She has a private altar. It would be nice to be worshipped by her. Alas, I have lost too many teeth to make a handsom altar piece. But I will grin my gap-toothed grin at her every day. I believe our bodies should be compressed into diamond keepsakes and made into charmed necklaces.
03.17.07.2008
Where in my response did you detect such a claim that Persians “made ice”? Since I never said such things, why do you even bother to bring up such absurdity in the first place?
No, we shant. The breadth of human intelligence has not changed in the last 7000 years, only our storage of knowledge and the methods of applying it.
The creation of myths and fables were the ancestor’s way of coping with certain observations through the complexity that is human consciousness. As our knowledge increases, our need to rely on myths and fables deteriorate into nothing more than poetry for the sake of aesthetics.
I believe that Mankind’s basic IQ was probably set more than two million years ago. Stone tools older than that reveal a high degree of sophistcated design and craftmanship. It takes all our present ability to duplicate them. Since nobody has yet found a way to improve on the original designs and workmanship of Stone Age engenuity, it seems that both common sense as well as circumstancial evidence supports my hypothesis, We know that Cro-Magnon had the same brain capacity as ours. Neanderthal’s cubic capacity was even larger. That did no happen over-night - all of which makes current theories about the intelligence and insighfulness of our earliest ancestors redundant. Hence your naive conclusion that man only got bright a par second ago. Which is why you hav’nt a clue about the ancestral reverence I am refering to in this thread. As far as I am concerned we are not even in the same league on this - as is with so many other subjects.
I did all my research on oral-based cultures in Africa for more than twenty years - and thus got my observations about preliterate human consciousness direct from the horse’s mouth so to speak. am beginning to wonder where you got yours from. Sounds like regurgitated book knowledge to me.
My private researches on the orgins of human consciousness contradict much that is in standard text books.
Much of myth, if not all of it, is crypted and disguises hidden wisdoms, meant to be understood only by the initiated. (Hence casting pearls before swine. etc)
We continue to rely on myths and fables and always will. The atom is a theoretical myth. God is a theological myth. Jesus is a religious myth. Which is why I said the possible discovery of his bones is so important.
Not quite.
Myth speaks to a part of the mind that is non-rational, and that gropes beyond the limits of rationality to understand consciousness itself, the universe as a whole, and the relationship between the two, all of which are things neither reason nor the scientific method can touch upon. Myth speaks on these things in symbol, and yes, certainly in poetry, but if you think poetry exists only “for the sake of aesthetics,” then you do not understand poetry at all.
couldn’t have said it better. However, we still do rely on superstition and myth, because it seems to bind us as communitites. hollywood movies, novels etc, (even the news 
) We like mystery. Humans have relied on it for a long time. I am not sure i really want it to change either. I like art and mystery more than science and philosophy, though I do see the practicallity of both.
Wel said.
I will add, though, that I believe the on-going evolution of human consciousness will result in an eventual union between the analytical and intuitive halves of the collective psyche and produce a holistically enlightened sense of cosmic consciousness.
I sure do hope so. That would be nice wouldn’t it. No more crusaders of the left or right brain.
03.18.07.2012
I have made no such claim.
Obviously; perhaps you’d like to clarify this “misunderstanding” I have. If ancestral reverence is anything like ancestral worship, then you’re right; I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. If that’s the case, where did you get it from because I’ve never heard of it.
However, if it is ancestral worship we’re talking about, then your assumptions about what I know and don’t know are even farther out of league than our agreements.
Sounds like you’ve wasted twenty years of your life. Unless you’re an accredited scientist with a valued standing in the scientific community, your observations mean less than any standard text book. The end-product (your knowledge) seems to be a collection of experiences rather than studiously analyzed data.
Such a claim from one who has demonstrated poor grammar.
“Initiated” you say? You really are a trip.
Finally! I agree with you that we need myths and fables, but I’m sure that you think we need them for different reasons than I.
Hardly. I was using the word as a figure of speech, but in all fairness, poetry is eventually what myth and fables become; but that’s not all. What I love about poetry is its capacity to contain messages about morality or some other ethical teaching. In the end, that is really what myths and fables become: teachings built around fantastic stories or events. The aesthetics of teaching are still aesthetics nontheless.
Nope. You’ve missed it.
It’s not morality and ethics per se (actually I believe those can better be addressed rationally, once one gets away from the core values on which all derivative ethics are based, and which are not rationally determined). It’s a way of understanding realities which cannot be approached objectively. For poetry, that may include subjective, primary reality on a small scale. For myth, however, the scale is always large.
As I mentioned earlier, but didn’t go into detail about, there are three undeniably real aspects of our world which are immune to reason and to scientific method. These are: consciousness itself, the universe as a whole, and the relation between the two. If you need me to explain why these are not parts of objective reality – despite their undeniable reality of some sort – then I will.
An attempt to understand these realities, and to express that understanding (always metaphorically, since direct expression isn’t to be looked for) is hardly encompassed by the term “aesthetics.” And that is what all myth is about. A creation myth, for example, is only on the crudest surface appraisal a story of how the world came to be. Much more importantly, it’s a statement about what the world IS, and who we are, and how we fit into it.
Consider the many creation myths in which some form of primal chaos, either a primordial proto-deity or monster such as Tiamat, or some impersonal chaos form such as the “waters” of Genesis, is acted upon by a God. In all cases, you will find that the act of creation consists, first, of a division. Marduk sunders Tiamat into pieces each of which becomes something-or-other; God creates a firmament in the midst of the waters and divides the waters above from the waters below.
The important point here is not the particular pieces, nor the end result, but the fact that creation consists of the division of an undivided whole into parts. And when you understand that this is really a statement, not about the process whereby the universe evolved in the distant past, but about the process whereby we experience it NOW, then this really has something very important to say. It is saying that the universe is, in itself, one undivided whole that cannot be experienced; that the creation – the process that allows us to experience – is taking this whole apart into component bits and sub-processes, so that we can occupy one part and, from that perspective, observe other parts.
And that’s just one example. All myths come down to those three things in the end.
03.18.07.2013
Perhaps I chose not to give an in depth explanation as you did. Regardless, this thread is not particularly about myth as poetry.
Of course, I am no expert on that subject. Personally, I prefer poetry that reflects the real world. Simple, concise, and uncomplicated. Sometimes very complicated… but that’s my cup of tea. What’s yours?
I admit to my error. I was being a trifle trite about your cliam of 7000 years as the start date of human intelligence. To be more precise - according to my calculations the exact period your claim was out by is: Two million, four hundred and ninety three thousand years.
Since I believe that man and God are one and the same Being, why split hairs over the exact definition between reverence and worship for our ancestors?
Pure pseudo-intellectual bigotry. How many times does one have to listen to it! Genius is the natural attribute of all humans and it can be evoked in ways other than in a lecture room. In fact the classroom tends to stifle original thought. A science degree is no guarentee of anything except the ability to memorize pre-digested data. Scientists come a dime a dozen. We have millions of them and the mass production line is producing millions more as we speak. Too many of them remain impractical after graduation - even at the cost of their ;lives. Example: Four young university graduates force-landed their light plane in the Kalahari in 1966. None were injured in the landing, yet all five were found dead five days later. None made it more than ten miles from the plane. Medically they died from dehydration and exposure. In fact they died out of panic generated by ignorance. The irony of the situation, which would be laughable if it were not so tragic, is that if a text book on desert survival had been included in the flight manifest, none of those young men would have died. Millions of animals and insects survive year round in the Kalahari, including large troops of chakma baboons. So do some twenty thousand Bushmen, (in 1966) including myself who had been there a year earlier, studying animism with them. The simple fact is that their erudition over-rode their basic common primate sense. I was twenty five at the time and had been contemplating going back to school to earn a degree in anthroplogy. That little incident convinced me as to where the better school of learning lay and I have given the ivory tower a wide berth ever since. Everyone can respect the criteria that determines scientific verification - but not to the extent that it confounds our common sense. Look how many fools with law degrees end up governing us.
To return to your objection about my lack of qualification. An original reseacher who has enough personal curiosity and basic common sense to get off his backside and step beyond the known and actually go out into the wilds to explore new paths, is without peer. We have very few of such. Especially in the field of metaphysics.
Trying to belittle my person, as you have done repeatedly, has no effect. I claim no great skill at grammer. I am happy for my reports to be understood by reasonable people. I speak better than I write and act better than I speak.
Absolutely! Besides experimenting with every known mind-altering drug for half my life, I have also taken direct intiation into Animism, Shamanism, Christianity. Hinduism. Taoism, Islam and Zen and have invested decades practicing their disciplines.
I would have a lot more respect for your critical opinions if you informed me of your own metaphysical qualifications - especially regarding the subject of this thread.
03.19.07.2018
You should put that in your sig. It would have prevented me from ever responding to any of your posts in the first place (it may prevent others from coming in contact with you as well). Now that I know your “knowledge” is based on drug-induced experiences, I need not to answer your questions any further.
When you’re ready for the real world, your words may yet hold value.
why are you guys arguing like little children.
Experimenting with drugs can make you see things very differently, and excite weird parts of your brain. You’ll be suprised the things your brain can do.
And experiementing with drugs, does not mean you are always doing them 24 hours a day.
Sagesound, have you ever done basic hallucinagens like mushrooms?
03.19.07.2022
Never have; never will. Why? Because A) I don’t see the point and B) I don’t have a need. Just like I no longer feel a pressing need for alcohol… I do not see a lasting benefit by it for my life. Enhancing your perceptions, even mental, with drugs, is a greater health risk than using a Dreamachine. I would like to try a Dreamachine someday, mainly because I understand the the whole purpose of “expanding your mind” and “enhancing your perceptions” basically throws your imagination to new heights your brain could not previously have achieved by itself. However, I simply do not believe in achieving those heights with drugs.
I’ve met too many people high on something or other… they seem to sacrifice rationality and logic for whatever their imagination makes up.
I stay away from most stuff as well. I am just telling you mushrooms is something you can’t experience any other way, people telling you about it cannot do justice on that one.
there is a reason people call them “magic” and why many people even feel they are sacred or the most spiritual thing they have ever done.
I know the dare program says, “just say no.” But as far as mushrooms go, I would learn the facts about them, and then have a friend who has done them before take you out in nature and try it. I dunno, it is just something from another world really, and to most people it isn’t scary or anything.
Anyway, to each their own. I respect that some people just don’t want to try it. I think mushrooms is kind of like the blue pill.