Universal Mysticism

East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, was published in 1973, and is the product of leading historians adding up finally to 969 pages.  Recently my total ignorance of the history of most of the planet, was brought back to me.  I was not surprised to find the following statement, however, in my newly acquired book.

[Taoism is]...in large part a philosophy of retreat and withdrawal on the part of thinkers who were appalled by perpetual warfare, instability and death..."  A philosophy of retreat does not describe at all accurately what could be argued as the greatest literature on the planet, the Tao Te Ching, and Book of Changes.  Actually the response of mystical empiricism, to the world, is the only sensible avenue to knowledge.  It is the only knowledge offering objective truths.  The alternative to this path is not any "advance," into the external world, the alternative is to be a bumbling staggering pawn of forces one does not glimpse or control.  To be sure, the mystic is in the same situation except for the knowledge he has of his situation.  He is no less blown about, but he can learn from his situation.  Not so those who are NOT appalled by warfare, instability, and death,( which features hardly isolate one historical period from another.)

And these simple facts eluded some leading historians.  My point is not the writers of the above quote, but for rhetorical purposes let us look at their educational background.  East Asia lists three authors:

John K. Fairbanks, graduated from Harvard University, and taught there also, starting in 1936.
Edwin O. Reischauer, graduate of Harvard, also faculty member there. Author of many books.
Albert M. Craig, also a Harvard graduate and professor there.  Together these guys wrote a lot of books.

The point in this little aside is not these fine scholars, but the binary mechanical mind of man.  (Readers of Jan Cox will appreciate the special status of the natural sciences and no doubt soon I will again review that aspect of man's knowing, which is only superfically a contradiction to the points in this essay.)  Only by hanging oneself on the forked branches of ordinary mentation is it possible to find statements about a man's retreat into philosophy of any useful import.  The mystic philosopher has at least the possibility of finding the knowledge, a vague sense of which haunts man's being. It is the mystic philosopher alone who can seize life by the throat and interrogate it.

A breath of ....?

It occurred to me again, especially after noticing in todays science headlines (plants absorb MORE carbon dioxide when it is hazy, that is, polluted, out) that Jan Cox said the planet will take care of itself.  Right now, for instance with the economic slowdown, one effect is that there are more green spaces, where construction has stopped, more woodsy cleavages left, for a while anyway, where feral cats can hunt rodents, less exhaust in the air as people do not commute to jobs they do not still have----it is like the planet is taking a deep, needed breath.

Of course I do not KNOW this, it is a possibility, and this aspect of my comments points up that it may not be WHAT you think, ----HOW you think may be the saving gasp.

The Silliness of Academe

Okay, these thoughts are about how silly it is to pay attention to academe, or to value any degrees from the academic world.  My tack here is to take some arguments from a book called something about Noble Animals, the author is David Salter, and the book is his doctoral dissertation, published in 2001. Now Dr. Salter, I am in no way insulting your research, and I am confident you will do fine in the academic world. Merely I am using one of your arguments to illustrate a point about the way EVERYBPDY's mind works, and if you by any chance come across my comments, to reassure you, I will state right now that I only read a few pages of your book, and so you can argue I have not given you a fair chance. Insulting anyone is not my intent here, and could it be proved that I did, I would certainly have failed in my purpose.

 

And that is (my purpose) to examine an argument and point out how this argument from a typical academic, quite misses the intent of the literature he discussed. The literature here is a kind of Aesops fable:  there was a story common in the medieval world called "The Lion and the Man." I need to tell the story first: so a lion and man were talking about who was stronger and the man proved his point by showing the lion a drawing of a man putting an ax into a lion.  The climax of  the storyis that the lion responded, "Who painted the lion?"  In other words had the lion been telling the story the ending would have been different.  The author of the book above, the exact title of which I still do not have to hand, says the point of this fable, is that depending on what part of society your are in, your insights will change. 

 

My own take on this story is that "The Lion and the Man," was mainly about this: the rational intellect is incapable of coming up with objective truth.  Because my take may sound abstruse to someone who has not looked at my blog before, does not mean that Chaucer, and/or Aesop were not capable of the mental delicacy my argument assumes.