Full Fathom Five (Sylvia Plath)

Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide's coming
When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of orgins
Unimaginable. You float near
As kneeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form suffers
Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in runnels:
Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor and
Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky's ridgepole.
Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;

You defy godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom's border
Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.

Hope (Emily Dickinson)

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me

If I can stop.. (Emily Dickinson)

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

Goethe's Faust

Faust "How uselessly I've laboured to collect
The treasures of the human intellect,
And now I sit and wonder what I've done.
I feel no new strength surging in my soul
I'm not a hairsbreadth taller, I'm not one
Step nearer to the infinite goal"

A significant theme emerging from the first volume of Goethe's Faust is the contrast between a life of study, deep introversion, observation and a life of direct action, involvment, raw emotion. Herman Hesse took this one theme, one contrast, and wrote a brilliant novel centred almost entirely on it, Narcissus and Goldmund.

I feel this theme addresses a fundamental element of human experience. As humans we have constructed complex, complicated cultures; epigenetic worlds. We are able to involve ourselves in these worlds and in some way detach ourselves from the physical, genetic world.

I think some people can involve themselves in an epigenetic world too much and lose connection with raw reality and direct experience. Thus it is understandable that Faust would, after years involvment in this world, want to break away from it. He undertsands that full, deep knowledge doesn't derive entirely from book learning.

Goethe's Faust and the Religious/Atheist Debate

Margareta "Then you don't believe?"

Faust "My sweet beloved child, don't misconceive
My meaning! Who dare say God's name?
Who dares to claim that he believes in God?
And whose heart is so dead
That he has ever boldly said:
No, I do not believe?
Embracing all things,
Holding all things in being,
Does He not hold and keep
You, me, even Himself?
Is not the heavens' great vault up there on high,
And here below, does not the earth stand fast?
Do everlasting stars, gleaming with love,
Not rise above us through the sky?
Are we not here and gazing eye to eye?
Does all this not beseige your mind and heart,
And weave in unseen visibility
All round you its eternal mystery?
Oh, fill your heart right up with all of this,
And when your brimming over with bliss
Of such a feeling, call it what you like!
Call it joy, or your heart, or love, or God!
I have no name for it. The feeling's all there is:
The name's mere noise and smoke - what does it do
But cloud the heavenly radiance?"

This passage sheds interesting light on the religious/atheist debate and to me provides one of the best takes on it.

Goethe was receptive to the awe-inspiring complexity of existence and interpreted his experiences in a subtle way, without succumbing to simplicity and dogmatism. With the purity and clarity of a child he realised and understood the sheer brilliance that things exist "Are we not here and gazing eye to eye?"

Significantly Goethe addresses the limitations of language, in describing the complexity of nature and reality, "the name's mere noise and smoke"

In order to address the multifarious nature of reality and the religious question Goethe writes in paradoxes. "Who dares to claim that he believes... whose heart is so dead that he has ever boldly said: no, I do not believe". The answer to the religious question lies in between two clearly defined, one-dimensional poles. The structure of his poetic language is also paradoxical, "weave in unseen visibility"

More points should, undoubtedly, be added to the religious/atheist debate. Such as the oppression of institutional religion and the point that religious stories or concepts, such as God, represent aspects of the human psyche and can therefore be illuminating.

Institutional Thought

Many people unconsciously operate under ideological or institutional assumptions. Without interrogating such assumptions people become ignorant, dangerous and uncreative.

When an individual or idea challenges one’s network of unconscious, institutional assumptions you will often find a violent, confrontational and aggressive reaction. To me this process occurs in all domains of human society and culture, for example in political and religious domains, and can be found on the left and right of the political spectrum.  

Clinging to ideological and institutional thought is dangerous because it pushes individuals and groups away from each other, discouraging cooperation. It promotes divisions and side-taking, because people will feel a vehement and aggressive need to defend specific positions, as though such positions were absolutely correct. It also greatly inhibits individual growth and the ability to see reality with clarity, sensitivity and accuracy.

I feel a significant ongoing hindrance to the development of human society and culture is that many of us unconsciously grasp to institutions and ideas and unhealthily identify with them. A degree of habit and order is necessary and we would be lost in chaos without this. But because so many of us are, I believe, fundamentally insecure, because naked reality is so frightening to the ego, many people unhealthily attach themselves to ideologies or simply established ideas and consequently resist fresh insight and genuine, fundamental change.

In my mind a healthy, psychologically mature or well-rounded individual is one who has developed a relatively consistent and flexible framework for interpreting and navigating the world and who realises the relativity of this framework, thus overcoming unnecessary aggression, delusional thought and narrow mindedness.

People might read these ideas but not deeply understand or integrate them, let alone meaningfully apply them. They might nod their heads and understand superficially but their ego, their conscious personality, would not realise them, for such insights would destroy their delusions and apparent psychological security.

Human Understanding

Any reflective work must be clear, from the outset, about certain processes. Few thinkers I have come across start from the simplest, most basic terms. Few of these thinkers are clear about their intentions and few of them form fresh insights. By fresh I mean free from platitudes and insipid ideological thinking.

I feel the ongoing confusions and divisions of human history need to be halted and everything, all the evidence, needs to be examined broadly and fairly. As far as I'm concerned we need to stop, pay attention, transcend the prejudices of the ego, dispense with preconceptions and, ultimately, find common ground.

Ideological autopilot needs to be switched off. We need to step outside and look within.

We can't change society until we personally develop. We can't personally develop until we are genuinely free of institutional conditioning and side-taking.

Human understanding must be viewed in light of two fundamental phenomena, language and naked reality.

In a broad sense language may be seen as the framework or context through which naked reality is translated and experienced. But language is ultimately derived, like everything, from naked reality.

The multiple elements of language are best seen as tools to understand, manipulate and cooperate with reality.

The urge to understand and attain clarity seems, with a number of people, to be a natural automatic process, an instinct. Arguably it is thus deeply rooted in biology and nature.

Understanding is about forming concepts, within the framework of language, that most accurately express naked reality, bearing in mind that naked reality is changeable. Accuracy can be determined through evidence and experimentation.

Human understanding is about aligning people and their conscious personalities with naked reality so that these phenomena move together in harmony.

Understanding is about consciousness and awareness. In this sense it is about receptivity and combating repression. Along with receptivity understanding must include attention and integration. To understand meaningfully one must be attentive and one must integrate information into consciousness.

To attain the most meaningful and rich pictures of reality it is necessary to take into account various forms of evidence, for example anthropological, biological, social, historical and cultural, to chart the development of understanding and consciousness and embed these phenomena in empirical and demonstrable contexts.