Groundhog Intercourse on Time Et Cetera

8/7/2019 Groundhog Intercourse on Time Et Cetera

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INTERCOURSE ON TIME ET CETERA

WITH

MADAME MELINA & MISTER GROUNDHOG

FROM

GROUNDHOG DAYS

August 31, 2003

Yikes, it's Groundhog Day!

I think I've been here before! Oh, now I remember, it's thesame old story again, and I can't break out of it. And here wego again, Alter Ego, it's Groundhog Day!

Heavens to Betsy, what is the name of that book aboutEternal Recurrence I like to read at moments like this? Thankyou, Betsy! Wow, what a coincidence! Here it is! right on topof my dresser - 'twas occluded but now it's mysteriouslyfound. Yes, I've got to read Ouspensky's novel for thehundredth time. Surely you, my most intimate companion,

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remember his The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin ? Indeed youmust. Christian eschatology is the way go, don't you think?No?

Well, then, how about another trip to Pure Land, which is, of course, in the West? That a way, where the Sun goes down,or so it seems. Have you forgotten so soon? Alright, then,dear reflection of mine, I shall bring you up to speed.

A master on the subject of Pure Land whom we know - a oldpoet from China - Mao was his English teacher before Maohad this man's family, amongst others, murdered - taught usabout the preservative effect of the Imperial Jade Robe. Thatwas some time ago, when we were writing a series of essaysabout Zhuangdi. Now do you remember? I asked him how farwest we had to go to get to Pure Land - he said, "As far asthe Concorde flies. " And off we went again, two for the priceof one! You, of course are wearing such a robe, an invisibleone, and that is why I am going around and around with youad infinitum..

Listen up, here it is, Chapter XXII, 'Paris' - Osokin is a studentthere, where he met Valerie, best pupil of Sorel. Hmm, do

you remember Sorel? What? Cat got your tongue? or are youon strike? Never mind. Osokin looks at Valerie; she's wearinga fine sable coat and is sporting a hat with an ostrichfeather; they converse:

"I believe in destiny," says Osokin. "I know that our future iswritten down somewhere and that we merely read it page bypage. Besides that, I had strange fantasies as a boy. Itseemed to me that I had lived before; for instance, I knewParis - thought of course I had never been here. Even nowthere are times when I feel that I have ived in Paris before.When I met with Nietzsche's ideas on eternal recurrence, Irecalled all these fantasies. And now I am sure thateverything really does repeat itself."

"Do you know Stevenson's - Robert Louis Stevenson's - Son

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of the Morrow?" Valerie asked.

Osokin starts, looks at her. "Why, what's the matter?" sheasks.

"How astonishing! How could I have forgotten it? Of course Iknow it. How does it begin?"

"'The King of Duntrine had a daughter when he was old,'"begins the girl slowly, "'and she was the fairest King'sdaughter between two seas....'"

Osokin listens to these words like a man bewitched. Scenesin which he can scarcely believe passed in successionthrough his mind; the morning at school when he repeatedthe beginning of this tale to himself in order to prove that hehad lived before; all the elusive thoughts andincomprehensible sensations connected with the magician,and with what - to him, at school - appeared to be the past,and which now - here in Paris - appears to be the fantasticand impossible future. What does it all mean?"

Mister Groundhog

September 25, 2003

The People of Byt

Every one knows Sisyphus' pathetic story: how he cheatedtime by tying up death, at least for the time being, that is,until the god of war hauled him back to the underworld

because Hades complained of the shortage of bodies in theinterim; from whence Sisyphus escaped by breaking his oathto Persephone that, if he were allowed to ascend to makesure his body was properly buried, he would return to shadyhades; but the perjurer did not, hence Hermes hauled himback to hellish haunts; and there Sisyphus the Runaway,now Sisyphus the Rock-Roller, is seen to this very day,

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serving his sentence of eternal repetition, rolling hisshameless stone, evidence from the scene of a crime againstZeus, to the top of a hill; whereupon, rather than rollingdown the other side, it rolls back down his side again -

maybe there is no other side; thus is labor lost and Sisyphusmust begin again while the gods laugh at his miserableplight. Camus says Sisyphus turned the tables on the gods,that he runs down the hill laughing at them all the way, thensets his shoulder willingly to the futile task in order to mockthem yet again.

Ouspenky wrote about the ancient doctrine of eternalrecurrence and drew some vicious circles for us tocontemplate, each spinning in its respective place in thevertical fifth dimension, each said place being a momentalong the horizontal continuum of the fourth dimension,allowing him to conjecture that we each might be rebornagain at the moment of death, to live the same life overagain, and again, and again, so on and so forth, until,perhaps with his help, we become aware of our habit and aresaved.

Yes, saved, for even Ouspensky will not abandon the

psychological essence of time, which is not the past exactlyrepeated, but is rather the expectation of something in partunknown and new, namely the future life, which so happens,as some of us have noticed, to fly from its past like a bat outof hell; of course there are certain differences between birds:the Jayhawk flies backwards because he loves the past anddoesn't give a damn where he is going.

The doctrine of eternal recurrence is absurd because, aseveryone knows, time moves in one direction only along itsline; history does not repeat itself - time reversed woulddestroy the universe. But Ouspensky conjured up some sortof clearing house where times speed up and slow down andall times are instantaneously adjusted after each death, thatthe relationships between people's deaths be kept constant -if I die two years before my eighty-year-old mother, I will still

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be born again to her when she is twenty. There is perhaps abetter solution, but we might want to drop the doctrinealtogether for it is a stumbling block in several ways. Forinstance, if it were true and if we knew we were doing

nothing but repeating ourselves, life might be hell indeed if salvation were wanting.

Now if Ouspensky had said that his doctrine was a merely ametaphor for bad habits together with lessons on breakingthem with new works, we might thank him very much andproceed. But he is pushing this rolling stone at us as if hewants us to embrace it. No thank you, Mr. Ouspensky. Maybewe do not want to repeat ourselves eternally, so why keepreiterating the doctrine? If there is a life after this one, whowants to take herself along just as she is? We dream of better conditions, yet each person is one of the conditions.And despite the apparent progress we seem to enjoy in alifetime, many are those who would start anew with a cleanslate if only they could. And if they did start afresh, theywould not know their pervious life, so why all the fuss? Whatis the difference between a clean slate and eternal death if one has no memory of a previous life? All do not fear death;many behold it as the ultimate salvation. Not that suicide is

the solution. Hamlet's theological studies included a coursein eschatology; he then had reason to worry the question asto whether to be or not to be; his sighting of a ghost gavehim even further cause for concern.

In any case, a Christian has a future for good or ill, and is notconsigned to eternal repetition of the past. Ouspensky notedthat Christians speak of a life after death but not of a lifebefore birth. He found hints, however, of the doctrine of eternal recurrence in the New Testament. He claimed thatthe doctrine was known to the ancients; they knew it wellbut could not communicate the occult knowledge to othersbecause those others were still dead caterpillars in contrastto wise butterflies who are in the know because of theirtransformation into a new life.

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"The idea of recurrence cannot be popular in its pure form,"wrote Ouspensky, primarily because it seems absurd....According to the ordinary wisdom of the world 'nothing everreturns' .... Buddhists have rejected the 'absurd' idea of a

return into the past, and their 'wheel of life' rolls along withthe calnder.... We are one-dimensional beings in relation totime; we have no knowledge of parallel lines.... In my book

Tertium Organum I described what the universe of one-dimensional beings must be. These beings know nothingbesides their own line.... There can be nothing parallel tous.... It is very difficult to accept the idea of the absolute andinevitable repetition of everything."

Of course it is difficult. And Ouspensky has a way out, a"necessary" way out at that. "The idea of absolute repetitiondoes not agree with the idea of growing tendencies, which isalso necessary."

He does not propose that the growth itself might repeatitself; that everything possible whether growing or decayinghas already happened countelss times and is being repeatedendlessly in eternity. According to him, "It must berecognized that as regards the character of the repetition of

their lives people fall into several types or categories."(emphasis added)

Now we discover that only certain, "unsuccessful" types of people are subject to inevitable eternal repetition. Let'smention only one type besides the usual "crowd.". Considerthe "people of byt." The Russian word is difficult to translate.It can mean a habitual lifestyle, say peasant-life, merchant-life, rut-life and so on; or, in theatrical life, the typical voiceor tone, the typical bit part, and so on.

"There are, first of all, people of byt, of deeply rooted,petrified, routine life.Their lives succeed one antoher withthe monotony of the hand of the clock moving on the dial.

There can be in their lives nothing unexpected, nothingaccidental, no adventures. They are born and die in the

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same house where their fathers and grandfathers were bornand died and where their children will be born and will die.National calamities, wars, earthquakes, plagues, sometimeswipe thousands and hundreds of thousands of them from the

face of the earth at one stroke. But apart from such eventstheir whole life is strictly ordered and organized on a plan....It is just this absoluteness of repetition that creates in themsome vague consciousness of the inevitability of everythingthat happens, a belief in fate, fatalism and, at times, asstrange sort of wisdom and calmness, in some cases passinginto an ironical contempt for people who are restless,seeking for something, striving for something."

Ouspensky seems to have a certain occult admiration for thisrepetitious type of person, the "unsuccessful" person whoseconsciousness of repetition seems to save him from fate byresigning him to it. Then Ouspensky is divided againsthimself. He seems to push the doctrine of eternal recurrenceto rid himself of it, but it rolls right back on him. Maybe hewas a Russian fatalist who dreamed of the New World. Eastlooks West, West looks right back.

Mister Groundhog

September 24, 2003

Time is a waste of time

For the life of me I cannot figure out why I am wasting somuch time on the subject of time, especially in view of thefact that many thinkers who were and are much betterversed than I am swear that time does not even exist in the

first place! But others say it does exist. It would take meseveral lifetimes to catch up to the current position on time.

On the other hand, what difference does the subject mattermake if art is for the sake of art? None. Even Nothing woulddo for a subject, and a far better subject to wax eloquent onwithout contradiction, for what does anyone really know

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about Nothing, or empty space, for that matter? Nothing!How absurd! However, seemingly absurd theories about timehave gotten some serious results, so one has to brush up onwhat it's all about or leave oneself open for ridicule.

Maybe I should take time off from time and devote moretime to my 'Two Emmas.' Emma Woodhouse must be a bitmiffed since I have devoted most of my time to EmmaBovary. But maybe not, maybe she thinks I am a dirty oldman and is glad I've kept my mind off her. I think 'TwoEmmas' might develop into a book. Why not? Sartre wrotethree heavy volumes, The Family Idiot, 'about' MadameBovary's creator. Some say Sartre was just using yet anotheroccasion to write his intellectual autobiography.

So what is it about this boringly abstruse subject, time? Toomany readers have already said I'm writing over their heads.Maybe it's just as well, because maybe I don't know what Iam talking about! I usually think I do, however. I'm verycareful to do my best to figure out complex subjects then digand dig and dig into the ideas of others far more advancedthan I, at least until I get done and come up with somebrilliant breakthroughs! But time? I've got to be kidding! It's

too complex. And one needs some higher language - likehigher math, symbolic logic, that kind of stuff. I didn't getpast basic algebra because I kept getting caught up in basicquestions like, what are numbers, anyway?

I am still puzzled about time. Oh! Deja vu! I remember! Yes, Ihad a dream when I was a very young man, that I was to findand read a book about clocks. Yes, the title was The Secretof the Workings of a Clock.

Mister Groundhog

September 20, 2003

The Mystery of Time

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"In reality, of course, no one knows anything. The mystery of existence before birth and existence after death, if there issuch existence, is the mystery of time. And 'time' guards itssecrets better than many people think. In order to approach

these mysteries it is necessary first to understand timeitself." - Ouspensky

Thinking about time bores most people while good sciencefiction about time travel does not. Yet the origin of the bestscience fiction on the subject is abstract speculation aboutthe nature of time. Furthermore, some of the best thinkersthroughout time have had an undying interest in speculatingabout time.

There are many answers to the question, What is time? Onebeing that there is no such thing as time; to which werespond, "All right, then, but what is it that is not? What doyou mean by time?"

We have many conceptions of time, but they are not timeitself. Psychologically speaking, time seems to be an intuitivefaculty, prior to experience, that allows us to orderexperience in a linear series with three phases: what hashappened, or the past, which is all that we really know tosome extent; what is happening at the moment, or thepresent, which we do not know until it passes; and what is tocome in the future, which we do not know until we reflect onit after it happens. That is, all that we know has already past,and because of the apparent order of its events, we expectthat order to be repeated in the future. It is as if we live inone phase of time, the past - and who can say for sure if there are three phases? Maybe everything has alreadyhappened and we are just remembering it over and over as

it eternally recurs. Thus do absurd speculations denying timebegin; our speculations cannot escape the common sense of time.

Prehistoric and primitive people did not have thesophisticated objective or mechanical conception of timethat we do. They might find our everyday tenses

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incomprehensible; but they had their seasonal andastronomical clocks, regularities which they used to mark ortime significant and crucial events. Of course human birthand death are crucial moments; a third is the marriage of

birth and death in sexual union, where two die to make anew life - the three Fates attend birth, marriage, and death.Death, a name for whatever is before birth and after death,is no doubt the greatest mystery of all; we wake up everyday, therefore we expect to live forever; at first death otherthan by accident or murder seems to be due to someunnatural or supernatural cause.

Death is very strange to a self-conscious creature used toliving. Anthropologists tell us that the awareness that we willdie and our response to death is at the very foundation of being human beings. It is said that elephants know they willdie and therefore they go off to a secret place to do so; thatis somewhat at variance with the recent film of bewilderedmale elephants trying to get their dead female companionon her feet by using every means at their disposal includinglifting her and repeatedly mounting her. But she did notbudge. She was dead. Her time was past. Or was it? On thatwe can speculate while her friends are totally stumped.

Time is somehow bound up with our lives, is essential to ourlives; our devices for measuring time may help to maintainand perpetuate life; at the same time, we fell that clocksmeasure the loss of the individual life as it approaches thegreat unknown. Some say there is nothing to the unknownas far as the individual is concerned; dust returns to dustand clocks tick for the living; and if none are left living, thegreat clock wound up still runs on and on until the universewinds down, if it does. Others want more time, in a futurelife.

Ouspensky thought about time, and said, "The mystery of existence before birth and after death, if there is suchexistence, is the mystery of time (his emphasis). He pointsout that we normally associate the three phases of time,Before, Now, After, with Before Birth, Life, After Death. "It is

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precisely here that the fundamental mistake lies.... Outsidethis life, outside the usual perception, the interrelation of thethree phases of time can change; in any case, we have noguarantee that it will remain the same. And yet, in ordinary

thought, including religious, theosophical, and 'occult'thought, this question is never raised. 'Time' is regarded assomething which is not subject to discussion, as somethingwhich belongs to us once and for all and cannot be takenaway from us, and which is always the same. Whatever mayhappen to us, 'time' will always belong to us, and not only'time', but even 'eternity.' We use this word withoutunderstanding its true meaning. We take 'eternity' to be aninfinite extension of time, while really 'eternity' meansanother dimension of time." (emphasis added)

Mr. Groundhog

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Dear Groundhog,

You're absolutely right--it's a total mind screw, but I love it!

And yes, thank you for putting it all so directly aboutMcTaggart's omission of a cogent framework for pondering

his abstrusemeanderings. Was he smug, or what?

Actually, I think he's onto something (or was onto something,or is that 'will be onto something'), but I can't comprehend it

well enough yet to say one way or another. I can buy thattime doesn't exist, but what in the hell does that mean? You

and I know that thechair in which I'm sitting doesn't exist, either--buthere it is under my tush, otherwise I'd be sitting on

the floor, which also doesn't exist. What is thepractical application here, then, or must all of this

remain intensely abstract?

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Once I was dreaming and found myself in North Carolinaflying over treetops on the street where I used tolive in the early '70s. It was a lucid dream, to be

sure. In fact, I thought I was astral projecting

while in the dream. Anyway, I ended up flying oversome field and saw an old-fashioned '40s glass babybottle sitting on an old wooden fence. I thought to

myself, "If I can grab that baby bottle and fly ithome (Ohio), then when I wake up I'll have 'proof'that this wasn't just a dream and that I really did

project astrally."

I grabbed the baby bottle and flew back to my "then"kitchen in Ohio and stuck it in a cabinet under the

sink. Of course when I woke up, I looked in thecabinet and the '40s baby bottle wasn't there. And

yet I put it there in some other dimension of time/experience--didn't I? Or did I put it in my

"astral" kitchen in "astral" Ohio? Ugh, all theseconfounded correlatives in weird overlapping

dimensions! You see now why we need to account forastral time and experience as well.

I guess I got carried away. Does McTaggart have thateffect on everyone?

Yours,

Madame Melinahttp://authorsden.com/melinacostello

October 10, 2003

The Plurality of Times

Logic does not prove that life exists on other planets or, forthat matter, that any other proposition corresponds to

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http://authorsden.com/melinacostello






objective reality. But logic can demonstrate that particularpropositions in themselves are false or fallacious, at leastaccording to the assumptions upon which the particular logicis based. Static logic is based on the principle of identity and

contradiction that, IF A is identical to A, THEN A cannot benot-A. Everything follows from that presumption. Yourargument may be illogical or fallacious, but that does notnecessarily mean that your hunch is mistaken or that yourcase is groundless.You might find a better argument orlawyer; in the interim, we have good cause for reasonabledoubting.

McTaggart doubted the reality of Time as we ordinarily thinkwe know it. He argued that time is unreal, and offered anextended, complicated argument to support his premise thattime, the "past, present, and future" contradicts itself. Of course his argument was challenged on logical grounds,sometimes with extended arguments in symbolic-logiclanguage beyond the understanding of most of us. Few timephilosophers agree with McTaggart's position today, yetmost consider it a good point of departure because it doesnot matter whether his proposal is right or wrong, for, ineither event, the student will gain considerable ground

towards the understanding of what may be the mostimportant subject in the world.

As for unreal time, or time as we think we know it,McTaggart said it requires the time-series triune of past,present, future. This he calls the 'A series.'

"It is because the distinctions of past, present, and futureseem to me to be essential for time, that I regard time asunreal," said McTaggart.

Now that statement may on its face seem absurd or illogical,since he seems to both affirm and deny the existence of time. Of course we have been around a few blocks, so weexpect he will proceed to juggle words and say that one kindof time is real, the other kind unreal; or that we misperceive

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reality; or that what we perceive is an illusion - we think of the man who tried to jump through a concrete wall becausehis guru said it was an illusion.

But never mind that for now. McTaggart insists that time aswe perceive it must have a past, present, and future. Mindyou, some say not: some say only the "B series", of Beforeand After, is essential to time. Never mind that either - weshall take McTaggart's word for the essentiality of A Series.

Now, then, remember, we who subscribe to Groundhog Dayshave our own special interest at stake: we are interested inthe Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, hence we want to know,What is Professor McTaggart's position on the logicalpossibility of multiple universes subject to different times?

The Doctrine as we understand it in relation to eachindividual self would require each universe to have adifferent present so that someone can die in the present of one time-series, and be at once born again in the present of another time-series, in the identical circumstances of thepast, at the time of his birth, of the one he has just left,where survivors of his death are going about their businessas usual, while he is a new born babe at his destination

universe, where everyone is of course younger or unborn.

McTaggart had no logical problem with multiple time-seriesalthough he says nothing about eternal recurrence; that is,assuming for the sake of argument that the time-series of past, present, and future is real in the first place. Multiple orparallel universes are not even required. There can bedifferent time-series going on in the same universe!

"The hypothesis here is that there should be within realityseveral real and independent time-series. The objection, Iimagine, is that the time-series would be all real, while thedistinction of past, present, and future would have meaningwithin each series, and could not, therefore, be taken asultimately real. There would be, for example, many presents(each point in each time-series is a present once), but they

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must be present successively. And the presents of thedifferent time-series would not be successive, since they arenot in the same time. (Neither would they be simultaneous,since that equally involves being in the same time. They

would have no time-relation whatever.) And differentpresents, unless they are successive, cannot be real. So thedifferent time-series, which are real, must be able to existindependently of the distinction between past, present, andfuture.

"I cannot, however, regard this objection as valid. No doubt,in such a case, no present would be the present - it wouldonly be the present of a certain aspect of the universe. Butthen no time would be the time - it would only be the time of a certain aspect of the universe. It would, no doubt, be a realtime-series, but I do not see that the present would be lessreal than the time.

"I am not, of course, asserting that there is no contradictionin the existence of several distinct A series. My main thesis isthat the existence of any A series involves a contradiction.What I assert here is merely that supposing that there couldbe any A series, I see no extra difficulty involved in there

being several such series independent of one another, andthat therefore there in no incompatibility between theessentiality of an A series for time and the existence of several distinct times.

"Moreover, we must remember that the theory of a pluralityof time-series is a mere hypothesis. No reason has ever beengiven why we should believe in their existence. It has onlybeen said that there is no reason why we should disbelievein their existence, and that therefore they may exist."

Therefore we have the Hypothesis for the Plurality of Timeswaiting for someone to present positive evidence for oragainst it. McTaggart's statement in its favor should arousethe hopes and fears of our subscribers: the hopes of thosewho think the world they are in is the best of all possible

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worlds and want to repeated it ad infinitum; the fears of those who think this world is hell on earth and do not wantanother vicious cycle let alone an endless series of hells.

We must admit that if multiple time-series exist, the positiveevidence when obtained might not prove the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence. We could respectively be progressing toheaven or hell in a hand basket. Even those Groundhog Dayssubscribers with a positive mental attitude towards endlessrepetition have expressed doubts about their portion of progress relative to the progress of the repeated lives of ourprogeny, and they do not accept the dogma that theprogress of all repeated lives are equal. That is no problemfor the time being. Pending the receipt of positive evidence,it appears that the Hypothesis for the Plurality of Times suitsthe hopes and fears of all those who want somewhere to goafter death whatever the situation may be there.

Mister Groundhog

October 8, 2003

Crazy Mystics

McTaggart's ideas seem to have greater respect amongrespectable people than Ouspensky's ideas on similarsubjects, probably because of their respective credentialsand lifestyles. We shall probably find more books by andabout Ouspensky than by and about McTaggart in a largelibrary - the ratio is 18 to12 at my five-million volumeuniversity library. But we do not find Ouspensky mentionedin leading philosophical dictionaries and encyclopedias. Wedo find some thinkers listed whose inclusion gives us causeto wonder what editorial method is being used to draw thedividing lines between philosophy, religion, and crackedpottery. At least one prestigious philosophical encyclopediaincludes Luther as a great philosopher - as we know, Luther

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explained confusing metaphysical issues not with a fineintellectual system or sophisticated discourse, but with directreferences to "God's mysteries." Of course we shall findHegel in all the references, despite the fact that many

philosophers denounced his work as the raving of amadman. McTaggart, who was a idiosyncratic Hegelian,wrote a few books about Hegel.

I do not think the exclusion of Ouspensky is due to "Westernprejudice", for several histories of Russian philosophy writtenby bona-fide Russians exclude him while dwelling onRussians with extraordinary views and attitudes; for instancemy favorite, Nicholas Berdyaev. Ouspensky is apparently aRussian outcast both in life and after life. The form of hisspiritual quest is apparently outmoded although it enjoyed arevival during the Sixties, particularly among pot smokersand acid droppers - Ouspensky might have liked TimothyLeary and would have experimented with LSD-25.

Of course both Ouspensky and McTaggart were mystics -Ouspensky's mysticism was more dramatic and romanticthan McTaggart's academic version, and he is far betterknown among the aging New Age crowd. McTaggart was

born in 1866, Ouspensky in 1878. Both saw the scientific-industrial revolution moving full steam ahead, as well as therevolutionary reactions to that movement including theRussian revolutions and the Great War. Intellectuals all overEurope in those days were getting sick and tired of themechanical rationalism of scientism and industrialmaterialism. Growing skepticism turned to romance,mysticism, symbolism, spiritualism - spiritualism fullybloomed during and after the Great War as survivors tried tocontact the millions killed in the orgy of mutual massmurder. Scientific thought was also breaking out of its staticmold into dynamic and organic forms - the principles of relativity and uncertainly would revolutionize science. Flightsof imagination were launched by schemers such as H.G.Wells, who was a biologist and teacher by training, a discipleof "Darwin's bulldog" - T.H. Huxley. Wells like Ouspensky was

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impressed by the Englishman C.H. Hinton's ScientificRomances, which led Wells to write his science-fiction novelabout a time machine. And Hinton's writings on the fourthdimension and eternal recurrence was the point of departure

for Ouspensky's experiments and effusions on same.Another writer by the name of F.A. Abbott ( Flatland ) helpedpopularize dimensional thinking. Indeed, the FourthDimension was quite the rage in imaginative circles for quitesome time.

Ouspensky was raised in Moody Russia. He lost his father - asurveyor and mathemetician fascinated by the fourthdimension - at a very young age. He was a precocious child,reading popular novels at age six. He was greatly influencedby his mother; she painted and she loved French andRussian literature, hence young Ouspensky developed anartistic inclination. He also had an anarchistic bent. He hatedschool, quitting it at fourteen, then self-educated himself,auditing a few university lectures at Moscow University andat other European universities - he never obtained a degree -Gurdjieff would later convince him of the importance of school discipline. He was an outsider by temperament,rebellious, romantic, restless, fascinated by unorthodox

ideas, unable or unwilling to hold down a steady job. Heexperienced the 1905 Russian first-hand while deeplydepressed and living in grinding poverty. His dear little sisterwas arrested for belonging to a leftist organization - she diedin prison in 1908. Ouspensky hated communist revolution;however, as an occasional journalist, he had to be a leftistsince that was the only game in town. It was in 1905 that hedrafted his romantic novel about eternal recurrence orrepeated lives, an occult concept which, if applied to him atthe time, would have meant eternal damnation. He traveledto the Caucasus, Europe, and the Middle East in search of the miraculous escape from the tedious routines of normallife - that life was really an abnormal state of stupefieddreaming in comparison to the normal supernatural state of lucidity.

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McTaggart grew up in Merry England. He lost his father atthe age of four. He was deeply attached to his mother; shewas largely permissive, hence he developed an anarchicstreak. He was an odd child, already a philosophically

inclined intellectual around the age of six or seven. As ayoung boy he was expelled from school for refuting theApostle's Creed and for denouncing the existence of God - inhis maturity, his mysticism did not require a personal god.

The boy liked to walk crab-like with his back against a wall ora fence - his village peers called him "loonie." McTaggarthowever pursued his studies and went on to Cambridge. Hisbeloved mother emigrated to New Zealand in 1890. Hevisited her there, stopping off in India and Australia. Hesettled down to his own family life at Cambridge, where hetaught philosophy to the likes of Russell, Broad, Moore andWhitehead. He turned on his protege Russell when Russellbecame became an activist during the war - he probably costRussell his job.

When we turn to the texts written by Ouspensky andMcTaggart, Ouspensky's are more appealing to the averagereader; again, McTaggart's work is aridly academic.Ouspensky was a teacher too, but to a lay audience. His non-

fiction is novel-like and hails back to the days when poetrywas philosophy and psychology was the quest for self-discovery. McTaggart, doctor of philosophy, law andliterature, had an arid style. His fundamental concepts areon no sturdier ground than Ouspensky's, but his reasoningseems more precise, cogent and organized. McTaggart'stechnical discussion of the unreality of time is difficultreading; the reader must concentrate and go over thematerial several times, and once the subject is understoodthe reader will think McTaggart could have said as much anddone so more clearly in a few paragraphs. On the otherhand, his articles in plain English on human immortality andpre-existence can be easily digested by the average adultreader, especially if she believes she has been here beforeand will continue hereafter; even if not, she will still learnsome interesting philosophical points. In any case, one might

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receive the impression from his professional style thatMcTaggart is the real McCoy while Ouspensky is a fakir. Yetat bottom they are both talking nonsense although there issome truth to be gleaned from nonsense. At least that is my

opinion.After setting aside metaphysics, what passes for nonfictionin the 'soft' human sciences is really fiction that can easilybe exposed as mythical malarkey by anyone who takes thetime to think clearly for herself. But the student of societywill usually not get very far in society by repudiating itsoverwhelming conventions: it is convenient to purchase theappearance of propriety if one wants to have a profitablepractice. Yet Ouspensky dropped out, did his own thing, andgot into the occult - he had a sour-grapes attitude aboutconventional education and its degrees. McTaggart abidedby the conventions and firmly secured his official position inlife and in legitimate philosophy textbooks. Ouspensky,however, is not a failure but an unusual example of unconventional success - many people take a liking toromantic rebels in all fields.

I notice that I have a few things in common with Ouspensky

and McTaggart. I lost my mother at a very young age andnot my father, yet I always felt spiritually close to my motherin her absence. My father was theosophically and artisticallyinclined - a poet - and I picked up my love of literature fromhim. I was brought up during my earliest years in a ratherpermissive foster home - I had the run of the town anddeveloped an anarchistic streak. I was always an outcast, anoddball, although I had a few friends. I was not interested inphilosophy but loved literature and was reading Dickens andDumas at age six. I hated school and any other groupactivity but I loved to study. I took up metaphysical subjects,the reading of Russian literature, and experimenting withmind-altering substances as a week-end hippie and part-timepsychic in the Sixties. Then I 'copped out', went to work forthe Man, gradually saying no to everything except coffeeand radical thinking. Nowadays I gravitate more to the

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respectable idealist type like McTaggart. I prefer Frenchliterature and German philosophy. Anti-intellectualism isrunning rampant lately, and my sympathies are usually withthe underdog. Ouspensky is largely ignored although well

known, while McTaggart has a few fans who know him as anacademic mystic. I am not a McTaggart fan, yet. That beingsaid, I will soon consider his professional crazy ideas, onmysticism and time.

Mister Groundhog

October 2, 2003

Death Clock

"I, too, had a dream about a clock, a clock and death. Therewere two time realities following very different laws: onegoverned the physical body, the other the spirit body. In thisdream they overlapped, as represented by a clock behind aglass case in a perfectly dark room. My father, who haspassed away, materialized in the dark room and pointed tothe clock behind the case as if to say, "The clock is on mytime - you are witnessing time outside your dimension." Yousee, the clock was also representative of a dimension intowhich no one can venture except through death. It was aweird dream." Madame Melina

Dear Madame Melina,

What happens after death is a mystery, and even more sobecause of dreams such as yours. Dreams may representwishful thinking, but the ancients accepted dreams as bona

fide awareness of the spirit world, a separate reality as itwere, perhaps where the spirits of the dead reside - death inthis world is a sleep from which one does not wake up. Youknow the stories.

Since almost all of my dreams are pleasant, often extremelypleasant, I only wish they would come true during my waking

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life. We know dreams have in fact come true in an uncannyfashion; many of them have been dreams of disasters. Forinstance, I am aware of a dream a mystic had of a tragic fireat a certain hotel in a foreign city a thousand miles away, a

city the dreamer had never visited before. The fire tookplace some time afterwards, just as he had dreamed. Themystic was said to have had a clairvoyant dream of a futureevent. That future was a future of the time series of his ownwaking life, the objective world he and his contemporarieswere familiar with. However, who can say that the fire didnot take place in a separate reality having another timeseries, its present being the future of his normal series?Likewise, who is to say that you did not in your dream meetyour father in another reality having its own time, or in a"hallway" somewhere between your separate realities?

Groundhog Days has uncovered a few of the ideas of Ouspensky coincidental to his fascination with the occultdoctrine of eternal recurrence. He noted that eternalrecurrence involves a return to the past, therefore involvestime travel. He pointed out that we really know nothingabout the subject, and that we must investigate the natureof time in order to gain any understanding of it at all. He

speculated on matters appertaining to the subject you haveraised, proposing so-called parallel time lines or time series'besides the one-dimensional time-line we are seeminglystuck in. His obsession with the idea of sequential repetitionran him headlong into the problem of how people are goingto die at different times and meet up at the point of death/birth with people who are still living - for instance hismother - at older ages in the world just left behind. Hebrought in a creative accountant to reconcile the times, eachone which might be moving at a different speed. Weridiculed all this for being illogical or absurd and contrary tocommon sense based on experience. Besides, Ouspensky,although he clearly stated that he was engaged in somewhatdubious speculations, seemed to want to accept them asreality and to build up some sort of cult about them.

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However, to give Ouspensky the benefit of the doubt, wemust admit, like he did, that we really know nothing for sureabout the mysterious subject of our discourse except that weare uncertain. What was contrary to common sense several

years ago is now a matter of fact. Now there are several'logics' or ways of thinking.

Our static logic based on affirmation of identities, or non-contradiction, has certainly come in handy, but it has givenway to a dynamic logic that seems absurd or awfully hazy atbest yet has had extraordinarily practical applications. If itwere not for the useful inventions flowing from the neotericsciences, we might dismiss leading-edge scientists as madmystics. Whatever crazy idea that consistently works is goodenough, and whether or not it is based on or is in itself some'objective reality' is something the metaphysicians canspeculate on pending empirical evidence.

I am not trying to confuse the issue here so that you mightbetter believe that you met your dad or that he is waiting foryou because we do not really die forever so we can feelbetter now and so on. But there are the possibilities, and,when we are speaking of the unknown, the imagination runs

wild. But still in ordinary conversation we try to adhere to theold argumentative logic and we tend to fall back on commonsense.

Ouspensky, whom I understand was a mathemetician, seemsto be a sort of curious 'crackpot' or eccentric occultist. Butwe have not delved into his biography: we are curious abouthis doctrine of eternal recurrence as he stated it, and will notaccept any authority on time simply because of theircredentials or personal background. Other more prestigiousphilosophers with several doctorates - as opposed to'crackpot' spiritualists - have taken up the weird 'oriental'doctrine of eternal recurrence; of course almost allphilosophers have explored the general concept of time;most idealists deny its existence.

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Ouspensky suggested the possibility of parallel worlds andmentioned time travel. But time travel would not be neededif we considered his fifth dimension, which is a series of repeating cycles along the time lines of different dimensions,

each period of the fifth dimension being vertical to the fourthdimension line. One could hypothetically get out of her lineby stepping into the present of some other time series, thatmoment being any time before or after the present of thepoint of origin. Most of us are stuck with metaphors derivedfrom our everyday experience with time and space in thisworld, and when we hear talk of five or more dimensions weshake our heads uncomprehendingly. Ahead, behind, above,below, is about all we can handle. Nonetheless, asincomprehensible as our subject seems, I think wesimpletons can get a bit of a grip on it if we stick with thesubject for awhile. Ouspensky challenges us to the task, andwe turn elsewhere for assistance.

In the next issue or two, I shall examine a few ideas of thehighly credentialed mystic and philosopher, the late JohnMcTaggart Ellis McTaggart, Doctor of Laws and Literature,past Senior Lecturer at the University of London. McTaggartinsisted on the unreality of time; of course he discussed the

concept of time at length while doing so. Several of hisremarks might make us think that Ouspensky was not soirrational after all, or at least that he had esteemed companyin Merry England. Therefore please stand by for the nextedition of Goundhog Days. It may put you to sleep.

Sweet Dreams!

Mister Groundhog

Saturday, May 29, 2004

My Dear Groundhog,

Thank you so much for your very astute missive. It is I, notyou, who should apologize for gross tardiness in writing, and

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so please accept all and sundry stupid excuses (for they are)for neglecting our correspondence. I could tell you, and itwould be true (however stupid), that I am absolutely up tomy eyeballs in end-of-the-year school work without a

moment to relax, read, meditate, carry on any sort of meaningful conversation with another human being, and,equally important, space out. It is only when I space out thatI am truly myself.

I'm becoming convinced that being the upright responsibleperson I strive daily to be (so as to keep my job and continueeating) is the Hell we otherwise ascribe to an after deathstate of blindness and torment. I ran across an interestingpiece on Manu not too long ago, which stated that hisfollowers thought the latter was true as well. I'm not certainhow they rationalized a way out of hell, though, but they didhold to an interesting concept that the God of the Bible was(or is), in fact, a false god--Satan parading as God, and thatwe have been royally duped down to our very core beliefs.Come to think of it, there was a way, however arduous, todiscover the "true God" and thereby be given an opportunityto doff this vale of tears and be redeemed, but for the life of me I can't remember what it is. Ring any bells? All of the

above (including Ouspensky's mythology) is very hideousindeed and this morning I had to remind myself that love isthe only thing that matters.

Once, when I was putting a pencil back into its cup in theclassroom while the children were coming to circle (March2000), I had a spontaneous in-the-body experience, whichwas perhaps the most noncorporeal moment in time I haveever known. I say "moment" because all time seemed toslow to a crawl and at once I saw the entire classroom andevery student in it as peripheral noise and activity in a fog of unreality--this is to say that the entirety of the temporalworld inside the four walls of the classroom faded as if itwere a mere projection on a very distant screen. Everythingbecame utterly silent as though a volume dial had beenturned all the way down. Imagine that, if you can, in akindergarten classroom!

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At the same time, I experienced what seemed to be atremendous upsurge of heretofore unknown life from mysolar plexus, almost as though an inner seal had beenbroken and a vault had suddenly flown open. My breathing

changed radically and I honestly felt that I was going to gointo a trance on the spot, which brought on a fleeting waveof anxiety—what about the children? But the experience wasso strong that I could do nothing but succumb. Instantly Ifound myself reconnecting (if not actually going back intime) to a way of being/seeing in my very early life as a childwhen I lived out in the country and roamed acres of myfamily’s property filled with the wild things of nature--a timewhen I was "empty." While I was still holding the pencil inmidair, this early state of emptiness, which I still possessedin some remote part of my being, became inexplicablyinfused with an interior knowledge I did not know I had.Perhaps better said, the experience itself WAS theknowledge--a direct hit, no dots to connect. The emptinessand the knowledge completed each other as though theywere never separate at all, yielding an amazingly intricateweave of apparent opposites, contradictions, and paradoxes,comprising an utterly simple “Whole” of unimaginableharmony and intention. The latter was entirely governed by

an omniscient, immutable awareness, the existence of whichseemed to inhale-exhale all life into continual being.

Now, four years later, I could not repeat to you what thisknowledge was (is); it will take the rest of my life and thensome to comprehend its staggering layers. And yet, in that“moment of the pencil,” I became one with it--or it becameone with me. I can only tell you that it is a type of extremelyheightened "remembering,"--coming back to oneself--whichwe know very little of, but which holds the key to our coretruth and opens the lock on all that is. In that moment Ithought, or knew, this was “the Way, the Truth and theLife”--no Jesus, no Buddha--only an upsurge of Force/Lightthat is wed to eternity.

Only a matter of seconds had passed because I found that Ihad placed the pencil in its cup and had turned to face the

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children, who were gathered on the carpet waiting for me. The intensity of the experience was receding, my normalbreathing was returning, and everyday reality began to takeon its usual vibrant hues and three-dimensionality. I

continued the rest of class as usual, but a half hour later atdismissal, standing outside in the parking lot as I helped thechildren to their parent's cars, I noticed the inner experiencehadn't entirely abated and I was permitted to continue to"remember"! I was so full of joy that my habitual blindnesshad been taken from me and so many, many "fragments"(and I do believe we experience life and ourselves in afragmented, if not fractured, way) coalesced in a dynamicdance of indescribable unity, orchestrated by an intelligent(knowing) force of LOVE.

I thought about that experience this morning as I hurriedlythrew myself together for school. I wondered if we might begiven a glimpse like this at death, a chance to have ourbrokenness mended before our consciousness morphs intosomething else, or is taken over by the fever of yet anotherexistence.

I await the continued unraveling of the Groundhog mystery,absolutely, and wish you well.


May 28, 2004

Dear Madame Melina,

I beg your pardon for the long delay in getting back to youon the Doctrine of Eternal Occurrence. Having burrowed intoa great deal of material on the subject, I am convinced thatwe must resort to parallel universes to explain or to excusethe instant doctrine, a doctrine which is, as you know,immoral, at least to the vicious extent of the same damnedthing happening over and over again, including the fatal car

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accident and the man beating his two-month old infant todeath, whether we like it or not.

Since I know next to nothing of parallel universes, which Ibelieve were invented or discovered to explain the weirdnessof quantum theory, I believe only the existence of paralleluniverses or some other incomprehensible notion mightaccount for the simultaneous resurrection at the time of theirdeaths of innumerable souls with identical bodies in identicalcircumstances, each one enjoying precisely the samesequence of events during each life. That is, when I die I willbe born exactly as I was born before, into the same world. Asyou know very well - from your extensive readings of Ouspensky - Aristotle's pupil Eudemus, attributing theDoctrine to the Pythagoreans, put Groundhog Day thus inpart: "I shall once more gossip among you with the little staff in my hand and again as now will ye be sitting before me,and likewise will be the rest."

If the Doctrine be true, it appears that everyone I left behindalive at the time of each death would continue to outlive mein that universe, and a younger set, when and whereapplicable, for instance my parents, would be duplicated inmy current universe, and I would relive my life as it was livedbefore in precisely the same company, doing the samethings. Of course the planet Earth and the relevant universewould have to regress each time I died as well. Myregressions would seemingly be an infinite series within aninfinite series, each repetition initiated contrary to thenormal direction of linear time. That would be the cyclicprocedure of eternal recurrence, and it would consist of infinite cycles. That is, unless I were the All and its soleperspective on its own multiplicity, unless everything comesand goes with me. But that would be logically absurd exceptto subjective idealists like Fichte, and would be, in anyevent, contrary to the everyday experience of the deaths of individuals. Therefore it is safer to presume that thoseindividuals are resurrected somewhere else, on other planetsif not in other universes, for they do not reappear here, atleast not as they were - if they are not whom they were, how

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can they still be? At the most, if we love cycles instead of linear progressions, we might presume that the entireuniverse comes and goes, say, from the fire into the fire, andis in the end consumed in its entirety regardless of the

various stages of progress of its internal systems, at whichpoint everything proceeds again.

Of course some people believe that souls come back but indifferent forms, and that they progress in timespace on thewheels as the wheels revolve. But I think the most commonsense and perhaps moral position of all is this, that we liveonly one life, that all the rest is wishful thinking, thereforewe had better do our best here and now, not only forourselves but for our race. Not that wishful thinking isuseless. There are facts, then there are opinions about facts.Fortunately, if the opinion is not scientific, it might still do ussome good. Therefore when someone gives me their opinion,no matter how naive it may seem to the experiencedsophist, I ask them, What good does it do you to believethat? As for the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, I suppose itmay serve the purpose of imagining a hellish wheel fromwhich one should do everything in his or her power to leapoff of if not break it for everyone else.

Again, I apologize for not getting back to you on this muchsooner. My burrowing has discovered a gaping hole in theDoctrine of Eternal Recurrence which I am dying to tell youabout but could not get to it without this preliminary. Soplease stand by as you will hear more from me. In theinterim please let me know how you are and what you aredoing with this life.

Sincerely,

Your Groundhog

Friday, June 25, 2004

Dear Madame Melina:

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http://mygroundhog.blogspot.com/

http://mygroundhog.blogspot.com/



Greetings!

Because of my orthodox upbringing, I would fain hope that

this message is not identical to countless other messagesyou have already received in identical worlds or universes orwhatever. But such a hope would not be reasonable until Iknow whether or not this life is in fact identically and foreverrepeated, and, if it is thus repeated, until I know whether ornot I would joyously accept it as it is, always was, and willever be, or whether I would despair of it and commit virtualor real suicide.

Life as it is, with all its ups and downs, is not good enoughfor most people. They would rather have the ups than thedowns, the pleasures than the pains, the goods than theevils. Since that is impossible, they envision another life, a

joyous life over the horizon, somewhere over the mountainsor across the seas, or on some other planet, or on animaginary plane on this very Earth of ours. Finally,confronted with the end of all that jazz, they would have anafter-life in whatever other-world happens to suit their fancy,perhaps the orthodox one favored by the current authorities

in order to get along well under them.

As you can see, I have embarked from Nietzche's heuristicnotion of eternal recurrence - that the exact history of thecosmos endlessly repeats itself. Said classical or pagannotion was of course the poor philosopher's point of departure for a gay, Dionysian life in contrast to the usualascetic life led by those for whom there must always besomething better. Although the notion of eternal recurrencewas Nietzche's "basic conception" for his Zarathustra, hissuperhuman protagonist never committed himself to it.

I have often wondered where you stood on the crucialquestion: What would your reaction be if a demon were toprove to you that your whole life with all its goods and illswill be endlessly repeated? I pray you will take the question

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seriously even though it is hypothetical - eternal recurrenceis plainly impossible or at least highly improbably given thefact that our incredibly complex system is open, subject toall sorts of external influences, inflows, outflows - the vast

number of elements involved would virtually preclude anyexact repetition of any cosmos or life therein.

I look forward to hearing from you before the shadow falls.

Sincerely,

Mister Groundhog

Friday, July 30, 2004

A Taste of Reality

Mister Groundhog: The Groundhog issue is too important tobe held hostage to semantics, although I realize many woulddisagree with that last statement. For instance, Nietzscheput forth that our realities are linguistic creations; that is, wereify through language. Appearances that we appropriate

through naming eventually become essences and things. T.Beckman (1995) wrote : Nietzsche supposes that there is not much difference between realists and idealists, objectivistsand subjectivists, except for linguistic habit. At bottom, all of these stem from origins in our passions, fantasies, and interests. Now that's a sharp slap in the face of our rationalunderpinnings, or at least what we've psychologized of ourrational underpinnings. Additionally, if we are to consideranything of Nietzsche's meditations on the nature of whatwe call reality, time notwithstanding, then we must alsowrap our minds around his denial that we have any organwith which to fix reality and thus are indefinitely subject tountruth. Argh! Furthermore, Beckman writes, To the

Apollonian [sic] scientist this is unbearable; hence, art iswhat makes our situation bearable because art, being

playful with appearance, gets around its untruth. This is

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probably the most important aphorism of [Nietzsche's] Book II and it concludes everything that he has been developingabout art. Is it possible McTaggart simply was not beingartful, that is, playful enough when asserting his logical

contradiction between past, present, and future, andtherefore could not escape the tar pit of his own untruths?And is this the definition of a dunderhead? And then there isNietzsche's Eternal Recurrence of the Same, which I fear wewill not be able to circumvent in our Groundhog musings.


Ah, Madame Melina ,

Nietzsche, despite the disease, rejection and grindingpoverty that he suffered over the years, at least verballyaccepted nature as it is, and believed that any superiorperson would embrace life, no matter how good or evil theworld appears to one who loves or hates their nature as thesource of pleasure and pain.

Even if a miserable life had to be endlessly repeated,Nietzsche would embrace it. And that is at the bottom of hisversion of the ancient doctrine of eternal recurrence. Hemust have known very well that, at least mathematically, theproposition that the cosmos endlessly repeats itself isvirtually impossible if not absurd; for, the more complex theuniverse, the less chance there is of such a repetition, andthe universe is almost infinitely complex. Nietzsche's interestin the doctrine of eternal recurrence was moral. His doctrinewas a heuristic or self-teaching device, and was not intended

to be a theory of physics. He raised a hypothetical question:If a demon came down and demonstrated to you that,beyond a reasonable doubt, your life as well as everyoneelse's would be repeated endlessly, would you rejoice? orwould you despair?

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Those who love life would perhaps react joyously and bewilling to repeat the cycle time and time again, good andbad; they would stick it out, through thick or thin, for betteror worse.

On the other hand, those who deny life would despair. Theywould probably, in their denial, have resort to the asceticmorality which negates life, the morality that says, "Nothingis good enough, therefore we must have progress, not acycle, we must be saved from this life, we must have eithereternal death of the self, when the body perishes, or wemust have an immortal soul that progresses to paradise andeternally perseveres there, providing, of course, that wehave blind faith in the god of paradise who booted us fromthe original paradise because we sinned, and, accordinglydeny ourselves in this world, which is ruled by the anti-god,et cetera.

Of course, in the case of the desire for eternal life, orpermanent death in contrast to the temporal dynamic life,Nietzsche refers to the religion he despises most of all,Christianity, for which life does not endlessly repeat itself butflies off the earth in a tangent, so to speak, a life thatprogresses. For Nietzsche, Christianity is a pathetic religion,a religion of pity. Pity for him is a disease, and he wouldhave none of it. He wanted to survive in this world, not thenext. The "truths" of Christianity, especially those derivedfrom Plato's Apollonian idolatry of eternal ideals, which heidolizes as real, and the craving for permanent supremebeing, which Platonic philosophy identifies with Reality, infact negate or destroy the actual truth, that of truly sacredlife, the real, the dynamic, Dionysian life.

"Plato is boring. In reality my distrust of Plato isfundamental. I find him so very much astray from all thedeepest instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moralprejudices, so pre-existently Christian - the concept 'good' isalready the highest value with him, - that rather than useany other expression I would prefer to designate the whole

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phenomenon Plato with the hard word, 'superior bunkum,'or, if you would like it better, 'idealism.'

"Christianity," further quoth Nietzsche in The Antichrist , hassided with everything weak, low and botched; it has made anideal out of antagonism towards all the self-preservationinstincts of strong of strong life: it has corrupted even thereason of the strongest intellects, by teaching that thehighest values of intellectuality are sinful, misleading and fullof temptation. The most lamentable example of this was thecorruption of Pascal, who believed in the perversion of hisreason through original sin, whereas it had only beenperverted by Christianity."

Nietzsche of course contemned Kant's moral philosophy,which did not depend on proof of god's existence but onautomatic duty to his Kant's version of Christianity's GoldenRule:

"What is there that destroys a man more speedily than towork, to think, feel as an automaton of ;duty,' withoutinternal promptings, without a profound personalpredilection, without joy? This is the recipe par excellence of decadence and even of idiocy.... Kant became an idiot." ( The

Antichrist )

Nietzsche's fictional Zarathustra is the epitome of oppositionto Christianity, the counter-ideal to the ascetic ideal whichamounts to denial of life and a demand for another,imaginary life, which is, for him, really nothing, eternalnothingness or death, not temporal life, which is everything.His Superman transcends the ascetic ideal of denial. If life ishellish repetition, he will accept it. Yet he believes there can

be a higher life, in this world, not in the next. The superiorperson reaches higher, but he does not at the same timedehumanize or condemn as sin his origin, the very ground hestands on. He does not destroy the old but presses himself into new forms, new values. His life, then, is an art.

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In his 1848 lecture on Wagner, Nietzsche scribbled, "Ibelieved that the world was created from the aestheticstandpoint, as a play, and that as a moral phenomenon itwas a deception: on that account I came to the conclusion

that the world was only to be justified as an aestheticphenomenon."

Havelock Ellis ( Dance of Life), during the course of hissympathetic discourse on Gaultier's philosophy of illusionism, Bovarysm, a philosophy Gaultier derived from astudy of Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary, opined, "Ourpicture of the world, for good or evil, is an idealized picture,a fiction, a waking dream.... But when we idealize the worldwe begin by first idealizing ourselves."

Gustave Flaubert, frustrated Romantic yet acclaimed pioneerof modern French realism in literature, personally felt thatreality was "shit," a disgusting thing he put in his mouth tofashion fiction. His family was well endowed, which allowedhim to avoid the detested office work which his legal trainingmight have lead, and to withdraw to his family cottage atRouen and write novels. He was the literary idol of the art forart's sake school of thought. Whatever art was, it was a wayto avoid reality if one could get away with it. It could beeasily justified by reversion to the ancient ascetic view thatthe real world is really an illusion. But this sort of artist wouldnot be an either/or monk in a cell, but would live anaesthetic life in his studio. The aesthetic life has severaladvantages, one being that artists and those who appreciatetheir are can enjoy things without actually possessing them,

just be looking at them. Of course a starving artist wouldrelish a study of a ham sandwich and bowl of fruit more thana bulging-belly, bourgeois patron of the arts.

Would the world not be more beautiful if more peoplewithdrew from the mad competition for the actualpossession of things and enjoyed artistic representations of those things at a distance? Better yet for the greedy world if the art was abstract. Such a better world would be a greatmarket for artists to sell their wares. Others, not so inclined

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to be painters as such, could instead live artfully, could theynot? As for the artists, they need not mix with the crowd andtry to prove some version of the 'truth.' No, the artist shouldlay aside the ideological arguments, the attempt to make

the truth, and simply take up a fragment of existence andreveal its truth. If artists would only focus on their art insolitude, they would pose no danger whatsoever to society,and their creations would greatly benefit a society that couldthen enjoy beholding things presented or represented ratherthan possessing the things in themselves.

Alas, as Ice-T screamed of Ozzie and Harriet, "The world isnot like that!" Creativity is revolutionary. Arts of all sortsincluding literary art have a reputation for fomentingrebellion, "corrupting morals" and the like. Furthermore, weadmit that reality sometimes tastes like shit, but so doesartifice. There is something distasteful in the view that theworld is just a stage upon which hypocrites (Gk. 'actors')play, that life is just a Machiavellian "game" of power plays.

"What is good?" asked Nietzsche. "All that enhances thefeeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man.What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What ishappiness? The feeling that power is increasing, thatresistance has been overcome." Wherefore Nietzsche wasmuch admired by the militant Prussian 'realists' to whomGermany's economic prosperity tasted like shit.

Finally, although there is some truth in it, there is somethinginsincere in the perspective that the world is phony.

Mister Groundhog

July 29, 2004

Brain Wreck!

Mister Groundhog, To be fair to McTaggart, I must ask you tosupply a quote or two from the man on said issues of time,

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past-present-future, in order to measure for myself whetherhe was duped by linguistic machinations and failed to seethrough the transparency so obvious to you and me.Madame Melina

Time is hard to think about because we are not used toconsidering it as separate from the contents we call events.And therein is a clue to understanding what in tarnationMcTaggart is talking about when he says, on the one hand,that the series, past, present, future, is essential to time,and, on the other hand, that time is unreal.

McTaggart's philosophical study, The Unreality of Time, isobtuse to those of us who are uncultivated by the philosophyof time. We wish he would have written the paper for us inthe form of an extended brief setting forth his Proposition upfront; giving us a History of the Question so that we may seewhat others have contributed to the subject; letting us knowwhat the Occasion for the Question is and why we shouldeven be interested; listing important Issues to consider;providing us with a clear and cogent Argument supportingthe Proposition; and summing it all up with a shortConclusion. But the professor ploughs right into the subject

as if he believes we are familiar with it. Perhaps not, so wemust either wrack our brains over it, or turn to otherprofessors for an explanation, or drop what somephilosophers say is the most important subject of all time!Let's wrack our brains.

McTaggart proposes that time is unreal. Time as we think of it requires change. There could be no change without thisseries: past, present, future. The terms of that trinity mustbe incompatible with one another if there is to be change,but the terms are also compatible and that is self-contradictory. Therefore time is unreal.

Here are some choice statements from McTaggart.

"Having, as it seems to me, succeeded in proving that there

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can be no time without an A series (past, present, future), itremains to prove that an A series cannot exist, and thereforetime cannot exist. This would involve that time is not real atall, since it is admitted that the only way in which time can

be real is by existing...."Two events are exactly in the same places in the time-series, relatively to one another, a million years before theytake place, while each one of them is taking place, and whenthey are a million years in the past. The same is true of therelation of the moments to each other. Again, if themoments of time are to be distinguished as separaterealities from the events that happen in them, the relationbetween an event and a moment is unvarying. Each momentis the same moment in the future, in the present, and in thepast....

"Past, present and future are incompatible determinations.every event must be one or the other, but no event can bemore than one. This is essential to the meaning of theterms....

"For time, as we have seen, involves change, and the only

change we can get is from future to present, and frompresent to past....

"The characteristics, therefore, are incompatible. But everyevent has them all. If M is past, it has been present andfuture. If it is present, it has been future and will be past.

Thus all the three incompatible terms are predicable of eachevent, which is obviously inconsistent with their beingincompatible, and inconsistent with their producingchange...."

To be continued in the Name of the Past, the Present, andthe Future, as Time.

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Mister Groundhog

July 28, 2004

McTaggart's Dunderheaded Category of One

Mister Groundhog, I couldn't agree with you more, but eventhough I agree, the argument you put forth makesMcTaggart somewhat of a dunderhead, and what are we tomake of that? Is it possible to be brilliant and dunderheaded simultaneously? Madame Melina

A Man's Intuition tells me that McTaggart's mysticalpredilection disposed him to find his conclusion ("Time isunreal") in his premise ("Time is unreal"). The fundamentalpresumption or aim of mysticism is Unity. Say, the unity of God and World including its inhabitants; to wit: One . Deistsof course insist that such a unity is no unity at all, but isperverse pantheism because the deity is identified with thetime-space multiplicity of finite things; but as deists they arein fact dualists who would divorce a personal God from Hercreation, and that gives us due cause to think they love theworld more than they would admit in their profession of lovefor God.

The mystic wants One, whether that be Being or Nothing.God versus World (including humankind) is a psychologicalprojection of Individual versus World, or Subject versusObject. The mystic wants identity of perceiving subject andperceived object, and calls that identity Reality or One. Of course such an identity precludes the time-space continuum

from the ultimate Reality. Hence McTaggart, following thetraditional mystical path, posits, "Time is unreal." All elsebesides Reality is illusion, or, as the Hindus say, maya.

But we must beware of the semantic traps, and not try toleap through brick walls, or off cliffs to gain the universe butlose oneself. For all practical intents and purposes, those

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walls are real; that is, if you wish, real illusions. Please notehere that McTaggart's need to make the real/unrealdichotomy is representative of the traditional "knee-jerk"either/or evaluation, which ironically separates him from the

One.Wherefore it would seem that McTaggart had a single a

priori (prior to illusory experience) category; to wit: Being -which is to say, on the other hand, Nothing. As brilliant as hewas, he was, in my opinion, confused in respect to thisultimate object of thought because, wrapped up in hissubjectivity, he had confused subject and object. Further, hislogic in relation to reality is Aristotelian, and is not up to datewith the revolutionary scientific thought of his time; by theway, his protege, Bertrand Russell, broke ground. Ironically,McTaggart, mystically inclined, might have been better off resorting to the dynamic logic of modern science rather thanreverting so often to the static classical logic to make hispoints; in doing so, he actually defeated his "mystical"processes, some of which are now upheld by modern orpostmodern science.

Lost in thought, ignoring the limitations of abstractions,prejudiced to find the conclusion already embedded in hispremise, that time is unreal, McTaggart became preoccupiedwith mere abstractions, and wound up confusing symbolswith the realities for which they should stand. In essence, heactually denied the reality of our perceptions of the world,and, in doing so, it follows that he unwittingly denied thatlanguage can have any meaning at all. Hence, to befacetious, we might logically conclude that everything hesaid in respect to Reality was quite meaningless, and that wecan safely ignore his statements. After all, his a priori is...Nothing.

Further, as to his logical proof of Nothing, McTaggart notonly confused subject and object, and symbol and reality,but he confused objects of thought with predicates, inholding that past, present, future, which are predicates of time, are identical with the object of thought or idea he

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speaks of, namely, time. That is, he relied on the so-calledlaw of identity, the claim that object and predicate areidentical - I mean the "is" of identity. Even an equalitystatement such as 2+2=4, which means 4=4, implies a

minimal, formal difference necessary to make the statement.Of course 'is' does not necessarily mean 'equal.' Past is notequal to time nor is it time, but is a predicate of time -time is an adjective refering to motion, and is, looselyspeaking, adverbial. The past simply refers to a past time,and the past time of existence of an object does notcontradict time simply because time has other indexes -present and future. Again, the tenses are predicates orindexes time. Similarly, in dating, we have Me in 1960, Me in1980 - Me is not the date: the date is a predicate, or whatcan be said about Me, that I lived in 1960, 1980 (etc).

I propose that our language necessarily refers to the world inorder to be meaningful, for as subjects we have only theobjective world in common to compare. Following AdamSmith's thinking, dunderheads might primitively dividelanguage into nouns and adjectives - some adjectives referto static qualities of things, others to dynamic qualities(verbs) of things. Of course the word 'time' refers to our

contrived descriptions of motion. The word time may be anoun referring to an object of thought or idea, but it is reallynot a "thing" or a substance in itself, despite all the bookswritten about it as if the ideal were "real." To identify thenotion of time is to idealize it, to make an ideal "real" - thegreat mistake of Plato. Time is a word referring to duration, acomparison of processes for the sake of measurement. Time(etc) as a word referring to our descriptions andunderstandings of processes (etc) is an adverb. "He walkedswiftly. He walked five miles in an hour."

Again, McTaggart has Nothing or Being for his a prior . Nowhe was familiar with Kant. We know Kant defined time andspace as a priori (prior to experience) categories, upon whichthe illusory intuition, or perception of sensed things by aunity of consciousness, depended - perception is illusorybecause the things-in-themselves can never be known. In

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fine, The Thingie is unknown, is The Unknown, or, if you will,the Supreme Being.

Persons who styled themselves "transcendentalists",especially the New England Transcendentalists in America,mistook Kant's effusions about intuition and a prioricategories as an argument for direct individual access toGod; that is, for non-sensory, spiritual intuition of theSupreme Being. But Kant warned us about the faultsinherent in reasoning divorced from experience, the sort of abstract reasoning based on mystical, wish-fulfillingprejudices. The further one strays from "worldly" experiencewith abstractions, the more illusory the transcendental logicbecomes. Logical systems of thought are designed to proveor to demonstrate that certain arguments are false; that isobviously a handy tool to own whenever the falsity has adirect bearing on practical life. However, systems of logic donot prove that any proposition, no matter how logical, is trueto any other reality than that of the particular abstractlogical system itself. Hence Kant warned us to beware lestwe get lost in thought, that transcendental logic is illusory,lest we leap to absurd conclusions - faith for Kant was apractical presumption, with attendant ethical-moral duties.

Finally, I propose that we are all dunderheads when it comesto the One , and, for that matter, the Many. But if we are toknow anything at all, we must have more than one, or many.

Mister Groundhog

July 27, 2004

Dear Mister Groundhog,I couldn’t agree with you more — but even though I agree,the argument you put forth makes McTaggart somewhat of adunderhead, and what are we to make of that? Is it possibleto be brilliant and dunderheaded simultaneously? If so, theregoes any hope I might place in seemingly brilliant mortals.

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Therefore, to be fair to McTaggart, I must ask you to supply aquote or two from the man on said issues of time, past-present-future, in order to measure for myself whether hewas duped by linguistic machinations and failed to see

through the transparency so obvious to you and me. Afterall, the Groundhog issue is too important to be held hostageto semantics, although I realize many would disagree withthat last statement. For instance, Nietzsche put forth thatour realities are linguistic creations; that is, we reify throughlanguage. Appearances that we appropriate through namingeventually become essences and things.

“Nietzsche supposes that there is not much differencebetween realists and idealists, objectivists and subjectivists,except for linguistic habit. At bottom, all of these stem fromorigins in our passions, fantasies, and interests.” (T.Beckman, 1995)

Now that’s a sharp slap in the face of our rationalunderpinnings, or at least what we’ve psychologized of ourrational underpinnings. Additionally, if we are to consideranything of Nietzsche’s meditations on the nature of whatwe call reality, time notwithstanding, then we must alsowrap our minds around his denial that we have any organwith which to fix reality and thus are indefinitely subject tountruth. Argh!

“To the Apollinian [sic] scientist this is unbearable; hence,art is what makes our situation bearable because art, being‘playful’ with appearance, gets around its untruth. This isprobably the most important aphorism of [Nietzsche's] BookII and it concludes everything that he has been developingabout art.” (T. Beckman)

Is it possible McTaggart simply was not being artful, that is,playful enough when asserting his logical contradictionbetween past, present, and future, and therefore could notescape the tar pit of his own untruths? And is this thedefinition of a dunderhead?

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I await your reply.


P.S. And of course there is Nietzsche’s “Eternal Recurrenceof the Same,” which I fear we will not be able to circumventin our Groundhog musings.

July 26, 2004

McTaggart's Series A Contradiction

Dear Madame Melina:

McTaggart's logical contradiction - between past, present,and future - which he asserted to prove that "time" is"unreal", is based on an linguistic error. He posits that thethree tenses are three different things which simply cannotexist at the same time. But the tenses are not things but aresomething that can be said about things. I mean, the tensesare adjectival, or predicate classes indicating or indexing therelation of a continuously existing thing to a particular point

in time, say, the time you might speak of it as somethingthat existed, exists, or will exist.

Do you agree?

In other words, the thing which you might refer to might be apast thing, a present thing, or a future thing in reference toyourself as you read this note. That a thing was red, is white,and will become blue, does not contradict the existence of the colored thing itself simply because the qualities or colorschanged. The categories past, present, future, do notcontradict the existence of the continuant or thing existing intime in reference to your perception at a certain time.

Do you follow me on this?

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In other words, I think McTaggart errs in ignoring the threetenses as tenses, or categories of existence in time. But toignore the tenses is absurd because that defeats theirpurpose, which is to serve as indexes. Why McTaggart, a

master logician, did not recognize his error I do not know.Perhaps, being the mystic that he was, he proceeded with aprejudice or foregone conclusion, that the changes wedescribe when we use the term 'time' do not really exist,that all action or motion is some sort of illusion. Since that iscontrary to common sense, perhaps he contrived an abstractlogical argument, one unconsciously designed to fall into acontradiction in order to avoid change and embrace eternity(hence avoid the implication of death). Such a trap might beeasily constructed, since "time" does not exist as a thing butas a general term referring to change in general. A timerefers to a change of one process in respect to another, saythe rain which began to fall when the clock read 0745yesterday.

If McTaggart said, What we mean by time is 'unreal' becauseit is an ideal, I might agree with him, for time is not aconcrete thing, but is a notion of change. Time is not some-thing that passes us by. Perfect or metered time is an

abstract ideal. Furthermore, time is something which cannotbe rightly said to exist in itself or to refer to itself as apassage or flow, as if we could measure time with time, orcompare a change to its change, or have a ruler measureitself, and so on. To say that change changes, or that whatbecomes becomes, is redundant. I mean to say that the"passage of time" is a myth.

Of course I might be mistaken, wherefore I look forward toyour advice, in the name of the past, the present, and thefuture, as one.

Yours truly,

Mister Groundhog

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July 19, 2004

Christians want progress

The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence appertaining to theendless and exact repetition of life-cycles was attributed tothe Pythagoreans by Eudemas, a pupil of Aristotle. Eudemas,who usually paraphrased Aristotle, wrote a book on physics.

We are not certain that the scientific faction of thePythagorean brotherhood actually espoused the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence - perhaps the Doctrine is Aristotle'snotion. We do know that the brotherhood religiously adheredto and developed the Orphic doctrine of metempsychosis -

the transmigration or the crossing over of souls into otherbodies - but we have cause to doubt that Pythagoras himself taught metempsychosis.

The relationship of the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence -which is a rather amoral (some say immoral) doctrinebecause cycles of relatively good and evil are endlesslyrepeated - to Metempsychosis - which allows the moralindividual who does his duty to escape from vicious cycles -

is a matter of some intellectual interest. With that in mind,we quote Eudemas:

"If we are to believe the Pythagoreans," said Eudemas, "Ishall once more gossip among you with this little staff in myhands, and again as now will ye be standing before me, andlikewise will it be with all the rest."

Thus we have an expression of a universal law of identicalcyclic successions or circular courses, a theory about whatprecedes all beginnings and follows all ends - the samething.

The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence is similar to otherhypotheses derived from the will to live and the wish tosurvive the obvious death of the body with its simultaneousdisappearance of its spirit or breath. Death is similar to

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sleep, hence one might conjure up a permanent soul, andimagine that, although the dead body apparently does notarise, its soul, the principle of permanence behind apparentchange, might awake somewhere else, unseen, in another

sort of body, or perhaps in a replication of the body leftbehind.

Of course some ancient peoples believed that the same bodywould be resurrected, and even buried the body standing up,for its convenience upon resurrection. Of course modernadherents to the belief in resurrection of the body would notcremate the body. For the same reason, the Chineseancients abhorred the mutilation or dismemberment of thebody, wanting it resurrected whole - the eunuch carried hissevered member in a box so he might be rejoined with itupon death.

Notwithstanding those who want the same body resurrected,a person who views the decay and dissolution of a corpseand observes the ebb and flow and transformation of otherthings on Earth, might be led to imagine that a soul survivesthe death of its housing, or, if you will, throws off its cloakand migrates from body to body, perhaps in a circular or

spiral course, from form to form, until, if he so wishes, it isreleased from the wheel of birth. And many were those whoentertained such a wish, and conceived of the body as thesoul's grave, from which it might escape: the pilgrim couldby virtue of the right purification conduct including right faithatone for the original sin of his race and ascend from thehellish muck, to heaven, and join the gods for dinner.

Westerners know very well one old story about the taintingof human nature: Zeus and Persephone begat Zagreus-Dionysus. The Titans wanted to kill the child, so he turnedinto a bull and fled. The Titans caught up with him, killed andate him. Athena however rescued the heart for Zeus, whoswallowed it, then struck the Titans with a thunderbolt.Mankind arose from their ashes, part Dionysian (good) andpart Titanic (evil). The objective of the moral or pure life is to

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purge the evil part and save the good. The poet Pindarinforms us that, after humans die, some of the mostdistinguished among them are reincarnated after eightyears, and become heroes - this assuages Persephone's grief

over the murder of her child. Pindar gives an alternative - amore democratic theory: worlds are places of reward andpunishment; those persons who lead three good lives afterthis world are released from further births.

As for right conduct, the Pythagorean brothers, for example,eschewed beans and meat among other things, and askedthemselves three questions before they went to sleep: Inwhat have I failed today? What good have I done today?What did I do today that I should not have done?

But the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence does not allow thesoul to inhabit a variety of forms during different life cycles;there is no progress or regress: the same cycle of life is livedover and over again. Welcome to Groundhog Day! Such anendless repetition is not very attractive to human beingswho love progress and variety. If people have to live "thesame damn life" over and over again, say some, then, maywe thank the god of ignorance that we do not know we are

stuck in a rut! On the other hand, say others, if that is allthere is, an endlessly repeated life, the same is sufficient foranyone who truly loves life, no matter how happy ormiserable it might be.

Christians especially demand an alternative to circularity;they want some sort of trajectory. Yes, said the spirituallyinclined predecessors to Christianity, there might be avicious wheel of existence, but the aspiring soul can breakthe law of cycles; fly off on a progessive tangent; progress toa favored X, or to infinity, or to death. Some of the greatescapees might periodically return to save the rest of mankind from time to time, just as heavenly bodies returnover immense tracts of time, say, at the end of a great year,a year that might be a century or a thousand centuresaccording to our world clock. Periodic correspondences

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between heaven and earth were posited by the astrologers:Conflagrations when the planets are in Cancer; floods whenin Capricorn - fire at the summer solstice; water at the wintersolstice. Perhaps all the cycles are subject to single, cosmic

cycle. Perhaps, as the Stoics supposed, the universe, asphere surrounded by an infinite void, is burned up by acentral fire, then the whole cycle recurs again, exactly as itdid before, again and again, ad infinitum.

The Stoics, who did not believe in the transmigration of souls, faced the world as conscientious stalwarts andstoically accepted the fatalistic Doctrine of EternalRecurrence. A moral man conducts himself morally despitethe external circumstances of the world; morality is a humanthing originating not in distant stars but in the family, tribeand clan.

As for the amoral (or immoral) Doctrine of EternalRecurrence, it was not necessarily inferred fromastronomical observations of the boring revolution of spheres - life on earth also has it regularities. We shouldnote, if we are to believe Eudemus, that the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence was held by the Pythagoreans, that

Chaldean astrology had little known influence onPythagorism. Theophrastus, fellow-pupil of Eudemus,expressed astonishment as the "sham-science" of Babylon.

We can be certain that Christian theology rejects thetransmigration hypotheses. The idea that a man's soul mighttake an animal form, say that of a pig or chicken, perhapsbecause the deceased ate ham sandwiches or chickensalads, is particularly repugnant to meat-eating Christians.

They have also rejected the Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence,for it postulates not moral progress but rather asimultaneous resurrection of innumerable souls in identicalbodies at the death/birth of each one of them. Whateverexists is not good enough for the ascetic spiritualist; he musthave something better, something good; and, in time, goodrequires a pre-existence evil. That is, Christians want

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personal salvation now if not moral progress on this Earth,that the soul may survive and not perish with the body.

Of course secular or evolutionary progress can be had by

virtue of the extinction of individual lives for the progress of the species - Alcamaeon of Croton, the "father of physiology," opined that man is godlike because he is alwaysmoving by virtue of a vital force or spring of life which atonce puts both body and mind in constant, progressivemotion towards the ultimate goal of individual life: death.Life is not cyclical, observed the ancient physiologist: "Menperish because they are unable to join their beginning totheir end."

Although Christianity rejects metempsychosis, Pythagorashimself was much admired. Ambrose, for instance, believedPythagoras was a Jew and placed him as a great authoritybetween Moses and Plato.

St. Augustine of Hippo held that cyclic repetition isincompatible with the Christian spirit. He rejected therecurring cycles mentioned by Aristotle, and insisted thatcreation and salvation are unique, unrepeatable events.

Time started with the creation of the universe and isindependent of the motion of its bodies hence is not derivedfrom their movement. We might delve into absolute time ortime without events elsewhere, since we cannot make muchsense of it at the moment.

Sunday, August 01, 2004

“I have often wondered where you stood on the crucialquestion: What would your reaction be if a demon were toprove to you that your whole life with all its goods and illswill be endlessly repeated? I pray you will take the questionseriously even though it is hypothetical - eternal recurrenceis plainly impossible or at least highly improbable given the

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fact that our incredibly complex system is open, subject toall sorts of external influences, inflows, outflows - the vastnumber of elements involved would virtually preclude anyexact repetition of any cosmos or life therein. I look forward

to hearing from you before the shadow falls.” — MisterGroundhog

Dear Mister Groundhog,

If a demon should prove that I’m doomed to repeat my lifeendlessly, I might be obliged to ask him a question or two.For example, I might ask him to expound on thephilosophical relevance of the following statement, I YAMWHAT I YAM, within a closed system of existence evolvingtoward a state of maximum entropy, i.e., one’s life repeatingitself ad infinitum. I daresay he could not categorize thelatter statement by fitting it within a contained (closed) circlewe might call “Z”, i.e., one’s life with all its goods and ills willbe endlessly repeated, without first proving that all thingsmatching category “Z” fit completely inside of the largercategory of “Y,” i.e., eternal recurrence is highly improbablegiven the fact that our incredibly complex system is open,

subject to all sorts of external influences, inflows, outflows,and that the vast number of elements involved wouldvirtually preclude any exact repetition of any cosmos or lifetherein. The demon would also have to prove that all thingsmatching category “W,” say, the effects of consuming X cansof spinach per week for the duration of one’s lifetime, also fitinside the category of “Z,” that one is doomed to repeat lifeendlessly and therefore consume X cans of spinach per weekfor eternity (mind you, the same damn cans whether or notthe manufacturer has long since gone out of business).

From these two statements (category “Z” into category “Y,”and category “W” into category “Z”), we can conclude thatall of “W” must fit inside of category “Y”—BRAIN WRECK! Itrust you see the enormity of the problem here and why Imight think twice before conceding to such “proof” as a

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demon might put forth.

In all seriousness,


August 04, 2004

RE: YAM=YAM

Dear Madame Melina:

I think we see I to I on the unlikelihood of the identicalrecurrence of any particular event, for that would require thecooperation of the universe in the identity. I think Imentioned heretofore that Ouspensky, who was amongother things a mathematician, pointed out that Nietzsche'sconcept of eternal recurrence posited a virtually impossiblerepetition if probability theory is our guide, because thegreater the number of things to be combined, the less likelyit is that they will combine in any particular way, and the

complexity of the universe is such that the possibility of asingle repetition of its history is exceedingly remote.

It could happen, I suppose, and an infinite number of times, Isuppose, hence the repetition would be an infinite serieswithin infinity, just as the number of even numbers is infinitewithin the series of all numbers, but I doubt it would happen,for I do not think the spacetime universe works that way,time being directional for the sake of motion - the repetitionof everything endlessly would be no repetition, perhaps, justa static eternity. Of course every insurance company nomatter how large is bound to fail, and the bigger they arethe harder they fall...

The Stoics, like other traditional societies in their longing fora return to the Great Time, rebelled against the tyranny of

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eventual simplification of every task until the highest form,man, becomes just another ant? Wherefore nothing is reallylost if the species survives. Therefore, in a sense, individualsper se, as particles of the species, are ideally immortal; that

is, "death", in an atomized humankind, is imaginary, for allunits are indentical. The concept of Death, then, isirrelevant. Nonetheless, the units among us who still possessa vestige of personality fear that society in this atomizationprocess is actually decaying, leaving everyone alienated andindependent of the disintegrating machine, hence vulnerableto total annihilation.

It is in that context that I wish you would elaborate on yournotion of "entropy," for I do not quite catch your drift. Nor doI understand the metaphysical significance the idea of entropy or the conservation of energy or matter and suchideas had on so many profound thinkers once the scientistsraised the subjects. My father said that everyone willeventually be gray and make one-dollar an hour, and thatthat is entropy.

YAM=YAM. Precisely. YAM=YAM just may be the answer.Well, almost precisely. I have never seen the law of identity

applied to sweet potatoes. I think you are alluding to theoriginal YAM.Incidentally, I am creating some revolutionary material, thewriting of which greatly relieved me from my recentobsession with certain objects.

Mister Groundhog

August 3, 2004

Antidote to Objective Materialism

Nicolas Berdyaev (Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev, 1874-1948), dubbed 'the Philosopher of Freedom,' was a religiousidealist, a leading Christian existentialist and mysticalpersonalist. His most important notion, of freedom, was

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derived from the ideas of the astute German businessmanand great mystic, Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), whom Hegelidentified as the first German philosopher.

Boehme of course was the subjective pantheist who took upthe willing self, which he said was derived from life-feeling,as the source of all knowledge. For Boehme, god is theGround of Everything, the willing Nothing that searches forsomething by means of its will and finds everything withinitself. Conflict emerges from the differentiation produced bythe will at the core of Nothing, wherefore nature, the outerreflection of the inner discovery, is the image of god, hencea mystical identity of god and nature abhorrent to dualists.

The progressive elaboration of the either/or struggle in whichone decides for/against god is via the Trinity. The meaning of this moving life is in Christ, and its purpose is to retrieve thelost unity by allowing the fire of love of Christ heart toembrace all. Boehme had a profound influence not only onBerdyaev but on many others including but by no meanslimited to Descartes, Newton, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling,Blake.

As for politics, Berdyaev was a socialist who studied Marx,but he was not a Communist. He was in fact a foremost criticof the Russian implementation of Marxism (Marxist-Leninismor Bolshevism). Berdyaev was further influenced by suchthinkers as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,and Jaspers.

Berdyaev studied law at the University of Kiev until 1898,when he was expelled for radical activities. That ended hisformal education except for a semester in 1903 under theneo-Kantian professor Wilhelm Windelband at Heidelberg.

Neo-Kantian philosophy was largely a "spiritual" reaction tomaterialism, another 'Romantic' reaction. It was a confusedrevival of either the human spirit or the transcendental spirit.Berdyaev's philosophy opposed both the human and divinespirit to nature. Berdyaev, like many other non-conformistEuropean thinkers, was not satisfied with "objective"

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materialism, and attempted to merge Kantian with Marxistthought.

Berdyaev, student of the German idealism, was the bestRussian representative of the Christian version of the newspiritualism. It was best represented in Germany by theChristian professor, Rudolf Eucken, who won the Nobel prizefor Literature in 1908 over the objections of critics who saidphilosophy was not literature. Eucken is barely heard of today, and then as a neo-Kantian curiosity. He wasdisgraced, perhaps unfairly, by his patriotism - his devotionto the German cause in the Great War and especially hisendorsement with other notable German scientists andphilosophers of the infamous paper whitewashing theGerman atrocities in Belgium, where he sometimesaddressed German soldiers.

The philosophy of neo-Kantian Christians was more or less asubjective philosophy of life, somewhat vague and obscure,one might say 'romantic' - Eucken was criticized for hisindefinite Christian "activism," while Berdyaev's work issometimes referred to as "impressionistic." Berdyaevattempted to elaborate a coherent philosophy, yet he likeother neo-Kantian inclined philosophers rejected systematicor mechanistic thought in favor of a dynamic dialectic. Heemphasized the freedom of the individual. He therefore wasnot averse to accepting the tag "existentialist" when thepop-culture sobriquet was eventually applied to him.

Berdyaev had welcomed the Russian Revolution of February1917, but he detested the policies of the Bolsheviks whoseized power in October. Despite his opposition, he was ingood graces with the Revolutionary government for awhile.

In 1919 he founded the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture,and he became professor of philosophy at Moscow University(1920). However, in 1922, he and more than 100 other non-Marxist exiles were expelled from the Soviet Union forrefusing to embrace "orthodox" Communism - they couldonly return to Russia on pain of death.

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Christian, not only because it contradicts Christianpersonalism, but also because it contradicts Christianeschatology. In the objective historical world there are nosacred things which can be transferred to eternal life; there

is nothing worthy of eternal life, and for this reason thereexists a moral obligation that the world should come to anend and be judged by a higher judgment. Organic theories of society are anti-eschatological; there is a false optimism, areactionary optimism in them." (1)

(1) Slavery and Freedom by Nicolas Berdyaev, New York:Scribner's 1944

Mister Groundhog

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Groundhog Intercourse on Time Et Cetera