Author: jdtabor

Koestler: Parts and Whole

jdtabor

Heisenberg’s autobiographical account of modern physics was called Der Teil und das Ganze but appeared in English as Physics and Beyond! The Part and the Whole are the cornerstone of Koestler’s take on the cosmos…a self-assertive tendency along with a Janus like opposite, a integrative tendency…in all things…from the inner life of cells to the movements of solar systems. The Part/Whole dynamic operates independently as discrete units, but at the same time as part of a greater whole…and that whole is a part of…part of, part of, and on and on it goes…physics, biology, sociology, history, our psychological states with the reptilian “self-interest” and “drives” crossing paths with our “higher” desire to integrate and merge and sense transcendence.

See NYTimes “37.2 Trillion Galaxies or Human Cells”

Sources: The Ghost in the Machine (1982) and Janus (1978)

 

Koestler on Visiting with the Messiah

jdtabor

Left Wien April 1, 1926, arrived in Haifa a month later. Arrived in Jerusalem in Sept 1927–after 18 months. Age 22. Rented a room at 29 Street of the Prophets, east of Jaffa Gate. Interviewed Abdullah of Transjordan. Visited our only 20th century Jewish Messiah, Moshe Guibbory, at the Sanhedria Tombs north of the city. Koestler also became “secretary” to the extraordinary Jabotinsky. 

Sanhedria Tombs c. 1830s

Left Palestine in June 1929. “I had gone to Palestine as a young enthusiast” but instead of Utopia, I had found reality, an extremely complex reality, which attracted and repelled me. In the end revulsion trumped attraction.”

Arthur Koestler’s original story filed with the German press is here: “Besuch beim ‘Messias‘” Neue Freie Presse, January 29, 1928. He also has an extended and fascinating account of this remarkable visit with Guibbory in his autobiography, Arrow in the Blue (New York: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 195-198.

The Sounds of Silence

jdtabor

So in the silence of the soul I listen for the still small voice, which is God’s call to each of us to engage in the work of love and creativity, to bring new life into the world, and to care for it and nurture it during its years of vulnerability. And whenever I see people engaged in that work of love, I sense the divine presence brushing us with a touch so gentle you can miss it, and yet know beyond all possibility of doubt that this is what we are called on to live for, to ease the pain of those who suffer and become an agent of hope in the world. That is a meaningful life. That is what life is when lived in the light of God’s presence, in answer to his call”

Rabbi Jonathan Sachs
Our deepest sense of value and meaning in this world are not an anomaly or fluke, projected onto an otherwise uncaring universe. This inner sense of self is not somehow “outside” reality, and thus unreflective of its fundamental nature. Our capacities of self-consciousness, our sense of time, our existential becoming, is emergent from the “ground of being,” that nameless process rooted in the most fundamental reality. Our best clue as to the deeper nature of nature is our inner selves, reflective of the inherent capacities of reality–defined simply as “what is.” Cogito, ergo sum is not a bad beginning, if one can excise the dualism of Western language and assumptions. Whitehead called it panentheism.
JDT
When I heard Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, I knew there was joy at the heart of the universe.
Paul Claudel

Some Thoughts on “Virtual Immortality” from Dr. Robert L. Kuhn

jdtabor

Many of my readers know the extraordinary PBS program hosted by Dr. Robert Kuhn, “Closer to Truth.” Simply put, Kuhn explores the deepest questions of our existence related to Cosmos, Consciousness, and Meaning…

Here is one of Kuhn’s most provocative published articles titled “Virtual Immortality” published in Skeptic Magazine in 2016. I use it in my classes:

Kuhn - Virtual Immortality - Skeptic Magazine - 21-2 - 2016

Losing a Child…

jdtabor

I was totally knocked out by these lines in the HBO series “True Detective” tonight.

A lost child is a void, that echoes backwards and forwards in time. It encompasses not just the rooms you were in with them, and are no longer, or even those rooms you will never enter together. The negation is deeper. It is the knowledge that every room you enter for the rest of your life, they should be there, and are not. And your memories of them become totems to that absence. A lost child is a story that’s never allowed to end.

True Detective, Season 3, Episode 6 at 54:33 minute mark…

End of 2018 Bits & Pieces

jdtabor

A man should be known by the enemies he keeps.
Ernest Hemingway

There is nothing I don’t know about myself, that’s why I can’t do therapy.
Greta Gerwig character Brooke Cardinas in Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America

I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused and who was so impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.
Michael Cain character Thomas Fowler in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American

Every revolutionary ends up becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.
Albert Camus

He is filled with a direct certainty that a higher order of reality existed, and that it alone invested existence with meaning.
Arthur Koestler, Dialogue with Death

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained in us than lying to others
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Never complain. Never explain.

It’s more selfish to have kids than to not have them.

No one in this world is going to know you longer than your older brother or sister. From the day you were born until the day you die.

What some people lack in common sense they make up for in self-esteem.

When the legend is bigger than the facts, choose the legend.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

No one knows what’s going on in someone else’s mind. If we did life would be intolerable.

All this for so little a neck.
Anne Boleyn