Zak's paws are too big for this key board. You should see him on the piano?

Language is not just the medium of thought, it is the very stuff and process of it. Cultural symbols provide thinkable thougts, giving them possibility and permanence. Their manipulation decides the consciousness of the people who use them, as, for example, in the removal of letters from the Greek alphabet with which the name of a universal goddess had been spelt.


'"These wretched slaves of wheels and ledgers began to congratulate themselves on being the conquerers of nature. Conquerers indeed! In actual fact, of course, they had merely upset the equilibrium of nature and were about to suffer the consequences. Just consider what they were up to during the century and a half before The Thing. Fouling the rivers, killing off the wild animals, destroying the forests, washing the topsoil into the sea, burning up an ocean of petrleum, squandering the minerals it had taken the whole of geological time to deposit. An orgy of criminal imbecility. And they called it Progress. Progress," he repeats, "Progress! I tell you, that was too rare an invention to have been the product of any merely human mind - too fiendishly ironical. There had to be outside help for that. There had to be the grace of Belial, which, of course, is always forthcoming - that is, for anyone who's prepared to co-operate with it. And who isn't?"… it was impossible for them to act in their own self interst.' (Aldous Huxley: 'Ape and Essence' - a psychopathology of object relationships.)


'"When your turn comes to jump into the Nothing, you too will be a nameless servant of power with no will of your own."… For a time Gmork peered at the boy out of half-closed eyes. Then he added: "The human world is full of weak-minded people who think they're as clever as can be and are convinced that it's terribly important to persuade even the children that Fantastica doesn't exist."' (Michael Ende: 'The Neverending Story')


The compromise between the material and spiritual creation, is the point at which the physically concrete meets the metaphysically abstract; with its art and music, soul, logos, freedom. The Greek atomists distinguished between spirit and matter; with matter as dead particles moved by external forces of spiritual origin - which became the dualism between mind and matter, body and soul.


'A glance at the clustered leaves which twined over the arches of a window; such nothings as these could dispel the illusion called reality, opening up, beneath its sober peace, the whirling depths, torrents, and starry heights of the world imagined in his soul. A Latin initial would frame the radiant eyes of his mother, a long drawn note in the Ave open some inner gate in paradise, a Greek letter become a galloping horse, a rearing snake, sliding in and out among flowers, till it vanished and left him staring down at the dull page of a grammar book… 'I believe,' he said to him once, 'that the cup of a flower, or a little, slithering worm on a garden path, says more, and has more things to hide, than all the thousand books in a library. Often, as I write some Greek letter, a Theta or Omega, I have only to give my pen a twist, and the letter spreads out, and becomes a fish, and I, in an instant, am set thinking of all the streams and rivers in the world, of all that is wet and cold; of Homer's sea, and the waters on which Peter walked to Christ. Or else the letter becomes a bird, grows a tail, ruffles out its feathers, and flies off. Well, Narziss, I suppose you think nothing of such letters. But I tell you this: God writes the world with them… How wonderful, he thought, that each of these thousand tiny leaves should have a whole starry heaven hidden in it. It was all a miracle and a mystery; the lizards, plants, stones, all of it together.' (Herman Hesse: 'Narziss and Goldmund')


The universe as an interconnected whole in which no part can be fundamental, so that the properties of one part are determined by those of all the others. Each part 'contains' all the others so that there is no logical finity. Science is successful to the extent that it provides workable approximations; choosing to select some phenomena and isolate others. The interconnections of 'mind at large'; with interrelated events within an interrelated structure, can then be reduced to working models, which do not require the consideration of wider interactions.


This fragmentation is applied to processes within and between people; with mind split from body, and individuals split up into conflicting compartments of function and personality. This inner fragmentation extends to the 'outside' world, which is seen as a multitude of separate objects and events which can then be exploited by different interest groups, as the fragmentation is extended to a world made up of different nations, races, religious and political groups.


'Each grain is at the centre. The dust is at the centre. The worlds are at the centre. The beasts are at the centre. The ancient peoples are there… When He died in the wounded world He died not for me, but for each person.' (CS Lewis: 'Perelandra')


'Our struggle,' the historian Herbert Butterfield commented, 'is against some devilry that lies in the very process of things, against something that might even be called demonaic forces existing in the air.'


Monsters bred from the sleep of reason.

Zak's paws are too big for this key board. You should see him on the piano?
Right. That's quite enough. Off to your bed! Now!





And don't start blaming poor Zak. I know it wasn't him.
Reply:thats some good stuff there
Reply:there's a lot to take in
Reply:why do you get so few answers i like your humour
Reply:Speechless, took me ages to read that well done.