[ by Charles Cameron — cross posted from Sembl — creativity as the blending of ideas ]
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Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner‘s The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities gives us a fascinating look at the way the human mind weaves a world out of seemingly disparate elements — in a very similar manner to that in which the creative mind weaves an aha! out of seemingly disparate ideas. The book deals with the formation of perceptions as well as ideas, but it was a specifically conceptual blend that intrigued me the other day.
First, they note that when we use expressions like “I had reached the boiling point. I was fuming. He exploded.” we are making a metaphorical mapping in which “a heated container maps to an angry individual, heat maps to anger, smoke and steam (signs of heat) map to signs of anger, explosion maps to uncontrolled rage.” Then they add in the “folk theory of physiological effects of anger” including ” increased body heat, blood pressure, agitation, redness of face” – and thus we have a threefold scheme, in which physiology, emotions and the physics of heat are intricately cross-correlated, so that we can say without much thought “He was so mad I could see smoke coming out of his ears”.
Here Fauconnier and Turner describe the mechanics of this remarkable conceptual blending process – which can yield such a seemingly unremarkable phrase:
In addition to the metaphoric mapping between Heat and Emotions and the vital-relation connection between Emotions and Body, there is a third partial mapping between Heat and Body. In this mapping, steam as vapor that comes from a container connects to perspiration as liquid that comes from a container, the heat of a physical object connects to body heat, and the shaking of the container connects to the body’s trembling.
The three partial mappings set the stage for a conventional multiple blend in which the counterparts in the inputs are fused, yielding, for example, a single element that is heat, anger, and body heat and a different single element that is exploding, reaching extreme anger, and beginning to shake. Once we have this blend, we can run it to develop further emergent structure and we can recruit other information to the inputs to facilitate its development.
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What interests me here is the phrase:
the inputs are fused, yielding, for example, a single element that is heat, anger, and body heat
It must always be remembered … that the various senses we take out of an ancient word by analysis existed in it as a unity.
Thus the King James Version of the Bible, John 3.8, reads:
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
In the Greek, the word here translated wind is pneuma, and the sentence accordingly means “the pneuma blows where it wills, and you hear its sound but can’t tell where it comes from or is going: and so it is with all those born of pneuma“…
Recalling Lewis’ remark about the “various senses we take out of an ancient word”, this in turn means simultaneously and without separation:
the wind blows where it wills, and you hear its sound but can’t tell where it comes from or is going: and so it is with all those born of wind…
the breath blows where it wills, and you hear its sound but can’t tell where it comes from or is going: and so it is with all those born of breath…
and:
spirit blows where it wills, and you hear its sound but can’t tell where it comes from or is going: and so it is with all those born of spirit…
Take this a step further, realize that spirit can be defined as what inspires us, and we have:
inspiration blows where it wills, and you hear its sound but can’t tell where it comes from or is going: and so it is with all those born of inspiration…
Four meanings, all making good sense, and all present simultaneously and inseparably in the one gospel phrase…
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Now consider that Fauconnier and Turner are speaking of how “three partial mappings set the stage for a conventional multiple blend in which the counterparts in the inputs are fused, yielding, for example, a single element that is heat, anger, and body heat” and compare it with Lewis’ “unity” from which we take out “the various senses” by “analysis”, as applied to the “ancient word” pneuma, with its meaning encompassing wind, breath, spirit… inspiration.
Are wind, breath and spirit or inspiration in fact three “primitives” that conceptual mapping in ancient Greek thought has brought together? What do we gain, and what do we lose if we view them this way?
And what do we lose, what do we gain if we view them as a single rich concept, now reduced to three or four separate — and separately less complexly interesting — ideas?
[ by Charles Cameron — of [almost] no military or intelligence interest, this is a post for computer scientists, historians, scientists, artists, contemplatives and other creatives ]
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I’ve been on a bit of a binge about medieval and renaissance diagrams recently, putting together an anthology of early “semantic networks” for the Sembl game site – but also thinking about the alternate track of art history which would focus on diagrams rather than paintings (I’m thinking of two dimensions here, hence no mention of sculpture) – an alternate history which may have something to teach our richly diagrammatic and data-visual times.
My interest in all this tracks back at least to my early encounter with an essay by the computer scientist Margaret Masterman in Theoria to Theory (1967).
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Yesterday brought me a post from Jason Wells, a scientist and bright all-rounder I follow on Google+, in which he posted an image of the cosmos from the Ptolemaic (pre-Copernical) point of view, which I’ve put at the head of this post.
Jason commented on this diagram:
As pretty as this is, this is not how your universe works.
That is all.
The diagram Jason posted purports to be mathematically and astronomically based: it is, if you like, a quantitative diagram. I don’t happen to think it’s pretty, although the two creatures (angels, goddesses?) up towards the top of the circle may be, and the serpent eating its tail around it is nicely done -– I think it has a rather austere beauty to be honest, but I’m likely to concede to Jason that it isn’t “true” in the sense of being an accurate representation of the (abstract) laws of celestial motion.
But then I also think there’s more to truth than accuracy, useful though that may be – there’s also a qualitative element to truth, and perhaps “beauty” is (among other things) a name for it.
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Yesterday also brought me a news bulletin that ties into that same interest in medieval and renaissance diagrams. From the Vatican Information Service (via Chant Cafe) , we learn that Hildegarde of Bingen (1098 – 1179) is now a saint of the Catholic Church with universal cultus:
Vatican City, 10 May 2012 (VIS) – The Holy Father today received in audience Cardinal Angelo Amato S.D.B., prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. During the audience he extended the liturgical cult of St. Hildegard of Bingen (1089-1179) to the universal Church, inscribing her in the catalogue of saints.
Consider, then, in contrast to Jason’s mechanistic Ptolemaic diagram, this diagram which today’s fresh-minted saint produced in the late 1140s or early 1150s to illustrate her visionary intuitions of the universe in the first of three books, Scivias:
and these two, from Liber divinorum operum:
and:
These, I take it, are purely qualitative images in contrast to the Ptolemaic diagram — making no propositional claims as to physical or mathematical accuracy, but portraying Hildegarde’s sense of cosmic order. And just as we would not argue whether it is Van Gogh or El Greco who is “right” about the skies in their respective paintings, so I don’t think Hildegarde is worried about which of her diagrams is “right” in its portrayal of the world she lived and prayed in – each one illustrates some aspect of her vision of the world, and one does not necessarily contradict another.
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Here are two descriptions of Hildegarde’s world, which may give us some insight into the diagrams above. For the top one:
For Hildegard of Bingen, twelfth century German Benedictine abbess, the universe is like an egg in the womb of God. Her view of the universe, conditioned as it is by her times and her education, represents her visionary understanding of God’s motherhood of this sphere that we call the universe. Hers is a view that is organic and holistic, coloured neither by Greek philosophy nor Enlightenment rationalism, refreshing and strikingly “true” in its perceptions around the source of created life.
God created the world out of the four elements, to glorify His name. He strengthened the world with the wind. He connected the world to the stars. And he filled the world with all kinds of creatures. He then put human beings throughout the world, giving them great power as stewards of all Creation. Human beings cannot live without the rest of nature, they must care for all natural things.
It’s probably worth mentioning that three of the “four elements” of the ancients are still known to us, though we call them “states” rather than “elements” at this point — the solid, liquid and gaseous states correspond with what the ancients called “earth”, “water” and “air”, respectively — and it has even been suggested that their “fire” corresponds to the fourth state we now term “plasmas” — not my line of business, however, so who knows?
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Hildegarde picked up the word “viriditas” from Gregory the Great and made it peculiarly her own. It means greeness, literally, and freshness by extension — but for Hildegarde’s integral view of all that is, it also carries a theological dimension, Christ being the greening of the world for her:
For Hildegard, viriditas was an attribute of the Divine nature, a reflection of God’s goodness and beauty. It stood for vitality, fertility, fruitfulness and growth; in fact all the things that we now associate with the “greenness” of nature. For us today “greenness” is a sign that the Earth is healthy and flourishing. Similarly, for Hildegard, viriditas was synonymous with physical and spiritual health, with the continuing vivifying force of the Holy Spirit.
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Dr Carmel Bendon Davis, Hildegard of Bingen: Eco-warrior and Superwoman
This greening or freshening is not, for Hildegarde, just a matter of earth and water, of river and forest, it is also infused with fire and air:
I am likewise the fiery life of the substance of divinity. I flame over the beauty of the fields and sparkle in the waters, and I burn in sun, moon, and stars. And with an airy wind that sustains all things with invisible life, I raise them up vitally. For air lives in greenness and flowers, waters flow as if alive, the sun, too, lives in his light, and when the moon comes to her decline she is kindled by his light, as it were to live again… Thus I, the fiery force, am hidden in [the winds], and they take fire from me, just as breath continually moves a man, and as a windy flame exists in fire. All of these live in their essence and are not found in death, because I am life.
Understanding in the soul is like the Veriditas of the branches and the leaves of the tree
It is, in fact, neither exclusively natural nor supernatural, but non-dual.
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Dylan Thomas, being a Welshman and a poet, thus has an insight that bears a family resemblance to Hildegarde’s, but phrases it in a way that leaves the “force” neither personified nor otherwise… and thus with no necessary doctrinal implication:
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
For Hildegarde, this “force” is also Christ — for he himself is the “the fiery life of the substance of divinity” — and his coming to earth a greening and freshening of a world until then barren of the love he brought.
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Hildegarde was the abbess in charge of a small flotilla of nuns — but also a mystic, a visionary, philosopher, poet, painter and songstress…
Her song of creation, O Viriditas, bears comparison in spirit with St Francis‘ Canticle of the Sun. She writes to her “green” Christ and his “green” planet:
O greenness of God’s finger
with which God built a vineyard
that shines in heaven
as an established pillar:
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
And o height of the mountain
that will never be dispersed
in the judgment of God,
you nevertheless stand from afar as an exile,
but it is not in the power
of the armed man
to seize you.
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit.
You are glorious in God’s preparation.
And she sets her words to the music of the times:
Indeed, her music is sung even today…
How’s that for a twelfth century statement of what we’d these days call “ecology”?
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But all this risks getting far too ethereal, I have wandered far along my own epicycles from Jason Wells’ point, and methinks I should bring us back down to earth.
Dennis The Constitutional Peasant, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, meets King Arthur and complains, “What I object to is you automatically treatin’ me like an inferior.” It’s understandable — but so, perhaps, is king Arthur’s response: “Well, I am king.”
Two worldviews clash here — and in the ensuing debate, Arthurian myth meets contemporary politics:
Dennis’ Mother: Well how’d you become king, then?
Arthur: The Lady of the Lake,… [Angel chorus begins singing in background] her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. [Angel chorus ends] That is why I am your king!
Dennis: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis: You can’t expect to wield supreme power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Arthur: Shut up!
Dennis: I mean, if I went ’round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
Or if some bint told me the universe was a cosmic egg in the womb of God, for that matter — even if Benedict XVI did just add her to the calendar of saints.
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Here you go, courtesy of YouTube:
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Frankly I appreciate both modes of thinking — the mythic and the scientific — and believe we’re in the sort of territory here that Nils Bohr was thinking of when he said:
The opposite of a true statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.
[ by Charles Cameron — out of the box thinking, the blues, prison escape literature and more ]
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As you’ll see by the time we get to the Colditz segment of this post, I’m not arguing that anyone should change out of uniform.
But oh yes, I do fish for eddies in the currents of words — or to put that the other way around, eddies in the currents of words tend to catch my eye, and when I read this paragraph in Kohlmann‘s Response to the Critics of Disruptive Thinking:
Jon Favreau, the head speechwriter for President Obama, was 27 when appointed. Aaron Schock, a Congressman from Illinois, is 30. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was still an undergrad at Harvard. Tom Brady won multiple Super Bowls in his twenties. This is a remarkable list, with some household names. Yet, I must ask, where are our young strategic military geniuses in uniform?
it was that last word that grabbed my attention — because somewhere in the back of my mind I have this idea that there’s nothing uniform about genius: it’s supremely individual.
Besides, I’m 67.
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All of which brings me circuitously to Blind Lemon Jefferson and his Lock Step Blues:
Mean old jailor : taking away my dancing shoes
I can’t strut my stuff : when I got those lock-step blues
Again, I’m not claiming that “military” equates to “prison”, or that marching involves leg-irons… just hop, skipping and dancing from one thought to another, to see whether there’s a creative leap available…
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And indeed it seems there is.
Thinking about disruptive thinking and uniforms and, well, prison, finally put me in mind of the place where the uniformed are required by their own code to be disruptive — that is, when they’re in POW camps.
There’s a great deal of noise these days about outside the box thinking — as a synonym for creativity — but it has only now occurred to me as I’m writing this post that one of my very first boyhood obsessions was in fact a kind of training ground for thinking outside the box.
And the box in question was Colditz Castle, the POW camp where the Germans sent those who had already escaped from at least one such camp and been recaptured.
I don’t know Emily Short, but in a post at her Interactive Storytelling blog, she describes the German “idea of putting all the most clever and resourceful prisoners together in an old building riddled with hiding places and odd physical quirks” as “not the brightest”, and notes that “those imprisoned found an astounding number of escape possibilities”.
That’s the essence of The Colditz Story, as described by PR Reid in his 1953 book of that name and its sequel, Men of Colditz [link is to double volume]. And I was fixated on Colditz and other World War II escape narratives for a boyish year or two thereafter.
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Decades after that obsessive interest of mine in military escape literature had faded from view, I ran across another tale that fits the genre: Felice Benuzzi‘e extraordinary 1953 No Picnic on Mount Kenya.
Benuzzi was an Italian POW in a British camp in Kenya, with little to no prospect that even if he could escape the camp he’d be able to avoid recapture:
The idea of escaping is a vital factor in the mind of every prisoner. On our arrival in East Africa I had as a matter of course carefully considered the chances of reaching the nearest neutral territory, Portuguese East Africa; but I had concluded that, for me at least, this would be impossible. The distances one had to cover were enormous, one needed a frightful lot of money, the opportunity of getting a car, knowledge of the country and of the main languages, and faked documents…
But imprisonment is appalling boredom, and boredom didn’t suit Benuzzi’s temperament. One night he saw Mt Kenya from the camp for the first time:
an ethereal mountain emerging from a tossing sea of clouds framed between two dark barracks — a massive blue-black tooth of sheer rock inlaid with azure glaciers, austere yet floating fairy-like on the near horizon. It was the first 17,000-foot peak I had ever seen.
I stood gazing until the vision disappeared among the shifting cloud banks.
For hours afterwards I remained spell-bound.
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Escape from boredom was imperative, climbing Mt Kenya would be Benuzzi’s return to life.
Fortunately, Bennuzi had a map:
Admittedly it was just the label from a can of “meat and vegetable rations” — but beggars and prisoners can’t be choosers, necessity is the mother of invention, and a meat rations can was what they had.
The dangers they faced were real enough. From the introduction:
“In order to break the monotony of life (in prison) one had only to start taking risks again,” Benuzzi writes as he and his comrades design their escape. The risks are real. Sneaking out of camp, they may be shot. For the first two days they must travel at night, across fields and past settlements. Once in the forest, away from what Benuzzi calls “the human danger-zone,” they will enter the “beast danger-zone.” Finally they will escape into the relative safety of the alpine tundra. Every mountaineer and outdoor person reading this tale will feel kinship to Benuzzi here, when he writes that “all the landscape around us reflected our happiness … green-golden sunrays filtered through the foliage … bellflowers seemed to wait for the fairy of the tale who would ring them. We were now into a world untainted by man’s misery, and bright with promise. Other dangers undoubtedly in store for us, but not from mankind, only from nature.”
Benuzzi avoided the worst that humans and beasts could throw at him, scaled Mt Kenya’s Point Lenana (16,300 ft), with equipment scrounged from around the camp, returned, surrendered himself to the British and to solitary confinement — knowing himself a free man — and lived, as they say, to tell the tale.
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So what do we learn?
It’s not that uniforms frustrate creativity, it’s that necessity procures it.
As the great Islamic poet Jalaluddin Rumi [quoted in Idries Shah, Tales of the Dervishes, p. 197.] says:
New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity.
Therefore, O man, increase your necessity, so that you may increase your perception.
That’s where this whole “disruptive thinking” discourse is eventually headed.
[ by Charles Cameron — Shin Bet’s Yuval Diskin calles Netanyahu messianic, Netanyahu called Ahmadinejad messianic, and other millenarian parallels and face-offs ]
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One man’s Christ is another man’s Antichrist:
We’ll get to Diskin and Netanyahu, but first some background.
It is not uncommon to see the face-off between the West and Global Jihad — however you might prefer to name the opposing sides — as both asymmetrical (our kevlar vs their shalwar kameez, so to speak) and symmetrical (our crusaders vs their mujahideen, so to speak).
There are several aspects of these symmetries and asymmetries that interest me:
1.
The first is that the asymmetries are typically quantitative: one side has more firepower than the other, more troops and more sophisticated weaponry, and indeed, the conflict or flurry of conflicts in question does seem to fall under the rubric of asymmetric warfare, and those who write about asymmetries with the deepest understanding are typically those whose “loop” is to observe, orient, decide and act… while by way of contrast, the symmetries are most frequently observed by those whose “loop” is to observe, comprehend, describe and influence, and the symmetries they observe are typically qualitative, operating at the level of ideas.
I’ll get to a couple of examples shortly.
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The second is that within the asymmetries, it is not uncommon to find a reversal of polarities by which the lesser outsmarts and defeats the greater force. I’m thinking here of David and Goliath as the archetypal version, and of Nigel Howard, in Confrontation Analysis: how to win operations other than war, writing:
the problem of defense in the modern world is the paradoxical one of finding ways for the strong to defeat the weak.
A different aspect of asymmetry emerges when one can think of Israel as both the powerful high-tech occupier of a poorly-equipped and stateless mass of Palestinians, and a tiny emergent Jewish democracy surrounded on all sides (except the sea) by Arab and or Muslim once and future foes… a Goliath seen one way, a David the other…
What’s intriguing here is that in some ways everybody wants to be David, right?
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The third point of interest is the frequency with which the symmetries appear to contain explicit millenarian, messianic or apocalyptic elements.
ush, Cheney, and the neoconservatives on one hand, Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Al Qaeda on the other — both sides staked their claim to power on a vision of global rectification through violent means. But the utopian ends that supposedly justified those means — universal democracy or a universal Islamist state — proved impossible to achieve, and in a few short years the opposing dreams of Bush and Bin Laden had devolved into an endless shared nightmare.
And then there’s Arundhati Roy, whose Guardian piece, The algebra of infinite justice, written less than a month after 9/11, asked:
What is Osama bin Laden? He’s America’s family secret. He is the American president’s dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised. He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of “full-spectrum dominance”, its chilling disregard for non-American lives… Now that the family secret has been spilled, the twins are blurring into one another and gradually becoming interchangeable. … Now Bush and Bin Laden have even begun to borrow each other’s rhetoric. Each refers to the other as “the head of the snake”. Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of good and evil as their terms of reference.
Note here that Kepel’s “vision of global rectification through violent means” and Roy’s “loose millenarian currency of good and evil” both have resonance that falls clearly within Richard Landes’ corpus of “varieties of millennial experience“.
4.
Even more explicitly messianic is the parallelism / opposition observed by Jean-Pierre Filiu, Kepel’s Sciences Po colleague, in his Apocalypse in Islam, where he notes that:
the emergence of al-Qaida has been accompanied by a millenarian rereading of jihadist terrorism that considers the Taliban sanctuary in Afghanistan to be only a first step toward the establishment of a universal caliphate… the Hour is near. The signs are there for all to see.
and writes with reference to Ahmadinejad and his Mahdist cohorts in the next paragraph:
These tragic visionaries share with the most farsighted of American neoconservatives the conviction that an implacable conflict is foretold in prophecy.
concluding (with regard to both, I would imagine):
It is therefor less a clash of civilizations that is now beginning to take shape than a confrontation of millenarianisms.
5.
Tim Furnish has a milder variant on the classic “One man’s Christ is another man’s Antichrist” theme as the opening sentence of his study of Mahdisms, Holiest Wars — he writes:
One man’s messiah is another man’s heretic…
which in turn reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges and his short classic, The Theologians, in which he describes the vicissitudes of two men deeply concerned with the nature of God — the heretic John of Panonia and the heresy-hunter Aurelian, his nemesis: Borges concludes his tale of these two intertwined lives with an extraordinary symmetry:
The end of this story can only be related in metaphors since it takes place in the kingdom of heaven, where there is no time. Perhaps it would be correct to say that Aurelian spoke with God and that He was so little interested in religious differences that He took him for John of Pannonia. This, however, would imply a confusion in the divine mind. It is more correct to say that in Paradise, Aurelian learned that, for the unfathomable divinity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox believer and the heretic, the abhorrer and the abhorred, the accuser and the accused) formed one single person.
But let there be no mistake about it, theologies differ. Safar Al-Hawali may use some of Hal Lindsey‘s exegetical devices to elucidate the end times from an Islamic perspective and proclaim “the Messiah = Christ Jesus Son of Mary, Allah’s servant and messenger” — but Islam’s Mahdi is pretty clearly Joel Richardson‘s Antichrist.
6.
What I hope to have accomplished thus far is to show two things: that keeping an eye out for symmetries and antitheses is a powerful tool for exploring conflict, especially at the qualitative and ideological level, and that messianic juxtapositions in particular have great force, and crop up with significant frequency in the literature of the “sacred vs secular war” also known to some as “jihad vs crusade”.
7.
But hey, we came here to talk about Netanyahu and his spy, right? I find the juxtaposition of these two quotes — one from the current Israeli Prime Minister shortly before he was elected, the other just a few days ago by the man who was recently his spy-chief — striking, particularly in the contex provided above:
I try to read carefully. When I first saw the Yuval Diskin quote it was contextualized as suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak were the leaders making “decisions out of messianic feelings” – but then for a moment it occurred to me that Diskin might have been saying “I don’t believe the prime minister’s accusation that the leadership of Iran makes decisions based on messianic feelings is correct – I see them as rational, persuadable actors.”
But no: Yuval Diskin is quite clear that it is Netanyahu and Barak he is talking about in this extended quote from Ha’Aretz:
My major problem is that I have no faith in the current leadership, which must lead us in an event on the scale of war with Iran or a regional war. I don’t believe in either the prime minister or the defense minister. I don’t believe in a leadership that makes decisions based on messianic feelings. They are two messianics – the one from Akirov or the Assuta project and the other from Gaza Street or Caesarea. Believe me, I have observed them from up close… They are not people who I, on a personal level, trust to lead Israel to an event on that scale and carry it off. These are not people who I would want to have holding the wheel in such an event.
Perhaps because I am more than usually sensitive to apocalyptic and messianic fervor, I find the implications of both Netanyahu’s and Diskin’s observations – if accurate as to the respective temperaments of the leaders concerned — quite chilling.
8.
As so often, I’m hoping to raise questions here — to prompt deliberative thinking, not to argue or persuade.
[ by Charles Cameron — introducing the world of problem solvers and creatives to the world of theologians and contemplatives and vice versa — and then, Simone Weil ]
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I believe this is an important post in its own way, though a short one: because it links two areas that I believe are joined at the hip in “reality” but seldom linked together in thinking about either one.
I mean, creativity, as in the guys working away in the garage on something that when it emerges will be the new Apple, and grace, the mysterious and mercurial manner in which inspiration touches down on us…
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In the first part of this post, then, I would simply like to suggest that those entrepreneurial folk who follow their dreams — typically into garages or caves — and beg borrow and steal from relatives, friends and passing acquaintances the funds they need to continue their pursuit of some goal or grail under the rubric “do what you love and the money will follow” are, in fact, following a variant of a far earlier rubric, “seek ye first the kingdom of God … and all these things shall be added unto you” – and that creative insight or aha! is in fact a stepped down and secular version of what theology has long termed epiphany – the shining through of the eternal into our mortal lives.
But this will get preachy if I belabor the point: what I am hoping to do is to open the literatures of the world’s contemplative traditions to the interest of “creatives” and the literatures of creativity, problem solving, and autopioesis to the interest of theologians and contemplatives…
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And Simone Weil.
Simone Weil, a philosopher I very much admire, wrote a book of superb beauty and wisdom titled Gravity and Grace. I must suppose that her title was somewhere in the back room of my mind, working quietly away behind the scenes, when the title for this post popped up.
Weil is, shall we say, hard liquor for the mind and spirit — highly distilled, potent, to be sipped, no more than two paragraphs or pages at a time…
A Jew who loved the Mass yet refused baptism, an ally of Communists and a resistance fighter against the Nazis, a factory worker, mystic, philosopher. The poster at the top of this post is for a film of her life: I doubt it will be a comfortable film, but the discomfort will likely be of the inspirational kind.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
