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Gabriel Marcel(1889-1973) It is is difficult to categorize his philosophhy. He was idiosyncratic in his writing, intentionally avoiding systematic formulations. At the heart of his writing is concrete experience, and such experience provides the way for man to find his place in the universe. Marcel's emphasis of being over knowledge stands in stark contrast to our increasingly scientific age. For this reason, his criticisms are particularly relevant and must be carefully weighed. Marcel was concerned that scientific thinking had bankrupted human experience. Scientific thinking, with its reductionism and technicality, avoids the mystery of life in favor of ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’. In modernity, man has, “…become unsure of his own essence and a stranger to himself.” He has divorced himself from fundamental experience by turning to objective analysis. As a result, “the dignity and sacredness of being” is replaced by “the idea of function.” Man views himself as a functional being, incorporated into biological, mental, and social systems. As a result, “the capacity to love, to admire and to hope” are lost as man loses his desire “… to transcend his situation of alienation and captivity.” Behind this technological mentality lies the danger of man being tempted, “…to view himself as the sole giver and creator of meaning and value.” In this view, the world is merely raw materials at men’s disposal, transformable to satisfy their desires. People then regard and admire their own technological creations, ascribing glory to themselves instead of the Creator. Unfortunately, this trust in technological advances diminishes our experience of authentic life. Finally, Marcel saw that the dual approaches of abstraction and possession lay at the root of social problems. While both abstraction and possession are part of life, they can grow out of proportion and dominate, and ultimately destroy, man’s being. By abstracting, man forgets the concreteness of experience, or those aspects which do not neatly fit into categories. As a result, man adopts a resentment towards experience, and this attitude is entirely opposed to “admiration, humility, and charity.” By possessing, man gains, “…the power to retain, conserve, protect and dispose of ,” an object. The insistence upon possessing things through a process of objectification limits concrete reality and its “mysterious fullness.” Marcel's criticisms are particularly relevant in light of the growth of science and technology since his death. Through his writing, we can better understand the sense of alienation and lack of richness that characterizes human experience of our scientific age.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was born in Paris. His father was a naval officer who died when Jean-Paul was young. Through his mother, the former Anne-Marie Schweitzer, he was a great nephew of Albert Schweitzer. Sartre lived after his father's early death with his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer and his mother in Paris. When his mother remarried in 1917, the family moved to La Rochelle. Sartre attended the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He graduated from the Ècole Normale Supérieure in 1929. From 1931 to 1945 he worked as a teacher and traveled in Egypt, Greece, and Italy. In 1933-34 he studied in Berlin the writings of the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In 1956 Sartre spoke out on behalf of freedom for Hungarians, and Czechs in 1968. After Stalin's death in 1953 Sartre accepted the right to criticize the Soviet system although he defended the Soviet state. He visited the Soviet Union the next year and was hospitalized for ten days because of exhaustion. The O.A.S. (Organisation de l'Armee Secrete), engaged in terrorist activities against Algerian independence, exploded a bomb in 1961 in Sartre's apartment on rue Bonaparte; it happened also next year and Sartre moved on quai Louis-Blériot, opposite the Eiffel tower. In a historical debate between Louis Althusser unexpectedly Sartre lost, perhaps the only time in his public life. In 1965 Sartre adopted Arlette Elkaïm, his mistress, who received the rights to Sartre's literary heritage after his death. In 1967 Sartre headed the International War Crimes Tribunal set up by Bertrand Russell to judge American military conduct in Indochina. He became closely involved in movement against Vietnam War and supported student rebellion in 1968. In 1970 Sartre was arrested because of selling on the streets the forbidden Maoist paper La cause du peuple.
existentialism - The doctrine that among sentient beings, especially humanity, existence takes precedence over essence and holding that man is totally free and responsible for his acts. This responsibility is the source of dread and anguish that encompasses mankind.
Albert Camus(1913-1960) French novelist, essayist and playwright, who received the 1957 Nobel Prize for literature. Camus was closely linked to his fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1940s, but he broke with him over Sartre's support to Stalinist politics. Camus died at the age of forty-six in a car accident near Sens, France. Among his best-known novels are The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947). "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I had a telegram from the home: 'Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.' That doesn't mean anything. It may have happened yesterday." (from The Stranger) Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, into a working-class family. Camus' mother, Catherine Hélène Sintés, was an illiterate cleaning woman. She came from a family of Spanish origin. Lucien Auguste Camus, his father, was an itinerant agricultural laborer. He died of his wounds in 1914 after the Battle of the Marne - Camus was less than a year old at that time. His body was never sent to Algeria. During the war, Catherine Hélène worked in a factory. She was partly deaf, due to a stroke that permanently impaired her speech, but she was able to read lips. In their home "things had no names", as Camus later recalled. But he loved his mother intensely: "When my mother's eyes were not resting on me, I have never been able to look at her without tears springing into my eyes." In 1923, Camus won a scholarship to the lycée in Algiers, where he studied from 1924 to 1932. Incipient tuberculosis put an end to his athletic activities. The disease was to trouble Camus for the rest of his life. Between the years 1935 and 1939 Camus held various jobs in Algiers. He also joined the Communist Party, but his interest in the works of Marx and Engels was rather superficial. More important writers in his circle were André Malraux and André Gide. In 1936, Camus received his diplôme d'étudies supérieures from the University of Algiers in philosophy. To recover his health he made his first visit to Europe. Camus' first book, L'ENVERS ET L'ENDROIT (1937), was a collection of essays, which he wrote at the age of twenty-two. Camus dedicated it to his philosophy teacher, Jean Grenier. The philosopher Brice Parain maintained that the little book contained Camus' best work, although the author himself considered the form of his writings clumsy. By this time Camus' reputation in Algeria as a leading writer was growing. He was also active in theater. In 1938 Camus moved to France. Next year he divorced his first wife, Simone Hié, who was a morphine addict. From 1938 to 1940 Camus worked for the Alger-Républicain, reviewing among others Sartre's books, and in 1940 for Paris-Soir. In 1940 he married Francine Faure, a pianist and mathematician. During WW II Camus was member of the French resistance. From 1943 he worked as a reader and editor of Espoir series at Gallimard publisher. With Sartre he founded the left-wing Resistance newspaper Combat, serving as its editor. His second novel, L'ÉTRANGER (The Stranger), which he had begun in Algeria before the war, appeared in 1942. It has been considered one of the greatest of all hard-boiled novels. Camus admired the American tough novel and wrote in The Rebel (1951) that "it does not choose feelings or passions to give a detailed description of, such as we find in classic French novels. It rejects analysis and the search for a fundamental psychological motive that could explain and recapitulate the behavior of a character..." The story of The Stranger is narrated by a doomed character, Mersault, and is set between two deaths, his mother's and his own. Mersault is a clerk, who seems to have no feelings and spends afternoons in lovemaking and empty nights in the cinema. Like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment (1866), he reaches self-knowledge by committing a crime - he shoots an Arab on the beach without explicit reason and motivation - it was hot, the Arab had earlier terrorized him and his friend Raymond, and he had a headache. Mersault is condemned to die as much for his refusal to accept the standards of social behavior as for the crime itself. "The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions, and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the "divine irresponsibility" of the condemned man." (from Sartre analysis of Mersault, in Literary and Philosophical Essays, 1943) In the cell Mersault faces the reality for the first time, and his consciousness awakens. "It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe." Luchino Visconti's film version from 1967 meticulously reconstructed an Algiers street so that it looked exactly as it had during 1938-39, when the story takes place. But the 43-year-old Marcello Mastroianni, playing 30-year-old Mesault, was considered too old, although otherwise his performance was praised. In 1942 also appeared Camus' philosophical essay LE MYTHE DE SISYPHE. It starts with the famous statement: " There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that." Camus compares the absurdity of the existence of humanity to the labors of the mythical character Sisyphus, who was condemned through all eternity to push a boulder to the top of a hill and watch helplessly as it rolled down again. Camus takes the nonexistence of God for granted and finds meaning in the struggle itself. "A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images," Camus wrote. He admired Sartre's gifts as a novelist, but did not find his two sides, philosophy and storytelling, both equally convincing. In an essay written in 1952 he praises Melville's Billy Budd. Melville, according to Camus, "never cut himself off from flesh or nature, which are barely perceptible in Kafka's work." Camus also admired William Faulkner and made a dramatic adaptation of Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. In 1946 Camus spent some time in New York, and wrote: " I don't have a precise idea about New York myself, even after so many days, but it continues to irritate me and seduce me at the same time." "It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us." (from The Plague, 1947) In 1947 Camus resigned from Combat and published in the same year his third novel, LA PESTE, an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France. A small town is abruptly forced to live within narrow boundaries under a terror - death is loose on the streets. In the besieged city some people try to act morally, some are cowards, some lovers. Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could be one of a final victory. It could only be the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers." Before his break with Sartre Camus wrote L'HOMME RÉVOLTÉ (1951), which explores the theories and forms of humanity's revolt against authority. The book was criticized in Sartre's Temps modernes. Camus was offended and Sartre responded with a scornful letter. From 1955 to 1956 Camus worked as a journalist for L'Express. Among his major works from the late-1950s are LA CHUTE (1956), an ironic novel in which the penitent judge Jean-Baptiste Clamence confesses his own moral crimes to a strager in an Amsterdam bar. Jean-Baptiste reveals his hypocrisy, but at the same time his monologue becomes an attack on modern man. Also in 1956 Camus and others protested Soviet actions in Hungary. At the time of his death, Camus was planning to direct a theater company of his own and to write a major novel about growing up in Algeria. Several of the short stories in L'EXILE ET LA ROYAUME (1957) were set in Algeria's coastal towns and inhospitale sands. The unfinished novel LA MORT HEUREUSE (1970) was written in 1936-38. It presented the young Camus, or Patrice Mersault, seeking his happiness from Prague to his hometown in Algiers, announcing towards the end of the book "What matters - all that matters, really - is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest - women, art, success - is nothing but excuses." In LE PREMIER HOMME (1994), the story of Jacques Cormery, Camus charted the history of his family and his lycée years. The manuscript was found in the car, a Facel Vega, in which he died on January 4, 1960.
LE MYTHE DE SISYPHE The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror. It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him. You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screw ed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock. If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism. One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men. All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eage r to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. ---Albert Camus--- Translation by Justin O'Brien, 1955
Equipped with the barest formal education, a formidable natural intelligence and an unquenchable yearning to understand, ALFRED RICHARD ORAGE emerged from British 19th Century working class poverty to survey the significant literary, psychological, political, and spiritual trends of the early 20th century. His literary skills and wide range of interests led him to edit the enormously influential journal The New Age from 1907 until 1922 when he moved from London to Fontainebleau to join Gurdjieff. In January 1924, Orage went to New York to help Gurdjieff with his first visit to America and later introduced and supervised the Work there. In May 1930, he returned to England and became deeply involved with political issues and was instrumental in rekindling interest in the socialist movement called ‘Social Credit’ which became a fringe force in politics for many decades. He founded a new journal The New English Weekly in April 1932. He was planning to introduce Gurdjieff’s ideas in that paper and elsewhere when he died on the night of November 5, 1934.
Questions developed by Richard Liebow for this chapter:Glossary:
- Are you as concerned and careful about the quality of impressions you feed into your brain as you are about the kinds and qualities of food you take into your mouth and your belly?
- Do you now and again pause to make a conscious effort just to observe your own breathing?
- Do you now and again pause to make a conscious effort just to observe and feel the kinds and qualities of sensations passing through the nerves and muscles of your fingers and toes, your hands and your feet?
- Do you sometimes just pause to ponder the subtleties of negativity (fear, false pride, arrogance, and envy) that pervade your thoughts and feelings?
- Do you really believe that just pausing to center yourself causes chemical changes in the physiology of your body?
- Do you really believe that struggling to control expressions of negative emotions saves enormous amounts of precious energy?
- Do you really believe that you can control the expression of your negative emotions--without first forming the habit of pausing frequently just to be present?
- Do you really believe that the practice of dividing your attention is crystallizing something in you that may survive the shock of the decay and crumbling of your physical body?
- How often do you find yourself aware of Higher Forces coming from far away places exerting their influence on your thoughts, your feelings, and your behavior?
- Are you beginning to understand why Ouspensky should have understood why he should have listened to the same lecture more than once?
- Are you beginning to get any sense of the meaning and value of the suggestion that every function you perform (whether it be physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual) requires a certain distinct kind of energy that sometimes must be synthesized through your own efforts?
- Do you sometimes sense the presence of some hint of an emotional stirring in your nerves and muscles when you pause to ask yourself, "Where am I in all of this?"
- Do you waste energy on unnecessary worry?
- Do you sometimes waste energy on unnecessary movement of your arms and legs, your fingers and toes?
Here is a link to check out some additional info on both the Food Diagram and the Ray of Creation from a Needleman article. http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/people/misc/School.html
Carbohydrates(szenhidrat): (from 'hydrates of carbon') or saccharides (Greek s???a??? meaning "sugar") are the most abundant of the four major classes of biomolecules, which also include proteins, lipids and nucleic acids. They fill numerous roles in living things, such as the storage and transport of energy (starch, glycogen) and structural components (cellulose in plants, chitin in animals). Additionally, carbohydrates and their derivatives play major roles in the working process of the immune system, fertilization, pathogenesis, blood clotting, and development. Additional info regarding Nutrition.
Hermes Trigometrus
Artificial shock
Additional Info:
Some other thoughts in respons to that in Life one has to have a project otherwise you're committing the ultimate sin. Not playing in Gods's world.: "The reason we anxiously push life in general and a project in particular is because we fear, falsely, that things may stop. We fear the stopping of an activity because we fear we may stop with it, being left empty and without purpose. But the very pur-suit of a particular activity is futility itself; nothing can come of it except further anxiety. It is chasing our shadow."
Modern Phytagorian Robert Anton Wilson: Chemical elements can be devided into eight groups (Ovtaves) DNA/RNA relation 64 (6 x 8) coordinates of the Univers.
Notes from Dana (a one time attendee to our meetings): To share time together,and suggest to take your burden lighter. Encourage her not to be discouraged. How can I be most usefull to you.NDE (Near death experiences research) the connection between loss and epheniy. Life changing experiences. deoty or deoxy.org/8brains.htm during meditation close the eye to reduce the visual stimulus (Reliquish the vision) or just half close to get some connection vipassana= meditation, Vedenta=The end of knowledge LA visit one of those magical days/