/tag/damnation

4 quotes tagged 'damnation'

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

816

Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two snow flakes are identical, and no two trees are identical, and no two people are identical- and, indeed, the smallest sub-atomic particle, we are assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the next- every card-index system is a delusion. 'Or, to put it more charitably,' as Nietzsche says, 'we are all better artists than we realize.' It is easy to see that the label 'Jew' was a Damnation in Nazi Germany, but actually the label 'Jew' is a Damnation anywhere, even where anti-Semitism does not exist. 'He is a Jew,' 'He is a doctor,' and 'He is a poet' mean, to the card indexing centre of the cortex, that my experience with him will be like my experience with other Jews, other doctors, and other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted. At a party or any place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action. Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes for the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is revealed: 'Oh, he's an advertising copywriter,' 'Oh, he's an engine-lathe operator.' Both parties relax, for now they know how to behave, what roles to play in the game. Ninety-nine percent of each has been Damned; the other is reacting to the 1 percent that has been labeled by the card-index machine.\n \n Certain Damnations are socially and intellectually necessary, of course. A custard pie thrown in a comedian's face is Damned by the physicist who analyzes it according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These equations tell us we want to know about the impact of the pie on the face, but nothing about the human meaning of pie-throwing. A cultural anthropologist, analyzing the social function of the comedian as shaman, court jester, and king's surrogate, explains the pie-throwing as a survival of the Feast of Fools and the killing of the king's double. This Damns the subject in another way. A psychoanalyst, finding an Oedipal castration ritual here, has performed a third Damnation, and the Marxist, seeing an outlet for the worker's repressed rage against the bosses, performs a fourth. Each Damnation has its values and uses, but is nonetheless a Damnation unless its partial and arbitrary nature is recognized. The poet, who compares the pie in the comedian's face with the Decline of the West or his own lost love, commits a fifth Damnation, but in this case the game element and the whimsicality of the symbolism are safely obvious. At least, one would hope so; reading the New Critics occasionally raises doubts on this point.

This Is It

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: Vintage (1973)

To 'realize Buddha in this body' is to realize that you yourself are in fact the universe. You are not, as parents and teachers are wont to imply, a mere stranger on probation in the scheme of things; you are rather a sort of nerve-ending through which the universe is taking a peek at itself, which is why, deep down inside, almost everyone has a vague sense of eternity. Few dare admit this because it would amount to believing that you are God, and God in our culture is the cosmic Boss, so that anyone imagining himself to be be God is deemed either blasphemous or insane. But for Buddhists this is no problem because they do not have this particular idea of God, and so also are not troubled by the notion of sin and everlasting damnation. Their picture of the universe is not political, not a kingdom ruled by a monarch, but rather an organism in which every part is a 'doing' of the whole, so that everything that happens to you is understood as your own karma, or 'doing.' Thus when things go wrong you have no one but yourself to blame. You are not a sinner but a fool, so try another way.

The Hebrew-Christian universe is one in which moral urgency, the anxiety to be right, embraces and penetrates everything. God, the Absolute itself, is good as against bad, and thus to be immoral or in the wrong is to feel oneself an outcast not merely from human society but also from existence itself, from the root and ground of life. To be in the wrong therefore arouses a metaphysical anxiety and sense of guilt - a state of eternal damnation - utterly disproportionate to the crime.

There are two obvious escapes from this dilemma (the struggle of choosing good vs evil). One is to stop being too keenly intelligent and too acutely conscious of the facts of one's inner life, and to fall back upon an inflexibly formal, traditional, and authoritarian pattern of thought and action - as if to say, 'Just do the right thing, and don't be sophisticatedly psychological about your motives. Just obey, and don't ask questions.' This is called sacrificing the pride of the intellect. But here we find ourselves in another dilemma, for the religion of simple obedience soon totters toward empty formalism and moral legalism with no heart in it, the very Pharisaism against which Christ railed. The other escape is into a romanticism of the instincts, a glorification of mere impulse ignoring the equally natural gift of will and reason. This is actually a modern form of the old practice of selling one's soul to the Devil - always a possible release from anxiety and conflict because damnation could at least be certain.