Thank You for that, and of I may comment on shapes and forms appearing out of formed elements.
Oh,Arcturus, I would be exagerating,if I were to claim some special route to some kind of gateway into the spiritual and the occult, and I wouldn’t want to exhaust myself as Gobbo did in trying to prove anything unusual .
The only point worthwhile mentioning is the focus achieved through the various levels of abstraction, tend to be become more objective, and even without referring to Jung’s synchronicity, coincidental events tend to emerge a pattern of unexplainable sililar events.
There has been a few laughable recorded cases of obvious Paxilm merit, the one which comes most clearly to my mind happened about a year ago.
A chocolate factory, in the midst of producing candy formed the image of the Virgin Mary. Production was halted, the neighberhood’a mostly Catholic community becoming aware of what’a in their backyard, arranged pilgrimiges ,firmly in the belief that an imimminent miracle is at hand.
This is not the type of experience I am referring to William James work is well documented with arguable but credible instances of this kind
I CANNOT furnish any concrete evidence other then personal anecdotes which surfaced in unusual circumstances. l
Just finished a book on the life and times of Machiavelli (Paul Stathern). Quite a good overview.
I read The Prince eons ago – they make you read war and strategy books in business school – but I didn’t know much about the background to writing the book.
It was a tumultuous time in Italy and Machiavelli was at the heart of it. City states, the Medici and the Papal armies battled it out over and over again. It was the Renaissance and the religious and intellectual landscape was also at war.
I’ve never thought of Machiavelli as being evil. He was simply attempting to develop a ‘science’ of politics without sentimentality. Like all good science he stripped it of any sentimentality, moral, ethics or ideology. Something either worked or it didn’t.
I’ve come to realize that his ‘science’ is particularly cruel and amoral because of the time it was written. I’m sure it would have been less harsh if it was written in a modern era.
I’m working on The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, FREE: The future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, and The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley.
I just finished Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson and look forward to The Skin Game by Jim Butcher next month.
Words of Radiance is a sequel, a thousand page sequel to a thousand page book, but Brandon Sanderson once again amazes me with his writing. If you’ve ever attempted to created any sort of art in your life, The Emperors Soul just might be the best book you’ve ever read, and it’s a novelette… Took like three hours to read the last time I read it, which was for the fifth or sixth time. Anytime I want to feel inspired, I pick it up.
Georg Steiner “On Difficulty” here referencing Ezra Pounds’s Canto LXXXI,
But to have done instead of not doing this is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
This is not vanity.