tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13617569.post3696982619337825275..comments2024-03-27T02:13:58.088-07:00Comments on Integral Options Cafe: Paul Bloom - First Person Pluralwilliam harrymanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06981478282688361274noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13617569.post-53578105292222012922011-07-05T07:02:10.355-07:002011-07-05T07:02:10.355-07:00The whole passage is mindblowing: http://thepresen...The whole passage is mindblowing: http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/2011/07/great-lines-from-steppenwolf-10.htmlLukehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03504073015448893273noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13617569.post-47103041916681119062011-07-05T06:40:42.898-07:002011-07-05T06:40:42.898-07:00I remember Sidra Stone talking about Steppenwolf l...I remember Sidra Stone talking about Steppenwolf loads in her beautiful Integral Naked interview. She said it was the defining moment for her in developing Voice Dialogue.Lukehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03504073015448893273noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13617569.post-91202030233217576722011-07-05T06:39:17.020-07:002011-07-05T06:39:17.020-07:00The delusion rests simply upon a false analogy. As...The delusion rests simply upon a false analogy. As a body everyone is single, as a soul never. In literature, too, even in its ultimate achievement, we find this customary concern with apparently whole and single personalities. Of all literature up to our days the drama has been the most highly prized by writers and critics, and rightly, since it offers (or might offer) the greatest possibilities of representing the ego as a manifold entity, but for the optical illusion which makes us believe that the characters of the play are one-fold entities by lodging each one in an undeniable body, singly, separately and once and for all. An artless esthetic criticism, then, keeps its highest praise for this so-called character-drama in which each character makes his appearance unmistakably as a separate and single entity. Only from afar and by degrees the suspicion dawns here and there that all this is perhaps a cheap and superficial esthetic philosophy, and that we make a mistake in attributing to our great dramatists those magnificent conceptions of beauty that come to us from antiquity. These conceptions are not native to us, but are merely picked up at second hand, and it is in them, with their common source in the visible body, that the origin of the fiction of an ego, an individual, is really to be found. There is no trace of such a notion in the poems of ancient India. The heroes of the epics of India are not individuals, but whole reels of individualities in a series of incarnations. And in modern times there are poems, in which, behind the veil of a concern with individuality and character that is scarcely, indeed, in the author's mind, the motive is to present a manifold activity of soul. Whoever wishes to recognize this must resolve once and for all not to regard the characters of such a poem as separate beings, but as the various facets and aspects of a higher unity, in my opinion, of the poet's soul. If "Faust" is treated in this way, Faust, Mephistopheles, Wagner and the rest form a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed. When Faust, in a line immortalized among schoolmasters and greeted with a shudder of astonishment by the Philistine, says: "Two souls, alas, do dwell within my breast!" he has forgotten Mephisto and a whole crowd of other souls that he has in his breast likewise. The Steppenwolf, too, believes that he bears two souls (wolf and man) in his breast and even so finds his breast disagreeably cramped because of them. The breast and the body are indeed one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen. <br />- Steppenwolf, Hermann HesseLukehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03504073015448893273noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13617569.post-64571318301096620672011-07-05T06:35:41.850-07:002011-07-05T06:35:41.850-07:00"We need not be surprised that even so intell..."We need not be surprised that even so intelligent and educated a man as Harry should take himself for a Steppenwolf and reduce the rich and complex organism of his life to a formula so simple, so rudimentary and primitive. Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications—and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then waste words, why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident, when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion". - Steppenwolf, Hermann HesseLukehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03504073015448893273noreply@blogger.com