Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Rostropovich and the Six Blankets

I am not what anyone would describe as a musical conoisseur. Not that I can't enjoy it; I hope I can just about escape Shakespeare's devastating remark

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.

— The Merchant of Venice V, i

It's just that it's not easy for me. I can happily spend 20 minutes looking at a Velazquez painting, but the same time listening to a complex orchestral piece would be tough going.

I've recently been listening in the car to a CD a friend gave me of the great cellist Rostropovich playing Dvorak's Cello Concerto (plus Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations, which I was recently informed was not the 4th movement!) and after about seven or eight listens I am really starting to enjoy it. There are passages I still can't follow, but gradually I'm beginning to get the idea. A couple of weeks ago I heard that Mstislav Rostropovich had died at the age of 80, and last night I happened by accident on the last half hour of a TV tribute to his life ... click "Read more"
It turns out that this was not just a great musician, but a great man. Miraculously talented as a cellist, he was also by the by a concert pianist and one of the greatest conductors. He commissioned works from all of the best composers of the 20th and 21st Centuries, championed the cause of Shostakovich and Solzhenitsyn (for which he was eventually exiled), played an impromptu concert to celebrate at the Berlin Wall when it was torn down, and stood shoulder to shoulder in the Russian parliament with Yeltsin and the others when Gorbachev was overthrown in a military coup. He was also fantastically generous with his time and money, leading a campaign to vaccinate millions of Russian children against hepatitis, and supporting from his own funds dozens of young musicians too poor to pay for their own education. He said "friendship is the most important thing in the world".

He told a story of how, as a young musician he had been travelling with five others in a train through the night in the Russian winter. Each of them had only one blanket and Rostropovich was so cold that he lay down to sleep, with only the sincere hope that he would never wake up. Some while later he opened his eyes to find that all of the others had piled their blankets on top of him. He was visibly moved at the memory: in all of his life, he said, he had tried to emulate this act of kindness; but nothing he had ever done came close to those blankets.

The programme closed with a film of Rostropovich, at the height of his powers in 1974, playing the final movement of ... Dvorak's Cello Concerto. It was tremendous to see him play - so big and forceful, and yet so light. I felt that he was giving of himself, just as in his life he had given to others so freely, conscious only of the music. At the end, clearly exhausted, he embraced the conductor and some of his fellow players, as if they had all come through a long, dangerous ocean voyage together.

I'm sorry if I don't have a point to make here. This was just something that inspired me and I wanted to write it down.

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Friday, May 18, 2007

Abandoning the story

Yesterday evening I went to the Gangaji meeting near Waterloo. It was, in its way, quite a revelation. Her short exposition of how she came to her teacher and found the freedom and fulfilment she was looking for, was simple and clarifying. Her subsequent handling of people who came to the front to talk to her was exemplary. But her voice! And presence. This is an extraordinary woman.


She spoke of silence and demonstrated it. She spoke of letting go the story of her life - and encouraged us to do the same as a necessary, if alarming, step towards fulfilment. Her words and manner acted as a very gentle cut.


Her teacher, a disciple of Sri Ramana Maharshi, whom she met in Lucknow, sent her back to teach. He said she had 'the purity, nobility and satvic nature to carry this transmission to the West' (Wikipedia).


Be that as it may, I walked out into the dusk to Waterloo Station on my way home and never have I found a railway station more beautiful and welcoming.


Today has been very quiet and reflective.


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Monday, May 14, 2007

Quote ... Unquote

I very much enjoyed the responses to the "Golden Rules" post a few days ago. I think that what happened was that we stopped thinking about the problems as being about "them" and started to look at ourselves, with humour and humility. Maybe we could do more of that. The blog is useful to chivvy along the pace of change, I hope, but the real change is within me and you.

Another thing I would like to raise is the way we use quotations.

I often think of a wise quotation that I might use to contradict what someone else says, but I very rarely use it. It always feels like using a hammer to crack a nut ... and maybe the nut one is talking to is a human being, after all! ... click "Read more"

This blog is 99% made up of the words of its contributors. Why is this important? Because I believe that we in the School rely too much on the words of the wise, and need to learn to stand on our own two feet. The wise are constantly contradicting each other, anyway. The Bible is self-contradictory, if one is literal about it. Shantananda contradicts himself. So if we are going to rely on the wise, we need to place more emphasis on our own understanding. If we regurgitate partly-digested wisdom at each other, this is not communication.

There are blogs which are the exact opposite - a collection of wise quotations, with maybe 1% original content. I would not disparage that at all, but this blog has a different function.

Shantananda told the translator at the first meeting: "don't listen to my words; listen to my meaning, and translate that". On another occasion he said, "no-one needs to bind himself to a word". He also said that the quickest way to self-realization is to speak from the heart, and act on your words, without worrying too much about whether you've made a mistake or properly understood the teaching.

These principles of his have been honoured almost entirely in the breach.

There have been too many wise words from India and elsewhere, and too little understanding. We need to start to discover our own voices. Some (I know) will say that this is the route to egotism, but I can only respond that if that is what is in my heart, then "better out than in"! We cannot purify what is hidden, but only what is shown.

So I would propose this rule:

Never use a quotation to dismiss someone else's words, or when you have words of your own, however poor.

Responses?

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Sunday, May 13, 2007

Show, don't be

there are two kinds of actors: introvert and extrovert. The introvert plays on the back foot, assumes character and attempts to 'be real'; the extrovert plays on the front foot, demonstrates and presents a character. As a generalisation, the extrovert actor flourishes at The Globe, the introvert does not. 'Show, don't be' is the rule.

- Howard Brenton writing about the Globe theatre in the Guardian, 12th May 2007

This comment interested me greatly, and I think it's because it reminds me of the School's founder. I remember he said that Christ on the cross was "putting on a show". However repugnant such a view may be to orthodox Christianity, it says a lot about the style and verve with which McLaren went about things. Surprising then that so many of his acolytes lack any sense of theatre. They are people playing on the back foot, 'attempting to be real', with the justification that "simply being" is where it's at, looking nervously down their pale noses at those who appear different.

(I recently spoke to two senior and very bright people in the School who had each decided to stop giving public talks because of the flak they got from fellow group members.)

What these people forget, of course, is that if there was an exam for "being" we would all get 100%. "Being" is not an aspiration, but a reality. Philosophically we can accept that life is a play, but how many of us know how to enjoy it?

How many of us can show that it is a play?

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Friday, May 11, 2007

Why We All Have a Novel in Us (And What To Do About It)

Last night I gave a 20-minute talk at the Catalyst Club in Brighton. The club is a very interesting idea - a night club where people get up to talk on any subject they feel passionate about. This is the text - it's not a polished article but just an aide memoire, so please don't take me to task over grammar or particular expressions!

The title of this talk is “Why We All Have a Novel In Us (And What To Do About It)”. I would like to state at the outset that this talk is not an encouragement to anyone to show me their unpublished manuscript!

I used to love novels. When I got a job in publishing a few years back, I used to read a couple of novels every week. In a way it was my ideal job, and I really enjoyed the reading. After I left that job I did freelance work reading the ‘slush pile’, and after a few months of this, I found I couldn’t take any more. It would be all right if I were the kind of reader who can pick up a book and put it down two minutes later … I have to spend time with it.

And the thing is that when I start to read a novel I feel a kind of obligation to the writer to keep reading. I’m very conscious of how much work has gone into it, how much of themselves the author has put into it, and if I put it down after a couple of pages I feel guilty, as if I’ve invalidated that person’s efforts. That’s why I’m unwilling into pick up a novel these days. It’s such a commitment.

Slide of: Novels published by Michael Palin, Melvyn Bragg, Julie Walters, Alan Titchmarsh, Katie Price (Jordan)

Everyone wants to write a novel these days – comedians and light entertainers; glamour models; journalists; MPs – the novel is a kind of badge of honour. We haven’t seen the footballer novel yet, but it’s going to happen. What writing a novel says is “I’m not just a pretty face, I’ve got substance and soul” or, in the case of someone like Melvyn Bragg, it says “I’m not just a po-faced egghead: I’ve got humanity”.

It is almost as if we accept that to write a novel is truly to be ... click "read more"

The question I’d like to look at with you this evening is, WHY? Why is the novel given such importance, such credibility?

Novels and Romances

The technology that made the novel practically possible was, of course, the printing press. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this was the only cause, but without it we would not have had the novel as a mass literary phenomenon. It made books cheaper to produce and therefore to buy, making books available to a much wider audience than before. When Caxton built his first printing-press in 1475, one of his first books was Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, a collection of Arthurian romances from which we draw a lot of our stories about the Knights of the Round Table. Some people think this was the first novel, but I think this kind of collection of stories is better seen as a bridge between the oral culture and the new emerging literary one.

Nouvelle

The word “novel” was first used in England and France in the 17th Century. It was usually used to describe a cheaply-printed romance. The word derives from the same root as “news”, and it seems that the early newspapers and novels were circulated together, and they shared the same relatively low status. A lot of people attacked the newspaper writers and the novelists for not writing the truth, but it might equally be said that they represented a democratization of knowledge. The same kind of thing is happening today with the rise in blogging and camera phones. These innovations represent a liberation of the media from its traditional custodians, and they also raise concerns about the quality of what is published.

During the 16th Century the wide publication of the romances, together with rising literacy, meant that a whole new class of people were able to read books for the first time. And these romances were what they read.

Don Quixote

Don Quixote, the hero of the first ever true novel, is one such reader: a poor down at heel gentleman from a backwoods part of Spain called La Mancha, who fills his head with ideas about chivalry that he gets from his collection of romances, and convinces himself that he is a knight-errant. The humour of the book comes from the gap between reality and what Don Quixote believes and sees.

Cervantes’ book distinguishes between the ridiculous fantasy of the romance tale and a new, more probable form of fiction. Don Quixote is not literally true, of course, but nor is it a fantasy. It allows us to reflect on the actions and motivations of the characters in the book, and to enter into their world in a way not possible in a book before.

The book was written in two parts (1605/1615) and in the second part, the author Cervantes has great fun with the idea that the first part has been published and read by many of the characters in the book. Aware of Don Quixote’s affliction, some of them dress up as knights and squires and construct elaborate practical jokes to play on Don Quixote and his faithful “squire” Sancho Panza, in effect becoming part of Don Quixote’s imaginary world. As Cervantes remarks, it is hard in the end to decide who is more deluded, Don Quixote or his tormentors.

As he was writing the second part of Don Quixote, Cervantes heard the bad news that someone else had already brought out a sequel. Rather than complain about this, he simply incorporated the spurious sequel into his own. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza come across someone who has a copy of the sequel and they hear that it tells how they went to Saragossa to take part in a joust. They are indeed planning to do just this, but they immediately change their plans and go to Barcelona in order to give the lie to the sequel. Later, they meet one of the characters from the false sequel, who agrees that this Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are far superior to the ones he previously met, and must therefore be the real ones.

This is the kind of literary game that people today like to call “post-modern”, and I think it’s fascinating that the very first European novel is full of self-referential post-modernity. I think that what it shows is that our ability to be aware of ourselves as we write, to be unreliable narrators, to write books that are about writing books and reading books, has very little to do with how clever we are today, and everything to do with the act of writing a novel.

Novels, ‘Realism’ and Ordinary Life

Don Quixote is a startlingly modern (or post-modern) read, and it’s maybe not too surprising that nobody wrote anything like it, despite its huge success and the numerous imitators, for another century. Cervantes was way ahead of his time, but there were huge changes happening, most of all the great shift in religious life caused by the rise of Protestantism.

Protestantism was in tune with a move away from the hierarchical society of the past towards one in which ordinary people and ordinary life became significant. The Puritans said, “God Loveth Adverbs”, by which they meant that it was not what one did that was significant, but the spirit of faith in which one did it. A Puritan preacher like William Perkins (1558 – 1602) shocked his listeners with his radical views. He said that from the point of view of God, there was no difference between washing dishes and preaching the word of God; that if they spring from faith, “deeds of matrimony” – that is, of sexual intercourse – “are pure and spiritual”; and that even acts such as wiping one’s shoes “howsoever gross they appear outwardly, yet are they sanctified.”

This new form of spirituality had a profound influence on our culture from the 16th Century onwards, as it turned attention on to the spiritual quality and meaning of ordinary life. When ordinary life – even down to washing dishes and wiping one’s feet – became significant and worthy of attention, the way was clear for the realistic novel. And these are just the kind of details one finds in Don Quixote.

Novels and Self-Examination

Protestant sects such as the Puritans also placed great emphasis on self-examination. They taught that God had chosen certain people to be his elect, and that it was necessary to examine one’s soul to discover the evidence of the grace of God working within. Most of the Puritan Founding Fathers who emigrated to America kept a spiritual journal, recording their daily innermost thoughts and experiences. In 1678 John Bunyan, an English Puritan preacher, published the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was a book half way between a spiritual journal and a novel.

This is, I think, one of the reasons why the novel exerts such a powerful hold over our imaginations. It is a kind of pilgrim’s progress: not to the hereafter, but into the inner self. When I sit down to write “my novel”, I am simultaneously exploring and revealing my inner life. Only in a novel do we get the promise of, as the title of a recent book by Tom Wolfe has it, “A Man in Full”.

This, at least, is the aspiration. But there are dangers in this kind of journey, as we shall see.

Robinson Crusoe: Getting Lost in a Book

Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe (1719) was the first English novelist in the modern sense. Like Bunyan, Defoe was a Puritan who wrote books of spiritual instruction. It appears that he set out in Crusoe to write an allegory similar to that of The Pilgrim’s Progress, based on the Biblical story of Jonah and the story he had heard of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years alone on a desert island.

Robinson Crusoe runs away from his father’s house in York and gets on a ship in Hull to take him to London. In an explicit echo of the story of Jonah (in which Jonah goes to sea to escape the command of God) the ship is beset by storms and the sailors speculate
that Crusoe is the cause of the trouble, although they don’t throw him overboard. Nothing daunted, Crusoe sets off on another voyage and this time he has another Jonah-like warning when he’s captured by pirates and sold into slavery. He escapes, and goes into the slave trade himself, and this third time he finally meets his Jonah-like fate when he is shipwrecked off the coast of Brazil and finds himself at last on the famous island.

At this point, Defoe forgets all about his apparent intention to write a cautionary tale. Instead, he becomes fascinated by Crusoe’s efforts to build a shelter, domesticate animals, till the soil, and so on. By the end of his exile, Crusoe is the triumphant ruler of the island, the master of all that he surveys. The early moralizing forgotten, Defoe tells us how Crusoe returns to civilization to find that he has become rich in his absence due to some investments he left behind. So much for Jonah: running away from Dad is now just the beginning of life’s great adventure.

What is so interesting here is the way that the novelist, ostensibly in control of the book he is writing, quickly loses control. To some extent this can happen with any book, but only in a novel can it happen so dramatically.

The Pilgrim’s Progress intended by the Puritan writer turns into something quite different. It is no longer clear by the end whether it is a pilgrimage at all, or if it is a pilgrimage then Crusoe has traveled to a quite different shrine. Defoe lost interest in condemning Crusoe’s folly, and became filled with enthusiasm for the idea of being a castaway.

It seems that Crusoe represents a kind of ideal of isolation and individualism, one that the modern world finds attractive. When the book came out there were examples of people who actually voluntarily marooned themselves on desert islands, and today we still have this fantasy. One day, if we win the lottery, we’ll buy an island and live in isolation from the world.
But for the rest of us, there is another way to escape.

Reading in isolation

Slide of: Silent Reading: Vermeer's Lady Reading a Letter

There’s a fascinating passage in St Augustine’s autobiography in which he described St Ambrose reading: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still”. Augustine speculates as to whether Ambrose didn’t want to disturb those around him with the obscure things he used to read, or whether he was trying to save his voice, “but whatever his reason, we may be sure it was a good one”. Evidently in the 5th Century, it was an extraordinary thing to read silently.

Following the Middle Ages, silent reading became more commonplace. Again, Protestantism was an important motive force, as it moved us away from the old communal forms of worship and culture, and towards new, private and personal forms. The Bible was translated for the first time from Latin into the vernacular languages, allowing ordinary people to read it. Whereas before the word of God was received orally in public, it could now be studied silently and in private. People were encouraged to learn to read so that they could study the word of God for themselves.

Of course, this also meant that they could read other things, and the ready availability of lengthy works of fiction in the 18th Century meant that one really could become immersed in privately reading a book in a way that was never possible before. These new reading habits provoked a great deal of protest, because while people could now read and reflect on religious doctrine within their hearts and minds, they could also reflect on other things.

Whereas other books might be a source of edification, the novel has always been inherently enjoyable. We get lost in a novel, and forget where we are. Dr Johnson remarked in the early 18th Century: “Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim’s Progress”.

One of the most controversial books ever published came out in 1740. It was written by a printer, Samuel Richardson, and it was called Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. It was one of the first novels to feature a female central character and it dealt with questions of love. Pamela is a young serving-girl whose wealthy employer takes a shine to her. His attempts to seduce or rape Pamela fail, and in the end he is converted by her unassailable virtue to the path of righteousness, and marries her. This new kind of novel proved irresistible to readers, especially women. Serving-girls and others who longed to climb the social ladder saw in Pamela not only a paragon of virtue, but a dream of advancement.

Interestingly, the explosion in romantic novels in the 18th Century coincided with the arrival of a new piece of furniture in fashionable drawing rooms: the sofa. Ever since, the novel and the sofa have been inseparable.

Writing in Isolation

But if reading a novel is a delicious isolation, how much more isolated is the author while engaged in the long labour of writing? When I was studying English at university I was struck by a curious fact about the early novels. So far as I am aware, no-one else has noticed this.
All of the early writers of the novels and the proto-novels – Malory, Cervantes, Bunyan, Defoe – had spent time in prison. Malory and Bunyan actually wrote their books in prison. Defoe had been in prison for debt. Cervantes, like a real-life Robinson Crusoe, was sold into slavery in North Africa for five years, and much of this time he spent in jail.

These were men of action – an adventurer, a soldier, a rogue preacher and an entrepreneur – who suddenly found themselves unable to do anything. There is no such connection between later novelists and prison, suggesting that the early period of the novel required a kind of crucible of intense isolation, in which the energies turn inwards and create a new world of the mind.

Cervantes seems to have had reservations about the validity of this: as he remarked in the preface to Don Quixote, his book was “the story of a dry, shrivelled, whimsical offspring, full of thoughts of all sorts and such as never came into any other imagination – just what might be begotten in a prison”.

The novel is a work produced in isolation, and consumed in isolation.

Novels and the Written Word

The other major literary forms, drama and poetry are essentially oral, public, shared experiences. People do read poetry by themselves, but this is a recent innovation. The expectation has always been that poetry was a performance. That’s why poems have metre and rhythm and rhyme: firstly because it makes them easier to remember, and secondly because it makes them more enjoyable to listen to.

Even novels were until the 19th Century often enjoyed in this kind of situation. There’s a story of how the people of Slough listened to Pamela being read publicly in the 1740s, and when the book concluded with her marriage, they rushed with joy to the church and rang the bells to celebrate. Dickens’ novels were similarly shared by large groups of people, and he used to travel the world giving public readings, which were apparently as much theatre as literature. Book-readings do still go on, of course, but perhaps the most hopeful development in recent years has been the rise of the book-group. Most book groups concentrate on novels, but by making the novel the excuse for a social gathering, I think the book group breaks through the isolation and individualism of novel-reading and gets the reader off the sofa.

I don’t have any evidence to support this, but I’d like to end by stating my belief that the shared experience of words is inherently more healthy and positive than the private one. That’s why it’s so good for me to be able to speak to you in this way. The Catalyst Club is a place where people can speak to each other meaningfully, enjoyably and seriously.

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Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Ich-Du

An excerpt from the Shankaracharya was heard recently (from memory):

“Devotion leads to direct relationship”.

This is a theme that has been appearing in a number of synchronous guises on this blog & elsewhere. Recent discussions on the blog re-evoked a memory of the name ‘Martin Buber’. I haven’t ever gone deeply into his work but, on review, I have found the essence of what he is saying about ‘meeting’ or ‘not meeting’ to be rather profound. So I hope this brief excerpt from Wiki is of interest to others.


The generic motif Buber employs to describe the dual modes of being is one of dialogue (Ich-Du) and monologue (Ich-Es)…

Ich-Du ("I-Thou" or "I-You") is a relationship that stresses the mutual, holistic existence of two beings. It is a concrete encounter, because these beings meet one another in their authentic existence, without any qualification or objectification of one another. Even imagination and ideas do not play a role in this relation. In an I-Thou encounter, infinity and universality are made actual (rather than being merely concepts).

Buber stressed that an Ich-Du relationship lacks any composition (e.g. structure) and communicates no content (e.g. information). Despite the fact that Ich-Du cannot be proven to happen as an event (e.g. it cannot be measured), Buber stressed that it is real and perceivable… Common English words used to describe the Ich-Du relationship include encounter, meeting, dialogue, mutuality, and exchange. ... click "Read more"

One key Ich-Du relationship Buber identified was that which can exist between a human being and God. Buber argued that this is the only way in which it is possible to interact with God, and that an Ich-Du relationship with anything or anyone connects in some way with the eternal relation to God.

The Ich-Es ("I-It") relationship is nearly the opposite of Ich-Du. Whereas in Ich-Du the two beings encounter one another, in an Ich-Es relationship the beings do not actually meet. Instead, the "I" confronts and qualifies an idea, or conceptualization, of the being in its presence and treats that being as an object. All such objects are considered merely mental representations, created and sustained by the individual mind… Therefore, the Ich-Es relationship is in fact a relationship with oneself; it is not a dialogue, but a monologue.

In the Ich-Es relationship, an individual treats other things, people, etc., as objects to be used and experienced. Essentially, this form of objectivity relates to the world in terms of the self - how an object can serve the individual’s interest.

Buber argued that human life consists of an oscillation between Ich-Du and Ich-Es, and that in fact Ich-Du experiences are rather few and far between. In diagnosing the various perceived ills of modernity (e.g. isolation, dehumanization, etc.), Buber believed that the expansion of a purely analytic, material view of existence was at heart an advocation of Ich-Es relations - even between human beings. Buber argued that this paradigm devalued not only existents, but the meaning of all existence.


“Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.”

~ Buber


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Buber

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Monday, May 07, 2007

Three Golden Rules

I'd like to propose some positive principles for the blog. I would ask that everyone who participates is prepared to say, when necessary, these three sentences:

"I'm sorry, I got that wrong"
"You made a really good point there"
"What do you think?"

I've mentioned these before - my father learned them on a management course in a slightly different form - and at that point I applied them to the School. I said that the School needed to learn to say these sentences: to admit error and the possibility of error, to praise individual students, and to ask non-rhetorical questions with real curiosity. I still believe that that is correct.

But maybe a function of the blog is for us, as members of the School (or perhaps in some cases "Honoured Alumni"!), to learn how to be the change we want to see. We need to learn these conversational skills and use them. In addition to this, if we have disputes in future, we can refer to these sentences for a way out.

They're just short-hand, of course, and need to be interpreted intelligently. If I genuinely believe that what I am saying is right, then I should not say "I'm sorry, I got that wrong". But I might say, "I'm sorry that we're having this argument. Perhaps I've misunderstood your position. Can you explain it in different words?" Or I might say, "I've often found your remarks helpful in the past, but this appears to me to be wrong, because ..."

There may be those who cannot agree to these sentences. If so, now is the time to argue the case!

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Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Satyakama & The Truth

Essay Question:

Q. In the following excerpt from the Chandogya Upanishad (Part 4, Ch 4) how is 'truth' defined?
(Not more than as many words as are necessary)


(Satyakama) came to Gautama the son of Haridrumata and said: "Revered Sir, I wish to live with you as a brahmacharin. May I approach you, as a pupil?"

Gautama said to him: "Of what ancestry are you, dear friend?" Satyakama said: "I do not know, Sir, of what ancestry I am. I asked my mother about it and she replied: ‘In my youth I was preoccupied with many household duties and with attending on guests when I conceived you. I do not know of what ancestry you are. I am Jabala by name and you are Satyakama.’
I am therefore, Sir, Satyakama Jabala."

Gautama said: "None but a true brahmin would thus speak out. Fetch the fuel, dear friend; I shall initiate you. You have not departed from truth."

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Torches of Freedom

This is the blog's first venture into video - a clip from Adam Curtis's 2002 documentary, The Century of the Self. I'm presently reading Edward Bernays' classic book Propaganda.

Edward Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew, "the father of public relations", the man who invented "bacon and eggs", toppled the democratically elected government of Guatemala on behalf of a banana corporation and, as this clip shows, persuaded women to smoke.

He did so with the advice of a Freudian analyst who said that ... well, I won't spoil it for you.

In five minutes this clip lays bare the truth about what Bernays calls "the new propaganda ... the executive arm of the invisible government".

To view, just click on the video. You might need to click pause and wait a couple of minutes for the download if your connection is slowish like mine.

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