a reading of Simone Weil & Ralph Waldo Emerson
Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires. -Song of Solomon 8:4
***
Beyond words lies the beauty we become in the practice of pure love. To Love what is Beautiful is an initiation into the eternal form of Beauty itself.
receiving the effluence of beauty through his eyes, he is warmed, and this warmth waters the growth of his [soul’s] wings… when he sees the beauty here below, he is reminded of the true Beauty, and his wings begin to grow, and he is eager to fly upward, but he cannot, and like a bird he looks upward, careless of the things below, and is accused of being possessed by madness. -Plato, Phaedrus
But how we resist purity.
How we stain the order of divine providence. How we disrespect the order of grace, how we run ahead of it with our fantasies and our personal desires , unable to sit chastely and purely- unrestrained children. In resisting purity in loving, we grow to pervert the gift of love by forcing it. By seizing love in brute force, or seeking to possess what is beautiful, we pervert it- we prostitute ourselves.
The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil. To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love. -Simone Weil
To mature is to see truly. To mature is to let go of the blind compulsion, and see the relations of things. It is to sit at home like the mountains, chaste as the inert matter of the world which awaits the order of grace and yields perfection.
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say,--'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
To love purely is the art of dying- the beautiful sacrifice of our own fantasies of desire, our own compulsions to possess, to become pure is to discipline all affection except that which visits us in our solitude by pure grace.
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it. Other affections have to be severely disciplined. -Simone Weil
To love purely is to enter reality - to sit at home in our own hearts and embrace what is. To be authentically affected by what exists through the organ of our heart not our mind (that great divider)- which fabricates to all hopes and fantasies of the future or selfish desires of another.
Every desire for enjoyment belongs to the future and the world of illusion, whereas if we desire only that a being should exist, he exists: what more is there to desire ? The beloved being is then naked and real, not veiled by an imaginary future. The miser never looks at his treasure without imagining it ‘x’ times larger. It is necessary to be dead in order to see things in their nakedness. -Simone Weil
It is to forgo every external compulsion towards love as a carnal pleasure for its own sake, to resist every lying affection the world brings to us, eager to imprison us in it. To love purely is to be obedient to the miracle of reality. The miracle of love and friendship is free, and cannot be worked, bought or paid for. It must be received as the fields receive rain.
It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or to wish to give) the people we love any other consolation than that which works of art give us. These help us through the mere fact that they exist. To love and to be loved only serves mutually to render this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind. But it should be present as the source of our thoughts, not as their object[ive]. -Simone Weil
***
So then, the practice of pure love is the practice of sublime death to all falsehood, and the authentic embrace, the authentic loving of reality in us, the world and in others. Only in this can we not destroy each other through fantasy, by oppresssing the other by images of our personal desires and fantasies. Instead, through pure love, to awaken the wings of each other’ soul upwards. Love as ascension towards eternal beauty and truth.
This begins with an essential stern quality. A vigorous disciplining of our own weak tendencies to satisfy our lower natures and to satisfy others out of inferior motivations. Only then do we become truly beautiful in our love.
We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Once our essence is pure, once the law of our soul abides eminently in us- we command all attention , because we need none of it. To love purely is to develop a purity of self-reliance, it is the beginning approach to the eminent sanctities of obedience and faith.
*Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.
Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not. *-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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a reading of Simone Weil & Ralph Waldo Emerson
Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires. -Song of Solomon 8:4
***
Beyond words lies the beauty we become in the practice of pure love. To Love what is Beautiful is an initiation into the eternal form of Beauty itself.
receiving the effluence of beauty through his eyes, he is warmed, and this warmth waters the growth of his [soul’s] wings… when he sees the beauty here below, he is reminded of the true Beauty, and his wings begin to grow, and he is eager to fly upward, but he cannot, and like a bird he looks upward, careless of the things below, and is accused of being possessed by madness. -Plato, Phaedrus
But how we resist purity.
How we stain the order of divine providence. How we disrespect the order of grace, how we run ahead of it with our fantasies and our personal desires , unable to sit chastely and purely- unrestrained children. In resisting purity in loving, we grow to pervert the gift of love by forcing it. By seizing love in brute force, or seeking to possess what is beautiful, we pervert it- we prostitute ourselves.
The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil. To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love. -Simone Weil
To mature is to see truly. To mature is to let go of the blind compulsion, and see the relations of things. It is to sit at home like the mountains, chaste as the inert matter of the world which awaits the order of grace and yields perfection.
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say,--'Come out unto us.' But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
To love purely is the art of dying- the beautiful sacrifice of our own fantasies of desire, our own compulsions to possess, to become pure is to discipline all affection except that which visits us in our solitude by pure grace.
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it. Other affections have to be severely disciplined. -Simone Weil
To love purely is to enter reality - to sit at home in our own hearts and embrace what is. To be authentically affected by what exists through the organ of our heart not our mind (that great divider)- which fabricates to all hopes and fantasies of the future or selfish desires of another.
Every desire for enjoyment belongs to the future and the world of illusion, whereas if we desire only that a being should exist, he exists: what more is there to desire ? The beloved being is then naked and real, not veiled by an imaginary future. The miser never looks at his treasure without imagining it ‘x’ times larger. It is necessary to be dead in order to see things in their nakedness. -Simone Weil
It is to forgo every external compulsion towards love as a carnal pleasure for its own sake, to resist every lying affection the world brings to us, eager to imprison us in it. To love purely is to be obedient to the miracle of reality. The miracle of love and friendship is free, and cannot be worked, bought or paid for. It must be received as the fields receive rain.
It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or to wish to give) the people we love any other consolation than that which works of art give us. These help us through the mere fact that they exist. To love and to be loved only serves mutually to render this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind. But it should be present as the source of our thoughts, not as their object[ive]. -Simone Weil
***
So then, the practice of pure love is the practice of sublime death to all falsehood, and the authentic embrace, the authentic loving of reality in us, the world and in others. Only in this can we not destroy each other through fantasy, by oppresssing the other by images of our personal desires and fantasies. Instead, through pure love, to awaken the wings of each other’ soul upwards. Love as ascension towards eternal beauty and truth.
This begins with an essential stern quality. A vigorous disciplining of our own weak tendencies to satisfy our lower natures and to satisfy others out of inferior motivations. Only then do we become truly beautiful in our love.
We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit. Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Once our essence is pure, once the law of our soul abides eminently in us- we command all attention , because we need none of it. To love purely is to develop a purity of self-reliance, it is the beginning approach to the eminent sanctities of obedience and faith.
*Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.
Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not. *-Ralph Waldo Emerson
VICTOR ALEXANDERThe Quantum Prison of the Postmodern Mind
The Postmodern MindIn avoiding the light of the sacred, the postmodern mind enters the darkness of a quantum prison—a disordered state where superposition-like possibilities overwhelm order and stability. The consequences of rejecting the divinity of man, final & formal causality, and the verticality of soul is to be trapped in the quantum prison of a postmodern mind. A disordered mind which intermingles desires, fantasy, self referential narratives and algorithmic embedding into a perception...
VICTOR ALEXANDERTHE VALUE OF CULTURE IS WORLD BUILDING
TL;DR: The “utility” & “network effects” valuation model for NFT’s undercuts their potential as digital cultural objects. Valuing NFT’s by attention capture incentivizes Clout chasing, creating toxicity between holder and founders. Culture is valuable because it creates new worlds by the patient work of community interrelation, shared experiences and collective imagination. Vital culture is rarely born online, it requires a high degree of context. As living memes, NFT’s can be the seeds of cu...
VICTOR ALEXANDER2023: the new humanism
The new humanism is a prodigal return to the genius of man as the foundation and origin of society rather than other foundations (corporatism). By rejecting money as sole obligation and motive for life, we retake the agency to organize according to principles we all hold in common as humans. Principles necessary in order to fulfill our shared eternal obligation- to respect and value human life. The new humanism: to create as humans, for humans. To believe again in a human network which relate...
building the new creative school
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