Hi Brad, it was a pleasure to read your essay here. I appreciate your candidness and authenticity. You are one of the few people on earth who I’ve had a chance to interact with, who - having attained a great height - still feels the gravitational pull to connect authentically with others on a level of self-awareness and self-scrutiny that is not common. The paradox of faith/action reminded me of J. Krishnamurti “Love can do nothing, but without it nothing can be done.” Best wishes to you on your journeys here on Substack!
After reading your essay, a question arose for me: would there be a political action that could bring us redemption, that could remove us from complicity with evil? I think the answer is clearly no, things simply do not work that way. Probably because, as you made clear in your second essay on this platform, good and evil coexist within us; we cannot fully incarnate one or the other. All we can do is remain lucid, align ourselves with love, and act in that direction from where we stand, accepting that there is no clear end to things and that salvation is not guaranteed. I recently encountered Greek tragedy and Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. I find this line of thought immensely valuable, because it embraces the inevitable without stripping away the dignity and beauty that lie in lucidity, in carrying oneself according to what is true and good while accepting loss and limitation at the same time. Following along, I think anything one can define about what love means and how it translates into action in any given situation has great value. Thank you again for sharing your thoughts, all the best to you
Thank you Fernanado for reading. I agree with your answer regarding some magic-bullet political action that would bring redemption - I also will not hold my breath and wait for that to happen. I'd like to think more about this, but I think it has to do with who and how we choose to love. Love, as much as we don't want it to be, is conditional. First in line are often those with consanguineous ties to us, bound by blood. Then, those in our tribe - like a nation-state. We don't want it to be this way, but it is. The point is that achieving love in some political sense is so very different and harder than loving someone directly. I think one answer is that we need to learn how to empathize with those who aren't in our tribe, and be on the look out for losing that empathy.
ha! spelling doesn't count. it is our responsibility as human beings to make sense of what google does to us. I turned spell check/autocorrect off. I proudly own my mistakes
I have a working definition of human Evil: escaping pain by moving it to someone else.. The result of evil is undeserved suffering. That suffering is everywhere. The ones who cause it
are also everywhere. That's how evil spreads pain: the very nature of evil is this shifting of pain away from one's self. I hope I'm making sense. Watch how these creeps escape accountability. See what I mean? It's like being handed a pile of shit that you never wanted.
I particularly liked the bit around prayer and the implications of prayer. It's also great to see you articulate your own insights and ideas about how you think and feel. That is the hero's journey: going inward, looking at the depths that push even beyond ourselves and returning with whatever we may find. So many errors and projections occur when the inner life and its drives are overlooked and therefore play themselves out in often trecherous ways in the world. Hence the place of art, prayer, relationship...all ways of transmuting archetypal drives into articulated forms. The alternative is violence.
Anyways, I could go on but I am wondering, are you familiar with Charles Taylor's work? I think you'd enjoy it, particularly "Sources of the Self" or even "Cosmic Connections". Its a philosophical work that sheds light on the moral universe that took two thousand years or even longer to establish and in which we find ourselves in, often despite our awareness.
Thanks John, thanks for taking the time to read and your feedback. I don’t know Charles Taylor’s work, no. I’m guessing from your description there it’s 20th Century?
Yes Sources of the Self was written in the 90s I think, so "contemporary" and still relevant. His latest oeuvre is called Cosmic Connections is also great with special emphasis on poetry and the poetic imagination as a source of meaning and re-enchantment. Basically the idea is that since the Enlightenment (if not before), the western mind has slowly created and inhabited a largely disenchanted world made up solely of material causes and only graspable through reason and intellect, if at all. And so the world, in many ways, has come to look like that, devoid of inherent (or immanent as you put it) meaning. Parallel to that however, there is a tradition (that Taylor is delineating) which holds that poetry, the imagination, and the soul all help us rekindle a deep relationship with nature and the world. Such a connection to things, a kind of intimate resonance by which I come to know the world, is in many ways the foundation of meaning. And the deeper we go into that meaning, with faith, the more the world opens up through such a loving gaze.
Thanks again for your article, look forward to reading more.
Thanks for pointing med to James, I have strangely enough missed him! And I can do totally relate to the feeling of watching Rome burn from my very comfortable position. But I suppose we must leave our actual contribution in the hands of God or the universe and trust we will contribute in our way through our work. Like you just now did for me by writing this text. ❤️
Hi Brad, it was a pleasure to read your essay here. I appreciate your candidness and authenticity. You are one of the few people on earth who I’ve had a chance to interact with, who - having attained a great height - still feels the gravitational pull to connect authentically with others on a level of self-awareness and self-scrutiny that is not common. The paradox of faith/action reminded me of J. Krishnamurti “Love can do nothing, but without it nothing can be done.” Best wishes to you on your journeys here on Substack!
Thank you Chase, good to hear from you here! Thanks for reading and like that quote from Krishnamurti. That's it, wow.
Brad, haven’t read a word of your writing yet…but, in your music, I hear the voice of God….
No pressure on the writing part, though 😆
Hi Brad, thank you for your great work.
After reading your essay, a question arose for me: would there be a political action that could bring us redemption, that could remove us from complicity with evil? I think the answer is clearly no, things simply do not work that way. Probably because, as you made clear in your second essay on this platform, good and evil coexist within us; we cannot fully incarnate one or the other. All we can do is remain lucid, align ourselves with love, and act in that direction from where we stand, accepting that there is no clear end to things and that salvation is not guaranteed. I recently encountered Greek tragedy and Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. I find this line of thought immensely valuable, because it embraces the inevitable without stripping away the dignity and beauty that lie in lucidity, in carrying oneself according to what is true and good while accepting loss and limitation at the same time. Following along, I think anything one can define about what love means and how it translates into action in any given situation has great value. Thank you again for sharing your thoughts, all the best to you
Thank you Fernanado for reading. I agree with your answer regarding some magic-bullet political action that would bring redemption - I also will not hold my breath and wait for that to happen. I'd like to think more about this, but I think it has to do with who and how we choose to love. Love, as much as we don't want it to be, is conditional. First in line are often those with consanguineous ties to us, bound by blood. Then, those in our tribe - like a nation-state. We don't want it to be this way, but it is. The point is that achieving love in some political sense is so very different and harder than loving someone directly. I think one answer is that we need to learn how to empathize with those who aren't in our tribe, and be on the look out for losing that empathy.
Hi Brad. I stumbled across your music this morning and am already whistful that I am so late to this party.
Now this essay.
They, the music and the words, are two sides of the same coin. Truth and beauty writ large. The Zen Buddhist finger pointing to the moon.
I will be back often for more but right now I am full.
Tuning in * spellcheck arghh
ha! spelling doesn't count. it is our responsibility as human beings to make sense of what google does to us. I turned spell check/autocorrect off. I proudly own my mistakes
Thanks so much for running in Sheilagh!
I have a working definition of human Evil: escaping pain by moving it to someone else.. The result of evil is undeserved suffering. That suffering is everywhere. The ones who cause it
are also everywhere. That's how evil spreads pain: the very nature of evil is this shifting of pain away from one's self. I hope I'm making sense. Watch how these creeps escape accountability. See what I mean? It's like being handed a pile of shit that you never wanted.
Whole lotta Rortyin' & neopraggin' going on in Annals of the Jyze Age on Jyze It Up.
Hello Brad,
Great essay, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I particularly liked the bit around prayer and the implications of prayer. It's also great to see you articulate your own insights and ideas about how you think and feel. That is the hero's journey: going inward, looking at the depths that push even beyond ourselves and returning with whatever we may find. So many errors and projections occur when the inner life and its drives are overlooked and therefore play themselves out in often trecherous ways in the world. Hence the place of art, prayer, relationship...all ways of transmuting archetypal drives into articulated forms. The alternative is violence.
Anyways, I could go on but I am wondering, are you familiar with Charles Taylor's work? I think you'd enjoy it, particularly "Sources of the Self" or even "Cosmic Connections". Its a philosophical work that sheds light on the moral universe that took two thousand years or even longer to establish and in which we find ourselves in, often despite our awareness.
All the best,
John
Thanks John, thanks for taking the time to read and your feedback. I don’t know Charles Taylor’s work, no. I’m guessing from your description there it’s 20th Century?
Yes Sources of the Self was written in the 90s I think, so "contemporary" and still relevant. His latest oeuvre is called Cosmic Connections is also great with special emphasis on poetry and the poetic imagination as a source of meaning and re-enchantment. Basically the idea is that since the Enlightenment (if not before), the western mind has slowly created and inhabited a largely disenchanted world made up solely of material causes and only graspable through reason and intellect, if at all. And so the world, in many ways, has come to look like that, devoid of inherent (or immanent as you put it) meaning. Parallel to that however, there is a tradition (that Taylor is delineating) which holds that poetry, the imagination, and the soul all help us rekindle a deep relationship with nature and the world. Such a connection to things, a kind of intimate resonance by which I come to know the world, is in many ways the foundation of meaning. And the deeper we go into that meaning, with faith, the more the world opens up through such a loving gaze.
Thanks again for your article, look forward to reading more.
Thanks John!
Very excited to see what’s next!
Thanks for pointing med to James, I have strangely enough missed him! And I can do totally relate to the feeling of watching Rome burn from my very comfortable position. But I suppose we must leave our actual contribution in the hands of God or the universe and trust we will contribute in our way through our work. Like you just now did for me by writing this text. ❤️