Karthik Bala

found this wonderful paper, on the value of drunkenness in plato’s laws. some highlights:

“shame” (probably an imperfect translation) is an important feeling to the greeks. their “shame” was a desire to not look stupid in front of others, and this desire created a feeling that prevented indulgence in excess pleasure. cultivating this feeling (which may or may not feel like what we think is shame) built cultivated restraint and temperance.

drinking increases the desire to indulge. and so restraining yourself while drunk is kind of like training with the weights on. if you can restrain yourself sloshed you can restrain yourself sober, no matter how great and how tempting the pleasure.

the Laws recommends supervised drinking parties (symposiums). these are employed strategically to cultivate shame in citizens, and to also reveal who is shameless. knowing who is shameless is said to be the most important thing a city can learn.

children are loud and spirited because they have fire in the soul

alcohol “pours fire in the soul” and makes adults like children, singing and dancing freely.

musical education is very important to plato. if an old person is musically mis-educated (for example, they listened to too much indie rock and are now a softboi unfit to the defend the state), it is difficult to retrain him, because he is too dry and embarassed to let loose and sing a new song (for example, spartan death metal)

so plato recommends he get drunk. and while he is drunk, a wise teacher should make him sing more noble songs. basically, drunkenness makes you more musically neuroplastic so you can re-educate your spirit.

People who like to rewatch movies know the ending, and this freedom from plot tension helps them savor the details. People who don’t like to rewatch movies lose interest without the plot tension, the details do not touch them.

Constant mindfulness of death help some enjoy the everyday. But causes others to see the everyday as pointless, and want for more.

For those who don’t care about plot or endings at all– none of this matters. They only ask: “what is going on right now?”

I’m trying to relax my desire to know and to predict.

“asti nāsti kathaṁ brūyāṁ vismayaḥ pratibhāti me”

We give our energy to “creating good memories” then reminisce to fill ourselves.

We give our energy to idols then contemplate them to fill ourselves.

They both feel like batteries. And because we share some collective mind, mystical cultures have dedicated idol-smiths who create and charge idols for the benefit of us all. And I think they create and charge them with feelings, insights, energy levels that are foreign to our individual conscious experience. So, like art, they allow us to download the experience of someone who had a deeper conscious experience of life.

New age magick that uses pop-culture is harnessing forms and pop culture idols that have already taken our energy, usually in childhood when we were not conscious of this exchange, and using them consciously to reclaim that energy.

Causality is not as strict as we think it is. “If I do this, I will get this.” Nothing is this simple. God often makes it this simple so we do not go insane. But he doesn’t have to. It’s said the planets choose to move in a regular motion, out of their own freedom, because they enjoy the rhythm and perfection.

The causalities described in the Vedas is maybe close to “law”. Newton is close to law. But most of our cause-effect ideas are largely God’s gifts and lessons. And God can break his own laws at any time, as al-Ghazali might say. Close to law means God enjoys the constraint and chooses, like the planets, to follow it, for his own joy. Miracles are proof that he can deviate from them at any time.

Original (pre-19th century) definition of “Baroque”: absurd, grotesque

Baroque disregarded the ancient rules of composition. Baroque painters like Frans Hals “knew how to attain the impression of balance without appearing to follow any rule” (Story of Art, 311).

With the baroque, art moves from the serene Middle Ages and Renaissance portraits of the Virgin Mary, to the painful ecstasies of Saint Teresa pierced by the golden arrow.

To me, baroque art looks like a wild and effortless balance. The balance of a jungle as opposed to the well organized home. The diagonals are invigorating. They cut you open. They strike, they impose. They imply that Heaven is glorious and ecstatic. That the Earth, though chaotic, is still ordered under God, still sensical.

There is passion in procrastination. It makes every impractical “what if” superficially fascinating and overstimulating.

The antidote is dispassionate work. It sobers me up, and then I look around, as if waking up from a bender, surrounded by impulse purchase woodworking tools I bought when intoxicated by distraction.

God wills through me, I just need to clear the way. “Lord, give me only what you will and in the way that you will.”

If this doesn’t lead to insight, then usually I have an obvious duty, chore, or task I’m neglecting out of lack of virtue.

complex or unorthodox purpose (e.g Jonah, Isaiah, Abraham) -> harder to reason about -> more dependence on surrender

Good work requires a certain soberness. This comes from detachment. Passion distorts the vision. The emotional detachment demanded by trading is the most direct version of this, and so God keeps it as the most direct way to wealth. The purpose of ārtha may be to inculcate this state: ‘doing what must be done’. That is also the satvic attitude.

I think it relates to the sixth house: cold logic and supporting others. Health must be approached in the same sober attitude. The opposite of the sixth is the twelfth, which includes sex, sin, and spiritual ecstasy– all passions.

when i see videos of people in great physical distress, jaw broken, wind pipes sliced into with a shovel– things i cannot even imagine the pain of– i am at a loss in reconciling what i see with god. my faith feels blind. my one cope is that in that moment god would remove their pain and their suffering, would not bring that pain to their conscious experience, or would only surface the amount of pain they could handle. i’m thinking of people saying how adrenaline causing them to not feel any pain, but this does not always apply, especially not in accounts of torture…

i often find myself persuaded by others ‘stop thinking. just follow your gut. just pick something you want and try to get it’. this is so common, but i really don’t think its wise. yes, it can be absorbing to chase. there’s an energy in it. but i feel joy only arises when your will is properly aimed.

most people’s wills, especially in sf, is aimed towards forcing into existence a startup that does not need to exist. i feel much better when i restrain myself, and carefully deliberate over what must be done, and what is worth pursuing, instead of picking the strongest impulse i have, which is always changing

We let technology handle perfection so we can be lazy. Typing is forgiving. Mobile autocorrect is even more forgiving. Handwriting is unforgiving. Every twitch, quiver, and mistake stares back at you.

This makes accomplishment easier. But for most of us, if we can be lazy, we will be. And so we atrophy.

What medium in history has been more error tolerant than typing? Does this encourage laziness and a lack of diligence?

Going to disable my backspace key and turn off autocorrect as an experiment.

i’ve been thinking a lot about sadhguru’s idea of each nation and culture having a unique rhythm, or tara, and once you are aligned with that tara, you will ride its tune, or raga.

www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bha-ra-…

in traveling i can better feel the distinct rhythms of America.

in the movies of the 50s, like It’s a Wonderful Life, you can sense a certain bubbliness, and a simple, optimistic enthusiasm. you can sense the rhythm of the go-getter, who must do, and do more, rather than reflect pensively over a cigarette in a dark room. we have them in 50s detective noir, but i’d bet money that aesthetic is imported from europe.

i wonder if the land can set rhythm. i would trust the indigenous to uncover this natural rhythm. the yang, will driven, europeans– they settle, and perhaps there is some reconciliation between how they are and how the land is.

to assimilate well into a culture, your constitution must be able to conform to its rhythm. an iowan farmer, unless brimming with Zarathustran self-assertion, will feel friction in Manhattan.

the alternative is a multiplexed reality, different rhythms laid on top of each other, harmonized, cultural cohesion determined by how well they can harmonize, and the iowan farmer, in his own reality tunnel, naturally recognizes what slow parts of manhattan exist, and they form a kind of bass-line for the neurotic NYU art students.

i would guess a lot of language learning is first adapting to the rhythm of the language. the melody, or words, come after.

classically educated music critiques complain modern music no longer continues the western canon. it is unlinked from tradition. everyone sings their own disparate songs and spawn unique tracks and voicings. so our national rhythm divides further and further. the liberal will say it will all harmonize into a richer and complex composition. the conservative will say it’s unlistenable chaos.

the EDM festival “fits” socal well. it’s like a reinterpretation of the sun and beach and desert. i wonder what will come out of it.

i do not want to accept a reality where humans are created so blind, the soul bound to a machine that carries so many flaws, and abandoned there to fend for themselves. how can god expect us to choose correctly? it’s like trusting a baby with a machete.

suffering can only make sense to me if it’s a part of his game. every mistake must be chosen deliberately by him, out of a curiosity of the various paths in and out of hell, the different flavors of ignorance, and a joy in struggle and effort, in losing and receiving again.

does god really leave us to flounder and suffer until our minds naturally turn to him? or does he choose to suffer, out of curiosity of different journeys in and out of Hell, wanting to explore every Valley of Death, experiencing the joy in effort of moving down then up again.

is tamas not a mode of krishna? is evil not just Him concealing himself? willfully embracing diverse forms, physical and mental, rather than awareness itself? how else can He “wipe every tear from our eyes”? what other explanation is there? what other justification can be given?

i recently read that the great philosopher-mystic simone weil, who grew up well off and educated, worked on an assembly line for a year in an industrial factory in order to experience for herself the problems of the 20th century french working class

she then wrote “The Need for Roots” about the problems she saw there. the first part is about what she believed to be the “Fourteen Needs of the Soul”

it reminded me of this great twitter thread on 90s movies-esque crappy jobs that are menial but humane, because you can fool around with your coworkers (also thinking of The Office)

chores alone sucks but doing it with friends doesn’t feel like work. my mom told me about joint families in india where a bunch of ladies would sit together while knitting or cooking and gossip for hours and it made life fun. i saw a bagger and cashier flirting at trader joe’s yesterday and they looked very alive and enjoying themselves

if you ever end up creating jobs, these are the subtle but important qualities that must be kept in mind

i love Bruno Maçães’s articulation of the issue of liberal universalism.

Liberals wanted their political values to be accepted universally, much like a scientific theory enjoys universal validity. In order to achieve this, a monumental effort of abstraction and simplification was needed, similar to Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein abstracting from previous physical theories a more formal system of relations. Western civilization stopped being a civilization, or at least it stopped seeing itself as a civilization. It would not embody a rich tapestry of traditions, ways of looking and seeing, and it renounced the classical aspiration to pursue a philosophical or religious vision. Its principles were meant to be broad and formal, no more than an abstract framework of relations.

human life takes place on a limited timescale, during which we are fated to place our bets on certain specific understandings of the world

from: the return of civilizations (noema mag)

basically: the libs think we don’t need tradition. we think we can live life totally rationally. but this viewpoint is based in a shallow understanding of the human condition (one which may be rectified by engagement with tradition). and it’s shallowness is revealing itself to us now, in health (mental and physical) epidemics, and continued international conflict. to throw away all the work of our ancestors towards this difficult task of living a good life is silly. life is too short for this. just because we do not understand their symbols does not mean they’re useless (Chesterton’s Fence).

also see:

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them - A.N. Whitehead

i have one caveat to Maçães point. we may be able to do away with civilizational states. but we all need to be mystics. or loving intuitives. we all need to be seeing so clearly, so attuned to intuitive truth, that we don’t need the support of tradition. the right thing to do is simply obvious, and so you do not need to enforce a culture beyond the basics of liberal universalism. many people today are moving in this direction, re-deriving subjective truths from the rubble of tradition.

that is my far far fetched utopia: mystical liberalism

i think this non-chalant sadhguru video, “How to Remain Focused & Energetic As You Age?", is a trojan horse for the ladder of eros in Plato’s Symposium. just replace the word ‘interest’ with Eros

sadhguru says the energy derived from the body goes down as we age, but the energy derived from the intellect and consciousness stays with us.

so we can infer it is more permanent. maybe because it is more subtle, and thus closer to God and Spirit.

the ladder of eros in the symposium, the ladder that lifts us from ‘interest’ in bodies to interest in knowledge, seems to me like what sadhguru is asking us to climb

i’m also reminded of cephalus, the elder in the beginning of plato’s republic. cephalus does not miss sex and feasts. he is actually happy to be free of these compulsions, and remains vibrant, enjoying life’s other pleasures