Thursday 23 May 2019

A book is nothing without a reader

in reply to this post in the thread:
Fair dinkum
Schumacher and Erich Fromm.
‘To Have or to Be’ is one of the most important books ever written.



A book is nothing without a reader - who is nothing without the willingness and wherewithal to understand it and let him-herself be changed by living from what is revealed by the book in the reader.

When the student is ready, the Teacher appears - or when there is willingness to know, the unfoldment of the answer within the active desire occurs. A chance meeting, remark or book appears. To such a one the book is alive. To others it is words.

The spirit of the living is not reached by application of the dead letter - but if there is also a desire to heal or to know, then dead letters will not completely block answer - though old habits of thinking and seeing may co-opt and subvert it as part of the curriculum of those who try to possess the answer for themselves.

In form (material sense), having - or possession is an object of affection (or indeed affliction) given meaning and attention for the role the meaning plays.
In mind, ideas strengthen by being shared.

Currently we have mass propagation of a split minded ideas (doublethink or self contradiction) through a manipulated 'narrative identity'.



The impulse to heal the divorce of heart and mind (or mind at war with itself in denial and substitution of the heart's desire) is evident in a 'scientific' milieu.

But the objectification of everyone and everything is hardly the basis for having and being life.

'He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise'.
William Blake

(Schumacher - economics as if people mattered).




Release and be released. (Or seem to possess and likewise be possessed).
Properly understood, it is never the thing in itself that binds, so much as the use to which it is put. If we try to fill a sense of self-lack with people or things, we not only give worth-ship to self-lack, and strengthen it in our minds, but mis-use others and lose recognition of all things alive.

To have freedom give freedom.
This is relational responsibility that is easily lost to habitual or institutionalised protections and controls that effectively tell us what to think, see and how to respond - but as if it by our own choice.

Bringing a disciplined curiosity to the activity of our own psychic-emotional and physical perceptions and responses is counter to acquired defences and so is not only 'upstream' - but becoming conscious of denied or suppressed self-experience. Much of people's willingness to give up freedom for a sense of protection is protection from deeper fears that are defended against being uncovered.

But they are no less active for being suppressed from conscious awareness and the rising of fear in the world anyway undermines the case of actually being protected, and the guardian of freedom is then revealed as a guard of a mind-capture and what had seemed solid is revealed illusory.

I understand Erich Fromm's work holds your deep appreciation.
It is often true that people of influence are revealed and revered after they are dead. It is also true that influence works in 'strange ways' - that is - not via the 'cause and effect' mechanism that so many seek to use as leverage.

I hold that while we can be temporarily 'possessed' by mad ideas - especially with social reinforcement - that only a fragment of mind dissociates the whole and doesn't and cannot 'leave' or separate from the whole of which it is integrally part of. And so a true sanity waits on welcome, and not on time.

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