- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 272
The Grand Tour of every-day Victorian Life, from the POV of a town clerk, his domicile, domestic bliss and circumstance and his complete and utter lack of self-awareness that characterize the middle class. It's humour lies in recognizing these foibles in everyone but ourselves.
Definitely of an era, but not entirely to my taste, and I found myself relieved to find the last few pages of this fallen out, there was no need to read this through to any sort of conclusion.
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 286
The Charm of local authors, every town has a few, nothing of literary merit but curious so see how this town was in the days before, many of the buildings and houses still remain, and most of the people he mentions still have descendants of the people in the town.
Beginning in Trail, and the great die off for 30 KM around due to the pollution from the Smelter, then to Nelson where the author grew up, neighbours included the Maglio’s, who’s name still appears on antique buildings, building supply stores and one descendent used to Golf and was a great customer, the "Old Money" of the town.
Comprised of reminisces similar to “The Great Brain”, childhood stories of poverty, of illness and Polio and the fact that while many if not all families were stricken by diseases and disabilities that would be preventable and treatable today, many doubtless connected to the smelter in Trail, the final follow up with his surviving friends, neighbours, brothers and sisters, Nelson’s Chinatown and Red Light district, still, and when my Metal Detector comes from the locker I have some ideas of where to search, this town is doubtless loaded with buried treasures only needing me to unearth...
It does bring to mind how much things have changed, and largely for the better.
A fine way to pass a bloody hot day...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 369
A fine selection of stories about early B.C.
Most, a page or two long, about the early fur trade and the Gold Rushes, interesting notes on the old (200+ years) forts set up by the Fur Trade and early explorers, as well as Buddhist artifacts found along the Skeena & Telegraph Creek, Chinese bronze coins found at Cassier, the suggestion that Kublai Khan made it to the Naas River area, rumours of the Spanish, other out-of-situ artifacts that have been not been adequately explained, all this requires a little further research...
Otherwise history, folk tales, legends of the Lost Lemon Mine and Slumach's Gold, a slender read that leads the mind off in all directions...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 381
Bloody hell this took forever.
Anyways, overall, an interesting idea that spurred a lot of thought, but the source material, well - OK. Nonetheless I'll outline it again and then make my notes.
First and again, the author is arguing that Man is in the process of evolving from a period of "Self Consciousness" to a higher plain of Universal or "Cosmic Consciousness" in which he will be able to experience the divine as part of his day-to-day experience. As substantiation for his arguments he provides a long list of people he believe's have (at certain times, and for certain periods) experienced it, with quotes from both them and those people who knew them.
Beginning with Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, etc. and ending with a more contemporary list of people; some of whom are listed by their initials only, others of whom are named, all of whom really loved Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass". I may have to give it a read.
A partial list follows, linked to their respective Wikipedia Pages, some of which make for more interesting reads than others.
And too many more to list. Now the author, as a Psychiatrist had a privileged insight into a lot of patients/inmates personality’s and experiences, unusual states of mind, and doubtless some of the acquaintances he made in his career influenced his observations. But - while not entirely doubting him, it doesn't hurt to be a little bit skeptical. The whole "I've achieved enlightenment and this is how it feels and perhaps you should/would benefit from it as well..." highlights the perils of self reporting, for what man doesn’t report himself better than his peers? And the belief that this is somehow an Aryan thing, or beyond the ken of more "primitive" tribes and civilizations does them a disservice, for only after we had destroyed their cultures and displaced them from their homes did we take a look at their spiritual practices. Language, culture, and the timed distance we put between them and our own understandings make it unlikely we'll ever know, but - from the books I've read, first hand and pertaining to North American and Australian Indigenous peoples they were far more in that zone than we are, and so (since we report on the extraordinary and rarely the ordinary) they have as much claim to this evolution as anyone.
As well the author overlooks that the mind can be trained to experience these things, as in Buddhist or Hindu traditions, and that indirectly the Christian tradition prepares one for the same epiphanies.
But, ignoring these criticisms, it's of it's age. Instead take the idea that you can somehow reframe and rewire and experience a world you had only hitherto suspected. Discarding the drugs (MDMA, ACID, MUSHROOMS, KETAMINE, Too many others to list) there are abundant instances in our current age where you can be "transformed" with an attenuation of sense you had never suspected.
Try for example Color Blind Glasses (Link provided to people getting colour blind glasses...). Clearly the experience is one that is both transformational - an invisible world becomes apparent. Or babies getting glasses or babies getting hearing aids.
Or lying between 2 giant trumpets in the forest to have all those quiet noises that lie beneath your perception made audible.
But these are technological remedies to sensory deficits. Consider that human beings have had colour cones since we were apes (they share a similar eye biology), yet only relatively recently did these distinctions make it into language.
Gladstone's colour theory postulates that Man/Humankind did not evolve a colour sense until relatively recently is undermined by the fact that the Ancient Egyptians were using Blue as a pigment as early as 2500 BCE. It's late entry into language, though, is suspicious, or curious - and the abundant studies of certain tribes and cultures that could not differentiate shades of blue/green until they were taught. But - their hardware (cones, rods) is the same, it is only that they have been bounded or restrained by language. So - while our hardware (bodies) are relatively the same; our software (thinking and language) are different.
When language expands, so do concepts and our ability to think. Which suggests that just as we hope to upgrade our software (language) we can hope to expand our experience(s) of the world.
Consider then Tetrachromats, with 4 types of cones in their eyes and a much vaster spectrum of colour than language will provide. Factually a different hardware, running on legacy code. Or synesthetes, who's experience of vision or sound is tied to another sensory input, "seeing" red as a colour and experiencing it as noise or a taste or touch sensation of some sort. Old hardware, new code. Imagining that you are the first to achieve this hyper-attenuation, a new cell in your eye that expands your spectrum, sharpen your vision to that of a Mantis Shrimp, with it's ability to see in ultraviolet and polarized rays, or a Hawk or Eagle, evolve the olfactory sensibility of a dog, the hearing of a whale, every enhancement of sense demanding a correlating enhancement in the brain to process and - in time, language to express and share it.
Or Supertasters, of which I'm sure my neighbour is one, you have only to watch her face as she bites into a dessert to know that her experience of it is so far beyond my own, but then words fail her in describing...
And consider the vocabularies of taste and smell - 5 basic tastes, Umami, Salty, Sweet, Sour and Bitter, after which everything is described in terms that can only make sense if you have prior experience of the taste or food it's referencing. And the same with scent - one theory lists the seven primary scents as "camphoraceous, musky, floral, pungent, ethereal, minty and putrid", almost all of which require some experience of items similarly described.
Contrast this with numbers - I have the theory of numbers, the experience of small numbers, and I can generalize from this up to larger numbers. I don't need the entire infinitude of integers or fractions to make sense of the world. But - the vocabulary of scent, taste, is meaningless without experience of these things.
...which is making me think of language as a virus, something that exists beyond us, a parasite that needs 2 hosts in order to evolve itself, grow, a parasite with a will and direction of it's own.
Consider LLM's, with their evolving "intelligence", AI is a little hyped and overused but their building upon the language of code and numbers and grow their "software" based on their interactions with others.
IN time, presumably, they will have to update their "hardware" to process these new ideas that they're creating...
Which makes curious, the stages of a babies psychological development, the child then of a magician who never learns object permanence, how then is their experience of the world? What narrative of their existence? Or a cat, just discovering (gingerly, slow pats of the salt shaker while sat upon the cupboard) discovering gravity? And wonder at the worlds of angels, fairies, elves and demons beyond our ken, coloured in shades beyond our perception...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 383
A curious book, found at a thrift shop and purchased despite the title and cover.
First published in 1901, the author argues that man is in his "Self Conscious" stage of existence, in which he is aware of himself (differentiated from the animals, that have an awareness of others but presumably not themselves. We now know that for certain species this is untrue). But - from time to time, certain men have achieved a sort of illumination, or enlightenment, and he argues that this is a trend forward for humanity in consciousness - that eventually we'll all transcend our self-conscious selves and become at one with the universe as we can perceive it (or, as we don't).
Of Canadian descent (reassuring in that most saviours seem to come from Galilee or Tibet) he describes his childhood in backwoods Canada, his growing up, travels, love of Walt Whitman (who, coincidentally is definitely one of the enlightened ones) before proceeding towards his theories of consciousness. Himself a psychiatrist the author proves very well informed on any number of issues and rather out of date on others (as is to be expected.)
It reminds me vaguely of Hegel's "The Philosophy of History" in that the author argues conscious awakening is, in a way, an inevitable part of being human. A little ray of sunshine to distract one from the news cycle...
But his Thesis is not the point, it's the questions he raises (in my mind, at least - along the way).
First of all, his views on Women and enlightenment and Savage/"Lower Races" on enlightenment - well, .... that isn't cutting it today. Even if he were right, which I strongly suspect he isn't. Culture is far more definitive than race. But he's not working from a place of ignorance or hate, merely a lack of information and through the lens of his time.
Some of his (so far) enlightened persons include Mohammed, Jesus, Buddha, Shakespeare (Francis Bacon), Dante, and so on and so forth. He finds no shortage of exemplary lives and attributed quotes to support his arguments. Of interest were his references to Colour Theory - that man has only recently developed a nuanced colour sense (and there is abundant evidence and other theories to support this, which I have referenced before), and extends this same theory to fragrance and taste (again, these things lacked a vocabulary until relatively modern times), he argues that colour blindness is simply atavism, that insanity is caused by the hyper-attenuation of modern senses, that as we "evolve" those higher up are more prone to mental illness, the foundation not yet secured, and so forth and so on.
Not everything is to be agreed upon, but he does force you to consider things from a different perspective.
Points of disagreement: that self awareness is not present in dreams (it can be, as in lucid dreams), that a effect can never be greater than it's cause (clearly and almost always untrue), that the Aryan Race is the most highly developed/evolved, that women have disproportionally fewer representatives of Cosmic Consciousness (possible - if you consider that women conform more to the mean than men do, and so men are overrepresented in things like mental health struggles - and, by extension, "Peak Experiences" that tear off the veil...)
anyways, a curious read but non-essential. Now probably I should attempt to elevate myself through some meditation, but I think instead it's time for lunch...
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Maurice_Bucke
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Consciousness
Link: https://archive.org/details/cosmicconsciousn01buck/page/n7/mode/2up