And Jacob asked him, and said "Tell me your name." And he said "Wherefore is it that you ask after my name?" (Genesis 32:30)Le-olam - a Hebrew word with three root meanings: forever, and also hidden, and also in the world. This is my name forever hidden in the world. So how to recognize the presence of the metaphysical?
And (the people) will say to me "What is His name?" What shall I say to them? And God said to Moses, "I will be that which I will be." And He said thus shall you say to the children of Israel "I will be" sent me to you.....This is My name leolam. (Exod. 3:13-15)
On that day (the Eternal) shall be One and Its name One. (Zech. 14:9)That is to say, the Eternal is One.
The Eternal is One. (Deut. 6:4)
You shall know this day and place it in your heart that the Eternal is God in heaven above and on earth below; ain od. (Deut. 4:39)ain od - a Hebrew expression in this verse meaning there is nothing else (compare Deut. 4:39 with Deut. 4:35)
-But this book."The first requirement of civilization is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do so which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than beasts."
To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for barbarism to triumph is for civilized men to do nothing: but in fact for the past few decades, civilized men have done worse than nothing - they have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians. They have denied the distinction between higher and lower, to the invariable advantage of the latter. They have denied the superiority of man's greatest cultural achievements over the most ephemeral and vulgar of entertainments; they have denied that the scientific labors of brilliant men have resulted in an objective understanding of nature, and, like Pilate, they have treated the question of truth as a jest; above all, they have denied that it matters how people conduct themselves in their personal lives, provided only that they consent to their own depravity. The ultimate object of the deconstructionism that has swept the academy like an epidemic has been civilization itself, as the narcissists within the academy try to find a theoretical justification for their own revolt against civilized restraint. And thus the obvious truth - that it is necessary to repress, either by law or by custom, the permanent possibility in human nature of brutality and barbarism - never finds its way into the press or other media of communication.
For the last decade I have been observing close-up, from the vantage point of medical practice, the effects upon a large and susceptible population of the erosion of civilized standards of conduct brought about by the assault upon them by intellectuals. If Joseph Conrad were to search nowadays for the heart of darkness - the evil of human conduct untrammeled by the fear of legal sanction from without or moral censure from within - he would have to look no further than an English city such as mine." (163)
"...a rejection of everything associated with one's childhood is not so much an escape from that childhood as an imprisonment by it." (25)
"To base one's rejection of what exists - and hence one's prescription for a better world - upon the petty frustrations of one's youth, as surely many middle-class radicals have done, is profoundly egotistical. Unless consciously rejected, this impulse leads to a tendency throughout life to judge the rightness or wrongness of policies by one's personal emotional response to them, as if emotions were an infallible guide." (26)
" Lawrence was was an earnest, but not a serious, writer - if by serious we mean one whose outlook on life is intellectually or morally worthy of our consideration. Lawrence put a lot of himself into Mellors (the protangonist in Lady Chatterly's Lover), who at one point in the book enunciates the essence of Lawrence's philosophy, the summary of all his reflections on human existence, his final testament to the world: "I believe in something, I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love. I believe that if men could fuck with warm hearts and women took it warm-heartedly, everything would be all right." The idea that social perfection is to be achieved through wonderfully sensual sexual relations between men and women is a fantasy unworthy of prolonged intellectual consideration. To call it adolescent tripe is to be unfair to many intelligent adolescents. The fact that so many eminent persons were willing to testify in court that Lawrence was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, worthy to be compared, say, with Conrad, is an indication of the elite's loss of taste and judgment. Their imprimatur helped transform a bad writer and a worse thinker into a major cultural influence: and his crude, egotistical literal-mindedness has been successively trumped ever since by yet cruder, more egotistical literal-mindedness.
Daily life, for most people, consists of a series of personal encounters, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The original meaning of the word "person" (persona) - as distinct from the technical sense which it has acquired in Catholic theology - is that of a mask used by actors. A person is someone who assumes, in however slight degree, a disguise. As soon as the word is extended to "personage". we have no difficulty in seeing the point. A personage is an individual with a role; he must, like an actor, project himself in accordance with the appropriate "image". An aspiring politician is obliged to appear as simultaneously cheerful, confident, and statesmanlike; a movie star as arresting and sexually attractive,; an ecclesiastic as at once grave and benign, with perhaps a hint of a bright clerical smile. These conventions are well understood and acceptable enough. They only become tiresome when the individuals concerned, forgetting that from the basic human standpoint they are merely playing a part, identify themselves with their role. This invariably leads to trouble both for them and for those associated with them.Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
(T.S.Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
"Huxley's outlook is preconditioned by his intellectualism. In the best tradition of intellectuals he started off as a rebel. His rebellion seems to have gone through two stages: first he revolted against the established form of society and its conventions, and when this revolt only involved him in new and deeper bondages, he rose in revolt against and from himself. The second rebellion really developed out of the first; for, as Huxley himself says in Ends and Means, although this revolt against the 'political and economic system' may have been justified on the ground that it was unjust, he and his friends had nothing to put in its place. It was a revolt into meaninglessness; and it is not in the nature of persons so markedly cerebral as Huxley to live in a vacuum for long. His revolt against sexual morality was equally unrewarding, as, in th elong run, it always is. It is easy to become impatient with the Evangelical Counsel of chastity, and it is even easier to flout it and tread it under foot. Huxley, however, found that by so doing he enmeshed and entangled himself further in the material world which nauseated him and from which even then he longed to escape. He slowly came to realize, what all the great religions have always taught, that bondage to the passions is as harsh a slavery as that imposed by any political system. Or, to put it in a more practical way, in the long run it is less trouble to be chaste. Huxley's whole career then predisposed him to conversion to a type of religion that would provide him with a way of escape from a world in which he had found is so extraordinarily difficult to fit himself. He had, it seems, not been a happy man; and because he was both unhappy and introspective, he needed a philosophy or religion that would deliver him from both his unhappiness and himself. Being a highly intelligent man he realized that the unhappiness and the self were in some way connected; and this is the beginning of religion. What Huxley calls the 'poisonous fruits' of the philosophy of meaninglessness forced him to look beyond himself for something a little more satisfactory. Realizing that preoccupation with the self is the source of all unhappiness, he turned towards the two religions which made this connection most clear, - Hinduism and Buddhism. He was right to do this: for though the Gospels teach that one must die to oneself in order to live, this is only one of many Christian teachings, whereas both Hinduism and Buddhism regard the elimination of the ego as the sine qua non of 'liberation' or 'enlightenment' and never tire of saying so. Moreover, a return to Christianity would have been difficult for Huxley since he remembered it only as something dry, moralistic, and Pharisaical, as part and parcel of an inhuman and mechanistic society against which he, like Kierkegaard before him, had revolted. There would have been no sense in returning to a religion that seemed to have become ossified into a not very indispensable adjunct of a questionable social system. There was the further point too that Christianity was far less clear in teaching that unhappiness and the ego are one and the same thing than was either Buddhism or Hinduism. There are, of course, texts in the Gospels which say very nearly this; but modern Christianity has not been at great pains to emphasize them.Buddhism, on the other hand, emphasizes and constantly reiterates that since all phenomenal things are impermanent and in perpetual flux, there can be no real happiness in them, and that impermanence is therefore identical with pain. The cause of pain is 'craving' and release from pain can only be obtained by stamping out all craving, that is, by suppressing all desire. It is against this background that Huxley can write of the urge to escape and the longing to transcend oneself as being one of the principle appetites of the soul." (16-17)
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