January 14, 2020 • TheOnion.com

DES MOINES, IA—Following the New Jersey senator’s decision to end his bid for the White House, sources confirmed Tuesday that without Cory Booker’s message of love and unity to hold it together, a bloody wave of chaos and rage had spread through the Democratic presidential field. According to eyewitnesses, absent Booker’s ideals of sympathy for those with different viewpoints and compassion for one’s political enemies, a series of violent attacks erupted among the candidates, with Joe Biden taking a tire iron to a campaign bus Pete Buttigieg had driven at full speed through a group of the former vice president’s canvassers. The sudden lack of caring and cooperation in the political atmosphere also reportedly led Amy Klobuchar to drag Andrew Yang by the hair through the streets of Des Moines, kick the entrepreneur unconscious, and throw him into a river. At press time, Mike Bloomberg is said to have responded to the primary race’s new climate by going door-to-door and pistol-whipping dozens of working-class Iowans until they agreed to vote for him.

CONSCIOUSNESS EVERYWHERE

KRISTIN HOUSER JANUARY 15TH 2020 (futurism.com)

“What this offers us is a beautifully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview…”

The only reason humans know about the existence of consciousness — the phenomenon of having subjective feelings and experiences — is because we have feelings and experiences.

But despite centuries of study, scientists have yet to make any major progress in understanding consciousness.

A recently published book by philosopher Philip Goff, however, takes a deep dive into a millennia-old theory that could help explain consciousness — by attributing it to all forms of matter, all the way down to electrons and quarks.

The theory is called panpsychism, and Scientific American recently published a provocative interview with Goff to explore his book’s key claims.

“The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality — perhaps electrons and quarks — have incredibly simple forms of experience,” Goff told the magazine.

According to Goff, panpsychism defines consciousness not as an ability to reflect on one’s own existence, but more simply as the ability to experience the world in some way — to feel pain or pleasure, to see sights or hear sounds.

While it’s obvious that at least some animals are conscious by this definition — we know that dogs can see and that cats derive pleasure from knocking our stuff off tables — the general consensus seems to be that, as lifeforms get more and more simple, they become less and less conscious until, at some point, they just aren’t anymore.

“But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness fading while never quite turning off carries on into inorganic matter,” Goff told SciAm, “with fundamental particles having almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. That’s what panpsychists believe.”

The belief that consciousness is somehow something our brains do means that it’s also something that neuroscientists should be able to figure out — but again, they’re nowhere close to making that a reality.

If we define consciousness as an unobservable quality possessed by all forms of matter, though, as panpsychists suggest, we could emerge with a unified theory of consciousness built on not just science, but a combination of science and philosophy.

“What this offers us is a beautifully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview,” Goff told SciAm, “of marrying what we know about ourselves from the inside and what science tells us about matter from the outside.”

READ MORE: Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe? [Scientific American]

More on consciousness: Research: DMT’s Effects on Brainwaves Could Explain Consciousness

January 15, 2020 by Common Dreams

The amendment is likely to be tied up in court battles following a Justice Department statement that the deadline for ratification has passed.

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 25 Comments

Supporters of the ERA amendment wave to arrivals at the start of the Virginia General Assembly, which went solidly blue in 2019 in Richmond, Va. (Photo: Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Women’s rights advocates celebrated Wednesday as the Virginia legislature became the 38th in the nation to approve the Equal Rights Amendment, nearly 100 years after activists first called for equality between men and women to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The approval of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) by Virginia’s state Senate and House means that the required three-quarters of U.S. states have now voted to ratify the amendment, which was passed by Congress in 1972.

The law aims to constitutionally guarantee the same legal rights regarding pay equity and other workplace discrimination to all Americans regardless of sex. It also provides protections for women from domestic abuse and pregnancy discrimination.

“For the women of Virginia and the women of America, the resolution has finally passed,” said Eileen Filler-Corn, the first female state House speaker in Virginia’s history, as the amendment was approved.

The resolution was passed with votes of 59-40 in the House and 28-12 in the Senate.

Although the approval of the ERA was celebrated as an historic achievement, for the time being the amendment’s step forward is largely symbolic.

As Virginia’s newly Democrat-controlled legislature was debating the amendment last week, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department issued a statement saying that because a 1982 deadline for ratification passed with only 35 states approving the ERA at the time, it is too late to add the amendment to the Constitution.

Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel wrote that Congress must start the process of ratifying the ERA over again and once again gain the approval of 38 states. The process could be further complicated by the fact that legislatures in Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, Tennessee, and South Dakota have rescinded their earlier approval of the ERA in recent years.

Pro-ERA groups including Equal Means Equal filed a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts earlier this month arguing that the deadline was not constitutionally binding.

“We are not surprised that the Trump administration acted swiftly to declare its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment,” Wendy Murphy, a lawyer for Equal Means Equal, told ABC News following the DOJ’s statement. “This development makes our lawsuit even more urgent.”

According to The Washington Post, “several efforts are underway on Capitol Hill to either extend or restart the ratification process.”

ERA advocates have also argued that the rescissions of the five states are not constitutionally sound, but courts have yet to rule on the subject.

Despite the uncertainty over when Virginia’s approval might lead to a constitutional amendment, women’s rights advocates applauded the state for “making history.”

In her speech in favor of passing the amendment, state Sen. Mamie Locke rejected the claims by ERA critics that the law cannot be added to the Constitution.

“There’s no time limit on equal rights,” said Locke.

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By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

“The state of enchantment is one of certainty,” W.H. Auden wrote in his commonplace book. “When enchanted, we neither believe nor doubt nor deny: we know, even if, as in the case of a false enchantment, our knowledge is self-deception.” Nowhere is our capacity for enchantment, nor our capacity for self-deception, greater than in love — the region of human experience where the path to truth is most obstructed by the bramble of rationalization and where we are most likely to be kidnapped by our own delicious delusions. There, it is perennially difficult to know what we really want; difficult to distinguish between love and lust; difficult not to succumb to our perilous tendency to idealize; difficult to reconcile the closeness needed for intimacy with the psychological distance needed for desire.

How, then, do we really know that we love another person?

That’s what Martha Nussbaum, whom I continue to consider the most compelling philosopher of our time, examines in her 1990 book Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (public library) — the sandbox in which Nussbaum worked out the ideas that would become, a decade later, her incisive treatise on the intelligence of emotions.

Martha Nussbaum

Devising a sort of incompleteness theorem of the heart’s truth, Nussbaum writes:

We deceive ourselves about love — about who; and how; and when; and whether. We also discover and correct our self-deceptions. The forces making for both deception and unmasking here are various and powerful: the unsurpassed danger, the urgent need for protection and self-sufficiency, the opposite and equal need for joy and communication and connection. Any of these can serve either truth or falsity, as the occasion demands. The difficulty then becomes: how in the midst of this confusion (and delight and pain) do we know what view of ourselves, what parts of ourselves, to trust? Which stories about the condition of the heart are the reliable ones and which the self-deceiving fictions? We find ourselves asking where, in this plurality of discordant voices with which we address ourselves on this topic of perennial self-interest, is the criterion of truth? (And what does it mean to look for a criterion here? Could that demand itself be a tool of self-deception?)

With an eye to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and its central theme of how our intellect blinds us to the wisdom of the heart, Nussbaum contemplates the nature of those experiences “in which the self-protective tissue of rationalization is in a moment cut through, as if by a surgeon’s knife”: Proust’s protagonist, Marcel, has rationally convinced himself that he no longer loves his beloved, Albertine, but is jolted into confronting the falsity of that rationalization upon receiving news of her death; in the shock of his intense sorrow, he instantly gains the knowledge, far deeper and more sinewy than the intellect’s, that he did, in fact, love Albertine.

In a testament to Proust’s assertion that “the end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own,” Nussbaum writes:

Proust tells us that the sort of knowledge of the heart we need in this case cannot be given us by the sciences of psychology, or, indeed, by any sort of scientific use of intellect. Knowledge of the heart must come from the heart — from and in its pains and longings, its emotional responses.

Illustration from An ABZ of Love, Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite vintage Danish guide to sexuality

Such a conception of love’s knowledge, to be sure, stands radically against the long intellectual tradition of rationalism stretching from Plato to Locke like an enormous string of reason that plays only one note, deaf to the symphonic complexity of the emotional universe. The Proustian view calls for a restoration of lost nuance. Pointing to “the pseudotruths of the intellect,” Nussbaum revisits Marcel’s predicament, wherein the intellect has imposed an illusory sense of order and structure upon the entropy of the emotions:

The shock of loss and the attendant welling up of pain show him that his theories were forms of self-deceptive rationalization — not only false about his condition but also manifestations and accomplices of a reflex to deny and close off one’s vulnerabilities that Proust finds to be very deep in all of human life. The primary and most ubiquitous form of this reflex is seen in the operations of habit, which makes the pain of our vulnerability tolerable to us by concealing need, concealing particularity (hence vulnerability to loss), concealing all the pain-inflicting features of the world — simply making us used to them, dead to their assaults. When we are used to them we do not feel them or long for them in the same way; we are no longer so painfully afflicted by our failure to control and possess them. Marcel has been able to conclude that he is not in love with Albertine, in part because he is used to her. His calm, methodical intellectual scrutiny is powerless to dislodge this “dream deity, so riveted to one’s being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one’s heart.” Indeed, it fails altogether to discern the all-important distinction between the face of habit and the true face of the heart.

Nussbaum considers how our over-reliance on the intellect for clarity about love produces instead a kind of myopia:

Intellect’s account of psychology lacks all sense of proportion and depth and importance… [Such a] cost-benefit analysis of the heart — the only comparative assessment of which intellect, by itself, is capable — is bound, Proust suggests, to miss differences of depth. Not only to miss them, but to impede their recognition. Cost-benefit analysis is a way of comforting oneself, of putting oneself in control by pretending that all losses can be made up by sufficient quantities of something else. This stratagem opposes the recognition of love — and, indeed, love itself.

[…]

To remove such powerful obstacles to truth, we require the instrument that is “the subtlest, most powerful, most appropriate for grasping the truth.” This instrument is given to us in suffering.

Half a century after Simone Weil made her compelling case for why suffering is a greater clarifying force than intellectual discipline, Nussbaum examines this antidote to the intellect’s self-delusion by quoting directly from Proust:

Our intelligence, however lucid, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.

Central to this method of truth-seeking is what Nussbaum calls catalepsis — “a condition of certainty and confidence from which nothing can dislodge us.” To be cataleptic — from the Greek katalēptikē, derived from the verb katalambanein, meaning “to apprehend,” “to firmly grasp” — is to have a firm grasp of reality. But, of course, the implied antinomy is that because reality is inherently slippery, either the firmness of such catalepsis or its conception of reality is false.

Noting the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Zeno’s view that we gain knowledge of the heart’s truth through powerful impressions that come directly from reality, Nussbaum returns to Proust’s Marcel:

The impression [that he loves Albertine] comes upon Marcel unbidden, unannounced, uncontrolled… Surprise, vivid particularity, and extreme qualitative intensity are all characteristics that are systematically concealed by the workings of habit, the primary form of self-deception and self-concealment. What has these features must have escaped the workings of self-deception, must have come from reality itself.

We notice, finally, that the very painfulness of these impressions is essential to their cataleptic character. Our primary aim is to comfort ourselves, to assuage pain, to cover our wounds. Then what has the character of pain must have escaped these mechanisms of comfort and concealment; must, then, have come from the true unconcealed nature of our condition.

Illustration by Julie Paschkis from Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People by Monica Brown

And yet there exists another, more dimensional possibility. Nussbaum writes:

For the Stoic the cataleptic impression is not simply a route to knowing; it is knowing. It doesn’t point beyond itself to knowledge; it goes to constitute knowledge. (Science is a system made up of katalēpseis.) If we follow the analogy strictly, then, we find that knowledge of our love is not the fruit of the impression of suffering, a fruit that might in principle have been had apart form the suffering. The suffering itself is a piece of self-knowing. In responding to a loss with anguish, we are grasping our love. The love is not some separate fact about us that is signaled by the impression; the impression reveals the love by constituting it. Love is not a structure in the heart waiting to be discovered; it is embodied in, made up out of, experiences of suffering.

[…]

Marcel is brought, then, by and in the cataleptic impression, to an acknowledgment of his love. There are elements of both discovery and creation here, at both the particular and general levels. Love of Albertine is both discovered and created. It is discovered, in that habit and intellect were masking from Marcel a psychological condition that was ready for suffering, and that … needed only to be affected slightly by the catalyst in order to turn itself into love. It is created, because love denied and successfully repressed is not exactly love. While he was busily denying that he loved her, he simply was not loving her. At the general level, again, Marcel both discovers and enacts a permanent underlying feature of his condition, namely, his neediness, his hunger for possession and completeness. That too was there in a sense before the loss, because that’s what human life is made of. But in denying and repressing it, Marcel became temporarily self-sufficient, closed, and estranged from his humanity. The pain he feels for Albertine gives him access to his permanent underlying condition by being a case of that condition, and no such case was present a moment before. Before the suffering he was indeed self-deceived — both because he was denying a general structural feature of his humanity and because he was denying the particular readiness of his soul to feel hopeless love for Albertine. He was on a verge of a precipice and thought he was safely immured in his own rationality. But his case shows us as well how the successful denial of love is the (temporary) extinction and death of love, how self-deception can aim at and nearly achieve self-change.

We now see exactly how and why Marcel’s account of self-knowledge is no simple rival to the intellectual account. It tells us that the intellectual account was wrong: wrong about the content of the truth about Marcel, wrong about the methods appropriate for gaining this knowledge, wrong as well about what sort of experience in and of the person knowing is. And it tells us that to try to grasp love intellectually is a way of not suffering, not loving — a practical rival, a stratagem of flight.

Art by Salvador Dalí for a rare edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy

And yet this notion of measuring love by degree of suffering seems to be a particular pathology of the human heart — could, Nussbaum asks, Marcel’s sorrow at the loss of Albertine be evidence not of love, or at least not only of love, but of grief or fear or some other constellation of contexts? She writes:

Marcel’s relation to the science of self-knowledge now begins to look more complex than we had suspected. We said that the attempt to grasp love intellectually was a way of avoiding loving. We said that in the cataleptic impression there is acknowledgement of one’s own vulnerability and incompleteness, an end to our flight from ourselves. But isn’t the whole idea of basing love and its knowledge on cataleptic impressions itself a form of flight — from openness to the other, from all those things in love for which there is in fact no certain criterion? Isn’t his whole enterprise just a new and more subtle expression of the rage for control, and need for possession and certainty, the denial of incompleteness and neediness that characterized the intellectual project? Isn’t he still hungry for a science of life?

Noting the contrast between the mutuality of love and the asymmetry of infatuation — after all, Marcel’s confrontation of his feelings for Albertine doesn’t require her participation at all and can be conducted as a wholly solitary activity — Nussbaum adds:

What Marcel feels is a gap or lack in himself, an open wound, a blow to the heart, a hell inside himself. Is all of this really love of Albertine?

[…]

The heart and mind of another are unknowable, even unapproachable, except in fantasies and projections that are really elements of the knower’s own life, not the other’s.

Proust’s protagonist arrives at this conclusion himself:

I understood that my love was less a love for her than a love in me… It is the misfortune of beings to be for us nothing else but useful showcases for the contents of our own minds.

And yet this conclusion, Nussbaum argues, is but a form of self-protection — in denying one’s porousness to the other and instead painting love as a curious relationship with oneself, it bolsters the illusion of self-sufficiency as a hedge against the suffering which love entails. Such a conception is ultimately a form of self-delusion masking the true nature of love and what Nussbaum calls its “dangerous openness.” Reflecting on Proust’s ultimate revelation, she writes:

Love… is a permanent structural feature of our soul.

[…]

The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart. In suffering we know only suffering. We call our rationalizations false and delusive, and we do not see to what extent they express a mechanism that is regular and deep in our lives. But this means that in love itself we do not yet have full knowledge of love — for we do not grasp its limits and boundaries. Sea creatures cannot be said to know the sea in the way that a creature does who can survey and dwell in both sea and land, noticing how they bound and limit one another.

Love’s Knowledge is a revelatory read in its totality. Complement it with Adam Phillips on the interplay between frustration and satisfaction in love, Erich Fromm on mastering the art of loving, Alain de Botton on why our partners drive us mad, and Esther Perel on the central paradox of love, then revisit Nussbaum on anger and forgiveness, agency and victimhood, the intelligence of the emotions, and how to live with our human fragility.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell‘s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley‘s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley‘s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

(Goodreads.com)

“Not only our experience of reality, but also this reality itself is traversed by a parallax gap: the co-existence of two dimensions, realist and transcendental, which cannot be united in the same global ontological edifice.”

–Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek (born March 21, 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher, currently a researcher at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Arts, and International director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London. He is also Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. Wikipedia

The beautiful way he [Thomas Mann in Joseph and His Brothers] starts with Joseph seated at the well, the well that goes back to the depths of the soul. The well that reflects the moon, and he’s in a mild, youthful, poetic mood there, making eyes at the moon, you know?

His father, Joseph, says, “Put your shirt on.” This is the play of the two principles that are going to run all through the book. The mood of rapture and giving and letting go. And lest he fall into the well, the father says, “Put your shirt on,” keep in terms of the historical moment that we’re in now. Don’t lose yourself in the abyss.

Very briefly, it’s the story of the favorite son who takes it to himself–the problem that we were talking about. The one who sees himself as it and lacks humility. And Joseph had to be divested of his pride. That’s what it was.

Yes, he was the beautiful one. Then he had the nerve to tell his brothers of the dreams he was dreaming which were of them bowing to him, you know.

And they just said, “Look, we can’t take this any longer.” And they threw him in a well.

The coat of many colors is his mother’s wedding gown. And what is the wedding gown? it depicts the heavens. It’s all the stars of the heavens. She is also in the mythological role, you know. of Virgo, the virgin, the one clothed in the glory of the heavens.

So Joseph takes this to himself. This is his coat of many colors. This is his virginal pride you might say.

And his father just dotes on him. Well, that’s wrong on his father’s part, too. His father has to be cleared of that.

So Joseph being thrown in the well is a discipline to both of them, and his story is rendered in such a way that you feel that and you get the ambiguity.

There wouldn’t have been any story if Joseph didn’t have his pride. So, there’s something good about that, too, you see. Mann is really doing it all the way. It’s a grand job.

And it’s a very simple story of the beginning of the descent into the well, the beginning of the descent into the abyss, and this is the well–not exactly the same well–but mythologically the same well that he was sitting at in the beginning of the story, when his father said, “Put your shirt on and don’t fall into the well.” Well, he took his shirt off and fell into the well.

He put on his mother’s wedding garment and he was making eyes at the moon. Moon logic, identification with the savior, and in the way of the savior–or the one to be saved, rather–goes down into the well.

The Hebrews go into Egypt. What came out? What went in were the patriarchs. What came out were the people. And the gem, the jewel, the found good in the Old Testament is the knowledge and being of the people.

And Moses is their servant, really. They are the ones who get to the Promised Land, not Moses.

It’s wonderful how Joseph goes into Egypt. He’s sold to a camel herder, a camel merchant. And the wonderful ambiguity there is Joseph is the important thing that’s being brought into Egypt, but as Mann says, he goes in, the guards don’t even look at him. He’s like a flea on the flank of the camel, you might say. You don’t worry about that. He goes in as the boy that’s going in and yet the most important thing being brought in to Egypt is Joseph.

He asks the man to whom he’s been sold, “Where are we going?” He says, “We’re not going anywhere. We’re going and we’re not going for you either.” Joseph has to just ride as a flea on a camel and is brought in.

I think that whole section of Joseph going into Egypt and becoming such a charming friend to the camel merchant and setting him at ease with his flattering stores… And here, plastic irony becomes intentional duplicity. This is what happens with Joseph.

He knows how to use the irony to his own advantage, to make people fall in love with him, that he’s the most previous thing.

And, of course, this is what gets him in trouble with Potiphar’s wife. He’s very intentional in bringing about his own shipwreck.

Well, he’s sold to Potiphar, the Potiphar’s wife is a priestess. Joseph, you know, tried to achieve the effect. He achieves it alright.

And this poor woman, he learns one day–that wonderful theme where Joseph is a servant, holding a candle or something like this, on his knees in the way of an Egyptian servant.

And he hears the father and mother of Potiphar discussing what they had done to Potiphar when he was a little boy. What they represent is traditional religion that has not changed with the time.

They are brother and sister, married. And they dedicated their son to the god by castrating him. So, this is one step further than circumcision, by the way.

The wife, then is married to a castrato and is absolutely just dedicated to the god. She is a priestess of Amun, and she is the bride of god.

But here is this beautiful young Hebrew in the house. He’s foreign, so interesting, beautiful, with just a slight disproportion of his shoulders a little bit. And very, very interesting.

And he does everything to let her know that he is interesting. And there are a number of Muslim stores about Joseph and Leila and this is the source of some of Thomas Mann’s writing about their affair. He’s taking Muhammedan material and incorporating it.

Well, that marvelous party where she invites all the ladies to a kind of tea, and they have fruit and knives to cut the fruit, and Joseph comes in to pour the wine, and they all begin cutting their fingers instead of the fruit.

This dazzling youth. And she is just taken in totally. And then proposes herself to him.

Now, this is the Potiphar’s wife motif exactly. Her name is Mut-em-enet.

Then comes the great moment. Joseph is willing, And when he comes to her, his father’s face is in front of him or cuts him off so that he’s utterly impotent.

And it isn’t that he refused her. It is that he was rendered impotent. And that is the ethical father cutting him off on this thing.

And then she says to her husband that he tried to rape her. And so Joseph is thrown in jail.

That’s the second well. He’s got to get over trying to be the one that knocks people down without any thought about them, thinking only of his own pride and all. So he’s divested a second time and thrown in the well again.

That’s the sense of that one.

The story is Joseph is now the story of two descents. The first, one level of pride–his adolescent egotism–everybody loves me more than himself. And then his later, post-adolescent attempt to just knock that woman down and make her just go crazy for him, without any respect for her and her life. And he knew, because he had overheard the story of her husband’s castration, what the situation was.

This is a cruel guy at this time. So he’s in jail again.

Now Mann does a very interesting thing in the third volume. He brings him out of jail as a servant of the Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh now is Akhenaten.

So, Joseph is now flattering Pharaoh. He’s able to read Pharaoh’s dreams. He has a gift of inward intuitions, of the dream world, the world of the moon logic and so on.

And so, again, just as he ingratiated himself to he camel merchant and then to Mut-em-emet, now he’s doing the job on the Pharaoh, and he gets a good job out of that.

He becomes the superintendent of supplies and so on so that when, in Mesopotamia, the seven lean years come along, and his family that has been without him and thinking him dead is starving. They come, the whole family, into Egypt for welfare, like the Puerto Ricans coming to New York, and the dispenser of the boons is Joseph, and he plays a very amusing game in introducing himself to his family and that they should realize that it’s their brother who was dead and is now alive.

–from Joseph Campbell: Mythos III

How is it that a human being can so experience the pain and danger and peril of another that forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to the other’s rescue even at the risk of his own life? He doesn’t do it out of duty. He doesn’t do it out of intention. It is suddenly his impulse to save that person. A child’s about to be hit by a car. You go out, and you get hit.

This goes on all the time. Schopenhauer asks, “How is it that the first law of nature, the maintenance and protection of this separate entity, can suddenly be dissolved and another principle take over?”

And he says, “It’s because you and that other are one.” He said, “This is a metaphysical realization.” Primarily separateness is secondary. And unity, identity is the prime condition.

What is called Buddha consciousness is the one consciousness of which we are all manifestations. We are all Buddha things. We are all separate manifestations of this great consciousness that informs the whole universe. The plants are conscious. The stones are consciousness. All things are conscious.

–from Joseph Campbell: Mythos III

Issued on: 13/01/2020 – France24.com

Text by:NEWS WIRES

Retired Pope Benedict XVI has broken his silence to reaffirm the “necessity” of priestly celibacy, co-authoring a bombshell book at the precise moment that Pope Francis is weighing whether to allow married men to be ordained to address the Catholic priest shortage.

Benedict wrote the book, “From the Depths of Our Hearts: Priesthood, Celibacy and the Crisis of the Catholic Church,” along with his fellow conservative, Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah, who heads the Vatican’s liturgy office and has been a quiet critic of Francis.

The French daily Le Figaro published excerpts of the book late Sunday; The Associated Press obtained galleys of the English edition, which is being published by Ignatius Press.

Benedict’s intervention is extraordinary, given he had promised to remain “hidden from the world” when he retired in 2013, and pledged his obedience to the new pope. He has largely held to that pledge, though he penned an odd essay last year on the sexual abuse scandal that blamed the crisis on the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

His reaffirmation of priestly celibacy, however, gets to the heart of a fraught policy issue that Francis is expected to weigh in on in the coming weeks, and could well be considered a public attempt by the former pope to sway the thinking of the current one.

The implications for such an intervention are grave, given the current opposition to Francis by conservatives and traditionalists nostalgic for Benedict’s orthodoxy, some of whom even consider his resignation illegitimate.

Mark Brumley@mabrumley

Story broke so I can say: Ignatius Press is publishing the new book by Pope Emeritus Benedict and Cardinal Robert Sarah. The title: FROM THE DEPTHS OF OUR HEARTS: PRIESTHOOD, CELIBACY, AND THE CRISIS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. Available for pre-order tomorrow, Jan 13. Ships Feb 20.

It is likely to fuel renewed anxiety about the wisdom of Benedict’s decision to remain an “emeritus pope,” rather than merely a retired bishop, and the unprecedented situation he created by having two popes, one retired and one reigning, living side by side in the Vatican gardens.

In that light, it is significant that the English edition of the book lists the author as “Benedict XVI,” with no mention of his emeritus papal status on the cover.

The authors clearly anticipated the potential interpretation of their book as criticism of the current pope, and stressed in their joint introduction that they were penning it “in a spirit of filial obedience, to Pope Francis.” But they also said that the current “crisis” in the church required them to not remain silent.

Francis has said he would write a document based on the outcome of the October 2019 synod of bishops on the Amazon. A majority of bishops at the meeting called for the ordination of married men to address the priest shortage in the Amazon, where the faithful can go months without having a Mass.

Francis has expressed sympathy with the Amazonian plight. While he has long reaffirmed the gift of a celibate priesthood in the Latin rite church, he has stressed that celibacy is a tradition, not doctrine, and therefore can change, and that there could be pastoral reasons to allow for an exception in a particular place.

Benedict addresses the issue head-on in his chapter in the brief book, which is composed of a joint introduction and conclusion penned by Benedict and Sarah, and then a chapter apiece in between. True to his theological form, Benedict’s chapter is dense with biblical references and he explains in scholarly terms what he says is the “necessary” foundation for the celibate priesthood that dates from the times of the apostles.

“The priesthood of Jesus Christ causes us to enter into a life that consists of becoming one with him and renouncing all that belongs only to us,” he writes. “For priests, this is the foundation of the necessity of celibacy but also of liturgical prayer, meditation on the Word of God and the renunciation of material goods.”

Cardinal R. Sarah@Card_R_Sarah

Marriage, he writes, requires man to give himself totally to his family. “Since serving the Lord likewise requires the total gift of a man, it does not seem possible to carry on the two vocations simultaneously. Thus, the ability to renounce marriage so as to place oneself totally at the Lord’s disposition became a criterion for priestly ministry.”

The joint conclusion of the book makes the case even stronger, acknowledging the crisis of the Catholic priesthood that it says has been “wounded by the revelation of so many scandals, disconcerted by the constant questioning of their consecrated celibacy.”

Dedicating the book to priests of the world, the two authors urge them to persevere, and for all faithful to hold firm and support them in their celibate ministry.

“It is urgent and necessary for everyone – bishops, priests and lay people – to stop letting themselves be intimidated by the wrong-headed pleas, the theatrical productions, the diabolical lies and the fashionable errors that try to put down priestly celibacy,” they write. “It is urgent and necessary for everyone – bishops, priests and lay people – to take a fresh look with the eyes of faith at the Church and at priestly celibacy which protects her mystery.”

The book is being published at a moment of renewed interest  – and confusion – in popular culture about the nature of the relationship between Francis and Benedict, thanks to the Netflix drama, “The Two Popes”.

The film, starring Anthony Hopkins as Benedict and Jonathan Pryce as Francis, imagines a days-long conversation between the two men before Benedict announced his historic resignation – conversations in which their different views of the state of the church become apparent.

Those meetings never happened, and the two men didn’t know one another well before Francis was elected to succeed Benedict. But while the film takes artistic liberties for the sake of narrative, it gets the point across that Francis and Benedict indeed have very different points of view – which the new book bears out.

(AP)

Even 20-year-olds forget the simplest things.

By Daniel J. Levitin

Dr. Levitin is a neuroscientist.

• Jan. 10, 2020 (NYTimes.com)

I’m 62 years old as I write this. Like many of my friends, I forget names that I used to be able to conjure up effortlessly. When packing my suitcase for a trip, I walk to the hall closet and by the time I get there, I don’t remember what I came for.

And yet my long-term memories are fully intact. I remember the names of my third-grade classmates, the first record album I bought, my wedding day.

This is widely understood to be a classic problem of aging. But as a neuroscientist, I know that the problem is not necessarily age-related.

Short-term memory contains the contents of your thoughts right now, including what you intend to do in the next few seconds. It’s doing some mental arithmetic, thinking about what you’ll say next in a conversation or walking to the hall closet with the intention of getting a pair of gloves.

Short-term memory is easily disturbed or disrupted. It depends on your actively paying attention to the items that are in the “next thing to do” file in your mind. You do this by thinking about them, perhaps repeating them over and over again (“I’m going to the closet to get gloves”). But any distraction — a new thought, someone asking you a question, the telephone ringing — can disrupt short-term memory. Our ability to automatically restore the contents of the short-term memory declines slightly with every decade after 30.

But age is not the major factor so commonly assumed. I’ve been teaching undergraduates for my entire career and I can attest that even 20-year-olds make short-term memory errors — loads of them. They walk into the wrong classroom; they show up to exams without the requisite No. 2 pencil; they forget something I just said two minutes before. These are similar to the kinds of things 70-year-olds do.

The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don’t think, “Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.” They think, “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now” or “I really need to get more than four hours of sleep.” The 70-year-old observes these same events and worries about her brain health. This is not to say that Alzheimer’s- and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction — they are very real — but every lapse of short-term memory doesn’t necessarily indicate a biological disorder.

In the absence of brain disease, even the oldest older adults show little or no cognitive or memory decline beyond age 85 and 90, as shown in a 2018 study. Memory impairment is not inevitable.

Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience. (This is why computers need to be shown tens of thousands of pictures of traffic lights or cats in order to be able to recognize them). If you’re going to get an X-ray, you want a 70-year-old radiologist reading it, not a 30-year-old one.

So how do we account for our subjective experience that older adults seem to fumble with words and names? First, there is a generalized cognitive slowing with age — but given a little more time, older adults perform just fine.

Second, older adults have to search through more memories than do younger adults to find the fact or piece of information they’re looking for. Your brain becomes crowded with memories and information. It’s not that you can’t remember — you can — it’s just that there is so much more information to sort through. A 2014 study found that this “crowdedness” effect also shows up in computer simulations of human memory systems.

Recently, I found myself in an office elevator in which all the buttons had been pushed — even though there were only three of us in the elevator. As the elevator dutifully stopped on every floor, one of the people standing next to me said, “Looks like some kid pressed all the buttons.” We all laughed. I thought for a moment and offered, “I was that kid about 50 years ago,” and we all laughed again. And then I thought: My memories of being 10 years old are clearer than my memories of 10 days ago. Shouldn’t that seem odd?

But in the warm, familiar privacy of my own mind, it didn’t seem odd at all: I am that same person. I don’t feel 50 years older. I can see the world through the eyes of that mischievous 10-year-old. I can remember when the taste of a Butterfinger candy bar was the most delectable thing in the world. I can remember the first time I encountered the grassy smell of a spring meadow. Such things were novel and exciting back then, and my sensory receptors were tuned to make new events seem both important and vivid.

I can still eat a Butterfinger and smell spring meadows, but the sensory experience has dulled through repetition, familiarity and aging. And so I try to keep things novel and exciting. My favorite chocolatier introduces new artisanal chocolates a few times a year and I make a point to try them — and to savor them. I go to new parks and forests where I’m more likely to encounter the smells of new grasses and trees, new animal musks.

When I find them, these things I remember for months and years, because they are new. And experiencing new things is the best way to keep the mind young, pliable and growing — into our 80s, 90s and beyond.

Daniel J. Levitin is a neuroscientist and the author of “Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives,” from which this essay is adapted.