[gardener]

tWelcome back, Wazier! I know exactly what you mean by being “a long-term oberver of Jean-Paul’s work,” and lurking “around to see how things in his world are evolving.” Right now, there is a lot of polemical material on these forums. I’m interested in these, but more interested in the themes of transformation that you perceive in these precincts.

I haven’t answered quickly, because your post is very rich. What it really calls for is a face-to-face seminar. Various participants in J-P’s forum could sit around a table and take up points you raise.

As far as eastern philosophies are concerned, I’m not able to go with any ease down these roads, partially because I have had so many academic colleagues who professed being adherants of this or that eastern system of belief but who really ended up as Zen Southern Baptists. (It is very hard to free ourselves from the subject-verb-object construction of the world that is hard-wired into our thinking processes, I think because it is given to us in Indo-European languages.) If we begin to look at the world in terms of personal transformation, however, there are major resources to draw from.

One is poetry--and I think first of Rainer Maria Rilke in the magnificent Duino Elegies, and, with painful directness in “Archaic Torse of Apollo,” the poet’s meditation on an encounter with a fragment of an ancient Greek statue. Not liking any translation I’ve seen--most try to preserve the rhyme scheme at the expense of clear statement--here’s my effort--

We can never know his magnificent head
With its eyes like ripe apples, and yet
His body still glows, from within, as if
It has become a lamp, in which his watchfulness,
Though turned down low, continues to shine forth.

If this were not true, the curve of his breast
Could not dazzle you, nor could you stand transfixed
By the line running like a smile through hip and thigh
Toward the groin
Where procreation flares forth.

If this were not true, this piece of rock, this stone, would seem broken and truncated
Under the shining slope of these shoulders, and would not gleam
Like a wild animal’s fur--
Would not burst, starlike, from each speck of surface.
With each speck
Looking at you.
You must change your life.

That final line is one of the most startling in all poetry: “Du musst dein Leben ältern”

Transformation, I take it, is not a one-time change from one state of being to another, but an ongoing process. The kids who frequent the Men’s Health boards seem to think that with this technique or that, this supplement or that, his regimen or that, they will (quickly) arrive at perfection. Grownups know better. The natural trajectory of our physical lives is upward and then downward, increasing power followed by diminishing power, eros succeeded by thanatos. We grow from helpless infancy into power and strength, and it’s all downhill from there on in, unless we intervene with all the strength we can muster--when? About the time we start to notice a thickening around our waistline.
I’m glad you picked up on my November 1 post. No one else did. I do think that the mind/body puzzle disappears once we start looking at human lives as stories. Maybe even at the lives of animals that live in our orbit. (See Christopher Smart: “For I will consider my cat Geoffrey...”)
Speaking of puzzles, I’m not at all puzzled by the ability of some people to awaken at precise times, without benefit of alarm clocks. My wife used to work as an R. N., changing from one shift to another. Often she didn’t even bother to set a clock. My own experience is that 99% of the time I am awake in time to hear the alarm goes off. It doesn’t wake me up.
This seems something to wonder at, until we realize that the history of reliable clocks begins only in the late 14th century, when clocks were features of public towers and struck only the hour. (Minute hands, if I have it right, came along around 1670.) The history of clocks involves progress from weights to springs to quartz to the behavior of atoms.
We could, I think, tell time, before we had clocks. Not precisely, but sufficiently for the purposes of daily living. I have a theory that it involves our sense of rhythms. The heart beat. The pulse. The awakening light of dawn. The gradually diminishing light of sundown. The seasons and their changes in vegetation. The quite precise and measurable differences from one day to the next, as the daylight hours change from equinox to solstice and then back again.
And then there’s music. Good musicians, resting for 23 bars before coming in to play a succession of quarter notes in 4/4, don’t have to count to come in at the precise right moment.
Reading? Spinoza, probably. (I mean to look into those books by Antonio Damasio.) Bergson, I think: I haven’t read him since 1958, and that was during a semester when I was falling in love to the exclusion of almost everything else. And Augustine, pre-eminently! Whitehead may have said that all of western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, but I would say that Augustine’s Confessions is a mother lode that has yet to be mined. Filter out the God-talk and the talking to God, and it gets really rich. “I had become a question to myself...:” “Lord, give me chastity, but not yet..” His appalling blindness regarding his treatment of his unnamed mistress...his love for their son. His analysis of what happens to us despite our wills, when we become spectators of blood sports. His narrative of breaking free of the mental prison of Manichean beliefs.
I am not a believer. Any more. But I admire Augustine more than Plato or Kant. Or Samuel Pepys. (And to make sense of that mention, you’d have to follow one of those polemical threads.)

Happy New Year a few hours from now. One of the best things of the departing year was becoming friends with some interesting folks, thanks to JP Fitness and those like you, who have contributed to its history beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Allen. aka Gardener