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To gradually, increasingly consciously extract oneself by es-caping out of that which unconsciously is the common mind, with its shared assumptions, and limitations.

Whenafter one stops seeking a shared religion or philosophy…and pursues the road of and on one’s own.

A secular Jewish-Russian intellectual escaped from Russia at about the same time as I, asks why I think about Putin’s relation to God.

I only ask the Dostoyevskian questions…

In fact the Jewish intellectual Heinrich Heine’s “verdammte Fragen”.

I could not myself but be tempted by the webinar topic religion and slavery… Yet noting the seven scholars obscuring the relations by their each clarifying them, I thought to Q for an A how such and they relate to those “non-scholars (eg ‘believers’) who want answers, not complexities and unanswerable questions”.

Just at about 1 hour 23 minutes – just as I was ready to give up waiting for an answer and leave the webinar – the hostess said she wanted to answer one question “From Steve Lapayroose”.

As it happened, some four of the scholars gave their answers essentially of their relation of scholarship and society, “non-scholars” wanting answers.

They each turn(ed) to “faith”, personally. “Faith” was what sustained and gave meaning to their lives, their scholarly work and teaching, and yet it clearly was, in the main, distinct.

So that at core their “faith” and their scholarship were different realities in their lives, scholarship, and teaching.

This helped answer deeper questions I had had after periodically visiting and attending events at HDS in my first two years after necessarily escaping self-exile in Russia.

Their “faith” sustained these scholars in their lives, scholarship and teaching – but their faith, their beliefs, were distinct.

. . . the dark moon and my body have colluded to preclude me sleeping this might for a noticed four decades of monthly cycles . . .

Upon further reflection, I would say: there is a conspiracy between my body and the moon against me!

Scholars who are trapped inside their nomenclature.

Living, moving and having their being in an Ideenwelt.

Revisioning history as personal psychotherapy.

Some of these “Notes” can only be “true” in so far as autobiography is in itself true, and not as might be imagined with an erred assumption of independent objectivity of some social politics, et al.

Very few are in reality not group personalities.

But most being most, they don’t notice.