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  • The American dream

    The group dream state in which a well-furnished suburban home is the successful end of history.

    The unconscious, metaphysical assumptions, even the “theology”, in which most “live, move, and have their being”. Quite apart from whatever their inherited articulable “beliefs” are.

  • Bildung a la Burckhardt

    “In an age of crisis and revolution, individuals cannot escape the impending sense of powerlessness and alienation through recourse to materialism, egotism, or violence; rather they must seek the solution within themselves and within the spiritual continuum of the past that unites all humankind. Bildung consequently provided Burckhardt with the necessary bridge between his day-to-day existence and his ascetic and aesthetic impulses. The very centrality of the goal of holistic self-realization to Bildung reveals the extent to which it was conceived as an essentially ascetic phenomenon. The pursuit of inner knowledge and self-exists cultivation as a spiritual calling, as a means of personal salvation in a time of crisis. Bildung consequently represents ascetic self-mastery and self-possession, the requirement of true culture and education. Devotion to this ideal empowers and liberates the subject. An exercise in the power of mind over body, it represents a self-imposed dedication to the spirit and the control of corporeal temptation. In an age in which both the mind and the body were being increasingly managed by a society that was refining its controls over the subject, Bildung emerged as the only source of true individual freedom.” — Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity, John Hinde, p. 135-136.

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  • Mental states

    The main problem with the “political positions” of people is that in reality they are a revealing of their mentalities.

  • Overviewing

    What did I learn and game from my nearly 2 months in Italy, Sicily? What did I gain in my now 50+ years of more or less independent personal life? And at “100”?

  • “Have a nice day.”

    How few have gone beyond the unconscious received assumption to enjoy life.

  • “We’re #1!”

    The USA is a good example of a country not to follow.

  • A major diagnosis

    A diagnosis of the problems of even only American society and civilization requires a great deal of study and thought, much going back much further than before America even began.

  • US TV commercials

    To what level of intelligence and education is the average US television commercial directed?

  • “Christian Evangelicals” for Trump

    This is what passes for “Christian” in America. But it is actually a question of levels of human intelligence. But they can’t help it.

  • ~4am NC, and back

    Ostia Antica, from near the “underground Mithraeum”

    I wake from walking and searching rather deep inside “Ostia Antica” still attempting to locate places in the life time of Augustine there, where he did, or might have done, various activities. And determined to read more on him there then. It is not serious to not consider his relation to the Mithraea there.

    And if you traveled “abroad” and came back the same then what was the point of having gone. Those who go to travel, to Europe, for example, to enjoy themselves are just taking their patterns and sleep with them.

    Meeting with, conversing with, interacting with complete strangers in a completely new place allows one’s soul to live — perhaps to grow — and develop, and be in ways that the patterns of one’s daily home life do not.

    I did not go to Italy and Sicily for seven weeks to come back unchanged, less knowledgeable and insightful, with a happy smile.