1 Corinthians 8:
Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him.
Tao Te Ching 1:
A mind free of thought, merged within itself, beholds the essence of Tao;
A mind filled with thought, identified with its own perceptions, beholds the mere forms of this world.
Psychology literalizes components - or actions - of the self via myths. Interesting concept: psychological myths. Are the four Zoas (or is the mind) a thing or activity alone?
The worship of reason (Urizen) represents an idol of impossible purity, because Urizen is nothing, Urizen is delusion. => guilt. (FZ40.2-8)
The Zoas represent endless dialectic, contraries, opposite aspects of the same essential characteristic, much like Tarot. The dialectical process is potentially endless because the active dialectic of human experience is endless. This concept is contained within the Zoas, along with their Emanations and Spectres.
Self and Otherness ...
Can there be both? Is Albion both whole and parts-that-are-not-parts?
What Blake seems to want - whether it is symbolized in Albion or in Jesus the divine body - is a whole whose parts are not parts, in which individuality can be preserved without concession to otherness. Here is a central antinomy in Blakes thought, the wish to be at once individual and universal, self and not-self, human and divine. (Damrosch, 1980)
Blake and Jung ...
Jung wrote, It was one of the greatest experiences of my life to discover how enormously different people’s psyches are.Blake would never say this, because for him, all psyches are versions of the universal psyche to an extent which Jung, despite his interest in universal symbols, would never claim. For Blake, the whole is fully present in each particular member (omnisubjectivity). All are interconnected through the imagination.
I assume Blake would also not appreciate the randomness of Tarot outcomes. This is another of his paradoxes: rejecting Reason or any -ism based perspective, while also embracing a certain objectivity (though multifaceted and perhaps undefinable) as a central organizing principle of the universe.
Also from Jung (influenced by Blake?) ... model of four mental functions: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting.
Carol Gilligan:
When we separate our thoughts from our emotions, we retain the capacity to solve logical problems but lose the ability to register experience and navigate the human social world.
Rather than asking how we gain the capacity to care, or how we learn to take the point of view of the other and overcome the pursuit of self-interest, we are prompted to ask instead: how do we lose the capacity to care, what inhibits our ability to empathize with others and pick up the emotional climate, and how do we fail to register the difference between being in and out of touch?
https://sway.office.com/kp3Ho6mNV0A7HimU?ref=Link
The connection between knowledge and “enlightenment” (S. Pinker): The single best predictor of emancipative (liberal) values is knowledge. Knowledge accounts for 70% of the variation in emancipative values across countries, making it a far better predictor than GDP. The statistical result vindicates a key insight of the Enlightenment: knowledge and sound institutions lead to moral progress.
Martin Buber’s prescient commentary on social media discussion:
Debate = Thoughts are not expressed in the way in which they existed in the mind but in the speaking are so pointed that they may strike home in the sharpest way, and moreover without the men that are spoken to being regarded in anyway present as persons.
Conversation = characterized by the need neither to communicate something, nor to learn something, nor to influence someone, nor to come into connexion with someone, but solely by the desire to have one’s own self-reliance confirmed by marking the impression that is made, or if it has become unsteady to have it strengthened.
Buber further describes this tendency to mistake so-called dialogue for reflexion, defined as withdrawal from accepting with his essential being another person in his particularity – a particularity which is by no means to be circumscribed by the circle of his own self, and though it substantially touches and moves his soul is in no way immanent in it – and lets the other exist only as his own experience, only as a “part of myself”. … Then Dialogue becomes a fiction …
