Shortly after noon and you are sitting in the shade at 0 miles in the historical district of Pass-a-Grill a few miles south of the old Don CeSars Hotel [the Pink Palace at St. Pete] after a short walk to the Gulf Beach. Carol has begun Jeffery Archer’s paperback Maisie Clifton, no doubt one of Linda’s many paperbacks as Carol and Linda have a tradition paperback exchange when meeting.
1233 hours. Before we left Ohio I had some questions. Here is one of them: how does the soul share [otherwise unknown or unknowable-to-human] information with the heartanmind?
The soul shares information with heartanmind, separately or together. When together, confusion can arise, as the heart can accept what the rational mind will not accept without convincing or it may never accept. Think on Captain Ahab. He accepts his inevitable condition, that in some form or dimension he is part human and part whale. That is, his ‘irrational’ mind accepts this. The crew, seeing the captain commands from his self-imposed position, have hearts that Captain is speaking from a deeper internal place, the heart, and their hearts follow his just as their minds have been trained to do, after all rules are rules, and even though the widows and orphans and others may own the Pequod; on the open sea Ahab owns it. They assume the heartanmind are not equal, but you can see from my grammatical perspective, they are indeed equally human.
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The Rachel's captain begs Ahab to aid in the search for the missing boat, but Ahab is resolute; the Pequod is very near the White Whale now and will not stop to help. Finally the Delight is met, even as its captain buries a sailor who had been killed by Moby Dick. Starbuck begs Ahab one final time to reconsider his thirst for vengeance, but to no avail.
The next day, the Pequod meets Moby Dick. For two days, the Pequod's crew pursues the whale, which wreaks widespread destruction, including the disappearance of Fedallah. On the third day, Moby Dick rises up to reveal Fedallah tied to him by harpoon ropes, clearly dead. Even after the initial battle on the third day, it is clear that while Ahab is a vengeful whale-hunter, Moby Dick, while dangerous and fearless, is not motivated to hunt humans. As he swims away from the Pequod, Starbuck exhorts Ahab one last time to desist, observing that:
"Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!".
—Moby-Dick, Ch. 135
Ahab ignores this voice of reason and continues with his ill-fated chase. As the three boats sail out to hunt Moby Dick, he damages two of them, forcing them to go back to the ship and leaving only Ahab's vessel intact. Ahab harpoons the whale, but the harpoon-line breaks. Moby Dick then rams the Pequod itself, which begins to sink. As Ahab harpoons the whale again, the unfolding harpoon-line catches him around his neck and Ahab is dragged into the depths of the sea by the diving Moby Dick. The boat is caught up in the whirlpool of the sinking ship, which takes almost all the crew to their deaths. Only Ishmael survives, clinging to Queequeg’s coffin-turned-life buoy for an entire day and night before the Rachel rescues him.
Selected and edited from: Wikipedia Offline: Moby Dick
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You are thinking on Joseph Campbell (Wikipedia below), and the whirlwind of life, the Buddhist ‘Sangsara’.
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Monomyth
Campbell's term monomyth, also referred to as the hero's journey, refers to a basic pattern found in many narratives from around the world. This widely distributed pattern was first fully described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). An enthusiast of novelist James Joyce, Campbell borrowed the term from Joyce's Finnegan’s Wake.
As a strong believer in the unity of human consciousness and its poetic expression through mythology, through the monomyth concept Campbell expressed the idea that the whole of the human race could be seen as reciting a single story of great spiritual importance, and in the preface to The Hero with a Thousand Faces he indicated it was his goal to demonstrate similarities between Eastern and Western religions. As time evolves, this story gets broken down into local forms, taking on different guises (masks), depending on the necessities and social structure of the culture that interprets it. Its ultimate meaning relates to humanity's search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return and is considered to be "unknowable" because it existed before words and knowledge. The Story's form, however, has a known structure, which can be classified into the various stages of a hero's adventures like the Call to Adventure, Receiving Supernatural Aid, Meeting with the Goddess/Atonement with the Father and Return. As the ultimate truth cannot be expressed in plain words, spiritual rituals and stories refer to it through the use of “metaphors”, a term Campbell used heavily and insisted on its proper meaning: In contrast with comparisons, which use the word like, metaphors pretend to a literal interpretation of what they are referring to, as in the sentence "Jesus is the Son of God" rather than "the relationship of man to God is like that of a son to a father". According to Campbell, the Genesis myth from the Bible ought not be taken as a literal description of historical events happening in our current understanding of time and space, but as a metaphor for the rise of man's cognitive consciousness as it evolved from a prior animal state.
Campbell made heavy use of Carl Jung’s theories on the structure of the human psyche, and he often used terms like "anima/animus" and "ego consciousness". That is not to say that he necessarily agreed with Jung upon every issue, for he had very definite ideas of his own. He did believe, however, as he clearly stated in The Power of Myth, in a specific structure that exists in the psyche and is somehow reflected into myths.
Function of Myth
Campbell often described mythology as having a fourfold function for human society. These appear at the end of his work The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, as well as various lectures.
Campbell believed that if myths are to continue to fulfill their vital functions in our modern world, they must continually transform and evolve because the older mythologies, untransformed, simply do not address the realities of contemporary life, particularly with regard to the changing cosmological and sociological realities of each new era.
Selected and edited from: Wikipedia Offline: Joseph Campbell
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1604 hours. We have returned to Linda and Bill’s after our usual lunch at the Daiquiri Deck. The reminder below (Wikipedia) reinforces the concept of the Sangsara. Which upon re-reading brings in other complications of ‘rebirth/reincarnation’. The suggestion at least to me is that the soul is reusable. That concept has not come up in the books as far as I understand.
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Samsāra or Sangsāra, literally meaning "continuous flow", is the repeating cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth (reincarnation) within Hinduism, Buddhism, Bon, Jainism, Yoga and Sikhism. According to the view of these Indian religions our current life is only one of many - stretching back before birth into past existences and reaching forward beyond death into future incarnations. During the course of each life the quality of the actions (karma) performed determine the future destiny of each person. The Buddha taught that there is no beginning or end to this cycle. The goal of Indian religions is to escape this process, the achievement of which is called moksha.
In popular use, Samsara may refer to the world (in the sense of the various worldly activities which occupy ordinary human beings), the various sufferings thereof; or the unsettled and agitated mind through which reality is perceived.
Etymology and origin
Samsara means "to flow on", to perpetually wander, to pass through states of existence.
The historical origins of a concept of a cycle of repeated reincarnation are obscure but the idea appears frequently in religious and philosophical texts in both India and ancient Greece during the middle of the first millennium BCE. Orphism, Platonism, Jainism and Buddhism all discuss the transmigration of beings from one life to another. Several scholars believe that reincarnation was adopted from this religious culture by Brahmin orthodoxy, and Brahmins first wrote down scriptures containing these ideas in the early (Aitereya) Upanishads.
Selected and edited from: Wikipedia offline: Sangsara
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If I remember correctly Campbell used [in ‘The Power of Myth’, Moyers & Campbell] the word ‘Sangsara’ in reference to its popular definition: “the unsettled and agitated mind through which reality is perceived.” I had not thought about this but the heartansoulanmind metaphysics is, in part, a focus on the mind’s agitated unsettledness.
Nearing dinnertime. Orndorff, you have a tendency to not see me, Amorella, for what I am. Do you think that after three books and my suggestion that you write three more, I would not have an objective? – Amorella
I don’t really believe it, Amorella. After three books I still don’t believe you were in control even though I know I was not consciously writing them myself. What good would it do me to believe you can continue to do such a thing? As usual I have not a real clue as to what the continuing works are about. You tell me from time to time but I forget. I don’t really believe in the books even though they are supposed to be coming from my heartansoulanmind. I am not one to believe in books.
You are not one to believe in yourself either, boy. – Amorella
That’s true. I was most fortunate in my private and professional life – mostly luck (being in the right place and the right time) and belief and sincere enthusiasm and interest in my subject area. In fact, I’m not sure what it means to believe in one’s self. Somehow it sounds contradictory to me. To be one’s self, I can understand. If one is who one is, why is belief even needed, belief seems to be a form of self-promotion which is not morally right as well as a waste of personal energy. That’s my opinion.
At least you are able to articulate your opinion without my help. Post. – Amorella
And, ironically, I have to continue this blog in order to write. If anyone were to think this is online for self-promotion, all sheorhe has to do is actually read these 'working' notes. If a reader were to think I believe in any of this content it is rare you will see any evidence of it. The notes are evidence of semi-organized 'thought', of reinforcing research, and of a degree of creative plodding through chapters in book four.
You are one fortunate fellow, boy. Heartansoulanmind honesty allows you to stand without a blink. Now post. - Amorella
A late casual family supper at Beef O’Brady’s – then a return to Linda and Bill’s.
2055 hours. Another mistake on my part. I checked the dictionary and ‘self-belief’ means ‘self-confidence’. Again, I was being too literal.
Being too literal is who you are, boy. This is one of the reasons you respell God as G---D. I like you for that. You don't need self-confidence, you have imagination and reason instead. Sleep well, dude. - Amorella
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