If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

To be awake is to be alive.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment;
that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,
and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,
he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

I should not talk so much about myself
if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts,
nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live
according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,
magnanimity, and trust.

Say what you have to say, not what you ought.
Any truth is better than make-believe.

“Mii de ori tai raul in frunze,dar cu securea dai o singura data in radacina”

Thoreau

Termenul “paradigma” provine din limba greaca.

La origine era un termen stiintific, iar azi denota un model,o teorie,o modalitate de percepere,o supozitie sau un cadru de referinta.In sensul cel mai general,este felul in care “vedem”lumea-nu in sensul vizual al vazului,ci in termeni de percepere,intelegere,interpretare.Mai simplu,eu am incercat sa privesc aceste “paradigme” ca pe niste harti,pentru ca stim cu totii ca”harta” nu este un teritoriu.Harta e doar explicatia anumitor aspecte ale teritoriului.Aceasta este si paradigma:o teorie,o explicatie,un model a ceva…

Fiecare din noi are nespus de multe harti in minte.Ele pot fi clasificate in doua categorii principale:harti reprezentand lucrurile asa cum sunt,adica realitati si harti ale lucrurilor asa cum ar trebui sa fie,adica valori.Toate trairile noastre sunt interpretate cu ajutorul acestor harti mentale.Rareori ne intrebam daca sunt sau nu corecte:de obicei nici nu ne dam seama ca lucram cu ele.Credem pur si simplu ca felul in care privim lucrurile este chiar modul lor de a fi sau modul in care ar trebui sa fie.

Ca sa intelegeti unde vreau sa ajung priviti imaginea de jos si descrieti ceea ce vedeti.

Unii dintre voi ar putea spune ca vad o fata,altii o batrana,sau poate chiar un batran cu un nas destul de mare.Cine are oare dreptate?Se poate ca doua persoane care privesc un lucru identic sa aiba pareri diferite si totusi ambele sa aiba dreptate?Raspunsul este da,deoarece fenomenul nu e logic,ci psihologic.Astfel am ajuns eu sa am un moment de “AHA!!!”  cu foarte mare aplicabilitatea in viata de zi cu zi,in problemele care apar mereu in ceea ce priveste conflictul de opinii.Puterea conditionarii e destul de puternica si ea afecteaza perceptia si paradigmele noastre.Ma gandeam asa ca daca in 10 secunde poate avea un asemenea impact asupra modului nostru de a vedea ,ce sa mai zic despre conditionarile suferite o viata intreaga?Toate au contribuit astfel la formarea propriilor noastre “harti”,intr-un mod mai corect sau mai putin corect.

Oricat de clar si obiectiv ni s-ar parea ca privim lucrurile,incepem sa intrezarim faptul ca ceilalti le vad cu totul si cu totul altfel,si dintr-un unghi de vedere la fel de clar si obiectiv:”Cum si unde stam de pinde de cum si unde ne-am asezat.”Cu totii,fiecare in parte credem ca vedem lucrurile asa cum sunt,ca fiecare suntem obiectivi.Dar nu e cazul.Chiar deloc.Vedem lumea nu asa cum este,ci asa cum suntem noi-sau cum am fost conditionati sa o vedem.Cand deschidem gura sa descriem ce vedem,in realitate ne descriem pe noi insine,felul nostru de a percepe,paradigmele noastre.Oricat am fi de sinceri si limpezi la minte,oamenii percep lucrurile in mod diferit,fiecare privind prin unica lentila a experientei personale.

Cel mai important moment(am inteles eu) in viata unui om reprezinta schimbarea paradigmei-acel moment de “AHA!!”,cand,in cele din urma cineva izbuteste sa vada imaginea sub un alt unghi.Cu cat persoana este mai dependenta de perceptia initiala,cu atat experienta “AHA!!” este mai puternica.E ca o fulgerare interioara.

Daca vrem cu tot dinadinsul sa ne amelioram substantial modul de viata trebuie sa renuntam la taiatul frunzelor-in atitudini si comportament-sa ne apucam de lucru la radacina;altfel spus,sa ne schimbam paradigmele,caci mentalitatea noastra si conduita din ele se nasc.

]]> http://osopher.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/recurrence/ Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:00:47 +0000 osopher http://osopher.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/recurrence/

Time is winding down on our course, and it keeps popping up in our reading selections. Nietzsche, whose “eternal recurrence” thought experiment invites personal reflection on one’s own meaningful relation to past, present, and future, raises the subject this time, and Sartre (remember Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion and their excellent adventure?) chimes in with his claim that since “existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves.” Time is nothing, we are nothing, until we act and choose. But when we do, we create something we can’t run away from. Scary, and– as previously noted (“renunciation“)– not so happy. Recall, too, his distinctively French- intellectual disdain for the distinctively American “myth of happiness” and Americanism generally.  Robert Solomon says Sartre said he never had a real moment of despair in his life. Huh. It was all affected, then. Sounds like “bad faith,” doesn’t it? But “Jean-Paul Sartre is currently dead,” authentically an object without possibilities. So let him be.

We’ve noted the views of at least two Taylors, Richard and James, and of Philip Zimbardo. Is time even real? Well, aging feels real enough. When time passes slowly it feels oppressively real, and when it “flows” it feels unbearably light. “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” said Thoreau. Meaning?

Meaning, I suppose, that we experience time as a condition of meaningful, happy-making activity. So it’s as real as happiness, happiness is as real as time, and both are real-as-experienced. We need time to unfold our projects, construct our relationships, and enjoy our lives. When we succeed, we experience them and it together as a subjective unity that closes the loop on each episode of expectation. A closed loop is a moment in time– which may or may not correspond to a conventional moment as measured by our clocks and calendars– that represents fulfillment or (in Dewey’s language of everyday aesthetic experience, and in Nietzsche’s of self-overcoming, in the clip below) consummation. Enough moments like that will make some of us describe ourselves as happy, whether or not Aristotle would approve.

For Dewey, btw, the thing about time is not that it’s not really  real, but that it’s not just yours and mine: it’s ours. It’s the stream humanity goes a-fishing in. We still have our consummations as individuals, but our largest meanings embrace the “continuous human community.” When we affirm our place in that pan-temporal community, our inescapably-subjective relation to time trades the worst vestiges of misanthropic narcissism for the more sympathetic angels of our nature: social solidarity and species identity. My time then is your time, and our kids’ time, and theirs, and… and aren’t we glad we had this time together?

Does it help, though, to live now and into the always-cresting now of what was the future just a moment ago, to  excise big chunks of the past? Nietzsche (among many others) said happiness requires living in the now. How forgetful must we be, to accomplish that? Must we aspire to the “blissful blindness” of childhood, the animal (“dog-like”) spontaneity of the Cynic, (IEP) or the aphasia of the amnesiac?

“Forgetting is essential to action” and for “the life of everything organic.” That seems right, we accumulate too much informational dross every hour of every day for our finite minds to absorb. We can be “healthful, strong, and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon.”

But then he gives us “eternal recurrence,” the “greatest weight.” The horizon, fixed decisively to the shores of this world, seems suddenly, paradoxically infinite and dizzying. And liberating? “Be calm.”

As I mentioned before, I’m reading a little bit about Buddhism. Often I hear the claim that Buddhism, having been developed in the East, is antithetical to western “rationality” or “instrumental reason.”

I’m not sure what to make of this claim, but I’m very suspicious of it for several reasons. First, the idea of tranquility, patience, and even meditation is not exclusively eastern at all (whatever “eastern” means). The book I’m reading, Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, makes many of its points by referencing Henry David Thoreau and his time at Walden pond. I think this is interesting, because Thoreau was closely tied to liberal thinking of the day of a somewhat libertarian bent. Furthermore, the metaphors that I’ve encountered in this book are in some ways very similar to paradigmatic western notions of theoretic contemplation (Plato) and scientific objectivity. Now one thing that’s worth pointing out is that the Buddhist aims for a contemplative separation from thinking in itself whereas the scientific western tradition opts for contemplative distance instrumentally (one must be free of bias to obtain the truth).

However this points to another interesting relationship between liberalism and Buddhism. One of the greatest critic of Buddhism was Nietzsche, who was also an enemy of liberalism for the same reasons. He believed that liberalism was a type of political Buddhism in which one abstained from everything and cut attachments to the point of being without character or energy. Again, I think this is suggestive of actually how much Buddhism may have in common with standard western political and ethical thinking.

No doubt though I need to read more broadly before I’m entitled to these sweeping generalizations.

Henry David Thoreau was born in historic Concord, MA, home of the most prolific thinkers of our time, The Transcendentalists.

Walden Pond

Less than two miles from Concord was Walden Pond, the mystical body of water that, aside from his writings, made Thoreau famous. Walden was a cool glacial lake surrounded by a piney woods. Thoreau, of course, picked it for what was known as “his famous experiment.

Thoreau loved Concord and all the intellectual thought and experimentation it had to offer. On December 5, 1856 he wrote in his journal, “I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of time, too.”

During this time, many of his peers and colleagues were moving west, to explore the wildfrontier. Thoreau stayed put in Concord as in the middle of the 19^th century the town was surrounded bysome of the most accomplished authors of his time; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson and May Alcott and their daughter Louisa Mae, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and many others. Intellectual thought and change was encouraged, whereas in other small communities this was not necessarily so in, not just Concord, but much of small-town America.

Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau graduated from nearby Harvard, where he would often bring home friends to entertain in Concord.  Long before Henry was born, Concord was steeped in rich history. In 1635 it was established as the first inland English settlement, 20 miles from the coast.

On April 19, 1779, the American Revolutionary War had begun at the Battlefield of Concord. Over a half century later Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem about a historic even he called “the shot heard ’round the world.” in a poem called “Concord Hymn”.

While still at Harvard Thoreau spent one of his summer vacations living with his friend Charles Wheeler at a place called Flint’s Pond in a small cabin and slept on bunks of straw for over a month.

But they were not alone in that hey stayed close to the Wheeler family eating and socializing with them. Thoreau loved this vacation and again returned to it, not realizing it was becoming the inspiration for his finally moving to Walden Pond and building a small house in the woods.

Walden was not Thoreau’s first choice. He looked at several areas including a place called Baker Farm, and another called Fairhaven Hill by the Sudbury River and even Flint’s Pond, where he’s stayed during his college years.

Those places were excellent for fishing and Walden was not, and though it had gorgeous scenery, Thoreau said “It did not approach grandeur”.

Thoreau finally settled on Walden due to the pond’s depth and clarity, unlike some of the closer-by muddier ones, he could see down Walden to a depth of 30 feet. There were parts of Walden so deep that the local legend was that it was so uniquely deep that in the center itwas bottomless.

Nevertheless, Thoreau was pragmatic and measured the deepest point to be a little over 100 feet and was still “thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol,” continuing, “While men believe some ponds will be thought to be bottom less.

Emerson purchased eleven acres surrounding Walden Pond and visited often, allegedly to save the trees from being cut as contractors were hoping to do to build. Emerson agreed to

allow Thoreau to live on his land in exchange for building the house Emerson could later use as his study. This solved Thoreau’s problem of finding a simple way of living for this “Walden experiment”.

There are only theories as to why Thoreau chose Walden. Many think it was because the pond so near his home and he used it for bathing and drinking. Also nearby was Brister’s Spring, which offered cold water which kept him cool on warm summer days. Also the land was elevated so flooding was rare, trees were, for the most part preserved, and the home faced south, which kept it warm during winter storms.

In Chapter 2 of Walden Pond, Thoreau described “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” writing, “I was seated… so low in the woods that the opposite shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my most distant horizon….it impressed me like a tarn [small mountain lake with steep banks] high up on the side of a mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains.”

Chances are good that Thoreau’s good friend Emerson had a great influence on him. Emerson wrote about and embraced nature and even begun the word with a capital “N” (or Nature).

Thoreau said, “ In wildness is the preservation of the world.” This famous quote from the essay “Walking” boldly declares one of Henry’s most emphatic beliefs, but it is often misquoted as “in wilderness is the preservation of the world.” Though he was a devoted observer of Nature and loved to immerse himself in the woods during his walks, what Thoreau meant to highlight was not an untouched “wilderness” separate from humanity, but instead an independence of the spirit epitomized in the world “wildness.”

His experiment living at Walden was not meant to be a wilderness excursion or a period of hermitage. In the opening statement of the Walking, he writes, “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and Culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.” Thoreau felt that society constrained the individual and he looked to the wildness of nature as pointing to our belonging to a higher way of life with much for freedom than society had to offer.

Thoreau Love Quote Shoes

Henry David Thoreau Slip On Love Quote Shoes

Thoreau Love Quote Canvas Bag

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Rick London is a freelance writer, cartoonist and designer. One of his ventures is called Shoes That Amuse which are the only shoes on the market featuring famous poets, writers, and philosophers and their most famous love quotes; Thoreau one of his most popular.   London is also brand designer for actress/author Mariel Hemingway and owns numerous funny gift stores featuring his cartoons on funny tees, funny mugs, and other funny gifts and collectibles.  His Londons Times Cartoons has been Google and MSN’s #1 ranked offbeat cartoon on the Internet since 2005.

“Poet engraver of New England”, Thomas W Nason was a self taught print-maker from Lyme Connecticut who dedicated his art to representing the romanticized landscape of New England. His work was frequently paired with and served as illustrations to writers like Thoreau and Emerson. I found these prints in a book which has both Emerson’s Nature and Thoreaus essay Walking.

“…In wilderness is the preservation of the world”

Det finns ingen unknare lukt än den från skämd godhet. Det är en av mänskligt, gudomligt kadaver.

(Från Walden, av Henry David Thoreau, (Natur & Kultur, 2009, s. 95) i vilken citatjägare kommer att finna mycket användbart.)

Från baksidestexten:

I mitten av 1800-talet byggde den amerikanske författaren och filosofen Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) en stuga i skogen vid tjärnen Walden. Där levde han ett enkelt liv nära naturen och hade under tiden få kontakter med civilisationen. I sin tidlösa bok Walden (1854) flätar författaren skickligt ihop filosofi, mytologi och poesi med odling, fiske och naturupplevelser. För första gången blir Thoreaus mångbottnade mästerverk, som inspirerat och provocerat miljoner läsare världen över, tillgängligt i en oavkortad svensk utgåva. Den nya översättningen är gjord av Peter Handberg.

Jag har valt att bland annat placera in den här boken under etiketten Filosofi, även om det förstås inte bara är en filosofisk bok, snarare än blandning av filosofi, självbiografi, lyrik, naturupplevelser och skönlitteratur. Till bokens styrkor hör enligt min mening de underbara naturskildringarna, medan filosofen Thoreau emellanåt tenderar att bli irriterande elitistisk, exempelvis i det kapitel i boken som handlar om läsning. Ännu 150 år efter det att boken först kom ut så känns boken bitvis väldigt provocerande, även om det givetvis också ger ett fräscht intryck. Det finns därmed något tidlöst i boken, som gör att även en modern läsare kan hitta något att tycka om eller att avsky. Jag tycker däremot att det är bra att man inte kan placera in Thoreau i exempelvis något politiskt fack, utan var och en kan plocka de bitar ur boken som man tycker bäst om. Det gör också att jag satte just den där rubriken på detta inlägg, eftersom jag inte känner att jag har blivit ”klar” med boken efter en enda genomläsning. Vill man läsa Thoreau, bör man läsa om boken flera gånger för att få ut så mycket som möjligt av läsningen.

Vilka ska läsa den här boken? Jag rekommenderar den faktiskt till alla som tycker om filosofi, självbiografi, lyrik, naturupplevelser eller skönlitteratur, för att inte tala om alla som vill få mer kunskap om en av miljörörelsens stora inspiratörer.

Betyg: 3 av 5

Thoreau, H.D: Walden, Natur & Kultur, 2009 (pocketutgåva)

As a writer I am motivated by my love of the story and the lives of the people they reveal. While I understand all too well that communicating through words has limitations, if I am honest, I feel quite the opposite. That is why Amos Bronson Alcott has thrown me for such a loop. Amos Bronson Alcott was the father of Louisa May Alcott, and one of the leading lights of America’s 19th-century Transcendental movement, despite a life of repeated haplessness and failure by any measurable standard. After reading the novel March by Geraldine Brooks I embarked on an Alcott biography binge, puzzled by how close and yet so far the main character was from his semi-biographical inspiration Bronson Alcott. After reading biographies and excerpts of his letters and journals I just don’t get it. How did he keep the loyalty and friendship of Emerson and Thoreau? Why did person after person bail him out financially when he repeatedly proved inept at being realistic in anything he tried? Why did he retain the loyalty and affection of his wife and daughters after a lifetime of criticism and extreme poverty because of his choices and inability to learn from his mistakes?

In his fifties, while his wife and daughters have to work to support the family he embarks on a career as a conversationalist, and travels the East and Midwest for years to gather interested parties to discuss various social justice and spiritual topics (though apparently it was not particularly interactive). Newspaper critics of these ‘perfprmances’ are quoted as saying one may not remember the content of what Alcott says, but one feels elevated. These trips made him money occasionally, but more often he broke even at best. He was in demand again.

Even those who loved and knew him best acknowledged the man was constitutionally incapable of any view but his own, and his own was divinely inspired in his view. He was an exalted ego, and at times those same loyalists admit, off his rocker, and at best, a man of embarrassing contradictions. He was an abolitionist of the first order. Alcott was willing to close his school rather than to close his doors to a free black girl, though that meant his family had no income. His home was a station on the Underground Railroad, and he deliberately tried to martyr himself in a Boston standoff over the trial of an escaped slave who was to be returned to his master. This same man believed that a person’s coloring was a metaphor for his/her capability of spiritual enlightenment (he was blond and blue-eyed). That being so, he proposed all black males be neutered. He thought of his olive-skinned dark-haired wife and second daughter Louisa as agents of darkness.

Words on a page can never explain the appeal of this man. He did some amazingly admirable things, but why he did them and the negligence of thought about anything or anyone but his principles makes these acts of courage and/or generosity questionable. So I am left like a detective with OCD and a puzzle that nothing but a time-machine and meeting the man in the flesh can solve. The even greater frustration is that it brings into question the research I have done on the life of other authors, possibly less inexplicable, but certainly not less complex. Is there something so intangible in a person’s presence and essence that ties all the facts and narrative of their lives together in a way that is always more than the sum of the parts? Can we only know the narrative but not the human being?

There is little or nothing to be remembered written on the subject of getting an honest living.  Neither the New Testament nor Poor Richard speaks to our condition.  I cannot think of a single page which entertains, much less answers, the questions which I put to myself on this subject.  How to make the getting of our living poetic! for if it is not poetic, it is not the life but death that we get.  Is it that men are too disgusted with their experience to speak of it? or that commonly they do not question the common modes?  The most practically important of all questions, it seems to me, is how shall I get my living, and yet I find little or nothing said to the purpose in any book.  Those who are living on the interest of money inherited, or dishonestly, i.e. by false methods, acquired, are of course incompetent to answer it.  I consider that society with all its arts, has done nothing for us in this respect.  One would think, from looking at literature, that this question had never disturbed a solitary individual’s musings.  Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off.  If it were not that I desire to do something here—accomplish some work—I should certainly prefer to suffer and die rather than be at the pains to get a living by the modes men propose. 

Sometimes halting eloquence doesn’t fare well when you’re trying to make a complaint.  Winston Churchill faced such a problem at this Scottish hotel, where his letter of misgivings is proudly mounted for guests to see.  I’m hoping that, in addition to showcasing Churchill’s disappointments, they not only addressed their bug problem but started serving lunch food as well.  After all, what distinguished person eats pancakes at mid-day?  For crying out loud, Scotland.

Lit. & The Internet

• Bolaño explains life, naturally and continually, even or especially on book tour.
• Robert Louis Stevenson’s archives go digital in time for the writer’s 159th birthday.
• Google’s working hard on their digital book deal.
• Why are Dutch writers never actually associated with the Netherlands?

Moby-Dick Lives

• California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute features Moby-Dick, where “artists from around the world are invited to address the key themes of the [book] and the  historical [moment] in which [it was] written.”
• Damien Searls has, after his foray into whaling territory, has taken on Thoreau’s journals, of which his edits are “meant to showcase the journal as a unified work of literature.”  Conversational Reading weighs in on the new edit, and provides a review.

Music

• Dave Hill: Funny guy/rocker
• The Serge Gainsbourg biopic is supposed to be good, and even better that the trailer, French of course, is NSFW.
• Thurston Moore answers the question, “what was there before YouTube?”, and quite a few others, for Carrie Brownstein’s Monitor Mix.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.  What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. –Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

hear me read?

At the peak of Texas summer, my brother sometimes challenged me to walk barefoot across hot asphalt in a who-can-go-slowest race. I needed to disconnect brain and legs.  My knees couldn’t bob.  No strain could show when, reaching the other curb, I had to say  (without saying), “No big deal.”

Perhaps you feel a metaphor coming on.

I’ve been thinking recently about “The right stuff,” not the web-defined, “Essential abilities or qualities like self-confidence, dependability, and knowledge necessary for success in a given field or situation,” but the sort suggested by Tom Wolfe’s book of that name.  Wolfe says the right stuff extends so far beyond what’s apt that “self-confidence, dependability, and knowledge” are givens, the bedrock of your being.  The right stuff is so placid and nonchalant, so James-Bondsian that it can be neither shaken nor stirred.

And, for me, it’s mostly an act.

Pretending tranquility can’t fool everyone.  The people closest to you know it’s make-believe.  Those who have seen your sudden temper, seen your peevishness and general dismay, they recognize you get bothered.  They begin looking for signs of earthquake.  And with the rare few for whom you’re transparent, being read is disarming and strangely comforting, as if everything you’ve lost suddenly rolls into view.

Most people, however, want to fall for your act.  Juggling is impressive only when it adds calm as it adds clubs.  I try to carry all my clubs serenely, but most of the time I’m settling for appearing to.  Knowing it’s not okay to just scream, I say “I could just scream” instead.  I figure keeping cool is good for those around me, and what’s the harm in acting the way you want to feel?  Frequently I’m just idealistic enough to believe thinking can make things so.

Still I feel split.  People who suffer panic attacks say their episodes well so suddenly, incongruously, and strangely that the attack seems to happen to someone else. I know that situation in reverse, wondering why I’m not more upset, how I could be racked and so pain-free. When people tell me appalling things, I gulp and say, “Oh.”

I wonder if I’d ask to shower and shave before my execution.

Medicine might tell me the right stuff is the wrong stuff.  No one can inhale a hurricane without internal damage, and a few heavy sighs won’t dissipate it.  But when you’re sitting on the edge of a precipice, you don’t dare let the hurricane out.

I’d like to ask if everyone feels as I do and am afraid to.

The other day a colleague praised my “poise,” and I answered, “I don’t feel poised.”  But I only said it. How can you know how far away that other curb is?

Amongst various lagoons, canyon wildernesses on the pacific shores, various places like Modjeska Canyon and others, long haired naked sun worshippers, wandered in the naturelands, singing songs, eating fruits, fasting, praying, doing yoga, playing guitars in huts and befriending American Indians, all in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, before the SF rennaisance carnival and all its merry troubadours shone into the Haight and elsewhere.
Nature boys they were called and of various stock they were, of English, Jewish, of German and of other. Meditating and doing yoga, eating pure foods, sunbathing an waterbathing and connecting with the wilderness they were a different breed to the settled gold trailsters and cattle ranchers, they were America’s sadhus, babajis, yogis and sants. And they had inherited things which went back further, things of the German spirit and nature far from the Hitler-Nazi perversions.
We can understand this curious brand of nature mysticism in the works of Thoreau, of Emerson, but moreover we can see them also trickling in the background of Herman Hesse, in the founder of Naturopathy and its various historical clinics, some in California. Going even further back we can see the Rosicrucian and Paracelsian fords and pastures and their glimpses of places further east, in North Africa, in Morrocco, Spain and Damascus, Syria and India.
Oriental Nature Boy Mystics housed the river of traditions arcane and forgotton and a spirit of freedom.
And not all nature boys were celebate and single, as some took their girlfriends along as well.

Laguna Beach, a place in the ambit of the nature boy wilderness wanderings, took in curious surfers who had given up the car gangs of beachrealm, and took to surfboard, yoga and pure foods not to mention psychedelic alchemistry. But before this period, Laguna Beach also housed bohemian types, artists and was a faved retreat renowned for its natural beauty and somewhere amongst these were esoetric interests in a mysterious group named the Order of Loving Service who harked back to an important inspiration, a Baba Premananda Bharati, who in the first decade of the 1900s established various Krishna congregtions centered on an ashram in Los Angeles caled the Krishna Home. Many of California’s esoterically inclined came across it, one such being a Maud Lalita Johnson, a famed esoteric writer in her own way. Another called Elsa Barker famed for her many esoteric novels had contact with the first wave of Krishna Chaitanya devotion. Premananda Bharati belonged to the Krisna traditions of Chaitanya, the blessed madman and holy fool and incarnation of Krishna who bathed Bengal in waves of ecstatic love of Godhead. This Krishna baba had an influence of Gandhi and Tolstoy, but the two world wars meant that this period of the oriental in American esoteric latter day Rosicrucian traditions such as New Thought, Golden Dawn, Theosophical society and others were forgotton, remembered by only a few. But all that is known is that the Order of Loving Service published a book dedicated to Baba Premananda Bharati in Laguna Beach and that it was associated with the Royal Order of Tibet founded by George Adamski who was the pioneer of UFO abductee narratives. They were also inspired by the wriings of Lalita Johnson and it was her book with the dedication to Premananda that they published in Laguna Beach called Square. It was later in 1969 that another Krishna temple of a different lineage appeared in Laguna Beach, that of the Krishna tradition represented by a famed guru named Bhaktivedanta Swami which is more commonly known. Certain folk in this new Krishna temple in Laguna had links to another group named the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, whom we shall look at another time.

Nat King Cole did a song dedicated to a certain nature boy named eden ahbez  or ahbe in which he describes this  nature boy as being wise. This track of Nat King Cole’s was also covered by John Coltrane, the great jazz musician who himself was inspired by metaphysical stuff descended from the latter day Rosicrucianism as well as oriental mysticism. Another nature boy named Gypsy Boots was friends with various musicians of the sixtiees of which the major music tribes of SF and was respected by Jerry Garcia. Kerouac wrote about him, Frank Zappa was friends with him and he appears on the stages between band sets of certain of the major bands at the Monterey Pop Festival and Newport Festival. He inspired Sky Saxon of The Seeds, Arthur Lee of Love and Randy California of Spirit to become vegetarian, he was admired by Mama Cass as well as Garcia’s wife, who was once Ken Kesey’s girl, named Mountain Girl, a name with a nod to the nature mystic in and of itself. He appears with Zappa in his film Mondo Hollywood in 1968. Gypsy Boots was an American of Russian Jewish descent, born in San Fransisco in 1916, he was taught directly by Maximillian Singer another nature mystic in 1935 learning yoga and fasting and special diets from him after a period of travelling and living in nature. After a while, he was living with many of the prominent nature boy mystics of the time around Tahquitz Canyon and selling crafts in Palm Springs, the very place the Brotherhood of Eternal Love had an epiphany, according to certain historical annals which we shall look at later. He eventually after a period of living as mystical wild man and learning lots, was married in 1953 to a Lois Bloemker, and settled into living near Griffith Park in LA and had three sons. He opened a ‘Health Hut’ in Hollywood where he taught his wisdom of living close to nature.

Maximillian Singer, Gypsy Boot’s mentor was from Augsberg who spent many years travelling and living as a nature mystic in and around Europe, thus the mystical life and water curing, sun bathing, breathing, nutrition and the like was practised assiduously by him. He came to California in 1935 and whilst here inspired many Euro-American born nature mystics. In the Brotherhood of Eternal Love linked loose knit community of Topanga Canyon, he was revered almost as a guru figure, and later on he appeared at the various festivals, be-ins and concerts of the period.

Some that were associated with these brothers of nature were called to the akashic realm, that same part wherein which PBRs Rosicrucians dwelled, that place between the portals of Eulis a place where others dwelled and visisted from time to time, others such as Beatfreak not to mention certain folk of the Order of Loving Service.

Last night, the television sat mute.  I curled up with steaming Earl Grey and handcrafted cookies, reading until my eyes drooped closed.

I’ve joined a book club.  We’re reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  The first few pages brought to mind ersatz Thoreau, but as I ventured a little further, I realized that Dillard isn’t copying Walden, but using the Walden experience to make it her own. Her writing is both lush and raw – describing the beautiful and the horrific.

“Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.” – Henry David Thoreau

I will write more on this subject of beliefs as time goes on.  It has become a central curiosity in my life.

Well, to be more accurate, I am fascinated by how beliefs shape & run our lives.  They are kind of like the operating systems that our “life computer” uses to make sense of all the incoming data.

If you hang out with someone for just a few minutes, you can pretty easily get a sense for what kind of beliefs are at work in their life.

The trouble with BELIEFS is that they are merely that.  Often, they are ideas that we have accepted as our own without any inquiry or experiential knowledge of them.

So, Thoreau’s quote caught my eye this morning where he says, “LIVE your beliefs…”

Live them.  Yes.  That means to take your beliefs out of the box and get them outside.  Try them on and get them grubby with real-world contact.

I’m not just talking about religion or politics here.  Examine the really large number of beliefs that are right now running like computer programs in the background of your consciousness.

Imagine yourself in an entirely different setting.  Yes…in a foreign country where they don’t automatically accept your way of life as THE standard.  What happens to your beliefs then?  Do they still work?

Well, that’s the real question, isn’t it?

Do the beliefs by which you operate your life really work when you consciously live them?

Don’t answer “Yes!” so quickly.

Can you think of a time in the past when you passionately held a belief that has since faded or even been discarded?  I certainly can.

So, I’ll spend some more time on this topic.  There’s a lot here and this is not Sunday School where we all sort of agree on the basics so that order can be maintained.

Let’s discuss and banter.

Yes…call me a heretic or a fool.  Don’t worry, I’ll give you plenty of reasons for that here shortly!

Weekend thought assignment #1: Become conscious (aware) of the individual beliefs that run simultaneously in your life.  Do any of them conflict with some of the others?  Don’t judge this or worry about it.  Just become aware.

While visiting relatives in Massachusetts over the weekend, I paid a visit to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. Not far inside the main gate is Author’s Ridge, where the local literary luminaries are buried, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

I’ve been to Walden Pond and Emerson’s house, and have always wanted to pay my respects to Emerson and Thoreau’s grave sites. While not Buddhists per se, the two of them were clearly in the Buddha’s wheelhouse, and  are a major influence on my ideas about an American Zen.

Emerson’s grave, in the family plot, is marked by a large boulder with an inscribed plaque attached to it. It is covered by stones placed by visitors, and I added mine to the tribute.

Thoreau is also in a family plot. The area is shaded by tall pine trees, and two of them have roots running right through Henry’s grave. Looking up at them, I commented to my friend Chuck that Henry was in those trees. It seemed more than fitting. It also illustrates the way I see the Buddhist concept of rebirth.

I don’t really believe in reincarnation. It seems at odds with the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence. If we reincarnate and can be aware of past lives, doesn’t that imply a kind of permanent self?  What is it that reincarnates and recognizes itself as such?

But basic physics has taught me that the things of which I am made cannot be destroyed.  They simply break down and then regroup as something else. That kind of “rebirth” makes sense to me. And I saw Henry David Thoreau in those pines.