Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
— Viktor Frankl
Never forget. Never forgive. Never again.
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_9742041791213725071691303540.webp
George Kennan in 1998:
"I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies.
I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever.
No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.
Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then (the NATO expanders) will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong.
This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end."
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_2915297076012575911691054071.webp
When the earliest Christians began celebrating their Eucharist up the coast in Rome, the Velians would insinuate themselves into the very foundations of the latest mystery religion. Where the precious secret of how to die before you die was practiced by the first generations of Christians, the so-called paleo-Christians, and later suppressed by the growing bureaucracy of a faith that chose to deny its Greek heritage. Ruck knows that, of course. Raised Catholic, he has been researching the origins of Christianity his entire career and writing about it since the early 2000s. The evidence at Emporion doesn’t just implicate the Ancient Greeks. It implicates their Phocaean sister city in Velia. And by a documented line of succession that we will explore, it implicates Rome. For the devotees of Jesus and the Catholic Church especially, the notion that their religion was midwifed by Greek-speaking Italian mystics with a spiked Eucharist could prove a very hard pill to swallow. But Ruck has been down this road before. So even if it takes a little while for the evidence to come to light, the old professor is confidant that a new generation of archaeochemists will be able to scientifically confirm the true nature of the original Eucharist in the years to come. And in the process, explain why the paleo-Christians in southern Italy and other Greek-speaking pockets of the ancient Mediterranean would have embraced the religion of Jesus. Not as something unfamiliar or unique, but a convenient take on the same Mysteries that had coaxed their Greek ancestors to Eleusis for two thousand years. And the same Mysteries that had inspired their Greek cousins at Mas Castellar de Pontós to create their very own house temple with their very own home brew. More than two hundred years before Jesus and his Last Supper brought the Mysteries into the dining room, the Greeks in Iberia beat him to the punch. They and their fellow witches in southern Italy were paving the way for the world’s biggest religion to find easy converts in every kitchen across the Roman Empire. In 1978, a lone classicist at Boston University tried to tell the world about this whole “perverse” idea. But the world wasn’t quite ready. Before we leave the Benedictine Abbey of Sant Pere de Galligants, I have to ask Ruck one final question. “Do you think this vindicates the past forty years of your tortured life?” He grinned. “Well, it will certainly make some people unhappy, won’t it?”
— Brian C. Muraresku
The most important book published in this century.
“[A]mong the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those [Eleusinian] Mysteries. For by means of them we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized. Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned from them the fundamentals of life, and have grasped the basis not only for living with joy, but also for dying with a better hope.” — Cicero
“In AD 364, the Christian emperor Valentinian abolished all nocturnal celebrations in an effort to shut down the [Eleusinian] Mysteries. The almost two-thousand-year march of pilgrims to Eleusis was in serious jeopardy of screeching to a halt. The Greek historian Zosimus credits Praetextatus with successfully convincing the powerful Valentinian to backtrack, permitting “the entire rite to be performed in the manner inherited from the ancestors.” But it’s what the initiate says to the emperor that, among all the strange things about Eleusis, always struck me as the strangest by far. It’s a prophecy of sorts. Faced with the obliteration of “the most sacred Mysteries,” Praetextatus declares that the shortsighted law “would make the life of the Greeks unlivable.” Having drunk the kukeon and experienced the vision for himself, the priest points to Eleusis as the one place that “hold[s] the whole human race together.” The Greek word for “unlivable” is abiotos (ἀβίοτος) — literally, the absence or opposite of “life” (bios). It’s a rare, evocative word. The eminent Hungarian scholar Carl Kerenyi is fascinated by it in his seminal 1962 book on the Mysteries, written in German, Die Mysterien von Eleusis. Kerenyi concludes that the word was consciously chosen to inform later generations that the Mysteries “were connected not only with Athenian and Greek existence but with human existence in general.”” — Brian C. Muraresku
Murarescu's book is the most important book published in this century, for it speaks the truth about the cornerstone in the foundation of human civilization that has been lost — the great tradition of direct experience of Transcendence. Without this tradition, humanity is doomed, and our modern history clearly illustrates this fact. Either we will bring back into our culture the experience of the divine that is available to everyone, or we will perish.
https://misharogov.medium.com/eleusinian-mysteries-a22e899cfd41
Every world system is a segment taken out of the world. The world itself cannot become a system. All “scientific cosmologies” have been mythical cosmologies, built on scientific methods and scant remnants of myth.
— Karl Jaspers
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_3213610137587863101691050755.webp
Ужасный сон отяготел над нами,
Ужасный, безобразный сон:
В крови до пят, мы бьемся с мертвецами,
Воскресшими для новых похорон.
Осьмой уж месяц длятся эти битвы,
Геройский пыл, предательство и ложь,
Притон разбойничий в дому молитвы,
В одной руке распятие и нож.
И целый мир, как опьяненный ложью,
Все виды зла, все ухищренья зла!..
Нет, никогда так дерзко правду Божью
Людская кривда к бою не звала!..
И этот клич сочувствия слепого,
Всемирный клич к неистовой борьбе,
Разврат умов и искаженье слова –
Всё поднялось и всё грозит тебе,
О край родной! такого ополченья
Мир не видал с первоначальных дней...
Велико, знать, о Русь, твое значенье!
Мужайся, стой, крепись и одолей!
— Тютчев, август 1863 года
"Helplessly hoping humanity will have a collective awakening is a fool’s errand. I watched Oppenheimer in the vain hope that this film would be the vector for the transmission of the kind of insight that occurs when one is brought back from the edge of disaster. I left disappointed because the movie did not deliver in this regard. That I expected such a revelation from theatrical art was not far-fetched—after all, it was ABC’s “The Day After” which helped alter the thinking of President Ronald Reagan in 1983, propelling him down a path that led to the initiation of nuclear disarmament between the United States and the Soviet Union. But then again, that was the purpose of “The Day After”—to scare the American people into an awakening where nuclear disarmament was not only desired but demanded. Oppenheimer, unfortunately, was created to entertain. In this it succeeded. But as a vehicle for the salvation of mankind it fell far short of the mark."
The fact that this [transcendental] dimension [of consciousness] remained hidden through the ages, the fact that, even after it made itself felt, it never aroused a habitual and consistent theoretical interest, can (and will) be explained by displaying a peculiar antagonism between the entry into this dimension and the preoccupations involved in all the interests which make up the naturally normal human world-life. … This schema for a possible clarification of the problem of objective science reminds us of Helmholtz’ well-known image of the plane-beings, who have no idea of the dimension of depth, in which their plane-world is a mere projection. Everything of which men—the scientists and all the others—can become conscious in their natural world-life (experiencing, knowing, practically planning, acting) as a field of external objects—as ends, means, processes of action, and final results related to these objects—and on the other hand, also, in self-reflection, as the spiritual life which functions thereby—all this remains on the “plane,” which is, though unnoticed, nevertheless only a plane within an infinitely richer [transcendental] dimension of depth. … Of course the power of historical prejudices also plays a constant role here, especially of those which, coming from the origin of the modem positive sciences, dominate us all. It is of the very essence of such prejudices, drilled into the souls even of children, that they are concealed in their immediate effects. The abstract general will to be without prejudice changes nothing about them.
— Husserl
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_8157520866969394761690642361.webp
“[Метафизическая] концепция материальной субстанции, возможно, является величайшим препятствием на пути к истинному пониманию природы.” — Нильс Бор
Но как объяснить им это, если они не понимают даже то, что "физическая материя" это именно метафизическая, а не научная концепция, в то время как наука не может дать ничего, кроме абстрактных математических описаний "природы" эмпирической реальности феноменального сознания и основанных на таких описаниях предсказаний эмпирических (интерсубъективных феноменальных) процессов? Как мы можем двигаться с ними дальше, если они не могут увидеть даже отправную точку?
“Чтобы сохранить свою репутацию, каждый ученый вынужден говорить, что ему не нравится метафизика. На самом же деле он имеет в виду, что ему не нравится, когда его метафизику критикуют.” — Альфред Норт Уайтхед
"Новая научная истина торжествует не потому, что убеждает своих противников и заставляет их увидеть свет, а скорее потому, что ее противники в конце концов умирают, и вырастает новое поколение, знакомое с ней." — Макс Планк
То же самое можно сказать вообще о любой новой (зачастую, как в случае с истиной трансцендентальной феноменологии и онтологического идеализма, хорошо забытой старой) истине: её торжество прямо зависит от вымирания тех, чьи беспробудные заблуждения стоят у нее на пути. Поколения метафизических материалистов (физикалистов) должны умереть и уступить путь новым поколениям, которые смогут избавиться от их метафизической мифологии и увидеть великий свет истины идеализма: всё есть Сознание, и это — Бог.
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_4077997786347772471690605917.webp
The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
— Gilles Deleuze
It's no coincidence that such a sexual pervert, atheist, metaphysical materialist, and evangelist of global empire as Harari denies the existence of freewill. If there is no God and no freedom, everything is permitted. A demon popularized by other demons.
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_5223652770230772101690533836.webp
"The denial of freedom is the denial of moral life." — Lev Lopatin
"Man's relation to God is not a quality given by nature. Because it only is in conjunction with freedom, it awakens in the individual only when from his mere assertion of life he takes the leap to his self, that is, to the area where, authentically free from the world, he becomes fully open to the world, where he can be independent of the world, because he lives in bond with God. God is for me in the degree to which I authentically exist." — Karl Jaspers
"Guidance through Transcendence is different from any guidance in the world, for God's guidance is of only one kind. It is given through freedom itself." — Karl Jaspers
"God does not speak through the commands and revelations of other men but in man's selfhood and through his freedom, not from without but from within. Any restriction on man's freedom, created by God and oriented toward God, is a restriction upon the very thing through which God manifests himself." — Karl Jaspers
"It is not man who demands freedom from God, but God demands freedom from man, and in this freedom He sees the dignity of man's God-likeness." — Nikolai Berdyaev
"We must rescue responsibility from the pernicious doctrine of the unfreedom of man, for otherwise we cannot escape the destruction of all morality." — Karl Jaspers
I don’t have the talent to do more than to suggest what seem to me reasonable guidelines for a better future. One might argue that Marx was too cautious in keeping to only a few general words about post-capitalist society, but he was right to recognize that it will have to be envisioned and developed by people who have liberated themselves from the bonds of illegitimate authority.
— Noam Chomsky
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_4689563264687362711690344548.webp
Слышались выкрики команд: «Отряд, вперед марш! Левой - 2-3-4! Левой - 2-3-4! Левой - 2-3-4! Левой - 2-3-4! Первый человек кругом, левой, левой, левой! Шапки долой!» Эти слова звучат в моих ушах даже теперь. По приказу «Шапки долой!» мы проходили через ворота [конц]лагеря под лучами прожекторов. Кто шагал не достаточно энергично, получал пинок. Еще хуже было тому, кто из-за холода спешил снова натянуть шапку на голову раньше, чем было разрешено. Мы спотыкались в темноте о большие камни и замерзшие комья грязи, шагая по дороге из лагеря. Сопровождающие нас охранники подгоняли нас криками и прикладами винтовок. Заключенные с больными ногами шли, опираясь на плечи товарищей. Шли молча; ледяной ветер не способствовал разговорам. Закрывая рот поднятым воротником, человек, идущий рядом со мной, вдруг прошептал: «Если бы только наши жены могли сейчас видеть нас! Я надеюсь, что им лучше в их лагерях, и они не знают, каково приходится нам». Эти слова вызвали в моем сознании мысли о моей жене. И когда мы брели, спотыкаясь, скользя на обледенелых местах, поддерживая друг друга, ничего больше не говоря, мы знали: каждый из нас думал о своей жене. Случайно я посмотрел на небо, где звезды начинали тускнеть и розовый свет зари начал появляться из-за темной кромки облаков. Но в моем сознании по-прежнему сохранялся образ жены, видимый с необычайной отчетливостью. Я слышал, как она отвечает мне, видел ее улыбку, ее нежный и подбадривающий взгляд. Реальное или нет, но ее лицо было тогда более ярким, чем начинавшее всходить солнце. Меня пронзила мысль: впервые в моей жизни я увидел истину, воспетую многими поэтами, провозглашаемую многими мыслителями. Истину, что любовь есть окончательная и высшая цель, к которой может стремиться человек. Тогда я понял смысл величайшей тайны, которую смогли раскрыть человеческая поэзия и человеческая мысль и вера: спасение человека — в любви и через любовь.
— Виктор Франкл
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_7488513043864616681690322935.webp
Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resigned themselves or make compromises.
— Hermann Hesse
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_9548048568239865151690282430.webp
Any weakening of the intellectual life in society inevitably leads to an increase in material inclinations and vile egoistic instincts.
— Fyodor Tyutchev
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_8716534881546139881690279793.webp
Only definitive knowledge can make definitive nonknowledge possible; it alone can achieve the authentic failure which opens up a vista not merely upon the discoverable existent but upon Being itself.
— Karl Jaspers
https://nostrcheck.me/media/public/nostrcheck.me_3939801465703113541690275659.webp
The ultimate question of metaphysics is God. This whole philosophical thing is not about matter vs. consciousness, but about unfaith vs. faith.
“How great a friend [the metaphysical concept of] material substance has been to atheists in all ages were needless to relate. All their monstrous systems have so visible and necessary a dependence on it that, when this corner-stone is once removed, the whole fabric cannot choose but fall to the ground, insomuch that it is no longer worth while to bestow a particular consideration on the absurdities of every wretched sect of atheists.” — George Berkeley
“We must return to a deeper origin, to a fountainhead from which all faith once welled forth in its particular historical shapes, to this wellspring which can flow at any time man is ready for it. When trust in that which is manifest and given in the world no longer supports life, then trust in the Origin of all things must lay the foundations.” — Karl Jaspers
“Faith is not a matter of the goals of volition, nor of the contents of reason that become purposes. For faith cannot be willed, it does not consist in propositions, between which one has to choose, it evades the programme. ... Faith is not a particular content, not a dogma—dogma may be the expression of an historical shape assumed by faith; but it may also be a delusion. Faith is the fulfilling and moving element in the depths of man, in which man is linked, above and beyond himself, with the Origin of his being.” — Karl Jaspers
“Pure immanence without Transcendence remains nothing but deaf existence.” — Karl Jaspers
Each time I mention God and faith, several people unfollow me on Twitter. Repression. There is a dark force in us that resists faith — the force of egoistic self-will, for “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.” (Dostoyevsky) Demonic arbitrariness vs. self-constrained freedom, i.e., evil vs. good.
Egoistic self-will is self-destructive, it runs down the spiral of chaotic (often violent) willing and submission to the power of whatever worldly authorities it creates for itself, terminating in the power of machines. It believes that it wants freedom but, in fact, runs away from it into an abyss of unfreedom.
“Without Transcendence Existenz becomes a barren and loveless demonic obstinacy.” — Karl Jaspers
The ultimate question of metaphysics is God. The ultimate existential choice is between good and evil.