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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rick Julian who wrote (24931)	9/15/1998 10:15:00 AM
From: Kid Rock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

p.s. I'm not being an apologist for these men, just want to give them a fair shake. My feelings about them remind me of those I have for Louis Farakkan: while he's widely branded as a rabid racist by the media (and were one to listen to limited excepts from his speeches one could be easily led to this conclusion) I've listened to many of his speeches in their entirity, and I hear his message being much morecomplex and sensible than his occasionally rancourous rhetoric. Could not the same be said for Emile?

To: Rick Julian who wrote (24931)	9/15/1998 12:18:00 PM
From: E	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

There are thinkers and thinkers. And thoughtful people often find themselves in the position of having to assess which thinkers are worth attending to. The productions of one class of thinker may consist entirely of nonsense--being based on false premises, internally contradictory, full of counter factual assertions, etc. One is licensed, in approaching such thinkers, to regard any "sensible" sounding material found in the mass of their burblings, as accidental elements. These people are often called "psychotic." In a second class of thinker, the balance between the sensible and deviations from the sensible is set differently. The proportion of sensible utterance is larger, and of nonsense, smaller. In such cases, one may wish, if one finds concurrence between one's own views and some of the views expressed by this compromised thinker, to overlook or even deny the nonsensical views. In the third case, there are thinkers who are rarely silly, and whose logic of discourse permits them to alter silly positions taken by them if their attention is called to the silliness. I believe Ouspensky and Gurdjieff are probably second case guys. Maybe Farrakhan, too. But, as to Farrakhan, keep in mind that everything in his thought derives from a nonsensical cosmology purporting, among other lunacies, that the white race is the mutant creation of a mad scientist named Yakub. Farrakhan is also a vicious, manipulative, dishonest, hate-mongering antisemite. Take a look at the literature list pushed by the Nation of Islam. "Occasionally rancorous" is a startlingly euphemistic characterization of Farrakhan's "rhetoric." In my opinion, any sensible views expressed by Mr. Farrakhan need to be seen against the medium in which they float.

To: Rick Julian who wrote (24931)	9/15/1998 8:54:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 108807

Rick, <<Their work is as innovative (particularly Gurdjieff's) as Stravinsky's, or Joyce's, or Coltrane's, or Picasso's -- all whose avant garde works elicited claims of "outlandish", "bizarre", and "unorthodox" when they first appeared>> As innovative, perhaps, but hardly as pleasing from an aesthetic standpoint. While that is a subjective judgement, I have yet to encounter anyone who read Gurdjieff or Ouspensky for pleasure. Both men, particularly Gurdjieff, clearly regarded themselves as inherently superior to other living beings (they also quarreled bitterly with each other, doubtless over who was superior to whom). While this was a common characteristic of the prophets of this period, it also inspires more than a bit of caution, in me at least. Are you familiar with the story of the "discovery" of Krishnamurti? The presumptuousness of that age never ceases to amaze me. I read Ouspensky's "Tertium Organum" when I was quite young and still enthralled by abstract intellectualisms, and I was much impressed. I remember picking it up again several years later, and quickly concluding that my time would be better spent floating down a river, or going to a bar with good live music and flirting with some girls. A regression, perhaps. Steve