Sunday, December 21, 2008

Yes . . . But Where Is It Tomorrow?*

Yes . . . But Where Is It Tomorrow?*


Preston Sturgis was a man tormented by his own genius. Like a shaman he could stand outside society and so detached observe it's workings. Unfortunately, unlike a shaman, he could not heal his community. Perhaps that inability was because he saw the whole of humanity as his community, and that is too much a burden for anyone.

Sturgis continually broke new ground, sought new thrills and engaged new ideas. Sometimes he was wildly successful, sometimes he was pitifully deficient. During his life he succeeded and failed in many professions: inventor, businessman, playwright, stage director, screenwriter, screen director, collector, songwriter (words and music), caricaturist, restaurateur, yachtsman, husband (4 times) and raconteur. His life ended in failure, a nearly forgotten man, his last gasp a half-finished autobiography entitled "The Events Leading Up To My Death."

His movie credits include 40 films as a screenwriter, 13 films as a director, 7 films as a producer and 4 films as an actor. The films run the gamut from classics to flops to forgotten, but all dealt with the human condition; the trials and tribulations of lives navigating through a treacherous society. As such, even his worst films are an attempt to deliver a message of healing to his audience. His message -- He knows, he cares, he is telling the world. Sturgis had no answers himself, but he did know how to couch his message in comedy much as a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Alas, Sturgis did not have the magick of Mary Poppins, and if he were alive today he would no doubt think all the effort of his films were for naught.

In many ways his films were a pale image of his life. The rich characters he was known for in his films are but shadows compared to the people he knew in life. His mother, Mary Desti, was a woman possessed and lived a life too fantastic for fiction. Some of the other people that were close to him at one time or another included Isadora Duncan, Aleister Crowley, Marjorie Merriweather Post, Irving Thalberg, Howard Hughes and Darryl Zanuck. He could and did travel in many circles, and the nameless nobodies he knew also appeared, larger than life, throughout his films.

The philosopher that resembles Sturgis most intimately is Aristophanes. They both brought all their characters, large and small, to life and pit them against the capricious whims of society. Both sought to bring their message to the masses through comedy, a comedy that is at once terribly tragic and poignantly comfortable. There is a truth that gallops through their writings that is undeniably real, yet at the same time is ignored in everyday life in favor of idle illusion.

Perhaps the best homage I can pay to Preston Sturgis is to say that I want to watch every one of his films.

*Excerpt from "The Lady Eve" - pastry chef's reply to accolades of wonderment on his confectionary creation

Writer Filmography

Director Filmography

Producer Filmography

Actor Filmography

Filomgraphy from the Official Preston Sturgis Site: http://www.prestonsturges.com/

Posted by OnlyEd at 12/21/2008 02:18:00 PM 0 comments

Thursday, December 18, 2008

The Edge

The Edge




The following is an excerpt on an interesting interview by Matthew Joyce of Peter Russell . . . interesting to me, anyway. My question is: why is philosophy dead? Indeed, to me it is dead if all it is about is one philosopher parroting another, still another philosopher denying the first, then another philosopher explaining what the other three meant, and still another philosopher contradicting the fourth, and so on, ad nauseum . . . without any one of them saying anything worthwhile to advance our common knowledge. Why is it that the following excerpt has to come from The Lunatic Fringe? And why is it that The Lunatic Fringe makes more sense than any philosopher since Socrates? Why? Because Socrates himself was a card carrying member of The Lunatic Fringe -- and THAT is where philosophy should be. The 'saneness' of mainstream Society, of mainstream philosophy, of mainstream -anything- is an illusion. The Mainstream is quite mad. I reject and refute and refuse it. The Lunatic Fringe is quite sane. Perhaps you have to have gone through the purifying fires of despair, perhaps you have to have desired to beat the shit out of Society's god, perhaps you have to have been to The Edge in order to See. Yes, that is it. Sanity is about exploring the boundaries of consciousness. If you've never cried out to the Universe for mercy, if you've never fled from all human contact, if you've never wanted to just be as Blind and Dead as the billions of Drones crowding you with their incessant and inane and ignorant chatter . . . then you've never been Alive, you've never been Sane, you've never Been.

Why am I writing this and posting that? Good question. I have no answer. I just want to. This guy ain't so smart, he just has open eyes. That, in itself, sets him apart from 99.9999% of humanity.


The Coming Paradigm Shift and What It Means


MJ: Our conversation today is going to start with some big picture issues and then focus on what people can do to advance their own spiritual paths. Can you tell us a little bit about this paradigm shift that's occurring and what's going on?

PR: It's something I call the super-paradigm because it's a paradigm of paradigms. Just to remind people, a paradigm is the basic model behind any area of science. The theory of relativity is a paradigm. In biology it has to do with DNA and RNA. The super paradigm is the much larger paradigm in which all of science - physics, biology, astronomy - does its work. That paradigm says the fundamental nature of the physical world is matter. It is material in nature and in that sense it is dead unconscious matter.

Few people in science question it. But as with all paradigms certain things can't be solved within the paradigm. The classic case was the old paradigm of the earth being the center of the universe. It couldn't explain the movement of the planets. So Copernicus said maybe the earth is revolving around the sun, which was heresy at the time. But he questioned the fundamental assumption.

The problem today with the material paradigm is that it explains everything pretty well except for the fact that we are conscious - that we have experiences and an inner world of thoughts, feelings, and imagination. There is nothing in the scientific worldview that says the dead inanimate matter that constitutes our brain cells should give rise to an experience. According to modern physics all that activity in the brain should be going on in the dark without any experience arising. Nobody can explain that.

MJ: That's a fairly large hole in the paradigm.

PR: It's a huge hole because in a sense the only thing we know with absolute certainty is that we are experiencing beings. We can doubt any aspect of our experience. We may be living in The Matrix. Our experiences may even be fed to us and there may not even be a real world. But even if I'm in The Matrix I can't doubt that I'm experiencing something. So there's always this problem of how does matter give rise to experience.

What a growing number of people have been doing is questioning the fundamental assumption that matter is not conscious. I believe there is no point at which consciousness appears. We know other animals are conscious. They experience. We see dogs and they seem to dream at night. It doesn't mean an ant thinks and feels like we do. But there is an inner model of its world. There is a subjective experience. It might be a billionth of the intensity of our consciousness. But there's something. It isn't completely unconscious.

When you take that view that conscious awareness is always there, then this problem of how dead inner matter gives rise to experience dissolves. As life has become more complex, so the inner life has got much richer and more structured until we have the magnificent rich consciousness that we experience. It's always been there.

MJ: Its one thing to talk about living things like ants or bacteria being conscious. But are you extending consciousness to what science would consider non-living matter?

PR: That's the leap. Where science normally draws a line is the nervous system. They say as soon as the nervous system evolves you have consciousness. But you still have to explain why a particular structure gives rise to experience. If you go back further and say a bacterium has some inner light but a virus doesn't, then you have to explain again this magical step of how come a bacterium has some sort of inner light. As soon as you draw a line you come up against this problem. So what we need to do is say there is no line. The consciousness of the bacterium is like a billionth of ours and the virus DNA is much less still. But there is never a point where that inner light is completely extinguished. That doesn't mean rocks think or have experiences like we do, but they are not absolutely, completely dead.

http://www.monroeinstitute.com/
Posted by OnlyEd at 12/18/2008 06:18:00 PM 0 comments
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