Cosmos Café [7/16/19] - Seeing Through the World with Jeremy Johnson - or - Dwelling in the House of Gebser

And whenever one reads the Bible one stumbles across passages that are ubiquitous in the culture. “How are the mighty fallen”, etc.

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Sorry, but I’m confused by the refs: Do you mean 1 Sam chapters 30 - 31 and chapters 41-42 (which is how I would read that)? But, 1 Sam only has 31 chapters total (but 2 Sam does have 24). (The generally accepted format for Biblical referencing is “Book name Chapter #[colon]Verse(s) #”, e.g., Psalm 23:6 (which is "And I will dwell …), if that helps.)

1 Samuel 20: 30-31, 41-42 and 2 Samuel 1: 23-24 (in the unlikely event you still need the references…)

The whole lament of David for Saul and Jonathan is quite touching. I always found the event immediately preceding this interesting: an Amalekite seeking favor proudly announces to David that he was the one to (mercy) kill them before the Philistines got to them once the battle had been lost. David… was not pleased with this…

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I think he goes psychotic. David is a twisted person in many ways and he does some pretty nasty things. He had lots of boundary issues! The gory mess is saved by the majestic language.

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No problem, John, I do it all the time. Unfortunately, things have been a bit hectic around here and I didn’t have time to try and fill in the blanks myself. I figured it was just a matter of a number somewhere. Thanks.

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Part of (on a theme from this excellent talk) the Old Testament being “steeped in life” (which I think was Ed’s great way of putting it). David was also making a political statement to those who were loyal to the house of Saul - and not necessarily privy to the Jonathan-David connection.

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I think TJ corrected me. I skipped around and unfortunately may not have made a clear reading of this but I just wanted to highlight the postmodern wave. I was trying to demonstrate how Integralists can practice by resonating with previous literature and paying attention to how our cognition works. Politics, art, law are all drawing upon the archetypal patterns laid down in the Bible. It is amazing how unaware our culture is of it’s own roots. The way we hold male, female, masculine, feminine, is shaped by these primary texts. I can’t imagine where we would be without them. I turn to them for inspiration. The Mythic and Magical as Jeremy says is hard to tease apart. As I get older I witness how derivative most of the current cultural products are.

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This, my friend, is another entire discussion…

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Yes, I think that is true. David was a political animal. We see how over and over again he trusts people he should not trust, ignores people he should not ignore. He pays a very high price for his mistakes. At the end of the story we are exhausted! I think that we see him change from a boy to a great King to an old broken man is breathtaking.

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One of the things that I find about almost all of the key OT figures is as you say, John, they’re almost psychotic, or schizophrenic, or, well, whatever. As the Germans say, one day hooey, the next day phooey.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t know yet what to do with that fact. The heroes bifurcate, the younger trumps the older, hierarchies are subverted, order is chaoticized. They are stories (and characters) that are difficult to follow. On the one hand, they follow an not-so-unusual narrative format, but they are quite often bizarre at the literal level.

In the Kabbalistic circles in which I’ve ventured, there was a general agreement that one had to interpret scripture according to the PaRDeS principle. Those four (captialized) consonants form a Hebrew word that means “garden”, and are representative of Hebrew words that roughly translate as or connote “literal”, “psychological”, “allegorical”, and “hidden” (or divine or esoteric) if you will. Tenen talks about this in a couple of his recordings about the Genesis text. In other words, the “story” makes “literal” sense, but that may not be what the story is about. Of course the rabbinic way of reading means that everything you think you figure out has to agree, cohere, resonate with everything else in the Tanakh (OT), so I’m not sure a lot of headway gets made very often. They’ve been doing this for a couple of thousand years, if not more, documenting the process and comparing the results.

While I don’t think for a moment that we have to be doing what they are doing, it is helpful, at least in my mind, that we are aware that the bizzareness that we sometimes encounter has to do with when and where the text was originally composed, how the translations have modified understandings over time, and, on top of everything else, how these “levels” of comprehension and understanding may play into it, well, it is a rather complex project just to get the stories sorted, let alone their meanings.

Talk about being force to chunk down and chunk slow. That has been the primary thing I learned while trying to learn Biblical Hebrew.

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But something that is becoming ever clearer in our Axial Age pursuits … so we are engaging in at least a tangential part of that discussion. Of course, this is not to say that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to pursue this particular discussion in a more focused way in an appropriate forum.

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And when you are old and sitting next to the fire, it’s nice to know you can pull down the good book from the shelf and return to your favorite passage and learn something new each time. What I get from Jonathan and David and Saul is so much more complex than what I registered as a troubled youth. I now realize that many scholars have opened up territory that I intuited but had no capacity for figuring out. So, I take a keen interest in chunking down and chunking slow as these ultimate questions about God after God are becoming more vexing.

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And what different understandings of those archetypes are being drawn upon.

And what different shapings of those understandings are being put forth as the “right” one.

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I think we have a long way to go but we have come a very long way. I am seeing how the identity arises from these ancient and perhaps impoverished ways of knowing. Some people have no sense of history. I once had a very smart friend with lots of education who heard the Adam and Eve story explained to her and was amazed. No one had ever taught her anything from the Bible. I am aware of Camille Paglia, an art historian, lesbian and atheist, who bemoaned the fact that so few young people knew the Bible. She said that was not true of black people, she felt that group had a strong sense of the Bible. If you know the Bible well you have learned to deal with great ambiguities. Unfortunately, the fundamentalists have no sense of irony. This is a big topic.

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Generally true in my experience, though things are probably slowly changing. Of course the great ambiguities of life in the Americas strengthened the appeal of messages like strength-in-adversity and ultimate (divine) justice - as well as a place of spiritual ‘leveling’ in a hierarchical physical world.

In my general experience, they tend to have a profound sense of irony. It’s rather the concept of relativity (which I will define specifically for the moment as ‘there might be other ways of seeing’) that eludes many.
A big topic for sure.

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Maybe that’s why we call it the Good Book.

As well it should be. Part of the beauty of the Bible as literature, and (good) literature in general, is that each time you revisit it, you learn something new. Who, however, really takes the time to revisit? Part of my own Job-like railing with G-d is that He doesn’t seem interested in stopping the endless deluge of information we are drowning in that distracts us from it. It’s been damn near 40 years that we’ve been enduring. (Mumble-mumble, mumble-mumble …)

Now, I don’t want to open any kind of can of worms, but I often ask myself why we need more information, and why do we need another theory to try and explain all this information that I’m not sure we really need? I think it’s (whatever that actually is) all (whatever that means) there, and all we need to do (easier said than done, of course) is figure it out (whatever that means).

It is my firm belief that whatever it is that we need to find/attain/accomplish salvation (although I extremely dislike that word)/enlightenment/integrality is already “there” or “here” (or available or accessible or whatever). If such is meant for all of us (that is, there is zero discrimination of any kind in the cosmos), then even the simplest among us can “get it”. But most of us don’t get much of anything at all.

Yesterday, while reading about Ibn al’-Arabi in Zen and the Unspeakable God, Blum reported that it as his (al’-Arabi’s) view that the greatest impediment to truth/enlightenment/union with G-d was rationality and reason. The philosopher is, in the end, his own worst enemy and blocks his own path to the Godhead, so to speak. It was an interesting twist that I thought was worth reflecting on. Also, while trolling through EPO again in preparation for our next Axial Age meet-up, I was struck by this particular quote by, of all thinkers, Heidegger: “Thinking begins when we have experienced that reason, glorified through the centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking. [EPO, p. 408; from Holzwege, 1950, p. 247]”

Sounds like “Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.” You’ve got to get it wherever you are.

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And I would agree, completely. That was T-H-E bone of contention between my mother and me, and she left us much too soon for me to resolve even part of it. (And I think your statement is relevant and appropriate to every flavor of fundamentalism going, be it religious or political or whatever.)

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(Edited my post because upon reading it I wasn’t sure I had been clear - but I see my point got across. :smile:)

Yeah… I was raised between maternal literalism and paternal agnosticism. And deeply operative love from both! ‘Twas interesting…

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Heh, heh, heh … at least you got it sorted … I never knew where my father stood on any of this, even though he had (strong) opinions and views on (almost) everything. Funny how that works.

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I am probably quibbling about this but I found fundamentalists are easily shocked if you can quote scripture. And you can draw conclusions about anything if you know the right scripture at the right time with the right person ( no easy task). What I have found very sad is that many hard core fundamentalists are closeted homosexuals who are also homophobic. Curing homosexuals ( a faith based initiative) has no scientific facts to support it’s claims and is rapidly becoming illegal. Now, that theory which was a norm is being thrown out of the therapy world. Of course, it all boils down to the deadlock between constructionist and essentialist dualism. Are we a universal or are we a endangered minority? Is it in your genes or is it a choice? Unfortunately, these kinds of questions are confused. It is very hard for people like me who disentangled from the family mind early in life to watch these over reactions and the unnecessary suffering. It is amazing how much people will allow as long as you don’t talk about anything directly. The art of keeping it down low. I think the Post Modern wave did a lot of good and a lot of harm. I tried to bring some of my own confusion to the table. This is not easy to figure out if you have a strong devotional nature ( often religious) which is a basic need for many of us to express. No wonder many of us become loners to escape these akward confrontations. Most people prefer not to think about it and will get angry if you do.

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