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Thursday, September 22, 2011

The Concept "The End-of-......"

End-of-whatever, merely fill in the blank.

So, what do we mean when we say "End-of_Time" or "End-of-Science" (due to budget cuts and anti-science types in power) and "End-of-Post-Modernism", or any of those many and variegated notions which bloom now, in this the malaise of our years.

Quoting Abel Rey fron 1907:
If the physical and chemical sciences, which in history have been essentially emancipators, collapse in a crisis that reduces them to the status of mere technically useful recipes but deprives them of all significance from the standpoint of knowledge of nature, the result must needs be a complete revolution both in the art of logic and the history of ideas.... Knowledge of the real must be sought and given by other means.... One must take another road, one must return to subjective intuition, to a mystical sense of reality, in a word to the mysterious, all that of which one thought it had been deprived.
What it amounts to is a return to Intuition, a Going-Inside of individual minds and a turning away from the Extended Mind, the Group Mind, the commonplaces and hackneyed ideas whose time has finally run out - standing around forlornly, gaping like monarchs after World War I in search of a kindly kingdom!

It is mystical because it is not-yet-conscious in us: it remains Intuition for which we seek conscious expression. We stand around and write and orate, wondering "What's the word!? What's the word?! What are the words I'm looking for!??"

Some of us mess up, like Reverend Camping, and proclaim The End-of-the-World, for example, a wee bit early. Most us dive back into accepted forms of thought and activity.
Even those who truly turn to mysticism usually express themselves in the usual and accepted (dare we say "hackneyed" here, too?) forms of mysticism, becoming living icons of holy folks of the past.

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