[afterthefact]

 

this really lifts me up

[MellySingsDoom]

Was Mr Rogers a closet sleazoid? I do hope he was!

[floatingslowly]

Originally Posted by MellySingsDoom

Was Mr Rogers a closet sleazoid? I do hope he was!

girlfun's mother wouldn't let her watch Mr. Rogers [no, really] because she was afraid that he would be her only male role-model (her dad worked a lot).

[MellySingsDoom]

Yeah, that Mr Rogers - I bet he liked bondage porn (thank God the dead can't sue!)

[afterthefact]

The new glitch seems to make this more creepy...

[Danny Himself]

Mr Rogers was one of the nicest guys ever to live! Creepy, but only accidentally. He had a good style too- Ties, cardigans, keds. Could he be any more indie?

[afterthefact]

He just needed some black rimmed glasses and a Modest Mouse shirt...

[SpectralJulianIsNotDead]

One of the greatest from Pittsburgh.

I remember we used to have a Lady Elaine Fairchild puppet. Good times.

[gmku]

Mr. Rogers was retro cool before there was retro cool.

[atsonicpark]

I’ve been giving a lot of thought towards the weaknesses in thought. It strikes me that we, in the west, and in the many places throughout the world we have infected with our world view, suffer under a tyranny of the rational mind. The major problem that this thought imposes upon me is that in order for me to get the idea across I must think rationally. I must use reason in order to convey to you that reason itself is flawed. First let me say that we are talking philosophy not psychology. I make no pretense at science in my discussion. Psychology is philosophy as science, and as such is truly useless, at least for this discussion. Psychology tends to take a leap from the specific to the general in its application and therefore falls into the chasm of falsehood. I intend to speak from the general to the general, forget the specifics.
Many philosophers have contended throughout the ages that the body is a tool. It is a vehicle for the soul, the mind, the self. Taking this further we can say that the mind itself is a tool as well. Our mind has myriad uses. For the sake of clarification, let us divorce “the mind” from “The brain”. The brain is the organ that more or less automatically runs the operations that allow the body to function. The brain also obeys many of the commands of the mind, by which I mean consciousness. What I mean when I say mind is the soup that makes up our mental activity, conscious and unconscious, rational and irrational. In the west we are quick to dismiss one half of the equation in favor of the other. In the west there is a certain Deification of reason that we can trace back to the renascence. However I would argue that reason has ruled over western thought for far longer than even this.
The middle ages in Europe is rightly thought of as a time of religious oppression, a time in which illogical fears of a divine bogeyman kept the Christian flock from straying. Certainly though this was no age ruled by reason you may conclude. However I posit that it is in fact an age of nearly pure reason. By this I mean reason without recompense to intuition or empirical data. So it is true it was no age of science, but it was certainly no age of revelation either. The people of this era start with one truth, the bible as the word of God, and use reason to explain the world in light of this fact. It did not matter that the empirical data did not bear out the reasoned conclusion, an intuitive thought as to a heretical truth behind dogma was an attempt by Satan to hijack faith. So not only was this age a dark mark in scientific history, it is also a dark make in human spiritual history.
The world before Gutenberg was the true antediluvian civilization, because the flood of knowledge that the printing press brought us changed the world far more than any other. With this influx of knowledge men were able to discover that in fact there were many spiritual perspectives throughout the ages and throughout the world. It was this combined with the obvious corruption of the Catholic Church that provoked men to find a new starting point for their reason. Descartes found himself, and therefore pure reason, the scientists found empiricism in which to temper their reasoned hypothesis. As religion became more open and free, far from finding a return to the age revelations and contact with the other side of our minds, we find the French deification of reason, we find atheism, and we find church after church turning religious ceremonies into tired funerals, fitting then that they worship a corpse.
So after this we find that we have people who continue on much like those in the Middle Ages using reason to define the world based on the inductive reasoning that the bible is truth, and then we have the scientists who combine reason with empiricism and try to discover the world in a deductive way. What we have is a complete ignoring of the other side of the human equation. This is not ignored by all, for we still have free religious thinkers, writers, and artists who use this intuitive illogical side to express great things. However it is devalued. We find that again this deification of reason as an all powerful god who shuts down the arguments and opinions of the illogical by default. If an opinion is not based in scientific fact it is seen as not simply lesser-than but as farcical and worthy of complete derision. New religions are dangerous cults, artists are kooks, and those who would indulge in any sort of independent spirituality are simply naïve fools who are victims of their own ignorance.
The problem of course is rooted in Descartes. When he stripped away everything in order to find his true self, there is one thing he didn’t strip away, his reason. Therefore he misconstrued this as the true self. “I think therefore I am” Well all that means is that he is still thinking. It reminds me of the old,”When you realize you are meditating, you are no longer meditating.” Don’t get me wrong, despite the fact that he was incorrect; Descartes made great and brave contributions to the intellectual world. It should also not be misconstrued that I am the enemy of reason either. Reason certainly has its place. However this is part of the problem, Reason has its place…but in our society it doesn’t stay there.
Reason is an evolutionary gift. It is a tool in which we use to navigate our natural environment and make decisions based upon it. Reason is part of the soup of consciousness and there for is different from an organ, but it is but one of the ingredients to the soup. Reason helps us decide if we should attack at dawn or at dusk, or whether we should choose a socialist state or an absolutist monarchy. Reason has its limitations. It should not rule emotional issues. Although like most things a good decision should be tempered with sound reason it should never dominate the decision, lest we go back to the good old days of arranged marriages. We find that even in the sciences reason breaks down quite quickly when we try to apply it to quantum theories. Although I’m not educated enough to discuss this subject intelligently so I will leave you to discover it on your own.
Reason is a tool that we use in order to navigate the physical world. The problem is that we so often misapply it. Would you use a power drill to dig a ditch? How about a spade to plunge a toilet? So why when we are discussing spirituality are we resorting to reason? We either find ourselves in a medieval paradigm slaves to a book written far before our time, or we find ourselves in this modern paradigm chained to empiricism. Neither perspective is able to fully appreciate the world beyond the physical, the world of the emotional, or any of the other dimensions of the human world and mind that are not available through the pages of a book, or through direct physical contact.
There is much to be said for using intuition, creativity, inspiration, and the illogical parts of the mind to comprehend truth. We can use these in nature to comprehend the world beyond ourselves in a direct way by simply allowing it to happen. There is a reason that westerners have to take psychedelics to have the experiences that aboriginal people have without aid of such substances. Descartes has told us that all we are is our rational mind, and if we shut it off for even a moment, there is the real existential terror that we may cease to exist. So we must be eased into this. This is not to say that reason can be abandoned: far from it! Our experiences that we bring back from the spiritual world must be incorporated into our world view through the use of reason. The problem comes when reason attempts to reject these experiences as invalid. This we must avoid.
There are many ways to get in touch with this side of our mind, automatic writing, meditation, real prayer, magical rituals, painting, performing music(Although this is not sure fire, because a vast amount of musicians only use their rational mind when constructing a performing a piece the endless recitation of scales, and the playing of other peoples music isn’t creative, its memory). My favorite is simply to sit on a beach or in a forest and let nature speak to me, because it will, if you can silence your own mind long enough to hear it, but perhaps more on that later.

[gmku]

Sorry, you lost me after the first sentence. What's your point exactly?

[atsonicpark]

Descartes roots.