The Swan's Nest

Elias and Schopenauer on the Will.

The Swan's Nest — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 06:57:00 GMT

I've been noting the similarities between the Elias material and German Romanticism, in particular, Arthur Schopenhauer. Like Schopenhauer, Elias asserts the primacy of the Will. According to Elias (and in contradiction to various other New Age and New Thought writers), thought alone does not create reality. The primal source of all phenomenal manifestation Elias ascribes io the faculty of "attention", "doing" and "choosing" -- in other words, Will. As in Schopenhauer's schema, the Will manifests phenomenal reality via perception (Schopenhauer's Anschauung ), organized in accordance with the Ten Primary Belief Systems (roughly comparable to Schopenhauer's Fourfold Principle of Sufficient Reason, encompassing time, space, matter, causation, logic and the like). It is interesting that Elias rarely uses the word "Will" itself; he refers to this function almost always in terms of action: "choosing",. Perhaps through his use of verbs he wishes to avoid reifying the Will, making it into a concrete...(read more)

Active Use of Inner Senses: Intuition

The Swan's Nest — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:09:00 GMT

Each of the inner senses can be used actively as well as passively. The active mode of Intuition is probability-shifting, or coincidental magick -- changing, adjusting and shaping the workings of chance and coincidence. The Law of Attraction and the Power of Intent are two popular ways of describing projective intuition. In this mode, you actively select future probabilities rather than merely sensing them. The synthesis of active and passive intuition, or the midpoint between them, is what Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi called the Flow State. In this state, a person moves and acts spontaneously in accord with intuition, and the barrier between subject and object dissolves. The flow state is common in sport, dance, and other highly focused activities. Quite often it results in performance that seems extraordinary or miraculous, as when a figure skater spins on the ice with the exquisitely precise abandon of a gyroscope, or an athlete seems to defy weight and gravity, or a mountain-climber surmounts...(read more)

Notes on Schopenhauer 1.

The Swan's Nest — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:25:00 GMT

Notes on The World as Will and Idea (WWI), Book 1. Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea was first published in 1819, and its second edition in 1844. In 1963, three months before she began channeling Seth, Jane Roberts composed a piece of automatic writing with a similar title, "The Physical Universe As Idea Construction". This was to be the nucleus of the complete body of work later elaborated in her channeled and unchanneled writings. There are some interesting parallels between Schopenhauer's philosophy and the Roberts/Seth material. Seth identifies the nature of being and consciousness as action, while Schopenhauer states that the nature of matter is action and causation, and that it, like time and space, is an idea of perception (consciousness). In a pre-Einsteinian intimation of the relativistic space-time continuum, he explains that time, space, matter and causality are all forms of the principle of sufficient reason , and that matter, or mass, is nothing other than the...(read more)

Preference, Evolution and the Law of Attraction.

The Swan's Nest — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:12:00 GMT

The Abraham-Hicks book Ask and It Is Given contains some striking passages about the role that individual preferences play in evolution: Do not underestimate the value of your preferences, for the evolution of your planet depends upon those of you on the Leading Edge of thought continuing to fine-tune your desires. And the contrast, or variety, in which you are standing provides the perfect environment for the formation of your personal preferences. (p. 17) Your current time-space-reality, your current culture, your current ways of looking at things -- all of the things that make up your perspective -- have evolved over countless generations. In fact, it would not be possible to retrace all the desires, conclusions, and perspectives that have resulted in your unique point of view right here and now. (p. 30) According to Abraham, therefore, preferences are evoked by the environment, by conditions of variety and contrast, which generate uniqueness of perspective and viewpoint. These individual...(read more)

The Selfish Gene and the Nondual Self.

The Swan's Nest — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 07:19:00 GMT

I finished Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene a while back. It confirmed many of my previous insights, and provoked new ones. One interesting thing about selfish gene theory is that it calls into question the nature of the self. Indeed, "the" self may itself be a misnomer. The standard usage in the West is to define self as single, discrete and unified: You either are or are not something. Yet, biology calls this into question, not only for other living creatures but for our own selves as well. Biologically, self and other are not a dichotomy but a continuum. The more genes that two or more organisms, or pieces of protoplasm, have in common, the more closely they are related, and the more they will act as if they share a common identity. Some well-known examples of this are kin-selection resulting in altruism between kin, even to the point of self-sacrifice; the hive-minds of the social insects; asexual lifeforms which reproduce by budding and fission, and for which reproduction is indistinguishable...(read more)

Meet Etheleona, Part 2.

The Swan's Nest — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 08:29:00 GMT

My New Year's resolution was going to be a one-month "typing fast" -- "fast" as in "abstinence". That is, to refrain from typing for at least one full month, the amount of time that I estimated it would take to get my fingers back in shape. But, here I am with a fairly long post. Have I already lost my resolve? Not exactly. A synchronistic event has fortuitously intervened. Recently, my computer developed a "glitch" in which windows began popping up on the screen. One of these unexpected windows turned out to be an "on-screen keyboard" -- a utility I didn't know that Windows had. I still can't type as much as I'd like due to back and wrist trouble, but it's a VAST improvement, going from a few words a day to several paragraphs. The Zeitgeist likes me. The Zeitgeist likes me bunches. ( The Zeitgeist likes me , incidentally, is a phrase I use when I experience synchronistic events or interesting new ideas. It is equivalent to being "in flow", "in sync", "on the spot", etc.) Now, I promised...(read more)

Poem: "Flight of the Swan".

The Swan's Nest — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 04:45:00 GMT

Due to slow typing capacity, I'm still working on my next prose post. In the meantime, and in accord with the Swan theme, here's a little poem. "Flight of the Swan" This time, I know I am going to fly, Sailing on impeccable white swan-wings. My freedom, bubbles rising through water, Is a beautiful and fearful thing. Why is it that I have no sense of ruin? When I see a red sky, I think only of morning. My feet leave the ground, Aerodynamic feathers stretch for breeze. How do I know I am meant for flight? The chick inside the egg dreams of blue vaults. The blue lake mirrors my passage One cloud among others. -- Ethel Leona Futo...(read more)

Meet Etheleona, Part 1.

The Swan's Nest — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 00:18:00 GMT

Greetings to the Greater Blogosphere, from an LJ expatriate. I'm new here. In fact, I recently migrated here from Livejournal due to the censorship, invasion of privacy and political persecution of Russian users which are being perpetrated by LJ's new owners, SUP. My friend heiko@insanejournal.com has made a series of informative posts on the situation: http://heiko.insanejournal.com/715.html http://heiko.insanejournal.com/786.html http://heiko.insanejournal.com/1064.html http://heiko.insanejournal.com/1317.html http://heiko.insanejournal.com/2960.html http://heiko.insanejournal.com/37978.html As a firm believer in freedom of speech and governmental non-interference, I cannot in good conscience continue to support LJ under SUP management. I encourage other LJ users to read the references and make their own decisions. At any rate, this gives me a excuse to move up into the Greater Blogosphere, a move I've been planning for awhile. Due to my physical disability, rheumatoid arthritis, I have...(read more)