sway2sway
04-21-2007, 03:31 AM
I stumbled onto this article today while I was waiting/watching my daughter at her swimming lesson this afternoon.
http://commonground.ca/iss/0704189/cg189_laughter.shtml
I found it rather interesting. It starts off discussing the benefits of laughter in our serious world. It moves into nonsense, nonsensical, meaning, meaninglessness, throws in a Tom Robbins quote, and even some alice in wonderland, for my reading pleasure. It's too hard to paraphrase it, considering this rough week I've surfaced from. I'll paste a few of the parts that tickled my fancy, but you'll just have to read it, if you wanna read it.
"It would seem there are few options between the two extremes of faith and faithlessness. "
"... we now have two extremes of officially-endorsed meaninglessness. The first is the “scientific� idea of a random universe ruled by inhuman forces to no particular purpose. The second is the religious fundamentalists’ take on ancient myths. In the latter world view, metaphors are misread as literal truths, leaving a temperamental God (or Gods) as the only option, as unpredictable as electrons and as arbitrary as Alice’s Red Queen."
"Watts reasonably argued that the universe has no meaning, at least not in the semantic sense, because only words have meaning, signifying things beyond themselves. The set of letters that spells “fork� is not, itself, a fork. How could the universe – all that there is and ever will be – signify anything beyond itself? The cosmos, Watts insisted, is a system of patterns at play, a loom of electromagnetic waves weaving a tapestry of ever-changing themes. The whole shebang has a great resemblance to music and dancing, which, in themselves, make no sense because they’re not intended to mean anything other than what they are. The meaning and the activity are one and the same."
"Watts, who was never afraid of sounding foolish himself by talking a topic to death, believed that the universe exists “... because the flame is worth the candle.� The manifest realm of all beings, subject to every conceivable experience, from heavenly to hellish, is an adventure that must somehow be worth having for it to have come about at all. Of course, the author had no proof for this metaphysical claim. It’s his own unsatisfactory response to that unanswerable question: “Why is there something instead of nothing?� It’s an unsolvable riddle we can better approach through myth rather than science. In interpreting eastern philosophy, westerners tend to focus on the idea of Maya, the realm of illusion resulting from the ignorance of our true being. The word has mostly negative connotations of trickery, deceit and forgetfulness. What gets relatively less attention is the flip side of Maya, which is Lila, the divine play or game of life. "
http://commonground.ca/iss/0704189/cg189_laughter.shtml
I found it rather interesting. It starts off discussing the benefits of laughter in our serious world. It moves into nonsense, nonsensical, meaning, meaninglessness, throws in a Tom Robbins quote, and even some alice in wonderland, for my reading pleasure. It's too hard to paraphrase it, considering this rough week I've surfaced from. I'll paste a few of the parts that tickled my fancy, but you'll just have to read it, if you wanna read it.
"It would seem there are few options between the two extremes of faith and faithlessness. "
"... we now have two extremes of officially-endorsed meaninglessness. The first is the “scientific� idea of a random universe ruled by inhuman forces to no particular purpose. The second is the religious fundamentalists’ take on ancient myths. In the latter world view, metaphors are misread as literal truths, leaving a temperamental God (or Gods) as the only option, as unpredictable as electrons and as arbitrary as Alice’s Red Queen."
"Watts reasonably argued that the universe has no meaning, at least not in the semantic sense, because only words have meaning, signifying things beyond themselves. The set of letters that spells “fork� is not, itself, a fork. How could the universe – all that there is and ever will be – signify anything beyond itself? The cosmos, Watts insisted, is a system of patterns at play, a loom of electromagnetic waves weaving a tapestry of ever-changing themes. The whole shebang has a great resemblance to music and dancing, which, in themselves, make no sense because they’re not intended to mean anything other than what they are. The meaning and the activity are one and the same."
"Watts, who was never afraid of sounding foolish himself by talking a topic to death, believed that the universe exists “... because the flame is worth the candle.� The manifest realm of all beings, subject to every conceivable experience, from heavenly to hellish, is an adventure that must somehow be worth having for it to have come about at all. Of course, the author had no proof for this metaphysical claim. It’s his own unsatisfactory response to that unanswerable question: “Why is there something instead of nothing?� It’s an unsolvable riddle we can better approach through myth rather than science. In interpreting eastern philosophy, westerners tend to focus on the idea of Maya, the realm of illusion resulting from the ignorance of our true being. The word has mostly negative connotations of trickery, deceit and forgetfulness. What gets relatively less attention is the flip side of Maya, which is Lila, the divine play or game of life. "