KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA1 (Muller)

Commentary 33

ON TOHU WA BohU
by Adrian van der Meijden
15 April 2005, posted 23 April 2005

WARNING: the reader will have to decide whether this is fact, fiction or faction. Muller states he is not a philosopher, and that's one thing we can agree one. He categorises everybody else by a given -ism, but won't do this for himself, which is placing oneself in an "objective" position by way of a social persona while insisting everybody else is subjective and then denying the split exists. It does by way of having a body with senses and a mind not necessarly limited to either the body or intellect. How one can adopt a monist position and pick themes from various -isms is not just paradoxical it's a Gordian knot. The one thing about Muller is that he does not reply to or comment on mine. On with the decontruction. Should I take the standard academic attitude here and state Muller won't defend himself because he cannot ? The current chaos is NOT the result of the flood but Ramusian Protestant rationalism worked out in the late medieval period. Re-framing, so called, is done by psychiatrists. It's not as Silliman has it 'rhetoric" but a designed attitude about social pathologies, which Szasz has it are social constructs not human issues. I would agree with Silliman should he intend Rhetoric to mean empty waffle, not made clear.

0: Proema

""...,Hence no safe conclusions can be drawn from the etymology of the name to the nature of the thing the name stands for. Plato arrives at the conclusion that it is futile to try to discover the truth of things by analyzing the names.

from Encyclopedia of the History of ideas on Language, now on internet.

Me: Indeed not, but it sure helps with untangling dysinformation and constructivisms The plotline is simple, once upon a time, before the fall from grace, we had heaven on earth but then, like the Greek gods moved to Olympus, heaven was moved far away to make it unreachable. The action reads most like a panoramic super spectacle on royal parade or a whodunnit at a fair, or maybe like a drunken octopus with polyps flailing everywhere. *They* should never have given Kennedy the money to go to space, or we should have stayed stuck with optical telescopes only. We'd have been a lot more ignorant and easier to manipulate. After all Cicero, who was a slave, became the most educated man of his time, which just goes to show our current masters don't really think things through properly. It comes with being uxorious. Look to how Claudius survived.

uxorious: Etymology: Latin uxorius uxorious, uxorial, from uxor wife : excessively fond of or submissive to a wife - ux·o·ri·ous·ly adverb - ux·o·ri·ous·ness noun me> really, self indulgent, we all know what of. Luxury is one version of it <1> argument The phrase Tohu wa Bohu is the lynch pin of Muller's argument, proposal, intent, expectation I'm not sure of the apt word. Right now 'attitude' seems best, but I might change my mind yet. It occurds in Genesis 1.2 as "tohu wa Bohu as its standard meaning ""without form and void" BUT that is not what is intened to be conveyed as its meaning. And there's the rub, as Hamlet said. Wallis Budge points out that "tahu" was - cuneiform, Akkadian possibly - was a goddess of destruction, with Tiamat, another one, coming along. in other words it is a pagan borrowing as it would conflict with hebraic doctrine. It refers to the old query, how can a good god allow evil, which led the Essenes to invent 33 Heavens in order to keep God pure. It seems nobody has considered that if god permits evil to proceed he has good reason for that, not for us humans to quibble about. I find it suspicious that god's attitude has to be rationalised by humans who also claim one has to trust god or have faith in him. It reeks of people making out they need to understand god and won't admit they cannot.

It's a story with a very broad,long tail that requires for its fuller understanding that one is a deep scholar of Hebrew, proto-hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Egyptian, Chaldean, Syriac, Sumerian, and its various changes & local dialects to even begin, plus a complex history and some clear ideas about politics. Even they make mistakes, like that word "Day", debated forever, when rendered as a 'beginning to end unit of a given cycle', sometimes arbitrarily picked, then the context of the cycle discussed will determine whether it is a literal 24 hr day, which only some biblical writers make clear. Our language is static, so that changes one's attitude about interpretation.

I've spent more than a couple of days, oops years, to find both modern [ well, 'modern', not quite THAT either or post-modern], western and rabbinic exegesis and more than a few hours to read only some material, which stretches through about 2000+ years on all fronts. I cannot present the actual hebrew script, of course. I shall be as brief as possible, and I may have to be cryptic or merely allusive, to try to be as unconfusing and clear as the topic allows. I summarise endless pages of exegesis and correlative evidence anout the nature of our ignorance, oops, sin. I here try to match modern knowledge with archaic reportage, as do many scholars, so I jump across time like a cricket.

1: it is not *the Bible* but Genesis 1.1 & 1.2. Does that "the Bible" imply things are to be taken in context ? Not explained. Is it about the shared part formalised experience or knowledge of a given group? Not explained.

2: 'Tohu wa Bohu' is an illiterate sound rendition. wa is not used in the Hebrew and the other two mean "utter chaos" in syriac, also misspelled. if anything it ought to have been vav. it's the *THE* that's missing In Genesis, in "in the beginning". There never was one. In the Beginning there was chaos, ALL Creation myths agree on that one. Mankind's recent history is a long struggle to find order. Some impatient souls invent one. It seems THE word imposes order, if so which kind ? Hebrew 'Waw' carries ALL seventy meanings of all our conjunctions.

3: Hebrew is a rather precise language, especially to learned native speakers, and its grammar, like Sanscrit and other pre-flood language, very strict. fi

Moses was an Egyptian princeling, in English a "fitz". Why then was Pharaoh hard set on catching them ? I doubt he worried about it as property stolen, after all he owned entire Egypt. The suggestion is that the Ark was very important. In Comment were one a Indian then Siva as Creator, Destroyer and Maintainer of the world can do all this, so there's nothing to get ecxcited about at a disaster but the Hebraic God is "good" only, and there, for Israel, enters the way to justify the ways of god to man. After all if a Protestant cannot use his common sense we're back to dogma. Not that I am one, just making a point.

4: Hebrew, when borrowing ideas, eidolon, from the neighbours, uses a very simple trick. It writes ungrammatically, obvious to any scholar as a loud warning sign. We have to fossick around in the entire Bible for a feasible meaning, for a native Hebrew speaking scholar it's immediately obvious. In English one is not permitted to make errors in grammar, funny that, not even puns are allowed. In short the learned are quite aware of the discrepancies between what language permits us to say and how it is in reality, which is these days obscurantified.

5: The lie was performed in translation, if not before, and from, what I gleaned, deliberately so, and that's yet another long, complicated story. It is a nice trick by which one can always escape from the strictures of a given language.

6: I also once did a bibliography of ancient bibles [ NZ National Library holdings] and read most of the Church Fathers. It took a bishop once thirty years at half an hour a day, {4500 hours, one year = 8760} but then I rapid read and don't sleep much. Eireneus is fascinating on heresy, as is the Malleus Maleficorum, which launched the Inquisition; not to ignore the jewish persecution and Exodus. Some are very boring. But they all think in Jaynes' bicameral mode.

7: By the concurrence of several scholars, a rabbe and a professor, the Opening two verses of Genesis, appear to be best rendered into English as:

IN A FORMER STATE GOD PERFECTED THE HEAVENS AND EARTH; BUT THE EARTH HAD BECOME A DEVASTATED RUIN. And: IN A FORMER STATE GOD PERFECTED THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH. BUT THE EARTH HAD BECOME A RUIN AND A DESOLATION, AND THE DARKNESS OF JUDGMENT WAS UPON THE FACE OF IT.

& What follows next is about God's anger that man had ruined the earth, so he had punished them with utter devastation and ousted man from Paradise, and he has a plan for man to redeeem him anyoldhow, including more punishment or karma. There's also that"elohim", plural, thus the gods; weird for a monological religion. ?another deliberate error? Elsewhere the gods are the planets, which sideways explains a mono-god did not do it, but he did let it happen. So much for protecting his people, a current end of the world pop motif among rabid protestants, 83 million in the USA. God won't save them, he did not before and since. God helps those who help themselves only. In Fact Genesis presents us with a Double Bind by blaming man for events he did not make happen. But as the gods, ie. planets, punished man he had to be guilty. It is suspected it was Saturn. New stuff seems constantly sucked up by and/or blown into our solar system from the Kuiper Belt by nova explosions and other cosmic fun games. Any scholar could have appended this interpretation, it was around for quite a while.

So the rest also does not add up because a Creator that gives man his freedom and is all knowing, nor suffers from a human personality, so just does not get angry, and if it is all knowing he should have known what would happen or blame itself. So we get a piece of all too human psychology poked into something a shade orthree or four more abstruse. Please focus on "Gods Plan for man" which opens up determinism or fate, and that the idea of being obedient to god's will is another piece of priestly nonsense. Who actually knows god's Will, if it has one? I won't untangle the rest here, because that would fill several more books, because the penny then lands in our Medieval period which led to Ramusian protestant, no frilly nonsense symbolisms but dour *it's real* rationalism many people are now getting fed up with, 80 million in the States. We should never have been universally educated, let alone gone electronic. Some people actually start thinking and sharing. There's some other funny stuff about who or what Adam and Eve actually are, since EVE or Mary or Quan Yin or avalitokitesvara, etc., was once the Mother of ALL Living, during matriarchy, and Adam her consort or maybe son or both [Goddesses can get away with anything] and details go as far afield as The Tuatha te Danaan and yet another book. I won't even touch on "The world was of one language", but it's true and Hebrew is, it seems, among the oldest of languages around, It did not start in 4004 BC nor recent archeological 8700 BCE either but older. That makes yet another progressing but as yet fully unsettled, if not unsettling and rather unpopular issue. The Hebrews, remember, were Egyptian slaves once and slaves tend to make up many of such cargo cult myths. Have a nice guilt trip.

8: It's the "former State" that has been kept secret and hidden, the same secret of antiquity Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, went in search of up North and is now coming up for air as catastrophism and neo-catastrophism, only 1930 websites. We did have a garden of Eden before, and If I can trust the word of some astronomers the earth was not spinning at 23 or 26 degrees but less, more or less constant spring. Opinion differs whether all this took place around 12,000 BCE, as Plato was told, or 3114 BC, which depends on more other data. It links with planetary conjunctions and lunar calendars. Atlantis I'll have you know is "atland" in old Frisian and means OLD land, so refers to the same sour pickle, which was earth global. Cayce reckoned it was between 33,000 and 18,000 but scholarship has not caught up with that yet, although an iridium laden clay layer has been found at 1.1 km below the surface. Iridium cannot be from earth and is reputed to have killed off the dinosaurs although anything above ten tons cannot walk in current earth's gravity, let alone run. Earth annually collects billions of tons of cosmic dust. It comes down in the rain and lands as meteors, dzoens of them a day. Droplets coalesce around dust particles; it's like a love story. 'Hungry male gets juicy woman' makes a nice metaphor of it. I told you it's a complicated story. And talk about Catastrophism, Noah [forty of them] knew beforehand so as to build the ark, which unless larger than an oil tanker would not have held all the beasts. Apparently he was at sea some 47 days perhaps more like 3 months, at least. The waters were cubits above any mountaintop. So how did he feed them without a fridge? And BTW apparently OG or Ock, the last of the giants, sat on top of the ark, OG is another Adam who survived. Or, another maybe, not all the animals survived? His image is carved in the white cliffs of Dover.

9: What was being done in Genesis is to personify, as myth will, actual physical, planetary events entailed on a big global disaster, possibly the flood, but what about the fire, when it seems planets, or other large solar objects, were bounced about like tennis balls and what with electromagnetic discharges which blames Zeaus for that, Jupiter that is, and another one that busted the Tower of Babel there's two possibilities that either one or several planets changed their locations, some could even have exploded, so it gets worse than a footie match, more like a Victorian game of bowls. The Aztecs used to play a sacred game of tennis, pretending to be the gods. The white clothes were once white cloaks, symbolic of death. The change in the setting of the sun suggests it arose from earth being relocated and which changed the face of the earth more than somewhat. Where all the water came from is still a moot point but Mars seems to be a candidate, it's lighter than earth, although water has also been found on the moon and once upon a long time ago earth had no moon but was one itself. That's why Nasa is hot on visiting Mars and keeping mum. More extreme opinion reckons we came fron Mars, who really knows? Panspermia [42,300 websites in the usual range of attitudes] is back in. Life can only come from life, so Fred Hoyle, with cosmic dust a mooted candidate. It works to do some planet forming, which is an actual scientific proposal.

10: So what is Muller into or up to? To be cryptic, He's talking psychiatric code, of the pathological kind to rationalise which one has to adopt to Lockean Tabulas rasa. He is literalising ancient mystical notions, not to ignore untranslated Rilke and some other abstruse allusions, like fitting things into a 0-D and, as he attests, having a method, never made clear to a public. Does M imagine/portend that again our world is in chaos and man is to blame? The case is that some of the insane have visions and voices that recall archaic collective unconscious memories attended by outrageous fears, couched in dream language, which is graphic and polysemous, like the language from before the fall. Oops, one should not introduce Jung into a Freudian discourse, sorry about that. Have you ever wondered how come man can be made to be afraid so easily? The of old Akhaiwa, sea kings, were "intrepid", and that's being mild. TA1 was well received by psychiatrists who have to deal with such things and "normalise" people. It's rather difficult hence the appalling rate of cure around and tactics used to keep people docile. What puzzles the dickens out of me is:

A: why would somebody to do this use a forum, or what is an ostensive forum?

B: Why would somebody in commenting on posts by members persistently use these ideas? Lacan reckons we're all schizophrenic, but you should also read Julian Jaynes on the bicameral mind. I would be, having said I don't fear my ID, and like playing there, but I have an old letter from a psychiatrist saying I'm sane, so now what? If one takes an uneven number of expert advices or "other opinions* you'll stay undecided either way. I am well aware that a rabid psychiatrist would detect signs of pathology in me; me not being in accord with "the true Faith" of the Malleus Maleficorum style.

Is it thought of as THE Truth? Tenaciously dogmatised? In which case Muller could be a member of a long line of Mullers and subject to *familish* traditions handed on from Father to son? OR, just picked up by son as to what Father is into, or imagined to be, sequentially? You know what kids are like? Yes, I looked into that one too.

Of course people with very orderly intellects only, imagine anything other than that is chaos. Chaos is a continuum with untold varieties of order, not just one, hence polytheism. Tom Bearden has some ideas about that. If you like to think about this, what if we change the decimal system with some 6 kinds of numbers to make pi or chi out as a whole number as like no 1? I think this is the only original to me sentence here. After all if my own mind cannot find its way around inside itself where would we be? Not my problem when other people cannot. So what do we need - or is that use? - psychology for? What do I *seriously* believe? Nothing and anything I will playfully explore, temporarily.

11: I started originally with some eight odd feasible hypotheses and have taken a couple of years to whittle it down to near enough to one. It does not seem to have occurred to Muller that some people can play any game or counter game around or if he did: what did he try to do? It's like "Annie get your Gun": "I can do anything you can do better", oneupmanship, like kings do and done in university staffrooms. Fred Hoyle suggests first making up as many hypotheses as possible and then, by observation, check the LOT instead of mere samples. It's called data crunching. BTW the odds are best that we got our DNA changes in whole lumps, which puts the kaybosh on Darwin who also did not know it all. For which Read Charles Fort. He wrote "I reckon we're at the bottom of an alien sink".

12: It all started with that word "paradox". About that, Merell Wolff, in "Consciousness without an Object", mentions that after the mystical experience paradox is no longer a problem, which is quite correct, as it is about using one's whole mind, the ID included, also known as intuition. I've got an article on paradox in Wikipedia under 'paradoxographics', which sums up as 'Introducing into a set as a member of the set the whole of that set itself', which is an exact match to the Consciousness problem and ends up in Infinity. Can I stuff a kitchen into a kitchen drawer? Literally No, symbolically yes. Paradox is a very pop topic these days, with about half a million websites, many of them nonsense. That does not need another book as G. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Paladin, 1973 ----, et al, "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia", Behavioral Sc.1:251-64, '56 ----------, Mind and Nature, Bantam etc, discusses that in relation to insanity, which led to such items in the psychiatric trade as counterparadoxing to try to uncrack a screwed up mind, which is also very simple, one just takes the set, by its assumptions, as wound up with the argument, usually introduced by a parental figure to the victim. Fritz Perls was very good at it, whence his "In and Out the Garbage Pail", But I recommend L. P. Kelley, "The Earth Tripper", Coronet, London, 1973 as much more hilarious for what Laing and mates were into; The perils of Institutionalism. Or otherwise read I. Watson, "the Embedding", not Lyall, Ian. All that sums up as insanity being a confusion between the literal and symbolic word, with dogmatic postures for the literal. I don't need Szasz to figure that one out. Now I understood paradox and games quite well, but to blandly pickle it in so many words, as I can now, took a while. It has everything to do with that "well-defined" word of jargon, and specialisation. But then most people have problems when someone else can understand what they don't, and of course that imposes social problems on the emitting individual as well. It also makes a simple means to test whether another person has had one of those cosmic experiences, apart from several others. And I am quite sure Muller has not. Even Psychiatrists are prone to Freudian slips. You see, mystics live in constant paradox, also known as relativity. I solved that little problem about age two, but then two year olds don't have much learning but lots of understanding. I find games boring unless it is with another playful person, then it's huge fun.

I rest my case, If anybody wants to private contact me I have many megabytes, 101 Mb to be somewhat exact, concerning all this in various perspectives or dimensions or specialities. Dysinformation is a very old gambit. One might call me an un-spindoctor. "First find ye the truth and the truth will set you free". Elementary, my dear Watson. Maybe Muller should have moved into other things but he did not. The whole historical story is bits and pieces of a puzzle scattered everywhere made up by piteous remnants of a population, solely into survival. A puzzle is not solved until all the pieces fit together and as yet they don't, although it's getting closer. And now it's time for another cup of tea, laced with a trifle of chilli, improves the flavour. Voltaire had it that history is an agreed on lie; I'm not so sure about the agreement. copyright reserved.

Theologically speaking. there are three possibilities

a: God and Creation are one and the same; the argument from essence

b: God and Creation are not, in which case i: God created the world and leaves it to its own devices. ii: God created the world and interferes by way of miracles. Scientifically speaking, under the material hypothesis, everything is reduced to the simplest literal explanation which excludes anything from a before the beginning or by causes and consciousness. Which makes these two POV incompatible But if we reason that there's only one UNI-verse, nothing outside of it or other than, then god IS his creation so changes along with Creation, whereby he is Creator, sustainer and experiencer of the universe, which again is incompatible with the two aboves. We're then using two different words for the same thing, since words isolate qualia or aspects. Experience does not. And to intercalate experience with words creates a paradox. For in Infinite Set Theory one can experience and not change, and finitely do change, which is also the case with humans. This too can be deconstructed into several possibilities. I simply report here how my mind deals with this.

BUT, all that is when it excludes experience itself, or insists it can be pickled in words or it is only permitted when put in words. Did I create myself and the entire Universe; not very likely, as I cannot get access to my cause. Even the physical has it that I am the outcome of an egg and sperm which one can extrapolate backwards to a where and when? Adam and Eve? Well did not god create them? Is my "being" embedded in words? Not at all. By god I mean the summa of what makes it be alive or soul compounded to infinity, or NN, the 2nd being a superscript or N^N. Remove words and the first two disappear as valid. BUT psychologically speaking it's all pathological unless subsumed into what I am told to believe, thank you, but I reserve the right not to. It's the Faust proposition all over again. There is no conflict between Creationism and Evolution, there is a debate about which one is "right" when both tackle different aspects of a same complex called reality. Now that evolution has been shown false, should I then elect Creationism as the only alternative on offer? Not at all. They are both incomplete. Seven blind men and the elephant, that one.

All this can be very simply summarised.

A: What may have begun as a form of care to shield us from reminders of a dreadful ordeal, living though a global disaster, became a habit that led to forgetting and then turned into a custom and convention and finally unarguable dogma, which then, noticed, turns into the rejection and replacement of a paradigm, when we get lost in a collective fantasy. This would explain the pervasiveness of current social manipuation which now pervades all aspects of our social life. Thus we will find that up to say, a 1000 years after that ordeal some people write about it after which it turns into "nonsense", so that after that it gradually changes into standard forgetting phases.

B: Our subjective, that is, inner awareness of time, differs from that when externally oriented. We can daydream and it may seem a long time, when sun cycle time is brief, and right the other way around, when not aware of time at all, in meditation, we are surprised how long we took. This has been scientifically tested. Thus we get in literature dramatic time, "meanwhile back in the forest" and soliloqui time which simply halts the drama process time and so on. We can call this symbolic time if we insist material time [which is anyhow not a constant these days[ is treated as real, which goes with clocktime which is, whereas not making such a distinction and treating both equally it may get confusing because it conflicts. We never got around to making such distinctions until the invention of clocks.

C: Thus for an Eternal creator or creative, the entire span of the universe can be but a moment in infinity because we have no way to make any kind of quantitative comparison, as shown up by "renormalisation". As we also know for children, who have no sense of time only the moment to moment shifts of experience, time is much longer. Beethoven told us that he received his symphonies in one fell swoop as a whole, which is so for intuitive thought. There is further no way we can tell whether any two people have the same sense of time. When we get absorbed in a task, that is solely aware of what we are doing, and are interrupted we react with the same body jerk we can see sleeping dogs have and we ourselves do too; not to ignore the absent minded professor stereotype. That would account for that living only in the present too.

As a footnote, may I ad that The creator is beyond good and evil, beyond time and space and gave us our freedom. It's counter commonsensical to believe that IFF that is the case then the Jewish faith mostly turns out to fit an underpeople's cargo cult mything, by which they will be redeemed, oops saved. etc, which IMHO amounts to today's findings recover that was lost in one or more global disasters of what was well known by previous civilisations which have come and gone like mosquitos in spring. Recent Egyptological enquiry finds that Egypt, Israel and Greece amount to a same culture, perhaps not to start but certainly towards the end, which is most likely the typical way of dominant societies needing workers and resources.

Note, The flood, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html lists many versions, from all over the world. The tales are told in terms of local experiences and pickled in local custom and tradition. The problem, is then one of finding out what happened in terms of earth as a whole. People may imagine this as like filling a cup or drowning the land. But another feasible scenario could be, if the earth moved location in the solar system then it could be the sea simply tsunamied right around earth and trip may have tyaken 40 days. It would have to be a slow trip or earth would have lost air and water alike. To resolve such issues one needs all the data, including computer simulations and so on. All which for also other such global myth motifs would take several lifetimes of hard work to resolve; Other scenerios are also possible.

A current religious theme in sermons is that of a naughty people and an avenging god, with some 5 million websites on "the world before the Flood" .

read http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/biblewho1.htm, for some comments about inconsistencies in the Bible and I noted the sentiment that "monotheism is the root of all violence". The general suspicion I come away with is that the model of Yahweh is Pharaoh, or the Hittites and Assyrians as the vegenful god, or possibly all of them in a rewritten history not supported by history and archeology, and that the devastation was aglobal disaster much earlier. The fascinating thing is that if hebrew is apparently an antediluvian language. How would one establish that as a fact? Imri and Ahab who established monarchies are the most reviled characters in the Bible, and only monotheism plays goodies and baddies. What has all this to do with consciousness?

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adrian van der meijden

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AND TOHU TO YOU TOO

You made a good choice by adopting tohu wa bohu as your motto. In case you did not yet know, you will be happy to learn that there is a French philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut, who proposes that everything is chaos. (La défaite de la pensée, 1987; Au nom de l'autre, 2003). "Tu parles, donc je pense", he says.

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HFJM