Buddhists believe in the following two propositions although, to non-Buddhists, they seem an odd fit. 1) I have no self or soul, no substantial thing that is "I" or "Me," and the idea that there is an I is an illusion. 2) I'll probably be reincarnated. The obvious response to this conjunction has to be: if there is no you, that what or who is to be reincarnated when "you" are? The Buddhist response, as I understand it, is that the illusion of me is a distinctive one, and this this illusion that there is a substantive me is what is reincarnated. A guest lecturer at a college course I took way back in the 1970s explained it this way. I may hold a lit match in my hand and transfer the flame from that match to something else -- another match, let us say. At SOME point both matches may be lit. Right after that, I may blow out the older match. It certainly appears that something substantial, a thing, the flame, moved from one match to the oth...
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The fire at Notre Dame cathedral strikes me as cataclysmic. I've never had the honor of a visit to Paris. But I have a family connection. My grandfather Comstock (who passed away in the 1990s) worked for years on a never-completed book that would have told the story of the great Gothic Cathedrals of Europe from the point of view of architecture-as-engineering. The fundamental idea was to be that engineers solve problems, and that the solutions to one set of problems invariably raise new problems, requiring a new round of solutions, etc. So the engineers' history of any subject is a history of this back and forth. Architecture is a form of engineering, and the creation of large sacred light and air-friendly spaces is one example. Sacred though the goal was supposed to be, the path can be understood in secular terms, as problems and solutions and new problems. Further, we can understand the great aesthetic appeal of cathedrals through understanding their history in this...
This is from Freud's book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). Freud throws off in a footnote a rather wild speculation about the origins of the human use of fire. I'll just paraphrase most of it, but I'll directly quote a bit at the end. In primordial days, lightning would strike the branches of trees and set them ablaze in this primordial forest, and primitive people would see the branches, still burning, fall to the ground. Then usually, one or more men would step toward the branch and put out the fire with their urine stream. Freud presumes that this was very pleasant for the men who did this: a form of sexual excitation, even. Why? Well … it was apparently an Oedipal thing. The father gods in the sky had sent the fire, the men of the tribe were conquering the father gods by pissing on the fire. Aaaaaah, feels good, eh? The real Prometheus? The real hero who tamed fire for the human species? That was a man who deprived himself of this pleasure by … N...
Bhaskara, an Indian living in the 8th and/or 9th century, maintained (against other Indians of the Vedic tradition before him) that the world in which our physical manifestations live and suffer is a reality, not or not entirely an illusion. Recently, in a book about the history of Indiian philosophy, I encountered the following explanation of Bhaskara's view on the nature of the human soul. The soul is not in reality different from God. Our individual souls are but his parts, as the sparks of a fire are but parts of the same fire. So God is real, our souls are real because they are of God, their separateness is at least in a qualified sense real (a single spark does fly off on its own trajectory), and the world in which they live is real. Realities abound. Taken together these are the characteristic positions of the Bhedābheda Vedānta , one of several traditions within Vedānta, one that is said to seek a balance betwen monism and dualism. .