The Gnostic Agnostic; A Darius Arash Kamali Blog

In common parlance it is said: 

                                            “I have a body.  The implication is that  I am not the body  but rather that I ‘have’ a body.  The ‘I’ is clearly not the body but rather something seperate from it which can posses a body.

It is also commonly said:

                                            “I have a brain.  Again, the ‘I’ is not the brain but something apart that ‘has’ the brain.

It is commonly said:

                                            “I have a mind. Is not the I the mind itself? If not, who/what is this ‘I’ that is prior, seperate enough to be able to ‘have’ a mind?  

                                                                                                                            Darius A. Kamali

“Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.”

                                 Joseph Cambell
 

“Out beyond ideas
of right-doing and
wrong-doing, there
is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”
— Rumi

Note: I woke up this morning thinking about the fact that we can watch so many people in various stages of life, thanks solely to the technologies of photography and film. This is something thats taken entirely for granted. Yet, upon reflection, this is an entirely new and condition. The last few generations have been the first in the history of humaninty wherein young people can view their elders the way they were young. Before this, excepting paintings, drawings and other artictic renditions, that may have existed in very rare cases, a young person seeing an elderly one could have no prcise idea what that person was like as a youth, much less as child. Surely tales would have been recounted but I wonder, imagining myself as a youth prior to the age of photography and film, trying to imagine my elders in as youth… I strongly suspect that I would have an extremely dificult time not only conceptualizing, but more importantly, actually beleiving that that person could ever have been anything like me. Today, when we see celebrities and how they have aged over time, it is easier, yet, amazingly still difficult, to accept the continuity of that original youthful pesonality with whom youth can intuitively relate. How much more fictitious the notion would have seemed without the documentary evidence. The enormous difficulty in of making this psychospiritual identification is evidenced by the apparant fact, despite the documentary evidence, that youth still tends, imediately, to thing of the old face as a manifestation of the’other.’ How much stronger this tendency would have been without the pictures to mediate the growing instinctive divide.
We all know the revolutianary impact on all aspects of our culture created by the still and motion picture revolutions. But what is often neglected is the power of these media to bring us closer to the possibility of acknogledging the essential sameness and humanity which is a part of the process of identification.