From Rodger.Hyodo at dialogos.com  Sun Sep 24 00:21:48 2006
From: Rodger.Hyodo at dialogos.com (Rodger.Hyodo@dialogos.com)
Date: Mon Sep 25 01:16:02 2006
Subject: Subject: RE: [Bohm_Dialogue] welcoming content
In-Reply-To: <20060924100003.84A3A2307A@web.internal.van-den-heuvel.org>
Message-ID: <OF3E169CD9.5CD217C4-ON852571F2.007A2D77-852571F2.007AD879@dialogos.com>







Rodger __Hey Dorothy, did you know?...

BBC NEWS, sept 23, 2006; On this day in 1952 world famous film actor and
director Charlie Chaplin returned to England for the first time in 21
years...  ...he would not comment on reports that US Attorney General James
McGranery may not allow him to return to America pending an investigation
into alleged "subsversive", left-wing activities.

Mr Chaplin was born in London in 1889. His mother had a nervous breakdown
and his father died when Charlie was five.

He danced in the street for pennies with his half-brother, Sydney, and was
then sent to an orphanage. He came to America when he was 17 with a troupe
of players and in 1912 joined the Keystone company to appear in his first
silent film, Making a Living.

In 1919 he co-founded United Artists and made such classics as The Kid
(1921), City Lights (1928), Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator
(1940).

After visiting England he went to Paris where he was awarded the Legion of
Honour for his contribution to cinema.

After Paris he went to Rome and then Switzerland, where he made his home
after he was barred from the US for his left-wing views.
He and his wife went on to have four more children.

In 1972 he was not only allowed back for a visit -to the US- but was
awarded a Special Academy Award. Three years later he was knighted by the
Queen.
.
.
From: "Dorothy Stulberg" <DStulberg@msw-law.com>
Subject: RE: [Bohm_Dialogue] welcoming content
To: <bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org>
.
I am so stressed over what our (my) country has done and is doing.
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From donfactor at donfactor.demon.co.uk  Sun Sep 24 00:31:56 2006
From: donfactor at donfactor.demon.co.uk (Don Factor)
Date: Mon Sep 25 01:25:59 2006
Subject: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
In-Reply-To: <20060923204945.84112.qmail@web55011.mail.re4.yahoo.com>
References: <20060923204945.84112.qmail@web55011.mail.re4.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <D80BE3C1-DBD4-4398-BF38-D41269CC03CB@donfactor.demon.co.uk>

Zoe, I don't know where you live, but if you live in America or  
Canada or in Europe or in any major city apart from one of a few  
obvious trouble spots, I would bet that you can take a walk down any  
street in your neighbourhood and you will see a world where there are  
people shopping and walking and driving, going to work and coming  
home to their families, taking their kids to school, having a coffee  
at the local Starbucks, and so on. And you will have to go to a lot  
of trouble to see at first hand any of the awful stuff that you  
describe.

I don't deny that a lot of what you describe exists and there are  
major problems in the world that need solving and that a lot of them  
are not being dealt with honestly or effectively. So our world needs   
lot of help. But you are lucky to be living now, with a cool  
broadband connection to the internet, a safe place to live. You are  
neither starving nor suffering from untreatable diseases,  nor hiding  
from insurgents or rebels or inquisitors or the gestapo. What you  
describe is the sort of stuff that is magnified and over hyped in  
order to sell newspapers, and pay newscaster's fat salaries. It is  
the kind of stuff that is aimed at keeping governments in power by  
making ordinary citizens feel frightened and helpless. it is the  
business of governments and their allies in the media to keep you  
feeling helpless and terrorised, in order for them to keep their  
power. Power, by the way, is the one thing that nobody ever gives up  
without a fight.

don



On 23 Sep 2006, at 21:49, Zoe Chu wrote:

> Don - Which Globe are you on? Mine is (called) Global-Warming,  
> Peakoil, Genocides,  Wars-all-over, Overpopulation, Epidemics, Mass- 
> starvations, Pollution, Collapse-of-natural-Stocks, Social- 
> Injustice, Mass-Extinctions, Torture, Election-Fraud, Rainforest- 
> Destruction, Record-Diabetes, Mass-suicides-of-Indian-farmers,  
> World-Freshwater-loss, Famines, Religious-Extremism, Nuclear- 
> Proliferation, Genetic-Design -- just to name a very few. Whatever  
> you might be inclined to perceive as "improvements" will soon,  
> according to the majority of experts, have no more stage to take  
> place on. The theater is on fire. No? Regards --- Zoe
>
> Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> For one thing, there is the growth of human population which is now  
> well in excess of 6 billion people. I suppose you can work out the  
> percentages. My comments implied that at least some parts of the  
> world are more peaceful now than ever before. Also, your figures  
> are somewhat questionable. Who did the counting? And especially,  
> who did the counting of all the people killed in the past? These  
> are the sort of extrapolations that make good headlines but that's  
> all.  I don't mean to deny we have had pretty violent times but the  
> process of change has to start somewhere. Of course, these day,  
> killing is far more efficient, so one smallish war can account for  
> many more casualties than some ancient big ones.
>
> As recently as when I was a kid, during WWII, war was still  
> considered something glorious. To be a war hero was something very  
> positive, at least in the Anglo American cultural setting. That is  
> much less the case these days.
>
>  I can only say that if things have begun to change in some places  
> it may be possible for them to change in others. For  
> instance,Kirsten's  vast masses of  modern mechanical men in Russia  
> and the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, no longer reads  
> as true as it might have a couple of decades ago.
>
> don
>
> On 23 Sep 2006, at 16:15, Zoe Chu wrote:
>
>> Don - How do following facts fit in your picture (imagination?)?  
>> Respectively: How do you fit them?
>>
>> The Past century was the most lethal in human history: Over 200  
>> million people were killed in 250 wars and genocidal onslaughts,  
>> more people than were killed in warfare in the past two thousand  
>> years.
>>
>> Which (historical) fact/s do you base your "We-have-a-choice" on?
>>
>> Regards --- Zoe
>>
>>
>> Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> On 22 Sep 2006, at 14:37, kirsten schneide wrote:
>>
>> > Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth; and
>> > if men could become noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing,
>> > they would have even less peace than we oblivious and driven madmen
>> > have today. Besides, can any ideal of therapeutic revolutions touch
>> > the vast masses of this globe, the modern mechanical men in Russia,
>> > the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, the brutalized and
>> > ignorant populations of almost every continent?
>>
>>
>> I know you are fond of quoting Ernest Becker's pessimism, and
>> actually doing the sort of stuff he wrote about - cannibalising and
>> plagiarising his texts, for your own purposes. But Becker for some
>> reason had a very rough time of it, even after writing his
>> masterpiece, The Denial of Death, he couldn't hold a job. He died of
>> cancer at a very young age. Pity. But this was one man's experience.
>> I figure we have a choice. The laws of human nature are not fixed nor
>> are they final. And if there is a limit, then it is yet to be
>> discovered.
>>
>> Amongst the animals we are unique in that we can imagine and we can
>> communicate abstract concepts. We can, or some of us can, experience
>> love without the necessity of it leading to reproduction or orgasms
>> or power. Simple things like this hold out possibilities for
>> something beyond what you might call our biological necessities.
>>
>> You choose to take the path of pessimism which reveals your own fear
>> of death and meaningless. I am happier with optimism seasoned lightly
>> with a bit of scepticism. Remember there was a time when humans had
>> no idea how to cook food and that was that. They knew nothing of
>> domesticating animals and were prey to the bigger and faster
>> predators. There was also a time when a consensus of the experts
>> agreed on ideas such as nobody can travel faster than a mile a
>> minute and that space travel was a physical impossibility. They also
>> agreed that, before Einstein came along that physics was finished.
>> pretty well all wrapped up. Nobody should be advised to become a
>> physicist because there was nothing left to learn. And there was also
>> a time when people with psychological disorders ended up in mad
>> houses that served mainly as places where the bourgeoisie could
>> entertain themselves laughing at the loonies.. My point here is that
>> to presuppose the sort of limitation that you seem to take as given
>> insures that such limitation will prove to be what you think it is,
>> at least for you
>>
>> So, the only positive idea that I can draw from these pessimistic
>> posts of yours is that you want us to help you get past your own fear
>> of death. I read a cry that says, "Convince me. Show me that I am
>> wrong." But nobody can do that for you. There are some here, I know,
>> who have overcome there fear of death, and who know that their
>> meaning does not die with them. So iif you are frightened, maybe you
>> ought to gather up your courage and ask for help.
>>
>> don
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> info:
>> www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>>
>> post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>>
>> dialogue facilitator:
>> facilitator@david-bohm.net
>>
>> Administrator of the mailing list:
>> admin@david-bohm.net
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Get your email and more, right on the new Yahoo.com
>> _______________________________________________
>> info:
>> www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>>
>> post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>>
>> dialogue facilitator:
>> facilitator@david-bohm.net
>>
>> Administrator of the mailing list:
>> admin@david-bohm.net
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> info:
> www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>
> post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>
> dialogue facilitator:
> facilitator@david-bohm.net
>
> Administrator of the mailing list:
> admin@david-bohm.net
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
>
>
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail.
> _______________________________________________
> info:
> www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>
> post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>
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>
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>

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From zoechuzero at yahoo.com  Sun Sep 24 05:02:39 2006
From: zoechuzero at yahoo.com (Zoe Chu)
Date: Mon Sep 25 05:56:41 2006
Subject: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
In-Reply-To: <D80BE3C1-DBD4-4398-BF38-D41269CC03CB@donfactor.demon.co.uk>
Message-ID: <20060924030239.14928.qmail@web55003.mail.re4.yahoo.com>

Don Factor  - What you wrote here was the most ignorant contribution I encoutered so far in this forum. Not merely are you displaying a high-wire act of projecting, but underneath your (twisted) performance gets revealed its "net" of structured pathos. "Your" world is not "the" world; you appear to live in quite some ivory tower. When was the last time you ventured beyond your (intellectual?) shopping-mall? --- Zoe Chu

Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:  Zoe, I don't know where you live, but if you live in America or Canada or in Europe or in any major city apart from one of a few obvious trouble spots, I would bet that you can take a walk down any street in your neighbourhood and you will see a world where there are people shopping and walking and driving, going to work and coming home to their families, taking their kids to school, having a coffee at the local Starbucks, and so on. And you will have to go to a lot of trouble to see at first hand any of the awful stuff that you describe.   

  I don't deny that a lot of what you describe exists and there are major problems in the world that need solving and that a lot of them are not being dealt with honestly or effectively. So our world needs  lot of help. But you are lucky to be living now, with a cool broadband connection to the internet, a safe place to live. You are neither starving nor suffering from untreatable diseases,  nor hiding from insurgents or rebels or inquisitors or the gestapo. What you describe is the sort of stuff that is magnified and over hyped in order to sell newspapers, and pay newscaster's fat salaries. It is the kind of stuff that is aimed at keeping governments in power by making ordinary citizens feel frightened and helpless. it is the business of governments and their allies in the media to keep you feeling helpless and terrorised, in order for them to keep their power. Power, by the way, is the one thing that nobody ever gives up without a fight.  

  don  

    

  
    On 23 Sep 2006, at 21:49, Zoe Chu wrote:

  Don - Which Globe are you on? Mine is (called) Global-Warming, Peakoil, Genocides,  Wars-all-over, Overpopulation, Epidemics, Mass-starvations, Pollution, Collapse-of-natural-Stocks, Social-Injustice, Mass-Extinctions, Torture, Election-Fraud, Rainforest-Destruction, Record-Diabetes, Mass-suicides-of-Indian-farmers, World-Freshwater-loss, Famines, Religious-Extremism, Nuclear-Proliferation, Genetic-Design -- just to name a very few. Whatever you might be inclined to perceive as "improvements" will soon, according to the majority of experts, have no more stage to take place on. The theater is on fire. No? Regards --- Zoe

Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:   For one thing, there is the growth of human population which is now well in excess of 6 billion people. I suppose you can work out the percentages. My comments implied that at least some parts of the world are more peaceful now than ever before. Also, your figures are somewhat questionable. Who did the counting? And especially, who did the counting of all the people killed in the past? These are the sort of extrapolations that make good headlines but that's all.  I don't mean to deny we have had pretty violent times but the process of change has to start somewhere. Of course, these day, killing is far more efficient, so one smallish war can account for many more casualties than some ancient big ones.   
  As recently as when I was a kid, during WWII, war was still considered something glorious. To be a war hero was something very positive, at least in the Anglo American cultural setting. That is much less the case these days.
  

   I can only say that if things have begun to change in some places it may be possible for them to change in others. For instance,Kirsten's  vast masses of  modern mechanical men in Russia and the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, no longer reads as true as it might have a couple of decades ago.
  

  don
  
    On 23 Sep 2006, at 16:15, Zoe Chu wrote:

    Don - How do following facts fit in your picture (imagination?)? Respectively: How do you fit them? 
   
  The Past century was the most lethal in human history: Over 200 million people were killed in 250 wars and genocidal onslaughts, more people than were killed in warfare in the past two thousand years.
   
  Which (historical) fact/s do you base your "We-have-a-choice" on?
   
  Regards --- Zoe
  

Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:
  
On 22 Sep 2006, at 14:37, kirsten schneide wrote:

> Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth; and 
> if men could become noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing, 
> they would have even less peace than we oblivious and driven madmen 
> have today. Besides, can any ideal of therapeutic revolutions touch 
> the vast masses of this globe, the modern mechanical men in Russia, 
> the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, the brutalized and 
> ignorant populations of almost every continent?


I know you are fond of quoting Ernest Becker's pessimism, and 
actually doing the sort of stuff he wrote about - cannibalising and 
plagiarising his texts, for your own purposes. But Becker for some 
reason had a very rough time of it, even after writing his 
masterpiece, The Denial of Death, he couldn't hold a job. He died of 
cancer at a very young age. Pity. But this was one man's experience. 
I figure we have a choice. The laws of human nature are not fixed nor 
are they final. And if there is a limit, then it is yet to be 
discovered.

Amongst the animals we are unique in that we can imagine and we can 
communicate abstract concepts. We can, or some of us can, experience 
love without the necessity of it leading to reproduction or orgasms 
or power. Simple things like this hold out possibilities for 
something beyond what you might call our biological necessities.

You choose to take the path of pessimism which reveals your own fear 
of death and meaningless. I am happier with optimism seasoned lightly 
with a bit of scepticism. Remember there was a time when humans had 
no idea how to cook food and that was that. They knew nothing of 
domesticating animals and were prey to the bigger and faster 
predators. There was also a time when a consensus of the experts 
agreed on ideas such as nobody can travel faster than a mile a 
minute and that space travel was a physical impossibility. They also 
agreed that, before Einstein came along that physics was finished. 
pretty well all wrapped up. Nobody should be advised to become a 
physicist because there was nothing left to learn. And there was also 
a time when people with psychological disorders ended up in mad 
houses that served mainly as places where the bourgeoisie could 
entertain themselves laughing at the loonies.. My point here is that 
to presuppose the sort of limitation that you seem to take as given 
insures that such limitation will prove to be what you think it is, 
at least for you

So, the only positive idea that I can draw from these pessimistic 
posts of yours is that you want us to help you get past your own fear 
of death. I read a cry that says, "Convince me. Show me that I am 
wrong." But nobody can do that for you. There are some here, I know, 
who have overcome there fear of death, and who know that their 
meaning does not die with them. So iif you are frightened, maybe you 
ought to gather up your courage and ask for help.

don

_______________________________________________
info:
www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue

post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net

dialogue facilitator:
facilitator@david-bohm.net

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admin@david-bohm.net

_______________________________________________



  

  
---------------------------------
  Get your email and more, right on the new Yahoo.com   _______________________________________________
  info:
  www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
  

  post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
  

  dialogue facilitator:
  facilitator@david-bohm.net
  

  Administrator of the mailing list:
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  _______________________________________________
  

  





_______________________________________________
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post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net

dialogue facilitator:
facilitator@david-bohm.net

Administrator of the mailing list:
admin@david-bohm.net

_______________________________________________



  

  
---------------------------------
  Do you Yahoo!?
Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail.  _______________________________________________
  info:
  www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
  

  post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
  

  dialogue facilitator:
  facilitator@david-bohm.net
  

  Administrator of the mailing list:
  admin@david-bohm.net
  

  _______________________________________________
  

  







_______________________________________________
info:
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post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net

dialogue facilitator:
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From donfactor at donfactor.demon.co.uk  Sun Sep 24 13:08:16 2006
From: donfactor at donfactor.demon.co.uk (Don Factor)
Date: Mon Sep 25 14:02:28 2006
Subject: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
In-Reply-To: <20060924030239.14928.qmail@web55003.mail.re4.yahoo.com>
References: <20060924030239.14928.qmail@web55003.mail.re4.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <57B552BE-AF2C-4EE7-BAE6-C77697C65AF3@donfactor.demon.co.uk>

Zoe, if it pleases  you to live in a state of fear and paranoia with  
the whole world crumbling around you, that's okay with me. But if it  
doesn't then you might want to dig deeper and look at some of the  
primary sources, actual statistics for instance, not just the media  
selections that make good headlines.

And for that matter, if you insist that all is so bad and getting  
worse, what do you suggest be done about it? I have asked Kirsten the  
same question but she just continues rabbiting on with her doom and  
gloom. Is that your position too? Do we live in the worst of times  
that can only get progressively worse?

Oh, and this bit:

>  Not merely are you displaying a high-wire act of projecting,

Did I misread  you? Have I been projecting something of my own
assumptions onto your remarks? I don't understand your meaning
here,

don

On 24 Sep 2006, at 04:02, Zoe Chu wrote:

> Don Factor  - What you wrote here was the most ignorant  
> contribution I encoutered so far in this forum.but underneath your  
> (twisted) performance gets revealed its "net" of structured pathos.  
> "Your" world is not "the" world; you appear to live in quite some  
> ivory tower. When was the last time you ventured beyond your  
> (intellectual?) shopping-mall? --- Zoe Chu
>
> Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Zoe, I don't know where you live, but if you live in America or  
> Canada or in Europe or in any major city apart from one of a few  
> obvious trouble spots, I would bet that you can take a walk down  
> any street in your neighbourhood and you will see a world where  
> there are people shopping and walking and driving, going to work  
> and coming home to their families, taking their kids to school,  
> having a coffee at the local Starbucks, and so on. And you will  
> have to go to a lot of trouble to see at first hand any of the  
> awful stuff that you describe.
>
> I don't deny that a lot of what you describe exists and there are  
> major problems in the world that need solving and that a lot of  
> them are not being dealt with honestly or effectively. So our world  
> needs  lot of help. But you are lucky to be living now, with a cool  
> broadband connection to the internet, a safe place to live. You are  
> neither starving nor suffering from untreatable diseases,  nor  
> hiding from insurgents or rebels or inquisitors or the gestapo.  
> What you describe is the sort of stuff that is magnified and over  
> hyped in order to sell newspapers, and pay newscaster's fat  
> salaries. It is the kind of stuff that is aimed at keeping  
> governments in power by making ordinary citizens feel frightened  
> and helpless. it is the business of governments and their allies in  
> the media to keep you feeling helpless and terrorised, in order for  
> them to keep their power. Power, by the way, is the one thing that  
> nobody ever gives up without a fight.
>
> don
>
>
>
> On 23 Sep 2006, at 21:49, Zoe Chu wrote:
>
>> Don - Which Globe are you on? Mine is (called) Global-Warming,  
>> Peakoil, Genocides,  Wars-all-over, Overpopulation, Epidemics,  
>> Mass-starvations, Pollution, Collapse-of-natural-Stocks, Social- 
>> Injustice, Mass-Extinctions, Torture, Election-Fraud, Rainforest- 
>> Destruction, Record-Diabetes, Mass-suicides-of-Indian-farmers,  
>> World-Freshwater-loss, Famines, Religious-Extremism, Nuclear- 
>> Proliferation, Genetic-Design -- just to name a very few. Whatever  
>> you might be inclined to perceive as "improvements" will soon,  
>> according to the majority of experts, have no more stage to take  
>> place on. The theater is on fire. No? Regards --- Zoe
>>
>> Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> For one thing, there is the growth of human population which is  
>> now well in excess of 6 billion people. I suppose you can work out  
>> the percentages. My comments implied that at least some parts of  
>> the world are more peaceful now than ever before. Also, your  
>> figures are somewhat questionable. Who did the counting? And  
>> especially, who did the counting of all the people killed in the  
>> past? These are the sort of extrapolations that make good  
>> headlines but that's all.  I don't mean to deny we have had pretty  
>> violent times but the process of change has to start somewhere. Of  
>> course, these day, killing is far more efficient, so one smallish  
>> war can account for many more casualties than some ancient big ones.
>>
>> As recently as when I was a kid, during WWII, war was still  
>> considered something glorious. To be a war hero was something very  
>> positive, at least in the Anglo American cultural setting. That is  
>> much less the case these days.
>>
>>  I can only say that if things have begun to change in some places  
>> it may be possible for them to change in others. For  
>> instance,Kirsten's  vast masses of  modern mechanical men in  
>> Russia and the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, no  
>> longer reads as true as it might have a couple of decades ago.
>>
>> don
>>
>> On 23 Sep 2006, at 16:15, Zoe Chu wrote:
>>
>>> Don - How do following facts fit in your picture (imagination?)?  
>>> Respectively: How do you fit them?
>>>
>>> The Past century was the most lethal in human history: Over 200  
>>> million people were killed in 250 wars and genocidal onslaughts,  
>>> more people than were killed in warfare in the past two thousand  
>>> years.
>>>
>>> Which (historical) fact/s do you base your "We-have-a-choice" on?
>>>
>>> Regards --- Zoe
>>>
>>>
>>> Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 22 Sep 2006, at 14:37, kirsten schneide wrote:
>>>
>>> > Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth;  
>>> and
>>> > if men could become noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing,
>>> > they would have even less peace than we oblivious and driven  
>>> madmen
>>> > have today. Besides, can any ideal of therapeutic revolutions  
>>> touch
>>> > the vast masses of this globe, the modern mechanical men in  
>>> Russia,
>>> > the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, the brutalized and
>>> > ignorant populations of almost every continent?
>>>
>>>
>>> I know you are fond of quoting Ernest Becker's pessimism, and
>>> actually doing the sort of stuff he wrote about - cannibalising and
>>> plagiarising his texts, for your own purposes. But Becker for some
>>> reason had a very rough time of it, even after writing his
>>> masterpiece, The Denial of Death, he couldn't hold a job. He died of
>>> cancer at a very young age. Pity. But this was one man's experience.
>>> I figure we have a choice. The laws of human nature are not fixed  
>>> nor
>>> are they final. And if there is a limit, then it is yet to be
>>> discovered.
>>>
>>> Amongst the animals we are unique in that we can imagine and we can
>>> communicate abstract concepts. We can, or some of us can, experience
>>> love without the necessity of it leading to reproduction or orgasms
>>> or power. Simple things like this hold out possibilities for
>>> something beyond what you might call our biological necessities.
>>>
>>> You choose to take the path of pessimism which reveals your own fear
>>> of death and meaningless. I am happier with optimism seasoned  
>>> lightly
>>> with a bit of scepticism. Remember there was a time when humans had
>>> no idea how to cook food and that was that. They knew nothing of
>>> domesticating animals and were prey to the bigger and faster
>>> predators. There was also a time when a consensus of the experts
>>> agreed on ideas such as nobody can travel faster than a mile a
>>> minute and that space travel was a physical impossibility. They also
>>> agreed that, before Einstein came along that physics was finished.
>>> pretty well all wrapped up. Nobody should be advised to become a
>>> physicist because there was nothing left to learn. And there was  
>>> also
>>> a time when people with psychological disorders ended up in mad
>>> houses that served mainly as places where the bourgeoisie could
>>> entertain themselves laughing at the loonies.. My point here is that
>>> to presuppose the sort of limitation that you seem to take as given
>>> insures that such limitation will prove to be what you think it is,
>>> at least for you
>>>
>>> So, the only positive idea that I can draw from these pessimistic
>>> posts of yours is that you want us to help you get past your own  
>>> fear
>>> of death. I read a cry that says, "Convince me. Show me that I am
>>> wrong." But nobody can do that for you. There are some here, I know,
>>> who have overcome there fear of death, and who know that their
>>> meaning does not die with them. So iif you are frightened, maybe you
>>> ought to gather up your courage and ask for help.
>>>
>>> don
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> info:
>>> www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>>>
>>> post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>>>
>>> dialogue facilitator:
>>> facilitator@david-bohm.net
>>>
>>> Administrator of the mailing list:
>>> admin@david-bohm.net
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Get your email and more, right on the new Yahoo.com
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> info:
>>> www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>>>
>>> post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>>>
>>> dialogue facilitator:
>>> facilitator@david-bohm.net
>>>
>>> Administrator of the mailing list:
>>> admin@david-bohm.net
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> info:
>> www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>>
>> post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>>
>> dialogue facilitator:
>> facilitator@david-bohm.net
>>
>> Administrator of the mailing list:
>> admin@david-bohm.net
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Do you Yahoo!?
>> Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail.
>> _______________________________________________
>> info:
>> www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>>
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>> facilitator@david-bohm.net
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>> Administrator of the mailing list:
>> admin@david-bohm.net
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> info:
> www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>
> post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>
> dialogue facilitator:
> facilitator@david-bohm.net
>
> Administrator of the mailing list:
> admin@david-bohm.net
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
>
>
> All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things  
> done faster.
> _______________________________________________
> info:
> www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>
> post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>
> dialogue facilitator:
> facilitator@david-bohm.net
>
> Administrator of the mailing list:
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>
> _______________________________________________
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>

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From Matti.Vaittinen at uta.fi  Sun Sep 24 13:43:22 2006
From: Matti.Vaittinen at uta.fi (Matti Vaittinen)
Date: Mon Sep 25 14:37:30 2006
Subject: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
In-Reply-To: <20060924030239.14928.qmail@web55003.mail.re4.yahoo.com>
References: <20060924030239.14928.qmail@web55003.mail.re4.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20060924144322.pxd67yhkpb4gsso8@imp1.uta.fi>

Zoe,

How much misery, how many problems do you think you could take on your  
shoulders, and still lead a happy life?  I don't expect you to answer  
this question; but I will tell you a true story.  About fifteen years  
ago I took an active part in a group that engaged in various  
activities that had to do with making art, doing theatre, making  
music, writing, organising happenings which included all the  
forementioned; also, needless to say we would regularly meet and just  
spend time together talking about art, philosophy, science, politics,  
you name it (we tried even dialogue ;- ...).  Especially these   
'organised happenings' would draw some people like 'hang-arounds', and  
some of those people were interested in what were involved in.  One  
evening a "new girl" had showed up, while we were planning a new  
happening.  (Or, maybe she was invited.)  She was outside of town, not  
local, small, beautiful, dark hair, a very nice person.  Yet, she  
joined us, came for visits and in the end participated in a  
"performance" that we did.  I think she studied philosophy and  
mathematics, in another town.  What made her especially "special" was  
that she was also a sister of a celebrity novelist and actress.  I  
mean: that gave her special "flavour."  I met her once in her home  
town, i.e. where she studied.  Then I lost the track of her.  In the  
course of years I sometimes would hear rumours about her that were, I  
don't know, slighly surprising.  Then, suddenly, two years ago I got a  
phone-call from a friend of mine, saying "guess what I have heard:  K  
has killed herself! - She has jumped off a building."  What a blow!   
This friend of mine had heard news of what she had been doing in the  
past few years and what she had been involved in, and it all sounded  
quite surprising and strange (keeping in mind the first impression of  
her).  Well,  what happened "next" was, after a year or so, her sister  
wrote a book about her (suicide): an account of what had happened to  
her younger sister.  It took me almost a year before I "could" read  
it. (You see, too much misery is also too much for "me" ;-).  The  
central thing was that a fresh, young, "ignorant" girl had become  
interested in the ACTUAL misery of the world.  She especially became  
interested in and involved in the mistreatment of women in Turkey.   
She started visiting the country, inquired into the actual lives and  
circumstances of women-prositutes and prisoners, etc.  She had the  
courage to go to 'dangerous places' and areas, bars etc.,  
investigated, met with people, interviewed them and, as a result,  
became also an object of some kind of surveillance of the Turkish  
police.  It was her goal to write a book which would "wake up people".  
  In the meantime, and earlier, she studied math & philosophy, started  
playing the saxophone and eventually joined a band that issued CD's.   
Probably she did many other things too, - but, what happened, was that  
in the end she became  d e p r e s s e d  .  The depression took over  
her, and contiuned for years.  She sought for professional help at  
some point, and took medication.  However, towards the end she had  
also become suicidal, and, once again, she went to see a doctor.   
However, this physician did not "see" her real condition, he wasn't  
"sensitive" enough for her cry for help, but said "you are not ill  
enough to be admitted into a psychiatric ward."  She wanted to get in,  
but was refused (and I am sure she outwardly must have looked quite  
"OK".)  So she jumped off a building.  She could not take it "in"  
anymore - that is, the misery, the atrocities, the horrible things  
that happen in the world.  She was sick (and her looks had changed  
too).  She could not handle the things that people do to their  
"neighbours".





Very best,


matti
From w at david-bohm.net  Sun Sep 24 14:00:04 2006
From: w at david-bohm.net (william)
Date: Mon Sep 25 14:54:24 2006
Subject: AW: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
In-Reply-To: <20060924030239.14928.qmail@web55003.mail.re4.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <0MKwh2-1GRSee0qNs-000849@mrelayeu.kundenserver.de>

Zoe Chu:
>Don Factor  - What you wrote here was the most ignorant contribution 

>I encoutered so far in this forum. 

 

Zoe, please tell me more about the globe you are on. How many children have
you seen carrying buckets of water on their heads? How many women have you
seen walking along the road-side, far away from home, carrying fire wood on
their heads, trying to be back before dark? Every day the distance gets
longer and longer. 

How many screams in the starry night have you heard with your own ears? How
many sick and hungry hands have you shaken? How many vultures have you seen
circling in the sky? 

Have you had fists shown at you? Have you had stones thrown at you? Have you
had guns pointing at your guts? Have you had to give "gifts" to stray
soldiers at socalled checkpoints? Have you had to pay "highway" fees for
permission to drive on a dirt track? Have you paid licence fees for being in
possession of a photo camera? 

These are some of my personal experiences with the globe that I am on. If
you ever feel pessimistic, go to Africa. You won't feel pessimistic while
you are there, but it may come again when you're back home. Feeling
pessimistic is a sign of luxury. So, if you feel pessimistic;
congratulations.

 

william

 

 

 

 



Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote: 

Zoe, I don't know where you live, but if you live in America or Canada or in
Europe or in any major city apart from one of a few obvious trouble spots, I
would bet that you can take a walk down any street in your neighbourhood and
you will see a world where there are people shopping and walking and
driving, going to work and coming home to their families, taking their kids
to school, having a coffee at the local Starbucks, and so on. And you will
have to go to a lot of trouble to see at first hand any of the awful stuff
that you describe.  

 

I don't deny that a lot of what you describe exists and there are major
problems in the world that need solving and that a lot of them are not being
dealt with honestly or effectively. So our world needs  lot of help. But you
are lucky to be living now, with a cool broadband connection to the
internet, a safe place to live. You are neither starving nor suffering from
untreatable diseases,  nor hiding from insurgents or rebels or inquisitors
or the gestapo. What you describe is the sort of stuff that is magnified and
over hyped in order to sell newspapers, and pay newscaster's fat salaries.
It is the kind of stuff that is aimed at keeping governments in power by
making ordinary citizens feel frightened and helpless. it is the business of
governments and their allies in the media to keep you feeling helpless and
terrorised, in order for them to keep their power. Power, by the way, is the
one thing that nobody ever gives up without a fight. 

 

don 

 

 

 

On 23 Sep 2006, at 21:49, Zoe Chu wrote:





Don - Which Globe are you on? Mine is (called) Global-Warming, Peakoil,
Genocides,  Wars-all-over, Overpopulation, Epidemics, Mass-starvations,
Pollution, Collapse-of-natural-Stocks, Social-Injustice, Mass-Extinctions,
Torture, Election-Fraud, Rainforest-Destruction, Record-Diabetes,
Mass-suicides-of-Indian-farmers, World-Freshwater-loss, Famines,
Religious-Extremism, Nuclear-Proliferation, Genetic-Design -- just to name a
very few. Whatever you might be inclined to perceive as "improvements" will
soon, according to the majority of experts, have no more stage to take place
on. The theater is on fire. No? Regards --- Zoe

Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote: 

For one thing, there is the growth of human population which is now well in
excess of 6 billion people. I suppose you can work out the percentages. My
comments implied that at least some parts of the world are more peaceful now
than ever before. Also, your figures are somewhat questionable. Who did the
counting? And especially, who did the counting of all the people killed in
the past? These are the sort of extrapolations that make good headlines but
that's all.  I don't mean to deny we have had pretty violent times but the
process of change has to start somewhere. Of course, these day, killing is
far more efficient, so one smallish war can account for many more casualties
than some ancient big ones. 

 

As recently as when I was a kid, during WWII, war was still considered
something glorious. To be a war hero was something very positive, at least
in the Anglo American cultural setting. That is much less the case these
days.

 

 I can only say that if things have begun to change in some places it may be
possible for them to change in others. For instance,Kirsten's  vast masses
of  modern mechanical men in Russia and the near-billion sheeplike followers
in China, no longer reads as true as it might have a couple of decades ago.

 

don

 

On 23 Sep 2006, at 16:15, Zoe Chu wrote:





Don - How do following facts fit in your picture (imagination?)?
Respectively: How do you fit them? 

 

The Past century was the most lethal in human history: Over 200 million
people were killed in 250 wars and genocidal onslaughts, more people than
were killed in warfare in the past two thousand years.

 

Which (historical) fact/s do you base your "We-have-a-choice" on?

 

Regards --- Zoe



Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:


On 22 Sep 2006, at 14:37, kirsten schneide wrote:

> Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth; and 
> if men could become noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing, 
> they would have even less peace than we oblivious and driven madmen 
> have today. Besides, can any ideal of therapeutic revolutions touch 
> the vast masses of this globe, the modern mechanical men in Russia, 
> the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, the brutalized and 
> ignorant populations of almost every continent?


I know you are fond of quoting Ernest Becker's pessimism, and 
actually doing the sort of stuff he wrote about - cannibalising and 
plagiarising his texts, for your own purposes. But Becker for some 
reason had a very rough time of it, even after writing his 
masterpiece, The Denial of Death, he couldn't hold a job. He died of 
cancer at a very young age. Pity. But this was one man's experience. 
I figure we have a choice. The laws of human nature are not fixed nor 
are they final. And if there is a limit, then it is yet to be 
discovered.

Amongst the animals we are unique in that we can imagine and we can 
communicate abstract concepts. We can, or some of us can, experience 
love without the necessity of it leading to reproduction or orgasms 
or power. Simple things like this hold out possibilities for 
something beyond what you might call our biological necessities.

You choose to take the path of pessimism which reveals your own fear 
of death and meaningless. I am happier with optimism seasoned lightly 
with a bit of scepticism. Remember there was a time when humans had 
no idea how to cook food and that was that. They knew nothing of 
domesticating animals and were prey to the bigger and faster 
predators. There was also a time when a consensus of the experts 
agreed on ideas such as nobody can travel faster than a mile a 
minute and that space travel was a physical impossibility. They also 
agreed that, before Einstein came along that physics was finished. 
pretty well all wrapped up. Nobody should be advised to become a 
physicist because there was nothing left to learn. And there was also 
a time when people with psychological disorders ended up in mad 
houses that served mainly as places where the bourgeoisie could 
entertain themselves laughing at the loonies.. My point here is that 
to presuppose the sort of limitation that you seem to take as given 
insures that such limitation will prove to be what you think it is, 
at least for you

So, the only positive idea that I can draw from these pessimistic 
posts of yours is that you want us to help you get past your own fear 
of death. I read a cry that says, "Convince me. Show me that I am 
wrong." But nobody can do that for you. There are some here, I know, 
who have overcome there fear of death, and who know that their 
meaning does not die with them. So iif you are frightened, maybe you 
ought to gather up your courage and ask for help.

don

_______________________________________________
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post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net

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_______________________________________________

info:

www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue

 

post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net

 

dialogue facilitator:

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Administrator of the mailing list:

admin@david-bohm.net

 

_______________________________________________

 

 

 

_______________________________________________
info:
www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue

post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net

dialogue facilitator:
facilitator@david-bohm.net

Administrator of the mailing list:
admin@david-bohm.net

_______________________________________________



 

 

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Do you Yahoo!?
Get on board. You're
<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=40791/*http:/advision.webevents.yahoo.com/mailbe
ta>  invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail. 

_______________________________________________

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_______________________________________________

 

 

 

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From kirstenschneide at hotmail.com  Sun Sep 24 14:32:48 2006
From: kirstenschneide at hotmail.com (kirsten schneide)
Date: Mon Sep 25 15:26:59 2006
Subject: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
Message-ID: <BAY107-F518F985B9F0F9D43A15D0A8270@phx.gbl>

Dear Zoe, just brushing up on Freud.

Hmmm

Good stuff!

But it does not turn away from the external world; on

the contrary, it clings to the objects belonging to that

world and obtains happiness from an emotional relationship to

them. Nor is it content to aim at an avoidance of unpleasure

— a goal, as we might call it, of weary resignation; it

passes this by without heed and holds fast to the original,

passionate striving or a positive fulfillment of happiness.

And perhaps it does in fact come nearer to this goal than any

other method. I am, of course, speaking of the way of life

which makes love the center of everything, which looks for

all satisfaction in loving and being loved. A psychical

attitude of this sort comes naturally enough to all of us;

one of the forms in which love manifests itself — sexual love

— has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming

sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a

pattern for our search for happiness. What is more natural

than that we should persist in looking for happiness along

the path on which we first encountered it? The weak side of

this technique of living is easy to see; otherwise no human

being would have thought of abandoning this path to happiness

for any other. It is that we are never so defenseless against

suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as

when we have lost our loved object of its love. But this does

not dispose of the technique of living based on the value of

love as a means to happiness. There is much more to be said

about it.

And:


In spite of the incompleteness, I will venture on a few

remarks as a conclusion to our enquiry. The program of

becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us,

cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not — indeed, we cannot —

give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some

means or other. Very different paths may be taken in that

direction, and we may give priority either to the positive

aspect of the aim, that of gaining pleasure, or to its

negative one, that of avoiding unpleasure. By none of these

paths can we attain all that we desire. Happiness, in the

reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a

problem of the economics of the individual's libido. There is

no golden rule which applies to everyone: every man must find

out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.

All kinds of different factors will operate to direct his

choice. It is a question of how much real satisfaction he can

expect to get from the external world, how far he is led to

make himself independent of it, and finally, how much

strength he feels he has for altering the world to suit his

wishes. In this, his psychical constitution will play a

decisive part, irrespectively of the external circumstances.

The man who is predominantly erotic will give first

preference to his emotional relationships to other people;

the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient,

will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental

processes; the man of action will never give up the external

world on which he can try out his strength. As regards the

second of these types, the nature of his talents and the

amount of instinctual sublimination open to him will decide

where he shall locate his interests. Any choice that is

pushed to an extreme will be penalized by exposing the

individual to the dangers which arise if a technique of

living that has been chosen as an exclusive one should prove

inadequate. Just as a cautious business-man avoids tying up

all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom

will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction

from a single aspiration. Its success is never certain, for

that depends on the convergence of many factors, perhaps on

none more than on the capacity of the psychical constitution

to adapt its function to the environment and then to exploit

that environment for a yield of pleasure. A person who is

born with a specially unfavorable instinctual constitution,

and who has not properly undergone the transformation and

rearrangement of his libidinal components which is

indispensable for later achievements, will find it hard to

obtain happiness from his external situation, especially if

he is faced with tasks of some difficulty. As a last

technique of living, which will at least bring him

substitutive satisfactions, he is offered that of a flight

into neurotic illness — a flight which he usually

accomplishes when he is still young. The man who sees his

pursuit of happiness come to nothing in later years can still

find consolation in the yield of pleasure of chronic

intoxication; or he can embark on the desperate attempt at

rebellion seen in a psychosis..... but I have the 'funny'

feeling it is not deemed very fashionable around here

to question belief&systems, since this Bohm-Chat-Group

does embody its inherent dynamics and 'features' so

"beauti"&fully ..... well, here you have it, again,

the ROD.... the Religion Of Dialog,,,, all ways some

thinkg to rub along/against ;-!



Love & Friction, Aladybythelabelbot







>From: Zoe Chu <zoechuzero@yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org
>To: bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org
>Subject: Re: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
>Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:36:11 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Kristen - I am currently looking at Freud some. You might
>   appreciate this one:
>
>Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion; Wer
>   jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion!
>
>   [He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he
>   who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion! —
>   Goethe, Zahme Xenien IX]
>
>   This saying on the one hand draws an antithesis between
>   religion and the two highest achievements of man, and on the
>   other, asserts that, as regards their value in life, those
>   achievements and religion can represent or replace each
>   other. If we also set out to deprive the common man, [who has
>   neither science nor art] of his religion, we shall clearly
>   not have the poet's authority on our side. We will choose a
>   particular path to bring us nearer an appreciation of his
>   words. Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us
>   too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In
>   order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures.
>   'We cannot do without auxiliary constructions' as Theodor
>   Fontane tells us. There are perhaps three such measures:
>   powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our
>   misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and
>   intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it.
>   Something of the kind is indispensable. Voltaire has
>   deflections in mind when he ends Candide with the advice to
>   cultivate one's garden; and scientific activity is a
>   deflection of this kind, too. The substitutive satisfactions,
>   as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with reality,
>   but they are none the less psychically effective, thanks to
>   the role which phantasy has assumed in mental life. The
>   intoxicating substances influence our body and alter its
>   chemistry. It is no simple matter to see where religion has
>   its place in this series. We must look further afield.
>
>   The question of the purpose of human life has been
>   raised countless times; it has never yet received a
>   satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. Some
>   of those who have asked it have added that if it should turn
>   out that life has no purpose, it would lose all value for
>   them. But this threat alters nothing. It looks, on the
>   contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question,
>   for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many
>   other manifestations of which are already familiar to us.
>   Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of animals,
>   unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of
>   service to man. But this view is not tenable either, for
>   there are many animals of which man can make nothing, except
>   to describe, classify and study them; and innumerable species
>   of animals have escaped even this use, since they existed and
>   became extinct before man set eyes on them. Once again, only
>   religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One
>   can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life
>   having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.
>We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what
>   men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and
>   intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and
>   wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in
>   doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy
>   and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and
>   a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of
>   pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing
>   of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the
>   word 'happiness' only relates to the last. In conformity with
>   this dichotomy in his aims, man's activity develops in two
>   directions, according as it seeks to realize — in the main,
>   or even exclusively — the one or the other of these aims.
>
>   As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the
>   program of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates
>   the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There
>   can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its program is at
>   loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much
>   as with the microcosm. There is no possibility at all of its
>   being carried through; all the regulations of the universe
>   run counter to it. One feels inclined to say that the
>   intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the
>   plan of 'Creation.' What we call happiness in the strictest
>   sense comes from the (preferable sudden) satisfaction of
>   needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is
>   from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When
>   any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is
>   prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We
>   are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a
>   contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus our
>   possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our
>   constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to
>   experience. We are threatened with suffering from three
>   directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and
>   dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety
>   as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage
>   against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of
>   destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The
>   suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more
>   painful to us than any other. We tend to regard it as a kind
>   of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be any less
>   fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from
>   elsewhere.
>
>   It is no wonder if, under the pressure of these possibilities
>   of suffering, men are accustomed to moderate their claims to
>   happiness — just as the pleasure principle itself, indeed,
>   under the influence of the external world, changed into the
>   more modest reality principle —, if a man thinks himself
>   happy merely to have escaped unhappiness or to have survived
>   his suffering, and if in general the task of avoiding
>   suffering pushes that of obtaining pleasure into the
>   background. Reflection shows that the accomplishment of this
>   task can be attempted along very different paths; and all
>   these paths have been recommended by the various schools of
>   worldly wisdom and put into practice by men. An unrestricted
>   satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most
>   enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means
>   putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own
>   punishment. The other methods, in which avoidance of
>   unpleasure is the main purpose, are differentiated according
>   to the source of unpleasure to which their attention is
>   chiefly turned. Some of these methods are extreme and some
>   moderate; some are one-sided and some attack the problem
>   simultaneously at several points. Against the suffering which
>   may come upon one from human relationships the readiest
>   safeguard is voluntary isolation, keeping oneself aloof from
>   other people. The happiness which can be achieved along this
>   path is, as we see, the happiness of quietness. Against the
>   dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some
>   kind turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task
>   by oneself. There is, indeed, another and better path: that
>   of becoming a member of the human community, and, with the
>   help of a technique guided by science, going over to the
>   attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will.
>   Then one is working with all for the good of all. But the
>   most interesting methods of averting suffering are those
>   which seek to influence our own organism. In the last
>   analysis, all suffering is nothing else than sensation; it
>   only exists in so far as we feel it, and we only feel it in
>   consequence of certain ways in which our organism is
>   regulated. (From "Civilization and Discontent).
>
>   --- Zoe (Millionaire, eh?)
>
>kirsten schneide <kirstenschneide@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>Dear Zoe, yes, Reynold's. Why do animals (chat)group? Herding, for example.
>Just watch here. "Risk dilution" of "predators'.... of that little cozy,
>sleepy belief&system. Zoe, would you see this Bohm&Chat Group as such?
>Belief, System? Early theorists developed ideas like 'mental contagion' and
>'herd instinc', which became very popular. But as freud was quick to see,
>these ideas never really did explain what men did with their judgment and
>common sense when they got caught up in groups. Good old Freud saw right
>away what they did with it: they simply became dependent children again,
>blindly following the inner voice of their parents, which now came from 
>them
>under the hypnotic spell of the leader. A Belief/System is a leader, too,
>dear Subscribers. TAS is a: "leader". Thus Subscribers abandoned their egos
>to his, identified with his power, tried to function with him as an ideal.
>Bohm/Dialog as crutch. Don't like "crutch/es"? try: Tit/s...
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>PS: Student;-? ....... I am the daughter of a millionaire.
>
>
>
>
>
>Love & Nike, Kbot
>
> >Kirsten - Thanks for that. Quite Interesting. Will look into that. By the
> >way: Are you familiar with Craig Reynold's work (Boids)?
> > 1, separation (avoid crowding neighbours)
> > 2 , alignment (steer towards average heading of neighbours)
> > 3 , cohesion (steer towards average position of neighbours)
> > Somehow seems to resonate nicely with Solomon's work on TMT
> > 1, to deny or belittle and devalue the importance third (second) party
> >"Weltanschauung" (Hegel), but try
> > 2, to controvert (To raise arguments against; voice opposition to) the
> >ideas and opinions of others which may, as a consequence,
> > 3, escalate into a conflict. Force. Violence. Elimination. You name it -
> > What do you think? Are you a student, too? -- Zoe
> >
> >
> >kirsten schneide wrote:
> > Dear Zoe, did you read how Donf keeps drooling about his (Chat group
> >going):
> >Laser-thinkg;-? It all ways cracks me up. Mon Cheri Donf, how many 
>decades
> >have you taken care of (by) now by 'doing' (Bohm)Dialog? And? Any Lasers 
>in
> >sight? In-sights?? Any "fresh" stuff? O Boy! At any 'rate', Zoe, this 
>'all'
> >brings up the great problem raised by the therapeutic revolution, 
>namely:::
> >" So What?".... Even with numerous (chat) groups of really liberated
> >people,
> >at their best, we can't imagine that the world will be any pleasanter or
> >less tragic a place. It may even be worse in still unknown ways. As 
>Tillich
> >warned us, and Donl likes to make-up himselves a bit here&there with T, 
>New
> >Being, under the conditions and limitations of existence, will only bring
> >into play new and sharper paradoxes, new tensions, and more painful
> >disharmonies—a "more intense demonism." Reality is remorseless because 
>gods
> >do not walk upon the earth; and if men could become noble repositories of
> >great gulfs of nonbeing, they would have even less peace than we 
>oblivious
> >and driven madmen have today. Besides, can any ideal of therapeutic
> >revolutions touch the vast masses of this globe, the modern mechanical 
>men
> >in Russia, the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, the brutalized
> >and
> >ignorant populations of almost every continent? When one lives in the
> >liberation atmosphere of Berkeley, California, or in the intoxications of
> >small doses of unconstriction in a therapeutic group in one's home town,
> >one
> >is living in a hothouse atmosphere that shuts out the reality of the rest
> >of
> >the planet, the way things really are in this world. It is this 
>therapeutic
> >megalomania that must quickly been seen through if we are not to be 
>perfect
> >fools. The empirical facts of the world will not fade away because one 
>has
> >analyzed his Oedipus complex, as Freud so well knew, or because one can
> >make
> >love with tenderness, as so many now believe. Forget it. In this sense
> >again
> >it is Freud's somber pessimism, especially of his later writings such as
> >"Civilization and Its Discontents", that keeps him so contemporary. Us
> >human
> >animals are doomed, doomed to live&die in an overwhelmingly tragic and
> >demonic world. Enough said, it's good to have you on board .... of this
> >ship
> >of fools.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >Love & Nuts, Kirsten
> >
> >
> >
> > >From: Zoe Chu
> > >Reply-To: bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org
> > >To: bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org
> > >Subject: Re: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
> > >Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 10:28:58 -0700 (PDT)
> > >
> > >Kirsten - You seem to be a real nut --- just the kind of humans I
> >cherish!
> > >Glad M told me about this list.
> > >
> > > The brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming 
>stimuli
> > >from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out
> >this
> > >same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined
> >as
> > >an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has
> > >shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the
> > >researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to 
>have
> > >low levels of latent inhibition.
> > >
> > > "This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra
> > >information constantly streaming in from the environment," says Jordan
> > >Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets 
>about
> > >it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than 
>he
> >or
> > >she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new
> > >possibilities."
> > >
> > > Previously, scientists have associated failure to screen out stimuli
> > >with psychosis. However, researchers hypothesized that it might also
> > >contribute to original thinking, especially when combined with high IQ.
> > >
> > > The authors hypothesize that latent inhibition may be positive when
> > >combined with high intelligence and good working memory - the capacity 
>to
> > >think about many things at once - but negative otherwise. Peterson
> >states:
> > >"If you are open to new information, new ideas, you better be able to
> > >intelligently and carefully edit and choose. If you have 50 ideas, only
> >two
> > >or three are likely to be good. You have to be able to discriminate or
> > >you'll get swamped."
> > >
> > > "Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity
> > >seem linked," says Carson. "It appears likely that low levels of latent
> > >inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought might predispose to
> > >mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishment 
>under
> > >others."
> > >
> > > For example, during the early stages of diseases such as 
>schizophrenia,
> > >which are often accompanied by feelings of deep insight, mystical
> >knowledge
> > >and religious experience, chemical changes take place in which latent
> > >inhibition disappears.
> > >
> > > "We are very excited by the results of these studies," says Peterson.
> > >"It appears that we have not only identified one of the biological 
>bases
> >of
> > >creativity but have moved towards cracking an age-old mystery: the
> > >relationship between genius, madness and the doors of perception."
> > >
> > > Zoe
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >kirsten schneide wrote:
> > > Dear Zoe, Hans Eysenck proposed that extraversion was caused by
> > >variability
> > >in cortical arousal; "introverts are characterized by higher levels of
> > >activity than extraverts and so are chronically more cortically aroused
> > >than
> > >extraverts". While it seems counterintuitive to suppose that introverts
> >are
> > >more aroused than extraverts, the putative effect this has on behaviour
> >is
> > >such that the introvert seeks lower levels of stimulation. Conversely,
> >the
> > >extravert seeks to heighten their arousal to a more optimal level ~ ~ 
>as
> > >predicted by the Yerkes-Dodson Law) ~ ~ by increased activity, social
> > >engagement and other stimulation-seeking behaviours.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >Love & Drugsl, Kirsten
> > >--------------------------
> > >Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > >Hi Kristen -
> > > >
> > > > Funny. I currently read some of that stuff for class. What do you 
>make
> > > >of that? Do you see co-relations? Anyone?
> > > >
> > > > Warwick's claims that robots that can program themselves to avoid 
>each
> > > >other while operating in a group raises the issue of 
>self-organization,
> > >and
> > > >as such might be the major impetus in following developments in this
> > >area.
> > > >In particular, the works of Fransisco Varela and Humberto Maturana,
> >once
> > >in
> > > >the province of pure speculation now have become immediately relevant
> > >with
> > > >respect to synthetic intelligence. Cyborg-type systems not only are
> > > >homeostatic (meaning that they are abe to preserve stable internal
> > > >conditions in various environments) but adaptive, if they are to
> >survive.
> > > >Testing the claims of Varela and Maturana via synthetic devices is 
>the
> > > >larger and more serious concern in the discussion about Warwick and
> >those
> > > >involved in similar research. "Pulling the plug" on independent 
>devices
> > > >cannot be as simple as it appears, for if the device displays
> >sufficient
> > > >intelligence and assumes a diagnostic and prognostic stature, we may
> > > >ultimately one day be forced to decide
> > > > between what it could be telling us as counterintuitive (but 
>correct)
> > >and
> > > >our impulse to disconnect because of our limited and "intuitive"
> > > >perceptions. Warwick's robots seemed to have exhibited behavior not
> > > >anticipated by the research, one such robot "committing suicide"
> >because
> > >it
> > > >could not cope with its environment. In a more complex setting, it 
>may
> >be
> > > >asked whether a "natural selection" may be possible, neural networks
> > >being
> > > >the major operative.
> > > >
> > > > Thinking about the implications of Warwick's research is not 
>confined
> >to
> > > >device implantation or automatons. Researching websites on the U.S.
> > > >Department of Defense's (DoD) development of a simulated 
>international
> > > >battlespace. It is no secret that the DoD foresees the day when not
> >only
> > > >all military systems are interoperable, but can be coordinated 
>globally
> > >in
> > > >a real-time war. Ultimately, simulations not only are to be used for
> > > >assessing alternative outcomes in wargaming settings but also are to 
>be
> > > >used as diagnostic "tools" interactive with a real time battlefield
> > > >situation. If this happens, we must consider self-organization in 
>these
> > > >synthetic systems operating in critical environments. That is, if
> >allowed
> > > >to operate with minimal or no human intervention, what of the 
>character
> > >of
> > > >the system, itself and its evolution? Hence, Warwick should be a
> >starting
> > > >point for a more serious discussion than the popular media seems to 
>be
> > > >capable of maintaining. In the worst case scenario,
> > > > Warwick is deemed a proponent of science fiction, but it may be said
> > >that
> > > >it is great science fiction, as it is based upon the plausible, 
>rather
> > >than
> > > >the impossible. In the best case scenario, Warwick, indeed has given 
>us
> > > >ample notice to humanity to concern itself with the choice of 
>thinking
> > > >about ourselves and our place in the universe or abnegate in favor of
> > > >another consciousness. A return to Aristotle and Plato is in order.
> > > >
> > > > -- Zoe
> > > >
> > > >kirsten schneide wrote:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >Dear habituated Susbcribers
> > > >
> > > >The study of group polarization began with an unpublished 1961 
>Master’s
> > > >thesis by MIT student James Stoner, who observed the so-called "risky
> > > >shift", meaning that a group’s decisions are riskier than the average
> >of
> > > >the individual decisions of members before the group met. The 
>discovery
> > >of
> > > >the risky shift was considered surprising and counterintuitive,
> > >especially
> > > >since earlier work in the 1920s and 1930s by Allport and other
> > >researchers
> > > >suggested that individuals made more extreme decisions than did 
>groups,
> > > >leading to the expectation that groups would make decisions that 
>would
> > > >conform to the average risk level of its members. The seemingly
> > > >counterintuitive findings of Stoner led to a flurry of research 
>around
> > >the
> > > >risky shift, which was originally thought to be a special case
> >exception
> > >to
> > > >the standard decision-making practice. By the late 1960s, however, it
> >had
> > > >become clear that the risky shift was just one type of many attitudes
> > >that
> > > >became more extreme in groups, leading Moscovici and Zavalloni to 
>term
> > >the
> > > >overall phenomenon "group polarization".
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >Love & Shiftstick, Kirsten
> > > >--------------------------
> > > >Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
> > > >
> > > > >From: "kirsten schneide"
> > > > >Reply-To: bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org
> > > > >To: bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org
> > > > >Subject: [Bohm_Dialogue] Welt*Bild
> > > > >Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 18:15:38 -0400
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >Oh William, I like your
> > > > >
> > > > >Attitude/s
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >Love & Dress, Kirsten
> > > > >
> > > > >PS:
> > > > >
> > > > >There is a pervasive sense of rootlessness and disorientation that
> > >causes
> > > > >many people to avoid contemplating their place in the universe and 
>to
> > > >focus
> > > > >instead on the trivial concerns of consumerism.
> > > > >
> > > > >The lack of social consensus on cosmology in the modern world has
> > >caused
> > > > >many people to close off their thinking to large issues and long 
>time
> > > > >scales, so that small matters dominate their consciousness.
> > > > >
> > > > >In most traditional cultures, people's sense of identity and codes 
>of
> > > > >behavior are grounded in a cosmology that provides a picture of who
> > >they
> > > > >are, where they come from, and what their personal relationship to
> >the
> > > > >larger world should be. For more than 300 years, however, 
>scientific
> > > > >advances have tended to undermine traditional cosmologies while
> > >offering
> > > >an
> > > > >image of the cosmos bereft of spiritual or mythic dimensions.
> > > > >
> > > > >Are you looking for an image of the cosmos consistent with what
> > > >scientists
> > > > >understand about the universe today. That symbol, known to the
> >ancient
> > > > >Greeks as a "uroboros," is the snake swallowing its tail. This:
> >symbol
> > >:
> > > > >represents the universe as a continuity of vastly different size
> > >scales,
> > > > >with the swallowing of the tail representing the hoped-for
> >unification
> > >of
> > > > >theories governing the largest and smallest scales.
> > > > >
> > > > >The size scales in the known universe encompass about 60 orders of
> > > > >magnitude, from the vastness of the cosmic horizon to the subatomic
> > > >Planck
> > > > >scale, the smallest size allowed by relativity and quantum physics.
> >Yet
> > > > >people asked to visualize "the universe" tend to think of endless
> >space
> > > >and
> > > > >uncountable stars and galaxies, while the human scale shrinks into
> > > > >insignificance.
> > > > >
> > > > >Gute Nacht!
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >> >I would love to know what anyone here thinks
> > > > >> >about the Deikmans' piece.
> > > > >>
> > > > >>Not much; as much nonsense as ever
> > > > >>
> > > > >>William
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >>_______________________________________________
> > > > >>info:
> > > > >>www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
> > > > >>
> > > > >>post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
> > > > >>
> > > > >>dialogue facilitator:
> > > > >>facilitator@david-bohm.net
> > > > >>
> > > > >>Administrator of the mailing list:
> > > > >>admin@david-bohm.net
> > > > >>
> > > > >>_______________________________________________
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >
> > > > >_________________________________________________________________
> > > > >Add fun gadgets and colorful themes to express yourself on Windows
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> > >
> > 
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> > > > >
> > > > >_______________________________________________
> > > > >info:
> > > > >www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
> > > > >
> > > > >post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
> > > > >
> > > > >dialogue facilitator:
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> > > > >Administrator of the mailing list:
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> > > >
> > > >_______________________________________________
> > > >info:
> > > >www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
> > > >
> > > >post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
> > > >
> > > >dialogue facilitator:
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> > > >Administrator of the mailing list:
> > > >admin@david-bohm.net
> > > >
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> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >---------------------------------
> > > >Stay in the know. Pulse on the new Yahoo.com. Check it out.
> > >
> > >
> > > >_______________________________________________
> > > >info:
> > > >www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
> > > >
> > > >post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
> > > >
> > > >dialogue facilitator:
> > > >facilitator@david-bohm.net
> > > >
> > > >Administrator of the mailing list:
> > > >admin@david-bohm.net
> > > >
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> > 
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> > >
> > >_______________________________________________
> > >info:
> > >www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
> > >
> > >post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
> > >
> > >dialogue facilitator:
> > >facilitator@david-bohm.net
> > >
> > >Administrator of the mailing list:
> > >admin@david-bohm.net
> > >
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> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
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> > >---------------------------------
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> > >
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From donfactor at donfactor.demon.co.uk  Sun Sep 24 14:34:21 2006
From: donfactor at donfactor.demon.co.uk (Don Factor)
Date: Mon Sep 25 15:28:33 2006
Subject: AW: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
In-Reply-To: <0MKwh2-1GRSee0qNs-000849@mrelayeu.kundenserver.de>
References: <0MKwh2-1GRSee0qNs-000849@mrelayeu.kundenserver.de>
Message-ID: <9E64336A-3262-4534-9B7E-CB6A6E9FBF86@donfactor.demon.co.uk>

This bit of the risk thread has got me considering a general  
misunderstanding of terms like cosmos and chaos. Most of us where  
taught that cosmos was orderly and lawful while chaos was the  
opposite, But this is not the case. Chaos is a part of cosmos, a  
necessary part. Creativity and growth occur at points far from  
equilibrium. A cosmos in perfect equilibrium would be death. Life and  
creativity exist far from equilibrium. This picture is a modern  
scientific view, and even Bohm accepts it. He would say that cosmos  
and chaos unfold and enforld into and out of each other,

But what does this imply? What might it imply for the many people who  
share Zoe's point of view? It seems to me that a world where all the  
lions and lambs were lying around with each other, and we all had  
whatever we need or could desire, would be one that was stagnating away.

I recall an old teacher of mine saying that we have been taught to  
mistake "evol" for evil. Evol was his word for something that was in  
a state of process, like a muddy unfinished building site And I am  
wondering what this sort of a viewpoint or this this sort of meaning,  
might reveal?

don

On 24 Sep 2006, at 13:00, william wrote:

> Zoe Chu:
> >Don Factor  - What you wrote here was the most ignorant contribution
>
> >I encoutered so far in this forum.
>
>
>
> Zoe, please tell me more about the globe you are on. How many  
> children have you seen carrying buckets of water on their heads?  
> How many women have you seen walking along the road-side, far away  
> from home, carrying fire wood on their heads, trying to be back  
> before dark? Every day the distance gets longer and longer?
>
> How many screams in the starry night have you heard with your own  
> ears? How many sick and hungry hands have you shaken? How many  
> vultures have you seen circling in the sky?
>
> Have you had fists shown at you? Have you had stones thrown at you?  
> Have you had guns pointing at your guts? Have you had to give  
> ?gifts? to stray soldiers at socalled checkpoints? Have you had to  
> pay ?highway? fees for permission to drive on a dirt track? Have  
> you paid licence fees for being in possession of a photo camera?
>
> These are some of my personal experiences with the globe that I am  
> on. If you ever feel pessimistic, go to Africa. You won?t feel  
> pessimistic while you are there, but it may come again when you?re  
> back home. Feeling pessimistic is a sign of luxury. So, if you feel  
> pessimistic; congratulations.
>
>
>
> william
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Zoe, I don't know where you live, but if you live in America or  
> Canada or in Europe or in any major city apart from one of a few  
> obvious trouble spots, I would bet that you can take a walk down  
> any street in your neighbourhood and you will see a world where  
> there are people shopping and walking and driving, going to work  
> and coming home to their families, taking their kids to school,  
> having a coffee at the local Starbucks, and so on. And you will  
> have to go to a lot of trouble to see at first hand any of the  
> awful stuff that you describe.
>
>
>
> I don't deny that a lot of what you describe exists and there are  
> major problems in the world that need solving and that a lot of  
> them are not being dealt with honestly or effectively. So our world  
> needs  lot of help. But you are lucky to be living now, with a cool  
> broadband connection to the internet, a safe place to live. You are  
> neither starving nor suffering from untreatable diseases,  nor  
> hiding from insurgents or rebels or inquisitors or the gestapo.  
> What you describe is the sort of stuff that is magnified and over  
> hyped in order to sell newspapers, and pay newscaster's fat  
> salaries. It is the kind of stuff that is aimed at keeping  
> governments in power by making ordinary citizens feel frightened  
> and helpless. it is the business of governments and their allies in  
> the media to keep you feeling helpless and terrorised, in order for  
> them to keep their power. Power, by the way, is the one thing that  
> nobody ever gives up without a fight.
>
>
>
> don
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 23 Sep 2006, at 21:49, Zoe Chu wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Don - Which Globe are you on? Mine is (called) Global-Warming,  
> Peakoil, Genocides,  Wars-all-over, Overpopulation, Epidemics, Mass- 
> starvations, Pollution, Collapse-of-natural-Stocks, Social- 
> Injustice, Mass-Extinctions, Torture, Election-Fraud, Rainforest- 
> Destruction, Record-Diabetes, Mass-suicides-of-Indian-farmers,  
> World-Freshwater-loss, Famines, Religious-Extremism, Nuclear- 
> Proliferation, Genetic-Design -- just to name a very few. Whatever  
> you might be inclined to perceive as "improvements" will soon,  
> according to the majority of experts, have no more stage to take  
> place on. The theater is on fire. No? Regards --- Zoe
>
> Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> For one thing, there is the growth of human population which is now  
> well in excess of 6 billion people. I suppose you can work out the  
> percentages. My comments implied that at least some parts of the  
> world are more peaceful now than ever before. Also, your figures  
> are somewhat questionable. Who did the counting? And especially,  
> who did the counting of all the people killed in the past? These  
> are the sort of extrapolations that make good headlines but that's  
> all.  I don't mean to deny we have had pretty violent times but the  
> process of change has to start somewhere. Of course, these day,  
> killing is far more efficient, so one smallish war can account for  
> many more casualties than some ancient big ones.
>
>
>
> As recently as when I was a kid, during WWII, war was still  
> considered something glorious. To be a war hero was something very  
> positive, at least in the Anglo American cultural setting. That is  
> much less the case these days.
>
>
>
>  I can only say that if things have begun to change in some places  
> it may be possible for them to change in others. For  
> instance,Kirsten's  vast masses of  modern mechanical men in Russia  
> and the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, no longer reads  
> as true as it might have a couple of decades ago.
>
>
>
> don
>
>
>
> On 23 Sep 2006, at 16:15, Zoe Chu wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Don - How do following facts fit in your picture (imagination?)?  
> Respectively: How do you fit them?
>
>
>
> The Past century was the most lethal in human history: Over 200  
> million people were killed in 250 wars and genocidal onslaughts,  
> more people than were killed in warfare in the past two thousand  
> years.
>
>
>
> Which (historical) fact/s do you base your "We-have-a-choice" on?
>
>
>
> Regards --- Zoe
>
>
>
> Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> On 22 Sep 2006, at 14:37, kirsten schneide wrote:
>
> > Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth; and
> > if men could become noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing,
> > they would have even less peace than we oblivious and driven madmen
> > have today. Besides, can any ideal of therapeutic revolutions touch
> > the vast masses of this globe, the modern mechanical men in Russia,
> > the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, the brutalized and
> > ignorant populations of almost every continent?
>
>
> I know you are fond of quoting Ernest Becker's pessimism, and
> actually doing the sort of stuff he wrote about - cannibalising and
> plagiarising his texts, for your own purposes. But Becker for some
> reason had a very rough time of it, even after writing his
> masterpiece, The Denial of Death, he couldn't hold a job. He died of
> cancer at a very young age. Pity. But this was one man's experience.
> I figure we have a choice. The laws of human nature are not fixed nor
> are they final. And if there is a limit, then it is yet to be
> discovered.
>
> Amongst the animals we are unique in that we can imagine and we can
> communicate abstract concepts. We can, or some of us can, experience
> love without the necessity of it leading to reproduction or orgasms
> or power. Simple things like this hold out possibilities for
> something beyond what you might call our biological necessities.
>
> You choose to take the path of pessimism which reveals your own fear
> of death and meaningless. I am happier with optimism seasoned lightly
> with a bit of scepticism. Remember there was a time when humans had
> no idea how to cook food and that was that. They knew nothing of
> domesticating animals and were prey to the bigger and faster
> predators. There was also a time when a consensus of the experts
> agreed on ideas such as nobody can travel faster than a mile a
> minute and that space travel was a physical impossibility. They also
> agreed that, before Einstein came along that physics was finished.
> pretty well all wrapped up. Nobody should be advised to become a
> physicist because there was nothing left to learn. And there was also
> a time when people with psychological disorders ended up in mad
> houses that served mainly as places where the bourgeoisie could
> entertain themselves laughing at the loonies.. My point here is that
> to presuppose the sort of limitation that you seem to take as given
> insures that such limitation will prove to be what you think it is,
> at least for you
>
> So, the only positive idea that I can draw from these pessimistic
> posts of yours is that you want us to help you get past your own fear
> of death. I read a cry that says, "Convince me. Show me that I am
> wrong." But nobody can do that for you. There are some here, I know,
> who have overcome there fear of death, and who know that their
> meaning does not die with them. So iif you are frightened, maybe you
> ought to gather up your courage and ask for help.
>
> don
>
> _______________________________________________
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From kirstenschneide at hotmail.com  Sun Sep 24 14:42:33 2006
From: kirstenschneide at hotmail.com (kirsten schneide)
Date: Mon Sep 25 15:36:41 2006
Subject: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
Message-ID: <BAY107-F305A8FE0FD8D147E1E5C2DA8270@phx.gbl>

Dear Zoe ~ yeah, Donf's "WeltBild" is a 'little' bit off  ~ ~

no thinkg a few decades of (Bohm)Dialog could not :

"take care" of ;-! He believes, chronically, in the

"good", the potential of Men .... he has ("has") to ...

his w'hole house of cards is based upon this "visison".

At any 'rate', just imagine how unsuccessful we have been in

precisely this field of prevention of suffering, a suspicion

dawns on us that here, too, a piece of unconquerable nature

may lie behind—this time a piece of our own psychical

constitution .

         when we start considering this possibility, we come

upon a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell

upon it. This contention holds that what we call our

civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that

we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to

primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing

because, in whatever way we may define the concept of

civilization, it is a certain fact that all the things with

which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that

emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very

civilization.

How has it happened that so many people have come to take up

this strange attitude of hostility to civilization? I believe

that the basis of it was a deep and long-standing

dissatisfaction with the then existing state of civilization

and that on that basis a condemnation of it was built up,

occasioned by certain specific historical events. I think I

know what the last and the last but one of those occasions

were. I am not learned enough to trace the chain of them far

back enough in the history of the human species; but a factor

of this kind hostile to civilization must already have been

at work in the victory of Christendom over the heathen

religions. For it was very closely related to the low

estimation put upon earthly life by the Christian doctrine.

The last but one of these occasions was when the progress of

voyages of discovery led to contact with primitive peoples

and races. In consequence of insufficient observation and a

mistaken view of their manners and customs, they appeared to

Europeans to be leading a simple, happy life with few wants,

a life such as was unattainable by their visitors with their

superior civilization. Later experience has corrected some of

those judgements. In many cases the observers had wrongly

attributed to the absence of complicated cultural demands

what was in fact due to the bounty of nature and the ease

with which the major human needs were satisfied. The last

occasion is especially familiar to us. It arose when people

came to know about the mechanism of the neuroses, which

threaten to undermine the modicum of happiness enjoyed by

civilized men. It was discovered that a person becomes

neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration

which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural

ideals, and it was inferred from this that the abolition or

reduction of those demands would result in a return to

possibilities of happiness.

There is also an added factor of disappointment. During the

last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary

advance in the natural sciences and in their technical

application and has established his control over nature in a

way never before imagined. The single steps of this advance

are common knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them.

Men are proud of those achievements, and have a right to be.

But they seem to have observed that this newly-won power over

space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature,

which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back

thousands of years, has not increased the amount of

pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and

has not made them feel happier.  From the recognition of this

fact we ought to be content to conclude that power over

nature is not the only precondition of human happiness, just

as it is not the only goal of cultural endeavour; we ought

not to infer from it that technical progress is without value

for the economics of our happiness. One would like to ask: is

there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal

increase in my feelings of happiness, if I can, as often as I

please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living

hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest

possible time after a friend has reached his destination that

he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed?

Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in

enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of

infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in

considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man?

and there is a long list thatmight be added to benefits of

that kind which we owe to the much-despised era of scientific

and technical advannces. but here the voice of pessimistic

criticism makes itself heard and warns us that most of these

satisfactions follow the model of the 'cheap enjoyment'

extolled in the anecdote - the enjoyment obtained by putting

a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night

and drawing it in again. If there had been no railway to

conquer distances, my child would never have left his native

town and I should need no phone to hear his voice; if

traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced,

my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I

should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What

is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is

precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint

on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round,

we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before

the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created

difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage....And,

finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult

and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we

can only welcome death as a deliverer. Love, Kirsten




>From: Zoe Chu <zoechuzero@yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org
>To: bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org
>Subject: Re: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
>Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:15:39 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Don - How do following facts fit in your picture (imagination?)? 
>Respectively: How do you fit them?
>
>   The Past century was the most lethal in human history: Over 200 million 
>people were killed in 250 wars and genocidal onslaughts, more people than 
>were killed in warfare in the past two thousand years.
>
>   Which (historical) fact/s do you base your "We-have-a-choice" on?
>
>   Regards --- Zoe
>
>
>Don Factor <donfactor@donfactor.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>On 22 Sep 2006, at 14:37, kirsten schneide wrote:
>
> > Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth; and
> > if men could become noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing,
> > they would have even less peace than we oblivious and driven madmen
> > have today. Besides, can any ideal of therapeutic revolutions touch
> > the vast masses of this globe, the modern mechanical men in Russia,
> > the near-billion sheeplike followers in China, the brutalized and
> > ignorant populations of almost every continent?
>
>
>I know you are fond of quoting Ernest Becker's pessimism, and
>actually doing the sort of stuff he wrote about - cannibalising and
>plagiarising his texts, for your own purposes. But Becker for some
>reason had a very rough time of it, even after writing his
>masterpiece, The Denial of Death, he couldn't hold a job. He died of
>cancer at a very young age. Pity. But this was one man's experience.
>I figure we have a choice. The laws of human nature are not fixed nor
>are they final. And if there is a limit, then it is yet to be
>discovered.
>
>Amongst the animals we are unique in that we can imagine and we can
>communicate abstract concepts. We can, or some of us can, experience
>love without the necessity of it leading to reproduction or orgasms
>or power. Simple things like this hold out possibilities for
>something beyond what you might call our biological necessities.
>
>You choose to take the path of pessimism which reveals your own fear
>of death and meaningless. I am happier with optimism seasoned lightly
>with a bit of scepticism. Remember there was a time when humans had
>no idea how to cook food and that was that. They knew nothing of
>domesticating animals and were prey to the bigger and faster
>predators. There was also a time when a consensus of the experts
>agreed on ideas such as nobody can travel faster than a mile a
>minute and that space travel was a physical impossibility. They also
>agreed that, before Einstein came along that physics was finished.
>pretty well all wrapped up. Nobody should be advised to become a
>physicist because there was nothing left to learn. And there was also
>a time when people with psychological disorders ended up in mad
>houses that served mainly as places where the bourgeoisie could
>entertain themselves laughing at the loonies.. My point here is that
>to presuppose the sort of limitation that you seem to take as given
>insures that such limitation will prove to be what you think it is,
>at least for you
>
>So, the only positive idea that I can draw from these pessimistic
>posts of yours is that you want us to help you get past your own fear
>of death. I read a cry that says, "Convince me. Show me that I am
>wrong." But nobody can do that for you. There are some here, I know,
>who have overcome there fear of death, and who know that their
>meaning does not die with them. So iif you are frightened, maybe you
>ought to gather up your courage and ask for help.
>
>don
>
>_______________________________________________
>info:
>www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>
>post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>
>dialogue facilitator:
>facilitator@david-bohm.net
>
>Administrator of the mailing list:
>admin@david-bohm.net
>
>_______________________________________________
>
>
>
>
>
>---------------------------------
>Get your email and more, right on the  new Yahoo.com


>_______________________________________________
>info:
>www.david-bohm.org/mailman/listinfo/bohm_dialogue
>
>post to: dialogue@david-bohm.net
>
>dialogue facilitator:
>facilitator@david-bohm.net
>
>Administrator of the mailing list:
>admin@david-bohm.net
>
>_______________________________________________
>
>

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From kirstenschneide at hotmail.com  Sun Sep 24 14:46:22 2006
From: kirstenschneide at hotmail.com (kirsten schneide)
Date: Mon Sep 25 15:40:32 2006
Subject: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
Message-ID: <BAY107-F132E7817821A48B28D4C06A8270@phx.gbl>

Dear Zoe, and then there is the added "Factor"

of disappointment and delusion and denial. During the

last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary

advance in the natural sciences and in their technical

application and has established his control over nature in a

way never before imagined. The single steps of this advance

are common knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them.

Men are proud of those achievements, and have a right to be.

But they seem to have observed that this newly-won power over

space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature,

which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back

thousands of years, has not increased the amount of

pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and

has not made them feel happier.  From the recognition of this

fact we ought to be content to conclude that power over

nature is not the only precondition of human happiness, just

as it is not the only goal of cultural endeavour; we ought

not to infer from it that technical progress is without value

for the economics of our happiness. One would like to ask: is

there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal

increase in my feelings of happiness, if I can, as often as I

please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living

hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest

possible time after a friend has reached his destination that

he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed?

Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in

enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of

infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in

considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man?

and there is a long list thatmight be added to benefits of

that kind which we owe to the much-despised era of scientific

and technical advannces. but here the voice of pessimistic

criticism makes itself heard and warns us that most of these

satisfactions follow the model of the 'cheap enjoyment'

extolled in the anecdote - the enjoyment obtained by putting

a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night

and drawing it in again. If there had been no railway to

conquer distances, my child would never have left his native

town and I should need no phone to hear his voice; if

traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced,

my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I

should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What

is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is

precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint

on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round,

we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before

the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created

difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage....And,

finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult

and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we

can only welcome death as a deliverer. Love & Organ(music),

Kbot



>From: Zoe Chu <zoechuzero@yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org
>To: bohm_dialogue@david-bohm.org
>Subject: Re: [Bohm_Dialogue] "Risky"
>Date: Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:36:11 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Kristen - I am currently looking at Freud some. You might
>   appreciate this one:
>
>Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, hat auch Religion; Wer
>   jene beide nicht besitzt, der habe Religion!
>
>   [He who possesses science and art also has religion; but he
>   who possesses neither of those two, let him have religion! —
>   Goethe, Zahme Xenien IX]
>
>   This saying on the one hand draws an antithesis between
>   religion and the two highest achievements of man, and on the
>   other, asserts that, as regards their value in life, those
>   achievements and religion can represent or replace each
>   other. If we also set out to deprive the common man, [who has
>   neither science nor art] of his religion, we shall clearly
>   not have the poet's authority on our side. We will choose a
>   particular path to bring us nearer an appreciation of his
>   words. Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us
>   too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In
>   order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures.
>   'We cannot do without auxiliary constructions' as Theodor
>   Fontane tells us. There are perhaps three such measures:
>   powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our
>   misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and
>   intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it.
>   Something of the kind is indispensable. Voltaire has
>   deflections in mind when he ends Candide with the advice to
>   cultivate one's garden; and scientific activity is a
>   deflection of this kind, too. The substitutive satisfactions,
>   as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with reality,
>   but they are none the less psychically effective, thanks to
>   the role which phantasy has assumed in mental life. The
>   intoxicating substances influence our body and alter its
>   chemistry. It is no simple matter to see where religion has
>   its place in this series. We must look further afield.
>
>   The question of the purpose of human life has been
>   raised countless times; it has never yet received a
>   satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one. Some
>   of those who have asked it have added that if it should turn
>   out that life has no purpose, it would lose all value for
>   them. But this threat alters nothing. It looks, on the
>   contrary, as though one had a right to dismiss the question,
>   for it seems to derive from the human presumptuousness, many
>   other manifestations of which are already familiar to us.
>   Nobody talks about the purpose of the life of animals,
>   unless, perhaps, it may be supposed to lie in being of
>   service to man. But this view is not tenable either, for
>   there are many animals of which man can make nothing, except
>   to describe, classify and study them; and innumerable species
>   of animals have escaped even this use, since they existed and
>   became extinct before man set eyes on them. Once again, only
>   religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One
>   can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life
>   having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.
>We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what
>   men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and
>   intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and
>   wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in
>   doubt. They strive for happiness; they want to become happy
>   and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and
>   a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of
>   pain and unpleasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing
>   of strong feelings of pleasure. In its narrower sense the
>   word 'happiness' only relates to the last. In conformity with
>   this dichotomy in his aims, man's activity develops in two
>   directions, according as it seeks to realize — in the main,
>   or even exclusively — the one or the other of these aims.
>
>   As we see, what decides the purpose of life is simply the
>   program of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates
>   the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There
>   can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its program is at
>   loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much
>   as with the microcosm. There is no possibility at all of its
>   being carried through; all the regulations of the universe
>   run counter to it. One feels inclined to say that the
>   intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the
>   plan of 'Creation.' What we call happiness in the strictest
>   sense comes from the (preferable sudden) satisfaction of
>   needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is
>   from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When
>   any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is
>   prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We
>   are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a
>   contrast and very little from a state of things. Thus our
>   possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our
>   constitution. Unhappiness is much less difficult to
>   experience. We are threatened with suffering from three
>   directions: from our own body, which is doomed to de