M&D Deep Duck Soulless?

[David Morris]

"The Learned Dog tells of KOANS.....which drive one to insanity when meditated
on....
second time the word insanity is used about a mystical-like experience..."

Some say that enlightenment requires embracing paradox, and a koan is one
way to loosen the mind (mental yoga) to be able to do so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes

http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/zenindex.html

David Morris

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:06 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Learned Dog tells of KOANS.....which drive one to insanity when
> meditated on....
> second time the word insanity is used about a mystical-like experience...
>
> Insanity is the social condition of mystical and religious belief in
> the Age of Reason?, once again
> MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION as a paradigm book.
>
> From the wiki article on MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION "in the Renaissance
> the mad were portrayed in art as possessing a kind of wisdom - a
> knowledge of the limits of our world"...
>
> which comes to my mind when I read The Learned Dog declare
> emphatically he is not supernatural, there is
> 'ever an Explanation"..
> and from that great leg-puller, ironist of irony, it is a talking dog
> doing the declaring.
>
> Samuel Johnson on a badly-walking-on-two-legs dog: "it is not that he
> does it badly but that he does it at all'
> [paraphrase actually, so check out for perfection]
>
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 6:50 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > p. 22....Mason, from the ongoing grief of the loss of his wife, after
> > suggesting to Dixon that they
> > should investigate the Learned Dog for Metempsychosis reasons, at
> > least p.19....after asking why are there still not
> > Oracles...Gate--Ways to Futurity.....
> >
> > must ask tLD if he has a soul...
> >
> > I would say, off the top, Mason is sorta-obsessed with whether Death
> > is The End or there is an After, wouldn't you? [tangential: we might
> > remember the von Braun quote in GR. More heretically tangential: we
> > might remember TRP's lifelong remembering of his great pal, Richard
> > F.?]
> >
> > The doubts of a religious man. There was a time in the West when no
> > (religious) person would even have such doubts. Dante's time did not,
> > right Monte? and TRP fave Henry Adams said about the same of the time
> > of building Mont-Saint Michel and Chartes.
> >  Becker suggests that Acquinas's massive Summa came about as his and
> > his time's edifice against doubt...
> >
> > But, doubtlessly, religious doubt at least was ushered in with the
> > Enlightenment.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150115/532142fb/attachment.html>