paranoia

[Mark Kohut]

I'd be willing to grant Koestler that he may be right enough in a
descriptive, speculatively possible way, perhaps knowing whereof he speaks,
as misogyny and sexual aggression--(read Eve as a Western male projection
myth) and possibly even (serial) rape might be *his *original sin
except that I have to say Only in the Western world--as he states it
here--since so many non-Western cultures do not share "the line of ascent'
eschatology in their mythologies.

I still prefer Pynchon's West-based perspective on such sexual sins: power
dynamics and whole cultures warp us, warp men especially since patriarchy
is very real in most of the Western world. I sometimes wonder whether P's
mysterious open-ended ambiguous bits of Something Eastern coming into
America is partially a nod to the Oriental traditions which infused America
from Emerson's and Thoreau's thoughts thru Beat Zen and all in-between and
after. Non-Western eschatologies.

Which overrides Original Sin as insight  in him, I aver, which kind of sin
he may believe in as well, of course.
O and what we still call Free Will to sin sometimes.

This is not to say that I think other (major) cultures are Original
Sinless......

For all we can learn, that I've gathered from coincidental reading. we see
Original Sinlessness in only a few cultures. And we might not know their
demonic outlets well.....(I just read about one society the
anthropologists saw this way but now have learned of the silent, secret way
mysterious deaths were caused by indiscernible poisoning to some who were
on on the wrong side of the culture or some within it.)

On Sat, Oct 6, 2018 at 11:00 AM Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

>
> The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur
> independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection
> of man’s awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that
> somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong. To put it
> vulgarly, we are led to suspect that there is somewhere a screw loose in
> the human mind. We ought to give serious consideration that somewhere along
> the line something has gone seriously wrong with the evolution of the
> nervous system of Homo sapiens.   (The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur
> Koestler 1968, 267, p. 238)
>
> ….Let us note as a possible hypothesis that the delusional streak which
> runs through our history may be an endemic form of paranoia, built into the
> wiring circuits of the human brain. ( The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur
> Koestler 1968, 267, p. 239)
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>