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Post by Tamrin on Aug 28, 2008 15:05:01 GMT 10
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Post by Tamrin on Aug 28, 2008 16:28:23 GMT 10
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Post by Tamrin on Aug 28, 2008 17:01:54 GMT 10
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Post by maximus on Aug 29, 2008 2:36:32 GMT 10
Ayn Rand on Mysticism To the [mystic], as to an animal, the irreducible primary is the automatic phenomena of his own consciousness.
An animal has no critical faculty; he has no control over the function of his brain and no power to question its content. To an animal, whatever strikes his awareness is an absolute that corresponds to reality—or rather, it is a distinction he is incapable of making: reality, to him, is whatever he senses or feels. And this is the [mystic’s] epistemological ideal, the mode of consciousness he strives to induce in himself. To the [mystic], emotions are tools of cognition, and wishes take precedence over facts. He seeks to escape the risks of a quest for knowledge by obliterating the distinction between consciousness and reality, between the perceiver and the perceived, hoping that an automatic certainty and an infallible knowledge of the universe will be granted to him by the blind, unfocused stare of his eyes turned inward, contemplating the sensations, the feelings, the urgings, the muggy associational twistings projected by the rudderless mechanism of his undirected consciousness. Whatever his mechanism produces is an absolute not to be questioned; and whenever it clashes with reality, it is reality that he ignores.
Since the clash is constant, the [mystic’s] solution is to believe that what he perceives is another, “higher” reality—where his wishes are omnipotent, where contradictions are possible and A is non-A, where his assertions, which are false on earth, become true and acquire the status of a “superior” truth which he perceives by means of a special faculty denied to other, “inferior,” beings. The only validation of his consciousness he can obtain on earth is the belief and the obedience of others, when they accept his “truth” as superior to their own perception of reality.
“For the New Intellectual,” For the New Intellectual, 17.
Only three brief periods of history were culturally dominated by a philosophy of reason: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century. These three periods were the source of mankind’s greatest progress in all fields of intellectual achievement—and the eras of greatest political freedom. The rest of human history was dominated by mysticism of one kind or another, that is: by the belief that man’s mind is impotent, that reason is futile or evil or both, and that man must be guided by some irrational “instinct” or feeling or intuition or revelation, by some form of blind, unreasoning faith. All the centuries dominated by mysticism were the eras of political tyranny and slavery, of rule by brute force—from the primitive barbarism of the jungle—to the Pharaohs of Egypt—to the emperors of Rome—to the feudalism of the Dark and Middle Ages—to the absolute monarchies of Europe—to the modern dictatorships of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and all their lesser carbon copies.
“The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age,” The Voice of Reason
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Post by Tamrin on Aug 29, 2008 12:00:26 GMT 10
Only three brief periods of history were culturally dominated by a philosophy of reason: ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century. These three periods were the source of mankind’s greatest progress in all fields of intellectual achievement—and the eras of greatest political freedom. And the philosophy of Freemasonry, sharing much with that of the Age of Enlightenment, is essentially one of practical reason. I fear our eighteenth and nineteenth century reformers, together with their Royal Society Fellows, would be aghast at the rejection of reason oft espoused under the aegis of their Craft.
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Post by Tamrin on Aug 29, 2008 14:49:46 GMT 10
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Post by Tamrin on Aug 31, 2008 7:39:53 GMT 10
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Post by Tamrin on Aug 31, 2008 8:11:12 GMT 10
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Post by Tamrin on Aug 31, 2008 11:41:08 GMT 10
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Post by Tamrin on Aug 31, 2008 13:09:53 GMT 10
Insight and PsychosisXavier F. Amador & Anthony S. David (Editors), 1998, Oxford University Press, New York. (Book Review—Excerpt)
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