Steppenwolf

One of my goals in learning German is to read Herman Hesse in German. In preparation, I have started to reread some of his books in English so that I am not totally lost and can understand the original in context. So, I have now reread Siddhartha and The Journey to the East and am currently rereading Steppenwolf. When I am done with it I will proceed with the German edition.

However, a few paragraphs from Steppenwolf have really got my attention enough, as they expose Hesse's thoughts on the nature of human folly, so that I want to share them here (embolden emphases is mine). 

First a detail:

The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.

Then in the context:

Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications-and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then waste words, why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-evident, when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.  

The delusion rests simply upon a false analogy. As a body everyone is single, as a soul never. In literature, too, even in its ultimate achievement, we find this customary concern with apparently whole and single personalities. Of all literature up to our days the drama has been the most highly prized by writers and critics, and rightly, since it offers (or might offer) the greatest possibilities of representing the ego as a manifold entity, but for the optical illusion which makes us believe that the characters of the play are one-fold entities by lodging each one in an undeniable body, singly, separately and once and for all. An artless esthetic criticism, then, keeps its highest praise for this so-called character-drama in which each character makes his appearance unmistakably as a separate and single entity. Only from afar and by degrees the suspicion dawns here and there that all this is perhaps a cheap and superficial esthetic philosophy, and that we make a mistake in attributing to our great dramatists those magnificent conceptions of beauty that come to us from antiquity. These conceptions are not native to us, but are merely picked up at second hand, and it is in them, with their common source in the visible body, that the origin of the fiction of an ego, an individual, is really to be found.

Body, Mind, Soul

There are those three agents to human life, most people would agree, the body, the mind, and the soul. It is quite obvious to us that we have a body and we know to a great detail how that body comes into being and how it ceases to exist. Then it is most of the time obvious that we have a mind -- have a mind is perhaps a misnomer, as some would argue that we are the mind. It is not that clear how our mind comes into being or how and when it ceases to exist, but we mostly associate our mind with our physical body one way or another.

Then there is this thing some call soul, some call spirit. When and how it becomes a part of who we are and when and how it stops being a part of who we are is subject to great dispute, most specifically the dispute between the so called "pro-lifers" and the so called "pro-choicers." All contend that our soul "enters" our mind-body at some point between conception and shortly after birth. Just when exactly that is is hotly disputed. I happened to have a completely different idea but that is not what I want to discuss.

I wish that those who claim that the soul somehow enters us at some point would be more specific about it, more detailed. For example, if the soul enters at the point of conception, exactly when does it do that? Conception is considered to be, according the Merriam-Webster dictionary, "the process of union of two gametes whereby the somatic chromosome number is restored and the development of a new individual is initiated."So, it is a process, and that takes some time. So then when does the soul enter? at the beginning of that process, at the end, or at some point in between? Probably at the end, no?

Another curious detail is that for the soul to enter it must already exist. Does it then exist without the body being ready yet for it to enter? Is it in some sort of preparation stage? Does it already "know" where and when it will enter? even before the soul-recipient is on the horizon? You see, there are all sorts of interesting details to think about in this context, unless, of course, you have a totally different idea about this body-mind-soul thing.

Memories

Back in 1966/67 I was in my senior year in high school and in America Percy Sledge recorded "When a Man Loves a Woman." Future looked bright and the present was wonderful. We, the highschoolers, had regular house parties, the popular "žurke" where we danced with our special person, feeling our ways through the hormone driven instincts, having memorable moments.

One such moment was when I danced to the beautiful "When a Man Loves a Woman" with Marija G. - she was the object of my adoration. I will never forget the feeling of Percy Sledge's voice making it a very special dance for me and so forever connecting Marija and me.

Now Percy is dead, R.I.P., and I wander whatever happened to you, Marija. I hope you've had a wonderful life..

The best country/place in the world to live in

You hear so many times in public and in private individuals say "my country is the best one in the world to live in." How can an individual who has not lived anywhere else say such a thing? I can understand saying "I prefer to live here (or there)" for one reason or another, but "the best in the world?" What makes us want to utter such nonsense?

I believe we simply want to feel good about the choices we make.

"Good Friday"

It strikes me as an oddity that English-speaking Christians call this day, two days before Easter, "Good Friday." What is so good about it? What is so good about Christ, according to Christian teachings, being crucified on (sort of) that day? Ah, could it be that the (Christian) Church "rejoices as mankind is granted Salvation from the bondage of Satan by Christ’s death?" Or as a commoner would say "Christ died on the cross for our sins."

So, I suppose the Christians rejoice that they get to get through to a better place scot-free, regardless of how they lived, but only if they accept Christ as their Saviour, and then only if he, Christ, is tortured and dies as a result. And God did all that out of love, but that love was not unconditional. I don't know, this Christian thing has got me all confused.

How I want to be remembered.

The question of how one wants to be remembered had always seemed to me to be a frivolous one. I should not care, I could not care about that once I am dead. But, it occurred to me that those close to me, like my daughter and my partner if they lived longer than I, would likely care about how others spoke of me. If others spoke well of me, those close to me would likely feel good about it. That's worth a consideration.

Hidden dimensions?

Beginning to watch "Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace" on YT (one of the sessions from World Science Fair) and wonder what I would look like if I could perceive myself in all those dimensions, plus, of course, the three-four dimensions that I do perceive myself in. Perhaps even to use the verb "look" is inappropriate. Actually, I should ask myself "what I am like" if I accept the proposition/theory of more than 3-4 dimensions, as it is the question of being not of "looking like."

But then, if indeed there are more than 3-4 dimensions to my being, how can I access those other dimensions of myself? Maybe I am all the time. Actually, I believe I am, but am not aware of it. Maybe that's where the consciousness comes to play.

Let's see what I can learn from, or be inspired by, this video.