patternsthatconnect

I recently met a friend after a time gap of 30 years. Back then, I was highly religious (in fact, others may have called me a religious fanatic), and I wanted to make it clear that that previous version of ‘me’ was not ‘me’ any more. My friend, who would not then or now call himself religious asked me if I still saw myself as a spiritual person, and I had the impression that he was willing me to say “yes”. The weird thing is that last Saturday almost exactly the same thing happened, with a different friend, that I was meeting again after a 30 year gap.

Has it become more acceptable than it used to be, fashionable even, to claim spirituality?

I said that I didn’t know what the term means.

Today this ”daily bloom” from blooms@kierkegaarden.com arrived in my inbox

The spiritual man differs from us men in being able to endure isolation, his rank as a spiritual man is proportionate to his strength for enduring isolation, whereas we men are constantly in need of ‘the others,’ the herd; we die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the herd, of the same opinion as the herd.

Source: Søren Kierkegaard, “Attack on Christendom” (1854)

The concept of spirituality in this quote seems so much at odds with the spiritual of the present, where suddenly it seems to be the case again that claiming to be spiritual or to ‘have faith’ makes you one of the crowd.

(The use of ‘man’, ‘men’ and ‘he’ are in the original text)

According to Heraclitus

you cannot step into the same river twice

In Soren Kierkegaard‘s book Repetition, Constantin Constantius carries out an experiment to test whether repetition is possible. He attempts to repeat a holiday in Berlin, only to find that he is repeatedly thwarted, being unable to secure the same seats at the theatre, finding that the room he had stayed in before was no longer the same, finding even that he is disappointed by the same company he had previously held. He concludes at first that repetition is impossible, only to update his conclusion a little later with the notion that “the only repetition was the impossibility of repetition”.

(In my blog surfing recently, by chance I saw Cazbag’s blog, including posts about a trip to Berlin and looking more closely discovered that she appreciates the repetitive)

I’m no film-maker but I am so tempted to do this one
they only want one minute
maybe I could achieve something even with my digital camera that has a video setting?

Verso Books just announced a challenging short film competition: Shooting Žižek short film competition Radical philosopher Slavoj Žižek has made his mark on how we view and interpret film through his writings as well as through his documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Now Verso Books and The Church of London are sponsoring a competition to produce a short film on Žižek’s theory of the end times. The winning entry will be chosen by Žižek hi … Read More

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