[MD] Dreaming and death

[david buchanan]

Mark said:
...Maybe it's because i have no theistic beliefs, but i would have thought 
that believing in life ever after would make talking about death more easy? 
'One day we will meet again and be happy in the arms of Jesus'or something 
like that? I suddenly find myself fascinated by this: Why, if Christians 
really believe they are going to live forever in heaven do they avoid 
talking about people they have just lost like the plague?

dmb replies:
Do grieving Americans avoid talking about the dearly departed? I don't know. 
Never heard that one before. I mean, I thought we were talking about facing 
our own mortality rather than loss. Anyway, it seems to me that the belief 
in life after death doesn't making dying any easier to talk about because 
that belief just makes death go away. I mean, at some point the body will 
fail but it still promises a kind of immortality and so death isn't really 
the end. I mean, this belief allows one to avoid the confrontation with 
total annihilation. Non-existence is taken off the table.
There's an old gospel tune called "Will the Circle be Unbroken" that 
expresses the sadness of a Christian family. They're sad because one among 
them does not believe and so they worry that the circle will be broken in 
heaven. They worry that the one non-believer will go to hell for his lack of 
faith and will not be joining their family circle in heaven. In a small 
church in rural West Virginia I heard the congregation sing this song. And 
my friend's family sang it in tears precisely because they imagined a broken 
circle of their own. I was impressed. That was about 27 years ago.

Mark said:
...Let's go back to basics and see what happens? Myths. Gods. What are they? 
They are socially learned sq patterns evolving our culture in response to 
DQ. Happy with that?

dmb quotes from chapter 20 of Lila:
"The 'gods'. He'd been watching them for years. The 'gods' were the static 
culture patterns. They never quit. After trying all these years to kill him 
with failure, now they were pretending they'd given up. Now they were going 
to try the other way, to get him with success."

"Each person you come to is a different mirror. And since you're just 
another person like them maybe you're just another mirror too, and there's 
no way of knowing whether your own view of yourself is just another 
distortion. Maybe all you ever see is reflections. Maybe mirrors are all you 
ever get. First the mirrors of your parents, then friends and teachers, then 
bosses and officials, priests and ministers, and maybe writers and painters 
too. That's their job too, holding up mirrors.
But what controls all these mirrors is the culture: the Giant, the gods: and 
if you run afoul of the culture it will start throwing up reflections that 
try to destroy you, or it will withdraw the mirrors and try to destroy you 
that way..."

Mark continued:
Orpheus. Who he? Answer: a metaphor. A social metaphor for DQ. Orpheus never 
existed. He's a character in a story. A story intended to promote a metaphor 
for DQ, as all stories were before Intellectual Quality emerged. But, as i 
said in my previous mail, and which you have left out of this response, 
which is a shame as i value your thoughts, some metaphors are better than 
others. They HAVE to be if we accept the MoQ. Orpheus may have been the best 
metaphor at the social level before the best intellectual metaphor at the 
intellectual level emerged. And they all point toward DQ.
(There is even more than one version of the Orpheus myth, which shows us it 
can be improved: if the Orpheus myth is the best social metaphor, then there 
must be a best version of the best myth?)
The Orhpeus lesson may be this: If you're too Dynamic people resent and hate 
you for it, they don't understand and find it hard to deal with you, even if 
they like you. This metaphor tells it like it is - it's the way Humans are. 
It's sociology. The art of sociology is an analysis of sq/DQ patterns...

dmb says:
I'm really not sure what you're asking here. There are a number of dubious 
assertions used as a premise for the question, but even if I accepted them 
for the sake of argument I still don't think I see what you're getting at. I 
mean, its clear that you're asserting that some metaphors are better than 
others and asking me to pick the best one. I really don't know how that 
would work. And what do you mean by intellectual metaphor? As I understand 
the term, a metaphor is a concrete image that refers to a spiritual reality, 
a reality that is intellecutally unknowable. And metaphors are not better or 
worse so much as they are culturally appropriate. A metaphor can become 
obsolete as the culture evolves and they can be misread as something other 
than a metaphor, but I really don't understand how we can say this one is 
better than that one.

Except when it comes to my version of Orpheus, of course, which is the most 
perfect thing the world has ever seen.

Ha HA, Ho Hee, they're coming to take me away, Ha ha, ho ho, hee hee...

Maybe I should add that Orpheus is a useful myth, I think, because it allows 
us to openly discuss Christ without letting any of the Christians realize 
what the topic is. Ooops. Cat's outta the bag.

Nice chatting with you. Your wierdness is refreshing. Thanks.
dmb

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