[MD] philosophers stone

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Arlo previously]
[The Secret Teachings of All Ages] opens with a very MOQish (in my 
opinion) premise, "Man's status in the natural world is determined, 
therefore, by the quality of his thinking." (Introduction)

[Craig]
Also:"PHILOSOPHY is the science of estimating values.The superiority 
of any state or substance over another is determined by philosophy.By 
assigning a position of primary importance to what remains when all 
that is secondary has been removed, philosophy thus becomes the true 
index of priority or emphasis in the realm of speculative thought.The 
mission of philosophy a priori is to establish the relation of 
manifested things to their invisible ultimate cause or nature."

[Arlo]
Yeah, that opening sentence is quite MOQish. I also like that the 
last sentiment here is about "relations", not about subjects or 
objects in-and-of themselves. This is echoed in Dewey's approach to 
"activity" (as it is in Leon'tev, Bahktin and Engelstrom and others 
following the Vygotskian School). It is evidenced in modern 
philosophies that attempt to draw from an ecological paradigm, rather 
than a non-interwoven paradigm.

[Ron]
The legend has it that the stone was buried on the banks of the 
Schuylkill river..

[Arlo]
Of all places! The Schuylkill River flows through the heart of my 
hometown, Schuylkill Haven, it was a river that a few decades back 
was so polluted from unregulated chemical dye companies dumping their 
waste directly into the river that to this day, despite efforts at 
clean up, I won't go in it at all. (My mother tells me when she was 
growing up, the funeral homes would drain all their...err... 
discarded bodily debris into the river. Ick.)

[Ron]
I laughed, I immediately said to my wife how what they were talking 
about was a concept, an understanding not a material thing.

[Arlo]
The same idea surrounds the Holy Grail. For some, the Grail is a lost 
physical object, the actual chalice used during the mythical Last 
Supper. For others, it's meaning is more esoteric, it's stories 
reveal (and conceal!) a bloodline between Jesus and Mary Magdelene 
(the topic of Holy Blood, Holy Grail which later became the 
watered-down "Da Vinci Code"). For others (such as Hall, I'd argue), 
the Grail represents encoded knowledge used to point the individual 
towards her/his own Enlightenment (the Grail represents achieving 
Enlightenment), with the Arthurian stories and lore encoding 
monomythic elements pointing towards that path. "In the personality 
of Arthur is to be found a new form of the ever-recurrent cosmic 
myth." (Hall writes). He continues, "In Nature worship the 
ever-flowing Grail signifies the bounty of the harvest by which the 
life of man is sustained; like Mercury's bottomless pitcher, it is 
the inexhaustible fountain of natural re source." (Hall) (More on 
Arthur and other aspects of esoteric Christianity in the chapter 
"Mystic Christianity" (http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta44.htm))