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transfiguration, 2011
Aug. 6th, 2011 12:47 pmIt is the Feast of the Transfiguration, that Orthodox feast day most amenable to interpretations in terms of Michael Murphy's The Future of the Body (where I doubt very much that it appears; I've successfully avoided reading the book, but plan to post a critical assessment of Murphy's whole enterprise sometime in the future, circumstances permitting. The new movie of Golf in the Kingdom has raised issues that overlap with the interests and empirical researches of David Eagleman.).
It has been a long time since I managed a ".)." grammatical construction, although my twisted and contorted syntax has come close enough to it. I am given to understand that Rilke contorts the German language equally in the Duino Elegies, but to those of us who are non-native speakers, the syntax there looks fine, no full stops or periods followed by parentheticals followed by....
Anyway, as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, the Orthodox belief in theosis, or divinization, as the goal of humanity-which is coupled with the notion that something called the Light of Tabor, manifested in the Transfiguration of Jesus of Nazareth on Mount Tabor, was the foretaste of the particular energies that would be accessible to divinized humans-suggests a very strange expansion of the sequence of events recounted in the Gospels. (The account, which features cameo appearances by Moses and Elijah, has the disciples freaked out by the whole experience, and spouting nonsense just to keep their composure.)
There was once a great deal of controversy about all this that I'm sure I have gone into in depth on August 6th in past years (if not, I was atypically reticent) so I shall spare you. You could look it up.
I am feeling as untransfigured as I have ever been as my physical frame starts to show the effects of bipedalism. (Yeats: "He with body waged a fight / But body won: it walks upright.")
But I have had sufficient meetings with remarkable men and women to wonder about the experiences encoded in doctrinal formulations in the East but not in the West. They are something more than developing the capacity to hit a hole in one, which is the sort of coordination of autonomous complexes about which Eagleman has much to say alongside Murphy. Murphy's fiction, of course, went from Golf in the Kingdom to An End to Ordinary History.
It has been a long time since I managed a ".)." grammatical construction, although my twisted and contorted syntax has come close enough to it. I am given to understand that Rilke contorts the German language equally in the Duino Elegies, but to those of us who are non-native speakers, the syntax there looks fine, no full stops or periods followed by parentheticals followed by....
Anyway, as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, the Orthodox belief in theosis, or divinization, as the goal of humanity-which is coupled with the notion that something called the Light of Tabor, manifested in the Transfiguration of Jesus of Nazareth on Mount Tabor, was the foretaste of the particular energies that would be accessible to divinized humans-suggests a very strange expansion of the sequence of events recounted in the Gospels. (The account, which features cameo appearances by Moses and Elijah, has the disciples freaked out by the whole experience, and spouting nonsense just to keep their composure.)
There was once a great deal of controversy about all this that I'm sure I have gone into in depth on August 6th in past years (if not, I was atypically reticent) so I shall spare you. You could look it up.
I am feeling as untransfigured as I have ever been as my physical frame starts to show the effects of bipedalism. (Yeats: "He with body waged a fight / But body won: it walks upright.")
But I have had sufficient meetings with remarkable men and women to wonder about the experiences encoded in doctrinal formulations in the East but not in the West. They are something more than developing the capacity to hit a hole in one, which is the sort of coordination of autonomous complexes about which Eagleman has much to say alongside Murphy. Murphy's fiction, of course, went from Golf in the Kingdom to An End to Ordinary History.
