User:Bdell555

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My real name is Brian Dell. I was born and raised in Sunny Alberta. You might say I am a professional student. I have four university degrees (in philosophy, law, business administration, and European affairs) and a CFA Charter. According to the business cards my current employer made for me, I am a "financial economist".

WHAT DO I BELIEVE?

I believe I am a skeptic, which is to say, "not much". I am more comfortable challenging the claims of others than advancing my own. This may explain why I frequented USENET a decade ago and am interested in Wiki today, but don't have a personal blog.

That said, I'll leave a number of quotes for you here to get an impression of what I often feel, but cannot express as eloquently as some of these authors...

"To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever been interjected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection, in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for.

An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and started spinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our misery today. Instead of living from the spontaneous centres, we live from the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We grind, grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we are beside ourselves."

- DH Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, First Steps in Education

"I think it is the lonely, without a fireside or an affection they may call their own, those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself, to meet its disembodied, eternal, and unchangeable spirit - it is those who understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular right to our fidelity, to our obedience. ...

Each blade of grass has its spot on the earth whence it draws its life, its strength, and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life. .... We exist only in so far as we hang together. ..."

- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

"With the progress of science and technology, man has stopped believing in magic powers, in spirits and demons; he has lost his sense of prophecy and, above all, his sense of the sacred. Reality has become dreary, flat and utilitarian, leaving a great void in the souls of men which they seek to fill by furious activity and through various devices and substitutes."

- Max Weber

“When there are few rituals to mark the turns in the wheel of life, if all events become the same with no ceremony to mark the distinctions - when one marries in ordinary dress, or receives a degree without a robe, or buries one's dead without the tearing of cloth - then life becomes grey on grey, and none of the splashiness of the phosphorescent pop art can hide the greyness when the morning breaks"

- Daniel Bell

“What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his "soul." Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.

So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched.

What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.”

- DH Lawrence, “Apocalypse” XXIII