Lace Masks And Ethics

People can get lost in their own sophistication. Have you ever noticed that there are people who will launch themselves into a dissertation on mathematics, or god in relation to mathematics(!), or advanced physics, or some other thing full of special obscure terms and terminologies that no one else in particular really has much firm grasp of – if indeed anyone does at all...

And they do so with verve, mainly because they feel the thrill of having discovered that they have what passes for them as intelligence. And of course intelligence has had such a great reputation in the past in society generally so it's no wonder they feel a thrill.

I suppose intelligence for these people must seem like some kind of a new toy.

I intend to bring the word 'ethical' - believe it or not - into my argument here. The governing spirit of things that are done – the ethos – in our modern times, could easily be simply erraticism. And so, those entangled in their own webs of complicated ideas and who really are simpletons on every other level – can't tie their own shoelaces and so on – may be acting quite ethically, in laying claim to the present-day high ground of the human intellect. : ) They are presenting a true depiction of their ethos!

From where I stand, today there's just too much – too many foolish and thoughtless iterations of someone else's original ideas or innovations – and none of it shows the formal consistency that a genuine form of ethics would donate to a validly intelligent human endeavour.

But one has to be careful to distinguish between outward style as deliberate studied design of a human facade or mask, as opposed to the purely opto-graphical capturing of human form as an aesthetical appreciation. This is the difference between the work of Helmut Newton and say – Ellen von Unwerth (who created the photograph to the right). I don't personally believe Newton wanted to show an appreciation of the human form, as much as he desired to explore an intellectual juxtapositioning of human things but involving the human form and this of course comes across almost always as erotic and sexual style. Von Unwerth, on the other hand, I would say explores a simple direct aesthetic appreciation of the human form as her main photographical subject matter without too much extra symbolic meaning. Her work often appears decadent but why this should be so in the sense of style escapes me. Maybe the human form is decadent!

People who know me know I have a great interest in design – industrial design, commercial design, also design in personal style as typified by the well-known stylists: Panté, Lagerfeld, Armani, and so on.

The intellectual ethics of style – once you disregard the current ADHD-afflicted, erratic mindset – goes like this:

A theme must be consistently carried through across the whole of the subject matter. The lace face-mask is mirrored by the lace-covered high-heeled shoes. This implied intellectual vision of style shows the fabric (lace) as translucent, confidential, ornate yet honest. It reminds us also of the Tao – black and obscure or impenetrable in part and clear and penetrable in another part. The surface and the internal. The front and the rear. Et cetera. It recalls to us the Hermetic Code: 'As above so below.' What we cannot see will be as one with what we can see.

Beneath the skirt we will expect the underwear to be black Chantilly lace, oui? And so too must the wearer themselves also be translucent, confidential, ornate yet honest. This is the meaning of personal ethics in relationships. Of course this is just one example of something where style is consistently expressed. I am not sure that people today quite so deliberately intend to express themselves as definitely as the image example I have just suggested, but the effect is that a personal inner haphazardness still comes across. We cannot escape the meaning of what we look like. Whether we like it or not. Some people think they are being very clever by employing complex facades and calling it style – but old hands see through them very easily.

And Kippers For Breakfast

This week I've been staying at a golf course resort. The course itself was designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., whom many regard as the world's all-time best golf course architect.

I haven't played golf in recent years myself although at one time I was a good player. I was taught as a teenager by a knowledgeable old Scot and frankly I loved the game and eventually just couldn't abide the great swelling tide of new players who turned up around the late Eighties along with the Japanese money of that era and its interest in brightly-coloured criss-crossed plus-fours and all things Anglo-American.

But every cloud has a silver lining.

The money that swirls around the golfing world nowadays has meant that the hotels attached to most of the top-grade courses lack for nothing.

The standard of service, quality of food, solidity of everything you touched – were all reasons to be extremely cheerful, if not indeed quite joyous, given the miserable day and age in which we live right now. (It's just a stock photo of fruit on the right there - the fruit at the hotel was light years better. I'll take my own pics next time!)

And I take it kippers for breakfast is rather normal for golf resort hotels... It wouldn't be too normal in most Australian households in high summer though let me tell you!

When was the last time I observed as fine an array and selection of fruit, for example, at the breakfast bar? Nope. Can't think of an 'ever before.' And as a good friend of mine noted yesterday, if John says so then it must pretty damned good because he's seen it all before and been there when it was something special. I had to smile when I saw him raise his eyes at my explanation of the extraordinarily high quality of the food.

I guess there may also be some effect coming from the China market commodity boom going on in Australia – particularly in Western Australia - right now...

Frankly I like the prospects for investing in Australia again right now and I haven't felt that way for, what, um, maybe thirty years...?

Let me tell you this much about money: it's pretty dumb stuff. When it's really around in huge chunks it just goes everywhere and anything can make you a profit. It's around in Australia right now. And I don't think its going away any time soon either. People who know me know that in fact most of my money is in South Africa and London, but I still have a few things here in Australia that I never thought would do too much. Wrong!!!!! Just shows ya, don't it; eggs in different baskets and all that.

All the best,

Calvin J. Bear

The Spirit Of Education

I am not an educator. I am an entrepreneur and businessman. My father, on the other hand, who came from a very wealthy family in shipping, tea and banana and pineapple plantations, and eventually oil – was an educator. He gave up the family business to teach english, which he ended up doing for forty years after World War II until he retired.

He claimed the two best writers in the english language were Arthur Quiller-Couch and Joseph Conrad. And he said Conrad demonstrated that people who did not have english as the mother tongue often wrote the language better than native english speakers because they actually tried to follow the rules of grammar. Conrad of course, was not English.

My own view of why my father gave up what was and would have been an incredibly lucrative life, in order to teach people who were pretty impoverished after the war, was very probably due to the life-changing experience the war itself had on him.

Personally I cannot teach and generally I will not try either. People who want to learn and know they need to learn – as may have been true of those who had missed the normal years of senior schooling, but had survived the war – are vastly different from people of the modern era who know everything, have eveything, and are usually seeking only greater access to ever greater material wealth.

The power of real education can certainly gain you material wealth. But the point of it is not that.

Virginia Woolf is a classic case in question. She was born rich, and both vastly more naturally intelligent, as well as stunningly well-educated – but she had no degree and never attended any university. An avant garde personality living in the wrong time, and dying tragically.

(Pic is Tilda Swinton as Woolf's 'Orlando.')

Being educated DOES NOT necessarily mean having a degree. I know it is widely held that being held up to the scrutiny of academic peers, and testing oneself against a benchmark of peer-rated excellence is the philosophy behind the honour and desirability of the modern university education.

And there is also an idea that the best educations develop leaders in various fields. Including, certainly, in professional fields.

At the same time though, happiness itself, for the wise individual, cannot be counterfeited under great swathes of money only... Happiness for a human can only come from the deepest understanding of a very large number and variety of things, including, of oneself as well as of others – and sometimes, nay, I would say often, in order to arrive at such understanding, it is necessary to abandon the mercantile altogether, and what even appears to the less wise, the immediately practical as well, and devote all attention to the important. And what is important? The human spirit is important. The character of a person is important – meaning, as my father would say, it isn't what you look like but the content of your character that counts. It is not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game, as the saying goes. It seems platitudinous but I maintain it to be true.

In order to follow the path of real education, one must hold still against a strong tide. One must discover what is worth fighting for, really worth fighting for; it's about values and having them. So many great and wise people have gone before you, and they have left their writings, and their words and their works. When your heart strings are moved by the legacies of those certain particular human beings who have gone before you, then you have found educators to follow.

And when all others have fallen away, and that paragon leads loftily ever upward even to the very highest reaches, the most difficult of places, the most unhuman and absurd and humanly despised of intellectual concepts, may you still be there, following that star in its own brightest divine firmament against the black and ignorant void of the rest of empty space, the place to which all the merely finite must be consigned eventually. And then you will be happy indeed with your position in the Universe. Knowing more than the merely mortal. And as the Platonists say, befriending the gods themselves.

Meditative Trance Consciousness

I like to throw a few things around on this blog that might go to worthy people who are here because they like and follow ideas and do not suffer the ADD that 'the mass mind' apparently suffers from. I'll take the risk, frankly, that the ideas won't be going too far from this fairly limited circle, which is in the hundreds, not the thousands I should add. And I'll further gamble that those who are well-connected or business-oriented who stop by here are capable of filtering what I write so that whatever large scale use they might make of something 'exposed too early' will be unlikely to harm anyone.

And so with those words of preparation let me mention the name of Tomas Prevenslik.

In connection to breakthroughs that Prevenslik came up with, I want to underscore that brain neurophysics – and not just neurophysiology – involves tremendously complex science that is way beyond the scope of this blogspot to indulge too deeply in here. At the same time, one can say this much readily enough: the popular terminology used by New Age ideas often obscures valuable scientific technical understandings that we do have about various experiences that people talk about involving trance states, and conscious awareness, and seemingly unusual capacities.

Accepted theories of mind and memory raise questions about where or even how certain trance state experiences are recorded in the brain, and for reasons of facility I am forced to simply assert here that one will find that many in-trance experiences cannot be 'remembered' when back in a conscious state. And that is because popular 'techniques' are not as advanced as science actually allows the potential for them to be.

You can chant a money mantra, for example, all you like and very probably you will make yourself go into a type of sleep during which you will perceive things only to not be able to retain those perceptions when you 'awaken' again.

Prevenslik – and a few others who are also in the avant garde of brain science research – will tell you that wine 'experts' are quite wrong in what they say about what they experience and also quite wrong in claiming to detect certain perfumes and odours and flavours the way they have developed this whole virtually completely commercial tradition now about it. More likely, they are creating a trance state from discrete micro-electronic arrangements of molecules and perceiving connections inside neuron networks in their own brains, and not perceiving things directly from odour molecules at all. Gasp.

Yes of course I have amazing high scientific research and literature that you can access with lots of money, but I know most of you are not going to do that. You might though, want to contact me if you are an executive in charge of marketing wine for a very large corporation. Short of that I am certainly not going to reveal all, that's for sure. But I don't make my email address a secret: it's interdeq@iinet.net.au

I will say this: if you take any old money mantra and chant away at it, it might stand a better chance of 'working' if you can recall what you experienced while you were in the part of the routine in which you were semi-conscious, or even 'unconscious.' What the brain perceives in these states when 'prepared' to think on a certain subject is very important. Money is fast, unobtainable, fascinating (I quote Arturo Perez Reverta). To perceive where it is flowing one must be able to perceive also, and without critical prejudice, that which is fast, unobtainable, fascinating. That is the meaning of one type of real 'money mantra' that puts your brain into a directed type of trance condition where you can 'see' these things.

Year Of The Dragon - Ice, Water, Power, Money

Money, is like water. Without enough water, things die; without enough money things also die.

If you watch modern business, financial institutions, people, politicians -, they all have this habit of trying to cling onto money by stopping its movement and turning it into a fixed form. And if you extend the first metaphor, what they are attempting to do is 'freeze the water into ice.' Which takes some considerable energy.

And that is why the world is in the place it is in right now.

Leaving aside for the moment all the academic economic questions about whether or not it is possible to perpetually increase the Money Supply, at a more fundamental level we are simply dealing with a kind of desperation and a grasping for something that is not that clearly understood, in the vain hope and belief that by 'clinging onto it' you will somehow 'have' what is quite ephemeral when in a given stationary position. Money is fluid and mobile. The flow – and not just the flow, but the system of flow – is what's important.

The people who are genuinely rich are those who have the power to move money around – not people who possess 'iced' money. If the world has gotten itself into a position where so much of the previous flows have been turned into ice, as it were, the only money mantra worth talking about is one that can melt that ice that is under the hand of whoever is keeping it under their hand.

Of course, the beauty of money itself, is that outside of a refrigerated atmosphere, it does have the tendency to melt virtually all by itself.

I can confidently tell you, that heading into this Chinese New Year of the Dragon (beginning 23 January, 2012) there is a genie fire being lit under all that ice that governments, politicians, 'technocrats,' and nominally 'financial' institutions, are trying to clutch to themselves for dear life – and it will all melt away and slip right through their fingers. Into the system of pipes that clever people have devised and positioned to channel it.

Last pic is an Omani Frankincense burner...

The Sultan of Oman buys 40% of his entire country's annual production of Frankincense - which is regarded by experts as the best in the world - and he burns it 24 hours a day throughout the year in a huge burner open to the sky. Quite extravagant and exotic. 

Calvin J. Bear

The Sage and Oracle of OMSF