So as you see from the abstract, there are two parts to my presentation.
Firstly, a paper that I should get through in 40 minutes. And secondly, and more importantly, video that will last 20 minutes.
The video is less polished than the paper because of the technical problems that always come up.
But what it makes I mean, what it loses in Polish, it makes up for in freshness.
Because I finished at last about six hours ago.
So but good to have its debut, rough as it is in this beautiful sepulchre.
But ultimately, I think the video, once it's done properly, will be the more important contribution to the topic of soul and nature.
That's cloud there. That mountain. What is real about those trying taking away the fantasy and the entire human contribution?
You sober real? Yes. If only you could do that.
If you could forget your heritage, your past and training your entire humanity and animality for us.
There is no reality. Nor for you either. Someone's.
I think are we not hearing some feedback or is it just that, Donald?
Nature is saying to the realist's then that it's impossible to extract from our current awareness.
The sedimentation is accumulated over millennia of previous animal as well as cultural experience,
impossible to escape the ways in which some fantasy.
Some prejudice. Some unreason. Some ignorance.
Some fear. And who knows what else have woven their way into our every feeling and sense impression.
And especially, it appears, when it comes to our experience of the natural world.
However, one also finds passages in Nietzsche's work works suggesting that it may, after all, be possible to cheque that ancient Positif,
perhaps through some kind of phenomenological epoch and let us natural phenomena like clouds and mountains simply show themselves from themselves,
perhaps even as they are in themselves. But if they're so possible, what would it be like?
How would nature look then? Behind these questions is, for me, a practical concern with the relentless devastation of the natural world.
One reason I think it's so difficult to persuade people in the developed countries to care about the ongoing
destruction of the planet and its climate is that they have so little direct experience of natural phenomenon.
Given the extent to which contemporary urban life enables us to insulate ourselves from them,
it would surely be helpful if one could escape or subvert the social construction of
the natural world that some theorists claim must always condition our experience.
In order to get back to the things of nature themselves,
each has talk of the possibility of our experiencing the natural world as D anthropomorphised D devised or newly redeemed.
Comes the question of exactly what we would encounter under such circumstances.
The short answer will to power require some elaboration as to the methods whereby one might effect such a transformation of one's experience.
To this end, I drawing some ideas and techniques from ballast and Zen Buddhist philosophy.
The results allow us to see that the way to respond to Nietzsche's exhortation through the person that s ostrer to stay true to the Earth
is to cleanse our experience of all the egocentric clutter that gets in the way of seeing what the Buddhists call our true nature,
as well as the nature of the world around us.
When does this by getting rid of consciousness, which Nietzsche calls not only superficial but ultimately superfluous and the language associated?
I'm sorry to do away with consciousness and the language associated with and supportive of such consciousness.
This undertaking does not preclude, but rather prompts a shift to a different kind of language that encourages behaviour
that can juicers to more fulfilling lives and perhaps even to saving the planet.
So very modest themes this morning as a way of showing the power of collective constructions of the natural world.
Each emphasises in human, all too human. The vast difference between ancient and modern forms of this process.
He discusses the relations of the first humans to nature in connexion with the origin of the religious cult.
Quote, The whole of nature is for those early religionists, a sum of activities of conscious and volitional beings.
An enormous complex of arbitrariness.
This complex for nature lacks any kind of natural causality, but is rather infused with unpredictable wills, magical forces,
demons and gods and inspirited things, all of which might be controlled or compelled to affection or effect doesn't work through sorcery.
A life in which quoting again things nature, tools, possessions of any kind where animate and then sold,
capable of injuring and evading human purposes, gave rise to an extraordinary feeling of impotence on the part of human agents.
Such a lack of power eventually engender desire for the opposite, for a feeling of power.
And this was later granted when Western science formulated laws of nature,
which enabled people to exercise unprecedented power over the natural world with a vengeance.
By means of increasingly sophisticated technologies, modern humans for nature tend to be impressed.
By contrast, by the uniformity of the laws of nature understood as utterly impersonal and completely devoid of any rational spirits.
He suggests that this uniformity derives for a change. Notion of the subject, which is now richer and more polyphonic than before,
such that the uniformity comes to some extent from a projection of human desires.
Although most early societies practised various kinds of ritual ceremonies and magic in order to ensure success in the hunt or for agriculture,
it was also clearly advantageous for our ancestors, especially when they were hunters and gatherers,
to gain an accurate understanding of natural processes. But nature points out on grounds that we would today call evolutionary biological,
that looseness in drawing certain kinds of conclusions also had considerable advantages.
Quoting from the joyful science, whoever, for example, didn't know how to find the similar.
Often enough in the context of food or dangerous animals,
liver subsumed too slowly or too carefully would have a smaller probability of surviving than one who immediately assumed sameness.
In the case of mere similarities.
So these Redish very strong example may not be quite the same colour as those which might gather a companion so greedily devoured yesterday,
just an hour before the stomach convulsions set in, which killed him with gruesome rapidity.
But they're similar enough in appearance for me to think twice about eating.
And that slight rustling sound isn't quite the same as the sound I heard the day before.
Just seconds before the sabertooth tiger leapt upon my hunting companion and devoured him.
But it sounds close enough for me to look for the nearest tree to climb to a height beyond the
range of a tiger's leap in order then for certain kinds of practical reasoning to take hold.
It was necessary. Each continues for a long time not to see or feel what is changing about things.
Beings that didn't see precisely had an advantage over those who saw everything in flux in and for itself.
Every high level of carefulness in drawing conclusions, every tendency toward scepticism miss in this regard posed a greater danger for life.
So to get on more efficiently with the business of living, it's better not to pay too close attention to what is really going on.
Nature draws the analogy with the process of reading, just as a reader skims quickly over the individual words on the page.
This is from beyond good and evil. So we scarcely see a tree exactly and completely with regard to its leaves, branches, colour, shape.
It's so much easier for us to fantasise an approximation of a tree.
Even in the midst of the strangest experiences, we still do the same thing.
We make up the greater part of the experience.
But this passage also suggests that we might be able to train ourselves to do what is less easy than fantasising the bulk of our experience,
namely to see through, as it were, the persistent web of concepts and categories and linguistic labels to what is simply there,
given the survival value that attaches to the tendency to fantasise approximations of things.
The strategy would be to suspend this feature of what Phenomenalist phenomenologists called the natural attitude,
thereby effecting a switch from one what what one might call a life perspective to a death perspective.
In an aphorism titled Midday in the Wonder and Its Shadow.
Each year writes of how a strange longing for repose can overwhelm the soul of one who has reached the noontide of life.
Quoting from that passage upon a meadow hidden amongst the woods, he sees the great God pan asleep.
All the things of nature have fallen asleep with an expression of eternity on their faces.
He wants nothing. He friends about nothing. His heart stands still.
Only his eyes are alive. It is a death with open eyes.
Then the man sees much that he has never seen before. And for as far as he can see, everything is spun into a net of light and as it were, buried in.
In an unpublished note, nature calls this condition a means of procuring the advantages of one who is dead.
This condition is not to be appreciated because of what he refers to as a fundamentally false evaluation of the dead world.
On the part of the sentiment. That note goes on, the dead world eternally in motion and without every force against force,
it is a festival to go from this world across to the dead world.
Let us see through this comedy of Senti and being and thereby enjoy it.
Let us not think of the return to the abandonment as a regression. We become quite true.
Thereby we purrfect ourselves. Death has to be reinterpreted with, thereby reconcile ourselves with what is actually with the dead world furniture.
This is also a way of getting beyond the human, all too human rights to think, to think oneself away, out of humanity,
to unlearn desires of all kinds, and to employ the entire abundance of one part of one's powers in looking.
And yet what often happens is a few years later, in 1881, each year elaborates these ideas in a series of passages in his notebooks.
He praises the will to know things as they are. For this, he writes, What is needed is practise in seeing with other eyes.
Practise in seeing. Apart from human relations and thus seeing objectively Sakalys to cure this enormous delusion of human beings.
Shortly after this, he presents a somewhat contrasting view.
The task to see things as they are the means to be able to see with 100 eyes from many persons.
It was a mistake to emphasise the impersonal and to character characterise seeing with the eye of
one's neighbour as moral to see from the viewpoint of many neighbours and with purely personal eyes.
That is the right thing. But the needn't be a contradiction here, as we can see if we move to the East Asian tradition,
I'll begin with some brief remarks about the classical Chinese and how they look at this idea of seeing with the eyes of many neighbours.
And the neighbours aren't just colour humans either. Confucius, for example, advocates the cultivation of reciprocal perspectives,
putting oneself in the other person's position or seeing the situation from the other
person's point of view as a way of reducing self centeredness and promoting social harmony.
Not long after Confucius, the classical DOWER'S thinkers and drums set in particular recommend expanding
the practise of experiential reciprocity beyond human beings to animals,
birds, fishes and even trees. Drugs are famously lichens are normal,
anthropocentric perspective to the situation of a frog at the bottom of a well who believes that he commands a view of the entire world.
Some 15 years. Sorry. Fifteen hundred years after doing.
In Japan, the Zen master Gorgan similarly recommends going beyond what he calls looking through a bamboo tube at a corner of the sky.
By entertaining the perspective, the perspectives of an even broader range of beings.
I quote dragons, hungry ghosts, celestial beings, mountains and drops of water for nature.
This kind of understanding came easily in the Western tradition to at least in the old days,
quoting from dawn of mourning during the great prehistoric age of humanity.
What presupposed spirit everywhere and never thought to wonder it as a privilege of the human being.
There was thus no shame attached to being descended from animals or trees,
and one saw spirit as that which connected us to the natural world, rather than that which separates us from it.
Such a view is still possible in the modern age, at least for someone like Nature who writes in an aphorism with the title.
Nature has stopped looking up. That's the ultimate joy.
Found in being able to save one's physical environment. This nature is intimate and familiar to me.
Related by blood and even more than that.
But what does he mean by saying that the landscape of the upper angered and is related to him even more than by blood?
Well, for one thing, from the death perspective mentioned earlier, he appreciates the contribution to our lives.
That comes from the inorganic realm.
Quoting from my notes of the 18 of 1881, the inorganic traditions us through and through water, air, birth, the shape of the ground.
How distant and superior is our attitude towards what is dead to an organic?
And all the while we are three Portia's water and have an organic minerals in us
that perhaps do more for our well until being than the whole of living society.
Nature was fascinated by what he knew, which was quite a lot about the biology of his day.
But he would have been truly delighted. Had he been capable of registering it.
At Discovery by Carl Bender in 1897 of mitochondria.
Mitochondria are organelles that reside within all cells in the human body and generated the necessity,
the energy necessary for the cells, activities and the body's life.
There are some 10 million billion mitochondria in the body of the average adult,
and they constitute almost half its dry weight, which is what remains after all, the H2O was extracted.
What is remarkable, however, about the mitochondria is that their DNA is quite different from the DNA of the body's own cells and quite
similar to the DNA of the mitochondria that power the cells of all multi cell report multicellular organisms,
whether animals or plants.
One implication of this is that if ICE attempt to assert my identity by pointing here to myself, to my body saying This is me.
Well, two thirds of what I'm pointing to is water and almost half the rest consists of mitochondria, which are very definitely not me.
And it's this substantial, not to me in the form of mitochondrial DNA,
even more than blood that relates my body physically to all other living bodies.
For nature, if one is going to understand the natural world properly and aside from the various human
projections onto it and appropriate research method is called for from joyful science.
As a researcher into nature, once you get out of one's human corner and thereby realise that what reigns in nature is abundance,
extravagance in accordance with the will to power, which is precisely the way of life.
One factor that allows us to get out of our human corner would be our intimate mitochondrial relationship to the natural world
on the basis of which we can learn to entertain the perspectives of any other lifeforms in the physical but the joyful science.
Each offers this advice to the natural scientists of his day.
Above all, one should not want to divest existence of its polycentric character.
That's what that is, what good taste demands.
Gentlemen, the taste of reverence in the face of everything that goes beyond your horizon and in the next aphorism, our new infinite.
He goes on to argue that the human intellect being perspectival at first in its view of itself, and the world is incapable of determining,
quote, how far the prospect type of character of existence reaches or whether it even has any other character,
whether an existence lacking interpretation loses its sense to the point of becoming nonsense, whether, on the contrary,
all existence is not essentially existence that interprets the stop sign that is interpreting in this.
Leaving aside the question of whether something other than the intellect may be capable of determining such a thing.
Beecher continues. But I do think that today, at least, we are far enough.
We are far from the laughable immodesty of decreeing from our own little corner that it is permissible to have perspectives only from this corner.
Rather, the world has become infinite for us again,
insofar as we cannot dismiss the possibility that it includes within itself an infinity of interpretations,
not only multiple interpretations then from each human being, but also from all other living, and ultimately, as we'll see, non-living beings.
You could call this scientist. This from another angle, from the angle of what nature calls the drives the treatment,
but one of his most important statements about the drives makes the remarkable claim largely ignored by the
secondary literature that the forces driving our cyclical life do so with almost no awareness on our part.
From dawn of mourning, however far we may drive our self-knowledge.
Nothing can be more incomplete than the picture we have of the totality of drives that constitute our being.
We can scarcely even name the crudo ones.
Their number one strength at the flood plain and counterplay and above all, the laws of their nourishment remained quite unknown to us.
Whether we are awake or dreaming.
Nature continues, our drives do nothing other than interpret nerve impulses and posit causes for them according to their own needs.
Since the patterns of stimulation received by the body during sleep are minimal,
the drives have much more freedom and freedom of interpretation in their imagined and the fantastic nature of the dream.
They are more constrained while we are awake and active since the patterns of neurostimulation than are much denser.
But nature emphasises that, quote, There is no essential difference between waking and dreaming.
Insofar as the drives continue their interpretations during the day, dreaming and fantasising occasions for their own fulfilment.
So in so far as all existence interprets and drives, in particular interpret and will to power interprets.
So that interpretation is itself a form of world power. This gives us the picture.
Nature proposes in Beyond Good and Evil 36 of the world as world power and nothing.
Besides, they are on the basis of the assumption that we can't get to any other reality.
Other other than the reality of our drives. He asks, is it not permitted to make the experiment and ask the question whether this
given doesn't suffice for understanding on the basis of things like itself,
the so-called mechanistic or material world,
as well as a kind of drive life in which organic functions are still synthetically bound up with each other as a prefill of life.
It surely is permitted to make that experiment,
and the results will be the realisation that as the PRISE interpret the interpretively project our waking world,
what they encounter is will to power, as Nietzsche puts it, will of course work.
Only one will and not a matter of nerves, for example.
Thus, the driver's encounter will in the form of other interpreting drives not only those of our fellow human beings,
but also the drives that animate animals, plants and all other natural phenomena.
So what is ultimately going on according to nature? If we manage to d anthropomorphise the natural world and naturalise ourselves,
as he puts it, with pure new-Found newly redeemed nature, nature doesn't elaborate.
But it's helpful to consider here the traditional East Asian practise of what they call emptying the heart mind.
This is referred to by both the classical DOWER'S thinkers and followed to this day by Chinese and Buddhist practitioners,
all of whom are engaged in a similar enterprise.
As one simply sits in the prescribed upright posture following the inhalations and exhalations of one's screech over time, the internal dialogue,
the incessant conversations and commentary's thoughts and feelings, memories and fantasies,
fears and anticipations that occupy our minds for so much of our waking lives.
Gradually quietens down. What supervene is, is a calm, openness and clarity.
The Dow is, to Buddhist thinkers, account for this in terms of the falling away of the conceptual frameworks in great thought patterns and emotional
overlays and underpinnings that usually condition and so preclude our immediate experience of what is going on.
Along with this comes a fading of the egocentric self that is generating all of this cyclical clutter.
Each year describes this kind of self as from dawn of mourning, a phantom of ego,
which for most people has been formed in the heads of those around them and then communicated back to them.
As a result of which, they all live together in a fog of impersonal and sending personal opinions and arbitrary,
almost poetical value evaluations, each one in the head of the other and this head in other heads, again, a wondrous world of Fantastics.
This fog of opinions and habits grows and thrives more or less independently of the people.
It involves the Buddhists. Call this karma. This General Kayode fiction of the ego, as nature calls it,
has internal as well as external origins insofar as it also derives from the plurality of the drives.
A note from the same time as that passage from Dawn of Mourning reads as follows.
The eye is not the attitude of one being to several drys, thoughts and so on.
But the ego is a plurality of person like forces of which now this one.
Now that one stands in the foreground, has the ego and regards others as a subject,
regards and influential and determining external world as the drives are in conflict.
The feeling of the eye is always strongest, precisely where the preponderance is human reason, according to Twilight of the Idols.
Paul believes in the eye, in the eye as being the substance and projects its belief in the eyes substance onto all things,
thereby creating the concept of thing. But when this belief in the eye is undermined, the concept of the thing is correspondingly weakened.
And what comes to the fore as substance recedes is relationships.
Just as the Buddhists teach, as we free ourselves from what nature calls the error of the eye, we come to recognise,
quote, the affinities, the fervent shuff and antagonisms amongst things multiplicities, therefore, and their laws.
This corresponds perfectly to the idea of no self, which is basic Buddhism,
and that applies equally to the eye into things and dissolves them all into a network of relationships.
So with the practise of meditation has one simply sit waiting for the words to subside and the language to decline and fall away together.
Not something one can do when driven by the instinct for self-preservation,
but rather in some temporary disengagement from the business of making a living in society.
When this is working, a field opens up that can remain through rising from the meditation cushion and returning to the opposite pole of four dynamic
activity with a diminishing of the thoughts flow and the falling silent of language comes of dying down of consciousness,
which is for each and any cases we saw something that is, for the most part, superfluous.
I'm going to quote from the passage that Larry discussed at length yesterday, but I don't think you it this part.
The human being, like every living being, is thinking constantly, but without knowing it.
The thinking that becomes conscious is only the smallest part.
The soup most superficial and the worst for part, is suddenly this conscious thinking that takes place in words,
in signs that communicate our thoughts are constantly generalised by the character of consciousness and translated into the perspective of the herd.
An increase in consciousness is thus a danger. And whoever lives amongst the conscious Europeans knows that it is even an illness,
a less sick way to live than would be to let the drives that give rise to our everyday consciousness and its thinking in words become quiescent.
No longer interpreting the situation from their own perspectives,
and to thereby allow what is going on beneath thinking to flow through the body in silence and without commentary.
What's going on is basically drys not exfoliating into consciousness or commenting on the text of experience,
not the egocentric drives that keep the illusion of the eye going.
But now only the more each ancient, deeper level drives through millennia of adaptation have kept the human body attuned to its physical environment.
Paradoxically, it's by putting ourselves in a situation where we don't need to be concerned with preserving ourselves,
that we can get to a condition in which it is only those original natural environmental,
environment related and life preserving drives that are operative.
Under such conditions, wonderous responses to the world are naturally spontaneous,
and one's actions stem not from the narrow confines of the small self,
but from the forces of heaven and earth as they operate through the world trade body.
Its great reason. One thinks of Nietzsche's praise of beauty in the twilight of the idols go to conceive of a strong,
highly cultured human being, adept in a range of physical skills,
lively, tighten self-control and with reverence for himself,
who can dare to grant himself the full range and richness of naturalness, and who is strong enough for this.
And whatever thoughts may come when the chatter of consciousness and quieten down will then be
genuinely results of Nietzsche's famous as Descartes rather than mere opinions of the egocentric self.
But since they apparently didn't engage in any formal meditation practise,
how did he arrive at such experiences and ideas, such ideas so that are so similar to Buddhism?
Well, he arrived there by walking or as he often puts it, Marciel March six to eight hours a day.
One can still the body's locomotion is by sitting and following the breath,
or else one can put it into energetically sustained movement by walking or running or climbing or swimming.
Wendy Cho was in the accident at hiking paths around this area.
He kept to the well trodden ones, avoiding dangerous terrain in which he would have to slow down and pay attention to where he was putting his feet.
Many of his letters expressed gratitude for the successful efforts of the local corps for AI to keep the paths around
town smooth and even and clear obstructions so that he could march along with them without any fear of stumbling.
By keeping to safe and secure paths, whether Aransas, Maria or amongst the lanes of Venice or the streets of Genoa,
he too was able to practise a vigorous form of walking meditation known as King in the Zen tradition that
allowed him to hear the innermost voices of his thoughts rather than the superficial chatter of his eye.
No wonder he reports that his creativity was always at its highest when the muscles were working
at its at their most subtle pitch such that the body is experienced not as recalcitrant matter,
but as energetic flow. One can also do this, but it's clear, at least it's clear to me,
that by means of his marching nature became able to see what was going on around him insofar as this description of learning to
see from Twilight of the Idols could certainly have been written in different language by a sage or the Zen master to learn,
seeing to accustomed the eye to resting patients, letting things approach to postpone judgement,
learning to go around and comprehend each unique case from all sides.
That is the first preschooling in spirituality not to react to a stimulus immediately,
but to get hold of the instincts that inhibit and cheque to learn.
Seeing as I understand it is almost what the other philosophical way of speaking calls a strong will.
But the essential thing here is precisely not to will to be able to defer a decision.
To conclude with a return to the things of nature. How are things then when the body flow is fully and vibrantly under way?
The language of south of the strip is helpful here. Redeemed from their bondage under purpose.
The things of nature does on the feet of chance and above each one that has an accident to heaven.
Innocence. The Heaven contingency that heaven exuberance.
Sorrowful stress.
Now tree at midday, while crowned by the love of defying the world, become perfect and we ourselves falling still into the well of eternity,
up into the abyss of the heavens from whence soul falls, as do you, baptising all things in the vast, incessant process of earthly becoming.