A subscriber to Thoughts While Shaving recently sent me the following:

“This moment that humanity is living through can be considered a door or a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or go through the door is yours.

If you consume information 24 hours a day, with negative energy, constantly nervous, with pessimism, you will fall into this hole.

In the context of a conversation about Being and Becoming, a friend of mine asked, “Is eternal becoming possible?” My first reaction was that the concept of becoming was inherently dependent on time and that time is the antithesis of eternity. But then I got to thinking…

A cursory reading of ethnographic surveys (Frazer, Spengler, Toynbee, et al.) shows that almost every human culture includes the recognition of a ‘transcendent’ dimension to reality. Sometimes this dimension is called “God”; other times it is better described as a “force” or as a “layer of eternal values”. What is not found are cultures that embrace WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) aka ‘naïve realism’…with one glaring exception: the culture of contemporary Western Europe and North America.

Nothing is everything” is an advertising slogan for Skyrizi (AbbVie), a dermatological drug. I assume it means that the absence of skin blemishes is ‘everything’, at least for some people.
But it got me thinking: what else could “nothing is everything” mean?

Following up on an earlier post, in an I – it relationship, the ‘I’ has complete dominion over the ‘it’. The ‘it’ is merely a passive receptor for the actions of the ‘I’. Therefore, this model ascribes infinite intrinsic value to the ‘I’ and zero intrinsic value to the ‘it’. But can such an arrangement be called a relationship?

Classical Western languages (e.g. Hebrew, Greek and Latin) for the most part lacked anything we would recognize today as ‘punctuation’. When marks did appear in texts, they were merely to guide actors and orators in their declamations. The same is true of Medieval languages (e.g. Old English, Old French and Old Norse).

Today, we are all about our pronouns. This incidental part of speech has suddenly replaced the noun and the verb as the focus of popular, and linguistic, attention.

Growing up in the ‘60s, we were accustomed to asking one another, “What is your sign?” Now, 55 years later, “What are your pronouns?” has become the ice breaker of choice. Even some business colleagues of mine have embedded “my pronouns…” into their electronic email signatures.

Someone sent me this and it’s so good I had to reproduce it in Thoughts while Shaving:

“The beginning of Deuteronomy is filled with promises about taking possession of the land of Canaan. But…remember that our ancestors lost possession of that land and went into exile. The Torah teaches that the way to live long in the land and avoid exile is not by having the strongest army, but by fulfilling the covenant of the Torah. And it tells us that one mitzvah is most important for making this happen: the Sabbatical or Shmita year, when the land rests.

Most young children are afraid of the dark. As adults, we tend to dismiss those fears. But as in so many other ways, it is the children who are right…and we who are wrong. They have not yet wrapped themselves in the cocoon of consumer goods. They still see life as it is.

Following up on my previous post, in Ancient Greece the concept of the individual as actor had not yet emerged. Human beings were the passive pawns of forces beyond their control, or even their ken. A late 20th century movie, “The Gods must be Crazy”, could easily have been set in Ancient Greece (rather than contemporary Africa). In fact, you could view Greek Mythology as the first Literature of the Absurd.

Since I was 12 years old, I have found Greek Mythology baffling. What exactly is the role of the gods? I told my grandchildren that the Greek gods are like our Super Heroes, but even that analogy didn’t totally satisfy me. Now, more than half a century later, I think I’ve figured it out (with a major assist from Oswald Spengler). In Ancient Greece it is the gods who act, not the people. Individuals go through the motions, but their intentions are meaningless and their actions entirely without effect.

According to Existentialist philosopher, Martin Heidegger, each of us has been “thrown” into an alien and potentially hostile world. It is as if an ocean suddenly disgorged us onto a strange beach populated by strange creatures. But of course, it’s much worse than that because initially we don’t know what a beach, or even a creature, is and we have no previous life experience to draw on.