A Multi-Polar Series of Observations on Multi-Polar Religion:

New Video delves into the scholarship of Alan Watts and reviews long term historical trends in the history of world religions and philosophy.

00:00 Alan Watts Collage Intro

00:22 Koans 14 and 15 of Blue Cliff Record

00:59 Ritual-I believe in What What I Do Does

01:12 Watts on Eastern and Western Religion

02:22 Watts and Foucault-if they met

02:37 Watts on Confuciuanism, Convention, & Ritual

03:54 Gary Snyder and a Dharma Bums Timeline

06:00 This Difficulty-the Meaning of Convention

06:33 Maybe Arthur Whane talked to Japhy Ryder

06:48 An Upside Down Statement on Ritual

07:08 Figures of Ritual After Ritual

08:19 To Beatniks and Boddhisatvas

08:36 Disambiguation of Norms

08:54 The Post-Avial Persistence of Ritual

09:04 Decay Signatures. Particle collider.

09:30 Not a Clash of Civilizations Now

09:40 What Jaspers Called Axial

10:10 Ritual (Pre-Axial) Individual Community

10:40 RItual (Post-Axial) Individual Community

10:55 Shakesperean Boddhisatva (wizard Anywhere)

11:22 Entangling Vines, Beatnik or Boddhisatva?

11:50 Foucauldian Narcissism

12:02 Shamans and Tantrists (Big Chart)

13:02 Burkert, Ritual, Animals, Display

13:24 Line of Ritual in History

13:58 Heterosis

14:57 The Axial Failure of Ritual in Heterosis

15:13 The Definition of Tantra (Gordon White)

15:36 Retro-Shamanism, Neo-Tantrism

16:42 A Neo-Retro-Kantian Analytical Take

16:49 Religion and/Or Philosophy. East & West.

17:10 Awareness in the East, Desire in the West

17:38 Liberation and Regimentation

18:18 Divinity and Demystification

18:45 Zen and Chuang Tzu

18:58 Nietzsche-Christianity’s Betrayal of Christ

20:37 The Confucianism of Christ

21:00 Between Buddha and Christ

21:20 Brahminism, Jews as Tantrists of the Mid-East

22:00 Buddhism pushed out of India (Bronkhorst)

22:16 Brahmins-Pastors of Caste. The Church.

23:08 Reincarnation

23:59 Ritual Stratification in Early Heterosis

24:25 The Embryo of History

25:18 The Buddha’s Remembrance of 1k Past Lives

26:20 World Historical Not Familial

26:30 Ross Geller (Friends) Genogram

26:56 What Could Possibly Be Reincarnated?

27:28 Reincarnation in Brahminism and in Buddhism

27:55 Salvation in the West. Enlightenment in the East.

28:33 Convention & Desire (Girard)

30:35 But Why Awareness with Ritual?

31:43 Dialogue Emerges (Socrates)

31:56 Ritual in the East, Convention in the West

32:22 Desire and Celibacy (vs. Brahmin Endogamy)

33:04 Buddhism, Brahmins, Christ, Church

33:18 Watts on Christianity-Myth or Ideology

34:41 The Only Church Ritual Already Happened

35:56 Today, how do I know if It’s Ritual?

36:51 Taoist Philosophy of Science (Warning)

37:10 Psycho-Therapy as Ritual?

37:49 Watts in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (1956/57)

38:14 Watts in Kerouac’s Desolation Angels (1956/63)

40:13 The Article in the New York Times

41:54 Watts on the Beats (Deleuze Avec Watts)

43:17 The Unconscious-The Real New Frontier

45:51 The Experience of Getting Easternized

46:50 The Next Video-A Thousand Hounds

47:32 The Tao of the West (The West Has No Taoism?)

47:50 The Watershed Moment of Spinoza’s Thought

48:03 Taoism was Laissez-Faire (Rothbard)

48:20 So-Called Common Knowledge (Pinker)

48:46 Modern Mysticism and Demystification (Foucault)

The full video is launching tomorrow. Here are the timestamps.

00:00 Koan 14 of the Blue Cliff Record
00:19 An Appropriate Statement on Oedipus
00:39 The Oedipus Complex = Perverted Anecdote (Robert Graves)
01:20 Later Psychologists had to do away with the Oedipus Complex
01:45 Have We Ever Been Anti-Oedipal (world historical not familial)
02:09 An Emblem of a Certain Axialization
02:29 Extant Oedipal Tragedy
02:44 The Status of Kingship at this Greek Classic Axial Moment
03:29 Robert Bellah-Religion in Human Evolution
03:19 Bellah Quotes Archaeologist Bruce Trigger
03:30 Kingship and Divinity — 2 Parts of a Single Whole
03:40 Hocart-Divine Kingship Before Class
03:54 Hudson on the Rise of Oligarchy
04:28 The King is a Repository of the Gods (Hocart)
04:46 Caste vs. Class (and the Decline of Ritual)
05:05 Why did The King Become Divine (James Frazer)
05:52 People Knew What What they Did
06:01 In that World, Maybe There Was No Truth
06:14 And then, This is Was The World of Socrates
06:27 Did the Greeks Believe in their “Myths”?
06:54 The World of Early Ritual was a World of Consensus
07:08 What is Ritual to the Greeks? It’s a Sphinx.
07:14 And That’s OEDIPUS!
07:29 Oedipus REX: Ground Zero of Oedipus
07:57 Foucault: Tragedy a Ceremony of Rememorialization of Right
08:27 The Sphinx
08:33 Oedipus is at Odds with Delphi (3 Warnings)
08:37 Delphi. A Tragic Addition?
08:53 Oedipus THE KING in conflict with the Divine
08:59 The Embodiment of Decayed Ritual: The Sphinx
09:44 The figure of Tragic Oedipus: Aspect of any Valid Axialization
09:52 Foreign Kings and Oedipus’s Botched Naturalization
10:27 Truth of Birthright Undermines Kingship By Merit (Irony)
10:57 Oedipus Christ-Oedipus Buddha
11:13 Renouncers and Wanderers, Caste, Kingship, Delocalizers
11:51 Lack of Intention in Oedipus
12:01 Creon: The Figure of Class
12:09 When Foucault Looked at Oedipus Rex
12:27 Creon, the Ruling Class, and the Sequels to Oedipus Rex
12:44 Cain and Abel 2.0 (Eteocles and Polyneices)
13:13 The Mutilated Anecdote Carried Along by 7 Against Thebes
13:45 Aeschyus: The Dramatization of Ritual
13:50 Aeschylus VS. Euripides (Nietzsche)
14:12 Creon in Euripides’s Phoenecian Women
14:33 Tiresias
14:49 The Misuse of the Delphic Oracle by Royalty of Thebes
15:12 Tiresias says, Oedipus, You’re the Tragedy
15:25 Oedipus D.A.R.V.O.
15:42 Oedipus Noir
16:04 Oedipus Train Wreck
16:12 Not Only Do Oracles Structure the Play. They Are THE Problem.
17:18 Violations of the Delphic Maxims
18:00 Divination and What Machiavelli Says About Wisdom
19:04 Divination and Burroughs’s Cut-Up Method
19:19 Was the Prophecy true before the Oracle?
19:54 Freudian Prophecies (Childhood Predicts Adulthood)
21:33 Freud’s World History (Projection)
21:55 What Freud was Looking for in Tragedy
22:10 Being a Small Child Feels Terrible: Targeting Destruction
23:57 The Tragedians created Something Uncanny
23:15 J.P. Vernant’s Critique of Freud
23:43 Richard Seaford and Kings
23:52 Deleuze’s Introduction to Vernant
24:06 Spiritual Exercis-es in Philosophy
24:17 Tragedy: A Spiritual Exercise in Empathy (Freud’s Appropriation)
24:29 Freud’s Discovery: The Childhood Genesis of Personality
24:50 Euripides’s Comeditatio Malorum
25:23 Psychology > Philosophy
25:40 Empathy and Freud’s Misinterpration of World History
26:20 Orestes
26:48 Oedipus Was Trying to Avoid Aggression to His Adopted Parents
27:15 Tiresias was the Dark Precursor to Psychoanalysis
27:56 From Oedipus to Narcissus. Tiresias/Psychoanalysis.
28:22 Misrecognition in the Mirror Pond of Ancient myth
28:39 Myth, Tragedy, Philosophy — Degraded meaning
28:59 Foucault’s Statement On Cynics, King Lear, Philosophy
28:27 The Disambiguation of Myth by Graves
29:46 Myth-Ritual — Convention-Ideology
30:23 Roland Barthes Mythology
30:30 The King as Living Myth
30:59 Failures of Kings in Ritual. Oedipus and Pentheus.
31:40 Rene Girard’s Oedipus Christ
31:50 Scapegoat — Degraded Meaning
32:18 Innocence of Oedipus, Socrates, Christ
32:48 Empathy in Societies of Ritual
33:17 Stephen Porges on Rituals of Coregulation or Fear
34:10 Why Stoicism Fails?
34:13 Empathy-From Social and Sacred to a Tactic
34:30 Empathy as a Way of Life
34:40 An Expression of God’s Will-Empathy with God (Deleuze’s Spinoza)
35:15 Deleuze’s Stoicism and Axial Empathy
35:49 Empathy in Zen? (Alternative Translations of Koan 14)
36:26 Empathy For/Empathy With
36:39 Redemption of Oedipus (Theseus/Colonus)
37:50 The Legacy of Tragedy in Modern Cinema and Television?
38:46 Benjamin on Mechanical Reproduction and Ritual
39:17 Conclusion
40:22 Dedication to Louisa Shea

The greatest theorist of ideology from our era when ideology has reached its greatest heights.

The After of Other Things: A New Theory of the 2 or 3 David Graeber Problem takes a look at the intertwined concepts of sovereignty and debt in Graeber’s most provocative texts — and traces some of his major collaborations and influences in the context of the last two+ decades of American history and theory.

This is the first in a series of 3 videos. Part 2:

Dedicated to Jean Luc Godard

00:00 What is Theory? Theory is a History of Theory.

00:19 History of Philosophy is a Part of Theory

00:38 Really What You Need to Do is Look at the Twentieth Century, The Long Twentieth Century

00:47 You Can Have a History of Philosophy But You Cannot Have a Philosophy of History

1:07 Just Like Philosophy is Nothing without the Philosophers, Theory is Nothing without the Long Twentieth Century of Writers

1:27 But This Is Not An Introduction to Theory Class

1:40 Pursuing these Two Questions of Theory Was the Motivation for My Off Course Texts Project

2:00 The Problem with the 2 Problems of Theory

2:23 Let Me Tell You What the 2 Questions Are

2:26 Question A:

3:37 Problem 2:

4:42 Two questions

5:04 Freud Gone Mad?

5:13 The Off Course Texts Explores the Potential for Viewing These as 2 Sides of the Same Coin

5:24 Theory Qua Philosophy?

5:51 Philosophy is Our Sphinx

00:00 2024: The Year Philosophy Dies

00:15 History is Not Lived in Multiples of Ten

00:42 Attempts to Encapsulate Foucault’s Radically Incomplete Work: A very Short Introduction

2:04 Kant’s Critical Philosophy Getting Out of Hand

2:46 We can say that in ‘modern philosophy there has been a tradition of metasophism that runs from the disciples of kant to those of Foucault

3:04 Ironic Dilemmas of Historical Transmission of Doctrine, Testimony, Meaning

4:04 Theory Qua Philosophy?

4:25 Three Hundred Plus or Minus Forty Years: A Pretty Amazing Unit

5:58 Reason, Ritual, History

6:14 10 Generations: The Epoch We Are Leaving

6:30 Kant’s Enlightenment: A Diagram of Pure Reason in the Critical Philosophy

6:58 The Truth Comes from Our Reason Not from What We Perceive

7:08 A Need to Motivate the Turn Towards Reason that Will Bring About the Kingdom of Ends

7:23 Kant’s Theologico-Teleological Problem

7:40 The Line of the Sublime/Beautiful/God

8:20 Can a Mechanism of History Operate in Critical Philosophy?

8:40 What Did Foucault Think About It? (Deleuze’s Version of Foucault)

9:10 The Great Thing About this Diagramme

9:47 The Kantian Enigma

10:58 These Are the 2 Questions of Theory

11:13 Where Foucault Saw His Own Work…

11:30 Kant Credited Plato with Notion that we do not have a priori access to things in themselves…

11:44 Foucault’s studies of antiquity/Christianity were the beginnings of an axialization

12:06 When you fold Foucault’s studies of antiquity into the capitalism and schizophrenia problem…

12:30 recommended

12:38 recommended?

13:01 Recommended: The Off Course Texts/Belief-O-Nomics

13:42 Isn’t Deleuze Philosophy? (Donald Trump Impression)

13:55 Well, Look at What Deleuze’s Philosophy Was

14:12 Nasty Kant

14:21 This is the End of the Delezean Century

14:46 Spinoza’s Boot Stepping on the Faces of Hegel and Wittgenstein, Forever

15:00 Evil in the Strata (Foucault Over Kant)

15:45 Recommended “Marc Djaballah’s Gap,” Shea, Han, Berhent, Lorenzi, Davidson, Etc.

16:05 Spiritual Exercise… and

16:25 Diagramme (A Definition in French) and the biggest need for a diagram

17:01 Spinozist Enlightenment-Alliances-Harmony17:10 Foucault’s Personal Communication to Dreyfus/Rabinow

17:45 Kant’s Empirical Problem

18:25 History of Reason? What Would A Kantian Axialization Look Like?

19:50 But What Would a Foucauldian Axialization Look Like

19:58 Foucault’s Books/Lectures on Parrhesia and Greek Thought

20:03 Foucault’s Books on Power’s Production of Knowledge in Modernity

20:09 Foucault’s Oedipus

20:34 Why Was Foucault’s Axialization More Than Kant’s Axialization?

21:19 Socrates in Axialization and the Problem of Belief — — A Foucauldian Definition of Belief?

21:48 War Against Convention

22:28 Structure of Belief and Convention (Norms)

22:57 Next Video

please check out the video. This is part 2/3 of a series on theory at http://youtube.com/@markajita

The final 7th chapter from last year’s

Serendipity Lost: Eden and its Consequences.

Instead of “Happy Accidents,” we might call Serendipity, the happiness in every accident and the accident that comes along with every planned success. A radical break with plans that is often required to reap good fortune from what is outside your plans. In order to “embrace the accident,” one often has to drop the other hopes one was holding on to. To reap the rewards of Serendipity, you need to abandon the plans you had previously wanted to succeed. Serendipity is, by definition, a diversion.

Watch/Listen to the chapter!

Coming Soon: Beliefonomics, Or, Why Philosophy Fails

And Chapter 1/12:

Key passages from the classics of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu turn backwards in time to an age where humans respected the power of serendipity rather than the power of planning. If Eden — as many have hypothesized — represented a hunter-gatherer oikos, then we might also imagine that there was a Tao in Eden…

Not only that, moving forward from the revolutionary (perhaps primitivist) Taoist mindset in the context of Early Civilizations, this way of rediscovering a relationship to (hunter-gatherer) serendipity lost with the neolithic turn also set the stage for revolutions closer to our modern times. The theme of ancient taoist roots of modernity is described further in the next chapter: “Laissez-Faire as Serendipity Imperative.”

This is Chapter 5 of Serendipity Lost: Eden and its Consequences. This chapter has gotten fewer listens than the others but it may be the most interesting, for many reasons…

This audiobook is read by the author.

Few philosophers have done more to connect the Neolithic Turn with the myth of Eden from Genesis in the Bible than the late novelist Daniel Quinn. Yet, perhaps we need to go further understand what was really lost in the human turn to agricultural practice. In Serendipity Lost, we propose that what was lost in the fading away of hunter-gatherer lifeways was Serendipity: a relationship of acceptance and celebration of unplanned goods and potentials. Furthermore, we can consider the founding storytellers of Judaism, the storytellers who first told the story of Eden as rediscoverers of Serendipity in the context of civilization.

This is Chapter 1 of 7 of Serendipity Lost: Eden and Its Consequences.

Serendipity Lost is the first book of The Off Course Texts: A Series of Philosophical Reflections on the Big Here and the Long Now.

Coming Soon: BOOK 3…. BELIEFONOMICS, OR, WHY PHILOSOPHY FAILS