До некоторых книг не удается добраться буквально годами, почему-то. Но вот пришла пора, настало время! (почему-то)

A course on Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception taught by Hubert Dreyfus at UC Berkeley in 2005.

- archive.org
- youtube playlist

Вот прямо из предисловия “Феноменологии восприятия”.

«Философ, как говорится в неизданных работах Гуссерля, — это тот, кто все время начинает с начала.» — очень, очень хорошо.

И вот как Мерло-Понти проговаривает тот вариант “начала”, который для меня имеет смысл: «Я не есть результат или переплетение многих причинностей, которые определяют мое тело или мою «психику», я не могу мыслить себя как часть мира, как простой объект биологии, психологии и социологии, не могу замкнуть на себе универсум науки. […] Наука не имеет и никогда не будет иметь того же обоснования, что и воспринимаемый мир, по той простой причине, что она является его определением или разъяснением. Я не есть «живое существо» или даже «человек», или даже «сознание», со всеми характеристиками, каковые зоология, социальная анатомия или индуктивная психология признают за этими продуктами природы или истории, — я есть абсолютный исток (!) […]

Вернуться к самим вещам — значит вернуться к этому миру *до* знания, о котором всегда *говорит* знание и в отношении которого всякое научное определение будет абстрактным, знаковым и зависимым: так география описывает пейзаж, на лоне которого нам довелось узнать, что такое лес, долина или река.»

Мой вариант исполнения этого феноменологического трюка я вот тут проговаривал: https://news.1rj.ru/str/ironheaded/896

George J. Marshall. A Guide to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception

Просто так прочитать Мерло-Понти мне, конечно, не удается, приходится пользоваться вспомогательной литературой. Для начала вот эта книжка мне неплохо помогает.

This section in no way is intended to replace the reading of the Phenomenology of Perception. Perhaps it is important to realize that this overview is not the same thing as a commentary. The job of a commentary is to tell the reader what the book is about. If it does this, it is a good commentary. If it does not do this, it is not good. But the goal of this overview is very different. It aims at providing a map that guides the reader through the maze of arguments and, hopefully, to achieve an understanding of what is happening in the Phenomenology of Perception. It is important to remember that no one would ever think that they "know Paris" if they only read a map of Paris. This work has the same limitations. Reading what follows will not enable you to "know" what Merleau-Ponty has to say in the Phenomenology of Perception. Only reading the Phenomenology of Perception will do that. But it is worthwhile to remember that having a map of Paris on your visit can really be a help and lead to your knowing Paris. This overview is offered as something that can help you to understand this book. But it is important to realize what it is and to use it in the right way.

Christopher Wallis. Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition
—

«Yoga is a living tradition profoundly influenced by the Tantra, yet it has forgotten much of its own history. This book is part of a new wave of work by scholars who are also practitioners, and whose goals are to rediscover and reintegrate some of what has been forgotten; to clarify the roots of many ideas and practices that are floating around (thereby grounding them and enhancing their richness); and to chart clearly the vast and varied landscape of Indian spiritual thought, with a view to what it can contribute to our lives today. For it is certainly the case that most 20th-century teaching and writing on Indian thought was either exciting but incoherent and ungrounded (the practitioner context) or systematic but dry, boring, and insipid (the academic context). It’s time to rectify that—and no Indian tradition has been more misunderstood, relative to its deep influence on global spirituality, than Tantra. […]

WHAT’S THE CONNECTION BETWEEN TANTRA AND YOGA? That really depends on what you mean by “yoga.” I’ll address two main meanings. The first is the original meaning of the word “yoga,” referring to a comprehensive set of psycho-physical practices (emphasizing meditation) intended to discipline and integrate body, mind, and spirit with the aim of attaining the highest spiritual goal. Yoga in this sense began around the time of the Buddha. A thousand years later, the Tantra incorporated yoga as an important part of its systems of practice. Tantra also expanded on the previously existing body of yogic practice, adding hundreds of new techniques: more complex prāṇāyāmas, detailed visualization practices, and mantra-science, as well as many body-based practices, especially yogic postures, sacred hand gestures, and the activation of energy centers (cakras) in the body. […]

On the other hand, if you mean “yoga” in the modern sense of a comprehensive āsana practice, plus one or two other simplified practices (i.e., what scholars call “modern postural yoga”), it too is connected to the Tantra, if only tenuously. Modern yoga is the latest phase of a historical development that may be traced all the way back to Śaiva Tantrik yoga. We can briefly summarize the salient facts here: the religion of Shaivism and its Tantra or esoteric teachings, which comprised an enormously detailed system with a vast institutional base, became unwieldy with the loss of state patronage after the Muslim conquests, and thus was later simplified into (and mostly replaced by) a grassroots system of practice called haṭha-yoga.

Haṭha-yoga traced itself back to the most well-known Śaiva Tantrik guru, Matsyendra. It presented itself as a complete spiritual path, consisting of prāṇāyāma, meditations on the centers of the subtle body, and the use of three bandhas and more than eighty-four different yogic postures or āsanas, all in service of activating and raising the spiritual energy called kuṇḍalinī. Though nearly all of these elements were explicitly derived from Śaiva Tantra, haṭha-yoga was not fully Tantrik because its texts did not teach Tantrik mantras, Tantrik ritual, or require full Tantrik initiation (the three indispensible elements of mainstream classical Tantra). It preserved some of the earlier practices of Tantrik yoga with admirable success, though it also continued the process of dilution and simplification of the Tantra. In the early 20th century, haṭha-yoga’s āsanas and prāṇāyāmas became the inspiration for the synthesis of the system of modern yoga. Thus modern yoga has its roots in ancient Śaiva Tantra.»

Порой рекомендации ютуба приносят удивительные чудеса. Завораживающе все: и женщина, и фон, и речь.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYrRYCSRxdE

Christopher Wallis. Tantra Illuminated
—

«Here [i.e., on this “level” of practice] there is no purity and no impurity, no dualism nor nondualism, no ritual nor its rejection, no renunciation and no possession…all the observances, rules and regulations [found in other Tantras] are neither enjoined nor prohibited in this way. Or, everything is enjoined, and everything forbidden here! In fact, there is but one commandment on this [higher path], O Queen of the Gods: the yogī is to make every effort to steady his awareness on reality. He must practice whatever makes that possible for him. (Mālinīvijayottara-tantra Chapter 18)»

The BBC Radio news bulletin from London stated: "Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news." Piano music followed for roughly 15 minutes

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p010szlg

«There’s an appealing sort of spirituality that tells you that your suffering is valid, that it’s important and significant, that it makes you special, that you are so good and brave and noble to bear your unique and special suffering with only a moderate amount of complaining. This is a message we often want to hear, and it sells extremely well.

Bodhisattvayana starts from the recognition that your suffering is not significant. Your suffering doesn’t make you special. Your suffering is exactly the same as everyone else’s suffering. Your story about the awful thing that happened to you, blah blah blah, might be unique, but the suffering itself is universal. It has no particular meaning. Suffering is just a thing that happens. It happens to everyone.

That recognition comes from opening your heart to others’ suffering. Then you find that it’s the same as yours.

“Opening your heart” may sound nice, but it can feel like open-heart surgery without an anesthetic. “Opening your heart” is not about sharing good feelings with safe friends. Or it is not just that! It’s feeling the fear and pain and rage of people we don’t like, people we hate even; or have contempt for, or whose pain is so extreme that even imagining it is intolerable at first.»

— David Chapman. Living beautifully † Cutting hard

я это услышал впервые, страшно подумать, 30 лет назад, и оказалось что так тоже можно. Наверное с тех пор все так

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxcOxvEsE_Y

и вот еще, пока на гребне бумерской волны, любимое

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Cg_f95wik&list=PLEMzLROuENR0zKj_1g-A9baVSGUNfHh-A&index=2

good stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaSZdCauekg

Kristopher Nielsen. Embodied, Embedded, and Enactive Psychopathology
—

«One of the biggest mysteries in philosophy is how purpose, meaning, and a sense that some states of the world are better or worse than others (e.g., normativity), can arise in a world of objects and facts. The answer to this mystery, according to enactivism, is that these things are brought forth—or rather enacted—through the recursive structures of life forms and their relationship to the world—i.e., the universe has meaning for life forms because of the way they are shaped to keep trying to live in an imperfect world. To unpack this, consider that all life must actively maintain a precarious organizational structure against the entropic flow of the universe around it, requiring the metabolism of energy from the environment to do so. To put this in simpler terms, life forms are really complicated and highly organized, while the surrounding universe tends towards disorganization. All life forms therefore have to do a lot of work in order to keep themselves up and running. If they stop doing this work they will die and decompose back into their environment. In a sense then, all life is constantly creating and defining itself. To do such work requires energy, which has to be sourced from the surrounding environment (e.g., food and oxygen), and the ability to adapt to threats and environmental changes (e.g., temperature fluctuations and other life forms that want to eat you). In order to source energy and avoid threat, organisms must, in either a basic or more complex sense, make sense of the world in order to navigate and respond to changes in it adaptively. This effectively sets up a selective pressure. We can see then that having an embodied purpose to keep living sets up the emergence of meaning for the organism. For a given life form the world ultimately has meaning because some things help it survive and some things threaten its survival, and it will be of clear benefit to the survival of the organism to evolve and learn to make sense of the world in order to respond adaptively.

[…]

For now, suffice to recognize that there is a sense in which things can be good or bad for bacteria, trees, tigers, and people, in a way that things can’t be good or bad for a pile of rocks. This is because, essentially, it is easy for these life forms to die, and hard for them to keep living; they are precarious in that they are far-from-equilibrium systems situated in an entropic universe. The very process of staying alive, i.e., self-maintenance, necessitates the metabolism of energy which is sourced from the environment. At the cellular level this process of self-maintenance is referred to as autopoiesis; literally ‘self-creation’. For the enactivist, this precariousness and the needful relation it establishes between the organism and its environment is the root from which meaning develops.»

Kristopher Nielsen. Embodied, Embedded, and Enactive Psychopathology
—

«Traditionally the dualistic divide between the mental and the physical has dominated our language and thereby our understanding of how ‘mental’ disorders can relate to physical processes. For example, in Chap. 2 we saw how certain conceptual positions understand mental disorders to be ‘products’ of biological/neurological abnormalities (e.g., biological essentialists), while others understand mental disorders to exist at a ‘psychological level’, somehow independent from biology (e.g., cognitive essentialists). Ideas of emergence, constitution, and organizational causality are inherent within the central 3e notion of embodiment—that our psychological functioning *is* the action of our biology in context over time. If our psychological functioning is embodied, then psychological dysfunction, whatever that may mean, seems unlikely to fit neatly into psychological or biological categories. This fits with the empirical evidence that ‘mental disorders’ are messy sorts of things, with causal factors ‘dappled’ over the traditional ontological domains of genetics, neurobiology, physiology, environment, as so on (Kendler, 2012). In a sense we might say that mental disorders are *ontologically disrespectful* in that they run amok over such categories. Notions such as organizational causality, dynamical constitution, and embodiment, allow us to make sense of such ontologically disrespectful phenomena because they allow us to conceive of constitutionally complex phenomena and process structures existing across multiple traditional scales of enquiry.»