2019 (#82 – 18b) : Heidegger , Montessori , Mathew 9:18-19 ,Tao Te Ching , Genesis 1:27 , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Derrida , Gospel of Thomas , Genesis 11:10 , Mathew 9:22 , The Diamond Sutra , Mathew 9:23-25 , Sri Ramana Maharshi , Footnote: Nietzsche

. Teaching is even more difficult than learning. We
know that; but we rarely think about it. And why is teaching
more difficult than learning? Not because the teacher
must have a larger store of information, and have it always
ready. Teaching is more difficult than learning because
what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher,
in fact, lets nothing else be learned than-learning. His conduct,
therefore, often produces the impression that we
properly learn nothing from him, if by “learning” we now
suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.
The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this
alone, that he has still far more to learn than they-he
has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable
of being more teachable than the apprentices. (Heidegger)

To stimulate life,–leaving it then free to develop, to unfold,–herein lies the first task of the educator. In such a delicate task, a great art must suggest the moment, and limit the intervention, in order that we shall arouse no perturbation, cause no deviation, but rather that we shall help the soul which is coming into the fulness of life, and which shall live from its own forces. This art must accompany the scientific method. (Montessori)

18 While he was saying this, a synagogue leader came and knelt before him and said, “My daughter has just died. But come and put your hand on her, and she will live.” 19 Jesus got up and went with him, and so did his disciples.
(Mathew 9:18-19)

Know the male, yet keep to the female: receive the world in your arms.
(Tao Te Ching)

20 Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. 21 She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” (Mathew 9:20-21)
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them — your very seeing them will make them go. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Mary said to Jesus, “Whom are your disciples like?”
He said, “They are like children who have settled in a field which is not theirs. When the
owners of the field come, they will say, ‘Let us have back our field.’ They (will) undress
in their presence in order to let them have back their field and to give it back to them. (Gospel of Thomas)

There is a time for being ahead, a time for being behind; a time for being in motion, a time for being at rest; a time for being vigorous, a time for being exhausted ; a time for being safe, a time for being in danger. (Tao Te Ching)

For everything there are innumerable causal factors. But the source of all that is, is the Infinite Possibility, the Supreme Reality, which is in you and which throws its power and light and love on every experience. But, this source is not a cause and no cause is a source. Because of that, I say everything is uncaused. You may try to trace how a thing happens, but you cannot find out why a thing is as it is. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Two years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he became the father[d] of Arphaxad. 11 And after he became the father of Arphaxad, Shem lived 500 years and had other sons and daughters. (Genesis 11:10-11)

22 Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment. (Mathew 9:22)

if such men allowed their minds to grasp and hold on to anything they would be cherishing the idea of an ego entity, a personality, a being, or a separated individuality; and if they grasped and held on to the notion of things as having intrinsic qualities they would be cherishing the idea of an ego entity, a personality, a being, or a separated individuality. Likewise, if they grasped and held on to the notion of things as devoid of intrinsic qualities they would be cherishing the idea of an ego entity, a personality, a being, or a separated individuality. So you should not be attached to things as being possessed of, or devoid of, intrinsic qualities. this is the reason why the Tathagata always teaches this saying: My teaching of the good law (dharma) is to be likened unto a raft. The buddha teaching must be relinquished; how much more so mis-teaching!” (The Diamond Sutra, 22)

23 When Jesus entered the synagogue leader’s house and saw the noisy crowd and people playing pipes, 24 he said, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him. 25 After the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. 26 News of this spread through all that region. (Mathew 9:23-25)

Life remains. Consciousness needs a vehicle and an instrument for its manifestation. When life produces another body, another knower comes into being,
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

producing these remains and therefore the witnesses of my radical absence, to live today — here and now, this death of me (Derrida)

In death only the body dies. Life does not, consciousness does not, reality does not. And the life is never so alive as after death. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being
suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.”
They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?”
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the
outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make
the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female;
and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a
foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the
kingdom.” (Gospel of Thomas)

What was born must die. Only the unborn is deathless. Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of ‘I’.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

For Him who is immersed in the bliss of the Self/Atman, arising from the extinction of the ego, what remains to be accomplished? He is not aware of anything (as) other than the Self/Atman.
(Sri Ramana Maharshi)

In later episodes of the Osiris cycl�, Thoth also becomes the scribe and bookkeeper of Osiris, who, it should not be forgotten, is then considered his brother. Thoth is represented as the model and patron of scribes, so important to the chancelleries of the Pharaohs: “while the sun god is the universal master, Thoth is his top functionary, his vizir, who stands near him in his ship in order to submit his reports. “)1 As “Master of the books,” he becomes, by dint of consigning them, registering them, keeping account of them, and guarding their stock, the “master of divine words. “)2 His female counterpart writes, too: her name, Seshat, doubtless means she-who-writes. “Mistress of libraries,” she records the exploits of the kings. The first goddess versed in the art of engraving, she marks the names of the kings on a tree in the temple of Heliopolis, while Thoth keeps account of the years on a notched pole. There is also the famous scene of the royal intitulation reproduced on the bas-reliefs of numerous temples: the king is seated beneath a persea-tree while Thoth and Seshat inscribe his name on the leaves of a sacred treeY And also the scene of the last judgment: in the underworld, opposite Osiris, Thoth records the weight of the heart-souls of the dead.(Derrida)

When you love the Self/Atman and nothing else, you go beyond the selfish and the unselfish. All distinctions lose their meaning. Love of one and love of all merge together in love, pure and simple, addressed to none, denied to none. Stay in that love, go deeper and deeper into it, investigate yourself and love the investigation and you will solve not only your own problems but also the problems of humanity. You will know what to do.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

footnote:

Continual transition forbids us to speak of “individuals,” etc;
the “number” of beings is itself in flux. We would know nothing
of time and motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we
see what is at “rest” beside what is in motioll. The same applies
to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of
“empty space” we should certainly not have acquired the conception
of space. The principle of identity has behind it the
“apparent fact” of things that are the same. A world in a state
of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be “comprehended” or
“known”; only to the extent that the “comprehending” and “knowing”
intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, fabricated
out of mere appearances but become firm to the extent that this
kind of appearance has preserved life-only to this extent is there
anything like “knowledge”; i.e., a measuring of earlier and later
errors by one another. (Nietzsche)

2019 (#81 – 18a) : Derrida , Montessori , John 6:43-65 , Chondogya Upanishad , Derrida , Montessori , Nietzsche , Revelation 10:9 , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

If I had invented a writing it would have been as an endless revolution. Each situation demands the creation
of a suitable mode of exposition, the invention of a law of the singular event, take into account the
recipient, imagined or desired; and at the same time it demands the belief that this writing will determine
the reader, who will learn to read (or to “live”) this writing, which he is not used to finding elsewhere. One
hopes that he will be reformed, otherwise determined; for example, these grafts (short of confusion) of the
poetic on the philosophical, or certain ways of using homonyms, the undecidable, ruses of language – into
which many people see confusion, while ignoring the properly logical need for it. (Derrida)

I may liken the effects of these first lessons to the impressions of one who walks quietly, happily, through a wood, alone, and thoughtful, letting his inner life unfold freely. Suddenly, the chime of a distant bell recalls him to himself, and in that awakening he feels more strongly than before the peace and beauty of which he has been but dimly conscious. (Montessori)

43 “Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. 44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’[d] Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me.
(John 6:43-45)

There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in our heart. (Chandogya Upanishad)

Time: the metonymy of the instantaneous, the possibility of the narrative magnetized by its own limit. The instantaneous in photography, the snapshot, would itself be but the most striking metonymy within the modern technological age of an older instantaneity. Older, even though it is never foreign to the possibility of techne in general. Remaining as attentive as possible to all the differences, one must be able to speak of a punctum of all signs (and all repetition or iterability already structures it), in any discourse, whether literary or not. As long as we do not hold to some naive and “realist” referentialism, it is the relation to some unique and irreplaceable referent that interests us and animates our most sound and studied readings: what took place only once, while dividing itself already, in the sights or in front of the lens of the Phaedo or Finnegan’s Wake, the Discourse on Method or Hegel’s Logic, John’s Apocalypse or Mallarme’s Coup de des. The photographic apparatus reminds us of this irreducible referential by means of a very powerful telescoping. (Derrida)

Life is a superb goddess, always advancing, overthrowing the obstacles which environment places in the way of her triumph. This is the basic or fundamental truth,–whether it be a question of species or of individuals, there persists always the forward march of those victorious ones in whom this mysterious life-force is strong and vital. (Montessori)

A full and powerful soul not only copes with painful, even
terrible losses, deprivations, robberies, insults; it emerges from
such hells with a greater fullness and powerfulness; and, most
essential of all, with a new increase in the blissfulness of love. I
believe that he who has divined something of the most basic
conditions for this growth in love will understand what Dante
meant when he wrote over the gate of his Inferno: “I, too, was
created by eternal love. (Nietzsche)

So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll.
(Revelation 10:9)

When more people come to know their real nature, their influence, however subtle, will prevail and the world’s emotional atmosphere will sweeten up. People follow their leaders and when among the leaders appear some, great in heart and mind, and absolutely free from self-seeking, their impact will be enough to make the crudities and crimes of the present age impossible. A new golden age may come and last for a time and succumb to its own perfection. For, ebb begins when the tide is at its highest. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

2019 (#80-17j) : Deleuze , Montessori , Nietzsche , John 1:1-5 , Derrida , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Heidegger , Gospel of Thomas

We must see the formation of
the conscious system as the result of a process of evolution: at the
boundary between the outside and the inside, between the internal
world and the external world, we could say that “a skin has been
formed which has been made so supple by the excitations it constantly
receives, that it has acquired properties making it uniquely suited to
receive new excitations”, retaining only a direct and changeable image
of objects completely distinct from the lasting or even changeless trace
in the unconscious system.
(Deleuze)

Once we have accepted and established such principles, the abolition of prizes and external forms of punishment will follow naturally. Man, disciplined through liberty, begins to desire the true and only prize which will never belittle or disappoint him,–the birth of human power and liberty within that inner life of his from which his activities must spring. (Montessori)

The ascertaining of “truth” and “untruth, ” the ascertaining of facts in
general, is fundamentally different from creative positing, from
forming, shaping, overcoming, willing, such as is of the essence of
philosophy. To introduce a meaning–this task still remains to be done,
assuming there is no meaning yet. Thus it is with sounds, but also with
the fate of peoples: they are capable of the most different
interpretations and direction toward different goals.
(Nietzsche)

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome[a] it. (John 1:1-5)

In my own experience I have often marvelled to see how true this is. During our first months in the “Children’s Houses,” the teachers had not yet learned to put into practice the pedagogical principles of liberty and discipline. One of them, especially, busied herself, when I was absent, in remedying my ideas by introducing a few of those methods to which she had been accustomed. So, one day when I came in unexpectedly, I found one of the most intelligent of the children wearing a large Greek cross of silver, hung from his neck by a fine piece of white ribbon, while another child was seated in an armchair which had been conspicuously placed in the middle of the room. (Montessori)

… the relations between the secret and the nonsecret, or, and this is not the same thing, between the private and the public, whether they involve property or access rights, publication or reproduction rights, whether they involve classification and putting into order: What comes under theory or under private correspondence, for example? What comes under system? under biography or autobiography? under personal or intellectual anamnesis?
(Derrida)

The first child had been rewarded, the second was being punished. The teacher, at least while I was present, did not interfere in any way, and the situation remained as I had found it. I held my peace, and placed myself where I might observe quietly. (Montessori)

‘Would people know that nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen, they would achieve much more with less expenditure of energy.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

The child with the cross was moving back and forth, carrying the objects with which he had been working, from his table to that of the teacher, and bringing others in their place. He was busy and happy. (Montessori)

If I had invented a writing it would have been as an endless revolution. Each situation demands the creation
of a suitable mode of exposition, the invention of a law of the singular event, take into account the
recipient, imagined or desired; and at the same time it demands the belief that this writing will determine
the reader, who will learn to read (or to “live”) this writing, which he is not used to finding elsewhere. One
hopes that he will be reformed, otherwise determined; for example, these grafts (short of confusion) of the
poetic on the philosophical, or certain ways of using homonyms, the undecidable, ruses of language – into
which many people see confusion, while ignoring the properly logical need for it.
(Derrida)

As he went back and forth he passed by the armchair of the child who was being punished. The silver cross slipped from his neck and fell to the floor, and the child in the armchair picked it up, dangled it on its white ribbon, looking at it from all sides, and then said to his companion: “Do you see what you have dropped?” (Montessori)

The very urge to achieve is also an expression of the total universe. It merely shows that the energy potential has risen at a particular point. It is the illusion of time that makes you talk of causality. When the past and the future are seen in the timeless now, as parts of a common pattern, the idea of cause-effect loses its validity and creative freedom takes its place.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

The child turned and looked at the trinket with an air of indifference; his expression seemed to say; “Don’t interrupt me,” his voice replied “I don’t care.” “Don’t you care, really?” said the punished one calmly. “Then I will put it on myself.” And the other replied, “Oh, yes, put it on,” in a tone that seemed to add, “and leave me in peace!” (Montessori)

For there is no universal schema which could be appMed mechanically to the interpretation of the writings of think ers, or even to a single work of a single thinker. A dialogue of Plato the Phaedrus? for example, the conversation on Beauty can be interpreted in totally different spheres and respects, according to totally different implications and problematics. This multiplicity of possible interpretations does not discredit the strictness of the thought content. For all true thought remains open to more than one interpretation and this by reason of its nature. (Heidegger)

The boy in the armchair carefully arranged the ribbon so that the cross lay upon the front of his pink apron where he could admire its brightness and its pretty form, then he settled himself more comfortably in his little chair and rested his arms with evident pleasure upon the arms of the chair. The affair remained thus, and was quite just. The dangling cross could satisfy the child who was being punished, but not the active child, content and happy with his work. (Montessori)

When you realise that you are absolutely free to be what you consent to be, that you are what you appear to be because of ignorance or indifference, you are free to revolt and change. You allow yourself to be what you are not. You are looking for the causes of being what you are not! It is a futile search. There are no causes, but your ignorance of your real being, which is perfect and beyond all causation. For whatever happens, all the universe is responsible and you are the source of the universe. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the
outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make
the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female;
and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, and a
foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then will you enter the
kingdom. (Gospel of Thomas)

By being with yourself, the ‘I am’; by watching yourself in your daily life with alert interest, with the intention to understand rather than to judge, in full acceptance of whatever may emerge, because it is there, you encourage the deep to come to the surface and enrich your life and consciousness with its captive energies. This is the great work of awareness; it removes obstacles and releases energies by understanding the nature of life and mind. Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

2019 (79-17h) : Deleuze , Montessori , Bhagavad Gita , John 9:11-12 , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Nietzsche/Zarathustra , Luke 23:44 , Derrida

The game has two moments which are those of a dicethrow – the dice
that is thrown and the dice that falls back. Nietzsche presents the
dicethrow as taking place on two distinct tables, the earth and the sky.
The earth where the dice are thrown and the sky where the dice fall
back. (Deleuze)

When she begins to find it her duty to discern which are the acts to hinder and which are those to observe, the teacher of the old school feels a great void within herself and begins to ask if she will not be inferior to her new task. In fact, she who is not prepared finds herself for a long time abashed and impotent; whereas the broader the teacher’s scientific culture and practice in experimental psychology, the sooner will come for her the marvel of unfolding life, and her interest in it. (Montessori)

The Light of consciousness comes to him through infinite powers of perception, and yet he is above all these powers.
(The Bhagavad Gita)

He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and then I could see.” “Where is this man?” they asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. (John 9:11-12)

Nothing will remain, all will remain. The sense of identity will remain, but no longer identification with a particular body. Being — awareness — love will shine in full splendour. Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

He is beyond all, and yet he supports all. He is beyond the world of matter, and yet he has joy in this world.
(The Bhagavad Gita)

if ever I have played dice with the gods at their table, the earth,
so that the earth trembled and broke open and streams of fire snorted
forth; for the earth is a table of the gods, and trembling with creative
new words and the dice throws of the gods. (Nietzsche/Zarathustra)

But these two tables are not two worlds. They are the two hours
of a single world, the two moments of a single world, midnight and
midday, the hour when the dice are thrown, the hour when the dice
fall back. Nietzsche insists on the two tables of life which are also the
two moments of the player or the artist; We temporarily abandon
life, in order to then temporarily fix our gaze upon it. The dicethrow
affirms becoming and it affirms the being of becoming. (Deleuze)

44 It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, 45 for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. 46 Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”[e] When he had said this, he breathed his last.
(Luke 23:44-46)

… a presence both perceived and not perceived, at once image and model, and hence image without model, neither image nor model, a medium (medium in the sense of middle, neither/nor, what is between extremes, and medium in the sense of element, either, matrix, means). When we have rounded a certain corner in our reading we will place ourselves on that side of the lustre where the “medium” is shining. (Derrida)

Nothing will remain, all will remain. The sense of identity will remain, but no longer identification with a particular body. Being — awareness — love will shine in full splendour. Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

2019 (#78-17g) : Deleuze , Montessori , Borges , Bhagavad Gita , Gospel of Thomas , Genesis 2:3 , Luke 2:21 , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Luke 17:20-21 , Derrida

The player-artist-child, Zeus-child:
Dionysus, who the myth presents to us surrounded by bis divine toys.
The player temporarily abandons himself to life and temporarily fixes
his gaze upon it; the artist places himself provisionally in his work and
provisionally above it; the child plays, withdraws from the game and
returns to it. In this game of becoming, the being of becoming also
plays the game with itself; the aeon (time), says Heraclitus, is a child
who plays, plays at draughts (Diels 53). The being of becoming, the
eternal return, is the second moment of the game, but also the third
term, identical to the two moments and valid for the whole.
(Deleuze)

The teacher has too thoroughly learned to be the one free activity of the school; it has for too long been virtually her duty to suffocate the activity of her pupils. When in the first days in one of the “Children’s Houses” she does not obtain order and silence, she looks about her embarrassed as if asking the public to excuse her, and calling upon those present to testify her innocence. In [Page 89] vain do we repeat to her that the disorder of the first moment is necessary. And finally, when we oblige her to do nothing but watch … (Montessori)

Universal history continued to unroll, the a11-too-human gods whom Xenophanes had denounced were demoted to figures of poetic fiction, or to demons–although it was reported that one of them, Hermes Trismegistus, had dictated a variable number of books (42 according to Clement of Alexandria; 20,000 according to lamblicus; 36,525 according to the priests of Thoth-who is also Hermes) in the pages of which are written all things. Fragments of this illusory library}’ }’, compiled or concocted beginning in the third century}’, go to form what is called the Corpus Hermeticum … (Jorge Luis Borges,)

Now I shall tell you of the End of wisdom. When a man knows this he goes beyond death … beginningless supreme: beyond what is and what is not.
(Bhagavad Gita)

“This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The
dead are not alive, and the living will not die. In the days when you consumed what is
dead, you made it what is alive. When you come to dwell in the light, what will you do?
On the day when you were one you became two. But when you become two, what will
you do?” (Gospel of Thomas)

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
(Genesis 2:3)

On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise him, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he had been conceived.
(Luke 2:21)

Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong. The universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are infinite; besides it is a manifestation, or expression of a principle fundamentally and totally free. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:20-21)

It follows, certainly, that Freudian psychoanalysis proposes a new theory of the archive; it takes into account a topic and a death drive without which there would not in effect be any desire or any possibility for the archive. But at the same time, at once for strategic reasons and because the conditions of archivization implicate all the tensions, contradictions, or aporias we are trying to formalize here, notably those which make of it a movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past, the concept of the archive must inevitably carry in itself, as does every concept, an unknowable weight. The presupposition of this weight also takes on the figures of “repression” and “suppression,” even if it can not necessarily be reduced to these. This double presupposition leaves an imprint. It inscribes an impression in language and in discourse. The unknowable weight which imprints itself thus does not weigh only as a negative charge. It involves the history of the concept, it inflects archive desire or fever, their opening on the future, their dependency with respect to what will come, in short, all that ties knowledge and memory to the promise.
(Derrida)

2019 (#77-17f) : Derrida , Montessori , Derrida , Luke 24:11 , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Montessori , Derrida , Luke 24:28-29 , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Montessori , Luke 24:30-32 , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj . Montessori , Luke 24:36 , Derrida

Even if we did not want to give in here to the easy passage uniting the figures of the king, the god, and the father, it would suffice to pay systematic attention-which to our knowledge has never been done-t-o the permanence of a Platonic schema that assigns the origin and power of speech, precisely of logos, to the paternal position. Not that this happens especially and exclusively in Plato. Everyone knows this or can easily imagine it. But the fact that “Platonism,” which sets up the whole of Western metaphysics in its conceptuality, should not escape the generality of this structural constraint, and even illustrates it with incomparable subtlety and force, stands out as all the more significant. (Derrida)

A special technique is necessary to the teacher who is to lead the child along such a path of discipline, if she is to make it possible for him to continue in this way all his life, advancing indefinitely toward perfect self-mastery. Since the child now learns to move rather than [Page 87] to sit still, he prepares himself not for the school, but for life; for he becomes able, through habit and through practice, to perform easily and correctly the simple acts of social or community life. The discipline to which the child habituates himself here is, in its character, not limited to the school environment but extends to society. (Montessori)

Not that logos is the father, either. But the origin of logos is its Ja ther. One could say anachronously that the “speaking subject” is the father of his speech. And one would quickly realize that this is no metaphor, at least not in the sense of any common, conventional effect of rhetoric. Logos is a son, then, a son that would be destroyed in his very presence without the present attendance of his father. His father who answers. His father who speaks for him and answers for him. Without his father, he would be nothing but, in fact, writing. At least that is what is said by the one who says: it is the father’s thesis. The specificity of writing would thus be intimately bound to the absence of the father. Such an absence can of course exist along very diverse modalities, distinctly or confusedly, successively or simultaneously: to have lost one’s father, through natural or violent death, through random violence or patricide; and then to solicit the aid and attendance, possible or impossible, of the paternal presence, to solicit it directly or to claim to be getting along without it, etc. (Derrida)

But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. (Luke 24:11)

You need not get at it, for you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that and the realisation that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you. With this will come great love which is not choice or predilection, nor attachment, but a power which makes all things love-worthy and lovable.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

The liberty of the child should have as its limit the collective interest; as its form, what we universally consider good breeding. We must, therefore, check in the child whatever offends or annoys others, or whatever tends toward rough or ill-bred acts. But all the rest,–every manifestation having a useful scope,–whatever it be, and under whatever form it expresses itself, must not only be permitted, but must be observed by the teacher. Here lies the essential point; from her scientific preparation, the teacher must bring not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. In our system, she must become a passive, much more than an active, influence, and her passivity shall be composed of anxious scientific curiosity, and of absolute respect for the phenomenon which she wishes to observe. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.
(Montessori)

What we are provisionally and for the sake of convenience continuing to call a metaphor thus in any event belongs to a whole system. If logos has a father, if it is a logos only when attended by its father, this is because it is always a being (on) and even a certain species of being (the Sophist, 260a), more precisely a/it/ing being. Logos is azoon. An animal that is born, grows, belongs to the phusis. Linguistics, logic, dialectics, and zoology are all in the same camp. (Derrida)

28 As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. 29 But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.
(Luke 24:28-29)

I know nothing about it all and see no difference between you and me. My life is a succession of events, just like yours. Only I am detached and see the passing show as a passing show, while you stick to things and move along with them. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

Such principles assuredly have a place in schools for little children who are exhibiting the first psychic manifestations of their lives. We cannot know the consequences of suffocating a spontaneous action at the time when the child is just beginning to be active: perhaps we suffocate life itself. Humanity shows itself in all its intellectual splendour during this tender age as the sun shows itself at the dawn, and the flower in the first unfolding of the petals; and we must respect religiously, reverently, these first indications of individuality. If any [Page 88] educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of this life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks. It is of course understood, that here we do not speak of useless or dangerous acts, for these must be suppressed, destroyed. (Montessori)

30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. 32 They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?” (luke 24:30-32)

I see what you too could see, here and now, but for the wrong focus of your attention. You give no attention to your Self/Atman. Your mind is all with things, people and ideas, never with your Self/Atman. Bring your Self/Atman into focus, become aware of your own existence. See how you function, watch the motives and the results of your actions. Study the prison you have built around yourself by inadvertence. (Sr Nisargadatta Maharaj)

The teacher has too thoroughly learned to be the one free activity of the school; it has for too long been virtually her duty to suffocate the activity of her pupils. When in the first days in one of the “Children’s Houses” she does not obtain order and silence, she looks about her embarrassed as if asking the public to excuse her, and calling upon those present to testify her innocence. In [Page 89] vain do we repeat to her that the disorder of the first moment is necessary. And finally, when we oblige her to do nothing but watch, she asks if she had not better resign, since she is no longer a teacher.
But when she begins to find it her duty to discern which are the acts to hinder and which are those to observe, the teacher of the old school feels a great void within herself and begins to ask if she will not be inferior to her new task. In fact, she who is not prepared finds herself for a long time abashed and impotent; whereas the broader the teacher’s scientific culture and practice in experimental psychology, the sooner will come for her the marvel of unfolding life, and her interest in it. (Montessori)

While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” (Luke 24:36)

Thus will Socrates evoke only the visible sun, the son that resembles the father, the analogon of the intelligible sun: “It was the sun, then, that I meant when I spoke of that offspring of the Good (ton tou agathou ekgonon), which the Good has created in its own image (han taga/hon egennisen analogon heautoi), and which stands in the visible world in the same relation to vision and visible things as that which the good itself bears in the intelligible world to intelligence and to intelligible objects” (508c). How does Logos intercede in this analogy between the father and the son, the nooumena and the horiimena? (Derrida)

2019 (#76-17e) : Derrida , Montessori , Derrida , Mark 14:8 , Nietzsche , Freud , Derrida , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Since we have already said everything, the reader must bear with us if we continue on awhile. If we extend ourselves by force of play. If we then write a bit: on Plato, who already said in the Phaetinn that writing can only repeat (itself), that it “always signifies (semainei) the same” and that it is a “game” (paidia). (Derrida)

We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself, and can, therefore, regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to follow some rule of life. Such a concept of active discipline is not easy to comprehend or to apply. But certainly it contains a great educational principle, very different from the old-time absolute and undiscussed coercion to immobility.
(Montessori)

Only a little further on, Socrates compares the written texts Phaedrus has brought along to a drug (pharmakon). This pharmakon, this “medicine,” this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces itself into the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be—alternately or simultaneously-beneficent or maleficent. (Derrida)

She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. (Mark 14:8)

The new world-conception.– The world exists; it is not something that
becomes, not something that passes away. Or rather: it becomes, it
passes away, but it has never begun to become and never ceased from
passing away–it maintains itself in both.– It lives on itself: its
excrements are its food. (Nietzsche)

From our “mythology” of the instincts we may easily deduce a formula for an indirect
method of eliminating war. If the propensity for war be due to the destructive instinct, we
have always its counter-agent, Eros, to our hand. All that produces ties of sentiment
between man and man must serve us as war’s antidote. These ties are of two kinds. First,
such relations as those toward a beloved object, void though they be of sexual intent. The
psychoanalyst need feel no compunction in mentioning “love” in this connection; religion
uses the same language: Love thy neighbor as thyself. A pious injunction, easy to
enounce, but hard to carry out! The other bond of sentiment is by way of identification.
All that brings out the significant resemblances between men calls into play this feeling
of community, identification, whereon is founded, in large measure, the whole edifice of
human society. (Freud)

Here, I am asking questions in the dark. Or in a penumbra, rather, the penumbra in which we keep ourselves when Freud’s un-analyzed reaches out its phosphorescent antennae. (Derrida)

The person is merely the result of a misunderstanding. In reality, there is no such thing. Feelings, thoughts and actions race before the watcher in endless succession, leaving traces in the brain and creating an illusion of continuity. A reflection of the watcher in the mind creates the sense of ‘I’ and the person acquires an apparently independent existence. In reality there is no person, only the watcher identifying himself with the ‘I’ and the ‘mine’. The teacher tells the watcher: you are not this, there is nothing of yours in this, except the little point of ‘I am’, which is the bridge between the watcher and his dream. ‘I am this, I am that’ is dream, while pure ‘I am’ has the stamp of reality on it. You have tasted so many things — all came to naught. Only the sense ‘I am’ persisted — unchanged. Stay with the changeless among the changeful, until you are able to go beyond. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

2019 (#75-17d) : Derrida , Montessori , Mark 13:37 , Derrida , Mark 13:37 , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

To a considerable degree, we have already said all we meant to say. Our lexicon at any rate is not far from being exhausted. With the exception of this or that supplement, our questions will have nothing more to name but the texture of the text, reading and writing, mastery and play, the paradoxes of supplementarity, and the graphic relations between the living and the dead: within the textual, the textile, and the histological. We will keep within the limits of this tissue: between the metaphor of the history and the question of the history of metaphor. (Derrida)

THE pedagogical method of observation has for its base the liberty of the child; and liberty is activity.
Discipline must come through liberty. Here is a great principle which is difficult for the followers of common-school methods to understand. How shall one obtain discipline in a class of free children? Certainly in our system, we have a concept of discipline very different from that commonly accepted. If discipline is founded upon liberty, the discipline itself must necessarily be active. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.
We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself, and can, therefore, regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to follow some rule of life. Such a concept of active discipline is not easy to comprehend or to apply. But certainly it contains a great educational principle, very different from the old-time absolute and undiscussed coercion to immobility.
(Montessori)

What I say to you, I say to everyone: “Watch!” (Mark 13:37)

“Death, the ‘proper result’ and therefore the end of life, the end without end, the strategy without finality of the living — all of this is not solely a statement of Schopenheur’s. It also coincides almost literally with several Nietzschean propositions that we had attempted to interpret: on life as a very rare genre of that which is dead (Joyful Wisdom), a ‘particular case’ and ‘means in view of something else’ (Will to Power), this something necessarily participating in death; and finally on the absence, in the last analysis, of anything like an instinct of conservation. The unconscious port of registry, at the distance of this generality, also will have been Nietzschean.”
(Derrida)

What I say to you, I say to everyone: ‘Watch!’” (Mark 13:37)

Nothing will remain, all will remain. The sense of identity will remain, but no longer identification with a particular body. Being — awareness — love will shine in full splendour. Liberation is never of the person, it is always from the person. (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

2019 (#74-17c) : Derrida , Montessori , Nietzsche/Zarathustra , Mathew 9:37 , Freud , Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj , Derrida

This return of the theological seed to itself internalizes its own negativity and its own difference to itself. The Life of the Concept is a necessity that, in including the dispersion of the seed, in making that dispersion work to the profit of the Idea, excludes by the same token all loss and all haphazard productivity. The exclusion is an inclusion.46 In contrast to the seminal differance thus repressed, the truth that speaks (to) itself within the logocentric circle is the discourse of what goes back to the father. (Derrida)

My intention was to keep in touch with the researches of others, but to make myself independent of them, proceeding to my work without preconceptions of any kind. I retained as the only essential, the affirmation, or, rather, the definition of Wundt, that “all methods of experimental [Page 73] psychology may be reduced to one, namely, carefully recorded observation of the subject”.
(Montessori)

. . . one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus: “‘You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine? ” ‘For ten years you have climbed to my cave: you would have tired of your light and of the journey had it not been for me and my eagle and my serpent. (Nietzsche/Zarathustra)

The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field. (Mathew 9:37)

I would like to dwell a little longer on this destructive instinct which is
seldom given the attention that its importance warrants. With the least of speculative
efforts we are led to conclude that this instinct functions in every living being, striving to
work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter. (Freud)

To grow is necessary. To outgrow is necessary. To leave behind the good for the sake of the better is necessary.
The end is in the beginning. You end where you start — in the Absolute.
Whose trouble? Which trouble? Do you pity the seed that is to grow and multiply till it becomes a mighty forest? Do you kill an infant to save him from the bother of living? What is wrong with life, ever more life? Remove the obstacles to growing and all your personal, social, economic and political problems will just dissolve. The universe is perfect as a whole and the part’s striving for perfection is a way of joy. Willingly sacrifice the imperfect to the perfect and there will be no more talk about good and evil.
(Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

The adventurous excess of a writing that is no longer directed by any knowledge does not abandon itself to improvisation. The accident or throw of dice that “opens” such a text does not contradict the rigorous necessity of its formal assemblage. The game here is the unity of chance and rule, of the program and its leftovers or extras. This play will still be called literature or book only when it exhibits its negative, atheistic face (the insufficient but indispensable phase of reversal), the final clause of that age-old project, which is henceforth located along the edge of the closed book: the achievement dreamed of, the conflagration achieved. (Derrida)

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We have only to weigh the matter carefully,
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however, to reflect: Are our children only those healthy little bodies which to-day are growing and developing so vigorously under our eyes? Is their destiny fulfilled in the production of beautiful human bodies?
In that case there would be little difference between their lot and that of the animals which we raise that we may have good meat or beasts of burden.
Man’s destiny is evidently other than this, and the care due to the child covers a field wider than that which is considered by physical hygiene. The mother who has given her child his bath and sent him in his perambulator to the park has not fulfilled the mission of the “mother of humanity.” The hen which gathers her chickens together, and the cat which licks her kittens and lavishes on them such tender care, differ in no wise from the human mother in the services they render.
No, the human mother if reduced to such limits devotes herself in vain, feels that a higher aspiration has been stifled within her. She is yet the mother of man.
Children must grow not only in the body but in the spirit, and the mother longs to follow the
4
mysterious spiritual journey of the beloved one who to-morrow will be the intelligent, divine creation, man.
Science evidently has not finished its progress. On the contrary, it has scarcely taken the first step in advance, for it has hitherto stopped at the welfare of the body. It must continue, however, to advance; on the same positive lines along which it has improved the health and saved the physical life of the children, it is bound in the future to benefit and to reenforce their inner life, which is the real human life. On the same positive lines science will proceed to direct the development of the intelligence, of character, and of those latent creative forces which lie hidden in the marvelous embryo of man’s spirit.

As the child’s body must draw nourishment and oxygen from its external environment, in order to accomplish a great physiological work, the work of growth, so also the spirit must take from its environment the nourishment which it needs to develop according to its own “laws of growth.” It cannot be denied that the phenomena of development are a great
5
work in themselves. The consolidation of the bones, the growth of the whole body, the completion of the minute construction of the brain, the formation of the teeth, all these are very real labors of the physiological organism, as is also the transformation which the organism undergoes during the period of puberty.

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We have only to weigh the matter carefully,
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however, to reflect: Are our children only those healthy little bodies which to-day are growing and developing so vigorously under our eyes? Is their destiny fulfilled in the production of beautiful human bodies?
In that case there would be little difference between their lot and that of the animals which we raise that we may have good meat or beasts of burden.
Man’s destiny is evidently other than this, and the care due to the child covers a field wider than that which is considered by physical hygiene. The mother who has given her child his bath and sent him in his perambulator to the park has not fulfilled the mission of the “mother of humanity.” The hen which gathers her chickens together, and the cat which licks her kittens and lavishes on them such tender care, differ in no wise from the human mother in the services they render.
No, the human mother if reduced to such limits devotes herself in vain, feels that a higher aspiration has been stifled within her. She is yet the mother of man.
Children must grow not only in the body but in the spirit, and the mother longs to follow the
4
mysterious spiritual journey of the beloved one who to-morrow will be the intelligent, divine creation, man.
Science evidently has not finished its progress. On the contrary, it has scarcely taken the first step in advance, for it has hitherto stopped at the welfare of the body. It must continue, however, to advance; on the same positive lines along which it has improved the health and saved the physical life of the children, it is bound in the future to benefit and to reenforce their inner life, which is the real human life. On the same positive lines science will proceed to direct the development of the intelligence, of character, and of those latent creative forces which lie hidden in the marvelous embryo of man’s spirit.

As the child’s body must draw nourishment and oxygen from its external environment, in order to accomplish a great physiological work, the work of growth, so also the spirit must take from its environment the nourishment which it needs to develop according to its own “laws of growth.” It cannot be denied that the phenomena of development are a great
5
work in themselves. The consolidation of the bones, the growth of the whole body, the completion of the minute construction of the brain, the formation of the teeth, all these are very real labors of the physiological organism, as is also the transformation which the organism undergoes during the period of puberty.

. . . one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus: “‘You great star, what would your happiness be had you not those for whom you shine? ” ‘For ten years you have climbed to my cave: you would have tired of your light and of the journey had it not been for me and my eagle and my serpent.’ (Nietzsche/Zarathustra)