Arizona Diamondbacks @ San Francisco Giants. AT&T Park. April 22, 2013.
Surat Al-Araf (The Heights)
7:1 Alif, Lam, Meem, Sad.
7:2 [This is] a Book revealed to you, [O Muhammad] - so let there not be in your breast distress therefrom - that you may warn thereby and as a reminder to the believers.
7:3 Follow, [O mankind] what has been revealed to you from your Lord and do not follow other than Him any allies. Little do you remember.
7:4 And how many cities have We destroyed, and Our punishment came to them at night or while there were sleeping at noon.
7:5 And their declaration when Our punishment came to them was only that they said, “Indeed, we were wrongdoers!”
7:6 Then We will surely question those to whom [a message] was sent, and We will surely question the messengers.
7:7 Then We will surely relate [their deeds] to them with knowledge, and We were not [at all] absent.
7:8 And the weighing [of deeds] that Day will be the truth. So those whose scales are heavy - it is they who will be the successful.
7:9 And those whose scales are light - they are the ones who will lose themselves for what injustice they were doing toward Our verses.
7:10 And We have certainly established you upon the earth and made for you therein ways of livelihood. Little are you grateful.
7:11 And We have certainly created you, [O Mankind], and given you [human] form. Then We said to the angels, “Prostrate to Adam”; so they prostrated, except for Iblees. He was not of those who prostrated.
7:12 [Allah] said, “What prevented you from prostrating when I commanded you?” [Satan] said, “I am better than him. You created me from fire and created him from clay.”
7:13 [Allah] said, “Descend from Paradise, for it is not for you to be arrogant therein. So get out; you are of the debased.”
7:14 [Satan] said, “Reprieve me until the Day they are resurrected.”
7:15 [Allah] said, “Indeed, you are of those reprieved.”
7:16 [Satan] said, “Because You have put me in error, I will surely sit in wait for them on Your straight path.
7:17 Then I will come to them before them and from behind them and on their right and on their left, and You will not find most of them grateful [to You].”
7:18 [Allah] said, “Get out of Paradise, reproached and expelled. Whoever follows you among them - I will surely fill Hell with you, all together.”
Proverbs 1
1 The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel:
2 for gaining wisdom and instruction; for understanding words of insight;
3 for receiving instruction in prudent behavior, doing what is right and just and fair;
4 for giving prudence to those who are simple, knowledge and discretion to the young -
5 let the wise listen and add to their learning, and let the discerning
get guidance -
6 for understanding proverbs and parables, the sayings and riddles of the wise.
7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
8 Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.
9 They are a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck.
10 My son, if sinful men entice you, do not give in to them.
11 If they say, “Come along with us; let’s lie in wait for innocent blood, let’s ambush some harmless soul;
12 let’s swallow them alive, like the grave, and whole, like those who go down to the pit;
13 we will get all sorts of valuable things and fill our houses with plunder;
14 cast lots with us; we will all share the loot” -
15 my son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths;
16 for their feet rush into evil, they are swift to shed blood.
17 How useless to spread a net where every bird can see it!
18 These men lie in wait for their own blood; they ambush only themselves!
19 Such are the paths of all who go after ill-gotten gain; it takes away the life of those who get it.
20 Out in the open wisdwom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the public square;
21 on top of the wall she cries out, at the city gate she makes her speech:
22 “How long will you who are simple love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge?
23 Repent at my rebuke! Then I will pour out my thoughts to you, I will make known to you my teachings.
24 But since you refuse to listen when I call and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand,
25 since you disregard all my advice and do not accept my rebuke,
26 I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you; I will mock when calamity overtakes you -
27 when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you.
28 “Then they will call to me but I will not answer; they will look for me but will not find me,
29 since they hated knowledge and did not choose to fear the Lord.
30 Since they would not accept my advice and spurned my rebuke,
31 they will eat the fruit of their ways and be filled with the fruit of their schemes.
32 For the waywardness of the simple will kill them,
33 but whoever listens to me will live in safety and be at ease, without fear of harm.”
Psalms 35
A Psalm of David.
1 Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me.
2 Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help.
3 Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me: say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.
4 Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after my soul: let them be turned back and brought to confusion that devise my hurt.
5 Let them be as chaff before the wind: and let the angel of the LORD chase them.
6 Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the LORD persecute them.
7 For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit, which without cause they have digged for my soul.
8 Let destruction come upon him at unawares; and let his net that he hath hid catch himself: into that very destruction let him fall.
9 And my soul shall be joyful in the LORD: it shall rejoice in his salvation.
10 All my bones shall say, LORD, who is like unto thee, which deliverest the poor from him that is too strong for him, yea, the poor and the needy from him that spoileth him?
11 False witnesses did rise up; they laid to my charge things that I knew not.
12 They rewarded me evil for good to the spoiling of my soul.
13 But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth: I humbled my soul with fasting; and my prayer returned into mine own bosom.
14 I behaved myself as though he had been my friend or brother: I bowed down heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother.
15 But in mine adversity they rejoiced, and gathered themselves together: yea, the abjects gathered themselves together against me, and I knew it not; they did tear me, and ceased not:
16 with hypocritical mockers in feasts, they gnashed upon me with their teeth.
17 Lord, how long wilt thou look on? Rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions.
18 I will give thee thanks in the great congregation: I will praise thee among much people.
19 Let not them that are mine enemies wrongfully rejoice over me: neither let them wink with the eye that hate me without a cause.
20 For they speak not peace: but they devise deceitful matters against them that are quiet in the land.
21 Yea, they opened their mouth wide against me, and said, Aha, aha, our eye hath seen it.
22 This thou hast seen, O LORD: keep not silence: O Lord, be not far from me.
23 Stir up thyself, and awake to my judgment, even unto my cause, my God and my Lord.
24 Judge me, O LORD my God, according to thy righteousness; and let them not rejoice over me.
25 Let them not say in their hearts, Ah, so would we have it: let them not say, We have swallowed him up.
26 Let them be ashamed and brought to confusion together that rejoice at mine hurt: let them be clothed with shame and dishonor that magnify themselves against me.
27 Let them shout for joy, and be glad, that favor my righteous cause: yea, let them say continually, Let the LORD be magnified, which hath pleasure in the prosperity of his servant.
28 And my tongue shall speak of thy righteousness and of thy praise all the day long.
I gotta love it to live it - I live it so I gotta love it.
HHHAAAAANNNNNZZZZZZZ! MY PRAYERS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED. THANK YOU OH LORD.
An Ideal of Hope.
Perfect.
[h/t] antovolk
Excerpt from “Poem of the Righteous Sufferer”
“WHAT STRANGE CONDITIONS EVERYWHERE!”
My god has forsaken me and disappeared,
My goddess has failed me and keeps at a distance.
The benevolent angel who walked beside me has departed,
My protecting spirit has taken to flight, and is seeking someone else.
My strength is gone; my appearance has become gloomy;
My dignity has flown away, my protection made off… .
The king, the flesh of the gods, the sun of his peoples,
His heart is enraged with me, and cannot be appeased.
The courtiers plot hostile action against me,
They assemble themselves and give utterance to impious words… .
They combine against me in slander and lies.
My lordly mouth have they held as with reins,
So that I, whose lips used to prate, have become like a mute.
My sonorous shout is reduced to silence,
My lofty head is bowed down to the ground,
Dread has enfeebled my robust heart… .
If I walk the street, ears are pricked;
If I enter the palace, eyes blink.
My city frowns on me as an enemy;
Indeed my land is savage and hostile.
My friend has become foe,
My companion has become a wretch and a devil… .
As I turn round, it is terrible, it is terrible;
My ill luck has increased, and I do not find the right.
I called to my god, but he did not show his face,
I prayed to my goddess, but she did not raise her head.
The diviner with his inspection has not got to the root of the matter,
Nor has the dream priest with his libation elucidated my case.
I sought the favour of the zaqiqu-spirit [dream god/spirit], but he did not enlighten me;
And the incantation priest with his ritual did not appease the divine wrath against me.
What strange conditions everywhere!
When I look behind, there is persecution, trouble.
…
CONCLUSION: “MARDUK RESTORED ME”
The Lord took hold of me,
The Lord set me on my feet,
The Lord gave me life,
He rescued me from the pit,
He summoned me from destruction,
[…] he pulled me from the Hubur river,
[…] he took my hand… .
Marduk, he restored me… .
The Babylonians saw how Marduk restores to life,
And all quarters extolled his greatness: …
Mortals, as many as there are, give praise to Marduk!
“Hammurabi hallucinating judgments from his god Marduk (or possibly Shamash) as carved on the top of a stele listing those judgments. About 1750 B.C. (199)”
“So far as we can make out, someone seeking redress from another would come to the steward’s statue, to “hear my words” (as the stele says at the bottom), and then move over to the stele itself, where the previous judgments of the steward’s god are recorded. His god, as I have said, was Marduk, and the top of the stele is sculptured to depict the scene of judgment-giving. The god is seated on a raised mound which in Mesopotamian graphics symbolizes a mountain. An aura of flames flashes up from his shoulders as he speaks (which has made some scholars think it is Shamash, the sun-god). Hammurabi listens intently as he stands just below him (“under-stands”). The god holds in his right hand the attributes of power, the rod and circle very common to such divine depictions. With these symbols, the god is just touching the left elbow of his steward, Hammurabi. One of the magnificent things about this scene is the hypnotic assurance with which both god and steward-king intently stare at each other, impassively majestic, the steward-king’s right hand held up between us, the observers, and the plane of communication. Here is no humility, no begging before a god, as occurs just a few centuries later. Hammurabi has no subjective-self to narratize into such a relationship. There is only obedience. And what is being dictated by Marduk are judgments on a series of very specific cases. (199-200)”
“These rules of the stele should not be thought of in the modern terms of laws which are enforced by police, something unknown at that time. Rather they are lists of practices in Babylon itself, the statements of Marduk, which needed no more enforcement than their authenticity on the stele itself.
The fact that they were written down and, more generally, the wide use of visual writing for communication indicate, I think, a reduction in the auditory hallucinatory control of the bicameral mind. Together, they put into motion cultural determinants which, coming together with other forces a few centuries later, resulted in a change in the very structure of the mind itself. (201)”
Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Excerpts from “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”
Bicameral Civilization and Social Control
“The only possible way in which there could be a bicameral civilization would be that of a rigid hierarchy, with lesser men hallucinating the voices of authorities over them, and those authorities hallucinating yet higher ones, and so on to the kings and their peers hallucinating gods. (80)”
“… the hypothesis of a bicameral mind: hierarchies of officials, soldiers, or workers, inventories of goods, statements of goods owed to the ruler and particularly to gods. (80)”
“… at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious. (84)”
“… volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey. (99)”
“The bicameral mind is a form of social control and it is that form of social control which allowed mankind to move from small hunter-gatherer groups to large agricultural communities. The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization. (126)”
“The king dead is a living god. (143)”
“The king’s tomb as the god’s house continues through the millennia as a feature of many civilizations, particularly in Egypt. But, more often, the king’s-tomb part of the designation withers away. This occurs as soon as a successor to a king continues to hear the hallucinated voice of his predecessor during his reign, and designates himself as the dead king’s priest or servant, a pattern that is followed throughout Mesopotamia. (143)”
“Like the queen in a termite nest or a beehive, the idols of a bicameral world are the carefully tended centers of social control, with auditory hallucinations instead of pheromones. (144)”
“… two main forms of theocracy: (1) the steward-king theocracy in which the chief or king is the first deputy of the gods, or, more usually, a particular city’s god, the manager and caretaker of his lands. This was the most important and widespread form of theocracy among bicameral kingdoms. … (2) the god-king theocracy in which the king himself is a god. The clearest examples of this form existed in Egypt and at least some of the kingdoms of the Andes, and probably the earliest kingdom of Japan. (178)”
“They were two separately integrated organizations of Hammurabi’s nervous system, one of them in the left hemisphere writing the prologue and epilogue and standing in effigy at the side of the stele, and the other in the right hemisphere composing judgments. And neither of them was conscious in our sense. (200)”
“The gods were in no sense ‘figments of the imagination’ of anyone. They were man’s volition. They occupied his nervous system, probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated speech which then ‘told’ the man what to do. (202-203)”
“But the second millennium B.C. was not to last that way. Wars, catastrophes, national migrations became its central themes. Chaos darkened the holy brightnesses of the unconscious world. Hierarchies crumpled. And between the act and its divine source came the shadow, the pause that profaned, the dreadful loosening that made the gods unhappy, recriminatory, jealous. Until, finally, the screening off of their tyranny was effected by the invention on the basis of language of an analog space with an analog ‘I’. The careful elaborate structures of the bicameral mind had been shaken into consciousness. (205)”
Excerpts from “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”
No Consciousness in the Iliad
“There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad. I am saying ‘in general’ because I shall mention some exceptions later. And in general therefore, no words for consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. The word psyche, which later means soul or conscious mind, is in most instances life-substances, such as blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the ground or breathes it out in his last gasp. The thumos, which later comes to mean something like emotional soul, is simply motion or agitation. (69)”
“Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as nous in later Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. It comes from the word noeein, to see. Its proper translation in the Iliad would be something like perception or recognition or field of vision. Zeus “holds Odysseus in his noos.” He keeps watch over him. (70)”
“Another important word, which perhaps comes from the doubling of the word meros (part), is mermera, meaning in two parts. … But essentially it means to be in conflict about two actions, not two thoughts. It is always behavioristic. It is said several times of Zeus (20:17, 16:647), as well as of others. The conflict is often said to go on in the thumosy or sometimes in the phrenes, but never in the noos. The eye cannot doubt or be in conflict, as the soon-to-be-invented conscious mind will be able to. (70)”
“It is the gods who start quarrels among men (4:437ff.) that really cause the war (3:164ff.), and then plan its strategy (2:56ff.). It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. (72)”
“The beginnings of action are not in conscious plans, reasons, and motives; they are in the actions and speeches of gods. To another, a man seems to be the cause of his own behavior. But not to the man himself. (72)”
“The gods were organizations of the central nervous system and can be regarded as personae in the sense of poignant consistencies through time, amalgams of parental or admonitory images. The god is a part of the man, and quite consistent with this conception is the fact that the gods never step outside of natural laws. Greek gods cannot create anything out of nothing, unlike the Hebrew god of Genesis. (74)”
“The gods are what we now call hallucinations. Usually they are only seen and heard by the particular heroes they are speaking to. (74)”
“Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then ‘told’ to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or ‘god’, or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not ‘see’ what to do by himself. (75)”
“My argument has stressed two things, the lack of mental language and the initiation of action by the gods. (78)”
