Joseph Maynor

True. But Andy Warhol has an original aesthetic like Elmore James does that makes their artworks great. You don't need to be technically excellent at skill to create great art. You can have an original aesthetic that is amazing. This is why some overly-technical music sounds awful in a way because it's too many notes or some other balance is off.

What's sort of awful is the music that the masses like that is insanely popular for no good reason.

I was watching FX the other day on a rare occasion that I was sitting in front of a TV, and the show I was watching was so bad I was wishing for some fine art honestly. That said, I can't stand Picasso honestly. All fine art means to me is a heightened degree of skill due to technique and experience and also weighed or measured against other artworks in an artform. Picasso is to visual arts as John Cage is to music. It's provocative and needs a narrative to understand because it goes beyond aesthetics into the area of provocation or forcing questioning. You wouldn't say that Picasso's paintings are conventionally beautiful. They're taunting in the way Frank Zappa is taunting in Rock music. It's criticism, in a way, mixed with aesthetics. It's like Derrida doing philosophy. I prefer fine art that is conventionally beautiful even if it has seeds of ugliness or rough around the edges notes in it. It still has to be beautiful for me to want to experience it over and over.

I tend to use the word The Divine, but I think you're not appreciating The Absolute. It's pointing to something. Probably what you already mean by You. This is just different terminology getting in the way of the same pointing.

This sentence right here is the metaphysical project expressed nicely and succinctly: "physical reality is just a manifestation of what my model describes." I can state it more abstractly and provocatively as The Metaphysics Project. This will cause the philosophers' heads to swivel, naturally.

This is called a metaphysic in philosophy.

Thank you. Someone had to say this finally.

The Super Bowl is really an event or happening that gives a reason to come together. It's an event where we may (or not) rally around. You might laugh at this, but it's true. It's funny because this is not a bug, it's a feature. We want to laugh. Who doesn't? We want to engage thru laughter. That's Love, in part. Relation thru amusement.

Zen, I think, may have a leg outside of psychedelics, but you'll have to figure that out on your path. Pointers might be contextualized more so than is usually said. It depends on where you are on the/your path.

I love this. This is next level for most people. Beautiful.

I see it more the opposite -- sometimes rhythm is melody stopping in its extreme. Take a drum circle for example: That's just begging for melody and form. But every melody seems to contain a bit of rhythm. Even row row row your boat has some rhythm in it, even though it's primarily melody.

Examine this starting point.

If you want to experience real pushback, start teaching spiritual enlightenment seriously and directly. This is worse than teaching philosophy in terms of being a glutton for punishment. And it will be all the spiritual teachers who will attack you, and people will call you a cult leader.

Actually it's the opposite. Pigeons come where there is abundance. If you're not a pigeon you're probably already living in an area with abundance. You're the inverse of a pigeon.

Some people need more routine after they have dropped it too, ironically.

As a philosopher you're going to offend people who are doing philosophy but don't realize it -- and who might even say they hate philosophy. These are people who want to have it both ways, which is to be expected. Yes philosophy is an attempt to zero in or probe somebody, but this is not always welcomed.

You can actually abstract this conclusion to cover almost any human activity actually. I'm not a huge fan of sports, but I will say this in its defense -- most people don't understand the intricacies that are going on and the strategies that are going on in a football game. It's deeper than it looks on the surface.

Distract yourselves with humor ad infinitum maybe?

What inspires me about Plato is essentially he's an artist. He's a dramatist. The philosophy is presented thru drama. What he shows is kinda the opposite of Descartes who thought philosophy could be done in an armchair or Aristotle who thought philosophy is an abstraction from voluminous facts. Plato realized philosophy is a kind of performance art. People miss this when they focus on the arguments in his work. It's more like a dramatist exposing a philosophical set of plays than an analyst trying to make a point.

This is where I think self-help spreads a false message. You can't fake abundance. Abundance means a strength in something. To have a strength you have to be willing to work hard in a specific area.

Yes. Basically, I have a component of Absolute Beauty in my spirituality that appears to be very rare.