I suspect that why people can fail to see the paradigm of shamanism -- or, indeed, can fail to see how it appears in some of the works of the biggest intellectuals -- is because they read or respond with the expectation that the writing tells them how things are, as if life was made of an array of objects, all in a row. To read Nietzsche in this way is to get a totally different impression of the writer than if one read him to understand how things WORK, which is to say how the objects of life conjoin and propel one another in specific ways. Life is not a noun, but a verb.
When youthful readers respond to Nietzsche's aphorisms on women by taking away the message, "That is how things really are." It would be better if they understood, "This is how my mind (or others' minds) WORK."
In exactly the same way they may hear me discussing how to avoid "conformity" and then misunderstand the message because they think there is a fixed state of being -- perhaps one that can be socially or sociologically defined -- that corresponds to the term "conformity". In fact, my sense of the term, conformity, has to do with the way things WORK, and is thus a concept of relativity, not a fixed state (just as the concepts of heat and cold do not describe fixed states, but express temperature gradations).
The best outcome would be if my readers would respond as one engineer to another, noticing a structural concern I have depicted, but not as someone asking for directions. This is the key to understanding me, too, and my videos. My works describe how things are structured. They do not give you directions.
When youthful readers respond to Nietzsche's aphorisms on women by taking away the message, "That is how things really are." It would be better if they understood, "This is how my mind (or others' minds) WORK."
In exactly the same way they may hear me discussing how to avoid "conformity" and then misunderstand the message because they think there is a fixed state of being -- perhaps one that can be socially or sociologically defined -- that corresponds to the term "conformity". In fact, my sense of the term, conformity, has to do with the way things WORK, and is thus a concept of relativity, not a fixed state (just as the concepts of heat and cold do not describe fixed states, but express temperature gradations).
The best outcome would be if my readers would respond as one engineer to another, noticing a structural concern I have depicted, but not as someone asking for directions. This is the key to understanding me, too, and my videos. My works describe how things are structured. They do not give you directions.
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