=kit008sa
Summary/Commentary (sa) on PVK KIT 008
ie on KIT 8 - High Key versus Low Key - Part I
  
PVK seems here concerned with the role of spirituality ("High key"
) in everyday life ("Low Key")

Speaking of fraying marriages, PVK remraks, in passing:

"Beautiful friendships, when genuine,
prove often to be the saving grace of a lifetime."(PVK KIT 008)
(kit008_1)                    

He speaks in passing of "the constraint of our trite
self_image"(PVK KIT 008).  

Rather a nicely_turned phrase that, if not quite a 'well_wought
urn' (Clemant Brooks Famous English 'New' Critic, if memory
serves)                           

I would though like to put in a plug for culture.  It does raise
the tone of one's life.
(kit008_2)

So far, this KIT looks like just a pep_talk for remembering to
spice up our humdrum lives with as much spirituality, if not
necessarily as large a variety of spiritual spices, as one can
afford.
(kit008_3)

PVK remarks:

"Is it not an
exciting feature of our gift as humans that we not only partake in
our flesh of the physical nature of the fabric of the universe,
but in our psyche of that very being that is the universe, and
more so that we have access into the thinking, the programming,
the software of the universe?" (PVK KIT 008)

I would like to underline the phrase "in our flesh".
(kit008_4)

PVK speaks in passing of psychedelic drugs:

"Since it is so difficult to maintain this attunement in
life, one can well understand why people have sought to drop out
from the workday existence either in the Indian tradition of the
'sannyasin' or by the dangerous drug trip where the experience so
dearly sought is distorted by a chemical stress on the brain."
(PVK KIT 008)

I'd like to know precisely what PVK thought of psychedelic drugs. 
I don't think that whatever he wrote on the subject is in the KITs
that I have (ie, the Kaivan set).

I'm not sure that the knew enough about psychedelic drugs to have
had the last word on the subject.  Though I am inclined to think
that his ban on mixing drugs into the spiritual path was correct. 

Nor does he seem to have written on the anti_spiritual impact of
the legal psychiatric drugs.
Nor even acknowleged pharmaceutical psychiatry as an opponent of
the spiritual queast.
(kit008_6)        

==============================================================

*** %%% ZOWIE FOR HOWIE
(kit000_0)
==================================================================
                       
COMMENTS FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY:

(kit000_0)
That is what we said in Belmont Senior High School Marching Band. 
I mean, did Mozart ever find an icicle on the end of his clarinet
during the Adagio?
(It would not, of course, have had time to form during the
Allegretto.)
Howie Nettleton was our band director.
I use the phrase now as a place marker, to separate text from my
comments.
It don't import no additional insinuations, Masons.



(kit008_1)
TEXT BY PVK:
Speaking of fraying marriages, PVK remraks, in passing:

"Beautiful friendships, when genuine,
prove often to be the saving grace of a lifetime."(PVK KIT 008)

COMMENTS BY sa:
I'd like to underline that.
We must be loyal to our former lovers, even those who are barely
on speaking terms with us.
And I would say, all the more to Platonic lovers.

That means, put the lie to "plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un instant;
chargrin d'amour dure tout la vie."  Though PVK often quotss it.

PVK once remarked, to meet another person on earth is an
extraordinary privilege.

Aristotle, as I recall reading, wrote a treatise 'On Friendship'.
#L2

Like almost all the Great Books of Western Civilization, I
ain't read it "but hum a few bars and I'll fake it".  (USA
slang, ca. 1950's, primarily said in jazz combos.)
#L1

I mean, most of us don't have enough friends that we can afford to
throw some of them away from time to time.

Real friends, I mean.
#L2
When Hayatt was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy, she was
surprised to find that a number of her supposed friends
immediately broke with her.
#L3
Really, we should never have let the Germans start World
War II.  I did them no good at all.
#L4
Lebensraum is a fine idea, 
#L5
everybody needs a bit of land around their
tract_house
#L6
(as_it_is_said (by me) 'Don't live
anywhere where you can't piss out the
front door'
#L4
but it does not seem to have occurred to them that
there were already people living them.
#L5
So here's a joke, of sorts, from The Jewish
Treasury of Folklore:

The Yeshiva Bochers were conscripted into the
Czar's army, and to everyone's surprise turned
out to be excellent sharpshooters.  So they
were placed in the front line.  However, on
the day of the enemy attack, they refussd to
fire their rifles.  One of them stood up,
turned around,  and explained to the
commanding officer, 'Don't you see, there are
people in the way.  Someone might get hurt.'
#L1





#L1

When PVK and TIK were dissolving their marriage -- 

in every sense but that of US civil law -- in Jewish law it would
count as a marriage, and I think in Islamic law (althoug PVK never
claimed that status) as a 2nd marriage -- both Judaism and Islam
allow a man more than one wife, provided he can and will treat
them all honorably and equally -- 

he posted a note to the Abode Family, saying, in effect, 'our
relationship is maturing into a -- deep, or enduring, or some
such; I don't recall the term  -- friendship.

And indeed such seems to have been the case.

I mean, we are dedicated to the realm of Truth, and a friendship
is interpersonal truth, so how can we not acknowlege and honor it.

In a tape which I transcribed in autumn '04, on Initiation, PVK
notes his regret if not surprise that some mureeds who take leave
of his tutelage seem to deny the friendship between them.

Of course the precondition of friendship -- and for the matter,
the Murshi__mureed relationship (in contradistinction, sometimes
anyhow, with the role of guru or Rebbe ) -- is that it is
non_possessive in every dimension.


--------------------------------------------------------

(kit008_2)

Huntington Cairns editted a large book for the Bollingen
Foundation, titled 'The Limites of Art' -- very short excerpts,
from a phrase to a few pages,  from western literature, mostly
classical, deemed superlative by the usual motley of recognized
critics.  

Whenever I enter the home of a gentile, my first reaction is, 'But
where are your books.'

Where I come from, we don't call a Ph.d 'Doctor' with a straight
face.                                              

But on the other hand, I always assumed that one could not even
consider marriage until one got one's Ph.d.  

Personally, I bogged down after page 90 of Kant's First Critique -

- I could see everything else he was goingg to say, and saw no
reason to put up with his 'hierarchitechtonic' (Joyce, Finnegan's
Wake) company for the rest of that muddy carriage_ride, so as soon
as I flunked my first try at the Comps, I dropped out and rejoined
the hippie commune of New Buffalo, where I hoped to learn and put
into practice some real philosophy.  

And that is why I never got married, The End.  

Legally married, I mean.  

On the other hand, I have always tried to as little legally as
possible.  

Ricky Sherover-(-Marcuse), zl'b, used to tell this annecdote:
Every once in a while, Jean-Paul Sartre would say to Simone de
Beauvoir, Simone, we really ought to get married.  And Simone
would respond, "Now-now, Jean-Paul"  Meaning "'tut-tut', let us
not become bourgeoise in our old age."




-------------------------------------------------------------------



(kit008_3)

Beats going to the odd orgy, I suppose.

The Captain of a sailing ship ate the same monotonously basic food
as the crew, but was privileged to bring along a spice_box.   

PVK used to say: Meditation is the greatest luxury this world
affords. 

#L2
('used to say' is stock Talmudic phrase, meaning simply, 'was
wont to say' .  It does not imply that the Dude then had
second thoughts and changedhis position).  It just means, He
now longer has a listed telephone numbeer.

#L3
Telephones were an artifcact of the mid_20th__century,
sort of a cross between a letter and an alarm_clock.  By
tradition, they were required to announce callers as
sridently as technologically possible; one who preferred
a bit of refinement was expected to hire a butler. 
According, young married couples of the middle classes
occasionally covered their telephones in several
pillows, tied up with a piece or two of string.     

I would like to borrow a Time_Machine, find the man
who invented the semi_colon, and buy him a pair of
eye_glasses.


#L1
-------------------------------------------------------------------


TEXT (sa):  I would like to underline the phrase "in our flesh"
[ quoting PVK, KIT 088 ]
(kit008_4)              
COMMENT. (sa) 

So anyhow, there I am flipping out at Taos Pueblo -- not the main
pueblo, of course, I'd not act out amongst strangers, not those I
respect anyhow; this was at the Hogan we helped Little Joe and
Adrain build -- and Adrian Goemz says to me, Steve, the body can
be a source of pleasure as well as pain.

As I've said, I was asked Barkat Jackman what the religious
orientation of the Abodeniks was, thinking she would say, Islam,
and she said, I think they are dabbling in Christianity.


(kit008_5)
Write your own footnote here.
This is your big chance.

(kit008_6)
Cousin Goober seems wont to say, of pychiatric durgs -- she seems
to have a cerain fondness for lithium, which I think is someething
best left in your automobile battery, especially if you like to
rush back to the hottub after a hard day on the horizontal slopes
--  that theys are simply natural productss which redess an
abnormal neuro_chemical imbalance.
But that fails to explain why they are most properly called zombie
pills.  Be me anyhow.