{"id":15910,"date":"2012-04-19T06:45:21","date_gmt":"2012-04-19T13:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/?p=15910"},"modified":"2012-04-19T06:45:33","modified_gmt":"2012-04-19T13:45:33","slug":"from-man-alive-the-love-of-splendor-is-the-life-divine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/15910\/from-man-alive-the-love-of-splendor-is-the-life-divine\/","title":{"rendered":"From Man Alive! – “The love of Splendor is the life divine.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.<\/em><\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

Extract from Chapter 12. The love of Splendor is the life divine.<\/a><\/h3>\n

<\/a>There is one more idea I want to take up with you, and I think it is the most demanding one I know. You had to wrap your mind around the self, after being told all your life to despise it, and then I sprung the notion of self-adoration on you. I undermined just about every dogma you have ever heard about, and then I made you eat anarchy-pie and like it – or at least not spit it out. And now I plan to make you stretch even farther, to go with me where no philosophy of reason has ever gone before.<\/p>\n

Where might that be?<\/p>\n

To heaven.<\/p>\n

“Say WHAT?!?”<\/p>\n

But, but, but… Heaven is for theologians. Heaven is for priests. Heaven, every smug academic will sneer, is for wishful thinkers who can’t handle the infinite hell that is human life on Earth.<\/p>\n

I think you might be able to guess what I think about a claim like that. If theological pronouncements about ontology and teleology are intellectually useless, invalidities defended with insipidities, so, too, are the metaphysical opinions of modern philosophers, academics, artists, journalists and politicians. If you hate the self, in time you cannot fail to hate life as well – your own life and all<\/em> of human life. You will not be able to stop yourself from sneering at joy, at hope, at ambition, at every value the fully-human life requires. You will look for nothing but evidences of failure and despair in the world around you, and your one, unique, irreplaceable human life will become<\/em> the infinite hell you insist you see everywhere.<\/p>\n

But what if you were to point your mind in the opposite direction?<\/p>\n

…continue reading here<\/a>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind. Extract from Chapter 12. The love of Splendor is the life divine. There is one more idea I want to take up with you, and I think it is the most demanding one I know. You had to wrap your mind around the self, after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,212,29],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-15910","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-egoism-in-action","7":"category-flourishing","8":"category-group-therapy","10":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":15831,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/15831\/a-celebration-of-me-man-alive-is-alive\/","url_meta":{"origin":15910,"position":0},"title":"A celebration of me: Man Alive! is alive!","author":"Greg Swann","date":"April 8, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I just traded two weeks of my life for the rest of human history. 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I will look at someone \u2013 anyone I happen to see \u2013 and try to project backward in time to the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Egoism in Action"","block_context":{"text":"Egoism in Action","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/egoism-in-action\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11662,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/11662\/splendorquest-my-plan-to-stage-a-graceful-exit-from-life-when-the-pursuit-of-splendor-has-become-impossible-to-me\/","url_meta":{"origin":15910,"position":2},"title":"SplendorQuest: My plan to stage a graceful exit from life when the pursuit of Splendor has become impossible to me","author":"Greg Swann","date":"March 25, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: 'Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Egoism in Action"","block_context":{"text":"Egoism in Action","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/egoism-in-action\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":16154,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/16154\/love-sex-and-philosophy-my-book-the-unfallen-is-available-on-kindle\/","url_meta":{"origin":15910,"position":3},"title":"Love, sex and philosophy: My book The Unfallen is available on Kindle.","author":"Greg Swann","date":"August 9, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"My novel The Unfallen is now available as an Amazon Kindle eBook. Here is the way I blurbed the book when I wrote it:The Unfallen is a very sexy book about philosophy and a very philosophical book about love and longing. It\u2019s written about and for smart, productive people who\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Egoism in Action"","block_context":{"text":"Egoism in Action","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/egoism-in-action\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=gregswann-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B008V0NGXE","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5793,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/5793\/my-bloodhoundblog-wish-list-as-we-embark-on-the-splendorquest\/","url_meta":{"origin":15910,"position":4},"title":"My BloodhoundBlog wish list as we embark on the SplendorQuest","author":"Greg Swann","date":"November 24, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"We're going to fire up SplendorQuest.com full-bore this week. For now it's nothing, no need to link to it. But if you've ever done a whois on any one of our domains, you will have seen that SplendorQuest.com lives at the top of everything. I've talked about Splendor a lot\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Disintermediation"","block_context":{"text":"Disintermediation","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/disintermediation\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":14479,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/14479\/splendor-is-where-you-find-it\/","url_meta":{"origin":15910,"position":5},"title":"Splendor is where you find it…","author":"Greg Swann","date":"April 22, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"A rose is a rose, but the desert has a beauty all it own... No matter how busy I get, I always want to make time in my life for beauty -- wherever I might find it. I spied these lovely cactus flowers in the front lawn of a hugely\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Egoism in Action"","block_context":{"text":"Egoism in Action","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/egoism-in-action\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15910"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15912,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15910\/revisions\/15912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}