Wonderful and thought-provoking post! Thanks for highlighting the terms 'esoteric' and 'exoteric' to help me think through. I see it in the practice of tea too here in Kyoto, which sometimes can be a bit of an exclusive club, where you need to get accepted by a particular teacher/ lineage. A bit of a tangent but your post got me thinking - is the preference for 'esoteric' transmission across different Japanese cultural arts traditions (small scale and perhaps easier to sustain from external shocks) may be part of the reason why Japan has managed to keep its cultural traditions in tact for so long over the course of history?
Perhaps. Japan has both kinds of traditions. check out Romaric's post on art for more about it (https://romaricjannel.substack.com/p/how-institutions-influence-art-and). I would argee that one of the benefits to esoteric traditions is that they remain largely unchanged. This as certainly helped traditional Japanese arts and crafts.
thanks, very important issue. I think any person can undergo a personal inquest and find his or her way into esoteric knowledge -- I did -- but it is very absorbing... in my case I only saw that this had been my intention in retrospect. It systematically sucked my whole life into it. I was driven by the rational unconscious. To think one can arrive at any insight through summations and clear thinking without undergoing an odyssey culminating in an epiphany I'm pretty sure is wrong. However one can be difficult gratuitously, if that wasn't the case, I sympathize with person who bristled at an admonition to be conventionally organized and easily digestible. Respected authorities write gigantic almost impenetrable tomes, and these are summarized into digestible soundbites, and then present original thinkers are supposed deliver only digestible sound bites. of course new ideas contain old ones, novelty only lies in rearrangement of the same old thing.
Surely real insight combines the exoteric and esoteric and brings them into balance, as it does the visceral, intuitive, irrational, and rational aspects of knowledge. In short, philosophy like everything that is worthy of the name of its classical discipline, is an art that uses knowledge gained from science to conquer pride and prejudice and refine sense and sensibility -- and that hardly means squeezing all the art out of it, until it's all science for only scientists, and all the pure machines can live happily ever after. Alas, this comment is just science, because while it's obviously demonstrably verifiably true, it's clearly not artful enough to convince you, whoever may reading this or on the way to, but some demon within is distracting you, to help me evolve the world by the one true path that everybody's scrambling all over the place around -- tortoise wins the race --where to stay on the path the vernacular tongue, loved and refined is perfect, and our faculties are up to the task of cutting through the bureaucracy and filibuster and the virtue to do so is within our powers, but both the spirit and body are weak, and the hypnotic distractions within and without are winning everywhere I gaze; just as someone reaches out a hand and I reach mine, I see him swiftly receding into the distance as in some horror film, because that is the way it goes in a cowardly loveless world requiring a heap of machine legible exoteric proofs and analysis or initiation into a twisted power hungry aberration of esoteric knowledge to authorize an individual's input output or even to ignite a spark of curiosity let alone open an ear to this always novel ancient music that's been playing since the origin of the world. It stinks far too hopelessly and homelessly even to drop a like in its cup.
Uh oh you're not going to like the allusion, but it's obviously true -- imitatio Christi the only game in town, even a fashion design firm figured that out -- it's not what goes in the mouth but what comes out of it after it's processed that defiles a person, it's not the given, continuously evolving forms, it's the way we occupy them, the rejectors of convention and the embracers of it conspiring in smothering the life out of it. We judge not the things themselves but the smothering masks they've been made to wear. We gladly don a mask and spend our whole lives play acting, as machines within and without us have read that all the world's a stage as flat fact, there being more and more to support the supposition, far easier to live than life, and that justifies their conforming the world to their empty soulless one.
Life, you say, is not a fairy tale, and I say, oh you couldn't be more wrong. That's exactly what life is, the screen eventually melts in this first class high art Hollywood movie; and when a fairy or one's messenger appears before your eyes, all the esoteric and exoteric knowledge cannot help you decide what to do about it. It's death's sweet call to newborn life every single minute that's been lost in all the ear shattering jumble of mumble, a call become as terrifying as death itself.
Wonderful and thought-provoking post! Thanks for highlighting the terms 'esoteric' and 'exoteric' to help me think through. I see it in the practice of tea too here in Kyoto, which sometimes can be a bit of an exclusive club, where you need to get accepted by a particular teacher/ lineage. A bit of a tangent but your post got me thinking - is the preference for 'esoteric' transmission across different Japanese cultural arts traditions (small scale and perhaps easier to sustain from external shocks) may be part of the reason why Japan has managed to keep its cultural traditions in tact for so long over the course of history?
Perhaps. Japan has both kinds of traditions. check out Romaric's post on art for more about it (https://romaricjannel.substack.com/p/how-institutions-influence-art-and). I would argee that one of the benefits to esoteric traditions is that they remain largely unchanged. This as certainly helped traditional Japanese arts and crafts.
thanks, very important issue. I think any person can undergo a personal inquest and find his or her way into esoteric knowledge -- I did -- but it is very absorbing... in my case I only saw that this had been my intention in retrospect. It systematically sucked my whole life into it. I was driven by the rational unconscious. To think one can arrive at any insight through summations and clear thinking without undergoing an odyssey culminating in an epiphany I'm pretty sure is wrong. However one can be difficult gratuitously, if that wasn't the case, I sympathize with person who bristled at an admonition to be conventionally organized and easily digestible. Respected authorities write gigantic almost impenetrable tomes, and these are summarized into digestible soundbites, and then present original thinkers are supposed deliver only digestible sound bites. of course new ideas contain old ones, novelty only lies in rearrangement of the same old thing.
Surely real insight combines the exoteric and esoteric and brings them into balance, as it does the visceral, intuitive, irrational, and rational aspects of knowledge. In short, philosophy like everything that is worthy of the name of its classical discipline, is an art that uses knowledge gained from science to conquer pride and prejudice and refine sense and sensibility -- and that hardly means squeezing all the art out of it, until it's all science for only scientists, and all the pure machines can live happily ever after. Alas, this comment is just science, because while it's obviously demonstrably verifiably true, it's clearly not artful enough to convince you, whoever may reading this or on the way to, but some demon within is distracting you, to help me evolve the world by the one true path that everybody's scrambling all over the place around -- tortoise wins the race --where to stay on the path the vernacular tongue, loved and refined is perfect, and our faculties are up to the task of cutting through the bureaucracy and filibuster and the virtue to do so is within our powers, but both the spirit and body are weak, and the hypnotic distractions within and without are winning everywhere I gaze; just as someone reaches out a hand and I reach mine, I see him swiftly receding into the distance as in some horror film, because that is the way it goes in a cowardly loveless world requiring a heap of machine legible exoteric proofs and analysis or initiation into a twisted power hungry aberration of esoteric knowledge to authorize an individual's input output or even to ignite a spark of curiosity let alone open an ear to this always novel ancient music that's been playing since the origin of the world. It stinks far too hopelessly and homelessly even to drop a like in its cup.
Uh oh you're not going to like the allusion, but it's obviously true -- imitatio Christi the only game in town, even a fashion design firm figured that out -- it's not what goes in the mouth but what comes out of it after it's processed that defiles a person, it's not the given, continuously evolving forms, it's the way we occupy them, the rejectors of convention and the embracers of it conspiring in smothering the life out of it. We judge not the things themselves but the smothering masks they've been made to wear. We gladly don a mask and spend our whole lives play acting, as machines within and without us have read that all the world's a stage as flat fact, there being more and more to support the supposition, far easier to live than life, and that justifies their conforming the world to their empty soulless one.
Life, you say, is not a fairy tale, and I say, oh you couldn't be more wrong. That's exactly what life is, the screen eventually melts in this first class high art Hollywood movie; and when a fairy or one's messenger appears before your eyes, all the esoteric and exoteric knowledge cannot help you decide what to do about it. It's death's sweet call to newborn life every single minute that's been lost in all the ear shattering jumble of mumble, a call become as terrifying as death itself.
thank you for your thoughtful question.