At 10:35 PM 7/31/2007, Nancy Gish wrote:


>I am fascinated with studies of and ideas about consciousness, and I do
>not see any reason why a god who created it--presuming one--would do so
>only for it to be dissolved.

   This presents the interesting proposition that a god would meet your
criteria. While I hope it is in some way true that so marvelous a thing as
consciousness, or more exactly, individual consciousness, is not, like so
much of 20th/21st cent Western culture, disposable, I don't find much value
in creatures prescribing to their creator what his purpose must be.

> It would make for a pretty dull eternity I
>should think. Fortunately for Eliot, his poetry really is not grounded
>in it--he talks about it but does not claim to have it.

   I am trying to follow this and it seems to say Eliot does not have
consciousness. Is that correct?



> Even in "Ash
>Wednesday" the narrator (it has one) keeps talking about wanting to find
>peace and stillness and keeps looking back with desire and nostalgia. I
>think it interesting that Eliot was never really happy until he married
>Valerie; it would seem that only sensual experience ever did provide his
>garden.

   Leaving aside whether Eliot was never really happy, this assumes that
marriage is first or primarily physical, or more simply, that another
person's major impact is physical, but I see no reason that it should not
be spiritual (of which I take the psychological to be a somewhat watered
down subspecies). The sensual without the spiritual still seems to sum out
to zero, or less than.

Thanks,
Ken A.