Embodying the Logos

Session 6, Assignment for Week 4.

Listening twice to Jack’s recording of the KTS chapter, “Knowledge by the Knower of the Logos”, which I had previously read on my own, I found I had to read it yet again.  What Jack’s voice recording allowed me to recognize was that the elements I felt I understood served to bring to the surface something that remains essentially mysterious:

             If the ‘logos’ is an expression of knowledge: ‘cognition’ is not restricted to ‘knowing’ the ‘logos’; instead it can ‘embody’ the ‘logos’. (KTS 417)

  I feel inspired by this possibility, without fully understanding it.  The characteristic of the ‘logos’ that it is both an expression of knowledge and an object that can be known by cognition, suggests that knowledge runs through both the knowing (cognition) and the known (logos).

Meanwhile the self, with its goal-orientation, only sees the parts of the logos that support its interests.  Seeking to ransack the logos for useful tools, we cannot embody the logos, and we thereby rob ourselves of the riches of creativity.

 I’m currently shopping for a little creativity and am therefore open to “embodying” knowledge from the logos: specifically about how corporations are despoiling the earth.  There is clearly a wealth of knowledge, too vast and too deeply woven into our world for me to master as a self.  Yet it is in in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and everything we eat.

 While looking at this KTS chapter I was also viewing a video “The Corporation Documentary”, which examines corporate behaviour on a check-list that is used to diagnose psychopathology.  All six items were ticked.  Considering that corporations now have legal status as “persons”, and are the dominant social entities in our world, this is very alarming.  Reading this KTS chapter with its discernment of how the goal orientation of the self forecloses a wider embodiment of knowledge, I was struck with how ‘corporate selfhood’ and the exclusive ‘goal’ of corporations to increase the bottom lines for their shareholders, virtually guarantees the death of creativity in their actions.

 The six characteristics of a Psychopath on this diagnosic evaluation were:

 –Callous unconcern for the feelings of others

–Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships

–Reckless disregard for the safety of others

–Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit

–Incapacity to experience guilt

–Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours

The video exposes each of these behaviours in a gripping story.