This is part II of our conversation with Karen King. For Part I, please click here.The following automated transcript of our conversation inevitably alters or distorts some of the content of the recording. The original recording is by far the better and more accurate representation of what’s on our minds when we offer Fire Philosophy audio-video events such as this one. We share this transcript anyway, but ask that you not quote it due to the frequency of its errors.Dale Wright: Our word passion in English (and probably goes to other European languages for a while at least) allows both good and not-so-good outcomes, right?Mozart was passionate and great athletes are passionate and yes, people, murder so on. So as you get both the extremes, I wonder, was there a word in Coptic or ancient Greece that could encompass? Or it was just pure energy and mental enthusiasm that wasn't necessarily either negative or positive? Karen King: Well, “love” would be one of those? You know there was the potential for ecstatic experiences of all kinds but if you think of passion, of course, it comes from the Latin related to the word “passive” and “passivity” is being subject to something and so the question is what you're being subject to, and certainly Christian texts and presumably this one as well would understand that receiving the Holy Spirit at baptism would be a kind of possession, which is something that Christians understood.Dale Wright: St. Francis receiving passionata. Karen King: Or just anybody who was baptized, it would be an exorcism of evil spirits and a possession by the Holy Spirit. So that everybody is in that sense, possessed by spirits is just who's in charge. But yeah, no, strong feeling but not the anger of Peter and not jealousy that he shows in this text and so on and so forth those are leading him astray. Dale Wright: I'm really interested in mind body dualism as it pops up, and I have a sense, having studied the history of religions across the Euro-Asian landmass, that at roughly the same time, it was just happening everywhere and that it took very similar forms.So you find Buddhist versions of this and Hindu versions of this and Chinese versions of this, although Chinese is a little bit on the outskirts. But something was happening in the broad spectrum of human culture, where there was elevation of culture through communication across duration that gave rise to that ability to say “I'm not my body.”I'm not just my body, I have a mind and to not think of yourself as just body and therefore to be able to maybe stand back from your anger or hatred and so on that those capacities are just becoming human, that they're evolving into human cultures and that it's happening across the board in really similar, although slightly different ways, and that the mental, spiritual advantages of that realization or that thought, whether true or not, carries forth into the enormous learning that's given rise to contemporary culture all the way through the history of West and East where the focus on the mind or the spirit may be over the body or in juxtaposition with the body— that development was enormously consequential for the evolution of human culture and that literacy probably had a great deal to do with it. The invention and the spread of literary capacity, so the growth of knowledge— you didn't have to hold everything in your head and the ability to learn gives rise to repercussions of the mind-body split that I think we forget in contemporary culture where we're so negative about mind body dualism, right?So since the 19th century—we European, Western culture anyway, but elsewhere as well—engage in fierce critique of mind-body dualism. And we do it because of Darwin and the implications of our— I mean, it's only been two centuries since we've understood at all that we're animals, that we're mammals, and that we are connected to this animal world.And the rehabilitation of the Olympics, from its end of the Olympic Games in Greece, all the way through, you know, athletics is gone or sidelined, and in the 19th century this happens in Germany, in France, in England, all of these cultures begin to give rise to an interest in the body and its connection to the mind, where we now know that our brain is the substance of our mind, or the basic framework, the substructure of our mind, and that it's part of our body, and it gives rise to mentality, and that mind and body are really one. So this whole set of thoughts just sends me reeling into an effort to understand the whole history of the evolution of human culture through that distinction that was made between spirit and matter or mind and body in this classic way, all the way across Eurasia.You don't need to respond to that question. That was a major thought that I've been mulling for, for many years now. Karen King: You talked about things like literacy that made it important and what was it like, do you think? What changes ...
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