About This Site
This site is where I store essays I want to share. There are several topics, one or more of which courses through nearly all of what is here.
It all has something to do with the writings of Meher Baba, which colors all my thinking since I was a teenager and first began to try to read his books. Perception is integrated into everything I write. This wouldn't be surprising if you knew my story. My father Lyn Ott was an artist who was going blind and eventually did before he died. Our family's bread and butter literally depended on his eyesight that was bad and getting worse when I was growing up. So his seeing was never far from anyone in our family's mind. I was told that when I was four years old I would turn around to make sure my Dad's head would clear a doorway. This is how conscious we were of his seeing. As an artist he also taught me a lot about seeing and principles of visual design. He was a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design. My mother, also a professional artist to this day, has her bachelor's degree in philosophy from Radcliffe.
Lenses interest me. This also is not surprising. I have a BA in cinema from U.S.C. and was the lead camera assistant on the George Lucas animated feature Twice Upon a Time. That was years of changing lenses, filters, ordering raw stock, and loading cameras. I doubled as the projectionist every evening for dailies. So cameras, lenses, and film I know intimately and I'm not just guessing. By the way I'm a lousy photographer.
Evolution keeps coming into everything I talk about. I don't know the psychological source of this, but I remember loving physical anthropology when I was an undergraduate, and I made easy 'A's in both physical and social anthropology. Both gripped me and still do. It was a toss up between philosophy and anthropology when I went back to school for a graduate degree to kill time while raising my daughter. I think I made the right choice.I speak a lot about eugenics. This is not because of my Jewish roots and concern about the Nazis. It's due to my belief from reading and thinking it over, as young as 19, that much of the assumptions of Charles Darwin were read into nature, not derived from it. I now believe that the roots of social Darwinism don't spring from Darwin at all. Rather Darwin was reading Malthusian theory into nature, and this is what gave rise to many of his notions of competition for niches being the compelling force for nature. Later this was projected back onto society by Herbert Spencer who first coined the term "survival of the fittest." So a social economic theory was read into nature, which was then read back into society - a kind of loop. This fascinates me because the conception of physical evolution by Meher Baba differs radically from Darwin's when it comes to what is compelling it. The whole notion of competition being what drives the upward mutations is discarded, and Baba's explanation explains the same fossil record far better than Darwin's own theory.
The conflict between materialism and idealism (the philosophical view that the phenomenal world is fundamentally caused by mental processes, not physical ones) is in all my work. This is also natural. My master's thesis was called Refutations of Idealism. The story behind how it got its title was that I began by asking my thesis advisor what the argument against idealism was, and he said, "There is none. It's just fashion. Idealism was fashionable in the 19th century, and materialism is fashionable now. But that is a great topic for your thesis. Why don't you look into it, and we'll title your thesis Refutations of Idealism." I no longer think it's fashion. Read Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and you'll find out what it is.
I hope you will enjoy exploring. There are well over 400 pages of text on this site.
c.j.o.
June 7, 2010
