The Act Of Creation by Arthur Koestler

[Jason]

Juvenile is a word to describe this board's tactic of censoring all form of "naughty words" which only incites members to find ways around the filter. Yes, I will admit to being the guy who did the Beatles/Peedles/Rutles thing - it was meant simply as humor. Juvenile humor, yes. As of now you're the only two people to take any kind of offense to it. They've been removed.

[bgas]

More likely, lots of people didn't like it, but couldn't do anything about it and just didn't bother with it. Or typed around it.

[rab2591]

Juvenile is a word to describe this board's tactic of censoring all form of "naughty words" which only incites members to find ways around the filter. Yes, I will admit to being the guy who did the Beatles/Peedles/Rutles thing - it was meant simply as humor. Juvenile humor, yes. As of now you're the only two people to take any kind of offense to it. They've been removed.

The filters? Or the people taking offense?

I didn't take offense to it, but I found it annoying after a while...it did made me laugh the first few times I saw it though

[♩♬🐸 Billy C ♯♫♩🐇]

I hate the Beatles to begin with...if it had been up to me I'd have changed the word filter to either New Kids on the Block or Destiny's Child.

[Jason]

Juvenile is a word to describe this board's tactic of censoring all form of "naughty words" which only incites members to find ways around the filter. Yes, I will admit to being the guy who did the Beatles/Peedles/Rutles thing - it was meant simply as humor. Juvenile humor, yes. As of now you're the only two people to take any kind of offense to it. They've been removed.

The filters? Or the people taking offense?

The filters. If I removed everyone who ever took offense to something on here I'd dare say the board would be devoid of a membership!

[SloopJohnB]

Not all the filters were removed, and that's a good thing, I thought some of them were funny.

Try typing "E­dit:" (don't forget the colon) and see what happens 

[SMiLE Brian]

The filters were funny and made reading about the beatles really interesting.

[Mike's Beard]

Guys, you're getting way off topic here! This thread is supposed to be for Bill Tobleman to send endless posts to himself about how Smile was all about "The Act of Creation". Please leave the entertaining posts to the other threads where they belong.

[♩♬🐸 Billy C ♯♫♩🐇]

Not all the filters were removed, and that's a good thing, I thought some of them were funny.

Try typing "E­dit:" (don't forget the colon) and see what happens 

Edit:

[louielouie]

Ok, thanks for the clarification

[Bill Tobelman]

A few quotes from The Act Of Creation (pages 168 & 169):

"....pictorial thinking is a more primitive form of mentation than conceptual thinking, which it precedes in the mental evolution of the individual and the species."

"Thus the poet who reverts to the pictorial mode of thought is regressing to an older and lower level of mental hierarchy--as we do every night when we dream...."

"Similar considerations apply...to rhythm, metre, alliteration, assonance, rhyme. The rhythmic beat, ecoing the shamen's tom-tom, awakens archaic resonances and 'lulls the mind into a waking trance' (Yeats). The rhyme appeals to the tendency to vocal repetition in the language of primitives and children (kala-kala, ma-ma), and to the equally deep-rooted tendency to associate by sound--punning."

[Bill Tobelman]

"Those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that science knows that almost every step therein has been made by...the invention of a hypothesis which, though verifiable, often had little foundation to start with...."

T.H. Huxley quoted in The Act Of Creation

[18thofMay]

Guys, you're getting way off topic here! This thread is supposed to be for Bill Tobleman to send endless posts to himself about how Smile was all about "The Act of Creation". Please leave the entertaining posts to the other threads where they belong.

[Bill Tobelman]

"Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling--a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. If we may suppose that this primary ego-feeling has been preserved in the minds of many people, to a greater or lesser extent, it would co-exist like a sort of counterpart with the narrower and more sharply outlined ego-feeling of maturity, and the ideational content belonging to it would precisely the notion of limitless extension and oneness with the universe."

Sigmund Freud quoted in The Act Of Creation

[cutterschoice]

I guess the main question is did Brian and VDP set out consciously to have spiritual enlightenment as a central theme or can it simply be interpreted that way?

When Brian worked with Tony he said that they would spend a lot of time talking and exploring a theme before they worked on a song. Often talking for hours. It makes sense Brian would have continued this with VDP.

We know Brian was into a lot of New Age stuff and psychedelics, as was popular among the more "hip" circles and during a time when people like Alan Watts were talking extensively on Eastern philosophy. It was part of the atmosphere at the time and these ideas and concepts were mirrored in lots of popular and underground music.

Brian mentioned in 1976 that he had heard drugs were the new messiah back in the 60s, and he agreed to a certain extent (if it wasn't for his own personal troubles with them). So you can surmise that Brian was very much caught up in all of this, and the idea that drug use can induce religious experiences, and the spiritual and so on. I would guess that having actually experienced a spiritual trip himself, certainly would have been all he needed to confirm his beliefs. We know he's taken LSD a few times, and if any of you have ever tried it you'll be aware of the great positive effects it can have on someone in the long-term, on your perspective, attitude and feelings.

As an artist, Brian's interests are going to inform his work, and like we saw with Pet Sounds, he was looking inward and attempting to explore subjects that resonated with him emotionally. On his path to form his personal philosophies and grow as an artist and a person there is no doubt these things made its way into his music.

I can disagree with Bill's interpretations of lyrics and interview segments, but that doesn't detract from the main argument.

And so, the idea that Brian and VDP consciously set out to capture/induce/inform spiritual enlightenment really doesn't seem far-fetched to me at all.

[Bill Tobelman]

That's a great post!

[rab2591]

Hey Bill,

I tried to find your site the other day and had no such luck. I tried finding it again today and the link to the site (from wikipedia) doesn't work.

Just curious if you have a new web address or something?

[18thofMay]

http://www.smileriddle.com/

[Bill Tobelman]

The Out Of Sight! SMiLE Site page is back. The older stuff (with all its warts) is to follow. Someday an Act Of Creation page may follow that would basically compile all that has been presented here already in some sort of vaguely cohesive form.

[Bill Tobelman]

Thanks to 18thofMay for the link.

[rab2591]

Thanks to 18thofMay for the link.

Indeed! Looking forward to the updates Bill!

[ghost]

Bill have you read anything from Alfred Korzybski?

Your site is cool I remember first seeing it - really opened my mind to where Brian was at then. I don't get hung up in the details but it's more or less gospel truth to me that Smile was a lysergic musical koan & trip.

 [for anyone familiar with Korzybski, what I am of course saying is that "I" as this nervous system am making a set of interesting abstractions representing various perceptual perspectives on the Smile music that appeal to ghost2011].

The edits in the music and song writing Brian employed on Smile interests me more than the other stuff though. Think of Barnyard - it wasn't supposed to be a square dance, it was supposed to be a speedy lsd cartoon consciousness song. LET'S HEAR THE ANIMALS!

Pet Sounds. Barnyard. What a transition!

[Bill Tobelman]

Never read Korzybski but he seems like an original thinker much like Koestler.

Here's yet another from The Act Of Creation:

""Without the hard little bits of marble which are called "facts" one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them. "We shall find"' wrote Butterfield on the opening page of his history of the Scientific Revolution, 'that in both celestial and terrestrial physics--which hold the strategic place in the whole movement--change is brought about, not by new observations or additional evidence in the first instance, but by transpositions that were taking place inside the scientists themselves....Of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult to induce even in the minds if the young, who may be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework, of all which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap for the moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact about Richelieu, but it needs light from heaven to enable a teacher to break the old framework in which the student has been accustomed to seeing his Richelieu.'"

[Bill Tobelman]

Sorry about this one intolerant folks but since I said that The Act Of Creation & the Zen thing were parallel paths last week here's some support for the claim.

"Zen philosophy, in the form in which it is taught by its contemporary propounders (foremost among them Prof. D.T.Suzuki and his Western disciples), is a welter of confusions, derived from the failure to discriminate between automated skills and creative originality--between the 'downward' and the 'upward' traffic to and from the unconscious. The former results in getting the 'knack' of a skill; the latter in the sudden flash of a new insight (the 'It'). The practitioner of the various applied Zen arts was trained to act 'spontaneously, unthinkingly'--and this led to the added confusion between the pseudo-spontaneity displayed by the responses of a well-oiled auotoman, and the genuine spontaneity of original inspiration."

Koestler's above endnote basically relates Zen's Enlightenment to The Act Of Creation's creative act. This gives a degree of credence to Brian's discredited bio's idea that "hallucinations were comparable to Zen riddles" as they both, according to Koestler, yield similar results.