I think that with litanies you're supposed to pay attention to the spirit rather than the letter.
I think that with litanies you're supposed to pay attention to the spirit rather than the letter.
And good litanies manage to unite spirit, letter and aesthetics into an elegant whole.
Even at the level of 'spirit', "seek to be disillusioned" doesn't feel right to me. It misses the point. "Learn to love" actually conveyed a fundamentally better message.
I was meditating on the word "disillusionment" the other day, and it stuck me as odd that it has such a negative connotation... doesn't being disillusioned mean that you see a truth that was previously hidden from you by a mirage of falsehood? The human-universal negative emotional response to finding out you were wrong seems counterproductive in the extreme, and I'm still working towards eliminating it from my mind. So I crafted this brief litany, and I think that with some help from the LW community it could become a useful tool for rationalists, much like the Litanies of Tarski and Gendlin. My "first draft" is:
"If you love truth, learn to love finding out you were wrong. If you hate illusion, learn to love disillusionment. If your emotions are not appropriate to your values, do something about it!"
What say you?