Alex Jacob wrote: "If a person is going to make the self-righteous claim that they are deluded and less-than-fully conscious (as Alex effectively does), then he should accept the conseqences of this - namely, that he isn't qualified to comment on matters that are currently beyond his reach."
I think this is crappy use of 'logic', friend. It always occurs to me that logic works best within a closed system, such as mathematics, where logical premises can be said to truly exist, or perhaps function is a better word. Right at the start---and I said this many many months ago---there are areas where logic is extremely useful and there are others where logic cannot decide issues. It is my personal belief that the magnitude of life, of phenomenal existence, of the manifestation of this matter and energy in which we also appear, is not reducible to simple logical predicates. One cannot interpret existence, or respond to existence, soley through a logical mindset.
There are so many things wrong with this opening passage alone that it is difficult to know where to start. But since these errors go to the heart of your fundamental misunderstanding of logic and its relationship with enlightenment, I should address it in some detail.
Firstly, you need to divest yourself of the idea that using logic to understand reality automatically translates into an attempt to curtail reality, or to interpret it, or to reduce it to a set of logical predicates, or to control it, or anything along those lines.
It's true that some people do attempt to use logic for such a purpose, but it is obviously misguided. As you point out, reality is too vast and magnificent to admit of such curtailing. The very attempt to do this will always create distortions and barriers and can only result in one remaining as far away from reality as ever.
It's a bit like trying to touch the moon's reflection in a lake with a stick. As soon as you try, it disintegrates and vanishes.
You need to think outside the box here. There are many different ways that logic can be used. Trying to curtail reality is just one such use. Creating mathematical and metaphysical systems is another. Engaging in sophistry and self-justification is yet another. These are all common uses of logic, but there are other ways it can be used as well.
Personally, I like to use it as a kind of broom to clear away misconceptions and delusions from the mind. I use its destructive side, as it were, rather than its creative side. In other words, this particular use of logic doesn't involve creating closed systems of thought or boxing reality inside a limited framework, but the very opposite. It involves destroying all closed systems and conceptual boxes, until there is nothing left .... except reality itself.
The core barrier that prevents people from perceiving reality clearly - in its naked state, as it were - is conceptual in nature. The mind cannot perceive the nature of reality if it is continually getting lost in its own fantasies and misconceptions. This is where logic comes into play. Logic can be used, not to tinker with reality itself, but to eliminate the conceptual barriers which exist between an individual and his direct connection with reality.
To use an analogy, it is like using corrective surgery to a person with defective eyes, whose vision is greatly distorted and who is constantly the victim of seeing and responding to things that aren't really there. For example, he might regularly jump in fright at perceived objects that his defective eyes have created for him. Note that the corrective surgery doesn't make any attempt to tinker with the wider world or try to box it in. It merely tries to correct a defect in the person's perceptual apparatus so that he can see and experience the world more clearly, and thus be in a position to live more sanely.
Similarly, logic, when used wisely, can correct the defects in a person's mental apparatus - his deluded habits of unwittingly veering off into fantasies and misconceptions - so that he can finally perceive and enjoy the magnificence of reality in all its fullness, without distortion.
So please, let's hear no more talk about how I am trying to curtail reality, or box it in, or reduce it to a set of predicates, and the like. Nothing could be further from the truth.
(Will you be listening to this with an open-mind and taking it on board? Or will you continue to offer the same misconceptions over and over again? How much of a conscience do you really have?)
Going back to your very first remark above where you commented that my logical observation was "crap", I note that you didn't actually give any specific reasons why you thought it was crap. You simply launched into a condemnation of logic more generally, which looks suspiciously like a smokescreen. So let's look at it again:
There is a fundamental contradiction in your current mentality which centres around you wanting things both ways. In this instance, you want your own consciousness to be both deluded and undeluded at the same time. You want to be be fully conscious and less-than-fully conscious at the same time.
On the one hand, you want everyone to be deluded and less-than-fully conscious - Jesus and Buddha included - as evidenced by your insistence that an objective enlightenment is a pipe-dream. Yet in order to be firm in this insistence, you necessarily have to believe, deep down, that you are not really deluded at all, that your consciousness is so fully-realized that you have been able to reach into every nook and cranny of existence and ferret out all its impossibilities.
This contradiction infuses your thinking on every level and forms part of the conceptual barrier that prevents you from realizing reality directly.
This does not mean that logic is not useful in some or many areas. It could also mean, and I take your emphasis (the emphasis of this forum) to mean that it would be a good thing if many more people used 'logic' more often in regard to issues they confront in life, or to their own mental processes, to getting clear about things, deciding things. But, to approach life wholly through the logical mind-set would be a great error. How to go about 'logically proving this?' I don't think I would make the effort, it would be a vain exercise. What I propose is, to me, intuitively obvious. The more a person lives, the more they come to understand that our human logic---for all that it is wonderful, unique and important---is not the only 'tool of consciousness' we have at our disposal.
No one is saying that logic is the only tool of consciousness at our disposal. That is a fantasy of your own making.
Obviously, there is also intution, altered states, mystical experiences, emotional passion, conversation, books, etc. But logic does have one quality that none of these other things have - namely, it can separate poor quality thinking from first-rate thinking and expose contradictions, which, in the context of understanding reality, is critically important.
In my experience, people only downgrade the important of logic and quality thought-processes because they have things in their mind that they wish to hide. No one who is honest, open-minded and truthful has anything to fear from logic.
And with that I say that your assertions are subjective and personal, and they should be seen as such by all who consider them.
Here is another example of this serious contradiction in your thinking.
On the one hand, you are wanting people's views to be subjective and personal, and yet at the same time you are insisting that everyone should have the objective view that they are subjective and personal.
Or to put it more succinctly, you want my assertions to be subjective and personal and your own to be objective and impersonal.
My argument against presenting 'enlightenment' as a clear, discussable category---again this is simply intuitively obvious---is that it is utterly subjective, and therefor is precisely an example of an area where logic cannot operate. There is no way to quantify enlightenment, and there is effectively no way to demostrate it. Obviously, and almost with no 'shadow of doubt', your entire assertion crumbles right here.
Are you presenting this as a subjective assessment? Or are you asserting it to be objectively true?
Again, the same contradiction arises.
People used to think that it was "intuitively obvious" that the earth was flat. So turning to intuition as a source of verification is problematical, to say the least. Intuition can be a powerful tool, but it is also very unreliable. The reason for this is that it invariably springs from a platform of what a person already holds, mistakenly or otherwise, to be true. To place trust in it would be akin to "building your house on sand", as Jesus put it.
Again, there is no specific reasoning on your part to support your assertion that enlightenment is "utterly subjective". You just offer some more generalities, which again looks like a smokescreen. It is true that no one can quantity enlightenment (whatever that means), but you're way off base in saying that it cannot be demonstrated. Enlightenment can be demonstrated to anyone who is perceptive enough to see it, to those who have "the ears to hear".
Enlightenment is subjective in the sense that only a subjective entity can experience it. At the same time, it is objective in that what is experienced in enlightenment is the Ultimate Truth, the very same Ultimate Truth that all enlightened people experience.
If an alien from another planet were to experience enlightenment, or if a robot in the far distant future were to experience it, then they would have the exact same experience that Jesus and the Buddha had. In all cases, the illusion of self is pierced and the boundlessness of Truth is realized.
I do not deny that there are very advanced, admirable and difficult to attain states of mind that could be grouped together in the category of 'enlightened', and I certainly do not deny that it is a noble goal for all of us to try to attain unique perspectives in life that allow us to navigate life with superiority. But, as I have expressed many times, I am very, very suspicious of the pursuit of 'enlightenment' as you are defining it (again, as you own it, possess it and dole it out), and I am thoroughly suspicious of so-called enlightenment teachers, and the whole tradition of so-called 'enlightenment', not only in the West but in the East too.
Well, it's certainly good to be suspicious of anyone who teaches enlightenment or claims to know something of worth. It is healthy to be sceptical and not accept anything that hasn't been thoroughly tested by one's own reasoning powers. But in your case, your suspiciousness is merely a ploy to not get involved in the spiritual path to begin with. It is an unhealthy cynicism designed to keep you safely within your own foggy, childish comfort zone.
It is true that no one can possess or dole out enlightenment, as you put it. On the other hand, since enlightenment is a specific reality, it is also true that people can either be right or wrong in their views about it.
When a person becomes enlightened, he becomes an expert in it and can tell when another person has false ideas about it. An expert can easily recognize another expert in his field, just as he can easily recognize when people display a lack of expertise concerning it.
I am inclined to think that the whole story of Ramakrishna may have been extremely embellished. He did no writing himself and everything about him is revealed in the writing of his disciples. I have always observed a marked tendency in Indians to exaggerate and embellish the saintliness of their gurus and enlightened teachers, such that it is an obvious thing. Yet, there are many very wise things that Ramakrishna said, many valuable and useful things, as I see it. How does one reconcile this possible split or division? My answer is that one does it by grounding oneself in one's own life, in one's own body, and understanding that our experiences come to us in this platform, in this biological, psychological structure.
Change this to ultimate reality and I would agree with you. It is only by grounding oneself in ultimate reality that one can genuinely separate the wheat from the chaff in the words and actions of others, including gurus.
This ultimate reality incorporates one's body and biological/psycholigical realities, but isn't confined to them. If you simply confine yourself to biological/psychological realities, then you lose the entire spiritual dimension and merely become, at best, a kind of prancing, banal zoologist.
The unity of the platform of existence with the experiences that we have in that structure is the key. Language intervenes and suddenly we are speaking about and considering abstractions. There is only the experience of a person who is alive in a physical body, within a limiting structure, highly imperfect and suseptible to all sorts of disturbances. But fundamentally, and no matter what, one has to take this experience and live it, translate it into daily activities, into service, into work, relationships, what-have-you.
That goes without saying. I've already explained that your imagined dichotomy between the philosophic life and engaging in the world isn't real. But it doesn't suit you to listen to this.
"Being undeluded and fully conscious means perceiving the nature of reality without any mental distortion. Not only is it entirely possible for the human mind to attain this magnificent state of consciousness, but it has been enjoyed and described by wise thinkers for thousands of years. It has been enjoyed by those who have "made every effort to go through that narrow gate", and denied to everyone else. "
Clearly, this is not a genuine argument, and no one could ever take it as such (one would be a fool to mistake it for a logical argument). It is so simple. One is there is no possibility, within philosophy, physiology, biology or psychology that there is a state of no distortion. It is a false category, inadmisable in a philosophical argument. It is an ideal state, an abstract state, that is represented as something attainable 'in reality'. We all know that nothing in 'reality' occurs in this way. Pretty much: end of argument. It is a waste of time to consider it.
Are you presenting this as an undistorted perspective on that matter? Or shall we just dismiss it as just another piece of distortion?
Once again, the contradiction arises.
You don't have any understanding of these deeper matters, but you are too arrogant and foolish to recognize it. One of the main reasons for this lack of understanding is that you haven't resolved these internal contradictions in your own thinking. The kind of undistorted perception that I talk about is not how you currently imagine it to be, and the objections you present here (as usual, without any specific reasonings attached) have no bearing on it.
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