Diebert wrote:David Quinn often called to "Trust in your own mind and form a direct relationship with Nature". This boils down in trusting the truth of causality when it's figured out what is meant by it. Just by surrendering to, acknowledging the truth of it on all levels: all concepts about and beliefs in gods, spirits, self, destiny, consciousness, truths, falsehoods, spiritual healths or diseases are eaten away by this "acidic poison" of surrender. This is what is meant by liberation. Or the path towards it.
Although I may be wrong or misunderstanding something, I am 'concerned' with the focus on a 'natural experience' and to some extent with the idea, if taken alone, of 'trusting the mind'. It seems to me that such a route, if operated exclusively, might lead to numerous errors. I also note that it tends to produce a self-referential system of thinking which, at least in some notable local persons, induces them to negate, or perhaps avoid altogether, to devalue or to cast aside, the 'knowledge base' of our accumulated history, our human repository. And so I point out such a revelation's 'dangerous' side.
When you write that 'all concepts about and beliefs in gods, spirits, self, destiny, consciousness, truths, falsehoods, spiritual healths or diseases are eaten away by this "acidic poison" of surrender', though I am uncertain if this is your belief (or method) or just your encapsulation of David's thinking, I begin to wonder if a revelation through 'a direct experience of nature' is really what we should be aiming for, I mean in an ultimate sense, as a 'path for man' as it were.
Ortega y Gasset wrote:"The truth is that, after we accompany him on his sublime voyage, what he succeeds in communicating to us is a thing of little consequence. I think that the European soul is approaching a new experience of God and new inquiries into that most important of all realities. I doubt very much, however, if the enrichment of our ideas about divine matters will emerge from the mystics' subterranean roads rather than from the luminous paths of discursive thought. Theology---not ecstasy!"
While it is not at all hard to imagine in the face of an experience of Nature a dissolution of or a diminishment of the kaleidoscope-like mental confusion, and through meditation an experience of cleaning out or clearing away, I am not convinced that it can realistically be touted as the best route to go. And keep in mind that it is highly touted as an experience opening up into levels of Absolute Truth that implies Absolute Understanding and at least in some sense 'the end of knowledge'. With this there seems to open up and to emerge something akin to what I have called 'hubris': an over-confidence in one's sensory (natural) experience?
'A direct experience of nature', in a negative aspect, could be seen to function like a drug-experience of nature; an experience of oblivion, a blasting away of discursive, mindful processes. If this experience is in effect a 'sensory' experience, and I don't see what else it could be, it is not an experience of 'knowledge' and cannot become knowledge until the experiencer of it interprets it. And that implies a mind that is there, established and capable of such an involved and refined act. When I read the words of the young souls who write here about their 'natural' experience, I cannot help but note that there is no developed intellect, or very little of one, and so the experience seems to utterly swamp them, to overwash them, to possess them. At that point there is no possibility of conversation, of discursive interaction or exchange, a most frustrating situation.
We come upon a whole group of problems if this is so. One of them is the presence of the fundamentally illiterate and unprepared person who pushes himself onto the scene and demands that his perception, his understanding, his presence, be accepted and heard. This is not at all a minor problem and, for me, one of my harshest criticisms of Q and R and S: illiteracy. And they draw out of the cyber woodwork young minds that mirror them in this specific sense. And like pigs rooting around in a library---unable to understand and appreciate where they are---they overturn things, grunt their 'wisdom', and in a group of different ways make a mess of things!
