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Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Sat May 05, 2012 9:50 am
by Dennis Mahar
When you and Laird chatter, it looks like you both believe in an inherently existing objective World that is to be described.
That things are to be passively discovered and pieced together like links in a daisy chain for understanding.

What gets left out in that picture is the power of mind.
how subject/object is interelated.
not separate.

'designating mind' constructs World.

I beg you, please,
to draw the distinction between a mind that constructs a World,
and a World a mind constructs.
If you can see that,
then what opens up for a person is a possibility to, in a way, 'choose' reality.
this is why a sense of an inherently existing, immutable self is considered wrong view.
a person and a World can be transformed.
a spiritual life is possible.
if a self was fixed, immutable, transformation would be impossible.

humans get dealt a hand in the Big Deal,
there is a possibility to play the cards wisely.

A quality I find perfection in is generosity.

Not so much handing out material comfort.

Giving time.
A person is a 'bag of words'.
The 'bag of words' runs the person.
The 'bag of words' is the persons World.
The 'bag of words' is the vehicle of suffering.

The truth is heard not as the 'bag of words',
it comes along invisibly inside the 'bag of words'.
that's what is listened for.

One 'gets' the truth.
like a slap in the face.


providing 'listening' for a mind in breakdown mode.
opening up a space for that mind to untangle itself and be restored to a point where that mind wasn't confused.
getting that person outside of it's 'bag of words', looking at it.
free.

what's your bag, man?
where you at?

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Sat May 05, 2012 10:44 pm
by Pye
Dennis:
What gets left out in that picture is the power of mind.
how subject/object is interelated.
not separate.

I beg you, please,
to draw the distinction between a mind that constructs a World,
and a World a mind constructs.
Dennis, I cannot fathom how you have missed this at the core of virtually everything I've put in this thread.
Dennis: this is why a sense of an inherently existing, immutable self is considered wrong view.
a person and a World can be transformed.
a spiritual life is possible.
if a self was fixed, immutable, transformation would be impossible.
This, too. What "immutable" self? Its existence and its mutablity are not mutually exclusive.

Who are you arguing with, Dennis?
Dennis:
A quality I find perfection in is generosity.

Not so much handing out material comfort.
These, too, needn't be mutually exclusive. A generous spirit is generous in whatever way it can be. No need to go splitting the world into spiritual and material twos again . . . .

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Sat May 05, 2012 11:07 pm
by Dennis Mahar
you're not the only one reading this.
the distinctions need to be addressed and made clearer and clearer.
This, too. What "immutable" self? Its existence and its mutablity are not mutually exclusive.
dasein or personhood or self appears to exist in and of itself and people worry of annihilating it.
what has to be shown is it's changing nature.
it's transformability.
in relation to the situation,
one is either unenlightened, toward enlightened or coming from enlightened,
back and forth switching from samsara to nirvana.


a personhood has attributes, it's a thing.
generosity is a higher calibre attainment that generates harmonious relations and changes World for the better in as much as harmonious relations and 'better World' can be called forth.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Sat May 05, 2012 11:25 pm
by Pye
Dennis: you're not the only one reading this.
yes, of course, pardon. It was the "you and Laird['s] chatter" thing that threw me; the begging-that-we, etc.
Dennis:
dasein or personhood or self appears to exist in and of itself and people worry of annihilating it.
what has to be shown is it's changing nature.
it's transformability.
in relation to the situation
yep.
Dennis: a personhood has attributes, it's a thing.
Those attributes and that thinghood only manifest in relation to all else. Just to reiterate what we're reiterating.
Dennis: generosity is a higher calibre attainment that generates harmonious relations and changes World for the better in as much as harmonious relations and 'better World' can be called forth.
What, concretely, does this 'better world' look like to you, Dennis? - and the harmonious relations? What do you mean by these, how are they manifest? You have your armature without anything hanging upon it. What's hanging there? - what do you mean?

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 8:47 am
by Dennis Mahar
If we get the ontology right.

Universe has no intrinsic meaning,
dasein has the power to conceptually designate,
dasein is transformable, not a fixed entity.
dasein participates.

and philosophy shakes down to 5 branches:
ontology,
epistemology,
politics,
ethics,
aesthetics,
and how they relate to each other.

then,
with our armature as you put it,
in the situation,
the human family,
disputes can be settled,
and this, as presently experienced, human family looks somewhat dysfunctional,
can strike out on a path of Reason and deal with the situation wisely.

there's a possibility for education,
a curriculum
and enrolment in that curriculum.

I had a dream.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 9:54 am
by guest_of_logic
Pye wrote:Matter and energy appear to have risen together (or better yet, have always been present as long as there has been presence [being]), so I am disinclined to imagine one to come before the other, as much as I am disinclined to separate them but for the most conventional of sakes. Particle or wave; thing or motion; so long as our local understanding of physics indicates that neither can be (re)created or destroyed, we are looking at eternity, we are looking at everything even if we cannot see it all at once or from any other point of view.
I see. I think you're equating "spiritual existence" with "energy" and "material existence" with "matter". To me, though, the mapping is different: the matter and energy that you refer to here (those which science has mapped) are both what I would refer to in total as "material existence" (after all, as you seem to be alluding to, Einstein is said to have proved that they are interchangeable), whereas those of "spiritual existence" haven't been mapped that much if at all by science. I suspect that you probably wouldn't even recognise/acknowledge/accept the types of energy/matter that I would refer to as "spiritual existence" - not that I'm by any means knowledgeable about them myself. And of course, as with many dichotomies, this is probably a somewhat gross and semi-arbitrary one.
Laird: but what I was trying to get at is that there could be a temporal or some other causal sense in which the material aspect to existence is a consequence of the spiritual aspect, so that in some sense "pure spirit" is "behind" the existence that we currently experience . . .

Pye: You can have it that way if you want, Laird, if you want there should be something “unreasonable” about the world . . . . but I‘d be inclined in return to ask why matter must be preceded rather than included in the wonders of being . . . . What would make existence more “valuable” to you in believing spirit – a spirit, energy, what-have-you – does the initial creating out of nothing?
What makes you think I believe what I believe because I want to make existence more valuable to myself? That's not how I form my beliefs. :-)

As for "unreasonable": what at a fundamental level is reasonable about the world? Why is it that a world should exist at all (as opposed to there not being any existence whatsoever)? As far as I know, we as a species haven't been able to answer this most basic question, and so, as far as we know, the world itself is "unreasonable", isn't it? (as an aside, I believe that this is what jufa is trying to get across in his occasional barrages of others that question the "logic" for existence). In any event, what is so "reasonable" about a wholly material universe that pops up out of a point of infinite density (assuming you hold to the mainstream scientific cosmological view)?

As for "why matter must be preceded", it's an inference I make out of various experiences of spirit, some my own and some related to me by others (sometimes impersonally, in books). I firmly believe based on these that the human body (including brain and mind) is more than a mere (consequence of a) biological entity; that it has spiritual components which can separate from it, most likely surviving the death of the biological body. This suggests a design to life, and a layer of reality which exists "independently" of "material" existence, and which precedes it (again, granting that this "spiritual" vs "material" dichotomy is a somewhat unwieldy one, especially given my lack of knowledge by which to cut a fine distinction, or even to clearly explain the nature of "the spiritual").

When you refer to an "initial creating out of nothing", I want to make it clear that I have no definite cosmological beliefs beyond the inference that spirit precedes the material. In particular I'm not sure of the origins of spirit nor how it created the material. Especially, I don't posit the spiritual to solve the problem of origins: I'm aware that from a purely logical perspective, that only defers that problem.
Pye wrote:It could be said, Laird, that things have properties to them, but only if these phenomena are played out in existence, are manifest as properties. It could be said that it takes certain circumstances (causes/conditions) for properties to display themselves, but this only happens in tandem with those causes/conditions. If this "property" of something never makes an appearance, how can we assume such a "property" exists in the phenomena?

It's like this: here's a very very heavy object. Just this object itself, all by itself. You might say of such a thing it has the property of gravity to it (inside" it? "hidden"? etc?). But if there is no space for the weight of this object to bend, or no other objects to slide toward it, then where exactly does this "property" reside?
Unfortunately, you picked a bad example, because an object's gravity acts upon the object itself as much as upon other objects. Perhaps a better example is that of a broken circuit in which we ask whether any electric properties of the circuit truly exist "within" the circuit until the circuit is closed. It's still not all that good an example, though, because the concepts of electric fields and electric potentials are well developed.

In any case, I think I understand what you mean. I also think, though, that your objection to properties is a mostly semantic one that might be solved semantically. Usually, we talk of things having properties "to them", or about things "having" properties, or simply about the properties "of" things: in other words properties are "possessed" by things. Perhaps, between you and I, we might agree to talk, instead of possessed properties, about "associated" properties: in other words to say that a property is "associated with" a thing rather than "possessed by" it. So, we would say not that gravity is a property "of" your very very heavy object, but instead that gravity is "associated with" that object. I think that this would ameliorate your objection because associations don't connote permanence in the way that possessiveness does, and nor do they imply that the property can be found "within" the object as possessiveness does: instead, we could simply say that the association is "active" when your "certain circumstances (causes/conditions)" apply (e.g. when the very very heavy object is attracting other objects to it), and inactive otherwise. What do you think?

This is compatible with the notion of a human template because, as I stated in an earlier post, it is possible to deviate from the template (as opposed to from a "fixed" nature).

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 12:38 am
by Pye
Laird:
What makes you think I believe what I believe because I want to make existence more valuable to myself? That's not how I form my beliefs. :-)
For now, Laird, and for myself, I find it nearly impossible to separate values-held from beliefs.
So how do you form your beliefs?
Dennis:
I had a dream.
then perhaps do not go gentle into that good night . . . rage, rage against the past tense of your verb . . . .

You know, Dennis, when I think about our situation and the possibilities of reason; when I think of reason's capacities, qualities, its playing-out similar to your self; when I think of the results of such a curriculum, an education, where one has always the possibility of fluid understanding with self and other, well, pardon me if it seems to look so much, seems to resemble the movements-of, the concrete actions-of; seems overall, this reason, this understanding, this possibility, well, it seems to me to be pointing to nothing other than love . . . . in its profoundest expression of inter-relationality, being-with . . . .

The Musty Odor

Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 2:31 am
by Tomas
Diebert van Rhijn wrote:I think the best advice ever given to you at this forum was - surprisingly perhaps - from retiring Tomas: here, here and elsewhere: to move to Israel. But what is the connection to the above? Does it need explaining? I hate to do the think work for others.
The 'retiring' doesn't take place until July 20th, 2012. At that time, the only posting (infrequent, at best) will be on Worldly Matters. The Genius side is overrun with has-beens and wannabe's.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 5:51 am
by Dennis Mahar
You know, Dennis, when I think about our situation and the possibilities of reason; when I think of reason's capacities, qualities, its playing-out similar to your self; when I think of the results of such a curriculum, an education, where one has always the possibility of fluid understanding with self and other, well, pardon me if it seems to look so much, seems to resemble the movements-of, the concrete actions-of; seems overall, this reason, this understanding, this possibility, well, it seems to me to be pointing to nothing other than love . . . . in its profoundest expression of inter-relationality, being-with . . . .
Love has got those connotations of clinging and attachment and strings attached, so that won't do.

What we're after is an immaculate conception.
(how the christians confused that with sex is another story).

An immaculate conception has gathered all the viewpoints unto itself,
the mood or 'felt sense' is admiration.
the play of causality is revealed,
how this got that and the reason for it,
and how it got tangled and there really isn't a reason that stands out as realistic enough to justify the necessity of the entanglement.
except what was missing was an immaculate conception.

it's astonishing how things get screwed up when something gets misunderstood.
it's astonishing how things clear up when something is understood.

In the context of Dasein, a condition that feels stuff,
the 'felt sense' of admiration,
gets a detachment,
the fingers get out of the pie,
and there's a looking on,
and an amazement of 'how could it be'.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 10:36 am
by Pye
Dennis: Love has got those connotations of clinging and attachment and strings attached, so that won't do.
okay, what if we were to take these very qualities you mention - clinging, attachment, strings, etc. - and de-fang them of their pejorative implications . . . sort of set aside the buddhist-speak for a moment, the confused worry over this . . . and see these as descriptive qualities to a phenomenon, rather than prescriptive ones. What we're looking at then is a phenomenon that pulls things together, holds things together, even sticks things together, however temporally. We could think of it happening between people, but why stop there? Isn't this same attraction phenomenon - this pulling towards, this attaching and clinging that holds a world together at all, attracts molecules to hold into a thing, however temporal, holds space as space, pulls into form any phenomena at all (and here, we will be de-fanging "form" of its negative prescription as well); in short, what other phenomenon pulls together things and people ever disclosing being in its infinite forms (and in the case of humans, the behaviour itself results in the creation of more human-being, animals, fauna, all re-production) . . . at any rate, you get where this can be taken.

Correcting, devaluing appearance, the temporal, would go hand-in-hand with correcting, devaluing love as phenomena.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 12:03 pm
by Dennis Mahar
I get 'love' as a mutual admiration society.

how do you keep the mutual mutualing.
To commit and generate for the time being in the face of all things pass.
To have it not break down.

what's needed is an immaculate conception.

As David implies, nonduality is the immaculate conception.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 12:27 pm
by Pye
Dennis:
how do you keep the mutual mutualing.
To commit and generate for the time being in the face of all things pass.
To have it not break down.
well, perhaps you don't. One's life is temporal as well, yet all this passing's just a clearing for something else. These things do not strike me as occasions to pout :) quite the opposite. Frankly frank, I think most folks are in bad faith with themselves when they remand the temporal to the nothing/why bother. I think most are lying when they declare of no-value something that infuses their every moment with its perfect piquancy, its nearby breath. I think most people already know how rising and passing makes wonder to wonder-about, and without this, how shall infinity be posited at all?

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 12:46 pm
by Dennis Mahar
'emptiness' doesn't remand the temporal to the nothing/why bother.

on the contrary actually.
it just 'gets' form as arising out of causes/conditions.
'gets' form as possibilities.
what's next.

things thinging.

Since every existent is dependent upon antecedent factors for its existence, which in turn derive their existence from factors external to themselves, nothing in existence is independent, unconditioned by others. According to shunyata theory, all things are empty of a self-nature, essenceless. It is emptiness which permeates all phenomena and makes their existence and development possible. Sunyata is untainted by duality.


emptiness realization is recognized as being a necessary precondition to enlightenment but only as a precondition.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 7:18 pm
by guest_of_logic
Pye wrote:For now, Laird, and for myself, I find it nearly impossible to separate values-held from beliefs.
Certainly I would agree with you when it comes to moral and ethical beliefs, or more generally any belief that can be formed as a statement of "should" or "ought", for example political beliefs such as "Party [xyz] ought to govern our country", or social beliefs such as "People should not kiss romantically in public".

I understood, though, that we were talking about fact-based beliefs (i.e. beliefs that we would describe as "knowledge" if we gained enough confidence in, or proof for, them), and facts are true independently of whether or not (and how) we value them.
Pye wrote:So how do you form your beliefs?
By experiencing, observing, reading and generally gathering data/evidence, and then evaluating what the most likely implications of all of that are. It's not easy! Experiences and data can be confusing and seemingly contradictory, not to mention that it's sometimes difficult to judge the trustworthiness of third-party data. It's a challenge to develop a consistent set of beliefs in this way. And, of course, the evaluation is partly subjective, which isn't to say that it's based on values, but there may be a tenuous link there: perhaps there are "predicates" or at least antecedents common to both one's values and the subjectivity in one's evaluative processes. Perhaps this is something like what you meant.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 1:21 am
by Dennis Mahar
what's the point of a belief?
what is it for?
what does it do?

can the distinction be drawn between a mind formatting a belief and the belief a mind formatted.

surely one doesn't have a belief, one is fallen into the belief, one becomes the belief.
and that belief fronts up to 'what is' prejudicially and afflictive emotions are experienced.

there's no hope of conscious contact through the narrowing of consciousness that an ingrained belief structure entails.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 5:31 am
by Diebert van Rhijn
guest_of_logic wrote:By experiencing, observing, reading and generally gathering data/evidence, and then evaluating what the most likely implications of all of that are. It's not easy! Experiences and data can be confusing and seemingly contradictory, not to mention that it's sometimes difficult to judge the trustworthiness of third-party data. It's a challenge to develop a consistent set of beliefs in this way. And, of course, the evaluation is partly subjective, which isn't to say that it's based on values, but there may be a tenuous link there: perhaps there are "predicates" or at least antecedents common to both one's values and the subjectivity in one's evaluative processes. Perhaps this is something like what you meant.
Now will be a good time to describe your communication with the spirits and how you derived existence and validation from a set of subjective experiences. In many cases the details are crucial in understanding the kind of evaluation at work. For example one could go through many subsequent steps to arrive at an evaluation but if one crucial error is made along the way, all other steps will be just as erroneous as the one relatively small misstep. This is a harsh law of logic.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 6:47 am
by Bobo
Can you state how have you arrived at this law of logic?

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 7:33 am
by Pye
Dennis:
what's the point of a belief?
what is it for?
what does it do?
This you have said here is not a non-point of view, or a non-belief, non-viewpoint, non-gathering, or any other non-what-have-you at all. One cannot think this belief about beliefs is of nothing or of no point itself, so you can look into what this very thought is doing-for you, the what's-the-pointing of itself in yourself for your answer. I don't know, maybe this thought, or rather, the belief it's grounded upon helps keep you from imploding or something? - sounds "right" about the world to you? - what's it's what-ness, Dennis, because it can't be nothing . . . .
Dennis: there's no hope of conscious contact through the narrowing of consciousness that an ingrained belief structure entails.
*see above :)
Pye: So how do you form your beliefs?
Laird: By experiencing, observing, reading and generally gathering data/evidence, and then evaluating what the most likely implications of all of that are.
O poohbear-bother, now we are compelled to analytics :) This you describe sounds like a process of reason and not one of belief. When you ask that I (we) try imagining causalities unknown or contradictory to the ones we know, or things potentially existing before there are things, or pure spirit behind and bringing into being the world, well, we don't seem to have those kinds of avenues open to these kinds of destinations. Perhaps what you speak of is rather of faith than reason, and faith needn't be subjecting itself to logics, guested or otherwise, by the nature of the leap. That said, I am aware you could mean your beliefs to rest upon data/evaluation not as beliefs at all, but as . . . . knowledge? So for you, knowledge = beliefs? . . . just asking. It'd be important to have that clear :)

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 8:10 am
by guest_of_logic
Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Now will be a good time to describe your communication with the spirits and how you derived existence and validation from a set of subjective experiences. In many cases the details are crucial in understanding the kind of evaluation at work. For example one could go through many subsequent steps to arrive at an evaluation but if one crucial error is made along the way, all other steps will be just as erroneous as the one relatively small misstep. This is a harsh law of logic.
I see no point in rehashing what's been done to death already. I had withdrawn from that conversation, remember? It's all on the record, and I have no problem with Pye reading through it if she hasn't done so already. It's all perfectly reasonable. Subjective experiences are legitimate ways to derive knowledge of existence - after all, the only way I know you exist is through subjective experience. Even so, I also presented third-party corroboration of experiences like my own and my interpretation of them.

That you are in denial of spiritual reality even after purportedly reading hundreds of books on the subject - I mean, really, what kind of books were these that you don't even recognise the basics? - and supposedly having many remarkable experiences is hardly my fault, and I have no desire to resume a conversation based in your denial.
Pye wrote:That said, I am aware you could mean your beliefs to rest upon data/evaluation not as beliefs at all, but as . . . . knowledge? So for you, knowledge = beliefs? . . . just asking. It'd be important to have that clear :)
Was it not clear enough from my previous post? To recap: I distinguished moral and ethical and generally "should" and "ought" based beliefs from fact-based beliefs, and defined fact-based beliefs as those that we would refer to as knowledge were we to gain sufficient proof of, or confidence in, them. In other words, to make it completely clear, those of my fact-based beliefs that I described as arising out of data/evaluation are different in my mind from knowledge only in that I'm not (yet) confident enough in them (i.e. don't have what I consider to be enough proof for such a thing) to refer to them as such.

Just two other points:

1) I have never asked you to try to imagine "things potentially existing before there are things". That has always been your framing, and one that I have called out as unrepresentative of my position from the start.

2) Re "causalities unknown or contradictory to the ones we know": I'd ask you to be specific about how the notion of spirit preceding matter is contradictory to what we "know", and how it is that we know what you think it is that we know.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 9:25 am
by Dennis Mahar
Pye,
This you have said here is not a non-point of view, or a non-belief, non-viewpoint, non-gathering, or any other non-what-have-you at all. One cannot think this belief about beliefs is of nothing or of no point itself, so you can look into what this very thought is doing-for you, the what's-the-pointing of itself in yourself for your answer. I don't know, maybe this thought, or rather, the belief it's grounded upon helps keep you from imploding or something? - sounds "right" about the world to you? - what's it's what-ness, Dennis, because it can't be nothing . . . .
the recognition of emptiness is this way.
form is empty (causes/conditions)
empty is empty because there can only be empty where there is form.

belief, being form is empty of inherent existence,
because it lacks inherent existence,
it's ultimately delusional,
has no absolute existence.

We've reached a stalemate Pye.

This statement:
I think most folks are in bad faith with themselves when they remand the temporal to the nothing/why bother. I think most are lying when they declare of no-value something that infuses their every moment with its perfect piquancy, its nearby breath.
That's a belief you hold.

Recognition of emptiness disappears afflictive emotions.
In the recognition of emptiness, freedom from afflictive emotions is the new way of being.

let's come at it the other way,
if our target became 'free of afflictive emotions',
surely we'd have to study our conceptual designations, our mental formations.

illumined mind means non-conceptual mind and the accompanying freedom from constrictive emotion.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 11:21 am
by Pye
Laird: is more than a mere (consequence of a) biological entity; that it has spiritual components which can separate from it, most likely surviving the death of the biological body. This suggests a design to life, and a layer of reality which exists "independently" of "material" existence, and which precedes it (again, granting that this "spiritual" vs "material" dichotomy is a somewhat unwieldy one, especially given my lack of knowledge by which to cut a fine distinction, or even to clearly explain the nature of "the spiritual").

I suspect that you probably wouldn't even recognise/acknowledge/accept the types of energy/matter that I would refer to as "spiritual existence" - not that I'm by any means knowledgeable about them myself.
pardon, Laird. I guess I got tangled in these.
Dennis:
This statement:
(etc.)
That's a belief you hold.
I'm okay with that, Dennis.

We've not reached any stalemate, but I have reached that time I work towards all year - 4 unplugged weeks of deep woods hiking with the philosopher I love.

Gon out
Backson
Bisy
Backson . . . .

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 11:50 am
by Dennis Mahar
4 unplugged weeks of deep woods hiking with the philosopher I love
.

brilliant!
love that!
as good as it gets!

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 11:56 am
by Pye
:) (thanks, mate)

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 12:36 pm
by Dennis Mahar
bliss.
see ya' later.

Re: The Mystic....

Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 1:29 pm
by Jamesh
Good thread this one.

I scan read it, and there were lots of points I know I should go back and review properly (I'm closest to Pye's point of view on most things she says) - whether I will or not is another question.

Pye - Last time I was out hiking I meet the guy below and I asked him if he was high, he responded:
http://i.imgur.com/m1C1E.gif