James wrote:
This is true. My mind continues to be very flowy. I flit from one thing to the next - but is it this way because I do not have as many solid attachments as others? I'm still learning, growing (I hope).
This is my initial response. What is your opinion?
I think you look for ways to philosophize in a distracted, indirect manner and people like Tumbleman suit that kind of purpose for you.
I just can't see how you are being rational relative to the circumstances. If you want wisdom to survive then you must work to create a world that humans can survive in, one of the first steps should be to remove the massive distraction of petty conflict. Nor quite frankly do I accept the boredom reason, I think you talked yourself into being bored.
It's the truth. You couldn't even call it a conversation, really. I wanted to talk about Reality, the Infinite, the spiritual path, getting rid of the ego, etc, and he just wanted to talk about the new telephone he's invented.
I think David is making a fundamental error in his decision that his sort of wisdom is what is required at the moment. He is far too idealistic.
It's a matter of priorities. Wisdom is probably beyond the reach of most people in the world today, but I believe there are still many thousands of individuals who can awaken to it. And so I have chosen to devote my energy to them, rather than try to enlighten the human race at large. Given this purpose, it is perfectly reasonable that I behave in the way that I behave and reject the sort of surface political methodologies that Tumbleman proposes.
In being idealistic he is making the “error of relative free-willâ€. While he doesn’t cognitively believe in free-will in any way, underneath he must, otherwise he would be rational rather than idealistic.
I am indeed being rational, given the goal I have chosen.
What he seems to believe in is relative-free will. He recognises that ultimately there is no free will, yet he spends his life trying to achieve just that. Enlightenment is a form of relative free will – it is relative to other humans.
More accurately, enlightenment is a form of freedom. It doesn't increase your free-will in any way, due to the fact that we don't have any to begin with, but it does free you from the unpleasantness of false thinking and suffering.
On the other hand, enlightenment does provide you with far more possibilities and choices, because you are no longer bound by the kind of debilitating fears which cause most people to put up their mental barriers and shrink away from life.
He is saying that he is free from the affect of emotions and of irrationality and thus has a higher, more noble consciousness. He says that they free themselves from irrationality and in the process free themselves from the binds of strong causes such as morality, conventions, conformity, mental barriers. Is a mind with less barriers of the nature of a freer will? (Ultimately it isn’t, it is one that is just based on memory and the brains CPU).
The enlightened mind is free of conventions and mental barriers, but bound by the dictates of logic and truth. So in a sense, it doesn't experience any increase in freedom at all. It merely changes its shackles.
It is NOT a higher form of consciousness, but merely a different form – it has a different mode of operation. If it was a higher form than he would have to call himself a mystic, which he doesn’t.
It is higher according to my set of values - higher even than mysticism.
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