Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Philosophy Club

[Stoppelmann]

oops ...

[Parsifal]

With Zen, we in the West have problems with our logic, that is true, because we think linearly and causally, and with the prejudice of predefined ideas. We have to learn to not think, which is something that we occasionally experience when we take our mind off of a problem we were deliberating on, doing something completely different, or our mind is completely passive, and suddenly an understanding is there. This is similar to the enlightenment of Zen, but probably poorly explained.
[/quote]

Thank you very much for your sparing precious time to my request. I think I could understand what you meant almost all except the following message:

I find that we are distracted by so many things that we need the cushion (or chair) in solitude to suspend that distraction increasingly, until it becomes a way of life.

This sentence is supposed to be a little bit too metaphoric for a non-native English speaker like me understand well. As a result of having read yours, I felt like you saw Buddhism as a kind of the thoughtful manner as way of life rather than a religion as you mentioned. Nonetheless, I was so impressed with your possessing profound knowledge in Buddhism by glancing at your some of words. So far I have exchanged an opinion on the same theme with western people a few times and I felt a similar impression as yours for their having quite deep knowledge about Buddhism. To my guess, some of those people are not Buddhist like you, who are in position to have rather discretional, rational and analytical view on Buddhism to the contrary. And this is the most significant difference in religious view between westerners and easterners, I guess. As you know well, D.T. Suzuki repeatedly stressed an essence to learn Buddhism via intuition and experience instead of anything in writing and words, namely as causally and linearly in case of using your phrases. You seemed to notice this point well.

To learn this point more in detail, I have once asked Hereandnow for it and then he recommended me to check Hussar's material. While I studied Hussar's, I came to encounter Wittgenstein's by chance. Soon after reading it, I felt this is just what I looked for. As to view toward a role of language, those of Suzuki and Wittgenstein are just vice versa, I learned. All things considered, it is fundamentally impossible for both peoples to share an identity view toward a religion, isn't it?

[Stoppelmann]

Thank you very much for your sparing precious time to my request. I think I could understand what you meant almost all except the following message:

I find that we are distracted by so many things that we need the cushion (or chair) in solitude to suspend that distraction increasingly, until it becomes a way of life.

This sentence is supposed to be a little bit too metaphoric for a non-native English speaker like me understand well.

Really, all I am saying is that the distraction that Buddhist teaching warns us about is best suspended by learning not to be so distracted. Meditation (the cushion) is a means to learn that, and with practise, becomes a way of life. You can meditate in any number of situations after a while, which subdues the rising stresses of life, and helps us keep our attention on important things.

As a result of having read yours, I felt like you saw Buddhism as a kind of the thoughtful manner as way of life rather than a religion as you mentioned. Nonetheless, I was so impressed with your possessing profound knowledge in Buddhism by glancing at your some of words. So far I have exchanged an opinion on the same theme with western people a few times and I felt a similar impression as yours for their having quite deep knowledge about Buddhism. To my guess, some of those people are not Buddhist like you, who are in position to have rather discretional, rational and analytical view on Buddhism to the contrary. And this is the most significant difference in religious view between westerners and easterners, I guess. As you know well, D.T. Suzuki repeatedly stressed an essence to learn Buddhism via intuition and experience instead of anything in writing and words, namely as causally and linearly in case of using your phrases. You seemed to notice this point well.

Thank you. I used the “Manual of Zen Buddhism” that Suzuki wrote to help me, which is online here: https://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/mzb/mzb00.htm, as well as the more well-known “Essays.” It is the fact that Buddhism isn’t concentrated on a “saviour” figure, but that Buddha is revered as the teacher who is showing you your own nature that gave me a new interest in Christianity, where the mistake seems to be ignoring that nature, or even finding it to be “nothing good” rather than distracted and therefore missing the mark.

Of course, the teaching is directed to the bodhisattva who is on the path to enlightenment. I am encouraged by the realization that there are signs that one is a bodhisattva "in the making." That is if you feel a strong calling to help, guide and/or uplift others, if you often feel intense pain for the suffering of the planet (including plants, animals, ecosystems and humanity as a whole), if you are a highly sensitive person and empathic, if the path of kindness of heart appeals to you more than the path of attentiveness, if you have a strong affinity for the archetype of the wounded healer, if you are by nature a generous and devoted person (your deepest fulfilment comes when you serve), and if you have experienced some kind of spiritual awakening. Much of this sentiment is found in Christianity as well.

To learn this point more in detail, I have once asked Hereandnow for it and then he recommended me to check Hussar's material. While I studied Hussar’s, I came to encounter Wittgenstein's by chance. Soon after reading it, I felt this is just what I looked for. As to view toward a role of language, those of Suzuki and Wittgenstein are just vice versa, I learned. All things considered, it is fundamentally impossible for both peoples to share an identity view toward a religion, isn't it?

I, too, have been advised to read about Husserl's encounter with Buddhism. He seems to praise the Buddhist attitude as overcoming worldly interests, and saw it to be comparable to his own transcendental phenomenological attitude. It seems that for a while he had hope that the Buddhist scriptures could be an ethical-religious source for cultural renewal, but in his final judgment, Buddhism does not satisfy his requirements of a genuine universal philosophy. However, I have read Schopenhauer, who is definitely closer to oriental thought and seems to follow The Way of the Bodhisattva (Bodhicharyavatara) in much of his thought in On The Basis of Morality, to be found in The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer where, as well as the Buddhist aspects, the Hindu and Christian aspects of his philosophy are recorded, as well as the importance of asceticism and his views on how best to live.

I definitely think that all wisdom teaching can help us understand what it is to be human, and point to the transcendental, which has various facets, like the colours of the rainbow that reflect from a prism.

[thrasymachus]

A little lengthy in the following. Oh well.

Stoppelmann wrote
Following the leads that you have given has slowed my response to this post considerably. Additionally, the last few days I have been using the better weather to do more garden work and observe the birds and smaller animals frequent our garden for seed or nuts, and observe the progress that the plants are making as spring is approaching. My garden is no Japanese garden with its precision and beauty, but I am heartened by the story of the Zen Master who observed the gardener keeping his garden immaculate, and went to the tree in the middle, shook the tree as hard as he could so that leaves fell all around, and said, “Now it is perfect!”

I have that kind of feeling when it comes to our discussion about the reality of things, especially with the catastrophe in Turkey and Syria in mind, where it is all about survival in the face of the unpredictability of nature. Even worse, the suffering at the hands of malevolent forces like in those countries where war is raging. Preserving equanimity in the face of such loss requires at the very least the acknowledgement that suffering that nature and our fellow human beings cause is often capricious, and the groan or cry of pain the only release that is understandable. It is then helpful to have a noble path to orientate oneself upon.

I look at it like this: Shaking the tree is a refusal to impose structure. Kierkegaard saw this first in his discussion of innocence:

n this state there is peace and repose, but at the same time there is something else, something that is not dissension and strife, for there is nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. (Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety)


The Zen master would not have put things like this, I know. But to me, the enigmatic ways of Zen are all questions at the basic level, and the Zen Buddhist position is, as you said earlier, an entirely open affair. The final yogic move (yoga: what yokes the self to, call it affective-transcendence) is conceptual or interpretative freedom, that is, freedom from the implicit control culture and the habits of language have on one. To see the sun, and realize at the perceptual level that what is there really is not the sun at all, that this before you is an actuality that entirely exceeds the language assigned to it, and that the whole world is like this, what Michel Henry calls a pure pathos, but much more really, which I won't try to say here.

The nothing is an odd concept to us in a world where there is presumption everywhere, but K is looking for origins of our collective troubled sleep, which I will say here goes like this: the crises of our time are personal, as global affairs are reducible to the personal; I mean, what is happening in Turkey should not be deflated to a statistic. It is only understood clearly in the intensity of lived suffering, and this is an event that is existential, a truly lived crisis in suffering, which can only be realized in a qualitative "leap" of compassion and empathy. And this crisis has no foundation. One asks why am I suffering?, and there is nothing.

I argue, suffering insists on metaphysical redemption, and happiness insists on metaphysical consummation. But this world is absent of both. This is just a way of saying, observe in a "leap" of empathetic compassion (not a redundant phrase here as empathy refers to the effort to imagine what the literal suffering would be like) what it would be like to, as vividly as possible (for isn't this simply the way a scientist proceeds, observing carefully and objectively? Just because it is not publicly demonstrable doesn't make it any less poignantly "there"), say, be told you will be tortured tomorrow morning, and there would be thumb screws and the like. Metaphysics puts this affair into an absolute context, Kierkegaard's "nothing". The question then is this: Can the suffering stand alone against the backdrop of nothing? Or, is there not required by intuition some kind of redemption, or resolution, deliverance, justification, and so on? I say, suffering as such a stand alone phenomenon is impossible.

For me, meditation is for a number of things, and it does not conform with normal Buddhist praxis. As an introvert, it literally heightens my well-being by reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, and even regenerating brain cells. There is also the act of listening to silence is an opening to the whisper of the “spirit” of wholeness, which for others may be God. It is an act of surrender, which is completed with contemplation and metta meditation, and ending with a chant or singing. It is an opening for whatever wisdom there may be to receive by turning towards the mystery of existence. It sharpens the senses, and it frees the mind.

I certainly won't argue against any of this. But I want to look at the actual meditative event itself, and in this, putting almost every concept that would make a claim on it in suspension. There one sits, so what is the nature, the simple descriptive features that define what is going on? In this kind of assessment, one usually fails to see that its most essential feature is time: We tend to spatialize time in that our references to events around us are only cast in terms of time if time is the theme laid out, as when one inquires when or how long. Usually, we think of things like brain cells and the sharpening of experience, as you do, and I as well, but we fail to see that ALL such things are essentially temporal constructs first, and this is, from both an methodological position as well as an analytical one, critical. Analytically, there is no object in the usual sense, for when we ask what such a thing IS, we are faced with the event of its being taken up cognitively and affectively. Here is the point: To speak as if there is an object, a thing that is there independently of time, is to speak in terms of pure nonsense, for such a thing not only has never been witnessed, it is unwitnessable, for the moment one conceives it at all, it IS the time matrix of our existence's experience. Not simply IN this matrix, but IS it, for this is the very nature of something being at all. Methodologically, because once one understands that meditation as an annihilative temporal event, then all attention is on this mechanism.

Time is existence. Things are not in time, rather, things ARE time. This cup is an event. I see the cup, the past rises up to respond, telling me things my experiential education possesses about cups, their properties, contexts, and so on. What is "before me" is really an historical event, and I, in the occurrent unfolding, stand apart from any possible identity the past might want to assign. Or, I CAN do this. Usually people don't, obviously. When I drive I am not second guessing everything. I just drive from rote memory, and the entire process is not reviewed. We all generally live our lives like this, allowing the past simply to "create" a future without my contribution. Phenomenology declares the present moment to be the
moment", if there is such a thing, we are capable of stepping OUT of this flow of past into future, altogether, in a sense. This is our freedom. The future is "nothing". And the past is an historical fact, of sorts.

Apologies for the drawn out explanation (found in Husserl, Heidegger) but this is critical in the way I think about meditation and the world. The world is "made" in a temporal human existence, which, and any given moment finds itself on the precipice of a "nothing" and if one understands this, one can freely choose which things shall be affirmed, literally a "world making" event. Meditation terminates this process, when it is successful and serious. What unfolds in the annihilation of the world-making enterprise is not a nothing! It is divinity. This is why Sanskrit and Pali have all of those terms for what is heavenly, divine, supernatural, profound, and the rest. Indian thinking (not the narratives which are about a lot of myths and stories) has always produced language like this. Ultimate reality

This relates to what I said above, where the badness is just bad, whether a natural catastrophe or war, and any attempt to find utility in it grates on our sensibility and causes a resistance in us. Silence is better than any attempt to find words. Compassionate action is the only response available, whether it is to embrace or to assist, relieve or shoulder a burden. But ethics also says where I come from, what is normal amongst my people. Many people forget this aspect, especially in politics, but you often see it in the reaction of people rejecting a group of people on the grounds of the behaviour of one of them.

I agree that it is futile to argue why something, or someone is good or bad. To start with, it just is. Happiness is too spontaneous, and its trigger can be so diverse. I think a toothache does give itself to analysis, however.

Silence does seem to be the only way to analytically respect the ontology of suffering and happiness as they are unanalyzable givens. Wittgenstein knew this. But again, how do we take this up philosophically? We go to the most basic level, where people don't ask question, but just assume. Terrible things unfold, but what is it for something to be a terrible thing at all? Of course, I just said silence is justified. But at least we have to allow the question in order to isolate and affirm what it is we are being silent about, for this mysterious notion of happiness is a stand alone condition of the world, and it carries an authority that transcends laws and principles that we establish for ourselves, because it is presupposed by these laws, is the essential Real that these principles are all about.

This, I argue, is what is missed in the analysis of ethics (metaethics). Most look and see a world that is reducible to an ethical nihilism, but this comes from the contrived premise that all theodicies fail. Well, they do fail, but this is because they are made to fail by insisting on an anthropomorphic God, one who is "the Greatest possible Being" and so on. A wonderful book on getting to the heart of this matter is John Caputo's The Weakness of God. My take is that SINCE analysis shows our ethics to be grounded in an absolute, THEREFORE, our actual ethical entanglements are grounded in an absolute.

Comparative studies attempt to find a common denominator that some might consider something absolute, but it is absolute in the sense that it serves as the basis for our existence or for determining the essential structure of benevolent habits and their limitations. Scriptures are usually pointing in a direction, with the intention of awakening insight rather than giving instructions, and sometimes the negative examples are misunderstood.

"Essential structure of benevolent habits and their limitations" is an excellent way to start. Essential? This takes us to what the essence in question actually is. One could do a comparative analysis to discover common features in disparate cultures, and call these features essential, which is certainly right. This is what science does; it is the consistency and the repeatable results that work into the equations of our practical world.

But metaethics, introduces another kind of absolute entirely. It is an absolute that issues from the actual "presence" itself, and it is far stronger, what is called a priori. Consider causality itself: it is not an empirical argument that says effects are preceded by causes. Rather, one cannot even imagine the opposite. It is an intuitive affair. And of course, logic itself has this, but note how logic's apriority is in the abstract (putting aside objections for now), but causality is very different: it is something IN the world. This cup will not move by itself, for it is, as they say, an apodictic impossibility (Kant was all about this in his synthetic apriori discussion. A very worthy read). This is the kind of absolute discussed here, and "in the fabric of things" absolute.

Ethics is like this. I shouldn't do harm because harm is in its very definition, intuitively prohibited. It is an intuitive law, if you will (you know, the way the Ten Commandments were meant to be). But because all of our affairs are so entangled, judgment about ethics is always messy. Philosophers tend, strongly so, to say these entanglements are all there is too it. They are afraid to affirm a metaethical absolute because they are rather blind. Big issue. fascinating.

As you can see from what I have written above, my practise isn’t pure Buddhism, and the quote above is enlightening, but beyond my experience. For me, attaining Nirvana in this way demands a separation from everyday life, as a bhiksu or bhikkhu, which would mean that we wouldn’t be having this conversation. As a lay person, neither the stringent role of a monk in Christianity or Buddhism is my daily practise, but rather an observation of the lessons to be learnt in each tradition.

The existence that I am therefore referring to is experienced existence, rather than everything in existence.

But experiential existence IS everything. This is not solipsistic at all. Long discussion.

Well, I think we could be having this conversation regardless. I am not a Buddhist in the traditional sense at all. In fact, I am quite confident I understand the meditative event better than Buddhists do, simply because understanding is about what we SAY. My cat "sees" cars go by, but her understanding?, well, she "knows" for she has a memory, and seeing such things again will be familiar. But she does not have language as a tool for analysis, needed to move beyond this. Language is a tool. Successful meditation takes one to a profound state of contentment, as if the world sits still and one finally sees they never really had been seeing the world at all because they were so busy in the their entangled thoughts and feelings (Heidegger, btw, calls this entanglement dasein); but it is language that allows one to see and work through, and discriminate, and clarify, and so on. This is philosophy's job. No doubt, the greatest Buddhists ever (take Thich Quang Duc, the one who self immolated in Vietnam in protest) could not tell ABOUT what they do like Husserl's thinking could. Husserl couldn't either, of course. He was an intellectual, but his analyses are deeply penetrating, and he is talking exactly about the world a Buddhist encounters when things are removed from their many distracting contexts.

Like spiritual exploration, philosophical exploration shows the fly the way out of the bottle. This is a form of enlightenment and is referred to (with deliberate paradoxical intent) as ‘beginner’s mind’ in the Zen tradition: the freshness of insight before intellectualising dimmed it. At the end of his career, Husserl admitted that ‘the first result of reflection is to bring us back into the presence of the world as we lived it before our reflection began (Lebenswelt)’.
Reality is rich and complex, and I have suggested that part of it is always hidden from us. This is not just my take: it was, in different ways what Bacon meant when he said that ‘the subtlety of Nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding’, what Heraclitus meant by saying that ‘Nature loves to hide’, what Einstein meant by ‘Nature hides her secrets’, and what Heidegger meant by ‘the clearing in which Being stands is itself at the same time concealment’.

McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (pp. 869-870). Perspectiva Press.
I feel that this seems to be the problem we have today and can confuse us and others through over-intellectualising. I think that this is the reason that ancient traditions tried to invoke insight in people through their stories, rather than instruct them. Even Buddhism lives from anecdote and allegory. We need to come “back into the presence of the world” after our reflections.

Too many issues in this. One could spend a lifetime just talking about nature, the sensibility, the understanding, etc. I will take the opposite point of view here from your thoughts: It is not in the open narrative that discovery occurs. Sure, one can be led, inspired and motivated, but the real task to understanding requires is clarity and efficiency, Occam's' Razor efficiency that eliminates the superfluity of the narrative and tries to see directly at what is there. Christianity and all of the popular religions are just this superfluity, and you know, I am quite sure Saint Francis and others did indeed have deep relations with God. I actually believe this. But I don't read what they said with any hope of being enlightened by it. The understanding wants something else, and it wants to be free of the frailties and naivety of narrative, and this comes in intuition and analysis, the only means of discovery we have.

[thrasymachus]

Belindi wrote
The subject is what must be studied next, after subjectivity. I'm puzzled by "Cartesian leap" ; the subject in cogito is taken for granted in cogito ergo sum. Nobody can seriously dispute that existence is happening, but that it's happening to an essential thing such as a subject is uncertain. I don't believe in essences . I thought not believing in essences is what the sage who wrote the Zen tract, that you copied and translated, was asserting. Not so?

It is a very big issue. Terms you use all need attention, and this just the kind of thing that makes philosophy so maddening: It is very hard to agree as to what basic ideas even are, especially after centuries of metaphysics. It is not like the empirical sciences, here there are clear paradigm shifts, as they say. No, philosophers are still talking about Plato. Heidegger wrote about Plato, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and he found his inspiration in the Greeks!

This, I argue, is all because philosophy is, essentially, religious inquiry, because it takes thought to its extremity, where there is encountered metaphysics, and metaphysics doesn't really have any demonstratively repeatable results, the kind of thing empirical science is made of. So religious dogma has ruled by default. But is there no way to objectively approach the issue of religio-philosophical phenomena?

What is an essence? No eye, no ear, no body, and the rest; and an "unobstructed mind" what is this? And this "what is this?" question goes to all that is said in the prajnaparamita. Does this even make sense, since to understand it at all requires the language to do so, and the language with all of its cultural richness and entanglements is certainly not interpretation-free. Just the opposite. This is the complaint about such talk: "Essence" IS the understanding itself. So reports about no eye and the rest must be such that the eye in question need not be an innocent or "pure" eye, for to think at all is to a compromised purity. This doesn't mean at all that the prajnaparamita is wrong; it does mean that we first have to understand that there must be a way to frame this extraordinary experience of "absence".

I can't do this here. All I can provide is this very unwelcome, and brief, analysis: Husserl was right! His phenomenological reduction and the epoche remove from consciousness all that is extraneous to the essential givenness, the intuitive givenness, of the world. What he does in a thesis, Buddhists (serious, meditating Buddhists) do in practice. Meditation literally "stops" the world. What is the world? It is a series of events in time, that ARE time in their nature. Alas, we think of a world independent of the perceptual event, but this is simply nonsense. Wittgenstein knew this; indeed, ALL analytic philosophers know this. They are simply tired of Kant. Kant can be argued about, but never, never is his transcendental idealism refuted. This is simply true. And this means the world as the world is bound to perception and experience. There is absolutely NO way around this.

But meditation's stopping the world doesn't mean nothing happens. The Buddhist still "sees". But she simply does not interpret. This is the goal: to see without the default normalizing functions of mundane experience simply stepping in spontaneously and delivering knowledge claims. Husserl says, if you want to philosophize the world, you have to remove content that is extraneous to the philosophical questions in play, and this is everything, apart from the "thereness" of what is simply present. It is a grand and all embracing Cartesian move to exclude what can be doubted because it does not belong to this residual "left-over" of excluding all knowledge claims.

But you see: Husserl is up the same tree as the Buddhist! Husserl talks about encounters with "pure phenomena" and proceeds to describe what is there (phenomenology is essentially simply descriptive) that cannot be second guessed. This is not the world of science. It is the intuitive world of givenness that underlies and is presupposed by science. And elaborate and lengthy exposition of Kant's simple "concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions with concepts are blind." I see a cup, what is in the perceptual encounter AS a perceptual encounter? There is a structure of time and space. Their is a network of perceptual takes in different perspectives. There is the eidetic intuition of predicatively formed perceptual events, to use his language; and so on. To get to this place where the world is reduced to its essential intuitions, one has to suspend standard knowledge claims. But the tree they are both up: To even think at all about a thing is to bring into mind a body of conceptual understanding that is language that always already holds an interpretative bias; technically when one perceives at all one is IN a language setting, and there is nothing "pure" about this.

On the other hand: Buddhists are not talking about some analytically procured thesis. They are just talking about an extraordinary event in actuality., which is descriptively just what Husserl is talking about. If you take the reduction all the way down the rabbit hole, you get an annihilation of the world and a radical clearing of one's existence, for existence IS just this cluttered world.

And so on. Like I said, not very welcome. The only thing to make ideas like this palatable is the reading of the arguments in their mind boggling and technical elucidations. Why is this a good idea? Because this is the only path to seeing what the Buddhists really mean by enlightenment and liberation. Enlightenment is cognitive, and can be stated propositionally. But then, one has to "see" the world anew for this. This is a liberation: Husserl's epoche is a liberation from knowledge claims that transfix our ordinary everydayness.

[Parsifal]

Of course, the teaching is directed to the bodhisattva who is on the path to enlightenment. I am encouraged by the realization that there are signs that one is a bodhisattva "in the making." That is if you feel a strong calling to help, guide and/or uplift others, if you often feel intense pain for the suffering of the planet (including plants, animals, ecosystems and humanity as a whole), if you are a highly sensitive person and empathic, if the path of kindness of heart appeals to you more than the path of attentiveness, if you have a strong affinity for the archetype of the wounded healer, if you are by nature a generous and devoted person (your deepest fulfilment comes when you serve), and if you have experienced some kind of spiritual awakening. Much of this sentiment is found in Christianity as well.
[/quote]

There seems no room for me to correct or add logically what you said from any viewpoints I know, to be honest. As well, I do not want you to feel skeptical or cynical about my seeing as you inherently so a good person, but you seem indeed a person of loving peace and neighbors compared with me. I have faith to Buddha not so a little but I cannot be such a genuine Buddhist as Gautam Siddhartha said. I sometimes hate my neighbors and feel jealous with people living so peacefully. I also am prone to accept even evil stuffs as being inevitable or a nature's providence. I think this tendency probably deriving from Taoism, especially Zhuangzi's notion of "all things in harmony". As you know, Buddhism was so much affected by this notion, especially Pure Land school and Zen. Whereas Buddhism as a whole regards it essential to see all things equally peaceful with compassion, some parts of its are sometimes seen nihilistic superficially. The detailed reason for it cannot be expressed easily for me at present. However, it may possible to express it with Wittgenstein's term as saying "keep silent against something hard to express by language". This must suggest this kind of notion stays beyond language and we could possibly pick up it in an absurd manner. Sorry for lining up redundant words so much just like absurdly.

[Belindi]

Belindi wrote
The subject is what must be studied next, after subjectivity. I'm puzzled by "Cartesian leap" ; the subject in cogito is taken for granted in cogito ergo sum. Nobody can seriously dispute that existence is happening, but that it's happening to an essential thing such as a subject is uncertain. I don't believe in essences . I thought not believing in essences is what the sage who wrote the Zen tract, that you copied and translated, was asserting. Not so?

It is a very big issue. Terms you use all need attention, and this just the kind of thing that makes philosophy so maddening: It is very hard to agree as to what basic ideas even are, especially after centuries of metaphysics. It is not like the empirical sciences, here there are clear paradigm shifts, as they say. No, philosophers are still talking about Plato. Heidegger wrote about Plato, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and he found his inspiration in the Greeks!

This, I argue, is all because philosophy is, essentially, religious inquiry, because it takes thought to its extremity, where there is encountered metaphysics, and metaphysics doesn't really have any demonstratively repeatable results, the kind of thing empirical science is made of. So religious dogma has ruled by default. But is there no way to objectively approach the issue of religio-philosophical phenomena?

What is an essence? No eye, no ear, no body, and the rest; and an "unobstructed mind" what is this? And this "what is this?" question goes to all that is said in the prajnaparamita. Does this even make sense, since to understand it at all requires the language to do so, and the language with all of its cultural richness and entanglements is certainly not interpretation-free. Just the opposite. This is the complaint about such talk: "Essence" IS the understanding itself. So reports about no eye and the rest must be such that the eye in question need not be an innocent or "pure" eye, for to think at all is to a compromised purity. This doesn't mean at all that the prajnaparamita is wrong; it does mean that we first have to understand that there must be a way to frame this extraordinary experience of "absence".

I can't do this here. All I can provide is this very unwelcome, and brief, analysis: Husserl was right! His phenomenological reduction and the epoche remove from consciousness all that is extraneous to the essential givenness, the intuitive givenness, of the world. What he does in a thesis, Buddhists (serious, meditating Buddhists) do in practice. Meditation literally "stops" the world. What is the world? It is a series of events in time, that ARE time in their nature. Alas, we think of a world independent of the perceptual event, but this is simply nonsense. Wittgenstein knew this; indeed, ALL analytic philosophers know this. They are simply tired of Kant. Kant can be argued about, but never, never is his transcendental idealism refuted. This is simply true. And this means the world as the world is bound to perception and experience. There is absolutely NO way around this.

But meditation's stopping the world doesn't mean nothing happens. The Buddhist still "sees". But she simply does not interpret. This is the goal: to see without the default normalizing functions of mundane experience simply stepping in spontaneously and delivering knowledge claims. Husserl says, if you want to philosophize the world, you have to remove content that is extraneous to the philosophical questions in play, and this is everything, apart from the "thereness" of what is simply present. It is a grand and all embracing Cartesian move to exclude what can be doubted because it does not belong to this residual "left-over" of excluding all knowledge claims.

But you see: Husserl is up the same tree as the Buddhist! Husserl talks about encounters with "pure phenomena" and proceeds to describe what is there (phenomenology is essentially simply descriptive) that cannot be second guessed. This is not the world of science. It is the intuitive world of givenness that underlies and is presupposed by science. And elaborate and lengthy exposition of Kant's simple "concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions with concepts are blind." I see a cup, what is in the perceptual encounter AS a perceptual encounter? There is a structure of time and space. Their is a network of perceptual takes in different perspectives. There is the eidetic intuition of predicatively formed perceptual events, to use his language; and so on. To get to this place where the world is reduced to its essential intuitions, one has to suspend standard knowledge claims. But the tree they are both up: To even think at all about a thing is to bring into mind a body of conceptual understanding that is language that always already holds an interpretative bias; technically when one perceives at all one is IN a language setting, and there is nothing "pure" about this.

On the other hand: Buddhists are not talking about some analytically procured thesis. They are just talking about an extraordinary event in actuality., which is descriptively just what Husserl is talking about. If you take the reduction all the way down the rabbit hole, you get an annihilation of the world and a radical clearing of one's existence, for existence IS just this cluttered world.

And so on. Like I said, not very welcome. The only thing to make ideas like this palatable is the reading of the arguments in their mind boggling and technical elucidations. Why is this a good idea? Because this is the only path to seeing what the Buddhists really mean by enlightenment and liberation. Enlightenment is cognitive, and can be stated propositionally. But then, one has to "see" the world anew for this. This is a liberation: Husserl's epoche is a liberation from knowledge claims that transfix our ordinary everydayness.

If I understand your reply, "Cartesian leap" refers to scepticism but not to Descartes's concluding that extended matter and thought are separate ontological substances.

I don't share your faith that a meditation state of awareness is the Enlightened gateway to truth, goodness and beauty. These transcendent values are cognitively intuited via arts, and as transcendent /Platonic, they overarch all states of mind including meditation awareness.

"An extraordinary event in actuality" is an experience. Including in a state of meditative awareness the subject remains at all times an interstice in Indra's net. The net itself is what the absolute idealist calls absolute experience, of which the sum of temporal experiences are an aspect. If an idealist takes the reduction "all the way down " he is not down any rabbit hole but has taken scepticism as his guide to existence. The world, interpreted as series of events in time, does not reach the sceptic's conclusion which is that existence is no more no less than experience.

Experience is basic enough that it arches above both the absolute and the temporal. Experience is undeniable.Your experience as a successful meditator is true, and my experience as an unsuccessful meditator is true.

Meditation is undeniably therapeutic : we must look to philosophy and the arts for theories of existence.

[thrasymachus]

Belindi wrote
If I understand your reply, "Cartesian leap" refers to scepticism but not to Descartes's concluding that extended matter and thought are separate ontological substances.

But skepticism is a negative concept. Here, one is invited to affirm. Descartes affirmed the cogito as the beginning for affirmation, for it was impossible to doubt (though this certainly has a serious challenge in later though), for there was the "unshakeable conviction of evident truth." Husserl is going to affirm this epistemic move toward an affirmation that moves outward, to all things, objects, thoughts, arithmetic, imaginings, and so forth. He can make this move because of his thesis of intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something. So when we think of the cogito, we already have a cogito relation, and this affirms the relation and its object along with the "I think", which, I should add, is expanded as well, for I do not simply think. I love and hate, discriminate, judge, desire, create, and on and on. Consider the way Husserl put it:

Objects, speaking generally, are not received in doubt at the basic level. I may doubt the sun will rise, but, says Husserl, I cannot doubt this sensation as a sheer presence when I stand before the sun. Presence as presence cannot be epistemically defeated. It is apodictic! Empirical sciences are not apodictic, because these are not based on, call it the simple intuitive revelation. They are discursive, based on habits of thought, wrought out, if you will, of inductively conceived premises. Such is the contingent nature of empirical science. But pure presence, the simple "givenness" of the world is NOT contingent, say Husserl. So it is not a matter different ontologies. All that is given in the world is appearance. Period.

I don't share your faith that a meditation state of awareness is the Enlightened gateway to truth, goodness and beauty. These transcendent values are cognitively intuited via arts, and as transcendent /Platonic, they overarch all states of mind including meditation awareness.

Think of it like falling in love. The beloved has "given" you nothing. And all you experience, all of that six inches off the ground due to the mere presence of a face that could launch a thousand ships it produced within.

The positive claim that meditation actually does produce liberation and enlightenment, in the extraordinary way they say it does, is something that one can only determine independently. I would add that happiness is not to be conceived as an augmentative construct. I mean, it's not like intelligence, say, such that the more text you internalize, synthesize and analyze, the better you are. Happiness is a general state, and a happy person lives in a happy world. When in love, all things bow low to this, all particulars lose their incidental natures. Emerson speaks of being "glad to the brink of fear" walking through a bare common. The point is, if one experiences the world like this, then one can take the Buddhist claim seriously, pursue it, discover the depths of it. Alas, philosophers are among the least inclined to do this, simply because they really don't understand at all what Emerson was talking about. Intellectuals are often mystified by such things and so have no inclination to think like this. Wittgenstein was one of the few who understood Emerson. Nietzsche did, too, though he was too busy fighting illness see clearly.

"An extraordinary event in actuality" is an experience. Including in a state of meditative awareness the subject remains at all times an interstice in Indra's net. The net itself is what the absolute idealist calls absolute experience, of which the sum of temporal experiences are an aspect. If an idealist takes the reduction "all the way down " he is not down any rabbit hole but has taken scepticism as his guide to existence. The world, interpreted as series of events in time, does not reach the sceptic's conclusion which is that existence is no more no less than experience.

Indra's net is a metaphor for hermeneutics (the so called hermeneutic or interpretative circle, which is simply about the contingency of language in the production of meaning) and one cannot get past this. It is Heidegger's complaint. But look: Just because meanings are divided and play against and into each other (I am reading Paul Ricoeur Time and Narrative. He talks about meanings and their metaphorical constructions, e.g.) in a network of possibilities, this in no way precludes any palpable experience. Clearly, language does not "speak" the world. It never did. Derrida holds that language does not stand for the world, but "stands in" for the world. This, however, leaves the world entirely alone. Nothing is precluded, for nothing was ever included, that is, language never had this function of speaking the world. But the world remains, there, its existence unspoken. And what it is is clearly not language. 'Happiness', for example, is a particle of language; but its worldly counterpart is not. Nirvana could be realized and enlightenment could be something otherworldly, and language would not flinch. Interpretation of what this is about, not this is a different matter.

Experience is basic enough that it arches above both the absolute and the temporal. Experience is undeniable.Your experience as a successful meditator is true, and my experience as an unsuccessful meditator is true.

Well, you are sounding like Husserl, though he will use the term consciousness. Consciousness is absolute simply means the Cartesian bit above.

[Stoppelmann]

A little lengthy in the following. Oh well.

I think you know that this isn’t a problem …

I look at it like this: Shaking the tree is a refusal to impose structure. Kierkegaard saw this first in his discussion of innocence:

n this state there is peace and repose, but at the same time there is something else, something that is not dissension and strife, for there is nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. (Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety)

The Zen master would not have put things like this, I know. But to me, the enigmatic ways of Zen are all questions at the basic level, and the Zen Buddhist position is, as you said earlier, an entirely open affair. The final yogic move (yoga: what yokes the self to, call it affective-transcendence) is conceptual or interpretative freedom, that is, freedom from the implicit control culture and the habits of language have on one. To see the sun, and realize at the perceptual level that what is there really is not the sun at all, that this before you is an actuality that entirely exceeds the language assigned to it, and that the whole world is like this, what Michel Henry calls a pure pathos, but much more really, which I won't try to say here.

I see what you mean and, although I appreciate it as a mental exercise in acknowledging that we are “flying on instruments” and wysisyg isn’t true of reality, the shaking of the tree is the anarchy against the illusion of order that is superficial. It is a tangible protest. I find that we always need to clarify what is existential and what is purely hypothetical, and acknowledge that appearances are speculative, because there is more below the surface. Just as “nothing” isn’t truly nothing, which we are slowly discovering, it is just the lack of something we can “grasp” mentally.

The nothing is an odd concept to us in a world where there is presumption everywhere, but K is looking for origins of our collective troubled sleep, which I will say here goes like this: the crises of our time are personal, as global affairs are reducible to the personal; I mean, what is happening in Turkey should not be deflated to a statistic. It is only understood clearly in the intensity of lived suffering, and this is an event that is existential, a truly lived crisis in suffering, which can only be realized in a qualitative "leap" of compassion and empathy. And this crisis has no foundation. One asks why am I suffering?, and there is nothing.

The reason why I am suffering in this context is, as you say, because of empathy, an ability that sometimes overwhelms us and must be brought into perspective but is very important in interaction with a patient. As a nurse, I couldn’t allow my empathy to grow so large that I end up lying next to the patient, but must realise that I can only do my job by restricting my inner familiarity with the suffering I am trying to alleviate. This is an ability that I found meditation helped me with, and the act of nursing became a meditation, but the suffering isn’t ignored, just brought into perspective.

I argue, suffering insists on metaphysical redemption, and happiness insists on metaphysical consummation. But this world is absent of both. This is just a way of saying, observe in a "leap" of empathetic compassion (not a redundant phrase here as empathy refers to the effort to imagine what the literal suffering would be like) what it would be like to, as vividly as possible (for isn't this simply the way a scientist proceeds, observing carefully and objectively? Just because it is not publicly demonstrable doesn't make it any less poignantly "there"), say, be told you will be tortured tomorrow morning, and there would be thumb screws and the like. Metaphysics puts this affair into an absolute context, Kierkegaard's "nothing". The question then is this: Can the suffering stand alone against the backdrop of nothing? Or, is there not required by intuition some kind of redemption, or resolution, deliverance, justification, and so on? I say, suffering as such a stand alone phenomenon is impossible.

The imagination of a future torture is in effect the beginning of the torture, a pre-empting of the suffering that one imagines one will suffer, and often part of the manipulation by torturers. The only effective method to combat this would be to not participate in speculation, and be in the moment. On the other hand, as Viktor Frankl demonstrated in the face of suffering, speculating on how he could present the situation he was caught up in at a later date, as a presentation in a university environment, can help us overcome the anxiety that we may otherwise feel. It is the divide between cause and effect in which he took refuge.

I certainly won't argue against any of this. But I want to look at the actual meditative event itself, and in this, putting almost every concept that would make a claim on it in suspension. There one sits, so what is the nature, the simple descriptive features that define what is going on? In this kind of assessment, one usually fails to see that its most essential feature is time: We tend to spatialize time in that our references to events around us are only cast in terms of time if time is the theme laid out, as when one inquires when or how long. Usually, we think of things like brain cells and the sharpening of experience, as you do, and I as well, but we fail to see that ALL such things are essentially temporal constructs first, and this is, from both an methodological position as well as an analytical one, critical.

Time is a factor that I give an alarm clock (preferably not too loud) so that I am not speculating on how long I have been sitting, but at the same time, giving the exercise a limit. Because it is out of sight, I have also removed the temptation to look, so that my attention is concentrated on the chosen point of reference, whether it is the sounds around me, my bodily functions, my breath, a mantra, my attention as such, or whatever. Obviously, the failure to continually focus my attention is as meaningful as when I can.

Analytically, there is no object in the usual sense, for when we ask what such a thing IS, we are faced with the event of its being taken up cognitively and affectively. Here is the point: To speak as if there is an object, a thing that is there independently of time, is to speak in terms of pure nonsense, for such a thing not only has never been witnessed, it is unwitnessable, for the moment one conceives it at all, it IS the time matrix of our existence's experience. Not simply IN this matrix, but IS it, for this is the very nature of something being at all. Methodologically, because once one understands that meditation as an annihilative temporal event, then all attention is on this mechanism.

I tend to see meditation as a practise to identify what I am. On the one level, I am one with everything, and my atoms and molecules rest against those of my clothes, the air in the room, the waves of sound, and there is no separation. On the other hand, I am observing these things from a distance, and they are tied up with my physical body, which when time ends, I will give up. In that much, I would say that it is a practise of surrender, rather than annihilation. But we might mean the same thing.

Time is existence. Things are not in time, rather, things ARE time. This cup is an event. I see the cup, the past rises up to respond, telling me things my experiential education possesses about cups, their properties, contexts, and so on. What is "before me" is really an historical event, and I, in the occurrent unfolding, stand apart from any possible identity the past might want to assign. Or, I CAN do this. Usually people don't, obviously. When I drive I am not second guessing everything. I just drive from rote memory, and the entire process is not reviewed. We all generally live our lives like this, allowing the past simply to "create" a future without my contribution. Phenomenology declares the present moment to be the moment", if there is such a thing, we are capable of stepping OUT of this flow of past into future, altogether, in a sense. This is our freedom. The future is "nothing". And the past is an historical fact, of sorts.

There are so many things that I observe myself doing automatically, like driving, “allowing the past simply to "create" a future without my contribution” as you say, and it is a practise in mindfulness to be fully aware of what I am doing. In meditation I am more in the moment than when I am moving outside, because outside I am particularly observant, “restless eyes” the Ophthalmologist called it, and even though I am often not aware of it, when my wife mentions something she assumed I hadn’t seen, I often can give a detailed description. I feel that this has been enhanced by meditation.

Apologies for the drawn out explanation (found in Husserl, Heidegger) but this is critical in the way I think about meditation and the world. The world is "made" in a temporal human existence, which, and any given moment finds itself on the precipice of a "nothing" and if one understands this, one can freely choose which things shall be affirmed, literally a "world making" event. Meditation terminates this process, when it is successful and serious. What unfolds in the annihilation of the world-making enterprise is not a nothing! It is divinity. This is why Sanskrit and Pali have all of those terms for what is heavenly, divine, supernatural, profound, and the rest. Indian thinking (not the narratives which are about a lot of myths and stories) has always produced language like this.

I found this part confusing, but it seemed to come back together when you described the end of the world-making enterprise as revealing divinity. This is of course an area where we find Taoism and Buddhism mingling, and aspects of Vedantism mixed in. I feel that much of this is a question of terminology, and Schopenhauer comes to mind, who saw a vast difference between Judaism and Christianity because of Christianity’s affinity with Vedantism: “The assumption that man is made out of nothing leads, necessarily to the assumption that death is his absolute end. Thus, in this in the Old Testament is perfectly consistent; for no doctrine of immortality is suitable to creation out of nothing. New Testament Christianity has such a doctrine because it is Indian in spirit, and therefore, more than probably also of Indian origin, although only indirectly through Egypt. But to the Jewish stem, upon which that Indian wisdom had to be grafted in the Holy Land, such a doctrine is as little suited as the freedom of the will to its determinism…” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, page 281

Silence does seem to be the only way to analytically respect the ontology of suffering and happiness as they are unanalyzable givens. Wittgenstein knew this. But again, how do we take this up philosophically? We go to the most basic level, where people don't ask question, but just assume. Terrible things unfold, but what is it for something to be a terrible thing at all? Of course, I just said silence is justified. But at least we have to allow the question in order to isolate and affirm what it is we are being silent about, for this mysterious notion of happiness is a stand alone condition of the world, and it carries an authority that transcends laws and principles that we establish for ourselves, because it is presupposed by these laws, is the essential Real that these principles are all about.

I have always seen happiness as the absence or a postponement of suffering because the latter is initially caused by distraction and indulgence in short-term pleasure and develops into compulsion and craving. However, deep suffering is speechless because it is no longer avoidable, and one can only grow used to it, like an amputated limb which our sensations suggest is still there, but it is not.

This, I argue, is what is missed in the analysis of ethics (metaethics). Most look and see a world that is reducible to an ethical nihilism, but this comes from the contrived premise that all theodicies fail. Well, they do fail, but this is because they are made to fail by insisting on an anthropomorphic God, one who is "the Greatest possible Being" and so on. A wonderful book on getting to the heart of this matter is John Caputo's The Weakness of God. My take is that SINCE analysis shows our ethics to be grounded in an absolute, THEREFORE, our actual ethical entanglements are grounded in an absolute.

Yes, the concept of God is largely anthropomorphized, and humans seem to lack the ability to recognize the paradox of Christianity. I have not read the book The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, but I have read that he argues that God is a weak force that gives form to indeterminate and uncertain elements redeemed by the impotent power of God's Son, that God is a call rather than a cause, and that the kingdom of God is not a reign of holy law, but a holy anarchy embodied in works of love, forgiveness, and hospitality. The “weakness” of God as an expression of God’s vulnerable love and faithful justice in contrast to an almighty warrior who massacres all enemies does have a considerable appeal to someone like me, who studies across the range of traditions, which you can see from above.

"Essential structure of benevolent habits and their limitations" is an excellent way to start. Essential? This takes us to what the essence in question actually is. One could do a comparative analysis to discover common features in disparate cultures, and call these features essential, which is certainly right. This is what science does; it is the consistency and the repeatable results that work into the equations of our practical world.

But metaethics, introduces another kind of absolute entirely. It is an absolute that issues from the actual "presence" itself, and it is far stronger, what is called a priori. Consider causality itself: it is not an empirical argument that says effects are preceded by causes. Rather, one cannot even imagine the opposite. It is an intuitive affair. And of course, logic itself has this, but note how logic's apriority is in the abstract (putting aside objections for now), but causality is very different: it is something IN the world. This cup will not move by itself, for it is, as they say, an apodictic impossibility (Kant was all about this in his synthetic apriori discussion. A very worthy read). This is the kind of absolute discussed here, and "in the fabric of things" absolute.

Ethics is like this. I shouldn't do harm because harm is in its very definition, intuitively prohibited. It is an intuitive law, if you will (you know, the way the Ten Commandments were meant to be). But because all of our affairs are so entangled, judgment about ethics is always messy. Philosophers tend, strongly so, to say these entanglements are all there is too it. They are afraid to affirm a metaethical absolute because they are rather blind. Big issue. fascinating.

Like I said earlier, I take up the leads that you give me and it is fascinating indeed. I think that the temptation in ethics is to force people to act, by having an almighty warrior God for example, or by executing the dissenters (as in the French Revolution for example), or the supposed counter-revolutionaries, and by so doing people undermine their own principles. This, however, is the danger of pot modernism as well. We observe it in cancel culture, in refusing to let people speak, in the radicalisation of protest, and violent representation of weak minorities.

But experiential existence IS everything. This is not solipsistic at all. Long discussion.

Well, I think we could be having this conversation regardless. I am not a Buddhist in the traditional sense at all. In fact, I am quite confident I understand the meditative event better than Buddhists do, simply because understanding is about what we SAY. My cat "sees" cars go by, but her understanding?, well, she "knows" for she has a memory, and seeing such things again will be familiar. But she does not have language as a tool for analysis, needed to move beyond this. Language is a tool. Successful meditation takes one to a profound state of contentment, as if the world sits still and one finally sees they never really had been seeing the world at all because they were so busy in the their entangled thoughts and feelings (Heidegger, btw, calls this entanglement dasein); but it is language that allows one to see and work through, and discriminate, and clarify, and so on. This is philosophy's job. No doubt, the greatest Buddhists ever (take Thich Quang Duc, the one who self immolated in Vietnam in protest) could not tell ABOUT what they do like Husserl's thinking could. Husserl couldn't either, of course. He was an intellectual, but his analyses are deeply penetrating, and he is talking exactly about the world a Buddhist encounters when things are removed from their many distracting contexts.

Speaking of experiential existence, Husserl went through many revolutions in his own person, didn’t he, and after WWI, he praised Buddhism as being not just any religion, but the religion whose “ethico-religious method of spiritual purification and pacification is of the highest dignity”, to such an extent that through its practice the state of nobility that the mind attains is comparable only to the highest forms of philosophical and religious spirituality in European culture. At the time, he was suffering from grief over the loss of a son, although before the war he was a fervent nationalist who was deeply concerned by the downfall of the old European civilization, and in favour of the war.

But I am reading so much at present, I can hardly keep up with the writing

[Belindi]

Belindi wrote
If I understand your reply, "Cartesian leap" refers to scepticism but not to Descartes's concluding that extended matter and thought are separate ontological substances.

But skepticism is a negative concept. Here, one is invited to affirm. Descartes affirmed the cogito as the beginning for affirmation, for it was impossible to doubt (though this certainly has a serious challenge in later though), for there was the "unshakeable conviction of evident truth." Husserl is going to affirm this epistemic move toward an affirmation that moves outward, to all things, objects, thoughts, arithmetic, imaginings, and so forth. He can make this move because of his thesis of intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something. So when we think of the cogito, we already have a cogito relation, and this affirms the relation and its object along with the "I think", which, I should add, is expanded as well, for I do not simply think. I love and hate, discriminate, judge, desire, create, and on and on. Consider the way Husserl put it:

Objects, speaking generally, are not received in doubt at the basic level. I may doubt the sun will rise, but, says Husserl, I cannot doubt this sensation as a sheer presence when I stand before the sun. Presence as presence cannot be epistemically defeated. It is apodictic! Empirical sciences are not apodictic, because these are not based on, call it the simple intuitive revelation. They are discursive, based on habits of thought, wrought out, if you will, of inductively conceived premises. Such is the contingent nature of empirical science. But pure presence, the simple "givenness" of the world is NOT contingent, say Husserl. So it is not a matter different ontologies. All that is given in the world is appearance. Period.

I don't share your faith that a meditation state of awareness is the Enlightened gateway to truth, goodness and beauty. These transcendent values are cognitively intuited via arts, and as transcendent /Platonic, they overarch all states of mind including meditation awareness.

Think of it like falling in love. The beloved has "given" you nothing. And all you experience, all of that six inches off the ground due to the mere presence of a face that could launch a thousand ships it produced within.

The positive claim that meditation actually does produce liberation and enlightenment, in the extraordinary way they say it does, is something that one can only determine independently. I would add that happiness is not to be conceived as an augmentative construct. I mean, it's not like intelligence, say, such that the more text you internalize, synthesize and analyze, the better you are. Happiness is a general state, and a happy person lives in a happy world. When in love, all things bow low to this, all particulars lose their incidental natures. Emerson speaks of being "glad to the brink of fear" walking through a bare common. The point is, if one experiences the world like this, then one can take the Buddhist claim seriously, pursue it, discover the depths of it. Alas, philosophers are among the least inclined to do this, simply because they really don't understand at all what Emerson was talking about. Intellectuals are often mystified by such things and so have no inclination to think like this. Wittgenstein was one of the few who understood Emerson. Nietzsche did, too, though he was too busy fighting illness see clearly.

"An extraordinary event in actuality" is an experience. Including in a state of meditative awareness the subject remains at all times an interstice in Indra's net. The net itself is what the absolute idealist calls absolute experience, of which the sum of temporal experiences are an aspect. If an idealist takes the reduction "all the way down " he is not down any rabbit hole but has taken scepticism as his guide to existence. The world, interpreted as series of events in time, does not reach the sceptic's conclusion which is that existence is no more no less than experience.

Indra's net is a metaphor for hermeneutics (the so called hermeneutic or interpretative circle, which is simply about the contingency of language in the production of meaning) and one cannot get past this. It is Heidegger's complaint. But look: Just because meanings are divided and play against and into each other (I am reading Paul Ricoeur Time and Narrative. He talks about meanings and their metaphorical constructions, e.g.) in a network of possibilities, this in no way precludes any palpable experience. Clearly, language does not "speak" the world. It never did. Derrida holds that language does not stand for the world, but "stands in" for the world. This, however, leaves the world entirely alone. Nothing is precluded, for nothing was ever included, that is, language never had this function of speaking the world. But the world remains, there, its existence unspoken. And what it is is clearly not language. 'Happiness', for example, is a particle of language; but its worldly counterpart is not. Nirvana could be realized and enlightenment could be something otherworldly, and language would not flinch. Interpretation of what this is about, not this is a different matter.

Experience is basic enough that it arches above both the absolute and the temporal. Experience is undeniable.Your experience as a successful meditator is true, and my experience as an unsuccessful meditator is true.

Well, you are sounding like Husserl, though he will use the term consciousness. Consciousness is absolute simply means the Cartesian bit above.

Descartes's demon was positive standing he did for deception, and the sceptical method is the only defence against against him. Descartes is the leading light of scepticism in European philosophical method. To be true, meditative awareness is experiential, and it would be silly to deny that experience is other than subjective. However what Descartes sought was the objective truth about what exists, not what made him happy, or sad.

Intentionality is not only view to some thing but also towards what to do next i.e. we are all future- oriented until we are consciously engaged in dying.
But pure presence, the simple "givenness" of the world is NOT contingent, say Husserl. So it is not a matter different ontologies. All that is given in the world is appearance. Descartes was in error, ontologically speaking. Cogito contains the first person singular so the first person singular implied in sumis redundant. I move that we don't refer to Descartes any more, as that discussion gets as no further forward.

Falling in love is hardly comparable to the state of meditative awareness except that , like ice cream, both can result in euphoria. The former is compounded of hormones and cultural mystification of Romantic love and its aim is passively reactive, whereas the latter has little or no hormonal component and although the method is cultural the aim is active.

I say " let's shelve Descartes pro tem" however your discussion including Descartes does inform me about Husserl.

Indra's net is not a fixed thing but is dynamic process. I said each experience is an interstice in Indra's net, however the interstice and the net are two aspects of change itself and are never the same in the sense that Heraclitus said. Language, even poetic language, crystallises the world as world . Experience is the only constant that bridges the gap between something and nothing.

When you wrote " language never had this function of speaking the world. But the world remains, there, its existence unspoken." were you referring to Kant's thing in itself? I hope not.

[thrasymachus]

Belindi wrote
Descartes's demon was positive standing he did for deception, and the sceptical method is the only defence against against him. Descartes is the leading light of scepticism in European philosophical method. To be true, meditative awareness is experiential, and it would be silly to deny that experience is other than subjective. However what Descartes sought was the objective truth about what exists, not what made him happy, or sad.

Then again, being happy is just as real, and I would say more real, than anything else you might qualify as real.

Descartes does this: he brings ontology in line with epistemology. I can doubt the "desk" is a desk, but I cannot doubt the thinking and the "I" that thinks. And he is right to make this move, the move that consummates the Real in the radical intimacy of its reception, for this is simply the way the world works. That is all we want from Descartes. He is important because this move turns the tables on empirical science: All that is "out there" in the world, empirically speaking, as Neil deGrasse Tyson would think about it, is not sufficiently presented to be a ground of existence, for nothing in the scientist's mentality produces existence. One ends up with some physicalist view, which is nothing more than a scientist's metaphysics. We here want to step clear of metaphysics! This was Heidegger's plan, Husserl's, Wittgenstein's and so on. Descartes (followed by Kant) showed us the way. Only now we drop the exclusionary rationalism. We want to know about existence, and reason is certainly not what is found when we make our "field observations". Not by a long shot. What we first encounter is interest, care, desire, beauty, ugliness, distain, approval, etc., and this long list is just a language abstraction the affective dimension of our existence, the true "body" of human existence lies here, in the "value" of our being. Here, I argue, philosophy has found its determinative foundation.

ntentionality is not only view to some thing but also towards what to do next i.e. we are all future- oriented until we are consciously engaged in dying.
But pure presence, the simple "givenness" of the world is NOT contingent, say Husserl. So it is not a matter different ontologies. All that is given in the world is appearance. Descartes was in error, ontologically speaking. Cogito contains the first person singular so the first person singular implied in sumis redundant. I move that we don't refer to Descartes any more, as that discussion gets as no further forward.

Of course, I don't want to talk about Descartes any more than I want to talk about Husserl. I am not preparing a lecture. I want to talk about the world, and when Descartes is helpful, it is this helpfulness I am interested in. Philosophical discussions are too often about attempts to elucidate text in the broad context of what was said here and there, you know, "see what Nietzsche says here, and so this is what he really means..." and the like. I don't care at all what Nietzsche really means, and this goes for the Zen master and the Christian apologist. I only care about how the meaning that is evident in these thoughts contributes to my understanding the world. It is not simply a textual matter, and the first person to agree with this would be the Zen master.

And your reference to time: quite so. This is the great nothingness that existentialists talk about. I call it foundational indeterminacy, this nothingness of an unmade future; but then, this is not the Buddhist's world. The Buddhist's world is timeless, or. struggles to be so. Time is fascinating. I won't go into this unless you want to, but just a quick note: See how time simply falls apart almost instantly upon inquiry into its presuppositions: The past? Can one make any sense out of this at all? The moment I think of it, I am occurrently thinking.

To me, the greatest philosophical insight one can have lies in seeing that language constructs concepts that we take for real, and necause of this being the very nature of language, language is self deconstructing, and by this I mean anything language can say can be turned into aporia and contradiction and indeterminacy. Take this indeterminacy into the perceptual event itself, and you see what Buddhism is really about.

Falling in love is hardly comparable to the state of meditative awareness except that , like ice cream, both can result in euphoria. The former is compounded of hormones and cultural mystification of Romantic love and its aim is passively reactive, whereas the latter has little or no hormonal component and although the method is cultural the aim is active.

If a person is euphoric over ice cream, this would be a very different kind of euphoria from that of, say, winning a chess tournament. In order to know what this is really about, one has to bring the matter itself to mind, and thus, calling it euphoria is of no help at all. And what do terms like passive reactive and hormonal compounds have anything to do with it? These are analytical terms that look to physical causal relations. It is not that they are wrong, but rather, the analyses referred to are extraneous to love as love. If you had referenced, say, evolution, and proceeded to talk about how love is conducive to reproduction and survival, as here, love would remain untouched by the analysis; it would remain a transcendental actuality, transcendental because language simply does not "speak" the world. Even in the calling of something transcendental, I am not speaking the world. The world is, I like to say, "real" metaphysics. It is not as if there is some impossible counterpart to the world, like noumena in Kant; rather, the world in the encounter, itself is noumenal. Utterly indeterminate. So in this, we "refer" to something prior to the contexts and their concepts, something presupposed by these, something entirely OTHER than what we "say" and write.

So, love and nirvana? The trouble with separation of terms like this: contextual differences engender qualitative distinctions. That is, because nirvana has a kind of mythical status, otherworldly no one really believes it is real. Love, on the other hand, is very common. If you think along these lines and you don't really believe in the "sublime and transcendental" concept of nirvana--after all, it is speculated that the Dalai Lama himself has no first hand knowledge of this, and, no one really thinks the Pope lives in the grace of God any more than the rest of us, and those that say they do are just are basically recalling their catechism; dogmatic belief doesn't count---then you likely have not read Kierkegaard. Look, it would take a lot of writing to tell you why this is important, but suffice it to say here that what we call mundane, like falling in love, is, as with all things, not mundane at all at the basic level of assumptions and inquiry. ALL of our affairs are like this. One only has to look at the existence of the world and look away from the massive finitude that sits on top of it, the superstructure of dasein, if you will, the world of common unexamined beliefs that presuppose the intuitive substratum of existence. Then the world yields its "presence," for one has found what Husserl was trying to articulate: the "narrow gate into phenomenology."

Buddhist meditation is the direct assault on this general complacency. Phenomenology is the "text" to this.

Indra's net is not a fixed thing but is dynamic process. I said each experience is an interstice in Indra's net, however the interstice and the net are two aspects of change itself and are never the same in the sense that Heraclitus said. Language, even poetic language, crystallises the world as world . Experience is the only constant that bridges the gap between something and nothing.

When you wrote " language never had this function of speaking the world. But the world remains, there, its existence unspoken." were you referring to Kant's thing in itself? I hope not

It is an interesting thing to say, and it is thick with ambiguity, as things like this are. Alas, there is too much to say. Think of Kant: he insisted that there had to be something representations were representations OF. Therefore, noumena. But noumena are simply remote from our understanding. You have to ask: if they are remote, then why postulate them at all? Because there is something in the givenness of the world that insists. Ah, so it is not so remote. This is the "nothing" of existential anxiety or primordial apprehension or dread existentialists talk about. It is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence. Only a Buddhist will tell you it is not indeterminate at all; it is our Buddha nature. A Christian says it's God, which is ultimate embodiment of love. I say, get out of the metaphysics and realize that everything that can be said in philosophy and religion that has meaning is right there before your eyes. Thoughtful Buddhists and Christians would agree.

[Belindi]

Belindi wrote
Descartes's demon was positive standing he did for deception, and the sceptical method is the only defence against against him. Descartes is the leading light of scepticism in European philosophical method. To be true, meditative awareness is experiential, and it would be silly to deny that experience is other than subjective. However what Descartes sought was the objective truth about what exists, not what made him happy, or sad.

Then again, being happy is just as real, and I would say more real, than anything else you might qualify as real.

Descartes does this: he brings ontology in line with epistemology. I can doubt the "desk" is a desk, but I cannot doubt the thinking and the "I" that thinks. And he is right to make this move, the move that consummates the Real in the radical intimacy of its reception, for this is simply the way the world works. That is all we want from Descartes. He is important because this move turns the tables on empirical science: All that is "out there" in the world, empirically speaking, as Neil deGrasse Tyson would think about it, is not sufficiently presented to be a ground of existence, for nothing in the scientist's mentality produces existence. One ends up with some physicalist view, which is nothing more than a scientist's metaphysics. We here want to step clear of metaphysics! This was Heidegger's plan, Husserl's, Wittgenstein's and so on. Descartes (followed by Kant) showed us the way. Only now we drop the exclusionary rationalism. We want to know about existence, and reason is certainly not what is found when we make our "field observations". Not by a long shot. What we first encounter is interest, care, desire, beauty, ugliness, distain, approval, etc., and this long list is just a language abstraction the affective dimension of our existence, the true "body" of human existence lies here, in the "value" of our being. Here, I argue, philosophy has found its determinative foundation.

ntentionality is not only view to some thing but also towards what to do next i.e. we are all future- oriented until we are consciously engaged in dying.
But pure presence, the simple "givenness" of the world is NOT contingent, say Husserl. So it is not a matter different ontologies. All that is given in the world is appearance. Descartes was in error, ontologically speaking. Cogito contains the first person singular so the first person singular implied in sumis redundant. I move that we don't refer to Descartes any more, as that discussion gets as no further forward.

Of course, I don't want to talk about Descartes any more than I want to talk about Husserl. I am not preparing a lecture. I want to talk about the world, and when Descartes is helpful, it is this helpfulness I am interested in. Philosophical discussions are too often about attempts to elucidate text in the broad context of what was said here and there, you know, "see what Nietzsche says here, and so this is what he really means..." and the like. I don't care at all what Nietzsche really means, and this goes for the Zen master and the Christian apologist. I only care about how the meaning that is evident in these thoughts contributes to my understanding the world. It is not simply a textual matter, and the first person to agree with this would be the Zen master.

And your reference to time: quite so. This is the great nothingness that existentialists talk about. I call it foundational indeterminacy, this nothingness of an unmade future; but then, this is not the Buddhist's world. The Buddhist's world is timeless, or. struggles to be so. Time is fascinating. I won't go into this unless you want to, but just a quick note: See how time simply falls apart almost instantly upon inquiry into its presuppositions: The past? Can one make any sense out of this at all? The moment I think of it, I am occurrently thinking.

To me, the greatest philosophical insight one can have lies in seeing that language constructs concepts that we take for real, and necause of this being the very nature of language, language is self deconstructing, and by this I mean anything language can say can be turned into aporia and contradiction and indeterminacy. Take this indeterminacy into the perceptual event itself, and you see what Buddhism is really about.

Falling in love is hardly comparable to the state of meditative awareness except that , like ice cream, both can result in euphoria. The former is compounded of hormones and cultural mystification of Romantic love and its aim is passively reactive, whereas the latter has little or no hormonal component and although the method is cultural the aim is active.

If a person is euphoric over ice cream, this would be a very different kind of euphoria from that of, say, winning a chess tournament. In order to know what this is really about, one has to bring the matter itself to mind, and thus, calling it euphoria is of no help at all. And what do terms like passive reactive and hormonal compounds have anything to do with it? These are analytical terms that look to physical causal relations. It is not that they are wrong, but rather, the analyses referred to are extraneous to love as love. If you had referenced, say, evolution, and proceeded to talk about how love is conducive to reproduction and survival, as here, love would remain untouched by the analysis; it would remain a transcendental actuality, transcendental because language simply does not "speak" the world. Even in the calling of something transcendental, I am not speaking the world. The world is, I like to say, "real" metaphysics. It is not as if there is some impossible counterpart to the world, like noumena in Kant; rather, the world in the encounter, itself is noumenal. Utterly indeterminate. So in this, we "refer" to something prior to the contexts and their concepts, something presupposed by these, something entirely OTHER than what we "say" and write.

So, love and nirvana? The trouble with separation of terms like this: contextual differences engender qualitative distinctions. That is, because nirvana has a kind of mythical status, otherworldly no one really believes it is real. Love, on the other hand, is very common. If you think along these lines and you don't really believe in the "sublime and transcendental" concept of nirvana--after all, it is speculated that the Dalai Lama himself has no first hand knowledge of this, and, no one really thinks the Pope lives in the grace of God any more than the rest of us, and those that say they do are just are basically recalling their catechism; dogmatic belief doesn't count---then you likely have not read Kierkegaard. Look, it would take a lot of writing to tell you why this is important, but suffice it to say here that what we call mundane, like falling in love, is, as with all things, not mundane at all at the basic level of assumptions and inquiry. ALL of our affairs are like this. One only has to look at the existence of the world and look away from the massive finitude that sits on top of it, the superstructure of dasein, if you will, the world of common unexamined beliefs that presuppose the intuitive substratum of existence. Then the world yields its "presence," for one has found what Husserl was trying to articulate: the "narrow gate into phenomenology."

Buddhist meditation is the direct assault on this general complacency. Phenomenology is the "text" to this.

Indra's net is not a fixed thing but is dynamic process. I said each experience is an interstice in Indra's net, however the interstice and the net are two aspects of change itself and are never the same in the sense that Heraclitus said. Language, even poetic language, crystallises the world as world . Experience is the only constant that bridges the gap between something and nothing.

When you wrote " language never had this function of speaking the world. But the world remains, there, its existence unspoken." were you referring to Kant's thing in itself? I hope not

It is an interesting thing to say, and it is thick with ambiguity, as things like this are. Alas, there is too much to say. Think of Kant: he insisted that there had to be something representations were representations OF. Therefore, noumena. But noumena are simply remote from our understanding. You have to ask: if they are remote, then why postulate them at all? Because there is something in the givenness of the world that insists. Ah, so it is not so remote. This is the "nothing" of existential anxiety or primordial apprehension or dread existentialists talk about. It is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence. Only a Buddhist will tell you it is not indeterminate at all; it is our Buddha nature. A Christian says it's God, which is ultimate embodiment of love. I say, get out of the metaphysics and realize that everything that can be said in philosophy and religion that has meaning is right there before your eyes. Thoughtful Buddhists and Christians would agree.

Descartes did not literally say " confirmation bias" however what we commonly call confirmation bias is the mechanism that worked Descartes's demon.Therefore Descartes was well aware not to be led astray by his own affections.

Feeling happy is an affect and as such is part of normal experience. But feeling happy is not part of deductive logic, which is experienced by the logician as devoid of affect like the logician is wearing the garb of a machine.


I tried to explain that Descartes failed to prove the existence of the first person singular, and you seem to not like my thesis; this disagreement is why I suggested we shelve Descartes pro tem, so we can get on with the Husserl thing. You claimed "I can doubt the "desk" is a desk, but I cannot doubt the thinking and the "I" that thinks." Whereas I claim you and Descartes are mistaken and that you can doubt the desk is a desk and you can doubt the I that is thinking but what you cannot doubt is that something is happening, i.e. that there is a process of change going on.

The link between how we know the world, and existence itself , is unknowable possibility the limits of which we guess at via probability i.e. common sense and its more sophisticated cousin :inductive logic and allied synthetic trial and error with theories.

True, it's scary being alone in a wide wide sea of possibility i.e. existential angst. I think the really good reason for philosophy is it shows us others who may not be in the same boat but who seek the same haven sans inauthenticity and authorities.

The numinous (according to Kant )does not exist. This is because the only existence is experience, and noumena by definition are never experienced.

I don't follow your words on love. Are you saying sexual passion with romantic gloss is love?

[thrasymachus]

Stoppelmann wrote
I see what you mean and, although I appreciate it as a mental exercise in acknowledging that we are “flying on instruments” and wysisyg isn’t true of reality, the shaking of the tree is the anarchy against the illusion of order that is superficial. It is a tangible protest. I find that we always need to clarify what is existential and what is purely hypothetical, and acknowledge that appearances are speculative, because there is more below the surface. Just as “nothing” isn’t truly nothing, which we are slowly discovering, it is just the lack of something we can “grasp” mentally.

This seems in the vicinity of right (if something is right without qualification, it is likely only trivially true). Consider that language itself is the "order that is superficial." This makes the philosophical puzzle complete. It is not just about the dogmatic insistence that goes unchecked, or the excessive love of well defined things. It is in the implicit "distance" between language and those actualities we encounter. To call a tree a tree, and say, my what a lovely tree, this and that in endless conversations about trees, and to let this rule my understanding unchecked by inquiry (the piety of thought), is the way of our "natural attitude," says Husserl. To be free of this constraint is the magic of a profound commitment to meditation. I find myself insisting that meditation is far more radical than most take it to be. Most sit under a tree and spend life sitting quietly doing nothing, true. But Gautama Siddhartha did. Certainly not to say that all should go there. But that this is where it gets philosophically interesting.

The reason why I am suffering in this context is, as you say, because of empathy, an ability that sometimes overwhelms us and must be brought into perspective but is very important in interaction with a patient. As a nurse, I couldn’t allow my empathy to grow so large that I end up lying next to the patient, but must realise that I can only do my job by restricting my inner familiarity with the suffering I am trying to alleviate. This is an ability that I found meditation helped me with, and the act of nursing became a meditation, but the suffering isn’t ignored, just brought into perspective.

Either bring it into perspective or go mad. In your profession, I imagine stepping out of explicit empathy would be an absolute necessity. It is ironic that what may bring one in compassion to address the needs of others is what can be such a liability in the actual care giving. Doctors, I have read, are best if they lean toward sociopathy. Better not to care too much. Pilots who are too thrilled by flying may be unsteady in their performance. And so on with all things that require control and competence. I can see why meditation can contribute to the need to control.

But I would take a moment to look into another context of discussion which is not about practical concerns.

Empathy can drive one mad if it is taken to the final step, the step where one realizes, like a revelation, that we are put "here" in this world, and those who torment our imagination with their impossible suffering not only suffer, but suffer without redemption. The literature that chooses this as its theme brings the whole affair to madness, for what could be worse than to write about suffering for no reason at all? To look away is bad faith, for we know it is there, and we know the burden of its existence on those of conscience. Consider the way Baudelaire thoughts about the invisible ignorance that runs through our existence:

Under a vast grey sky, on a vast and dusty plain without paths, without grass, without
a nettle or a thistle, I met several men bent double as they walked.
Each one of them carried on his back an enormous Chimera as heavy as a sack of
flour or coal or the paraphernalia of a Roman infantryman.
But the monstrous beast was no inanimate weight; on the contrary, it enveloped
and oppressed the man with its elastic and powerful muscles; it clutched at the
breast of its mount with two vast claws; and its fabulous head overhung the man’s
forehead like one of those horrible helmets with which ancient warriors hoped to
add to the terror of their enemy.
I questioned one of these men and asked him where they were going like that. He
replied that he did not know and that none of them knew, but that they were evidently
going somewhere since they were driven by an invincible need to go on.
A curious thing to note: none of these travelers seemed irritated by the ferocious
beast hanging around his neck and glued to his back; one might have said that they
considered it part of themselves. All these tired and serious faces showed not the
least sign of despair; under the spleenful dome of the sky, their feet deep in the dust
of the earth as desolate as the sky, they continued along with the resigned physiognomy
of those who are condemned to hope forever [SC’s emphasis].
And the cortège passed by me and disappeared in the atmosphere of the horizon,
where the rounded surface of the planet is concealed from the curiosity of the
human gaze.2
Preamble
And for a few moments I persisted in trying to comprehend this mystery;
but soon irresistible Indifference descended upon me and I was more
heavily overwhelmed than they were by their crushing Chimeras

This is the French poet who wrote the infamous Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal). Important to note that I do not recommend this "attitude". But one has to look!

This is the despair of ethical nihilism. My view is that not only is this thesis wrong, it is impossible; as impossible as an uncaused effect.

Time is a factor that I give an alarm clock (preferably not too loud) so that I am not speculating on how long I have been sitting, but at the same time, giving the exercise a limit. Because it is out of sight, I have also removed the temptation to look, so that my attention is concentrated on the chosen point of reference, whether it is the sounds around me, my bodily functions, my breath, a mantra, my attention as such, or whatever. Obviously, the failure to continually focus my attention is as meaningful as when I can.

And when you do find yourself speculating on how long, you step back into time. A really good meditation seems timeless. But take the matter beyond this: The seeming of timelessness is an actual timelessness. It is no longer that cse that you sit while the world around continues, and the you are the anomaly. Rather, the time that was in place in your normal affairs was only there because you produced in these affairs. This raises the questions: what is the relation between these affairs and time? Is time really "subjective"? Is it true that Einstein was not really talking about time in the genuine sense of the term at all, but was simply doing "physics"? And physics is only body of postulated thought that sits upon subjective reality? Isn't it this "subjective" reality wherein lies the basis for talking about time, space, reality, knowledge, and so on?

If you believe along with most analytic philosophers (and of course, everyone else encultured into a science mentality) that empirical science is also the basis for philosophical thought, then I would invite you to consider that this is impossible. Not just a bad idea, but impossible, demonstratively so. But if you think as Augustine did, that time, to put it simply, is problematic in its basic expression, as in "How can time exist if the past is no longer, if the future is not yet, and if the present is not always?, then the meditative act, the purely subjective event, is a temporally primordial affair, and what I mean by this is that meditation literally annihilates time.

I consider this a very important thing, for I am not trying be more relaxed about the world (a great virtue of meditation, certainly). I am trying philosophize about meditation, because I think it is a great deal more then we generally think it is, for when we generally think, we are in "another world" that cares nothing for deeper existential analysis, and meditation is thereby is reduced to what this world can say.

I tend to see meditation as a practise to identify what I am. On the one level, I am one with everything, and my atoms and molecules rest against those of my clothes, the air in the room, the waves of sound, and there is no separation. On the other hand, I am observing these things from a distance, and they are tied up with my physical body, which when time ends, I will give up. In that much, I would say that it is a practise of surrender, rather than annihilation. But we might mean the same thing.

I think we do mean the same thing. But the question of what that is so extraordinary. This is why I read phenomenology. It takes one into a deep analytic of this. Picked up a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time about ten years ago and have made a project of it, the whole body of continental thought.

There are so many things that I observe myself doing automatically, like driving, “allowing the past simply to "create" a future without my contribution” as you say, and it is a practise in mindfulness to be fully aware of what I am doing. In meditation I am more in the moment than when I am moving outside, because outside I am particularly observant, “restless eyes” the Ophthalmologist called it, and even though I am often not aware of it, when my wife mentions something she assumed I hadn’t seen, I often can give a detailed description. I feel that this has been enhanced by meditation.

I think mindfullness and "in the moment" are very interesting, more than this, if one makes the critical move into philosophy. You can see by now that this is my principle concern, and I am claiming that this move is practical, not simply theoretical, speculative or in the abstract. I am saying that the way we understand the world is a pragmatic function, I mean it is actively determining how we experience the world. We don't realize this because it is a struggle to think one's way out of it, and this struggle takes time and work: Human dasein (Heidegger's term for what we are) IS language and to get "beneath" this to witness the radical intuitive foundation (Husserl's idea, a departure from Heidegger) of our existence is simply too hard and alien to be believed. Of course, Buddhism, in its basic claims, is MORE radical than Husserl.

I

found this part confusing, but it seemed to come back together when you described the end of the world-making enterprise as revealing divinity. This is of course an area where we find Taoism and Buddhism mingling, and aspects of Vedantism mixed in. I feel that much of this is a question of terminology, and Schopenhauer comes to mind, who saw a vast difference between Judaism and Christianity because of Christianity’s affinity with Vedantism: “The assumption that man is made out of nothing leads, necessarily to the assumption that death is his absolute end. Thus, in this in the Old Testament is perfectly consistent; for no doctrine of immortality is suitable to creation out of nothing. New Testament Christianity has such a doctrine because it is Indian in spirit, and therefore, more than probably also of Indian origin, although only indirectly through Egypt. But to the Jewish stem, upon which that Indian wisdom had to be grafted in the Holy Land, such a doctrine is as little suited as the freedom of the will to its determinism…” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, page 281

I'll have to get back to you on Schopenhauer. I've read very little and even though he was an inspiration to others I do know about, I just never got around to him seriously.

I would keep this very simple: what are they all talking about? It is about this, here, sitting in a room. What if I said that the whole of philosophy and religion is contained within this cup on the table? And I don't mean this a some cute exaggeration. Consider: The cup is an object, across from me, so the issue of epistemology arises; and I care, vaguely, about the cup for to observe at all is to have an interest, and so the value nature of the world arises; and consider that to see the cup is to bring it up into a matrix of language and logic, after all, to see a cup AS a cup is an affirmation, a category of logic, and an implicit negation of all that is not a cup; and religion needs a clear, foundational definition, one that puts aside the incidental features of a religion to discover the essence, what makes something religious, and this goes to an analysis of the human condition at the basic level, and this is brings one to ethics and aesthetics, then metaethics and metaaesthetics (see Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics for a brief account of this),and ethics is about our value-nature, that is, our desires, frailties, gratifications, indulgences, the wanting, the needing, the despair, and on and on, and THIS is the category of value, something embedded in the cup-recognition encounter.

This is likely not that enlightening, something of a cliche perhaps, but I am emphatic in my understanding of these grand themes of our existence that the grandeur one seeks lies in no text (contra Heidegger and Derrida; but keeping in mind that Derrida was beyond Heidegger. Big issue). Texts and their historical accounts and the evolving belief systems that come to us for academic elucidation are, if you can bear it, just a distractive engagement that can be so absorbing one can't see beyond it.

A moment of disclosure in the here and now (nunc stans they called it) possesses the basis and the substance of the entire problematic of our existence. The only question I can see is this: what unfolds when one closes in on the here and now, in the stillness of the depths of meditation? Are these Eastern sources right, and it is an extraordinary, not just liberation, but enlightenment and affirmation of the divine? I answer in the affirmative, simply because I stand with Wordsworth: it is not some full disclosure, clear, like a logical construction; rather it is in the music, the being in love, the nostalgia--an intimation:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

I have always seen happiness as the absence or a postponement of suffering because the latter is initially caused by distraction and indulgence in short-term pleasure and develops into compulsion and craving. However, deep suffering is speechless because it is no longer avoidable, and one can only grow used to it, like an amputated limb which our sensations suggest is still there, but it is not.

I look at suffering and happiness for what they are, free, at first, of the analysis: a spear in my kidney hurts, and the hurting is final. I mean, one cannot argue one's way out of it because it is a simply given. I can argue about it being a spear and not a hallucination of a spear, and so on, but the pain? Pain cannot be imagined because it would still be IN the imagined pain. Pain is not a construction of language. It is a pure "givenness" of the world. This kind of thing is impossible. It is an absolute and such things are not in the finitude of our existence (say Heidegger, et al).

this is not it is entirely wrong what you say above at all. But when you say happiness if the postponement of suffering, you sound like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, and these are not philosophers of affirmation. They are nihilists and my suspicion is that, especially Nietzsche, they were transfixed by the philosophical acknowledgment of suffering. It can make one mad, and with Nietzsche, who suffered his whole life. Hard thing to talk about, but my view is this, bluntly put: our affairs ARE also the metaphysics of our affairs. Ethical problems are inherently metaethical problems, as if they were played out on the stage of God vs Satan, but without these entities and the narratives that brought to us. Our ethical problems, especially the great problem of why we are here at all to love, suffer and die, ARE metaphysical problems. This means the ethical bad and good have, if you will, a Biblical gravitas, as if there really were an anthropomorphic diety at the source of it all. But f course, without this and without all of the foolishness.

Not a popular view, of course. But i say the Buddhist and the Hindu and the Christian are committed to just this simple equation, regardless of how they argue.

Yes, the concept of God is largely anthropomorphized, and humans seem to lack the ability to recognize the paradox of Christianity. I have not read the book The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, but I have read that he argues that God is a weak force that gives form to indeterminate and uncertain elements redeemed by the impotent power of God's Son, that God is a call rather than a cause, and that the kingdom of God is not a reign of holy law, but a holy anarchy embodied in works of love, forgiveness, and hospitality. The “weakness” of God as an expression of God’s vulnerable love and faithful justice in contrast to an almighty warrior who massacres all enemies does have a considerable appeal to someone like me, who studies across the range of traditions, which you can see from above.

Yes, I think you have it. Better than I, because his Biblical references are mostly beyond me. But this notion of the kingdom of God, consider Caputo's reference to Derrida whose structure is on display in what Derrida refers to a “sovereignty without force. By this Derrida means the unconditional authority exerted by the undeconstructible event—which goes under an endlessly translatable string of names like justice, the gift, forgiveness, hospitality—which of itself lacks force or worldly power, lacks an army or an armature, the material means to enforce its will, that is, to forcibly bring about what it is calling for. Such an unroyal, unkingly power, like the power of justice."

Undeconstructable is what I am calling the metaethical Good and Bad, something analysis cannot touch. A word like justice works nearly like this.

Like I said earlier, I take up the leads that you give me and it is fascinating indeed. I think that the temptation in ethics is to force people to act, by having an almighty warrior God for example, or by executing the dissenters (as in the French Revolution for example), or the supposed counter-revolutionaries, and by so doing people undermine their own principles. This, however, is the danger of pot modernism as well. We observe it in cancel culture, in refusing to let people speak, in the radicalisation of protest, and violent representation of weak minorities.

Political thinking is complicated and I won't deal with it. But what you say seems mostly right to me. The "radicalization" of the politicizing process turns reality to a myth of extremes. It has always been like this. I am disgusted by it, but then I an grateful I am not living as a Jew in Germany in the 1930's and 40's. Hope the geit zeist of all this resolves soon.

Speaking of experiential existence, Husserl went through many revolutions in his own person, didn’t he, and after WWI, he praised Buddhism as being not just any religion, but the religion whose “ethico-religious method of spiritual purification and pacification is of the highest dignity”, to such an extent that through its practice the state of nobility that the mind attains is comparable only to the highest forms of philosophical and religious spirituality in European culture. At the time, he was suffering from grief over the loss of a son, although before the war he was a fervent nationalist who was deeply concerned by the downfall of the old European civilization, and in favour of the war.

But I am reading so much at present, I can hardly keep up with the writing

All that I have been saying, and simply never occurred to me look up if Husserl ever directly talked about Buddhism. He was so fond the the Greeks, Western culture and how interpretatively superior they are, just dismissed it. Heidegger gives Buddhism a nod in his Der Spiegel interveiw, but little more. I'll have to read about Husserl and Buddhism to see what he said. Gautama Siddhartha is called the quintessential phenomenologist because he brought the world down to the essential descriptive presence, and he did it efficiently, you might say, through a decisive assault on common sense and common thinking. I have no doubt that this is right.

Thanks for that.

[thrasymachus]

Belindi wrote
Descartes did not literally say " confirmation bias" however what we commonly call confirmation bias is the mechanism that worked Descartes's demon.Therefore Descartes was well aware not to be led astray by his own affections.

But we are not following Descartes; we only take his lead with a single critical method: the alignment of ontology with epistemology. That is, the answer to the question, what is real? is determined by one thing: the intuitive presence of what appears. Descartes put the matter in the hands of the cogito, the thinking subject, but in this he was mistaken, for there is a great deal more than thought that survives the process of doubting. Value-sense, call it, I argue, is the most salient feature of the world and really the only thing that truly survives the Cartesian move, always keeping in mind that we leave Descartes and his arguments behind. We have moved forward with a new thesis in that the claim now is that IF one is looking for indubitability, s/he will not find it in the cogito as such, in the thinking "I", for the cogito is only discovered IN relations, and therefore one has to look to these relations, and here we at first find ourselves in the scientist's attitude, talking about objects as the positing of each being absolutely without relation to consciousness. This kind of thinking is dismissed, and we are now in the phenomenological attitude:


Your thinking like a rationalist dedicated to the rigors of uncompromised judgment, wary of the way passion can interfere. But that is not what this is about. The "new eidos" or new region of being never before delimited, and this is straight Husserl-speak, is what the world is reduced to once the matter of factness of the natural attitude is suspended. It simply means that confirmations of existence lie with direct apprehension, reality-intuition, if you like. Affectivity is thereby reduced to the givenness of the experience, which cannot be second guessed.

Feeling happy is an affect and as such is part of normal experience. But feeling happy is not part of deductive logic, which is experienced by the logician as devoid of affect like the logician is wearing the garb of a machine.

Not part of a logical construction? But there is nothing that is not, for the moment you conceive of what it is, you have already placed it in such a construction. It is impossible to conceive of something "outside" of conception. Nor should one think of anything devoid of affect, for it has to be understood: we are trying understand our world, and understanding is not a mirrored transparency which delivers objects as they are independent of the consciousness act of perceiving them. In understanding something, the understanding is IN the thing; the thing is a composite of what is there in the appearance, the phenomenon we call a tree, a cat, a cup, and so on. Logic and affect are parts of the constitution of the understanding in the actual apperceptive event. They are only thought as separate when we isloate them for analysis (and just to note that there really is no such thing as logic, affect, consciousness, and the rest. Rather, these are interpretative terms about certain dimensions of some impossible original whole. Abstract categories meant to describe something that itself is not an abstraction).

I tried to explain that Descartes failed to prove the existence of the first person singular, and you seem to not like my thesis; this disagreement is why I suggested we shelve Descartes pro tem, so we can get on with the Husserl thing. You claimed "I can doubt the "desk" is a desk, but I cannot doubt the thinking and the "I" that thinks." Whereas I claim you and Descartes are mistaken and that you can doubt the desk is a desk and you can doubt the I that is thinking but what you cannot doubt is that something is happening, i.e. that there is a process of change going on.

I am agreeing with you. "You can't doubt the event that something is happening," is a basic way to make Husserl's point. The Cartesian "I" just establishes the "method" of closing in on just what it is that is at the end of this rainbow of reductive "doubt" to get at what is REALLY there: It is the presence AS presence; pretty much what you said. The "I" (if you follow Husserl) is the "residuum" after the reduction. He actually calls it "the transcendental consciousness as the phenomenological residuum" and his argument is that once the world is acknowledged as a horizon of intuitive presence, consciousness is the necessary part of the relation in which this is understood. Not all agree with him.

The link between how we know the world, and existence itself , is unknowable possibility the limits of which we guess at via probability i.e. common sense and its more sophisticated cousin :inductive logic and allied synthetic trial and error with theories.

And no one disagrees with this. But before one proceeds to apply inductive reasoning ("common sense" is not helpful, as I see it, for it is a tendentious term, leaning toward the "common" thinking) it is important to know what it is one is observing. The difference between phenomenology and empirical science is the, if you will, raw data. A scientist will observe an event of terrestrial erosion or wave amplitude in water, and determine the obvious and "common" things regarding mass and movement; a phenomenologist simply says, all well and good, but let's take a close look at the event of perception itself, the "place" where date becomes data, which is presupposed by empirical science. Kant looked at reason and the form of judgment that was observed in the structure of the way we think about the world. This is inherently phenomenological, a "suspension" of the superstructure of events of everydayness, to discover the elementary intuitiveness of the existence that underlies it.

True, it's scary being alone in a wide wide sea of possibility i.e. existential angst. I think the really good reason for philosophy is it shows us others who may not be in the same boat but who seek the same haven sans inauthenticity and authorities.

I would add, what is this boat, anyway? Like Kierkegaard asking in his Repetition about this existence he had been thrown into:

I am at the end of my rope. I am nauseated by life; it is insipid — without salt and meaning. If I were hungrier than Pierrot, I would not choose to eat the explanation people offer. One sticks a finger into the ground to smell what country one is in; I stick my finger into the world — it has no smell. Where am I ? What does it mean to say: the world ? What is the meaning of that word ? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here ?
Who am I ? How did I get into the world ? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling shanghaier of human beings ? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality ? Why should I be involved ? Isn’t it a matter of choice ?

This is our boat. Phenomenology sees this as a principle feature of the "data" to be "observed" in order to understand what human existence means.

The numinous (according to Kant )does not exist. This is because the only existence is experience, and noumena by definition are never experienced.

And this is, as with Descartes, a point of departure. The world is foundationally indeterminate. Just follow the analytic of anything at all, all the way. You will encounter language at the bottom of it all. 'Intuition' is a particle of language, so where does this leave Husserl who claimed that we have a transcendental apprehension of the intuitive foundation of all things? Derrida steps in.

I don't follow your words on love. Are you saying sexual passion with romantic gloss is love?

Thinking of love like this is to fit love into a context of a scientific orientation, and it is not wrong to do this, any more that thinking of consciousness and its phenomena as, in part, an emerging quality of a brain. You could easily talk about happiness like this in a variety of contexts, happiness and evolution, happiness and neuorobiology, happiness and anthropology, happiness and literature, and so on, and in each case one would not be wrong. In the case here, the context is phenomenology, the most basic of all (hence, philosophical). We pull away from all other contextual construals to acknowledge what is there, in the presence of existence logically PRIOR (presupposed) to all other categories.

Here we ask the question in a Kierkegaardian fashion: what IS this experience of love as love, unmixed with other explanatory contexts? What is it to walk down the street feeling wonderful about everything? To simply feel wonderful? What is this "feeling"? this line of inquiry goes to the nature of value, and leads to meta value questions, the kind Wittgenstein took up in the Tractatus. (Was the early Wittgenstein a phenomenologist? Yes, he was. He was crazy about Kierkegaard.)

[Stoppelmann]

Consider that language itself is the "order that is superficial." This makes the philosophical puzzle complete. It is not just about the dogmatic insistence that goes unchecked, or the excessive love of well defined things. It is in the implicit "distance" between language and those actualities we encounter. To call a tree a tree, and say, my what a lovely tree, this and that in endless conversations about trees, and to let this rule my understanding unchecked by inquiry (the piety of thought), is the way of our "natural attitude," says Husserl. To be free of this constraint is the magic of a profound commitment to meditation. I find myself insisting that meditation is far more radical than most take it to be. Most sit under a tree and spend life sitting quietly doing nothing, true. But Gautama Siddhartha did. Certainly not to say that all should go there. But that this is where it gets philosophically interesting.

I agree, although I probably failed to make that clear in my posts. It is something that I have followed for some time since reading CS Lewis’ Preamble to Prayer, in which he laments that his imagination gives him images that cannot be what God is and asks for forgiveness for his idolatry. The key to prayer for Lewis was the struggle of getting the “real I” in touch with the reality of God. Prayer is saying, “may it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.” It was the beginning of my drift away from formal Christianity, and my beginning with MBSR and comparative studies.
My meditation is the acknowledgement of the distance between language and those actualities we encounter, the fact that incessant talking was the very thing that took me away from reality, and that silence enabled me to mindfully encounter it again. There had also been the strange fact that at that time, the more I was talking about morality, the more I was prone to strange divergencies and deviations, “temptations” as my Christian peers called them. I saw it as a clear indication that the language I was using was misguiding me. At one stage, I walked out of a prayer meeting saying, “We just have to shut up!”

That said, my affinity to poetry is something that moves me considerably, but I feel that good poetry overcomes this problem by giving words an ambiguity that at the same time is paradoxically expressive of more than superficially apparent, which is why some people sit with a poem for long periods of time and remain “outside.”

Either bring it into perspective or go mad. In your profession, I imagine stepping out of explicit empathy would be an absolute necessity. It is ironic that what may bring one in compassion to address the needs of others is what can be such a liability in the actual care giving. Doctors, I have read, are best if they lean toward sociopathy. Better not to care too much. Pilots who are too thrilled by flying may be unsteady in their performance. And so on with all things that require control and competence. I can see why meditation can contribute to the need to control.

Exactly.

But I would take a moment to look into another context of discussion which is not about practical concerns.

Empathy can drive one mad if it is taken to the final step, the step where one realizes, like a revelation, that we are put "here" in this world, and those who torment our imagination with their impossible suffering not only suffer, but suffer without redemption. The literature that chooses this as its theme brings the whole affair to madness, for what could be worse than to write about suffering for no reason at all? To look away is bad faith, for we know it is there, and we know the burden of its existence on those of conscience. Consider the way Baudelaire thoughts about the invisible ignorance that runs through our existence:

Under a vast grey sky, on a vast and dusty plain without paths, without grass, without
a nettle or a thistle, I met several men bent double as they walked.
Each one of them carried on his back an enormous Chimera as heavy as a sack of
flour or coal or the paraphernalia of a Roman infantryman.
But the monstrous beast was no inanimate weight; on the contrary, it enveloped
and oppressed the man with its elastic and powerful muscles; it clutched at the
breast of its mount with two vast claws; and its fabulous head overhung the man’s
forehead like one of those horrible helmets with which ancient warriors hoped to
add to the terror of their enemy.
I questioned one of these men and asked him where they were going like that. He
replied that he did not know and that none of them knew, but that they were evidently
going somewhere since they were driven by an invincible need to go on.
A curious thing to note: none of these travelers seemed irritated by the ferocious
beast hanging around his neck and glued to his back; one might have said that they
considered it part of themselves. All these tired and serious faces showed not the
least sign of despair; under the spleenful dome of the sky, their feet deep in the dust
of the earth as desolate as the sky, they continued along with the resigned physiognomy
of those who are condemned to hope forever [SC’s emphasis].
And the cortège passed by me and disappeared in the atmosphere of the horizon,
where the rounded surface of the planet is concealed from the curiosity of the
human gaze.2
Preamble
And for a few moments I persisted in trying to comprehend this mystery;
but soon irresistible Indifference descended upon me and I was more
heavily overwhelmed than they were by their crushing Chimeras

This is the French poet who wrote the infamous Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal). Important to note that I do not recommend this "attitude". But one has to look!

This is the despair of ethical nihilism. My view is that not only is this thesis wrong, it is impossible; as impossible as an uncaused effect.

Yes, I understand. This poor man with his illnesses, his long-term use of laudanum, a life of stress and poverty that took its toll, was caught up in the paradox of being a poet and literati and being only able to describe reality as something quite different to what others were willing to see – and quite monstrous if appropriate metaphors are used. How much is our present generation oppressed by their crushing Chimeras, invisible to them but perceptible for eyes that see?

This reading led to me writing a short piece on my blog concerning the war in Ukraine and the yearning for peace based on that short passage.

And when you do find yourself speculating on how long, you step back into time. A really good meditation seems timeless. But take the matter beyond this: The seeming of timelessness is an actual timelessness. It is no longer that cse that you sit while the world around continues, and the you are the anomaly. Rather, the time that was in place in your normal affairs was only there because you produced in these affairs. This raises the questions: what is the relation between these affairs and time? Is time really "subjective"? Is it true that Einstein was not really talking about time in the genuine sense of the term at all, but was simply doing "physics"? And physics is only body of postulated thought that sits upon subjective reality? Isn't it this "subjective" reality wherein lies the basis for talking about time, space, reality, knowledge, and so on?

Given that there are so many instances when we are “out of time” in as much that it is not a factor, but to which we return when we take back up our interaction with the world, time seems to me to be a matrix in which society lives. Sometimes reading or watching a play, or listening to a concert can be like taking a train or a plane to another country, and for as long as we are in that vehicle, the matrix just speeds by outside until we disembark and participate again. This suggests then, that I was in another time for as long as the figurative “journey” lasts. Like if, according to Einstein, time is relative to the proximity to the planet, and a space traveller on a flight would experience a different time span and find everyone has aged when he returns, so to on our imaginative journeys, we would be sometime surprised at what has gone on without us.

If you believe along with most analytic philosophers (and of course, everyone else encultured into a science mentality) that empirical science is also the basis for philosophical thought, then I would invite you to consider that this is impossible. Not just a bad idea, but impossible, demonstratively so. But if you think as Augustine did, that time, to put it simply, is problematic in its basic expression, as in "How can time exist if the past is no longer, if the future is not yet, and if the present is not always?, then the meditative act, the purely subjective event, is a temporally primordial affair, and what I mean by this is that meditation literally annihilates time.

I consider this a very important thing, for I am not trying be more relaxed about the world (a great virtue of meditation, certainly). I am trying philosophize about meditation, because I think it is a great deal more then we generally think it is, for when we generally think, we are in "another world" that cares nothing for deeper existential analysis, and meditation is thereby is reduced to what this world can say.

Augustine's reflections on time begin with the fact that time is a measure of change. As such, it presupposes the existence of things that can change and that must be "created". Consequently, he said, "There can be no time without creation." Perhaps I am too accustomed to this point of view, because creation to me is the natural world, that which physically exists and will change. In essence, this agrees with Einstein, surprising as it is, but the other aspect is that there was no observation of time before physical existence, only the now.

I think mindfullness and "in the moment" are very interesting, more than this, if one makes the critical move into philosophy. You can see by now that this is my principle concern, and I am claiming that this move is practical, not simply theoretical, speculative or in the abstract. I am saying that the way we understand the world is a pragmatic function, I mean it is actively determining how we experience the world. We don't realize this because it is a struggle to think one's way out of it, and this struggle takes time and work: Human dasein (Heidegger's term for what we are) IS language and to get "beneath" this to witness the radical intuitive foundation (Husserl's idea, a departure from Heidegger) of our existence is simply too hard and alien to be believed. Of course, Buddhism, in its basic claims, is MORE radical than Husserl.

I read Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit in 2014 in German and although when reading German the meaning seemed quite straightforward, I had problems translating it (which questions whether I have understood) into English, but one thing I understood was that Being must not be thought objectively, but only temporally. The difficulty is perhaps clear in this quote, “Das Sein des Seienden „ist” nicht selbst ein Seiendes.“ I would translate that as “The Being of that which is, is not itself something that is.” So, the Being of that which is makes it what it is. Dasein (“being there” in German) reflects the awareness of being that which is, or have I misunderstood?

I agree that our brains are wired to understand the world in a pragmatic way, which helps us survive, but we have another level of awareness, which seems to be absent in most other animals. This is difficult to say definitely because of their lack of language, which would suggest that they do not experience Dasein in the way we do, if Dasein is language. However, they do experience, and react to compassion, and in some cases display an attempt to mimic that by showing compassion to humans that have affected their lives. No wonder then that Jains, Buddhists, and Hindus have a doctrine expressing belief in the sacredness of all living creatures and urging the avoidance of harm and violence.

I would keep this very simple: what are they all talking about? It is about this, here, sitting in a room. What if I said that the whole of philosophy and religion is contained within this cup on the table? And I don't mean this a some cute exaggeration. Consider: The cup is an object, across from me, so the issue of epistemology arises; and I care, vaguely, about the cup for to observe at all is to have an interest, and so the value nature of the world arises; and consider that to see the cup is to bring it up into a matrix of language and logic, after all, to see a cup AS a cup is an affirmation, a category of logic, and an implicit negation of all that is not a cup; and religion needs a clear, foundational definition, one that puts aside the incidental features of a religion to discover the essence, what makes something religious, and this goes to an analysis of the human condition at the basic level, and this is brings one to ethics and aesthetics, then metaethics and metaaesthetics (see Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics for a brief account of this),and ethics is about our value-nature, that is, our desires, frailties, gratifications, indulgences, the wanting, the needing, the despair, and on and on, and THIS is the category of value, something embedded in the cup-recognition encounter.

“I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or into what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into the right way of living.”… “Thus, in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile, I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first appeared to be simile now seems to be mere nonsense.”… “Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.”

This “tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion … to run against the boundaries of language,” is then an expression of Dasein, or have I misunderstood?

This is likely not that enlightening, something of a cliche perhaps, but I am emphatic in my understanding of these grand themes of our existence that the grandeur one seeks lies in no text (contra Heidegger and Derrida; but keeping in mind that Derrida was beyond Heidegger. Big issue). Texts and their historical accounts and the evolving belief systems that come to us for academic elucidation are, if you can bear it, just a distractive engagement that can be so absorbing one can't see beyond it.

Yes, my peers back then took umbrage at my saying that the texts point beyond their content, that we must “read between the lines” and seek enlightenment in silence. One author wrote that stories are vehicles into which you board, travel with and then get off. If you look at fundamentalism in any religion or ideology, there is always a lot of words and dogmatism, and simplicity is somehow suspect although it is often profounder.

A moment of disclosure in the here and now (nunc stans they called it) possesses the basis and the substance of the entire problematic of our existence. The only question I can see is this: what unfolds when one closes in on the here and now, in the stillness of the depths of meditation? Are these Eastern sources right, and it is an extraordinary, not just liberation, but enlightenment and affirmation of the divine? I answer in the affirmative, simply because I stand with Wordsworth: it is not some full disclosure, clear, like a logical construction; rather it is in the music, the being in love, the nostalgia--an intimation:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Yes, that is a beautiful description, similar to one a German author gave, saying that it was similar to being enthralled by a particularly bright star at night, but having to suffer the clouds or the daylight obscuring it, and waiting patiently for it to reappear. It is the origin of magick and of enchantment, which was then taken literally.

I look at suffering and happiness for what they are, free, at first, of the analysis: a spear in my kidney hurts, and the hurting is final. I mean, one cannot argue one's way out of it because it is a simply given. I can argue about it being a spear and not a hallucination of a spear, and so on, but the pain? Pain cannot be imagined because it would still be IN the imagined pain. Pain is not a construction of language. It is a pure "givenness" of the world. This kind of thing is impossible. It is an absolute and such things are not in the finitude of our existence (say Heidegger, et al).

I agree, but even some kinds of pain are something that meditation can relativise, which Jon Kabat-Zinn worked on with regard to chronic illnesses. The spear is a cause that we can identify and remove, but chronic pain has to be worked on internally, and some never manage that. Suffering has this intangible quality at times that is like chronic pain, and sometimes you hear patients repeat a mantra of suffering, which it would help to break through. But it is as though they cling to that mantra and identify themselves with it.

this is not it is entirely wrong what you say above at all. But when you say happiness if the postponement of suffering, you sound like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, and these are not philosophers of affirmation. They are nihilists and my suspicion is that, especially Nietzsche, they were transfixed by the philosophical acknowledgment of suffering. It can make one mad, and with Nietzsche, who suffered his whole life. Hard thing to talk about, but my view is this, bluntly put: our affairs ARE also the metaphysics of our affairs. Ethical problems are inherently metaethical problems, as if they were played out on the stage of God vs Satan, but without these entities and the narratives that brought to us. Our ethical problems, especially the great problem of why we are here at all to love, suffer and die, ARE metaphysical problems. This means the ethical bad and good have, if you will, a Biblical gravitas, as if there really were an anthropomorphic diety at the source of it all. But f course, without this and without all of the foolishness.

By postponement of suffering I mean that there is always potential for suffering, and some people I know have a proclivity towards it that is worrying. I do acknowledge that it is there, like a puddle on the pathway, but I don’t always have to go through it. I was often disturbed by the invocation of Satan by believers to explain the most unremarkable of mishaps and told them that if anyone is doing that it is them. In fact, Satanism was created by the church as far as I am concerned, and what started as a ridicule became a countermovement. The anthropomorphism of Theism has been a problem to begin with, because the biblical record is clearly symbolic and metaphorical in nature. The statement that Moses can only see the back of God as if he has passed by is to be understood in this way.

But this notion of the kingdom of God, consider Caputo's reference to Derrida whose structure is on display in what Derrida refers to a “sovereignty without force. By this Derrida means the unconditional authority exerted by the undeconstructible event—which goes under an endlessly translatable string of names like justice, the gift, forgiveness, hospitality—which of itself lacks force or worldly power, lacks an army or an armature, the material means to enforce its will, that is, to forcibly bring about what it is calling for. Such an unroyal, unkingly power, like the power of justice."

Undeconstructable is what I am calling the metaethical Good and Bad, something analysis cannot touch. A word like justice works nearly like this.

If there is something blatantly obvious in the fate of the OT prophets, of Jesus and his Apostles, it is that they do not attempt to guide by physical power, but by the dynamis of the “Spirit.” They all become martyrs for the wisdom of love. It is a break from this principle when the church is given political power by Constantine. The same can be said of Buddhism, and the wars that Buddhists have fought, though not so influentially as Christianity. Therefore, having read part of Caputo’s “What Would Jesus Deconstruct?” I find many arguments a valuable contradiction of the hypotheses that the church has constructed and acted upon.

Thanks for your suggestions and entertaining my questions. I feel I have learnt a lot.