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[thrasymachus]

Stoppelmann wrote
I wouldn’t say that anything is “eliminated” by meditation, but it is certainly contained after a while, and not so invasive, which is helpful.

Nothing anyone can say is not metaphorical in nature, because language is metaphorical, and interprets experience with known concepts. As we come to experience different things our use of language adapts.

Which is surprisingly precisely on the money, where the thought meets reality. Heidegger would agree, and so would I, but this takes some analysis: Language is metaphorical, and this goes to the depth of meanings and rational categories. After all, what is it to call something a rabbit if not to identify a particular under a generalization, and what is a generalization if not a broad subsuming principle grounded in similar features, and then, isn't this what metaphors are?: drawing on similar features in things for efficiency in referencing. Not ever rabbit is the same rabbit, so what makes this rabbit a rabbit? Its definitional essence, you could say. So, in this reference there are defining features, like a certain meekness, proclivity to reproduce and so on, and these are borrowed from out of this standardized category to fit in another due to an observed similarity, the very thing, similarity, that is what makes a concept a concept. It can be defended, and has been (see Paul Ricuour's Time and Narrative and Rule of Metaphor, e.g., though I haven't read much of the latter, I mean to).

But this is the issue: Thought encounters objects in a predelineated way, always already "knowing" prior to the encounter. BUT: the actual "rabbit" object is more than the concept (Quine alludes to this in his Radical Indeterminacy of translation thesis), I mean, this "live" experience is not exhausted by the language that speaks it. this is Sartre, Kierkgaard before him and, well, everyone who reads phenomenology sees this, and it is especially poignant in matters of value: A spear through the kidney is NOT a language event. I will be, no doubt, when we talk about it, but the live event itself has, Kierkegaard reminds us, has nothing at all to do with language and logic.

You can argue, as Heidegger does, about this. It is a big deal. I argue that meditation delivers us from this interpretative language and logic without compromising the integrity of agency itself. In other words, I can establish an extraordinary void within, and still maintain status as a language bearing and interpreting person. Requires an argument.

It is strange how your criticism confirms what you are criticising: “Many words, little meaning, just sit.” Your verbal output is an attempt to overbear, to manipulate and dominate, probably an attempt to be rigorous (and imitate your namesake), but you are judgemental about another’s experience, which you cannot judge. If this were an attempt to learn to think better, to act more wisely, and thereby help to improve the quality of all our lives, which to me is the aim of philosophy, we would be more explorative, rather than judgemental, and although we may challenge to ideas of others, there would also be a collaborative attempt to understand.

Well, that collaborative attempt is philosophy. And improving the quality of our lives begs the question: what quality do you have in mind? Clearly not in making a better automobile or warmer socks. Philosophy's mission is to ask the most basic questions to find foundational affirmation for everything else. The good it does is both positive, in that it reveals fascinating truths about our existence, and negative, in that it keeps belief and the most basic level grounded in justification.
Certainly NOT an attempt to dominate, etc. If one didn't know how to drive or what cars and trucks were, then any conversation about them would be alien. Here: continental philosophy is very alien to common sense. You haven't asked the essential questions and so addressing these questions sounds remote and pretentious. But Kant through the post moderns is deeply meaningful. Did you really think the world is foundationally just the same old thing?? See what Kant has to say about this and take a look at the Critique of Pure Reason. NOT that I am a Kantian! But he opens the door.

You use my descriptive language against me and pile on numerous witnesses, although I answered the question of what happens when I meditate. You then show how well-read you are, which seems to be the point, and are in the realms of speculative ideas, rather than experience. I don’t see how this helps us understand that experience, other than saying that my descriptive language is not appropriate. Therefore, your method is to destroy your opposite by rendering anything they say as inferior to your command of words.

The reason I talk like this is that philosophy talks like this. And philosophy talks like this because basic questions about the world is a whole new world. Like others, you assume that your sensibilities deliver to you what is really-going-on. Why would you think like this? It is no better than the lunatic fundamentalist Christian who believes most emphatically the most absurd things simply because s/he has not looked, and refuses to look, at the basis for justified belief in religion. Philosophy is the cure for this. Just sit, you say? I recall Thoreau writing about the older, "wiser" people he met around Waldon Pond who simply sat: there was nothing wise at all in what they said. It took a Harvard degree to provide the language tools to SAY what is wise. Language is a pragmatic tool, and the more refined the tool, the more penetrating it is into the subtle entanglements that constitute the dogmatic mentality that rules common sense.

You deflect. I didn’t question the primordial experience, but your ability to speak about it. If the comparative studies (you know I am not a Buddhist) I engage in do anything, it is to inquire about our existence at the level of the most basic questions. Meditation, as I experience it, brings me to a place of the most basic questions. Buddhism, as I read the sources, points to the most basic questions, but so do other traditions each in their own way.

And this is exactly what I am addressing, this drivel about one tradition vs another. Not that these are wrong, but that one reads them, gets a scholastic setting in their head, and then thinks this is Buddhism. One has to turn this on its head: Buddhism is all about what happens when one meditates seriously, and this is inherently annihilative. Philosophically, one inquires about what it means to annihilate experience like this, vis a vis what, say, Heidegger, what Kant said about noumena, what Kierkegaard said about the qualitative movement, and so on. One can rely on texts like the Abhidamma, but I've read through some of this and it does not make for phenomenological clarity, though I will likely never truly find out. I work with phenomenology, and Gautama Siddhartha was the ultimate phenomenologist.

But that is the point. Meditation brings us with time to that silence, to that emptiness, and teaches us that language is always interpreting using half-baked concepts, that our very self-conception is an illusion. The truth of the matter is that we are inside this whirlwind of experience, and must seek the eye of the storm if we are to find equanimity. The examples you give are people on that mission, but they too are attempting to use words for silence, for it is all we have, except in the silence of meditation, when words are superfluous.

Just my cup of tea, here. You just don't like it when someone talks about it. Tibetan Buddhists, I read in an intro to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, talked about it all the time. They had a language that emerged out of meditative revelations. There is nothing about language that is prohibitive of talk. Logic is an empty vessel, I am fond of saying, and God could appear in unimaginable glory to a person, and logic wouldn't bat an eye. I would simply say, oh, and God appeared to me the other day. The descriptive vocabulary would have to be updated dramatically, of course, and others would have to confirm it just as they do everything else from rabbits to interstellar events. The point is, it is not a limitation of language, the "saying" that something is the case, that makes this prevents agreement between words and "enlightenment"; it is the domination of a culture's fixation on prohibitive thinking. Have some chicken salad! Can you "speak" this event? Yes. But do your words "say" the actuality of eating? No. Language never worked like this. The world of ordinary experience always already IS as deep as it gets In the foundational intuitive experiences we have. I mean, one, in the everydayness of one's affairs, is, beneath the surface of assumptions, a metaphysical existence; metaphysical because
there is in the shear "thereness" of the things, the object, the event, what is NOT language. Again, this doesn't mean we cannot talk about it, around it, relate what this strange "threshold" encounter where the words fail is, or that it fails. See Husserl, Levinas, Jean luc Marion, Michel Henry, et al. They talk like this.

Concepts which begin in the mind, fed by the input of our senses, and translated into concepts that help us survive. In effect, we are flying by instruments through a storm in the dark

Yet talk about being a storm in the dark begs the question: what dark? It is not like metaphors like this have no analysis. Remove the metaphor, and move into analysis: Dark, an absence of something--knowledge. How can something be outside of knowledge? What are knowledge claims such that there is some indeterminacy about them that a certain deficit (darkness) makes sense? Now you are in the world of phenomenological thinking. Ask, what is "mind"? Before we can move on to an empirical science of mind, we have to realize that thought itself is an existence prior to what can be said. I mean, to see the world is not to be some clear mirror of nature. This is a problem in epistemology: how does anything out there get in here (pointing to the brain)?

This doesn't undo or attack science. It simply says at the level of more basic questions, empirical science is something else entirely.

Bodhi, Satori, insight, an opening, liberation, arriving … what words could do a service, after we have discovered that apophatic negation rather than positive assertions are helpful?

The goal is liberation is it not? The mind is tied in knots with worries, interests, appetites, desires, etc., and institutions of culture that, it you will, sublimate these. Liberation, I argue, is a radical term, and Derrida and the rest are brought up here because their philosophies clarify the just this radicality. Most who meditate think about calming the mind and the like, but they really don't see the world as a profound issue in itself, so they bring the whole business into a mundane point of view.

I say, remember that terms like apophatic negation and the rest are themselves words in propositions. To know something is to know propositionally, sententially, that something is the case and if I experience the world this way or that, language does not undo this, but it is the deficit of the shared language of a culture that stands in the way. Language inhibits, but language is also the necessary tool for understanding. Analysis itself is language. You have a great meditation session, but how do you even know this? How can it be thought? There are no singular events that are imparted without a matrix of language (Derrida). We ARE language, and I by no means mean this in some deflationary way.

[Belindi]

Belindi wrote
But how may this be so and inanimate things be nothing other than determinate? If we have thought (reason) then we are more able to determine our futures than are engines or bridges which are nothing other than their histories.

I wrote this above but forgot to address it. I would add that when one thinks about indeterminacy, the matter goes to one own existence. It is not an abstract piece of speculation, but rather, the text needs to put down, suspended, and one has to face the world and ask basic questions as Kierkegaard did, as an existence that finds in every inquiry about one's nature, a failure in discovery. This is not the indifference one finds when reading, say, Willard Quine or Bertrand Russell. This is an inherently religious question, and needs to be taken personally. Keep in mind, there is only one ground for the Real, and that is one's own subjectivity.

But how may this be so and inanimate things be nothing other than determinate? If have thought that we are more able to determine our futures than are engines or bridges which are nothing other than their histories.

Indeterminacy as an epistemological concept: something is indeterminate in that our understanding cannot speak what it is: ask what a thing is, and you will find yourself in more language that is equally in need of explanation. It cannot be shown where language actually presents the world that is not language, and so this existence is never possessed by what we say it is. It remains entirely transcendental, this actuality I call objects.

As to existential indeterminacy, you take our ability to determine our own future and ask, what future do you have in mind? This is indeterminate: One's ability to freely determine a future (and keep in mind that this is notion of freedom is not about the trivial argument of defying the principle of causality, after all, ask what causality IS, and you will find yourself deep in indeterminacy), a "nothing," or a blank slate of unrealized possibilities, is exactly what is indeterminate. It is not like a stone or a bank teller which have definitional assignments that are fairly fixed. It is not, as Kierkegaard was saying in his Repetition, a mere recollection that asserts itself in the construction of a mimesis of the past, such that when you ask me what a bank teller is, I can proceed with something a dictionary says. Ask me what I will do in the next moment, and I can produce "possibilities" out of which a future can be constructed. This is not true of a stone, or a stellar mass, or anything else. Human being s are not in time; they ARE time in their freedom to become.

It was existential indeterminacy that I had in mind when I asked you the question. I fully understand that humans ARE time ; this a facet of absolute idealism. It follows from "Human beings--------ARE time" that during the lives and after the lives of individuals existence is not only existence in time but also absolute existence . In fairness I must include also all living beings, and it's impossible to be sure to what extent a plant or a bird can choose its future. I imagine there is a continuum between viruses at one parameter and sapiens at the other with a large crowd in the middle.

I also appreciate your remarks about so-called Free Will; the "trivial argument" about causality. I like that!

[thrasymachus]

Belindi wrote
It was existential indeterminacy that I had in mind when I asked you the question. I fully understand that humans ARE time ; this a facet of absolute idealism. It follows from "Human beings--------ARE time" that during the lives and after the lives of individuals existence is not only existence in time but also absolute existence . In fairness I must include also all living beings, and it's impossible to be sure to what extent a plant or a bird can choose its future. I imagine there is a continuum between viruses at one parameter and sapiens at the other with a large crowd in the middle.

I don't think idealism is a proper term here: Idealism implies an alternative to idealism, some kind of materialism, so the term pits mind against the world that is not mind, and this dualism needs to be dismissed, even though I do like to ask "how things out there get in here?" I do this to show that a model of the world grounded in materialism ends up in serious reductio ad absurdums. Anyway, idealism is what analytic philosophers like to say about phenomenology, in a disparaging way. Phenomenology simply says givenness is what IS. What else could "what is" be?

Regarding absolute existence: Tricky, no? I don't follow: " It follows from "Human beings--------ARE time" that during the lives and after the lives of individuals existence is not only existence in time but also absolute existence ."

What do you have in mind?

[Stoppelmann]

Which is surprisingly precisely on the money, where the thought meets reality. Heidegger would agree, and so would I, but this takes some analysis: Language is metaphorical, and this goes to the depth of meanings and rational categories. After all, what is it to call something a rabbit if not to identify a particular under a generalization, and what is a generalization if not a broad subsuming principle grounded in similar features, and then, isn't this what metaphors are?: drawing on similar features in things for efficiency in referencing. Not ever rabbit is the same rabbit, so what makes this rabbit a rabbit? Its definitional essence, you could say. So, in this reference there are defining features, like a certain meekness, proclivity to reproduce and so on, and these are borrowed from out of this standardized category to fit in another due to an observed similarity, the very thing, similarity, that is what makes a concept a concept. It can be defended, and has been (see Paul Ricuour's Time and Narrative and Rule of Metaphor, e.g., though I haven't read much of the latter, I mean to).

Aha, the left hemisphere on overtime, engaging with every thought that comes to mind. The generalisation is the normal state, observing a larger picture, on the watch for oddities that warn us to check them out, which is when language is required to categorise whether the observed is a danger, and define what it is. If you want, you can even identify what kind of rabbit you have, or whether it is a particularly attractive rabbit, otherwise it passes under the category “rabbit”. If there is no name for what we observe, we turn to metaphors, a figure of speech describing the observed as something like something else.

But isn’t this general knowledge? Years ago, we were using the metaphors “floodlight vision” and “spotlight vision” to explain how we usually perceive our surroundings to relatives of stroke patients, and why the patients were restricted in their perception, especially if they were suffering from neglect.

But this is the issue: Thought encounters objects in a pre-delineated way, always already "knowing" prior to the encounter. BUT: the actual "rabbit" object is more than the concept (Quine alludes to this in his Radical Indeterminacy of translation thesis), I mean, this "live" experience is not exhausted by the language that speaks it. this is Sartre, Kierkgaard before him and, well, everyone who reads phenomenology sees this, and it is especially poignant in matters of value: A spear through the kidney is NOT a language event. I will be, no doubt, when we talk about it, but the live event itself has, Kierkegaard reminds us, has nothing at all to do with language and logic.

I am aware that our brains seem to make decisions up to ten seconds before we are aware of them, which calls into question how consciousness our decisions are and may even challenge our ideas about how free we are to decide at any given time. I also learnt that children are thinking at a symbolic level but are not yet using cognitive operations at between 2-7, so is that what you mean here? I can’t see why anyone would think that language could normally give an exhaustive account of a live experience, except by employing imagination and achieving a meta-level of awareness.

You can argue, as Heidegger does, about this. It is a big deal. I argue that meditation delivers us from this interpretative language and logic without compromising the integrity of agency itself. In other words, I can establish an extraordinary void within, and still maintain status as a language bearing and interpreting person. Requires an argument.

I would like to validate your statements, but I can’t find them relative to what we were talking about.

It is strange how your criticism confirms what you are criticising: “Many words, little meaning, just sit.” Your verbal output is an attempt to overbear, to manipulate and dominate, probably an attempt to be rigorous (and imitate your namesake), but you are judgemental about another’s experience, which you cannot judge. If this were an attempt to learn to think better, to act more wisely, and thereby help to improve the quality of all our lives, which to me is the aim of philosophy, we would be more explorative, rather than judgemental, and although we may challenge to ideas of others, there would also be a collaborative attempt to understand.

Well, that collaborative attempt is philosophy. And improving the quality of our lives begs the question: what quality do you have in mind? Clearly not in making a better automobile or warmer socks. Philosophy's mission is to ask the most basic questions to find foundational affirmation for everything else. The good it does is both positive, in that it reveals fascinating truths about our existence, and negative, in that it keeps belief and the most basic level grounded in justification.
Certainly NOT an attempt to dominate, etc. If one didn't know how to drive or what cars and trucks were, then any conversation about them would be alien. Here: continental philosophy is very alien to common sense. You haven't asked the essential questions and so addressing these questions sounds remote and pretentious. But Kant through the post moderns is deeply meaningful. Did you really think the world is foundationally just the same old thing?? See what Kant has to say about this and take a look at the Critique of Pure Reason. NOT that I am a Kantian! But he opens the door.

This does depend rather on what you believe the essential questions to be, in the sense of what is absolutely necessary or indispensable. For me, the philosophy of religion has more to do with the examination of the themes and concepts involved in religious traditions, but also reflecting on matters of religious significance, such as the nature of religion itself, alternative concepts of God or ultimate reality, and the religious significance of nature and the cosmos, or of history.

The reason I talk like this is that philosophy talks like this. And philosophy talks like this because basic questions about the world is a whole new world. Like others, you assume that your sensibilities deliver to you what is really-going-on. Why would you think like this? It is no better than the lunatic fundamentalist Christian who believes most emphatically the most absurd things simply because s/he has not looked, and refuses to look, at the basis for justified belief in religion.

Okay, so after invalidating me and displaying your superiority, without actually referencing what I have said, but only my reaction to your objections to me, where do we go from here? I find you rather presumptuous, assuming that you have identified the person you are talking with, disregarding his area of expertise or experience, instead you make comparisons that are frankly insulting, and display an air of pomposity that is hardly bearable.

Philosophy is the cure for this. Just sit, you say? I recall Thoreau writing about the older, "wiser" people he met around Waldon Pond who simply sat: there was nothing wise at all in what they said. It took a Harvard degree to provide the language tools to SAY what is wise. Language is a pragmatic tool, and the more refined the tool, the more penetrating it is into the subtle entanglements that constitute the dogmatic mentality that rules common sense.

Well, I suggest you go look for someone who has that Harvard degree, and stop busying yourself with what you consider drivel. Being someone who has considered religious traditions comparatively, I do not set one religion against the other, and working in nursing, I have an appreciation of the non-academic wisdom that you disregard, and enough compassion to validate people without a degree.

If I were to be as presumptuous as you, I would assume that you would be someone who is a proponent of eugenics and would willingly sterilise people you consider “weak minded.” But fortunately I am reserved with my judgement, and have instead engaged in discussion on the themes and concepts involved in religious traditions, reflected on matters of religious significance, such as the nature of religion itself, alternative concepts of God or ultimate reality, and considered the religious significance of nature and the cosmos, or of history. If that isn’t interesting for you, I’m very sorry.

[Belindi]

Belindi wrote
It was existential indeterminacy that I had in mind when I asked you the question. I fully understand that humans ARE time ; this a facet of absolute idealism. It follows from "Human beings--------ARE time" that during the lives and after the lives of individuals existence is not only existence in time but also absolute existence . In fairness I must include also all living beings, and it's impossible to be sure to what extent a plant or a bird can choose its future. I imagine there is a continuum between viruses at one parameter and sapiens at the other with a large crowd in the middle.

I don't think idealism is a proper term here: Idealism implies an alternative to idealism, some kind of materialism, so the term pits mind against the world that is not mind, and this dualism needs to be dismissed, even though I do like to ask "how things out there get in here?" I do this to show that a model of the world grounded in materialism ends up in serious reductio ad absurdums. Anyway, idealism is what analytic philosophers like to say about phenomenology, in a disparaging way. Phenomenology simply says givenness is what IS. What else could "what is" be?

Regarding absolute existence: Tricky, no? I don't follow: " It follows from "Human beings--------ARE time" that during the lives and after the lives of individuals existence is not only existence in time but also absolute existence ."

What do you have in mind?

Materialism is not the only alternative ontological theory to absolute idealism. However materialism is also a monism so it resembles absolute idealism as does dual aspect monism. Absolute idealism theoretically embraces both materialism and dual aspect monism. I think Schopenhauer thinks that European idealism is much the same as Asian non-duality. Materialism is everyday common sense, and is normally as far as the scepticism of non-philosophers will be applied.

I am sorry that I can't comment on phenomenology as I barely understand it despite trying .

Regarding absolute existence as contrasted with temporal or relative existence. We who can speak to each other are able to do so because we are individual and unique selves. If you subtract your feeling of being a self which is what I imagine you do when you meditate, then you are in a state of absolute existence. Your self , like every other event , are a necessary event which cannot be otherwise than it is. Note the present tense which is the eternal now not the temporal now. So you are not only temporal and relative, you are also eternal.
You are your experiences; to be is to be perceived. You perceive all extended matter including you body, therefore your experience is not only temporal and relative to time and a material body, it's also absolute being.
It would be impracticable to live your life as absolute being; however I imagine when you meditate your wakingly aware brain-mind is temporarily experiencing absolute being.

[thrasymachus]

Stoppelmann wrote
Aha, the left hemisphere on overtime, engaging with every thought that comes to mind. The generalisation is the normal state, observing a larger picture, on the watch for oddities that warn us to check them out, which is when language is required to categorise whether the observed is a danger, and define what it is. If you want, you can even identify what kind of rabbit you have, or whether it is a particularly attractive rabbit, otherwise it passes under the category “rabbit”. If there is no name for what we observe, we turn to metaphors, a figure of speech describing the observed as something like something else.

But isn’t this general knowledge? Years ago, we were using the metaphors “floodlight vision” and “spotlight vision” to explain how we usually perceive our surroundings to relatives of stroke patients, and why the patients were restricted in their perception, especially if they were suffering from neglect.

Not on overtime. That is reserved for reading Kierkegaard who is maddeningly idiosyncratic. The trouble is, to read this stuff you have to deal with the minds of actual geniuses, and they without mercy.

The question is, what is this generalization that is already in place. Generalizations are schematic representations of classes of things. The particulars fall in line to the degree they conform to the principle. Is it rain, or a thick mist? A spoon or a ladle? Interesting to note how the mind puzzles over features as to the inclusiveness of the category. The idea I presented goes to how such principles work: clearly there is something there all spoons have that allows the spontaneous recognition such that even when a particular spoon is absent, one already knows what it is.

So, regarding metaphor, this notion of similarity is the functional essence of what a metaphor is and how it is used. I say Felix is a real tiger in the playing field and I am pulling a feature of one category and applying it to one that is that is categorically unrelated. I am reassigning ideas contextually, bringing a tiger's ferocity out of the jungle and into a playful reference to a person.

This is what i thought you were talking about. Note, interestingly, when one makes such moves things happen: irony is born. Irony and metaphor are what stitch together our meanings, that is, normal speech and the way concepts are interrelated contextually in a natural and familiar way, has it grounding in dissimilarity! And this goes directly to what Jacque Derrida is talking about when he says meanings emerge out of "differance". Language in its singular deployment is never singular for all meanings are contextual.

I am aware that our brains seem to make decisions up to ten seconds before we are aware of them, which calls into question how consciousness our decisions are and may even challenge our ideas about how free we are to decide at any given time. I also learnt that children are thinking at a symbolic level but are not yet using cognitive operations at between 2-7, so is that what you mean here? I can’t see why anyone would think that language could normally give an exhaustive account of a live experience, except by employing imagination and achieving a meta-level of awareness

.

No, that's not what I mean here, though I don't dismiss anything of what you said. Take the idea of "cognitive operations" you mention. What I mean here goes to what a meaningful response to the question, what do we mean by "cognitive"? Thinking, of course. Thinking is inherently symbolic, and then this moves into the nature of symbolic thinking, and then logic and its contents becomes the focus. Logic, reduced to an analytic essence, is pure structure, has no content, as with modus ponens and the rest. The content is to the point: language is the meaning bearing medium and the focus here is on what it means to think and speak at all. When I say, There is a rabbit! I am deploying meaning in language, and it is a problem for analysis to ask what this relation is between my meanings in the structure of logic vis a vis the world of objects, like rabbits. Look at it simply: I say "rabbit" and there is a thing over there, furry, etc, which I intend. There must be some way to talk about how my word and that furry thing connect, in order for my word to be ABOUT that furry thing. This is a problem is epistemology: language and its symbols are not the things they are "about", to put it bluntly, if less than accurately. A word is not a rabbit, to put it worse, still. So what is inside one's head doing all this talking about rabbits and the rest of the world, which we never question, are actually, if Kierkegaard is right, entirely alien to the meanings assigned.

I would like to validate your statements, but I can’t find them relative to what we were talking about.

It is an issue, but it's hard to talk about without bringing in all the jargon you despise. Nutshell: Husserl thought that beneath the world of everyday thinking and talk, there is a substratum of intuitions, sense impressions, if you like. This has to be in place in order to talk about late busses and what we had for breakfast. Husserl's is a Cartesian move! Toward what is there in the unassailable pure presence of things; the pure "givenness" of the world (for Descartes, of course, it was the pure givenness of the cogito). When one meditates seriously, one stands, radically so, apart from the everydayness of things that otherwise crowd consciousness. Doing this regularly, intelligently (after all, my cat is very good at sitting quietly and doing nothing), for as long as it takes, and everydayness will yield to seeing the world as never before: a pure intuitive presence. This is the point. Husserl called his "method an "epoche," a suspension of the ordinary world that leads to what is referred to in the Abhidharma as "ultimate reality" which sounds very mysterious. It is. Fascinating, really.

This does depend rather on what you believe the essential questions to be, in the sense of what is absolutely necessary or indispensable. For me, the philosophy of religion has more to do with the examination of the themes and concepts involved in religious traditions, but also reflecting on matters of religious significance, such as the nature of religion itself, alternative concepts of God or ultimate reality, and the religious significance of nature and the cosmos, or of history.

I think this is right, mostly, but you know, once you look at all of this, you discover that most religious themes are entangled in bad metaphysics. I was arguing earlier about how atheists mostly construe a concept about God, you know, the omni this and omni that, then proceed to attack, not bothering to notice that all of these omni's were inventions of theology. Philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein had had enough of this and the former invented a wholly new conceptual approach in order to be rid of the vast metaphysical foolishness. His Being and Time is just breathtaking. But not for the squeamish.

What is religion without the centuries of neo-Platonic hogwash? Positive and negative: On the negative side, religion is a response to the ethical indeterminacy of our existence: why oh why are we born to suffer and die? Sounds flippant, but nothing could be more profound, by my thinking, referring to the horrible actualities of this world. Religion seeks affirmation, redemption, heaven, in a world that essentially tortures us to death, and that really isn't an exaggeration. On the positive side: nirvana, which is heaven on earth. Buddhism is a "Way of Liberation," not into nothingness, but into a release to realize our true nature, the Buddha nature. Whether or not a person believes in this kind of thing depends entirely on one thing: whether such a thing has been to some degree already intimated in one's life. If one has been in love, e.g., one walks six inches off the ground. It is not as if heaven and happiness are just religious inventions. But interesting to note: when one does fall in love, the one never gives to the other anything. The rapture of being in love is a latent quality in all of us, and the solitude of meditation is anything but isolation.

Okay, so after invalidating me and displaying your superiority, without actually referencing what I have said, but only my reaction to your objections to me, where do we go from here? I find you rather presumptuous, assuming that you have identified the person you are talking with, disregarding his area of expertise or experience, instead you make comparisons that are frankly insulting, and display an air of pomposity that is hardly bearable.

So your not a fundamentalist Christian. Remember, you were very insulting yourself right at the outset. By all means, review what you said. I thought I was being very polite.

Well, I suggest you go look for someone who has that Harvard degree, and stop busying yourself with what you consider drivel. Being someone who has considered religious traditions comparatively, I do not set one religion against the other, and working in nursing, I have an appreciation of the non-academic wisdom that you disregard, and enough compassion to validate people without a degree.

If I were to be as presumptuous as you, I would assume that you would be someone who is a proponent of eugenics and would willingly sterilise people you consider “weak minded.” But fortunately I am reserved with my judgement, and have instead engaged in discussion on the themes and concepts involved in religious traditions, reflected on matters of religious significance, such as the nature of religion itself, alternative concepts of God or ultimate reality, and considered the religious significance of nature and the cosmos, or of history. If that isn’t interesting for you, I’m very sorry.

No. All of that is interesting to me. I really don't know what you're talking about. Eugenics?

[Stoppelmann]

The question is, what is this generalization that is already in place. Generalizations are schematic representations of classes of things. The particulars fall in line to the degree they conform to the principle. Is it rain, or a thick mist? A spoon or a ladle? Interesting to note how the mind puzzles over features as to the inclusiveness of the category. The idea I presented goes to how such principles work: clearly there is something there all spoons have that allows the spontaneous recognition such that even when a particular spoon is absent, one already knows what it is.

So, regarding metaphor, this notion of similarity is the functional essence of what a metaphor is and how it is used. I say Felix is a real tiger in the playing field and I am pulling a feature of one category and applying it to one that is that is categorically unrelated. I am reassigning ideas contextually, bringing a tiger's ferocity out of the jungle and into a playful reference to a person.

I think that the first generalisation is the differentiation between danger and safety, then between food and non-food, growing into an ability to differentiate things at first glance that we regularly encounter, and where that isn’t possible, we look in detail and designate. Once that is achieved, it is something that we recognise quickly, and we can relax again, which is really the point, because a heightened sensitivity costs energy.

When we start differentiating between spoons and ladles, we should be in a relaxed mode because it isn’t existential, and even the difference between rain and a thick mist is only a question of clothing. And this is where I start, perhaps because, as a nurse, I am naturally orientated to the somatic consequences of psychological states, which can, of course, be subject to illusion or even delusion. It may be interesting to investigate semantics, but not existential, and I believe that choosing and seeking meaning and direction in life is what religious thought is addressing. Even the dialogues that Plato recorded are about existential questions, and Socrates, who is said to have been a distinguished veteran who fought bravely on Athens’ behalf and who had grown indifferent to the discomforts of war, saw life from a pragmatic perspective that people who had not been in combat couldn’t see.

This is what i thought you were talking about. Note, interestingly, when one makes such moves things happen: irony is born. Irony and metaphor are what stitch together our meanings, that is, normal speech and the way concepts are interrelated contextually in a natural and familiar way, has it grounding in dissimilarity! And this goes directly to what Jacque Derrida is talking about when he says meanings emerge out of "differance". Language in its singular deployment is never singular for all meanings are contextual.

From the perspective of Buddhism, the existential conclusion that life is dukkha, meaning "incapable of being satisfied" or "unable to bear or withstand anything," and that the cause of dukkha is a thirst or craving for that which cannot satisfy us, and which makes us malleable, leads to the question of whether this can be changed. The solution to dukkha is to stop clinging and attaching to things, to people and even life. Some people imagine that this means to do without compassion, but what they understand is not feeling another person's pain and wanting to take steps to help relieve their suffering but a craving for reciprocity. Love isn’t a deep sense of oneness, but a longing for possession. His solution to that resembles the physician’s prescription for the treatment for our illness. This is the differentiation that is existential, not semantics.

No, that's not what I mean here, though I don't dismiss anything of what you said. Take the idea of "cognitive operations" you mention. What I mean here goes to what a meaningful response to the question, what do we mean by "cognitive"? Thinking, of course. Thinking is inherently symbolic, and then this moves into the nature of symbolic thinking, and then logic and its contents becomes the focus. Logic, reduced to an analytic essence, is pure structure, has no content, as with modus ponens and the rest. The content is to the point: language is the meaning bearing medium and the focus here is on what it means to think and speak at all.

As you can see from the above, I understand cognition to be the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge and understanding, including thinking, knowing, remembering, judging, and problem solving. From my interaction with patients with limited cognitive abilities, I also see this as existential, which is why a child must develop these abilities before we can say he or she is capable of living and encountering the world without close supervision. When these abilities are limited, it quickly becomes apparent.

But it is also necessary to have these abilities to truly meditate. Not that they are actively used, but they provide a stable foundation on which we can relax. Insecure people need to have a long history with meditation to be able to meditate, because insecurity creates an even more intense monologue that disrupts equanimity if we let it. This monologue can have symbolic features, but very often it is language, which at first it is difficult not to engage with. Engaging is where we give that monologue meaning, and if we are non-engaging, it passes as a string of words. Therefore, language is very often a ”meaning bearing medium,” but only if we engage with it.

When I say, There is a rabbit! I am deploying meaning in language, and it is a problem for analysis to ask what this relation is between my meanings in the structure of logic vis a vis the world of objects, like rabbits. Look at it simply: I say "rabbit" and there is a thing over there, furry, etc, which I intend. There must be some way to talk about how my word and that furry thing connect, in order for my word to be ABOUT that furry thing. This is a problem is epistemology: language and its symbols are not the things they are "about", to put it bluntly, if less than accurately. A word is not a rabbit, to put it worse, still. So what is inside one's head doing all this talking about rabbits and the rest of the world, which we never question, are actually, if Kierkegaard is right, entirely alien to the meanings assigned.

We experience a dissonance between words and meaning in semantic aphasia, where people begin to lose their vocabulary, or when the ability to produce speech and to repeat phrases and sentences spoken by others is unaffected, but the patients mean something else. It can also happen with cognitive dissonance, when people are averse to inconsistencies within their own minds, and spout out words with no apparent meaning. This can also be brought on by hysteria, induced sometimes by rousing speeches, or sermons which “whip up” emotions.

It is an issue, but it's hard to talk about without bringing in all the jargon you despise. Nutshell: Husserl thought that beneath the world of everyday thinking and talk, there is a substratum of intuitions, sense impressions, if you like. This has to be in place in order to talk about late busses and what we had for breakfast. Husserl's is a Cartesian move! Toward what is there in the unassailable pure presence of things; the pure "givenness" of the world (for Descartes, of course, it was the pure givenness of the cogito). When one meditates seriously, one stands, radically so, apart from the everydayness of things that otherwise crowd consciousness. Doing this regularly, intelligently (after all, my cat is very good at sitting quietly and doing nothing), for as long as it takes, and everydayness will yield to seeing the world as never before: a pure intuitive presence. This is the point. Husserl called his "method an "epoche," a suspension of the ordinary world that leads to what is referred to in the Abhidharma as "ultimate reality" which sounds very mysterious. It is. Fascinating, really.

It isn’t that I despise the jargon you use, it is a question of whether it is relevant. It obviously fascinates you, but as a simple guy that has been dealing with the existentiality of suffering on a wider scale, Buddhism gave me the grounding to pragmatically deal with it. Although I value various traditions for different aspects, Buddhism seems to me to best applicable in a medical environment. As you say, “when one meditates seriously, one stands, radically so, apart from the everydayness of things that otherwise crowd consciousness.” It is the relief that meditation brings that enables the return to that environment, and to retain an inward distance, whilst personally engaging with patients, often fraught with fear and worries. Empathy can cause a clinging to a situation but disables one from doing the job. And intuition is for me the consequence of experiences, good and bad, that enable me to react quickly in a given situation. Therefore, intuition is a substrate of thinking and talking, which you experience in ER, when everything has to happen quickly.

This does depend rather on what you believe the essential questions to be, in the sense of what is absolutely necessary or indispensable. For me, the philosophy of religion has more to do with the examination of the themes and concepts involved in religious traditions, but also reflecting on matters of religious significance, such as the nature of religion itself, alternative concepts of God or ultimate reality, and the religious significance of nature and the cosmos, or of history.

I think this is right, mostly, but you know, once you look at all of this, you discover that most religious themes are entangled in bad metaphysics. I was arguing earlier about how atheists mostly construe a concept about God, you know, the omni this and omni that, then proceed to attack, not bothering to notice that all of these omni's were inventions of theology. Philosophers like Heidegger and Wittgenstein had had enough of this and the former invented a wholly new conceptual approach in order to be rid of the vast metaphysical foolishness. His Being and Time is just breathtaking. But not for the squeamish.

The problem with understanding religious themes is that you have to understand that they are dealing with the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, cause and effect, necessity and possibility, through myth, poetry, dance, music, fertility, and nature. They are coming from what Barfield called “original participation,” and he says that for people before around 800BCE, “Although it was a violent world focused on survival, there is much evidence that many people might have had healthier psyches than we do today. They knew they participated in what was still an utterly enchanted universe.” Around 500 B.C. we witness via texts, how an awareness emerged worldwide with the Eastern sages, the Jewish prophets, and the Greek philosophers, which was the birth of systematic and conceptual thought. It was a step back, that was necessary to distinguish rather than participate in the immediate way people did before. We should today be able to differentiate and thereby value both perspectives, but we have people who are stuck in the original participation, often denying the reality they have to face, which is fundamentalism.

What is religion without the centuries of neo-Platonic hogwash? Positive and negative: On the negative side, religion is a response to the ethical indeterminacy of our existence: why oh why are we born to suffer and die? Sounds flippant, but nothing could be more profound, by my thinking, referring to the horrible actualities of this world. Religion seeks affirmation, redemption, heaven, in a world that essentially tortures us to death, and that really isn't an exaggeration. On the positive side: nirvana, which is heaven on earth. Buddhism is a "Way of Liberation," not into nothingness, but into a release to realize our true nature, the Buddha nature. Whether or not a person believes in this kind of thing depends entirely on one thing: whether such a thing has been to some degree already intimated in one's life. If one has been in love, e.g., one walks six inches off the ground. It is not as if heaven and happiness are just religious inventions. But interesting to note: when one does fall in love, the one never gives to the other anything. The rapture of being in love is a latent quality in all of us, and the solitude of meditation is anything but isolation.

I agree largely, as you can see, but I can understand the people holding on to whatever “hogwash” they value out of nostalgia, a yearning for the past that can be addictive, which can cause dukkha, but they need to be weaned off their nostalgia, and enabled to confront reality. This is why I value Jack Kornfield as a teacher, a Buddhist monk-turned-psychologist, whose integration of modern psychology into Buddhist teachings has helped many people heal in a disturbing world. I find many parallels in his teaching with the Sermon on the Mount, but also with non-Dualism, such as in words like, “You are consciousness incarnated in the human body, but not limited by it. Consciousness is the clear space of knowing, as vast as the open sky. Rest in consciousness, in loving awareness. Let vastness be your home.”

Remember, you were very insulting yourself right at the outset. By all means, review what you said. I thought I was being very polite.

First of all, I was reacting to “Burning Ghost,” although I realised too late that the post was from a long time ago, and you reacted to me in a very boisterous manner. I think it was your choice of names, Thrasymachus, who, in the first book of the Republic, attacks Socrates' position that justice is an important good. This was a dialogue that I was discussing with my brother a few weeks before our first encounter and may have influenced my reaction to your statement. My brother and I were of the opinion that Thrasymachus’ claim that “injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice” was devoid of all necessary ethics of social life. Hence my equally boisterous answer.

If you observe my answers to your position, you can see that I come from a very different place, and my non-academic background, as a soldier, nurse, manager and later in higher management in the course of nearly seventy years, has put me in a place that sympathises with Socrates, although that might make me, like him, the object of comic ridicule. Of course, he died at seventy, which I hope is not my fate.

[thrasymachus]

Stoppelmann wrote
I think that the first generalisation is the differentiation between danger and safety, then between food and non-food, growing into an ability to differentiate things at first glance that we regularly encounter, and where that isn’t possible, we look in detail and designate. Once that is achieved, it is something that we recognise quickly, and we can relax again, which is really the point, because a heightened sensitivity costs energy.

When we start differentiating between spoons and ladles, we should be in a relaxed mode because it isn’t existential, and even the difference between rain and a thick mist is only a question of clothing. And this is where I start, perhaps because, as a nurse, I am naturally orientated to the somatic consequences of psychological states, which can, of course, be subject to illusion or even delusion. It may be interesting to investigate semantics, but not existential, and I believe that choosing and seeking meaning and direction in life is what religious thought is addressing. Even the dialogues that Plato recorded are about existential questions, and Socrates, who is said to have been a distinguished veteran who fought bravely on Athens’ behalf and who had grown indifferent to the discomforts of war, saw life from a pragmatic perspective that people who had not been in combat couldn’t see.

The questions about spoons and ladles and the rest only arise when specific questions are asked, like what is the nature of knowledge? If you don't ask such questions, then the whole affair is without meaning. Questions about what to wear are completely different. You may say the latter have some privileged position over the former, but this would be hard to show because questions about he nature of knowledge, concepts and their relation to the world, and the like, are part of a general inquiry into the foundation of our existence. I argue that inquiry like this, stepping away from particular technical arguments, is an acknowledgment that our "being here" is foundationally an important matter, and this importance is bound up with our ethics, what can be called meta-ethical questions, questions about what the ethical/aesthetic Good and Bad dimensions of the world are about. This thinking is critically important for an understanding of our existence. It is the "real" conversation about our religious situation, and, again, I argue, that religion will one day turn here for its substantive concerns.

Pragmatism is a philosophical thesis that was popular in the US in the early 20th century. I think it is largely right, with some major exceptions. But Platonic thinking isn't like this. I mean, there are many things you can say about it, but pragmatism isn't one of them.

From the perspective of Buddhism, the existential conclusion that life is dukkha, meaning "incapable of being satisfied" or "unable to bear or withstand anything," and that the cause of dukkha is a thirst or craving for that which cannot satisfy us, and which makes us malleable, leads to the question of whether this can be changed. The solution to dukkha is to stop clinging and attaching to things, to people and even life. Some people imagine that this means to do without compassion, but what they understand is not feeling another person's pain and wanting to take steps to help relieve their suffering but a craving for reciprocity. Love isn’t a deep sense of oneness, but a longing for possession. His solution to that resembles the physician’s prescription for the treatment for our illness. This is the differentiation that is existential, not semantics.

there is no separating the two. The issue about semantics is not one that sits on top of an established body of assumptions. It is about what it means at all to have an assumption. A thought is an ironic construction AS a thought, and so, when we talk about dukkha or any term at all, we are here asking, what is it for a term to have any meaning at all? Derrida and others are saying language itself is not the kind of thing that reveals in its meanings the way the world IS. Language is always contextual, contingent, or simply, relative to whatever it is one is talking about. OUT of language, one cannot speak at all. the reason this is so interesting vis a vis Buddhism is that the most subtle and hidden form of attachment, and arguably the most prohibitive to progress, is the grip language has on consciousness. Speaking of pragmatists, there is Dewey, who wrote Art As Experience, and in this book he nicely demonstrates how cognition is inherently affective/aesthetic. So, when we think at all, we care, are interested, desire, crave, or whatever. This goes to the very foundation of one's understanding at the perceptual level! We generally live in the fixity and comfort of assuming our thoughts are aligned with the world we witness, but this very comfort is the essence of the most critical attachments. Hindus have this term, "maya" which refers to the illusion of our everyday existence. Language and its semantics is this illusion. But consider again: it is not language AS SUCH that burdens liberation. Rather, it is the, as you say, semantics.

When I see the moon, I am a conditioned perceiver as my intuition of what appears before me is crowded, tacitly, with countless assumptions that invisibly serve as a substrate for the occurrent perception, and these assumptions issue from an educational process of enculturation that began since birth. Liberation from this is very difficult to even understand, for the understanding is informed by this very language/culture conditioning. Obviously, this is not a popular concept in our society. To most, the idea makes no sense at all. But in western philosophy there is an approach, a method, called phenomenology. This is our version of jnana yoga, and at the heart of it is Husserl's epoche. For the spiritual implications of this, see, e.g., Anthony Steinboch's Phenomenology and Mysticism.

As you can see from the above, I understand cognition to be the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge and understanding, including thinking, knowing, remembering, judging, and problem solving. From my interaction with patients with limited cognitive abilities, I also see this as existential, which is why a child must develop these abilities before we can say he or she is capable of living and encountering the world without close supervision. When these abilities are limited, it quickly becomes apparent.

But it is also necessary to have these abilities to truly meditate. Not that they are actively used, but they provide a stable foundation on which we can relax. Insecure people need to have a long history with meditation to be able to meditate, because insecurity creates an even more intense monologue that disrupts equanimity if we let it. This monologue can have symbolic features, but very often it is language, which at first it is difficult not to engage with. Engaging is where we give that monologue meaning, and if we are non-engaging, it passes as a string of words. Therefore, language is very often a ”meaning bearing medium,” but only if we engage with it.

But we engage in it implicitly in simply being aware. Imagine how your awareness would register if you were born feral and lived that way. You would be like an animal, no? Sure footed down the rugged paths where you grew up, able to spear a fish, but in the plain perceptual settledness of your life, no penetrating questions or the understanding these engender. You wouldn't even be able to wield a conditional proposition. Or a negation.

I don't disagree with what you say about cognition and its role in meditation. Language and logic are tools. Tools to do what, is the question. They put me on the mat, tell me to reject that intrusions of thought, and so on. I AM language, it can safely be argued; it is just that I am not only language at all. This discovery of the what-is-not-language of my existence is the goal of meditation.

We experience a dissonance between words and meaning in semantic aphasia, where people begin to lose their vocabulary, or when the ability to produce speech and to repeat phrases and sentences spoken by others is unaffected, but the patients mean something else. It can also happen with cognitive dissonance, when people are averse to inconsistencies within their own minds, and spout out words with no apparent meaning. This can also be brought on by hysteria, induced sometimes by rousing speeches, or sermons which “whip up” emotions.

You are thinking in terms of pathologies due to injuries or disease. I don't understand these beyond the simple notion of impairment. I suppose it is a matter of degree: Patients with Alzheimer's in the final stages are mostly absent, or so I have witnessed.
Rousing speeches and the like suggest a loss of decision making ability in the substitution of one thoughts with those of another's. This goes on all the time, and is a principle theme of existential philosophy: the liberating movement out of conditioned responses (Heidegger calls this das man; Husserl calls it the naturalistic attitude; and so on) in the world to an inquiry that second guesses these.

It isn’t that I despise the jargon you use, it is a question of whether it is relevant. It obviously fascinates you, but as a simple guy that has been dealing with the existentiality of suffering on a wider scale, Buddhism gave me the grounding to pragmatically deal with it. Although I value various traditions for different aspects, Buddhism seems to me to best applicable in a medical environment. As you say, “when one meditates seriously, one stands, radically so, apart from the everydayness of things that otherwise crowd consciousness.” It is the relief that meditation brings that enables the return to that environment, and to retain an inward distance, whilst personally engaging with patients, often fraught with fear and worries. Empathy can cause a clinging to a situation but disables one from doing the job. And intuition is for me the consequence of experiences, good and bad, that enable me to react quickly in a given situation. Therefore, intuition is a substrate of thinking and talking, which you experience in ER, when everything has to happen quickly.

Of course, one cannot argue against this pragmatic point of view regarding meditation. But when you are in the ER, or you are dealing with radical pathologies of one sort or another, you are brought into a context of dealing with affairs and the fear and worries and this gives one an insight as you are allowed to witness in dramatic settings first hand the face of despair and suffering, which is something most of us spend life ignoring. to me, this is a profound insight, though it would bore you to tell you why.

My interests are, if you will, spiritual and philosophical. The world is to me a question, a radical indeterminacy. I see this at the perceptual level. See my little discussion above on language and attachment. This is where my standing is on this, and I have really only touched the surface: Consider that Eastern philosophy has two essential parts, which are one essential unity. One is liberation, to be free of the burdens of one's existence. The other is enlightenment, and this is the hardest to explain for what it means to be enlightened in this way is very strange to normal living. It is an experience, to put it bluntly, of the way the world "really is."

Explaining what this could be about is a job for a descriptive philosophy, like phenomenology. Herein lies the relevancy and the fascination you mention. Imagine a "science" that could take one to a deeper intimacy with "absolute reality" as the anglicized Abbhidamma puts it. Sounds far fetched and impossible? Well, the world is far fetched and impossible. The trick is to first SEE that this is the case. To break the complacency, for the "simple guy" version of the world is, like me and all of us, woefully unprepared. There is another "guy" that second guesses everything, Kierkegaard's knight of faith, Heidegger's authentic dasein, and many others, that emerges in sincere inquiry that is altogether OTHER than the constructed self that worries about the kids, prepares dinner, wonders about the stock market, etc. This other is not easily acquired.

The problem with understanding religious themes is that you have to understand that they are dealing with the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, cause and effect, necessity and possibility, through myth, poetry, dance, music, fertility, and nature. They are coming from what Barfield called “original participation,” and he says that for people before around 800BCE, “Although it was a violent world focused on survival, there is much evidence that many people might have had healthier psyches than we do today. They knew they participated in what was still an utterly enchanted universe.” Around 500 B.C. we witness via texts, how an awareness emerged worldwide with the Eastern sages, the Jewish prophets, and the Greek philosophers, which was the birth of systematic and conceptual thought. It was a step back, that was necessary to distinguish rather than participate in the immediate way people did before. We should today be able to differentiate and thereby value both perspectives, but we have people who are stuck in the original participation, often denying the reality they have to face, which is fundamentalism.

Then, I argue, stop thinking about religion as an aggregate of thematic possibilities, and as an historical study. This is deflationary as it normalizes religion, bringing its issues in line with things that are accessible. Religion is inherently about what is NOT accessible. It is our metaphysics. The "enchantment" of a distant "original participation" is not distant at all; it is immanent, but ignored. Meditation discovers this. Ancient Buddhists knew this. But I would say that existential philosophy of this past century and the post modern work of philosophers like Michel Henry, articulate what this about better than it ever has been. Their thoughts are penetrating. This philosophy is not an augmentation, a building of theory. Rather, it is a tearing down of bad metaphysics, and a clarifying of where things went wrong.

Our situation is no different than the ancients here: we face a world, the same sunrises, the same sun and stars, and we have the same capacity to still the cultural events in our heads. But we are, granted, much busier, more fragmented, multi tasked, but this goes to motivation. No one really cares.

I agree largely, as you can see, but I can understand the people holding on to whatever “hogwash” they value out of nostalgia, a yearning for the past that can be addictive, which can cause dukkha, but they need to be weaned off their nostalgia, and enabled to confront reality. This is why I value Jack Kornfield as a teacher, a Buddhist monk-turned-psychologist, whose integration of modern psychology into Buddhist teachings has helped many people heal in a disturbing world. I find many parallels in his teaching with the Sermon on the Mount, but also with non-Dualism, such as in words like, “You are consciousness incarnated in the human body, but not limited by it. Consciousness is the clear space of knowing, as vast as the open sky. Rest in consciousness, in loving awareness. Let vastness be your home.”

to be a consciousness incarnated in a human body is an interesting idea. Now, what does one do to actual see this not simply in the abstract? to confirm this to be the case as Neil Armstrong confirmed walking on the moon? Extraordinary, but there, in your own perceptual affirmation. Not as a therapeutic technique, but an insight into the nature of our existence.

I actually believe in this kind of thing, but not metaphorically or heuristically. Ask this question: How does anything out there get in here (pointing to one's head)? Arguably the second most important question in philosophy. I know my cat is here in the couch. But how is this possible, my knowledge reaching out of my brain to encounter the cat such that I know this?

This problem in epistemology is insoluble. For no one wants to break the laws of physics, which is what it would require to conceive of an epistemic connection like this, a knowledge that passes through space intimating other things are "out there". Of course, if the brain were not the generative seat of consciousness.......

First of all, I was reacting to “Burning Ghost,” although I realised too late that the post was from a long time ago, and you reacted to me in a very boisterous manner. I think it was your choice of names, Thrasymachus, who, in the first book of the Republic, attacks Socrates' position that justice is an important good. This was a dialogue that I was discussing with my brother a few weeks before our first encounter and may have influenced my reaction to your statement. My brother and I were of the opinion that Thrasymachus’ claim that “injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice” was devoid of all necessary ethics of social life. Hence my equally boisterous answer.

If you observe my answers to your position, you can see that I come from a very different place, and my non-academic background, as a soldier, nurse, manager and later in higher management in the course of nearly seventy years, has put me in a place that sympathises with Socrates, although that might make me, like him, the object of comic ridicule. Of course, he died at seventy, which I hope is not my fate.

Thrasymachus does not win that argument. Nietzsche was fond of him, which is not a good sign. But I am an anti rationalist or sorts. Anyway, I certainly don't believe the advantage of the strongest or anything close to this. I should change it. But then, it is a good name.

Errors likely in the above.









I

[Stoppelmann]

I argue that inquiry like this, stepping away from particular technical arguments, is an acknowledgment that our "being here" is foundationally an important matter, and this importance is bound up with our ethics, what can be called meta-ethical questions, questions about what the ethical/aesthetic Good and Bad dimensions of the world are about. This thinking is critically important for an understanding of our existence. It is the "real" conversation about our religious situation, and, again, I argue, that religion will one day turn here for its substantive concerns.

I would also say that this is of primary importance, and one that is primarily associated with mind, where everything starts for us. Ethics then, would be the “frame of mind” with which we observe and act in the world, which has consequences “as the wheel follows the hoof of the ox.” It is also the reason for an eightfold path: Right View or Right Understanding, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration. With reference to what we are talking about, Right Understanding is the basis for this.

Pragmatism is a philosophical thesis that was popular in the US in the early 20th century. I think it is largely right, with some major exceptions. But Platonic thinking isn't like this. I mean, there are many things you can say about it, but pragmatism isn't one of them.

Pragmatism has its uses within a certain field, but is too little to address the whole of existence. For example, my pragmatism when nursing at the bed doesn’t work when feeding someone, that requires more empathic compassion and patience, just as our interactions with family and friends does.

This is the differentiation that is existential, not semantics.

there is no separating the two. The issue about semantics is not one that sits on top of an established body of assumptions. It is about what it means at all to have an assumption. A thought is an ironic construction AS a thought, and so, when we talk about dukkha or any term at all, we are here asking, what is it for a term to have any meaning at all? Derrida and others are saying language itself is not the kind of thing that reveals in its meanings the way the world IS. Language is always contextual, contingent, or simply, relative to whatever it is one is talking about. OUT of language, one cannot speak at all. the reason this is so interesting vis a vis Buddhism is that the most subtle and hidden form of attachment, and arguably the most prohibitive to progress, is the grip language has on consciousness.

What I was really referring to, although perhaps not clear enough, was that reaction to suffering, if it is not show, is spontaneous and speechless, acting from compassion, for which there is no language until we start to explain ourselves. I have watched people with considerable cognitive restrictions which also caused aphasia, react spontaneously to help someone. It surprised us because these people never spoke and needed help themselves. Additionally, experiencing life as an immigrant in Germany and initially working on building sites where the foreman used grunts and gesticulations to get things done and speech was monosyllabic, one colleague quipped, “he probably speaks more with his dog than with us!” Under such circumstances it sounds strange to think that language is existential. But perhaps that has to do with what you wrote:

Speaking of pragmatists, there is Dewey, who wrote Art As Experience, and in this book he nicely demonstrates how cognition is inherently affective/aesthetic. So, when we think at all, we care, are interested, desire, crave, or whatever. This goes to the very foundation of one's understanding at the perceptual level! We generally live in the fixity and comfort of assuming our thoughts are aligned with the world we witness, but this very comfort is the essence of the most critical attachments. Hindus have this term, "maya" which refers to the illusion of our everyday existence. Language and its semantics is this illusion. But consider again: it is not language AS SUCH that burdens liberation. Rather, it is the, as you say, semantics.

Even as someone who has tried hard to be understood, perhaps more than the average immigrant, resulting in social advancement, the affective aspect of cognition has been very present in my observations. I am also a lover of art, and can become absorbed in colours and brushstrokes, or light and shadow, the shape of a foot or the line that is enough to interpret it as something special. But as you can perhaps see, equally poetry and especially Roget’s Thesaurus, can fascinate me for hours. I wouldn’t call it craving, rather a fascination, but then again, I am conditioned by the literature I have read to avoid the temptation to grab, possess, or even rip out, instead I would draw or photograph a wallflower for example, rather than putting it into a pot.

Dharma or dhamma is reality-as-it-is, the illusion is the perceptions and preconditions that mislead us to believe that we are separate from that. These perceptions might be the semantics, the language to achieve a desired effect through the use of words, with which we fool ourselves as much as we fool others.

When I see the moon, I am a conditioned perceiver as my intuition of what appears before me is crowded, tacitly, with countless assumptions that invisibly serve as a substrate for the occurrent perception, and these assumptions issue from an educational process of enculturation that began since birth. Liberation from this is very difficult to even understand, for the understanding is informed by this very language/culture conditioning. Obviously, this is not a popular concept in our society. To most, the idea makes no sense at all. But in western philosophy there is an approach, a method, called phenomenology. This is our version of jnana yoga, and at the heart of it is Husserl's epoche. For the spiritual implications of this, see, e.g., Anthony Steinboch's Phenomenology and Mysticism.

It sounds a lot like “beginners mind,” which I learnt to use in nursing, approaching especially difficult situations without prejudgement. This is particularly important with people with mental disorders, but also with common dementia, where sufferers are often suggested to have purposely done something, whereas their biggest problem is not having intentions, but reacting to every moment. It takes some practise, because, as you say, our conditioning is often dominant. It was also not willingly adopted by my staff.

But we engage in it implicitly in simply being aware. Imagine how your awareness would register if you were born feral and lived that way. You would be like an animal, no? Sure footed down the rugged paths where you grew up, able to spear a fish, but in the plain perceptual settledness of your life, no penetrating questions or the understanding these engender. You wouldn't even be able to wield a conditional proposition. Or a negation.

I meant engaging “with” it rather than “in” it, the latter would imply noticing, whereas the former is reacting. Meditation isn’t a feral state, but it is a state of not reacting; being aware but not responding, much like we would if we were concentrating on something, without allowing ourselves to be distracted. In meditation, we are concentrated on awareness itself, and it depends on which form our meditation takes, whether sitting, lying down, walking, what that awareness perceives, but still be do not engage with it. We take in everything but do not participate.

I don't disagree with what you say about cognition and its role in meditation. Language and logic are tools. Tools to do what, is the question. They put me on the mat, tell me to reject that intrusions of thought, and so on. I AM language, it can safely be argued; it is just that I am not only language at all. This discovery of the what-is-not-language of my existence is the goal of meditation.

Exactly.

You are thinking in terms of pathologies due to injuries or disease. I don't understand these beyond the simple notion of impairment. I suppose it is a matter of degree: Patients with Alzheimer's in the final stages are mostly absent, or so I have witnessed.

Rousing speeches and the like suggest a loss of decision making ability in the substitution of one thoughts with those of another's. This goes on all the time, and is a principle theme of existential philosophy: the liberating movement out of conditioned responses (Heidegger calls this das man; Husserl calls it the naturalistic attitude; and so on) in the world to an inquiry that second guesses these.

Cognitive impairment is seldom complete, except in appallic syndrome or a so-called vegetative state, or in a coma. There are impairments that have an impact on alertness, cognition, and behaviour, but still leave these people mobile, even if instable. Even among dementia patients we know of terminal lucidity, which refers to a return to mental clarity and working memory among some dementia patients shortly before death, although experts don’t know exactly why a person may experience this and it raises many questions.

You can either respond to a situation reflexively or reflectively, and a few examples above showed that conditioning sets in even when cognitive restrictions are present, and I think that rousing speeches are also causing a reflexive response, although, as you say, it is by habitually restricting ones reflective capabilities.

Of course, one cannot argue against this pragmatic point of view regarding meditation. But when you are in the ER, or you are dealing with radical pathologies of one sort or another, you are brought into a context of dealing with affairs and the fear and worries and this gives one an insight as you are allowed to witness in dramatic settings first hand the face of despair and suffering, which is something most of us spend life ignoring. to me, this is a profound insight, though it would bore you to tell you why.

It is interesting to read how much regular meditation benefits concentration, it disciplines the mind and enables a flow state to be achieved, so that the fear and worries are put into perspective and dealt with reflectively.

My interests are, if you will, spiritual and philosophical. The world is to me a question, a radical indeterminacy. I see this at the perceptual level. See my little discussion above on language and attachment. This is where my standing is on this, and I have really only touched the surface: Consider that Eastern philosophy has two essential parts, which are one essential unity. One is liberation, to be free of the burdens of one's existence. The other is enlightenment, and this is the hardest to explain for what it means to be enlightened in this way is very strange to normal living. It is an experience, to put it bluntly, of the way the world "really is."

One could say that it is about liberation in order to become enlightened, since dukkha is very much involved in restricting our ability to see things clearly. It also has to do with the discipline, the Bushido Code, which I read in German, called “Die Sieben Wege des Samurai” by André Daiyû Steiner, a Zen teacher here in Germany, shows how service is central, and most importantly:
“There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. There will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.” ― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai.

Explaining what this could be about is a job for a descriptive philosophy, like phenomenology. Herein lies the relevancy and the fascination you mention. Imagine a "science" that could take one to a deeper intimacy with "absolute reality" as the anglicized Abbhidamma puts it. Sounds far fetched and impossible? Well, the world is far fetched and impossible. The trick is to first SEE that this is the case. To break the complacency, for the "simple guy" version of the world is, like me and all of us, woefully unprepared. There is another "guy" that second guesses everything, Kierkegaard's knight of faith, Heidegger's authentic dasein, and many others, that emerges in sincere inquiry that is altogether OTHER than the constructed self that worries about the kids, prepares dinner, wonders about the stock market, etc. This other is not easily acquired.

My meditation teacher told us the story of the Stundent that goes to his Master and asks, how it is that he is always so relaxed and joyful. His Master said, “it isn’t difficult. When I sit, I sit. When I stand, I stand. And when I walk, I walk.” The student is puzzled and says, “but I do that too!” The Master shook his head and said, “No, no. When you sit, in your mind you are already standing, and when you stand, you are already walking. And when you walk, you have already arrived.” That seems to touch on that “authentic dasein” of Heidegger.

Then, I argue, stop thinking about religion as an aggregate of thematic possibilities, and as an historical study. This is deflationary as it normalizes religion, bringing its issues in line with things that are accessible. Religion is inherently about what is NOT accessible. It is our metaphysics. The "enchantment" of a distant "original participation" is not distant at all; it is immanent, but ignored. Meditation discovers this. Ancient Buddhists knew this. But I would say that existential philosophy of this past century and the post modern work of philosophers like Michel Henry, articulate what this about better than it ever has been. Their thoughts are penetrating. This philosophy is not an augmentation, a building of theory. Rather, it is a tearing down of bad metaphysics, and a clarifying of where things went wrong.

I understand what you are getting at. I also tend to argue against the notion of truth that dominates modern thought and in its manifold effects determines the world we live in, and get looked at sceptically. I think it is my comparative studies that have given me this perspective, estranged me from the church in which I was once an elder, but also towards the end of my career, isolated me a little, so that I was considered aloof and distant by my peers – which didn’t really fit, because I still enjoy a relationship with employees from the past. Michel Henry would interest me, so I might by the reader. His rejection of Marxism in favour of a Marx that he interprets as both a philosopher of reality and a philosopher of life sounds similar to Erich Fromm, who also differentiated in a similar way.

Our situation is no different than the ancients here: we face a world, the same sunrises, the same sun and stars, and we have the same capacity to still the cultural events in our heads. But we are, granted, much busier, more fragmented, multi tasked, but this goes to motivation. No one really cares.

Or they are distracted by triviality, but when you encounter people who suffer the loss of loved ones, or what I experienced, the disappointment of a failed therapy (my staff mourned the death of a 46-year-old patient that we were sure we could help to get back on her feet), or the struggle with a long infirmity, like long-covid and similar ailments, then existential questions arise. The problem is that the way these are addressed is not appropriate, and here I am close to Michel Henry in my appreciation of Christianity.

to be a consciousness incarnated in a human body is an interesting idea. Now, what does one do to actual see this not simply in the abstract? to confirm this to be the case as Neil Armstrong confirmed walking on the moon? Extraordinary, but there, in your own perceptual affirmation. Not as a therapeutic technique, but an insight into the nature of our existence.

I actually believe in this kind of thing, but not metaphorically or heuristically. Ask this question: How does anything out there get in here (pointing to one's head)? Arguably the second most important question in philosophy. I know my cat is here in the couch. But how is this possible, my knowledge reaching out of my brain to encounter the cat such that I know this?

This problem in epistemology is insoluble. For no one wants to break the laws of physics, which is what it would require to conceive of an epistemic connection like this, a knowledge that passes through space intimating other things are "out there". Of course, if the brain were not the generative seat of consciousness.......

“Though much has been published on the ‘hard problem’ [of consciousness] I think it is appropriate that I quickly summarize here what it is all about. The problem is this: according to current state-of-the-art materialism, the primary element of reality is a relatively small set of fundamental subatomic particles described in the so-called ‘Standard Model’ of particle physics. These particles are referred to as ‘ontological primitives’: they are materialism’s basic building blocks for constructing everything else in nature, from galaxies to chairs, to you and me. In other words, we should be able to construct explanations for every object or phenomenon in nature in terms of the dynamics of these subatomic particles; how they move and interact with one another. The problem is that materialism ordinarily assumes these subatomic particles to lack consciousness. So how do you eventually get consciousness simply by arranging ‘dead’ subatomic particles together?”
Kastrup, Bernardo. Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything (pp. 16-17). John Hunt Publishing.

Kastrup has been following this problem for some time, and although he doesn’t go the whole way (in my estimation), he does make the problem with the brain as the generative seat of consciousness clear in his books. He and many others with whom he has talked online, have pointed out the failings of modern materialism. This seems to me from the little I have read about Michel Henry, is “the truth of this world” against which he argues.

Perhaps we are on the brink, and we might step over in the course of our discussion. I need a break to think about it, but what you had to say was interesting.

[thrasymachus]

Perhaps we are on the brink, and we might step over in the course of our discussion. I need a break to think about it, but what you had to say was interesting.

Right. Consider the following as you please. I am starting to repeat myself, for such general accounts are limited and are just the surface of the technical discussions that Henry and others give us.

Been a pleasure!

Stoppelmann wrote
I would also say that this is of primary importance, and one that is primarily associated with mind, where everything starts for us. Ethics then, would be the “frame of mind” with which we observe and act in the world, which has consequences “as the wheel follows the hoof of the ox.” It is also the reason for an eightfold path: Right View or Right Understanding, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration. With reference to what we are talking about, Right Understanding is the basis for this.

Right this and right that, and a frame of mind, these beg a deeper question, which is the foundation of anything being right or wrong. Follow the eightfold path and you still encounter this: Right concentration is contingent on what it is you are meditating for, for all the right technique one can imagine is without value if sitting quietly doing nothing is taken as a stand alone goal. Nothing is like this. The question begged by ALL such practices is the metaethical/metavalue question: what is the nature of the Good you are seeking? By 'nature' we are not asking about the good FOR somethig else. We are asking about what it means for something to be good at all. There are contingent goods, like good couches and shoes: ask why a couch is good, and you find yourself referring to its comfort, durability, size, and so on. Contingent goods are identified easily, and they vary according to purpose. A good knife is sharp, well balanced, but then, such a thing would be a bad knife if the purpose was to use it in a performance of Macbeth. Someone could get hurt.

This kind of contingency permeates our ethics, and is responsible to the almost universal agreement that ethics itself is a contingent matter, and "it all depends" on the relativity of circumstances, cultures, and so on. But this analysis is not a metaethical analysis. Consider the knife and note how the good qualities of the knife can become bad qualities given the situation. But good simpliciter is not so indeterminate, for it is not conceivable for goodness or badness itself to be anything but good or bad:make the choice of utility between the suffering of the one over the many, if given the choice, and you have a defensible argument of contingency, that is, the good choice is measured quantitatively in terms of pleasure, happiness produced. But the "bad" of the suffering as suffering is not diminished, for it cannot be diminished. The "bad" quality being bad cannot be, like the sharpness of the knife, reconceived; it would be like reconceiving the color yellow to be some other color. This is because badness as such is not reducible; it is not a construct that can be explained, for it is IN the fabric of our existence and the existence of the world.

Why is this argument important? It brings inquiry to a halt, for one finally has reached an end. As Wittgenstein wanted to show us, there is an impassible and impenetrable "presence" of the world that defies analysis. One cannot analyze being-appeared-to-redly, as the analytics like to talk about qualia, and one cannot analyze the "bad" of a toothache or the "good" of being happy, even if it is Hitler being happy about some new extermination technique. Happiness as such, is unassailable.

Here we have a resting place for religion, for when we try to suspend the narratives and ancient culture that produced the bulk of scripture, and get the heart of what the religious human condition is, we find the non contingency of the value of value. This is called meta-value discovery and it is, frankly, earth shattering in its consequences: the identifying of something absolute in our everyday affairs.

Buddhism, and religious and philosophico-religious inquiries. and living itself, all have, as their implicit mission, the search for the Good and the deliverance from the Bad, to put is bluntly. The longest path is karma yoga. The most direct is meditation which a radical practice of cutting to the chase: nirvana. Nirvana is, far and away, the most mysterious and "impossible" things imaginable, for to approach it, one has to be rid of the world itself.

Pragmatism has its uses within a certain field, but is too little to address the whole of existence. For example, my pragmatism when nursing at the bed doesn’t work when feeding someone, that requires more empathic compassion and patience, just as our interactions with family and friends does.

Pragmatists say that experience ITSELF is a pragmatic phenomenon. Any experience. Consider the scientific method: X is true according to how well works, and something working is measured by its output, its consequences. So truth is a "forward-looking" concept. What is nitro glycerin? IF it is impacted is such and such a way, THEN it will explode. What a thing is is determined by our anticipated responses in the encountering, and this makes truth a temporal concept. I walk along, see a friend, and instantly the language, and the entire body of remembered events of what this person will do, say, and so forth, rises to greet him or her.

As to "all of existence": what existence do you refer to? What is a flower or an interstellar mass?: I see the flower, and my resources rise to anticipate what I will encounter, after so many encounters in the past. The "what is there before me" AS a presence that is not part of this anticipatory matrix, is transcendental or "absolute". Cannot be spoken, for speaking itself is pragmatic. Buddhism, serious meditation, breaks down the pragmatic anticipation, releases one from the grip of their instantly conferring identity. It is a momentous event to witness a world without these identities in place. To approach such a state is the goal of meditation, and it is inherently liberating and enlightening. the prajnaparamita agrees:


Tasmāc Śāriputra, śūnyatāyāṁ
Therefore, Śāriputra, in emptiness

na rūpaṁ, na vedanā, na saṁjñā, na saṁskārāḥ, na vijñānam;
there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no volitional processes, no consciousness;

na cakṣuḥ-śrotra-ghrāna-jihvā-kāya-manāṁsi;
there are no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind;

na rūpa-śabda-gandha-rasa-spraṣṭavya-dharmāḥ;
no forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, thoughts;

na cakṣūr-dhātur yāvan na manovijñāna-dhātuḥ;
no eye-element (and so on) up to no mind-consciousness element;

na avidyā, na avidyā-kṣayo yāvan na jarā-maraṇam, na jarā-maraṇa-kṣayo;
no ignorance, no destruction of ignorance (and so on) up to no old age and death, no destruction of old age and death;

na duḥkha-samudaya-nirodha-mārgā;
no suffering, arising, cessation, path;

na jñānam, na prāptir na aprāptiḥ.
no knowledge, no attainment, no non-attainment.

Tasmāc Śāriputra, aprāptitvād Bodhisattvasya
Therefore, Śāriputra, because of the Buddha-to-be’s non-attainments

Prajñāpāramitām āśritya, viharaty acittāvaraṇaḥ,
he relies on the Perfection of Wisdom, and dwells with his mind unobstructed,

cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād atrastro,
having an unobstructed mind he does not tremble,

viparyāsa-atikrānto, niṣṭhā-Nirvāṇa-prāptaḥ.
overcoming opposition, he attains the state of Nirvāṇa.

I read western phenomenology because it articulates extremely well the world that I am trying to overcome. Pragmatism shows us that language is not an assignment of markers to talk about things. It is a powerful dynamic structure of meaning that constitutes our existence in the world.

Even as someone who has tried hard to be understood, perhaps more than the average immigrant, resulting in social advancement, the affective aspect of cognition has been very present in my observations. I am also a lover of art, and can become absorbed in colours and brushstrokes, or light and shadow, the shape of a foot or the line that is enough to interpret it as something special. But as you can perhaps see, equally poetry and especially Roget’s Thesaurus, can fascinate me for hours. I wouldn’t call it craving, rather a fascination, but then again, I am conditioned by the literature I have read to avoid the temptation to grab, possess, or even rip out, instead I would draw or photograph a wallflower for example, rather than putting it into a pot.

Dharma or dhamma is reality-as-it-is, the illusion is the perceptions and preconditions that mislead us to believe that we are separate from that. These perceptions might be the semantics, the language to achieve a desired effect through the use of words, with which we fool ourselves as much as we fool others.

I think tis kind of thinking needs a closer analysis: Let's say I have through some yogic practice come realize at the perceptual level a certain intimacy with reality-as-it-is. And so, where I once looked around me an saw trees and stars and the rest and there was nothing threatening to disconfirm this perceptual (or, apperceptual) acquaintance, and my thoughts and feelings were aligned with normal living; now I "see" something that was hidden by this conformity. The, call it matrix of conformity, was pervasive, meaning a unity, a totality, like a dictionary's totality: look up a word and you find more words. What was it that was concealed? Something that has always already been there, but ignored. Buddhists call this the Buddha nature: one does not acquire it, one already IS it, a kind of purity that underlies the matrix of conformity. At any rate, there I am, bent in the direction, say, of liberation and enlightenment, just starting to "see" and having moments of clarity. How this to be described?

One thing holds: I am not thrown into chaos, like a child's "blooming and buzzing" (James). I still know trees are trees, and I am still grounded implicitly in the language that makes propositional knowledge possible. I can say, here I am, and there is a cell phone on the table--these are not threatened in the least, and while the identity-imparting nature of such utterances remains intact, I can still experience the loosening of the grip of identity this totality has (see adjacent thinking in Emanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity. A VERY hard read. But that is just the way it is) once had.
this is important to see, I claim: To annihilate language is not the purpose, nor is it, therefore, an annihilation of the boundary that separates me from the world I encounter. Intimation of reality-as-it-is is not a complete dissolution of the self. It is a question of agency. I may be delivered fromt he conceptual structures that place interpretative walls between me and the tree, but once these walls are weakened, there is an enduring implicit "I am" that attends all. This is, of course, the Cartesian cogito, a "thinking substance" if you will; BUT, and this is a critical point: The very semantical walls that are threatened in the process of seeing more penetratingly into the world are precisely what create expressions like "I am". This is a very strange juncture, the circularity (hermeneutics) of language that at once brings one to awareness, yet the awareness itself is "about" the very constructed semantics of the awareness.

In other words, when we try to talk about liberation and enlightenment, we find ourselves tied in knots, discarding the very thing that is essential for affirming what we want to say. Hermeneutics, which is endless question begging, Heidegger called a "feast for thought" is unavoidable.

This is why the Zen master's fan goes flying across the room.

It sounds a lot like “beginners mind,” which I learnt to use in nursing, approaching especially difficult situations without prejudgement. This is particularly important with people with mental disorders, but also with common dementia, where sufferers are often suggested to have purposely done something, whereas their biggest problem is not having intentions, but reacting to every moment. It takes some practise, because, as you say, our conditioning is often dominant. It was also not willingly adopted by my staff.

Consider what Husserl said about starting a absolute poverty in his Cartesian Meditations:

First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and
attempt,within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom
(sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as Ms wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights. If I have decided to live with this as my aim the
decision that alone can start me on the course of a
philosophical development I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty,

Of course, as I understand a "beginner's mind" it is not about forgetting training, but about being free of extraneous judgment, things that hinder objectivity. The assumption is that it is made clear just what is being made free: a regard for an environment that should be honest and efficient. Consider that in phenomenology (which dominated western thinking for more than a century after Kant) is just this, but about something radically different: human existence.

I meant engaging “with” it rather than “in” it, the latter would imply noticing, whereas the former is reacting. Meditation isn’t a feral state, but it is a state of not reacting; being aware but not responding, much like we would if we were concentrating on something, without allowing ourselves to be distracted. In meditation, we are concentrated on awareness itself, and it depends on which form our meditation takes, whether sitting, lying down, walking, what that awareness perceives, but still be do not engage with it. We take in everything but do not participate.

Which is a fair way to put it. I want to philosophize about it, understand it. I want a descriptive account that lays this out, for I am confident that "not reacting" nor being distracted can also terminate inquiry, and inquiry has more work to do. Enlightenment: this is both cognitive and affective. Cognition's analysis shows us that thought is structurally temporal. I know this is a cup, and this means I anticipate, I already know it, if you will, prior to the encounter, and so I am not surprised what I see it. The future is unmade, and it is made BY that anticipatory matrix automatically, spontaneously. Essentially, what meditation does is free us of the future, or better, cancels time altogether, for there is no dynamic of production of a what-will-be if anticipatory memory is suspended. And hence, the present is annihilated, becomes meaningless as a stand alone phenomenon. Traditionally the term used for this is nunc stans. The eternal present.

Thinking like this is a kind of yoga: these concepts are working models for ascending to an enlightened mind. They help work out explicitly the nature of attachments. There are revelatory moments in this.

Cognitive impairment is seldom complete, except in appallic syndrome or a so-called vegetative state, or in a coma. There are impairments that have an impact on alertness, cognition, and behaviour, but still leave these people mobile, even if instable. Even among dementia patients we know of terminal lucidity, which refers to a return to mental clarity and working memory among some dementia patients shortly before death, although experts don’t know exactly why a person may experience this and it raises many questions.

You can either respond to a situation reflexively or reflectively, and a few examples above showed that conditioning sets in even when cognitive restrictions are present, and I think that rousing speeches are also causing a reflexive response, although, as you say, it is by habitually restricting ones reflective capabilities.

Quite interesting, really. I wonder about near death experiencers who have no cognitive function at all, or anything else, because there is no pulse or blood pressure. They are dead. Yet they report extraordinary things. Typically, they are dismissed as "brains in the throes of death." But these are fascinating testimonies. I have seen several and their accounts are without question sincere.

It is interesting to read how much regular meditation benefits concentration, it disciplines the mind and enables a flow state to be achieved, so that the fear and worries are put into perspective and dealt with reflectively.

As I see this, and this may sound odd, concentration is a kind of out of the body experience. In fact, all perceptual encounters are like this, but concentration is a focused projection of awareness. It is not simply a stilled mind, but a dynamic focus. One has to dismiss any physicalist restraints on how this can be done, after all, physicalist thinking is an epistemic failure (though this is something that is very difficult to argue given the default naturalistic attitude). This kind 0f thinking steps outside the boundaries of philosophical thinking, and into the quasi mystical.

How are perceptual encounters out of the body experiences? Because IN the body, knowledge is impossible, and the candle on this table is not IN the body, and Kant, by my lights, opens tis door (a very worthy read, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason).

One could say that it is about liberation in order to become enlightened, since dukkha is very much involved in restricting our ability to see things clearly. It also has to do with the discipline, the Bushido Code, which I read in German, called “Die Sieben Wege des Samurai” by André Daiyû Steiner, a Zen teacher here in Germany, shows how service is central, and most importantly:
“There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. There will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.” ― Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai.

I certainly see this to be true, and the freedom of the moment is nothing short of extraordinary. More than true. Profound, this sense of being bound to nothing, for when genuinely achieved, a "pure self rises to awareness, and one starts to understand what the Buddhists are talking about.

However, the matter is not analytically settled, and by this I mean, IN the solemn moment, there is an expansiveness and a gravitas that intimates greater depth to experience. Not really something that wants to be talked about, because the occasion belongs a radical unfolding of one's own nature, or, the nature of one's existence that is equally true for all, but only acknowledgeable within.

Buddhism is far stranger than is generally held. This is because most do not take inquiry more deeply into what is being said.

My meditation teacher told us the story of the Stundent that goes to his Master and asks, how it is that he is always so relaxed and joyful. His Master said, “it isn’t difficult. When I sit, I sit. When I stand, I stand. And when I walk, I walk.” The student is puzzled and says, “but I do that too!” The Master shook his head and said, “No, no. When you sit, in your mind you are already standing, and when you stand, you are already walking. And when you walk, you have already arrived.” That seems to touch on that “authentic dasein” of Heidegger.

If by authentic dasein you mean a temporally structured agency that is, in its freedom, on the cusp of creative possibilities, then you could look at it like this: we are Time. Time is inherently anticipatory, and before we become aware of our own freedom, we are lost in the "They" that is the language and the culture that carries us through life. So, when one sits one is already standing, one is never attending to the present, for to exist is a future-looking event.

But keep in mind, Heidegger was no mystic, nor was Husserl. There is, however, in that Der Spiegel interview, mention made of Buddhism suggesting the possibility of a new language. I'd have to look it up to see. Not much there though.

I understand what you are getting at. I also tend to argue against the notion of truth that dominates modern thought and in its manifold effects determines the world we live in, and get looked at sceptically. I think it is my comparative studies that have given me this perspective, estranged me from the church in which I was once an elder, but also towards the end of my career, isolated me a little, so that I was considered aloof and distant by my peers – which didn’t really fit, because I still enjoy a relationship with employees from the past. Michel Henry would interest me, so I might by the reader. His rejection of Marxism in favour of a Marx that he interprets as both a philosopher of reality and a philosopher of life sounds similar to Erich Fromm, who also differentiated in a similar way.

Michel Henry (and I am not aware of his Marxism, though I intuitively think I see the idea: there is no escaping the moral observations of Marx. But then, implementing these has always been a disaster) follows through from Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida; especially Husserl and his four principles of phenomenology. Derrida is (a good read on this is John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics) the one that puts the nails in the coffin of language being "about" something that is not language, and thereby inserts this extraordinary "distance" between thought and what-is-not-thought, for lack of a better locution. The entirely OTHER of thought, which is transcendental.

As to modern thought, Heidegger wrote The Question Concerning Technology. He rails against turning the world into a "standing reserve" and has a nostalgic eye on the poets like his obvious favorite, Hölderlin, a romantic who reminds me of Tolstoy or Wordsworth, a glorious celebration the natural world, but then, there is that sense of "homeland" that probably many had at the time, which encouraged nationalism, Nazism, and the rest. There was this popular Volkism I read about once. Dangerous and morally unstabling.

Don't know much about Fromm.

No wonder you experienced some estrangement from associates. This thinking is alien to anglo American analytic philosophy.

Or they are distracted by triviality, but when you encounter people who suffer the loss of loved ones, or what I experienced, the disappointment of a failed therapy (my staff mourned the death of a 46-year-old patient that we were sure we could help to get back on her feet), or the struggle with a long infirmity, like long-covid and similar ailments, then existential questions arise. The problem is that the way these are addressed is not appropriate, and here I am close to Michel Henry in my appreciation of Christianity.

Yes, you have it, and there it is: blissful unawareness. Going to church and being a part of a community of believers is no longer an option if you read existential philosophy, and issues of suffering rise up out their slumber, and life deepens, as does responsibility and one's humanity and compassion. We have forgotten that we exist, says Kierkegaard.

I would add that we should be careful not to judge, for, as Yeats put it, "the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." The burden of the knowledge of suffering is too great, and this is the very essence of religion. When the human condition is complete, not like Heidegger but more like Kierkegaard or Henry, and reaches into our primordial indeterminacy for God (one could argue, though with difficulty, that this is the purpose of suffering. As Dewey put it, if life were free and easy, no problems to solve, then there would be no education, no art, no music, no meaning; and God would never be conceived. Hard to think like this when children are screaming in burning cars and the like, but it is exactly this kind of thing that makes God a necessity. I argue for the positive drive to God as well, of course: the consummation and resolution of our love and compassion) we become different people. It is, again, I argue, a step out of culture, out of human dasein, and into our existential transcendence.

[Belindi]

Thrasymachus wrote:

John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics) the one that puts the nails in the coffin of language being "about" something that is not language, and thereby inserts this extraordinary "distance" between thought and what-is-not-thought, for lack of a better locution. The entirely OTHER of thought, which is transcendental.

Absolute idealism holds that thought creates the world; in that sense language transcends the world. The medium of language is creative because it is symbolic and in open systems the symbols are changeable. (Though it's remarkable how tenacious some symbols are.) Society is just such an open system unless political tyrants restrict freedom of expression. There are also other symbolic media which have their special capabilities .

[thrasymachus]

Belindi wrote
Absolute idealism holds that thought creates the world; in that sense language transcends the world. The medium of language is creative because it is symbolic and in open systems the symbols are changeable. (Though it's remarkable how tenacious some symbols are.) Society is just such an open system unless political tyrants restrict freedom of expression. There are also other symbolic media which have their special capabilities .

Hovering around it here. But not just because symbols are open and interchangeable. These symbols have a world to deal with, and their openness is contingent upon this. But then, this world is itself an historical entity, but not just this. We face existence which is transcendent. Even language AS language transcends language. Phenomenologists have a lot to say, and they are not all in agreement. Some are very far out there. Like Fink:


by producing the transcendental onlooker, who as such does not go along with the belief in the world, with the theses on being [Seinsthesen] held by the world-experiencing human I. Rather, he takes a look at that belief in the world in such a way as to inquire back behind the "world-character" of world-believing life, behind humanness, and thereupon to reduce that life to the transcendental constituting experience of the world that was concealed by the apperception of the human. 9Thus
through the reduction the proper theme of philosophy is revealed: the transcendental constitution of the world

Husserl's associate, assistant and likeness, Fink is flat out saying that the famous phenomenological reduction reveals the foundational hiddenness of the world, which, in analysis, reveals the true generative grounding of our existence. You know, it is certainly not a brain, for a brain is just one more phenomenon, and has no privilege outside of this. The only way to look deeply into the grounding of our existence as an affirmation, an agreeing, that occurs when existence imposes itself in the moment of generation, and somewhere in the threshold of awareness, consciousness "agrees" to go forward. This is Heraclitus' world of becoming, and in time, we implicitly yield to the inevitable coercive intrusion on our future making endeavors. (This reminds one of Camus on suicide: it is a choice to exist.) This takes one far down the rabbit hole of self consciousness, and the world is no longer the world. Reductions are always played out like this, no? Freud wanted to tell us what was "really" going on in our daily affairs, and Kant was about what judgment "really" is. Fink takes takes reductive thinking all the way to the encounter with our own, and the world's, transcendence.

Kant did this, of course, but Kant was more epistemological. Husserl and Fink are existential, intuitive. And more, far more, "out there".

[Belindi]

Belindi wrote
Absolute idealism holds that thought creates the world; in that sense language transcends the world. The medium of language is creative because it is symbolic and in open systems the symbols are changeable. (Though it's remarkable how tenacious some symbols are.) Society is just such an open system unless political tyrants restrict freedom of expression. There are also other symbolic media which have their special capabilities .

Hovering around it here. But not just because symbols are open and interchangeable. These symbols have a world to deal with, and their openness is contingent upon this. But then, this world is itself an historical entity, but not just this. We face existence which is transcendent. Even language AS language transcends language. Phenomenologists have a lot to say, and they are not all in agreement. Some are very far out there. Like Fink:


by producing the transcendental onlooker, who as such does not go along with the belief in the world, with the theses on being [Seinsthesen] held by the world-experiencing human I. Rather, he takes a look at that belief in the world in such a way as to inquire back behind the "world-character" of world-believing life, behind humanness, and thereupon to reduce that life to the transcendental constituting experience of the world that was concealed by the apperception of the human. 9Thus
through the reduction the proper theme of philosophy is revealed: the transcendental constitution of the world

Husserl's associate, assistant and likeness, Fink is flat out saying that the famous phenomenological reduction reveals the foundational hiddenness of the world, which, in analysis, reveals the true generative grounding of our existence. You know, it is certainly not a brain, for a brain is just one more phenomenon, and has no privilege outside of this. The only way to look deeply into the grounding of our existence as an affirmation, an agreeing, that occurs when existence imposes itself in the moment of generation, and somewhere in the threshold of awareness, consciousness "agrees" to go forward. This is Heraclitus' world of becoming, and in time, we implicitly yield to the inevitable coercive intrusion on our future making endeavors. (This reminds one of Camus on suicide: it is a choice to exist.) This takes one far down the rabbit hole of self consciousness, and the world is no longer the world. Reductions are always played out like this, no? Freud wanted to tell us what was "really" going on in our daily affairs, and Kant was about what judgment "really" is. Fink takes takes reductive thinking all the way to the encounter with our own, and the world's, transcendence.

Kant did this, of course, but Kant was more epistemological. Husserl and Fink are existential, intuitive. And more, far more, "out there".

I think at the moment when "consciousness agrees to go forward" it's motivated by affections not cognitive beliefs. Experience of affect and fading of life correlate when for instance at the crisis of an acute or otherwise debilitating illness you may have to defer or abandon the choice to exist in submission to some god such as fate or fate's theological big brother.
Affect always is self vis a vis the other, so that living is inseparable from the environment of the experiencer. Nature thrives on affect which as we know involves suffering.

[thrasymachus]

Belindi wrote
I think at the moment when "consciousness agrees to go forward" it's motivated by affections not cognitive beliefs. Experience of affect and fading of life correlate when for instance at the crisis of an acute or otherwise debilitating illness you may have to defer or abandon the choice to exist in submission to some god such as fate or fate's theological big brother.
Affect always is self vis a vis the other, so that living is inseparable from the environment of the experiencer. Nature thrives on affect which as we know involves suffering.

I think you're right about that, though I leave a term like 'nature' out of it. See what Michel Henry, a kind of post modern Christian apologist, says about this:
This original revelation reveals itself to itself, in other words, it is a self-revelation. There is only one self-revelation of this kind: life. Life reveals itself to itself, it experiences [s’éprouve] itself in such a way that in that experience there is neither an “Outside” nor a “world”—nothing visible. The phenomenality of this experience is a pure pathos.

He follows Husserl deep down to the the very point where observation tries to behold and describe the actual conditions of consciousness' constitutional appearance, withdrawing from all that would otherwise make a claim to explanation (which is what Husserl's epoche is all about). As I see it, Henry gets very close to the strange threshold that meditation, serious meditation, that is, can bring one to, only keeping in mind that Henry is a philosopher and his job is to discuss this. When analysis closes in on the generative source of consciousness, it encounters the Real of the transcendental ego (Husserl), and keeping with the Cartesian principle that finds confirmation of what is Real in epistemic proximity (I mean, something is most verifiable in its very existence given the reduction of doubt in its apprehension), the Real is truly Real, free of interpretative interposition. I bit like climbing Mount Horeb to have a conversation with God. Of course, It is not the naive Christian metaphysics that is affirmed here; rather, it is the stepping OUT of the totality of language possibilities to affirm what is not language, and, as you put it, is "motivated by affections not cognitive beliefs." Cognition is just this totality, the thinking things through that is informed/powered by a semantics of the ordinary. Affect, pure pathos, is what, I argue, stands before one at the juncture where all knowledge claims are suspended and one "stands before" the world authentically.

Here is a topic for discussion I am considering under the Forum's heading Epistemology: Is perception of the world really an out of the body experience?

Knowledge claims about the world are, simply put, impossible, according to any standard, commonsensical model of epistemic delivery.

[Belindi]

Belindi wrote
I think at the moment when "consciousness agrees to go forward" it's motivated by affections not cognitive beliefs. Experience of affect and fading of life correlate when for instance at the crisis of an acute or otherwise debilitating illness you may have to defer or abandon the choice to exist in submission to some god such as fate or fate's theological big brother.
Affect always is self vis a vis the other, so that living is inseparable from the environment of the experiencer. Nature thrives on affect which as we know involves suffering.

I think you're right about that, though I leave a term like 'nature' out of it. See what Michel Henry, a kind of post modern Christian apologist, says about this:
This original revelation reveals itself to itself, in other words, it is a self-revelation. There is only one self-revelation of this kind: life. Life reveals itself to itself, it experiences [s’éprouve] itself in such a way that in that experience there is neither an “Outside” nor a “world”—nothing visible. The phenomenality of this experience is a pure pathos.

He follows Husserl deep down to the the very point where observation tries to behold and describe the actual conditions of consciousness' constitutional appearance, withdrawing from all that would otherwise make a claim to explanation (which is what Husserl's epoche is all about). As I see it, Henry gets very close to the strange threshold that meditation, serious meditation, that is, can bring one to, only keeping in mind that Henry is a philosopher and his job is to discuss this. When analysis closes in on the generative source of consciousness, it encounters the Real of the transcendental ego (Husserl), and keeping with the Cartesian principle that finds confirmation of what is Real in epistemic proximity (I mean, something is most verifiable in its very existence given the reduction of doubt in its apprehension), the Real is truly Real, free of interpretative interposition. I bit like climbing Mount Horeb to have a conversation with God. Of course, It is not the naive Christian metaphysics that is affirmed here; rather, it is the stepping OUT of the totality of language possibilities to affirm what is not language, and, as you put it, is "motivated by affections not cognitive beliefs." Cognition is just this totality, the thinking things through that is informed/powered by a semantics of the ordinary. Affect, pure pathos, is what, I argue, stands before one at the juncture where all knowledge claims are suspended and one "stands before" the world authentically.

Here is a topic for discussion I am considering under the Forum's heading Epistemology: Is perception of the world really an out of the body experience?

Knowledge claims about the world are, simply put, impossible, according to any standard, commonsensical model of epistemic delivery.

Please do so! However it's hardly epistemic is it? OOB experience is either experience or it's not, so it's an ontological question? If it's experienced it exists. What is knowledge unless it's experience? If someone experiences OOB then they do so, by virtue of privileged access.