Dontaskme wrote: ↑Tue Sep 12, 2017 12:54 pm
Differences are purely conceptual, they have no existential reality in and of themselves. Differences are existential within the dream of separation, illusions appearing real as the dream is real, as the dreamer is real..
This is just wrong. Again, take a Japanese flag and a Swedish flag and lay them side by side. Now look at them. There is a difference. And the difference is real in the sense that if I give each a name and then show you one or the other you can say which you are seeing and if I do the same to a room full of people i will get virtually 100% agreement. Also, if I put one of those flags in the top drawer of my dresser and the other in the bottom and you ask for one or the other I know what drawer to go get it in.
You see the nature of what we experience is not arbitrary. It has remarkable similarities (symmetry, in the physical sense). If you put the Swedish flag in the top drawer, close it, and then re-open it then you would be very surprised, actually, no matter how much you say otherwise, to find a Japanese flag. And if you could find that happening over and over you could get a Nobel in science for we think that it can't happen given the nature of the material of the flags and the drawers and the space that we have studied over a very long history.
Now if you call that an unreal distinction then it says nothing about the distinction only about your words. A rose by any other name.... And if you refuse to acknowledge that kind of distinction you will be crippled. Just try living in a way that ignores those distinctions. You won't be able to do anything.
So why do you say "...have no existential reality...", "Differences are existential within the dream of separation", "illusions appearing real as the dream is real, as the dreamer is real"?
Let me outline what is happening:
There is an epistemic construction that occurs. Experiencing finds itself experiencing experiencing. In the beginning there is just that. We have remarkable ability to read faces and expressions. Look at a very young infant. Pass your hand before his face and you will see that his eyes do not track your hand. Or look out at a single star surrounded by black at night. Is the star something there in the empty space? Not from an experiential phenomenal point of view in a single state. If you have gained control over your brains ontological functions you can even stare at that star and try to see it first as a white hole in a black presence or as a white presents on a absent background (a star in space - that is why we think of space as the nothing in which the stars are) or you can loose yourself in the experiencing and the white and the black become the character of experiencing experiencing experiencing.
There is only experiencing experiencing experiencing then and it has character. When one is immersed in experiencing experiencing experiencing there is not even someone experiencing something. There is only the Oneness of experiencing. We use that term Oneness to indicate the collapsing of the subject-object distinction. It is not something just "thought" in the narrow sense of the word, rather it is a state one can be in. That "Oneness" we capitalize when we spell it.
And it is self validating. In other words one sees the truth, the truth that has been missed up until the moment of Satori. One may hear even a voice then, the so called Vox Dei, "Saul, Saul, why doest thou persecute me?" or some other sentence. Language itself takes place.
And one feels very good, that one has finally awoken, like from a dream.
Why? Within the human being is the desire for being. (It seems to me to be primarily mammalian) We are programmed to want being. And what is it of what we want that we want to be? Well it is not exactly "ourselves" but it is related to us. Basically we want to remain conscious but even that is wrong for consciousness is but one pole that dies in the experiencing. Conscious is deeply related to nothing and that is why we have trouble satisfying our urge to be through identification with it. Sartre was very right to identify nothingness as being "of consciousness" . Now that is a gross oversimplification but basically the experience that is the Oneness relieves all anxiety about being. Even that existential one. Precisely that existential one. One ceases the nihilation and experiences being as it appears phenomenally. It is the phenomenology of Being. Sartre was to disregard it - his conclusion was that being was trans phenomenal. Ok, in a sense. But in another sense no. It it can do this because consciousness cannot be except that it is. Experiencing is the pure plenum of being. Descartes saw the impossibility of doubt. And that certainty is at the heart of the Absolute. It is why it is Absolute.
But what is not seen is how much our sexual natures infect this distinction. The chakras of the East culminate in this ultimate experience in the total integration of the Kundalini across the chakras and we experience a kind of Ecstasy that is related at a lower chakra to the love that encourages reproduction and the protection of our offspring. Even the cuteness of a puppy is activation of this system.
We have a history of not separating these experiences from objectivity - at least in intellectual circles, I suspect the politicians had no trouble throughout most of history. Prior to the Copernican revolution the scientific worldview did not exist separately from experiencing experiencing experiencing and there was, and still is in both sacred (religious) and secular (atheistic) fundamentalist misinterpretation of the issue. Many both theistic and atheistic people regard religious belief as a kind of scientific worldview and there is a plethora of examples about them arguing about the "existence" or "not existence" of "God" with complete misunderstanding of the issue on all sides including the moderators. Awareness of the mystical apprehension of experiencing experiencing experiencing in ecstasy is completely absent.
And when one achieves that standpoint of Awareness, from that vantage point one looks (usually back) upon what was before and sees the error of it. The "illusion" that was when one was caught up in the differentiation.
Further analysis, can even track the introduction of Nothingness into the plenum of being and we can see how our very perceptions, as opposed to just our conceptions are infected by this "error". The "error of things" if you want to call it that. Or the "illusion of things". Maya, Original sin, the forgetfulness of being.
But that is not all that is to be said. Basically that phenomenological approach misses the fact that Husserl's phenomenological epoche is a temporary setting aside of the issue of things. One simply decides not to consider it and to experience what the residual is. But we can then reapply it. By Sartre things are turned around and phenomenology is no longer seen as a technique or possibility but has itself become somewhat objectified. Look at the first line of the Pursuit of Being, the intro to Being and Nothingness. The epoche is no longer to be found.
It turns out that that re-application can re-differentiate being and we can, and do, re-experience ourselves as experience-ers experiencing the experienced. And that experiencing is based on the introduction of nothingness into being and our saying "No. It is not just my seeing it. In fact, it is independent of my experiencing. My experiencing is only how I find out about it."
Now that is a genuine intellectual possibility as much as is the Oneness. When this is done, oh one philosopher talked about splitting the chicken at the joints, and what it means is that the introduction of nothingness within our experience is not completely arbitrary. If you take the vase/profile illusion for example you can either have being assigned to the faces and there is a gap, a nothingness, introduced between them or you can see a vase and there is nothing around it. Don't make the mistake of thinking that that is how we think of it. I am talking about the experience one can have of either state. One can, it is true, by trying to think of it or see it the other way, switch it but the event of seeing it that way is a positive state that one can either be in or not and one can actually think of it as just a drawing or something while seeing it as a vase.
You see you can't say that the vase or the profile is a Japanese flag - nor is it a Swedish flag. No, rather there are certain ways of seeing that are not choose-able and other choices that are present. Try it. Don't just think of it. Try to sit with the vase profile illusion before you and switch back and forth from profile to vase. Now try to see it, don't just think about doing actually try it, try to see that illusion as a Swedish flag and see how far you get. There is something about "it" that determines our experiencing. We cannot decide the nature of our experiencing and further the nature that we do experience seems to be independent *in a sense* to the fact that we are experiencing it. Pass the illusion to a distant cousin or a stranger. They will have the same problem. Now you can say that is all the "illusion" or the "dream" and that they are all wrong but that is wrong because it doesn't capture the fact of it and describe it. It just misses the point.
It has to do with the constancy of them and the usual meaning of "dream" and "illusion".
When one says that it is a "dream" one implies that there is also the waking state. The nothingness based objectification is said to be the dream state and when one wakes one is in the waking state of true awareness. But there is something very different from an actual dream, like when you go to sleep, and when the word is used here. If I found that I dreamed last night that I was being attacked by someone and then I woke up, then I would realize that the dream had not reality. And I could ignore it. If however, I place my socks in my drawer that night and I wake up the next day, I can look into the drawer and my socks are still there. In that sense my socks and drawer are part of the reality I wake up to and are not a dream. In the same way an "illusion" implies a "lusion" if you will pardon my locution, a lucid state of knowing the magicians trick and catching him doing it. It implies another state that is what really is and stands opposed to what isn't. The trick is to get someone to believe one thing instead of the reality. Many atheists believe that the belief in God is just such an illusion. But the problem is that the emergence to and from mystical awareness and, let's call it scientific objectivity, (it's not but let's call it that for now) , is characterized by a return to the same state. The drawer is there in the morning.
OK, like Popper I will agree it might not be tomorrow, but only if you will give me how consistent it is there and has been for thousands of years of recorded human experience.
Imagine a dream that you have. A dream that certain things are happening but this dream occurs each and every night and is of the same things each night. Imagine a dream of "another reality". Now I am asking you to do that so that you see how the term dream, or illusion function. You cannot say of the reality of my sock drawer, or my car keys, that they are an illusion or a dream because I can find and show you them in the morning and you will not be able to expose the trick.
So both of these characterizations, "illusion" and "dream" are ill-used locutions.
So what this is the relationship? Well it comes down to seeing that the when a scientist says that for example we are on a planet orbiting a star once every year, that 1) he is referring to something about what he is experiencing. 2) He does not believe that it is just some of his experiencing - rather he believes it "really" is and that those "things" cause our experiencing through neurology. He sees experiencing as merely and unavoidable epistemic necessity and he will point out that is why he does experiments but he will not admit that the nature of the universe is just experiencing as he can describe milliseconds after the big bang when there was no consciousness. (Please spare me the measurement problem. I can resolve that but don't want to make it more complex here)
See, one must genuflect with care to modern physics. I am aware of the relativity of time, the indeterminacy etc of quantum mechanics etc. Modern physics is neither an objective nor material science in the naive sense. Still its claims (even the one that says that time is relative for example) are claims about the nature of experiencing, and there is a further claim that the nature of our experiencing is intentional and that our senses are used to "find out" about what is "really there" after the fact of it presence.
In other words, for example, the back of the moon right now may be presumed to have some rock some where. That rock does not depend on the existence of sentient creatures at all. It is there in its own right. Its being is "in-itself" which means that if I were to exterminate all conscious life there would still be a universe.
You cannot, nor should you dismiss this worldview as an illusion, or a dream, for as I have said it is distinct both from the experience we have of normal dreams and of the illusions created perhaps by a stage magician. And it capture reality that cannot be reduced to mystical awareness but rather are the product of examination by means of sensation.
Nor can you call it a mistake. A mistake might be that there are two moons of the same size orbiting the earth right now but not that there is only one.
These two views are not contradictory. Rather they are different ontological states. They do not disagree as much as like they are like skew lines, they do not speak of the same. In Mystical experience of the One (or even the experience of El Capitan in Yosemite valley, or a beach or something) we are experiencing a kind of meaning of, and start to be, experiencing experiencing experiencing. In science, on the other hand, we introduce nothingness into the plenum of that being and realize that *what* we are experiencing, by its nature, accidentally, just happens to be, a world of things, and perhaps right now I am sitting looking out at this fantastic ocean which is really made of water and contains minerals etc and has at this moment a wave right there of very specific dimensions and shape.
No, the thinks of the world are not an illusion, they are real aspects of the accidental nature of *what* we are experiencing and are not purely phenomenal, but rather, are the basis for our consciousness. Fire a gun into the head of a mystic at the moment he is in ecstasy and you will end his ecstatic experiencing. It is a fact based on empirical evidence. It is related to anesthesiology and what people report who are knocked unconscious. Likewise the presence of this natural world cannot be ascribed to itself, for it is incapable of being derived from itself. Rather it is the fact of existence, contingent being, which is not either consciousness, nor is it what is, but rather is "that what is is" that is responsible.
We are, yes. But we are creatures not the creator, and we are "thrown" into a world in which all of these things around us are there and can be used to ensure we are able to experience.
There are twin dangers. One that Mysticism and its intellectual consequences are ignored (here the Mystical states are considered "illusory" and the objective one's real) and the other where the experience, the careful deliberate looking through experiment and the discovery of these patterns in our sensory experience that are not just patterns in experience but which drive via causal relationships, un-foundable except through the fact that they "just are", but "present" nonetheless and real, and of our awake world not of our dreams, is ignored and called an illusion, or a dream.
You make that second mistake.
The fact is that both ways of being are intellectual insight. The first allows intellectual insight into the eternal nature of being. The fact "that it is" is experienced as it is. The second, contingent awareness of the nature of the physical systems and causal structures of "what is". Both are true. Neither contradicts the other for the fact that something is can in now way contradict a statement about what it is anymore that any statement about what is can contradict a statement about the fact that it is. Unfortunately you have Quine's mistake and the philosophical worlds suspicion of metaphysics and its genuflection to science which, as Heidegger said "...does not think".
That desire is so linked to these is mostly not understood in our culture, and the ultimate fate of the criticisms of nihilism and boredom, the mocking that can occur will be decided long after we are dead. But your talking about illusion and dream in this context is incorrect in my opinion.