Kant

[Veritas Aequitas]

Veritas Aequitas wrote

I started with advaita vedanta and was a Jnanist [Jnana Yoga] for a long time and I have now graduated from Jnana to be a generalist.
Any yoga master will advice Jnana Yoga is the intellectual approach and it must be consummated with Bhakti to "yoke" with the ultimate Brahman.

I will take this mean this: once you have taken the interpretative enterprise, that is, philosophical thought, to the point where you understand that a perceptual encounter in the world is not an irreducible event, but has, if you will, parts, and thus analyzable, and analysis then shows you that the truth you seek is foundational truth, something that is truly not reducible, and is the basic "given" of the world, then you will encounter nihilism: the failure to find meaning in meaning, value in value (see Witgenstein's Tractatus, btw. He understood this threshold very well). At this point, one needs faith, which is where Bhakti yoga becomes helpful. Kierkegaard can be understood to have said the same thing.

The trouble with this thinking is that faith becomes naive when the world is closely examined, and it is also a terrible distraction from the serious undertaking you are in. The point is, or part of the point, is to let thought and interpretation (thought is inherently interpretative) fall away altogether.

My point was to show you that Jnana Yoga is not the ultimate means as you had portrayed it to be with the authors you mentioned.

The facts is the diversified humans are born with different types of propensities, thus there are 5 main types of Yoga to cater for the different proclivities, but according to advaita vedanta, the yogi must always complement whatever yoga adopted by various individuals with Bhakti yoga.

Within advaita vedanta, Bhakti yoga is not blind faith like those of the fundamentalist Christians, Muslims. i.e. just believe and viola one is saved. Bhakti yoga in its more sophisticated form entail lots of meditation and mental practices.

I believe reduction is necessary in all fields of knowledge, in this case 'spirituality' but reduction in spirituality is to ensure the spiritual practice is holistic.
In this case, one can target the neurons and parts of the brain specifically so as to expedite the spiritual process rather than rely on trial and error [hit and miss] or the experience of past masters where there is no final verification that all of them are right and precise.

Targeting neurons? I don't take your meaning. Though I do take that you mean neurological studies can be useful to an end, somehow. But then, there are no neurons, and to participate in the world as if there were is to buy into that which you're trying to undo. In my understanding, the very nature of the concept of Eastern "illusion", regardless of the literature (one must see that what others tell us, even if it is dead right, is only a utility for personal enlightenment. The "telling", the scriptures, the philosophy, is, all of it, only a means to an end, and, as the parable goes. Thought itself is yoga, the "light of reason" that attends our karmic journey) is interpretative error: things are not what we "say" they are. They are something entirely Other.

Whatever is of human actions and behavior [other than auto and reflex actions] are represented by specific neurons in the brain.

For example,
positive empathy and compassion are represented by the working of specific neurons in the brain, [hypothetical represented by mirror neurons],
by identifying those specific neurons and targeting to improving their workings,
then each person will be able to have optimal empathy and compassion to increase their 'spiritual' quotient.
This is not easy due to the complexity involved, but we will be able to do it in the future riding upon current researches into the brain.

From the Jnana perspective, the Jnana yogi would definitely be interested to understand the brain if such knowledge was available for the Jnana yogi of the past. But then neurosciences were only active merely about 50 years ago.

As I had stated, the authors you mentioned would qualify to be described as adopting the Jnana Path, but they don't delve into the practical path or even recommended any. There are merely armchair philosophers of NATO.

Fortunately, this is not true. I care nothing for the politics as it has no place here.

But sadly, I cannot convince you of the value of Husserl, Heidegger, and the rest in a post. You would actually have to read Heidegger's Being and Time yourself. But, alas again, he is thoroughly embedded in Western philosophy, so this requires a lot of reading besides. I can present an idea or two. For one thing, Heidegger explains is a very well reasoned argument what the nature of illusion is, though, of course, this is not his explicit aim. He makes phenomenology clear as a bell, and he leaves Truth an open concept, which is exactly where philosophy should take a person.

Husserl predates Heidegger, and this philosopher is, for some, closer to the Eastern notion of liberation. He took the presentation of the world as a Given, when observed phenomenologically. The trouble with traditional philosophical approaches was that it lacked the significant movement from mere abstract thought to actuality, and his epoche invites just this: it is a perceptual event of removing from t he perceptual field what would make an implicit knowledge claim on it. Husserl leads one the fountain of "selflessness" where things themselves in the perceptual act are seem AS SUCH. His phenomenological reduction (epoche) is a practice!

Hope you have not missed it, NATO = No Action, Talk Only.

I have read Being and Time [BT] quite thoroughly and have even prepared numerous detailed flowcharts for various systems within Being and Time.
Heidegger did critique Kant very strongly but what I noted is Being and Time is still entrapped by the drive toward the self-in-itself or BEING-in-itself.
So far, I am aware Kant's CoPR and his other books [spent 3 years full time on them] still override [one-up on] BT and others.

Re the brain, the Indian yogis [Vedic and Buddhists] reflected deeply into consciousness from outside the box and established various methods to achieve various states of consciousness.

Box?

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box
  Thinking outside the box is a metaphor that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel or creative thinking. -wiki

Heidegger interacted with Buddhist scholars but he never talk of Buddhist practices nor did he adopted any spiritual approaches. ??

What Heidegger sought was a way back to experiencing the world that has been lost in the thick of very bad thinking over the ages. We are alienated in our lived habits, and he sought to show the way back to the primordial experience that were once in place, and this could be achieved through ontology, a stepping back from the usual world to get to what underlies it. He believed that the world is constructed, as with Kant, of thought and what is given, though, the given is always given AS thought. For him, there is no separation. The world of thought is "of a piece" with actuality. People are thought constructions.

He is so illuminating because once one goes through the reading of Being and TIme, one understands the empirical self, the divisions that separate and allow things to be things, the pragmatic (instrumental) nature of our everydayness, and so on. His is a vehicle to a higher understanding of what the East calls illusion, and if you can see this in the clarity he presents, disillusionment is possible.

I agree BT is quite extra-ordinary than the average views because Heidegger had made a very serious attempt to improve on the thoughts of the ancients and modern on the idea of 'Being'.

But then most are susceptible to the following which Kant warned;

They are sophistications not of men but of Pure Reason itself. Even the wisest of men cannot free himself from them.
After long effort he perhaps succeeds in guarding himself against actual error;
but he will never be able to free himself from the Illusion, which unceasingly mocks and torments him.
CPR B397

As I had stated the above impulse is psychological and deeply embedded as a primal instinct.

[odysseus]

Atla wrote
Enlightenment, the realization of our "true nature". The theme that many Eastern philosophies are centered around and what Western philosophy lacks in general, even though it's true. I was talking about nondualism.

Maybe this will make a worthy point. Eastern thought is mostly about a method of liberation (so Alan Watts points out in his Zen), and in the end the metaphysics simply falls away, along with the physics and everything else, and this seems to be your issue, this idea o f self annihilation sounds a lot like, well, death, maybe calm death, but certainly underwhelming and even "dangerous" as a "reason for all things" desideratum of a person.

As a method, most meditate, and I would like to take a look at this. There are many, as you perhaps know, things one can meditate on, your breathe, a flame, a sound. I meditate on my thumb. Yes, weird, but true. I sit there, put my attention on the my thumb and keep it there. Doesn't matter, really, what it is. For me the thumb is completely without distracting character. The keeping my attention on the thumb, therein lies the discipline. That one spot becomes everything, and nothing at all. It's just there.

This stands analysis, and it reveals why I think reading the existential philosophers (which begins with Kant) is so important. I am not in an exercise that deals with spatial entities, but temporal ones. Meditation is a method of controlling time, for the content of my mind that I am trying to control is the past: a recollection; it could be a desire (well, they all have this), a simple thought, anything that is part of what James called the stream of consciousness which rules our day lives. It is the this endless intrusion of memory, and memory has to be understood not as something inert, an abstraction or an idea with no substance. All ideas have substance. They are, as Jung put it, "feeling toned" and there engagement is captivating, that is, they capture your attention throughout the day and in dreams as well.

The idea of meditation, if I may be so bold, is to put this down, to put it simply, and see what happens when the endless cycle of thought stops interpreting the world, for language and thought is inherently interpretative: My pen is not a pen until I take it AS a pen, andif I shut down systems of interpretation, it doesn't "disappear" (a silly take on idealism) but it just is not a pen any more. It is simply "presence" even pure presence, though this has issues that go to Husserl and subsequent thought. I get good at "staring", with my attention, at my thumb. Good enough that it becomes quite natural, and this affair is not unlike what it means to be so engrossed in reading that you don't hear the doorbell. It's concentration, but here, it is pure concentration, concentration with no content.

So far, I think things have not gotten "dangerous" at all. It should sound pretty mundane, and yet this brief sketch possesses the essence of the most far flung things in eastern philosophy. I mean, you're already there, in the midst of all that crazy thinking you find so repugnant. the more you do this kind of thing, the more you withdraw from interpretative standards issued to you as a child, and this applies to the most basic apprehensions of the world. A tree is not a tree if you can withdraw from the thinking (the temporal thrust, if you will) that cyclically and implcitly tells you it's a tree. Of course, you still know it's a tree for the background predelineations of it being a tree, a house over there and the guy who never paints it, all remains in tact, as does the loves and distractions of you life. None of this vanishes. You simply have now discovered a way to live in the eternal here and now, a Kierkegaardian term (and prior to him, of course. Wittgenstein uses this as well in his Tractatus) in the midst of all things that you do. Eternity is not to be understood here as an infinite succession of befores and afters (a wonderful and short book on this by Emanuel Levinas, Time and Alterity); this kind of thing is just an abstraction built out of the events in our lives. This is the goal of Buddhism, and, on the practical end, nothing more. But it is not underwhelming at all, for to follow through on this, and one gets more and more intrigued as one gets better at it, the more one discovers the hidden world of the present, and THEN it one becomes more and more alienated form the world as we know it.

And this is where the matter does get far flung indeed. What can I say, things get unambiguously profound, deeply rich with meaning, and to see this you have to do it. End of story.

[Atla]

Atla wrote
Enlightenment, the realization of our "true nature". The theme that many Eastern philosophies are centered around and what Western philosophy lacks in general, even though it's true. I was talking about nondualism.

Maybe this will make a worthy point. Eastern thought is mostly about a method of liberation (so Alan Watts points out in his Zen), and in the end the metaphysics simply falls away, along with the physics and everything else, and this seems to be your issue, this idea o f self annihilation sounds a lot like, well, death, maybe calm death, but certainly underwhelming and even "dangerous" as a "reason for all things" desideratum of a person.

As a method, most meditate, and I would like to take a look at this. There are many, as you perhaps know, things one can meditate on, your breathe, a flame, a sound. I meditate on my thumb. Yes, weird, but true. I sit there, put my attention on the my thumb and keep it there. Doesn't matter, really, what it is. For me the thumb is completely without distracting character. The keeping my attention on the thumb, therein lies the discipline. That one spot becomes everything, and nothing at all. It's just there.

This stands analysis, and it reveals why I think reading the existential philosophers (which begins with Kant) is so important. I am not in an exercise that deals with spatial entities, but temporal ones. Meditation is a method of controlling time, for the content of my mind that I am trying to control is the past: a recollection; it could be a desire (well, they all have this), a simple thought, anything that is part of what James called the stream of consciousness which rules our day lives. It is the this endless intrusion of memory, and memory has to be understood not as something inert, an abstraction or an idea with no substance. All ideas have substance. They are, as Jung put it, "feeling toned" and there engagement is captivating, that is, they capture your attention throughout the day and in dreams as well.

The idea of meditation, if I may be so bold, is to put this down, to put it simply, and see what happens when the endless cycle of thought stops interpreting the world, for language and thought is inherently interpretative: My pen is not a pen until I take it AS a pen, andif I shut down systems of interpretation, it doesn't "disappear" (a silly take on idealism) but it just is not a pen any more. It is simply "presence" even pure presence, though this has issues that go to Husserl and subsequent thought. I get good at "staring", with my attention, at my thumb. Good enough that it becomes quite natural, and this affair is not unlike what it means to be so engrossed in reading that you don't hear the doorbell. It's concentration, but here, it is pure concentration, concentration with no content.

So far, I think things have not gotten "dangerous" at all. It should sound pretty mundane, and yet this brief sketch possesses the essence of the most far flung things in eastern philosophy. I mean, you're already there, in the midst of all that crazy thinking you find so repugnant. the more you do this kind of thing, the more you withdraw from interpretative standards issued to you as a child, and this applies to the most basic apprehensions of the world. A tree is not a tree if you can withdraw from the thinking (the temporal thrust, if you will) that cyclically and implcitly tells you it's a tree. Of course, you still know it's a tree for the background predelineations of it being a tree, a house over there and the guy who never paints it, all remains in tact, as does the loves and distractions of you life. None of this vanishes. You simply have now discovered a way to live in the eternal here and now, a Kierkegaardian term (and prior to him, of course. Wittgenstein uses this as well in his Tractatus) in the midst of all things that you do. Eternity is not to be understood here as an infinite succession of befores and afters (a wonderful and short book on this by Emanuel Levinas, Time and Alterity); this kind of thing is just an abstraction built out of the events in our lives. This is the goal of Buddhism, and, on the practical end, nothing more. But it is not underwhelming at all, for to follow through on this, and one gets more and more intrigued as one gets better at it, the more one discovers the hidden world of the present, and THEN it one becomes more and more alienated form the world as we know it.

And this is where the matter does get far flung indeed. What can I say, things get unambiguously profound, deeply rich with meaning, and to see this you have to do it. End of story.

That just sounds like the realization of the eternal present. Well I guess we could say that that's usually, but not necessarily, a big step towards awakening.

[odysseus]

Veritas Aequitas wrote

My point was to show you that Jnana Yoga is not the ultimate means as you had portrayed it to be with the authors you mentioned.

The facts is the diversified humans are born with different types of propensities, thus there are 5 main types of Yoga to cater for the different proclivities, but according to advaita vedanta, the yogi must always complement whatever yoga adopted by various individuals with Bhakti yoga.

Within advaita vedanta, Bhakti yoga is not blind faith like those of the fundamentalist Christians, Muslims. i.e. just believe and viola one is saved. Bhakti yoga in its more sophisticated form entail lots of meditation and mental practices.

I do see the value in it, but find it the kind of thing that one has to abandon more than anything else. And the impression it makes on the mind is the kind of thing that encourages delusion. Quite right about how different people enter into a spiritual life predisposed in different ways, and this is very important to see. We are not all the same. But then, it is not simply God one is devoted to. It is a body of scripture, and set if ideas, and like all yogas, these boats have to be moored at the dock, as the metaphor goes, once the river is crossed. Meditation is simply a means to an end, e.g., and the end is "enlightenment" and this is an interpretative matter being undone; hence the value of Heidegger who constructed a new vocabulary on the premise of phenomenology that frees up the world from a tradition that always established a reductive bias. Heidegger is great not for his conclusions, but his phenomenological liberation delimiting thinking, Heidegger's problem was his dismissal of transcendence in immanence, just like Kant, but after Heidegger came a flurry of extraordinary literature, as with those in the Book whose first chapter you read, Phenomenology and Religion. You dismiss these too readily. Michel Henry is extraordinary as is Emanuel Levinas. These and others {Eugene Fink, included) look at the consequences of admitting transcendental thinking into the structure of dasein as a presence, and here you find exactly the kind of philosophical vehicle that possesses the means to cut through standing belief, which is the point of jnana yoga.

Bhakti yoga can do more harm than good, that is, it can bind a person to belief, while the dynamics of belief constitute the very obstruction that creates illusion. All illusion is interpretative error; beliefs are not static things vis a vis the world, and Heidegger takes the foundation of inauthentic belief, the infamous das man, our fallenness and makes it the basis for a radical departure. Kierkegaard called it quantitative sin, but note, for Kant, there is no equivalent for this, and this is his failing. I would be interested to know if you can where Kant even mentions that which is fundamental to Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, and so on. The Transcendental Dialectic discusses tradition's metaphysical abuses, not the lived life, our "everdayness" as Heidegger put it, that constitutes the major barrier the separates us from more authentic understanding. This is the very thing that stands out in Heidegger's successors, this presence of transcendence in our midst, as "there" in dasein, the totality of one's"Being in the world" as time itself. This is critical to my point that Heidegger advances philosophy beyond Kant.

Whatever is of human actions and behavior [other than auto and reflex actions] are represented by specific neurons in the brain.For example,
positive empathy and compassion are represented by the working of specific neurons in the brain, [hypothetical represented by mirror neurons],
by identifying those specific neurons and targeting to improving their workings,
then each person will be able to have optimal empathy and compassion to increase their 'spiritual' quotient.
This is not easy due to the complexity involved, but we will be able to do it in the future riding upon current researches into the brain.

Quite true. But you know what would Heidegger say about this and authenticity. This kind of talk binds one to what Husserl calls the naturalistic attitude. This is phenomenologically preanalytic. The baker down the street understands as much. It certainly IS part of our general karma yogic path, as are all things, and perhaps a useful one. But it does not speak to the decisive move away from this. Again, Eastern illusion is that of an interpretative nature, and it is language that stands in the way. Heidegger never says this, of course. Just the opposite. But he shows in massive detail what this world of the empirical self IS: a construct of language and, to use Husserl's term, hyle (borrowed from the Greek) an interpretatively embodied given.

[odysseus]

Atla wrote
That just sounds like the realization of the eternal present. Well I guess we could say that that's usually, but not necessarily, a big step towards awakening.

Sorry, but that term 'just' has no place here.

[Atla]

Atla wrote
That just sounds like the realization of the eternal present. Well I guess we could say that that's usually, but not necessarily, a big step towards awakening.

Sorry, but that term 'just' has no place here.

I don't think so. As I said realizing the eternal present (and that there is pure being etc.) are big steps, but you are mistaken in thinking that that's the main essence of Eastern philosophy. That's just a misinterpretation coming from the shallow Western thinkers who deep down STILL base everything on the illusion of the ego, even if they aren't realizing this.

There is one big final step beyond all that, 'awakening' to 'our' 'true nature'. Again, this one is traditionally entirely missing from Western thought and culture, and I have never seen it understood by the Western thinkers you keep mentioning (Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and so on). Advaita states it openly, Buddhism hints at it, it's there lingering at the base of Taoism. Most people reach this realization through prolonged meditation, a few others through different ways. (Watts understood it perfectly though.)

[odysseus]

Atla wote

I don't think so. As I said realizing the eternal present (and that there is pure being etc.) are big steps, but you are mistaken in thinking that that's the main essence of Eastern philosophy. That's just a misinterpretation coming from the shallow Western thinkers who deep down STILL base everything on the illusion of the ego, even if they aren't realizing this.

There is one big final step beyond all that, 'awakening' to 'our' 'true nature'. Again, this one is traditionally entirely missing from Western thought and culture, and I have never seen it understood by the Western thinkers you keep mentioning (Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and so on). Advaita states it openly, Buddhism hints at it, it's there lingering at the base of Taoism. Most people reach this realization through prolonged meditation, a few others through different ways. (Watts understood it perfectly though.)

The spoken Tao is not the genuine Tao, as I recall. Look, I know it is not a popular thing to do, to actually read closely what someone has written. People generally have their own ideas and are adamant about them. But that bit above I wrote about meditation does not hold one to the concept of an eternal now, at all. All language is interpretative, utility bearing; that is, it's validity as true depends on its instrumentality. Thus, such thoughts as an eternal now are methodological, a yoga, and the reading of them is meant to point the way out of something, not instill a doctrine. Lao tze is after all presented in writing, in language, in order to tell you to suspend language. It is the same here. In the meditative state, one is not philosophizing, but concentrating so as to clear the mind of interpretative priorities we are all conditioned to have, and these are all about the dynamic stream of thought that literally constitutes the world. It is a method that suspends habits of thought that keep one glued to deeply inculcated values. Heidegger is extremely good at telling you what this is, this world of engagement, and the clearer you are on this, the more theoretically you can move beyond petty belief that is engaged in it. Not Heidegger's own conclusions. We use these philosophers to unravel that which stands as the most debilitating obstruction to "enlightenment: our empirical selves, our day to day selves.

Watts is only as good as Suzuki (Watts did drink himself into oblivion; though, not to say he wasn't good for his time, the sixties, for introducing thinking that was alien to Western culture. He was.), and the idea here is exactly what I talked about: the eternal present IS the Buddha nature, "always, already there," the true self unconditioned by time. I did say that the matter of meditation is one of time, and the way structures of thought intrude and and define our reality. It is that vanishing point, the "between" past and future, where ideally meditation takes you. It is, as Kierkegaard and Heidegger and others out it, a Nothingness of sorts, relative to this world where thought constructs experience. I am reading Michel Henry, a post modern, post Heideggerian thinker, who plays on this nothingness. It is not some metaphysical nothingness, but that which presents itself when one pulls away from what it means to be something, that is, a particular thing. Jaspers calls this the Encompassing. Husserl....

Look, these philosopher, again, are not informing me for a paper I want to write. They are useful in the "pointing to" of the direction thought can take in order to reach beyond the grasp of common thinking. And here, a great deal of langauge yields to a new order of understanding. One does not read Husserl of understand Husserl unless one has to teach Husserl, talk about Husserl. But on the other side of this, Husserl said some things, embedded in his rather dense philosophy, that are very useful in the practice of jnana yoga.

I don't think I can say any more. One should read these philosophers and see for oneself. People don't realize, if you ask me, how entangled their experiences are in their thinking. this needs unraveling.

[Atla]

Atla wote

I don't think so. As I said realizing the eternal present (and that there is pure being etc.) are big steps, but you are mistaken in thinking that that's the main essence of Eastern philosophy. That's just a misinterpretation coming from the shallow Western thinkers who deep down STILL base everything on the illusion of the ego, even if they aren't realizing this.

There is one big final step beyond all that, 'awakening' to 'our' 'true nature'. Again, this one is traditionally entirely missing from Western thought and culture, and I have never seen it understood by the Western thinkers you keep mentioning (Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and so on). Advaita states it openly, Buddhism hints at it, it's there lingering at the base of Taoism. Most people reach this realization through prolonged meditation, a few others through different ways. (Watts understood it perfectly though.)

The spoken Tao is not the genuine Tao, as I recall. Look, I know it is not a popular thing to do, to actually read closely what someone has written. People generally have their own ideas and are adamant about them. But that bit above I wrote about meditation does not hold one to the concept of an eternal now, at all. All language is interpretative, utility bearing; that is, it's validity as true depends on its instrumentality. Thus, such thoughts as an eternal now are methodological, a yoga, and the reading of them is meant to point the way out of something, not instill a doctrine. Lao tze is after all presented in writing, in language, in order to tell you to suspend language. It is the same here. In the meditative state, one is not philosophizing, but concentrating so as to clear the mind of interpretative priorities we are all conditioned to have, and these are all about the dynamic stream of thought that literally constitutes the world. It is a method that suspends habits of thought that keep one glued to deeply inculcated values. Heidegger is extremely good at telling you what this is, this world of engagement, and the clearer you are on this, the more theoretically you can move beyond petty belief that is engaged in it. Not Heidegger's own conclusions. We use these philosophers to unravel that which stands as the most debilitating obstruction to "enlightenment: our empirical selves, our day to day selves.

Watts is only as good as Suzuki (Watts did drink himself into oblivion; though, not to say he wasn't good for his time, the sixties, for introducing thinking that was alien to Western culture. He was.), and the idea here is exactly what I talked about: the eternal present IS the Buddha nature, "always, already there," the true self unconditioned by time. I did say that the matter of meditation is one of time, and the way structures of thought intrude and and define our reality. It is that vanishing point, the "between" past and future, where ideally meditation takes you. It is, as Kierkegaard and Heidegger and others out it, a Nothingness of sorts, relative to this world where thought constructs experience. I am reading Michel Henry, a post modern, post Heideggerian thinker, who plays on this nothingness. It is not some metaphysical nothingness, but that which presents itself when one pulls away from what it means to be something, that is, a particular thing. Jaspers calls this the Encompassing. Husserl....

Look, these philosopher, again, are not informing me for a paper I want to write. They are useful in the "pointing to" of the direction thought can take in order to reach beyond the grasp of common thinking. And here, a great deal of langauge yields to a new order of understanding. One does not read Husserl of understand Husserl unless one has to teach Husserl, talk about Husserl. But on the other side of this, Husserl said some things, embedded in his rather dense philosophy, that are very useful in the practice of jnana yoga.

I don't think I can say any more. One should read these philosophers and see for oneself. People don't realize, if you ask me, how entangled their experiences are in their thinking. this needs unraveling.

I can only repeat myself: yes this is all good, but there is a deeper realization waiting. Don't let the shallow Western thinkers tell you that that's all there is to 'Buddha nature'.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Veritas Aequitas wrote

My point was to show you that Jnana Yoga is not the ultimate means as you had portrayed it to be with the authors you mentioned.

The facts is the diversified humans are born with different types of propensities, thus there are 5 main types of Yoga to cater for the different proclivities, but according to advaita vedanta, the yogi must always complement whatever yoga adopted by various individuals with Bhakti yoga.

Within advaita vedanta, Bhakti yoga is not blind faith like those of the fundamentalist Christians, Muslims. i.e. just believe and viola one is saved. Bhakti yoga in its more sophisticated form entail lots of meditation and mental practices.

I do see the value in it, but find it the kind of thing that one has to abandon more than anything else. And the impression it makes on the mind is the kind of thing that encourages delusion. Quite right about how different people enter into a spiritual life predisposed in different ways, and this is very important to see. We are not all the same. But then, it is not simply God one is devoted to. It is a body of scripture, and set if ideas, and like all yogas, these boats have to be moored at the dock, as the metaphor goes, once the river is crossed. Meditation is simply a means to an end, e.g., and the end is "enlightenment" and this is an interpretative matter being undone; hence the value of Heidegger who constructed a new vocabulary on the premise of phenomenology that frees up the world from a tradition that always established a reductive bias. Heidegger is great not for his conclusions, but his phenomenological liberation delimiting thinking, Heidegger's problem was his dismissal of transcendence in immanence, just like Kant, but after Heidegger came a flurry of extraordinary literature, as with those in the Book whose first chapter you read, Phenomenology and Religion. You dismiss these too readily. Michel Henry is extraordinary as is Emanuel Levinas. These and others {Eugene Fink, included) look at the consequences of admitting transcendental thinking into the structure of dasein as a presence, and here you find exactly the kind of philosophical vehicle that possesses the means to cut through standing belief, which is the point of jnana yoga.

Bhakti yoga can do more harm than good, that is, it can bind a person to belief, while the dynamics of belief constitute the very obstruction that creates illusion. All illusion is interpretative error; beliefs are not static things vis a vis the world, and Heidegger takes the foundation of inauthentic belief, the infamous das man, our fallenness and makes it the basis for a radical departure. Kierkegaard called it quantitative sin, but note, for Kant, there is no equivalent for this, and this is his failing. I would be interested to know if you can where Kant even mentions that which is fundamental to Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, and so on. The Transcendental Dialectic discusses tradition's metaphysical abuses, not the lived life, our "everdayness" as Heidegger put it, that constitutes the major barrier the separates us from more authentic understanding. This is the very thing that stands out in Heidegger's successors, this presence of transcendence in our midst, as "there" in dasein, the totality of one's"Being in the world" as time itself. This is critical to my point that Heidegger advances philosophy beyond Kant.

In contrast to Buddhism or even Abrahamic religions, all the authors you mentioned and also Kant are involved in Jnana Yoga, i.e. purely intellectual and advocated no practices.

My point is the authors you mentioned are still somehow 'entangled' with that thing, i.e. the thing-in-itself which Kant demonstrated is an illusion. Note the B397 of CoPR which I quoted.
In Heidegger's case, he was still somehow entangled with 'Being' i.e. 'Being-in-itself' which is the ground [positive] of his philosophy.

On the other hand, Kant still use the illusory thing-in-itself but only in the negative sense but not as something positive.
It is true Kant like your authors did not propose any practices [practical] for others to adopt, but he did provide a Moral framework and system [note Kant's 3 major book on morality] to guide the moral activities of humanity toward perpetual peace.

Re Bhakti yoga what is recommended in not blind faith nor devotion.
Faith comes in degrees from high to low.
For example, even in Science, some degree of faith is involved.
Similarly a Jnanist will only exercise the minimal level of faith from Bhakti Yoga.

Whatever is of human actions and behavior [other than auto and reflex actions] are represented by specific neurons in the brain.For example,
positive empathy and compassion are represented by the working of specific neurons in the brain, [hypothetical represented by mirror neurons],
by identifying those specific neurons and targeting to improving their workings,
then each person will be able to have optimal empathy and compassion to increase their 'spiritual' quotient.
This is not easy due to the complexity involved, but we will be able to do it in the future riding upon current researches into the brain.

Quite true. But you know what would Heidegger say about this and authenticity. This kind of talk binds one to what Husserl calls the naturalistic attitude. This is phenomenologically preanalytic. The baker down the street understands as much. It certainly IS part of our general karma yogic path, as are all things, and perhaps a useful one. But it does not speak to the decisive move away from this. Again, Eastern illusion is that of an interpretative nature, and it is language that stands in the way. Heidegger never says this, of course. Just the opposite. But he shows in massive detail what this world of the empirical self IS: a construct of language and, to use Husserl's term, hyle (borrowed from the Greek) an interpretatively embodied given.

The reference to neurons is about Science and scientific knowledge which is without doubt is critical to humanity.
What the philosophers like Kant, Heidegger, et. al. expounded and warned is not to seek its ontological eternal substance and be obsessed about it.

My point with Heidegger and gang is whilst they are able to explain away the dogmatic sense of being of the ancient and even those in their time, they are somehow unknowing entrapped by that 'thing' i.e. the thing-in-itself.
I believe ultimately Kant himself was entrapped [minutely] by the warning he raised for others.

Are you familiar with Anthony Flew?
Flew was one of the most notable atheist at one time, but during his later years he succumbed to that "thing" and became a deist to the shock of the atheist community during that time.

Here is one clue which is related to the above re Flew;

• https://www.livescience.com/19971-belie ... m-age.html#
  But new research reveals one constant across parts of the globe: As people age, their belief in God seems to increase.

In contrast note Buddhism's Tetralemma;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetralemma

• 1. P
  2. Not-P
  3. P and Not-p
  4. Neither P nor Not-P

I note Heidegger and gang do not delve into 4.

I was researching Being & Time > 5 years ago, so don't have its full philosophy on my finger tips but I have > 50 FlowCharts from Being and Time to refresh on the main points, here are the main ones;

BEING
Time
World & Universe
Nature

• A..Humanity
  ....Dasein
  .......My Dasein
  ..........WHO
  .......Others
  ..........The THEY
  
  B..Non-human
  .....Beings- Unlike-Dasein
  .......Living
  ..........Animals
  .......Non-Living
  ..........Equipments

................................................
Another Map of Dasein

Existential Fundamental Constitution of Dasein
DASEIN
-TEMPORALITY
-Anticipatory Resoluteness
-CARE
-Being-in-the-World
...Being-In
...Who
...World

Disclosed Basic Modes of Being
-The There
-Disclosure
-Everydayness Being

[odysseus]

Veritas Aequitas wrote
In contrast to Buddhism or even Abrahamic religions, all the authors you mentioned and also Kant are involved in Jnana Yoga, i.e. purely intellectual and advocated no practices.
My point is the authors you mentioned are still somehow 'entangled' with that thing, i.e. the thing-in-itself which Kant demonstrated is an illusion. Note the B397 of CoPR which I quoted.
In Heidegger's case, he was still somehow entangled with 'Being' i.e. 'Being-in-itself' which is the ground [positive] of his philosophy.

On the other hand, Kant still use the illusory thing-in-itself but only in the negative sense but not as something positive.
It is true Kant like your authors did not propose any practices [practical] for others to adopt, but he did provide a Moral framework and system [note Kant's 3 major book on morality] to guide the moral activities of humanity toward perpetual peace.

Re Bhakti yoga what is recommended in not blind faith nor devotion.
Faith comes in degrees from high to low.
For example, even in Science, some degree of faith is involved.
Similarly a Jnanist will only exercise the minimal level of faith from Bhakti Yoga.

First, put practices aside, and ask whether a thesis is defensible. Who is right here? And right is simply a matter of close reading. Second, after you have determined the soundness of what is being said, you have already "done" a practice. This is part of Heidegger's analysis of time and dasein. Our existence is not static, thinking is not inert or stationary. It is a temporal dynamic where history constitutes possibilities and choice can be "free" when issued from in authentic "nothingness" that is the openness of the present (not a Kierkegaardian present or a Husserlian present). It is this notion of openness is taking up the world "as" such and such, and, following Nietzsche, the idea of some final truth is discarded.

Thus, Heidegger's world is an interpretative one (beyond apophantic inauthenticity), and this realization should be revelatory in nature, not merely propositional. H's ontology steps back from everydayness to an openness for discovery of one's true primordial self.

This is of course Heidegger's weakness, for he binds truth to the openness of language, not to transcendental openness. Husserl was actually closer in this. His epoche was an actual practice explicitly intended to release one from the naturalistic attitude (Heidegger's das man is derivative), hence the book's on phenomenology and religion which follow his idea that there is something IN experience, that is palpably transcendent which is the point I am driving at. This division in experience, which does not really divide at all for transcendence is eternity and eternity encompasses or subsumes finitude.

Thought here is not propositional merely (if there is such a thing) . Not abstract, but Real. The question is, when a person comes to this threshold where there is a "qualitative" leap in the understanding (Kierkegaard) does one remain the same, or does one actually make the "leap". This same question would apply to meditation: there are those who are very good at sitting quietly, doing nothing, but can never make the essential. Qualitative step out of dasein in an affirmation of transcendence. Everything is yoga, the Hindus rightly tell us; everything is an interpretative "doing" in the world, and this doing is grounded in problem solving and these problems are presented in culture as "illusions", that is, in our apophantic (Heidegger uses this term quite a lot) finitude The world is made of doing, which is what Heidegger's ontology gives us. i am saying, as you did suggest earlier, that the critical part of this lies in the individual's readiness to receive. We are all different, and for some the philosophy, the thinking, translates into revelation.

The reference to neurons is about Science and scientific knowledge which is without doubt is critical to humanity.
What the philosophers like Kant, Heidegger, et. al. expounded and warned is not to seek its ontological eternal substance and be obsessed about it.

But very limited is being philosophically critical, or, critical as a yogic practice. It is a practical and intrasubjective affair that gets our teeth fixed but really has nothing to do with the path to enlightenment. But it is not the metaphysical obsession, but the everyday illusion.

My point with Heidegger and gang is whilst they are able to explain away the dogmatic sense of being of the ancient and even those in their time, they are somehow unknowing entrapped by that 'thing' i.e. the thing-in-itself.
I believe ultimately Kant himself was entrapped [minutely] by the warning he raised for others.

Or, you can dismiss this general notion being trapped that may apply to them, and look at the content they possess which posits a way to see past what traps people. Gang? No. They were not of one thought at all. Again, those post Heideggerians like Levinas, Nancy and others, explore exactly the very troubling nature of of what it means to be in the very threshold the East expounds so freely, if without real clarity, on. Eugene Fink takes up Kant's mantle in exactly this way. Reading them, to put it in Heidegger's terms, is "unconcealing" in ways Heidegger never intended, but their language is a vehicle, a yoga as it reaches out toward and into Eastern enlightenment understanding.

Here is one clue which is related to the above re Flew;
https://www.livescience.com/19971-belie ... m-age.html#
But new research reveals one constant across parts of the globe: As people age, their belief in God seems to increase.
In contrast note Buddhism's Tetralemma;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetralemma
1. P
2. Not-P
3. P and Not-p
4. Neither P nor Not-P
I note Heidegger and gang do not delve into 4.

No. Heidegger was all about 4. Our world is an interpretative one, not an absolute, and P is inherently interpretative. Such thinking is bound to circularity, of course, and H is quite willing to accept this (and we are don the cusp of where Derrida takes his cue toward a post modern....err, nullity). He does not think ideas are fixed at all. Just the opposite. Even terms like 'transcendence' are bound to interpretative possibilities, but this is where others step in. This openness is an essential part of existence, and dasein dissolves in it, that is, its interpretative nature meets the inscrutable apodicticity of eternity (my words).

I was researching Being & Time > 5 years ago, so don't have its full philosophy on my finger tips but I have > 50 FlowCharts from Being and Time to refresh on the main points, here are the main ones;

Not sure how this is helpful. Hubert Dreyfus' "Being in he World" is quite useful, though.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Veritas Aequitas wrote
In contrast to Buddhism or even Abrahamic religions, all the authors you mentioned and also Kant are involved in Jnana Yoga, i.e. purely intellectual and advocated no practices.
My point is the authors you mentioned are still somehow 'entangled' with that thing, i.e. the thing-in-itself which Kant demonstrated is an illusion. Note the B397 of CoPR which I quoted.
In Heidegger's case, he was still somehow entangled with 'Being' i.e. 'Being-in-itself' which is the ground [positive] of his philosophy.

On the other hand, Kant still use the illusory thing-in-itself but only in the negative sense but not as something positive.
It is true Kant like your authors did not propose any practices [practical] for others to adopt, but he did provide a Moral framework and system [note Kant's 3 major book on morality] to guide the moral activities of humanity toward perpetual peace.

Re Bhakti yoga what is recommended in not blind faith nor devotion.
Faith comes in degrees from high to low.
For example, even in Science, some degree of faith is involved.
Similarly a Jnanist will only exercise the minimal level of faith from Bhakti Yoga.

First, put practices aside, and ask whether a thesis is defensible. Who is right here? And right is simply a matter of close reading. Second, after you have determined the soundness of what is being said, you have already "done" a practice. This is part of Heidegger's analysis of time and dasein. Our existence is not static, thinking is not inert or stationary. It is a temporal dynamic where history constitutes possibilities and choice can be "free" when issued from in authentic "nothingness" that is the openness of the present (not a Kierkegaardian present or a Husserlian present). It is this notion of openness is taking up the world "as" such and such, and, following Nietzsche, the idea of some final truth is discarded.

Thus, Heidegger's world is an interpretative one (beyond apophantic inauthenticity), and this realization should be revelatory in nature, not merely propositional. H's ontology steps back from everydayness to an openness for discovery of one's true primordial self.

This is of course Heidegger's weakness, for he binds truth to the openness of language, not to transcendental openness. Husserl was actually closer in this. His epoche was an actual practice explicitly intended to release one from the naturalistic attitude (Heidegger's das man is derivative), hence the book's on phenomenology and religion which follow his idea that there is something IN experience, that is palpably transcendent which is the point I am driving at. This division in experience, which does not really divide at all for transcendence is eternity and eternity encompasses or subsumes finitude.

Thought here is not propositional merely (if there is such a thing) . Not abstract, but Real. The question is, when a person comes to this threshold where there is a "qualitative" leap in the understanding (Kierkegaard) does one remain the same, or does one actually make the "leap". This same question would apply to meditation: there are those who are very good at sitting quietly, doing nothing, but can never make the essential. Qualitative step out of dasein in an affirmation of transcendence. Everything is yoga, the Hindus rightly tell us; everything is an interpretative "doing" in the world, and this doing is grounded in problem solving and these problems are presented in culture as "illusions", that is, in our apophantic (Heidegger uses this term quite a lot) finitude The world is made of doing, which is what Heidegger's ontology gives us. i am saying, as you did suggest earlier, that the critical part of this lies in the individual's readiness to receive. We are all different, and for some the philosophy, the thinking, translates into revelation.

The reference to neurons is about Science and scientific knowledge which is without doubt is critical to humanity.
What the philosophers like Kant, Heidegger, et. al. expounded and warned is not to seek its ontological eternal substance and be obsessed about it.

But very limited is being philosophically critical, or, critical as a yogic practice. It is a practical and intrasubjective affair that gets our teeth fixed but really has nothing to do with the path to enlightenment. But it is not the metaphysical obsession, but the everyday illusion.

My point with Heidegger and gang is whilst they are able to explain away the dogmatic sense of being of the ancient and even those in their time, they are somehow unknowing entrapped by that 'thing' i.e. the thing-in-itself.
I believe ultimately Kant himself was entrapped [minutely] by the warning he raised for others.

Or, you can dismiss this general notion being trapped that may apply to them, and look at the content they possess which posits a way to see past what traps people. Gang? No. They were not of one thought at all. Again, those post Heideggerians like Levinas, Nancy and others, explore exactly the very troubling nature of of what it means to be in the very threshold the East expounds so freely, if without real clarity, on. Eugene Fink takes up Kant's mantle in exactly this way. Reading them, to put it in Heidegger's terms, is "unconcealing" in ways Heidegger never intended, but their language is a vehicle, a yoga as it reaches out toward and into Eastern enlightenment understanding.

Here is one clue which is related to the above re Flew;
https://www.livescience.com/19971-belie ... m-age.html#
But new research reveals one constant across parts of the globe: As people age, their belief in God seems to increase.
In contrast note Buddhism's Tetralemma;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetralemma
1. P
2. Not-P
3. P and Not-p
4. Neither P nor Not-P
I note Heidegger and gang do not delve into 4.

No. Heidegger was all about 4. Our world is an interpretative one, not an absolute, and P is inherently interpretative. Such thinking is bound to circularity, of course, and H is quite willing to accept this (and we are don the cusp of where Derrida takes his cue toward a post modern....err, nullity). He does not think ideas are fixed at all. Just the opposite. Even terms like 'transcendence' are bound to interpretative possibilities, but this is where others step in. This openness is an essential part of existence, and dasein dissolves in it, that is, its interpretative nature meets the inscrutable apodicticity of eternity (my words).

I was researching Being & Time > 5 years ago, so don't have its full philosophy on my finger tips but I have > 50 FlowCharts from Being and Time to refresh on the main points, here are the main ones;

There can be many perspectives [proviso they are sound] to reality, i.e. one can view reality from many angles.

I agree B&T is one very refine and acceptable perspective to reality with reference to 'Being' and 'Time'. This is why I had put in a lot of time and effort in researching into B&T previously.

In the Pre-Intro of B&T, it is stated;

• "Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the Meaning of Being and to do so concretely.
  Our provisional aim is
  the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being."
  Pre-Intro of B&T

I believe B&T had achieved its stated objectives, subject to the missed out intended Division III.

In my case, I am expecting a bit more given my exposure to other perspectives and my review of where B&T stand.
B&T had expounded the concept of Angst, it would be great if B&T went further and provided the practical solutions to deal with and manage the Angst or at least provide the probable linkage to other practices that can deal with it. [.. I understand that is not its intention at all]
This is where I find Kant's philosophy is able to provide the linkage to the practices of Buddhism. Note the link I provided 'The NT and N8FP as Life's Problem Solution Technique'.

Not sure how this is helpful. Hubert Dreyfus' "Being in he World" is quite useful, though.

I did spend a lot of time reading [many times over] on Hubert Dreyfus' "Being in he World" noted the useful 11 Tables therein.
What I did is to convert the PDF to Word [as with all other books] so I can do all the necessary to facilitate easier understanding.
I read Joan Stambaugh and Mcquarie then has to prepare a Chart to compare the different English terms they [Stamabaugh, Mcquarie and Dreyfus] used to translate the German words.

Btw, have you read Kant's CoPR extensively, deeply and seriously.
It is said, one need at least to spend 3 years full time to get a the necessary grasp on Kant's thoughts.

[Eodnhoj7]

Phenomena = appearances, and noumena = things-in-themselves, so far so good (if I understood correctly).

But did he understand that technically and objectively, all phenomena are noumena (the noumena in the human head)? So some of the noumenon is directly 'knowable'.

1. The distinction between phenomena, as appearance, and noumena, as things in themselves, is negated where phenomena are noumena given they exist through impressionable forms. An appearance is an act of distinction where one phenomenon stands out in contrast to another, in this case being stands out in contrast to Nothingness or being stands out in contrast to further being.

2. This distinction necessitates the appearance, as that of contrast, as a thing in itself given it exists in itself under a self referential loop where being self references in contrast to Nothingness as only being exists. This self referentiality is further reflected where being stands in contrast to further being given that which is distinct acts as the beginning and end point of the phenomena it exists in contrast too.

3. This self referentiality, as a loop, sets the premise for being in itself as grounded in form. This is further reflected in the very same phenomena, as appearance, are traceable forms given the beginning point of the phenomena are the same as the end point which is not just the phenomena itself, as both the beginning and end of a traceable loop form, but the phenomena themselves as both the beginning and end points to further phenomena. This form as a loop in itself and the looping between forms necessitates a self-referentialiy where an appearance is a thing in itself.

4. Yet this distinction of a "thing in itself" reflects that the phenomena as a point of change to another phenomenon due to its contrasting nature. Given an appearance only exists through contrast the nature of the thing in itself is one of fundamental emptiness given no one phenomenon exists on its own. To point out a distinction is to point out the change of one phenomenon to another much in the same manner where a man of distinction is one who changes from what is normal thus offering a different paradigm of behavior.

5. Dually this distinction necessitates an inherent dualism within the phenomenon due to the nature of contrast where one phenomenon must stand out relative to another thus necessitating not only a multitude of phenomena, with the multitude beginning with two phenomena at minimum, but being standing out against Nothingness. This contrast mandates an emergence of phenomena as that which projects from a previously formless state. This projection from a previously formless state in turn projects back into and is recieved by that which is formless thus necessitating an act of impression of forms which occurs through a loop.

6. These impressionable forms are that which are imprinted. This imprinting is grounded in the assumption of the form as the recieving of form. The reception of form is the act of taking a previously formless state and inverting it into one of form. The form repeats itself through nothingness thus necessitating a recursion where the form encapuslates nothing leaving only being as existing. The repetition of being is the encapsulation of what is formless through form. An example of this would be a cookie cutter as being composed of form at its outer edges but its inner state being one of formlessness. The emptiness of the cookie cutter allows for its ability to project a form onto a further blank state, that of the dough.

7. In impressing a form onto a blank state, one can say a void, comes the projection of that said form through the nothingness where the act of imprinting of said form is the repetition of projection of said form. An example of this would be a rock imprinting sand. The sand as imprinted by the rock leaves an impression as the indent with this indent being a projection of the form of the rock through the sand thus leaving not only the rock as a form but this form of the rock as repeated through the sand.

8. One form repeats through another form as an isomorphic impression given any state of impression is that of a projection of one form repeating itself through further projections. All appearances as fundamentally empty necessitate each appearance, or phenomena, as a thing in itself, or a noumena, given it is distinct. This distinction is the point of change from one being into another as a repetition of that said being into a newer state.

[Eyeon]

If you reflect on the writings of the neo-Kantians [Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.], they are all driving toward the self-in-itself, despite Kant's warning there is no such thing as a real thing-in-itself, thus no self-in-itself, where the self is the context of a 'thing'.

The neo-Kantians were idealists in that they wanted to expand upon Kant's notion of philosophy being a scientific endeavor. In short they sought to 'science-ify' Kant's notion of the thing-in-itself.

[Veritas Aequitas]

If you reflect on the writings of the neo-Kantians [Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, etc.], they are all driving toward the self-in-itself, despite Kant's warning there is no such thing as a real thing-in-itself, thus no self-in-itself, where the self is the context of a 'thing'.

The neo-Kantians were idealists in that they wanted to expand upon Kant's notion of philosophy being a scientific endeavor. In short they sought to 'science-ify' Kant's notion of the thing-in-itself.

It is not the case of scientifying the thing-in-itself.

Point is, DNA/Wise it is a very a "normal" psychological impulse for the majority to reify or objectify the thing-in-itself [illusory] as a thing of substance of 'necessity' to ease the cognitive dissonance arising from the existential crisis.

The above necessity to reify the thing-in-itself has its purpose for certain purposes in life at a certain time but not all purposes at all times.

What Kant did with the thing-in-itself, was Kant revealed there are two perspectives to what is a thing, i.e.

• 1. the ordinary perception of a thing [phenomena] is represented by something of substance [noumena] - the thing-in-itself.
  2. Kant demonstrated the thing-in-itself is an illusion, i.e. merely an idea of the mind.

Thus a thing is real in one sense and unreal [an illusion] in another sense.

My point is,
whilst had demonstrated convincingly the two perspectives of what-is-a-thing is a real in one sense [S1] and illusory [S2] in another higher sense [S2] during his time, those who came after him and adopted his theories merely adopted S1 but are unable to grasp the fact of S2 - i.e. the illusory aspects of thing, the thing-in-itself.

Note Kant wrote and warned;

They are sophistications not of men but of Pure Reason itself. Even the wisest of men cannot free himself from them.
After long effort he perhaps succeeds in guarding himself against actual error;
but he will never be able to free himself from the Illusion, which unceasingly mocks and torments him.
CPR B397

The Neo-Kantians could not free themselves from the illusion as mentioned above and that is why they always fall back to the thing-in-itself as something.
In the case of Schoppenhauer it is the Will and the others always treat the thing-in-itself as a thing and never an illusion.

Note Hume got it right as with Kant, i.e. to Hume there is no thing of substance called a soul, but the self is merely a bundle of perceptions.

The strong urge and impulse to reify things and soul as something of an ultimate substance is very psychological.

[Belinda]

People can transcend 1. the awareness of the world of time, relativity, and change, and engage
2.awareness of eternity /things in themselves. But why claim 2. has more virtue than 1. ?

If there were an omniscient being (or Omniscient Being) that being would know , besides 1. and 2. also states of awareness 3. 4. and 5. to infinity.