Christianity

[Belinda]

Since you cannot, even slightly, understand what he is talking about, you certainly could not follow him or his path. Only when you actually understood the terms and concepts he is working with could you then make any sort of reasoned decision.

And this is just what I have been talking about: Once the capability of understanding certain ideas and concepts has been undermined, and the conceptual pathway disturbed or broken, those ideas seem outrageous and ridiculous -- unworthy of consideration by a sensible person! And they are dismissed.

In my experience the conceptual pathway is not inherent but learned . I can't lose the conceptual pathway if I never learned it in the first place. It's true that general respect for education is inculcated by the prevailing culture via significant others in early childhood as any primary school teacher will agree. If respect for education has to be learned by children of school age it's done with as much entertainment and playfulness as may be. Novels and cartoons are quite helpful.

A culture of understanding may become materialistic as has happened due to regimes' scorn for academia and its knock on effect in education policies. Even scientists are not officially taught philosophy of science as there isn't time to learn it. Keep up the good fight!

The field of human ability has not lost its potential fertility, because Lamarckism is not true.

BTW my recent try at theodicy by clustering demiurge, satan, and trickster did not work for the reason you gave earlier. The problem of evil remains in place.

Plato used the term in the dialog Timaeus, an exposition of cosmology in which the Demiurge is the agent who takes the preexisting materials of chaos, arranges them according to the models of eternal forms, and produces all the physical things of the world, including human bodies. The Demiurge is sometimes thought of as the Platonic personification of active reason. The term was later adopted by some of the Gnostics, who, in their dualistic worldview, saw the Demiurge as one of the forces of evil, who was responsible for the creation of the despised material world and was wholly alien to the supreme God of goodness.

Why do you accept Gnostic duality and assume the demiurge are evil rather then Plato's explanation of the demiurge responsible for bringing order into chaos. Is that evil?

I had to look up what Plato said in the Timaeus about the Demiurge. It's as I thought. The Demiurge is The Craftsman. A craftsman creates things. The world is a creation. It's well known that the world contains a lot of suffering. The degree of suffering is evil. The Good could not have created that amount of evil. Take pain for instance; pain is necessary for us to not damage ourselves but the degree of much of the pain suffered has no useful function and is therefore not order but disorder which men struggle to ameliorate.

[Belinda]

Depends what you definition of 'enlightenment' would be.

But allow me to comment: Some people are locked into, perhaps even imprisoned, within conceptual structures that do not allow them to excel and prosper. They live in conceptual prisons. Trapped. So let us suppose that you accept that what I describe is real and some people do live in such prisons.

Would you then be able to accept that gaining conceptual knowledge that would enable them to begin to leave such conceptual prisons could be possible? And if that did happen would that be 'progress' in your book?

I don't have any thoughts on how people should live their lives. Contentment seems the most desireable goal to me. If spending all your free time watching third rate rubbish on TV brings you contentment, and it causes you no problems, that is probably what you should do. I don't have a TV set, which is probably why I try to make my experience here as entertaining as possible. If the world was full of deep thinkers, life would probably be Hell for everyone.

Sorry about all the probablies.

Entertainment alone seems an odd motive if it's the only motive. I like to be entertained while I am learning, or playing games, but I need some challenges too. If Nick were repeating platitudes I'd be bored but there seems to be thinking going on there.

[Harbal]

Entertainment alone seems an odd motive if it's the only motive. I like to be entertained while I am learning, or playing games, but I need some challenges too. If Nick were repeating platitudes I'd be bored but there seems to be thinking going on there.

Nick has obviously spent a lot of time thinking.

I sent you a PM, btw.

[Belinda]

Entertainment alone seems an odd motive if it's the only motive. I like to be entertained while I am learning, or playing games, but I need some challenges too. If Nick were repeating platitudes I'd be bored but there seems to be thinking going on there.

Nick has obviously spent a lot of time thinking.

I sent you a PM, btw.

Gosh you are so funny Harbal. I am actually laughing out loud.

[Dubious]

The answer to that question (where is that "objective truth" that's supposed to prove its reality?) is discovered when one examines all things that are created, all things that come to be and are expressed, when metaphysical ideas are translated into our realm through human endeavor and expression.

Much more than metaphysics (which explains nothing), physics, etc., in all its capacities is the art by which all things created get examined which doesn't render it less mystical than any of your metaphysical pretensions. Only then do we face the real mysteries of nature; not the ones we manufacture.

Since there cannot be presented to you that which corresponds to the *objective truth* you say you seek

The only objective truth is the one which negates its existence. Where have I ever implied I'd be searching for something whose meanings are constructed to conform to human psychology? After all my posts, this statement makes no sense. To seek or search for objective truths I would need to believe they exist as you and Nick clearly do. In what post have I done that?

The invisible, including an idea which cannot but be described as non-tangible and thus non-objective, can yet be understood objectively

Pluralistically yes, in the sense that something consensually agreed to can be understood objectively: note understood as such without being explicitly denoted as such.

(And yes, very much, I hold to extreme hierarchies of valuation).

I don't; nature manifests itself through emergence, never hierarchies of valuation which belongs specifically to human endeavor.

As I was thinking about this yesterday a scene from an old Japanese film Late Spring came to mind. Early postwar (ll) Japan. The scene involves a friendly gathering of women and the preparation of tea. All of this rehearsal, the rite itself, comes about as a result of the translation of metaphysical ideas, and also principles, into their realm of social activity. Obviously the tea ritual is an expression of a contemplative understanding or vision. This social performance, seen from our vantage today, at least by many, cannot in fact be seen -- if seeing involves understanding. In order to understand it one would have to become familiar with a range of ideas precisely of the sort I describe as metaphysical. What is not understood cannot certainly be appreciated. And what supersedes the *value* expressed in it is vulgarized and debased. I am frankly surprised that you do not seem to grasp some of this. Why must these things be laboriously explained? Shouldn't you be explaining these things to me?

The tea ceremony is a highly ritualistic process; the Japanese have always been extremely ritualistic and formal in their society. To truly understand it requires knowledge of each movement in its performance not only in its execution but also in its meaning. No one questions the formality, the power of ritual on the psyche and the necessity for its performance. Art can also be qualified as a revelation of it. One can even extend its formality to the universe as a cosmic tea ritual. If you insist on calling that kind of experience metaphysical in the sense of aspiring to fixed eternal values which preexist humans, that depends entirely on your belief preferences being not unlike theism.

Life means structure; that's why as often mentioned, the ghosts of past beliefs (traditions) are still of service to those who may not have an equally potent substitute to structure their lives beyond the mundane and the seemingly static.
Rites, rituals, etc., never ceased to be of prime importance, more so psychologically (subjectively). Claiming a human necessity as metaphysical overburdens its meaning into a domain beyond human which doesn't make sense.

So as I see things (and I am just as much of an outcome of decadent modern processes as anyone except that I am aware that something destructive was done) when we lose a sense of what 'metaphysics' actually refer to, when we lose the understanding and therefore the connection, we descend from a higher level down to a lower plane. If high or exalted forms of behavior and comportment depend on a relationship to metaphysical principles, and it is clear that they do, when these disappear or are 'erased', the vertical dimension is lost sight of or sacrificed.

I would ask the same question of you as I did of Nick: at what time in history were we at a higher level? How did it reveal itself?

What happens to a person who has no anchor (in eternal values and ideas) of any sort?

I'll never figure out why this nonsensical hyperreality of eternal values and ideas are so important to the likes of you and Nick! Why would a human with a lifespan which yields an infinitesimal measured against anything eternal be so concerned with eternal values and ideas as if such actually existed! Why would such a limited, temporary agent of life require values which objectively co-exist with that of eternity either remaining forever hidden or not existing at all...both of equal consequence! Ever think or really examine on your own why mortality would be more fractured if it doesn't have any such hyper-conceptual or metaphysical quality for its anchor?

Applying the word "eternal" to values and ideas is not only an absurdity - which diminishes meaning rather than expanding it - but also an oxymoron forming its own black hole as the ultimate paradox. So, feel free to remain vertical; I'm in the age were horizontal feels good.

With all the reading that you do, it's especially important to have one's Bullshit Detector on at all times.

[Belinda]

The answer to that question (where is that "objective truth" that's supposed to prove its reality?) is discovered when one examines all things that are created, all things that come to be and are expressed, when metaphysical ideas are translated into our realm through human endeavor and expression.

Much more than metaphysics (which explains nothing), physics, etc., in all its capacities is the art by which all things created get examined which doesn't render it less mystical than any of your metaphysical pretensions. Only then do we face the real mysteries of nature; not the ones we manufacture.

Since there cannot be presented to you that which corresponds to the *objective truth* you say you seek

The only objective truth is the one which negates its existence. Where have I ever implied I'd be searching for something whose meanings are constructed to conform to human psychology? After all my posts, this statement makes no sense. To seek or search for objective truths I would need to believe they exist as you and Nick clearly do. In what post have I done that?

The invisible, including an idea which cannot but be described as non-tangible and thus non-objective, can yet be understood objectively

Pluralistically yes, in the sense that something consensually agreed to can be understood objectively: note understood as such without being explicitly denoted as such.

(And yes, very much, I hold to extreme hierarchies of valuation).

I don't; nature manifests itself through emergence, never hierarchies of valuation which belongs specifically to human endeavor.

As I was thinking about this yesterday a scene from an old Japanese film Late Spring came to mind. Early postwar (ll) Japan. The scene involves a friendly gathering of women and the preparation of tea. All of this rehearsal, the rite itself, comes about as a result of the translation of metaphysical ideas, and also principles, into their realm of social activity. Obviously the tea ritual is an expression of a contemplative understanding or vision. This social performance, seen from our vantage today, at least by many, cannot in fact be seen -- if seeing involves understanding. In order to understand it one would have to become familiar with a range of ideas precisely of the sort I describe as metaphysical. What is not understood cannot certainly be appreciated. And what supersedes the *value* expressed in it is vulgarized and debased. I am frankly surprised that you do not seem to grasp some of this. Why must these things be laboriously explained? Shouldn't you be explaining these things to me?

The tea ceremony is a highly ritualistic process; the Japanese have always been extremely ritualistic and formal in their society. To truly understand it requires knowledge of each movement in its performance not only in its execution but also in its meaning. No one questions the formality, the power of ritual on the psyche and the necessity for its performance. Art can also be qualified as a revelation of it. One can even extend its formality to the universe as a cosmic tea ritual. If you insist on calling that kind of experience metaphysical in the sense of aspiring to fixed eternal values which preexist humans, that depends entirely on your belief preferences being not unlike theism.

Life means structure; that's why as often mentioned, the ghosts of past beliefs (traditions) are still of service to those who may not have an equally potent substitute to structure their lives beyond the mundane and the seemingly static.
Rites, rituals, etc., never ceased to be of prime importance, more so psychologically (subjectively). Claiming a human necessity as metaphysical overburdens its meaning into a domain beyond human which doesn't make sense.

So as I see things (and I am just as much of an outcome of decadent modern processes as anyone except that I am aware that something destructive was done) when we lose a sense of what 'metaphysics' actually refer to, when we lose the understanding and therefore the connection, we descend from a higher level down to a lower plane. If high or exalted forms of behavior and comportment depend on a relationship to metaphysical principles, and it is clear that they do, when these disappear or are 'erased', the vertical dimension is lost sight of or sacrificed.

I would ask the same question of you as I did of Nick: at what time in history were we at a higher level? How did it reveal itself?

What happens to a person who has no anchor (in eternal values and ideas) of any sort?

I'll never figure out why this nonsensical hyperreality of eternal values and ideas are so important to the likes of you and Nick! Why would a human with a lifespan which yields an infinitesimal measured against anything eternal be so concerned with eternal values and ideas as if such actually existed! Why would such a limited, temporary agent of life require values which objectively co-exist with that of eternity either remaining forever hidden or not existing at all...both of equal consequence! Ever think or really examine on your own why mortality would be more fractured if it doesn't have any such hyper-conceptual or metaphysical quality for its anchor?

Applying the word "eternal" to values and ideas is not only an absurdity - which diminishes meaning rather than expanding it - but also an oxymoron forming its own black hole as the ultimate paradox. So, feel free to remain vertical; I'm in the age were horizontal feels good.

With all the reading that you do, it's especially important to have one's Bullshit Detector on at all times.

I agree with a lot of what Dubious says. I only once watched people doing the tea ceremony . I have done some Tai Chi and what D says about the tea ceremony applies to Tai Chi. Tai Chi is about grounding , not elevating.

While you don't like "hyperreality", is it okay with you if eternal values are psychological only?

[Nick_A]

I do have a bit of a clue for you. In respect to people like Nick, and like myself I should say, you'd do well to understand that our adamancy has a function for ourselves. For example I have, to all appearances, been unsuccessful communicating certain ideas to Dubious. In fact if "The End" meant what I think it meant my insistence irritated him. (He's a somewhat grumpy fellow at times!)

But in trying to convince you I am in fact shoring up my own sense of what is right and true. This all has great importance for me. None of this is vain conversation. I have to get clear about these things in order to be able to function in a holistic sense.

So what I have done (in the course of these months) is to have retreated from an overt defense of Christianity to a defense of the ideas and the metaphysics that stand behind it. This is, in one sense, a shade or a step below real belief -- but it is the best I can do.

My brain just isn't wired up like Nick's, I am never going to be able to appreciate what his vision is. From time to time I do make a slight effort to understand this type of thing, but it never ends in success. I have been rather horrible to Nick in the past, which I don't feel great about, so this was just an attempt to understand him. I am nowhere near Nick's concept of what a human being should be, but if he really knew me, I don't think he would disapprove of me as much as he probably does.

I know the ideas I have adopted which represent higher reason seem odd to those not used to them. Their need for meaning has been satisfied by the world so no reason to concern oneself with these God questions. Your attacks in the past were just a certain frustration which apparently you have outgrown. The real annoying ones are hostile mods who use their power to kick those able to think out of the box out of the forum. When this happens you have a dead forum only good for those practicing denial.

Here is a description of Man. You may not understand it but you've gone beyond the chorus of boos that many use rather than opening to contemplation normal for one willing to admit like Socrates "I know nothing."

“We are dealing with two fundamental human and cosmic forces in man and in the universal world: the movement of the descent of the Spirit into the manifest material world (creation, incarnation), and the movement of ascent and return (spiritualization) to the Source that is Spirit, Being itself. And it is man who is destined to stand in the middle as a bridge between these two intrinsically opposing forces—in Christian language, on the Cross... ”from Jacob Needleman's book: "What Is God"

What are these cosmic forces known in the Great Chain of Being of which they both exist in opposition in man creating the unique nature of man' being? Of course you don't know but no longer need to glorify ignorance and respect philosophy rather than condemning it.

[Nick_A]

This has nothing to do with your intelligence, it has to do with your background education.

Yes, and I am grateful to you for pointing it out. I am not in possession of the necessary background knowledge that I need in order to understand Nick. That's fine. There is no reason why I should be in possession of that knowledge.

Education is limited. I have gone through my readings on the great ideas brought to the West by Gurdjieff and expanded upon by Ouspensky They contributed to the cause of my experience with metanoia: inwardly turning towards the light with the whole of oneself and away from the shadows on the wall.

In a letter to professor and vicar John Staupitz, Martin Luther wrote, “I learned that this word is in Greek metanoia and is derived from meta and noun, i.e., post and mentem, so that poenitentia or metanoia is a “coming to one’s senses,” and is a knowledge of one’s own evil, gained after punishment has been accepted and error acknowledged; and this cannot possibly happen without a change in our heart and our love. All this answers so aptly to the theology of Paul, that nothing, at least in my judgment, can so aptly illustrate St. Paul.

Then I went on and saw that metanoia can be derived, though not without violence, not only from post and mentem, but also from trans and mentem, so that metanoia signifies a changing of the mind and heart.”

A person can receive the most involved Christian education but if they never experience metanoia, they can never "understand" it.

[Dubious]

While you don't like "hyperreality", is it okay with you if eternal values are psychological only?

Eternal values are psychological only. I called it a hyperreality since the idea of all that we value, subjective as it may be, is de-localized into a domain which no-longer has any relation to us in an effort to generate the grand illusion of objective values and ideas.

By adding an extra dimension to ours under the rubric of Sub specie aeternitatis our subjectivities inherit some of the qualities we imagine eternity may itself possess. What better way to transmute what's singular, personal, indigenous to a species, into something as universal as objective values for no other reason than the urge to do so.

[Harbal]

I know the ideas I have adopted which represent higher reason seem odd to those not used to them. Their need for meaning has been satisfied by the world so no reason to concern oneself with these God questions.

I am very keen to understand the world, but I'm not looking for meaning. I don't believe there is any meaning, and I do not feel any need for there to be meaning. I think these "God questions" are for the people who do need to believe the world has meaning. If you want to be respected for searching for meaning, you need, in return, to respect those who are looking for the truth, rather than dismissing them as wretched creatures on a lower plane of existence.

You may not understand it but you've gone beyond the chorus of boos that many use rather than opening to contemplation normal for one willing to admit like Socrates "I know nothing."

I am aware that I know nothing, and when I do join the chorus of boos I am usually booing at those who insist they know everything. And even more so when they are already booing at me for not seeing things the way they do.

What are these cosmic forces known in the Great Chain of Being of which they both exist in opposition in man creating the unique nature of man' being? Of course you don't know but no longer need to glorify ignorance and respect philosophy rather than condemning it.

I have never glorified ignorance, and I very much respect philosophy, and that is probably why I don't spend any time exploring the "Great Chain of Being".

[Belinda]

While you don't like "hyperreality", is it okay with you if eternal values are psychological only?

Eternal values are psychological only. I called it a hyperreality since the idea of all that we value, subjective as it may be, is de-localized into a domain which no-longer has any relation to us in an effort to generate the grand illusion of objective values and ideas.

By adding an extra dimension to ours under the rubric of Sub specie aeternitatis our subjectivities inherit some of the qualities we imagine eternity may itself possess. What better way to transmute what's singular, personal, indigenous to a species, into something as universal as objective values for no other reason than the urge to do so.

I like idealism, so I think that sub specie aeternitatis is no less an aspect of reality than is sub speciae temporis. The latter seems more real than the former because we have to strive to stay alive, all the more so for adults who know death is a future certainty.

[Belinda]

Nick wrote:

Education is limited. I have gone through my readings on the great ideas brought to the West by Gurdjieff and expanded upon by Ouspensky They contributed to the cause of my experience with metanoia: inwardly turning towards the light with the whole of oneself and away from the shadows on the wall.

Was the other part of your experience practical?

[Sculptor]

Education is limited. I have gone through my readings on the great ideas brought to the West by Gurdjieff and expanded upon by Ouspensky They contributed to the cause of my experience with metanoia: inwardly turning towards the light with the whole of oneself and away from the shadows on the wall.

If you concentrate on the musings of two mystic clowns then no wonder your education is limited.

All you are doing is looking up at the light coming through the bars of your own prison cell.
Might need to try to get the fuck out of your head, to the other side of the wall and through to door.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_euDhMDDRq4

[Nick_A]

Nick wrote:

Education is limited. I have gone through my readings on the great ideas brought to the West by Gurdjieff and expanded upon by Ouspensky They contributed to the cause of my experience with metanoia: inwardly turning towards the light with the whole of oneself and away from the shadows on the wall.

Was the other part of your experience practical?

It was practical in the sense that without what Learned and verified on both the law of three forces and the dicontinuity of vibrations and described in the law of octaves and why everything turns in circles I would still be arguing for duality. It was practical as a mind opening experience. What is so practical about a closed mind fixated on the shadows on the wall to supply meaning?

[Alexis Jacobi]

I don't have any thoughts on how people should live their lives. Contentment seems the most desireable goal to me. If spending all your free time watching third rate rubbish on TV brings you contentment, and it causes you no problems, that is probably what you should do. I don't have a TV set, which is probably why I try to make my experience here as entertaining as possible. If the world was full of deep thinkers, life would probably be Hell for everyone.

OK so please let me say that I fully understand what you are saying and I also think I have a sense why you say it. And as you might guess I view your attitude, the attitude you express, as being another symptom of social, cultural and personal degeneration. And this is one more example of the sort of 'outcomes' that I have been talking about. We are all outcomes of evolutions, and devolutions, in thinking processes. Our moral and ethical responsibility either becomes more sharp and more acute -- and necessarily more relational to the principles that we hold to -- or we fall away from being directed by those principles.

There are a number of *statements* that you are making. One, that you do not see yourself as having responsibility in representing or teaching or demonstrating any particular values. You are 'value neutral'. You 'have no thoughts' meaning that you avoid any thought or any conclusiveness in regard to what are, in fact, ethical issues. To have, say, abandoned the field' in this way, and in regard to ethics, is a symptom of the degeneration I talk about. But you suppose (I gather) that your position is a higher or better position. You therefore assert that it is ethically better not to have any opinion on the matter.

You then assert that 'contentment' is the best human occupation and perhaps even goal. Again you are making a positive ethical assertion. Contentment, as you point out, could be achieved giving one's life over to watching trash TeeVee 'if it brings contentment'. What a puzzling assertion!

Pleasure (ἡδονή/hedone) is the only thing that is intrinsically valuable. Other things (e.g., knowledge, virtue, friendship, and philosophy) may have value, but only insofar as they contribute to pleasure. Whatever value they have is thus merely instrumental.

Your views, I assume, fit into this ethical category.

Then you say -- and this is also a laden statement -- " If the world was full of deep thinkers, life would probably be Hell for everyone". Which when translated means "too much thought contaminates pleasure" or disrupts pleasure. The implication being that the great mass of men if left to themselves just want to sit around doing those things which correspond to watching trash TeeVee and would see the living of life transformed into a sort of 'hell' if people who thought too much had too much influence.

What is the ethical stance here? Where does it come from? Since I say that we are *outcomes* of social and ideological processes (that I define as degenerate) I believe I have an answer!

Though posting links in forum messages is criminal, yet this gives me pleasure and so it can't be wrong! Voilà.

In order to understand what has happened in out culture, and in us, we have to trace the evolution of ideas and attitudes back to the 'causes'. Ideas Have Consequences.

[I wonder if you'd ever seen the movie If? (with Malcom McDowell).] [Scene]