Eh?Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 7:01 pmFor various reasons this caught my attention.attofishpi wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 11:45 amHow many hookers have you had sex with?
How many cars have you stolen? (or borrowed)
How many anecdotes can you share without boring everyone to death?
In the course of this *conversation* (quote/unquote) I have had to confront and also to surmount, or perhaps resolve, what Immanuel Can represented to me and represents as a cultural figure, a sort of general trope. I know it is tedious (or seems picayune) that I keep mentioning IC but, in my case, my encounter with him, here, turned out to be momentous, and in relation to my own development and understanding. Remember that this all began with LaceWing many months ago and no part of the extended conversation, and all elements of it, should be forgotten (though some here have no inkling at all of this).
Jumping right into it I have to state, and make clear, that the notion of 'sin' cannot and should not ever be dismissed. Those who confront the myriad *Immanuel Cans* roving around out there will react, as is natural, against 'him'. They will reject 'him' and, perhaps, all that he might present about man's sinfulness and the need for a 'redeemer' and a whole range of different connotations. This is why I say that IC is *wicked* and *destructive* (and I am referring to him now as a symbol for a larger set of conceptions) because he produces, I have even thought deliberately, a sour taste that demands, in order to defend personal sovereignty, to be spit or vomited out. One could say, one might say, that this is the Devil's trick: to cause people to reject an aspect of the message when the messenger is rejected.
We need a different conceptual framework in order to understand 'sin'. True, in developing mine I will refer to a transcendent or perhaps expanded metaphysics -- that of Vedānta which has been enormously developed as an explanatory system and is extremely useful in explaining and clarifying what is valuable in Christianity. I am going to assume that all who write here, and all people generally, have a 'conscience' of the sort that Nick refers to. In thinking about what Nick has attempted to present I am at least clear that I know what he means.
But what interests me personally, and for very personal reasons, has been and is the process through which 'conscience' has been stimulated. The more awareness, the more wakefulness, the more, shall I say, sobriety and seriousness, but also the more awareness of 'higher orders of being', the more that I have been made aware, and unpleasantly, of my own 'sinful activities'.
If you evoke awareness, awareness will make itself known, and 'conscience' will bear down on you. I have had to relive and remember, against my own volition, hundreds of different situations in which wrong turns were taken. Sexual misconduct is not a minor one but these are not the ones that seem to 'haunt'. There are other levels of moral sin that seem more consequential.
But what is the basis of sinfulness? It seems to involve trying to get what one feels is lacking or missing on an internal plane through an ignorant and falsely-based hope, a mistaken wish, that it is possible to get *it* from out of circumstances that can never give it. For 'incarnated entities' such as ourselves, we are stuck in unfavorable and even misfortunate circumstances. I do not see a way around this. The Vaishnavas describe this human condition by referring to the metaphor of 'material entanglement'. The truly ignorant (in the Vedānta sense of avidya) have so little discerning intelligence that, stuck in such conditions, they can do little else but muck things up. Desire, anger, appetite, longing, uncontrolled lust, possess their entire selves. They are trapped and driven along, getting & grabbing. The metaphor is imprisonment.
But this is a condition that is universal and general -- though the discriminating have more skill in understanding their 'condition'. Though it also seems to happen that they get better at concealing the degree to which they are possessed by their longings that cannot ever be genuinely satisfied.
Switching topics, to a degree . . .
Actually, there very definitely is such a path. It is even I think rather obvious at a simple and undeveloped intuitive level. But getting to the capability of properly conceptualizing it, which definitely involves a grasp of universals (!) and also of metaphysical concepts, is a fraught process with many obstructions.Haribal wrote: It's not a question of what I favour, it is a question of what is the case. Although man might search for the "ultimate path to truth", that is no assurance that there is such a path. Perhaps if you could define "truth" we could at least get a sense of whether our ambition of finding a path to it is feasible.
At the point of realization one will have to make choices, and depending on where one is located (what cultural milieu, moment in history, surrounding religious concept) one will as a result of realization seek the appropriate and available tools in order to extract oneself from the 'mire' (if mire is taken to mean a circumstance of ignorance of causation and consequence). But the process is, I think, universal.
That is exactly right: at that point there is no other yardstick. But when the larger pattern of what is called, within spiritual traditions, awakening occurs, that the circumstances one awakes from are more or less exactly the same. The human situation, the 'material entanglement', is exactly the same in all relevant senses for all people, everywhere. It is very specific to this realm.If we do find ourselves wanting to measure anything in the meanwhile, what do we have to measure it with other than the yardstick of our own human judgement?
I really have an uncouth approach with people of late. A while ago I asked IC to describe what he envisions heaven to be, but he has declined.
I wonder if he would be disappointed if he was told he is already in heaven?
(for the record, I have never paid for sex!!)