Aug 31, 2017

On Listening...an offering

close friend speaking Buddha to me
in the silent park 
the quiet was listening 

Aug 30, 2017

On Thinking, Thinker, and Me as Intended Object

When thinking, there is the tacit assumption that you are thinking "to yourself." At one and the same time, there is the tacit assumption that you are the thinker." In thinking, "I am both thinker and hearer of thoughts, i.e., a subject and an object. How is that possible? This is a well-known paradox that, to the best of my knowledge, remains unanswered or dissolved. (At this juncture, I wish to give credit to Edmund Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation for inspiring me to write about the paradox. I'm still looking for the page to quote from. It's forthcoming.)

When faced with another sentient being, we are--at one and the same moment--both the subject who faces and the object being faced. All of this occurs in our own experience. The other is other in our experience. And, we are also an other in facing the other. Questions arise. Does it matter if what you are facing is sentient? Yes and no. When faced with a situation excluding any sentient beings, do we not assume that we, as an object, are there, in a world? How can we be both subject and object at once? However, when facing a sentient being, human or animal who is aware of us, by the very fact that both are aware of us turns us into an object for another--in our own experience. Again, we are both subject and object. Is this possible? Logically speaking it is defiant. We have a seeming contradiction. Does it or can this contradiction be "resolved." How? Remember, this bifurcation occurs in all experience, barring specialized states of awareness.

Several important points must be added in the form of questions. What kind of self as object are we to the other? Can we have a say in that? Like it or not, we are an object, not only to the other but to the other in our own experience. We as subjects are simultaneously aware of being both the subject and object. How is that possible? The other gives us our selves as objects. But in this instance, we have no choice but to be the object for the subjective facing of the other in our own experience.

The sentient other turns me into an object for me--the subject (I) becomes an object (a thou) to me at one and the same time as I am a subject, similar to what takes place in thought. Note well this comparison. Often, we concern ourselves with the kind of "objective" self we "give" to the other--all taking place within our own experience. Maybe, we then concern ourselves with our "objective" self as others may view it. After all, it is the power of otherness that gives us this objective self that clearly resides in our experience. What kind of other do we wish to project to others in ourselves?









Aug 24, 2017

Facebook, Youtube, other tech giants launch joint, state-backed censorship programs

This is important for all of us. Please read. It's not just for these websites.



Facebook, Youtube, other tech giants launch joint, state-backed censorship programs

Aug 22, 2017

What-,who-ever gave us the belief...?

Whatever gave us the belief
that what we perceive is anything
other than our experience?

Perhaps metaphysics?
Perhaps the who is
the Ancient Greeks?
Perhaps Parmenides?

Whatever gave us the belief
that technology was changing anything
other than our experience?

When we seek to change "the world,"
we are looking for "everyone," or
"the means of production,"
or "society" to change.

When we seek to change experience,
we are "seeking" change
in ourselves.

Change in experience
is the radical change
that will change our worlds.

Aug 20, 2017

Question...

Why are "spiritual" experiences spiritual? 

Aug 16, 2017

The "Body"

Many materialists and naturalists hold the view, with variations, that we encounter some version of a physical, natural, or material world in perception and cognition. Once that metaphysical and epistemological view is in tact in the body-memory with its attendant feelings, the world is cast away from its dynamic and living source in a feeling-body. The mistake here is to believe in an encounter with the world. Being unaware "of" the always and already prior union of the body-world, the body-world union is concealed. By repetition, this embodied encounter belief regularly operates to render the union hidden. It glides unobtrusively into a background function that is subject and object (form khanda*) yielding.

Identities are manifest in relation to objectification. "I am in relation to my circumstances." Both selves and circumstances are generated in reciprocal relations. Circumstances incarnate forms, feelings, perceptions, and consciousnesses shaped by incarnate memories, the "cognitive unconscious" of the cognitive scientists. These derive from prior acts of body, speech, and mind. These prior acts form the intentional memory configurations that provide meaningful manifestations of selves and situations. We find ourselves, in all cases, on the manifest side of these memory configurations. Selves and situations are at the effect end of the evanescence of experience. We are not the agents of these acts that produce time as experience. We find ourselves already in identities and situations. Hence, there is no perception of creations or beginnings. This process of experience is without beginning.

At this point, a question may arise: "If this union of the body-world is prior to thought and perception, how is it known?" The answer, perhaps a seemingly elusive one is "We are it." It is held in the body. It is felt in the body, it is breathed in the body. The body, as mentioned in a previous blog post, lives in real time, experience time. The body holds the felt evanescence of time. Its manifestations are the manifestations of worlds, of experience.

Ever had the experience of noticing the halt of an air conditioning unit? Or, the silencing of a birdsong? Or the cessation of children's laughter as they play nearby? How is it that we do not notice the air conditioner, the birdsong, or the children's laughter when it was occurring? We seem to notice only the cessations. Well, we may say, I wasn't conscious of the sounds but I became conscious of them when they ceased. Are you sure you were not conscious of them? Perhaps a different type of knowledge was operative that held the sounds. Perhaps we were able to become conscious of the sounds because they were held in a different kind of knowing, one that we are not habituated to call "knowing."

More to follow...






 *Rosenberg, Alex. 2017. "THE STONE; A Foundation Of Science". Query.Nytimes.Com. Accessed August 18 2017. https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F00E7DF1F3CF93BA2575AC0A9679D8B63&rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fthe-stone&action=click&contentCollection=opin


**"Khandha Sutta: Aggregates". 2017. Accesstoinsight.Org. Accessed August 16, 2017. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn22/sn22.048.than.html.

Aug 15, 2017

Upcoming: Suffering and the Foundation of Ethics

Aug 14, 2017

Me-ness: A Brief Meditation

I am making an entreaty here. Please come along with me and explore this me-ness at its root. The revelation that beckons us may lead us to accept our ultimate vulnerability, i.e., the ground of courage.

When observed in a moment of empty, silent, me-ness, it reveals itself to be no one in particular. In a word, the I am is empty of identity. It is at once, me and not me. Take a good look you'll see what I mean. In its being revealed for what it is in experience, it shows itself to be anonymous. The self is empty of self-nature. Who am I then? I am no one in particular; I am everyman. I am the everyman! More precisely, I am the everyself, gender is not at hand.

In the raw revelation of selfness, I am revealed to be worldless as well. Without identity, its correlate, world, vanishes. World and identity are like form and color, distinguishable yet inseparable.

poem

Oriental Islamic rug on my office floor,
that's the body being complicated.
They are called "magic" carpets for
good reason.

"so to speak"

We could, with justification, follow almost every meaningful sentence we utter with the words "so to speak."

On narration...

We begin with a telling etymology of the word "narrative": early 15c., from Old French narracion "account, statement, a relating, recounting, narrating, narrative tale," and directly from Latin narrationem (nominative narratio) "a relating, narrative," noun of action from past participle stem of narrare "to tell, relate, recount, explain," literally "to make acquainted with," from gnarus "knowing," from PIE *gne-ro-, suffixed form of root *gno "to know."*
In addition, we add the Latin word gnosis, "knowledge" and the Sanskrit word Jnana, "knowledge" from the verb jna, "to know, and English "know." Here it is of immense interest that the word "narrative" has its roots in words for "knowledge." We shall aim to indicate why in the following.



Why narrative? Narratives are, upon reflection, the stories we live. When living in their pure execution, narratives speak situations that, more often than not, seem real. Upon reflection, we call them thoughts. Thoughts are a conceptual artifice designed to explain what happens. They too are a component of narration.



*"Online Etymology Dictionary". 2017. Etymonline.Com. Accessed August 14 2017. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=narration&allowed_in_frame=0.

Aug 13, 2017

Did you ever...

When thoughtfully, i.e., no thought, observing the nature of an accidental spill or dropping something, did you ever focus on it from the point of view of surprise? We are generally surprised by accidents. Why? A simple answer would be, "We are surprised by accidents because we do not commit them. They are quite selfless; they lack agency. So, when an accident occurs, we feel a shock, a pause, a fear, and a range of other feelings that may occur. These feelings are, not to be silly, felt. We feel surprised. It feels somewhat uncomfortable, in less intense accidents, and often horrified by the more intense. These feelings are, for the most part, uncomfortable or worse. Our bodily feelings of surprise are a crack or fissure in what might be called the continuity of agency. We feel and often think that we are simply sailing along, performing actions as the doer until something, often the surprise of accidents, interrupts that continuity. The shock occurs as an interruption or fissure in a seeming continuity. What happens? Well, what happens is the fissure awakens us to the fact that we are not the agents of our acts. We ride the current of the continuity of agency to the breaking point, the occurrence of an accident. Accidents interrupt life as we anticipate it. They may be seen as an opportunity to watch what happens as it happens. This may be termed the thoughtless observation "in" living.

Aug 8, 2017

On Thinking

There is no thinker of thoughts;
the thoughts think the thinker. 
More precisely,
there are no such things as thoughts.
Thoughts exist in theory only;
just like everything else. 
Narratives rule all
but the wise.




Aug 3, 2017

Freedom, Determinism, Free Will, and the Causa Sui: Karma

Introduction:


The doctrine of free will may, and very often does, exclude compassion through one of its common manifestations, blame. Some may protest, without free will how can we be said to make choices? We don't! It is prior acts (karma) that determine what arises in experience and it is karma that will change what arises in experience. We may call that the cultivation of merit (punya) or demerit (apunya). With the exclusion of free will, we can blame only the causes and conditions that constitute our histories, including our present circumstances, and therefore we place the blame where it belongs--in our ideas and beliefs, i.e., the fundamental presuppositions that constitute the latent powers of manifestation of experience. In a word, it is incarnate history that determines the nature of all experience, barring what some may call the experience of nirvana or the "freedom from experience."*

If we truly had a radical form of free will, that will would not be determined. It would be unconditioned by history or anything else. To be "free" means, in this sense of the word, to be free from all determinations. In this instance, a will can be free only if it is not conditioned at all. To be undetermined would, therefore, include being without any causal influence whatsoever. If there was such a thing as free will, it would be without any determinations. A will that is partially free would not be free. So, this kind of will would not be influenced by prior acts, nor would it be caused to exist. It would have to be uncaused and totally undetermined. If this will was "real," upon what would its decisions be based? If unconditioned, there would not be any conditioned views to draw upon because then the will would be conditioned by those views and hence conditioned itself. As Nietzsche pointed out, the notion of free will implies what is called a causa sui or "cause of itself."

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far, it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic, but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately,..., the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself....**

(This aseity is what was ascribed to the God of the Catholics. God is the cause of himself. Or, God contains, in some fashion, the cause of himself. He is the first cause of all else but He must be the cause of himself. This is Aristotle's "prime mover, or theos. This godlike Being is the thought that thinks itself. Well, we may take that a bit differently, as we shall see below. The subject is the thought that thinks itself. The I is in the thought. The thoughts think the thinker.)

We are now left with the problem of accounting for what is euphemistically called "choice." The notion of choice has been a plagued narrative element since its inception. There is no doubt that we experience making decisions. I don't think most of us would argue that. However, most of us do not often focus on the process of decision making. We simply take it for granted, i.e., we rarely observe the process closely. Let's begin with thinking in general. When carefully observed, thought arises without effort--often to our detriment. The manifestation of thought occurs without someone, a thinker, there to generate the thoughts. If there were a thinker of thoughts, it would involve us in a logical and, I hasten to add, an experiential impossibility. If there was a thinker of thoughts, that thinker would have to be separate from the thoughts that arise. That would, of necessity, imply that a choice of the thought to be thought is being made. The thinker would choose what thought to think. This involves us in what is called an infinite regress. If a thinker chooses what thought to think, the thinker must--of necessity--have already thought it. Now, if the thinker has already thought it, what need would there be to think it again? And, if the thinker has already thought it, there must be a thinker "behind" that thinker choosing the initial thought the first thinker thought, and so on. This leads to an infinite regress of thinkers, choices, and thoughts. I trust you see the problem.
If there is no thinker of thoughts, then what leads to the distinct impression that we think our thoughts. My answer is feelings! We feel the thinking process thus granting a sense that I, in this instance my body, is doing the thinking. My feelings, being distinct from thoughts and being identified as "me," provide a felt basis for the impression that I (as my body-feelings) am doing the thinking. In this manner, we are identified with both feelings and the cognitive content of the perception or cognition. This is usually apparent only in a condition of quiet watchfulness; it is a serene form of consciousness.

Now, you may be asking yourself what chooses the particular responses to various circumstances, or what "decides" on what thoughts or feelings to manifest. Well, the easy answer is association. In meeting our "almost" novel circumstances in each moment, we only know what there is and what to do because of the presence of the past. Our prior knowledge, our karmic history, is on reserve. The familiar is only so in relation to the past. This past is further elaborated in the movement of thought toward action infused with knowledge. The present acts move based on an incarnate history toward an as of yet incarnate future. The future is always an "as of yet." That is the nature of our living future. The future in this sense is not a future fantasized. This future is a living future toward which we live in immediacy. The present in this sense incarnates the three moments of time, the past, present, and future. They arise interdependently. One does not exist without the others. The important point here is that these three moments, being interdependent, are infused with meaning: objectivity or form, feeling, perception, vectorial formations, and consciousness. (What the Buddha called the skandhas/khandhas, "heap," "muckle") This is one form of analysis that brings some completion to our reflective understanding of experience. Subjectivity is configured by the co-occurrence of these constituents of all experience. Subjectivity is always a meaningful subjectivity. Of course, some may say, there is the possibility of a minimal subjectivity without attendant meaning (Zahavi). We must hasten to add that this minimal subjectivity is infused with its correlative notion of being as in "I am." There is no sense of self that is naked. There is, however, the minimal subjectivity of the I am--still laden with the notion of meaningful being.
Now, if subjectivity is always a meaningful subjectivity, then it is not a pure subjectivity but an intersubjectivity. We share a common language, common meanings, common perceptions and so on. If subjectivity is a historical and social construct, we are of "one mind." There is, in this sense, a universal mind or "collective mind." If subjectivity is drawn from a historical repository, as "I" must be to function in the "world," the familiar, i.e., in experience, (For the lived world is always and only experience.) subjectivity must be intersubjectivity. We are, in this sense, inherently communal. Experience is drawn and projected from a communal well of past acts of body, speech, and mind--our karma. No human is an island. Our living is simultaneously a sharing.

Desperately needs some editing, but I hope it leads you in the right direction. I will entertain questions in the meantime.





*This is something of a difficult statement that I hope to explain in greater detail. I'm sorry for the momentary inconvenience.
**Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good And Evil: Part I - Aphorism # 21 (Philosophy Quote)". 2017. A Contemporary Nietzsche Reader. Accessed August 3, 2017. http://nietzsche.holtof.com/reader/friedrich-nietzsche/beyond-good-and-evil/aphorism-21-quote_55f5c2e62.html.