Comment by Forrest Curo on 2nd mo. 7, 2016 at 10:28am

To clarify if possible: You may not need 'a concept of God' for your experience or your guidance, but the actuality of Him/Her/Itself to Am you at all...

Comment by Kirby Urner on 2nd mo. 7, 2016 at 1:30pm

I've been following this discussion and appreciate a willingness to pause and check the words themselves, as words, being outward forms, have an inertial power all their own to weave our thoughts for us, should we suspend judgement and "go with the flow" (hum along with the melody as it were, carefree about where it leads -- to outward war?).

Philosophy is more my bag than anything "Bible studies" i.e. I'm not one of those ready with chapter and verse for apropos insertion.  In philosophy, a time came in European thought, on the eve of World Wars, that philosophers realized that language itself should not be trusted or, better, should not be left unchecked, or, better, it's up to "us" (creatures of language in so many ways) to use it responsibly, to exercise judgement, to not just hum along, completely passive spectators to the power of words to conjure elusive mirages, that vanish as we get closer.

Put another way, maybe other Friends don't do this, but I watch movies a lot (I also drink beer) and am quite aware what they mean by "suspended disbelief".  "Getting into it" (otherwise known as "getting one's money's worth") requires not spending the entire film thinking about how these are flat images in a darkened cave-like place.  Reading a novel is less immersive if one is continually thinking about the process whereby typed symbols come to impart a story line.  Focusing on the mechanics, in other words, is a step away (a big step) from suspending disbelief.  To suspend disbelief is to get lost in the story, the characters, the outward forms.   One chooses to do so deliberately, no apology required.  That's the whole point of outward forms:  you're invited to get lost in them.

To take the analogy a step further, I'm also admiring and to some extent understanding of the film making process, so in other moods and mindsets, thoughts about the mechanics is precisely what's up for me.  The story and characters are no longer my focus.  Maybe I've seen the movie several times in suspended disbelief mode already and now I'm ready for something completely different. 

That mode, by analogy, is when some people "wake up" to a dream they've been having, in that they now know "how it goes" and can sing along in their sleep as it were.  The desire to think about the film, and how it's a film, arises spontaneously in some cases, out of boredom even.  Life has become predictable.  One need not become cynical about it, nor fatalistic.

Sometimes this all comes with age and achieving Enlightenment is typically associated with those retired from raising a family.   Jung called it "the second half of life".  After witnessing a billion births, a billion families and communities, a billion deaths (all unique, all different), one comes to see more of the forest itself, less of just trees.  The generic patterns, the physics of it all, and that can be mighty interesting -- awesome even -- and many an individual might call this "coming to know God" even while sticking to outward roles such as philosophy or physics professor, having a family, a career, being immersed.  Even if we awaken to a dream, we may continue to dream.  We call such dreams "lucid" right?

How many levels of "waking up" do we have then?  Does "waking up" mean "becoming aloof and distant"?  The zen value of "detachment" or "disinterest" as these get translated, may impart the stereotype of the Enlightened master as uncaring about the world, devoid of compassion.  The heart is hardened to the plight of the damned, in this picture?  The words themselves could give that impression, starting with choice of words on translation. 

We shouldn't take those words at face value necessarily.  Buying every melody that comes along may lead one nowhere.  They cancel out.  One pop song on the radio counters another, without end:  "Stay with me forever"; "Leave me alone".
Thanks for continuing an interesting discussion, complete with word checking.  I'm somewhat close to a professor of computer science in my day-to-day outward role playing and appreciate what we call the difference between "local" and "global" names.  Understanding names as staying local, confined to namespaces, helps free up the global space.  Keeping a global space clean and empty, devoid of words, relegating words to namespaces, is a discipline I practice, based on my judgement and intuition, my sense of responsibility.  I think of my approach as a kind of housekeeping. 

When I come across a next thing, a melody, my goal is to *not* assume I already know the meanings, have encountered this namespace, have mastered this way of talking -- even if every word is one I've seen before.  The very familiarity of the words feeds their power to lead one astray. 

I may think (somewhat blindly) I know what's meant by X, because I see words I've seen before, but it's the usage patterns that may yet differ greatly, and one appreciates usage patterns only over time, from special case examples, from which extrapolation may (or may not) occur. Active investigation is called for, attentive listening, if the goal is to stay awake.

"Now I can go on!" is something like "now I understand", "now I can hum along".  But getting to that point, with any namespace, takes practice and discipline.  Life is short.  Best to work on a few, get them in good shape, than to go running from one to the next, looking for something to suspend disbelief in. 

My advice then:  craft a namespace that suits you, and practice using it, and precisely because you're responsible for your invention, you'll know to *not* assume others are thinking the same way.  It's neither their business or capacity to think the way I do.  Become responsible for your thinking, by developing its locale.  Your job is not necessarily to create global names for others to use, but to create a local namespace into which other namespaces might be translated and deciphered by you, a personal Esperanto if you will.  Take that as a challenge.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 2nd mo. 8, 2016 at 12:44am

Sometimes a choice of words will make very little difference, for someone who knows the reality they point to and isn't unduly concerned about what it's called.

And sometimes a choice of words will make very little difference, for someone who doesn't have a clue about the reality they point to, and hence imagines that they are about nothing.

Comment by Keith Saylor on 2nd mo. 8, 2016 at 1:25am

Hello Forrest. I appreciate the honesty of your response. Even as you express you disagreement with me. I absolutely find your criticisms of my words valid in the context of the environment of the outward thoughts, feelings, and observations, you say God has given you. That is, in the context of the environment in which God, as you say, has given you what to think, given you what to feel, and given you what to observe. I have no wish to criticize or invalidate the environment you say God has given you nor the outward thoughts, feelings, or observations, you say God has given you to think, given you to feel, and given you to observe. The environment you say God has given you (and which many others find, as you say, suitable) is a reality of existence on this earth. It is literally a given. I am sharing different way of existence than the way you say God has given you.

I do not live in the same environment as you. I do not participate in the earth in the way you participate. This is not meant as a criticism of the environment you exist within nor the way you participate. With that said, while I welcome you sharing the environment you say God has given you, I also will share a different way of participation and will continue to work hard at sharing this different way of participation in such a way that does not suggest criticism of or a attempt to invalidate.

You wrote:
Ideas about being anchored in direct intuition' of how you should, or should not, relate to 'external' influences -- are not necessarily the same as 'being anchored in direct intuition etc.'

I agree with you completely and I have not suggested otherwise. I use words to share a different way of being with those who have lived in an environment wherein God or other people or outward institutions have given them what to think, given what to feel, given them what to observe, and no longer find that environment suitable. I use words to express being independent from outward constructs to people admittedly dependent on outward forms. I use words and express a way of being or experience wherein the conscience and conscience are no longer anchored in and informed by an environment of outwardly given thoughts, feelings, and observations. If an individual or group of individuals come into this experience, they step into a different way of existing this earth.

I am particularly interested in these words written by you:

"Given that God is real, AMing away in each & all, what you claim becomes possible -- but if you leave out the only source available for confirmation or correction of your system -- you thereby leave yourself merely a confused solipsist."

It is true that, if you posit God is real and gives you the environment within which what you think, feel, and observe, your conclusion is completely understandable. Understanding what you posit I have no argument with your conclusion. I just do not share your environment. So your conclusions do not match my experience.

Finally, these words struck me as particularly meaningful:

"That is, you may not think there's any need to posit a spiritual mind & heart of the Universe to generate & validate your experience -- but without that, you'd be a nothing that couldn't even imagine itself imagining"

I understand that based on what you say God has given you and the environment you say within which he gives you to think, feel, and observe, your conclusion is sound. However, I am sharing with you an experience that does not posit anything and is actually living in the activity of imagining itself. In this experience, the activity of imagining is the reality. When being and conscious are anchored in the direct and unmediated activity of imagining itself, there is no need to imagine imagining because imagining is experienced directly and it exactly nothing and everything. The experience of being in the activity of imagining itself is the validation. I do not need to imagine myself imagining, or think about thinking, I exist in the activities of imagining and thinking.

Thank you again for your honesty. 

Comment by Kirby Urner on 2nd mo. 8, 2016 at 11:19am

And sometimes a choice of words will make very little difference, for someone who doesn't have a clue about the reality they point to, and hence imagines that they are about nothing.

Apropos of words "pointing":  as a result of Ludwig Wittgenstein's investigations (and Gilbert Ryle's) the whole idea that words "point" (popular since St. Augustine) came into question during the "linguistic turn" in philosophy.

Sure, we have picture books with words like "horse" captioning horse pix, which feeds the notion words mean by captioning or somehow labeling or pointing.  But how?  How does the word "pain" point to anything or is that how it works?  Is a thought or feeling like a horse in some private mental pasture that we're able to privately point to with our words?

Thinking of a pawn in chess, we might agree it points to no "real pawn" in the world, but is itself, as a symbol on the game board, the thing signified.  Signified and signifier are one.  Its meaning then, comes from not what it points to "beyond itself" but how it is used, according to rules which comprise the "grammar" of the game we call chess. 

Wittgenstein gave us "language games" for a concept, in modeling how namespaces cohere.  We may investigate meaning by discovering the rules of whatever "grammar" (i.e. game).

This is a better model for how words achieve significance:  not through pointing, but as tools engaged in elaborate "meaningful" operations.  Accordingly we're able to discuss the meaning of "zero" or of "God" or of "Enlightenment" without any sense of pointing to "the thing" that is "the meaning" of these terms.  They do not thereby lose meaning. plus we're liberated from a semi-meaningless mental model of words "pointing" to make their point.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 2nd mo. 8, 2016 at 3:16pm

The only Devastatingly Impressive Name I could add to the conversation would be that of a fictitious little bird in one of Rumi's stories, who said: "Never believe an absurdity, no matter who says it."

There is no "it" to rain in the English expression, 'It's raining,' and no need to 'make' the wind in the French 'Il fait du vent.' But in either case there is a certain condition which people come to recognize, despite the fact that one can't "point" to it.

There is some arbitrariness in the words people use and how they're arranged in saying various things, but outside of politics, the things people say are supposed to mean something.

In saying "God", most people will agree that the word does refer to a specific Being, said to be 'within' us, but not limited to our internal psychological environment.

Who "observes" this Being?

I'm not being 'merely rhetorical' when I throw in the related question, "Who observes us?" -- That is, if Keith observes a 'non-environment' in which imagination simply imagines itself imagining (I have to wonder whether 'imagining' in the vulgar sense is quite what he means -- or if he might also put it as 'Awareness is aware of being aware"?)

There's still this sticky question of "Who's watching the store?" Efforts to account for awareness as 'an emergent phenomenon produced by lots of neurons getting off' are nothing but  laughable hand-waving, when you consider them closely.

If we mean to be empirical  about this, 'experimental' as G. Fox would say -- What we can observe is this unexplainable act of observation that keeps going on, producing results we observe to be somehow coherent.

Something needs to keep 'be'-ing, because observations without an observer simply aren't done, in any science whatsoever I can imagine.

It doesn't just 'be' in me; and it can't just 'be' in Keith, or in Kirby, or in Dick Cheney for that matter. The linked coherency of what people do observe implies that the same 'Be'ing must needs be doing the job with all people and with the environment it creates/'imagines' us to share.

Keith, I would have to say that what you imagine is 'what you're Given to imagine',

that the content of imagining is as much an 'external' as anything else.

The awareness of '___ing' is internal -- but then that sort of 'internal' connects to a bigger aware- ness than yours or mine.

Whatever the _content_ of our experiencing, we seem to be God's fictitious characters, whom God inhabits as any good novelist inhabits her characters (and more so, yes?)

Comment by Kirby Urner on 2nd mo. 8, 2016 at 6:14pm

Yes, "fictitious characters" seems a good characterization of how God fills in the blanks.  Allowing the "pointing" to go away, as the chief model of "meaning", allows us to not require a "cogito" for all this "I-talk" to make sense. "I think I am therefore..." what?  Might one not think that, just because Descartes did?

For Euro-UK thinking, the linguistic turn, starting with Nietzsche, Wittgenstein a beacon, came as a breakthrough to some lineages, and the yes, the names behind these new views are still circled (venerated), but I'm not meaning to be too name-droppy. 

It's a fact of my personal autobiography that Wittgenstein's stuff was a focus of my senior thesis and I have miles of prose on his thinking out there on file, plus a collection of some forty titles in my personal library (most of them on-loan from a fellow fan). 

Contemporary humans tend to believe in a self (a cogito) even more strenuously than a god, with the Buddha dharma providing a constant counter -- takes two to tango.  Anthropology suggests the "geometry of selfhood" is far from constant.  Is the idea of a "self" a "meme virus"? -- a very successful one, if so.

To have "no self" at one level (a relief to some, an awkward burden shed), may couple with accepting its institutional role at another level.  "Individual responsibility" remains a part of the ethical code.  Like, if the ego did not exist, it'd be necessary to invent same, and here we be.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 2nd mo. 8, 2016 at 7:44pm

The word 'self'' seems to have various meanings...

1) The identity we'd like to be able to wear to parties.

2) The identity we, uh, 'identify with'. As in that 'fictional character' we've come to love so well, or rather "'to know and accept as myself" anyway.

3) That clumsy, inept, not-always-well-intentioned person who we are when doing things we'll eventually wish we hadn't.

3) The collection of social roles we're called on to fill out from time to time.

4) The 'Self' aka 'God taking an active hand in our character development.'

5) The center of a whole collection of 'stuff impinging on this location here, including events in all the various modes of experience we know (& maybe a few others: ie where "here" seems to be more than one place, or one gets struck with a random bit of synesthesia.)

& probably you could think of a few others. 1-3 could probably be well dispensed-with, or at least not taken too seriously.

And when the toilet paper dispenser runs out, there's always the guy who needs to fetch himself a fresh roll, if he wants to be able to wipe what needs wiping...

Comment by Kirby Urner on 2nd mo. 8, 2016 at 11:42pm

Right, 'self' is like a piece on the game board.  Just seeing the word 'self' tells us little or nothing as to its meaning, though of course one might hazard a guess.

What will the rules be?  How are these 'selves' expected to behave themselves?  It's not like there's just one game we all play.

Go to a new unfamiliar culture, and the rules of the familiar one start to become clear.  Contrasts among language games come into focus.  In culture (A) people are encouraged to stand out and be special, cultivate a "character", be individuals whereas in (B) perhaps little energy is spent in that direction (broad brush stroke differences -- the devil is in the details sometimes).

Indeed, the computer language I often teach, Python, has a 'self' in it, a placeholder, that stands for (provides access to) whatever peculiar attributes differentiate one instance of a self from another.  Given two dog objects, each with a self, when either dog barks or wags its tail, the deeper "Dog in all dogs" kicks in with a common recipe; the individual self is not the source.

The discipline I'm encouraging is precisely *not* assuming "we all understand each other" when we talk about God or ego or whatever.  What I notice happening a lot, is people talking passed one another, like ships in the night, yet sometimes imagining they're on the same wavelength because the words are the same.  I'm encouraged when discussions focus on noticing nuances, difference in usage.  I like when we stop pretending we all speak the same language (English or whatever we call it). This thread has been exemplary in that regard.

Comment by Keith Saylor on 2nd mo. 9, 2016 at 12:46am

Forrest. You wrote:

Keith, I would have to say that what you imagine is 'what you're Given to imagine', that the content of imagining is as much an 'external' as anything else.

Of course, you would say that what I imagine is what, as you say, God has given me because, in the environment you say God has given you, he gives you, as you say, what to think, what to feel, and what to observe.

Here is some more absurdity.

You further suggest that the "content" of "imagining" is as external as anything else.

I agree with you to the extent that my speaking or writing of a conscious anchored in and a conscience informed by itself in itself is an imagining of it to those who do not share the experience. That is, the content I am asking them to imagine is external until or if they move from imagining to actually experiencing.

However, direct experience of the activity of conscious itself in itself is not 'content' in the same way as the bodily perception and sensation of a tree, or, for the matter, outward political, economic, and religious ideology and institutions are external. Normally, the conscious and conscience are anchored in and informed by the five sense, perceptions, sensations, thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. represented by the function of the body. That is, consciousness is dependent upon these representations or mirrors of the body to be. For many people, this is easily understood by asking them to think of themselves without the five senses, brain, and feelings and asking them what is left. Normally, they will say nothing is left. That is, a non-functioning body means the loss of consciousness. This is the nature of the fear of death.

There is another way of consciousness. This consciousness experiences itself in itself directly without the content of the bodily anchored consciousness. In this experience, the content of bodily anchored consciousness is no longer the focus or anchor to be. In essence, the bodily consciousness is transcended and yet there is conscious. It is knowing or experiencing conscious without content.

This experience of a conscious anchored in and a conscience informed by itself in itself is not 'content' in this same way as a conscious anchored in and a conscience informed by, as you say, 'external' forms. A conscious itself in itself is in essence not "external as anything else."

In this experience, the question you ask "Who observes this Being," has no meaning. It assumes a paradigm that no longer exists ... that is a paradigm the observer and the observed. The new paradigm, in this experience, is I AM Being or I and Being are one; Meaning, purpose, and identity, are no longer established in external content.

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