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Author | Topic: Philosophising on the Evo vs Creo debate. | |||||||||||||||||||
lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
Bad example. A fist is an object. "Making a fist" is the action. The word "fist" is the subject of the sentence "A fist is an object" so what are you talking about? After having made a fist where does it go if you open your hand? lfen
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lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
We are using the hand as a symbol. The hand represents a pointer, an arrow. When you point your finger at the dog food, the dog, who perhaps does not understand symbols, licks your finger instead of turning his head toward the food. But I've known quite a few dogs who do look where I'm pointing. It's a communication and dogs, especially in that they are pack animals, use commmunication. Also surely you had dogs look at you and then look at their empty food bowl and then look back at you? And then there are sheep dogs who work extensively with hand signals, whistles, and some work with sequences of verbal commands. Here once again your brevity is cryptic. I don't know what you are getting at. lfen
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lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
There is a sense in which all is process, since all is changing, but I would think there would have to be something to be processed. These somethings are objects. I don't think you can have an "event" without a something to go through the event. Good question. Let's take some time with this and see what we can find. Let's find an object/event and see what is it that goes through the event? I don't know if hand/fisting is a good example but it's been started. We could change it for something else. What is a hand? Cells. What are cells? Molecules. What are molecules? Atoms made up of sub atomic particles. So do you wish to say sub atomic particles are the objects that go through events? I certainly accept that events often appear to us as objects. But when we get really close to an object at the sub atomic level its solidity dissappears. There is a lot of empty space with some energy fields and weird stuff going on all the time at the quantum level. There is a possibility that what goes through an event is mind. lfen
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lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
Anyway, we can use our hands as symbols, but that doesn't mean it's something else when we use it as such. It's just a symbol--an abstraction. Yes, abstraction, a fundamental of language. Is it real? lfen
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lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
An emotional reaction to the idea: it feels suffocating to me think that all is mental. Just associations on my part. This feeling of suffocating might lead you to a perception about what the Buddha meant by duhkka, suffering, samsara. When the whole mental thing collapses then there is vast emptiness and freedom, nirvana, awakening. lfen
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lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
Yet is has a kind of reality in that it can effect outcomes.
The proven ideas about germs vs. unproved ideas about contamination from say people outside our caste can both lead to washing hands which can lead to fewer incidents of some infectious diseases for example. There is what happens, our experience of what happens (sensory experience), and our ideas about what happened, what caused it, what results it might bring, whether what happened was good, bad, neutral, etc. This realm of ideas may be what the believers refers to as spirit but then confuse it with matter/energy happenings. On the other hand emotions are sometimes asserted to be spirit. So what "unreal" is seems to me harder to grasp than what "real" is. I think because it's mental and does have a sort of reality. I mean we can remember it and talk about and it can effect behavious and results. lfen
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lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
By mental thing I mean the way in which experience is construed, our everyday sense of being in this elaborate world of experience, knowledge, belief, memory.
You said considering the universe to be mental resulted in a feeling of suffocation. That seemed right to me is some sense but that there is also a possiblity that though it is sustained through out most people's life perhaps it's not inevitable. That is what those who experience awakening talk about. But I wouldn't put much more into this, not in this thread anyway. It was just something that occurred to me as I read your post. lfen
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lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
my emotional reaction to reading him was extreme suffocation: everything is everything else, he seemed to be saying. I didn't want everything to be everything else. I wanted things to be separated out). How you feel is after all how you feel. I don't argue that.As for myself cherrying seems so much richer than cherry. The concept kills the multilayerd meanings of the process and limits it to a thing. Cherry is still there only it's more than it was not less. I can still appreciate the beauty of a waterfall even while knowing it's an event in the river which is another larger event. I think you are saying that the way our experience is construed is false (all is process, there are no individuals, etc--that's the reality). I love many of the plays and characters of Shakespeare. Were Mercutio, Romeo, and Juliet real or false? Were the performances in say the Zeffirelli movie version real or false? As I see it when the ego, insisting it is real, models the universe and pushes it's model hard it either falls into a dispair of nihilism or the logical contradictions of mainstream religion. It's not that the ego doesn't exist. It does as a function. It doesn't exist as a permanent thing. It's a function that consciousness identifies with and confuses itself with. It's as if a hand thought it was a fist and then out of anxiety sought reassurrance that it would always be a fist. Non dual teachings push the their model consciously producing paradoxial language but they don't claim their language is correct. Is light a particle or a wave? You are always in a state of infinite regress without noticing it. That is where the optical illusion of the "I" not "eye" is. Anything you point to and say is you is an object to you. You are the subject, the eye looking everywhere but unable to look at itself. It's not that this is an error. It's a function but there are aspects of the function that are so confining as to be painful. The notion of awakening points to a way out. It's as if the hand in the fist begins to tire or cramp and eventually relaxes and opens. It's no longer a fist but it discovers it never was a fist. I suspect you say "but it was a hand". And this is a limit to the analogy particularly in that I used conventional subject predicate noun verb English to express it. Those who have awakened try to express what they discovered themselves to be when they stopped egoing, or fisting but it's not something that can be as easily labeled as a hand, or even spirit or soul. Time I left for work.lfen
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lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
Are you speaking of matter/energy phenomena or would you include ideas also?
lfen
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lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
So if some being/thing/idea always was it never came from anywhere, it was uncreated, had no beginning. It didn't come from anything so there was always something and we can't ask where IT came from?
I don't see how you've avoided the problem. It's a mind boggling paradox of a mystery which ever way you cut it. I can't choose, neither alternative makes sense to me and yet I can't think of anything that does. lfen
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lfen Member (Idle past 4677 days) Posts: 2189 From: Oregon Joined: |
In my view, something had to be forever if anything exists. But I ask myself How did it get here in the first place. How come you are tempted to ask that? Why is there anything at all? Where did it come from? lfen
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