It’s probably easiest if I quote back to you your comments and add my comments in boldface.
(i) you are really addressing platonic forms or ideas when you talk of essences. Instead of dogs, i’ll discuss it traditionally in terms of chairs.
NO, I wasn’t referencing Platonic forms/ideas, although I understand that frame of reference.
plato's question was " if you're sitting in a red chair with one leg, and i'm sitting in a black chair with 4 legs and he’s sitting in a purple chair with 3 legs, and so on, what is it about these different chairs that they have in common so that they are all called “chairs.” Clearly, it’s not color, the # of legs, the material, etc. Plato called what they have in common "chairness", which is the “Form” of a chair, sometimes called the “Idea” of a chair.
I would not ascribe “chairness” to the object. I would say instead that all of this is perceived in MIND, which on a personal basis consists of both PERCEPTUAL mind and CONCEPTUAL mind; that Mind is an Association Machine and that COSMIC MIND may be involved in the association process.
I would differentiate between the issue of NAMING/RECOGNIZING an object and understanding the ISNESS/BEING of the object. Presumably in your “chair” example, the pattern-matching capabilities of the Human Mind are capable of seeing enough similarities in the images (legs/seats) to associate the varying images with the manifold images in Mind that in turn are associated with the (in this case English) word “chair” (for this particular viewer). But in the case of a German viewer in the group, the images would be associated with the word “stuhl”.
So to summarize, the process would be reliant on MIND, most specifically the archetypal images therein, plus the pattern-matching capabilities in MIND, plus the capabilities of PERCEPTUAL MIND to receive the images and the capabilities of CONCEPTUAL MIND for the remainder of the process.
Relative to understanding the ISNESS/BEING of the object, as I stated in another post here, we do NOT understand this. PERIOD.
We are capable of NAMING the object, and knowing a good deal
ABOUT the object, which often gives us the ILLUSION that we understand what the object IS. But ultimately we do not.
Since we don’t observe “chairness” in the empirical world and, obviously, it must be someplace, plato thought it must be in the non-material world, the heavens, I believe.
Well, just because MIND is non-physical, its existence does not have to be denied, does it? Or are we writing these posts backwards and forwards to each other, mindlessly? Really?
And so some philosopher says “If it is not physical, then I refuse to consider it in my system”. Well, what about sub-atomic particles? Are they physical? No. So we just take them out of our model of physicality, do we? Were we able to do that physically, we would collapse all physicality, would we not? That would be physical enough, would it?
Our use of “chair” to describe various kinds of chairs is learned.
A great deal depends upon whether one’s model posits either:
1) You are born as a “blank slate”, even though obviously you have SOME capabilities such as breathing, eating, sleeping, crying etc (and inevitably a substantial chunk of PERCEPTUAL mind)
But then you have to learn everything and then finally you die.
GAME OVER! There are about 10,000 weaknesses to this model, such as: near-death experiences, ESP, intra-species communication, past life regressions, geniuses, idiot-savants, etc etc etc.
2) There are THREE bodies: Physical (as the name implies); Astral or Etheric, the Energy body(which interpenetrates the preceding); and Causal, the Mind body (which interpenetrates the preceding two bodies). At death the Physical body is released, and after death, so also is the Etheric body. The Causal body continues, containing the same “predispositions to experience” as it has in the physical. There follows (as perceived by the being) a short period or much longer period (akin to the dream state in physical life) during which the “undigested” experiences of the recently concluded physical life are re-experienced, etc. Then the “reshuffled” Causal body is associated with “appropriate” parents,
based on the remaining tendencies of the to-be-born entity at the moment of conception.
In the second model, LEARNING is seen significantly as the
Reconnection with already available skills, talents, coordination of the physical etc.
just because it’s not in real-time, doesn’t mean it’s not real (I assume that was the connection between your 2 paragraphs: reality/real-time)
The point I was making is that we are REMOVED FROM THE DIRECT PERCEPTION OF EVERYTHING by:
a) the time lag of the perception
b) the fact that the images/perceptions are CREATIVELY GENERATED by the Perceptual/Conceptual Minds working together. An example (scientifically proven) is that any STORED MEMORY is never recalled exactly as it was because the perceptual apparatus RECREATES images/perceptions each time.
so now you’ll ask me what’s real
Influenced as I am, by the Teaching of Adi Da, I would say that
REALITY IS THAT WHICH IS ALWAYS ALREADY THE CASE.
Try that definition on for size!
Namaste!
Jim |
