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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (13380)	10/23/1997 12:56:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 108807

An Essay on Life, the Universe, and Everything I guess my problem with the "A is A" doctrine, as I understand it (danger! Zen crossing) is that it's circular. Sure, A is indeed A is A is A. But...here's the rub. How to connect the sublime isness of A with, say, the ache in my joints? Philosophers have been busting their chops for centuries on the disconnect between perception and reality. Rationalists (to use the term in the Galt sense) take the sword to the knot (= cheat, imho) by saying: Reality is Reality, and that is all you need to know. Now go feed, breed&succeed. I'm not sure I understand the story about the dude's watch. But I can easily imagine that if this was one of those Amazon basin tribes with knowledge of botanical tryptamines (ayahuasca, yopo, and other powerful hallucinogens) the concept of linear time would be patently ridiculous. I mean, if you've touched the face of the Jaguar God, time is no mean thin straight line, it is endlessly folded and woven like the grain of the brazil nut tree. It flows through the watch, behind the watch, laughs at the watch. No watch tells time. Time tells the watch, if it would just listen! But the watch is dead, refined and processed until the earth-spirit has been beaten out. of C'mon over, white boy with too many clothes on. Drink this. And you will see so far beyond A that you'll never say anything so foolish again. ... "A ia A" is a bold statement of faith, a declaration of the premise that the cosmos which surrounds and suffuses us may be understood and broken to our will by the assiduous practice of Logic constructed upon Empiricism. When I was eighteen, I thought in this manner. Then I had a sort of crisis event befall me that strongly suggested that 1) There's a lot more to human reality than Reason can ever hope to contain. 2)That extra something is both amazingly powerful and amazingly chaotic. Call it "spirit-awareness". This is perhaps the final driver for all manner of religious thought, from animism (a real "natural" when supplemented by goodly doses of various sacramental substances) to the big religions of today, including humanism, which strives toward the creed that Man is the sole and sovereign master of his destiny. It is my tentative observation that the chaotic nature of the "spirit awareness" is such that a person who has had a touch of the Transcendent can read anything into it that he/she wants. So you get a lot of permanently-righteous cranks walking around. There's just no reasoning with them, because their motivation is outside of reason. There's something irreducibly masturbatory in talking about faith. What do I believe? I don't yet know. To lean on a heavily-abused clich‚, I'm on a quest for the Tao or whatever; a seeker-after-truth. "I'm working on it!" I've had the cosmic Art Fleming let me peek behind a coupla doors, but I'm not ready to bet the wad at this point. I'm getting comfy with the decidedly Zen idea that looking obscures finding. My cautious credo (for now) is: It's never as simple as it looks. There is harm in overly simple ethics. In the interim, I try to maintain a policy of tolerance balanced against common sense. This in itself is pretty [bad word] hard, and some of my failures are documented on the fossil chatter buried in the deeper layers of this site. I didn't intend this to become such a heavy post. But it's like finding a loose thread, and pulling&pulling.