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

To: George S. Montgomery who wrote (24210)	8/11/1998 3:06:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

George - I don't know if I can answer fully or concisely. I'll just pour a handful of gravel into the old twelve-gauge and slap the trigger. The fun begins: Okay. Let's go into Abstract mode and posit some d'posits. 1) There is an extrahuman Presence. 2) We can get into fitful, occasional touch with It. 3) It cares. 4) It has the cosmic mojo to be the wellspring of moral substance. (There are variations, of course. What if the vastness of human lives - along with the gigatons of oak, termites, plankton,[...] generate a sort of kozmik transformer hum which we can kinda pick up? An Oversoul which isn't exogenous to Life, but produced by it. No wait, George Lucas has already done that.) My simple-minded argument is that if even one of the above conditions isn't met, it just plain doesn't matter. We're on our own. I am intrigued by the universality/fractiousness of spiritual thought and learning. Nobody has come up with a winning formula for tapping the universality while transcending the fractiousness. This was pounded home with a mallet in our generation, when it became clear that psychedelic drugs (the Holy Grail of spirit-awareness?) acted as an apparent VOLUME knob for our inner eyes. Waht has it gained us? Ken Kesey thrashed himself apart, and Tim Leary quit the game and became one with his navel. So the acid test <hnyarf!> of a moral/mystical school is imho what it does for us in mundane daily life. Psychedelia is simply too personal and Protean to lend itself to building churches. As for [my championing] two values in black and white - this is an artifact of my arguing/inquiring style. I'm confident that you know that, like Penni, I embrace the gray. One of my most cherished ethical and aesthetic touchstones id s the overarching concept of balance. But we're talking some big, sticky concepts here, and drawing them as cartoons is my way of trying to keep an unmanageably complex discourse presentable. So, from this vantage - >With one, there is mysticism, religions, ordered systems of Faith. With the other, there is no Faith. The two do not cover the ballpark.< it's not so simple. Choosing one does not wipe out all elements of the other. Even if I believed in the Christian story, I'd still be aware that morality is pretty much what we make of it. Conversely, as a (temporary? transitional?) agnostic, I'm not so bold as to say - "if I don't see it, it isn't there." I live in between. >If you can, how do you come up with the specifics (Conscious, etc.) of the Extrahuman selection? Is it the Desire to Avoid Absence of Total Knowledge? The Need for Neatness, Completion? The Inability to even remotely Experience Awe?< Maybe so, I don't Really Think So, and Hey, No Fair. The Conscious/Interactive part is needed to make the Force be of consequence. It doesn't really affect discussions about its reality one way or the other. Avoiding absence of total knowledge - I guess this is a good way to describe the core emotion that drives our superstitious nature. We want an umpire on the field; playing alone is lonely. Inability to experience awe?! You seem to be suggesting that agnosticism is for cynics only! I believe you don't want to say that, but it's how it sounds to me. Awe is wonderful. Awe may be the whole ball of wax! There may be no more to the Force than a functional sense of awe to keep us humble! That's where I came in with my allusion to Peale's "power of positive thinking". The idea being that positive thinking might be more than the dry sum of its parts - the Force seems to be moving under the surface, dolphinlike. BWDIK!!! :-) Btm line - I'm all for awe. But I'm enough of a skeptic to entertain the notion that awe, for all its power and radiant benevolence, might be radio noise from too many neurons in too small a skull!