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

To: Rick Julian who wrote (25286)	10/6/1998 5:57:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I am forced to admit that I know very little about formal Taoism. I was talking with a better-traveled buddy one day and I was induced to expound on my ethics. One of my ethical anchors, a "subjective absolute" if you're as delighted by the patent absurdity as I am, is an idea which I term Balance. The idea that extremes of action or opinion - the blacks and whites - are bad as they are unrealizable. The optimum lies in finding and working that point of balance between opposed principles. Buddy said that I was something of a natural Taoist. Where I fall out of harmony is with this idea: >as being evidenced by the observable processes of the physical world.< My problem is I see NO reliable evidence for God in the mundane. (Or for that matter for the mundane in God, waht with I can't measure the Ineffable.) Nothing that'll win an argument. All I have seen is our human capacity for God-consciousness. This means I'm unable to dismiss the increasingly cogent idea that all we know of God is a construct of our minds, of the way we're wet-wired. Thus to me God becomes the Entheon, each&every person's private view of and relationship with the Divine. (John Ott charmingly calls psychedelics "entheogens", bringers of the God within.) I guess the kernel of my agnosticism is that even while I currently, provisionally believe this solipsistic idea of the Entheon, I can't and won't dismiss that there is a real Godness somewhere outside us. But - where I am dead cold stalled is on the shoal of "the power of the Divine". All I have seen, and that includes the x to the Xth power phenomenon, is reducible to attitude. Our belief of and interaction with the Numinous powerfully molds our ideas of right behavior. This reaches into every part of our social life. Insofar as we restrict ourselves to what we see, think and feel - and the things we do deriving from these cognitive events - I accept the power of the Divine. But barring something Really F****** Amazing, I do not entertain the work or evidence of the Divine in the Mundane. "Energy" is a pretty word, but I haven't heard a convincing account of even a grain of ordinary matter or energy clearly altered by something not mundane. No crystals, no UFOs, no linen shroud. Sorry.

To: Rick Julian who wrote (25286)	10/6/1998 6:24:00 PM
From: George S. Montgomery	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Rick, you are a despicable non-tao, non-god, non-nature fanatic... This inacceptable post of yours is so flagrantly a con job, it causes me to post to you again - despite that I have said I would not. You say: "It appears both of our minds landed in the same place: Taoism. It works for me Because it is so non-specific, and it is non-specific because it relies on the poetry of natural metaphor." This could be an honest statement, from an honest person. Then you say: "This allows the mind (at least mine) to find resonance in the notion of our inability to comprehend the full nature of God," This is a valid continuation of your first statement. And you finish the sentence with: "yet still acknowledges Him (yeah, yeah pronouns, schmonouns) as being evidenced by the observable processes of the physical world." Where, in all the tininess or greatness of things, do you get this connection, this "yet" connection? WHERE? HOW? You have no mind, or you have no ethics. How do you leap such chasms without the thought that it is a leap. I personally believe you are a deceptive person, offering discourse, kindly and openly, then slamming back to your preconceptions - without any idea of a discourse taking place. If you had the ability to read Sam's dissertation of a day or so ago, you would be forced out of your singularness. I do not believe you have the ability. I believe you are a fanatic, who schemes and deceives to prove his postulation. I am afraid of people like you. geo ps: CGB, if you want to kick me off your thread for posts like this, simply say so - and I will never contaminate this space again. (I find Rick is completely without morality. Sneaky. Duplicitous. Dishonest.)