Well then, and please excuse my paraphrase as it is only an attempt to get more clear about what you do mean: to say that 'philosophy is entirely personal', when compared to the statement 'scientific understanding of the world is entirely personal' (a problematic statement and also likely false), seems to indicate that 'philosophy' is not so much linked to 'reality' or arises out of an understanding of reality, but is a 'personal' issue of personal choice. I gather that you don't see it so, but I wanted to explain why (for a moment) it looked so.
But what you seem to be saying is that deeper understandings of the 'true nature' of reality, or the 'true relationship' to existence in the phenomenal world, is a special category of knowledge and in this sense is 'personal' and also incommunicable.
But it must be so that you are speaking of yourself and also that you are offering additional commentary in this on-going conversation; insofar as you are talking with a deluded idiot who, you feel, does not get what you are on about. So, you have been sending out bottle after bottle but the 'message' is not received. How terribly frustrating this must be! And 2,200 posts of the same. ;-)
If I have got this right, this sort of statement always interests me. Why? Because it points to 'special knowledge' or special epistemological 'secrets' that are only revealed to initiates. And if this is so, it indicates that in your metaphysical grasp, the metaphysical picture of reality that you refer to, there is in this sense a revelation of knowledge or information. Which also means - I think this is implicit - that there is something that reveals. Not a 'person' or a deity but yet the very
place itself. It teaches in this sense.
Meaning that in the 'World' you describe there are paths and processes which lead, shall we say, a thoughtful man to such knowledge that gives him advantage or power, even if only over himself. This reveals additional dimensions of the *place* itself: something of its mysteries but also of *patterns* of understanding that arise in us and yet essentially out of *it*. I think this is a rather common feature of epistemological and ontological experience.
I think that this functions against some of your other statements: that there is no 'reason' to things, and hence that the question Why? is not one that should be posed.
Give you methods - for what? Conclusions - for what? Advice - for what? The puropse - and I admit that it is and should be the purpose - is to accurately and realitically define the place where we are. To define a metaphysic. If we cannot do that how can we then construct an ethic which must - mustn't it? - arise out of the place itself if you catch my drift.
If it doesn't, and if we yet avail ourselves of an ethic, it will have to arise spuriously in our own imagination and through our choice, or to come from *outside* as an imposition on the natural world. This could mean 'transcendentally' but also 'demoniacally'. I do not mean to say that you think in these terms - you seem not to - but that people often do.
The most that you say, now that I think about it, is that 'thinking exists and is real' and that 'we can modify thinking' or 'stand back from thinking' as an observer of it.
Seeker wrote:I'm no longer concerned with discussing where philosophy starts, but where it leads. Purpose and further benefit seem to me to be the only reasonable drives behind such an activity.
I have little sense of where exactly you desire to go. But having a goal is in different ways a statement, too, about where one has been. As I look back over my (so-called) spiritual path I am aware that what I sought originally was 'personal power'. I had been instructed that 'The first order of offerings are to the self' (which could also be written as Self to indicate something higher than mere 'self'). I could describe this nearly in Taoist terms, or T'ai Chi terms: the purpose of knowledge is strength, power, equilibrium and also advantage. I suppose one could see it all in Chinese terms: strength, order and power sought in order to benefit the self in its pursuit of the tangible things of life. When I began to look into the various 'Vedic' schools, I found that in most cases their focus was entirely tangible: health, strength, longevity, fulfilment of social function and thus fulfilment of dharma, producing intelligent and powerful children, for purposes of fulfilment here.
So, looked at through a practical and 'this-worldly' lens (what I understand as) your thinking-reform practices should have an effect in enabling you as a more powerful, a more competent person. Or what else? What one does notice about you is will and drive. These are not the typical characteristics of renunciants (and it seems to me that most Buddhist doctrine is a form of renunciation-while-living).