Esteemed Diebert.
But the question here is why do you constantly make me the subject of your own 'obsession'? Right now, at this juncture, with
so many opportunities to speak in human terms about your own self, you are trying to get to the bottom of me. It's weird. But it is what you have done, continually, for the last 4 years! And I am usually glad to take advantage of the opportunity because it gives me a way to expand on my ideas. But I really do think a little self-examination of your own part here is needed. I look over my posts and, though they are not composed of the same stuff as 'certain of you here' compose your own posts, I am by and large happy with them. I think any doctrinal environments, as this is, needs a 'dissident' voice. A jester. A Talking Ass.
If you yourself took up more your own side of conversations and all their possibilities, in that way you would do more service to the forum.
Perhaps this is the frustration, the idea that a final but false fix or escape route for psychological scars or other shortcomings would be in the offering somewhere? As many have pointed out by now, this is not what it's about at the heart of the good tidings.
Though you should really be speaking about the reasons you appear so regularly in this space, and what the 'secret' reasons for that are, you seem only to be able to focus on others, such as myself. But if I give you a straight, honest answer, you will not accept it. Or you'll twist it around in some way to work it against me. I have not necessarily really minded to be truthful. The reason is because I am always looking for an opening to expand on my ideas. My sense of what is 'spiritual' is quite a bit larger than what you allow to it. But again, you are nothing but questions questions questions
about me, but where are you in all this Diebert? That question has been asked numerous times and you have roundly avoided it. This is suspect. You call that 'Hello Kitty' confessions or girlish chatter. But I say something quite different: our spiritual life is being conducted in the midst of all sorts of heavy things, and immediately in the life we lead.
And the actual fact of the matter, as I have painstakingly explained, is that I have strong feelings about 'making the life we lead real', and about maximizing our impact on it, and about actually living it and dealing with it, and not avoiding it. And you know very well that I take strong positions against what I call 'neo-Buddhism' and this particular Edifice that is supported here, and for reasons that I carefully explain. You just do not like---no you detest and resent---this focus! Be truthful! It makes you very angry. There is something you are very closely defending, and I know this because I have been arguing with you for quite some time now. You are formidable in your way. We know about Dutchmen in the US. Some few of them have left quite an impact. You are very stubborn and very prone to the defense of your positions. But that is neither here nor there.
The actual fact of the matter is that I write, mostly, 'as an American'. That is just a fact and it is one that I cannot hide (nor do I wish to). And I write from a 'post-Sixties' perspective, with something like 7-8 years of difference between us. That placed me sub-generational to Tomas, a half-generation apart. And my country had an almost inconceivable splitting-apart as a result of that war and so many other things. And those things fractured people, or fractured them off into all sorts of directions. And that is the 'reality' that I grew up in. And there is a reason, a good and a genuine reason, why I am concerned for 'spiritual paths' and articulated spiritual paths that also seem to me to deny a part of the human being, or to cut it away, or to 'poison' it. Now, you know so much of this. You don't agree with it. You have other ways and means of looking at the issues. Fine. But why not speak about that in your own terms, in your own threads? Why must you always take my views or my orientations to task? And why do you always keep yourself out of these conversations? Where were you, and where are you, in all this? What happened to you? What was your Christian experience like? Where, how did you grow up? What impacted you? What about your own wounds and your own loneliness?
You are a fucking coward at times, Diebert! (And I am saying it in that way mostly for effect...) ;-) (Note the wink).
So, this is just one more explanation offered to you, Diebert. One more request for information satisfied. My thing is a desire to understand, essentially, how a people (that is to say America and Americans because I don't really have another context to refer to, not in any depth) had been uprooted from their own selves by powerful forces outside of them. Waldo Frank is a big influence for me. Nineteen twenties and thirties. Strongly anti-capitalist, anti-militarist with Randolph Bourne and others. Very pro-Latinoamericano with Virgin Spain and other works. Defining humanism in its deeper, spiritual sense. Stuff that you and other here hold in stark contempt I don't doubt. But there is a whole, great slew of stuff that is held in stark contempt here, and that is the place's own 'poison'. And yes, I have certainly
extended myself (to put it mildly) to make a case against what I think is dangerous and destructive. And I know too that many folks who read here lack the literary skills and the knowledge of history skills to make good judgments about 'things' (though they are top-filled with easy opinions). But the work of understanding the Present is hard work.
I do think you get a lot of this. You are not a simple intellect and there is a good deal of shading to you. Bravo! You also seem a quintessential Christian. Has anyone ever told you that? I mean that in the best of all possible senses. But why you have taken it into your soul to oppose little old me, who can guess? (Maybe I am more Satanic than I even know?)
Another thing that I have done is to have insisted, and then insisted more, and to resist every wall that is thrown up and every trick and jab to get me to stop saying and thinking and believing what I think and feel (this notable tactic and tendency to cut someone's ideas down, to say (in so many words):
- 'You are stupid for even thinking such a STUPID thing, you STUPID LOOSER!'
These are the sorts of formulations I first came across here. They are imbedded, perversely, in the doctrines themselves (or haven't you caught that yet?) Well fuck you, fuck the mother that bore you, and the backassward horse who carried you both! ;-) That, in those and similarly colorful terms, has been my charming modus operandi. I've made some friends and more enemies.
Is that the explanation you had been looking for? I have others too...
Now, I gather that for you this is not 'doing philosophy' but I hope you have also gathered, by now, that I
don't hold you or Dan or Kevin or David as a model of philosophy. So I am doing something then altogether different. It works for me. I put a
HUGE amount of time and thought into my studies. You have likely no idea how I have taken this Forum seriously, but not for the reasons it might desire to be taken seriously. I have covered a
huge amount of ground. I understand myself and 'my world' much better. I have used it to my advantage. Shall I be blamed?
But yes, 'A=A' still flies by me, thumbing its nose, shouting
'Looooosseeerrrr!'