The Qualities of a Divinely Inclined Person.....

[cousinbasil]

One 'sees' causality, invisible and invisible, without defining the cause, which cuts the rope of 'seeing' causality, revealing I am That. One then 'sees' I am That, which cuts the rope of 'seeing' I am That. What 'remains' is the living of I am, non-duality.

When there are no more ropes to cut, what do you have?

[Dennis Mahar]

When there are no more ropes to cut, what do you have?

No more ropes to cut.
how much instruction do you need?

[cousinbasil]

When there are no more ropes to cut, what do you have?

No more ropes to cut.
how much instruction do you need?

Excuse me, o enlightened one. But I wasn't talking to you.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Hey! I'm gettin the hang of this! It's...liberating!

[cousinbasil]

Am I the only one who wants to MATE with Lisa Hannigan?, who is actually IRISH...(?)

Not at all. Irish Girls Are Pretty.

[Dennis Mahar]

Hey! I'm gettin the hang of this! It's...liberating!

It's empty and meaningless.

No here, no there.

No inherent meaning.

Just the possibility of making something meaningful.

or not.

absence of meaning.

[Alexis Jacobi]

• ...And yet, and yet, methinks I discern some profounder truth in the juxtaposition of these, the Two Opposèd Views؟

[David Quinn]

Deaf to non-duality!!

David, how do you reconcile non-duality with causality?

Causality, when taken all the way, dissolves duality.

-

[Dennis Mahar]

'tis here and 'tis there

On spatiality,
space is homogenous, out there in deep space there's no reference points.
here, there, near, far etc...
are human constructs.
depend for their existence on the human mind and senses.
and so with time,
past, present, future depends on us.

even when we feel someone is close to us, that is ours alone.

[Dennis Mahar]

One's ontology is one's list of what exists.

Let's take a look at a concern of yours Alex.
Something you said that matters.
Victory and Defeat.

Does victory and defeat exist outside of human being?
Is it a human construct?
Does it depend for its existence on human being?
Is it made meaningful by human being as a picture that human being carries out there in front of itself on its list of ontologies?
Has human being convinced itself that victory and defeat is really there and that's the way it is?

Or is human being completely deluded with regard to its list of ontologies?

If we go through the dualities,
can we notice that each and every one depends for its existence on human being?

Is it possible to realise that human being is a meaning making machine that gets around nominating ontologies to suit itself?

[Pam Seeback]

Deaf to non-duality!!

David, how do you reconcile non-duality with causality?

Causality, when taken all the way, dissolves duality.

-

And then, from this dissolution of duality, this going all the way to the stillpoint of awareness, the reasoning mind, which is dependent upon causality/duality arises? Is this not to put in place the very rope a person claims is dissolved?

I say that those who formed their rope again did not wait long enough at the stillpoint for God to reveal his true face. The face of invisibility. This awareness of invisibility is the emptiness that transforms, and one must stand in the emptiness and endure the emptiness and become the emptiness before God's invisible movement of spirit fills their awareness. It is this being filled of spirit that ends causality, duality, and its offspring of the suffering of accepting and rejecting, reason. Is not being filled the end of the sense of lack, which is the food of the reasoning mind?

[David Quinn]

Deaf to non-duality!!

David, how do you reconcile non-duality with causality?

Causality, when taken all the way, dissolves duality.

And then, from this dissolution of duality, this going all the way to the stillpoint of awareness, the reasoning mind, which is dependent upon causality/duality arises? Is this not to put in place the very rope a person claims is dissolved?

If there is still rope, then causality hasn't been taken all the way.

The reasoning mind is like a fire. When everything has been burned, it dies away of itself.

I say that those who formed their rope again did not wait long enough at the stillpoint for God to reveal his true face. The face of invisibility. This awareness of invisibility is the emptiness that transforms, and one must stand in the emptiness and endure the emptiness and become the emptiness before God's invisible movement of spirit fills their awareness. It is this being filled of spirit that ends causality, duality, and its offspring of the suffering of accepting and rejecting, reason. Is not being filled the end of the sense of lack, which is the food of the reasoning mind?

It depends on what you mean by all these terms. On the face of it, "God revealing his true face", "awareness of invisibility", "being filled with spirit", "ending causality/duality", etc, are, all dualistic acts. Rather than seeking something to be aware of, or to be filled by, it is better to undermine the very heart of all duality and rest in what's left.

-

[Trevor Salyzyn]

I cannot share with you what are my means and methods to understand 'truth' or 'meaning' because 95% of all I would employ to present my sense of it, is not anything you'd consider valid.

I deal with more poetry than philosophy, tbh.

This thing you don't want to do was going to be my next question, so instead, if you'll allow me a moment of hermeneutics, I picture your method to be somewhat like the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs. Except with beliefs and not with semi-sentences, thoughts taken from a hundred different books and stitched together. Contrariwise, the dominant method of GF is dubbing a set of rather cannibalistic beliefs "true" and letting them eat everything.

How's that? Anything you'd like to add?

Why do you do it, Trevor؟

Because Sudoku makes me want to commit seppuku, crosswords excite me like reading dictionaries, I can't complete a jigsaw puzzle lest I feel autistic, and puzzle-boxes are for dogs not people.

(Translation:) the profane is divine.

I guess not؟

[Alexis Jacobi]

This thing you don't want to do was going to be my next question, so instead, if you'll allow me a moment of hermeneutics, I picture your method to be somewhat like the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs. Except with beliefs and not with semi-sentences, thoughts taken from a hundred different books and stitched together. Contrariwise, the dominant method of GF is dubbing a set of rather cannibalistic beliefs "true" and letting them eat everything.

How's that? Anything you'd like to add?

[quote="FIRST: These words are true & valuable dictum fortuitum: You wrote: 'Contrariwise, the dominant method of GF is dubbing a set of rather cannibalistic beliefs "true" and letting them eat everything'. AS TO THE REST: Nothing to add but some to subtract! In any case, let's subtract and then add add add! Unfortunately, your divination has widely missed the mark. [sad face placed here] As so many divinations must. But that is not as bad as one might think, in the sense that there is no loss. It is an opportunity to (darkly) clarify...Funny, I have just been thinking about these things again as I have been contemplating (okay, I uncontemplated it...) throwing in some more comments on the (middleweight?) Cory-Ryan (Is-It-Going-To-Get-Ugly?) thread dealing on Facebook and Spreading the Yellow Light of Wisdom to the BENIGHTED (which is about all that's poppin' down here in Hell these days). I wanted to say that the whole nature of spiritual and religious texts, and stories and parables and the use of language generally to communicate what is (isn't it?) incommunicable, is just the fact that these Loaded Texts, the ones that conceal meaning, are not at all transparent, they are precisely the OPPOSITE of transparent; they are dark, they are obscure, they are difficult, and it is as if they hold secrets that challenge the hermenaut, delight and inspire him, while simultaneously foiling his assault on the encapsulated meaning: meaning which is so hard to grasp. Wisdom/knowledge/understanding is not analogous to a bubble gum machine where you put in your quarter and simply turn the handle and out it comes. So, I meekly stand by my flapping, cracking standard (flag) on which is blazoned: Difficult of Interpretation, multilayered, deliberately parabolic, throny on the outside, promising sweetness on the inside, and delivering one of those punching fists with a boxing glove when one finally gets the Lid of Hermes opened just a crack; and I ALSO AFFIRM the devilish foxyness of ALL who engage in the art of Communicating Difficult Truths. AND THUS ALEXIS"]My 'divination' into the Nature of the Reality in which we occur cannot be said to be stiched or cobbled together in the manner of a hipster's cut-up. (Although I have a certain fondness for Wee Hermes and puzzling meanings that, every so often---poof!---just appear out of nowhere). That stems from the Surrealist's School and I oppose the Surrealistic School with all the fibres of my being. I am interested in what I am now calling New Gnosticism, whose primary tenet is that all existing religious, spiritual, metaphysical, mythological and existential descriptions shall be looked at again through this interpretive as well as praxical (?) lens. So, I start from a position of Revelation, that is, personal revelation, and around that revelation 'things' may or may not be gathered from our Cut-Up World. Every man is a Wizard in this sense, every man a Magician, every man an Interpretive Agent wending his way through this world of woe and strangeness, DIVINATING at every turn to polish his grasp of the meaning as he moves though an Incomprehensible Reality.[/quote]

[Trevor Salyzyn]

Every man is a Wizard in this sense, every man a Magician, every man an Interpretive Agent wending his way through this world of woe and strangeness,

Two gods, I see, rule our modern minds
One only imaged, like the geometer's lines
The other speaks loudly in Holy signs.
Wizards and schemers flock to the holy writ,
Controlling the world through words of it.
One recalls, another beriddles, a third interprets.
But what, I ask, does the line create?
Who uses form, shapes, and colour to relate
Everything that transcends Word's sacred gate?

-Scribbled in my journal, about a month ago

I believe that using pure reason, despite all self-justifications, is at bottom spell-casting. I'll ignore how effective it is, only pausing briefly to note that no one could possibly measure all the effects of a single well-chosen word spoken at the right time.

The ideal of The Philosophical Argument isn't simply to convince your interlocutors to agree with you, which is a rather modest (but sometimes impossible) task, but rather to convince reality to change its mind. (I first made this association while locked in a hospital, where in my madness I was utterly convinced of the mystic power of my own writing. I wrote constantly for weeks. You can call this my big Revelation, but that I completely threw out this line of reasoning when the medications kicked in... that is, until a recent re-evaluation of the claims deriving from my mania.)

This is a rather loose train of thought, but sometimes I can only speak loosely. The question is, is my divination as to your meaning nearer the target, closer to expressing the Difficult Truth?

A mindless man needs no words.

Heh. I wonder what Thales would think.

[Dennis Mahar]

What do you think of this Pam?

Deep, deep, deep in the background dwells Presence.
Like the light in the room that reveals the activity.
Presence is not being.
the activity is being.
Many forms of being interacting.
quark being produces atoms, gets molecules, gets cells, gets organs, gets human beings...
human being produces Worlds...
Worlds like Xian World, World of Finance, Political World, World of Buddhism.
Worlds interact and overlap.
A World is a meaningful whole for those in it, a referential totality of roles, practices and stuff, a totality of involvement.
The financial world has money, bankers, debit, credit, banks, debt collectors, journals,

A world struggles not only against other Worlds but Earth as well.

Earth can wobble on its axis and instantly wipe out all Worlds leaving no trace of these meaningful worlds of meaning making humans.

I'm not sure as a human being you can let go this rope, more likely the rope flicks you off.
Accept the situation.
There's no hope.

[Pam Seeback]

It depends on what you mean by all these terms.

I explained what I meant by these terms. All of them refer to awareness of emptiness, of being obedient to this awareness, of enduring this awareness and of becoming this awareness.

On the face of it, "God revealing his true face", "awareness of invisibility", "being filled with spirit", "ending causality/duality", etc, are, all dualistic acts.

I do not deny that I remain under the influence of my belief in dualism, my awareness of emptiness. Ergo, I remaining striving to be perfect as my [non-dual] Father is perfect.

Rather than seeking something to be aware of, or to be filled by, it is better to undermine the very heart of all duality and rest in what's left.

I am not seeking to be filled of something of my projecting imagination, rather, of that which is not material in any way, shape or form. And, in the being filled of this pure substance/essence, to be completely cleansed/purified of any and all thoughts of form.

You speak of resting in what is left after the heart of duality has been underminded, as if awareness of what is 'left' is not an awareness of dualism.

[Pam Seeback]

I'm not sure as a human being you can let go this rope, more likely the rope flicks you off.
Accept the situation.
There's no hope.

You are right; a human being has no hope of letting go of this rope. Why? Because "being human" is a belief, just as "rope" is a belief. Can a belief let go of a belief?

I am not a belief, therefore, I have hope, realistic hope. What am I? I am That which is swallowing my beliefs, one by one, day by day, moment by moment.

[Alexis Jacobi]

• Trevor wrote:
  
  TWO GODS, I see, rule our modern minds
  One only imaged, like the geometer's lines
  The other speaks loudly in Holy signs.
  Wizards and schemers flock to the holy writ,
  Controlling the world through words of it.
  One recalls, another beriddles, a third interprets.
  But what, I ask, does the line create?
  Who uses form, shapes, and colour to relate
  Everything that transcends Word's sacred gate?

It seems to me that a New Gnosticism is required, but such a perspective is, and this is perhaps inevitable, available only to a minority. A New Gnosticism will have no fear at all of strict scientific reasoning, and a decided sobriety in general, but will not feint when confronted with the mystical text, the ancient religious text, any and all views of any other outmoded episteme. But what it will NOT do is to unconsciously mimic the declarative certainty of the religious fanatic, and put into motion another octaves of wizardry and scheming (reductions?), or a voracious, consuming 'philosophy': easy to pick up and handle (like some Evangelical Tract) and which installs itself in the mind and cannibalizes that mind and all meaning. (Note: I am engaging in a certain 'violence' of interpretation as I appropriate aspects of your kerygma ('Good News to the poor & the blind & the captive') and employ them for my own purposes, which is to say The Devil's Work).

In a New Gnosticism, which must resist the fatal attractions of post-modernism, all potions can be ingested while a core Knowledge holds the 'soul' and the personality and ego intact. Many things approach the Soul and (why is this?) seek to break it asunder, divide and conquer it, fraction it, but there is some gnowledge that aids us in holding ourselves together in the face of the onsloughts. He he he who holds himself together, and yet 'flies' in and out of Meaning(s), wins.

[Alexis Jacobi]

A story, a story!
(Let it go. Let it come.)
I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender
into this world.
First came the crib
with its glacial bars.
Then dolls
and the devotion to their plastic mouths.
Then there was school, the straight rows of chairs,
blotting my name over and over,
but undersea all the time,
a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work.
Then there was life
with its cruel houses
and people who seldom touched---
though touch is all---
but I grew,
like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew,
and then there were the many strange apparitions,
the nagging rain, the sun turning to poison
and all of that, saws working through my heart,
but I grew, I grew,
and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,
still ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked,
and I grew, I grew,
I wore rubies and bought tomatoes and now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I'd say,
I am rowing, I am rowing
though the oarlocks stick and are rusty
and the sea blinks and rolls
like a worried eyeball,
but I am rowing, I am rowing,
though the wind pushes me back
and I know that the island will not be perfect,
it will have the flaws of life,
the absurdities of the dinner table,
but there will be a door
and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat inside of me,
the gnawing pestitential rat.
God will take it with two hands
and embrace it.

As the African says:
This is my tale which I have told,
if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,
take somewhere else and let some return to me.
The story ends with me still rowing

[Sphere70]

That's a damn good poem

[David Quinn]

... for a rower.

-

[Alexis Jacobi]

...And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst
of the waters" and into the dome God put

the poor, the addicts, the blind, and the oppressed.
God put the unsightly sick and the crying young

into the dome and the dry land did not appear.
And God allowed those who favored themselves

born in God's image to take dominion over
the dome and everything that creeped within it

and made them to walk to and fro above it
in their jumbo planes and in their copy rooms

and in their conference halls. And then
God brooded over the dome and its multitudes

and God saw God's own likeness in the shattered
tiles and the sweltering heat and the polluted rain.

God saw everything and chose to make it very good.
God held the dome up to the light

like an open locket and in every manner called
the others to look inside and those who saw

rested on that day and those who didn't
went to and fro and walked up and down

the marsh until the loosened silt gave way
to a void, and darkness covered their faces with deep sleep.

[Dennis Mahar]

sittin' here on Death Row doin' time ain't all that bad,

even the stench from the Jacobs Fertiliser Factory brings a smile.

[Dennis Mahar]

You are right; a human being has no hope of letting go of this rope. Why? Because "being human" is a belief, just as "rope" is a belief. Can a belief let go of a belief?

Presence is not being just about nails it.