Can people change?

[Tomas]

Tomas,

he just consumed too much beer and LSD in his younger years...

that's a nasty aspersion Tomas, you have no evidence of that.

Kangaroo one.
Dingo two.
Rattle the "I" cage.

[Talking Ass]

Soundtrack for this Post.

Blair asks: So what is your point now? What are you getting at? Would it perhaps have something to do with you are a sinking ship and you want to take everyone with you?

Blair, Blair, Blair. You require a special post, 'a post apart' if you will. We shall start with the basics: No logical 'argument' could ever reach you. You don't want it, you have no need or interest in it. To place communication in this sort of *packaging* is just a waste of time. So, what must one do? Ah ha! It is an old, time-worn trick. It is called 'speaking in parables'.
________________________________________________________

• I walked, or rather I trudged along. I felt exhausted, wasted, drained. Somewhere, somehow I'd taken a wrong turn and gotten completely off track. I came to a crossroads and noticed little mounds of stones, round stones piled on top of each other. Then, beside a big sagebush I noticed a coyote sitting very still and very quiet. His coat blended perfectly with the tawny colors of the dry grass and the dirt. He stared at me, neither afraid nor aggressive nor even particularly curious. He just stared at me. I turned away for a moment and noticed a man, an oriental man, riding a bicycle down the trail with a young woman sitting side-saddle. I wasn't in a desert anymore but on a promenade beside the ocean. There were flowering trees and the petals rained down. The man and the girl came to a stop and when the girl put her leg down I was able to see up her skirt and noticed she didn't have any panties on. The man was talking and the girl glanced over at me. She knew that I was looking at her and it didn't bother her. In fact, she seemed to like it. I tried to devise a means to get her phone number but while fretting over this I woke up.

_________________________________________________________

"He became fascinated with a strange African god called Eshu. C.G. Jung was very taken with the alchemical emblem of Mercurius and wrote a great deal about it. But when he imagined a Greek or Roman Mercury in a snappy little get-up with a matching hat and little felt boots, it just didn't quite compare with strange, ebony, wood-carved, forbidding image he saw in a market in Nigeria of an old man, rather devilish, with a fully erect penis, around whose shoulders were draped strands of cowrie shells and who received from the market women rubbings of palm oil, and the blood of goats and chickens.

"Mercury, Hermes, Polytropos: he of many shifts. Cunning. Robbery. Cattle driver. Bringer of dreams. Watcher by night. Thief at the gate. 'One who was soon to show forth wonderful deeds among the deathless gods'. He protects: travelers, miscreants, harlots, crones, gamblers. A deified trickster. Psychopomp. Rooster. Tortoise, purse, pouch. A herald's staff: kerykeion.

"Hymn, let us sing a hymn! To clandestine violations of boundaries and laws!

• Hymn to one's fate, to the way it was, to the utter strangeness of it all, to the darkness & the pain of it, the coldness & loneliness of it, the embarrassing sense of having had a grand trick played on you, but a shaming trick by a 'malicious' god. But this god is part & parcel of a greater intelligence that offers wisdom, sobriety, irony.

"Eshu-Mercurius. The god of knowing, of the possibilitiy of knowing, and also the interpretation of what can be known. And so it is entirely proper that the science of interpretation is 'hermeneutics' and contains Hermes within it. This god of deciphering, of the skill of unravelling and making sense, is therefore at the base of everything human, or rather part and parcel of every living and conscious being. Under this god are language, signs, communication and of course the most problematic and mysterious one: meaning. A dog may stare at a body, a puddle of blood, a knife and a broken window, and make nothing of it. There is no way to connect the dots. No meaning emurges. But with our language, our memory, our signing, our honing of mercurial skills, we make conections between innumerable objects and events, many completely intangible. It must be that the original hermeneutic discipline, or art, was the hunt. It takes much hermeneutical skill to observe, follow, know and predict the habits of animals. One mind---a predatorial, 'superior' mind---envelopes another, always a less accomplished mind. It subsumes its thinking, its longings and needs and desires, its habits and patterns, into its own, projects itself into that other mind, so to be able to track it and kill it, to be nourished by it. The great predators, because of their superior intelligence and capacity to previsualize, are hermenuetical beings, and when we are pursued and when we are prey, we know what it is like to be manipulated and directed by a superior entity.

"Similarly, marketing and advertising are mercurial enterprises where clever 'predators' study the habits of their chosen prey, the animals being hunted, and they devise methods to entrap them, entangle their legs or their minds, to enchant them, to stupify or hypnotize them like deer in the headlights, creating a circumstance where the prey has few options open to it and must surrender to the foil: it must run through the only narrow passage that appears open and there must give up its resources. We have established hierarchies of predation whose success is measured by how successful they are at tricking us. And because there is no field of study, no discipline, known as 'resisting entrapment by foxy predators'---and indeed quite the opposite is true: we are trained by the very predator himself to cooperate with the predatorial system---we have few tools to resist our own milieu. We fail to discern the elaborate subterfuges that conceal the wolfish predator whose object is to devour us.

"In nature, what is predatory appears as what is not, and the victim only learns when it is too late that he has walked into a trap. Survival, then, depends on our ability to interpret. To see correctly. To know exactly what is going on and to separate it from false stories, the subterfuge woven into our reality. To see beyond the apparent form and to discern what is functioning there in fact. It is interesting to watch defenseless animals like prairie dogs. They live in nearly constant vigilance on wide, open prairies. Their burrow is their only safe haven and at great risk do they venture away from it. And the risk is very, very great, the consequences enormous. Indeed, the game is played with his essential, valuable thing: the flesh of his own person. You can rarely fool a prairie dog. No matter how harmless you think you are or try to make yourself. When you, the dangerous interloper, come near the vigilant prairie dog, all the alarms sound, his body tenses and he does not take his eyes off you.

"Observing, keeping one's eyes peeled, calculating, assessing, are therefore very important tools in the game of resisting the surrendering up of our very being..."

---Excerpted from The Book of Ass. [Available now at Barnes & Noble, $39.95].

Soy Feliz en La Navidad
Maria Cristina me Quiere Governar

[cousinbasil]

from what i've read, cousinbasil and Dennis Mahar, stop talking about a page ago. You've regressed to expressing emotions in your separate ways. Loose the petty insults, they detract from your contribution (since they aren't funny :P).

I am not trying to be funny, mental. I am assuming Dennis is not taking anything I say as in intended insult, since no insult has been intended, petty or otherwise. To be logically consistent, Dennis would find it impossible to be insulted.

But you are correct in picking up "emotion" if that includes frustration. I have often heard people espouse similar viewpoints, and it usually strikes me as a refusal to connect, to consider, to think. For how does one pay attention or focus if "one" does not exist?

This exemplifies Dennis' viewpoint:

go around the other way and show me how you are self established.

Or better:

That is what is refuted.
The existence of an I and its claims of ownership.

If you extend this logically, it must be true for everyone. If it is true for everyone, what enables me to distinguish one person from another? In fact, how can Dennis then logically disagree with me or anyone else? There would be nothing doing the agreeing or disagreeing.

[Bobo]

So what is your point, Alex?

That everything is a joke, fodder for humour and we dance through life without a care in the world because it's not worth getting stressed about. Something like that?

Be honest now. Is that the case? and if so it also applies to you; being a joke, not worthy of anything but being laughed about.

So what is your point now? What are you getting at? Would it perhaps have something to do with you are a sinking ship and you want to take everyone with you?

Your script is old, tired, been heard before, was once amusing but no more.

Who is the one that can overcome humanity? Who is able to get over man?
Hey prince, do you think that genius is universal (in all things or all people)?

[Talking Ass]

Who is the one that can overcome humanity? Who is able to get over man?

Just as sure as He overcame Mahar
On a Talking Ass you'll journey far.
Trust in the Ass who talks a dollop,
Whose mighty rear leg packs a fearsome wallop.

[Bob Michael]

I don't get what, Bob? That you can talk until your tongue goes numb and your wrist dislocates from gesticulations and they don't, nay never will 'geddit'?

Yes, I think you know my stand here, TA. That 'many are called, but few are chosen' and my reason for this tragic fact of life.

But YOU geddit, right? Or, you geddit and I don't?!

I'm not so sure about you.

Oh now I'm getting confused...;-)

Being confused is a good place to be. As it's from this point (total confusion) that a breakthrough to a new state of consciousness, if it's in the cards, can and may take place. Or if a breakthrough has already taken place then it can bring about new and deeper insights into oneself and the human condition.

Perhaps I should have initially said: A few or more of the right words to the potentially wise (those with ears to hear) will suffice. Words that reach deep into the core of a person's being, words that will incite the long-repressed and dormant human spirit to explode.

[Tomas]

Who is the one that can overcome humanity? Who is able to get over man?

Just as sure as He overcame Mahar
On a Talking Ass you'll journey far.
Trust in the Ass who talks a dollop,
Whose mighty rear leg packs a fearsome wallop.

Yeah. jufa's come around a bit and lost some of that backward masking of language. Dennis is pretty much lost.

There's hope though for Bob. He pleasant no rudeness. He's been there, done that. Moving A has some learning to do. Alice is a breath of fresh air. Mental frag seems on top of things.

[Dennis Mahar]

If you extend this logically, it must be true for everyone. If it is true for everyone, what enables me to distinguish one person from another?

Imputation/ mental abstraction.
Mental trick.
causes/conditions.
characteristic of human being.

look at a table.
normally it looks like 'tableness' exists.
that 'tableness' is a concrete solid 'thing' that exists in and of itself.
We take it for granted there is tableness.
It looks like its own thing.
It looks like the collection of parts that go to make up a table are ignored and 'table' exists.
The only time we see that 'table' depends on its parts is when 'table' breaks down ( a leg snaps in two)...we then fix the leg and magically 'table' is restored.

There is no 'tableness' existing there in and of itself except by mental imputation giving it its own identity.

where is 'table' except by name.
a name we share with each other that gives a thing identity.
I doubt if a crocodile would notice and name it as table.

This thing 'table', when looked at more deeply,
is causes/conditions
pieces/parts
and a thinker who thinks it so.
a desiganator designating.

table depends on wood,
wood depends on soil, rain, nutrient, climate, planet, solar system, universe
table depends on tree feller, chainsaw, human being, tablemaker..

For table to exist requires a set of dependencies as wide as the universe.

Therefore its said,
no thing exists in and of itself,
it exists as a piece/part of an intricate web
due to causes/conditions.

The existential machine (human being)
goes around naming stuff,
giving identities,
meaning maker,
for the most part getting it wrong,
and failing to realise what's going on.

'I' is then seen to be imputed.
it is really a collection of parts,
body/mind,
feelings, sensations, intelligibility, smelling, touching, tasting, eyesight, hearing, mobility,
the ability to impute meaning, the ability to realise it imputes meaning.

Conditions.

[cousinbasil]

'I' is then seen to be imputed.

By whom?

[Dennis Mahar]

By whom?

Intelligibility.

It's considered intelligibility is our ontology.
We share intelligence.
It's not mine or yours.

It takes intelligibility to do mental tricks ( wink, wink, nudge, nudge)

It takes intelligibility to uncover mental tricks.

[cousinbasil]

We share intelligence.
It's not mine or yours.

You can quibble about whether or not one can "own" anything, even one's own characteristics. But you are not demonstrating in the slightest that one does not exist.

Even in this example your logic doesn't hold up. If something belongs to the both of us - whether it be intelligibility or the air we breathe - then to whom does it belong?

[Dennis Mahar]

then to whom does it belong?

I don't know, do you?
There's a lot of theories.
Higgs-Boson?
Can you help.

Is it necessary to know?

[Blair]

If something belongs to the both of us - whether it be intelligibility or the air we breathe - then to whom does it belong?

All of us?.

So for example if I assert that you don't exist, how can you disagree? Do you assert that you exist with the realm of your reality, and ignore the rest (the aspect that tells you, you don't)

[cousinbasil]

Can you help.

That's what I am trying to do.

Is it necessary to know?

Knowledge is a good thing, remember?

[cousinbasil]

If something belongs to the both of us - whether it be intelligibility or the air we breathe - then to whom does it belong?

All of us?.

So for example if I assert that you don't exist, how can you disagree? Do you assert that you exist with the realm of your reality, and ignore the rest (the aspect that tells you, you don't)

Exactly. All of us. To say "we" can exist but "I" cannot seems contradictory.

If I don't exist, then you don't. In which case, there is no "you" to do the asserting.

I am just trying to be consistent. I don't think the way to go about it is to deny that a self exists.

When did it become fashionable to relinquish the achievements of the Western mind?

[Talking Ass]

When the Vandals crashed the gates and set up camp in the main square...

Every once in a while the Emperor is seen at the window of the palace looking down over the encampment, the open fires, the orgies of half-cooked meat. But then he goes back inside. Do we pray to him, to God? Who will drive them out and set things 'right'? Why, many of us can't remember the time they were NOT there and this is terrifying to those who remember former times...

[Dennis Mahar]

I exist ( I'm certain)
You exist (so you tell me, I have no opinion, I take it for granted)

therefore it looks like a duality.
We've got a numbers game appearing.

We want to get to non-duality (home base)

Enquiring into how things exist.

We discover I and We lack inherent existence,
meaning,
not self-established.

Hello me.

[Blair]

Soundtrack for this Post.

Blair asks: So what is your point now? What are you getting at? Would it perhaps have something to do with you are a sinking ship and you want to take everyone with you?

Blair, Blair, Blair. You require a special post, 'a post apart' if you will. We shall start with the basics: No logical 'argument' could ever reach you. You don't want it, you have no need or interest in it. To place communication in this sort of *packaging* is just a waste of time. So, what must one do? Ah ha! It is an old, time-worn trick. It is called 'speaking in parables'.
________________________________________________________

• I walked, or rather I trudged along. I felt exhausted, wasted, drained. Somewhere, somehow I'd taken a wrong turn and gotten completely off track. I came to a crossroads and noticed little mounds of stones, round stones piled on top of each other. Then, beside a big sagebush I noticed a coyote sitting very still and very quiet. His coat blended perfectly with the tawny colors of the dry grass and the dirt. He stared at me, neither afraid nor aggressive nor even particularly curious. He just stared at me. I turned away for a moment and noticed a man, an oriental man, riding a bicycle down the trail with a young woman sitting side-saddle. I wasn't in a desert anymore but on a promenade beside the ocean. There were flowering trees and the petals rained down. The man and the girl came to a stop and when the girl put her leg down I was able to see up her skirt and noticed she didn't have any panties on. The man was talking and the girl glanced over at me. She knew that I was looking at her and it didn't bother her. In fact, she seemed to like it. I tried to devise a means to get her phone number but while fretting over this I woke up.

_________________________________________________________

"He became fascinated with a strange African god called Eshu. C.G. Jung was very taken with the alchemical emblem of Mercurius and wrote a great deal about it. But when he imagined a Greek or Roman Mercury in a snappy little get-up with a matching hat and little felt boots, it just didn't quite compare with strange, ebony, wood-carved, forbidding image he saw in a market in Nigeria of an old man, rather devilish, with a fully erect penis, around whose shoulders were draped strands of cowrie shells and who received from the market women rubbings of palm oil, and the blood of goats and chickens.

"Mercury, Hermes, Polytropos: he of many shifts. Cunning. Robbery. Cattle driver. Bringer of dreams. Watcher by night. Thief at the gate. 'One who was soon to show forth wonderful deeds among the deathless gods'. He protects: travelers, miscreants, harlots, crones, gamblers. A deified trickster. Psychopomp. Rooster. Tortoise, purse, pouch. A herald's staff: kerykeion.

"Hymn, let us sing a hymn! To clandestine violations of boundaries and laws!

• Hymn to one's fate, to the way it was, to the utter strangeness of it all, to the darkness & the pain of it, the coldness & loneliness of it, the embarrassing sense of having had a grand trick played on you, but a shaming trick by a 'malicious' god. But this god is part & parcel of a greater intelligence that offers wisdom, sobriety, irony.

"Eshu-Mercurius. The god of knowing, of the possibilitiy of knowing, and also the interpretation of what can be known. And so it is entirely proper that the science of interpretation is 'hermeneutics' and contains Hermes within it. This god of deciphering, of the skill of unravelling and making sense, is therefore at the base of everything human, or rather part and parcel of every living and conscious being. Under this god are language, signs, communication and of course the most problematic and mysterious one: meaning. A dog may stare at a body, a puddle of blood, a knife and a broken window, and make nothing of it. There is no way to connect the dots. No meaning emurges. But with our language, our memory, our signing, our honing of mercurial skills, we make conections between innumerable objects and events, many completely intangible. It must be that the original hermeneutic discipline, or art, was the hunt. It takes much hermeneutical skill to observe, follow, know and predict the habits of animals. One mind---a predatorial, 'superior' mind---envelopes another, always a less accomplished mind. It subsumes its thinking, its longings and needs and desires, its habits and patterns, into its own, projects itself into that other mind, so to be able to track it and kill it, to be nourished by it. The great predators, because of their superior intelligence and capacity to previsualize, are hermenuetical beings, and when we are pursued and when we are prey, we know what it is like to be manipulated and directed by a superior entity.

"Similarly, marketing and advertising are mercurial enterprises where clever 'predators' study the habits of their chosen prey, the animals being hunted, and they devise methods to entrap them, entangle their legs or their minds, to enchant them, to stupify or hypnotize them like deer in the headlights, creating a circumstance where the prey has few options open to it and must surrender to the foil: it must run through the only narrow passage that appears open and there must give up its resources. We have established hierarchies of predation whose success is measured by how successful they are at tricking us. And because there is no field of study, no discipline, known as 'resisting entrapment by foxy predators'---and indeed quite the opposite is true: we are trained by the very predator himself to cooperate with the predatorial system---we have few tools to resist our own milieu. We fail to discern the elaborate subterfuges that conceal the wolfish predator whose object is to devour us.

"In nature, what is predatory appears as what is not, and the victim only learns when it is too late that he has walked into a trap. Survival, then, depends on our ability to interpret. To see correctly. To know exactly what is going on and to separate it from false stories, the subterfuge woven into our reality. To see beyond the apparent form and to discern what is functioning there in fact. It is interesting to watch defenseless animals like prairie dogs. They live in nearly constant vigilance on wide, open prairies. Their burrow is their only safe haven and at great risk do they venture away from it. And the risk is very, very great, the consequences enormous. Indeed, the game is played with his essential, valuable thing: the flesh of his own person. You can rarely fool a prairie dog. No matter how harmless you think you are or try to make yourself. When you, the dangerous interloper, come near the vigilant prairie dog, all the alarms sound, his body tenses and he does not take his eyes off you.

"Observing, keeping one's eyes peeled, calculating, assessing, are therefore very important tools in the game of resisting the surrendering up of our very being..."

---Excerpted from The Book of Ass. [Available now at Barnes & Noble, $39.95].

Soy Feliz en La Navidad
Maria Cristina me Quiere Governar

I'll give you a C+, for effort.

You see Ass, in this world, if you want to make it as an artiste, you need two things

Honesty and Flair.

Unfortunately you have niether, neither, neether.

[cousinbasil]

look at a table.
normally it looks like 'tableness' exists.

I have heard this line of reasoning countless times, and for some reason a table is always used, sometimes a chair.
There is the table. You have introduced "tableness" which will become your straw-man. So far, I see a table and the notion table comes to mind. Usually that suffices, although I have been to IKEA and sometimes have to be informed the object is a table. Depending on my purpose, I might see the object and think desk.

normally it looks like 'tableness' exists.
that 'tableness' is a concrete solid 'thing' that exists in and of itself.
We take it for granted there is tableness.

Straw-man.

It looks like the collection of parts that go to make up a table are ignored and 'table' exists.

The parts are ignored for a reason. There are of course names for these parts as well, like legs, leaves, feet, top. Their utility lies in their having been assembled - a fact not lost on one when one gets home from IKEA and has to assemble them, often according to directions in Swedish. But once that has been done, why would it be preferable to refer to this object as "the many various pieces of cedar that have been lathed and carved in Sweden and packaged and then shipped here where I have purchased them at a decent price from IKEA, transported them home, and having removed them from their packaging, assembled with my own two hands"? Maybe it would be philosophically more sound to make the quote signs with one's fingers, as in, Honey I think we have to move the "table" over a skosh.

The only time we see that 'table' depends on its parts is when 'table' breaks down ( a leg snaps in two)...we then fix the leg and magically 'table' is restored.

Then it's a broken table. And make no mistake, since the restoration "magic" is usually less than enchanting, the table then has become a restored table.

Quite often when people are buying antiques, for example, the term "table" might the one thing upon which they agree. The "wide universe" you go on to identify is central to a thing's value: is it Huang Hua Li or a lesser rosewood, is it Ming or Ching, what is it's provenance, and has it been restored?

Therefore its said,
no thing exists in and of itself,
it exists as a piece/part of an intricate web
due to causes/conditions.

It said because it is intuitively self-evident, not because of the above straw-man argument.

The existential machine (human being)
goes around naming stuff,
giving identities,
meaning maker,
for the most part getting it wrong,
and failing to realise what's going on.

Which you do. I will leave you with that thought, and often I have this sentiment myself. I am however aware that other people "for the most part get it wrong" is not provable or even demonstrable in any way, and so is just that - a sentiment.

BTW, if the human is a machine, what was it before any machines existed?

[mental vagrant]

BTW, if the human is a machine, what was it before any machines existed?

What is your problem with humans described as machines?

[Dennis Mahar]

A little kid gets born and he is named Johnny and is named American and Baptist and middle class etc.
It gives him the look of being independent, in and of himself.
That he was born that way.
And he is held to account for that apparent 'fixedness'.
A separate object.
He is granted his own 'thingness'.
He is hammered like a square peg into a round hole.
In his definitions of himself he is feeling a sense of 'impenetrable barrier' between himself and other.
The belief in a separate self and all other phenomena are so ingrained, so automatic and pervasive, that it is difficult to recognize.

Is this rubber stamping of Johnny, Real or mental trick?

'Tableness' is not there in and of itself as an independent, self-established entity.
It looks like 'tableness' is there.
If you turned the collection of parts upside down.
'Tableness' disappears.
You cannot say it is 'tableness turned upside down'.

You can say the possibility 'tableness' will show up, if I stand this contraption on its legs.
Tableness is an imputed condition dependent on a collection of parts standing up in space in a certain way.

Tableness is dependent for existence, relational.
It is causes/conditions, pieces parts and depends also on a perceiver perceiving tableness.

Tableness is made up of non-table elements and is of dependent origination.

Not saying 'tableness' doesn't exist basil.
Just saying 'how it exists'.

[cousinbasil]

BTW, if the human is a machine, what was it before any machines existed?

What is your problem with humans described as machines?

No problem, really. I myself in another thread called people robots with emotions or something similar.

Much of a human's existence is necessarily robotic and machinelike. My point is that humans are not simply machines, or robots. Not just reactive machines.

[Dennis Mahar]

Take a look at your hands.

there's a conventional agreement betwen people that they are your hands.
and you say they are my hands.

a group of people hold out their hands and declare these are our hands.

You've got to be kidding right?
It's a joke right?
A swifty's getting pulled right?
You want me to fall for that right?
Nice one Jose.

Geddit?

[Talking Ass]

Dennis wrote: A little kid gets born and he is named Johnny and is named American and Baptist and middle class etc. It gives him the look of being independent, in and of himself. That he was born that way. And he is held to account for that apparent 'fixedness'. A separate object. He is granted his own 'thingness'. He is hammered like a square peg into a round hole. In his definitions of himself he is feeling a sense of 'impenetrable barrier' between himself and other. The belief in a separate self and all other phenomena are so ingrained, so automatic and pervasive, that it is difficult to recognize.

You have repeated, more or less, this same example about 50 times now. I think this might be the center of your confusion, as confusion it seems to be. By thinking a little better, by stepping out of the reduction you have established (which is, IMO, where the real 'machine'-like behavior is to be found), you may be able to see things in a new light.

In your example to say that a kid gets born, is a Baptist, an American and is named Johnny, is set up as an arbitrary thing. For (and this is where your bad thinking kicks in, where it begins to operate) another kid is born in Russia, the religion of his parents is Leninism, and has name is Ivan. If you were to switch them, Johnny would grow up a Commie, and Ivan a Baptist. You obviously apply this formula to any and all human beings. There 'being' and 'identity' are arbitrary.

But in actual fact, in our reality, the way this works is quite a bit more complex. Take a great man, say Johann Wolfgang von Goethe---your Little Johnny! This man arose in his context and was nurtured by infinite streams---so multiplex that they could never even be named---and his being is intimately tied to his place of origin, the way the hills and fields were, the food he ate, the strains of music he heard, the way bird songs were sung, the nature and means of locomotion. He was given, from a very early age, private lessons by his father in Latin, Greek, French, English and Hebrew, etc. You would have to take into account his later childhood in the Alcase and the particular landscape that had such an effect on him. One could go on and on listing all he different influences and factors that contributed to him being what he was and became. Surely he would be seen as uniquely being a product of his place, his time, his language and so many different things, too many to name.

Similarly, another great man of another locale and time-frame---say Chen Tuan (Chinese Taoist)---arose in his context, breathed that air, ate the foodstuffs that came from that soil, listened to that wind and those birds, and was nourished in that whole cultural and social tradition. You might be able to imagine either of these men being transposed---surely something like that has happened in the course of the world---but in truth you have established a spurious and fallacious example argument since the actual facts of what makes a person a given person are infinitely complex.

By transposing them, one might actually succeed in destroying their potential, though one assumes that their innate personality might not change.

You often attack specific traditions and claim them to be arbitrary, and wish to call them 'empty and meaningless' because you take a certain (quite limited) position within your language- and concept-structure and 'force a square peg into a round hole' (to borrow your sense). You seem to desire (like Jufa?) some sort of Platonic Absolute to have fathered all possible traditions, values, etc., and you seem to imply that they can all be reduced...to a sort of valuelessness...or to relativism.

Myself, I don't see things like that at all. The mystery of how things came to be, and how we came to be, supersedes the reductions we might apply. It seems we are better off working with the 'mystery' than with the reduction.

The better word for 'machine' is simply 'organism'. But since machines are relatively late contraptions, contemporary with the industrial age, it is misleading to refer to ourselves, our brains, to living organisms and to natural systems themselves as 'machines'.

We also know that so much of our 'organism' is run for us. Not only that but the whole *place* where we are has come about through indescribable, incomprehensible means. In this sense Dennis understands 'contingency'. 'It' does what it does without the intervention of what we normally distinguish as I and myself. We all know that there are greater and lesser degrees of self-consciousness, and that we suppose that we strive to be more self-conscious than less. And it also appears to be true that that part of us which IS conscious, does have certain if limited choice, within a pre-established range of possibilities, not the least of which is 'Existence'. If we do not, then it is indeed a kind of cruel trick of the cosmos (our biological system) that we only imagine (hallucinate) we do. I am of the opinion that we have a great deal of choice (free will) within certain limits, not the least of which is (as Dennis is aware) that pretty soon---so soon in fact that what we consider 'life' is not even a spec in relation to all---I will be utterly wiped away. All the assembled parts will flow back into a greater scheme.

[Dennis Mahar]

But in actual fact, in our reality, the way this works is quite a bit more complex. Take a great man, say Johann Wolfgang von Goethe---your Little Johnny! This man arose in his context and was nurtured by infinite streams---so multiplex that they could never even be named---and his being is intimately tied to his place of origin, the way the hills and fields were, the food he ate, the strains of music he heard, the way bird songs were sung, the nature and means of locomotion. He was given, from a very early age, private lessons by his father in Latin, Greek, French, English and Hebrew. You would have to take into account his later childhood in the Alcase and the particular landscape that had such an effect on him. One could go on and on listing allt he different influences and factors that contributed to him being what he was and became. Surely he would be seen as uniquely being a product of his place, his time, his language and so many different things, too many to name.

Have you not just described causes/conditions, pieces/parts?

Are you nuts?

Does Johann Wolfgang von Goethe own Johann Wolfgang von Goethe?