Either did Buddha.Dan Rowden wrote:you haven't ever really said anything?
Maybe Alex is a koan-head.
Either did Buddha.Dan Rowden wrote:you haven't ever really said anything?
Having taken a contrary stand in numerous pretty crucial areas with David, one learns quite rapidly that one is ignorant not only of the 'Truth' but that one is completely out of harmony with all spiritual figures of history. What is the core idea that supports such a judgment? Similarly you, though you are rhetorically more proficient and you seem to wear a far more reasonable garb, seem also to be capable of a similar order of judgments. What about the question of motive there? If you can ask questions about it in others, are you also able to respond to the same question?Diebert wrote: And don't forget motive. Your motive appears not clear, not fresh, actually a bit smelly after four years of rotting flesh. Someone who believes to have found the Kingdom of God at least has a healthy looking motive to talk about it for the rest of his life. People who are not really interested have a motive to laugh about it and move on. But to campaign against it, year after year, is more like a tragedy unfolding. So much bleeding and nothing to stop it.
You're never going to find that 'something' because there's nothing there.. the whole "thinking system" is a mental mirage. When we say that consciousness/enlightenment/absolute truth is the motive, you ignore it vehemently and misplace the motive into something else: a form of emotionally motivated, subjective fundamentalism. But the fact of the matter is, your position holds that when spirituality is the object of pursuit, 'emotionally motivated, subjective fundamentalism' must be the necessary result! After all, there can be no objective goal to be reached, according to your subjective doctrine. "All truths are subjective." - The Book of Alex: ch. 1, verse 1.Alex Jacob wrote:It is hard for me not to see the sort of opposition I receive here for some pretty anodyne comments as arising from a great need to defend...something. But what that 'something' is, is hard to say. Especially in your case.
First I wish to say that I am very aware that, in respect to you-all, I did not really get anywhere. The question might be posed: 'Well, if you'd have chosen a whole other method of tactic would you have achieved different results?' I think the honest answer is no. It is naturally problematic to speak too broadly about 'the house philosophy' and to corral everyone who now participates here into too restrictive a ring, but in a very real sense (though you, Diebert, deny it) there is a core religious philosophy that functions here, at least in all those who have come forward (with the exception of Jamesh and certainly Pye), in this thread. The core arguments of that specific philosophy are presented rhetorically and dogmatically, and in some sense axiomatically, and in the sense that I mean, which I write about extensively, these doctrines function 'like drugs'.Gorgias (Sophist) wrote in 414 BC: “The power of speech has the same effect on the condition of the soul as the application of drugs to the state of bodies; for just as different drugs dispel different fluids from the body, and some bring an end to disease but others end life, so also some speeches cause pain, some pleasure, some fear; some instil courage, some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.”
You have ascribed such a view to me, so using it here is a clear straw man. I would use an analogy from chemistry to describe how moral and ethical ideation (and the higher ideation of man generally) comes into existence in our world: it follows patterns perhaps similar to crystal formation. While I recognize there is a temporary and arbitrary organization (that will fall away at some point), there is a 'supporting structure' within the cosmos that will always produce it. David's system is a unique 'crystallization' that will produce a certain form, or 'deform', of crystal. There are simply other and superior crystals!Dennis writes: You [Diebert] and I understand Alex sees that all essences are false.
In that understanding he argues Quinns curriculum is an edifice or lacks essence.
Suffering, by whatever definition, is unavoidable. You overcome suffering by developing strengths. If you don’t develop those strengths you regurgitate on your woes and your ego makes you suffer more, often unnecessarily so. The less potentially controllable suffering you encounter, the less capable you become in dealing with negative externalities.Laird,
This could be the launching point for a dialogue, because I don't think anyone would argue that there is not suffering in life, nor that it would not be preferable to avoid that suffering. A dialogue might, though, take place on the extent to which there is suffering in life, the extent to which suffering is avoidable, the extent to which the house philosophy succeeds in eliminating suffering, the extent to which suffering is unavoidable in the achieving of higher goals (most superficially, those leading to pleasure), and, most broadly, the extent to which we ought to focus philosophy in the first place on avoiding suffering, to the exclusion of all else that might be valued positively.
But if you examine the process the judgement of whether to continue onwards is with the “greater goal” being in place. It is the same as the work one goes through, including the decision at crisis points to continue or not, where the ultimate goal is an Olympic medal. With truth the gradual progression of rationality gives you strength, and you gain the confidence of achievement, but without the dominant goal being valued more highly than the pains on the way, then you won’t do the required training. It is a subjectively-rational valuation that achieving positive X is worth many negative Y’s on the way. For the journey towards enlightenment, that training is to go where you haven’t been before in depth of truth by building upon what you already have – something Alex is determined not to do.As for your suggestion that this 'system' may be for "pain management," What David and others discuss here (the "path of enlightenment" you could call it) is clearly not about avoiding pain.. what could be more painful than doing away with all worldly desires? Friends and family turning against you as you turn to reason? The path of enlightenment is much more about embracing the "pains of life" (or "long suffering" as they say in Christian traditions) in route to buddhahood, not in seeking avoidance.
Interestingly, I haven't received a single PM or email from anyone concerning you, Alex. In fact, I don't think I've ever received one in the entire time you have been here.Alex Jacob wrote: It is perhaps vain and I thought not to mention it, but in the course of this particular run here I have received a number of PMs from people who understand what I am trying to communicate.
Oh dear. And this is said with a straight face? What a gall you have.So, when I refer to you Diebert as an excellent or accomplished rhetorician I do not mean to take away anything that is not yours or that you do not deserve. An accomplished lawyer will necessarily be an accomplished rhetorician, and the more he knows of the art of rhetorical skill, the greater likelihood he will have in convincing his hearers. But I think we all know that a great deal that is quite dubious on close examination can be presented in a rhetorical display that, at the very least, will succeed in convincing the untrained and the unaccomplished.
You have modified your previous statements: earlier there was 'no core system', but now you seem to recognize the presence of one, even if you might label it as 'heuristic'.Diebert wrote: There's the conviction you keep repeating that there's a "core" systematic philosophy in place, while it's not entirely clear how one could talk about the nature of reality and enlightenment without gravitating towards certain terms, a few traditional formulations combined with some contemporary observations and developments. It's not difficult to see that you always will end up with some type of conglomerate of notions and that there's just no other way to get some kind of focus, some fertile way to propel any conversation, although you seem to think it can by changing the rules as you go. This basic necessity is not enough to claim the presence of a rock solid system, one without any flexibility or openness to change or improvement. Unless we call all instances of culture or heuristics as problematic.
I see this paragraph as sophistic in essence. It is essentially a rhetorically-driven and sophistical restatement of what I wrote. It is well-ordered, uses some academic references to bolster authority, but it has almost nothing to do with what I have been talking about. What I am speaking against is a limited and fixed group of notions about 'reality' around which a group of choices and decisions coalesce (an ethic). I am also saying that this group of ideas, ensconced within its dogmatic, is very attractive to a certain sort of mind and a certain sort of person. And in this person it acts like a 'drug'.It seems that you, Alex, are using the term "rhetorically" in some odd 19th century sense. But in classical as well as modern sense it's not about "convincing" a (dumb) audience. Aristotle for example defined it as "an ability, in each case, to see the available means of persuasion". This is something way different of course. It works then as leading art in the world of meanings. Or like expert James Boyd White, a law professor ironically, who describes it as "the methods by which culture is maintained, criticized, and transformed". So if we are talking criticism on modern culture, criticism on some cultist philosophy or the dialog around a mix of cultures and philosophies, one would expect a lot of rhetorics as the leading means to have any discussion. This all shows your implied usage of the word rhetorician is meaningless, backwards and pretty useless in this context. It's not very skilled, to say the least. Not very convincing to anyone having their thinking cap on.
This is a false argument. I am suggesting a closer examination of the core thinking system outlined in a specific document the influence of which is 'felt' throughout the forum. It is the core and defining document of a House Philosophy. I am also suggesting the inclusion of a great deal of material, 'possibilities' I have called them, that is excised by a radical-absolutist religious program. If there is a demonstration of 'loyalty' (not at all the spirit in which they were offered)(those few PMs) in truth such 'loyalty' as a stalwart defender of a general philosophical system is far more evident in your approach, old chum! That is quite the impression I have of your 'loyally rendered service' here. The Greeter in an absolutist Walmart. The defender, the explainer. A kind of bouncer. An undertaker! ;-)I would only counter with a warning that it might just as well be proof of your status as counter-guru. Your pontificating way of writing, interlaced with light disarming humor and clearly mastering the art of post writing, makes you attractive for certain types to demonstrate their support and loyalty to.
(I'm an Elvis man, myself).And as last nail in your coffin, you are again wrong about the whole term "fundamentalist". If you go for an extended period on a forum about The Beatles, complaining about the dangers of pop music and promoting classical music, you'll meet a lot of resistance. Mostly the question of why you are there or if you are a troll. They will question your motive, not as much the fact that you despise Beatles or think modern music is dangerous for the brains. But you instead will see all the resistance as proof that modern music is "baaad" and you'll carry on explaining why. And for sure you'll get support from the left fielders looking for ways to criticize the forum's administration they mistrusted all along. This happens on Internet forums all the time.
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.Alex Jacob wrote:A position from which to 'stimulate conversation' is a necessary and good thing. But when 'absolute rules' that derive from an installed absolutist thinking are firmly in place there really no longer can occur 'conversation'. Any deviant view, any threatening view, can and will be defeated. Whether the argument (against) is reasonable or not is irrelevant.
Fading still...
(One, maybe two posts remaining...)
In the more general sense the heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. A technique I see for example as talking about causality instead of oranges. Or to use language to create Koans instead of limericks. If people use hammers to insert a nail, there's Alex to claim there's a system being forced by a cult of carpenters? It's really that simple, you might need to lobotomize yourself to get it though (as cure for the disorder).earlier there was 'no core system', but now you seem to recognize the presence of one, even if you might label it as 'heuristic'.
Because they are never the issue. This is the difference between unity and multiplicity. Unity is no thing, nothing to hold on to and almost impossible to describe. While multiplicity, the ten thousand things, are a never ending activity of naming, examination, differences of opinion, revelation, different schools of thought, complicating backgrounds, surprising influences and eventually at some point a big twist at the end when all looks now like the opposite of what earlier seemed be the case. This is not between good and bad but more the question which direction might be more fruitful when questions of a spiritual nature arise.you can never be tied down to any specifics
The point however, and you missed it flying five miles over your head, was that the dynamics of the online forums are the same everywhere. You as a criticaster, a borderline troll, plays (inevitable it seems in your case) the part defined by the medium. You get sucked into it and think you are doing something significant, meaningful, pleasurable, what ever. The medium of a forum creates opportunity for you to play out this role, amplifies this desire and you fall into a well-defined niche. From that niche you operate and derive justifications to continue. It's all rather empty, "artifactual".This is not a Beatles fan club forum.
It's all about seduction. And destination...To seduce people on the basis of such a program is a sort of 'dangerous drug'. But what you have done in your sophistical display, above, is to ridicule a closer examination of what y'all are engaged in here. You have reduced it to an ego-game played by some immature personalities who may not indeed hold 'truth' or 'wisdom' in such high regard after all.
Well you’d better get busy book burning the works of all the highly respected philosophers of the past, which also had a limited and fixed group of notions about reality at the time they published their works.What I am speaking against is a limited and fixed group of notions about 'reality' around which a group of choices and decisions coalesce (an ethic). I am also saying that this group of ideas, ensconced within its dogmatic, is very attractive to a certain sort of mind and a certain sort of person. And in this person it acts like a 'drug'.
By Jazz I presume you mean the improvisation side of things. As in when an instrument player fully masters the “physical truth” of the instrument, they are free to be musical in the moment. The QRS are just about providing tips about the instrument that is reality so that one might master the music of reality.Even the great blues players come from another place eventually and get into jazz as a possibility.
I don’t mind Alex as I find him useful. It is like playing table tennis with oneself by practising against a wall (the block you speak of) – everything just rebounds at a slightly different angle. For lazy minds like mine, responding to him and Laird prompts one to “refine their justifications for positively viewing the house philosophy”I think you have a great point about sensitivity, and how could anyone having less than great sensitivities develop the circumstance where the more subtle forms of thinking could start taking place? As much as I love Alex, his quick wit and his decent knowledge, he looks to me still rather clumsy and crude when it comes to the finer points in this particular discussion (sorry mate, the knife cuts at both sides). For this reason some, including myself, have described a few of his charges as "blocks", something actively maintained to freeze the whole movement up, becoming completely insensitive and stunted when it comes to something that threatens some core issue, inside the psyche, something to let go. Then again, who really knows? Perhaps it's a game to him or a desire to bang his head against a brick wall.
“The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price: this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer. They put themselves against all those conditions under which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been permitted to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct opposition to natural conditions—one by one they distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and psychology until each became a contradiction of its natural significance.”
Psychologically, the Jews are a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side of all those instincts which make for décadence—not as if mastered by them, but as if detecting in them a power by which “the world” could be defied. The Jews are the very opposite of décadents: they have simply been forced into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of skill approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have managed to put themselves at the head of all décadent movements (—for example, the Christianity of Paul—), and so make of them something stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. To the sort of men who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity,—that is to say, to the priestly class—décadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of “good” and “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it.”
The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified;—but even here Jewish priest-craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel ceased to be of any value: out with it!—These priests accomplished that miracle of falsification of which a great part of the Bible is the documentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unparalleled, and in the face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the past of their people into religious terms, which is to say, they converted it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all offences against Jahveh were punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. We would regard this act of historical falsification as something far more shameful if familiarity with the ecclesiastical interpretation of history for thousands of years had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness in historicis. And the philosophers support the church: the lie about a “moral order of the world” runs through the whole of philosophy, even the newest. What is the meaning of a “moral order of the world”? That there is a thing called the will of God which, once and for all time, determines what man ought to do and what he ought not to do; that the worth of a people, or of an individual thereof, is to be measured by the extent to which they or he obey this will of God; that the destinies of a people or of an individual are controlled by this will of God, which rewards or punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested.—In place of all that pitiable lie reality has this to say: the priest, a parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every sound view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state of human society in which he himself determines the value of all things “the kingdom of God”; he calls the means whereby that state of affairs is attained “the will of God”; with cold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the extent of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly order. One observes him at work: under the hand of the Jewish priesthood the great age of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, with its long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a punishment for that great age—during which priests had not yet come into existence. Out of the powerful and wholly free heroes of Israel’s history they fashioned, according to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely “godless.” They reduced every great event to the idiotic formula: “obedient or disobedient to God.”—They went a step further: the “will of God” (in other words some means necessary for preserving the power of the priests) had to be determined—and to this end they had to have a “revelation.” In plain English, a gigantic literary fraud had to be perpetrated, and “holy scriptures” had to be concocted—and so, with the utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of penance and much lamentation over the long days of “sin” now ended, they were duly published. The “will of God,” it appears, had long stood like a rock; the trouble was that mankind had neglected the “holy scriptures”.... But the “will of God” had already been revealed to Moses.... What happened? Simply this: the priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to be paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (—not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of meat, for the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be known just what he wanted, what “the will of God” was.... From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the “sacrifice” (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it—in his own phrase, to “sanctify” it.... For this should be noted: that every natural habit, every natural institution (the state, the administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made the reverse of valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the “moral order of the world”). The fact requires a sanction—a power to grant values becomes necessary, and the only way it can create such values is by denying nature.... The priest depreciates and desecrates nature: it is only at this price that he can exist at all.—Disobedience to God, which actually means to the priest, to “the law,” now gets the name of “sin”; the means prescribed for “reconciliation with God” are, of course, precisely the means which bring one most effectively under the thumb of the priest; he alone can “save”.... Psychologically considered, “sins” are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be “sinning”.... Prime axiom: “God forgiveth him that repenteth”—in plain English, him that submitteth to the priest.
! On the other hand, the savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of God: their revenge took the form of elevating Jesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews, to revenge themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves from their God, and placed him on a great height. The One God and the Only Son of God: both were products of ressentiment....
Hard upon the heels of the “glad tidings” came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the “bearer of glad tidings”; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels—nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth!... Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history—he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings.
“The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was already persistent within the primitive community. That which Paul, with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the Saviour.—These gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk behind every word. I confess—I hope it will not be held against me—that it is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate joy to a psychologist—as the opposite of all merely naïve corruption, as refinement par excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological corruption. The gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is not to be compared to them. Here we are among Jews: this is the first thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal “holiness” unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art—all this is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation of nature. The thing responsible is race. The whole of Judaism appears in Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there, after many centuries of earnest Jewish training and hard practice of Jewish technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery. The Christian, that ultima ratio of lying, is the Jew all over again—he is threefold the Jew.... The underlying will to make use only of such concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the instinctive repudiation of every other mode of thought, and every other method of estimating values and utilities—this is not only tradition, it is inheritance: only as an inheritance is it able to operate with the force of nature”.