Christians and me, Part II:

[jupiviv]

Sequel to a topic I posted long ago.

[Edit: found it! viewtopic.php?f=10&t=7395&hilit=christians+and+me]

I've been reading C.S. Lewis' and Kierkegaard's books lately, and thoroughly enjoying how the latter beats the former at his own game.

Kierkegaard was born too soon! Imagine him denouncing the likes of Chesterton and Lewis in the same way he did Bishop Mynster. Lewis would probably soil himself in mortal terror and become a Wiccan or Scientologist along with the rest of his disciples. Perhaps that would result in modern Christianity being a bit less of a urine-soaked blanket than it is.

But descriptions of false Christianity from almost two centuries ago are not very exciting. I felt I needed to kill some time...I mean, find a more recent example. So I scoured the right wing and social conservative enclaves of the internet for untold aeons until I found this guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._W ... 8author%29

Yes, John C. Wright, who as it turns out I actually know about since I've read a couple of his books (he is a science fiction author). He's no Dick, but if you're a scifi/fantasy fan there is a good chance you've at least heard of him. The guy is also an apologist of the Dennis Hopper variety, and is afflicted by a strain of logorrhea which is simultaneously frustrating and very entertaining. He's like our own Alex in a way, if Alex took a decisive leap of faith and an overdose of chalk.

I was shocked - not by his loquacious craziness, which I expected because I've read his books, but rather by the fact that he is a Christian. I'd had the impression, when I read his books some years ago, that he was an atheist or agnostic of some sort with perhaps some New Age tendencies. On further reading, it turns out he was an atheist who converted to Christianity after suffering a heart attack.

As with all neophytes, his zealotry is potent. If a man loves only himself in his beloved, then it follows that he hates only himself in his nemesis. Thus, men reserve their bitterest bile for those who display those characteristics they hate in themselves, and even more so if they have managed to overcome or suppress those traits to some degree (or believe they have done so).

In the case of this individual, it seems he is a mostly irrational man who nevertheless feels compelled to be rational to some extent, and has managed to get rid of his intellectual compunction about his beloved irrational thoughts by calling them his "Christian faith", and then equating that "faith" with rationality.

Mental ballet is the best way to describe it. Most of his arguments (as put forth in this article) are eristic. They dance around the actual point or issue until the audience is impressed and then bow out. Indeed, it is amazing how similar theologians and their voluntarily subservient apologists are to lawyers. They argue like snakes, pretending to be composed and oh-so-logical right until the opportune moment for the swift venomous bite. If they have to resort to this sort of behaviour to defend or vindicate their faith in God, then this faith is about as genuine as a lawyer's faith in Justice.

But, as they say in science fiction, "show, don't tell". Here is the article by him that inspired this post:

http://www.everyjoe.com/2015/11/11/life ... -damage/#1

Yes, that is in fact what the article's called ladies and gentlemen - "Atheism causes brain damage"! We can safely conclude right at the outset that this man believes there is a place called heaven where we go after we die, as long as we are nice of course. Oh, and also on the condition that we aren't cleverdicks and hasten our departure thereto by committing suicide the moment we come to know of such a place. One must, you see, live one's earthly life as long as God intends. Deciding to end it oneself is rebellion against God's decision, whereas sustaining it is not. We know this because God himself tells us so in his book, or in visions and wonders when language alone is insufficient.

But I digress. Let's have a look at what he actually says:

There are two kinds of atheist: a rational atheist, whose disbelief in God is grounded on some rational reason he can articulate

That's nice to hear, because us rational atheists don't get a lot of plug these days. Everyone just uses "atheist" as a blanket term for all atheists, and frankly that's just rational-ist!

I have noticed of late the rational atheists are disappearing and the irrational atheists blooming,

All the better for right-thinking Christians like Mr. Wright here to practice their compassion! Those slender, sickly little irrational minds need only suckle on some faith-laden boobies to get back on the old straight and narrow (as I'm sure Mr. Wright knows well enough). The rational ones are the real problem here, as they are sucklings to the plump-breasted monster Lubrica, who has six anuses and weals for nipples, and whose milk is a pasty residue of Original Sin derived from unbaptized infants.

and fear I know the cause.

I'm sure I think I believe he thinks he believes he does.

In my youth, one could find from time to time an honest and thoughtful man who, not believing in God, could give a rational and honest reason for his disbelief.

Translation: I myself used to be a rational atheist, and my atheism was rational because I had very good reasons for not believing in God. However, after becoming a Christian I "discovered" even more reasonable reasons for believing in God. Even an ISO 9001 bona fide rational atheist like myself had to eventually submit to the Christian faith, the rationality of which I was inadequately rational to recognise. Therefore, God certainly exists, and certainly hasn't died laughing at his worshippers.

He could say it would be a logical contradiction to believe that an omnipotent and benevolent creator could permit evil a place in his creation, since if the creator lacks the power to prevent it, the creator is not omnipotent, or lacks the motive, not benevolent.

Or the rational atheist could say an omniscient being possessing or bestowing free will was paradoxical, since only the acts of an unfree will can be foreknown.

The rational atheist could say that natural causes were sufficient to explain the cosmos and man’s role in it, so no inquiry into supernatural causes is needed.

Or a rational atheist could say that Christian theology was essentially the same as pagan mythology, and since even Christians admit the myths of other religions are manmade falsehoods, there is no rational way to defend the Christian myth as true while condemning all others false.

Finally, a rational atheist could point out various inconsistencies in the Bible or in Church tradition, or enormities committed by followers of Christ, to lend weight to any doubts one might entertain in taking the Bible or the Church as a trustworthy authority or trustworthy witness. This final argument is not meant to prove atheism is true, merely that skepticism toward Christian claims is justified.

So far, our evangelist seems to using a rhetorical trick very common in legal practice. He pretends to impartially represent the opponent's view, but words or presents it in such a way that it can be refuted by an argument he makes later on. He ignores the bits he cannot use to his advantage, and focuses precisely on those he can.

On the other hand, he may genuinely believe that these are the best arguments offered by rational atheists. Indeed, most atheists do use all or some these arguments to make their case against religion.

In any case, the fact is that there are plenty of other, strictly logical, arguments that are also advanced by more than enough atheists even in our dissolute age. Mr. Wright does not address them, either knowingly or out of genuine ignorance. The arguments he presents have loose ends.

For example, if one assumes the existence of an omniscient being, then it is possible to validly claim that such a being both possesses and bestows free will. After all, omniscience would mean being instantaneously aware of all actual and possible events or chains of events, so an omniscient being is not forced to commit to any of them due to his knowledge of them. And man, being made in the image of an omniscient being, has inherited some form of this freedom and sustains it through his faith in that being.

However, it is logically impossible for any finite being to be omniscient, because in order to understand the true nature of everything it would have to contrast everything with something apart from everything. The latter cannot exist by definition. An infinite being, on the other hand, is also logically impossible. Is our evangelist friend unaware of this argument? Possibly, but it is more likely he does not use it as an example of an argument given by rational atheists because it is irrefutable and uncontroversial. Free will, on the other hand, is a matter of great contention and bringing it into any discussion helps the incorrect position by distracting attention from it.

I regret to report that, so far in my career as a Christian, not one of these rational atheist arguments has been encountered by me.

Not one.

I don't think this fact will convince anyone that atheists who offer rational arguments are either scarce or non-existent. Well, anyone who doesn't already think so.

Indeed, one can read a more coherent argument against the existence of God in Thomas Aquinas, where he states the opposing position he intends to disprove, than you can find in any modern atheist tract.

I do not necessarily disagree with this statement, but let's have a look at the actual text:

Objection 1. It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word "God" means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.

Reply to Objection 1. As Augustine says (Enchiridion xi): "Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil." This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good.

- Article 3 of the Chapter "The One God" from the first part of Summa Theologica.

This objection is false because it assumes that an infinite whole can have qualities such as goodness and evil. It's just a cogent version of the argument - "vids, pics and (far more uncommonly) experiences of terrible things made me stop believing in God".

Objection 2. Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God's existence.

Reply to Objection 2. Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle, as was shown in the body of the Article.

- Article 3 of the Chapter "The One God" from the first part of Summa Theologica.

This objection is also false because it assumes that there is an inherent distinction between natural and voluntary (artificial/man-made) things.

The author of the article explains just how utterly irrational irrational atheists are before making his next point, which is:

Of the several arguments for the existence of God, the easiest to grasp is this: in order to deduce any truths about nature, one must affirm the principle that all effects spring from causes, that is, nothing comes from nothing. Hence, saying truth exists is tantamount to saying men can reason about it, which is turn implies that cause and effect exists.

I agree with Mr. Wright that effects spring from causes, but causes also spring from the effects of other causes. Every cause is also an effect. Nor can truth be said to exist, because untruth doesn't exist. Rather, everything that exists is truth.

Now, we call the sum total of all natural events the cosmos. The cosmos either had a beginning, or not. If it had no beginning, then all chains of cause and effect reach backward endlessly to no first cause.

If we define any event whatsoever as a "natural event", then the sum total of all events cannot have a beginning. The reason, quite simply, is that there are no other events which can make it begin.

But this beginningless chain of events is like supposing we could see a line of railroad cars without a first car, that is, without an engine to impart speed to the second car. We see one car pulled by the car before it, which in turn is being pulled by another before it, and we wonder why this cannot continue endlessly. Perhaps we imagine is a train track that circles the globe, with each car attached to the one in front, and the whole line is in motion; or perhaps we imagine a track reaching across an infinite flat plain with an endless line of cars rushing past. But no matter how we imagine an engineless train, if there is no engine, we cannot imagine why these cars are moving at their present speed, and not ten miles per hour more slowly. We cannot imagine why they should be moving at all.

Likewise, whether one imagines the cosmos, as the Hindu does, as an endless circle of eternally returning events, or imagines it, as the Steady State theory holds, as an endless line reaching forever back into the infinite past with no first point, one cannot imagine what defines the cosmos in its current form. Something, the current speed of the railcars, or the current situation of the universe, comes from nothing, from nowhere, for no reason. But our first principle of cause and effect rejects this.

Hence from philosophical reasoning alone, we can deduce the cosmos must have had a beginning before which was neither time nor space, matter nor energy.

All this posturing for the sake of the cosmological argument? Speaking of railway trains:

Think of a very long railway train – but long ago the locomotive ran away from it. Christendom is like this. Generation after generation has imperturbably continued to link the enormous train of the new generation to the previous one, solemnly saying: We will hold fast to the faith of the fathers. Thus Christendom has become the very opposite of what Christianity is. Christianity is restlessness, the restlessness of the eternal. Any comparison here is flat and tedious – to such a degree that the restlessness of the eternal is restless. Christendom is tranquillity. How charming, the tranquillity of literally not moving.

- Soren Kierkegaard

Now that's a rational atheist to hang your hat on.

Again, since no effect arises without a sufficient cause, the cause of the cosmos must be something outside the sum of all natural events, but potent enough to cause them all.

The cosmos includes all causes, whether natural or supernatural. The question of whether it has a cause proceeds from a false premise - that the cosmos itself is a cause, i.e, a finite thing with causes and effects.

The cause which gave rise to time and matter must therefore be eternal and immaterial, that is, a timeless spirit.

The cosmos itself gave rise to time and matter and everything that exists, simply because there cannot be anything else by definition. In this sense, it may be called a first or ultimate cause. However, the relationship between the cosmos and the specific things included within it is not literally a causal one, because causes are distinct from their effects. Nothing can be distinct from the cosmos. In fact, the above stated relationship cannot be given a name at all, because it is ultimately the cosmos itself.

So, then, is the cosmos an eternal incorporeal spirit? I myself envision it as a donkey's foot.

The evangelist now makes an almost equally convincing historical argument:

From this argument we can defend Deism, the watchmaker God of the philosophers, but not the specifics of the Christian faith. That defense rests on another type of argument, an historical argument. Christianity is not a philosophy, like Deism; it makes a specific historical claim, hence philosophical reasoning absent historical reasoning is insufficient to defend it.

[...]

Now, miracles we can define as divine intervention: a natural effect or event arising from a supernatural cause. If no miracles are possible by definition, we need not look into the evidence or testimony of any particular miracle. If, however, even one miracle is shown to have happened, this opens the possibility that others have as well, and therefore each reported case of an alleged miracle must be examined on the merits of the historical evidence.

But we have just defined a miracle as a natural event arising from a supernatural cause. The creation of the cosmos, by definition, must be such an event, since nature did not exist before time and matter and the sum total of nature we call the cosmos existed. Hence miracles are possible.

This leaves us with this question of the historical accuracy of the testament affirmed in the New Testament. Not being a philosophical argument, the persuasive value here depends on the weight given the evidence, and each bit of evidence must be examined prudently both in its own right and in how it fits into the historical picture, and whether any pertinent personal experience coheres with the model of the world thus presented, or contradicts it.

(A man who has seen a ghost, for example, and has no reason to doubt his senses, has an experience that coheres with at least some versions of reportedly supernatural events, but this experience does not necessarily cohere with a purely naturalistic explanation to explain away such reports, since such explanations would call him a victim of hallucination, or a fraud.)

Such a minute historical argument is far too tedious to repeat in this short column, but the conclusion of any honest examination of the record is brief enough to utter in a sentence: no one disputes the testimony of the Gospel for historical reasons, only for philosophical reasons.

No one says, for example, that since a manuscript contains a report of a miracle but also of many other anachronisms or things contradicted by other sources, that manuscript is false and hence the otherwise credible the miracle ought not be believed. The skeptic only ever argues that, taking it as given that miracles do not exist, a manuscript containing a report of a miracle is by definition unreliable, even if it contains no anachronisms and the non-miraculous events so reported are confirmed by other contemporary sources.

But the alleged historical untrustworthiness of the Bible is always the starting point of the so-called freethinker who wants to erode the authority of the biblical testimony.

Yet these arguments rapidly founder when the standards applied to any other historical argument about the reliability of an ancient documents are employed: the fact that the Bible has more copies, more contemporary or near-contemporary confirmation, than any other ancient document undermines any legitimate skepticism. There is more evidence that Jesus Christ existed and said and did the things he is reported to have said and done than there is evidence that Julius Caesar existed and did what he is said to have done. There are more and clearer documentary evidence that Saint Paul existed than Cicero. And so on.

The freethinker soon finds his historical nitpicking at the Bible is futile unless he addresses and audience that already, and for philosophical rather than historical reasons, does not believe in miracles.

But, as we have seen, to disbelief in miracles requires eventually a disbelief in the creator, which, in turn, requires either a disbelief in cause and effect, or a disbelief in the cosmos, or a disbelief in the truth, or (what amounts to much the same thing) a disbelief in man’s ability to know the truth.

The most obvious problem with historically justifying any religious faith is that historical facts, being scientific facts, are tentative. How can faith, which relies upon absolute principles, be substantiated by science?

Regardless of how much historical evidence is available that proves the existence of Jesus or his divinity, it can never justify the faith in his existence or divinity, because such a thing cannot be proven by definition. Any proof in support of it proves something entirely different from it, e.g., the desire of Christians to feel good about themselves. It is either believed or ignored. But let's hear what the rational atheist Soren Kierkegaard has to say about this:

“History,” says faith, “has nothing at all to do with Jesus Christ; with regard to him we have only sacred history (which is qualitatively different from history in general), which relates the story of his life in the state of abasement, also that he claimed to be God. He is the paradox that history can never digest or convert into an ordinary syllogism. He is the same in his abasement as in his loftiness—but the eighteen hundred years, or if it came to be eighteen thousand years, has nothing [XII 29] at all to do with it. These brilliant results in world history, which almost convince even a professor of history that he was God, these brilliant results are certainly not his coming again in glory! But this is just about how one understands it; it shows again that Christ is made into a human being whose coming again in glory cannot be or become anything other than the result of his life in history—whereas Christ’s coming again in glory is something entirely different from this, something that is to be believed. He abased himself and was wrapped in rags—he will come again in glory, but the brilliant results, especially on closer inspection, are too shabby a glory, in any case a totally incongruous glory that faith therefore never mentions when it speaks of his glory. He still exists only in his abasement, until he, something that is believed, comes again in glory. History may be an excellent branch of knowledge, but it must not become so conceited that it undertakes what the Father will do, to array Christ in glory, clothing him in the glittering trappings of results, as if this were the second coming. That in his abasement he was God, that he will come again in glory—this goes not a little beyond the understanding of history; this cannot be drawn from history, no matter how matchlessly one regards it, except through a matchless lack of dialectic.”

- Soren Kierkegaard in "Practice in Christianity".

The rest of the article carries on in the same vein of eristical arguments, aimed at making points rather than proving them, using truths as camouflage and half-truths as ammunition to defend utter lies or nonsense.

But what was really the point of this long post? Well, mostly to kill time, but also (I believe) to show what the thing usually called religious faith actually is. The gods of Christendom or Hinduism are not really ideas or imaginary entities as many atheists and agnostics seem to think, because in themselves they are just nonsense. They only make sense when attached to ways of life, political, social or cultural identities and so on.

Genuine faith rests upon the All, which performs no miracles, makes no promises and dictates no laws. Its miracles are already authenticated, its promises already fulfilled and its laws already enforced. But humanity sees nothing extraordinary in any of this, and calls anyone who does a simple-minded narcissist.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

So much interest in Christianity for some disenfranchised Hindu ;-) just kidding, or just speaking in civilizational terms.

You're right in all of your analysis. Another famous apologist would be G.K. Chesterton, especially his "Orthodoxy" (link to online copy). It's interesting to find out at which point they start to lie. And yet at the same time some of their thinking is pretty sharp, somewhat mystical and rebellious. But then comes this need for w̶o̶m̶e̶n̶ some structure to belong to, some loyalty to tradition and/or church which starts bending the start of actual dangerous philosophy into a common safe haven to rest their tired souls.

The main struggle all apologists demonstrate is the one with causality and the emptiness of existence. Therefore "first causes" are inserted forcefully. Another one is the problem of evil (suffering) which is always misrepresented in these arguments. If God is almighty and includes or allows evil to prosper in name of freedom, some atheists just ask why bother to seek a God which does not deliver from the evil of his own creation or address the question of suffering personally beyond the comfort of prayer? There might be the promise of a solution but no sign of much evidence. In other words, believing does not help with the larger question of evil and suffering, which is just how to live and how not. The atheist therefore argues with the question of relevance to the issues of life and not as much trying to find reasons to reject God on any moral high ground. He's just as well dismissing a morally ambiguous god, for the same reason: how does it help to address life and today?

And what they all avoid is the problem of power. How any artifice, any great idea, act or event in history turns into a power structure, a body, a faith: another rebellion against any truth of existence. They of course never address this deeper problem because they themselves are seduced by that power and happily on a trip -- it's Eden all over again.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Logorhea did you say? I'd suggest that that was a heroically long post which, likely, could be summed up with a sentance of 5 or maybe 6 words.

Both Jesus and Alex tend to find their way deep into people's lower layers. I am beinning to wonder what connection Alex has to the Aion and the world's destiny?

I am working on trying to understand what an 'apologist of the Dennis Hopper variety' is. I'd guess you mean as in Apocalypse Now in which case The Lord would have to be Brando's rendition of the heart-darkened soul?

I'd venture to guess that you, Jupi, are describing in one way or another the course, or a course, that you will possibly have to pursue. At some point or another, under some great strain or event, the 'rational mind' has to surrender its conrol of a narrative which it can't control. Something in the Christian form - rather evidently - has got hold of you. As in the example with John Wright the entire edifice of a man's thinking, his forced ordering of a chaotic reality he struggles to understand, can come crashing down, and in the example you site, at least in some senses, rather embarrassingly.

Personally, Christianity is an odd edifice. I have struggled some - not much but some - to understand Kierkegaard's spirituality and his relationship to Christ. I have wondered if that class of anguished faith is the last eruption before non-belief sets in.

Still, the Christian edifice is one that is very hard to get around. My manoeuvre in realtion to it is the attempt to work a Johannine angle: to see it all as a coded language, or to apprehend the content of the rather potent symbols in some higher, non-material form.

I think I am inclined to be far more generous than you though. All men have to have and hold to and envision their 'metaphysical dream of the world'. In one way or another we all encounter meaning-symbols, and in one way or another we encounter symbols which are larger than we are. The 'restlessless of the eternal' does and will take shape for men in different ways. You are certainly not excluded from that.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Both Jesus and Alex tend to find their way deep into people's lower layers. I am beinning to wonder what connection Alex has to the Aion and the world's destiny?

More like a daemon: whisper his name and he appears. Did he haunt this place like a disembodied Jungian shadow creature? :)

Still, the Christian edifice is one that is very hard to get around. My manoeuvre in realtion to it is the attempt to work a Johannine angle: to see it all as a coded language, or to apprehend the content of the rather potent symbols in some higher, non-material form.

You mean we have language somewhere not being coded or containing symbols of some non-material form? Quick, speak such word and you might create another universe with it! All kidding aside, I don't believe in uncoded language or direct references to material forms. In my view that's just the case where the code is hidden more cleverly as to make it more convenient to exchange faster without the effort and distortions of decoding. The symbol just becomes the embodiment of its meaning. The shadow becoming the self! Isn't that the classical desire of all ghosts, all daemons, to reach embodiment, to become real? Perhaps I see language, thought and ritual as the continuous incarnation of this curse, this desire to produce reality and embodiment.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

You cannot merely 'whisper' his name though: it has to be intoned with intentionality. The brown rat-killer virgin from India - a worshippable saint - quite definitely has such intentionality. That is his most notable feature I think: the focus of the mind as if he is crushing the Cosmic Cockroach. The capacity to focus contempt into a laser-like burning and vaporising beam! I think I was asleep and dreaming dreamless dreams when the Messenger awoke me and brought me through all the world's lushness to the desert and thorn-regions of GF.

What you say is not only interesting but *inevitable*. Yet it occurs to me that such a view - it is meta-viewing, is it not? - only seems to lead in to evermore intricate dissections and meta-conversations. And those meta-conversations bring us, eventually, to the setting sun whose light is darkness. But since the topic here - Christians and Me - makes reference to an event or an appearance or a 'realisation' that shatters a modus operandi of the hitherto 'rational' (and brittle) man, I would (and of course have) suggest that *we need* a more direct relationship - is this not Kierkegaard's existential imperative? - to Idea (which I gather for him is this Christ he is captured by, and which also killed him (yet I do not well understand Kierkegaard).

It is possible that the Diebertian Contemplative State is inevitable for those with certain strong proclivities of mind yet it does seem to attenuate into quiescence, desired or simply wound up at.

And I suppose that I meant it differently than you took it. True, it is all about encapsuled symbols, and thus about metaphysical content, but symbol and content that moves man, like a lever. Do I wish to move with a body in a physical universe, or to take up a position on a perch where I view everything marching before me and around me? It is, obviously, the same general question one asks - one must ask - as one comes under the sway of the Quinnean set of definitions, isn't it? Here it all coalesces again!

Nothing new under the setting sun I suppose ...

[Diebert van Rhijn]

...et it occurs to me that such a view - it is meta-viewing, is it not? - only seems to lead in to evermore intricate dissections and meta-conversations. And those meta-conversations bring us, eventually, to the setting sun whose light is darkness.

Meta can also just mean "whatever flies over the head". It's not just over or beyond. Not even reflecting. It's more like after, what we could talk about after one is done chasing ghosts of logic, powered windmills and playing with cultural analysis, having a mind now stronger and more trained, not to mention desillusioned.

But since the topic here - Christians and Me - makes reference to an event or an appearance or a 'realisation' that shatters a modus operandi of the hitherto 'rational' (and brittle) man.

But does it really do that? Referring to such thing or set of things. It seems there are in fact a lot of appearances, events and realizations which resulted over time in many composite figures, collections of beliefs and mechanics of power. The same tendency to look for "first causes" is at work when trying to distill some unique, special event or appearance on the stage to examine. It's that first step which already carries so much metaphysics and will cause one to find more of the same flavor with every inquiry.

Do I wish to move with a body in a physical universe, or to take up a position on a perch where I view everything marching before me and around me?

The question is more what is the nature of the "me" and the "I" in those questions. How and when do they rise? But that's more mediation 101, the first discovery of movement and its many reflections and distortions - the door towards self-knowledge.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

There is no doubt that a contemplative life, a contemplative relationship, to ideas, to existing, can and will lead to self-knowledge. No argument there.

Yet the question which Jupi seems to pose, or the problem in which he lands, with a contemptful splat, has to do with - but what does it have to do with? Naturally, that is what interests me. It is in that sense the Achilles' Heel of the Quinnean stance (and I use this term not out of contempt or for lack of appreciation but rather as an attempt to be accurate: you and Jupi and Quinn and some others here desire to orient themselves within a particular strain of 'contemplative relationship' (my term of course). I neither support this yet certainly do not condemn it, I just want to examine it. It is fair to say that among those who hold to this valuation (of it) it is held up as an ideal, the ideal in fact. You are of course quite aware that I have often taken issue with that claim and have always attempted to thwart it. I have not cooperated with the 'project'. Well, that has served my purposes of course. And since polemic is desired in such a 'bloody' space, it should not be seen to be unwelcome.

As to 'meta' I see what you mean but I don't mean it like that. It seems to me that we are, and likely have for some time, been involved in 'meta-projects'. Once the specificity of a relationship to a fixed and established form has been transcended - and it is inevitable that this happen - one naturally attempts to grasp and in a sense handle or control ever-larger viewing points. Meta to me means 'viewing point'. 'Chasing ghosts of logics', 'playing in cultural analysis', these are real activities and, as I think you mean, can involve vanity. A passtime? Neither do I disagree that, after all has been said and done, the mind may wind up 'more disciplined. Yet naturally I would linger for quite some while over the 'disillusioned' aspect. This is what Jupi is on about, it seems: the claim to be 'disillusioned'. Having spent considerable time among ye I am inclined to challenge that self-claim. And this leads in, once again, to the possibility that after all our projects of organization, of ordering, of 'insiting' and also of claiming have reached their end, and the self has lost the steam-power or the wind-power which propelled it, that something other than *that* self comes to bear on us.

That is Jupi's presentation in a nutshell. He despises the Christian form (a urine-soaked blanket) and yet - in my view - at one time or another he will have to 'eat crow'. Now, I am less interested in arguing or combatting the correctness of that view (m view, just stated) and more inclined simply to note that it 'tends to happen', and I I said I am more forgiving about how men discover and uncover meaning for themselves.

I can see why, in your case, and perhaps in that of Quinn & Co. the question will be made to revolve and turn on 'the nature of the me and the I. Yet as you may guess, and have guessed, I do not have the certainty you have of the 'salubrity' of the question and of the activity. Sorry! The question has to be questioned and I think motives, seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, need to be sweated out of it. Because the question - does it not? - actually contains and proposes its answer. The answer is not many things, but one thing. Am I right here?

2100 posts and then:

• I no longer believe there can be a point to philosophy without the context of a real and ongoing action based on purpose. Whether the meaning in whatever purpose that is chosen is temporary or not, to me it is a necessity, any philosophy or discussion without that context seems to me to be the ramblings of boredom or a mad man trapped in a box with only a wall to talk to.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Alex, you're just too much focused on dysfunctional father Quinn. Try to build your "opposition" on something else for once! What is it that you're trying to question even here? It seems often that you desire some academic lively discussion centered around sociology, cultural anthropology and linguistic theory.... but you do not appear to seek any equivalent peers to do so. It's a question that really needs to be asked again and again. Your interest in various topics and themes is noted but you're not really interested to test them, just to impose them on people who don't share that interest or even would have sufficient capacity to handle the subtleties. To me it shows something and that is that you prefer to produce yourself through solely that dynamic. And you need amongst other things forums with a certain type of membership to do so.

I can see why, in your case, and perhaps in that of Quinn & Co. the question will be made to revolve and turn on 'the nature of the me and the I. Yet as you may guess, and have guessed, I do not have the certainty you have of the 'salubrity' of the question and of the activity. Sorry! The question has to be questioned and I think motives, seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious, need to be sweated out of it. Because the question - does it not? - actually contains and proposes its answer. The answer is not many things, but one thing. Am I right here?

Well I just called it "mediation 101", nothing more, not a "path to enlightenment" or something. Perhaps a little common self-awareness for the masses but you run with it again as some systematic "forum philosophy" since it's your desire to find one and to take it down a notch. It seems that you just want to dig in, no matter what. This is why I call it your production, you need to do it as it's how you produce and maintain your self in any exchange. That's why I don't think you understand truly the contemplative life. Your unrest is born out of survival modes and not a sincere desire for any dialog. Please note that I don't think you're unique in that respect. If anything this forum has been a chisel for many doing exactly that. You're really at home here in the end despite all your imagined critique on imagined versions of some ghostly philosophy of life dwelling around the premises.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

No, 'Quinn' is just a symbol really! In any case, this is only a bit of where we left off. One always has to cover a bit of that ground. There are other fish to fry as the saying goes.

And I really think there is something quite crucial which you are failing - definitely failing - to take into enough consideration. The essence of it is the nature of the critical project undertaken by 'Quinn & Co.' - a substantial critical endeavor! - which must be, MUST BE, answered. Really, this is all part of the 'bloody' nature of things, or ideas, of polemic, and of working one's bloody way through things. The question of 'imposition' is interesting yet the morality of my imposition (this is merely your characterisation) is not to be questioned by you. I do not in any sense mean that you cannot and should not say whatever you desire to, and only that you don't get to finally decide.

I am also realy quite interested in this idea of 'self-production' in relation to [name your favored declaration, or theology, or description of truth], but in this case GF. Genius Forum really does have a certain importance for me, and I have come to understand my appreciation on many levels. Why is this? It is because - ultimately - I appreciate anyone who comes out with grand, declarative statements. The great challenging questions. The great propositions. So, and of course despite your position guarding the bases and home plate, my endeavor has been to answer the call, so to speak. And answering that clal has required going over an great deal of material. Perhaps that is what you mean by sociology, anthropology and linguistinc theory, yet I never would have described it in that way. But - and I say it again - it does very much have to do with literacy.

And FYI: there are movements in thought nowadays that very much need to be 'taken down a notch'. Yet that means, too, bringing other things up some notches. And that is really what I am inspired to do.

It is true, at least in the sense that you mean, that I am not a contemplative - or is it that I am a contemplative with another emphasis? No, in fact your characterizations here, while they certainly are not unrelated to what I am on about (you are good at discernment and yet, like everyone, inflect it with your own moods), they are not precise.

Finally, if indeed I am 'really at home' and am 'not unique' in my use of the stark position that is outlined here (but not abided by of course), then what have you to complain about?

Ideas and unfolding being move gloriously forward. Everyone seems to be carrying forward their ideas and naturally we develop relationally with others.

You must also recall that I cae on here - ironically and in some sense for fun, for the game - to comment on Jupi's 40 inch post. Jupi seems to appreciate lightening rods and he has a bit of a lightening spirit in him. I do think that if this immense potency could be harnassed India's rat problem could be solved almost overnight!

[jupiviv]

So much interest in Christianity for some disenfranchised Hindu ;-) just kidding, or just speaking in civilizational terms.

I'm just trying to get some context for my Kierkegaard marathon, as well as trying to figure out why he is one of only two wise people (known to me) to have come out of the Christian tradition. Speaking of which, can you or anyone else reading recommend some books or essays that are generally considered hallmarks of Christian apologetics (apart from the one you already linked to - thanks for that)? So far I've read "Mere Christianity" by Lewis and the far more recent "The Irrational Atheist" (download link).

You're right in all of your analysis. Another famous apologist would be G.K. Chesterton, especially his "Orthodoxy" (link to online copy). It's interesting to find out at which point they start to lie. And yet at the same time some of their thinking is pretty sharp, somewhat mystical and rebellious. But then comes this need for w?o?m?e?n? some structure to belong to, some loyalty to tradition and/or church which starts bending the start of actual dangerous philosophy into a common safe haven to rest their tired souls.

Yes, the need for pleasure trumps reality, and apologists spend most of their time trying to pretend that this need for pleasure is not only harmonious with reason, but is actually very hard to fulfill.

"You won't get prezzies until you've done your chores and eaten all of your vegetables!"

All their cleverness is wasted upon making a pretty lie look tough, like that dragon girl from Game of Thrones.

Another one is the problem of evil (suffering) which is always misrepresented in these arguments. If God is almighty and includes or allows evil to prosper in name of freedom, some atheists just ask why bother to seek a God which does not deliver from the evil of his own creation or address the question of suffering personally beyond the comfort of prayer? There might be the promise of a solution but no sign of much evidence. In other words, believing does not help with the larger question of evil and suffering, which is just how to live and how not. The atheist therefore argues with the question of relevance to the issues of life and not as much trying to find reasons to reject God on any moral high ground. He's just as well dismissing a morally ambiguous god, for the same reason: how does it help to address life and today?

If I were an apologist, I'd respond that God created evil in order to show us what goodness is and inspire us to become good. Therefore, evil is just an indirect demonstration of God's goodness.

The problem with that argument, however, is why does God's creations need to be shown what goodness is if God himself is good? How can a good tree bear partially bad fruit?

And I, as the apologist, would respond to this by saying that since evil is a kind of indirect goodness, those who are partially evil are actually partially indirectly good! And so on ad infinitum. So it's probably not a good idea to get into such an argument with a theist. Basically, any line of argumentation that accepts the premise of the existence of God or any of his divine characteristics should be avoided. On the other hand, atheist or agnostic professors of philosophy and theology need their daily bread, so the problem of evil must continue to elude solutions.

[jupiviv]

I am working on trying to understand what an 'apologist of the Dennis Hopper variety' is. I'd guess you mean as in Apocalypse Now in which case The Lord would have to be Brando's rendition of the heart-darkened soul?

I was thinking of Blue Velvet, but that works as well.

I'd venture to guess that you, Jupi, are describing in one way or another the course, or a course, that you will possibly have to pursue. At some point or another, under some great strain or event, the 'rational mind' has to surrender its conrol of a narrative which it can't control.

Most atheists *are* irrational atheists, since their disbelief in God is based on emotions rather than reasoned thought. The author of that article says as much. What he doesn't mention is that he himself was an irrational atheist, which is why he converted to Christianity. The emotions which motivated him to adhere to godlessness caused him to be reborn as a Christian. Hot or cold, it is the same hell that such a person is fated to be born into for all eternity. And that is the problem - no one wants to admit that they are irrational beyond the point where the garment of their lives needs to be discarded rather than patched up once again.

Something in the Christian form - rather evidently - has got hold of you.

Yes, because if it merely *interested* me, that would be too undramatic for you.

You must also recall that I cae on here - ironically and in some sense for fun, for the game - to comment on Jupi's 40 inch post. Jupi seems to appreciate lightening rods and he has a bit of a lightening spirit in him. I do think that if this immense potency could be harnassed India's rat problem could be solved almost overnight!

The "rat problem"? I will not have you talk that way about our beloved prime minister young man!

(Seriously though, the fuck is the "rat problem"?)

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Most atheists *are* irrational atheists, since their disbelief in God is based on emotions rather than reasoned thought. The author of that article says as much. What he doesn't mention is that he himself was an irrational atheist, which is why he converted to Christianity.

I see any atheism (yet this term, and of course the conflict embedded in it need to be carefully discussed and ordered) as being pure irrationality. I know that to state this, to one who surely does not see it that way, is to invite the entire polemic to materialise. Yet I feel it is, from my perspective anyway, an honest and necessary comment. Atheism is irrational. Yet it is true that one could be powered by an emotional motive, however that is true in all areas.

I tend these days to appreciate rhetoric, perhaps to understand it better: To employ rhetoric is to use emotives to convince. Isn't it? But the real issue is to have arrived, first of all, at some perspective or stance that can be said to be *truthful*.

To say that he 'converted to Christianity' is not quite right. You make it sound as if he was 'rationally convinced'. I doubt he was, but then I also doubt that people do things -anythings - independently of their sentiments. It is an impossibility. You can purify sentiments, surely, but you cannot act freely of them. I think this is a truthful statement.

The man in question had an overpowering series of experiences and in the face of those he came to surrender to the *meaning* of them. To understand this (this is next to impossible for folks structured as, I suppose, you are structured) requires a good deal of subtlety because it is all highly nuanced, and not (in my view) amendable to simple reductions.

Yet to defend his *experience* is not to say that I *agree* with it. I understand it. (Some day, Shiva may pounce out a jackfruit and convert you).

But a more curious thing is to speak about Kierkegaard's relationship to Jesus Christ and to this 'structure of revelation'. I admit it is strangely - impossibly perhaps - complex. It is hard to sort through. Is Kierkegaard a man to be considered, or an epoch to be understood?

• "Christianity or being a Christian is like every radical cure; one puts it off as long as possible".

How do you interpret that? How do you interpret Kierkegaard's Christian relationship?

Or the point of view whose object is to show that Christianity is not a peep-hole restricting the vision to a single object, nor a way of thinking and feeling which admits only one state of mind, but on the contrary a permanent source of rejuvenation and life? (Quoting more or less Regis Jolivet there).

Rejuvenation and life: are these terms you would or have employed? Do they mean anything to you?

And this? :-)

[jupiviv]

I see any atheism (yet this term, and of course the conflict embedded in it need to be carefully discussed and ordered) as being pure irrationality.

Not impressed. Mr. Wright can eat you for breakfast as far as making ludicrous statements followed up with pretend-prudent conditionals goes.

I know that to state this, to one who surely does not see it that way, is to invite the entire polemic to materialise.

It certainly invites something. English being my 3rd language, I find judging whether "polemic" is the right word for it rather difficult.

To say that he 'converted to Christianity' is not quite right. You make it sound as if he was 'rationally convinced'.

No, he says that himself.

I doubt he was, but then I also doubt that people do things -anythings - independently of their sentiments. It is an impossibility. You can purify sentiments, surely, but you cannot act freely of them. I think this is a truthful statement.

If that statement is true, then according to its own premise it must be dependent upon a sentiment which in some way favours the state of its being true. If the positive influence of that (or any) sentiment upon the truth of that statement is considered valid, then it follows that the negative influence of any sentiment(s) upon the same must also be considered valid. Therefore, the statement according to its own premise must be *both* true and false, and not exclusively true. Therefore, the statement contradicts itself and is wrong.

The man in question had an overpowering series of experiences and in the face of those he came to surrender to the *meaning* of them. To understand this (this is next to impossible for folks structured as, I suppose, you are structured) requires a good deal of subtlety because it is all highly nuanced, and not (in my view) amendable to simple reductions.

The "meaning" of his experiences in this context would not exclude the longer series non-overpowering experiences he was probably having before the overpowering ones came along. I'm willing to bet that this heart attack was simply something Mr. Wright had been waiting for as a sort of signal. Also, that had that *particular* signal not been forthcoming, Mr. Wright would have undergone the conversion at the behest of a different one.

But a more curious thing is to speak about Kierkegaard's relationship to Jesus Christ and to this 'structure of revelation'. I admit it is strangely - impossibly perhaps - complex. It is hard to sort through. Is Kierkegaard a man to be considered, or an epoch to be understood?

"Christianity or being a Christian is like every radical cure; one puts it off as long as possible".

How do you interpret that? How do you interpret Kierkegaard's Christian relationship?

He understood what being an "apostle" would entail but decided he was too weak to commit himself to being one, instead preferring to be a "poet". I think he was essentially a romantic man who loved himself, his family, his girlfriend and life in general. That's why he loved the music of Mozart, which I find to be saccharine and childish (although incomparably superior to all modern music). Anyways, he just wasn't self-hating enough to live up to his ideals.

In conclusion, then, what is India's rat problem?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

If that statement is true, then according to its own premise it must be dependent upon a sentiment which in some way favours the state of its being true. If the positive influence of that (or any) sentiment upon the truth of that statement is considered valid, then it follows that the negative influence of any sentiment(s) upon the same must also be considered valid. Therefore, the statement according to its own premise must be *both* true and false, and not exclusively true. Therefore, the statement contradicts itself and is wrong.

Curiously, yet predicatbly, this immediately brings to the fore what is - in my opinion of course - the area of essential error. It is a fundamental error in thinking, or a sort of misapplication of a group of choices in thinking, that becomes, for that thinker, a trap, a cage, a block. More of less this is the area I'd focus in (of course I have already) and I would endeavor to suggest that such thinking, such strict application of spurious predicates, will lead always to the same result: a philosophical box. Largely, when I employ the symbol of 'Quinn' I am referring to men, and women, who are internally ordered in a certain way.

In my present view, and this ties back to your opening post, and to a man who was shall we say forced by circumstances to exit his self-defined and self-enforced box of arrogation of perception, summed up by 'a rationalistic mind-frame lording it over Being' (a condition of youthfulness as I have said so many times), I am of the opinion that you perfectly illustrate a 'brittle' mind-frame which will - it must - call forth an event, a circumstance, a revelation, an epiphany that will allow another modus of perception and understanding to enter through the barred door. True, this has a Jungian inflection, I admit this. What can't come in through the door will seeks window; when the window is barred it will come up through the basement; when the basement door is too securely guarded it will seep in through cracks. In the most basic - really rather crude terms I suppose - what seeks to make its way in is 'God'.

I know, I know, this is in a sense the application of a reduced formula. Naturally it all would have to be qualified carefully.

Obviously, I use 'sentiment' to refer to something you have no way of understanding. The door is so tightly shut, and so much energy is employed to keep it shut, that meaning outside or above rather crude binaries simply cannot be heard. Oh Good Heavens! One comes to understand so very quickly that one is back in the Quinnean zone! Again: A certain structure of mind which enforces itself on other - and they certainly exist - frames of mind.

The more interesting thing for me has been to take this as a symptom of dysfunction, as a modern affliction, and to seek to understand how and why this has come about. My findings have been quite interesting. Basically, it requires a revision of intellectual history. Despite self-declarations the Quinnean mind - excuse the use of the symbol but it really is required - is not some 'original mind' or Taoist mind nor the discovery of some original mode of being, nor is it a method that arises out of those schools. No, I rather believe it to be an ultramodern choice, that is to say (and I'd use you as an example) an imposition by a certain sort of person, within a certain context with no connection at all to ancient modes. It is a game of the present and it is an outcome of present trends. I begin to see it as having little in common with 'philosophy' in any genuine sense, and everything to do with the vulgarization of thought, the destruction of thought. As I have said - how many times now? A hundred? A thousand? - it is part of a movement of undermining thought, of excavating under it, or collapsing the possibility of productive philosophical thought, and the perversion of thinking away from 'genuine connection to the self'.

Also curiously: Diebert is nearly as trapped as you are. Actually it is not impossible that you could, with considerable effort, become a sort of Diebert 2, though I cannot guarantee that you'd be offered a website manager position. Diebert, like a fabulous mollusk, has accreded around him a fabulous range of idea yet, at least as I see things, lacks (if 'lack' is the right word at all) what might be referred to as some hard-to-define quintessence which ties everything together.

And is, oddly, a Baudrillardesque smile floating invisibly in the air, bodiless ... ;-)

These are of course outrageous statements! Reckless! Wild and whirling words! Yet what I mean by this is that 'many here' and many who have trapsed through here, each one with some flaming fragment, each one lit-up by some fragmentary truth, we are all products of a modern metaphysical impossibility which, in various ways, fucks us.

And that is why statements such as this:

"Christianity or being a Christian is like every radical cure; one puts it off as long as possible".

And also this:

"The point of view whose object is to show that Christianity is not a peep-hole restricting the vision to a single object, nor a way of thinking and feeling which admits only one state of mind, but on the contrary a permanent source of rejuvenation and life".

Always splats up against a Wall of Mind and can never seem to get through. (Much more productive to ruminate the origin of the 'me' and the 'I'!)

Obviously, the question: OK, and what have you to do with all of this? Is a good one. I seem to remember that Diebert has asked that question, with different inflections, many many times. 'Leave us to our Contemplations!'

But that has been and it really is the 'bloody challenge': You have to be willing to accept it, to fight through it all. I merely suggest that what one finds, and perhaps 'what one should find', undermines the predicates that, say, allow you to make your ur-foolsih Declaration, the one I commented on above.

The Rat Problem of India? No no no no no. You are not yet ready ...

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

As to good books on Christian apologetics I first want to say that I was not much impressed with 'Mere Christianity'. I have found Christopher Dawson to be more interesting - more vital if you will - philosopher of Christian religion from a believer's perspective. A Catholic theologian, he has written 'Religion and Culture', 'Christianity and the Rise of Western Culture' and 'The Historic Reality of Christian Culture'.

I would also suggest - though this is somewhat out of the range of a specific apologetics - Werner Jaeger's 'Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture' (3 volumes). Christian apologetics is really, at least in many ways, a synthesis of early Occidentalism. It is a 'way of being' and also a way that the occidental soul and person has come to be constructed. In my view, once one understands that this is so, one in fact discovers that one is, in truth, that. Thus the negation of Christianity becomes an absurd and yet destructive project of 'undermining self'.

As a little brown Hindu - a victim of so much of this - your reaction against it is comprehensible. Yet - and I marvel at this - you express yourself entirely through an Occidental shell. Don't you find that a wee bit curious? Shouldn't you, like Ghandi, take up spinning of more 'authentic' South Asian themes?

Have you considered learning to sing?

• ♬If that premise be true oh how it makes me blue,
  And disrupts my binary miiiind ...
  But as that premise certainly caaan't be true,
  My mind I shall calmly unbind,
  Yes my mind I shall calmly unbiiiind ...♬

He understood what being an "apostle" would entail but decided he was too weak to commit himself to being one, instead preferring to be a "poet".

Yet wound up as both Apostle and Martyr! (You mention Alex who seems to suffer a similar fate...poor little bugger).

That is an interesting view, but I think also superficial. It is informed by (I imagine) your (false) sense of having even the slightest idea what being an 'apostle' is, can be, or should be: This is a common arrogation one notices often round these parts. Don't you think?

But wouldn't a deeper understanding - of Kierkegaard's predicament - be that he could not define exactly what 'being a Christian' should be, or even is 'supposed' to be? And doesn't he have meaning - rather poignant meaning - for us now since we really have no idea at all what these things mean, either? What does it mean, really, to be a Christian, to be an 'apostle'?

If all the motive is there (is this the romantic engine you refer to?) but the defined goal has vanished, toward what will one be impelled and en-powered?

[jupiviv]

If that statement is true, then according to its own premise it must be dependent upon a sentiment which in some way favours the state of its being true. If the positive influence of that (or any) sentiment upon the truth of that statement is considered valid, then it follows that the negative influence of any sentiment(s) upon the same must also be considered valid. Therefore, the statement according to its own premise must be *both* true and false, and not exclusively true. Therefore, the statement contradicts itself and is wrong.

Curiously, yet predicatbly, this immediately brings to the fore what is - in my opinion of course - the area of essential error. It is a fundamental error in thinking, or a sort of misapplication of a group of choices in thinking, that becomes, for that thinker, a trap, a cage, a block. More of less this is the area I'd focus in (of course I have already) and I would endeavor to suggest that such thinking, such strict application of spurious predicates, will lead always to the same result: a philosophical box. Largely, when I employ the symbol of 'Quinn' I am referring to men, and women, who are internally ordered in a certain way.

In other words, you don't have a valid counterargument and are compensating for this by ceasing to make even the bare civilised minimum of sense.

In my present view, and this ties back to your opening post, and to a man who was shall we say forced by circumstances to exit his self-defined and self-enforced box of arrogation of perception, summed up by 'a rationalistic mind-frame lording it over Being' (a condition of youthfulness as I have said so many times), I am of the opinion that you perfectly illustrate a 'brittle' mind-frame which will - it must - call forth an event, a circumstance, a revelation, an epiphany that will allow another modus of perception and understanding to enter through the barred door. True, this has a Jungian inflection, I admit this. What can't come in through the door will seeks window; when the window is barred it will come up through the basement; when the basement door is too securely guarded it will seep in through cracks. In the most basic - really rather crude terms I suppose - what seeks to make its way in is 'God'.

Basically your point here is - "my God's wee-wee is bigger than your God's wee-wee!"

Obviously, I use 'sentiment' to refer to something you have no way of understanding.

Lol...how reductive of you! So your point is that it is impossible to hold any belief on purely rational grounds, because something we don't understand will always play a part - perhaps a necessarily more crucial part - in swivelling us towards such belief. You know, this is so vague that I actually agree with it!

Since *anything* is caused by the infinitely vast and complex web of causality itself, all our thoughts, actions and beliefs depend upon a literally infinite number of things we have no way of understanding. We can, however, understand this - if the faculty of reason is at odds with anything else that exists, it follows that there cannot be any connection between them whatsoever. If it is harmonious with all other things that exist, it cannot be inherently separate or different from them. *Therefore* there is a God, indeed, the *only* God there is, who is also *all* there is in any case. So who we BS'ing?

The more interesting thing for me has been to take this as a symptom of dysfunction, as a modern affliction, and to seek to understand how and why this has come about. My findings have been quite interesting. Basically, it requires a revision of intellectual history. Despite self-declarations the Quinnean mind - excuse the use of the symbol but it really is required - is not some 'original mind' or Taoist mind nor the discovery of some original mode of being, nor is it a method that arises out of those schools. No, I rather believe it to be an ultramodern choice, that is to say (and I'd use you as an example) an imposition by a certain sort of person, within a certain context with no connection at all to ancient modes. It is a game of the present and it is an outcome of present trends. I begin to see it as having little in common with 'philosophy' in any genuine sense, and everything to do with the vulgarization of thought, the destruction of thought. As I have said - how many times now? A hundred? A thousand? - it is part of a movement of undermining thought, of excavating under it, or collapsing the possibility of productive philosophical thought, and the perversion of thinking away from 'genuine connection to the self'.

Also curiously: Diebert is nearly as trapped as you are. Actually it is not impossible that you could, with considerable effort, become a sort of Diebert 2, though I cannot guarantee that you'd be offered a website manager position. Diebert, like a fabulous mollusk, has accreded around him a fabulous range of idea yet, at least as I see things, lacks (if 'lack' is the right word at all) what might be referred to as some hard-to-define quintessence which ties everything together.

It's always Quinn, Diebert and Rowden (and now me) with you. The gentler and perhaps even kinder and bosomier Solway is the tragical mother figure torn between love for husband and son, feebly watching the two locked in eternal struggle.

Obviously, the question: OK, and what have you to do with all of this? Is a good one. I seem to remember that Diebert has asked that question, with different inflections, many many times. 'Leave us to our Contemplations!'

But that has been and it really is the 'bloody challenge': You have to be willing to accept it, to fight through it all. I merely suggest that what one finds, and perhaps 'what one should find', undermines the predicates that, say, allow you to make your ur-foolsih Declaration, the one I commented on above.

But you *won*, Alex. You *always* win in the end, because everybody else gives up ______.

Fill the blank.

As a little brown Hindu - a victim of so much of this - your reaction against it is comprehensible. Yet - and I marvel at this - you express yourself entirely through an Occidental shell. Don't you find that a wee bit curious? Shouldn't you, like Ghandi, take up spinning of more 'authentic' South Asian themes?

Gaer rong amar boroncho khoirir theke sada athyar madhyomei mananosoibhabe niruponio. Jai hok, amar mote sahebder kotha saheber motoi bola uchit. Dokkhin jombu athyanobostubishesher moddhe emon kono bishoi mele ni amar (jodio eisob byapare amar onushondhan-udyom bolte idaning ebong bolte gele chirokali khoobi samanno) ja thik ei ontorjaladheen samprodayer moddhe alochonar upojogyo. Amar mote ei gogonochari somproday sotyer upashok, ar soty kono bhasha manena, karon sokol bhasha sotyakei mene chole.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

In other words, you don't have a valid counterargument and are compensating for this by ceasing to make even the bare civilised minimum of sense.

'Truth', 'reality', 'explanation': these are intimately connected to a sense of what is true: what is felt to be true.

'To explain', we understand, means to 'make clear', to 'render intelligible'. But wherein consists the clarity, the intelligibility? The clarity of an explanation seems to depend on the degree of satisfaction it affords.

Since *anything* is caused by the infinitely vast and complex web of causality itself, all our thoughts, actions and beliefs depend upon a literally infinite number of things we have no way of understanding. We can, however, understand this - if the faculty of reason is at odds with anything else that exists, it follows that there cannot be any connection between them whatsoever. If it is harmonious with all other things that exist, it cannot be inherently separate or different from them. *Therefore* there is a God, indeed, the *only* God there is, who is also *all* there is in any case. So who we BS'ing?

I'd have to say, in a gentle manner, that you are BSing only yourself. You see, you have come into contact with some folks, either here on GF or in other places, who have hooked you into a description-project. It is, overall, a sort of game played with LANGUAGE. But this is not an ironical game, and it is not a fun game, and it is not 'fun & games': it has a serious underbelly. It is a manifestation of a certain will to power, a way to make oneself strong and large in conversation, but none of these 'ideas' (they are pseudo-ideas really, or idea-fractions) can function in a truly philosophical way. Well, I would modify that a bit: one can internalise these notions, these verbal explanations, but as I have said, and maintain, it leads - as I see it - to dead-ends.

People tend to find this out.

Listening to you fellows for so long, and witnessing this game of shenanigans, I have come to understand that it has much to do with powerless individuals, or individuals whose power is threatened, attempting to gain power or become powerful through elaborate and sustained verbal declarations. But why is this, I asked? How and why has this come about? There IS a very interesting conversation to be had there, but it is not one that you participate in, because (as I have said 1,000 times) the lens of examination will be turned around. You will be examined.

And this leads into a very important - certainly an interesting - set of ideas:

How we view the world is an enormously complex affair. The very ideas ‘truth’, ‘reality’ and ‘explanation’ are intensely complex terms, and the terms themselves flow from moulded and remoulded viewpoints. Pilate asked ‘What is Truth?’ but a better question is what do we FEEL to be true? That will lead us into a territory of ‘metaphysical assumptions’. These are more often than not received and not conceived.

• As T.E. Hulme and others have pointed out it is almost insuperably difficult to become critically conscious of one’s own habitual assumptions; ‘doctrines felt as facts’ can only be seen as doctrines, and not facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually only with the aid of a first-rate metaphysician.
  
  Our ‘explanations’ are usually, if not always, restatements of something – event, theory, doctrine, etc. – in terms of current interests and assumptions. And clarity of an explanation seems to depend, often, on the degree of SATISFACTION it affords.

Obviously, what I began to understand is that with a relatively simple effort - of seeing - the simplicity, and in this sense the stupidity, the childishness, of this pseudo-metaphysics is easily refuted. While it cannot be said NOT to be a philosophical platform, it is one that is 'played' and 'handled' as I have said so often ... by boys.

And so, in relation to this, and I say this sincerely: An 'honest Christianity' (as in Dawson's approach) represents many many steps upward from whatever it is you are doing or what engages you. That is a curious twist, don't you think?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

"The life-giving hope of the soul is contrary to the hope of the reason".

Kierkegaard's faith.

From a secondary source, of course. Nevertheless it establishes, in my view at least, an utterly contrary and oppositional perspective about Kierkegaard's spirituality. It is from Regis Jolivet's 'Introduction to Kierkegaard', 1946.

According to this view - and it is part of an interpretive project by a Catholic writer- I'd be inclined to locate our fine Jupi's relationship outside of 'religious doubt' and more in the domain of 'demoniac doubt': the inability to believe, but also the inability to recognise sources of understanding, or perhaps resolution of understanding, through surrender to metaphysical potencies beyond the self with the small 's'.

When the term 'reason' is used, and 'reasoning', this is some part of what it means: the construction of a wall against understanding and the usurpation of a man's awareness by a limited aspect of self. It would be stupid to deride reason and reasoning from any man's approach to life and existential exploration, yet just as stupid to eliminate that aspect which can be termed, loosely, as 'surrender'. Or perhaps listening.

As Joviet indicates, both aspects of doubt arise out of 'anguish' (and as I said I feel that, neurotically, much of the hightoned philosophical jargon one has thrust at one by, say, Master Jupi, is subpowered by a form of anguish). It won't describe itself as such but I think it has links to a general mood of unsteady, self-separated anguish that is such a factor in late modernity.

It takes on airs that represent itself as confidence and self-assertion of a nearly hubristic variety (and thus pulls these sorts of nutcases out of the fabrics of the Internet universe with some predictability and amusing regularity), yet a simple scratch of the surface reveals - right quickly too - an undergirding vacuousness. A person from whom something essential appears to have been ... carved out.

What is the 'missing piece'? What is the absent quintessence? This is of course why I suggest that all the religious and spiritual stories that have to do with the seeker who is overpowered by knowledge, who is stopped in his tracks or turned around, are relevant.

[jupiviv]

In other words, you don't have a valid counterargument and are compensating for this by ceasing to make even the bare civilised minimum of sense.

'Truth', 'reality', 'explanation': these are intimately connected to a sense of what is true: what is felt to be true.

'To explain', we understand, means to 'make clear', to 'render intelligible'. But wherein consists the clarity, the intelligibility? The clarity of an explanation seems to depend on the degree of satisfaction it affords.

If that is true, then untruth, unreality and obfuscation are intimately connected to a sense of what is *felt* not to be true. I am not one of them, but there are plenty of people on this forum itself who would *feel* dissatisfied and even angry at your explanation, and who would *feel* satisfied or happy if the ideas popular in this forum are voiced or approved.

Therefore, without reiterating the entire syllogism stated above, your statement contradicts itself because it purports to be *exclusively* true when according to its own premise it should be both true *and* false (since it induces both positive and negative emotions in various people). Indeed, according to your premise any statement of any kind, which can *conceivably* induce both positive and negative feelings in sentient beings, is both true and false.

Since *anything* is caused by the infinitely vast and complex web of causality itself, all our thoughts, actions and beliefs depend upon a literally infinite number of things we have no way of understanding. We can, however, understand this - if the faculty of reason is at odds with anything else that exists, it follows that there cannot be any connection between them whatsoever. If it is harmonious with all other things that exist, it cannot be inherently separate or different from them. *Therefore* there is a God, indeed, the *only* God there is, who is also *all* there is in any case. So who we BS'ing?

I'd have to say, in a gentle manner, that you are BSing only yourself. You see, you have come into contact with some folks, either here on GF or in other places, who have hooked you into a description-project. It is, overall, a sort of game played with LANGUAGE. But this is not an ironical game, and it is not a fun game, and it is not 'fun & games': it has a serious underbelly. It is a manifestation of a certain will to power, a way to make oneself strong and large in conversation, but none of these 'ideas' (they are pseudo-ideas really, or idea-fractions) can function in a truly philosophical way. Well, I would modify that a bit: one can internalise these notions, these verbal explanations, but as I have said, and maintain, it leads - as I see it - to dead-ends.

I don't think you're in any position to psychoanalyse me or anyone else, given that you leak about three skeletons per post and wouldn't know a coherent argument if your life depended on it. Just look at how you've managed to create a scene over a non-personal argument that you find incommodious, including calling me a "little brown Hindu" (because anyone who is at least as proficient in their 3rd language as you are in your first must harbour some sort of neocolonial inferiority complex!). For that alone you should *consider* turning your spyglass upon yourself instead of your imagined e-enemies. No wonder you think feelings determine truth - you're a loony!

My opinion of the average genius forum member is no higher than that of any other philosophy-centric forum, which means there's plenty of room for criticism and improvement. But if you truly believe that your formula of polemic and smug dilettantism elutriates anything in those you presumably wish to free from their chimeras or strip of their misplaced egotism but respect for your sanity and intelligence, you should *consider* changing your method.

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

If that is true, then untruth, unreality and obfuscation are intimately connected to a sense of what is *felt* not to be true. I am not one of them, but there are plenty of people on this forum itself who would *feel* dissatisfied and even angry at your explanation, and who would *feel* satisfied or happy if the ideas popular in this forum are voiced or approved.

Therefore, without reiterating the entire syllogism stated above, your statement contradicts itself because it purports to be *exclusively* true when according to its own premise it should be both true *and* false (since it induces both positive and negative emotions in various people). Indeed, according to your premise any statement of any kind, which can *conceivably* induce both positive and negative feelings in sentient beings, is both true and false.

I think a great deal hinges on this aspect of the question. I do not think though that the word 'felt' here is quite the same as 'feeling' or 'sentiment', though I reckon that sentiment and feeling are some part of it. Put another way, I am quite uncertain that any person, at any time, ever, has 'reasoned' out an existential relationship with reality in the sense that you seem to feel possible, and by that I mean mystics and those types - including any Zen or Buddhist exponent - who have dedicated themselves to such knowing at these levels, and who articulate their awareness and share it. And I am fairly certain that within 'Occidentalism' (all the strains of knowing that inform so-called 'Christianity') such a separation would be absurd.

I'd also wager that you too, in exactly the sense that I mean, *feel* your relationship (to both reality and your ideas about it) to be true or correct. Your mistake is also to equate the feeling I refer to with emotions and emotionalism. I think a significant error is to be found precisely in this area. But even to speak of people in such a way as divided into categories is a bit absurd.

And additionally, since Kierkegaard is, for me in any case, a backdrop to this conversation, and Christian modes, my impression of his philosophical and religious position is that relationship with God, and what he means by 'faith', is a doing or an endeavour that is done with another aspect of the self, or perhaps an entirety of self would be a better way to put it. In any case, the reasoning part of man, at least according to his understanding, must give way before another way of knowing, and another mode of relationship. By saying this I am still responding to parts of your OP. I do not think any aspect of this - and thus religion in its deepest sense, or spirituality generally - can be nor is it ever coldly reasoned out in the manner that you seem to indicate. Thus, it requires other aspects of self, and other aspects of knowing, of which I assume from what you write and the limitations of your discourse that you are unaware. This problem is one oddly peculiar to GF and that is because they have inflected it with this cast. I think this happens with any forum, any school of thought. What is set in motion stays in motion ...

I don't think you're in any position to psychoanalyse me or anyone else, given that you leak about three skeletons per post and wouldn't know a coherent argument if your life depended on it. Just look at how you've managed to create a scene over a non-personal argument that you find incommodious, including calling me a "little brown Hindu" (because anyone who is at least as proficient in their 3rd language as you are in your first must harbour some sort of neocolonial inferiority complex!). For that alone you should *consider* turning your spyglass upon yourself instead of your imagined e-enemies. No wonder you think feelings determine truth - you're a loony!

My opinion of the average genius forum member is no higher than that of any other philosophy-centric forum, which means there's plenty of room for criticism and improvement. But if you truly believe that your formula of polemic and smug dilettantism elutriates anything in those you presumably wish to free from their chimeras or strip of their misplaced egotism but respect for your sanity and intelligence, you should *consider* changing your method.

Since I feel that it is quite precisely 'the soul' that we are ultimately dealing with I can say with certainty that 'psycho-logics' is apropos to any conversation. True, psychoanalysis over the Internet is a wee bit absurd, but then a good deal of what takes place over the Internet is similarly absurd.

Whether you like or don't like how I express myself is irrelevant to me. I am now and have been on-topic. Taken strictly logically, you are Hindu, you are probably rather little, and likely brown. What the heck is your problem?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

From an interesting study called 'Nabokov in America' by Robert Roper that sketches Nabokov's years in America as he wrote numerous of his American novels such as Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire and his autobiography.

This selection begins with "Reality showed itself to be ambiguous, self-undermining around the edges; it donned quotation marks and at that point became ...



I found this passage somewhat interesting and useful for toward helping structure some comments I want to make.

I am interested in contrasting this rather unspiritual yet spiritual take on 'reality' with a quote from Joviet's biography of Kierkegaard:

• "The point of view whose object is to show that Christianity is not a peep-hole restricting the vision to a single object, nor a way of thinking and feeling which admits only one state of mind, but on the contrary a permanent source of rejuvenation and life".

This is, in fact, a quite profound statement. Quite far-reaching.

Despite my acidic, polemical or even repetitive stances, I recognize a debt to GF. The debt is dual: On one hand I owe a debt to folks who established a tough and defined stance which is one, I think, created to oppose a mindless 'flowey' present; but the other aspect of the debt is to have been forced to look into and investigate just where these folks went wrong. It is in defining and demonstrating what they have eliminated and not included that, in my view, one finds the rich territory.

In essence, the posture of spirituality which is presented here predominantly - and I suppose that Jupi is an example of this - one that defines itself through a terribly harsh selectivity, a ruthless selectivity which is established in a denial of self. If one cannot define how this has come about, and why we choose to do this to ourselves, I do not think that we can nor will we progress through it and discover a fuller and more life-giving' spirituality. So, I focus once again in suggesting that a spirituality should not be a 'peep-hole' which restricts vision and understanding to a single object nor to a fixed definition (I suggest that Jupi offered this and is bound to this in the paragraph of his I quoted and challenged); nor should it be 'ways of thinking and feeling which admit only one state of mind' (I suggest that absolutism of this variety will tend to have this effect), but that it is imperative, in a man's life, that he find those springs that 'rejuvenate' life and one's relationship to it.

Interestingly, I think that this 'rejuvenation' is and should be a radical activity, insofar as the 'present' is saccharine and miresome and deathly, but one of the notable effects of the 'Quinnean' posture, which has inflected this forum and still holds it, as it were, in its grasp, is in the way that it severs itself away from its own humanness. It winds up in an obvious dead-end and cannot escape from itself. Fairly obvious, yet it cannot see this. How it dead-ends, and the bizarre ugliness of it, illustrate and bolster the critiques one makes of it.

It is hard to find the words that do not sound so terribly cliche as does 'humanness', and this is some part of the counter-definitional project that has to be taken when confronting what in 'Quinneanism', and this bizarre postmodernistic philosophical manoeuvre of which 'Quinneanism' is a symbol. My basic critique of this approach, overall, is and has been to attempt to focus on what it destroys. And this is highly relevant because there are very destructive and undermining tendencies which have become part of our present modalities and which, I think, we do not examine nor fully understand. We are carried along by them and it requires a critical effort to begin to put a brake on them.

Some powerful ideas such as 'mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe' and the interesting sense that the realm itself, and mind itself, is a 'trickster' consciousness and thus (given the Trickster metaphysic) one that brings us to awareness, but often forces us to turn against our own modalities, assumptions, habits of mind. If life and 'God' have this cast, I suggest that the 'absolutist' mind-set I am critiquing cannot really serve us. It will have to be penetrated or broken-down.

An interesting take:

• 'The Great Mind that decrees a world of doubles, riddling coincidences, and secret correspondences is, by curious coincidence, the very model of the mind that can understand it'.

I would suggest a spinning backwards toward 'our own metaphysical traditions', as well as a more literary relationship to understanding 'self', and a veering away from the nearly puritanical defects of this 'Quinnean' absolutism which, as I say, has set this forum in motion: a spirit which still lives here, is fed, and draws others to feed in it: this is required.

It is doubtful that much - or any of this - will be explored here now or ever. Jupi mentioned Alex in his useless and valueless exposition that is the OP. One is duty-bound to respond, as it were, to the challenge.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Interestingly, I think that this 'rejuvenation' is and should be a radical activity, insofar as the 'present' is saccharine and miresome and deathly, but one of the notable effects of the 'Quinnean' posture, which has inflected this forum and still holds it, as it were, in its grasp, is in the way that it severs itself away from its own humanness. It winds up in an obvious dead-end and cannot escape from itself. Fairly obvious, yet it cannot see this. How it dead-ends, and the bizarre ugliness of it, illustrate and bolster the critiques one makes of it.

Sigh, sins of the "father" and so on -- you're still shadow-boxing here. But feel free to do so, it's what you desire and until you drop it, you'll find a way to continue it here or elsewhere. And the amount of cultural analysis thrown in can still be impressive, not even disagreeable. It's only not the point.

It is hard to find the words that do not sound so terribly cliche as does 'humanness', and this is some part of the counter-definitional project that has to be taken when confronting what in 'Quinneanism', and this bizarre postmodernistic philosophical manoeuvre of which 'Quinneanism' is a symbol. My basic critique of this approach, overall, is and has been to attempt to focus on what it destroys. And this is highly relevant because there are very destructive and undermining tendencies which have become part of our present modalities and which, I think, we do not examine nor fully understand. We are carried along by them and it requires a critical effort to begin to put a brake on them.

Then again, all your efforts have revealed a cultural reactionism and even soft-fascism at times. You have nothing but some conservative revisionism. All because you are rejecting a post-humanity, a future moving beyond anything you can imagine because you're still having your hands full of the past, your own past, your own father-god. Every age struggles with this in exactly the same manner. The only answer to the birthing pangs, all the suffering involved is a personal re-focus on existence itself. It won't solve your or anyone's troubles but it certainly won't destroy or undermine anything important either (of course first it has to be realized what's really important!). Sometimes it might enable someone to let go of something -- a small elevation indeed but no universal all-compassing "cure".

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

"Of course first it has to be realized what's really important!"

__________________________________________

Then again, all your efforts have revealed a cultural reactionism and even soft-fascism at times. You have nothing but some conservative revisionism. All because you are rejecting a post-humanity, a future moving beyond anything you can imagine because you're still having your hands full of the past, your own past, your own father-god. Every age struggles with this in exactly the same manner. The only answer to the birthing pangs, all the suffering involved is a personal re-focus on existence itself. It won't solve your or anyone's troubles but it certainly won't destroy or undermine anything important either (of course first it has to be realized what's really important!). Sometimes it might enable someone to let go of something -- a small elevation indeed but no universal all-compassing "cure".

I can think of little more 'fascistic' than the GF enunciation:

• "Genius is a discussion forum that is passionately dedicated to the nature of Genius, Wisdom and Ultimate Reality and to the total annihilation of false values. It is an unconventional discussion forum suitable only for the brave hearted. It is for those who like their thoughts bloodied and dangerous."

Can you imagine this applied in cultural domains? Economic domains? Anywhere you place it, it is explosive.

I am really rather sorry to linger over these things. You'd have imagined that I'd have completed this process years ago, wouldn't you? But it is as you say (sort of): "It's what you desire and until you drop it". But it really can't be 'dropped' nor should it be dropped. The issue really is about extremism, about seriousness, about a certain madness, about obsessiveness, and I suppose you'd have to (honestly) include 'desire' in the equation too. If human life and all our struggles and endeavours are not circumscribed by desire, and if desire is not a topic and even the topic, perhaps I have got it all wrong!

'The total annihilation of false values'? How could you possibly contrive an argument against my continued focus? And you will I hope clue me in to the real 'purpose'. If you make such a statement you surely must know, and knowing, must reveal.

In my view, and in order to understand better what the Founders of this forum attempted, and why they attempted it, one is duty bound to make efforts to cover much cultural ground, and not to erroneously imagine one can jump over it. In your statement, which is in fact a Declaration and an Assertion, I think you do jump over it with a Nietzschean leap. Now, this all may be true, yet I do not in any sense exclude myself from these processes or, to use your term, the 'desire' to achieve hitherto unseen platforms.

I am also of the opinion that a great deal about us and how we think and perceive, and on many different levels, ties back to the last great war and that this is, perhaps in some ultimate sense, not merely political or ideological or economic, but metaphysical.

True, I have supposed it possible to locate 'metaphysical bedrock' (because it is ideationally necessary to understand that such 'exists') but you will please excuse me for labouring under the endeavour of describing it. There, of course, I'd refer to the what I'd previously linked to (Kierkegaard's faith.): the paradox: the struggle between daemonic solution and then what we would struggle to define as 'correct' solution. So, and for example, the Founding Threesome establish their praxis within a self-assumed 'correct' stance or predication, and naturally all 'serious men' desire to find and place themselves on such bedrock. It is inevitable that we do so.

Though it is true that people like Evola, Guenon and the so-called 'traditionalists' (and Bowden) touch on elements which very certainly have connections to fascistic philosophy (which is a real, valuable and considerable philosophical domain), I think that your suggested condemnation of it is what can be questioned. What do you propose, Diebert? Where are the limits of your defined philosophy? Or, is this just Cafe Philosophy and flaccid Dutch liberalism? All that I have attempted to 'say' is that there is a great deal of material to be taken into consideration.

Sometimes it might enable someone to let go of something -- a small elevation indeed but no universal all-compassing "cure".

Well, that is certainly fine except that you are defining an approach 180º opposed to the declaration on which this forum is founded. Interesting, n'est-ce pas?

[Pam Seeback]

Alex: "It's what you desire and until you drop it". But it really can't be 'dropped' nor should it be dropped.

You dropped your desire to crawl and walked. You dropped your desire for suckling and drank from a cup. You dropped your desire for this knowledge then that knowledge, for this person then that person. All too soon, whether you desire it or not, you will drop your body. When this happens, will you desire it again?

[Gustav Bjornstrand]

Crawling and walking - or flying - is still movement. Suckling and drinking are still nourishment or, to follow Vaishnava philosophy, the very root of desire (satisfactions of the tongue). One knowing or another knowing is still desire to know or exploration, isn't it?

But if I am reading you correctly you are making a statement: It has to do with your desire to quench desire and not to return to the body. It is a very interesting, and yet a strange, conversation and mediation for me: I have been very affected by transcendent visions and have even thought that I understood little-known things about incarnation and how we come to be here. (Moths to a flame).

But crawling and ambling and sucking my way through all this, I tend to think that we are bound by duty to inhabit our world, and our body, and we should not avoid this. And yet we almost have no choice but to desire to avoid all the trouble that comes to us through this desire.

Ideally, I suppose that I would long for (desire) a more durable vehicle, a less tragic one, a non-fleshy one given all the oozy fatality of the flesh.

According to some arcane Hindu metaphysics there are said to be '14' discrete 'worlds' of which ours are 'middle worlds' (Bhur, Bhuvah, Svaha). There are 7 'underworlds' (Patala, Mahatala, Talatala, Rasatala, Sutala, Vitala and Atala) which correspond to the demoniacal worlds. And then the 'overworlds' of Mahah, Janah, Tapah and Satyam.

Can I arrange for a more subtle body with a somewhat longer lifespan that will still allow me to cavort a little bit in and through the Magnificence of All Things?