GENIUS FORUMS

Thanks Jason for your post. You engage with the core issues I bring up, and you do it honestly. With your comments I do believe we are getting right to the core, and this is why for me this conversation is relevant and why it might be worthwhile to continue in it. I may not be able to say in this one post all that I want, but I will respond to a few of your points---or 'objections' as I think they are.

Jason wrote: "You seem to view spirituality as being at least partly a means to satisfy deep human needs. That is certainly not one of the main aims or concerns of the GF contributors that you are taking issue with. In fact, it's quite the opposite."

You are exactly right, and you are exactly right to place emphasis on this emphasis of mine. The core of all that I say and mean is in this. There are quite a number of things I would say, right off the bat. One, any spirituality or religion HAS to take the human organism into consideration. When it doesn't, it turns man into a sort of machine, and seeks to 'drive' that man along machine-lines. I have been making the effort to explain why I think this is foolish, why it reflects a mental disease, why it is a presupposition that leads to a praxis that, in the end, can only result in failure if not calamity for the human person. There is, as I have been saying, great danger at such a juncture, and therefore all this requires a great deal of thought. I brought up the I-Ching hexagram of The Well to attempt to illustrate different ways to think of this problem: placing man at the center of an organic relationship to the world and to the Totality.

"Most of their path is very "ascetic" in a sense, it might even be compared to self-mortification, with the sin being irrationality and the punishment being a strict adherence to reason. They readily admit that their path consists of much pain and suffering - self-inflicted. It's seen as a byproduct of the method by which purification is attained. It has nothing to do with attempting to placate and satisfy human needs."

This asceticism', as I have been trying to say, is a kind of desperate jumping of the gun. The modern individual comes face to face with deep existential problems that he cannot solve, or whose time has not come to solve, and he takes desperate action without sufficient consultation and consideration. 'Asceticism' can be debated---for utility and for function, and often 'asceticism' is a cover for a strange eroticism turned inward, or perverted. It is possible that the anti-sensualism of the QRS (expressed in a rather extreme anti-femininity) pushes a great deal of 'human stuff' underground, but this 'stuff' does not go away. It becomes distorted, in the sense of psychologically distorted.

The issue of 'rationality', as I have also been trying to say, is part of this diseased praxis. The rational part of a human being is just one part of that person. We are composed of a group of different 'traits', including feeling (the one most pushed out of the picture here, so the one I especially mention). It is an utterly arbitrary choice on the part of Q-R-S to focus exclusively on 'rationality' in such a way that it 'kills' or denies other parts of the human individual. I do not believe there is any sage or mystic who has ever recommended such a thing. But, in no sense does this mean, therefore, that a person should give themselves over to the world in the strict sensual sense, or lose themselves in the sensual (or emotional) world.

One could describe a path or spirituality or religion, and a strategy of self-realization, that took the 'whole person' into consideration, that did not, machine-like, have to 'chop' anything off necessarily. One should, I suggest, be leery of people who are inflicting suffering on themselves and who hold it up as a value to be pursued. I suggest this might cover over a pathology that needs to be looked into, examined more closely.

The issue is not to 'placate' or 'satisfy' human needs, in the exact way you (and they) suggest, but not to cut oneself off from what, in essence, makes for a complete individual who can enter into a more complete relationship with Life, the Totality, etc. The path you describe seems to be a strange auto-erotic suicide. One MUST see these things for what they are and not paint them with a romantic brush. There is both a weird romanticism one sees here and a strange desire to separate oneself 'from reality'.

"The Principle, reason, logic, takes absolute unwavering precedence over any satisfaction of the human - the human's needs and desires are a problem, and the human passes through this shredder of reason and gets various parts lopped off, leaving only the core supposedly perfected being on the other end.

"I'm no stranger to this type of mindset. I've lived it. I've considered it to be somewhat masochistic in a way, and likewise I've considered it to be somewhat sadistic when attempts are made to spread the mindset. The Principle takes center stage, and the human is hostage to it. Truth, whatever that is thought to be, supersedes all, even if bowing to its principles causes major suffering and dissatisfaction verging on complete breakdown."

We have all 'lived it' in one degree or another, Jason. More, we are all living it. These choices we are making are desperate choices, arbitrary choices, in the face of a crushing modernity. The point is not that some sort of 'radical' activity isn't required---it may indeed be---the point is to examine these specific choices and to ask if they really conduce to the ends we want them to. You know the expression of course: man proposes, God disposes. I don't mean that theologically necessarily. I mean that so many times, in so many junctures in history, people have come up with religious and spiritual praxis and have attempted to live them. Many of them have ended up on the rocks and have been recognized as distortions. Again, the question is that of real 'living water' as it is expressed in the hexagram The Well. The implication is that if one doesn't establish The Well correctly, if one does not build it correctly, or if one does not access the 'Water' for any number of different reasons, one's project fails.

"The effect on the human organism is ultimately not important - it's all about consistently conforming to The Principle. You seem to approach this almost from the opposite direction - always concerned with the outcome, the fate, the satisfaction of the human. The human comes a far second to The Principle.

"I see a lot of similarities to science in their method. The answers that science gives are not at all designed to be comforting, satisfying or even significantly meaningful to humans and their everyday life. The answers are simply meant to be accurate, correct, true - stuff if it they upset humans or make some of their lives less satisfying. "

Their method, it seems to me, and quite oddly, is a sort of 'science'. But science, which is purely conceptual, cannot ever unite all those facts. You can know a billion 'facts' but have no real appreciation of a Totality, nor any fundamental relationship to that Totality. The idea of a mystical relationship---as for example in yoga, Taoism, etc.---is that the total person enters into or discovers a complete relationship with the cosmos surrounding him. 'Science' does not have this as its goal. It can name all the facts it wants but only in a human person could knowledge of 'facts' ever be united with the consciousness of that individual to allow a 'cosmic relationship'.

I suggest that this rationalism of the QRS (and the Forth Genius) is the beginning stages of turning a person into a sort of Machine. That is why I have been stressing this. It is a response to the pressures of modernity, and this process is occurring in many other areas as well. We are falling more and more away from a sense of organic unity with the Totality (described as God, ethics, universalism, or even humanistic doctrines) and what takes the foreground is a vision of man as Machine. I only ask that yo (and anyone else reading) take this into consideration, hold it in the mind as it were, as we continue in this conversation. (While the 'geniuses', as is usual, do all they can to keep it from happening).

"You don't need to be "literate" when The Principle is so simple and it's the only thing you need to know to accomplish your goal."

Interesting. Then I suppose you could take a feral child---a person who has had no cultural experience, who is 'blank' and a pre human---and you could mold that person into your ubersage? The actual fact, Jason, is that spirituality, religion and mysticism arise ONLY from a cultured individual, a specially prepared individual. Even, or perhaps especially, shamans are people who are uniquely gifted within a more primitive setting and can 'handle' language, vision, conceptualization, all these things, in a unique way. They represent advancement of the human type.

Neither can you take the average man off the street and ask him to enter into any of this stuff. He simply cannot. Therefore, all this 'stuff' has to do with advanced conception on the part of advanced persons. Those advanced persons need to take themselves (more) seriously and actually go farther into what is enabling them to see what they do now. It has to be taken farther.

There is much more to say about all this. It takes time.

PS: I read Rowden's spoof and it was a little funny. But in no sense at all does it illustrate the existential problem that rises up in front of all of us, with the capacity to destroy the individual.

Ah, The Fall --- that notion that has haunted humanity since it woke to itself and its suffering: suffering that is seen as an error, as punishment, and falling that implies a non-suffering state from which we originally came; falling that implies an originally innocent state to which we might have hope of returning.

It never existed, you know - this pre-fallen state, except in the most concrete circumstances of the womb.

What religion, what philosophy has not made it its business to either eradicate or rationalize the presence of suffering. Lo, if we could just 'get back' to our non-distinguished state, eradicate the fact of our sentiency, avoid the concrete circumstances (and suffering) of being separated as individual, and rationalize away that very individuality -- in other words, escape the facts of our own condition; do anything to avoid the private rigors that belong to any sentient being: especially one that appears to grow in self-consciousness, with a parallel growth in its suffering. Ancient eastern philosophy addressed the question by either eradicating such an entity as self altogether; or subsuming that self into collective notions of Atman; or crush our private circumstances with assertions of error/delusion that we should feel ourselves as any private circumstance at all. And while we're at it - this suffering as an individual - we can not only deny that we exist, we can deny that existence itself is a matter of anything; it's just pure nothing, pure emptiness.

Western thinkers like Hegel performed this subsuming trick as well by dissolving all particular into the universal; Plato sucked up the Individual into the State collective, and now, in our present age, we have the science/philosophy of determinism, which also dissolves any notion of self into pure mechanism; denies any such for-itself function as choice, or human agency; returns us to that sense of innocence before we woke to our concrete condition of being able to think at all. We're in a matrix; we're entirely all effect and no cause; take a drug, a pharmaceutical, see a shrink - anything but live what we are (for what we are as sentient beings includes what we suffer, what we feel. Kill the feeling! Escape the self as it appears in the world! Anything, anything but this!) Some where inbetween all this comes a Nietzsche thinker, too, who rather than seeing suffering as error, instead shall boast of the rigors of suffering; declare for its value as a learning tool, a mark of advancement; the edge of the sword against which we shape ourselves altogether.

It is no mystery that some of our oldest thoughts - at the dawn of this coming to consciousness of ourselves, our condition - are the strongest and most insistent that what you really undergo is illusion; that you are not separate from anything; that you are not really even there. And early religions that insist we've done something wrong by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge/awareness and out of paradise we are forever cast. All the same; all the same.

There is no end to these pathologies that were birthed in the beginning of human consciousness and have been nursed all the way to the 21st century in the flavor of some of our 'best' science and rationality. To this moment, suffering still strikes us as an error of understanding; a thing for which we should be ashamed; a thing for which we might boast, too. A thing that defines us negatively and defines us positively, but defines us none the less. All thought and action has been bent to the task of its address.

I should say . . . cowardly. Every bit of it. And I should like to think that any real meaning to an ubermensch will be a conscious life form that stops trying to escape the truth, the rigors of its own existence.

I have yet to meet the real philosophers in this world; the real wisdom and the real truth of the human life and the circumstances of its sentiency. It lives, it dies, to be sure. But it exists. Where is the philosopher whose courage can extend to a truthful self-awareness, and whose suffering over which they do not obsess - for it's the obsession that has kept them nailed to the self-same thing. Where is that truly courageous philosopher whose rationality does not bend in cowardice - transparently - back into the metaphorical womb; the matrix, the drug, the "innocence." What form, what somersaults, what endless tricks the human mind has performed to turn its back on itself and the rigors of self-consciousness - the rigors of consciousness altogether!

I want to sleep! I want a dream! I want a buzz; a hallucination; a logistical matrix; an escape; a 'mystery'; an excuse, forgiveness; a dissolution into the All! Anything - anything, but this! Ah, this cowering human being, still running from itself!

Pye wrote: "It never existed, you know - this pre-fallen state, except in the most concrete circumstances of the womb."

Viewed from an anthropological, archaeological, and a Darwinian platform, no, clearly not. And it is important to know, to internalize, there was never any physical Garden. It's ascending animal not fallen angel.

Still though, in a realm so hard to define: consciousness, dream, 'racial memory', myth, there are always stories of a coming up from some lower level, or a going down from a higher level.

I think one needs to define why it is that man is inclined to have revealed to him, to invent, to develop or to discover explanatory mythologies that explain the Totality and his place in it. It has been done by all men at all times and this inclination to 'mysticism' (coming up with a unified complete theory) will never just stop. For that reason, it is perhaps 'wise' to stop and examine, not the absolute concrete facts, but the content of the metaphor.

"And early religions that insist we've done something wrong by eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge/awareness and out of paradise we are forever cast. All the same; all the same."

Every culture's 'genius' seems to be to take a stab at the grandest existential questions, but always to do that from the platform of a complete, whole and (forgive the word) 'empowered' individual. I am thinking of the early 'vedists'. Just some people, unusually intelligent, with a certain level of material development, who set themselves to the task of 'examining reality'. Really, they were looking for a vision of the Whole Picture, the Totality. They looked at the platform, the orb of heaven circumferencing the earth. The powers and potencies that moved in that realm: wind, fire, rain, night, the sun, the dawn, the storm. They saw the same reality (form) expressed in their own dream-reality, the same 'facts' repeated. But they went further, much further. They used the whole human organism as a refined instrument of discovery. There were no 'sense-extensions' as we know them now. What they used was the totality of their selves.

Is what they discovered, that is to say, their mystical revelation that explains the human condition within a specific sphere ('loka')(among many possible or 'sensed' lokas), conditioned in a specific way, for specific reasons, subject to intricate and subtle laws---was all of that just 'illusion'? One could look at all of the great models of a Totality from numerous civilizations and epochs, and then look at our own.

While we have, it seems, the true line of sight on the absolutely real (our science, we believe, could never deceive us), what we seem to absolutely lack is a way to express and explain that Totality. And we have no relatedness with what we see and express. In short, we have no mysticism in this particular way, just a sea of facts, and facts that mean next-to-nothing to the man on the street. It is a splendorous if terrible world and cosmos he looks out on, but there is no way for him to sustain the gaze: there is nothing that nourishes him there. Just the opposite in fact: what he sees sucks the little bit of life he has out of him. What he gazes on is too vast, too consuming.

So, how about this: like it or not, now, we are 'cast out' in a whole new way. It seems almost inevitable that we will HAVE TO rediscover a path to a complete relationship to the Totality.

I think if you two guys were to puff yourselves out any more, you'd explode. But then, that's what easily happens to people when they completely lose touch with the amazing simplicity of their true nature.

Plato once asked Diogenes, "Where is the whole person who can teach us the great secrets of life?"

Diogenes began tapping the ground with his finger.

Plato was appalled. "By the gods, Diogenes, what a windbag you are!", he said and walked off.

-

David wrote: "I think if you two guys were to puff yourselves out any more, you'd explode. But then, that's what easily happens to people when they completely lose touch with the amazing simplicity of their true nature."

Well, perhaps. Both Jason and Pye made excellent contributions in my opinion. I was in Nirvana also when I read them, so I reacted like you, naturally. We can't ask too much too quick, David. Patience!

Why the defensiveness, dejavu? I've not known you to deny your self; do with it what you will.

I don't really know what Pye said, as I'm at work after an alcohol lunch, and don't wish to spend the time doing the required interpretive steps, but I'd agree 100% with the idea that the drive for enlightenment is a result of a lack of "courage". It is a desire to be rid of emotional effects, rather than to encompass both emotionalism and rationality as part of human life.

Admittedly in saying that, I hate to acknowledge that this is what Alex has been saying forever, as he is way too smug.

Rider: I was listening to someone on the radio last night who was saying much the same thing - that rationality can often be merely a retreat/recluse from having to face up to forming a workable partnership with emotions, and it more often leads to irrational outcomes than not.

History certainly shows us this is the case. Nietzsche went mad, Weindogboy suicided, Jesus died young (if he existed), the original Buddha sat under a fucking tree for years (if he existed), Kierkegaard couldn't work out if he was 100% religious or 100% anti-religious, all the Indian based gurus ended up as suckholes for sex and materialism. As regards the Chinese enlightened, well we really don't know enough about them, except most were killed off before their time (or became politicians). The Jap Buddhists were more or less just soldiers.

EDIT: And this is just the tip of the iceberg, ask yourself how many unknowns suffered similar fates.

Still, we wouldn't be here if the QRS didn't have something special. Maybe there are like Christian martyrs that we use to placate our intellectual egos with. Perhaps we are the Roman crowd cheering on the lions to seek revenge as a result of our own lack of courage.

Pye wrote:Ah, The Fall --- that notion that has haunted humanity since it woke to itself and its suffering: suffering that is seen as an error, as punishment, and falling that implies a non-suffering state from which we originally came; falling that implies an originally innocent state to which we might have hope of returning.

It never existed, you know - this pre-fallen state, except in the most concrete circumstances of the womb.

I have enjoyed many of your thoughts over the past few years, insightful and penetrating for the most part. You seem to me as honest and almost fearless, two qualities I admire deeply.

There is a vast difference between innocence and holiness.

Innocence has no choice.

Beingof1 wrote:There is a vast difference between innocence and holiness.

Innocence has no choice.

Ooooooh so pithy! You must be very proud!

Jason wrote:

Beingof1 wrote:There is a vast difference between innocence and holiness.

Innocence has no choice.

Ooooooh so pithy! You must be very proud!

Of being pithy?

Are you still trying to push my buttons?

How are you sir?

Beingof1 wrote:Are you still trying to push my buttons?

Those were buttons!!!?????

But you told me they were......and I thought you were........fuuuuuccccckkkkk!!!!! ;)

Funny, ain't it? I don't agree with Jamesh about 'enlightenment'.

It takes time to talk about, and there is no one there to listen, apparently. The Fourth Genius is off in a huff, brooding (thinking up one-line retorts that really sting.)

Enlightenment must be similar to the Catholic idea of 'sanctity' or saintliness. It results from mystic union. But you can only have mystic union if you genuinely connect with the Whole. The operative word is genuinely. We have utterly fallen from a unified conception of the Whole. We have broken off from whatever conceptual Whole used to exist and we have become little machine-like parts existing unto ourselves. A little machine dedicated to its separate, individual will, but set in motion by forces superior to itself that seem to embody and express not human will, but machine-will. A real human will would be an integrated, unified, sane and recognizable will, with personality, with thoughts and emotions, with a body. Again, you have to name what it is not. It is not psychosis. It is not disassociation. It is not absurd 'rationalistic' constructs that take shape independently of the 'soul' and the body and go careening off on strange voyages of absurd doing/thinking. It is not a mechanical latching onto the idea of woman and repeating it machine-like:

Whir---kachunk!----whir---kachunk! (*beep-beep!*) whir---kachunk!

The local sages are all into the idea of causation. I think we can think in causal terms when we think about the disintegrating personality of modernity. Isn't that everyone of us, in some way? Huge forces we cannot see or even name have caused this. But if you can't see them and name them, how could you ever 'master' them?

Whir---kachunk!----whir---kachunk! (*beep-beep!*) whir---kachunk!

Pye's use of the word "cowardice" in relation to the goal of ridding the mind of its mirages is pejorative and self-serving.

It's understandable in one way, because she doesn't really understand what it means to live without mirages, nor does she understand (or want to understand) the mirage-like nature of her own self. I get the impression with Pye that she is fighting a long-standing battle that has little to do with us here on Genius Forum, but has something to do with others in the past trying to swamp her individuality. Her resulting sensitivities from that battle cause her to misunderstand what spirituality, as expressed on this forum and by wise men throughout the ages, is all about.

Is it cowardly or courageous to want to go beyond all mirages? This is like asking whether it is cowardly or courageous to want to leave behind insanity and become sane. The insane will give you one answer, and the sane another.

The same applies to the emotions - which, in the end, are expressions of insanity triggered by mirages. Is it cowardly to want to put an end to these bouts of insanity and the uncontrollable damage they cause (to others, as well as oneself)? Or is courageous?

Again, those who are addicted to these bouts of insanity will give you one answer, while those who aren't will give you another.

-

Isn't it true that the I inside of a male or female is neither male or female?

dejavu wrote:"Suffering as an error of understanding."

As Pye maintains, a notion that amounts to nothing short of cowardice. One may as well say death is the result of a poor imagination.

Suffering is not an "error" of understanding, it is the lack of understanding. The fact is that suffering, like birth and death, is simply a logical category, like the "I". All these categories are distinct from each other, so an individual never suffers, is born, or dies. An individual just remains as that - an individual. So it's nonsensical to say that suffering, birth and death are part of ourselves, because our selves are only our selves, and nothing else. And there can only be only one "I", in the sense that there can be only one number "1". No matter how many things we define as "1", there will still be a single number "1". It is the same with the Atman, or the Buddha nature, or the state of man before the fall.

The attempt to escape suffering is in fact the first step to having any understanding whatsoever. It is not "cowardly". Cowardliness would be to know that there is an escape from suffering, yet not try to escape it. In your and Pye's case, you don't even wish to acknowledge that there is an escape from suffering. So you are neither cowardly nor courageous. You are simply nothing.

dejavu wrote:That's not how Pye spoke of cowardice David. My twist was only to point out (as though Pye didn't know) that the philosophical beast is an escape artist by nature.

Everyone is an escape artist by nature, as dictated by the choices they make. So Pye isn't really saying anything here. Next she'll be saying that philosophers breathe in air and eat food, and I'll thank her for the insight.

So the real question is, what should we be escaping from? I happen to think that things like ignorance, irrationality, insanity, unnecessary suffering, etc, are worth escaping from. Hell, in other words.

But I'm aware that not many people share this view.

"Suffering as an error of understanding."

As Pye maintains, a notion that amounts to nothing short of cowardice. One may as well say death is the result of a poor imagination.

And so it is, at root.

Putting profundity to one side, one would have to question whether Pye has experienced any great suffering in her life, if it really is her view that it is a desirable thing to maintain. Her views sound very romantic to me, like a poet eulogizing from the comfort of an armchair.

In any case, I don't believe it is necessary to indulge in suffering just for the sake of it. Nor do I believe in the egotistical pleasures involved in being a martyr in one's own mind. That's pure self-indulgence, nothing more. Granted, suffering is often a product of growth ("growing pains") and can be educational, as well as character-building. But to glory in suffering itself, simply because of a romantic illusion .... that seems like insanity to me.

There is an awful lot of suffering in the world that is self-inflicted, undignified and completely unnecessary. It is produced by people who have no real idea what they are doing, chasing irrational dreams that promise so much and deliver so little, and who never learn anything in the process. They are like those poor moths who keep getting burnt by a flame, only to keep returning and diving back into it again. A form of madness generated by ignorance, a lack of memory, and poor understanding.

Is it true that philosophers have always pulled the cart of the people? That in order to play their finer points they perpetuated the superstitions common to the populace that produced them?

All insane people contribute to the madness in the world, whether they be philosophers or not.

In laying claim to the spiritual, one should be obliged to put it into action.

Can't argue with that.

-

dejavu wrote:Suffering is what it is

So what is your definition of suffering?

An individual remains an individual it is true, but you cannot cancel its constituents through categorization.

I think I showed that birth, death and suffering are not the constituents of an individual. They are simply different entities. An individual is causally related to all of those things, but he is not constituted of any of those things.

We are born, we die, that's all that's meant when we say birth and death are a part of us.

The things that we call the "I" change, not the "I" itself. In fact, even those things don't die, or are born. A 30 year old man in 1990 is as eternal as A=A, even if that man later grows older and dies. Birth and death are not intrinsic to anything. They are simply categories like everything else.

Denial of suffering is what is cowardly, eg. your equating it to a lack of understanding.

I'm not denying suffering at all. I understand very well what suffering is, whereas you don't.

DavidQuinn wrote:Putting profundity to one side, one would have to question whether Pye has experienced any great suffering in her life, if it really is her view that it is a desirable thing to maintain. Her views sound very romantic to me, like a poet eulogizing from the comfort of an armchair.

I think that by "suffering" she means the things that Buddhism and other philosophies treat as suffering, like emotions.

Jamesh: I don't really know what Pye said, as I'm at work after an alcohol lunch, and don't wish to spend the time doing the required interpretive steps, but I'd agree 100% with the idea that the drive for enlightenment is a result of a lack of "courage".

perhaps you've read by now. It is the denial of selves I've marked as cowardly.

David: I get the impression with Pye that she is fighting a long-standing battle that has little to do with us here on Genius Forum, but has something to do with others in the past trying to swamp her individuality.

Now, if you were to recast this as disagreement with the house philosophy that posits no such entity as the self, then we can recover you from your fancies. That's the only sense it has "little to do with Genius Forum."

David: one would have to question whether Pye has experienced any great suffering in her life, if it really is her view that it is a desirable thing to maintain. Her views sound very romantic to me, like a poet eulogizing from the comfort of an armchair.

I more or less described that view as Nietzsche's. My point is the obsessive attachment to suffering qua suffering in the first place as the singular project to life - boasting, avoiding, or otherwise.

jupiviv: The attempt to escape suffering is in fact the first step to having any understanding whatsoever. It is not "cowardly".
dejavu: If you're trying to imply Pye or I have said anything to that effect, good luck!

yes, too many blips in reading comprehension for me to chase down right now. Some telling projections, though . . . .

dejavu wrote:

dejavu: "Suffering as an error of understanding."

As Pye maintains, a notion that amounts to nothing short of cowardice. One may as well say death is the result of a poor imagination.

david: And so it is, at root.

jupiviv did better to say it was a lack of understanding ie. ignorance! He got closer, but you're both bamboozled by buddhism. It's either desire or ignorance responsible for suffering with you people. jupiviv even had the nerve to bring the law of identity into the bargain! :D You're a champion of causality David, are we to distinguish a cause from its effect when not discussing the nature of the universe itself? I say yes, and so say no to the cowardice of pointing to the root, particularly where it cannot be "helped". It's a lot like the disgusting stupidity of a Christian saying Haiti has suffered for its sins through the recent quake.

That's definitely not what I am saying. Don't be so quick to judge all the time. Try and be a little more open.

Yes, I grant you that some forms of suffering can't be helped, such as physical accidents. But the kind of suffering that can be addressed and eliminated through philosophical wisdom is the emotional and psychological kind, which is not only very common in the world, but the kind of suffering which cuts deepest. Far deeper than physical pain.

Do I really have to expand on this, or can I just assume that you already know what I'm referring to?

A man goes swimming in the ocean. A large white pointer nearby senses him and relieves him of his legs for its lunch.

A terrible error of understanding that!

Perhaps it was an accident and not the swimmer's fault. Or perhaps the swimmer was foolish and put himself at risk by swimming out so far. Or perhaps he had an underlying death wish and subconsciously wanted misfortune to befall him. It is impossible to say without more detail. Your use of a vague example to formulate an objection doesn't really help.

And then there is the subsequent emotional torture involved in losing your legs, which can easily extend into the rest of your life. People often fall into depression after such events, or become anxious and violent. Perhaps he will take out his emotional suffering on other people, causing them to suffer as well. If only he had taken the time beforehand to eliminate his delusions, break free of his mirage-self and become conscious of his true nature. Then none of the emotional torture would have happened, and perhaps not even the accident itself.

It's a sad fact about the human race, but true: Most people would prefer to stumble blindly into hell than to live consciously and take the steps to avoid it. For them, the very thought of living consciously is equivalent to hell. And then when they have stumbled into hell, and are suffering immensely, it is far too late for them to do anything about it.

-

Pye wrote:

David: I get the impression with Pye that she is fighting a long-standing battle that has little to do with us here on Genius Forum, but has something to do with others in the past trying to swamp her individuality.

Now, if you were to recast this as disagreement with the house philosophy that posits no such entity as the self, then we can recover you from your fancies. That's the only sense it has "little to do with Genius Forum."

The trouble is, your objections are always misplaced because of a lack of understanding of the "house philosophy". This may surprise you, but I would actually agree with most of what you say concerning individuality (an entirely different issue), if it weren't for that lack of understanding.

In other words, the way you consistently equate the understanding of truth, such as the truth that the self is an illusion, with a lack of individuality is too misguided for me to ignore.

My point is the obsessive attachment to suffering qua suffering in the first place as the singular project to life - boasting, avoiding, or otherwise.

I can't argue with that. If it was one's goal in life simply to avoid suffering, then seeking to become fully conscious of truth is definitely not a good way to go about it. I would have thought that seeking a cushy job, finding a placid spouse, acquiring a big-screen TV, having access to an assortment of sedatives, and basically abandoning all ambition in life would be the better option.

I don't think anyone here has the elimination of suffering as his primary goal. It's certainly not mine. Once again, your objections are misplaced.

-

Pye wrote:yes, too many blips in reading comprehension for me to chase down right now. Some telling projections, though . . . .

Well, frankly, I can't make much sense of anything that most of the people here write. So I have to project some of my own understanding onto them. The argument that you seem to be making here reminds me of the Chewbacca defense:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Q_ZKOcwbE

David Quinn wrote:The trouble is, your objections are always misplaced because of a lack of understanding of the "house philosophy". This may surprise you, but I would actually agree with most of what you say concerning individuality (an entirely different issue), if it weren't for that lack of understanding.

Yes, this is the problem. The kind of individuality that Pye seems to be talking about is the individuality of, say, a rock, for being an individual rock. It's not really individuality at all, since there is no consciousness. All unconsciousness is suffering, and so consciousness eradicates suffering by default. I also don't understand what she means by accepting our suffering and the "facts of our condition", as that would be the exact opposite of individuality. In sum, dejavu and Pye are saying many different and contradictory things at the same time. I don't think they themselves know what they are talking about. They're lost in the henids.

Yep, totally agree. But you must admit, they are henids which are expressed most passionately.

-

David Quinn wrote:Yep, totally agree. But you must admit, they are henids which are expressed most passionately.

Woman is sentimental, and knows emotion but not mental excitement. - Otto Weininger.