GENIUS FORUMS

Is this, in the end, what my essential criticism of the QRStian ideas is?

Can it be said you think 'something's wrong?'

Is where you are at: 'something's wrong'.

What happens for living inside of 'something's wrong'.

What does 'something's wrong' get.

On the question 'who am I?
'something's wrong'

I stand in 'something's wrong' as a stand, that's who I am.

'something's wrong' works out for me because 'I know'.

In all fairness to discourse (if that is something you, dare I say 'value', but then I realize: How could he?) you should really work within the questions posed in my last post to you. The present line, though it may be all you are capable of, is utterly 'meta'. "You notice a problem therefor you are that problem". The questions I asked and the comments I made in relation to those questions were good ones, I thought.

Can we establish the ontology of 'something's wrong'?

Most of the ordinary, everyday conversations are about 'something's wrong'.
occasionaly 'somethings right'.

something's wrong about the weather.
the monday's experts stand around the watercooler and talk about 'something's wrong' with the team, even if the team won, there's something needing fixing.

Does human being come at it from 'something's wrong' and 'needs fixing'?

On that other question.
His complaint is the Europeans smashed the Sioux.
Before the Euoropeans smashed the Sioux,
the Sioux were having a whack at the Apache, the Iroquois, the Navaho.
the condition 'all in brawl' is ever so.
History is a story about who won and who lost.
The losers complain.

I've sat here for 10 minutes visualizing and rehearsing every line of discussion that might proceed from this point, and they are all futile. That is the ultimate advantage of your position: nothing can assail it. You can literally take on the whole world. In that sense I can understand the wisdom of sticking with "Pass the potatoes, please". ;-)

Give me the potatoes, or else.

Alex Jacob wrote:-but it seems to me that the possibility of anything at all ('manifestation') is the 'force' I am alluding to. My understanding is that, even in physics, no one is able to speak about the 'force' or power in anything or all things or as the origin of things.

Lo and behold, you are describing this Force's inherent properties; it's 'absoluteness.'

Now, what will likely occur here next in the QRStian game, is to pick apart phrasing; dissect language; and devise argumentation on the basis of minuscia. That is after all the chosen field of the QRStians.

Ahem, it is you whom continually misinterprets terms, then say they have no meaning to you, then go on using them in describing what we're wrong about (as if you knew what they meant all along).. and curiously neither Dan nor David say that we're using them wrong in our attempts to correct you.

Seriously, if you think the "QRS way" is as childish and ridiculous as you imply, what on earth makes you think you can do anything to help us?

As to an 'Edifice', which is my term thrown back at me, while it may be a subjective description, it is an attempt to answer a question about how divinity is grasped by yours truly. Such a view has advantages and I suppose disadvantages. It allows for a general way of understanding all tendency toward over-arching religious or metaphysical description, and a way to understand how the human mind cobbles together endless limited descriptions of something intuited. The disadvantage is perhaps in its diffuseness. What exactly does it mean to say that a divine Brahmanic 'force' is the origin of all things and pervades all things?

Again, your are describing what you perceive is the inherent properties of this 'force.'

Riddle me this, does this Brahmanic 'force' have anything to do with me, or any of us who refuses to grant anything any ultimate inherent properties? Or does its existence permeate throughout all of phenomena, whether we acknowledge it or not? If it does, then how does it fit into your paradigm that ALL truth is subjective?

...Are you 'misunderstanding' this stuff on purpose?

To be too limited of vision is the difference that destroys the possibility of a 'sane' theology.

Agreed, especially if you limit words like "Truth" to refer only to purely subjective phenomena, ultimately wiping out all validity of any "point" anyone could possibly make. It is saying your truth is yours, and mine is mine. Neither of us are right or wrong, in the end.

Thus reducing your presence here as nothing more than an indulgence, a playground for you to explore your skills and ideals.

Give me the potatoes, or else.

I prefer pontiacs and desirees were dished up.
shit.

I've sat here for 10 minutes visualizing and rehearsing every line of discussion that might proceed from this point, and they are all futile. That is the ultimate advantage of your position: nothing can assail it. You can literally take on the whole world. In that sense I can understand the wisdom of sticking with "Pass the potatoes, please". ;-)

If there's something wrong that needs fixing.
what's at stake?

Bluerap wrote: Riddle me this, does this Brahmanic 'force' have anything to do with me, or any of us who refuse to grant anything any ultimate inherent properties? Or does its existence permeate throughout all of phenomena, whether we acknowledge it or not? If it does, then how does it fit into your paradigm that ALL truth is subjective?

I think I understand where you are coming from and where you wish to go with this. But to me, what is most relevant here is how your mind functions within your select group of ideas about an 'Absolute'. You are asking me to enter into your line of reasoning, which may also be your own selection of facts or ideas, which is engagement in what appears to be an abstract game.

The lines of my ideas (and the tradition I seem to represent in these conversations) function in relation to another group of possibilities and resists an 'abstract game', choosing to remain focussed within a far more tangible group of facts or possibilities. There are numbers of reasons why I personally make that choice and not the least of them is a result of seeing what some people---y'all in a general sense---DO with your reasoning system and within it. Can you make that separation? Because I suppose that people could abstract themselves from reality (our tangible existence) and choose to play mental games within unending disembodied speculations. Perhaps you would wind up in the kind of non-zone as Dennis? You would have some absolutist mental formula to apply in any and all circumstance and might carry it out in such a way that all things, including yourself, are rendered unreal and irrelevant. And it would all make perfect sense!

I don't think this is a question of 'deliberate misunderstanding' of the doctrines on my part but more a clear insight into a form of neurosis. In my view: It is a mind fuck.

A theological system may indeed have an abstract, upper portion, and many do, but it must also have a developed lower portion: the part that connects with tangible existence, in the here and now. I think our thinking systems also have to have the ways and means to deal on and to decide real issues in real time. In short, even if it is possible through some form of analysis to render *everything* unreal, empty and meaningless, I think our creative act has to be to find ways to make it real and also meaningful. Is this delusion in your book?

I don't know, maybe at some point I will become convinced of the opposite? I have made other reversals in the way I thought about things. But as it is going, through 'your' influence, I am striving very hard in another direction! But let us state the facts: you are soon going to achieve 'Enlightenment' and you are going to have a unmediated view of Reality. I will be stuck down here like a chump amid all my cracked and sagging subjectivities! You have many very good reasons to claim the advantage! ;-) If you have doubts, recur to David. He'll get you straightened out.

Some people keep a bong by their bed stand...

Agreed, especially if you limit words like "Truth" to refer only to purely subjective phenomena, ultimately wiping out all validity of any "point" anyone could possibly make. It is saying your truth is yours, and mine is mine. Neither of us are right or wrong, in the end.

I don't think I use the word truth with a capital 't'. It is far too laden. Anyway, that is David's domain. Who else hangs out there? The Hare Krishnas. Many fundamentalists. When it comes to moral and ethical questions, or political and social questions, it is just too dangerous a doctrine.

But again I do see how you use these ideas. So, while it is possible to mentally and philosophically speculate about Absolute Reality or Absolute Truth, in reality we seem to be working out a group of far more local ideas about right and wrong, desirable and undesirable. In my case, the more that I hang out in this space with people who seem so desperately addicted to absolutist thinking, the more that I feel we need to resolve to hang out much closer to the ground. I know that doesn't satisfy you and I know there are many, many problems associated with that focus, but I see no alternative. But if you can provide one I'm all ears.

When the rain falls do you say 'why me?'.

This is probably a really bad idea, but I can't resist the urge to post...

Here are just a few comments on the importance of communicating with shared definitions. The word "absolute" seems to have been used on this forum in at least four senses:

1. universal [as of truth]: true in all possible worlds; this type of truth is also known as a "logical truth"
2. non-relational and/or inherent: whole, a thing-in-itself (i.e. not existing in relationship to anything else, as of the Totality) and/or basically grounded and objectively real
3. ultimate and/or fundamental [as of truth]: a truth beyond which no more can be known [and/or] the most basic truth about reality
4. utterly unamenable to the possibility of being wrong; uncontestable and unmodifiable [which perhaps Alex would characterise as rigid, inflexible and doctrinaire; no doubt David, bluerap and co. would use more flattering terms - naturally this depends on whether you believe the truth in question really *deserves* to be seen as uncontestable].

One problem in this thread is that participants are criticising one another on the basis of different senses of the word. For example, when Alex writes: "The notion of absolute truth is so obviously---potentially---fascistic to honest and open inquiry that it must always be placed in quotations", he is clearly using it in the fourth sense, yet when bluerap chides Alex that Absolute Truth "means exactly what it says; truth that applicable to all, no modification needed", he is clearly using it in the first sense.

This happens again when Alex writes, again using the fourth sense of the word: "I am aware how absolutist systems of thinking and seeing become even more attractive and necessary for a wandering soul in all our modern confusion [...] [Y]ou see pretty quickly that it is an enormous defense against standing on [one's] own", and when Dennis and bluerap criticise this statement based on the first sense - here's bluerap: "Dennis is right, Alex. You are describing what you believe is the absolute nature of absolutists. And yet at the same time, you are denying any validity to your analysis, because you affirm that there is no absolute basis for any observation".

We can preserve and nicely contrast the senses of "absoluteness" in these two statements by substituting, in Alex's, "rigid, inflexible and doctrinaire" for "absolutist", and, in bluerap's, "universal" for "absolute" and "universalists" for "absolutists".

Alex's becomes: "I am aware how rigid, inflexible and doctrinaire systems of thinking and seeing become even more attractive and necessary for a wandering soul in all our modern confusion [...] [Y]ou see pretty quickly that it is an enormous defense against standing on [one's] own".

bluerap's becomes: "Dennis is right, Alex. You are describing what you believe is the universal nature of universalists. And yet at the same time, you are denying any validity to your analysis, because you affirm that there is no universal basis for any observation".

Clearly, Alex and bluerap are talking past one another.

Later, bluerap accuses[1] Alex of "describing this Force's inherent properties; it's 'absoluteness.'". Here, he is using "absoluteness" in the second sense of "absolute" above. Now, Alex might (I don't speak for him) object to this forum's absolutism in that sense too, but the force of his critique is focussed on the fourth sense, and this, bluerap does not seem to recognise. It might be helpful, bluerap, for you to consider what Alex means when he writes[2]: "You are asking me to enter into your line of reasoning, which may also be your own selection of facts or ideas, which is engagement in what appears to be an abstract game".

As I said, I don't speak for Alex, but my own interpretation of (and elaboration on) what he's saying, in terms of what I've outlined in this post, is: "I don't see any value in discussions based on the first three senses of the word 'absolute', and I see your valuing of these meanings, and the way you use them to frame a conversation and a system around them, as the playing of an abstract and unhelpful game, in which not only is the general framing (in which universality, non-relationality/inherency and ultimacy/fundamentalism are important) arbitrary, but so is the so-called logic that you use within this framing arbitrary".

Anyhow, that's my two cents. I welcome clarifications from all parties on whether my interpretations of the various quotes are helpful / as intended...

Cheers.

[remove the space after the "http"; I had to do it this way to evade the 3-url limit]
[1] http ://theabsolute.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=7044&p=135982#p135982
[2] http ://theabsolute.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=7044&p=135984#p135984

P.S. I'm about to take an overnight bus journey, so won't be able to attend to any replies for a while.

Anyhow, that's my two cents. I welcome clarifications from all parties on whether my interpretations of the various quotes are helpful / as intended...

unhelpful.

until you realise a word refers to a direct experience what is the point.

absolute means a direct experience of release from conditions.
loosened up.
absolved of.
freedom.

if it wasn't a direct experience there wouldn't be a word.

guest_of_logic wrote:P.S. I'm about to take an overnight bus journey, so won't be able to attend to any replies for a while.

Hi Laird, how are you? We are in an important sense all taking overnight bus journeys. Although one can and perhaps should discuss the method of driving or where we're seated, everything else about the destination or theorizing about the passing lights reflected in the windscreen would be rather tendentious. This is the reason why interpretations are consistently off, because some people in the discussion think of themselves as taking this bus from anywhere to nowhere while others look like stuck to the window thinking they know where they are and wondering where we're going and how long the bloody ride is going to take. In the existential ride, the most important thing is always the bus; the absolute nature of us experiencing (so I guess #3).

I thought Laird's contribution was quite helpful. And I agree with his definitions and also that I am focused toward #4.

3) Ultimate and/or fundamental [as of truth]: a truth beyond which no more can be known [and/or] the most basic truth about reality

4) Ultimately unamenable to the possibility of being wrong; uncontestable and unmodifiable [which perhaps Alex would characterise as rigid, inflexible and doctrinaire; no doubt David, bluerap and co. would use more flattering terms - naturally this depends on whether you believe the truth in question really *deserves* to be seen as uncontestable]

And I personally have no problem at all seeing the value in, and also the irony of expression, in Diebert's analogy of Night Jounreys.

Is #3 possible? Stating it is a possibility is certainly possible. Therefor it seems attainable at least abstractly. But who can we hold up as an example of this attainment? And when they speak how are we to know, in this lying age, in a platform of existence in which we are constantly fooled, hoodwinked: overbowled by some spurious discourse masquerading as Truth. Isn't that one of the most core meanings of our age?

It is not to the possibility of an ultimate truth to which I object but rather to the cult-like thinking that accretes itself around some folks who hang everything on an abstract possibility, non-tangible and self-claimed, that is also deeply mystic and non-rational.

Also, and because all my suspicions about the QRS System, I am inclined to continue to bring up the following points: David's outlined program is toward a system of religious conversion and also appears to be a system of 'thought-reform'. If this is true then it follows hard upon that we need to take much more into consideration how religious conversion has functioned in our culture and also that 'thought-reform systems' (as for example is Zen, as for example is Chinese state 'brainwashing' for social and political purposes, as for example are certain cult-thinking systems) need to be very closely examined even when those who uphold their value and who enforce or recommend them tell us that we must not do this, that we are wrong (evil, deluded, malicious, and a whole litany of other claims) to do so and doing so is only evidence 'that we do not understand'. As David said: A word to the wise.

When the rain falls do you say 'why me?'.

I just say: 'Would you pass the potatoes, please?' Keep it simple, Dennis.

Laird, I get everything Alex is saying. He just can't understand or respond to direct, to-the-point conversation. He claims that we stay stuck in a form of "abstract absolutism," while it in reality it is always him that takes it there with no help of anyone else. We speak directly to him, and he switches into third person mentally to remove his own rigidness from the spotlight, to describe what's going on within his own understanding, as to deflect and ignore the direct points made to him. It's a defense mechanism that he has developed over the years.

Alex Jacob wrote:It is not to the possibility of an ultimate truth to which I object but rather to the cult-like thinking that accretes itself around some folks who hang everything on an abstract possibility, non-tangible and self-claimed, that is also deeply mystic and non-rational.

That's just the thing. I have talking about ultimate truths the entire time, but you keep saying that I and others are just adopting some doctrine, or game, or cult like thinking.

The problem is you just can't fathom how anyone can live through, and in accordance with these truths. You think it's 'irrational.' Reminds me of the classic Christian doctrine that we are all inherently sinful, except that instead we're all inherently irrational, and there's nothing we can do about, and we're delusional for even suggesting it's possible.

Bah, I give up, for now at least.

Bluerap wrote: The problem is you just can't fathom how anyone can live through, and in accordance with these truths. You think it's 'irrational.' Reminds me of the classic Christian doctrine that we are all inherently sinful, except that instead we're all inherently irrational, and there's nothing we can do about, and we're delusional for even suggesting it's possible.

I can without any problem at all fathom how people live through and in accordance with these truths. Why would you think that I don't understand this? If we use Diebert's analogy of a bus ride in deep night I think we approach a point where we could begin to talk about how we organize our perceptions.

What I say about 'irrationality' is different from what you hear me saying. I am not opposed to the fact of a faith-based or 'mystical' leap into religiosity. I am opposed to a whole group of contrived assumptions about what spiritual life is and isn't based on arbitrary decisions, as well as the group of rigid conclusions that flow from it. And generally I uphold a whole other group of choices and values which derive from other religious-based systems and compare them to what y'all generally declare. I do this overtly and at the very least honestly. But in the end I shy away from the mystically-based and say that we are forced to take decisions based in what we can demonstrate as being valuable. And I admit it is a fraught area.

(And I find it very curious, and also suspicious, that when we start to zero-in on the core issue here that you bug out. See, in the end I think 'you-all' are cowards! You set up this intense system whereby to engage in truth you have to run a gauntlet and be willing to 'get bloodied' but, when push comes to shove, you show yourselves as weak-hearted pansies! Worse than the 'girls' you rail against!)

Reminds me of the classic Christian doctrine that we are all inherently sinful, except that instead we're all inherently irrational, and there's nothing we can do about, and we're delusional for even suggesting it's possible.

I am willing to entertain the idea that, as opposed to a Grace-solution (your analogy is placed in this context) that there may be a Reasoning-solution. A logical order of ideation that can lead, as David says, to some Universal Vision of Reality that is the end of every aspect of the human quest.

How will you speak about this? How will you prove and demonstrate that it is what you say it is? Everything hinges on this it seems to me.
________________________________

Riddle me this: what is the link between a steaming bowl of mashed potatoes, Henry the Eighth's lust for Ann Boleyn, the anxious uncertainty of Hamlet, and the QRS? Guess even close and you'll receive an island in an abstract Kingdom!

Alex Jacob wrote:I find it very curious, and also suspicious, that when we start to zero-in on the core issue here that you bug out.

What you claim is the "core issue" is really just a drastic misunderstanding of what is being explored here on this forum.

Let's face it Alex, the language used here simply isn't compatible with you, no matter how much others and myself try to correct you. If ultimate truth is really something you want to discuss, you're going to have to find somewhere else for that. After 4+ years of trying, that much should be obvious.

But of course, if we observe everything here under the "all truth is subjective" paradigm, then what you and others are doing here is perfectly ok! Truth is purely in the eye of the beholder, and there is no goal to be met, or point to be made. Let's all continue to pointlessly disagree with each other!

Which one is it?

It is in fact much more than that, Bluerap. I require a much bigger mould and if you don't mind prefer to write my own copy for the label to be stuck on my lapel. And the 'core' is to be found in the dialectic between No. 3 and No. 4 in Laird's definition.

Oh God! Help us to make it through our uterine entwederoder! ;-)

I am willing to entertain the idea that, as opposed to a Grace-solution (your analogy is placed in this context) that there may be a Reasoning-solution. A logical order of ideation that can lead, as David says, to some Universal Vision of Reality that is the end of every aspect of the human quest.

There is,
All is empty.

Dennis Mahar wrote: All is empty.

Is that All ?

ALL (geddit ?)

The statement " ALL is EMPTY "
is a OXYMORON

All phenomena depends for its existence.
What depends for its existence can't be said to have real existence.

The wordsmiths are caught up in categorising and completely miss the conversation about HOW it exists.

Dennis Mahar wrote:What depends for its existence can't be said to have real existence.

Yet it exists. To not exist depends on to exist. So emptiness is also empty.

empty is empty, yes.

I saw a painting of a unicorn,
I had a direct experience of unicorn and a word for it.
I don't have to get lost in categories about unicorn.

I had a direct experience of absolute and got a word for it.
I don't have to get lost in categories about absolute.

The reason is causes/conditions.