Resistance

[Pattern-chaser]

Do you think that stone age people could build the pyramids or Machu Picchu near Peru?

The existing ruins seem to indicate that they did exactly that.

[Nick_A]

Do you think that stone age people could build the pyramids or Machu Picchu near Peru?

The existing ruins seem to indicate that they did exactly that.

Are you suggesting that the being, (what a person objectively is) of all people is the same?

[Sy Borg]

The NFL has reportedly cancelled an invitation to Grammy Award winner Victory Boyd to perform the national anthem at the league's season-opening game Thursday, after the singer/songwriter declined to get a COVID-19 vaccination for religious reasons.

Classic secular intolerance and political manipulation.

Nope, that's what happens when a society is trying to reduce the load on their ICU units when a significant proportion of the population is uncooperative.

I note that we could have a very much longer conversation about western religious intolerance than secular intolerance. Religious intolerance continues today after thousands of years, while western secular society is only new.

Consider the thousands of years where the religious have killed and tortured secular thinkers in their droves. How children were ripped from families, the women raped, the children indoctrinated and put to work. By contrast, secularists have been exceedingly kind, tolerant and decent to theists. Even the atrocities of Mao and Stalin (who believed themselves to be divine*) pale next to the hard treatment of non-believers by theists.


* It is not secular society where anything is posted to be divine - be it an abstract or a deluded leader. The Hitler/Mao/Stalin trifecta were not secular societies because they demanded worship. In secular society, one need not worship anything or anything, that is entirely up to the individual.

[Sy Borg]

Sy

Personally, I always liked Plato's cave analogy and I'm not adverse to his forms ideas either. It certainly looks to me that being in reality is to play roles that have been played countless times before and will be played countlessly again. The roles remain through time - repeating substantially, but never exactly - while the physical "actors" shuffle through those roles like planks in the ship of Theseus, or the actors of a play with a ten-year run.

My biggest beef with tribalism is the way people surrender their thoughts, even to the extent of using the same words, as though reading from a script. Something I appreciate about Nick is that his vision is his own. Try to find material that includes Plato, Simone Weil, Mme Blavatsky, Ouspensky and Gurdjeiff together. That's an interesting mix! They are thankfully not part of any particular movement, but each is a smart, individualistic and influential esoteric thinker (whether one is into mysticism or not).

Socrates and esoteric Christianity are examples of the perennial philosophy which existed from the beginning. However there are different qualities in the ability to understand universal laws and how human being is determined by them. Do you think that stone age people could build the pyramids or Machu Picchu near Peru?

Sure, technological advancement is a sign that people are better acquainted with universal laws. So why are you not especially delighted with today's society's extraordinary understanding of those laws. We don't just build pyramids, but modern cities and space stations, connected by our increasing understanding of universal laws.

Of course I would like it if anyone could post a legit thread on Plato’s cave

If you do not create such a thread in the next week, then I will do it (as long as this morning's 2nd Astra jab doesn't do me in, famous last words haha).

How about an experiment? I think the problems you encounter stem from your manner rather than your content.

So, if you send me a PM with the key points you wish to make in a Plato's cave thread, I can post it. Then we test to see if I am cursed out. My guess is that a couple here would treat me like a nong if I started speaking about Plato's cave here, but they usually think of me that way anyway :) Water off a duck's back. The joy of old age.

Plato motivates us to feel the root cause of human values through the forms. Educated society values arguing opinions. Plato’s divided line deals with the transition between the opinions of the visible realm and the knowledge of the intellectual realm but sadly society invites the struggle of opinions over knowledge.

Plato pointed out that there are recurring basic patterns in nature.

Certainly Plato encouraged educated society, and he would have spent much of his life arguing opinions. If you want to avoid arguing opinions, you'll need to find a (non-Platonic) cave to hide in.

Personally, I find the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and the focus of Zen masters more inspiring but each to their own. I find Plato more interesting than inspiring, given that I'd worked out my own idea of forms from observation anyway, and I expect many others have noticed the same things.

I have my influences including Plato, Socrates, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Simone and of course the art of my talented ancestor which helped me to experience the interaction of elemental forces in water.

What does "experience the interaction of elemental forces in water" mean?

Supporting perennial truths invites secular intolerance ...

Do you feel that you are tolerant towards secular views? It's not about tolerance, just that many people disagree with you. Surely people can disagree with you without being labelled intolerant. That's not fair. These people are are tolerant, but they have different opinions to yours.

[Nick_A]

Don't forget. We have one female singer surrounded by thousands of screaming maskless football fans and I'm supposed to believe that she should be the one the one wearing a mask? Does that really make sense to you?

More so than many religious claims about virgin births, resurrections, demons, angels - not to mention that a significant number of religion's officialdom wore dresses as they attacked gay people while quietly molesting boys and telling people that his cheap wine is Jesus's blood and a cheap wafer is Jesus's body.

I also note that the singer would be hundreds of metres away from the crowd, but would be in close proximity with numerous staff and VIPs.

Further, the religious seem quick to claim martyrdom status. It's remarkably PC for people who decry PC. Of course the singer is not being punished for her religion. People refuse to be vaccinated for several different reasons - ideology, distrust of government, dislike the idea of vaccines etc - and if the singer refused for those reasons, her rejection would be exactly the same. It's nothing to do with her religiosity. It's risk management.

The ritual of mutual self destruction attacks all collectives. Some are led by a belief in a personal God while the majority of killings are led by the Great Beast or the worship of society championed by communism.

Sure the killing can be caused by Trump or Communism. Or it might be from traditional hatreds, intolerance, greed and so forth.

According to a disturbingly pleasant graphic from Information is Beautiful entitled simply 20th Century Death, communism was the leading ideological cause of death between 1900 and 2000. The 94 million that perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe easily (and tragically) trump the 28 million that died under fascist regimes during the same period.

During the century measured, more people died as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) put together. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism's total by only 9 million.

Secular society has proven its superiority for justifying and actualizing the kill. The question is the value of this superiority?

Your error is here is not being able to parse secularism from Communism.

Most Communists are secular but few secularists are Communists. By the same token, most fascists today are religious, but few right wingers are fascists.

Further, your use of raw figures ignores the fact that Asia has approxinately four times the population of the west, so one can expect four times the kill ratio, at least. Probably more than four times because close proximity allows for more efficient extermination.

Given the long history of religious wars and the current push by the extreme religious right for a civil war in the US, the religious cannot validly claim that their beliefs are more peaceful than non-believers. History says otherwise.

It's like the unfounded claim that the secular cannot be moral due to lack of religion - a claim made even as the religious perform atrocities around the globe.

The fact is that life is savage per se. Societies throughout history have tried to find ways to ease the pain, but the most peaceful ones seem to be taken over by societies that care more for power than comfort or happiness of its people. It seems to be a function of numbers. The bigger the population, the more uncaring the government for the welfare of individuals.

I suspect that in this century humans will finally come to realise that they are not the end product of evolution, that they are being usurped and upstaged from right under their feet, and they will have to learn to live as second-class beings, ever more akin to the treatment we mete out to other species. We have not created a Great Beast, but numerous great beasts, aka giant organisations, which includes the CCP and Abrahamic religions.

What these giant organisations love is for the little people to fight amongst themselves. Aside from boosting their news sales, it ensures that the masses cannot unite against them. (Bread and circuses, courtesy of Fox and co). They benefit from little people arguing over secularism and religion.

Like giant organisations, however, I am more interested in large dynamics rather than political minutiae. The larger dynamic is that the Earth is changing in a number of ways and environment has always shaped behaviour more than many modern people are willing to accept. Humans' great numbers and improved technology are creating new emergent phenomena. That which is not swallowed or dominated by the large, intelligent entities we are creating will be treated as either resources or vermin.

No point fretting about it. It's locked in and the processes are already well in train. Grab the popcorn.

[Nick_A]

Sure, technological advancement is a sign that people are better acquainted with universal laws. So why are you not especially delighted with today's society's extraordinary understanding of those laws. We don't just build pyramids, but modern cities and space stations, connected by our increasing understanding of universal laws.

No, technology and science are largely ignorant of the interactions of universal laws since they are caught up in binary proofs. It may be beginning to change and if it does it will be of great benefit for our species. But that is at least fifty years away. There is too much arguing to do first.

http://esoteric.msu.edu/Reviews/NicolescuReview.htm

After reading Nicolescu's Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, it is hard to imagine how any thinking person could retreat to the old, safe, comfortable conceptual framework. Taking a series of ideas that would be extremely thought-provoking even when considered one by one, the Romanian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu weaves them together in a stunning vision, this manifesto of the twenty-first century, so that they emerge as a shimmering, profoundly radical whole.

Nicolescu’s raison d’être is to help develop people’s consciousness by means of showing them how to approach things in terms of what he calls “transdisciplinarity.” He seeks to address head on the problem of fragmentation that plagues contemporary life. Nicolescu maintains that binary logic, the logic underlying most all of our social, economic, and political institutions, is not sufficient to encompass or address all human situations. His thinking aids in the unification of the scientific culture and the sacred, something which increasing numbers of persons, will find to be an enormous help, among them wholistic health practitioners seeking to promote the understanding of illness as something arising from the interwoven fabric—body, plus mind, plus spirit—that constitutes the whole human being, and academics frustrated by the increasing pressure to produce only so-called “value-free” material.

Transdisciplinarity “concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline,” and its aim is the unity of knowledge together with the unity of our being: “Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.” (44) Nicolescu points out the danger of self-destruction caused by modernism and increased technologization and offers alternative ways of approaching them, using a transdisciplinary approach that propels us beyond the either/or thinking that gave rise to the antagonisms that produced the problems in the first place. The logic of the included middle permits “this duality [to be] transgressed by the open unity that encompasses both the universe and the human being.” (56). Thus, approaching problems in a transdisciplinary way enables one to move beyond dichotomized thinking, into the space that lies beyond....................

Society is years away from recognizing how the law of the INCLUDED middle is an extension of the law of the EXCLUDED middle giving it meaning. But least there is hope. Could it be possible that experts in the field of the arts, logic, and mechanics can all realize they know nothing so pool their research to reveal the higher truth which unifies them at a higher level of reality? Not now; but perhaps in the future.

[Nick_A]

What does "experience the interaction of elemental forces in water" mean?

Nick_A wrote: ↑Thu Sep 09, 2021 8:09 am
Supporting perennial truths invites secular intolerance ...

Do you feel that you are tolerant towards secular views? It's not about tolerance, just that many people disagree with you. Surely people can disagree with you without being labelled intolerant. That's not fair. These people are are tolerant, but they have different opinions to yours.

Imagine a wave in a storm. The forces creating the wave determine its beauty as it responds to the wind. Each creation is the result of three forces interacting: active, passive, and neutralizing. They change places during the wave The logic of this interaction exists within our emotional nature. When an artist remembers it from within, he can paint it.

I am the wretched Man. I live in Plato's cave along with other wretched men. It is foolish to be intolerant. I read once that when a person realizes they are an idiot. They tell their friends who now believe he is an idiot. Now he is a complete idiot and able to experience the reality of the human condition. What is there to be intolerant about?

[Sy Borg]

Sure, technological advancement is a sign that people are better acquainted with universal laws. So why are you not especially delighted with today's society's extraordinary understanding of those laws. We don't just build pyramids, but modern cities and space stations, connected by our increasing understanding of universal laws.

No, technology and science are largely ignorant of the interactions of universal laws since they are caught up in binary proofs. It may be beginning to change and if it does it will be of great benefit for our species. But that is at least fifty years away. There is too much arguing to do first.

http://esoteric.msu.edu/Reviews/NicolescuReview.htm

After reading Nicolescu's Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, it is hard to imagine how any thinking person could retreat to the old, safe, comfortable conceptual framework. Taking a series of ideas that would be extremely thought-provoking even when considered one by one, the Romanian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu weaves them together in a stunning vision, this manifesto of the twenty-first century, so that they emerge as a shimmering, profoundly radical whole.

Nicolescu’s raison d’être is to help develop people’s consciousness by means of showing them how to approach things in terms of what he calls “transdisciplinarity.” He seeks to address head on the problem of fragmentation that plagues contemporary life. Nicolescu maintains that binary logic, the logic underlying most all of our social, economic, and political institutions, is not sufficient to encompass or address all human situations. His thinking aids in the unification of the scientific culture and the sacred, something which increasing numbers of persons, will find to be an enormous help, among them wholistic health practitioners seeking to promote the understanding of illness as something arising from the interwoven fabric—body, plus mind, plus spirit—that constitutes the whole human being, and academics frustrated by the increasing pressure to produce only so-called “value-free” material.

Transdisciplinarity “concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline,” and its aim is the unity of knowledge together with the unity of our being: “Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.” (44) Nicolescu points out the danger of self-destruction caused by modernism and increased technologization and offers alternative ways of approaching them, using a transdisciplinary approach that propels us beyond the either/or thinking that gave rise to the antagonisms that produced the problems in the first place. The logic of the included middle permits “this duality [to be] transgressed by the open unity that encompasses both the universe and the human being.” (56). Thus, approaching problems in a transdisciplinary way enables one to move beyond dichotomized thinking, into the space that lies beyond....................

Society is years away from recognizing how the law of the INCLUDED middle is an extension of the law of the EXCLUDED middle giving it meaning. But least there is hope. Could it be possible that experts in the field of the arts, logic, and mechanics can all realize they know nothing so pool their research to reveal the higher truth which unifies them at a higher level of reality? Not now; but perhaps in the future.

I'm not a binary thinker, myself. I've been badgering people here about grey areas for years. Nature operates more in analogue than digital in my observation.

However, it strikes me that your thinking is pretty strongly binary, very much a case of "you are either with us or against us", with cherished allies and hated foes. Must be nice to have a team to root for. I never had the knack for joining groups or movements. I always disagreed with too much of their compulsory thoughts lol

[Nick_A]

Secular intolerance and the resistance to the needs of the human heart is alive and well though denied. Anyone. If Jacob Needleman is right it is up to people of understanding in the real meaning of the term, to offer alternatives regardless of the growls. Alternatives to the killing of the self which secular intolerance promotes. Where do we find such people?

More and more, as I see it now, this heartless way of thinking about God and ultimate reality dominates the mind of the contemporary world. For God or against God, “belief” or “atheism,” it makes no difference unless the inner yearning— or whatever we wish to call the cause and source of the “second breathing” — is there. And it can so easily be there, just as it can so easily be covered over and ignored, perhaps for the rest of one’s life. God or not God, “belief” or “science” — it also makes no real difference for my personal life unless the call of the Self and its need to “breathe” is heard and, ultimately, respected. Not only can thought about ultimate reality make no difference to the world or to my personal life unless we hear and respect the call of the Self, but such empty thought can bring down our personal and collective world, even our Earth itself. When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing toward destruction.

Jacob Needleman: What Is God?

[Sy Borg]

Secular intolerance and the resistance to the needs of the human heart is alive and well though denied.

Steve is right. You don't read or respond to what others say. I might join him in bailing out, as I don't think it will make any difference to you whether I say anything or not. I might start my own thread on abstract forms, though.

Thanks for what I'd hoped would be an interesting chat as I'm interested in what adherents of the esoteric have to say. Alas, my posts have been the excluded middle of this conversation, so to speak.

Also disappointed that, while you overtly champion the esoteric aspect of Christianity, it seems impossible to divert you from the political aspects of religion to get you to actually talk about it. I'm interested in mystical experiences, not recital of standard New Right mantras. It seems to me that I am more interested in the mystical aspects of life than you are.

[Nick_A]

Sure, technological advancement is a sign that people are better acquainted with universal laws. So why are you not especially delighted with today's society's extraordinary understanding of those laws. We don't just build pyramids, but modern cities and space stations, connected by our increasing understanding of universal laws.

No, technology and science are largely ignorant of the interactions of universal laws since they are caught up in binary proofs. It may be beginning to change and if it does it will be of great benefit for our species. But that is at least fifty years away. There is too much arguing to do first.

http://esoteric.msu.edu/Reviews/NicolescuReview.htm

After reading Nicolescu's Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, it is hard to imagine how any thinking person could retreat to the old, safe, comfortable conceptual framework. Taking a series of ideas that would be extremely thought-provoking even when considered one by one, the Romanian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu weaves them together in a stunning vision, this manifesto of the twenty-first century, so that they emerge as a shimmering, profoundly radical whole.

Nicolescu’s raison d’être is to help develop people’s consciousness by means of showing them how to approach things in terms of what he calls “transdisciplinarity.” He seeks to address head on the problem of fragmentation that plagues contemporary life. Nicolescu maintains that binary logic, the logic underlying most all of our social, economic, and political institutions, is not sufficient to encompass or address all human situations. His thinking aids in the unification of the scientific culture and the sacred, something which increasing numbers of persons, will find to be an enormous help, among them wholistic health practitioners seeking to promote the understanding of illness as something arising from the interwoven fabric—body, plus mind, plus spirit—that constitutes the whole human being, and academics frustrated by the increasing pressure to produce only so-called “value-free” material.

Transdisciplinarity “concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline,” and its aim is the unity of knowledge together with the unity of our being: “Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge.” (44) Nicolescu points out the danger of self-destruction caused by modernism and increased technologization and offers alternative ways of approaching them, using a transdisciplinary approach that propels us beyond the either/or thinking that gave rise to the antagonisms that produced the problems in the first place. The logic of the included middle permits “this duality [to be] transgressed by the open unity that encompasses both the universe and the human being.” (56). Thus, approaching problems in a transdisciplinary way enables one to move beyond dichotomized thinking, into the space that lies beyond....................

Society is years away from recognizing how the law of the INCLUDED middle is an extension of the law of the EXCLUDED middle giving it meaning. But least there is hope. Could it be possible that experts in the field of the arts, logic, and mechanics can all realize they know nothing so pool their research to reveal the higher truth which unifies them at a higher level of reality? Not now; but perhaps in the future.

I'm not a binary thinker, myself. I've been badgering people here about grey areas for years. Nature operates more in analogue than digital in my observation.

However, it strikes me that your thinking is pretty strongly binary, very much a case of "you are either with us or against us", with cherished allies and hated foes. Must be nice to have a team to root for. I never had the knack for joining groups or movements. I always disagreed with too much of their compulsory thoughts lol

No, I try to experience and reveal the contradictions in my philosophical conversation. Most don't want to admit their contradictions. Yet it is only through the cotradiction that the truth is revealed

“When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.” Simone Weil

Finding the door is the purpose of philosophy or seekers of wisdom. It remains intolerable until a person begins to understand its value

[Nick_A]

Sy

Two questions for you. What is a Christian?

Also, Jesus said to give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is Gods. Can you tell the difference?

[Steve3007]

One of the most common problems with attempts to critique one's own position, interesting it can sometimes be, is that it all too easily turns into an exercise in creating a large and intricately (sometimes quite subtly) designed straw man.

[Nick_A]

One of the most common problems with attempts to critique one's own position, interesting it can sometimes be, is that it all too easily turns into an exercise in creating a large and intricately (sometimes quite subtly) designed straw man.

Interesting. As you've tried to critique yourself, you experienced that you actually imagine yourself, We all tend to do this. It is all part of resistance that keeps a person as they are

[Pattern-chaser]

One of the most common problems with attempts to critique one's own position, interesting it can sometimes be, is that it all too easily turns into an exercise in creating a large and intricately (sometimes quite subtly) designed straw man.

Interesting. As you've tried to critique yourself, you experienced that you actually imagine yourself, We all tend to do this. It is all part of resistance that keeps a person as they are

If you merely explain people's own words back to them, it is very difficult for them to continue in dialogue with you. Why not try offering your own opinions instead, in complement, or counterpoint, to what they have said?