Metaphysics - Idealism without woo-woo

[Lou Gold]

IMO the best we can do is to experience this Mystery of the reality as it is directly and appreciate its Mysteriousness in awe. This is something the Christian mystics such as Dionisius the Areopagitis and the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing", as well as many Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist and Sufi mystics, knew very well. This is not to stop the intellect from exploring the Mystery and attempting to understand it, but it is to put the limits to the claims of the intellect that it can know anything definitely and exhaustibly about any fundamental aspects of the Mystery beyond our direct experience of it.

I agree!

[Lou Gold]

IMO the best we can do is to experience this Mystery of the reality as it is directly and appreciate its Mysteriousness in awe. This is something the Christian mystics such as Dionisius the Areopagitis and the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing", as well as many Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist and Sufi mystics, knew very well. This is not to stop the intellect from exploring the Mystery and attempting to understand it, but it is to put the limits to the claims of the intellect that it can know anything definitely and exhaustibly about any fundamental aspects of the Mystery beyond our direct experience of it.

I agree!

The more I mull the marvelous back-and-forth-and-circle-about dialog in this thread, the more I appreciate Henri Corbin's great translation of Ibn' Arabi

Listen, O dearly beloved!
I am the reality of the world, the centre of the circumference,
I am the parts and the whole.
I am the will established between Heaven and Earth,
I have created perception in you only in order to be the object of My Perception.
If then you perceive Me, you perceive yourself.
But you cannot perceive Me through yourself.
It is through My Eyes that you see Me and see yourself,
Through your eyes you cannot see Me.

Dearly beloved!
I have called you so often and you have not heard Me.
I have shown Myself to you so often and you have not seen Me.
I have made Myself fragrance so often, and you have not smelled Me,
Savorous food, and you have not tasted Me.
Why can you not reach Me through the object you touch
Or breathe Me through sweet perfumes?
Why do you not see Me? Why do you not hear Me?
Why? Why? Why?

For you My delights surpass all other delights,
And the pleasure I procure you surpasses all other pleasures.
For you I am preferable to all other good things,
I am Beauty, I am Grace.

Love Me, love Me alone.
Love yourself in Me, in Me alone.
Attach yourself to Me,
No one is more inward than I.
Others love you for their own sakes,
I love you for yourself.
And you, you flee from Me.

Dearly beloved!
You cannot treat Me fairly,
For if you approach Me,
It is because I have approached you.
I am nearer to you than yourself,
Than your soul, than your breath.
Who among creatures
Would treat you as I do?

I am jealous of you, over you,
I want you to belong to no other,
Not even to yourself.
Be Mine, be for Me as you are in Me,
Though you are not even aware of it.

Dearly beloved!
Let us go toward Union.
And if we find the road
That leads to separation,
We will destroy separation.

Let us go hand in hand.
Let us enter the presence of Truth.
Let It be our judge
And imprint Its seal upon our union
Forever.

Although not a poem in Arabic, this moving account of Divine “pillow talk” or munājāt (intimate discourses) by Ibn' Arabi was beautifully translated by Henri Corbin in poetic form. Creative Sufism ‘Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, p. 174-75

[AshvinP]

So do you agree that we are 'bottoming out' at some thing/process which has continuity of experience, i.e. some before and after 'identity'?

Yes, we are bottoming out at this continuity and at the very awareness of the conscious experience ("experiencing of experiencing"), but I don't see how this has anything to do with "identity". We can say (again, as a result of thought processing and some abstraction of such experience) that such "process" in its continuity is "identical to itself", but this sounds to me like a tautology.

I mean that the process of awareness before the 'mystical awakening' is in essence the same one after, in so far as it can recollect what that experience was like.

[Lou Gold]

Well, well, WOW!

I've obviously been captivated by Ibn 'Arabi, so I had to find out more, which led me to this AMAZING lecture by Filip Holm. There's dozens of metaphysical threads in this one. It's a lengthy piece. The metaphysical core begins around the 24 min mark::



This should surely make one's mind spin! If too much and one prefers to immerse in the love and joy aspect of the Sufi path, the Griot music of Sona Jobarteh is highly recommended:



Follow your bliss.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Follow your bliss.

Let's face it, everyOne is imperatively lost. What's paramount is realizing this, then finding and irrevocably knowing That which gets lost ... Voila, Satchitananda, the Lost is the Found, not-two. Let Lila play on.

[Lou Gold]

Follow your bliss.

Let's face it, everyOne is imperatively lost. What's paramount is realizing this, then finding and irrevocably knowing That which gets lost ... Voila, Satchitananda, the Lost is the Found, not-two. Let Lila play on.

So it turns out that one does not have to go way East to find non-dualism. Was it only obfuscated by a couple of centuries of Crusades that defined what was considered as Western Civilization? In my earliest and most naive days here at the forum, as I faced the paradoxes of either materialism or physicalism and either non-dual or dualist, I would ask, as an 'intuitive', "why not both/and?" It seemed to default to rationally/logically having only one miracle, one ontic primitive, only One. Now, I stumble into an approach that feels like my own experience that says, "it's both rational and intuitive. It's One and it's many."

You say, Voila, Satchitananda, the Lost is the Found, not-two. and 'I' fall into an approach that says, "It is two and it is not-two." Suddenly, I make sense of the fact that Henri Corbin intuitively felt correct to me despite having never heard of him except in a reference by Becca Tarnas to him as the source of her use of the term 'imaginal' and despite personally having never read him. Following my bliss, I discover a 'fall off my donkey' poem by Ibn 'Arabi' and rest in the Griot language of the heart. Voila, touch the earth and blessed be. Let's face it, everyOne is imperatively lost. VIVA! The Great Mysteriousness. VIVA!

[Soul_of_Shu]

Well, well, WOW!

I've obviously been captivated by Ibn 'Arabi, so I had to find out more, which led me to this AMAZING lecture by Filip Holm. There's dozens of metaphysical threads in this one. It's a lengthy piece. The metaphysical core begins around the 24 min mark::

Great find Lou ... definitely should not remain lost to anyone.

[Mandibil]

[/quote] Everyone has faith in some beliefs about themselves and the world, otherwise they could not continue to find any meaning in their lives.
[/quote]

I don't have faith in anything. It is a self-inflicted mysticism to create pseudo meaning.

[Mandibil]

To me it means "I have faith that the sun will set this evening",

That is what I call rationality

[AshvinP]

Everyone has faith in some beliefs about themselves and the world, otherwise they could not continue to find any meaning in their lives.

I don't have faith in anything. It is a self-inflicted mysticism to create pseudo meaning.

You have faith that we exist and can understand what you are writing. Otherwise, why bother? Perhaps we are all artificial constructs in your own mind. Without faith, there is no reason to say or do anything. Yet you continue to say and do things because you have faith that some aspect of your own experience of individual thinking is shared with the rest of us. That may not even be a great example, but you get the point.

Can we place our faith in flawed perspectives? Yes, and that's what we end up doing all the time. The perspective that faith is unnecessary to be-in-the-world is one such flawed perspective people have started putting their faith in recently. It's convenient, enticing, and relatively simple, but it's self-defeating.