Eugene I wrote: ↑Fri Nov 26, 2021 2:00 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Nov 26, 2021 12:32 am
I don't get it Eugene... you say I was correct about the implicit dualism in your view, but your responses to Cleric are making the
exact same points you have been making since we started many months ago, which are all born of that implicit dualism. You feel Cleric is not adequately "integrating both" because
you have created an artificial duality between "ideational" and "awareness/experiencing/existing/etc." to begin with. Since Reality is not, in fact, two, Cleric cannot integrate these two facets, one of which is a complete abstract artifice. As he has mentioned often, it is classic example of the person sitting on the Thinking tree who saws off the branch on which he is sitting and then blames the tree for not being able to support his weight.
Let me give you an analogy. Let's say I'm blind from birth but not deaf, I can experience sounds and cognate the meanings of audible forms. But I can not see and therefore can not cognate the meanings of visual forms and colors. My friend is the other way around - he is deaf but can see. In reality the meanings of the visual and audible forms are not apart, they are inseparable dimensions of the same manifold of meanings. But I can not cognate the visual dimension of meanings and my friend can not cognate the audible one. Then we both go to a hospital and I have my vision restored and my friend have his hearing restored. Now we can experience the dimensions we were unable before, and cognate the meanings related to those dimensions, which means we can now "integrate" from our perspectives those dimensions together. In fact nothing actually happened to those dimensions, they have always been united, it's just that we cold not perceive them both at the same time.
We can not deny the fact that we, as limited human beings, have a limited and fragmented knowledge of the World/Idea and can only cognate limited parts of its fulness. Most of us do not perceive the high-cognition meanings, structures and hierarchies that Cleric perceives. Similarly, most of us do not experience the non-dual mystic states. And there is perhaps a lot of other meanings and ideas in the universe that we are not aware of. But this fact of the incompleteness and fragmentation of our knowledge does nothing to the unbreakable unity of the Idea. The seeming fragmentation only applies to our limited perspective and incomplete knowledge of it. And when we are able to break with our experiential knowledge into some dimensions and levels previously unknown to us, we can say that we now "integrated" them into our body of knowledge.
Eugene,
I wasn't saying I don't get the meaning of your criticism, but rather I don't get why you are still making it.
Let's just observe what an "analogy" is, for starters. It is what the intellect uses by way of abstraction to point to an underlying Reality which cannot be captured directly by its cognitions. Cleric has made many analogies on this forum - in fact, almost every post he writes uses at least one. For ex., the GR analogy to show the way in which Perception and Idea exist in a polar relation (form-formlessness, respectively). So what is the difference between his and yours above? I think it's clear his are operating within deeper layers of meaning. They are still employing intellectual concepts of GR, because, after all, he is trying to explain higher cognitions to people who can only perceive with intellectual cognition. If he didn't employ the intellectual concepts, then it would be completely meaningless to us (due to our own cognitive limitation).
But the GR analogy has now moved deeper into the realm of relativistic Time-experience. Your analogy is still operating from fixed spatially-oriented concepts of
particular sense-perceptions and the meaning we cognize when observing them. His analogy is speaking to the very structure of what our cognition is
universally doing when we engage any sense-perceptions of
temporal phenomena and their relations. So who is more likely to be misunderstanding whom here? Could it possibly be the person who has explained, by way of analogy, the very structure of how you construct your analogies in order to criticize of his lack of "integration"? I don't think so. I realize this is a really roundabout way of making a simple point, but I am running out of ways to provide helpful explanations without just copying and pasting what I have written before.
Also, you are using an analogy to explain your criticism of our philosophical approach (which we already understand). And, on top of that, it is simply false to assert that Cleric has not experienced the "non-dual mystic states" of meaning, i.e. that he is either 'deaf' or 'blind' to Eastern mystical experiences. Cleric, on the other hand, used an analogy to illuminate the problematic polar relation of Perception and Idea which gives rise to the dualistic thinking you are employing when the polar relation is not understood concretely.