Seeing the truth is not conductive to survival

[SanteriSatama]

The phantasies of a wedding in a Procrustean bedding... the freedom of the flight, all the might, the fright, the urge to leave that behind, in search of closures most kind?

Brilliant ... Love it ... like Logos bewitched by Eros, poetry after my own heart

For those fearfull of math, how about this nice little poem by Language of the World showing a bibilical supervencience of one-many:



Göd-El, O, him?



What if God was not an idea in distance, what if God was each of us, to each other?

[JustinG]

My issue with the Barfield diagram and with Ashvin's metaphysics more broadly as I understand it so far (and, I suppose, Steiner's?) is precisely that they seem very much to posit an ultimate totalization as a good thing -- that the collapse of embodied differences is something that will happen, and that its occurrence is to be hoped for. I disagree on both points

I see where you're coming from. Perhaps, then, the right hand side of the diagram should end where the left side begins, so it becomes more like a circle than a linear progression (which seems to blend in well with the lovely clip Santeri just posted ).

[DandelionSoul]

What if God was not an idea in distance, what if God was each of us, to each other?

Well, that's about the most succinctly I've ever seen my theology put. ^_^

[DandelionSoul]

That bolded part is not an explanation, though. It is frequently mistaken for an explanation, but it's not. This happens a lot in materialist Darwinian theory, for ex. - we will ask about a certain trait of our psychic life and the materialist Darwinian will say that is explained by the fact that "it helped people survive in this or that way a long time ago". It may have a very well helped people survive, in fact that is very likely, but that does nothing to explain the essence of what it is. Similarly, the "terror management" psychologists try to explain all of religion and spirituality in that way, and the Freudians in a slightly different but similar way. Ultimately, I would trace all of that back to Cartesian rationalism and the notion that if we can link a phenomenon to some psychological state, then we have exhaustively explained it. I don't agree, rather I think we have explained almost none of it with such attribution. That is what really set apart Jung from Freud - the former realized ancient spiritual traditions spoke to a much deeper essence than any personal fear or desire, hence coming forth with the notion of a "collective unconscious".

I agree and disagree. I don’t imagine my very brief statement was much of an explanation at all -- too “low-resolution,” so to speak. But I think it gestured at an explanation in a way that the “It helped them survive” response just doesn’t, and in that sense, the two are disanalogous. “It helped them survive” doesn’t point to an antecedent, a ground; it points at a consequence, which it then takes for a cause:

They survived because they discovered fire.
Where did the discovery of fire come from?
From the fact that it helped them survive.

Now take mine:

They developed systems to justify the idea of immortality.
Where did the idea of immortality come from?
From the emotional reaction to the notion of death.

There’s a different trajectory here, one that leads naturally to a followup question: where did the notion of death come from? And the answer to that question is too complex for me to write out in a forum post. Its root system, if we were to explore it, would run across the development of the use of symbols and our heritage as inexorably social beings and the development of systems of power and the culture/nature split and so on. And there would be followup questions to those, and then to the answers to those, and so on. Where the cart-before-the-horse just-so story of “because it helped them survive” ends in a circle, my gesture was toward a trajectory of further and deeper inquiry. It not only progresses, but progresses along paths that diverge and reconverge and lead us to new places. I didn’t pursue it very far because stopping there, at the immediate motivation for such systems, seemed fine for our purposes right now. And what's more, my analysis is accessible within our own experience with death and grief and power -- or, at least, mine, and isn't that where I should be starting?

By contrast, “It reflects something we intuitively understand about the Cosmos” doesn’t seem so different from asking how it is that we see the sun and being answered, by the naive realist, “Well, because it’s there!” We can certainly agree that there’s an intuitive longing for immortality, a predisposition to believe in eternity, but then we must, if we’re to make any progress, interrogate the intuition to find the soil in which it’s grounded. Turning to that, by way of an explanation of the intuition itself, you offered this:

I account for it by saying the fundamental reality is all conscious activity and that we all inhabit the same unified (or contiguous) realm of that activity. So the Big System Builders (BSB), especially those tied to spirituality, are drawing from that same 'space' of intuitive meaning

Here I’m just not sold. You’re suggesting that “intuitive meaning” is sort of... out there in this (presumably metaphorical) space to be drawn upon, like a tree is there for anyone to paint. Rather, I would say that this:

and presenting it through their own individual personalities with all manner of unexamined assumptions and cultural baggage.

Is just the locus of the generation of meaning: the intersubjective.

(Also, whaddaya mean “cultural baggage”? You mean to tell me history didn’t end with the attainment of Absolute Spirit in 19th century Prussia? )

I agree that "to read is to interpret"

In the interest of saving space, I’m not gonna copy/paste the whole paragraphs for this one. Instead, I want to suggest that you may have misread me: my intention is not to halt the hermeneutical dance by pointing out that every interpretation can be problematized and reconfigured and so on. My intention is to lean into it. I mean, look back over this thread. The Existentialists would be most unhappy that I’ve roped them into a defense of animism. After all, Sartre literally said this:

Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be.

But to me it doesn’t matter what Sartre thought of animism, not in any ultimate sense. I ripped his ideas right out of their framework and stuck them in another one, one that he would absolutely have objected to, humanist that he was. What matters to me is what I can do with his ideas: this can connect to that in ways the original authors could not possibly have imagined, or could’ve imagined but wouldn’t have liked. And that’s just scratching the surface. Throughout this conversation, I’ve pulled from Mark Green’s Christian animism/panincarnationalism, phenomenology-inspired work on embodiment, Existentialist notions of freedom, Buddhist and psychoanalytic ideas about desire, Gagliano’s studies on plant cognition, Buddhist ideas about form/lessness (and, of course, the poststructural love for sticking slashes in words to problematize a binary), Death of God theology, the work on death in Heidegger and Becker, apophatic theology, Spinoza’s ontology, Hegel, Martin Buber, the Book of Genesis, Mathews’ panpsychism (and her theory of eros), Alan Watts... and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head. And in the background to all of that is snippets of poetry, images, fiction, song lyrics, mystical experiences.

All these authors, all these ideas, are in constant conversation in my head, new connections forming between them, new ideas emerging from the synthesis. My sense that meaning is never fixed or final or fully disclosed, that it’s locally, intersubjectively generated, is not a sense that we ought to stop doing metaphysics or hermeneutics. It’s the sense that we ought to do it creatively. In the words of Tool, “The poetry that comes from the squaring-off between and the circling is worth it -- finding beauty in the dissonance.” Philosophy is art and play and alchemy, structures spontaneously emerging and then dissolving again only for new ones to coalesce.

Then we begin to realize there are infinite number of concepts we can attach to the perceptions. I can take the concept of "kid with kite" and attach it to the perception of old man with seeing eye dog, or the concept of "basketball" and attach it to the perception of tennis ball.

It’s just this sort of conceptual play that allows new ideas to form. You’re right that the interpretation will ultimately come down to our desires -- that’s basically what I said about purpose and desire way back at the beginning of the thread, though I think calling them “practical aims” is a bit reductive. But sense has a way of erupting abruptly from apparently nonsensical juxtapositions (is that not the way of dreams, like we were discussing earlier?), and we do ourselves a disservice narrowing down the range of allowable desires to the apparently practical. Sure, we need to realize that they’ll stick us in a hospital if we ask the old man if we can fly his dog or ask the kid if we can pet her kite. I don’t mean to dismiss that layer of meaning. But desire itself is more creative than that, and it’s just those sort of bizarre connections that ultimately allow our thinking to go in directions we couldn’t possibly have anticipated from the logic of the given. Or, at least, that’s how it works for me -- but, to be fair, my mind is a little... odd.

Oh dear Lord, it’s six in the morning and I’ve only gotten through one post. -_- I’m looking forward to engaging with the rest of what you’ve written, but I think this one was important, if for no other reason than that trying to get across how I think might help to contextualize and clarify what I think.

[SanteriSatama]

where did the notion of death come from?

Tolkien's Silmarillion etc. offer a deep discussion of that question, in the juxtaposition of immortal elves and mortal men.

[Soul_of_Shu]

What if God was not an idea in distance, what if God was each of us, to each other?

What if God only imagines it is God by way of one its metacognitive expressions, which upon the realization of this breaks out in Divine laughter?

[AshvinP]

That bolded part is not an explanation, though. It is frequently mistaken for an explanation, but it's not. This happens a lot in materialist Darwinian theory, for ex. - we will ask about a certain trait of our psychic life and the materialist Darwinian will say that is explained by the fact that "it helped people survive in this or that way a long time ago". It may have a very well helped people survive, in fact that is very likely, but that does nothing to explain the essence of what it is. Similarly, the "terror management" psychologists try to explain all of religion and spirituality in that way, and the Freudians in a slightly different but similar way. Ultimately, I would trace all of that back to Cartesian rationalism and the notion that if we can link a phenomenon to some psychological state, then we have exhaustively explained it. I don't agree, rather I think we have explained almost none of it with such attribution. That is what really set apart Jung from Freud - the former realized ancient spiritual traditions spoke to a much deeper essence than any personal fear or desire, hence coming forth with the notion of a "collective unconscious".

I agree and disagree. I don’t imagine my very brief statement was much of an explanation at all -- too “low-resolution,” so to speak. But I think it gestured at an explanation in a way that the “It helped them survive” response just doesn’t, and in that sense, the two are disanalogous. “It helped them survive” doesn’t point to an antecedent, a ground; it points at a consequence, which it then takes for a cause:

They survived because they discovered fire.
Where did the discovery of fire come from?
From the fact that it helped them survive.

Now take mine:

They developed systems to justify the idea of immortality.
Where did the idea of immortality come from?
From the emotional reaction to the notion of death.

There’s a different trajectory here, one that leads naturally to a followup question: where did the notion of death come from? And the answer to that question is too complex for me to write out in a forum post. Its root system, if we were to explore it, would run across the development of the use of symbols and our heritage as inexorably social beings and the development of systems of power and the culture/nature split and so on. And there would be followup questions to those, and then to the answers to those, and so on. Where the cart-before-the-horse just-so story of “because it helped them survive” ends in a circle, my gesture was toward a trajectory of further and deeper inquiry. It not only progresses, but progresses along paths that diverge and reconverge and lead us to new places. I didn’t pursue it very far because stopping there, at the immediate motivation for such systems, seemed fine for our purposes right now. And what's more, my analysis is accessible within our own experience with death and grief and power -- or, at least, mine, and isn't that where I should be starting?

I don't agree with your distancing of the analogy. The materialist Darwinian with "it helped them survive" is pointing to the fact that a psychic trait which develops genetically in a population and makes it more likely to survive is then more likely to be passed on to offspring. That is a perfectly valid causal explanation within its own terms and, as I said before, I think that fact is almost undeniably true. However, even if we perceive all of the details of that causal chain in the natural process we are pointing to, we still have no idea what the essence of the psychic trait is as expressed as a result of the natural process. What is the essence of a "gene"? What is the essence of "Nature" which selected for the "gene" survival? What do all of these things essentially mean?

I believe the "terror management" explanation you are proposing is of the same sort (I am not sure if TMT actually influenced your view, but it's just easier for me to capture the general logic in that way). It may develop a perfectly logical chain of mechanisms within its own terms for the psychic traits associated with spirituality, and of course there is going to be a link between fear of death and spiritual conceptions, but those links do nothing to explain the essence of what the spiritual symbols mean. And I also don't just leave it there, but rather, like Jung and Steiner and many others, I think there are good spiritual explanations for why the symbols exist and what they mean. Not just "because God exists and created everything", but a much higher resolution explanation.

That stuff is also too complex to write out here, but is generally the subject of my essays on the Metamorphoses of Spirit, Thinking-Memory-Time, and Spiritual Aesthetics. For now I will quote Emerson from the last Spiritual Aesthetics Part II essay. What he says below also fits pretty well with what SS jokingly but somewhat seriously pointed to earlier - "every body knows that humans are just space suits and Application Programming Intephases for anaerobic endogastric bacteria." We can sense the underlying meaning that comes from that image of bacteria using humans in this way - at low resolution we say it is "every life form is dependent on the activity of other life forms" - and it is that meaning which points us in the direction of the spiritual explanation for physical processes.

2. But this origin of all words that convey a spiritual import—so conspicuous a fact in the history of language—is our least debt to nature. It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture. An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle spite; flowers express to us the delicate affections. Light and darkness are our familiar expression for knowledge and ignorance; and heat for love. Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope.
...
Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence... And the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlasting orbs, is the type of Reason. That which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in all ages and countries, embodies it in his language, as the FATHER. It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature.

]By contrast, “It reflects something we intuitively understand about the Cosmos” doesn’t seem so different from asking how it is that we see the sun and being answered, by the naive realist, “Well, because it’s there!” We can certainly agree that there’s an intuitive longing for immortality, a predisposition to believe in eternity, but then we must, if we’re to make any progress, interrogate the intuition to find the soil in which it’s grounded. Turning to that, by way of an explanation of the intuition itself, you offered this:

I account for it by saying the fundamental reality is all conscious activity and that we all inhabit the same unified (or contiguous) realm of that activity. So the Big System Builders (BSB), especially those tied to spirituality, are drawing from that same 'space' of intuitive meaning

Here I’m just not sold. You’re suggesting that “intuitive meaning” is sort of... out there in this (presumably metaphorical) space to be drawn upon, like a tree is there for anyone to paint. Rather, I would say that this:

and presenting it through their own individual personalities with all manner of unexamined assumptions and cultural baggage.

Is just the locus of the generation of meaning: the intersubjective.

(Also, whaddaya mean “cultural baggage”? You mean to tell me history didn’t end with the attainment of Absolute Spirit in 19th century Prussia? )

You're right - I didn't mean for my "account" of intuition in that one sentence to be the full resolution explanation for what is happening with the BSBs. The overall point, though, is that we should be looking to the spiritual realm for explanation of "physical" facts and processes, as mentioned above. Moving from reality of intuitive experience to the physical "soil in which its grounded", as you suggest in bolded phrase, is the exact opposite direction I say we need to move in. We do not want to reduce psychic facts to physical processes, but the other way around. What we call the study of "psychic processes" (psychology) is a study of the Spirit under idealism, because the underlying Reality is only psychic processes. And I further argue the psychic processes are fundamentally ideating activity, which is how I would distinguish "idealism" from "non-dualism".

Even if that idealism is not assumed, though, I think we can also get to the same conclusion from Jung's depth psychology with comparative mythology, the philological arguments of Emerson and Barfield, or the phenomenology of Thinking activity of Steiner in PoF. Those things make clear to us that intuition is pointing us towards a shared psychic reality in the MAL, the collective unconscious, the higher spiritual worlds, whatever we want to call them. Not only intuition (which is highest order of cognition), though, but also inspiration, imagination, reason, and bare minimum intellectual thinking. They are all drawing on the same source of meaning which makes it possible to communicate, interact, empathize, etc. I don't mean some independent source of abstractions like "God" is normally used, but a realm of living beings where we are always existing and participating, even right this moment.

I agree that "to read is to interpret"

In the interest of saving space, I’m not gonna copy/paste the whole paragraphs for this one. Instead, I want to suggest that you may have misread me: my intention is not to halt the hermeneutical dance by pointing out that every interpretation can be problematized and reconfigured and so on. My intention is to lean into it. I mean, look back over this thread. The Existentialists would be most unhappy that I’ve roped them into a defense of animism. After all, Sartre literally said this:

Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists – that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be.

But to me it doesn’t matter what Sartre thought of animism, not in any ultimate sense. I ripped his ideas right out of their framework and stuck them in another one, one that he would absolutely have objected to, humanist that he was. What matters to me is what I can do with his ideas: this can connect to that in ways the original authors could not possibly have imagined, or could’ve imagined but wouldn’t have liked. And that’s just scratching the surface. Throughout this conversation, I’ve pulled from Mark Green’s Christian animism/panincarnationalism, phenomenology-inspired work on embodiment, Existentialist notions of freedom, Buddhist and psychoanalytic ideas about desire, Gagliano’s studies on plant cognition, Buddhist ideas about form/lessness (and, of course, the poststructural love for sticking slashes in words to problematize a binary), Death of God theology, the work on death in Heidegger and Becker, apophatic theology, Spinoza’s ontology, Hegel, Martin Buber, the Book of Genesis, Mathews’ panpsychism (and her theory of eros), Alan Watts... and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head. And in the background to all of that is snippets of poetry, images, fiction, song lyrics, mystical experiences.

All these authors, all these ideas, are in constant conversation in my head, new connections forming between them, new ideas emerging from the synthesis. My sense that meaning is never fixed or final or fully disclosed, that it’s locally, intersubjectively generated, is not a sense that we ought to stop doing metaphysics or hermeneutics. It’s the sense that we ought to do it creatively. In the words of Tool, “The poetry that comes from the squaring-off between and the circling is worth it -- finding beauty in the dissonance.” Philosophy is art and play and alchemy, structures spontaneously emerging and then dissolving again only for new ones to coalesce.

Then we begin to realize there are infinite number of concepts we can attach to the perceptions. I can take the concept of "kid with kite" and attach it to the perception of old man with seeing eye dog, or the concept of "basketball" and attach it to the perception of tennis ball.

It’s just this sort of conceptual play that allows new ideas to form. You’re right that the interpretation will ultimately come down to our desires -- that’s basically what I said about purpose and desire way back at the beginning of the thread, though I think calling them “practical aims” is a bit reductive. But sense has a way of erupting abruptly from apparently nonsensical juxtapositions (is that not the way of dreams, like we were discussing earlier?), and we do ourselves a disservice narrowing down the range of allowable desires to the apparently practical. Sure, we need to realize that they’ll stick us in a hospital if we ask the old man if we can fly his dog or ask the kid if we can pet her kite. I don’t mean to dismiss that layer of meaning. But desire itself is more creative than that, and it’s just those sort of bizarre connections that ultimately allow our thinking to go in directions we couldn’t possibly have anticipated from the logic of the given. Or, at least, that’s how it works for me -- but, to be fair, my mind is a little... odd.

Oh dear Lord, it’s six in the morning and I’ve only gotten through one post. -_- I’m looking forward to engaging with the rest of what you’ve written, but I think this one was important, if for no other reason than that trying to get across how I think might help to contextualize and clarify what I think.

I don't disagree at all with what you say above, but with the conclusions you seem to be drawing from that capacity for "conceptual play" and creativity in Thinking. I think your emphasis on the personal and relative nature of life's meaning is limiting the true creative capacity and possibilities of humanity, which, in my view, are fundamentally nothing short of that which we normally attribute to the God(s), the creation (or co-creation) of the entire phenomenal Universe. But we only get there by harmonizing our individual lives with the life of the Cosmos as a whole by leaning into the shared realm of cognition and meaning, rather than the fragmentary personal "bubbles of consciousness" each generating their own meaning as they go along. Again, I want to make clear I am not saying we should do that it because it sounds nicer to "harmonize" rather than "fragment", but because that is the actual essence of the underlying Reality and the path on which it is evolving, and we must all confirm that for ourselves rather than taking it on any sort of faith.

[AshvinP]

It’s just this sort of conceptual play that allows new ideas to form. You’re right that the interpretation will ultimately come down to our desires -- that’s basically what I said about purpose and desire way back at the beginning of the thread, though I think calling them “practical aims” is a bit reductive. But sense has a way of erupting abruptly from apparently nonsensical juxtapositions (is that not the way of dreams, like we were discussing earlier?), and we do ourselves a disservice narrowing down the range of allowable desires to the apparently practical. Sure, we need to realize that they’ll stick us in a hospital if we ask the old man if we can fly his dog or ask the kid if we can pet her kite. I don’t mean to dismiss that layer of meaning. But desire itself is more creative than that, and it’s just those sort of bizarre connections that ultimately allow our thinking to go in directions we couldn’t possibly have anticipated from the logic of the given. Or, at least, that’s how it works for me -- but, to be fair, my mind is a little... odd.

Oh dear Lord, it’s six in the morning and I’ve only gotten through one post. -_- I’m looking forward to engaging with the rest of what you’ve written, but I think this one was important, if for no other reason than that trying to get across how I think might help to contextualize and clarify what I think.

I don't disagree at all with what you say above, but with the conclusions you seem to be drawing from that capacity for "conceptual play" and creativity in Thinking. I think your emphasis on the personal and relative nature of life's meaning is limiting the true creative capacity and possibilities of humanity, which, in my view, are fundamentally nothing short of that which we normally attribute to the God(s), the creation (or co-creation) of the entire phenomenal Universe. But we only get there by harmonizing our individual lives with the life of the Cosmos as a whole by leaning into the shared realm of cognition and meaning, rather than the fragmentary personal "bubbles of consciousness" each generating their own meaning as they go along. Again, I want to make clear I am not saying we should do that it because it sounds nicer to "harmonize" rather than "fragment", but because that is the actual essence of the underlying Reality and the path on which it is evolving, and we must all confirm that for ourselves rather than taking it on any sort of faith.

To clarify a bit more - let's consider in the context of human language. I would analogize your conclusions about play-creativity in plastic thinking-thoughts, which we both agree exist, to someone who concluded the flexibility in human language will eventually allow a situation in which someone can choose to make whatever sounds they please and that will be adequate for communicating meaning to someone else. That if he just starts making random sounds then a whole new language will arise through his novel approach. I say that is a naïve approach and will end badly. We need to focus on developing further the shared aspects of our plastic languages, because that is how we are truly able to communicate meaning to each other more effectively. The person who wants complete "freedom" to make whatever sounds he pleases will be rendered incomprehensible if he follows that urge for "freedom" far enough. And a person who is incomprehensible is one who is dangerous and endangered, because he must resort to violence to assert himself against the people he no longer comprehends or defend himself against the people who no longer comprehend him.

And connecting the above to your mention of "dreams", no I don't think the "erupting abruptly from apparently nonsensical juxtapositions" is what actually happens in dreams. We are only forced to that conclusion if we a priori assume that they are only personal to us. I hold with Jung on dreams, which I think is really the only reasonable explanation for the shared symbolism - they draw on a shared source of meaning which then presents to us in personalized ways (most of the time). They are, in a real sense, the birthplace of all ideas during waking life. Perhaps you meant they only appear as "nonsensical" but we can figure out their objective meaning by paying attention to them and imaginatively thinking through their imagery, in which case I agree. Reading Dante's Divine Comedy is basically the same as reading his dreams, in my view, and its deep connection to the shared realm of spiritual meaning is what makes it such a visionary masterpiece.

[DandelionSoul]

What if God was not an idea in distance, what if God was each of us, to each other?

What if God only imagines it is God by way of one its metacognitive expressions, which upon the realization of this breaks out in Divine laughter?

Outside of her dreams, God knows nothing because there's nothing to know, but in her dreams, every so often she realizes that she's dreaming.

[SanteriSatama]

But to me it doesn’t matter what Sartre thought of animism, not in any ultimate sense. I ripped his ideas right out of their framework and stuck them in another one, one that he would absolutely have objected to, humanist that he was. What matters to me is what I can do with his ideas: this can connect to that in ways the original authors could not possibly have imagined, or could’ve imagined but wouldn’t have liked. And that’s just scratching the surface. Throughout this conversation, I’ve pulled from Mark Green’s Christian animism/panincarnationalism, phenomenology-inspired work on embodiment, Existentialist notions of freedom, Buddhist and psychoanalytic ideas about desire, Gagliano’s studies on plant cognition, Buddhist ideas about form/lessness (and, of course, the poststructural love for sticking slashes in words to problematize a binary), Death of God theology, the work on death in Heidegger and Becker, apophatic theology, Spinoza’s ontology, Hegel, Martin Buber, the Book of Genesis, Mathews’ panpsychism (and her theory of eros), Alan Watts... and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head. And in the background to all of that is snippets of poetry, images, fiction, song lyrics, mystical experiences.

All these authors, all these ideas, are in constant conversation in my head, new connections forming between them, new ideas emerging from the synthesis. My sense that meaning is never fixed or final or fully disclosed, that it’s locally, intersubjectively generated, is not a sense that we ought to stop doing metaphysics or hermeneutics. It’s the sense that we ought to do it creatively. In the words of Tool, “The poetry that comes from the squaring-off between and the circling is worth it -- finding beauty in the dissonance.” Philosophy is art and play and alchemy, structures spontaneously emerging and then dissolving again only for new ones to coalesce.

Am I deluded, or are you doing there Deleuze rather masterfully? Reading so well that you internalize the method and can apply it creatively is what I call loyalty to the text.