Eugene I wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 6:52 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jul 26, 2021 6:02 pm
You are creating all of these problems for yourself, because no one else has mentioned "
independent eternal existence". You are adding "independent" even though we have told you a million times that polarity, by its very essence, denies independent existence. So why are you inserting these words and creating these problems? I think it is pretty obvious why - you want to leave yourself an escape hatch for the implications of eternal Thinking Self. By adding that in, you can continue thinking of them as personal qualities which do not survive death and therefore have no fundamental spiritual importance.
I will say this one more time. I hope you read it carefully, because I am not going to waste any more time than I already have repeating myself to you over and over. If you affirm that formless force is fundamental aspect of Reality, and all Reality is conscious activity, then you are affirming inherency (another word for "fundamental") and eternality of formless activity (Thinking). And that eternal formless activity cannot be separated from Self. There is no way around that. That is what it
means for some aspect to be "fundamental" under idealism - it is eternal. There can be no beginning and end to these aspects under consistent idealism.
First, instead of "eternal" I use the term "timeless" to mean that it exists beyond time and is not subject to transitional change (not impermanent). If you remember, I stressed it many times that formless aspect is also exactly timeless because it is permanent, not changeable and not conditional on any forms that it experiences. You can also call it "eternal", I have no problem with that, but to me "eternal" traditionally means "ever-lasting" within the dimension of time. However, I doubt the existence of the dimension of time altogether, because we actually never experience the dimension of time, we always and only experience the moment of NOW with ever-changing content of forms/ideas and with never-changing and ever-present "That which experiences" the forms. And the formless "That" is actually what survives death.
I actually agree with SS on this point for a change, at least most of his last response. It is modern abstraction which says "we never experience the dimension of time". Time is actually
our phenomenal representation of experiential states existing relative to one another. So it is always experienced when there is still more development to unfold, although it does not have to be strictly linear experience. It is actually more of a rhythmic experience, i.e. from waking to sleeping to reawakening; birth to death to rebirth. The "eternal" is that which encompasses all such experiential states. Those states would never unfold if it was not for the eternal aspect, which is the
integration of all such states, because there would be nothing to integrate towards. I don't really care if it is called "timeless" or "eternal", even though the latter is traditionally used in philosophy, as long as we understand that it is the fundamentally real and meaningful aspect of Reality - the Center towards which all beings metamorphically progress. From my perspective, based on what you write here, you still have not internalized that understanding.
Eugene wrote:Now, you can also call WFTE as "Self", I have no problem with that either, but that would be just a linguistic tautology for the same Reality of WFTE. But, as we discussed before, the problem with such labeling is that people will confuse their sense of separate self with with the "Self" of the WFTE. If you examine it carefully, our personal sense of self is typically very specifically felt as a sense of separate self: we understand and perceive our own self as something other than and separate from other people and other objects. Such perception is both a foundation of psychological selfishness and of cognitive eternalism-dualism that separates the One Reality into multiplicity of eternally and independently existing subjects/selves and objects. It was not me who "introduced" the idea of independent existence of subjects and objects, it is actually how most people think and perceive the reality, and so the point of the Buddhist practice was exactly to dismantle and unroot such distorted perception of reality. So, the point of the Buddhist teaching of "no-self" was not to deny the oneness and existence of the One (WFTE=Self), but to deny the independent existence of multiple separate selves rooted in our psychological "sense of separate self".
What people will confuse that? Are we writing to random people on the street or people on a metaphysics forum where it is understood specific word-concepts have specific uses and meanings in philosophy? The "Self" is one such Word, also used in Eastern philosophy ("Atman", "Veda", etc.). Under monist idealism, there cannot possibly be anything which exists "separate" from anything else. (I am using "anything" even though we all agree it is process). What really results in a dualism, even among sophisticated idealist philosophers, is assuming ideating activity is less objective or less real than "pure experiencing" or "pure willing" or anything similar (or denying there is "objective" reality altogether). Owen Barfield discussed your "linguistic tautology" objection in quotes I posted originally on this thread, which I am reposting below.
Barfield wrote:Twentieth-century science has abolished the 'thing' altogether; and twentieth-century philosophy (that part of it, at least, which takes no account of imagination) has obediently followed suit. There are no objects, says the voice of Science, there are only bundles of waves or possibly something else; adding that, although it is convenient to think of them, it would be naïve to suppose that the waves or the something else actually exist. There is no 'referent', echoes the philosophy of linguistic analysis deferentially, no substance or underlying reality which is 'meant' by words. There are only descriptions, only the words themselves, though it 'happens to be the case' that men have from the beginning so persistently supposed the contrary that they positively cannot open their mouths with out doing so.
...
'It is true,' says Professor Ryle, 'and even tautologous that the cobbler cannot feel the shoe pinching me, unless the cobbler is myself, but this is not because he is excluded from a peep-show open only to me, but because it would make no sense to say that he was in my pain, and no sense, therefore, to say that he was noticing the tweak that I was having.' (My italics.) I shall return to this, but must remark in passing that this attempt to dismiss the palpable by writing off as tautologous the language in which it is affirmed is surely one of the strangest that has ever bemused a vigorous mind. By the same device black (though it is perhaps better to avoid saying so, because it 'makes no sense') may be thought of as white; for to object that black is 'not white' is to found on a tautology. The theory is, that what is self-evident may for that very reason be profitably ignored.
So, once we settled with the timelessness of the WFTE and illusory nature of "separate independently existing self", the remaining question is whether the forms/ideas themselves have any timeless quality/aspect or not, and this is where the Platonic and non-Platonic versions of idealism diverge. Notice that we accept that the forms/ideas do not have any independent/separate existence, we now only consider whether they have timeless/eternal quality. The Buddhist answer to this is no: in Buddhism all forms/ideas/images/experiences are always impermanent and conditional upon each other, and what is permanent and non-conditional is only "That which experiences" these forms. But I get it: in your paradigm the ideas have "eternal" (permanent and non-conditional) quality/aspect while not having any separate/independent existence from WFTE. I personally do not adhere to only one of this alternatives and I'm open to both, simply because I have no way to prove or disprove either of them.
Oh, and just a suggestion: it would be nice and more productive if you would discuss the subject in a more non-personal way. Let's discuss the philosophy but not the personalities involved.
When I say "Thinking" or "Ideating", I am speaking of the
formless force of Reality that is eternal or timeless or whatever. That is
not the same as the "forms/ideas" which is obviously the formative aspect. You cannot have formless force without formative force in
any experience.
