Cleric K wrote: ↑Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:01 pm
There's something within our experiences that 'locks in' with the concepts.
Yep. A common English words for that something is 'hunger'. Thinking is primarily a hunting weapon. That's how we shop our food with money nowadays.
We can envision some fundamental undifferentiated color but this doesn't mean that immediately blue and red become illusionary and we can think them away. That's where nondualistic schools become even more abstract than the already abstract philosophies. It's only that the singleness of this abstractions makes it look that we are dealing with Divine simplicity. We smear out all concepts and replace them with the ultimate abstract One.
As I commented in another thread with a wiki quote, the fundamental difference between Advaita Vedanta (Brahman = Atman) and Mahayana Buddhism (anatman), is that former is substance metaphysics, latter process philosophy as anatman is denial of permanence and inherent, independent self. On historical note, there were especially close connections between Greek and Indian philosophy during Hellenistic era, influences going both ways, and similarities between Pyrrhonian skepticism and Nagarjuna are especially apparent. Plato's dialogues offer much food for both substance advaita ('hen kai agathon') and process advaita ('dynamis').
It's the substance advaita that gets very abstract. Zen, as well as process philosophical animistic-shamanic traditions tend avoid abstractions to a high degree. Also, only the substance advaita requires metaphysical postulation of quantification and existential quantifier usually called "One", and is inseparable from monotheist theology of metaphysical solipsism.
Interestingly, solipsism (aka "there's no other") is something we - at least me and some of my friends have attested to the experience - go through during "psychotic" experiences, meaning spiritual transformations, to know the
'thing as such' of solipsism and what it feels like to be the Lonely God, but don't stay stuck in the sickness of such sick god, because it's not a nice place to be and there's available peer support from friends who've gone through similar experience.
We go nowhere if we conceptualize the primordial One and then seek to derive from it all the diversity of experience. We can take the diversity only from reality. Only from reality I can get blue, red and white. It is higher order ideas (in contrast to immediate one-to-one perception-to-concept ideas) that introduce unities. These ideas turn out to be living metamorphosing beings in the higher worlds. The intellect can only grasp them in their mineral-like projections. That's why we don't go anywhere when we simply imagine the cultures, animals, plants, etc. as being all one with the abstract One.
Feeling same spirit/breathing beneath our appearances of skin, fur, bark etc. is sensual and sentient, not abstract thought of a number. "New animism" of Viveiro de Castro et alii is based on perspectival multinaturalism of fundamentally peer-to-peer relations. Spirit is not an object, breathing is verb for movement of expanding and contracting. At abstract level we can think of breathing between infinity and infinitesimal, and emulate such abstraction in our meditations and spiritual practices, as well as mineral metaphore of 'Universe in a speck of sand' etc.
Though anatman denial of inherent self makes plenty of ontological sense, a great ethical teaching is that all unique has inherent value, and hence out of love and freedom all is unique. In our hunger for uniquely experiencing we are both food and feeding.