Lou,Lou Gold wrote: ↑Mon Apr 25, 2022 7:06 pmPerhaps a favorite Thich Nhat Hanh poem Please Call Me by My True Names is relevant here. I feel a similarity between what you call "Heart Thinking" and what Thay calls "Heart of Compassion". Yes, I grok that the name "thinking" has a different trajectory in Eastern and Western cultural gestalts. The West being more committed to rational linear (Cartesian) reason at the time seems to obligate philosophers like Steiner to not throw the baby out with the bath and thus a bridge name like Spiritual Thought or Spiritual Science was necessary for dialogue. Alternately, I suspect the Eastern tradition felt less need for a semantic bridge and could thus speak directly of a compassionate heart or Tao that would flow naturally through one who was empty of conceptual thinking. As a non-philosopher I'm just offering a speculation and not setting the stage for a debate.AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Apr 25, 2022 3:38 pm Can our conceptual definitions of Good and Evil stand in for their realities at the level of Being-Nothingness itself? Anyone with a mind can see there is great suffering, pain, violence, and torture in the world. But is this evil 'out there' or is it within us as well? Is our desire to conceptually define and substitute the definition for understanding complicit in the evil? And if the evil is within us as well, then are we to destroy ourselves or seek redemption of our evil nature through Heart Thinking? Through a reasoned trust that there is a genuine path to redemption, even if we cannot conceptually define it? Perhaps the realities of Good and Evil still exist 'behind' our conceptual perspective and, while they certainly shape it, that perspective itself is mostly oblivious to its deeper nature. We then awaken to the fact that evil cannot be redeemed by finding it 'over there' in someone or something else, by reducing and defining it with our mineralized concepts, but only by coming to experientially and deeply know our higher Self.
From a more folksy perspective, I very much agree with Pogo that, "We have met the enemy and he is us." I also believe that "We have met the friend and he is us" and the ongoing evolutionary challenge is to more truly grok both the friend and the enemy in all of us and to know, even if only temporarily, the difference as we seek to do our best. That process of deep ingoing and ongoing inquiry within a dynamic ever-changing living situation (embodied or not) would seem to me as a true spiritual science. Meanwhile, perhaps we might agree that moving too deeply into abstraction carries the risk of separation from the senses, which would inform us palpably of the differences between good and evil. I believe this is the point that BK is trying to make.
You know how Cleric and myself are always mention something related to how people stop logically reasoning when reaching their desired conclusions? When you write the bold, you are practically saying, "I reached this conclusion with my logic and reasoning, but I don't want to hear any more reasoning from you which may cut against it, because I'm a 'non-philosopher'". I suppose my question is, what is the point of conversing if further logical dialogue has been made impossible on this issue? No matter what I say, it will be objected, "you are making a logical argument now, and I already told you I am a non-philosopher!".
It seems my only response can be - that is not what I mean by heart thinking and I don't think your West-East conceptualization on this topic is accurate. In short, I disagree.