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So many do not understand this. It is troubling. | ||||
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That doesn't sound very controversial, on it's face. And I am late to the argument(s), but what else are others suggesting might have happened that was of such import that we now mark time in terms of BC AD and CE? | ||||
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Thank you.  And for your informative reflections on consciousness, as well. | ||||
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LOL! Yes indeed, the Middle Ages was rife with talk about how matter = energy and how consciousness vibrating matter could assume a wide range of expressions. Some of my favorite authors on this topic are . . . well . . . (cough, cough).  | ||||
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Johnboy, Appreciate your work enough to have spent about twenty hours attempting to Grok it.  Again, FWIW,thank you! "Aurobindo proves too much." Perhaps Goldilocks can elaborate further on the how and why of too much. -------------------------------------------------- "No ghost. No Machine." What if there is a ghost in the machine of modernity and it leads to an abortion holocaust in the tens of millions. What if Rex 84, Operation Cable Splicer and Operation Garden Plot are fully implemented, leading to tens of millions of Americans in internment camps, hundreds of which are even as we speak being built and maintained across the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. They come complete with guard towers and barbed wire, railway linkage and airstrips. One of them is a "mental health" facility in Fairbanks equipped to hold up to two million "patients." KBR, a division of Halliburton has a $375 million contract to build more. Six, seven, eight hundred camps now in existence, depending on who you ask. Our best thinking produces internment camps. In Trinidad, just west of here, they are refurbishing a camp once originally build to house Italian Americans. "Oh when will they ever learn." "Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing, long time ago."  Koestler's "On Disbelieving Atrocities" along with some Catholic Pro-Life commentary: http://www.ewtn.com/library/PROLIFE/HOLOCAUS.TXT Can SEP help to avoid atrocities? Let's hope so! -------------------------------------------------- Thirdly, can SEP really function on all quadrants, all levels? http://www.integralvisioning.o...ronterror&mode=print Note how Mark Edwards hits the nail on the head re: Individualism and Evolutionism, thereby explaining the prevailing dynamic of political thought and commentary at shalom place this last five years or so. Profundity in the extreme! Methinks George Will not ready for Mark Edwards! Just some thoughts and thanks for jogging them loose. You have a new baby in the stroller and it's just bad manners to call any baby ugly, but even the pretty ones need a nose blow and a diaper change once in a while. Shalom, a Place, Within SEP, spoonboy | ||||
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I agree. But does anyone know of a case where creationists are teaching the bodily resurrection as a biological phenomenon? I have my doubts on this. After all, they have the same New Testament that we do, and they read of the risen Christ appearing and disappearing, passing through walls, etc. That's not a sarx/soma/corpus/psyche-icon! Such a literal view of bodily resurrection isn't what Fundamentalist Christians believe. | ||||
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I took a look at that article and a few others at that site. It was difficult for me, with a cursory review, to evaluate the nuances in the various AQAL interpretations of the different authors. For example, how closely do they track on Wilber's approach and/or how much do any of them diverge? You may have noted that I have recently added a few thoughts to my SEP and they, too, speak of certain maladies, one of which I consider to be Wilber's own radically apophatic, arational, gnosticism. I'll excerpt that discussion: BTW, George Will "gets" this | ||||
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See my contributions re: consciousness from the past two days, here in this forum, in this thread. Until neuroscience advances a tad more, there are certain realities we might best approach with a reverent silence. | ||||
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spoonboy <<<< reverently silent shalom | ||||
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Hi Johnboy: You wrote: "In my own life, it has not seemed so very difficult to keep orthodoxy out front, probably because of my thinking-oriented temperament. And the same thing is true for orthopraxis, probably because this has been drilled into us, perhaps even overemphasized?, by our tradition's magisterium. And the community/fellowship aspect comes naturally enough, I suppose, for one in a large family. Orthopathos was a gift from family and church at a young age. A personal prayer life and a life of communal worship thus came natural to me as a young Catholic. However, it has been the one aspect of that fourfold integral nature of religion described-above that, in my experience, is the quickest to slip away. And I know this happens for many reasons in our lives. And I can also say that it has been very painfully felt when I have thus lapsed. Such desolation is a great gift. To feel the need to pray as urgently as one feels the need to breathe underwater is a description Merton used to describe the spiritual life. It sure describes my own. In an age-appropriate way, yes, we need to continue to touch all four bases. Being Catholic helps, in my experience, in precisely this way, as long as one's approach is balanced with no over/under-emphases." ++++++++++++ Just wondering if you have considered the work of Dr. Lipton and his book "Biology of Belief in regards to our religious beliefs and experiences. Here's a small piece of an article. http://www.brucelipton.com/art...of-your-cells-part-3 How Babies Learn In human development, when a sperm and egg come together their fate is presumed to be controlled by the inherited genes. The role of the woman in fetal development has primarily been restricted to her contribution in regard to nourishment via the components of her blood that pass through the placenta to the fetus. But her blood contains a lot more than just nutrition. Blood contains all of the information molecules as well, such as hormones and emotional chemicals. The mother is always adjusting her physiology and her emotions to deal with the contingencies of life. Since her blood via the placenta is directed to the fetus, the fetus is experiencing and feeling what the mother senses. This is a super-intelligent idea on the part of Mother Nature. Since the fetus, when it is born, is going to live in the same environment that the mother perceives, the mother is helping the fetus �adjust� to current world conditions. If the mother perceives the world as threatening, this sends completely different signals to the fetus than if she perceives the world as a warm, supporting place. When stress hormones cross the placenta they have exactly the same target sites in the fetus as they have in the mother. They cause the fetal blood vessels to be more constricted in the viscera, sending more blood to the periphery, preparing the fetus is for a fight/flight behavioral response. In a developing fetus this is going to enhance the development of the musculoskeletal system and make a bigger body, with a coordinated increase in the hind-brain function to control that response. In a truly unstable world, this mother is creating a child that will have a great advantage because its ability to be a fighter and survive is greatly enhanced. Yes, the genes control the unfolding of a body plan but how you enhance some organs and take away from other organs is based on the flow of information chemicals that are transported from the mother's blood into the placenta. <cut> Science has documented how responses to the world that we acquired from our parents are profoundly important in shaping our own physiology, our health and the diseases that we may experience later in life. " <cut> | ||||
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No, I have not. Because there is SO much out there re: "energy" studies (e.g. PSYCH-K), I tend to filter my interests in same thru NCCAM, National Institutes of Health at http://nccam.nih.gov/ | ||||
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Johnboy, From Matthew Fox's introduction to Hildegard of Bingen's Book of Divine Works: "People, though they may think and talk rationally-- and even behave so--yet live irrationally...Man is born beyond psychology and he dies beyond it but he can LIVE beyond it only through vital experience of his own-- in religous terms, through revelation, conversion, or re-birth.....Our age was up to recently so highly rationalized that the irrational had only the neurotic form of expression. But the attempt to cure this result of rationalism by more rationality is just as contradictory as a war to end all wars. The only remedy is an acceptance of the fundamental irrationality of the human being and human life in general...a real allowance for its dynamic functioning in human behavior, which would not be lifelike without it. When such a constructive and dynamic expression of the irrational together with the rational life is not permitted, it breaks through in violent distortions which manifest themselves individually as neurosis and culturally as various forms of revolutionary movement which succeed BECAUSE they are irrational and not is spite of it." -Otto Rank 'Mother Earth will not be saved and mother church will not be reborn by the rational mode alone. In Hildegard, we find a healthy balance of rational and irrational. Hildegard never sacrifices the rational to the irrational or the irrational to the rational. She dances the dialectic dance of both/and, of science AND intuition, of feeling AND cognition. She is niether anti-intellectual nor impractical, but is bent on "what is useful," to use her own words. Much of her advice offered in these letters is of a deeply practical and useful kind. Yet her images and symbols, born of a passionate visionary irrationality, touch and move us at depths which are frequently ineffable. "From the heart comes healing," she advises. Depression comes from dualism, she teaches in these letters. We are urged to "be saturated at the fountain of wisdom" and to do justice and not bury justice. Angry at "bungling abbots" and clergy who grumble "like bears and asses," she urges a "new order of justice for the church." God is "the purest spring" and all are to celebrate the fact that "you are divine." She images herself as a "small tent" and as a "small feather." She urges the clergy "whose tongues are dumb" to start trumpeting justice and become prophetic again. She laments how the clergy have separated themselves from the people and have rendered their hearts lukewarm instead of loud on behalf of the oppressed. "Our age is full of pain," she comments--an observation not at all unapt for our times. She herself proves in these letters how true it is that women are called to be prophets to church and society alike. She herself consciously states that that she is chosen as a prophet, and she struggles with the ineffable depths of her own insight when she declares that "I can't fully understand the things which I see." She urges a spiritual awakening that will be marked by an "outpouring of the prophetic spirit" when art and spirituality will awaken people from their slumber.' Is there room within SEP for the prophetic gnosis of the irrational, the transrational and the apophatic, properly balanced by the rational? Shalom, A Place Where Everything Belongs spoonboy | ||||
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There is a place for the nonrational and arational and transrational and rational Perhaps I'm just being semantically picky, but irrational to me, implies going against reason. The other word forms, again, just to me, seem to imply those moments which are not related to reason or which go beyond reason. I like to say that these other moments are intellectually-related but not logically related, because our intellect had better be more than formal logic if we are going to fruitfully realize the values life offers us (which I like to call eco-rationality )! Still, being picky perhaps, I prefer the word prophetic charism to gnosis, if only because gnosis implies esoteric knowledge and the Holy Spirit is WAY more generous than that! As for the apophatic, it has a HUGE role! It isn't really conceptually that distinct from kataphatic. They both aim toward an increase in descriptive accuracy , one through negation, the other through affirmation. I didn't read that Matthew Fox piece with a hypercritical eye, but your characterization sounded pretty right-headed to me. Without being open to these other "moments" in the human pursuit of value-realization ... ... well ... we might well have been the type of folks that would have shown up at Pentecost with fire extinguishers. Perish THAT thought You might find this post at NCRCafe interesting. I have recently bit off more than I can chew by placing my SEP out for consideration in three different forums at once --- here, NCR and philosophyforums (the right, the left and the far left)  It helps me to stay sharp because there are hermeneutical hawks waiting to make easy prey of any so-called mistakes of mine. And, everyone bitches about my jargon, and then I go back and write what I wrote over (and over).I need to get back to my sit-coms or I shall become a dull er boy. Truly yours jb | ||||
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Sitcoms! Aha! You DO have irrationality on board! | ||||
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Yes, EVERYTHING in moderation. There are even some things we have to do, once in awhile, to remind ourselves never to do them. | ||||
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One can take this approach that I've been describing and possibly tease out some political implications. All contemplation ends in politics. For anyone interested, go ahead and muse over what those implications might be. When I get a chance, I'll come back and address those. | ||||
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The Conservative Pragmatism of Charles Peirce by Thomas Short; Modern Age Archive � Volume 43, Number 4; Fall 2001
My own heuristic, appropriating the Peircean take, is thus biased toward tradition and conservatism and political realism. | ||||
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Johnboy, From David Hawkins we learn that the jump from the rational to the transrational consists of leaving the myriad trees and seeing the forest. Rationality is a prerequisite for the transrational. When Huang Po teaches us to leave behind all intellectual concepts and to avoid them as we would demons, he presumes that his students have already mastered the sutras and learned the dialectics. To be Zen or to live Tao is to see the essences and essential nature underlying the specifics and to see the whole and the sum of the parts. It operates seemingly without effort, but the effort went into previous stages, reason and intellect, logic and deduction gave way to a sort of abduction or whole essences coming all at the same time through aquired contemplation. Men are Like Waffles, Women are Like Spagetti. Blog sites with separate threads for different topics are very horizontal and vertical, like a waffle. A more feminine thread from one relation to another part of their lives is the spaghetti way of being in the world. Eventually a man and a woman may learn to be together without spilling syrup on the spaghetti or sauce on the waffle. Transrational thought is both and neither at the same time. Clear as mud, I suppose. shalom, a place, above the spaghetti and waffle house, spoonboy | ||||
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The trick is not stop at First, there is a mounatin Nor to stop at Then, there is no mountain And, we all know the rest of that verse and that we must return to Then, there is My take on Enlightenment via Zen or Tao is not that they speak to issues of ontology thus gifting us with metaphysical insight but rather that we are gifted with a unitive-like, ineffable experience awakening us to solidarity with ensuing compassion for all. This all implies a relationality. Of course, this is not everyone's take and some do take such experiences and try to articulate them as metaphysical insights. But, to me, that seems rather incoherent. I can see the appeal in such an idealist monism for those jaded by the regnant, scientistic, materialist monism in some parts of society, but both ontologies, in my view, are, again, proving too much. I do not offer this over against your thoughts, especially your affirmation that the transrational goes beyond the rational but not without it. I wasn't sure, however, whether or not you were advocating making the return trip in Donovan's hermeneutical roundtrip, or whether you had bought a one-way ticket to apophaticLand. From the context of the rest of your message re: sauce and syrup, I gathered you sing Donovan's tune? | ||||
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both/and/neither has, indeed, been working for Catholics for a very, very, long time | ||||
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There are many for Islam's encounter with the "West." It seems that philosophical middle ground between religious theology and positivism is very thin, so mediating between these two levels of concern is difficult, presenting significant "either/or" contrasts. So, for Islam, politics and religion must needs go together, and "the way of the West" is in direct conflict with this theocratic ideal. | ||||
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Yes, and "in the West" we even differ (thankfully) amongst ourselves, as the post-Enlightenment secularistic influences in Europe totally marginalized religion, unlike our US Founders, who struck an amazing balance. | ||||
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I'm off to work on another project. Thanks for the interaction and feedback. pax! jb | ||||
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Johnboy, I do believe in the return trip and the Ox pictures as a Zen hueristic bear this out. We return to the marketplace with gifts to bear. Taoism has a lively and wise political dimension and arose in response to social upheaval. It has many applications. Will spend the rest of my life... Ramana Maharshi realizes the capital "S" Self as God and that is IT. Papaji, one of his dosciples, says that Aurobindo has failed. There is no group evolution, only the indvidual Self as Ultimate Reality. Buddhists have an individual and a collective vehicle. Confucians have a moral teaching, soon to be rediscovered by Western conservatives, methinks. Billy Graham preaches both individual and collective salvation. I believe that J.C. Him-Self accomplished all of the above in 40 days and applied it for 3 1/2 years. The Ultimate Example! SEP allows for the transrational, and hence for growth. It's holons all the way up and all the way down... shalom, a place, where everything belongs spoonboy <*))))>< | ||||
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Shalom Place Community Shalom Place Discussion Groups General Discussion Forums Christian Morality and Theology From Physics & Biology to Religion & Theology