The Impossible, part 4: Spiritual Oneness and the State of Incorporated Reality.

The operative question that motivates the essays on the impossible can be formulated by the questions of determinism and contingency: Is the random aspect of the physical universe of science responsible or otherwise enacted or present in the random aspect that involves human choice, such that choice is determined by the state of the universe, or, is the human being a mediator or mediation of an extra or supra universal element and the physical world, where the random aspect of the physical is but that supra element of the human, that the physical universe is contingent upon the series of choice?

We should see that these questions remain salient so far as the terms themselves reflect or are capable of reflecting True Objects of a particular scheme. The impossible, then, lay at the exposure or decoupling of such metaphysical structures, at the complete shredding of all discursive-conceptual methods for meaning, including such conceptions that would end this with an ineffective nothingness or nihilism.

The reader should be clear in his or her orientation upon this reading. This is not a discernment of ‘either you’re in or you’re out’ situation; but, this statement assumes that the reader is indeed oriented in this way, or at least can understand from that perspective, and thus has been coming upon a sort of intuitive rebuttal, that some sort of antagonistic anxiety is cultivating the response that places the argument for nonsense, ripe to be useless, ridiculous, or for a term extrapolated to nothing less than impossible. This is the sign of irony; the argument presents the dissolution of its representation. The attachment to or faith in the True Object come upon by its dissolution as an indication of another True Object is, as Soren Kierkegaard rightly situated, despair, but its opposite elicitation is elation. The continuation through despair, and not the Sartrean revolt from it, is the revealing of the impossible into discourse, into the logic involved in the meaning of terms, it’s implicated scheme, that has become itself ripe to speak of the impossible in its impossibility, that what has so far been seen as the polemical position to reality is but a discursive situation of a modernist sort, which is to say, of a One True Universe, that is or has developed itself to the point of being capable of revealing its own limitation through its limiting definition of objects, such that these objects not only argue their determination but their contingency as well, and ultimately, that because this situation has arisen only and of the the supposed common humanity of meaning, that this common humanity can no longer be upheld, where the subject agent of will likewise is seen as a faulty conception. The irony is that the universe counts as a ‘one’ in which humans are not segregate, and that the universe, as a conceptual scheme that comes about in humans, has developed the meaning of its unsound concept. Hence, the concept brought to its objective ends is despair, yet it moved through is the phenomenon itself, an ironic reversal or upending of reality. The revolt from despair is a re-establishing of reality, as well as its historical truth.

The potential at any moment for the revealing the full extent of the contradictory feature of any conventional discourse evidences the true qualitative motion of history and is reflected in the mood or attitude of the era. What has been defined, at this late date, as modernist and post-modernist expresses the oscillation of history to non-history, and by this we should surmise that the history of which science designates evolution and the development of human beings and all its stages, is much, much older than what physics and anthropology has determined. In our moment we are struggling with the situation that has deconstructed the subject, what heretofore I have called the subject-object. The natural and automatic ‘revolt’ has been back into modernist objectivism, which is for our time, reality, the ideologized capitalized corporate structure. The conception that is left to fully dismantle the tower of righteous babble, since we have already seen how the human determines object contingency, thus involves the revealing of the object unto itself, which is to say, how it is the object itself that determines human contingency. The resistance to such exposure, the subject of the object of capitalism is the incorporation of the the effect of human ignorance into the exaltation of its own designation, the subject (-object) in despair of its own existence; in effect, this is the building of the ‘God-human’ out of the oppressing state of reality, which is to say, out of the real, inviolate, and essential human subject of faith. To reiterate: The effect of the inability to withdraw faith from the calculus of reality is capitalized upon, and this, also as effect, reduces reality to a real particular assertion of power that is enacted by the capitalist upon humanity. The con of capitalism is reality itself maintained through a ploy of the individual with free will.

The reason we must emphasize ‘effect’ has to do with the difference between authentic human interpersonal relations and the thoughts which overdetermine the activity of a larger common human whole. The traversing of what I shall term ‘local’ interactions to a ‘distant’ humanity calls forth the ideological negotiations of faith concerning True Objects, and thus the various religious (see below) assertions of Truth that become capitalized upon in the reducing capitalistic fetishism; in the avoidance of such objects of faith, one must speak about effects (see my earlier essays, particularly, “Aphilosophy, Convention, Faith and God”).

Yet, before we describe in detail the impossible situation of reality that most of know intuitively, we must begin with tying up some loose ends.

Whereas ‘before’, in the subjective ‘phase’, so to speak, such argument come upon was seen to indicate some sort of spiritual basis, some transcendent or otherwise meta or supra reality, some ‘other than regular’ world that lay at some recouping of total meaning that then indicated a Truth of the universe, that couples with regular reality. The idea is that usual reality is recouped or accounted for by a type of ‘psychic’ or thoughtful ‘centered-ness’, that in turn presents usual reality against a more real ‘One’ reality’. There are two rebuttals to this. The first concerns ‘logical’ discursive failure, as Western minds might consider metaphysics, and the second, spiritual or philosophical failure – and see that what is philosophical is meant in a more Eastern mode, such as Tantric or Zen Buddhist can be considered. The union of these two coordinations represent the one possibility of reality. Religion, or what can be called spiritual ideology, in general reflects belief that corresponds the logical and spiritual in this respect. Recently, Non-philosophy-as-method appears to resonate this ‘one’ posture, but its move is incomplete; this is why non-philosophy represents convention in-the-last-instance, the ‘least overdetermined’ object of reality, despite its ‘regular’ non-philosophical meaning incited in the ‘Future Christ’.

It is not difficult to see, though, that metaphysical speculation, which includes all forms of real speculation, will not relinquish its hold upon the agent as a fixed social construct. The subject object of faith will not allow reality to be disturbed, and the linear progress of history will continue as the individual subject-object remains under the dominion of a particular effective power of the doctrine of free will. We can only suppose that Non-philosophy will be taken as another philosophical object, even as we redefine what philosophy is or re-term it, and that its Future Christ will become another speckle in the lineage of philosophical ideas.

One issue in this that will be addressed later is the point of elucidating the truth of the matter if no one wants to or is capable of hearing or understanding it.

*

If we can concur that this can be a logical assessment of the facts thus far (see my essays on The Impossible, parts 1,2,3) then it is here from which we may derive all the facets of ontological and cosmological discourses, their arguments, including religion, philosophy and science. These purport to explain what can be called ‘the argument of the One’, which is always the basis of every reality, and which can amount to the query, how do we reconcile the random universe with the random human choice? We have just indicated above that the answer is routinely reconciled in having the universe as basic, and the human being as a thing of the universe, and that even taking the human being as central, the universe is situated likewise as basic. Science proposes to be able to discover or uncover the true thing (True Object) that is the universe, and psychology proposes that we may discover the true thing (True Subject-Object) of the human being, that we may discover the mechanisms and or functioning of the universal human, a thing of the universe. Religious and or spiritual thought also propose to be able to offer a true One of reality, but is not limited in the same way as science; spiritual proposals may use any number of rhetorical devices, but their arguments likewise draw from the sensibility of a knowable One.

We can see here that the historical solution to reality always tends toward falling into the True Object, as I define it, of faith; the bare human in the world is one of a past ignorance toward an informed future. The situation is always of the world of True Objects, since it is quickly apparent that there is a world of things that humans must negotiate in order to survive, but this imperative then colludes with the terms and derives reality proper. Any deviation from this endeavor, of things, as definition might distinguish various things from other things that are not things, is typically called ‘spiritual’ and is correspondent with a situation that occurs ‘within’ the knowing subject individual; psychology is scientific investigation into this ‘spirit’, and thus accounting for the motion that sees the universe as primary to any investigation, amounts to a ‘world religion’.

The motion of spiritual endeavor, though, the activity of psychic investigation, is taken up along two vectors of discourse that again collude ( I will take to the ethical implications later) in a quadripartite:

1) A practice of instruction that suggests the individual toward a correct understanding-and-practice, an experience-understanding gained by the individual. This is nothing more than an assertion of proper method. The Eastern philosophical teachings that propose a relieving of the individual of all true objects to the ‘meta-nirvana’, so to speak, recourses similarly to Sartre-esque motion. From a coming to a realization of the sangsaric phantasmagoria of temporal objects, the ‘enlightened’ individual may come to more intuitive or aware consciousness of bodily operations and how such operations may effect the individual’s appropriation of conceptualization of objective situations. The various coordinations amount to the methods traditionally call ‘martial arts’, as these stem from ‘right’ thought, action, attitude, etcetera, but extrapolated into achievement and practice for ability can said to include any proper method.

2) A practice of ‘following ones bliss’, so to speak, where the individual is disclosed upon his or her own motion as proper unto itself. Whether the individual sees itself as some sort of cosmic or psychic center or entity, in communion with a spiritual source, is worthy or unworthy, the product of such calculus is the same; the motion does not avoid this classification. When undertaken thoughtfully in experience as a thing unto itself, as a motion with ends of itself and not upholding a proper object as projected ends, this vector develops in a more ‘proper’ Sartre-existentialist motion, as I describe in my previous essay, “post-post-modern-modernism”. The individual ‘revolts’ from this precipitated abyss of nothingness and thereby finds true agency for the negotiations of established ideological structures, or True Objects, and appropriates proper methods based upon given routes for such methods, though most are not systematized to a degree as the Eastern martial arts to be called such. Of course, the individual of (now) free agency would never admit to their activity being determined, neither that they are fitting their agency into preexisting ideological structures of True Objects, it is more likely that such a one would adamantly assert that they have created or established something entirely new, but he is capitalizing upon the gap that is maintained in the revolt; the power of the True Object is gained through its becoming a fetish, the ‘magic’ that arises in the real denial of the gap (see below). Obviously, such agency is supplied by the old adage “ignorance is bliss”; it is similar to my assertion that computers function by water moving through vessels to fill rubber balloons, obviously I don’t care at all about how they might really work, but nevertheless, they still work for me. Hence it is useless to talk about ‘more real’ reality, but only effects of reality – the power that humans appear to have over objects is a real effect.

These two ideologic situations can be coaxed out of the present East-West ideological paradigms, where it can be seen each ideological-spiritual base involves the same polemical motive elements. Respectively, though aggravated argument can blur any statement of character, it is not difficult to draw an umbrella over the West to characterize it with individualism and as well see the European-American ideal of manifest destiny as an individualized motif. The individual, moved by a ‘invisible hand’ starts out and motivated by his or her own impetus, strives and thereby creates their own world united in individuality. The East, similarly generalized, contains individuals ordained in their incarnations under a celestial dictate that is evidenced in social order. Noted that such generalizations are not absolute in their designations; the West has an overreaching and implied structure of order, and the East has individuals that act upon individual ‘karmic’ designations. Indeed every human place carries these designations in their own way. Again, what can argue the inadequacy of such a generalization are based upon random factors that real investigation seeks to discredit in method, and by its effort establish the unified ‘One True’ universe.

( Note: This is the third-moving-into-the-fourth of non philosophy, but, as I have said elsewhere, the non-philosophical fourth is still but one fourth of two possibilities, such that we have a quadripartite of a quadripartite that derives its meaning from the philosophical object that is non-philosophy as it represents itself as (non-) cornered in the Real, extended by radical immanence into the Future Christ, that has inevitably been established by it.)

*

Again, the same problem poses itself through every route. The persistent aspect of real inquiry into True things that obscures the truth for the certitude of the One Reality can be called a ‘gap’. As to our discussion so far, we consider universal randomness, human randomness, universal basis, and human psychic basis. Conceptual gaps become presented in a critical consideration relating any to each of these categories, but are always overcome with reference to and or correspondent with whichever category is taken to be basic to the investigation. Francios Laruelle has indicated as much of philosophy in his non-philosophy. When the universe is taken as basic, then all discourse refers to its truth, that once the human mind is understood, a proper linking of causal relations will be made to universal physical randomness. When choice is basic, likewise physical interpretations will be able to be understood by a contextual consciousness, such as free will. Where the universal thing is basic, the human will be accounted for as an explained thing; where the psyche is basic, universal structures will likewise become realized. And, where choice, discourse will reconcile determinacy; where the universal true thing, randomness will be accounted for. Any combination of these four categories yield a correspondent solution oriented by what is taken as basic, but each solution, when applied dialectically to the possibility of other bases, will yield a conceptual gap, a contradiction that then necessitates a move upon, elliptically, in condensing and expanding substantive real quality, back into the base as truth of the matter in question.

Of course, the distinctions of these categories do not argue absolute categories and are not upheld, rather suspended, in the activity of consideration; each operating base organizes a particular matrix of transcendental and immanent elements within the discursive posture (see my earlier essay, “Aphilosophy, Convnetion, Faith and God”). Take for example the statement, “I am a human being.” In considering the statement’s veracity, any term of the phrase will reside in a transcendent or immanent state while one term is considered. For a universal basic query, the term “I” considered may yield an assertion of evolutionary physical traits acquired through a natural selection such that the term “I” is qualified; in such suspension, “am a human being” may state transcendent qualifiers that reify the universal proposition, while offering immanent qualifiers in the subsequent explanation likewise. The human query may refer the term “I” to a universal evolutionary stage, but then qualify the universal evolution to an immanent fact of knowing, thereby reifying the meaning of the basic human. The humanity of the universal, it the case here, and the humanity of the human position may have exchange due to the ignorance of the contradiction involved in approaching absolute bases. The term “human”, though understood as an object in-itself, as indicating a True object between such arenas (universal/human), is already a contradiction in argument, since one cannot have an evolutionary product decide upon its own agency to be evolutionarily determined. Yet also the contradictions are suspended within bases likewise in so much as ‘I’ may be a ‘human being’, but when I go to figure out what a human being is, ‘I’ am not including the ‘I’ in the consideration; ‘I’ have become immanent to the discussion, and by the time I may have found out what a human being is, I have probably situated it in a universal setting yet while avoiding again the basis of my evolutionary redundancy for the sake of arguing the human center of being human, so the evolution has become transcendent. Different terms and the statements that support argument pronounce or otherwise punctuate different ordinances of transcendental-immanent structure according to the base from which it is argued; this feature of discourse can be called a ‘differend’, the gap that is reconciled in a discursive redundancy that is denied for reality, and this occurs in ‘real time’.

To reiterate; for every basic argument, its conclusions are supported upon non-admitted contradictions that reveal its lack when considered against other discursive bases; to uphold its truth, it must retain an ability for plausible denial in its argumentative structure by speaking of and to possible referents of and to other discourses while never confronting the base of truth the other discourses rely upon: it must ‘disguise’ its equivocations that cover for the vacillating or oscillating discourse through posturing, or for another term, identity. In general, the science of physics and mathematics eventually comes to admit a type of universal structure that contains the possibility of ‘non-locality’ (an extrapolated meaning of the Heisenberg Principle), along with mathematical ‘complexity’ and ‘chaos’, where the non-local event resides in the position of observation; a contradictory situation, but also a noticeably ‘conscious’ indication. The scientific observation of non-locality in chaotic complexity excludes the observer as an included variable but instead develops parameters that include the description of the observer as ‘an excluded observer’, and by extended discursive moves, negates the act of observation through including multiple occurrences of different observers’ observations, which again, through yet more discursive maneuvers neatly avoid that the arena by which the observations have been or are being performed has already been established as the reality that they are testing, the results of which already determined by the parameters of real meaning; a particular orientation upon objects is assumed. Reality is seen as variable in contrast to the controlled experiment which yields the constant elements of reality, but reality is static in as much as it yields consistent results when a consistent method is applied. In other words, the procession of physical discourse, in its transcribing mathematical data to meaningful terms, must use terms that are a ‘best analogy’ and left uninvestigated in order to make the statements of its findings. What is truly static and variable is ignored for the definition that corresponds with a particular and proper orientation upon objects. In effect, science does its best to assure that the choice that is made upon a decision to experiment or observe, is mitigated by the ‘natural’ demands of physical element to be tested; the phenomena ‘lends itself’ to the formulation of experiment and the matter of its communication is likewise left to a presumption of the real universe where what is spoken about the findings of physics is necessarily consistent with the terms of the experiment. Take for example the Higgs Boson; this particle is supposed to have something to do with the manifesting or ‘ability to be’ of matter. What this Higgs-type Boson has to do with the scientists who are made of matter experimenting, finding this boson, and concluding things about it, I am not sure. It seems plain to me though that the boson is nothing more that a way to justify the individual human scientists in reality. What this boson has to do with me is I find an occasion to write in a particular way. To stick to some absolute category, such as physical science, as if they are really finding an actual basic particle of the True universe, avoids the reality that is already manifested so as to bring about that course of events, including me writing about the ridiculousness of the importance of the boson, for the sake of the individual free agent of reality.

Extended at root, the situation of human choice represents an effective conceptual gap from the physical base, a gap that occurs where the universe is segregated into static or controlled elements and ‘in motion’ or variable elements. Since the physical-mathematical world is taken as base, yet it is choice that has allowed such a base to become known, the knowing individual comes to miss its own resonant motion in the vacillation, for the sake of defining what is moving. One could say Einstein was a philosopher. Likewise and further, spiritual type findings of ‘acceptance’, as well for meditation, communion and proper action, deriving from choice as base, and seeking to find guidance or correspondence from some ‘higher’ source, may use the ideas of theoretical physics to support its spiritual affection claim, such as ‘chaos’, ‘complexity’, ‘fractal’, aspects of subatomic theory, to name a few from contemporary science, but the scientific and physical discourse of the manifestation of physical things indicates no effective ‘source’ that an individual may have audience with beyond an inference made by the spiritual participant. The individual is caught in a vacillation that he does not recognize due to the insistence of his own true conceptual-discursive base.

Though this may be a somewhat ‘dry’ interpretation or designation, while these two categorical arenas may seem to overlap and conspire with each other to define a sort of ‘holistic’ picture at certain junctures, the meaning of each discourse indicates a universe that cannot admit a transcending consciousness as well as a consciousness that cannot fully account for a (scientific) physical universe due to the insubstantial situation of those things, even while each might defer to the other to round out each respective lack. Together, the implicated unity of such universe relies upon discursive situational gaps that are avoided in the act of deference, or emphasized in the act of debate, to the ‘One’ truth. Here we find the definitional parameters of reality; the various discourses of truth have veracity only in as much as the truth they suppose to be the goal or purpose of their efforts contributes with other discourses of the One Truth, but this One Truth is always suspended in the very proposal that seeks it.

Yet, ironically, one argument is typically and routinely unheard, one that arises in the conflation of basic discourses, in the gap, so to speak. Our understanding of the universe has no necessary correspondence with what is true of the universe or ourselves beyond what is understood through faith. The effect, the ‘presence’ of the conscious human being thinking, acting, and behaving in the world, is consistently reduced in the prior decision of investigation that seeks the true One; faith is anachronized in a history of and displaced to religion and spirituality of the One True Thing. This is to say, the idea of reality is a mythology, as well an ideology of power that prescribes beforehand every investigation as to its object and purpose, as well as placement and function. Further, and in type contrast, in so much that the human being is merely another thing of the universe, all human activity must be correspondent with the universe functioning; that which evidences this without seeking a scapegoat of random occurrence must admit then that the mythology is the human-thing of the universe behaving universally. Yet, its behavior cannot admit anything ‘of the True universe’ since the universe’s operation is not evident ‘to’ the meaning that humans develop, but only ‘in’ the meaning. The meaning that would have humans gain a true understanding of the universe and its operations or even purpose, is an ‘overdetermined’ meaning, a meaning that derives from a presumption of the One, of transcendence and or immanence of divinity that ‘evens out’ the vacillations of existence for the sake of itself. This then outlines what is meant by the question “how do I know this”, and, “how do I segregate myself from the universe sufficiently to know of the truth of the universe”. To reiterate; human consciousness cannot be anything but a universal operation, which is to say, human consciousness ‘makes sense’, it ‘forms meaning’ and ‘means forms’, but that such meaning has no more meaning beyond its establishing than, say, a leaf might be able to know of a true photon of light. The relation of meaning meaning is one of pure effect unto itself. The issue then is not so much about what may or may not be determined or chosen, about the uncovering or discovering the truth of an object, but about how one is oriented upon the True Objects of reality.

*

Hence, not only have I outlined the problem of what is possible and thereby indicated what is impossible, and as well represented what is most offensive to faith in reality, but most significantly, I have presented a situation, the meaning of this essay, that is not only impossible, but more so, ironic. For if the meaning of this essay is true, then its meaning cannot be true. Indeed, it is, again, not real, absurd. For what has occurred in order for the meaning of this essay to be conveyed, is no discursive segregated overdetermination. The essay speaks of reality, for for a one that may not be included by it. It speaks of history for the future; in other words: nonsense.

It is for this reason that metaphysical speculation will always remain the procurer and law of reality, and irony remain excluded as a viable discourse of truth.

So, if I may accentuate my point with a quote from the bodacious author David Mitchell, from his abominable book “Cloud Atlas”, 2004, pg 401:

“Maybe the answer is not a function of metaphysics but one, simply, of power.”

*

More impossibility in part 5? Hold onto your diapers!

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Comments

35 responses to “The Impossible, part 4: Spiritual Oneness and the State of Incorporated Reality.”

  1. landzek Avatar

    …or and. The ‘lending for the experiment’. You rebut does not work in the frame i explore, because it was that experiement that is informing the object to its reality that you are drawing upon by which to have a position to discuss whether or not i might be correct. And that experiment itself occurred in the only way i could have; the object exactly set itself to the experimental discourse such that it yielded, not against what They thought as a hypothesis, but what they could say based on the condition of the object for any time. ‘

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  2. nosewings Avatar

    “Take for example the Higgs Boson; this particle is supposed to have something to do with the manifesting or ‘ability to be’ of matter. What this Higgs-type Boson has to do with the scientists who are made of matter experimenting, finding this boson, and concluding things about it, I am not sure.”

    Careful here. Philosophy has received more than its share of abuse from ignorant and arrogant scientists, so philosophers should know better than to ignorantly and arrogantly abuse science.

    “It seems plain to me though that the boson is nothing more that a way to justify the individual human scientists in reality.”

    This sentence is especially troublesome. What I think you mean is: the only reason any scientist would look for the Higgs boson is because it, in explaining why matter manifests, it would explain why the scientist exists.

    Assuming this interpretation is correct, I have a few thoughts.

    I’m not sure why you think you can read the motivations of a large group of people whose field of study you do not understand.

    I’m not sure why you read their motivations in this particular way. It seems naiive — almost uncharitable.

    Finally, I wonder if you would attribute to them similar motivations if you actually understood what the Higgs boson is supposed to be, and why its existence was predicted in the first place. Or why some scientists were hoping that it would not be found.

    “In effect, science does its best to assure that the choice that is made upon a decision to experiment or observe, is mitigated by the ‘natural’ demands of physical element to be tested; the phenomena ‘lends itself’ to the formulation of experiment and the matter of its communication is likewise left to a presumption of the real universe where what is spoken about the findings of physics is necessarily consistent with the terms of the experiment.”

    This is usually true, but not always. For example:

    It was initially thought that electromagnetic waves had to propagate through a medium, just as sound waves do. This medium was called the “luminiferous aether.” In the late 1800s, the Michelson–Morley experiment measured the relative speed of light in different directions in order to determine the “flow” of the aether relative to the Earth — the idea was that light would travel faster if it were traveling “with” the aether, and slower “against” it. What they found was that light appeared to travel at the same speed in all directions. This eventually led to the rejection of aether theory and, later, the development of relativity theory.

    This is all especially sad because, if you took the time to look, I think you would find that scientists are not so ignorant as you seem to think they are. Kuhn, Hawking, and Mlodinow come to mind as thinkers who expressed thoughts similar to yours here.

    There is more to be said, but I think I am going to push it into a post, and end this reply here.

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    1. landzek Avatar

      Thank you for commenting! So very few comment. And a rebuttal at that. I yearn for critique and rebuttal. I get so little.

      I think it is in another essay where is do admit that being a layman, my concept of the Higgs boson is necessarily Incomplete and based in ignorance, that I cannot really know what the hell it is and so my opinion about it means little.

      My point is that there is nothing said that is not a justification of the sayer.

      More in a bit…. (I just had a minute right now)

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    2. landzek Avatar

      …. Pt 2. “…what i think u mean is: the only reason any scientist would look for the Higgs boson is because it, in explaining why matter manifests, it would explain why the scientist exists.”

      Indeed; your answer goes toa larger point i address somewhere in my essays: The idea that there is an achievable and essential link of sorts between some phenomena, such as the ‘physics object’, and the discourse.

      While the veracity of that case is addressed elsewhere, the point here, is that all that the object resides entirely in discourse, that there is no subjunctive, subjective and or thinking subject apart from the discourse that tells of it, and the possibility that sets in this domain.

      I am saying nothing about their motivations; i am describing the actual situation as the entirety of ideological and religious affection can be described once this situation is admitted.
      Yes. That experiment i am familiar with. And the description of it and everything you present has no further basis than the discursive arena. It is a condition of your/ our/my existence.

      I am not saying it does not have another basis; i am describing a particular basis as it goes to informing how all religion and religious thought has arisen.

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  3. inthesaltmine Avatar
    inthesaltmine

    “It is for this reason that metaphysical speculation will always remain the procurer and law of reality, and irony remain excluded as a viable discourse of truth.”

    I am rereading this post, and perhaps it is my place to slow down and ask more questions. How does one orient oneself with respect to this statement, assuming its truth. In other words, what do you want to do with the irony? Do you want to include this irony where it was otherwise excluded, i.e resist the metaphysical speculation and its power-plays? Or would it be best to buy-in wholeheartedly and commit to the “game”? This might mean declaring that, as the “Italian Kafka” Ugo Betti said wonderfully, “…to believe in God is to know that all the rules are fair and that there will be wonderful surprises”

    I believe I’ve chosen the latter, but I am open to consideration of other options, e.g. as if saying “This is not a game!” at every point it is suggested this is game. I am left wondering which is the real game here: acceptance of reality or its denial?

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    1. landzek Avatar

      Strange my app is being weird. This reply of yours ( the first reply) comes up in one window of mine in my blog app, but it gets cut off toward the bottom and I don’t know how much longer it is since my screen will not scroll down to see the rest of it. And in my other reply view, this reply is not there. Very weird. But I got most of it, I think. The next two replies of your show up good; I don’t know why. So I don’t know if my reply to this reply will show up either. Let’s see. The first replying I just pasted to reply in this second reply….

      ‘Granting’ and ‘ conceding’ – lol, yes! I have conceded that reality is real! Lol 🙂 so were good. Yes, it is strange that we are communicating, have found or otherwise understood a common ground, yet the means by which we have communicated ‘reaches’ no encompassing rhetoric that either of us could access to gain a true meaning of what the other has said; perhaps we could say (in our communion room; our ‘private space’) that God is allowing particular discourse to hold on to its object in this space just enough that some link could be made between us. And if I saw you kneeling and praying I would not judge, but I may have an idea of what is actually occurring – but does this idea prevent me from praying too? No. Maybe the action, the positioning, the kneeling, the expression of intent, is enough to convey -what?- a humbling, a supplication – to what? To myself in the moment of and to the ‘unaccounted for beforehand’ not yet come upon? To God? Yes, maybe, maybe not so maybe, maybe in truth.

      More in a bit …

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    2. landzek Avatar

      Blog ‘Agent Swarm’ posted a essay recently (pretty sure it was him) that spoke of ‘commitment’; if I recall, that one makes a radical commitment that seems to contradict what ‘has been come upon’ (my take).
      I can dig this. There is a certain resonance with what occurs, it seems. It has to do with the ‘absolute withdrawal’ we have mentioned. I have been playing with the idea of a ‘partition’; I tend to see that I do not take sides, though, in that what I speak (write, upon the occasions) I cannot help but do so, ‘putting down’ the contradictions while ‘holding up’ the partition. In the way you have presented it, a ‘pocket veto’ would be the witnessing of the partition but acting from one of the sides, acting in commitment, with fidelity to the partition, the ‘point of contention’ of real philosophical decision, to one of the sides, mediating thereof the sides by the integrity of the partition while not residing or speaking ‘from’ the partition.

      For me, In this way of speaking, my commitment is ironic because it is to the partition itself, a fidelity that contains no aspect of choice as I act, but further because my commitment becomes for life, for living, for my actual negotiation, a choice in my day by my family, and by extension, humanity, that love cannot be lImited to what I choose, but must be all that I am in existence, as I am able. For so alone I had become, out in the wilderness, that such a family commitment, for which I could never enact or cause to bring about, was completely beyond and foreign to me, such intimacy and love for another, that to have been come upon by this Life, must be then entail a radical commitment, for I made no choice upon it except that it was the only choice, the romance actualized, realized, through nothing I could have made or brought by my will, I could only choose to see that within this commitment I need make choices.

      Hence my commitment to the partition, and by the partition, the fidelity that brings me no choice but in love to make choices. For I could not have a choice in love so long as I was choosing to try to have it, so long as I was negotiating the terms by which I wanted love.

      More to come…

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      1. inthesaltmine Avatar
        inthesaltmine

        Ah, this post greatly helped me to understand not only what you mean, but also what I mean. I feel this post to be especially important to our discussion. I can quite clearly see the way in which the first paragraph plays out in the course of my own life, in the non-ironic commitments which I have made.

        Most commitments in life seem to be non-ironic, i.e. to continue using your language, they contain an aspect of choice or deliberation in action. They are commitments made “in” life, not generally “to” life itself. Consider my commitment in life to nonviolence resistance, the kind I have written about on my blog. To probably repeat myself from before, I use the metaphor that nonviolence, by my understanding, is more or less like an Anti de Sitter space in that it is negatively-curved (because it is a mode of resistance, applying positive pressure) and has a certain n-dimensionality to thought as it concerns categories (i.e. it is nonviolent, and so does not employ terms in rigid or totalizing ways) given for an open experimentation with Truth. In science, however, there is this thing in string theory called AdS/CFT correspondence. I showed, or tried to show, that even the most advanced or enriched of all categories do not grasp (how to say it…) “the biological” side of things, whose primary guiding question is “What is Life, itself?”

        With that stated, I likened conformal fields to Life itself, because of its invariance, i.e. the “partition” you mentioned. I suggested that it is best for nonviolence resistance to remain “in dialogue with” or in correspondence with CFT, or with Life itself. In other words, I keep my “gravity” in Life, but also use a “gauge” (i.e. aspect of choice) in Nonviolence. The reasons for this are perhaps obvious: commitments made “in” life are not made “to” life itself; as such they may, if you are not careful, devour you! So, what I find to be most synchronous here is that I have been, perhaps without knowing it, doing exactly as I had written: speaking with you in dialogue, you who shows me increasingly what it means (ironically) to live with a commitment for life itself, for living. Is this dialogue sufficient to keep one from being devoured by dragons in the wilderness? Maybe, but even there is still this duality to nonviolence/Life. Am I right to liken “Life” to CFT, and so to place it in the duality with AdS?

        Well, you did mention that “you are exactly my painting that I could not account for, and this situation is exactly the situation of the guru, of encountering God through oneself that is the reality that could not be accounted for beforehand in another person” —– …. such joy your remark gives me!!

        I want to push these limits beyond our ironic and non-ironic “commitments”, insofar as they are both commitments and share similarities in this way, to something more mysterious that perhaps gives rise to commitment. Understandably, this means moving beyond the “Unitary” Bound that exsits between us into a form of, well, what? …. non-perturbative string theory? LOL. This is pretty much why I am flirting with the Trinity as energy source or fountain and nondual forms of mystical contemplation (this requires not commitment, but “uncommitment” as Eckhart says) as of late, it may analogously involve “tachyon-ghosts” or some bizarre nonsense like that. At the surface of discourse, all of this sounds absolutely absurd and I can’t expect anybody to take me seriously. But I intuitively I do hold quite naturally to the claim that there is more than discourse, some “supplement” or “additionality” above what is already whole, and so more than life itself – even if I have the hardest difficulty articulating what this means. Is it “true” life? Yes, no, I don’t know, but I’m still looking…

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      2. landzek Avatar

        Do you, Itsm, perhaps have another blog call ‘adfontem’ because his essays seem very accordant with yours. But on another front. He even has an entry called ‘Aquinas and Ghandi’. If not, you should check it out.

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  4. adfontem Avatar

    “To reiterate; for every basic argument, its conclusions are supported upon non-admitted contradictions that reveal its lack when considered against other discursive bases”

    Yes this is true – then let us not consider them *against* other discursive bases. Is this not the difficulty and danger of “comparative religion”, that we turn other religions into evidence for our own instead of letting them be in themselves, and uniquely/independently so? This is not to say “…let us not consider them” period, for that would be foolish. It is important to encounter them, engage them, etc. and it is pretty hard to avoid doing so unless you’re in an secluded enclave of uniform belief or a “cult”. Instead, we have to be completely vulnerable in our faith (as non-admitted contradictions, or even freely admitted contradictions — they do not need defending or apologetics!) and open to the real possibility of conversion to another faith if truth really lies elsewhere.

    How is it, then, that people navigate and consider if they hold so tightly to their non-admitted contradictions? I’m not sure, but there is a basic “trust” to social and ethical behavior, something that in the if/then form says: If you are hurting or you are in pain, then you will express it. This is Wittgenstein’s turf here, the primary/secondary issue. I may have to read up on his psychology again. There is something peculiar about “pain” or “weariness” here, I think, that effectively coerces, like a normative punishment that the ironic God slaps you with from above, this reconsideration in the long run if people do not reflect upon their experience and its truth. It is a consequence of their walking on the wrong path, so to speak. Plus, I am generally inclined to believe that people are, more often than not without need of this consequential-pain, smart enough to consider these things for themselves and together, and that they are not blind inasmuch as the Spirit moves within each of us uniquely and specially.

    But that is something I take on faith, you see. I could well be the blind one here. 😛

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    1. adfontem Avatar

      Oh, looks like I accidentally spilled the beans – I’ve been working on a new blog that, I hope, says these things a bit more clearly or carefully, in a less “maddening” way.

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      1. landzek Avatar

        Ah – …and if there is some ‘inner’ subject that conveys or uses discourse, then the conveyance, it’s real manifestation, is absolutely necessary while it’s appropriation thereof what is real is only sufficient. The ‘use’ by this inner subject likewise falls into an orientation upon what is real.

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    2. landzek Avatar

      I read this reply and then the post of yours to which you refer. I like it.

      For my post here: in order for there to be a duality as we see it here, there must have been a ‘non-duality’ by which to observe the first. Some call it ‘the One’.

      I ride very close to the line; from such a view duality admits no recursive ‘One’. I am more like Lyotard, that we are dealing only with modes or means of communication, discourse; we cannot reduce or shave off some other mode from discourse. Discourse is all there is. To suggest that there is something more than discourse always relies on discourse to communicate it. So if there is some ‘inner’ subject or being that conveys or uses discourse, then it is lost in the using of discourse.

      To see that that there is more than discourse, that discourse refers to something that is not discourse, indicates faith; for if there is no object ‘in itself’, how can there be a true object that any discursive move refers to?

      The solution to this limit is to deny the limit. And In this way, reality is established through faith, and it is this such faith that sees humanity as more than it is, reaching something more than itself.

      Perhaps this discourse of faith indicates a non-reification of polemical entities, which is a move of acceptance, but this move would yield still only the reality of faith.

      I’m not sure if there is any ‘blind spot’ in ones faith; conventional faith establishes reality in its totality. Yet, ironically, it is within this faith that one might ‘locate’ or otherwise be able to indicate that a blind spot may actually be real in the negotiation of true objects. I suppose this could amount to a definition of the real individual.

      Yet, in so much as reality cannot be ‘escaped’, and that I deal with reality all the time, I would say that your essay is very well, corresponds well with what I could say is some sort of sensible reduction for living or our placement in reality.

      Thanks for your presence and interaction. I look forward to more.

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    3. landzek Avatar

      This group of people and their non-admitted contradictions-

      Perhaps, for one who deals with truth of reality, such people would amount for the ‘unaccounted for beforehand’ of existence, and in so much as the person coming upon the ‘pain’ that would be expressed, such a person would have to account for it through the real other, which is to say, conventional reality.

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      1. inthesaltmine Avatar
        inthesaltmine

        What about post-conventional forms of faith? e.g. as in Fowler’s stages of faith and development? Would these be “unaccounted for afterhands” by your thinking? In any case, they do seem to be unaccounted for… i.e. freely admitted “mystical” contradictions. Just thinking out loud…

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      2. landzek Avatar

        I hadn’t heard of Fowler before I just checked his Wikipedia spot. It would seem he is studied people, patients, not just book work , or think work or just living-work, and came to these conclusions of stages. They don’t appear to me to correspond with what I’ve encountered; roughly I can identify with them. And I’m not so old to know whether one becomes enlightened and if I can judge from my dad, he could be enlightened in that he stopped being a stubborn self righteous father and more accepting and loving one. But his faith is obstinate as ever. He keeps hoping I’ll come back to Jesus, but he’s learned not to say it so much. Lol. And wit that, I am able to speak with him more as a loving friend and less as a wayward son.

        Yet I’m sure the Wiki is not quite Fowler. I’m sure F is talking about how the psyche incorporates the world and where and how faith is involved. They seem to have some credence; I think personally I shifted around the order a little bit lol.

        Bit the manifestation of his stages as a theory? Reality allows for all sorts of theoretical science and ideas of truth. But I tend to say that it is these real theories of truth (philosophies of…) that contribute to the mistaking of truth for the real, and the problems we see everywhere. One could say these are efforts in bad faith and thereby are unethical, sinfull in a K way.

        And then ironically Fowler is just taking about himself, but he thinks he’s talking about subjects and faith as if he is not subject to faith. I mean, that he does not see that his experience that he put I to stages is about him, that because this is his experience, this is how his science came to be; his orientation is upon reality so the distinctions can be solute. But his idea will be catalogued and quickly mistaken or forgotten , put I to the category of ‘Fowler saw this, and we agree with him here, and see he was wrong here . But his idea contributed in this way… Etc..

        Yet one must ask if anyone could choose to orient themselves upon reality differently, if people could choose to proceed in life doing something different. I say that Fowler, in this case, could not, but is doing exactly the only thing the only way he can, having his interests but also his basis from which he has and gets truth intact. Again, then, the issue is: does he know this of himself? And the issue of faith is: how do I distinguish myself, and how do I know this? In one manner of speaking the answer is: I do not and don’t.

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  5. inthesaltmine Avatar
    inthesaltmine

    Our differences are primarily ones of epistemology, not ontology.

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    1. landzek Avatar

      Yes, I can agree : how we situate terms. But this is a reason why we discuss, no? 😉

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  6. inthesaltmine Avatar
    inthesaltmine

    There is this separate issue of discerning one’s “calling” in Life. It is not a simple matter of “I” choosing a call, nor is it a dialectical insofar as “my calling” chooses me. I have a friend who wrote this short poem that speaks quite nicely to the phenomena, the call, and its response.

    when the shrivelled boats that have carried the sun
    wake one by one face down by the river
    and rise blind to sing where they are
    if i can stand i will be standing by the last one
    calling you
    who are so near that i cannot believe you
    and when i call the calling begins
    beyond you

    If I re-call correctly, Laruelle’s more recently published essay also deals with this idea of “the Call” and the Phenomena, here: http://jffp.org/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/view/596/645

    Perhaps for a variety of lingering personal and psychological issues, plus a penchant for comfort and security (like how my “I” probably subconsciously still takes rather seriously the “truth” and “reality” of its baptism into a world of violence and “evil” and its confirmation in the Church over and beyond mere facticity or that-it-happenedness) my “I” feels called to engage Christendom from within rather than from without. This would allow “me” to confront its variety of problems with the dual quality of being-Christian (“I come not to bring peace, but a sword”) by being able to personally challenge it from a “higher” perspective. This does not preclude also recognizing this “external” truth (but herein seeps the potential for “bad faith”), especially insofar as the universal basis has not yet been fully discovered. It does mean that “I” becomes more of a “people person” and works with personality over and above relationality as a matter of convention. Given that I have already come this far, is it cowardly for me to choose comfort? What if I, for example, decided to become a chaplain and routinely had to deal with such end-of-life situations?

    There is an opening, and I have to pick a certain time-frame. In the long-run you are right, but if I limit my vision to a shorter window (like that of an individual life, my life), then perhaps being right is not a priority and, like Pascal’s wager, I lose nothing by being a bit more lenient. Would this be again betraying “common humanity” for a prideful or selfish end? Isn’t this a kind of fall in its own right? Put otherwise, it seems better to suggest that the value of mediation is not to be fully denied in favor of purely negotiation, e.g. the two can both exist simultaneously in various degrees and there are many people with many different callings. Or is it truly an Either/Or? Maybe it is… As an aside, perhaps in the next-life I will be a Tibetan Buddhist and can devote my fullest solitude towards this task of engineering reality. Conceptual engineers of reality are basically bodhisattvas.

    What, do you think, is your calling?

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    1. landzek Avatar

      There is so much in ur two replies here that I am tempted to re-call a ‘one mind’ , at least between us – maybe a type of ‘call and response’ liturgy. I have never encountered this and it is refreshing. So, I must take some time to reply fully and appropriately. :). Namaste, My brother in the mines.

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    2. landzek Avatar

      It is not so much that I am intolerant of mysticism, just the terming, just as I do not say I am a Christian, or a Buddhist; if I wish to speak to truth, I cannot hold myself to these ‘bound’ terms.

      I find it an interesting corner I am building myself into in my arguments. I have no ‘pocket veto’ available to me, and in a way I wish I did. In a way, that is what I was trying to ‘build’ or create for myself, but I could not.

      So I am left; a strange situation I find myself in. The augument I present is not of the ‘either/or’. There is a right; somehow the truth falls within the ‘if-then’, but it seems incommunicable: the situation of absolute withdrawal. And I see this as the problemata that K explores in ‘Fear and Trembling’: is Abraham justified in keeping silent about where he is going and what he is to do with Issac? For I see the unfolding of history as the attempt to speak this ‘kind’ of silence. The endeavor is folly. Never when one speaks is one’s meaning conveyed; rather, it is the faith that sees the communication as indeed taking place. This situation takes place in the realm of thought, and I am indebted to you for your essay on the ascetic ideal. For you see, somehow we have communicated, a possibility that I knew could occur, but doubted it could. So if it has, I am on new ground. For again, if the world is what we paint, then you are exactly my painting that I could not account for, and this situation is exactly the situation of the guru, of encountering God through oneself that is the reality that could not be accounted for beforehand in another person; in other more Western psychological terms, this could be called the relinquishing of the ego.

      Thought is the fundamental issue; it seems you concur as a kind. Do I think? That is to say, are these thoughts mine? Do they originate in, as, or of me? These questions reflect correspondence with my concept of one’s ‘orientation’ upon reality, upon true things, true objects.

      “…who are so near that i cannot believe you
      and when i call the calling begins
      beyond you”

      I does seem we are communicating. I wonder, who is the friend of yours? Is it possible that more than two can communicate? But, I think as you have said, we begin at two.

      I endeavor to expose; the encompassment of my larger work is appropriately called “Exposition”. Since, my plight is to address all ‘inappropriations’ of being human in reality (but not necessarily real social and moral institutions, unless it just so happens to become appropriate to do so) but if put too bluntly such a course can be distasteful, too crass against the stream for anyone to hear it, for we are involved in speaking, and thus hearing. One can only cater to the priority discourse, as I call it here and there, which is the ‘proper method’ of placing things in reality; that is, unless one is entirely self indulgent if not narcissistic – without the irony, that is.

      One of the things I am interested in exposing is the romance itself. But in order to do that, there is a lot of prepping to do, a lot of situating terms. Is there an actual scenario, as I like to call it, that is able to be spoken about, a common theme, a more specific rendering of content that we can get to further, or more specifically, than general motions and theoretical implications?

      So far as mysticism, I think there is something to say about the Tarot, the Golden Dawn, Kabalism, Tantra and all this, including various stories and fiction.

      Presently, I am considering “Faust”. What is your impression, or what do you know of Faust? I am not leading you on; I have read it and am studying it. And I am curious if the story has crossed your path in any way.

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    3. landzek Avatar

      A friend of mine, when I tell him, upon parting, ‘have a good day’, he regularly replies “I can’t help it; I have no choice”. I can’t help but be impressed by the magnanimousness of that sentiment – and more because his answer to the purpose of life is ‘to be of service’.

      To undertake a religious position that you describe cannot but be good and godly.

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      1. inthesaltmine Avatar
        inthesaltmine

        ”I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings. My wisdom flows from the Highest Source in you. I salute that Source in you. Let us work together for unity and love.” (Gandhi)

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    4. landzek Avatar

      The ‘tearing away’ L speaks about in the Call ( thank you for that ) ; I havnt totally absorbed its implications, but I tend to feel that he tends to reify duality resolving in the One, that a proper delineating of defined terms will be able to explain or otherwise grant instruction or a method for achieving the overcoming of the Gap. He appears to confirm what I had surmised from the beginning , as you know, that I think this effort is misdirected if not folly.

      In very simple terms: to do is to think and to think do. The correspondence is of existence, not so much of meaning, except maybe that the meaning is resituated to allow for the absolute discrepancy of objects, which is to say, meaning does and does not resolve in a Oneness of identity. I postulate and am developing the notion that the romance is a want for reconciliation of objects within a particular scheme of meaning, but that it always re-solves in a different ordination of transcendent and immanent terms such that reality is maintained and the discrepancy reestablished, finally, in a denial of existential truth.

      I suppose the irony comes in acceptance rather than denial, in letting God be God and human a human; instead of demanding God be manifest in my oneness, I let me be in Gods infinity. But in reality. As some Tibetan monk dude said, ‘nirvana is sangsara, and sangsara is nirvana; everyone is enlightened.’ Yet somehow there is still these terms that appear to refer to different things; the precipitate here is what allows me to propose a conventional reality of faith, as opposed to the the ironic truth of knowledge.

      Not that I’m a Buddhist either; just that I see the same types of efforts in East and West; just different terms. But I have to say that it appears the ‘tantrics’ if not the ‘zenners’ seem to have come across the issue way before the West. Which makes sense if we consider the anthropological history of our times. Judaism, the Kabbala, and the idea of Christ, seem to be ‘a significant’ moment. Heck, Lauruelle, ‘future Christ’ …

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      1. inthesaltmine Avatar
        inthesaltmine

        I find myself writing an enraged response, as though my only aim was to provoke you. It seems that you have provoked me, too. I wonder if this is this not friendship, a mutual provocation through love? In truth, if this is really true, it is (as usual, like a bad disclaimer) not for my lack of regard for you and your words, but instead because I gratefully enjoy the feeling of generalized unsettlement or uprooting that such provocation affords and, maybe, I feel also that sometimes we are too comfortable in our “knowing”, no matter if we are mediators or negotiators. Allow me to try, best I can, to provide an argument for the third: arbitration, on the groundless grounds of the cloud of unknowing. In other words, I want to share in this special feast of with you, but you cannot know it. Notice my emphasis here turns towards a “feeling” in addition to a “thinking”; it is gesturing towards a spiritual “feeling” in community that enfolds the humanity of its “thinking”. It’s one which even which exceeds the grounded aim of “thinking together” in concert with one another given a secular-democratic basis of understanding. It is more like, it seems to me, the feeling of enjoyment during, and the subsequent the full belly after, a heavenly meal prepared by kind angelic hands and feet — for I am speaking of (and not “to”) the delectable truth of a divine feast, after all, with its celestial music. This should not be confused with conventional human “feeling”, like getting sick to one’s stomach, although confessedly that may happen from time to time if you eat too much at once or devour something unpleasant. It is as though your notion of “building yourself” in negotiation or even the one I share with Novalis, the notion of Bildung (“broaden and build”) in mediation, both become easy things to accomplish if only one has a basic thoughtfulness about the way things/objects are situated in the world, in discourse, and otherwise. Yet, simply, in order to establish one’s collective body as you wish to do, or do the work of the good and peaceful messenger as I wish to do, food is required for energy. The both of us need it to varying extents (e.g. you more than I). We hear resonances about the problem of “movement”, as the Medievals once considered it. The Dark Ages are, well, you see, not very dark after all if you take into account the blossoming Islamic arts & sciences as well as scholastic and mystical fluorishing.

        I am given to write an enraged response, and perhaps it seems a “thoughtless” one from the stand-point of where you actively builds yourself in thinking, rather Unitive as it may be in speaking to truth, in its special Vision of things. Granted. I’ll allow it. A fair critique, from one who upholds the value of “thought”. However, I insist that I’ve already built myself and have sought now to “feel together” within this my thoughtful construction. You are still engineering the mind, I am learning to drive the mind that I have already engineered. Surely you can drive, too, as most engineers can. Stay there in your workshop, my friend, as long as you would like, for you do good things there, but to me the beauty of life itself is perhaps more likely to be found in the common experience of driving across the world as an underling than it is in creating it. The Church, for all of her many problems, is precisely this vehicle I have decided to take in faith. There are many other such vehicles to drive, but for me she has been steady and reliable, efficient enough on the road, with some loving and generous company along the way.

        This argument for His arbitration is far more difficult to maintain because, at first glance, at second, at third, there is no Big Arbiter. It is easy to be discouraged when you meet others on the road who seem to be going faster than I. I also choose to obey traffic rules (given by tradition), police officers (or puh-riest officers), etc. where others neglect these ordinances. I think I’m going to shout at all bad drivers “YOU HERETICS!” from now on. The task is to develop an intuitive or post-conventional feeling which itself calls “beyond you”, I suppose. In any case, we can speak of a certain “mystic” feeling. It is not graspable in thought, powerful as thought may be. I speak of, specifically, if you want a name for it, the mysteries of the Trinity. I am arguing, to the extent that I am arguing, for BOTH something resembling your Unitive view AND something else entirely, e.g. the Trinitarian one. They all “go together”, joined together, on the roads of life. If we are communicating, it is only in “thought” in accordance with the former Unitive vision, our common humanity. Yet to me there appears to be more to life, something that exceeds the human. There is divinity.

        Consider this response as “me” trying to call beyond you, e.g. “to Him”, which is not to say without you, but instead which moves beyond the individual “relinquishment of ego” to a new kind of we-“ego” (“wee-go”? we go, or, we drive together, vulgarized as “Jesus take the wheel”…) which is, in its own way, “not ego”. It’s a kind of Christian nonduality that draws me in and motivates me, over and above any other kind of generic nondualism or negotiation of objects. Admittedly, again, I always retract a bit when people valorize “communication”, preferring instead “the feels” of that which is incommunicable. This post-conventional (and ultimately, I think, “religious” in the Kierkegaardian sense) intuition tells me that building oneself in this fashion is a task doomed to failure for it, too, like everything else, is found to be wanting even after ego is dissolved. How can this be if “wanting” is a function of ego? I don’t know. Perhaps it is too solitary and shielded, too willing to drive alone in the world with the enleashed perceptual agency it does have. It is written: “By their fruits you will recognize them”. This is the invitation I hope to, well, impose rather than expose upon you in the sense of the following:

        (1) force (something unwelcome or unfamiliar) to be accepted or put in place; and,

        (2) take advantage of someone by demanding their attention or commitment.

        A heavenly imposition, not a human one. Certainly you are not intolerant of mysticism. Yet, if you are not intolerant of mysticism of all things, then why skirmish over terminology? Is it because you value “exposition” to what is understandably perceived as the violence of terminological imposition (e.g. including and especially Christological terms)? Me too. Is it because you do not wish to be “put in place”? Me too. Is it because you resist tradition? Me too. Is it because you are not willing or able to give your attention or commitment to Christendom? Me too. And yet, all of this does not preclude me from seeking out the Advocate or Divine Arbiter in all things. I wonder, however, if such expositions of categorical violences are not in turn but another kind of imposition against that which is divine in favor of that which is human, all too human: the tacit demand that one think, and not feel (for) the necessarily incommunicable. We have speckled or glistening moments of common humanity, yes, and they are very good; but it is the moments of divinity which are most beautiful. They need not preclude each other in Truth.

        I was resistant, for a while, very stubbornly resistant indeed, “in speaking to truth” just as you do, to calling myself X (Christian, Buddhist, etc.) because, formally speaking, this makes a category with boundaries that in theory and often in practice, too, define also a not-X which is excluded with a certain force, neglect, or violence. With my penchant for nonviolence, this kind of self-definition became quite repulsive on principle, or in any case I actively sought to avoid it and challenge others on it. I sought to eliminate all of these X’s that make up my identity by serially “non-“ing them (as we have previously discussed) in my own argument (e.g. I would say sometimes that I am “a non-Christian mystic”, a non-Buddhist, or what have you…), not unlike you seem to be building yourself into your arguments. There would be an ambiguity, a kind of seamless experience that would for the most part, if not entirely, dissolve the self and keep at a certain distance “belief” and “identity” — those sometimes tricky little devils. The only identity which remained for me in the last instance so to speak was “preacher’s kid”, but I could have easily gotten rid of it too and, in doing so, I would have wound up in roughly the same place as you right there in the mind-workshop. I’ll often introduce myself like that to more conventional Christians who ask about this “me” that I am: “Hi there, I’m a preacher’s kid. It’s, well, really complicated” (as though implying: please don’t inquire further unless you have the time for a long story about my “pathetic” crisis of faith that I claim ownership over; it is mine, my love-object…). As an identity, to say “PK” is easily conveyable to others, “they” usually understand me, it communicates something without much failure, it resists the either/or logic (“Either you believe or you don’t”) and generally promotes the if/then thinking, and opens itself up to negotiation.

        It’s a quite successful procedure, all things considered. It is, I confess, an example of that “posturing” you mentioned, and surely some see it as a particularly disgusting or at least troubling one. If I gave it up, I would find myself there with you in a non-posturing mind-frame. Yet there is another posture, too, beyond my own: humbling oneself before Him. Given how obscure and “small” PK is qua identity, I didn’t think generated much violence to anybody but perhaps mainly myself. I was able to retain the peace of that divine posture, while at the same time the justice of non-posturing. Does this split me? Maybe it does, but I could then self-suffer its affects as they variously happened to me (loneliness, mostly, inability to relate except to other PK’s), and make up for its unintended violences (e.g. sometimes non-PK Christians, who empathize, are nevertheless visibly hurt by my hurting and doubt; more clearly, because they respect me and know I read voraciously, and are perhaps not so secure in their own faith, or do not trust their integrity, or whatever). Often, I became sometimes a crisis for “them” just as I was often for myself. In this way, I held to truth or “spoke to truth” as you said, while at the same time I was able to learn from others and, well, “communicate” despite a plurality of different visions. This all makes enough sense to me; I mean, after all, I’ve lived it for a long while not knowing any other way forward. The gap between my minimal (…is it also maximal?) posturing and your total “relinquishing of ego” is very small, less than a 10% difference if you’ll allow me to quantify it or count it in this way. Maybe this difference makes all the difference, you might say, for we all know that “ego is ego” all the same and percents really don’t matter, since 1% can become even more vile than 99% as we well know. My minimal posturing, at times, can be very maximal too! IF we agree about “thought” as fundamental, in kind, and we do, THEN this is quickly becoming an affair of degree.

        IF you hold to this vision, like my “I” did, THEN certain consequences follow for better and perhaps also for worse. Fruits, again. I mean social ones inasmuch as I do, well, eternal ones. Do I give myself over to the humble service of humanity, as you freely do? Do I give myself over to humble service of divinity? IF the former, THEN you become, effectively, nonviolent action and resistance itself and you find yourself in an n-dimensional space of thought, thinking, etc. but with “negative curvature”. I often say that nonviolence is like an Anti de Sitter space in this regard. You are literally standing in the way of things by building yourself in the way of things. You will be faced, continually, with many such “either/or” situations and you will be dancing around them or standing in the middle of them, resisting them or allowing them to pass as your thought (sharp as it must be to effectively inhabit the argument) sees fit. It is warfare, “fighting the good fight” as they say. It is messy. It is thankless. It is tiresome. It is admirable, courageous. Then, when you are weary, you will be presented with, for instance, the apparently open, free, and humble Christian invitation to faith (EITHER embrace it OR reject it; you have no pocket-vetoing available to you), in an encounter with a kind and enthusiastic believer who posits, purely and positively, Christ as Truth and all that entails with the Trinity. Yet, in speaking to truth, you are given to respond to this proposition, however well-intended, if you are honest with yourself, negatively or in the negative: No, but thank you, I am not a believer in the Trinity or the goodness of all creation, I am not a Christian, etc. When you grow weary, many still reject this divine feast. This strikes me as foolish or else it is an “ignorance” as Augustine would complain.

        For example, to give a worldly example, I dated a girl for a while whose mother would always ask me, even if I had already eaten her spicy (relatively speaking) meal with a smile despite my American taste palette, if I wanted more to eat. If I politely said “no, but thanks” she would be personally offended that I did not accept her prepared food (again). IF I said “no” too many times, THEN certain consequences would surely follow. EITHER I must choose to eat more, or I don’t. Rule of thumb: for sake of your significant other, if you really care for her, always go to great lengths to say “yes” to her mother’s cooking and enjoy it even if your white taste buds literally cannot handle it.

        My point is that the resonating “no” I was giving to Christianity in particular, in due time, began to weigh down on “me”. Perhaps, one might claim, I was not strong enough to sustain myself in the face of these incoming “attacks” which bear the name of unconditional love. It is suffocating, sometimes. Or, perhaps given my history, my location, or often disorganized mental state (e.g. having a “crisis of faith”), I was bombarded more frequently than you are. Maybe my mind wasn’t well-trained enough in the end to withstand it perpetually — yes, that is perhaps it, I had too strong a grip on ego and did not “relinquish” it. Or maybe I did relinquish it, and instead I was “called” even beyond my relinquishment. I became heavy with resistance as I negotiated the world. I did not bring myself accept the reality (as you say) of “me” being-embedded or otherwise “built-in” to this negative curvature of space-time. That is the way things are, you might say, and you’d be right, both scientifically and otherwise. Obviously you can continually point out the violence of the EITHER/OR, it is always there, or how there is a certain passive-aggressivism or subtle coercion lurking beneath the apparently “free” invitation. Christianity is – in general – a gigantic breeding ground for this kind of behavior, it seems. (I hesitate to add that perhaps so are extremely generous and loving cooks). And you would be right here, too. I grant that as well. I grant the truth of most everything you say. I am enraged, but I don’t exactly “know” why if we are already in harmony.

        There is a binding, yes, but it then it becomes a matter of a willful self-binding, or an voluntary acceptance of certain bounds given the making of a radical commitment made through love. A faith that allows itself to be bound by, say, tradition of the Church or whichever vehicle one selects to drive. IF I love her daughter, THEN I will choose to keep eating her mom’s food even if I am already full or do not like it in actuality or whatever else. Perhaps you can keep “it” (whatever “it” is, in any situation) at-bay ad-infinitum, or eliminate it entirely if you are so skilled in the workshop. Dodge being at her house around dinner time, or only go there afterwards as I often would try to do. Tell her you already ate, or invite her to eat elsewhere. Yet, these are all “negative” reactions, and the invitation, humble and pure and positive, always comes again. One can be without love, expose it, and this problem wouldn’t exist. Yet, around each corner, love insists upon its truth, even as you resist it. You cannot avoid “it” forever unless you give up that which you love. I found that the “No” or even my implicit “pocket-veto” (still a No) does not hold up against the explicit “Yes” of belief or submission and its peaceful acceptance of things. At the end of the ball game, in my core of cores, I am a Christian. It takes a lot of digging to get there, maybe “I” never gets there except in Love, but I do not have equal parts of faith and doubt in “me”. I’ll visit you as often as I can in the workshop, especially as my car turns up the mileage. Yes, of course, the “yes” is all too frequently weaponized in the worst ways possible. I will be the first to grant as much. I will grant the truth of many other things too.

        Perhaps there is something to this “granting” that we should explore together. It seems to me that IF you are concerned with being so precise or careful with terms and terminology, THEN you risk becoming generally antagonistic or adversarial in the eyes of others who drive as a result. Like when a lowly customer gets into an argument with the learned mechanic, who clearly “knows” better most of the time. In other words, If/then does not appropriately “grant” the truth of the either/or in its faithful positivity or love because it would rather “speak to” it from a knowing non-posture. This often may turn into “speaking against” or “speaking down” upon, due to the contrast with at least an apparent humility and openness and goodness of the invitation to drive which poses itself as an alternative to painstaking engineering. This is the negative curvature of negotiation and its nonviolence. IF/THEN may often not be as humble as the positing of an EITHER/OR, which is always itself a kind of IF/THEN in its underlying subtext, e.g. EITHER you accept Christ into your heart blah blah as Truth or you do not…. usually implies, tacitly, IF you do not THEN eternal damnation AND IF you do then eternal salvation. It’s important to weigh these consequences accordingly for yourself, in yourself, and see how it plays out in your life. Fruits.

        Perhaps for you that “no” works just fine. IF that is so, THEN “all the more power to you” as they say. But for the “me”, it seems it does not work in the long-run because it gives rise to a certain weariness and even loneliness at the very least, minimally. Maximally, it could be infinitely worse (you know, damnation and shit). Do you experience this weariness-by-negative-curvature too, or is it just “me” speaking? How much does this “no” weigh for you? Nothing at all? Perhaps to you it is very light, because you relinquish ego instead of accept it as God-given (imago dei)? Christianity, I think, at least historically, gave rise to this ego and said it was fundamentally good. Can you afford to do that in the face of, say, a mother’s kind offer of otherwise really delicious cooking? Is this what “exposing” the romance means: calling out the mother on her passive-aggressivism and so, in a way, forfeiting the love? If so, I’m not sure I want to expose things. Instead, things will expose themselves. Instead of “speaking to truth”, with divine love it seems that truth “speaks through” you, or at least it is supposed to do that if the vehicle drives smoothly enough. Isn’t occasionally putting up with the in-laws apart of the marriage-commitment, too? I am not married on earth, but in an otherworldly way I am. That is so strange to say. Its operative psychology (if I can say this, it seemingly resists psychological reductions – but what else is there?) risks perversion or insanity insofar as it is also unknowable. Among those who cannot drive well, it leads to terrible accidents on the road. But surely I am not a bad driver (and isn’t that what we all say?). One can afford to say NO when it comes to Christianity insofar as one understands that offer as abstracted from reality (with its negative curvature or space-time already implied) and not true reality itself. I figured that occasionally I will have to put up with Christians, but only because I love Him. Expose this for its violations, if you must. You probably “know” much better than I do where, exactly, the problems of the world lie (with the ego, obviously). But you cannot say to the mother: since I am empty and without ego, “I” cannot eat your meal. The Way of Jesus implies real consequences, too. I hereby impose upon you the trump card, the final Arbiter: Mother knows best.

        With a letting-go of the self, it becomes easier to navigate and handle Christianity’s EITHER/OR, but I wonder what this does for, say, building a community. It is like we are looking for a community of now ex-lovers who each denied the mother’s food and decided to join together over the shared experience of missing out on the feast. We are given to look through the stained glass of the Cathedral from the outside on a snowy night. You wish to try it, and I will try with you: to carry out a new, all the more-inclusive or indeed INFINITE experiment, born here in the thinking workshop, by inviting a third person into conversation. Then a fourth, then… A community form without ego and identity, that embraces all X’s and non-X’s alike without passing judgment. How many people can we invite? What if somebody says “no”? No matter — our idea of “love” is even bigger than unconditional love, in exposing the romance, we will do without dualistic passive-aggressivism and offer instead pure compassion! But it seems undeniable that Christianity is the most radically successful experiment in love to date. Is our only difference from “them”, in truth, that we experimenters with infinity do not like to use so much Christian terminology? Can we do better with our own terms? I’m open to the attempt, at the very least. I wonder often, however, what if Christianity already offered the kind of community we were trying to create? Our discussion is becoming so “elitist”, isn’t it? What if the workshop were opened to all? If you are engineering vehicles of the mind (consider the Church as one such vehicle among others), that does not preclude you also driving them, but it does mean that the time you spend engineering you likely do not spend driving. EITHER you engineer OR you drive. You CAN certainly do both, are capable of both, but NOT at the same time. The question of “calling” may be rephrased as: How do you spend your time? What radical commitments have you made?

        Eating oranges, I think you said earlier…

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      2. landzek Avatar

        I am reading your reply: i am not sure from where you gathered an antagonistic approach, but I have a suspicion that you think I was being sarcastic when I said to be of service is good and godly. I was not. And your ‘pocket veto’ I think is the most wonderful expression.

        Merely that I am curious what you mean by your vacillation; perhaps we have different ideas of what the ‘romance’ is. Perhaps we can discuss what this means to avoid further miscommunication.

        I seems to me that you have associated the romance with a oscillation, and you have suggested that you have difficulty at times, a type of depression or loneliness, the crisis of faith; but perhaps I have been mistaken.

        If I can speak plainly, as one human being to another: I find it is good to have a balance between self and service; but if I am speaking of truth, then it is all service. But it seems not everyone can keep such contradictions salient in their view of their position in reality (maybe I don’t either; who knows? This is why i write; all my proposals are questions, begging to be answered. “Think not, Protagoras, that I have any other intrest in asking questions of you but that of clearing my own difficulties. For…’when two go together,one sees before the other.” )

        I engage in life to the fullest, as I do in thought. This is why I say I am not speaking upon an either/or: because readers tend to read what I write as an argument of right and wrong, correct and incorrect. I am writing an argument of the facts, that all. It does not mean that somehow I am not human, or have come to some ‘righteous’ or ‘more correct’ way of living. Perhaps i have a good angle on the problems of speaking about reality, but I live solution; I am human, I live in reality. What I think is never conveyed, except as colloquialism. My living is hardly ‘more proper’,though it may be less ‘difficult’ than what I observe and hear from others about how they see things and their opinions and how they go about responding to them. I will leave life guidance in the probably more capable hands of others for they have plenty to offer (as do I, as do you) but I am hardly an Eckhart Tolle, Joyce Meyer, Andrew Weil, or Wayne Dyer, or even Anthony Robbins.

        This is just a first impression; I will read more. And get back…thanks for your honesty.

        There is a difference between irony and sarcasm. Sometimes, though, the tone can get confused, especially in text.

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      3. landzek Avatar

        Hmmm… Again, alot there.

        I think another issue that keeps coming up with readers, similar to the last reply, is that it seems that they take what I am saying as implicating a method for living, as if what I think implies a certain approach to what I do in life. Perhaps it does, but the facts do not contradict that I live in reality; the facts are the facts, they are neutral. This does not mean that I am neutral; I am human as every other human. But my approach to life is sort of reflected by what I write: I am intolerant in theory, but I am compassionate in person. I know the truth, but often I am unable to live by that truth. I want things that upon reflection I wouldn’t really use. In reality, the presence of myself a living human being is ironic. But my presence in the world is for the sake of others. This may be God in my life, and indeed at certain junctures I can speak in that way, but God in my life is also the facts, applied according to the situation at hand.

        It can be similar to what cultural theory calls ‘registers’; one develops an ability to speak in different registers for the purpose of communicability, to foster communication. It is not dishonesty though, it is a reflection of authentic experience. Likewise if I am communicating about truth, I must use the register that speaks in facts. If I am communicating about how to deal with loss, I then might use the register that deals in relations, spiritual or psychological affirmations and compassion. It does not change the facts to speak differently in different situations, rather I would say it ‘speaks’ of a human understanding and legitimacy in being, because part of such ability contains or involves not being offended with the various manifestations of facts.

        My tone may seem antagonistic at times, but what of ‘you shall not have any other God before me; I am a jealous God’; God seems remarkably human at times, ironically.

        *

        Maybe I mentioned this to you before, but you bring up the Trinity; coincidentally, Dave blogger just commented to me in my blog comments, upon his uneasiness with the Christian trinity, though he is an avid Christian. I think you would get a lot out of a conversation with BigStoryGuide@wordpress Dave. He and I are having quite a good discussion, I feel. As you and I are. Perhaps you might check out.

        And though I think it is a fault of mine that I dislike and often try to avoid discord (often at the cost of creating more discord), I think discord at times among friends is healthy (how ironic, huh?)

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      4. landzek Avatar

        …or perhaps you could just enter into Dave and I comment stream; I think he mentions his trinity issue there, in the “Issues and Existence” comments; If you’re into it…

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      5. landzek Avatar

        I don’t know if I told you about the ‘oranges’ reference. It comes from Ram Dass’s ‘Be Here Now’. He tells of an enlightened man who was a sort of patron saint of a village he was lead to in his travels. This enlightened one was said by the villagers to be so much not of this world, his incarnation so tentative, that they had to keep someone posted at his side all the time, lest he disappear completely. When there was some complex item for his consideration, say, what the villagers would come to him for guidance, he would ‘eat oranges to increase his karma’, I suppose meaning to more establish himself in this world to better be able to figure out the answer. At least, this is what I remember of it.

        “The question of “calling” may be rephrased as: How do you spend your time? What radical commitments have you made?”

        I think I know what you are saying, but I am not sure what this really means.

        It seems like it is as if everyone is held up to some ethical standard for being human. I am not sure if this is tenable beyond a theoretical position. For, it could be very well said that I was acting quite radically in this way for a long time, but then one could also just as validly say that how I am now is quite radical, also in this way, though they were drastically different modes of being in the world.

        I would say that the most radical one could be, would be to have an ‘absolute duty toward God’. But then, if this means ‘radical’ in the sense of spending ones time ‘properly’, then I am not sure that Abraham should have stayed silent. But indeed, Abraham was justifed in God.

        I think the very act of communicating, of enacting a world that is ‘not real’ or the effort thereof, is quite radical at its base. I have never really communicated before our interaction. I have only had faith in what I say, that others might understand. Perhaps this is what I still do.

        I would say what ‘calls’ is the event reverberating, resonating of existence for reality. I am called, of you, through discourse. There is nothing real outside of discourse.

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      6. landzek Avatar

        “is this not friendship, a mutual provocation through love? ”

        So new, this provocation; I ask myself: is this not God opening doors to wondrous new worlds?

        My brother in the salt mine. It must be.

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      7. inthesaltmine Avatar
        inthesaltmine

        “Zenners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

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  7. inthesaltmine Avatar
    inthesaltmine

    I have little resistance, if any, to this post as it is phrased. Firstly, it seems spot-on with regard to how I feel regarding non-philosophy and the Future Christ. We seem to have a similar take with respect to Laruelle in general. I have taken this and turned it into a “non-Laruellean non-philosophical” mess, but truth be told this is just a new True Object, albeit a more complex one than any conventional non-standard Laruellean thought. My understanding remains that my position grows closer to realizing what you are saying with respect to the impossible than does Laruelle or anybody else, but it is not “postformal” enough yet and this has certain consequences for the both of us.

    A few confessions: perhaps I am still beholden to the multiple comforts and difficulties of mediation, to that “magic” which you rightly say “arises in the real denial of the gap”. This includes, but is not limited to, a partial posturing or reservation of plausible deniability as you suggest, a certain infinite disguising, etc. and along with a bag of other tricks up my sleeve which allow me to postpone the acceptance of this basic truth of which you speak. Very well, then there is a denial, or perhaps from my perspective it is more like a pocket-veto. I told you not very long ago that I am a “recovering Derridean”. Laruelle to me is simply a redoubled-over Derrida, a deconstruction of deconstruction re-cast in a new machine. There is not yet this “constructive undoing” which places itself squarely within the antinomy, since it is more of an oscillatory move of vacillating between deconstruction-reconstruction at will and as one sees fit. The usual problems with Derrida quite obviously persist in Laruelle, even if they are all the more difficult to locate.

    Together this is nothing other than the theoretical capitalist industry of “suspension”, whether this means binaries/dichotomies (Derrida) or philosophical decisions (Laruelle). I have taken it upon myself to come up with a “variable suspension” mechanism that allows for a sometimes suspending of these suspensions, while other times letting them stay in place. It improves, I think, over all the previous attempts at suspension and it is all the more menacing as a result. It can also be non-menacing if it pleases. It is a “super-hybridity” which out-does even Bhabha’s idea of hybridity. This ‘masking’ of mine grows ever-more complex as the mathematics becomes increasingly advanced or perhaps it even claims to be ‘enlightened’. I revel in this obfuscating mysticism, trying as hard as I can to ride its infinite wave. For instance, I am now dealing in higher category theory for crying out loud (e.g. you write: “…seeking to find guidance or correspondence from some ‘higher’ source”)! I might say, “yeah, but that’s the good stuff!” which sounds like a sketchy drug dealer! What are you smoking? Oh, nothing, it’s just Rumi’s ecstatic love poetry, don’t worry. It seems you are calling for a more originary and so incalculable or immeasurable kind of non-intoxicated love which does not have these barometers of judgment or gauges for its gravity. Your “aperspectival” or “aphilosophical” stance favors more a pure perception of reality as it really and truly is in itself, with little to no tolerance for such mystical bullshitting. In this way, it allows for the opening of a space of non-judgmental dialogue, and for that alone I believe you should be commended rather than judged.

    You are right, and I will be honest and say that this is true. I do not hold on tightly to any particular True Object, although I am *partial* to some like the “sound of silence” or the “inner Light” or the “celestial music” among others which take on these more subtle metaphors that strike me as mostly harmeless if not liberatory at times. They are not, however, causal. It is these tricky “partial objects” (NB: this is a psychoanalytic term; I think I am using it in the right way…) which gives me to stage a beautiful and harmonious Novalisian Blue Flower(tm) orchestra which, to be sure, with its Sufi-Quaker musicology, to a certain extent falls prey to the infamous Wagner problem as first identified by Nietzsche. In truth, however, I can only follow you about 90% of the way. Which means your problem with me is my lingering 10% judgmentality that makes up the entirety of my still-mysterious Christian faith. Perhaps this open and ambiguous 10% holds more potency than the 90% exactitude in the end. This is the “Christian” gesture: to accept the reality of the Fall, e.g. that we as humans have a natural tendency to buy into the localized fantasy, to hold as it were to True Objects or to worship various “idols”. This recognition of “original sin” entails quite a bit, re: buying into the reality of locality and its personality. It means also that I miss my own “resonant motion”. Is this not what Christians say by “missing the mark”? “We are all sinners” as it were. For William Blake, if I recall correctly (I may well be mistaken), the word “sin” is used in his poetry more along the lines of making an error in science. In other words, the difference between us remains that I gladly allow for a 10% margin of error in my observation whereas perhaps you do not, instead acting in favor of a certain exactitude. It is the ossification of this ‘exacting’ maneuver gives me whatever resistance I may have to the “a-” prefixial stance. With you, knowing you as I do, I do not anticipate this as being much of a problem, but with many others it seemingly becomes one to me because the judgmentality returns in the all too harsh condemnation of anything that sounds remotely spiritual or religious. It is important for me to hold open or otherwise generate a space of free experimentation with truth, and this means allowing for those personalities which may be strange or “peculiar” to take part in discerning the nature of relationality. I am glad, for instance, that you will listen to me in what I have to say and that we can have this dialogue together. Many others will have tuned me out by now…

    It seems to me that Christendom must become progressively nondual and nonlocal or else in the future it will not be at all. This is perhaps a separate conversation you and I must have, particularly with respect to Islam and its views on relationality. Obviously the basic truth you have “effectively” argued for is that of the logic of nonlocality, which is to say neither local nor nonlocal. But there is a sense in which 10% of me is not interested in argument or negotiation, and I, personally, want to focus on that because I find the basic scientific reality to be, well, rather boring and insufficient. But that’s just me. Can I get away with saying that? More often than not, I am not willing to bite the bullet and say “all is mind” (e.g. what we call “the world” is entirely mind-constructed). This is because the old adage is not simply “ignorance is bliss”, but instead you may find that it has to do with spatial-temporal context: “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise”. The emphasis lies on the “where”, or the place/topos of this ignorance. You mentioned the story of your grandmother (I think) and her faith. I find that it is important to meet others where they are at, and that this personal dimension takes priority for me in Life over the engineered, relational truth. But, you see, there I go with the “obviously I don’t care at all about how they might really work, but nevertheless, they still work for me” stuff again…

    The loneliness/solitude is already great enough as it is, and I don’t know if I would be able to handle diving any deeper into “reality” without a proper psychological/ecological training or preparedness. In a word, I would in all likelihood need a *spiritual* mentor to guide me as it becomes increasingly a “felt and bodily” issue as Layman Pascal puts it. Hey – perhaps that person is you! Happy New Year, my friend. Best wishes to you and your diapers.

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    1. landzek Avatar

      On irony, the doing and the thinking.
      I just thought of an example of the paradox.

      Suppose I had a thought about activity (doing), or an activity that I thought about afterward. Suppose the thought did not correspond in an ethical way to the activity, or vice versa. Ethical here meaning ‘what I want to do or what is right for me to do, what I ought to do.
      The usual conventional route is to say that I can sort out why such an event occurred, and if I still feel uneasy about it, I can come to an idea of how to have such an event not happen it the future.

      Such a sorting is of method, a proper method that I am trying to gain. Taken as a holistic series of such events, it is a method by which to gain proper ‘humanity’, which is really, a reconciliation of ‘chance’ event, the event that did not go as I would have liked, and ‘will’, as I wish events would go how I feel is right.

      In reality, this is how we go. And this is why I speak of ‘orientation’ upon the object. Where I feel I might one day find such an application of proper method, I am oriented upon the true object, the universal ethical object of faith that establishes my individuality.

      Ironically, though, such an effort is inherently resistant to existence; so we can say, consciousness is a retreat from existence, a movement based in ‘offense’ of what is true. Because the thought ‘I don’t want to do this’ coupled with ‘doing this’ is exactly correspondent in existence. The realization of this aspect brings not so much a ‘One’, but ironically, a relieving of the discrepancy that was so hard sought through the ethical negotiation.

      And again – ironically, such a resistance, being itself necessary in its sufficient contingency, argues an essential and effective ‘God’ that indeed is at the reigns.

      The question then repeats, eternally: can this God be known, and what does it mean when It can be? And of course the negative-positive of that: there is no God, this means our agency is foundational; any larger consideration is moot, it exactly argues human ideological-psychological contingency.

      I turn the question away from this arena, and speak about effects. The effect of the answer of ideological-psychological-scientific foundationality posits an unknown that is unknowable: not real. Hence, irony. Since, in reality, it is the effect itself, of this now set real reality, that is set aside; it denies any real recourse to what can be called ‘revelation’, or, for Laruelle, the Call.

      But it does not mean that the discussion with pocket veto in pocket, is not valid. Because, apparently, communication has occurred despite the usurping proclamations of real reality.

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      1. dwmasten Avatar

        Namaste!

        Like

      2. landzek Avatar

        You’re causing me to revisit these posts and our exchanges from back then. 😝. Interesting. And thank you.

        Like

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