Evolution and Enactment

I just wrote the following post in response to David on the “Authentic Enlightenment” thread, but I am moving it here because we've really moved into a new discussion altogether. 

~*~

I wrote:  I don't think we can say that [spiritual] experiences lead “directly” or “automatically” to a particular interpretation, if only because we can see they already are associated with a range of interpretations – mythical, monistic, nondual, naturalistic, etc.  (And isn't this what the W-C Lattice tries to account for?)  We might argue that “nondual” is the best available interpretation (I happen to think it is), but that doesn't mean it is an absolute or final one.

You responded:  Yes, I agree. Such experiences wouldn't necessarily lead to a particular interpretation, and, as I said in my last post, any interpretation we have now, even the best one, would not likely last for all of time, so words like “absolute” are probably not only not necessary but not the most accurate either.
 
The discussion seems to have been about 1) whether there is an actual referent for states (!, 1p/c, 1p/nd) or whether they are simply epiphenomenons of the brain; 2) whether nonduality should be considered an involutionary given (meaning nonduality, emptiness) since the Big Bang or whether it emerged at some point; and 3) whether nonduality a perspective or the one perception that isn't a perspective.
 
And my point is that with the emergence of nondual “experience,” nonduality is seen to have subsisted all the way back to the Big Bang and thus is rightfully regarded as an involutionary given. If it didn't, if, say, quarks and atoms weren't empty, no one could have a truly nondual experience. Of course this view is also enacted and has a kosmic address, and things might get rehung later on.

I think we can say that non-duality is both an evolutionarily emergent concept and an 'involutionary given.'  But notice that the notion of 'involutionary given' is also an aspect of an overall stage-dependent interpretive structure.  Recall how Wilber argues that eco-systems didn't ex-ist prior to the emergence of a particular stage of evolutionary development, but that from that perspective, we can 'retro-read' the ecosystem-undertanding back into the past and recognize its subsistence – the operation of 'ecosystemic' principles back into our prehistory?  But then Wilber points out that 'ecosystem' is also a stage-dependent understanding, likely to be replaced by different understandings in the future.  So, from a particular (evolutionarily emergent) perspective, we can 'read back' that understanding into the 'past' (prior to the historical emergence of that perspective) and 'see it' as a given, universal feature of the world (whether people in the past would have recognized it at the time or not).  But such a reading, while universalizing, is not absolute.

The recognition of Kosmic 'involutionary givens' is just such an historically situated, retro-active / universalizing interpretive movement.  Do you follow what I'm saying?  Using the AQAL range of knowledge available to us at a given time, we can legitimately 'read back' that understanding into the past, assessing conditions then, making pronouncements about universal and evolutionary features of the kosmos, etc.  But the point I believe Tom and I have both been making is that that movement is still a (historically situated) reading.

You wrote:  So, with regard to the question whether it is an epiphenomenon of the brain or the groundless ground that's beyond all concepts, if we agree that there is such a thing as a nondual “experience” I think we must say it is the groundless ground, because any genuine nondual experience implies that everything else in the multiverse is empty and always was (unless we take the position that all quarks, atoms, and gokumis somehow became empty over time).

But, once again, that perspective is an enactment like any other, though if everything in the multiverse is empty and always was (which is the case if there is any genuine nondual experience) I don't think it can be entirely reduced to a human-understanding experience. I think that offers a blend of the modern and postmodern  methodologies, as well as the zone-#1 injunctions.

So, if you acknowledge that that perspective (the assertion of a nondual groundless ground) is an enactment, and that the concept of 'nonduality' is not absolute and that new understandings will likely emerge in the future, then what happens to the 'groundless ground'?  It goes the way of the Newtonian atom or the mythic God:  the 'foundational' element was the foundation of an enacted worldspace.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Okay, thank you, Bruce. I will move my response here, too, then. Let's hope it doesn't come out all scrambled.



David: And my point is that with the emergence of nondual “experience,”
nonduality is seen to have subsisted all the way back to the Big Bang
and thus is rightfully regarded as an involutionary given. If it
didn't, if, say, quarks and atoms weren't empty, no one could have a
truly nondual experience. Of course this view is also enacted and has a
kosmic address, and things might get rehung later on.

Bruce: The recognition of Kosmic 'involutionary givens' is just such an
historically situated, retro-active / universalizing interpretive
movement.  Do you follow what I'm saying?

Yes, I said the same thing in the last paragraph you quoted before this
and which I excerpted again above, so it seems that we are basically in
agreement there.

Wilber also acknowledges this; he says that Integral Spirituality is written from a Violet perspective.

He says something similar in this guru-and-pandit discussion:


          AC: The thing is, that as you've been saying, the traditions can and

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Hi, David,

Good, we may be on the same page, or a similar one!  Several things have given me the impression that we are talking past each other a bit, which is why I thought this was worth pursuing.  I'll list some examples and we can open them up.

To start:

You wrote:  And my point is that with the emergence of nondual “experience,”
nonduality is seen to have subsisted all the way back to the Big Bang
and thus is rightfully regarded as an involutionary given. If it
didn't, if, say, quarks and atoms weren't empty, no one could have a
truly nondual experience. Of course this view is also enacted and has a
kosmic address, and things might get rehung later on.

What gave me the impression that we were talking past each other was this sentence:  If it didn't, if, say, quarks and atoms weren't empty, no one could have a truly nondual experience.  Here, you seem to be insisting that things must really be empty for us to be able to experience them as empty.  People also understand and experience things as self-existent, or substantial, or imbued with animistic spirits, etc.  Must things really be any of these things for us to be able to have an “authentic” experience of them as such? 

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Also, here is my reading of your exchange with Tom (both of you please correct me if I am misunderstanding either of you):

Tom said: The developmental chain:
thinghood —> emptiness —> nondual

You replied:  The only trouble with this is that it assumes the waking state as a baseline and that the dream- and deep-sleep states are epiphenomenons of the body/mind. This is primarily thinghood thinking—it assumes that the material is the most real.
 
It admits that we can have experiences of emptiness, nonduality, perhaps even become that, but it assumes that we are fundamentally material beings. That might well just be the myth of the given.

It appears to me that Tom is tracing out the development of forms of understanding – thinking and seeing in terms of things, thinking and seeing in terms of emptiness/negating, thinking and seeing in terms of nonduality.  On the other hand, it appears to me that you are reading this as an assertion about reality itself:  that you are taking Tom to mean that first there are things, then emptiness experiences and nondual experiences evolve out of that material ground. 

Tom would be involved in a 'myth of the given' argument, if he were insisting that we are fundamentally material beings and that experiences of emptiness and nonduality are ultimately material operations.  But in his chain above, I don't think that's what he's trying to argue:  I think he is saying that the perception of emptiness presupposes and depends on, first, the perception of things (e.g., thinghood thinking).  He's tracing an evolution in interpretive models.

This could be unpacked further, but before I say more, I want to check in and see if I'm reading both of you correctly.

All the best,

B.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Hi Bruce, you've pegged my understanding correctly.  I tend to view a view or perception or an understanding or interpretation as a structure, with development proceeding from less complex to more in a transcend and include manner.  “More complex” does not quite capture the qualitative changes I see when that “more” actualizes (molecules are unheard-of to atoms). 

Thus, for me, cognitive or perceptual development along the line thinghood—>emptiness posits a movement that begins with whatever structure or level of development is represented by thinghood, and in emptiness moves to negate aspects of thinghood thinking.  But it doesn't negate it entirely as it actually views thinghood thinking in thinghood terms: look at that thing called thinghood thinking.  Rather, it takes elements of thinghood representing into its operating (includes) and qualitatively changes others (transcends).

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David: If it's the second possibility, what is the understanding that's higher than the one Wilber has offered in Integral Spirituality?

For starters, stop projecting emptiness as ground of being.  Historicize it.  AQALize it.  Relativize it.  In current Wilber, emptiness is the ground of AQAL (ie, of being). 

To head you off at the pass, David—because I can feel you quoting Wilber saying form and not-form are not two—let me quote him where he says otherwise:

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Bruce: What gave me the impression that we were talking past each other was this
sentence:  If it didn't, if, say, quarks and atoms weren't empty, no one
could have a truly nondual experience.  Here, you seem to be insisting that
things must really be empty for us to be able to experience them as
empty.  People also understand and experience things as self-existent, or
substantial, or imbued with animistic spirits, etc.  Must things really be any
of these things for us to be able to have an “authentic” experience of them as
such?

I've never insisted that. I've always made it clear that you are free to think nondual experiences are an illusion of some sort, if you like. But if you think nondual experiences are genuine, as I said many times, you must also admit that it is emptiness all the way down, unless you want to take the position that atoms became empty over time.



Tom said: The developmental chain:
thinghood —> emptiness —> nondual

Bruce: It appears to me that Tom is tracing out the development of forms of
understanding – thinking and seeing in terms of things, thinking and
seeing in terms of emptiness/negating, thinking and seeing in terms of
nonduality.  On the other hand, it appears to me that you are reading
this as an assertion about reality itself:  that you are taking Tom to
mean that first there are things, then emptiness experiences and
nondual experiences evolve out of that material ground.

That's been his position, that nondual experience is a later evolutionary emergent, a product of human understanding or the brain. For example, he said:

Re: Evolution and Enactment

You wrote:  I've never insisted that. I've always made it clear that you are free to think nondual experiences are an illusion of some sort, if you like. But if you think nondual experiences are genuine, as I said many times, you must also admit that it is emptiness all the way down, unless you want to take the position that atoms became empty over time.

No, I didn't mean that you were insisting that I must believe one thing or another.  What I was saying is that you appear to be insisting that, for nonduality to be “true,” it must accurately represent reality as it really is, all the way down:  in other words, I think your argument involves a representative or “mirror of nature” understanding.

I said: It appears to me that Tom is tracing out the development of forms of understanding – thinking and seeing in terms of things, thinking and seeing in terms of emptiness/negating, thinking and seeing in terms of
nonduality.  On the other hand, it appears to me that you are reading this as an assertion about reality itself:  that you are taking Tom to mean that first there are things, then emptiness experiences and nondual experiences evolve out of that material ground.
 
You replied:  That's been his position, that nondual experience is a later evolutionary emergent, a product of human understanding or the brain. For example, he said:
Nonduality is a concept -— a mental something -— with a massive evolutionary history (read: massive conditioning).

Here, he appears to be saying what I was suggesting above:  that “nonduality” is an evolutionarily emergent form of understanding.  On the other hand, I believe you are talking about nonduality as a particular state experience, not an “understanding” that things are “not one, not two.”  At some points in our conversation, you've agreed that “nonduality” is an historically emergent understanding (a correction to or refinement of monism); but here I think you are using it differently, as a discrete state experience.  Is that the case? 

You wrote:  For him the history of the interpretative models and the history of the emergence of nonduality are one and the same thing, and it seemed like you were taking the same position, that emptiness is not an involutionary given but something that emerged later on, as a result of human evolution.

I wasn't saying that nonduality, as a thing-in-itself, emerged later on, but I am suggesting that 'nonduality' is an 'insight' or 'understanding' or 'interpretation' that has emerged historically.  Once it has emerged, we can retroread it into the historical Kosmos – it becomes a universal way of seeing-experiencing the world.  From that perspective, the whole of existence is understood nondually (rather than, say, in “thing” terms, or otherwise), and in that sense it is an “involutionary given” (as a fundamental characteristic of this worldspace).

You wrote:  The tracing of the interpretive models part is fine, but to say that nonduality depends on or issues from a particular structure appears to 1) ignore childhood spiritual experiences, 2) discount the reports of the zone-#1 explorers that it is beyond the brain, and 3) miss the implication that if nonduality is genuine the structures that the interpretations issue from must also be empty of inherent existence.

Not necessarily.  1) From the perspective which sees nondually, “nonduality” may be recognized in childhood experiences of oneness or union; but as we've agreed, this doesn't mean that this perspective is absolute or final. 

2) Regarding the “beyond the brain” assertions of “zone 1” explorers, it's not clear to me why these accounts should be taken as 3p truths, unless they can be verified in 3p ways.  (“Beyond the brain” is a 3p claim). 

3) Regarding the application of 'nondual understanding' to perspective-taking itself, I think that would be appropriate and expected at the stage which sees nondually, particularly if that stage also includes linguistic an d interpretive self-awareness (such as becomes available beginning with postmodernism).

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Bruce: “On the other hand, I believe you are talking about nonduality as a particular state experience, not an “understanding” that things are “not one, not two.”
 
Would you be happy to agree that the experience of no-thinghood cognition - if you believe there is such a thing, but I think you described such as experience you had yourself - and the understanding “no-thinghood thinking” are two separate items that we can talk about? That the understanding is culturally constructed in the way post-modernism demonstrates, and that the experience is direct and non-conceptual in the way, say, zen demonstrates? Or do you doubt the validity of the experience as well?

Eckhart Tolle: “There's simply a sense of awe or wonder or openness, and that's beautiful.”

Thanks, David. That's what I mean - the beauty of the don't-know mind. The mind of no-separation, the mind of no-mind, the mind of no-center, or whatever. I think if we want to have a truly integral view, I think this non-dual experience needs to be accounted for. Because so, so many people have experienced it both cross-culturally, and just “out of the blue” without having heard about it (non-duality) before.

David: “But if you think nondual experiences are genuine, as I said many times, you must also admit that it is emptiness all the way down, unless you want to take the position that atoms became empty over time.”

Einstein warned us that: “You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.”
 
I think that you are trying to explain emptiness is terms of an Orange worldview, while the concept emptiness in fact emerges after that, I think somewhere between the Green an Turquoise worldviews.

You cannot any longer say that “atoms were empty all the time” in a post-Orange world. You've noticed that you've been critized from many fronts for asserting it. This is because atoms don't exist objectively “out there”, independent of the conceptualizer of the the concept “atom”, the way Newtonian physics would have it (3-p, L/6). And if atoms don't objectively exist, then their emptinesses don't either, because they depend on eachother.

Then of course, the problem emerges: if there are no atoms, what is it that we're looking at in the microscopes?! I think the best and most straight-forward answer is I don't have a clue. But by I don't have a clue I don't mean I'm too lazy to care about it, or too stupid to understand, or something. Wisdom is, atleast in my book, knowing why you can not know.

And so, I don't have a clue because atoms are empty of inherent existence. Therefore whatever there is that we choose to describe as “atoms” can't be known, because it is not a separate thing. The atom is basically just action (3-p, L/8). And you can't possibly understand action. Action just is - immediate, direct, instantaneous, right now. It can't be expressed in any ordinary sense, because it is too alive, too now.

And - hopefully integral - spirituality comes in when 1) you realize that there are not many separate actions, but just action, and 2) when you realize you are not separate from that, because the separate I is just a story without any intrinsic reality.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David: Well, if it's truly empty, that can be retroread to find that thinghood was empty to begin with …

It's not truly empty.  It's only empty of one limited, historically developed way of viewing.  Emptiness doesn't empty non-thinghood thinking.  It only says (by analogy) Greek gods don't exist.

Thinghood thinking is not “the way humans in the relative sphere view.”  It's a certain way of viewing that, in a long developmental chain, appeared at a certain time.  It possibly appeared when humans first really got hold of the negating function in thinking, allowing them to “objectivize” (ie, abstract a thing and cast it out as not me, or not this or not that).  Thus did Buddha appear when the notion of “infinite” appeared.  “Infinite” is but a negation of a certain way of viewing.

Emptiness, to me, is but a small change to this objectivizing, way of viewing, a further negating, that says, well, it actually is not not me, not not this, etc.

David: It's neither sat nor asat.

It's neither thing nor not-thing.  It's neither Greek gods nor non-Greek gods.

Any negated view can suffice for “sat.”  “Asat” is the negation.

It's neither Copernican nor non-Copernican.

David: But notice he says “nondual realization,” not the experience of nonduality …

Granted, but we're parsing at a fine level with that distinction.  I take nondual realization to refer to a stabilization of that (the structure) which underlies and gives rise to nondual experience.  If this is a proper understanding, the two are essentially the same.  If you say nondual is not a structure, what is it?  Nothingness?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Tom: “Thinghood thinking is not “the way humans in the relative sphere view.”  It's a certain way of viewing that, in a long developmental chain, appeared at a certain time.” 

Here are some synonyms for thinghood thinking, which I think quite palpably clarifies what exactly it is that is refuted by emptiness: 

* The reality of the thing irrespective of culture or language or human consciousness.
* Objective existence.
* Independent existence.
* True essence.
* True establishment.
* True Existence.
* Existence as its own such-ness.
* Natural Existence.
* Existence from the object’s side, as opposed to being imputed from the subject’s side.
* Existence through its own power.
* Existence able to establish itself
* Existence right in the basis of designation.
* Existence in the manner of covering its basis of designation.
* Existence from the side of the basis of designation.
* Platonic essence.
* Real existence.
* Inherent Existence.
* Ontological existence.
* The thing as it really is.
* The thing in-itself. (Das ding an sich.)
* The is-ness of the thing.
* The beingness of the thing.
* The actuality of the thing.
* Perseity.
* Self-sufficient being.
* Self-inclusive being.
* Essential being.
* Instantiation in reality.
* The subject of ontological commitment.
* The thing’s entificiation.
* The way it really is, regardless of what anyone thinks.
* The reality of the thing as opposed to its appearance.
* What science will eventually discover the thing to be.
* The way God intends the thing to be.
* ”It is what it is”.
* ”It’s like that - ’cause that’s the way it is.” as the rappers in Run DMC used to say.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

A big list of nots!

Notice how God or True Nature is typically not-process reified, thingified, nounified:

THE:
Unmanifest
Unborn
Unlimited
Unmoved
Infinite (un = not)
Immortal (im = not)
Unchanging (The Permanent)
Eternal (not in time)
Undying
Anything “Beyond” (beyond = not)
Anything Prior (prior = not)
Absolute (ab = not)
Emptiness

So, yes, emptiness is notting par excellence.  A kind of sophisticated adult version of a two-year-old's enlightenment to the not.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

I think, Tom, we need to make a distinction between God and emptiness right now. This is why: God implies something that is non-empty; something that in theory can actually sustain its own existence without being posited by thought. Whether this exists or not is an open question. God is an affirmative assertion, a positive phenomenon. The descriptors of God you listed are affirming negatives, that is, they negate but in the place of the negated, they place something positive, i.e. God.

Emptiness on the other hand is not like that. When something is described as empty, nothing is put in its place. Emptiness is merely an absence of those points I listed. If you by emptiness imply a positive affirmation, like God, it is not emptiness. That does not mean non-affirming negatives are pointless, though. Emptiness Yoga (my underlining):

”[…] although non-affirming negatives do not imply any positive phenomenon in their place, they can imply other non-affirming negatives of the same type. The four reasons [that negate inherently existent production, x not being produced from other, self, both or causelessly] imply, or prove, an absence of inherently existent production, which in turn implies, or proves, that things do not inherently exist.”
 
I hope you manage to see the difference between assertions, affirming negatives and non-affirming negatives and therefore remove emptiness from your list of affirming negatives. (Perhaps we can compile a list of non-affirming negatives, but for now I know only emptiness, analytical cessations and space.) God and emptiness is not, and can not be, the same thing. I used to believe this half a year ago or something (having read and become confused by Wilber's notion of the Great Emptiness), until Holden and e set my thinking straight. Thank God!

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Dawid: God and emptiness is not, and can not be, the same thing.

Thing?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Meaning, they are not at all similar, because of the former being an affirmative assertion, the latter being a non-affirming negative. See?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Do these assertions in any way correspond to anything?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

What do you mean?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

FWIW, here is a question I sent in to Andrew and Ken on today's webcast:

Andrew, I appreciated your description of evolutionary enlightenment as realizing oneself as the very process, including the entire history of that process, by which I emerged, a realization that that is me.  This realization stabilized in me recently.  I moved there spontaneously from amness or suchness realization, if you will, into a spontaneous, growing in-my-bones feeling and perception that I am that process.  In that realization, “I” and “me” are of course not there, as they were not in amness or suchness realized states, but in the later evolutionary form, there seems to be a deeper, perhaps broader elimination of separation.

One question that has arisen for me from this realization concerns language I might use to convey this realized state.  It seems to me that this form of realization arises with and as what I am, bodily if you will, as this evolved being.  Being this evolving what-is, I find that, to quote Ken, within this perspective “nothing is outside of evolution,” and to paraphrase you “everything that I am, including consciousness, is produced by an evolutionary process.”

If my experience and these statements are true, at least as within my developmental level of perceiving, can we not say, without losing depth of realization, that anything we say or feel or experience or realize or perceive is evolutionarily and developmentally specified?  It took considerable personal growth and evolution on my part (not to mention 13+ billion years of such otherwise and previously) to arrive at where I am.  It thus seems to me that 1P expressions of this realization express that which is humanly in this XYZ evolved state.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Bruce: What I was saying is that you appear to be insisting that, for
nonduality to be “true,” it must accurately represent reality as it
really is, all the way down:  in other words, I think your argument
involves a representative or “mirror of nature” understanding.

That's not what I was saying. Each time I said if you think nonduality is genuine, you have to admit either 1) it was empty all the way down, or 2) it's all made of the same stuff—I held off on the second option because I didn't want to get distracted by the self vs. no self discussion at the moment.

Really, it's neither void nor stuff. It's things as they are without mental constructs. If you think nonduality is a mental construct, this is where you fall short of enacting the meta-paradigmatic aspect of Wilber's Integral Methodological Pluralism and instead absolutize postmodernity's contribution that everything is entirely interpretation, including nondual “experience.”


Bruce: Here, he appears to be saying what I was suggesting above:  that
“nonduality” is an evolutionarily emergent form of understanding.  On
the other hand, I believe you are talking about nonduality as a
particular state experience, not an “understanding” that things are
“not one, not two.”

It is both a state “experience”—neither an experience nor a perspective— and an interpretation. As Wilber has said, “nondual realization is in part interpretative”—he doesn't say it's all interpretative or simply an understanding.

You seem to want to reduce it to a form of understanding, a mental construct— that's a postmodern critique, not a meta=-paradigmatic critique. You assume duality as a baseline, with nonduality added at some point later on.

As Wilber has said, nonduality is what there is before you do anything with it. This is also my experience. I understand that moderns and postmoderns don't think the wisdom traditions have enaged in legitimate science. Is that your view? Do you think nonduality is merely a way of thinking, or do you think it is also a way of being?



Bruce: From that perspective, the whole of existence is understood nondually
(rather than, say, in “thing” terms, or otherwise), and in that sense
it is an “involutionary given” (as a fundamental characteristic of this
worldspace).

This again reduces nonduality to an understanding, but my experience is that it is a way of being, a perception. It would be more accurate to say that the whole thing is felt nondualy as your core experience, or, as Andrew Cohen has put it, “the most intimate part of ourselves.”  People find that it's who they most deeply are (!).

You may also say, “That's the myth of the given, mirror of nature, represtentationist!” But I think you are using an incorrect methodology to answer this particular question.

The irony of your mirror-of-nature argument is that you seem to be believing in the pre-given world. As Wilber points out, these hori-zones do not enact different perspectives on the same world but different worlds. You, and Tom, with your postmodern-heavy enactivism are believing in one world, in which postmodern-heavy enactivism reigns supreme.

They are simply different worlds, and you and Tom are raiding the zone-#1 world with a postmodern-heavy enactivism, kicking over stone buddhas, scrawling epithets about Wilber on shoji screens, and leaving your Birkenstock prints on zafus.

Bruce: From the perspective which sees nondually, “nonduality” may be
recognized in childhood experiences of oneness or union; but as we've
agreed, this doesn't mean that this perspective is absolute or final.


The “experience” of nonduality is not a perspective; only interpretations about nonduality are perspectives.  When we retroread into childhood experiences and such, we are enacting a perspective.

You've agreed in the past that enactivism involves both an interpretative aspect and an objective aspect—how are you integrating those two with regard to state experiences? I have asked you to differentiate your view of states from the postmodern view, to lay them out side by side—how does your view differ from the one Wilber describes here:


“For example, the typical postmodern pluralist maintains that there are few if
any context-transcending truths that are universally and cross-culturally valid.
Rather, all truth is actually intersubjectively constructed; it is not a series
of facts but a series of interpretations; all truths are situated in cultural
backgrounds that mold or even create the form of the truth at any given time;
truth is therefore not a matter of objectively representing facts correctly (or
a matter of representing a single, pregiven world), but is rather a matter of
intersubjective mesh within a particular cultural hermeneutic and social
practice; and that, finally, notions of truth that claim to be universal are
therefore imposing their own particular values on everybody else, which results
in oppressing and repressing the pluralistic richness of the Divine.    

 “But, you see, all of those claims are asserted to be true for
all people, at all times, in all cultures. Those assertions are a series of
literally dozens of truth-claims (such as the contextuality of all knowledge,
the interpretive component of all knowledge, the intersubjectivity of all
knowledge, etc.) that are claimed to be universally and absolutely true and
binding on all people. These claims are not merely true for those who believe
them. These claims are not merely interpretations that hold only for those who
embrace them. These claims themselves have not an ounce of pluralism in them.
They are instead an incredibly extensive, sophisticated, cognitively generated
meta-theory about truth and knowledge that is claimed to be absolutely binding
on all people, with no exceptions, whether those people believe it or not, like
it or not.     

 “And that is why, as Lesa pointed out, these pluralistic schemes are
often the hidden ground of narcissism–of a personal set of values forced on
others whether they want it or not. In these theorists, the absolutist
impulse is removed from the explicit features of all knowledge (which are
claimed to be local, context-dependent, and pluralistic) and are instead
secreted in the implicit features of all knowledge (features which themselves
are said to true for all peoples in all cultures–that is, the deep features of
pluralism are themselves implicitly claimed to be context-transcending,
cross-cultural, universal, and absolutely binding).    

 “In other words, the cognitive meta-theory in the minds of these
pluralists is claimed to be the single meta-theory that should be in the minds
of everybody else, since it is the one, true, correct way to view the world.
Further, this absolutism is carried out in a way that allows the postmodernist
to vehemently deny any absolutist claims–and to vilify those who happen to
propose their own universal meta-claims in a conscious, open, and honest
fashion.    

  “But Foucault already exhausted that meta-claim game, in The
Archaeology of Knowledge , and saw its utterly self-contradictory and
arrogant nature–'arrogant' was his word for it. The only theorists still
pursuing that hidden absolutism, which is used to brutally condemn all
alternative schemes, are certain American writers, for reasons suggested in
Boomeritis. [1]

You see? You and Tom have been applying postmodern perspectives in an absolute way, all the while saying that there could, of course, be nothing that is absolute (while applying postmodern insights absolutely). This is the classic postmodern performative contradiction.




Bruce: Regarding the “beyond the brain” assertions of “zone 1” explorers,
it's not clear to me why these accounts should be taken as 3p truths,
unless they can be verified in 3p ways.  (“Beyond the brain” is a 3p
claim).

We can take a 3p view on our own interior. That's zone-#2 of course, which we usually talk about with regard to UL structures, but meditators can also take a 3p view on their interior. They can then compare it with the findings of others. That amounts to something, a legitimate form of science, though perhaps not ultimate proof.


David: Well, if it's truly empty, that can be retroread to find that thinghood was empty to begin with …

Tom: It's
not truly empty.  It's only empty of one limited, historically
developed way of viewing.  Emptiness doesn't empty non-thinghood
thinking.  It only says (by analogy) Greek gods don't exist.

Tom, seem to be confusing some linguistic understanding with meditative nonduality. They are not the same thing. Nonduality, in the meditative sense, is not a way of thinking.

In fact, some meditative states (and sometimes enlightenment, nonduality) are defined by a cessation of thinking, all thinking, including non-thinghood thinking.


Tom: Emptiness, to me, is but a small change to this objectivizing, way of
viewing, a further negating, that says, well, it actually is not not
me, not not this, etc.

You seem to have come upon some sort of practice that could increase awareness, could help in state training, as well as construct awareness, but this is certainly not to be confused with the meditative states experienced in Buddhism, Advaita, and other schools.

One thing that spiritual teachers can be helpful with is verifying student's experiences. They do this in Zen with koans and other experiences; I've seen Andrew Cohen do it with students.  I related Ken Wilber's stories about Kalu Rinpoche doing this, telling his students that if there experience had a beginning in time it was “not it.”

If you want to take the zone-#1 injunction, I don't think this always-already interpretation is to be dismissed. Once you see what they are saying, perhaps you will the zone-#1 overlord who dismisses it and ushers in some new interpration, but first you have to see what they are talking about.

One experience people that you can look for that is preliminary to nonduality is the casaul—this is characterized by light, radiance, bliss. It's not a way of thinking. Nonduality is after that light, radiance, bliss, and beyond—and, paradoxically, what is already the case. I think once you have those causal experiences of radiance you will be done with dismissing the wisdom traditions as another way of thinking. It is most definitely beyond concepts.

Tom: Granted, but we're parsing at a fine level with that distinction.  I
take nondual realization to refer to a stabilization of that (the
structure) which underlies and gives rise to nondual experience.  If
this is a proper understanding, the two are essentially the same.  If
you say nondual is not a structure, what is it?  Nothingness?

Nothingness isn't bad! You might be a Buddhist at heart! It's not a structure. The interpretation is a structure, but the “experience” is not a structure.


Is: I think this non-dual experience needs to be accounted for. Because so,
so many people have experienced it both cross-culturally, and just “out
of the blue” without having heard about it (non-duality) before.

Yes, quite. The evidence is that it's not a structure.


Is: I think that you are trying to explain emptiness is terms of an Orange
worldview, while the concept emptiness in fact emerges after that, I
think somewhere between the Green an Turquoise worldviews.

Im not sure it's true that emptiness comes after Orange. Genpo Roshi has said that all of the Zen masters he knew in Japan were Amber; Ken has said that Amber is very common among Buddhist teachers in Tibet. Perhaps those Amber folks are interpretating it as Buddha nature or something like that (though I think Buddha nature can also be Turquoise, which is where I think Shunryu Suzuki is coming from when he speaks paradoxically about emptiness and buddha nature).



Is: You cannot any longer say that “atoms were empty all the time” in a
post-Orange world. You've noticed that you've been critized from many
fronts for asserting it. This is because atoms don't exist objectively
“out there”, independent of the conceptualizer of the the concept
“atom”, the way Newtonian physics would have it (3-p, L/6). And if atoms don't objectively exist, then their emptinesses don't either, because they depend on eachother.

Is, for one thing you are, like Tom, mixing up the debate between modernists and postmodernsists with the emptiness doctrine. I've said this a number of times. The debate betwen modernists and postmodernists involves the debate between modernist representationist thinking (atoms are out there, ready to be discovered, in one particular never-changing interpretation) and postmodernist never-ending subjectivist thinking (there is nothing out there at all; it is all interpretation).

Integral enactivism, as taught by Ken Wilber, involves a blend of the two.

Do you remember the Robinson Crusoe experiment, how each interpretation worked with the book in some way? No one, for example, mistook the book for a plum.

Your criticism that you can't say that atoms have always been empty in a post-Orange world is postmodern, not integral. I have always said that that view has a kosmic address as well, and it's not anything differnent than Wilber's nonduality as an involutionary given.

If you're still not convinced that you can speak about atoms like that, listen to how Wilber speaks about ecosystems in Integral Spirituality (my underlining):

Re: Evolution and Enactment

They are simply different worlds, and you and Tom are raiding that zone-#1 world with a postmodern-heavy enactivism, kicking over stone buddhas, scrawling epithets about Wilber on shoji screens, and leaving your Birkenstock prints on zafus.

David, I think we're rather seriously misunderstanding each other – I'll see what headway we can make in a subsequent post – but I think this is an insulting pot-shot and hope you'll refrain from such snide and condescending remarks in the future.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Second that.  See my post below.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David: It's not a structure. The interpretation is a structure, but the “experience” is not a structure.

It's not a structure … it has no structural or identifiable aspect whatever?  Yet it's identifiable whether in feeling, or experience, or perception, or awareness, or consciousness as this not that?  On what basis, if not structure (this not that), is it identifiable?

David: I think once you have those causal experiences of radiance you will be
done with dismissing the wisdom traditions as another way of thinking.

David, what do you know about my experience?  FWIW, I don't talk but from a base of experience.  And further FWIW, I enjoy rigorously pursuing thinking about experience, which is my intention here. 

I don't dismiss the wisdom traditions.  I've poked at what I consider certain limitations they embody, which are IMO historical limitations embedded in their language and interpretations.

Surely what you say about the “in time” enlightenment test is only partly descriptive?  The Buddha was in time—about 500 B.C.—even when he was out of time. 

David: Tom, seem to be confusing some linguistic understanding with meditative
nonduality. They are not the same thing. Nonduality, in the meditative
sense, is not a way of thinking.

I'm not confusing the two.  I'm looking at a process in and by which something appears, with an interpretive assumption that that process has something foundational to do with what appears.  I'm not saying, and never have, that meditative nonduality is but a form of thinking in the way, I think, you here refer.  It's a form of experiencing and perceiving, a mentality, a type of overall mental, conscious, knowing, awareness function; nondual happens as and with, and not without, this overall function …. which IMO might be called mind, and includes brain, and includes history, and includes matter.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Bruce, I'm sorry if you didn't like that. It was meant to 1) illustrate the point that you were forcing postmodern insights onto the claims of the wisdom traditions (“they're all interpretations”), and 2) be humorous.

It was neither snide nor condescending, but your last post was.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David: “The evidence is that it's not a structure.”

I've listened to atleast 30+ different people who've claimed to have experienced non-duality, or experienced the non-inherent existence of the self and phenomena. And all of these people talk about it in their own type of language, and from their own personality - some are calm, some are intense, for example - but it is obvious they all speak about something very specific. You can quite easily tell whether the person is “liberated” or not, I think. You just get the sense that when they speak or act, there's no clinging to the personal storyline. It truly feels like there's no one talking, or no one acting - but more like talking happens, or action happens.

It's like when I tried to insult e some months ago, to check out how he would respond. And nothing happened. No response whatsoever to defend his honour or his pride, or whatever. This to me demonstrates true non-attachment, true realization.

David: “Is, for one thing you are, like Tom, mixing up the debate between modernists and postmodernsists with the emptiness doctrine.”
 
I think you don't understand that emptiness is basically buddhist post-modernism. They both (emptiness and post-modernism) serve exactly the same purpose - refuting the existence of things as if having their own intrinsic reality, independent of the experiencer of the thing. The only difference is in why they do it. Generally speaking, western post-modernism refutes thing-ness basically because it's a fun intellectual game, while the eastern traditions have a more pragmatic or soteriological motive behind the reasoning - they want to find a cure for suffering.

David: “There is really no truth to those atom-believers because, you see, they're lost in the myth of the given. Do camels believe in atoms? Hah! Do the Yanomamo? Hah! It's all interpretation, you see. Atoms don't really exist. (3p, L/6)

Atoms don't, like anything else in the multiverse, have inherent existence. They are empty. (3p, L/8, s/c, t/Bdht.)”
 
The L/6 response: “Atoms don't really exist”, is exactly the same as what you call a L/8 response: “atoms are empty of inherent existence.” (As long as that L/6 response is not pathological, by which I mean that the L/6 person has fallen into the extreme of nihilism - utterly no referent, only signified - which I think is quite rare.)

So as I said, the question becomes, if what we call atoms do not intrinsically or naturally exist - which can be logically demonstrated - what is it that the word is pointing to? What is the referent of the signifier A-T-O-M? Apart from my conceptual (3-p, L/8) answer action, I have said I'm ready to accept that I do not know. Are you?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Tom: It's not a structure … it has no structural or identifiable aspect
whatever?  Yet it's identifiable whether in feeling, or experience, or
perception, or awareness, or consciousness as this not that?  On what
basis, if not structure (this not that), is it identifiable?

It's defined as being without structure, though, of course, overall “nondual realization” includes a structure.


“Following the great philosopher-sages (such as Nagarjuna, Plotinus, and
Shankara), we can summarize the reasons that any sort of quantum or subquantum
events are not Spirit:
Any quantum reality has some sort of characteristics, qualities, or
dimensions that set it apart from manifest matter; but Spirit is radically
shunya of drsti (empty of any and all qualities, including that
characterization itself)—e.g., quantum vacuum has vast energy, spirit is
unqualifiable.

Any quantum reality is different in some important ways from gross matter;
but Spirit is not different from any manifestation, but is rather the Suchness
or Isness of whatever arises.

Quantum reality has an opposite (e.g., non-quantum reality), but Spirit is
radically nondual.

Spirit is dimensionless; quantum reality is merely in a different dimension.


And, most important, quantum material energy comes directly out of prana,
not out of spirit (i.e., matter crystallizes out of spirit-as-prana, not
spirit-as-spirit).” [1]


Tom: David, what do you know about my experience?  FWIW, I don't talk but
from a base of experience.  And further FWIW, I enjoy rigorously
pursuing thinking about experience, which is my intention here. 

Sorry, but you were talking so much like you had completed the zone-#1 injunctions, had the same realization that Wilber has, that Cohen has, I decided to press you on it. It came off sounding like a declaration, though, sorry, but I think claims like that are something we need to be careful of, be aware of, because they are very much a matter of power relations, of the truth-power-knowledge complex Wilber discusses in Integral Spirituality. I believe that a few things in this thread have been a little heavy on the power aspect of the truth-power-knowledge complex, which was why I responded in a bit of a polemic manner.


Tom: I'm looking at a process in and by which something appears, with an
interpretive assumption that that process has something foundational to
do with what appears.

Yes, I agree; it's an interesting perspective. Not necessarily foundational, however. Maybe, but no one really knows the answer to this, so I think an exploratory, inquiring attitude is called for, a weighing of different perspectives.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Is: You can quite easily tell whether the person is “liberated” or not, I
think. You just get the sense that when they speak or act, there's no
clinging to the personal storyline. It truly feels like there's no one
talking, or no one acting - but more like talking happens, or action happens.

I generally like what you're saying here, but I think we also need to consider lines. Adi Da, for example, according to Wilber, would go off in a huff and pout if someone disagreed with him. I think it's kind of tricky because there's often a certain overlap between the definitions of liberation and things like emotional development and ego development. Probably what we consider liberation is some combination of those lines and others. There are people who are very strong emotionally and resistant to criticism who don't know anything about liberation, for example.

I think there are certain types of people that fit very easily into the spiritual-teacher role. They tend to be “sanguine types” (using the ancient “Four Temperaments typology); they tend to be at ease in social situations.


Is: They both (emptiness and post-modernism) serve exactly the
same purpose - refuting the existence of things as if having their own
intrinsic reality, independent of the experiencer of the thing.

I think you might want to look at the following. I included a bit more that was beyond the postmodern vs. Buddhism part because it touched upon some other things we have discussed.

Shambhala: Okay, we'll come back to that. But what's wrong with
finding parallels between, say, a certain type of Derridaean deconstruction and
Buddhist Emptiness or the Madhymaka school?

KW: There's nothing wrong with it, as long as you keep certain
profound differences in mind. The basic aim of deconstruction is to work with
language, and while in the waking state or gross realm, attempt to come to a
certain type of understanding about the ambiguity, instability, and
paradoxicality of signifiers. The aim of Buddhist meditation is to strengthen
consciousness so that it can give bare attention to all the phenomena that arise
in the waking state AND the dream state AND the deep sleepless state, so that
one awakens to an all-pervading consciousness or Buddhamind that is present in
all three states–waking, dreaming, sleeping–and thus gain a great liberation
from all transient states of being, high or low, sacred or profane.

Shambhala: Once you put it that way, there seems little in common.

KW: There is very little in common. All they share is a certain number
of similarities about the limitations of language in the waking state. I find
those similarities suggestive and useful, and I have written about that (e.g.,
in endnotes for SES). But if one merely stays with deconstruction, then one will
not take up the arduous practice of yoga, of zen, of meditation, which will
transform consciousness beyond the verbal mind altogether–in fact, beyond
waking, dreaming, and sleeping, which is something deconstruction not only
cannot do, but does not even imagine is possible. But until you are pursuing a
yoga in which you remain conscious through the waking state, the dream state,
and the deep sleep state, then you are merely identified with the superficial,
surface, waking state, and you manipulate linguistic signifiers in that state
and imagine that this “deconstruction” is somehow deconstructing samsara,
whereas it is merely manipulating a rather surface consciousness and not getting
into the deep causes of suffering, such as the attachment to the waking state
itself. Deconstruction is something the ego does in the waking state in order to
hold onto the ego.

Shambhala: Got it. Next point: mostly the postmodernists do not draw
similarities with the great wisdom traditions or the perennial philosophy, but
rather they strongly attack them as being oppressive. As for the perennial
philosophy, you yourself have also been a harsh critic of it, so why pick on the
postmodernists in this regard?

KW: That's true. Or more precisely, I try to look at both the
strengths and the weaknesses of the perennial philosophy, whereas most
postmodernists (including postmodern transpersonalists) merely trash it. The
strengths of the great wisdom traditions are many, and include the fact that
these were some of the great pioneers of higher states and stages of
consciousness development, and as such they deserve an enormous amount of honor  and respect. Also, to the extent that Spirit is timeless, or has a dimension
that is timeless, these pioneers were the first to awaken to that eternal state,
and this is an awesome accomplishment, to which the only correct response, it
seems to me, is a deep and humble bow, something the strong postmodern ego would never contemplate.

The downsides are also many, however: the perennial philosophy was usually
stated in forms that were static and fixed instead of dynamical processes; the
psychological and cosmological hierarchies were often too rigid; evolution over
geological and phylogenetic time was not understood; the archetypes were
therefore stated as unchangeable forms rather than kosmic habits; the quadrants
were not sufficiently understood; and so on. Criticisms of the perennial
philosophy can be found in almost all my books (see, e.g., Integral
Psychology , One Taste , the Introductions to CW volumes 1, 2, 4, 7,
and 8, posted on this site). But what I have basically tried to do is take the
timeless wisdom of the great premodern traditions and add the complementary
truths of the modern and postmodern mind, to give us something resembling a more
integral view embracing the truths of all of those great epochs, premodern and
modern and postmodern.[1]

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Typical grandiose and lofty KW-talk. Anyway, I thought I wrote this in my post, encompassing all that ranting in a much shorter sentence:

“Generally speaking, western post-modernism refutes thing-ness basically because it's a fun intellectual game [usual outcome: cynicism & scepticism], while the eastern traditions have a more pragmatic or soteriological motive behind the reasoning - they want to find a cure for suffering [usual and desired outcome: compassion & wisdom].”

Both of these outcomes are great character-traits (perhaps, regarding the western PM, excluding the cynicism and just keeping the scepticism). And, in the spirit of integral philosophy, both should be incorporated into one's mental continuum for great evolutionary effect.
 
David: “Adi Da, for example, according to Wilber, would go off in a huff and pout if someone disagreed with him.”
 
Yes, that's tricky. On one hand, I find it hard to understand how anyone who has truly seen through the drama of the ego can behave like an asshole. Because bad and harmful bahviour springs from attachment, and if realization is loosely defined as non-attachment, how could a person causing harm have seen through the ego-drama? From this perspective, I doubt whether Da's realization was very deep.

On the other hand, I don't see that realization would necessarily alters one's moral behaviour. Seeing that everything is illusory needn't involve a growth in compassion, that would depend on one's general stage, and needs to be practiced separately. So morals is a different and independent line, as you say.

Further, I noticed you didn't answer the grand finale of my previous post. Any perticular reason? Here it comes again:

“So as I said, the question becomes, if what we call atoms do not intrinsically or naturally exist - which can be logically demonstrated - what is it that the word is pointing to? What is the referent of the signifier A-T-O-M? Apart from my conceptual (3-p, L/8) answer action, I have said I'm ready to accept that I do not know. Are you?”

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Dawid, someone once walked into Einstein's office when Einstein was in his latter years, asking him what he thought of the new particle accelerator being built, and what new particles will we find etc?  His answer was, “I only want to know what an electron is.”  : )

No idea.  Hardly even the barest of a clue.

By the way, I agree with you that attachment or reactivity of any sort—to ideas, to a plan, a book, whatever—shows a limitation to realization.  Don't seem to me too many ways to slice that particular cake.  But neither do I doubt that someone like Da was deeply realized.  I scratch my head.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David,

I wrote:  What I was saying is that you appear to be insisting that, for
nonduality to be “true,” it must accurately represent reality as it
really is, all the way down:  in other words, I think your argument
involves a representative or “mirror of nature” understanding.

You replied:  That's not what I was saying.  Each time I said if you think nonduality is genuine, you have to admit either 1) it was empty all the way down, or 2) it's all made of the same stuff-— I held off on the second option because I didn't want to get distracted by the self vs. no self discussion at the moment.
 
Really, it's neither void nor stuff. It's things as they are without mental constructs. If you think nonduality is a mental construct, this is where you fall short of enacting the meta-paradigmatic aspect of Wilber's Integral Methodological Pluralism and instead absolutize postmodernity's contribution that everything is entirely interpretation, including nondual “experience.”

I have not said that everything is entirely interpretation, but I have been trying to point out that I think attempts to describe Zone 1 phenomena as if they are interpretation-free – as if they don't tetra-arise in the AQAL matrix, but manifest independently of history, evolution, context, etc – is problematic.  And when someone insists that, through zone 1 inquiry, they have accessed an absolute truth that is true at all levels, in all times, for everyone and anyone, I think this is what is going on – a form of quadrant provincialism or dissociation.

You wrote:  [Nonduality] is both a state “experience”—neither an experience nor a perspective— and an interpretation. As Wilber has said, “nondual realization is in part interpretative”—he doesn't say it's all interpretative or simply an understanding.
 
You seem to want to reduce it to a form of understanding, a mental construct — that's a postmodern critique, not a meta-paradigmatic critique. You assume duality as a baseline, with nonduality added at some point later on.

Well, in the quote above, I was trying to describe and differentiate the perspectives you and Tom have been taking in this discussion, since I think there has been a degree of “talking past each other” going on.  I wasn't trying to tell you my perspective.  I do think “nonduality” is an understanding, but it is also a type of experience – and I think if you inquire carefully, it's hard to cleanly separate these things, such that you have understanding without experience or vice versa. 

You said:  As Wilber has said, nonduality is what there is before you do anything with it. This is also my experience. I understand that moderns and postmoderns don't think the wisdom traditions have enaged in legitimate science. Is that your view? Do you think nonduality is merely a way of thinking, or do you think it is also a way of being?

Does Wilber still say this?  I think that must be a statement he made before his post-metaphysical stage.

Regarding your last questions, no, I don't believe nonduality can be reduced simply to a way of thinking – it is, or can be, just as much a way of being/experiencing.  But is it an ultimate, absolute, final, unchanging “way of being”?  I don't think you would want to argue that in an “evolutionary spiritual” context.

I said: From that perspective, the whole of existence is understood nondually (rather than, say, in “thing” terms, or otherwise), and in that sense it is an “involutionary given” (as a fundamental characteristic of this worldspace).

You replied:  This again reduces nonduality to an understanding, but my experience is that it is a way of being, a perception. It would be more accurate to say that the whole thing is felt nondually as your core experience, or, as Andrew Cohen has put it, “the most intimate part of ourselves.”  People find that it's who they most deeply are (!).

I understand.  But I don't really strongly separate “understanding” from experience, perception, etc.  They are co-implicated, in my view.  Anyway, again, when people feel that it is “who they most deeply are,” do you think they've arrived at the final evolutionary self-understanding? 

You wrote:  You may also say, “That's the myth of the given, mirror of nature, representationist!” But I think you are using an incorrect methodology to answer this particular question.
 
The irony of your mirror-of-nature argument is that you seem to be believing in the pre-given world. As Wilber points out, these hori-zones do not enact different perspectives on the same world but different worlds. You, and Tom, with your postmodern-heavy enactivism are believing in one world, in which postmodern-heavy enactivism reigns supreme.
 
They are simply different worlds, and you and Tom are raiding the zone-#1 world with a postmodern-heavy enactivism, kicking over stone buddhas, scrawling epithets about Wilber on shoji screens, and leaving your Birkenstock prints on zafus.

I think you've given me an interesting insight into our disagreement here.  You are saying I'm arguing for a “single world” because I'm applying post-metaphysical, enactivist insights to the Zone 1 world.  I think you are also suggesting that the “realms” disclosed by different Zone-specific disciplines are in some sense independent and incommensurate, and therefore, us Berkeley pomos should keep our Birkenstocks out of the Zendo.  To apply postmodern or post-metaphysical insights to Zone 1 phenomena is a quadrant transgression – and a sign that we are attached to the notion of a “single world” because we think these insights actually apply to Zone 1 realities.  Is this what you are saying?

You wrote:  The “experience” of nonduality is not a perspective; only interpretations about nonduality are perspectives.  When we retroread into childhood experiences and such, we are enacting a perspective.
You've agreed in the past that enactivism involves both an interpretative aspect and an objective aspect -— how are you integrating those two with regard to state experiences?

Have you ever heard of the fallacy of division?  It has a number of different manifestations, but one way it shows up is in the belief that, for any given perspective-occasion, we can somehow separate out the “factual part” from the “conventional / constructed part.” 

I do agree that enactivism involves both 'interpretive' and 'objective' aspects, but I do not agree that we can somehow isolate “pure objective reality” and put it in a box, setting all our “mental construct” stuff over to one side.  Post-metaphysics challenges the metaphysical belief that we can ever have pure, pre-given, unadulterated and non-historical, non-contextual experience.  This is why Tom and I both suggested Wilber was smuggling in metaphysics through his use of “states” as timeless, pre-contextual and pre-given constants.

You wrote:  I have asked you to differentiate your view of states from the postmodern view, to lay them out side by side -— how does your view differ from the one Wilber describes here:

[Excerpt not included]
 
You see? You and Tom have been applying postmodern perspectives in an absolute way, all the while saying that there could, of course, be nothing that is absolute (while applying postmodern insights absolutely). This is the classic postmodern performative contradiction.

I don't think either Tom or I have been doing this.  I have not said it is not possible to make universal claims based on cross-cultural evidence.  I wouldn't even be interested in Integral Theory if I saw all discussion of universals as hopelessly hegemonic and misguided.  But I have been saying that, while universalizing (and retro-reading) are legitimate exercises, it is important (from the Green stage forward) to acknowledge that this is what we are doing: we are universalizing, based on our present knowledge and understanding; we aren't simply “discovering” and “reporting” the absolute truth.

I said: Regarding the “beyond the brain” assertions of “zone 1” explorers, it's not clear to me why these accounts should be taken as 3p truths, unless they can be verified in 3p ways.  (“Beyond the brain” is a 3p claim).
You replied:  We can take a 3p view on our own interior. That's zone-#2 of course, which we usually talk about with regard to UL structures, but meditators can also take a 3p view on their interior. They can then compare it with the findings of others. That amounts to something, a legitimate form of science, though perhaps not ultimate proof.

But saying that consciousness goes “beyond the brain,” e.g. beyond the physical organism, actually appears to be a right-hand claim, and therefore it should be subject to right-hand verification.  Would you agree?

Best wishes,

B.

 

Re: Evolution and Enactment

I would like to give you all, a very relevant to this discussion - 9:13 minute bit of expansive Kosmic-respite to enjoy & consider.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Is: Further, I noticed you didn't answer the grand finale of my previous post. Any particular reason? Here it comes again:

“So
as I said, the question becomes, if what we call atoms do not
intrinsically or naturally exist - which can be logically demonstrated
- what is it that the word is pointing to? What is the referent of the
signifier A-T-O-M? Apart from my conceptual (3-p, L/8) answer action, I have said I'm ready to accept that I do not know. Are you?”


The grand finale! Sorry I didn't respond …

Any particular reason I didn't? Well, there seemed to be an assumption in there that I hadn't already accepted it that I didn't know everything there was to know about the atom, but perhaps now, with your lead, I might make that leap.

In any case, there isn't a lot that I do know about the atom from an empirical standpoint. I don't know that I have ever even seen one through a microscope or if I did today whether I would be able to tell an atom from a quark or a gokumi.

One neat answer I could give is that an atom is a holon. Can you beat that?  :) And as a holon it has certain characteristics, including action, a particular kind of action; holons emerge and not only that but emerge holarchichally; they transcend and include their predecessors …

Now that feels like quite powerful knowledge, and it is, but that also opens up the possibility that we will get attached to it and wield it in untoward ways, right, which is one thing you were perhaps getting at.

Of course the holon idea will one day be superceded by another; it has a kosmic address like any other. We shouldn't mistake it or any other formulation for having solved the Mystery, which is what happens when people get dogmatic or attached to concepts; they feel and speak as though they have it all figured out.

But even if we accept the twenty tenets of holons as reasonably enduring truths (3p, L/8) there remains something quite mysterious even in that little atom. Why does it emerge? Why has it transcended and included its predecessors? What is the energy that drives that evolution? How many tenets of holons have yet to be discovered?

The atom isn't nearly so mysterious and complex as a human being, but in it we still find the basic mystery of the entire multiverse.

And here, an opportunity to link you to one of my favorite poems, which honors the atom, along with the electron, the lizard, the leapard, and a few other things and creatures.

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Is: Anyway, I thought I wrote this in my post, encompassing all that ranting in a
much shorter sentence:

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“In any case, there isn't a lot that I do know about the atom from an empirical standpoint. I don't know that I have ever even seen one through a microscope or if I did today whether I would be able to tell an atom from a quark or a gokumi.”
 
You seem to believe that atoms really do exist out there. Tell me, is the atom composed of parts? I presume you'll say yes, otherwise it could not be a holon. So then, is the atom the same as its parts, or different from them? I presume you'll say that it is the same as its parts, otherwise, why would it need parts at all to be explained? If it can exist independent of its parts, why we do we need to bother getting into this neutrons, protons and electrons business? Hence, we then get to the interesting question:

Is the atom a) the same as its parts as a whole? Or b) is the atom the same as its parts individually?

If a), it then absurdly follows that the parts of the atom (protons, neutrons and electrons) must be one like the atom. Also, if the atom were nothing but the parts as a whole, then logically you couldn't remove electrons from it without the atom utterly disintegrating. But you can remove electrons without destroying the atom. So this alternative clearly doesn't work. Our last chance of finding the atom then is b), so let's examine it:

If the atom is simply its parts individually, then, absurdly, the atom must be many like its parts. This is not how we think of the atom, we think of it as a singular entity. We say the atom, or an atom. We do not say atoms about one atom.

So, we have run out of options. Where is this atom then of which you speak? We have searched thoroughly for it all over the place, but we couldn't find it.

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Dawid, I get what you're saying, and mostly agree, but I don't think the matter quite ends there.  An atom has a certain irreducible particularity, a particular thisness about it.  Try making an automobile out of helium atoms and this point will become clear.

Those parts of which you speak have a somethingness about them that our admittedly limited understanding can yet distinguish with some accuracy that allows action respecting them.  Your explanation does nothing to explain that particularity.  And pushing the matter further back by saying those parts are themselves made of parts, therefore the former don't exist, just repeats without then explaining the latter.  Resting in infinite regress doesn't quite cover the field, for me.

To wit: it's quite possible, in my understanding, that some essence to things does exist and inhere in what is.  I say this because I don't assume my knowledge, itsy-tiny as it is, is the arbiter of reality.  In other words, saying non-inherent substance could be (to my mind is) but itself an itsy-tiny step in reducing that itsy-tinyness.

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Bruce: I have not said that everything is entirely interpretation, but I have
been trying to point out that I think attempts to describe Zone 1
phenomena as if they are interpretation-free – as if they don't
tetra-arise in the AQAL matrix, but manifest independently of history,
evolution, context, etc – is problematic.  And when someone insists
that, through zone 1 inquiry, they have accessed an absolute truth that
is true at all levels, in all times, for everyone and anyone, I think
this is what is going on – a form of quadrant provincialism or
dissociation.

Yes, it's very important, as we try to take the largest view that we can, to trim those claims of quadrant provincialism, cultural baggage, hundred- or thousand-year-old beliefs that have been disproven, modified, or at least brought into question.

You say that you don't think everything is entirely interpretation, with reference to the wisdom traditions, I think—what about their claims isn't interpretation?

You say at the end, though, that claims of absolute truth are “a form of quadrant disassociation or provincialism.” Assuming that that's true, that wouldn't include universal truths, would it? Is there anything about the claims of the wisdom traditions that while not absolutely true might nevertheless be universally true at this point in time?

Also, it seems that you are making an absolute claim—that we can make no absolute claims. Maybe there is an absolute but that it just takes different forms. Can we avoid implying an absolute or nonduality?


Bruce: I do think “nonduality” is an understanding, but it is also a type of
experience – and I think if you inquire carefully, it's hard to cleanly
separate these things, such that you have understanding without
experience or vice versa.

Yes, it's quite difficult; kind of like the difficulty of division between fact and interpretation that you mention below.

 I will give a small quote from Wilber just to frame this discussion a little bit:

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David: In any case, there isn't a lot that I do know about the atom from
an empirical standpoint. I don't know that I have ever even seen one
through a microscope or if I did today whether I would be able to tell
an atom from a quark or a gokumi.”
 
Is: You seem to believe that atoms really do exist out there. Tell me, is the atom composed of parts? … Where is this atom then of which you
speak? We have searched thoroughly for it all over the place, but we
couldn't find it.


This is where we need to be clear on the two-truths doctrine. We don't stop looking through microscopes or discussing atoms and holons in a post-Orange world, do we?

It's not that the two-truths doctrine inherently exists or anything; it is just something that we have to agree upon in order to have a clear discussion about things once the absolute or nondual truth comes into the picture, kind of like we need to agree that 2 + 2 = 4 before we can move on to multiplication.

I mean, what if someone stopped you on the street and asked, “Sir, could you please tell me the way to the nearest gas station?”

I don't think you would say, “You seem to believe that gas stations really do exist out there. Tell me, is the gas station composed of parts?”

I believe you would say, “I'm sorry, I do not know. Good luck in finding one” or “Yes, certainly. Five blocks straight ahead and then one to the right.”

But if he then said, “Sir, I'm sorry. It's not really a gas station that I'm looking for. You see, I'm suffering, very badly at times. Well, pretty badly, anyway. There are probably some who suffer more. At any rate, I don't like it, to the extent I do suffer, and would like to—you know, stop suffering. And you see it's brought me some relief to go from one gas station to the next again and again and again. But my soles are worn, and frankly, it's getting a little boring. Anyway, can you help?”—at that point you could perhaps walk him through the Prasangika analysis.

I think it's pretty cool, the Prasangika analysis, and I will look through your post once again when I finish this, but I was talking about my relative knowledge of atoms and gokumis from an empirical perspective—that's in the world of the relative truth. I answered that way because you had asked me a relative question—“What is the referent of the signifier A-T-O-M?”—though I see now you were really inquiring about the absolute truth.

At any rate, I think we could speak of “not knowing” in a relative way and in an absolute way. In the relative way, we can have a “not knowing” or beginner's mind in which many things are possible, and this is really a balance or dance between known facts and unknown facts, the right balance or dance steps resulting in an informed openness that results in creativity.

In an absolute way, maybe we could describe cessation as “not knowing.” With the kind of emptiness Almaas and Nisargadatta described above, there isn't even knowledge of self or self-awareness. Nothing is known, and there is no content to be known.


Tom, very nicely said.


And, Lisa, that's a cool link! I had been wondering what that was all about.

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Tom: “Dawid, I get what you're saying, and mostly agree, but I don't think the matter quite ends there.  An atom has a certain irreducible particularity, a particular thisness about it.  Try making an automobile out of helium atoms and this point will become clear.”

Oh, my God! Am I really hearing this? Did I just got the most ardent post-modernist on the block to argue for the existence of irreducible perticularity independent of culturally conditioned thought? No doubt, this is what I will write on my tombstone. :D

Tom, yeah. You've arrived at the point in the Prasangika process in which one stands on the very verge of nihilism, and it's quite easy to slide off. So we've been searching for the atom, but we couldn't find it anywhere. We've exhausted all the options, but the atom hasn't been found.

So, does this mean there is utterly nothing at all? (Which would constitute nihilism.) No, of course not. But this direct realization of the non-finding of the atom (emptiness) is very important to arrive at. Why? Because only then will one start to seriously suspect and doubt the way in which the world - through conditioning in all quadrants - currently appear to us. We begin to look around, slowly beginning to mistrust what the world tells us is true; what we should believe in in order to fit in, how we should blindly conform to established patterns. You remember Neo in the beginning of the Matrix.

So, what is the referent for the word “atom”? Obviously not nothing, you've just suggested that there is an “irreducible perticularity”, which is quite different from utter nothingness. You have asserted that it would be a serious fallacy to conclude that there is utterly no referent for the signifier “atom” at all.

But what is it? As I said, I don't know. And I don't because we've found no independently existent atom when exhaustively searching for one. We seem to have found only an ephemeral process, a set of relations, which we have together agreed to call “an atom”. Atleast that is how it appears. So what is this ephemeral process? I call it action, but apart from that, I truly don't have a clue - it is a complete mystery.

This is where God enters the picture, for me. She is that ineffable Reality. That action which is so direct, so present, so now, so unboundedly alive, that words can't possibly describe Him. Only in this digital, dualistic and fragmented written/spoken form can we try, and got more or less close, yes, but never succeed. Only through death can we achieve union and freedom.

“Sir, could you please tell me the way to the nearest gas station?”
 
We're having high-level philosophical debates about the nature of reality here on this forum. This poor chap just want to get some gas for his car. So we need to meet people at where they are moment to moment.

So actually, the answer ”Sure, it's right down the street and to the left. :)” is, I think, a more enlightened answer than ”Gas stations don't exist. :<”, because that demonstrates strong attachment to emptiness. And since emptiness doesn't inherently exist - such as you claim, btw - then that is just as deluded (because it will cause suffering) as asserting that gas stations do exist.

Anyway, I think you would find it quite fascinating to experience that we can't find any atom, anywhere, even though we look everywhere it could possibly be. The realization that separate atoms are actually nothing but presently arising thought is bound to be an explosive event - this is definitely not how we ordinarily percieve of the world in our day-to-day life. Things most definitely appear self-established, from their own side, having nothing to do with us. :O

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Dawid, how apropos the subject of this thread that your understanding of me changed to give you that insight!  I've been talking up this particularity theme from before the emptiness thread, so there's nothing much new in what I said above.  In fact, IMO particularity (AKA difference) is a post-modern leaning (AKA Derridean differance) that says, in one of its various effects: note the context.  Remember me saying anything like “the Absolute” is always your absolute?  Same context-referencing differance.

But j'digress: it was your understanding, not me, that changed.  That to me shows an evolution in your enactment of “Tom,” the content of which of course has some basis in Tom-in-Canada, and some basis in Dawid.  Particularly the change you experienced was all yours, buddy, which you then projected as me having changed.

Speaking more broadly, a given, IMO, involves that very kind of projection to the extent a statement, among other things, presumes an absolutely absolute status for its contents.

David: Yet at the same time we don't want to leave the impression that it is “all interpretation,” right?

Right, IMO, though I'd add that I don't take Bruce to be saying it's all interpretation.  Interpretation will necessarily accompany experience, but the experience, in its overall functioning and ramifications etc, surely goes beyond one's interpretation of it.  I mean, didn't people make Freudian slips before Freud (instance 1 of experience beyond interpretation)?  And even Freud's interpretation surely cannot be the final word (instance 2 of experience beyond interpretation).

David: Yet try as we might we won't be able to put our finger on just what it
is that is constant, though we can tell you what it isn't.

This is perhaps where a rigourous metaphysics, with a dash of linguistic analysis, both guided by experience, might help. 

Let's look at the word absolute.  I'll give a few personal musings.  The word appears to me to denote that which is non-relative.  Something absolute is what it is apart from any influences whatever: independent, unchanging, constant, self-defined.

The relative, on the other hand, is dependent, changing, inconstant, other-defined.

So we have these two words that connote rather opposite qualities.  One might ask, where is the absolute located?  Apart from the relative?  It's definition seems to connote so.  Just look at historic religious accounts defining God the Absolute as Wholly Other, residing other than in or on earth, not finite like here and earth, no limited like here and earth, etc.  Even non-deistic versions of the Absolute suggest a kind of locational otherness (as not samsara, for instance, though I'm oversimplifying).

But watch this: I in what I am am constantly changing, was formed from conditions and influences not me, am thus dependent, etc—all in all and through to my bones relative.

But that I am is absolute.  That I am—amness or isness—does not itself change.  What I call conditionality is not itself conditional such that my changingness for its part does not change, is independent of any change whatever.  This is the I amness of Ramana, and might be called the absolute in the relative, appearing, to reference Bortoft, at right angles to the relative, and thus not separate (as its definition suggests) from relative.  Relative and absolute are not two.

Thus whatever I might call relative is not ever just-relative.  Relative cannot be absolutely separated from absolute, both definitionally and experientially, such that the extent or depth of one's experiential relativity might in respects suggest a limit to one's capability to experience the absolute aspect of what is.  I think this much is implied by green being a first-step, but absolutizing and self-contradictory, relativity, with the big leap at yellow denoting full relativity and a return to heirarchy (which is absolute).  I think it is also implied by Wilber saying state-development is required for entry to higher stages.  It is in any event one version of nondual, a kind of post-relative-and-absolute-are-different view.

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“But j'digress: it was your understanding, not me, that changed.”

I certainly didn't believe you changed any opinion because of this discussion. I was just thrilled to hear something useful and productive sneak out from your mouth, as opposed to the usual endless and pointless post-modern deconstruction rant.

So, there's a certain irreducible particularity - your words now, not mine - that actually exists independent of whether we are aware of it or not. If we for example brainwash someone from birth into believing that helium atoms could actually make cars, then - your reasoning now, not mine - it wouldn't be possible. So why is this you think? Last time I tried to discuss this with you, you said you didn't have time. Perhaps now.

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I don't have time.

Well, a little time.  To your question: one can't make a car from helium (except via long-term stellar process) no matter what one is brainwashed to think otherwise.  What the ur-stuff of the world is doesn't depend on our thinking.  Rather, our thinking depends on the ur-stuff as you can find out by first thinking you can walk through a wall, then testing that thinking. 

One might speculate that proper thinking is proper ur-stuffing in the sense that thinking arises from it and must, for proper working, must correspond to it.  We've all experienced how this can be true in many ways.  Going a little further than this, experiencing the structure to which thinking corresponds and from which thinking arises—or being the experience of that structure—could be said to be experiencing (or being) the ur-stuff as manifested there and then, in experience.  And doesn't any such experiencing also change one's thinking?  That would be to experience the ur-stuff's absolute aspect within that relative position, per Wilber's lattice.  Voila, absolute relativity.

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“the ur-stuff's absolute aspect”

Haha, I certainly never thought I would hear something like this from you. “Ur-stuff”, “absolute aspects”? What next?!

So what do you think this “ur-stuff” - your word, not mine - is? Surely not really, really small partless particles whizzing around, given your interest in quantum physics. Also, what is its kosmic adress?

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No, not particles.  Particle stupidity can be seen to have died on Feynman's admission that he couldn't get rid of the field-somethingness that space seems to be.  The ur-stuff is to me an indivinable, almost transparent, liquid-like fluffstuff that cannot be expressed without a degree of error that increases exponentially with the intended reach of one's expression.

If you listen to Hans Peter-Durr, he calls that “stuff down there” pure connectedness, but then qualifies by saying the “con” in “connectedness” is improper because it denotes “two,” and in quantum physics there is no two, just an indivisible whole.  He says we have very few words that connote connection without separation, they being love and spirit.  That's the best description I've heard by far.

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The tigle nyag-chig.

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Yes, the tigle.

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Btw, I'm not sure the kosmic address.  I haven't worked out how to use that particular slide-ruler yet.

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Tom: “No, not particles.  Particle stupidity can be seen to have died on Feynman's admission that he couldn't get rid of the field-somethingness that space seems to be.  The ur-stuff is to me an indivinable, almost transparent, liquid-like fluffstuff that cannot be expressed without a degree of error that increases exponentially with the intended reach of one's expression.

If you listen to Hans Peter-Durr, he calls that “stuff down there” pure connectedness, but then qualifies by saying the “con” in “connectedness” is improper because it denotes “two,” and in quantum physics there is no two, just an indivisible whole.  He says we have very few words that connote connection without separation, they being love and spirit.  That's the best description I've heard by far.”

That's completely awesome, all of it! My resonance-meter goes through the roof. Thanks alot for sharing.

In your mind, what is the kosmic adress of this understanding? Must be something like (3-p, L/8, l/c), right? [Edit: Ok, I see!]

My two concepts “action” and “wave” I use to describe it seem to go along quite well with this idea too. (I like “action” better though, it isn't so… pictoral.) Also, my claims that because of the properties of these two concepts - action, and wave - dualistic language (which always by necessity implies two or more which is then related) becomes like an outdated tool trying to describe “it”. So therefore, in my mind the only thing that can actually describe this “ur-stuff” is something like zen-pointers. Here's one such pointer, used by a korean zen master, which struck me as a very powerful expression of reality:

“Ouch, ouch.”

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Cute, Dawid.  One thing that is new in my talking now is the reemergence of the word absolute.  Over the last several weeks, I have been working behind the scenes to understand the absolute aspect of experience, language and thought.  As my starting point for this work, it seemed clear to me, on necessary implication from evolution, that anything called absolute must be some human being's version of absolute, that human bearing a kosmic address of XYZ characteristics and limitations.  That person's absolute is thus relative to that person, and seemingly never not, if one takes evolution seriously.

I was thus left with this notion of relative absolute, which began making sense to me.  If we look at various terms people use to describe absolute aspects of experience, those terms tend to be negatives:

absolute
unmoving
undying
unborn
empty of characteristic
timeless
etc.

A negative of course requires a positive to negate, which experientially and linguistically sets up a timelike series in how experience can manifest, a seeming necessary order to experience.  Thus considering the experience of time, one first (naively) experiences time, then with sufficient insight into those experiences, can experience or abstract the timeless element within time.  One version of timelessness might be: that time is is outside time.  Thus at a subtler, higher level of experience of time can presence time's opposite, that which is necessarily implied by time, which is timelessness.

The same can be said of any of the negatives in which form the absolute element is said to manifest.  Thus in Buddhist cosmology, one first experiences samsara, then emptiness, then nondual.  That development is clearly historical and seems clearly a sequence within given individuals (some exceptions granted).  Of course, any development is of time, is a time sequence. And in this particular development, the timeless aspect in time—here, emptiness—presences later in that sequence, and necessarily later, it seems.  The sequence per se refers to the always present relative aspect; emptiness the absolute aspect.

This sequencing is prefigured in a linguistic analysis.  In line with negatives being parasitical on positives—being in that sense dependent on positives—positive terms are the more inclusive, and constitute the relative side of linguistic contraries.  See the list below.  From that list, take, for instance the terms particular and universal.  “Particular” is positing and relative; “universal” is negating and absolute.  A universal must refer to some particular, but not any particular necessarily, just some particular as embodying it.  Its referring, as such, is as in an emptied form—universals are stripped down (negated) particulars, the common elements of particulars.  And there can be no universal (apart from idealistic assertion) absent a particular embodying that universal.

Regarding the inclusive aspect, the relative term, particular, is the more inclusive—quite naturally because, as a positive term, it is required beforehand in the sequence by which a universal can be known or experienced.  This inclusivity can be tested by asking which can be seen to contain the other and not vice versa.  Here, we can speak of a particular universal (redness), but not a universal particular, which makes no sense.  

Relative terms are thus first in time, if you will, and are more inclusive.  But relative makes no sense without absolute, which IMM comes in as a “later,” abstracting experiential and linguistic element absent which a full description of anything at all lacks meaning.

In this understanding, one can appreciate how humanity's various and numerous versions of the Absolute (call it God) have appeared on an evolutionary trajectory (called Wilber's lattice).  Our idea of God has moved with our own evolution, such that the absolute aspect of experience shows that it rides upon the relative as perhaps an ever-present accompaniment.

It also strikes me that absolute also corresponds with (or perhaps should be seen to be confined) to metaphysics.  If you take “metaphysical” to refer to that which every experience or saying necessarily implies, that something is—amness—reveals itself of the most foundational metaphysical notions.  And isn't it amness—the great I Am—that pops so often in deepest spiritual experience?

This understanding of absolute to me feels integrated, and to me respects a post-modern, post-green view that each stage will have its own experiences and expressions of absolute aspects.  The understanding shows a real evolution of the absolute—a moving absolute presencing in relative particulars, and nondually not apart from particulars.

FWIW, here is a list of relative and absolute terms I took from Hartshorne, with several additions from me.  The first term in each pair is the relative.

1 relative absolute
2 subject object
3 whole part
4 effect cause
5 later earlier
6 becoming being
7 temporal nontemporal
8 concrete abstract
9 particular universal
10 actual potential
11 contingent necessary
12 finite infinite
13 discrete continuous
14 complex simple
15 proximate ultimate
16 real unreal
17 dependent independent
18 totality constituent
19 true false

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There, now I can stop my kvetching about the absolute.  Thank God, I can hear some say.

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“Over the last several weeks, I have been working behind the scenes…”

Cute, Tom. :P

I really liked your last post. It really defined your view on the subject. Just some questions.

“evolution of the absolute”
 
First of all, we both agree that there can never be an expression of God that is somehow “the right one”, because views/interpretations/understandings/beliefs change and evolve in a time squence. Ok, so far so good.

So what usually happens, and what has happened in this thread, is that by claiming that God evolves, it seems that this claim reduces God (actual reality) to only an understanding - that there isn't actually a God which the evolved words and understandings is trying to describe. There is only the understanding, and nothing else. Nothing that is actually Real, with Reality anthropomorphically defined as: that which “doesn't care” about being understood or not in order to be. To many people - especially Amber - this is outrageous, and unacceptable.

I try to solve this by saying that God exists, but a God that has no other characteristics than simply being the Truth - the actual reality, what is really the case, no matter what people believe. So he can't be described as Ur-stuff, not as pure Awareness, not as an organizing Intelligence/Web of Life, etc. But simply Truth. Whatever is in fact True = God. This whole sentence and opinion I agree is kosmic adressable, but the God that the sentence points to is not. :O

So we then have arrive at two different viewpoints:

1) God is just an understanding. Consequence of holding this view: There is no actual reality, just interpretations. So whatever is true for me is actually true, and whatever is true for you is actually also true. So there can, absurdly, be many truths, not just One.

2) My interpretation, that God actually exists (as Truth, capital T, and nothing else) and is independent of understanding, although he can still be partially understood by conscious beings. Consequence of holding this view: Why would I be correct? Why would this perticular interpretation of reality be the final? How do I know? There seem to be so many truths, how do we know which one is actually True? Also, Truth-Power problem described by Wilber in IS is an issue for some. (Obviously, I have my attempted answers to these consequences ready to be launched, but I'll leave that for now.)

What are your views on this, Tom? I'm very curious. Would you say that you like nr 1)? Or if not, which I believe you have proved through the helium atoms not producing a car-reasoning, how do you justify your non 1)-view without falling prey to the consequences of nr 2) which you have been so fervently fighting against in this pod? Thanks.

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Hi Dawid, good questions.  1 for me is definitely out.  Apart from the question of God and what God could be, 1 doesn't hold even for matter.  If God exists, I would assume God to be no less mysterious and, in a sense, no less objective than matter.

I don't find 2 disagreeable, and am comfortable with the notion of something beyond my understanding—that beyond is in some regards a driver of change.  But depending on context, I do find talk of what might exist beyond understanding often empty of content, or often a form of escape, or to constitute a pre-yellow my-view-for-you projectile.

Returning to 1 for a moment, a baseline observation for me is that people cannot talk or experience or think beyond their stage of development, and can only learn in their stage as a maximum, with creeping advances to the next.  Any sense of “beyond” will presumably be processed in stage-specific fashion, such that even that question falls to be understood, in practical terms, as a stage representation.

For my part, I want the notion of absolute to have meaning in a stage-relative world, as I assume it must, because even to say “relative” posits or implies “absolute” as its necessary opposite.  IMO, meaning making depends on opposition, such that where one pole of a pair of contraries is reduced to zero, the other pole is likewise so reduced.  I thus want to view through the lens, to see what can be seen, of perceiving relative-absolute as a dynamic human process where both terms respect our developmental observations.  Talk of God beyond my understanding and ability to perceive and process is thus largely superfluous.

And one final point, projecting my view of absolute as true-beyond-stage looks to me to be a pre-yellow projecting, and a fixation that presumes I know.  So I also find personal developmental reasons, not to mention disciplined theoretical reasons, to not focus my own personal attention too much on what might be objectively true for all or other than me, whatever my location happens to be.

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“1 for me is definitely out.”
 
That is fantastic news for me. Since 1 is not an option for him, I now regard Tom as a shining example of someone having passed through Green and made it out not just alive, but healthy as well! That is he has included the important contributions of Green, and discarded the pathological ones - like believing in nr 1). I think many, many so called “integral people” I've seen on the net totally skip not just this stage, but fail to include many other important aspects of other stages as well. (I like talking about people in 3-p.)

“[I] am comfortable with the notion of something beyond my understanding”
 
What I am talking about is not that God is some intellectual understanding that will always be slightly “beyond” our current understanding. Like a sacred equation just lying hidden out there somewhere, under a mossy rock, waiting to be found. What I mean is that God is simply not an object of intellectual (dualistic) understanding at all, being non-dual. That being said, since Truth is perticular, since the world we inhabit has a certain structure, Truth is not just a question of opinion. Truth doesn't care about our feelings, what is True is True, regardless of our personal interpretations.

Moving on, because there is no other way for us to communicate about issues (that are of interest to us as separate human beings) than through dualism, then there will always be refinements of our dualistic understanding. Dualistic refinements trying to reach ever closer to that dualistically unreachable Truth. This is stage evolution.

But once we get to the understanding (which is kosmic adressable) that we are not separate human beings - that separation is only an idea - and as this understanding turns into a direct realization of not-two, not-one, then we are no longer reaching for the Truth. The Truth will not be some apparently distant and mysterious future point of knowledge. Instead, you just fart in your pants, and the Truth dawns on you - that you are that, that you are Truth.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Is: And since emptiness doesn't inherently exist - such as you claim, btw - then that is just as deluded (because it will cause suffering) as asserting that gas stations do exist.

I can see a couple of reasons why an assertion that emptiness exists could cause suffering.: 1) because “emptiness” is a dualistic, finite word; there is no word that accurately expresses nonduality, and 2) because putting it in third-person language suggests that it is not already there, not already the case.

Is the answer not to have a third-person map with “nonduality” on it? I don't think that's the answer. One thing I think would be helpful is to make it clear that nonduality is the ever-present condition, make that understanding an explicit part of the Wilber-Combs Lattice, perhaps by putting the nondual column first, and then gross, subtle, and casual.


Is: You can remove electrons without destroying the atom.

How many subholons can we remove before the the larger holon ceases to be what it is?

How many atoms can we take away from a molecule before it ceases to be a molecule and becomes a heap of atoms?

How many cells can we take away from an organism before it ceases to be an organism?

This is one thing that has caught my attention before, the line where “an atom isn't dependent on its parts” or something like that.


Is: “Ouch, ouch.”

Just to make it explicit, the point being: pain but no separate-self to feel it, right?



Tom, I like you're study about the relative absolute. I think that involves what Nisargadatta described as “as the timeless I express my self as time” or the absolute + perspective or emptiness + view aspect of nonduality.

What about the experience that Nisargadatta and Almaas described where there is nothing at all there that is self-aware? Almaas described his interpretation of that “experience” as being entirely retroactive because there is no interpretative function or anything capable of interpretation there. Could that be called simply absolute?

“Nondual” action or interpretation or speech would always be relative + absolute.

One way to look at it is: How would we describe the absolute in the dream state and in the deep, dreamless sleep? The most accomplished meditators first take the causal “witness” (in quotes because it is not a witness as we normally consider the word, not really a “self” as we normally think of it) through each realm and then take nonduality through each realm, so a complete definition of the absolute, if we want to use the word, would have to include each of those states.

The experience of the causal and nondual in deep, dreamless sleep might be the same for everyone, and, even without entering it with some spark of awareness, deep, dreamless sleep could be the same for everyone, right? Is there any evidence to prove that it isn't the same for everyone?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

“One thing I think would be helpful is to make it clear that nonduality is the ever-present condition, make that understanding an explicit part of the Wilber-Combs Lattice, perhaps by putting the nondual column first”
 
Yeah, or as e said, placing non-dual as some kind of transparent background of the map. But then that will cause problems, because for like 99,999999999999% of the population, non-duality doesn't feel like an ever-present condition. Perhaps they won't like the map! But then instead, maybe that will open our minds to the non-dual reality that is present right now. Bah, I don't know, I'll leave that to the professional map-makers! :)

“How many subholons can we remove before the the larger holon ceases to be what it is?”

Very good question. Keep asking yourself this until you realize that holons, like any other concept, is just an idea having no intrinsic reality, even though it is a highly evolved idea.

“This is one thing that has caught my attention before, the line where “an atom isn't dependent on its parts” or something like that.”
 
If it was inherently dependent on its parts, then how could the atom have evolved? Because inherently existing dependence involves that that which is dependent (the atom) to always be in dependence on that which it depends on (the electrons, the neutrons and the protons). If this is the case, then the consequence is that since atoms must always have existed simultaneously with its parts, it contradicts the evidence we have about atoms, as well as our knowledge about evolution. There were for example a time (however short) when atoms didn't exist, and there were only its parts. Also, if the atom inherently depended on its parts, then neither fusion nor fission would be a possibility.

“Just to make it explicit, the point being: pain but no separate-self to feel it, right?”
 
You're trying to understand it now, if you were in the zendo the master would hit you on the head! :P There are no words to describe it. But I think your attempt comes quite close. “Ouch, ouch” even closer.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Couldn't holon theory, set in an evolutionary context, perform the same function as Prasangika analysis? I'm not saying it is already doing that, but it seems to me that perhaps it could or that the two could be merged.

Also, I think I have a better answer than that dualistic zen master:

“Ouch.”

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David: “Couldn't holon theory, set in an evolutionary context, perform the same function as Prasangika analysis?”

There's a difference between the two. I think you are aware of this. Holon-theory is positive, assertive, constructive, whereas Prasangika is mainly negating and deconstructive. This is because the two theories have different aims.

Holon-theory is proposed as a Turquoise alternative to Orange scientific understanding, I think. So instead of these partless point-particles whizzing around you instead have structured, fluid processes which you therefore can't really tell exactly where they begin and where they end. It's aim is to further our understanding about the universe in relative terms.

Prasangika-analysis on the other hand has only one purpose: ending dukkha through the destruction of ignorance. Another great benefit for very sceptical people like myself is that it allows you to actually dare to investigate non-duality; it functions as a “doubt-remover”. Like, say you are walking down the road and spot a car from the corner of your eye … the thought arise: “How the hell could this car be non-separate from me? It's really ridiculous and new-agey. All these spirituality ideas are completely nonsensical”.

So when this doubt arise, you perform or refresh some of the analyses about inherently existing I, or other-phenomena, for example, and you realize that your doubt is in fact not grounded in reason at all, but in ignorance! :O This in turn helps create another kind of doubt, which is said to be the beginning of wisdom and awakening - the correct doubt about belief in inherent existence. (Neo in the beginning of the Matrix.)

Hence, the Prasangika's aim is to further our understanding about the universe in ultimate terms. (I don't like saying the word ultimate though, it makes it seem like it's something far off and arcane, while it most definitely is not. It's right here right now.)

David: “Also, I think I have a better answer than that dualistic zen master: 'Ouch.'”
 
Now you're in for a real zen-stick beating! :P

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Is: There's a difference between the two. I think you are aware of this. Holon-theory is positive, assertive, constructive, whereas Prasangika is mainly negating and deconstructive. This is because the two theories have different aims. . .
 It's aim is to further our understanding about the universe in relative terms. . . Hence, the Prasangika's aim is to further our understanding about the universe in ultimate terms.

Yes, I undertstand that. But it seems to me that holon theory could perform both functions and tie the two objectives into one.

For example, if you simply saw that everything is a holon, or a heap of holons, that you also see that it doesn't inherently exist, right?

A holon is dependent on all its subholons for its existence and therefore couldn't inherently exist. It will later be subsumed by a larger holon.

Holons are relative and noninherently existing by definition, right? And as small as they get (infinitely small) there were no holons before the Big Bang that anyone is aware of. So holon theory implies a deep-time context, and as long as we maintain that deep-time context it is difficult to fall for the idea that anything inherently exists.

David: “Also, I think I have a better answer than that dualistic zen master: 'Ouch.'”
 
Is: Now you're in for a real zen-stick beating! :P

Why? It might be the case, but I'm not seeing it; I'm not too up on Zen logic, though.

The Zen master said, “Ouch, ouch.” I interpret that to mean one ouch for him and one for God—is that an incorrect interpretation? Why two “ouch”s? Why not just one “ouch”?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

“Why? It might be the case, but I'm not seeing it […] The Zen master said, “Ouch, ouch.” I interpret that to mean one ouch for him and one for God—is that an incorrect interpretation? Why two “ouch”s? Why not just one “ouch”?”
 
These questions, doubts and theories is not the zen way. The way I see it is that the zm didn't reason his way to the answer. It came naturally, without thought. Pain - BANG - ouch! Zen is about action. As Seung Sahn said: “Only action - only do it!” In action there is no subject, and no object.

Don't take my word for it, though. I'm just starting my formal koan practice a few weeks from now.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David: What about the experience that Nisargadatta and Almaas described where there is nothing at all there that is self-aware? Almaas described his interpretation of that “experience” as being entirely retroactive because there is no interpretative function or anything capable of interpretation there. Could that be called simply absolute?


I tend to view any such descriptions, including those of DDS, through an evolutionary lens.  Thus the “no interpretive function” of which Almaas speaks, for me, arises only when a certain level of development is reached such that absent that developmental level, the function doesn't arise.  It seems to me a person, as it were, generates their experience—this is evident on Almaas' and Nisargadatta's descriptions, where the very form of the experiencer changes to allow their experience to manifest.  Note that by “generating” I'm not saying the experience is epiphenomenal in the way that term is normally used (“just” a product of matter), for matter must be seen to include that experience, which in turn defines what matter is. 


Thus just like consciousness itself arises only (so far as we have evidence) in the context of a certain ordering of matter, so too those experiences arise only in context of a certain ordering of matter (I'm assuming spiritual training reorders matter).  And just as consciousness is a property of matter ordered such, so are those experiences properly considered a property of matter ordered such.  The “experience” corresponds to UL spirit-interior, the matter UR matter-exterior.


And, yes, the experience can be described, I think, as an experience of the absolute aspect of what is.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Is: These questions, doubts and theories is not the zen way. The way I seeit is that the zm didn't reason his way to the answer. It camenaturally, without thought. Pain - BANG - ouch! Zen is about action. As Seung Sahn said: “Only action - only do it!”

Well, I guess it hurt so much he had to say it twice!

Or perhaps he could have had some Amber interpretation of enlightenment and thus one “ouch” for himself and one “ouch” for God? I don't know much about Buddhist Asian Amber.

Is: In action there is no subject, and no object.

I think we might say that a certain type of action doesn't issue from the separate-self sense but that other types do issue from the separate-self sense. A lot of action is dualistic, based on dualistic fear and desire.

It sounds great about the koan study. I think Zen is really cool.


Tom: Thus the “no interpretive function” of which Almaas speaks, forme, arises only when a certain level of development is reached suchthat absent that developmental level, the function doesn't arise.

I see what you're saying: It requires a structure to develop a trained-state realization. That's true. But it doesn't necessarily follow that the state itself (where there is no self-aware self) was built on top of those structures. It could simply be that it requires a structure for a human being to access it consciously.

It seems to me that the evidence points the other way, that that no-self-aware state preceeded structures. Those deeper states are experienced at a variety of fulcrums, including lower ones by children, and the people who have realized them most deeply (through the sleep cycle) tend to agree that the state is prior to any mental construct.

Tom: The “experience” corresponds to UL spirit-interior, the matter UR matter-exterior.

All action and interpretation requires UL and UR correlates, but the experience that Almaas and Nisargadatta were discussing (the first one, which Nisargadatta described as awareness that wasn't aware of anything including itself), isn't any kind of an action or interpretation at all.

If genuine nondual “experience” is possible, then everything in the multiverse must have that no-thing space in common. If that no-thing space didn't pervade something out there already (including rocks and trees and planets) then there would be no such thing as a genuine nondual experience. And if that no-thing space does pervade everyhing in the multiverse it is not dependent on an evolved structure.

Thus, either nonduality is genuine, a no-thing space that pervades the entire multiverse, or it is not really nondual and a product of a higher structure. But we can't logically say that nonduality is genuine and it is a product of evolution, though of course it does require an evolutionary structure to realize it consciously.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David, out of curiosity, do you think that no-thing state (or that awareness that isn't aware of anything including itself) is a condition to aspire towards? 

Also, as I expect you're aware, several of your descriptions are rather self-contradictory (which one might be tempted to justify on the grounds that they are “mystical”), but just for the sake of communication (and for exploring your arguments), I'd like to ask you about them:

If something is unaware of anything, including itself, why should it be described as “awareness”?

Regarding no-thing space, how can something that is not a thing “pervade” things?  Pervasion implies “taking up space” or “permeating a thing,” and both of these descriptions or metaphors trade on notions of substantiality.  So, when you say that “no-thing space pervades everything,” what do you mean?

Best wishes,

B.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Bruce: David, out of curiosity, do you think that no-thing state (or thatawareness that isn't aware of anything including itself) is acondition to aspire towards?

Well, it appears there are benefits to state training and various types of realizations.

Were you referring to the practice-or-not-practice discussion?


Balder: Also, as I expect you're aware, several of your descriptions are ratherself-contradictory (which one might be tempted to justify on thegrounds that they are “mystical”), but just for the sake ofcommunication (and for exploring your arguments), I'd like to ask youabout them:

If something is unaware of anything, including itself, why should it be described as “awareness”?


Several? And then you name one of Nisargadatta's descriptions as if it were mine?

Yes, of course Nisargadatta's description didn't make a lot of sense. Almaas also felt that way. I thought it was a little too self-evident to mention.


Bruce: Regarding no-thing space, how can something that is not a thing“pervade” things?  Pervasion implies “taking up space” or “permeating athing,” and both of these descriptions or metaphors trade on notions ofsubstantiality.  So, when you say that “no-thing space pervadeseverything,” what do you mean?

Yes, of course nonduality is beyond all concepts; I thought we were past that.

Some people, nevertheless, find it useful to discuss it and try to describe it. They call these descriptions “approximate ultimates” in some quarters. We couldn't discuss it at all if we only allowed perfect descriptions because there are no perfect descriptions.

When I wrote “no-thing space” it was meant to convey the paradox, which is “the way nonduality looks to the mental level,” and alert sensitive readers that what I was referring to was beyond concept.

All metaphors or descriptions, without exception, imply substantiality and duality.

You've called nonduality “an understanding” and “a type of experience.” I'll assume by the first you meant the interpretative aspect, but are you aware of it that nonduality is not really an “experience” because there is no personal self there to experience anything?



 

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David, I'm asking because I think our conversation has been impeded by the employment of multiple, slippery definitions of nonduality.  Sometimes we are describing it as a type of understanding (as when I pointed out that the term, nondual, emerged historically as a corrective to earlier monistic descriptions of reality, and you concurred with this) and sometimes as a type of non-conceptual (non)experience devoid of content.

I'm asking because, while your description appears to use a paradoxical phrase, the “structure” of the overall argument is still quite concrete and representationist.  For instance, this is a straightforward representationist argument:  “But it doesn't necessarily follow that the state itself (where there is no self-aware self) was built on top of those structures. It could simply be that it requires a structure for a human being to access it consciously.”

I do recognize it is difficult to talk about or describe nonduality, but my belief is that our attempts to do so always fall within one interpretive frame or another, so I am asking questions about the particular “frame” (or frames) being used in this discussion.

In your view / experience, what is nonduality?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Bruce: For instance, this is a straightforward representationist argument: “But it doesn't necessarily follow that the state itself (where thereis no self-aware self) was built on top of those structures. It couldsimply be that it requires a structure for a human being to access itconsciously.”

It's not a straightforward representationist argument because it's understood, in this discussion, that it comes with a kosmic address.

Also, though, I think representationist arguments and maps are to be integrated with postmodern awareness (with ka's, qualifications, etc.) rather than dismissed as being unenlightened as extreme postmoderns would have us do, right?


Bruce: I do recognize it is difficult to talk about or describe nonduality,but my belief is that our attempts to do so always fall within oneinterpretive frame or another.

It would probably be edifying to list those interpretaive frameworks. Without associating any with a particular level, I see the:

Madyamaka

Advaita

postmodern

Wilber IV

Wilber V


Any others?


Bruce: In your view / experience, what is nonduality?

 In my experience it's like the pear pictures you see beginning just before the one-minute mark in this video:

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David, thanks for highlighting that video.  I'd seen it before, but I appreciated watching it again.  The “pear” images resonate with me – my TSK practice having led, or opened, into similar sorts of modes of seeing/experiencing. 

But this does still raise questions for me, since I have the feeling that “nonduality” is still being used in multiple ways in this thread:  as a contentless non-state; as the realization of the 'union' between that empty non-state and the world of form (leading, perhaps, to the more transparentized 'experience' of form, as represented by Da's pear images); as the deconstructive realization of the lack of inherent existence of subject and object via Madhyamika analysis (where no abiding, self-existing selves or objects can be 'found'); and perhaps in other ways as well.

Would you agree that these are some of the definitions being used?  Are there others?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David: “If genuine nondual “experience” is possible, then everything in the multiverse must have that no-thing space in common. If that no-thing space didn't pervade something out there already (including rocks and trees and planets) then there would be no such thing as a genuine nondual experience. And if that no-thing space does pervade everyhing in the multiverse it is not dependent on an evolved structure.”
 
As you've been saying, it is indeed impossible to talk about non-duality. But I think one can point to it in more or less accurate ways. And it seems like this description is coming from thing-hood thinking, and I'll qualify why. It is because you have something, X (in space-time) that pervades something else, Y (in space-time).

Don't you think that a more accurate dualistic description of what non-duality is would be to simply argue against the space-time existence of rocks and trees and planets altogether, instead of asserting a kind of “non-dual/emptiness substance” which is actively pervading all these objects, and therefore making them somehow non-dual? So, not like this:

Rock + Emptiness-Substance = Non-duality. But instead something more like this:

Non-duality = Rock.

If we do this, we avoid many uncomfortable consequences. With the first “equation” it seems like you think that we through meditation can “tap into” this emptiness substance/no-thing space, which will then “infuse us” into the multiverse because of it's pervading power. This thinking contains two flaws, obstructing omniscience. The first is that there is still a separate individual, the second is that the space-time - the relative - dimension remains.

If we on the other hand simply negate the self-established existence of self (I, me, mine) and other (rocks, planets, body and mind and consciousness), putting nothing positive in the place of what is negated, we then instantly dissolve both the separate self as well as space-time, which obviously are the major obstructions to omniscience.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Tom: Thus the “no interpretive function” of which Almaas speaks, forme, arises only when a certain level of development is reached suchthat absent that developmental level, the function doesn't arise.

There's something I could have been clearer about yesterday. I think we could say that this is right in terms of structural development, that we can develop a vertical contemplative view, with construct awareness, ego awareness, a contemplative view that is not in itself an interpretation but rather a contemplation, and I think we could speak of a nonduality that doesn't have anything to do with structure—this is the claim of wisdom traditions—until such a thing has been proven not to exist/not exist.

Are we as individuals structures, or are we something beyond that? I think we could look at in terms of Who Am/Aren't I? It might be more to the point than fussing over states and structures. At least it's another angle to consider. It gets us back into transmigration issues, but I actually believe that the longer one sits in meditation the less likely one will think that it will be lights out at the time of bodily death.



Is: Don't you think that a more accurate dualistic description of whatnon-duality is would be to simply argue against the space-timeexistence of rocks and trees and planets altogether, insteadof asserting a kind of “non-dual/emptiness substance” which isactively pervading all these objects, and therefore making themsomehow non-dual?

I've been kind of playing it as if hitting it from different conceptual angles will leave us with the most accurate description, kind of like Almaas' inexhaustibility idea.

I think the empty-of-inherent-existence angle is very good, and I have been giving that as well, but it does seem to create a duality in which the manifest realm doesn't exist. It might actually be a more accurate description of causal emptiness than nondual spirit. It's neither sat nor asat, so maybe descriptions from both side of the street will leave us with the most accurate conceptual view.

This is kind of what the tetralemma does for us, isn' it?
Everything is real and is not real,
Both real and not real,
Neither real nor not real.
This is Lord Buddha’s teaching. 18:8

Is: It seems like you think that we through meditation can “tapinto” this emptiness substance/no-thing space, which will then “infuseus” into the multiverse because of it's pervading power.

I never spoke of infusing oneself with nonduality. I have said that the self is nonduality, that it is always already the case, in line with the nondual schools.

Ramana Maharshi, by the way, didn't think it was ultimately possible to move into nonduality by one's own force. He said something like, “Eventually the Self has to push through.” This is consistent with what Wilber said that the causal witness is as far as a person can get by their own power. Wilber has said that the nondual schools attemtp to do “the impossible,” see things nondually.


Is: Omniscience

Why are you calling it “omniscience”? That sounds like mythological ideas about enlightenment, that the master knows everything. I know it's a fairly common idea in Tibet.


Is: If we on the other hand simply negate the self-established existence of self (I, me, mine) and other(rocks, planets, body and mind and consciousness), putting nothingpositive in the place of what is negated, we then instantly dissolveboth the separate self as well as space-time.

I think this is a fine way to view it, at least if it's taken in a meditative/self-inquiry sort of way. But, even if we agree that it makes more sense logically, is it necessarily more effective than paths that “reify” nonduality from a Prasangika perspective?

I think we also need to consider structures and ask whether the no-self doctrine is really going to help higher structural development or whether it could actually inhibit structural development. Can it accommodate the second face of God, for example, the energetic aspect of emptiness?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David: I think the empty-of-inherent-existence angle is very good, and I havebeen giving that as well, but it does seem to create a duality in whichthe manifest realm doesn't exist.

What I meant here is that we might include definitions or descriptions that include the relative existence of the manifest realm, things like: emptiness = form, and form = emptiness, or emptiness = evolving form and evolving form = emptiness.

But I meant that theoretically. What is useful dharma is another question. Doesn't the Prasangika approach basically amount to neti neti, not this not that?

I'm not saying that neti neti is wrong at all and that nondual-sounding practices are inherently better; I'm just pointing out that that's what it seems to amount to.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

“But it doesn't necessarily follow that the state itself (where there is no self-aware self) was built on top of those structures. It could simply be that it requires a structure for a human being to access it consciously.”

David:  It's not a straightforward representationist argument because it's understood, in this discussion, that it comes with a kosmic address.

Doesn't the argument above describe a 'state in itself' (nondual) independent of all structures?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

I don't think so because that state is also defined as being the suchness of each structure.

Also, I was responding to a claim that nonduality was built upon other structures as sort of a higher structure itself, and I used “state” to differentiate the phenomenon (which is also the suchness of this 3p view) from evolutionary structures.

We might take “nonduality” off the Wilber-Combs Lattice altogether and just say it is the paper or pixels the lattice appears on, but that wouldn't illustrate the point that nonduality is also the deepest meditative state.

What are you proposing now? What is your current alternative?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David, apart from any question of the structure, if any, of nondual, when a person—by definition a being of XYZ structure—enters or experiences the nondual state, is that person's structure operating during the state encounter or experience?  Or is that structure suspended or otherwise disappeared?

If the structure is operating, does this operation in any manner transmit, facilitate, carry or translate the state encounter or experience to or within the person?  That is, does a nondual encounter or experience in any manner involve activation of that structure?

You can perhaps see the problem these questions pose for positing anything experience-like beyond structure.  How can a human being—again by definition a being of XYZ structure—encounter or experience something not activating that human's encounter-structure or experience-structure?  It seems to me we must posit that that structure, call it what you will, is necessarily activated for the encounter or experience to occur in reference to that being—the encounter is decidedly not happening everywhere because little I go into nondual.  The encounter otherwise would not register, could not be remembered, would not operate in any future sense post-encounter.  If the structure is suspended during encounter—and suspended, presumably, because limited-structure cannot relate to something beyond it, like a tree cannot relate to my talking to it—how is the encounter later remembered?

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Good questions, Tom. Looking forward to your discussion.

“Why are you calling it “omniscience”? That sounds like mythological ideas about enlightenment, that the master knows everything.”
 
I define omniscience as: when it is known that there is nothing that can be known - because that would imply entities capable of establishing themselves as essentially possessing certain knowable properties - then all-knowledge is acheived. For example, say you believe that omniscience implies 100% conceptual knowledge about everything, like how many grains of sand there are on Mars in total at this moment. Then an omniscienct one will simply refute the self-established existence of grains of sand as only a fiction in your mind, having no independent existence. Therefore, knowledge about the amount of grains of sand on Mars is in Reality irrelevant.

“the energetic aspect of emptiness?”
 
I will now say something that Holden told me some time ago: don't call it the energetic aspect of emptiness, because you're hijacking a word that has nothing to do with the conceptualizations of evolution. Use instead the energetic aspect of Eros, or God, or Spirit-in-Action, or whatever. Just don't use the word emptiness, because it has a very specific and precise meaning. It would be like saying “My mother loves me because of quantum entanglement.” You take two separate concepts - human emotion and quantum entanglement - and try to combine them in a way that does harm to both.

“but it does seem to create a duality in which the manifest realm doesn't exist.”

It may seem that way to you, but it really does not. All I'm saying is that no things exist. Independent nuggets, pixels, pieces, particulars, entities, etc, that somehow then come together to create other things, reducible to the composition of the former things. This is all that is refuted. I don't say that there are no appearances. Ultimately I don't know what constitutes the appearances, however, Tom and I discussed what he called the “ur-stuff” (3-p, L/8), and described it like this:

“The ur-stuff is to me an indivisible, almost transparent, liquid-like fluffstuff that cannot be expressed without a degree of error that increases exponentially with the intended reach of one's expression.”

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Tom, yes, I also think they are good questions.

Tom: Apart from any question of the structure, if any, of nondual, when aperson—by definition a being of XYZ structure—enters or experiences thenondual state, is that person's structure operating during the stateencounter or experience?  Or is that structure suspended or otherwisedisappeared?

I think we have to question the definition first of all, the assumption that “a person [is] … a being of XYZ structure.” The claim of the wisdom traditions is that if we look deeply enough into it we find that we are not a being of XYZ structure, or we are and we aren't. In action, we certainly are, everyone, including “nondual realizers.” But not necessarily if we meditate/inquire/analyze/simply relax etc. into the deepest part of our selves/no selves.

If we stripped away all structure, would it be simply lights out, total disappearance, complete death? The claim of wisdom traditions, by and large, is that it wouldn't be simply lights out, that, while each of us has a degree of relative development, we can't be reduced to that.


Tom: That is, does a nondual encounter or experience in any manner involve activation of that structure?

I think there are two kinds, and one most definitely involves a structure (Clear Light, Supermind), and one does not, nondual. The claim is that it is the one perception that isn't a perspective. This, of course, is one of the most difficult questions, one that people have been asking for centuries in one form or another.

There are also causal or “witness” experiences (just in terms of state development now). I think we might say there is some kind of structure there, awareness, going way back, not the colored fulcrums we usually dicsuss. But even this is beyond/prior to those colored fulcrums. We could say just a bare awareness or being. This can also be integrated as a stage development where the person has contruct awareness, ego awareness, etc.

Tom: If the structure is suspended during encounter—and suspended,presumably, because limited-structure cannot relate to something beyondit, like a tree cannot relate to my talking to it—how is the encounterlater remembered?

Yes, this is what I used to bring up in the no-self vs. self discussions. I'm not defining the self as limited to a structure, first of all. Almaas also says that all interpretations of the experience are entirely expost facto.

Have you read Wilber's description of his seizures, when he remained aware for three days while unconscious? He didn't talk about deep sleep in this blog that I can recall, but I think it illustrates the phenomenon we are talking about in other ways. He talks about it also in One Taste: November 30 and March 23-24.


Is: I define omniscience as: when it is known that there is nothing that can be known - because that would imply entities capable of establishing themselves as essentially possessing certain knowable properties - then all-knowledge is acheived. … Therefore, knowledge about the amount of grains of sand on Mars is in Reality irrelevant.

Okay, but this seems to overvalue absolute knowledge, knowledge of the absolute truth, and devalue relative knowledge. Absolute knowledge could be helpful for alleviating one person's suffering and also that of others if the person is able to transmit it. It can also be helpful for a person's work, inspiring creativity and such, but, as I'm sure you'll agree, it is often useless, right? I mean, knowing that your friend/child doesn't inherently exist won't help set his or her broken arm, and knowledge about setting a broken arm would be more relevant in that situation than the absolute truth, right?



David: “the energetic aspect of emptiness?”
 
Is: I will now say something that Holden told me some time ago: don't call it the energetic aspect of emptiness, because you're hijacking a word that has nothing to do with the conceptualizations of evolution.

Sorry, but I think this represents a new way of looking at things. This is something that needs to be dealt with, integrated. It is not something Nagarjuna and the Buddha understood.

When the most recent guru-and-pandit discussion comes online I will be able to show you Wilber's remarks about that. I have also copied this out before:

Re: Evolution and Enactment

David: “Sorry, but I think this represents a new way of looking at things. This is something that needs to be dealt with, integrated. It is not something Nagarjuna and the Buddha understood.”

You will create only confusion, and distort centuries and centuries of scholarly work.

Emptiness = the absence of inherent existence (a non-affirming negative), and nothing else.

If we want to talk about the overflowing, the dancing, the singing, the bubbling, the flowing, etc, we need to invent or use another words. Spirit-in-Action, Eros, Lila, Self-organizing principle? Then I think we also need to distinguish between “meaningless” self-organization and “consciousness-centric” self organization. The latter being the “guided”- or “Omega-point”-type most religious people cling to. The first being non-guided, atleast not guided with conscious beings “in mind”.

David: “I mean, knowing that your friend/child doesn't inherently exist won't help set his or her broken arm, and knowledge about setting a broken arm would be more relevant in that situation than the absolute truth, right?”

Well, of course. Compassion is feeling with the suffering of others, even though one knows the suffering is based on ignorance and is ultimately unreal. But for the person dreaming, it feels 100% real, and that's what matters. Also, relative knowledge is paramount, especially since in the dream of separation I'd very much enjoy becoming a post-human in the future! Without relative (scientific) knowledge, this will never happen.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Is: You will create only confusion, and distort centuries and centuries of scholarly work.

Emptiness = the absence of inherent existence (a non-affirming negative), and nothing else.

I have two kind of contradictory responses.

The first is, okay, sure, that's what emptiness means, as long as don't claim that it is the exclusive definition for nonduality, if we mean it in the spirit of Almaas' idea of inexhaustability.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Right, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing – but it can lead to confusion, if people are using different definitions and therefore talking past each other.  Which is something that has been happening on this thread, and in several related ones. 

About adding the union of emptiness and evolving form, I think I already included that above, when I mentioned the union of the empty non-state and the world of form.  However, there are a couple meanings of emptiness being used too, so when we talk about the 'union' of emptiness and evolving form, people might be thinking of the union between, say, the Yogacara-like 'natural state' and all forms, or between the Madhyamika “lack of inherent existence” and the evolutionary unfolding of forms.  In the latter case, though, it's not really a 'union' between two different things; emptiness, here, is the ultimate condition of evolutionarily arising objects.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

If we were to make a hierarchy of definitions I wouldn't have a problem with “not characterizable at all” as the highest.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Bruce: Emptiness, here, is the ultimate condition of evolutionarily arising objects.

This kind of sounds good, but when you use the word “ultimate,” emptiness sounds like the Omega point: the self-organizing principle leads everything back to emptiness and then forever it's emptiness as Almaas describes it, nothing self-aware.

I suppose that is the traditional Buddhist view, isn't it? A full circle, emptiness, evolution, back to emptiness. It could be true, but we don't really know, do we?

Might “original” be more accurate than “ultimate” here? We at least have some evidence to support that it is “original” (though not conclusive), but what evidence is there that it is the omega point?

It's just that saying it is the ultimate condition leaves a kind of static view of nondual realization. I'm not saying that this is what your preference is or what you were suggesting; you were stating the Madhyamaka position. I'm just commenting on that.

Emptiness might be the original condition; Clear Light might be the ultimate, and they may not be the same thing. You have asked that question before, and I think it's interesting to ponder.


Is: I'd very much enjoy becoming a post-human in the future!

I hope you get your wish, Dawid! But I am wondering: Who is this “I” that would like to be a posthuman?

Also, is it possible that this is a misplaced intuition of the Rainbow Body? And if higher biochemical correlates are necessary for higher-stage realization, how are mechanical bodies going to help with that?

Also, if there is such a thing as a Rainbow Body, wouldn't that be better? It wouldn't rust; you wouldn't have spyware worries, that kind of thing.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

There's one that wasn't explicitly on your list, Bruce, “not one, not two.”

To me it seems like the most to the point (if we are trying to describe “nonduality”), and without the nihilistic or annihilistic connotations of emptiness.

Emptiness doesn't sound like a good word for nonduality to me because it is one half of an opposite.

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Yeah, I should have included that, but really it is subsumed under the Madhyamika definition – that essentially is what “lack of inherent self-existence” points to, not “lack of existence altogether,” but “not one” (monistic) and “not two” (dualistic)*.

This is one reason why I think it's important to be clear in our definitions – because the “not one, not two” formulation is, in fact, an historically emergent understanding (not a posited timeless “natural state”).

You wrote:  This kind of sounds good, but when you use the word “ultimate,” emptiness sounds like the Omega point: the self-organizing principle leads everything back to emptiness and then forever it's emptiness as Almaas describes it, nothing self-aware.

I suppose that is the traditional Buddhist view, isn't it? A full circle, emptiness, evolution, back to emptiness. It could be true, but we don't really know, do we?

You're right that I was just trying to state the Madhyamika position, as I understand it.  But 'ultimate' isn't understood here as an Omega point, but more in the sense of 'always already' – meaning, it's not about moving from an empty void to the manifestation of things and then back to the void again.  Rather, 'empty' here is the mode of existence (or mode of appearance) of all things:  as dependently originated, with no 'bottom' or 'foundational essence' anywhere.  Asserting lack of inherent self-existence is a rather technical claim.  It is not the denial that things exist at all; it is only the denial that anything can be said to exist independently from its own side.

Best wishes,

B.

*  The Buddhist approach also attempts to find a middle way between nihilism and eternalism (not denying existence altogether, but neither positing any eternal 'thing' or 'ground').

Re: Evolution and Enactment

Thank you, Bruce, that's very helpful.

The mode of existence—that's very good!

If that is Wilber's view, he ought to change the Wilber-Combs Lattice to reflect that; I mean he really should.

I have more, but I must catch a train …