Getting to know people?

[Dawid Dahl]

Hello, everyone! Thanks Bruce for inviting me.

 

I'm Dawid, from Sweden, with a passion for abstruse truth, pensive art, well-rounded morality, daring transhumanism, and integral cognition.

 

It would be awesome to get to know a few of you people here. (James, e, Bruce and Irmeli I am fortunate enough to know a little already, even back from the ol' Zaads days.) So I thought that perhaps the easiest way of making that happen would be to start with a premeditatedly terse - perhaps annoyingly so? - question! I'd really appreciate any answers, be they elaborate or concise, 0-tier or 4th-tier. So here goes:

 

Does God exist?

 

Kindly,

Dawid

 

:)

[Seth]

I would just use the dictionaries definition to define existence -  The fact or state of existing; being.  So 'being' is fundamental to the fabric of existence.  I also see acceptance as being fundamental to existence as there is absolute acceptance in conjunction with being.  It would also seem practicle to say that connectivity is fundamental to the fabric of life (existence, God) because its characteristics permeate all.

I hope I'm not being aloof by any means.  What I'm saying isn't meant to be profound or anything, it's just my basic view of God.

The name is Seth.  We have vaguely crossed paths before so I took it for granted that you already knew my name.  Of course I only knew you as Is(?) before.  I can see how the 'H' also looks like an 'A'.

Dawid Dahl said:

All right. May I ask how you define "existence"?

 

Also, does your name read "Seth" or "Seta"? :)

 

 

[Dawid Dahl]

Cristophe: "So yes, the Smurfs and God belong to the same category: they are both imaginary, with very real implications for culture, business and education."

 

Home run! Christophe: 1, God: 0.

 

"I feel that I have grown a lot in the past year, and learned mucho mucho both personally and job-related. Our clinic works with lots of hugging and body contact, things I would have run away from and considered "mean green" not so long ago lolol. But hey, it's really not so bad to feel close to your colleagues and yes, also to your patients."

 

That sounds like a great place to work, Christophe. Though I'm sure it must also be extremely demanding at times, as you said. I know a guy who work as a paramedic, and another who's employed at a care-center for people with Asperger's; I've witnessed that these lines of work can be, to put it mildly, quite emotionally straining. But I've also noticed that these two tend to be one of the most composed, harmonious people I know, too.

 

Personally I work in the family's clothes business. Tommorrow I will demand more hugging, clearly there's not enough going on!

 

"The Smurfs are an artistic product by a belgish comic artist, and have become part of the cultural canon of european comic books. Every child knows them, there are video games, bed-linen, plastic figurines and all kind of stuff. I'd say they belong to the imaginary realm of fantasy, with a cultural echo in the LowerLeftQuadrant."

 

Do you draw lines between different modes of existence, or are you content with simply using the word "existence" for everything with a kosmic address? For example, some people like to differentiate between how a desert mirage exists, and how an oasis capable of providing water and shade exists. Like, the former exists as an illusion, and is therefore ontologically nonexistent, while the latter "really" exists, perhaps because it can sustain the physical body or something.

 

What are your views on this?

 

Seth: "I would just use the dictionaries definition to define existence -  The fact or state of existing; being.  So 'being' is fundamental to the fabric of existence.  I also see acceptance as being fundamental to existence as there is absolute acceptance in conjunction with being.  It would also seem practicle to say that connectivity is fundamental to the fabric of life (existence, God) because its characteristics permeate all."

 

I think I understand. Let me throw a question your way. Is "existence" and "nonexistence" for you merely convenient designations which humans use to enable conversation, or do these concepts somehow relate to, or represent, ontological reality in any way?

 

For example, if we have a chair in a room and you say that the chair exists, do you think that the chair would continue to exist in the room (by virtue of its own chair-ness) even if all conscious life in the kosmos were to die?

 

"The name is Seth.  We have vaguely crossed paths before so I took it for granted that you already knew my name.  Of course I only knew you as Is(?) before."

 

Ah, yes! It must have been back at Zaads?

 

---

 

(If you guys find the questions irritating, please feel free to ignore them. I don't want to waste your time. :P)

[Seth]

Instead of me answering your questions, David, why don't you tell me what you think you follow, and then we can go from there.

[Dawid Dahl]

Sure, my view - regarding the chair for example - is actually very simple to explain, as I've found that a Tibetan dude called Tsongkhapa described it perfectly, like this:

 

“This combination of the following two [factors] barely occurs - (1) refuting, without residue, the object of negation [inherent existence] through reasoned analysis and (2) the feasibility of positing, as left after the negation, without loosing anything, all the functionalities of dependently arisen causes and effects as like illusions. Therefore, it is very difficult to gain the view of the Middle Way."

 

That said, I think my broader view is like a fusion of Zen, Madhyamika-Prasangika, Hua Yen, and perhaps Islam. (Hopefully viewed through an integral lens.)

 

[Seth]

Well your beliefs seem perfectly suited to you, Dawid.

Have a Happy New Year, Everyone!

[Dawid Dahl]

"Well your beliefs seem perfectly suited to you, Dawid."

 

That's a conversation-stopper fer shure! :P Ah, well.

 

Happy new year, people!

[Balder]

Thanks for the good wishes, Seth and Dawid.  Happy New Year to you (and everyone here) as well!

[e]

 

"God is invented by man. I am sure that you won’t like this. But you are attached to that concept: God exists."

 

http://www.jiddukrishnamurti.org/god.htm

 

 

[Dawid Dahl]

Hey, e!

 

At our zendo, we bow to Buddha as we end our practice. Even though Buddha is not a separate, independent entity, we still bow.

 

In other words, as part of a practice in which we stop imagining ourselves to be at the center of the Kosmos, do you think 2-person style language can have value? That is, not as a reified, ontological assertion, but as a useful practice.

[e]

It depends...there is this idea in Spiral Dynamics of being open/arrested/closed to life’s environmental change conditions in order to mundanely develop. In regards to the supramundane Buddha's first inclination was to not teach, he felt the truth he found was too sublime and no one would understand him. Krishnamurti is reported to have spoken over 1 million words in order to set man free and at the end of his life after 50 or so years of speaking to people in the East and West he said no one understood. Did you read all the K quotes? If you groked what he was saying would you quote Meister Eckhart much? :-)

 

"Out of confusion, you invent something permanent - the Absolute, the Brahman or God."

 

[Dawid Dahl]

This deviates from my last question, but what do you think about this Integral Spirituality quote (from this page):

 

“This is not to say that spiritual philosophy can do completely without any a priori forms (no philosophy can); but the fewer, the better. And the a priori forms that are postulated had better be defensible with at least some reference to modern and postmodern forms of justification (and validity claims).”

 

Do you simply disagree with Wilber on that point?

[e]

what is a validity claim?
believing what oneself (and others) sees = seeing what oneself (and others) believes

There are different types of philosophy. The ones that resonate with my deepest non-knowing are non-substantialist, non-absolutist, non-essentialist, non-metaphysical, etc.. Wilber takes the most substantialist, absolutist and essentialist philosophies and religions (from Advaita to Zen) and cobbles them together. They seemingly fit together because they all assert an absolutist ontology, that is what connects their substantialist dots.

I don't postulate anything a priori as I have never found a way to get prior to this moment but in imagination. This* is it.

"Out of confusion [This* is not enough], you invent something permanent [a priori forms] - the Absolute, the Brahman or God."


* The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.  Rene Magritte