and to human transformation supported by various practices and experiences.
— Wiki

I appreciate your take on these issues, however what I am concerned about within mysticism is described in this phrase in your Wiki quote. All the other phrases there are more platitudinous in nature.

You say yourself that you have little experience of mysticism, so you might learn something new.

Any effort to translate from the sphere of institutionalized practices (e.g. Buddhist meditation) to uniquely personal experience (which mysticism is by definition - e.g. samadhi) is going to be prone to the subjective-terminological quagmire problem. Do we de-mysticize mysticism in order to discuss it?

No, although I don't want to diminish the quagmire you describe, I agree with that, but what I think we can do is describe it, what is involved and what the outcomes are, or might be.

Thanks for the thread anyway, it might prove interesting, although I expect there will be numerous folk who will not find anything, stimulating, shall I say.

Yes I agree about the stage of watching and learning, especially where there is someone on the path to observe. A study of human behaviour, nature and of their place in this world. Along with an inquiring, questioning and free mind. This would include a similar study of the personal self and an appreciation of ones position in humanity and the world. I think in a sense of seeking an individual, personally shaped interpretation, knowing of these things. Also this is often accompanied by an enquiry into religion, or God in some way.

I think there are people who for whatever reason find themselves in this position and who naturally follow this path, rather like the shaman.

There are others I think who are more driven as well and seek out with a passion experiences and answers to these issues. Personally I was more driven in this way, driven also to explore philosophies and religious and mystic teachings, theories, practices and experiences.

The issue I think here is not so much a discussion of what happens up to this point in a person's development, but rather what happens next. If it can be described, or discussed in an analytical, or impartial way within a philosophical setting.

This I think is where the big stumbling blocks rapidly emerge, of the language, do you use language from one tradition, or another, can you agree on the terminology, can you forge a path, so to speak through this minefield. Also rendering personal experience into language which can be effectively communicated. Even trust, "beware false prophets" etc.

Also there is secularisation within mysticism, which I am about to get embroiled in I expect with a couple of other posters.

Nice article and so the solution is a great big up yours. Nice.

No one ever said it was going to be easy to unify Europe, so they can work together. No one said it would be easy to leave the EU did they. Oh wait a minute, the Brexiters did, we would have the exact same benefits, we would have the sunlit uplands of free trade with the world, we would have our cake and eat it etc etc.

We would train our own to do the jobs of the EU workers after they have left, dream on.

I know we can get all those workers who are going to lose their jobs juring the lockdown to pick cabbages and cauliflowers 12 hours a day, or wipe arses. Good honest graft. Just what this country needs.

Perhaps the way to approach the issue is to talk about talking about mysticism, rather than talking about mysticism.

One way of engaging the issues is through mutual understanding and experience of an established mystical tradition, such as can be found in Hinduism for example. But this is fraught with difficulty too, because the analysis, or academic understanding, or interpretation of the tradition in question easily becomes confusing, opaque even secular. This combined with the degree of, or personal interpretation of the tradition, or lack thereof, by the person engaging in conversation. Also mystical understanding is intensely personal and is often gained through personal experience. Such an experience may be either unintelligible to the person, or uintelligable to another. Or how do you find the words, or do the words mean the same thing to another.

In my experience the best mutual understanding I have achieved with another is through spending time together, spending time with people in an ashram and having a teacher disciple relationship with another. I have had interesting experiences with gurus, but again there are problems sharing understanding with gurus. I found this was overcome by repeated worship in the presence of a guru in puja.

This investigation viewed in hindsight was just one of a number of formative experiences and explorations in my path towards a mystical understanding. Part of the reason for coming to sites like this was for me to try to integrate some of this with the philosophical tradition, but this has not been easy, not withstanding my belief that they are not incompatible. I find the philosophy quite rigid.

Any thoughts?

My reply was not about my position, but a notional person who had an unearned income.

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

So I found this place. And I guess it's better than other places where nobody wanted to talk philosophy at all. But I still get the impression that most people here aren't interested in the same kind of big-picture philosophy-as-a-whole thing that my interest is all about. Maybe I'm wrong about that.

But I'm still curious. Why are you here?

I am here for a bit of intellectual stimulation where there is a high standard of thought. To achieve this in the area where I live would not be easy and would mean seeking out the right kind of people and travel and therefore logistics and time, would be required.

Rather like you say, my particular area of interest does not fall into a philosophical category, as academic philosophy describes them. I refer to mysticism, whenever I bring up the subject I either get a blank, I am put into some sort of weirdo category, or if someone does engage they tend to give up, or lose interest, once I say something like, you have to look beyond your intellect. It just doesn't seem to compute. There are one or two folk on here who do understand to a degree what I am thinking, but even then it is virtually impossible to engage. This is probably why I find myself in the politics section at the moment, because it is possible to engage.

Yes, and that's why in the UK, a lot of people think the poor are undeserving, idle and should be dispised. While we, the well off, are derserving, indeed entitled to feel superior, to have our wealth because we happened to be in a position to buy property (for example) in an area where house prices became vastly inflated and sold up and bought a number of buy to rent properties in less well off areas and charge extortionate rents from our poor tenants. We worked hard for our privelidge and sense of superiority.

Have you seen the movie Wall-e. It's a kind of satire of a future where robots do most things.

I can't remember where I saw it, but I watched an article on how some Norwegian people became depressed, or were loosing motivation because a lot of their needs were provided for. Sorry I can't be more specific.

I can't pretend to know about finance, I don't. But it seems to me that you can bend the rules provided everyone agrees to it. Getting everyone, whoever that is, to agree might not be possible, but there might be a role for the IMF.

That's quite a reefer he's smoking.

A wise man in Australia is called a Nostradamus, In Aussie it translates as knows his Shielas

Nostra = nose
damus = shielas

P.s. Love Courtney Barnett

If all the countries stand in line with their debt written down and all agree to cross off an agreed number of noughts, what's so wrong with that. It's not as though we're going to start doing it all the time?

One should look out for those hands that wave, or for sleight of hand.

Weasel words.

Punshhhand

Are you talking to the hand? I didn't think I'd tried that approach yet :lol:

Oh no it's the other side who do it, not our side, what we say is ok.

How about a debt jubilee?

That would be my choice. Why should all nations suffer in debt together, just let each other off the hook.

Something I really don't understand is why you people on the right think the EU is a leftist project

If you're on the right it's a very steep slope until your head is in the clouds like Rees Mogg. If you're on that slope anything left of Johnson or Cameron is socialism.

I agree with your comments on small business support. The Tory's have often said that themselves, and they have tried but failed to deliver. Your prejudice comes out here,

On the other hand I'd gradually raise the minimum wage and encourage those that choose not to work to get off their asses by making them do something for their welfare.

You can't come on a site with intelligent people and come out with that kind of nonsense. There may be a handful of people who choose not to work, but they are a tiny minority. What sort of encouragement do you suggest to get them off their arses?

It may mean that we have a bit less, but that would probably do us good

You do realise, I suppose that it will only be the ordinary folk who would have a bit less. You really should have a look at how the other side lives. If you live near Chester, you should be aware of the affluence around there. In the affluent areas in the south they live it up like the French aristocracy or hadn't you noticed?

Are you aware of the extent of the housing crisis? And how it stifles growth, creates social division and widens the wealth gap. Not to mention the rental nightmare a lot of young people have to endure. I suspect Blojo doesn't notice such issues, his sort just pocket the increases in equity to fund those lifestyles I mentioned.

The cult of the individual is not going well either.

Oh and sorry to be a bore, but what does any of this have to do with leaving the EU? Most of what you are proposing has already been adopted and is working very nicely in European countries. It's just this country who can't seem to get it right.

Also there are fundamental systemic problems underlying and causing a lot of these problems which I and fdrake mentioned in our replies to Frank. I won't repeat them here.

'I'm a one-nation Tory. There is a duty on the part of the rich to the poor and to the needy, but you are not going to help people express that duty and satisfy it if you punish them fiscally so viciously that they leave this city and this country. I want London to be a competitive, dynamic place to come to work."

He was the Mayor of London at the time. Is this just rhetoric meant to hide a desire to abandon social programs? Or is the need to compete real?

Yes as fdrake says they have to minimise the spending on social welfare etc, so they can capitalise everything and compete on the global free market stage. But it's a myth, they can't compete with the Philippines, South Koreans, or Chinese etc etc, because they are basically built on bonded labour with no workers rights, or safety and will always undercut us. The model is broken, hence all this nationalism and protectionism.

Johnson says whatever the audience wants to hear, or what his strategists say fits in with their agenda. You can't take a single word that comes out of his mouth seriously, like Trump.

He has shown a little genuine sentiment after staring Covid19 in the face, but it won't last.

Ok, I can go with the idea that the EU is in a sense a socialist project. Which justifies why you would want to leave the EU. So what is the alternative, something to the right of the moderate Conservatives?

I don't think this was a strictly Tory thing, my impression at the time was that faith in politicians and politics itself was being eroded. Labour was losing its heartlands too;

Yes, there is a big issue with Labour losing its heartlands, but not due to the financial crisis specifically. What I was focusing in on was is the way in which the Conservative party has had one of its legs knocked out from under it. By the chaos and capitalist failure of the financial crisis and the measures they then had to implement to balance the books. This was not supposed to happen. The problems of debt amongst the young had already started before the crash, but were compounded by it. This has resulted in many young people in Tory heartlands relying on handouts from their parents to buy their houses, bail them out from their student debt, while they are not getting those well paid jobs they were expecting, well enough that is to maintain a nice house and family with a couple of labradors in the Tory heartlands. Not nearly enough, and this is the touchstone of a healthy Tory ideal.

The Conservative party is limping along and having to present a brave face to hold on to its credibility.

I can't remember if it was in this video or another, but he talks about how the UK basically had almost of the good bits of the EU (open borders, trade standards, etc) without the bad (the monetary union).

Yes we had the best of both worlds. But there were still problems, they were internal to the UK though, not due to our membership of the EU. Our failing politicians had repeatedly blamed their failure to act on the EU. The public was happy to lap up this blame game too, following rows with the EU over the cod wars and repeated impatience with dictates like we all have to weigh produce in Kilogrammes now and ditch pounds and ounces for example.

But the real problem behind all of this was not Europe, it was the combination of the effects of globalisation, wealth being taken offshore and massive tax avoidance practices like the double Irish and the effects of financialisation etc.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dutch-sandwich.asp.

I have a slightly different take to fdrake on what the Conservative party is up to. It is only a minority of the party who are true Brexiters. But from 2015 when they won the election with a majority they have taken advantage of the Anti EU sentiment whipped up by the populists, as a mechanism to save the party from electoral oblivion, by piggybacking on the back of the anti EU sentiment in the EU referendum in 2016. Once the referendum delivered a majority for leave the Brexiters in the party went into overdrive and there was no stopping them, because the the more disruption, the bigger the row, the louder they shouted, the more oxygen of publicity they got. This also included the way they described the EU and treated the EU representatives. The more they insulted the EU there more the EU wanted to get rid of them (this is evidenced by how difficult it was for Theresa May to stand up to them in her own party because they were literally rabid. In the end she tried to work with the opposition to reach a majority for the withdrawal bill because that was easier).

This is also the time when the vicious attacks against Corbyn started, the more they could discredit him the better because if he could not beat them in an election they're rabid hard Brexit was assured and the Tory party would be triumphant, having neutralised the Brexit party which was tearing their party apart, which would have let Labour in.( no one in the party or the Brexit party could countenance Labour getting into power, so they would unite)

My reason for why the party was set for electoral oblivion was that following the financial crash of 2008, the Conservative party has gradually begun to nose dive, as the dream of financial and capitalist success which they stand for had failed and they were having to impose stringent austerity on the population. Eventually the population would turn away from this and go with Labour who would turn on the money taps again. This trend can be seen in the demographic, the young who now distrust their capitalist dream and who are saddled with debt and can't buy a house, are overwhelmingly supporting Labour. Whereas the older wealthier voter who owns property has a good pension etc overwhelmingly supports Conservative. Unfortunately the latter don't have time on their hands and the former can see the shambles in front of their eyes.

This rabid hard Brexit kamicaze trajectory we are now on is their last gasp, their last throw of the dice to restore their party relying on a restoration of free market capitalism modelled on the US and propped up directly by the US. Literally a Singapore on Thames.

It's doomed to failure though, especially thanks to Corona.

Financialization (or Financialisation in British English) is a term sometimes used to describe the development of financial capitalism during the period from 1980 to present, in which debt-to-equity ratios increased and financial services accounted for an increasing share of national income relative to other sectors.

Financialization describes an economic process by which exchange is facilitated through the intermediation of financial instruments. Financialization may permit real goods, services, and risks to be readily exchangeable for currency, and thus make it easier for people to rationalize their assets and income flows.

And quoted in the same article,

"only debts grew exponentially, year after year, and they do so inexorably, even when—indeed, especially when—the economy slows down and its companies and people fall below break-even levels. As their debts grow, they siphon off the economic surplus for debt service (...) The problem is that the financial sector's receipts are not turned into fixed capital formation to increase output. They build up increasingly on the opposite side of the balance sheet, as new loans, that is, debts and new claims on society’s output and income.

[Companies] are not able to invest in new physical capital equipment or buildings because they are obliged to use their operating revenue to pay their bankers and bondholders, as well as junk-bond holders. This is what I mean when I say that the economy is becoming financialized. Its aim is not to provide tangible capital formation or rising living standards, but to generate interest, financial fees for underwriting mergers and acquisitions, and capital gains that accrue mainly to insiders, headed by upper management and large financial institutions. The upshot is that the traditional business cycle has been overshadowed by a secular increase in debt. Instead of labor earning more, hourly earnings have declined in real terms. There has been a drop in net disposable income after paying taxes and withholding "forced saving" for social Security and medical insurance, pension-fund contributions and–most serious of all–debt service on credit cards, bank loans, mortgage loans, student loans, auto loans, home insurance premiums, life insurance, private medical insurance and other FIRE-sector charges. ... This diverts spending away from goods and services.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

It is a house of cards and when the house falls ordinary workers and tax payers have to pick up the tab, as in 2008.

We can make this a pissing competition over who's had the harder life but I don't see the point.

You brought it up, by labelling us as middle class academic elites. Suggesting that salt of the earth working class know better.

Really come on, your are squirming on the floor.

Give us some tangible benefits for the UK to leave the EU.

I agree with fdrake on this. The degree of coup depends on how far one delves into possible conspiracies about the divisive nature of parts of the Conservative party. I wrote about this last year (in this thread).
Let me give an example, I don't subscribe to this as a conscious conspiracy, but there are many who do, but rather a general drift towards a free market economy. The kind of Conservatism we have been subjected to in recent years (actually going back 40 years) has been making government, the civil service etc smaller, a small state, creeping privatisation has been eating into public services along with the state funded parts being repeatedly cut and hollowed out. The house price boom and crisis stemmed from this due to no building of council housing, state housing. As the public services become strained an opportunity presents itself for xenophobic groups to blame it on an increase in immigration putting a strain on the services. This switches the blame from the government who starved the organisation of funds, causing the strain and places it on those people over there, those immigrants. The de-regulation of business, erosion of Union power etc leads to workers being exploited more and more, again this is blamed on the immigrants in the same way. So the harder the government starves the economy, the more blame can be lumped on the immigrants and the less blame is attributed to the government. Alongside this is a growth in US style profiteering, profit based privatisations and large amounts of wealth draining out of the country to offshore accounts, or into the estates of wealthy Tory backers who are expert at tax avoidance etc. And if you can start blaming all this on the EU as well, then the more the merrier.

The problem, which is why I suggest politics will drift to the left is Coronavirus, it has shone a light on all this hollowing out destruction of institutions hard won.

One can also factor globalisation into this.

We've asked Chester what tangible benefits there are to leaving the EU, what we have to look forward to and he has drawn a blank. He can only tell us about the things he hates. The Murdock press has done its job.

Psst, there's a liberal left conspiracy to pack you all in like sardines before the sea levels rise above your dikes. So you must leave the EU.

That made me laugh because Punshhh knows bugger all about my background.

Prove your background is more working class than mine? Or anyone's for that matter?

It will drift to the left, the "loads of money" days of the Tory's are over. The public has seen through their wheeze about keeping the population down as wage/consumer slaves while they live it up in their privelidge.

What I found laughable was that down to earth working class folk, grafters, thought Johnson was one of them. How did he pull that off? I think back to William the Conquerer pulling off the same trick a thousand years ago, we fell for it then and we fell for it now.

I didn't accuse you of anything, I simply pointed out that the failings of the EU you mention are mythical. You can google each of them and find out yourself if they are genuine issues effecting Britain as a result of being a member of the EU. There are some genuine issues, but they are rarely cited by EU skeptics, for example systemic problems with the common agricultural policy. They usually cite things like immigration and EU corruption, or something to do with fishing. Issues which have been selected by the anti EU propagandists as emotive issues which will spread well and are easily believed and gossiped about by the population.

If the "liberal left" are dying as a political force, then what's the problem? They will soon loose their power and influence and not be a problem anymore. Oh wait a minute, they have no power and have little influence. Again you are trying to dump problems and issues wrong in the country on a powerless group, to distract any focus on the political grouping which has been in power and presided over all this hollowing out of society, running down of services, the failures in the housing crisis, the rise of populism and this divisive Brexit nightmare.

It's not their fault (the liberal left), it's all the fault of the Tory's. Got it?

Interestingly you claim to know that I am some kind of privelidged academic middle class person who doesn't know how the other half lives. You couldn't be further from the truth. I guarantee that my background is more working class than yours. I am a tradesman with no academic training and I come from four generations of Irish navies who lived in the slums of Huddersfield.

"the're ain't nobody here but us chickens, there ain't nobody here at all"

The mass slaughter of chickens is normal, I recently tried to rescue a few chickens, as the egg producing industry replaces them when they are a year old, because they are less efficient as egg layers. There are organisations who try to save them and hand them out to people who keep a few chickens. I have three which provide 3 large eggs every day all year round and they are good company too. Unfortunately Tesco had decided to withdraw the order from an egg producer, meaning they had to kill 1,800 and there was a failure to organise their rescue in time.

If we're talking predictions, I predict the UK death toll to top 60,000 by the end of May, or certainly by the end of June.
The graph shown on yesterday's gov' Covid press conference showed that the curve is not falling, but levelling off due to the continued increases in deaths in care homes.

The real toxicity in UK politics is the divisive identity politics of the liberal left, the non-stop shit stirring.

This is a typical populist straw man argument. Oh, look at those looney left over there in the corner, it's all their fault. Not our fault who have been in power for the last 40 years. It glosses over the fact that those looneys in the corner haven't got anywhere near power during the period in question.

Have you seen Ian Duncan Smith being interviewed recently, it's so toxic that he regularly threatens the interviewer. Also did you watch the power drunk swagger of Geoffrey Cox in parliament following the preroging of parliament verdict. Followed by Johnson's violent rant ripping up any decency left in parliament, insulting the memory of Joe Cox, the MP murdered by a crazed Brexiter, following on from two years of the Tory Brexit psycho drama.

Oh no, it's those looney left over there in the corner, it's all their fault, their doing.

And now this vitriol is going to be turned on the EU commissioners and European leaders by Johnson and his stooges. Haven't we learnt anything from 2000 years of war and pillage and tyranny?

As you're interested in the back story here, I happened to watch an interesting programme lastnight by my favourite TV historian Michael Wood. In which he delved deep into the history of the French invasion of Britain in 1066. It confirmed what I had been thinking for a while now, that Britain was ruled with an iron fist by invaders who divided up the land between them and turned many in the population into tenants on what had hitherto been their own land. This persisted for over two hundred years culminating in a civil war (not the larger civil war of 1648), but widespread revolt against the French rulers, which was eventually quashed with some horrific slaughters and the reimposition of an apartheid, which they had been living with for two hundred years.

Such resentment can remain in the population for many generations and I'm sure is the basis for a lot of the mistrust of certainly the French.

Anyway going back to the story, Michael Wood focused on a small town in central England called Kibworth and its surrounding area, for which there is a complete and unbroken record of every event which happened going back to 1066 in the parish registers and records kept in a purpose built library in Merton College Oxford. It is the oldest continually used library in the world built in the 14th century. There is real life testimony documenting the apartheid system which was introduced in which the Britons where second class citizens and the ruling elite where portrayed as superior overlords. The vestiges of this class division still remain in this country and is partly responsible for the deep class divisions and wealth inequality of the UK today. This is the backdrop to this existential issue in the psyche of the British people.

I had thought that in the modern world intelligent grown up people were able to put such historic divisions behind them and begin to work towards a common good, in peace and prosperity and certainly the EU project is a serious and concerted effort to achieve such progress. People who are critical of it should remember the reasons for which it was established, to end countless centuries of war and division and to move forward in mutual cooperation.

All your criticisms of the EU are myths peddled by anti EU activists, or rumour amongst friends. I know because I briefly became hoodwinked by them in the early 1990's and then when I looked into it, they were never actually correct, or true, or accentuated a small imbalance or problem, so as to sway people to start questioning our membership.

There is a real issue about the number of mainly Polish people who came over from 2004. But the government at the time could have limited the numbers and imposed conditions to control their access to longer term residency and welfare services, as many other EU countries did and still do. It was Tony Blair who allowed "unfettered access" to EU citizens which was the root of the problem. It was never necessary to leave the EU to solve this problem.

I agree with what you refer to about the choice as it was laid out in 1973, that it was just for a single market. Fortunately due to the flexibility of the EU, it has repeatedly agreed to arrangements for the UK to remain outside the closer integrations, between the other members. There hasn't been at any point an insistence that the UK should integrate in these ways. The ways in which greater integration has occurred were always agreed to, even led by the UK government.

The systemic demographic problems which have developed in the UK following 2004 and pressure on housing and public services etc, are due to poor management of taxation, investment and funding by UK governments, the EU was not responsible for these problems.

There are some issues with EU policy particularly the common agricultural policy, which does require overhauling. It's not perfect, but I don't see how the alternative is going to be any better?