The idea was to keep a lid on Iran, it was working. Until Trump came along. The only way to stop them now is to topple Iran, or invade and occupy. This is now existential for Israel and it didn’t need to be. Still it keeps Netanyahu out of jail a bit longer, I suppose. So much winning.

The hawks are spreading the narrative that Iran could have a workable bomb within 4 days. Even the BBC is repeating this now. It reminds me of the 45 minute claim prior to the Iraq war. They’re all ready to step in if Israel suffers any kind of serious hit.

I don’t think Trump is stealing for a fight here, but the hawks around him surely are. They’ll be saying now is the time to take Iran out, they are weak and Hesbollah are on the back foot.
Trump will go along with it and try to use it to his advantage. Plus it gives Netanyahu cover for the genocide in Gaza and keeps him in power. If Isreal is at war with Iran, he can cancel elections.

It’s all about him looking a tough guy on the day of his parade, tomorrow.

You have to do the Trump voice when he’s being really mean when you say the big in italics.

I've always thought so: intentional agents make goals and the only intentional agents known to us are ourselves, mere humans. Am I missing something?

Don’t forget the dolphin’s, etc..

lol, reminds me of an occasion in my teenage years. I could be found squirrelling away in dusty old secondhand book shops. I happened to be in one in a quieter part of Oxford and found a raggedy little book called The Way of Life by Laotsu. I had no idea who he was, or what the book was about. But I liked the circumstances in which it came to me, so I bought it. It made a lot of sense.

We are human, faith is important in how we got to this point and even beyond this point, it is still important because one is still reliant on the natural world provided for us, even if one can see it in a better light.
The way I see it sometimes is that we need faith up until the point we merge with what it is that provided the natural world(sorry for the garbled language, I’m trying not to use words with baggage). Beyond which we offer faith back in the other direction to the brave people following on behind us.
There’s something of a communion about it.

I know it sounds counter intuitive. It was a way of seeing it, that I was describing. The reality would be more nuanced. This is something I have been working on for some time. That nothing in this world changes, but in the new light, it is seen for what it really is. So the person before the realisation is working with the same stuff, is in the same place in the world, and the person after the realisation is still working with the same stuff in the same place in the world. But something very subtle has changed, but from the viewpoint of the new person, a lot has changed. However if that new person where to try to explain what had changed to themselves before the change, it would be impossible, because everything that they described would be things that he already knew intellectually and from being in the world. None of that would have changed, there would be no new knowledge. Just a subtle change, which could be a new light, or a certain orientation. After all isn’t this what realisation means, a light bulb moment.

So belief or faith is required for the aspirant, because in the absence of the insight which is the actual fruition of that discipline, one only has the faith that it is, in fact, a real possibility. In this Buddhist sutta, the disciple Sariputta says that 'Those who have not known, seen, penetrated, realized, or attained it by means of discernment would have to take it on conviction' that nibbana ('gaining a footing in the deathless') is real - whereas those (such as himself) who have 'seen, known, penetrated' etc, would not have to take it on conviction, rather, they would know it directly.

Quite, and a good way of seeing this is that there is no difference between the aspirant before realisation and after realisation.
Or the sum of knowledge before and after the realisation is the same.
There is nothing different between she who knows and she who doesn’t. Because the new knowledge that the knower now knows is the identical knowledge as before. But seen in a different light.

The question is “why”? Why do Americans have to suffer yet again the destruction of their cities, the people in their roadways, the curfews, the violence and looting, the waving of foreign flags on American streets?

We all know why, to stroke Trump’s fragile ego. He want’s his pram to look extra shiny. No worry if some more blood is shed, it’s already in the hundreds of thousands (in proxy wars), beyond a certain point the numbers don’t matter any more.

Yes, that is clearly true. The question is, what more can we usefully say?

There is plenty, but whether it is useful, or not depends to a large part on who we are saying it to and whether they think it is useful.
We can say that it might make someone more constructive and cooperative in their and their family, friends and associates’s lives. It might make the life of the person more peaceful and enjoyable. It could result in the restoration and care of the ecosystem, locally, or globally. It might further their progress towards their liberation from material incarnation. And in the long term, contribute to humanity finding it’s rightful place as the custodian of the ecosystem of the planet and all that would entail.

Sometimes they are conscious and sometimes not. But there doesn't seem to be any agreement how this can be done. (In one way, ordinary language sets our starting-point, but it seems too limited for what we want to do.)

Yes, I know, which is a part of the reason I went elsewhere to do this. There is a language and literature which does this in Eastern philosophy. But translating this into a Western narrative is not easy, Theosophy has tried, but this has not been adopted by Western academics as far as I know.

I would like to treat "ego", "self", "mind" as all equivalent to "person" - unless and until a more detailed and more objective framework can be developed.

Well I can try.

It’s looking like he’s going to invoke the insurrection act on the 14th of June. Protests are organising in all major cities for Trump’s birthday parade. Once that touch paper has been lit there is no way back. The only hope is that enough people in the military refuse to participate.

I have a problem with any theory that divides the person/self into separate elements like this.

Yes, I can see that*. I will continue by addressing the attributes attributed to the ego and the role it plays in a person’s behaviour. Rather than making distinctions in the make up of the self(forgive me if I do so by mistake and please do point it out).
What the Zen master is getting at is that by tethering the ox to the post, one is controlling things like blind passion, envy, greed etc and the psychological tendencies to inflate a sense of self importance, status in social grouping, for example. Or to feel a victim, when you are not, but you are in denial of poor behaviour to someone etc. (this can be a long list, with a lot of detail). These tendencies in human behaviour act as stumbling blocks and hurdles in the practice of stilling the mind and quelling emotions.
What I’m getting at is that a person is able to self reflect and carry out a restructuring of the psychological make up of themselves. Even the emotional make up, although, this is very difficult and usually accommodation is made for this in the practice. Also that in the spiritual scenario, to rebuild the self in the image of, and guidance of a deity. Hence the goal of enlightenment etc.

Yet you seem to be able to tell this story without the help of the analysis, until the very last moment, when you revert to the "ego", and I want to say that it is your ego that took you through the process of training that allows you to grab hold of the ego and tether it (yourself).

I would place this in the context of an internal process within the self, which does not necessarily require a thorough analysis. There are checks and balances and analysis going on, but in a personal form and language. When you say “ego”, presumably you are referring the the thinking person, the mind. The mind and thinking might be able to convey the process, but the practice of the process may include, emotions (the endocrine system) and the body (the animal, the primate, which we are).

I have no idea what a Zen master would say about this story, but I say that the point is that you have not tethered yourself, but set yourself free. Or rather, you were taking the process as a process of tethering, but now you can see it as a process of freeing yourself.

It is a process which includes control, restriction etc, in order to free, through crisis. Or another way to see it, would be a way of getting out of a rut.

* I come to this with a history of seeing the self as made up of different parts. Sometimes 3, sometimes 5, or 7, or 12. So will find it difficult to go into detail without referring to this.

They are not rioters, they are demonstrating in protest to bands of anonymous vigilante groups abducting people without due process, in their communities, directed from the White House. But you know that don’t you.

Yes, I understand that the ego is the ox. But who is it that tames the ox/ego? The story would lose its point if we could imagine the ox willingly submitting to the tamer. You speak of "one" or "me", which seems to be neither ox nor ego.

This can become complicated when we use phrases like ego. Ego can mean different things, not only different aspects of the self, but it could be the whole self, or just something that the self uses, in it’s tool box so to speak. I make the distinction between ego, personality and being(sentient). Although, there could be more than three parts to the person. We are after all talking about a narrative used by people, involved in religious, or spiritual schools with their own terminology and I’m trying not to get into that, if possible.
So I would say, it is the being, working with the personality who wrestles with the ego.

I sometimes think that the journey is something that happens to us adn which we cope with as best we can, rather than being something that we decide to do.

Yes, of course and both happening at the same time, as well. I adhere to the view that it is mainly something that happens to us and that a propensity, or calling, towards such a lifestyle may be a result of that.

The ego has to be tamed like the ox in Zen is tethered to the post.
— Punshhh
Yes, but how do I decide who is the ego and who the ox-tamer?

This is the most crucial crisis in the life of someone who seeks to serve (in these terms), to follow a spiritual life, or to seek the divine. To be able to make right choices. It is necessary because otherwise one will end up navel gazing.

There is a process where one questions oneself, asks for guidance, tries to live by the example of saint’s, or prophets. Fails, has crises of conscience etc etc. For each person it is different. For me it was a combination of a faith in guidance and the realisation of good. The power of good, can when you want to do good, or have goodwill, is like an accumulator. As each act of good, or kindness and its rewards are experienced it colours your way of life etc. Rather like acts of service, or compassion. Eventually a purification takes place. For faith in guidance, one offers freely to be guided, to follow the guidance. Where the guidance isn’t so much in the external world, but internally. In a sense, one is offering up one’s liberty, freedom to follow selfish thoughts and desires. To put other’s needs before oneself, to put the guidance before oneself. A tipping point is reached beyond which there is a strength of feeling and knowledge that one is living a gooder life and yet not feeling the lesser for it, but the more for it. Again a tipping point is reached beyond which one can grab hold of and tether the ego.

From what I’ve seen, the experience is often all about ‘one truth for all' so how could we expect restraint? Intellectual honesty seems to me to be a separate project. Are we really expecting those touched by the divine to say, ‘I encountered a higher power and I know we are all one, but I’ll keep it in perspective because intellectually this is the right thing to do?'

This is one of the crosses to bear, for the believer, or mystic. They have beholden truths which for a number of reasons they cannot impart to their friends, family and associates and yet they must continue life as normal.

But none of this is by definition. The essence of God is not determined such that definitional proofs can simply be brought forth.

If God doesn’t fall within these and the more established definitions of God, then it is not God, it is something else.
If it’s something else, well that’s fine, provided it fulfills the tasks that we ascribe to God. If it’s something else and it doesn’t fulfill its tasks, then it’s not God, or anything to do with God and why would someone refer to it as God?

One has to drop everything, just as empirical science has dropped nearly everything evolving through the centuries, dropped and added through endless paradigms (as Kuhn puts it) that hold sway and then yield

Yes, I have dropped any mention of God, in my own life and in conversation,(except where God is being addressed directly). You brought it up, I was only talking about divinity and aspects of the world that we don’t know about.

I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus,
obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how
I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to
lead to genuine knowing

Yes, although I apply this to ego, rather than lifestyle, living in the modern world with all the stuff we have around us, makes that difficult. To be humble, to always approach situations and people with humility kindness and to be unassuming. It is remarkable how these simple things act as a powerhouse in the mystical life. The ego has to be tamed like the ox in Zen is tethered to the post.

I guess I am asking, what does it mean to guide? Phenomenology is not an invitation to think in the abstract, but to see the world "for the first time". What does this mean? is answered in the process of realization. When one is comfortably encountering the world, one is ensconced in the past as it gives familiarity to the present that makes the anticipation of the future secure. Time separates God from us, you could say.

Yes, well apart from the bit about God. This is the bread and butter of mysticism.

We’re getting somewhere;
Developing and embracing humility.
Developing and embracing an unassuming posture.
Clearing the self of all conditioning.
Realising our limited position in the world and the limits of knowledge.
An ability to put to one side all cultural and social narratives.
Communion with nature, or prayer.

All things which ought to be practiced at length before one takes one step.

The question then is, when it is affirmed that God is something beyond our capacity, from whence comes the ground for this claim?

By definition.

God is something which may have created us and the world, may be with each of us and every animal and plant, every planet. May be performing a task via these things. May have a purpose in mind. All of these actions are beyond our capacity to understand (unaided).

With phenomenology, something rarely even acknowledged is brought out in the same kind of examination, very rigorously, and here is discovered the ground for religion, and God, and divinity, redemption, consummation of "meaning" and importance

The mystic does all this internally, rather than inter subjectively. Infact it may not be possible to cover the same ground inter subjectively. Because doing it internally is a much more integrated process of knowing the self, working with the self, developing personal dialogue, narrative and walking the walk. The fact that in the spiritual schools there is direct interaction and communication between teacher and student at a profound level, would indicate that there is a process of guiding and communion going on, which goes well beyond the intellectual and intellectual analysis.

But this sense of "beyond" is speculative, and while I have no doubt that the more one moves into this strange terrain, the more is disclosed, it is not a move into a confirmation of a speculation. It is an openness that is its own disclosure that leaves speculative anticipation altogether, because it is openness itself. But whatis openness? It is found in mundane affairs in the question itself. So how is it that something as familiar and plain as a question be of the same essence as "spiritual enlightenment"?

Yes I see this explanation and I see how such an openness is a receptiveness to what is there to be disclosed, whatever it is.

Phenomenology discovers the supramundane IN the mundane, and reveals that all along in the daily course of things we stood before a world that had extraordinary dimensions of possible insight.

I see this and am aware of it in my own way.

This issues goes on and on, and there are tensions here as to the nature of this Other vis a vis the conscious act in which it is encountered, and the term 'intuition' comes into play, and this is a controversial matter, but in the end, it really depends on if one is the kind of person who is capable of "pure eidetic" apprehension, and this refers to pure presence, pure givenness of ordinary things. This is where the epoche takes one, to this unconditioned givenness of the world: one does not go anywhere but realizes that what and where one already is is somewhere else entirely.

I think I know what you are saying here and I have worked on this for some time.

the phenomenological method that unpopulates, if you will, the horizon of awareness itself, such that the "seeing" is unburdened by the presumptions familiarity, which is no less than the operations of language itself taken as foundational truth, as if what a scientist, the most analytic expression of plain talk, has to say has authority that cannot be gainsaid. Phenomenology says, not only can it be gainsaid, but it can be utterly undone in the face of phenomenological ontology. The slate can be wiped clean! This is the essence of religion, the wiping clean of all the clutter in simple perceptual awareness such that the world finally shows itself, and God is discovered with the consciuosness that beholds.

Yes, this is also something I work on. But I would say that God is something that is beyond our capacity to either see, or comprehend, while it plays the role of guide, in that we revere it. Commune with it.

out (the world at the most basic level of analysis is both the most idstant in that no one even begins to suspect such a level even exists, yet the most proximal, for the pure phenomenon is the absolute clarity of the pure presence of all things and there is no "distance" at all between consciousness and presence),

Yes, been there many times.

BUT THEN: why not just leave it to the church, a priest or minster and let the Bible (or whatever) do the talking? I think this lead to irrationality and it creates problems out of problems, that is, entirely contrived conceptions about the way the world is, and solutions that are built on this that, as we see in the church today, are bound up with a great deal of bad thinking.

Agreed, but the phenomenological approach is so discreet as to be available to a very few who have the capacity.

Phenomenology IS the mystical path

So here we have the implicit claim.

disciplined and sincere turn toward the phenomenality of the world is a shock to ordinary experience, and one needs to be shocked if one is going to try to understand the world at the basic level. The thing is, faith stops inquiry where inquiry should be just beginning, and one never gets to the real matters at all, but gets comfortable in faith, like Buddhist doing hatha yoga, which is nice, but complacent and spiritually inert.

And here we have an attack on spiritual practice, which you seem to conflating with mysticism. But mysticism as opposed to general spiritual practice in these schools, does begin the enquiry where you say it settles into a complacency. Nothing you have described goes beyond what I consider as the basics tools of mysticism.

Religion always seeks to get beyond itself to affirmation that is evidentially based, but this has been impossible because of the universally held notion that our finitude was prohibitive of exceeding its own delimitations,

This was because the vast majority of followers of those religions didn’t have the capacity, or disposition to practice at the priest level, or above.

the kind of thing you find only with monks, ascetics, those who climb mountains and stay there until they are brought to witness something, driven people who not only seek this novel "ecstasy", but insist on it

Yes and when they have witnessed it, the ecstasy recedes and they return to their day to day way of life. Like I said, an initiation, or right of passage. This ecstatic state can only be maintained for short periods by the human body. The mystical life has a series of these rights and the skilled practitioner is able to cross them without going to those ecstatic extremes.

This ecstatic reorientation is the very essence of the "movement" toward divinity,

We are back to the science of orientation.

as Meister Eckhart says again and again, the more we are here in this world of constructed values (), the farther out we are from divinity. For divinity is absolute Being that is constantly being denied in the participation of this world.

So this is why as I said, the kind of meditative practice you are describing is not advisable in our modern world. It was developed for monastic life in cultures far more simple and down to earth than ours.

I don’t want to argue with you, but you keep making claims which are difficult not to challenge. I have no argument with phenomenology and am not critical of philosophical approaches to these issues. I have a genuine interest.

Going back to what you are describing, I have covered all these things, albeit from a different route. I’ve been there, done it, got the T shirt, so to speak. Over 30yrs ago. If `I were still seeking that ecstasy you describe every day for the last 30years, I expect, I would be a bit frazzled by now.

The function of Modern news networks is to collect information about "dysfunction and suffering: children with cancer, mass starvation, natural disasters, a clusterfuck of disease and disorder" from around the world, and funnel it into your eyes & ears.

Alongside the more sinister role being adopted by our media in recent times. Of spreading populist lies and disinformation. Spreading the propaganda devised by megalomaniac oligarch press barons, to divide and rule, to turn man against man to keep the socialists away. To erode democracy and the rule of law, to oppress the poor reducing their ability to fight back, etc etc.

Indeed. Part of me believes that the animal is in a superior position to the human. They have what they need. They require no gadgets, no psychotherapies, no fictional narratives through which to interpret their existence. They act, they live, and that is enough. In contrast, we are burdened by self-consciousness- forever constructing and deconstructing meaning, seeking justification, and struggling to feel at home in the world and often being dreadful to all an sundry while we go about it.

Yes, very much so. One can see human evolution as a devolution in many ways. All this meditation, prayer, self development that religious, or spiritual people strive to master is merely to regain that purity of animals and plants that we have lost. Even within human experience there is a devolution. I once met an old guy while sitting in a forest, he just walked up to me and asked where I was going. During the conversation he (after having mentioned that he was an architect) said that the highest achievement of humanity was the capital order, the classical Greek architecture which has become the standard for most architecture since. That it has been downhill from there.

We mustn’t dismiss our over active brains though, they have given us the opportunity to develop civilisation, scientific knowledge and technology. And all things being well, we will get over our self destructive nature (eventually) and take our role of custodians of the biosphere of our planet. Demonstrating that intelligent life can coexist and live alongside a rich ecosystem.

Yes, I know what you were getting at with empirical evidence. I reacted because I felt you were cracking a nut with a sledge hammer. There are many things about human life and experience which can’t easily be accounted for in this way.

I do think it is important for philosophers to examine things in this way, even if it is a slow process and may take a long time to come to explain things like religious, or mystical experience. I do think there will one day be a science of these things along the lines of psychology.

The stumbling block I see repeatedly is that we are blind to the reality, rather like I was saying to Astrophel, we are blind to the reality we are attempting to pass judgement on, we don’t have the eyes to see it. All we have is the testimony of people who have had religious, or mystical experiences. Some who may have seen beyond the veil, but who’s testimony we must set aside, until we have some metric with which to measure it.

But the thing is, as soon as the most rudimentary organisms begin to form, something else appears with them: the rudimentary emergence of meaning. How so? Because the very hallmark of an organism is that it maintains itself in distinction from its environment. It enacts a boundary—not merely spatial, but functional and existential. It resists entropy, resists the universal drift toward dissolution, by preserving internal order and homeostasis. In doing so, it expresses negentropy: it is for itself, in a basic but decisive sense. This is the first flicker of seity—the incipient sense of a self. Not yet a mind, not yet a subject in the rich psychological sense, but already more than mere matter. Already something that matters to itself.

We don’t realise the importance of cellular life for the ground of our sense of being and consciousness. After all we are a colony of cells. As you say this is crucial for the emergence of life, living beings. Animals and plants, (even fungi). While they don’t yet have a mind, they do know things, they do have knowledge, how ever simple.

But can religious authority be trusted?

I haven’t spoken about other realities, only realities outside our field of view, which I qualified here;

when I say beyond us this can be because;
It is a reality which is inconceivable to a being using the human brain to exercise thought.
It may be hidden from us, for some reason, or purpose.
It might require the person to be hosted by the deity, thus enabling them to witness things that we cannot witness unaided. Or to reach some state unaided.

These are the questions that phenomenology must account for when the phenomenologist claims to have an alternative route to the mystical path. It is the realisation of our limited abilities, our human frailty which underpins the religious, or mystical life. That in order to see beyond these limitations a belief, or faith in some form of guidance, or hosting is required. Otherwise we are blind to that which is beyond our scope. And by blind, I don’t mean, haven’t worked it out yet. But rather we are entirely unable to see, we don’t have the eye to see it.

But to see such a bridge, one has to step into it.

The bridge is quite easy to conceive of, but to surmise what is at the other side of it requires a telescope. To step onto the bridge without knowing which direction to walk, or how to put one step in front of the other, leaves one wandering around in circles. The idea is that a guide is required. A guide who can provide you with a telescope and steer you in the right direction.

Again if the phenomenology is the be an alternative to the mystical path, then it must account for these questions.


I agree with what you say about unraveling our entanglements freeing ourselves from conditioning, reaching stillness etc. Although as I said before, I take issue with the idea that faith must become ecstatic. That one must prostrate one’s self, basically to break yourself. Although young aspirants will want to do this in the beginning, I did myself. As one becomes older and the new you evolves, there is the opportunity to calm down and root one’s self in a normal life and play a role in society and family. While retaining one’s insight achieved in one’s youth, coming to realise that the fiery stage is not a requirement, but rather an initiation, the cracking of a shell. A seed to germinate and once the tree is growing it lives and grows and integrates in and with the human world.

As he is thus absorbed in meditation, a day comes when, to his surprise, he witnesses an aura emanating from his body (Obhàsa). He experiences an unprecedented pleasure, happiness, and quietude. He becomes even-minded and strenuous. His religious fervour increases, and mindfulness becomes perfect, and Insight extraordinarily keen

Again we have immersion, “absorbed”, this is not necessary and could be quite harmful in the modern world. I suppose if one resides in a monastery where your needs are met, it is a suitable course of action. I have known many people who meditate over the years and beyond a certain point, I don’t think it does them much good.

Neither of those count as empirical evidence. I'm not being pedantic, or trying to dismiss religion as an evil or even a problem on account of its lacking empirical evidence to support it. I just think it's important to maintain consistent and coherent epistemological distinctions between different spheres of knowledge and belief.

That’s odd, you seem to be asking for empirical evidence in guiding one in how to live one’s life (governed by self reflection) While excluding evidence of how people lived their life (that was governed by self reflection).

I was responding to this comment;

It seems to me that the "ultimate concern" of any life governed by self-reflection is the basic ethical question "how should I Iive?" Could there be strictly empirical evidence available to guide me in answering that question?

Surely what you are asking for here is evidence which can be used as a guide, while excluding all evidence of evidence being used as a guide in all previous lives.

Not to mention that how one might live a life would also include an enquiry of the results of a previous life lived to glean an idea of where such a life course might lead.

There is clearly empirical evidence of the results of lives lead guided by self reflection. Just take a previous life lead this way and see where it lead.

Now I feel pendantic.

On the other hand, I agree that there can be no empirical evidence of a divine realm.

It's very interesting, isn't it, that a meeting with the Guru is called 'darshan', meaning 'auspicious vision'.

Thank’s for this it has focussed my mind a little and reminded me about the specific experiences of participating in puja.
I like this definition;
“ In Hinduism, darshan is a significant aspect of temple rituals and devotion. It involves viewing the deity's image (murti) in the temple's inner sanctum (garbhagriha).”

We had a life size murti of kali carved in black granite in the inner sanctum.

I'm not sure I understand this either. What does 'know by the body' mean? You feel it rather than think it?

We in our western society and with all the scientific knowledge we now have, seem to have reached the view that we are minds and that our body doesn’t know anything, with out the mind processing the nerve impulses and so on. Or that a mind is required to know something and that it is somehow the mind that knows it.
But in reality we are an organism with a body, hormones, nerve endings etc. these things go on about their business regardless of what the mind is doing, thinking about, a lot of the time. Also animals which don’t do much thinking and have little in the way of knowledge are the same. They know things without a mind doing the knowing.
Also there is a deeper level to this described in the word communion. Where beings have knowing between them by being together, either in a group, or in prayer.

I too have had experiences like this. One which had a similar conversion like experience, although I would call it more like an epiphany.

I was attending a Puja ceremony at an ashram I was staying at. I knew the Guru well, not a close friend, but we had a nice banter going on and I had become a favourite of his for a few days. Much to the consternation of some of the monks.
To set the scene, there were a number of Asian naturalised Hindu worshippers there who would come at the weekend, on a Sunday. So for them it wasn’t a deep New Age type feeling as it was for me. For her it may have been a lot like going to your local Church of England, or Catholic mass, or the like, as you do every Sunday.
During the ceremony, at the height of the fervour I watched the guru who was only a few feet away turn and see a little old Asian lady, who was there for the weekend ceremony. Effortlessly and in an instant he moved from the intensity of the ceremony to greet her and bent over to exchange a smile and hold her hand. I was struck by how kind this was and could somehow see the depth of grace and humility in his behaviour. At that very moment, he turned suddenly to me before I could turn away and in that fraction of a second his glance was so intense, fiery and I had a sense of exchanging a glance with something bright like a star, light years away. Then he turned back to her, and pressed his hand more firmly into hers and then turned away and returned to the worship. I felt as though I had seen a ghost, although not scared, or shocked as if I had seen a ghost. But surprised and trying to process what had just happened.

What stayed with me was the depth of humility and kindness which I had witnessed. Which I would not in a million years have expected to see while there. Everything else that happened didn’t affect me so much as that sort of thing happened all the time in that place.

It does seem odd that a god understood as a nonspecific intuition, let's say, could be presented as a meaningful relationship with the divine/ultimate concern. By definition, there is no relationship. I'd be interested in seeing someone try to crystallize what this looks like in practice

The simple answer is that one knows God via the body, rather than the mind. Rather like the way a plant knows soil through the roots. The flower, or fruit of the plant has no conception of the soil that was vital for it to grow.

Straight to a radical realization of the self.

Yes, it’s easy to say this though, a different thing to do it.

I recognise what you describe, which mirrors quite well the narrative I have followed via Theosophy. There are a number of routes to this point, which mirror each other like this.

There are distinctions between them though. I have encountered some Metaphysicians on this site and they tend to be of the view that the human intellect is to reach the goal of the realisation of the self, through the power of thought, or even logic. This differs from the other narratives in that they are of the view that this goal is reached with the guidance of a deity, spirit,or higher self.

This raises a number of issues, which leaves metaphysics out in the cold, unable to forge a connection with the unknown and leaving the human intellect on it’s own in reaching the goal.

The primary issue I find with this situation is that it is a fundamental view, or conviction, in the other schools, that the transfiguration of the self requires a revelation of realities far beyond* what the human intellect can achieve from it’s position in the world we find ourselves in. That from this limited predicament we are blind to the realities beyond, have no access to them. That it is required for them to be revealed to us.

Now I don’t deny that it may be possible for the intellect to bridge this divide given the appropriate circumstances. But I can’t see this happening in the near future, in such a primitive society(in terms of spiritual revelation). Or that there might be one, or two maverick genius minds who somehow achieve this goal through the power of thought alone. But I haven’t seen any evidence of this yet.

In the end, it depends on how intuitive the individual is. One really has to be already quite alienated to be motivated to do all that insane reading of dense philosophy that talks about things entirely foreign to common sense (consider that those you call mentally unstable and perhaps not suitable for your religious education may be the ones most disposed to understand it).

I don’t agree that it is for the alienated, or the mentally unstable. Because they would become captured by the ego during the process. It is for well rounded people who play a full role in society and have the impulse to follow this route.

This is metaphysics, the essence of religion.

Each school will invariably say this about their preferred method.

* when I say beyond us this can be because;
It is a reality which is inconceivable to a being using the human brain to exercise thought.
It may be hidden from us, for some reason, or purpose.
It might require the person to be hosted by the deity, thus enabling them to witness things that we cannot witness unaided. Or to reach some state unaided.

Yet you also post "personal experience" which is not shared

I don’t think we can rush to this conclusion, in a very real sense we are one being, so any so called personal experience may not be as personal as we might think.

We are effectively clones of the being of our species. Yes in the outer world we have budded off into separate units, or people. But we may be more connected than we at first sight appear to be in the inner world. Just look at the behaviour of crowds, or other animals and plants which live in highly integrated colonies.

It seems to me that the "ultimate concern" of any life governed by self-reflection is the basic ethical question "how should I Iive?" Could there be strictly empirical evidence available to guide me in answering that question?

Firstly there is the evidence of the lives lived of earlier people of self reflection.
Secondly, implicit in living a life of faith one has faith in the guidance of whom one has faith in.

In the second case, empirical evidence is irrelevant.

I think much of this comes down to temperament.

Yes, I agree. It depends on the person, although I would point out that we are on a site frequented by deep thinkers, who often look into these issues, although more in the direction of metaphysics.

I've never really found myself wondering why there is something rather than nothing, or even why we’re here. To me, those questions feel like they are from the land of cliché.

Au contraire, I am very much interested in these things. Although annoyingly people say things like why do you have to ask these questions, is there something missing in your life. Or something to that effect.
I very rarely meet anyone who is actually prepared to give it some thought.

It’s not that I have any answers. It’s just that the questions themselves have never struck me as urgent or necessary.

Actually, I know no more than you, which is the logical conclusion of my position. But this is not to negate the role of the apophatic route, or the realisation that if one were to know, nothing would change. So what is the difference between one, who does know and one who doesn’t? A bit of a zen posture. I can say more than one might expect about the subject from this position.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'ascended beings', they're not part of the framework I know.

I reference this as all the major religions have such beings and infer that you personally can become one of these beings by practicing the religion. It would be remiss of me to leave them out.

Well, I don’t understand it, so there’s that. :razz: Logical fallacies aside, I suppose my intuition is that we understand some things. We’ve learned to make things work; we’ve developed remarkably effective models, tools, and narratives to account for what we observe. But does that amount to genuine understanding?

That’s not quite what I’m trying to get at. It’s more that the answer to our origin, the reasons why there is a world like this etc, might be really easy to understand, but that no one has bothered to tell us, or are waiting for us to figure it out on our own. All the ascended beings could be sitting by our side*, but we can’t but see it. And when one of them turns to us and explains it. We would say, we’ll blow me down, it was so obvious, I don’t know why I failed to see it.

*if one collapses time and space, they literally are sitting by our side, or in the same point as ourselves.

I personally don't know that the world makes sense, but I accept that humans have some pragmatic relationship that allows us to get certain things done.

Yes, something’s don’t make sense, although most things do. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow and that when we sit down to lunch, we will eat it rather than it eat us. But when it comes to discussing things beyond the world we know, we can’t make these assumptions. This limits what we can say considerably.

Are there many serious people who would make such a claim? The main conceit of science seems to be the idea that the world is understandable, which is a metaphysical position.

We’ll there probably aren’t many people who overtly make such a claim and philosophers are quite open minded about this. But there is an implicit assumption in human nature that the world we know and those who have investigated and thought about it in depth are right. This also manifests in a deeper way, in that we are blind to the other, the other that is beyond our known world. This is understandable, as this is all we know, but it puts us in the position where we have to account for any implicit bias that this leaves us with.

A legitimate answer. But given what you've said about our ant-like limitations, one could also argue (using this frame) that God is our own creation; a comforting teddy bear to help us face the unknown.

Yes, I was coming to that, God is entirely our own invention*, but actually this doesn’t bring us any closer to an understanding. Because God is used in our culture to discuss, or provide explanation of our origin. So the question remains. By what means did we arrive in this world we find ourselves in?

Perhaps one could dismiss the whole question as pointless, because the answer could be anything, just take your pick. It could be the Flying Spaghetti Monster who delivered us. Or a big bang, or something mundane and inconceivable to us. We are just here, rather than not here. But this brings me back to the issue I brought up. We really don’t know and yet there could well be some kind of agency, or being responsible for our arrival. Or there really might not be. Both possibilities result in really deep questions about what is really going on here. Questions that put everything we know aside and leave us profoundly blind to reality, the reality of this issue.

*I am well aware of people who have been contacted, or communed in some way with God, or divine beings. So they perhaps have a claim to some knowledge of God. But I am putting this to one side for now, as it may become a distraction from my point.

I tend to avoid threads about God, but this isn’t so much about God as about how we discuss God, or think about the issue.

My position hasn’t been laid out so far as I can see in the thread. Although the apophatic approach has been mentioned in passing. But philosophers don’t seem to be all that interested in this sort of position.

The first point I would make is that we don’t know, but not just that we don’t know, but how could we know? and if we did know, what would we know? Because it may be something that we are incapable of knowing, or understanding. There may not be anything to know and if there is why would it necessarily conform with what we regard as rational, or plausible.

Furthermore, we are sort of assuming that we are in a world that makes rational, or logical sense. Follows the laws of nature for example. How do we know this? When it comes to what it is that’s going on in which we find ourselves here in this world we inhabit. Or that anything to do with our origins does too.

I could go on and in greater depth, but you probably know now where I’m coming from.

Another approach is to realise that all this talk in this thread is just chitta chatta in our heads. A discourse framed and hosted by a certain kind of organism which has developed an organ (the brain) which works quite well in solving problems to do with survival of the organism. We are rather like(an analogy I like to use) an ant walking across a mobile phone that happens to be placed across his trail. The ant has no idea what he is walking across, other than its shape and surface texture. It certainly has no idea, if it is even capable of having ideas, what that phone represents in terms of the evolution of animate objects.
And yet, a bold ant might stand there and claim “I am the pinnacle of evolution, I know everything about how the world works. Speaking in ant of course and confined within the limits of that language.

Are we like this ant, who just happens to be standing on a mobile phone? Proclaiming in our own little language that we understand everything, how we got here, why we are here etc etc.

Perhaps the best thing we can say about God, or referring to God, is the one about which nothing can be said.

Thank you for your considered response, it’s appreciated. You covered a lot of ground and I may only focus in on one or two points for brevity.
Firstly my comments about faith and other facets of being as something about being, independent of thought. Was only a comment about faith. Not about spiritual enquiry in general, which does involve the intellect and mind, teaching, learning and understanding. I thought it important to make this distinction at the outset. Rather like as you say here;

But what one says about this, I do. What IS an intimation of the divine? You don't think there is a language that can talk about this? But there is. It's not what you think, though. Talking about such things is talk about the presuppositions of ordinary affairs. God is not abstract and remote, as I am guessing you agree, but is IN the world of lived experience; ignored absurd to talk about, but there to be discussed.

We need to go beyond the presuppositions of ordinary affairs and I am saying that there are fundamental aspects of self and being, such as certain examples of faith which are not part of the conscious(thinking) mind. So in this enquiry we must deal with things inaccessible to the thinking mind. This has been done formally in the various schools, however for the mystic it is primarily a personal journey, perhaps guided by these teachings. Personal in the sense that it involves a synthesis and subtle relationship between the intellect, the self and the being. Revealing knowing and understanding which requires direct experience and practice.

I have had a look at Husserl and see parallels with his ‘problem of constitution’, the state of ‘astonishment’ and the developing of a ground. With what I generally describe as questing. The aspirant quests so as to strip away his/her preconceptions, conditioning and habits of thought. Working within a spiritual framework of teachings.

This inevitably brings me to the next question of when one reaches this point of a clear ground and is proficient in the practice of astonishment and constitution. What happens next? Where does the phenomenologist go from there?

But what is this "science of orientation"?

It is a phrase I have coined, there is no peer reviewed scientific establishment, or body of literature. However all the schools that I have looked into have a teaching and practice which amounts to the same thing. To put it as simply as I can. It is the process of the alignment of the conscious self with the divine self and by inference the divine. The result being that one lives a religious, or spiritual life guided by the divine. Which crucially involves the process of the transfiguration of the self.

The reason I keep emphasising this is that in these schools the focus is on developments and changes within the self. Rather like the unfurling of the petals of a flower, this process is already developed, or growing within us and is simply being facilitated in this unfurling.

The moment you start explaining this, you begin a kind of intellectualizing, for things have to make sense, and they don't belong to everyday accounts, but somehow stand outside of these, yet everydayness is not separated, and if you don't talk about this kind of thing, you could get things wrong interpretatively and you could be missing important contributions to your understanding of what you are doing.

This is a concern and any novice should enroll in an established school, so as to follow a long established and tested ideology. But here we are discussing this as people who already have an understanding of these things and are just exchanging thoughts about it.

Of course, if you are going for the truly radical, sequestering yourself from all mundane assumptions, retiring to a meditation mat for a program of self annihilation because intimations of divinity are so clear and compelling, then I can hardly complain. I actually believe in such things, and I know people who have made this move to close off entanglements. And see what Meister Eckhart says about attachments:

Christian ascetics are some of the most strict practitioners, however there are alternative teachings and practice which are not so stark. Many mystics live a “normal” life. I don’t agree with what you write in this passage;

For those that are IN, the world "sticks" to the understanding as an indissoluble bond. These are engaged people, so confident that everything is what it IS, because doing something is done best in full immersion, and foundational doubt rarely touches this world. Foundational doubt is the absolute "out" of such engagement.

For me this is a description of what I would call a fiery aspirant. Someone who is forcing their practice to initiate some kind of initiation, or crisis, through which they will emerge in some kind of purified, or transfigured state. Also I assure you there are very few people who have absolute certainty around these things.
I would suggest that there are many who live a relatively normal life, but who have undergone some developments in the self and hold no deeply held beliefs, or faith. But who have in themselves grown to a point, like in my analogy of the flower, where they are unfurling. Some even entirely unaware. In this circumstance, they may emerge out of some development in their life even more purified, or transfigured than the fiery aspirant.

Anyway, my point being that faith and the way it is held and used by people is not reliant on any philosophy, while often accompanied by a philosophy, which by its presence enriches the experience of being a person of faith.