Yes, and it has often struck me that theists are not conceptualizing the same thing when they allegedly share this belief. The notion of god seems incoherent or 'diverse' enough to embrace everything from the 'ground of being' to a throne dwelling elder, with a flowing grey beard. — Tom Storm

But you know this is because this is all scripture based and no care at all is given to making religion respectable to sound thinking. Philosophy is the cure. Philosophy's mission is to replace religion by rationalizing its content (rationalizing in the good sense of this term).

The existence of God is controversial also, nevertheless belief in God is kind of a prerequisite in many religions. Maybe there are secular theist too though. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. — praxis

Is it so far fetched, though? After all, God is more than just an anthropomorphic image constructed out of the imaginations of a people. It has this solid basis in the world upon which fictional thinking rests. Keeping in mind that, speaking of the anthropomorphisms of religions, all we ever see is anthropomorphic, meaning what we call perceptually "out there" cannot be removed from "in here". To do so just yields an abstraction.
God is all about our ethics and the great question that haunts our world: why are we born to suffer and die? The what-to-do questions presuppose this ethical primordiality of our existence. Buddhism, in it analysis, I think addresses both.

You believe that nirvana is merely an uncanny experience? Like seeing a ghost or something? — praxis

I did say "experience of extraordinary dimensions" which doesn't sound like something is "merely" anything. Quite the opposite, wouldn't you say?

But this uncanniness does need to be looked at, for it is not the kind that applies in familiar contexts, that is, it is not like a ingenious move in a game of chess or a knack to catch on to things (an uncanny ability). It is of all things in a sweeping impossibility, impossible because there is no assumption lying in the background that it couls make any sense of it. Making sense is fitting into a body of "facts" and their logical construction. The only way explaining could work is in a shared experience with a language index, as when one sees a thing and reports to another the thing seen, and the other "knows" this because it is familiar. It is shared familiarity that makes language possible, not qualitative content, and ours is not a society of mystics!

I think this uncanniness goes to subjectivity and the apprehension of the self: what is existence? there is, in this question, something impossible, yet there on the intuitive radar. This is me, and one can discuss this in a qualified Cartesian model of existence: the closer inquiry moves to an affirmation of existence, to more uncanny the world gets, and this movement is toward subjectivity. Buddhists affirm just this, and the uncanniness here is the kind of affirmation of a qualitatively different content from our everydayness.

I've been interested in epoche for some time. Since I was a child I have often found myself regarding the world around me as unfamiliar and strange and wonder at this. It leave me feeling light and unshackled. In the quotidian life we inherit/develop a way of seeing that seems to be primed by conceptual schemes. You seem to agree. — Tom Storm

If you since childhood had this feeling that something was simply out of sync between you and the world, then I most certainly do agree here, and this is a major theme, if not THE major theme, of existential philosophers, that impossible distance that defines and undercuts all relations, as it is a "suspicion" at the base of all things, preventing one from being part of the world's affairs. As I've read, what this is about entirely rests with what kind of person you are. Putting it very plainly, either you are inclined toward a "spiritualist interpretation", or you are not. Look, I am not a great mathematician or visual artist, though certainly some are. We are all very different kinds of people, and some are possessed by this impossible intuition about the world, others are not.

The objection would be that here, in religio-philosophical inquiry, one cannot make extravagant claims about something only some can see. This undermines philosophical objectivity. I respond, there is nothing I can do about this difference among people. It is simply there. Even those who provide me with the basic vocabulary to talk about such things often seem unable to affirm this in experience. Those who can they call mystics.

My own thinking is that the jumping off place for philosophy is where a person encounters the "saturation" of existence by indeterminacy. This is rather an involved discussion.

That is an interesting idea. Self-realization seems to involve a type of self-shedding, no? — Tom Storm

But then, what is a self? It is here, in the way we think about basic ideas that all of this unravels. It is not so much a shedding but a realization that this self is something else. Many ways to approach this. One is to consider time to be foundational. you know, ask me what the past is and all I can give you the "present". Past and future cannot be observed and are in a very important way, just fictions of process that is just transcendental, for one would have to be outside time to say what it is, this temporal unity. The self, it has been written is not in time. It IS time (Kant, Heidegger, in different ways). Buddhist enlightenment is to stand timeless before the world, and the only way to explain this is to actually stand thusly, and acknowledge it.

That's a striking description and resonates with me. — Tom Storm

Me, too! this experience is utterly fascinating, poor as I am in understanding it. Christians say God is love. I say, love is being in love, listening to Maurice Ravel's Mother Goose (Ma Mère l'Oye, esp. the second movement. You may not be into this; it matters not), autumnal affective indulgence (whatever that is), the standing there and simply having the world transfigured into pure phenomenological bliss that fills the horizon of experience. Now there here is a discussion the likes of Meister Eckart could only talk about. Not exactly philosophy, is it. but this is where philosophy goes, ineluctably.

See Wittgenstein on value in his Tractatus, Culture and Value, Lecture on Ethics--this god of analytic philosophy, he knew human affectivity was off the far off radar of our "states of affairs".

Have you ever tried hallucinogens or meditated? — Janus

Yes, which accounts in part for my philosophical eccentricities. I would add, music is the voice of god. Music, mescaline and meditation: a very powerful antidote for mundanity.

Can you say some more on this? What is a 'revelatory, non discursive, radical, affective apprehension of the world'? Do you see this as a possibility elsewhere - Christian/Sufi mysticism for instance? — Tom Storm

Sorry for all the writing. I got a little carried away.

Revelatory: Existentialist philosophers take the "distance" between what is said and what is actual very seriously. You read it in Kierkegaard, Sartre "radical contingency, Heidegger's metaphysics and nothing; Husserl is interesting: He thought one could see what is actually there such that the actuality witnessed is absolute, unqualified and non composite. Heidegger thought he was walking on water with this, for it is such an extravagant claim to say there is in one's worldly perceptual witnessing, a "presence" that is a pure, a kind of, "it is there" that can't be second guessed, is like encountering God herself.
And this gets to the point: Husserl famously defended his phenomenological reduction, or epoche. Keep in mind I am no Husserl scholar, but I have read him and about him, and these days there is a so called French theological turn I am reading which plays significantly through this reduction. The idea is, I think, very Buddhist, and Husserl does call it a "method" rather than just a theory. He holds that the object before your gaze is generally thick with the "naturalistic attitude" which refers to our everydayness affairs, but it is grasped with such spontaneity, it seems direct and natural. The epoche is a method of reducing this perceptual encounter to its bare presence, such that the object itself (back to the things themselves! is his rallying cry) in its intuitive purity is revealed. This purity has been hidden beneath experience all along, but we have been so busy, we never noticed it, and have never really been living in the "real" world, but in a kind of fiction of narratives with our established and habitual culture and language (Kierkegaard called this our hereditary sin, as an existential analysis of Christianity's original sin, which he derided).
Does Husserl's epoche bring one, with practice, to a revelation of pure phenomena? Are we not here very close to what the Abhidhamma calls, in translation, ultimate reality? Isn't the epoche what the Hindus called jnana yoga, a form of what we call apophatic theology, or neti, neti? Keeping in mind that one does not become the Buddha, as one is always already the Buddha, but needs to awakened to this. My thinking is, beneath the skin of experience, there is something deeply profound.

Non discursive: this is tough, for the argument goes that even when we are in our most spontaneous encounters with the world's objects, we never can observe actuality itself, because the understanding is essentially conceptual. Rorty was no rationalist, but he emphatically denied non propositional knowledge. Even in the most intimate moments of realization that I exist, one has to see that this is not being, but becoming I am witnessing, and becoming is time's past making an anticipatory future in the crucible of the present.

Indeed, this "actuality itself" is just vacuous metaphysics, they say. this seems like a strong argument, and it is, by my thinking, if it wasn't for that intuitive dimension of affectivity, like pain: take a lighted match and apply it to your finger and leave it there for a few seconds. Now, am I NOT in a Real actuality? Just because I live in an interpretative world of temporal dynamics, doesn't mean at all that I do not experience non discursively, events, like a burn, or a broken limb, or being in love or lasagna, or the direct apprehension of my existence. Implicit discursive processes, that only seem like immediacy, do nothing to deny non discursive intimations.

I agree with Husserl on the essential epoche as a way to self realization. His epoche is a less radical version of meditation.

Affective apprehension: what is nirvana? And what is liberation/enlightenment? The epoche is a method, so what happens when thought encounters the world, and is reduced to the bare perceptual away from the apperceptual (sp?)? The self becomes free. It is not just an intellectual movement, but an experience. Enlightenment is the wonderful feeling of experiencing the world free of implicit "knowledge claims, keeping in mind that knowledge never was just a conceptual tag hung on a thing; it is a conditioned response to the world established since the time of infancy, and it is settled deep into experience as a default acceptance of things. Release from this is not just a nullity, though there is much that is nullified. It is an uncanny experience of extraordinary dimensions.

That would be the nutshell version. Don't know about Sufi, Christianity has many mystics, like Eckhart, Pseudo Dionysus.

The world is presented to us and it is as we subjectively present it to ourselves. If we say H2O, what kind of knowledge has come forth? We know abstractly that we can put "this" with "that" and get something to drink. But even when we know what something tastes, looks, feels, and smells like, this doesn't give us knowledge beyond the senses — Gregory

And, as I see it, this "beyond the sense" is a tricky phrase, for it implicitly draw a line: there is here, and there is this beyond. I think this kind of thing can really trip us up, and my thinking goes a bit off the rails here: In the perceptual act itself, and not beyond this lies the impossibility of existence, as the actuality before me in its existence is not reducible to some explanatory account. But there are many explanatory acccounts there implicit in the act itself, meaning, when I perceive a thing, I am not just innocently taking in what it tells me; I am doing this. It is not taking in the thing, but my interpretative history making the tacit determination and I just go along as if the world were transparent to me. But there is nothing transparent at all in this encounter with the thing. The event is filled with the past. We generally affirm this past conditioning of a present (and time is an issue that plays significantly in this) encounter as "knowledge" about the thing, but this kind of knowledge never even beholds the thing to encounter it. The encountering is a temporal dynamic, not an encounter at all, for, for this, one needs to put down the years of knowledge building.

Guess the point would be that the beyond is right there, immanent, not transcendental, and the Buddhist/Hindu thinking is like rope and snake of Vedantic thinking: merely an error in judgment/interpretation, it is just that interpretation is not simply a tag of words onto the world, but are dynamic and powerful attachments (as the Buddhist would put it. The final step in Buddhism is the liberation from just these conceptual attachments, it can be argued) . I think this important: It is not so much that what is behind the sense of not revealed (a Kantian, et al claim), but that the revelation is there, at hand, before the waking perceiver.

I do struggle with the terms immanence and transcendence. In the end, there is no division, and to see this is to annihilate the past-present-future illusion. Concepts are just this.

So, yes, actuality is a "non-propositional" presence; although I would say it there when the cup and the coffee cease to be merely "cups" and 'coffee". — Janus

Heidegger and most others would disagree, simply because the being there of the cup and the coffee cannot be parted from the "cups and coffee". Language is "of a piece" with actuality, and it is only by an abstraction that we think of them as separate. This is an idea of some profundity, really. there really is no logic, value, language, and so forth, and this regards all things that the understanding takes hold of, for to think at all is categorize, and, as Rorty would put it, there is no truth "out there" because there really is no out there, for such an idea is a foolish metaphysics, this "original Unity". I am inclined to agree, except for one very important issue, which is metaphysics and the revelatory, non discursive, radical, affective apprehension of the world Buddhists talk about. This is not a religious fiction.

anal preoccupations of the walking dead. — Janus

That THAT is precious.

The reason I mention being and nothing is that only the insane would deny they experience being (and the insane are detached from that) but if one can answer "nothing!" to all questions of being *nonetheless*, this would be Buddhist. People without a mystical side won't understand this, but look at it this way: dependent origination means everything is connected as one without a foundation (because it is nothing), an infinite series. As Aristotle said, an infinite series needs an essential first cause. This is true philosophically unless WE are the first cause and everything, even us, are nothing. God is in all our eyes — Gregory

Interesting. Schopenhauer thought that without our perceiving agency to divide the world, the world would some impossible singularity, impossible because such a thing cannot be conceived, for the thought of it itself imposes division. I thinki there is something in this, a vague but exotic intuition that tries to consider being as such, and finds in this attempt, the grasp concepts have on things slips. One way to look at the mystical side of things. Wittgenstein, who Russell accused of being a mystic when the former said he had missed the point of the Tractatus and wanted to break off contact, was no mystic. But he did realize the mystical dimension of things was built into the world (the Tractatus was not meant to emphasize the boundaries of what could be said, but rather what could not be said, and this was much more important than what could be said; so he said).

As to first causes, certainly not a temporal first cause, for this is intuitively impossible. But how about a first cause as the generative source of existence. Eugene Fink made a bold claim in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation, saying he (and Husserl) "have broken through the confinement of the natural attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing, and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity." Reading the Sixth Meditation is quite an experience. It plays on the (in)famous phenomenological reduction: I see an object before me and the I am instantly aware of its identity. Now take this knowledge and reduce (remove) it until you have removed everything but the bare intuitive presence. Here you have the bare, pure phenomenon, the simple "thereness" of the object.

When you say it would be insane to to deny the experience of being, you do open up a can of worms, for it has to be admitted that the object before you is entirely conditioned, and structured by, the past. I never see anything in this pure phenomenological sense, for nothing comes to me "pure". It is always given as a concept in a context, and without the context there is no meaning. So, I want to say that there is this inviolable intuitive apprehension of things, this certainty, yet certainty seems to be bound to contingency of the language as language steps in between you and the object an language makes the utterance, the truth bearing proposition. How does language possess this magical power to say what things are? Or that they are? Whence comes this "are"?

And yet, as you say, the presence of the world is simply there, regardless of these issues. I would say that here, in this issue, lies the secret to a philosophical approach to God. After all, if there is something there that is absolutely there, then this is tantamount to a burning bush in its apprehension, for one is not merely there, nor is the object. Rather, one and the thing are metaphysically there. Finitude and infinitude merge.

I'd go further and say that the idea of anything at all as a self, the tree itself, the chair itself and so on is entirely a linguistic phenomenon. No doubt things may stand out pre-linguistically as gestalts to be cognized and re-cognized, but the idea of them as stable entities or identities, I think it is plausible to think, comes only with symbolic language and the illusion of changelessness produced by concepts.. — Janus

I pretty much agree, except for one thing: Our acknowledgement of just this is itself a language event. This is hermeneutics. So the world has two faces, Janus: the one is the language existence we live in and, if you will, are "made of". The other is all that lies before one that is not language (and following Wittgenstein, language "is" not language, though this is nonsense to say, for the generative source of language is unrevealed. The world is shown, nothing more). Actuality is not a thesis. It is a non propositional "presence" which cannot be possessed by language, and since there is nothing that escapes being actual, it does follow that all things are metaphysical. Metaphysics is not some entirely impossible other of the world (though it is that, for sure). It is there, in the cup, in the coffee, in our affairs. Is our affairs.

Buddhism says that "that" is just illusion because we are all everything which is nothing. To traditional Western philosophy that is nihilism but many modern philosophers would disagree. Hegel says we are being and nothingness at the same time — Gregory

Kierkegaard said Hegel probably didn't understand Hegel. Being and nothing the firs dialectical movement? Or something like that. Maybe one day I'll take a closer look. At any rate, I think a rationalist like Hegel is miles away from Buddhism, which revelatory, not dialectical. As to the illusion of being a person, a self, this is, to me, very interesting. What is illusion? and what is a self? As a construct in the world, the self is a language entity. Thinking is where identity comes from. What is anything? you could ask, and the first thing that steps forward is language, of course, for the question itself is an expression of language and logic. The old testament Yahweh utters the world into existence (says John), and self identifies in the tetragrammaton, which is an utterance itself.
It is in language that all things are conceived, and it is in the conception that illusion arises: errors in interpretation as to what the world is. Is a person a nurse, a politician, a plumber, a doctor, and so on? And all the rest we say we "are", what is the grounding for these? They are mere pragmatic conventions, institutions that allow us manage our affairs.
The Buddhist tries to see more deeply into what we are, but not through religious dogma and faith. It is through a liberation of our deeper selves. Is there such a thing? One can only look for oneself.

Certainly. But I am not bound to this and what Buddhists talk about usually doesn't interest me. As I see it, the whole affair comes to one thing, and that is a reduction of the world's interpretative possibilities to the original intuitive givenness: Nunc stans. A pure phenomenology.

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is" Albert Camus — Gregory

It does beg the question, doesn't it? In order to refuse to be what I am, I have to actually be something. What is that?

I doubt anyone can find happiness without a good understanding of themselves. The process may never end — Gregory

But this places the matter in a mundane perspective, and I certainly agree with you here. But then philosophy steps in and the world is no longer what it seemed.

Faith is believing in something, which appears out of the range of thought, for the sake of the good the intuition seems to sense in it. I assume Buddhism has much of this. I was wrong to equate Nirvana with Heaven because Heaven has resurrected bodies and God, neither if which are in Nirvana. Anf the goal in the West seems much more specific such that you can have palpable faith in it. But meditation is not a rational process but an intuitive one, so I don't think belief/faith in contrary to the Buddhist religion. Isn't belief part of all religions because it goes beyond the world of sense? Some say all thought begins and ends in faith. Reason is in the middle — Gregory

I would counter that Heaven has nothing to do with God or resurrected bodies. One needs to get to the essence of the term, not just the historical bad metaphysics. How was such a term ever even conceived? It issued from what we experience every day, which is the joys of our existence, and what is called love is the best thing we have going. And love is just another word for being happy, the old Aristotelian summum bonum. Heaven is just a radicalization of what is commonly experienced set in metaphysical idea. But it doesn't end there. does it? After all, now all eyes are on finding some account of what happiness is. It can be very deep and full: Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?

But the metaphysics of happiness is not a meaning less concept.

At the start you wrote “the matter has to be approached phenomenologically” so that’s what I’m doing. You are entirely free to confer whatever meaning you like to the phenomenon of your subjective experiences of satisfaction. I’ve not made any judgment of it, simplified it, or polarized your meaning. — praxis

But the idea that was put on the table was that attachments, affections, and so on, are errant engagements of our original actuality, the Buddha nature, and the idea that "life is suffering" needs to be understood apart from this bald statement. No Buddhist is going to say I am miserable when I am having the time of my life, unless the lines of demarcation are radically moved regarding what suffering is.

The idea of an attachment has to be looked at more closely, and this requires looking at one’s subjective constitution as Wittgenstein did in Tractatus. To value anything does not belong to the world of facts. It is a simple givenness, off the radar of what can be said, and it is thus a transcendental presence, though, Witt is going to tell us that the speaking of this is just nonsense. The Tractatus itself, he tells us, is fundamentally nonsense, for one cannot explain sheer givenness. Dennett denies at length meaningful talk about qualia, a “phenomenological purity” of apprehending things in the world. So whence comes value? From the original source of valuing a thing, and this is us, our nature which stands before a thing and feels desire and abhorrence.

So, liking ice cream is not proof positive that the world is not all suffering, or, it is, but only if you think simplistically about it. My attachment to ice cream is only possible in a context of contingent affairs, but the Buddha within, the source of affection itself, is not contingent, not, that is, dependent, relative, context dependent; nor is it as trivial as ice cream indulgence AS ice cream indulgence. This is a sticky matter, and Kierkegaard helps unstick it: His Knight of Faith lives in God, and ice cream becomes part of her existence in this divine dynamic. A weird, but interesting ways to look at this. It was Witt who said a depressed man lives in a depressed world. So where does the Knight of Faith live? In what "world" does a deeply committed Buddhist live?

All boats rise. (Meaning, when one's world is elevated to a sublime apprehension of things, all things are transfigured.)

I probably should have referenced Evan Thompson rather than Bitbol. — Tom Storm

I see Even Thompson and his ilk as intellectual Buddhists, which, frankly, is fine if you're going to be teaching it (the history, the explanatory texts), but radically off the mark otherwise. Thompson read and read, talked and wondered, but what he did not do is put his life into the slow process of its own annihilation, and by this I am just referring to revelatory nature of Eastern liberation, which is very hard to swallow for academics, or anyone, in the West. Buddhism, taken to its foundations, is more than radical: it is a complete undoing of one's relationships with the world. The claims are not, as Thompson would say, about Buddhism being a part of the variety of ideas that have a meaningful place in the general societal mentality. I did read the Embodied Mind earlier, and their conclusions include a turn away from foundational thinking, which is both good and bad in my view, for what one turns away from is the historical traditions that stand, as Jean luc Marion put it, like idols that fascinate our gaze. Good riddance. But then there is the turn towards a secularization, an incorporation of Buddhism into meaningful living for all, and this is just wrong.

See the Abhidhammattha-Saïgaha (as weird as it is in much of it): Buddhism is not for directing our collective moral compass, even if it can do this. Nor is it for encouraging a theory among theories that make us more reasonable in practical matters, though it may do this. Meditation and withdrawal are an attempt to discover something hidden deep in human subjectivity.

It’s not a complement. I merely point out that you subjectively experience the phenomena of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and this is evidence that life is not dissatisfaction but both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. If your body is dehydrated you will suffer the dissatisfaction of thirst and should you be fortunate enough to find water and drink your thirst will be satisfied. This isn’t “materialist” science. It is phenomena that you subjectivity experience. — praxis

But it shows none of the nuance of the brief review of the matter I provided above. Yours is a manichean pov, a reduction to a two sided simplicity of something that is not really simple. I took t that you didn't really read what I wrote and so, oh well.

There you have it. — praxis

Oh. Well, thank you very much!

Are you suggesting that liberation is not a value or an entangled concept? Incidentally, are you a Buddhist, or are you working to 'connect' Buddhist principles to phenomenology or both, like Michel Bitbol? — Tom Storm

It is not a reference to quantum physics, no. Entanglement here is a descriptive feature of being attached to things in the world, like sex and ice cream. But the French do have my attention, only here is Jean luc Marion, Michel Henry, Emanuel Levinas, and others.

I don't think Buddhism has anything at all to do with physics. Not that one cannot make a connection, but that connection would be extraneous to the discipline.

This seems to be a lengthy way of stating 'you can't put this into words' - which is one of the standard message of ineffability inherent in most religious traditions. Sure. As someone outside of Buddhism (or phenomenology) this construction of 'liberation' sounds much like an appeal to faith. — Tom Storm

I think you can talk about anything. there is nothing in language that stops this. Ineffability is about there being no shared experiences, not about the failure of a concept to grasp an experience, for concepts don't do this. Concepts are social constructs, vocabularies invented in the process of evolvement by groups to share experiences, but they never impose limitations on experiences, that is, as Hume said, human kind could be eradicated altogether, and reason wouldn't bat an eye. It is the formal limitation of judgment, but has no limitations in experience, and if God were to actually appear before me in all her depth and grandeur, and the same happened to you, we could talk about it, refer to it, develop new vocabulary, and so on. Ineffability refers to something alien to a people's familiarity.

Liberation I don't think is about faith. It is an experience, but something nobody talks about because it is alien to our culture.

It is rational certainly, though it is not a rationalization or compromise of any sort. Earlier, you were claiming this must be approached phenomenologically. Do you not personally experience the phenomenon of satisfaction? — praxis

I certainly do. Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream is squarely there. But this enjoyment is, you might call it, a hedonic fetish. A fetish is something that draws on some original energy for its appreciation, but it itself does not have this as a native feature. It is a parasitic gratification, you might say. now Buddhists say that one does not become the Buddha; rather, one always already is this, but has become entangled in desires and attachments. To realize who one "really is," one has to be liberated from these attachments. So what energy is there that is so fond of Haagen-Dazs? It is one's original energy misaligned in such affections. I think it is very important to see that attachments are value driven, and what it is to be attached is to have your original nature, which is the source of value in the world (Wittgenstein affirmed this: we bring value into the world, and apart from this value, the world is mere states of affairs), confer value in other things. So what is a mere fact of the world, to refer again to Witt., is elevated to a value saturated possibility.
And again, btw, Kierkegaard called this attachment original, or hereditary sin, this yielding to the world's cultural institutions, what he calls the aesthetic stage of our existence. Of course, K uses terms like God and the soul, but he does talk in ways that correspond to eastern thinking.

Buddha blames life, claiming that it is all disatisfactory. That is, of course, a lie. There is both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Life requires both to achieve homeostasis (the middle way). — praxis

Not do much a lie if you consider what suffering is. Not that, say, requited love, is just miserable. But Buddhists claim this is far short of what nirvana is: a sustained being in love (only more than this) without the instabilities of an actual life, the latter being the entanglements I mentioned earlier. And being in love is invariable an entangled affair, isn't it?

The balance you speak is a rationalized compromise of something foundationally pure, a Buddhist would say.

I think the word one is looking for is *suffering*. — praxis

Sure, but consider that the world IS suffering, Any time your mind wanders into any of the various institutions that comprise this world, from breakfast to geopolitical conflicts, you are in suffering. So the practical matter before you is a resistance to, or a permitting a falling away from, these concerns, each of which is inherently a kind of suffering.

The world is what makes suffering because it is complicated; that is, suffering is so entangled in our affairs and we not think of these as suffering at all. Value is an entangled concept. Buddhists say retract from these essentially social and pragmatic constructs, and this gets down to the, call it the pure meditative act: No discrimination here, for every thought is equally occlusive to the purpose. In the end, one do not give these institutions time or energy. They become irrelevant. All that remains is nirvana.

Incidentally, this is very close to what Kierkegaard had in mind in his Concept of Anxiety. What is sin? It is an immersion in the distractions of culture, the money, the relationships, the egoic endeavors, all inherently sinful (NOT, he is quick to point out, in the Lutheran sense of offending God with some primordial original sin. Kierkegaard was pretty enlightened for a Christian).

have often pondered Buddhism and emptiness and how this sits with nihilism - perhaps passive nihilism. Nietzsche (admittedly with an inadequate understanding) thought Buddhism expressed nihility. But might there not a connection between Nietzsche's goal of self-overcoming and citta-bhavana the Buddhist concept of (mind-cultivation). In used to read Suzuki on Buddhism in the 1980's. This quote resonated and I have often adapted it (perhaps controversially) for some expressions of nihilism.

Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.
D.T. Suzuki — Tom Storm

But this seems to bypass the essential idea, which is really quite simple. The meditative act is very simple; the interpretation brings in the complexity, for people have questions that are extraneous to this one simple notion: liberation. But, one has to ask, liberated from what. This IS the extraneous question. Liberation itself answers this question, but does so do not by issuing text after text of dialectic superfluity. The abhidhamma was written for instruction and understanding, but the assumptions about what this understanding is are really quite foreign to general thinking. This is because liberation is about something wholly Other than general thinking, and to talk about it, one has to step away from it and enter into the historical and cultural mentality, where everything is entangled with everything else.

Liberation does not "speak" and it is not anything that can be spoken; but then, this is true, really, of all things, isn't it? Look around the room and there are chairs, and rugs and walls, etc. But these are interpretative events, the seeing and understanding that things are such and such this or that. These are contextualized knowledge claims played out in the understanding. Liberation in the profound Eastern sense puts these events on hold, thereby terminating world determining events.

The matter, like any matter, can be approached from various angles, including scientific or “materialist.”

Can you explain why you believe it has to be approached phenomenologcally? — praxis

Of course, it can be approached in many different ways. Historically, physiologically, contextually, even politically. But the business of understanding Buddhism simply does not lie with any of these. Consider phenomenonlogy as an interpretative stand that allows what appears to one to be determined as it is in this appearance, and not how it is taken up in other thematic context. E.g., Buddhism is certainly a historically grounded body of thought, but this history really has no place in the radical meditative process of liberation, which is an attempt achieve apophatically (think neti, neti, the Eastern notion of what we call apophatic theology/philosophy) a profound departure from the everydayness of living, a departure from its "historicity."

To annihilate the world in this sense would mean erasing our internal model of the world. Clearly, that's not the case and practice is more like temporarily bypassing particular neural networks, perhaps strengthening some and weakening others in a more permanent way. — praxis

Meditation is not to be understood with talk about materialist reductions. The idea is absurd, for all things become the same thing. As if being in love or experiencing plague symptoms are analytically reducible to regionalized brain functions. No, the matter has to be approached phenomenologically. Buddha, the quintessential phenomenologist, it is said, and I believe this right, takes the world as it appears, and the annihilation of the world in the context of Buddhist thought sees the world as a construct that can be put down, ignored, and this is a affectively revelatory event of profound dimensions.

there is no understanding of Eastern thought apart from this essentially phenomenological description of the world.

And this is contradicted by their doctrine that we create our lives fully and should take responsibility for our own births. — Gregory

Taking responsibility is not the business of the so called so-self. the logic goes more like this: If there is no self, then there is no one to take responsibility. The act of taking responsibility can be understood as the illusory self, which is a construct (a personality constituted by language and cultural institutions), which is a necessary condition for the self effacing finality of nirvana.

The basic message I believe is that you are simply not who you think you are. So is then anatman a tool in the sense that this will disentangle you from yourselves and your own grasp? — Gregory

The disentanglement is Of the empirical self. The no-self, as odd as this sounds, is never put in play, so to speak, for it is a kind of nothing, a nothing relative to our gaze. The Buddha nature is always there, pure and inviolable. How does it, then, come under the "spell" of delusory thinking? this is unanswerable, since to speak and answer would be a deployment of the delusional self. This is not unlike the Wittgensteinian objection that logic cannot be known, for this would require logic to make it so.
It is a metaphysical problem.

2) the world is illusion

This is contradicted by the idea that Nirvana is now, is here. To see the world without mental essences is a goal of meditation. The result is seeing the world for what it is. But what happens to maya? How can you treat the world functionally as real while doubting what it is? — Gregory

But this "seeing the world without mental essences" is just part of the illusion, this kind of thinking that divides and builds meanings out of "differences". Derrida is in the background on this issue. If there is anyone who makes this case, it is Derrida. See his Structures, Signs and Play (and certainly Not his "Difference" which will simply irritate. Think of illusion as, not simply words as tags on things; rather, it is experience, the past/present/future construction is the very foundation of the world. No wonder serious meditation is so hard to achieve. Daunting at best, for one is not just trying to calm the mind. One is quite literally attempting to erase/nullify/annihilate the world.

Time, being a human construct, is a matter of sensitivity and perception.

Time is the inverse to frequency [ t=(1/f) ] and it only points in a positive direction. Because it is a construct, the only question becomes: Is it sound and valid? — Rocco Rosano

Soundness is a reference to the world. You deploy an abstraction, thinking deductively, as if there were something axiomatic about the metaphor of "positive direction." Antecedent to abstractions like this, there is the world. One must look here first.

The question is not a logical one until the terms of what is there to be determined are set in place. One must say what the world is, that is, what is there in our midst that gives rise to the concept of time. We find here the apriority, as Kant would put it, but this begs the question: to what does this apriority refer? HERE was are mystified, for the return on this question is more concepts that presuppose time; even time, as a concept, presupposes time.

And one makes the final and dramatic move toward indeterminacy in all things. A move grounded, I would argue, in Kant's exposition.

And this is where philosophy assumes the place of religion, which is the final move philosophy can make. Without the nonsense, which is the point.

Which is why it is helpful to think of time in terms of William James "specious present", that duration, perhaps 2 seconds or so, in which we combine the immediate future, the instant present and the already passing moment in time. Anything less than that is something which we aren't aware of consciously, at these levels we react unconsciously.

If you deny the future and past, you cannot make sense of the present, because it has already past. — Manuel

And Derrida refers to the "metaphysics of presence." The argument, the elephant in the room argument, is that amidst the theoretical work, there is the inscrutable givenness of the world. That time as a philosophical concept is so readily deconstructable, which simply means it falls apart so readily under analysis at the basic level, leaves the theory entirely "open", that is, indeterminate. But the same applies to space, logic, my grandmother and everything conceivable. ALL are subject to the came critical assault. For one reason, because their basic conception is bound to time, and if time is indeterminate (at the basic level of analysis), then everything is.

Not really. We see, roughly, when photons hit the eye and react to the photo-receptors we have. We aren't conscious of this process. We become conscious of it when we study mammalian vision, but, aside from the discussions, we don't see photons, nor do we see how the brain turns this into images.

And there is plenty of study in linguistics than show that we cannot introspect into our language faculty. What we get in consciousness are fragments, not the process by which we get these fragments.

Until we get rid of this idea of "access to consciousness", we will remain stuck in philosophy of mind, because, as a factual matter, the vast majority of the things we do don't enter experience. But this should be rather obvious, requiring little times reflection. — Manuel

True, we are not conscious of a zillion things in a given moment, but give this situation its due: when the photoreceptors are brought into an observable, occurrent event, the meanings that seize upon the content are conscious. Even the idea of the unconscious itself is entirely and is necessarily, a conscious conception. the unconscious has never been, NOR CAN IT BE, ever witnessed. This "nor can it ever be" breaks ranks with empirical concepts, the assumption behind them being that what is not known, can be at least conceived as being known.

The unconscious, and again, at the basic level, that is, philosophically, (certainly not in regular science) a nonsense term. Even the extrapolation from what is seen to what is unseen cannot apply here.

My whole point was that concepts exist as ideas in our mind before we give them names!

You totally missed it. And it took me some time to explain all that. Pity! — Alkis Piskas

Then let's look at what you wrote:

This is how I can see concepts are created: We first have an abstract idea, i.e. a concept, about something and then we give it a name. Ancient people, where watching a river flowing, seing the sun rising and setting every day --an illusion of course, since it's the earth that is rotating and orbiting-- etc., and these observations, penomena were giving them a sense, an idea of continuous change and movement, which is very similar to that of time, but they didn't have a name for them. At some point, they had to invent words for them for description and communication purposes. One of them was "time".

The problem with this lies with "at some point." It sounds as if time came into conceptualization through an act of abstraction from the actual events of flowing rivers, blowing winds, and the like. As if some philosopher sitting on a rock was musing about the need for a word. this certainly is how philosophers likely came up with what they have, but it is not how the term 'time' was brought to conceptualization. This occurred in the everydayness of our affairs. The before dinner, after the game, in two minutes, an hour earlier than yesterday, and so on with all the time words, came to us in pragmatic circumstances long before things were abstractly conceived. Indeed, the abstract could never have become an abstract if there were no that-from-which-it-is-being abstracted-from. And empirical science is an incremental process (again, see Kuhn's famous book).

But these abstract ideas are not confined in the description of phenomena in the external world, which we perceive through our senses. They can refer to things that exist only in our mind. For example, how has the concept of freedom been created? From the idea of getting liberated from a state of being imprisoned into something or enslaved by someone. The sense of relief and the idea of being released, at some point gets "materialized" in the word "freedom" (or whatever came before it). — Alkis Piskas

But what is a phenomenon int he external world if not that which possesses the basic terms of the abstraction? If you take time as an abstraction, then the question goes to what was there in the world prior to this, out of which time the abstraction, was abstracted? If you want to move to what the mind only can "see" apart from the empirical entanglements, one still must deal with the abiding historical language that made those mental moves possible. And these came forth out of their predecessors, and so forth.
When you talk about ideas "only in the mind" you refer to what is called apriority (made famous by a philosopher whose name I will keep unsaid). But apriority, the universality and apodicticity of logical propositions, has a very long history of observation and abstraction, prior to Aristotle an Plato, and likely deep in prehistory.
But if you are still not convinced that terms like time are, for meaning to take place at all, welded any intuition (apriori or otherwise) we might have antecedent to the concept, consider that in order for our understanding to be able to apprehend something "as it is" independently of the perceptual conditions imposed upon it in the actual act of perception, then ask: how is it that anything "out there" can get "in here", that is, IN the conceptual matrix?

This is how I can see concepts are created: We first have an abstract idea, i.e. a concept, about something and then we give it a name. Ancient people, where watching a river flowing, seing the sun rising and setting every day --an illusion of course, since it's the earth that is rotating and orbiting-- etc., and these observations, penomena were giving them a sense, an idea of continuous change and movement, which is very similar to that of time, but they didn't have a name for them. At some point, they had to invent words for them for description and communication purposes. One of them was "time".
But these abstract ideas are not confined in the description of phenomena in the external world, which we perceive through our senses. They can refer to things that exist only in our mind. For example, how has the concept of freedom been created? From the idea of getting liberated from a state of being imprisoned into something or enslaved by someone. The sense of relief and the idea of being released, at some point gets "materialized" in the word "freedom" (or whatever came before it).

So there's no word "time", until we get the concept of time into a word. That is, until we give a name to the idea of constant change and movment. Yet, it still doen't exist in the way a river exists, but only as an idea in our mind. — Alkis Piskas

The trouble with this kind of thinking is that is assumes a time when there was no word/concept there for time. Consider what happens with a genuinely novel phenomenon: When the approach is made, there is in place in the perceptual constitution that receives it a vast system of thought---referring to even the most primitive epistemic involvement with objects, moods, and practical affairs, i.e., everything: when language is brought into the world of an infant, it itself is a pragmatic "issue", the matching sounds with objects, fitting these on logical constructions of sentences and paragraphs all in a future looking event of anticipating moments and resolving matters at hand. In order to address something new (and yes, perhaps your are thinking of thomas Kuhn's "Revolutions" here, with it popularized "paradigms" of science) it is not,no matter how sui generis it appears to be, "discovered"; rather is it "made" out of the possibilities of the existing system. To borrow: New encounters come into a mind, a culture that is "always already" endowed with interpretative meanings and standards. think also of the way they tried to conceive in science fiction in the 1920's what the world would be like in the future. It looked an awful lot like a weird exaggerated world of the 1920's.

So when you think of how ancient cultures conceived of time, certainly there were language inventions that created novelties that became the next dominating paradigm which was in turn built into a system that itself would yield to new paradigms (as in Kuhn's book), but NO ex nihilo novelty. And this is the point: time came upon not as a response to natural phenomena in some revelation about what was there that suddenly was discovered. Rather, time was conceived OUT OF a matrix of existing thought, and the novelty was a modification of things language was already doing with time. time is not a simple construction at all. It is a complex and evolving idea.

When I say time is no longer time at all, I am referring to the massive intuitive and empirical concept that time IS. The actualities that are "out there" that thought is a response to is certainly "there" are not to be dismissed, but to try to conceive what this/these would BE without the personal and historical matrix is nonsense. Time's "isness" is this very matrix, and the "invented words" you mention are not stand alone referents to their objects. They are integral parts of an entire evolving language that essentially "deals with" the world.

The thought of myself is not myself. The thought of a tree is not a tree. — Alkis Piskas

See the above. It is not as if when you refer to yourself you directly refer to the body of thought in which a self is conceived. It is rather, when you refer to yourself, it is NOT a simple reference, not just a singularity. the self is a complex of self related thinking that is in the "region" of the reference. A structure (so called structuralism) is "behind" the self, the tree, that richly informs the occasion implicitly of referring. think of a brain storming mapping out of ideas for inspiration. Start with a simple idea, yet surrounding this is a complex of inter related thought brought out by the mere suggestive power of the original simple idea. Those discovered thougths are already there. They stand at the ready to deal with the world.
The "actual self"?? A very big issue in philosophy.

Don't talk to me about more reading, pleeeease! — Alkis Piskas

Apologies.

physicists are day dreamers that somehow get paid to daydream, like you said they believe in time which is different then knowing — MAYAEL

Physicists are daydreamers?? I wonder what this means.

Right. This is about what I said. Time itself cannot be fragile; it's concept only can be. So, are tou agreeing agree on that but just don't want to accept it directly? :smile: — Alkis Piskas

But without the concept, time is no longer time at all. It is "something" but then, the moment I mention it, the concept is in play. The thought of time IS time as far as time can be even conceived. So when we speak of time, we are speaking of a concept. References to what is there that is NOT is a concept, that stands independently of conceptual contexts, that IS in some unassailable way, are attempts to declare an absolute. But, according to the "fragile" nature of language, such talk is impossible: the mere mentioning precludes it!
And this goes for everything, from cats and dogs to interstellar phenomena. When we speak of these, they are thereby in the context of speaking, not sand alone entities proclaiming what they are by their presence. Of course, as you say, "time alone" cannot be fragile, if by this you refer to what is there independent of language. But it is not independent of language, because to behold it at all with your intelligence is to bring whatever something is, INTO language.

You lost me. Too complicated for me to get involved in! The space in my mind will be distorted! And I'm afraid that my mind might even be exploded! :grin:

Indeed, how can you perform all that thinking? What I can only get are complicated optical illusions, like this one: — Alkis Piskas

Not that complicated, just unfamiliar. But yes, it gets complicated when you read, say, Husserl:

Where do we get the idea of the past? The being present of an A in consciousness through the annexation of a new moment, even if we call the new moment the moment of the past, is incapable of explaining the transcending consciousness: A is past. It is not able to furnish the slightest representation of the fact that what I now have in consciousness as A with its new character is identical with something that is not in consciousness now but that did exist.

This is from Husserl's The Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time. A very worthy read. I have it on pdf if you want it. Husserl is not easy in this, but really, if you take it slow, you will get it, and it can change the way you think dramatically.

I don't know what that "something can be. But I thought later that "a mind inside a mind" might not be the case, but rather a different "mind", i.e two minds working parallely, which anyway, doesn't make sense either. So it's useless to speak about any of them. That's why I use to say "a part of my mind", refering to what is customarily called "unconscious". This at least makes more sense. — Alkis Piskas

Hard to talk about. One has to read her way into it, really. The disclosure of truth can only occur AS a disclosure. But when questions are asked regarding what is "behind" disclosure, then one is lost. Bring up any idea at all and one is instantly in the familiar (if you know the jargon, that is). Hard to discuss because on the one hand one cannot deny that knowledge claims about the world all fail at the basic level. Yet, the world is this imposing , undeniable presence (the feels, the sensory immediacy, the affectivity, and so on) that is the very thing that cannot be possessed in the knowledge claim. It is not some "way beyond other" but it is an "other" that is right there before you. This is where knowledge claims fall apart, in my cat, at the bus stop, under my feet, and in anything at all. One FACES the world of indeterminacy when questions are brought to bear on things right before you at the basic level. This is, it can be argued, the heart of existential thought. Existence is not thought (notwithstanding Heidegger, et al). So what IS it? It belongs to eternity, so to speak. Transcendence. See Eugene Fink's 6th Meditation.

At lot of reading here. See Derrida's Khora, the Violence of Existence, How to Avoid Speaking, and others. See Levinas. See Human Existence and Transcendence by Jean Wahl.

Always trying to get people to turn away from Science magazines to "real" philosophy. All I mention here I have on PDF. You are welcome to it. And btw, I am just an amateur philosopher. I am like you: I read. The question is, what does one read and where does one's curiosities lie? If you really want to get to the core of the human philosophical situation, continental philosophy is the only way. Luckily, the internet is saturated with freely given lectures and essays. You can read Heidegger's Being and Time just as I did.

Indeed, this guy was quite problematic! :grin: I can only find problems and emptyness in his "sayings", like the above position you mentioned, which for me means absolutely nothing. Giving a logical answer has nothing to do with defining logic! You give dozens of logical answers everyday about a dozen different subjects. Godssake, man. Enough! There. Because you have ignited a wick in me that started a fire! :grin: — Alkis Piskas

Wittgenstein, and I am thinking of the Tractatus, not Investigations, isn't saying every judgment is about logic any more than particle physicists are saying every judgement is about atoms and molecules. Witt is saying that all that can be sensibly said has a logical structure. Facts are not out there beyond what a person's logicality can do; they are rather inherently logical. I think of opening the window and my mind is miles from the logical structure of my thinking. Yet there it is, the conditional form: If I pull up on the frame, THEN the window will rise; also, more fundamental propositions like, there is a window, the window is closed, closed windows obstruct air flow, etc. All that lies before us in any given moment from sticks and stones to star systems are on a logical grid of the understanding. Read Kant for an intro.

This is Aristotle, then Kant, then Wittgenstein. Logic is a systematic way to lay out the formal structure of all we think and say.

No, I didn't say that. I didn't speak about any theory. I just mentioned that the word "unconcious" was invented by Freud.
I stopped being interested in and talk about the "unconscious (mind)" since a long time ago. I'm only interested in and talk about the conscious mind and consciousness! :smile: — Alkis Piskas

I don't take issue with the assumption of an unconscious to the extent that it yields an understanding of the dynamics of a conscious set of affairs. The assumption that there are underlying motivations and conflicts is simply a given confirmed in "talk therapy" all the time. But to posit unconscious motivations is merely to say that the foundation for talk about motivations is absent, therefore, we must extrapolate from the seen to the unseen just to get a working knowledge for understanding, NOT to establish an metaphysical ontology. Think of Freud's ID, e.g., as mysterious X that never shows itself, but from which things manifestly issue. What do these things tell us? Ontologically they tell us nothing, it can be argued, because they are beyond language, and the moment they are spoken or thought, they are no longer what they are, for the taking up of them itself is radically "other" than what they are.

I am guessing a lot of this is unfamiliar. As it was for me not too long ago.

Do you maybe mean "The fragility of the concepts of time and the unconscious"?
Because neither time nor unconscious does actually exist to be fragile or strong. — Alkis Piskas

I wonder how you will find the following:

Time and the unconscious are always already conceptual, are they not? To even bring up the idea of time is to have a concept in mind; it is part and parcel of what it "is". And this kind of thing is to the point here: To bring up anything at all is to quality that thing by the terms set in the bringing it up. There is no innocent, pure "time" that is free to be considered apart from the concepts that are in the mentioning.

The fragility refers to the assailability, which is shown readily, easily. Take space: where IS something? If a given location (under the dresser, in Miami, inside the box, and so on) is given by a reference to a broader, more inclusive spatial designation, and this certainly is the case, then the rule for identifying spatial identity will inevitably end an inquirer up in eternity, a concept of true indeterminacy. talk about something "Under the stairs" is analytically reducible to an indeterminacy.

About time: As you said, we use the terms "past", "present" and "future" conventionally. They are points of reference. We use them mainly for description purposes, and they are indeed very useful. But it is very easy to see that neither of them exists: past is long gone, it' not here, it's nowhere. Future has not come yet, so it's nowhere either. Present --which we usually call "Now"-- is the most controversial concept of the three. For one thing, it cannot be "grasped" because from the moment we refer to it, it has already passed by. But we can define it in a context, as a period of time, e.g. "At present" or "At the present time" or "Presently", refers to a period of time existing "as we talk". (Note: all the references to the word "exist" are figurative, since time does not actually exist.) — Alkis Piskas

An interesting analysis of time: Focusing on the presence of what is before me, qua presence reveals a dynamic: As I make reference to, say, the future, I deploy, in the act of reference itself, the past which informs the reference regarding language and habits of experience that are "enacted" in the event. But the event itself is necessarily a future looking affair, an anticipation of what the thinking is "going to be," and so the past is always IN the future reference; reflections on the past are, as temporally structured events themselves, future looking in the event of the recollection. Thus, past, present and future is, in this brief analysis, a dynamic that really has none of any these three concepts; time is "all of a piece," that defies representation altogether, for as one speaks such a thing, this past/present/future is presupposed in any and all possible time references. The daily familiar time language seems to be entirely a fiction at the basic level.

One conclusion is that language never touches down in the intuitional givenness of the world. to think at all is to bring what is before one under a language representation. Of course, your answer to this is to say contextuality is the requisite setting for meaningful speech to take place. Even at the basic level, thoughts about philosophical indeterminacy only become meaningful themselves in a context of foundational talk (philosophy's true domain, I argue). More mundanely, to say that yesterday was warmer the next week's forecast, I am making perfect sense in talk about weather, temperatures, predictions, and so forth, but to think one can understand at all "outside" of contextuality is impossible. That makes it impossible to discover what it could even mean for an idea to be about what is not an idea. Rorty takes this tact: no such thing as non propositional understanding. Ideas "refer" to ideas, and truth can only occur in propositions, and there are no propositions "out there".

This kind of thinking is radical. It entirely undermines the possibility of foundational talk, that is, talk that refers to what is not in an established totality of meaning. It says that inquiry and research are not "closing in" on the nature of things, as science would have it; but rather, the indeterminacy that faces us when paradigm meets actuality, when words about, say, ethics, meet the foundational giveness of actual pain and happiness, is an actual structural problem that does not go away via "paradigm shifts" and bigger telescopes.

About unconscious: It doesn't actually exist either. It's a term invented by Freud and it is rejected by a lot of psychologists today. If there were an unconscious mind, it would have to be inside mind, i.e. a mind inside a mind. We use the term conventionally, as we do with the terms mentioned above regarding time, to mean whatever is inside our mind that we are not aware of, i.e. it is "hidden". It is also very useful. We say, "I did that unconsciously", meaning without thinking or being aware of it. — Alkis Piskas

Not so much a mind inside a mind, but "something". It is a very sticky wicket, but is where inquiry has to go: Any attempt to talk about the unconscious is going to be met with talk about what is conscious, since the inquiry itself is conceived consciously, and any idea that is even possible to address it will be conscious. It is the old Wittgensteinian problem: try to say what logic is, and the very best you can do is give a logical answer! Question begging at its worse. But, and this is a mysterious "but", one quickly encounters Kierkegaard. Actuality, the "raw" feels of the world, are not concepts, and when a knowledge claim is brought forth in the "saying" of something, the saying hardly possesses the "feels". In fact, it is entirely "other" than the feel. Truth, as Rorty holds, may be a propositional matter, but reality is not (he disagrees); presence of the presences all around me is not presence of propositions. Propositional knowledge may take it up, speak contextually about "it", use it, have purpose for it, write volumes and libraries of contextual thinking, but there is that impossible "presence" that refuses to be reduced. This is the other/Other of the world.

So it is not so much of a metaphysics of the unconscious that is so "fragile". This is all too clear. It is a metaphysics of the conscious! THIS is where indeterminacy is revealed.

Where to go from here? The answer lies in ethics and aesthetics (as Wittgenstein said early one).

I can't see where does the contradiction lie. Psychotherapy (and other techniques) is based on exactly that process: bringing things that lie in out "unconscious" to our consciousness. This helps us to understand problems that lie hidden inside us and affects us and out behavior negatively, But in general, this is a very natural process that occurs with us every day: I have a name in my mind that I cannot remember, however hard I try. Suddenly, it pops up in my head: "I remembered it!". I don't know how much percent, but the very larger part of our is hidden from us at any given moment. We can say that it lies in our "unconscious", but only for description purposes. — Alkis Piskas

I thought you said Freudian theory, theory of the unconscious, was merely an invention.
But I do see. But even now, as you produce speech and writing, what is the constitutive source of all this? best answer science has is the brain, brain chemistry, billions of neurons and axonal fibers connecting them; and so on with this kind of talk. But this altogether dismisses (or better, simply misses, being, as is usually the case, completely unaware of it) the paradox of phenomenological accounting: to posit brain science itself occurs as a phenomenon. In order to do the kind of explaining required, there would have to be a position outside of phenomena that "observes" a foundation for this scientific observational foundation! In other words, phenomena cannot be a basis of explanation for phenomena.

Talk about the unconscious always already is talk about conscious thinking about what the unconscious is. Even the unconscious itself is this.

The phenomenon of Kuhn-loss does, in Kuhn’s view, rule out the traditional cumulative picture of progress. The revolutionary search for a replacement paradigm is driven by the failure of the existing paradigm to solve certain important anomalies. — Moliere

Of course, it depends on how you define progress and if this can be done in a way that something noncontingent is IN the progress. Kuhn's paradigms refer to science, but the question is begged: what is science's progress really about, that is, what is it that is progressing forward? If it is merely anomalies that turn up in normal science, and these are simply to be taken as constructions upon constructions, and there is no foundation to be "discovered" then you have the endless permutations of an infinite and evolving yet aimless science; apart from the localized settings of categorically assigned meanings, going no where.
But then you have the actual world, the that-which-is-not a language setting at all, or better, that which appears in a language setting (everything) but reveals itself to be wholly other than language. If the search is for something noncontingent (and I think it does come down just to this) that is, if you will, in the fabric of the experiential basis for scientific observation and work, and not simply a derivative idea born out of paradigmatic normalcy, then the answer lies apart from the language.

This goes to a more basic inquiry into language and the world: is there something in our midst, as responsible thinkers committed to the scientific method (I think is was Putnam who coined the term :hypothetical deductive method. But he got this pragmatic notion from, was it Peirce? Dewey?) that is PRIOR to science itself? And by prior I mean presupposed. Of course: it is the foundational intuitive landscape of experience itself. Here we find value, affectivity, the ethical/aesthetic dimension of the world.

Herein lies the answer to your thinking: science makes progress in an objective and noncontingent way is it progresses toward greater value. As to how this works is a further matter, of course, entangled as value is to factual affairs. But the presence of this value dimension that stands in the midst of scientific inquiry (for what does not stand in this way?) does reveal something Kuhn did not consider (though I haven't read everything he wrote) in the equation of replacement paradigms.

Language is mysterious for me. How does a child learn to connect words to actions and objects. If i point to a vase and say "vase", how does the child know that I am referring to the material object and not the pointing action, or the color of the vase for that matter. There is something we learn about language through social action and I don't think we can put our fingers on it. Is it indeterminate? — Gregory

You are missing the essential part of language acquisition: it occurs in time. See the pragmatists on the hypothetical deductive method (aka, the scientific method). What is, say, nitro glycerin? The anxwer comes in the form of a conditional: IF it impacts a surface at a certain velocity, THEN it will explode. That is what it IS. All things we encounter are things we already know. How was this acquired? imagine a no nothing infant, noises all around, modelled language everywhere. Eventually you make the connections: IF this noise is made, THEN the color RED is present. Hmmmm; noise...the color red...Eureka!
Of course, infants don't think like this, but it is fairly intuitive that the process is like this.

The meanings we encounter in the world are forward looking. We don't know, in the knowing, what things are; we know what they do, the results they produce.

I recently found Neville Goddard and how all is one in God. It seems true, and listening to hours of Gregorian (sic) chants confirm it for me. I never understood the meditation thing but I don't doubt "reality" on a daily basis either. I find myself on my bed typing this and it all seems as real as can be. The cell phone even appears "to be" exactly as it looks, without any noumena behind it. So I get the idea of something beyond this world which engulfs it, but the regular daily things seem pretty clear and obvious to my perception. That's why it strange for me to read people saying that truth can't be found. Isn't there the truth of today? But putting all peoples' perspectives together is where the meta comes in. How is it that truth makes sense to me but others use words that contradict it? In moral questions it gets worse. I think it's wrong to ever kill another human, while others think self defense, death penalty, ect is valid. We have to ask our consciences those questions, and the truth part in prayer or meditation, as you say — Gregory

What the "real" is, I cannot say. That is, the issues that come out of trying to contextualize what it is to be real don't make things clearer until enough work is done that familiarity begins to yield, and one begins to understand what Kierkegaard meant by repetition. Look at it in this (somewhat Wordsworthian) way: There was a time when I did not have any of the impositions of language and memory taking hold of the world and in their grasp, defining it. Of course, being so young, nor did I have a structured personality to understand anything; I was a non-egoic agency, and the world was "pure" phenomena. This idea of pure phenomena is the way Husserl talks about "things themselves" that appear in a lucid apperceptual encounter with the world in the employment of the "method" of reducing experience to its phenomenal underpinning. It is a method, his "epoche," and not simply a thesis! Starting with Husserl is not a bad idea, and his Cartesian Meditations are very accessible. Anyway, in the reading and the practice of the epoche (phenomenological reduction), there is, one could argue, a regressive attempt to regain what was lost in the process of enculturation, and what was lost is the ability to spontaneously witness the world in a purely forward looking (rather than a backward recollection) way, with only an unmade future, a "nothing" before you, but FREE of the learned anxieties that qualify a typical lived life (see Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics). This kind of encounter is like the atman realizing she is the Brahman, if you want to use that language (language is the prison cell and the key at once. Better to be very cautious of any language, I say. See Levinas' Totality and Infinity, though it will drive you a bit mad trying to understand what he's saying. Such works at first need to be "read through" imperfectly, then adjacent readings about this, and then others about these, and so on.)
I think Rorty and Derrida have truth right. See Derrida's Structure, Sign and Play (not his famous "Differance" which will just irritate you). Even to utter the term 'truth', you are in a vast language context out of which there is no exit, for to conceive of an exit is an act of language. So our understand of anything is always already a language affair. I can't really do this justice. You'd have to read these guys, watch online lectures, etc. As I see it, truth eventually points to its own delimitations, and truth itself calls for a shutting down of the world, that is, culture and familiarity.
As for ethics, killing others and all of its confusions, I put these down altogether, and ask the foundational question: what IS ethics? It is a thing of parts. Long discussion. See John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong for the opposite of what I believe about this. It is masterfully written. I take the exact opposite view, though.

but I also know the letter is not as if the essence of "being a letter" does not leap out at me from the thing there before me. — Constance

this has an unintended double negative.