This is something meditators, yogis and even some philosophers understand thoroughly, of course. — Wayfarer
Do you think the kind of emptiness in depression is really that comparable to the emptiness of meditation? They feel like entirely different things to me. I'd wager most people suffering from the emptiness of depression WISH they could have the emptiness of meditation. — flannel jesus
Which is good, I think you're right, there are different enough for that. — flannel jesus
Depressed people think a lot. They think, I'm bored, this sucks, this isn't satisfying, I'm lonely, nothing is fulfilling, etc. The kind of emptiness that depressed people feel isn't a lack of thought - depression would be a lot more bearable for more people if it were. — flannel jesus
I think of sunyata as an absence of knowledge claims in the perceptual event, knowledge that is "always already" in normal experience, and is the essence of existential illusion. But then, it is IN knowledge claims that one is a person at all in-the-world. What is revealed in putting explicit knowledge to rest, if you will, is a revelation, and this, too, is received by the understanding which is what constitutes "normal experience". One could have a deeply profound meditation in which all mean appearances fall away. Now, what just happened? Now this self that has been transcended in the sublime experience is called upon to explain the very thing that could only be shown by its own annihilation.There have been comparisons made between śūnyatā and the epochē of Husserl, — Wayfarer
Meditative emptiness is about not thinking — flannel jesus
The mundane self is time, and meditation annihilates time. — Astrophel
This resonates strongly with Krishnamurti, who's books I read ardently in my twenties. One of them is called 'The Ending of Time' and it's a theme that's always present in his talks. He says that the observer IS the past, that freedom from thought is 'freedom from the known'. A few weeks back, I enrolled in an online seminar run out of Ojai, which was to run over the next two years, comprising recordings of his talks and an online discussion group. But I cancelled my enrollment, for the same reason I stopped reading his books decades ago. I felt that I understand what he's saying, but I can't find my way into it. He would say, meditation is never the effort to meditate. I've got a quote from him on my homepage 'It is the truth that liberates you, not your effort to be free'. But all I know of meditation is the attempt to meditate (which incidentally I stopped making four years ago.) — Wayfarer
You might not agree, but I argue, once one sees that any of the varieties physicalism or materialism and their counterpart, idealism, is simply the worst and most inhibiting metaphysics that we all carry around with us, and it is carried with an implicit unbreakable faith. It is a reduction to dust, as Michel Henry says. — Astrophel
The inversion of culture in “barbarism” means that within a particular socio-historical context the need for subjective self-growth is no longer adequately met, and the tendency toward an occultation (i.e. concealment) of the bond between the living and absolute life is reinforced. According to Henry, who echoes Husserl’s analysis in Crisis, such an inversion takes place in contemporary culture, the dominating feature of which is the triumph of Galilean science and its technological developments.
Insofar as it relies on objectification, the “Galilean principle” is directly opposed to Henry’s philosophy of immanent affectivity. For Henry, science, including modern Galilean science, nonetheless remains a highly elaborated form of culture. Although “the joy of knowing is not always as innocent as it seems”, the line separating culture from “barbarism” is crossed when science is transformed into scientist ideology, i.e., when the Galilean principle is made into an ontological claim according to which ultimate reality is given only through the objectively measurable and quantifiable. — SEP, Michel Henry
The clearest statement of this form of barbarism is Daniel Dennett. But I've been arguing against philosophical or scientific materialism here since day one so it's not news to me. — Wayfarer
I can't imagine Dennett arguing the way Henry does. — Astrophel
It is said that the Buddha was the quintessential phenomenologist — Astrophel
So, in Zhuangzi, the problem is shown in our speech but not explained. Even saying that is too much. — Paine
The Taoist practices I try to work at don't frame the quiet as substance or emptiness but as what happens when the chatter stops. My brief encounters with it have changed my expectations. There is a timing to reactions that shape events. I have no idea why. It is like a point of leverage to lighten the energy needed to move something. — Paine
Jacques Derrida, that annoying French deconstructionist that is so difficult to read, is intentionally annoying. He wants the reader to see, in his own way, this Taoist point in his analysis of the "difference and deference" of the structure of language and the basic idea is that language not only does not tell us "about" a world in any foundationally determinate way, but does not divide the world with its categories. The world is entirely "outside" of this, yet to say this at all obviously is an exercise in language — Astrophel
And yet, here we are, existing out of context, notwithstanding the context of saying this. There is in this, some elusive and profound affirmation that has nothing do to with context, though as with all things, nothing stops it from being categorized — Astrophel
"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence.”
"imperceptible difference. This exit from the identical into
the same remains very slight, weighs nothing itself...". “It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.” “Pure repetition, were it to change neither thing nor sign, carries with it an unlimited power of perversion and subversion.”
For Derrida an element of meaning, an ‘identity’, can only be what it is by relying on something absolutely foreign to it and outside of it. But this outside doesn’t sit alongside an inside of meaning but inhabits it , belongs to the inside itself.
"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence.” — Joshs
religious faith and groups usually tend to make me wonder about a lot of questions rather than give me answers.
This makes me struggle to understand religion... — javi2541997
To be honest a cleric or a believer might ever only refer to the maybe/perhaps/hoped for 'God' instead of the misleading/unethical 'God is true' proclamation. — PoeticUniverse
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