This is something meditators, yogis and even some philosophers understand thoroughly, of course. — Wayfarer

That's why I am arguing that the result of meditation, "emptiness" is described in the same way as the result of depression, as "emptiness". It takes one (intentionally in meditation) to the limits of one's freedom. What I think, is that the difference is that unlike depression where the limit to freedom, and consequent emptiness, is forced upon the person unintentionally, and unknowingly, from the other side, as a sort of enclosure, in meditation the limit is approached, and emptiness produced, willingly and knowingly, as a learning experience, therefore it is manageable.

Depression is quite common, yet very disruptive, and sometimes a highly disturbing mental illness. If a person practises the art of managing the condition, "emptiness", this could prove to be very useful in preventing the occurrence of the unintentional form, where the emptiness is forced upon one from the other side.

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.

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

Yes I do, and what I pointed to, is that I believe that with practise and effort, one could substitute the emptiness of depression with the emptiness of meditation. So if you suffer depression, and WISH that you could have the emptiness of meditation instead of the emptiness of depression, then with the required will power, determination, and effort, your wish might be granted.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-meditation-helps-with-depression

seems like you're agreeing with me that they're substantially different enough for a depressed person to want that. Which is good, I think you're right, there are different enough for that.

I guess what I'm saying is, the difference between depression and meditative emptiness isn't only that one is voluntary and one is forced, there's more differences than that.

Meditative emptiness is about not thinking. 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.

Just bear in mind that the protean nature of religious belief is not unique. You'll see the same thing in scientific articles and public health datasets being mustered to prove anti-vaccine arguments, or in the endless debates over public education (e.g., is offering optional advanced mathematics classes in high school good, or an engine structural racism, etc.)

That people can disagree wildly on things doesn't necessarily entail that knowledge is impossible. This is true even when there isn't consensus. We'd hardly say that there is no truth of the matter as to what makes for a good or bad education, simply because there is a large diversity of opinions in the education policy space, or that there can never be an adequate explanation of consciousness just because we currently lack one and are left with a wide diversity of opinions.

From a theological perspective, such diversity is often seen as necessary for the progress of human understanding in the same way a plurality of political movements is required for the historical development of political institutions. E.g., modern liberal democracy only has universal education, restrictions on child labor, rights to unionize, pension/health systems, etc. today because it faced the challenge of socialism and was forced to sublate it, making key socialist policies part of itself. A similar phenomena would seem to be at work in the parallel strands of faith.

Or this is at least the explanation some theologians take, e.g. it's sort of the explanation of plurality laid out in the current catechism of the Catholic Church (rather than, we are right, everyone else is wrong).

Which is good, I think you're right, there are different enough for that. — flannel jesus

Yes, I described how I believe they differ. The one is intentional, therefore manageable, educational, and helpful in confronting the very real limits to one's freedom. The other consists of the very real limits to one's freedom imposing upon the person in an unwanted, unmanageable way. So the same "emptiness" is approached from two different ways. The one is a peaceful, confident, courageous approach, while the other is an anxious fearful non-approach, as it is instead imposed.

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

The thinking itself is not the emptiness of depression. The emptiness is the feeling associated with the hopelessness of the thought. Yet the thought continues despite the hopelessness created by the feeling of emptiness. The feeling ought to end the thought in hopeless emptiness, but it does not, so the feeling of emptiness is required to increase in order to confront the hopelessness of the thought. So, just like meditation, the emptiness is the end of the thought. But in meditation the end is properly achieved because it is a trained practise, while in depression the end cannot be achieved because the emptiness is the product of hopelessness of the thought.

It's just a feature of the two different ways that the emptiness may be induced, intentionally and unintentionally. The unintentional requires the hopeless thought as catalyst, the intentional produces the emptiness without the catalyst.

I agree with your post, Timothy. But I don't know what to say. My aim is not to argue about a specific religious branch. I am fully aware that religious belief is not unique, and I have even already discussed this in another thread, where some users started to rant about the bad 'influence' of Christianity due to the Spanish empire. And then, I asked them: what kind of Christian group are you referring to? Because it is obvious that there are a lot of distinctions between Catholics and Protestants, for instance.

Nonetheless, I think I will keep learning more about Christianity from a personal perspective. It is the main religion - and custom - where I live. I am not bother to understand different religious perspectives. It will be interesting, but I am not ready yet.

Look how many exchanges and debate Kierkegaard produces! More than 200 replies have this thread, when we are 'only' discussing spirituality from a Christian Ethics view...

There have been comparisons made between śūnyatā and the epochē of Husserl, — Wayfarer

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.

What is a knowledge claim? This is important. It is pragmatic and forward looking. It is TIME. The mundane self is time, and meditation annihilates time. To cancel an attachment is to relax the desire that attempts to create a future in the image of the desire, again, so to speak. Sin, in Kierkegaard's terms and my interpretation, is time (the sins of the race, that is, the cultural/historical body of institutions that constitute our world).

Husserl's epoche has this trajectory, leading us to an absolute intimation of being. It is essentially apophatic, like the Upanishad's neti neti, annihilating assumptions that are always in place when we see the world in familiar ways. What is canceled is time itself, not the abstract concept of time, one thing following another in some apriori quantitative model, but existential time, the right now in a room with lamps and coffee cups ALL of which are familiar and prima facie holding the world in place. This living structure of existence is time, the knowing of all these things being essentially anticipations confirmed in the mere recognition. To me, this cuts directly to the chase of the issue of Eastern spiritual illusion, or maya: holding this cup right before my eyes, feeling its warmth, its weight--then notice when the mind is cleared in radical meditation, how time evaporates as the anticipatory "veil" falls away.

Knowledge is forward looking, and so, knowledge is time. But to experience AT ALL, even profoundly, time cannot be altogether dismissed in explaining what a spiritual experience IS. Even as time slips into nullity, this is done in "metaphysical" time. Our finitude IS noumenal., something Kant missed in the deduction (a long but fascinating argument there).

Just to add: illusion and time, these are the same. Time is anticipation, a "not yet" at the ready when one sees an object, and when the object is confirmed, it too is confirmed in a "not yet," that grasps to fill the future with the same, and it is what defines normalcy. It is a living presence IN the object of awareness, this dynamic knowledge claim. I hold that Eastern enlightenment and liberation is all about what stands in the perceptual moment telling me it is a cup, a rose. It is temporally existentially dynamic, not spatially inert, as scientific physicalism/naturalism tells us. Meditation literally stops time, anticipation, the "not yet" of the vacuum of a future unmade. Time is karma, not an abstraction. Time designates all of the passions, desires, etc., in the anticipatory moment. One's desires are flung forward in the "not yet".

Meditation literally stops time... — Astrophel

:roll:

Meditative emptiness is about not thinking — flannel jesus

spot on.

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.)

That's why something about your posts communicates this same understanding, even if it's one that I've never managed to get.

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.

So, in Zhuangzi, the problem is shown in our speech but not explained. Even saying that is too much.

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

There are other yogas. Jnana yoga is also very effective if it cuts through the mass of presuppositions that rule our thinking in a default way. As I see it, the strongest pillar of dogmatic insistence is physicalism. 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.

Consciousness conceives first, is ontologically first in any conception. You might want to give Henry a listen on youtube at Michel Henry By Steven Delay. One has to put aside the Christian orientation. It really doesn't matter. But he is worth it.

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

Agree that physicalism is the presiding and destructive myth of modernity, but not in the least that idealism is merely a 'counterpart' to, or dialectical projection of, physicalism. I've been introduced to Michel Henri on this forum and read part of his essay Barbarism, which is an an exact diagnosis of eliminative materialism.

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.

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

But I can't imagine Dennett arguing the way Henry does. I read his, or read through it, Consciousness Explained. Dennett It does a good job of showing me what I am up against. I know this thinking, we all do, just not as well as he does. We grew up with it, this common sense that assumes science is basic. Our familiarity is called public education. This is why phenomenology is so hard: such thinking as Dennett's has to be "read out of" like a child reads of other lands and discovers there is so much more out there. But I haven't read Dennett on barbarism, and likely will not, even though he may have interesting things to say.

It is said that the Buddha was the quintessential phenomenologist, for no one made a stronger case for the kind of thing Henry argues for: the more appearing, the more being. What is being? It is affective-ontology. What if I asked what nirvana is? We would still have as an implicit premise that it is just an emotion that issues from material being, but has no being of its own. This is the hard part, this freeing being from implicit materialism (always there, trivializing existence) for this is a thesis that makes experience derivative. But meditation and its apophatic "method," that is, the method of negating common sense which is our everyday world, turns this entirely on its head. Nirvana (affectivity) IS Being, it is the essence of being, not derivative of anything. Affectivity is the ontological foundation. The materialist assumption is constructed OUT of this, just as all of our thoughts and ideas.

At any rate, I get rather up on my high horse when Dennett comes mind.

I can't imagine Dennett arguing the way Henry does. — Astrophel

Of course he doesn't! What I'm saying is, Henry's description of 'barbarism' applies to, is exemplified by, Daniel Dennett's 'eliminative materialism'. In other words, in those terms, Daniel Dennett is indeed an exponent of a barbarous philosophy. Dennett, and the other materialist philosophers, are what Henry has in mind with his criticism. They're barbarians!

It is said that the Buddha was the quintessential phenomenologist — Astrophel

That is the point I was labouring a couple of pages back, which you seemed not to notice. I even included a passage from Husserl to this very point.

Is there something the matter with my prose style? Am I being obscure?

So, in Zhuangzi, the problem is shown in our speech but not explained. Even saying that is too much. — Paine

I think this taboo on speaking is overplayed, and yet, not played enough. One can speak anything, its just that there has to be a shared experience. You could report to me that you had an excellent meditation or insight, and all crude meanings vanished revealing something profound and beautiful . Words like profound and beautiful are common, as in, that was a profound chess move, but in the context of Eastern enlightenment, we think of something else because this region of thought is contextualized with a greater sense of the mystery of existence. Even as I use terms 'mystery' and 'existence' I take your thoughts and sense of things INTO a world of orientation that makes sense. This is the point: talking like this doesn't degrade the essence of this weird, marginal way to encounter the world.

When we use language, we almost always are talking about mundane things, and it is this that has to be put aside. Brings the whole matter into familiar contexts where it doesn't belong.

Is there something the matter with my prose style? Am I being obscure? — Wayfarer

No, no. Sorry about that. I did forget previous things mentioned.

Don't worry about it! It's turning out to be a very interesting discussion.

I was not thinking of the speaking as taboo. Zhuangzi confronts the categorical quality of Confucian expression but does not reject what it is trying to do. Confucius appears as a teacher in the work.

On a practical level, the training leads to a change or not. Perhaps a way to read Zhuangzi is to look at the problem of reporting success and failure. Those words are highly leveraged properties.

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

There is an uncanny space that opens up when the chatter stops for some people. While for others, most, it is simply the same old perceptual encounter with the world. This space deserves analysis, the rigorous kind that discovers the structure of consciousness itself.

On Zhuangzi. Consider this passage:

......whether you point to a little stalk or a great pillar, a leper or the beautiful Hsi-shih, things ribald and shady or things grotesque and strange, the Way makes them all into one. Their dividedness is their completeness; their complete­ness is their impairment. No thing is either complete or impaired, but all are made into one again. Only the man of far­ reaching vision knows how to make them into one. So he has no use [for categories], but relegates all to the constant. The constant is the useful; the useful is the passable; the passable is the successful; and with success, all is accomplished. He relies upon this alone, relies upon it and does not know he is doing so. This is called the Way.

The point of this is to show how language makes issues out of thin air, dividing the world (categorical thinking) that is an original pragmatic singularity. Human discontentment lies with this false sense of a world divided. Further on, the matter is spelled out in clarity:

There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something.

There is nothing in the world bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount T'ai is tiny

There is in this, something definitive and is, of course, not definitive at all: Definitive because the final wisdom clears the playing field, and yet not definitive because the act of doing this is itself categorical since all language and meaning is categorical: words divide the world.

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.

So my interest in this "space" can be approached here. It is where one's existence and the existence of the world is realized by "the person of far reaching vision" is released from the grip of language. But what is THIS about? There is a LOT to "say" about this, paradoxically. Or is it a paradox? For language and its "distance" from the the palpable, pragmatic (the "constant" is "useful" says Chuangtzu) world are themselves IN this world and allow us to realized this very thesis. The tao is conceived in language! How does this work? Language itself, and its categories, must also be of the tao, not apart from it, perhaps it most essential feature. To reject categorical thinking occurs in categorical thinking.

Thought is not to be simply suspended. My thoughts say language is the greatest expression of our existence. It is "useful" to have a more penetrating view.

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

For Derrida language, understood in its broadest sense, is the text, and text means context. His famous dictum, there is nothing outside the text, doesnt mean nothing outside language understood as a formal symbol system, but nothing outside of some context or other. Put differently, there is no world outside language if we understand language as context.

I can follow your description of what is happening but the attempt to bring another to be more skillful is its own thing. The truth or falsity of that is not a general idea. It might even be stupid, in many ways.

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. God could appear in actuality, some entirely novel insight into eternity, and if this were shared, we could talk about it all day. All this about things language cannot say I think is overplayed. Language is an empty vessel.

God could appear in actuality — Astrophel

Christians believe that this happened already, with the Incarnation.

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

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.”

The repetition of the same meaning intention one moment to the next is the fundamental origin of the contextual break, and our exposure to otherness. Iterability, as differance, would be an

"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.”

The repetition of this very slight difference dividing self-identity from itself produces a self and a world that returns to itself from its future the same differently, every moment. Is this what you mean by ‘existing out of context’?

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

I am reminded of Zeno's paradox of the arrow never arriving at its target. The iterable "moment" itself analytically reducible to constitutive iterability, thereby rendering the iteration an endless a never ending cycle. I want to be Diogenes and walk across the floor and then consider the matter refuted. But as I see it, there is only one thing that can make it all the ways across the room, and that is value-in-being (as I call it, grasping for the right way).

This not sitting "outside" and "along side" is to me, extremely insightful, for the silence of meditative gelassenheit, if you will, shows that what one seeks, in this pursuit of a profounder wisdom than thought can think, has been there all along, in the eye that "sees" the seeing, the cogito that thinks the cogito.

And the repetition in the discover of the "repetition" as Derrida lays it out, is itself thereby annihilated. There is in this what in Zen is called satori, a jolting realization.

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

There is not much to understand but that religious 'faith' is a wish or a hope that 'God' exists and the rest is the dishonor of acting, saying, and preaching as if 'God' exists, and then layering more 'truths' upon unto many myth-takes.

Their ingrained beliefs the priests’ duly preach,
As if notions were truth and fact to teach.
Oh, cleric, repent; at least say, ‘Have faith’;
Since, of unknowns ne’er shown none can e’er reach.

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.

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

Well, if someone is a true believer, I think he gives God's existence for granted. When a believer thinks that, perhaps, there is a possibility of the existence of God, they start to experience anxiety, or more specific, a crisis of faith. Some battle doubts about the veracity of the Christian faith itself (“Does God truly exist?” or “Does another religion or belief system more truly reveal the nature of ultimate reality?”)

On the other hand, why do you claim it is unethical to state 'God is true'. I agree that proclamation could be fallacious or misleading. Yet desiring 'God is true' doesn't make unethical behaviour for a believer. It could be unethical to believe in Christianity, and act against the principles of this dogma. For example, no giving credit to God's mercy when a believer is put in dilemmas or not following Christian ethical principles, such as moral code, standards, behaviours, conscience, values, rules of conduct, etc.