Nice!

Reminds me of the work of Savador Dali.

Yes, the final work of art is one's self. Yes the realisation that all is art, or what someone says is art was a coming of age. Before this point I had struggled for years to get to the bottom of art, to understand the philosophy of art. Even to find the philosophy of art, if it was out there somewhere. All I found were historical, or sociocultural comment. Perhaps the most fruitful route was to look at the art itself, ignore the critics and see it's meaning, quite a pilgrimage.

Now I know and understand art, it is a joy, in all its guises* and history. I will be going to view the Abstract Expressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy in a few weeks, I can't wait. Some nice Pollock and Rothko to dwell on.

* unfortunately I do have a pet hate in the guise of degenerative Brit Art. But I see very little merit, I blame it on the ex hippy lecturers that frequented the art schools in the 80's.

Second the above. I went to some of the Science and Nonduality (SAND) conferences in California - some of the speakers were genuine, but there was a lot of pseudo-mystical quantum woo being put about.

Yes and there are many false prophets these days. There was less of this in the past when the mystical traditions were cloistered.

I would point out here and in reference to the Eckhart quotes each being dwells in and expresses a reality in measure to their condition of evolutionary development*. So in a sense, it matters little what they say, provided they don't hinder others. So there may be two people in the same place talking the same words, of differing evolutionary positions, for whom their experience and meaning differs by orders of magnitude.

Also there may be people of high evolutionary development, true Mystics, living an ordinary life as an ignorant farmer or washer woman.

* by evolutionary development, I am referring to the development of the soul ( for want of a better word)

But as Rumi says, there would be no fool's gold if there were no gold

Nice quote.

It is the conception of the moment as a series of nows which is incorrect. From my perspective it is one continuous period, continuous in an eternal realm in which our being is present, as a soul or spirit(or mind, or the like), but due to us inhabiting a physical body we experience what seems to be a brief moment, dictated by the chemical action of the atoms in our environment(including our brains). So I am positing an underlying eternal time, which we can only access through the mechanisms of the physical body and the environment it is evolved to experience.

I do think that for animals and uneducated tribal people the moment is eternal, they don't or only rarely intellectually divide or limit their moments, there is just now, which is very extensive.

I don't think we can view the moment as a series of brief moments as ticks on an atomic clock, which is in tune with all other atomic clocks, or the like. This is because as time (as we experience it) is actually a result of chemical reactions and atomic activity in the physical material of our world. This is an organic progression, in which there is some small variation in the progression of time, also that events happening closer, or farther distant from the observer are experienced with a delay, due to the effects having variations in delay.
Also our brain is rigged to create the perception of a greater breadth of moment for better interaction in our environment, which is why I used the phrase "holism". This holism my be artificially constructed by a divine process to mirror a breadth of moment in the experience of the soul or spirit in the eternal moment in another parallel realm, as I suggested at the top.

And I haven't said anything about knowing or experiencing the transcendent, because both notions are incoherent. There is no transcendent apart from the immanent, and that is precisely Hegel's point

To know or experience the transcendent might be rationally incoherent. But this does not mean that both don't happen in the life of a mystic. In humanity's ignorance a bit of rational thought does not change, or dictate events or facts on the ground.

I would agree though that the transcendent is in the immanent. There may be processes in revelation in which a being is caught up in the transcendent and sees the unseeable.

It sounds like you've got something good going on. I can't help but interpret this "A" and "B" as names for different mental states. I don't believe in squircles, but I love the word. I do of course know some beautiful math. The real numbers are a black and seamless sea, and also an "uncountable" infinity. Unlike the rational numbers, we can't print them out one by one or line them up. It's beautiful to me that such psychedelic and "drippy" numbers get called the "reals." The rationals are shiny and crystalline. The reals are like wet, black smoke

Yes A and B are different brain states, there may be some difference other than the fact that one is internally directed and the other externally, but the science hasn't been developed into being yet and I expect it is some way off. But I fully expect to find that there is an organ in the brain which uncannily enables transcendence. You are free to sculpt yourself, to have two sides to your coin. Even to embrace spuircles(surely a romantic would do that?). You are free to develop the conceptual tooling to take you to where you want to be. Now there's a question.

The divine reals, I wonder if the rules of math can be bent squared, why would they be constrained, who in their right mind would do that, if they had the freedom to do otherwise?

But this is just some guy's interpretation and synthesis of his favorite texts in the largely emotional and sensual context of his experience

Yes, we each take what we find around us in terms of concept, to weave into our "coat of many colours".

I would point out that along with the perspective of seeing the silence, the stillness, negating ones thoughts and feelings which is a sort of feminine, or negative technique. There is also a masculine or positive technique in which there is the presence of deities, gods, sensual stimulation, a transfiguration of thoughts and feelings and a sense of presence. This for me is embodied in Hinduism and the approach of silence and stillness is embodied in Buddhism.

No I don't see you as someone who experiences side B. I was trying to explain the distinction between externally orientated being and internally orientated being. I know that I keep appealing to mystical practice as does Wayfarer, this appears to be because we approach this from an Eastern perspective.
Anyway, I will change my approach now that I have made the point about the route of mystical practice. Suffice it to say that I do consider the body (also the mental body) as an apparatus which one would seek to operate correctly.

I don't wish to negate your approach as I am of the opinion that there are people among any culture who experience mystical awakening of all kinds through the prism of the culture and knowledge they find themselves in and in each culture mystics or prophets emerge and leave a body of work in attempt to convey, or teach their experiences.

In the Satre quote he mentions along with yourself facing existence face to face. This is described by some as facing God face to face. This contemplation is a kind of meditation, communion which enables one to shed the shackles of cultural conditioning and the like, in the light and knowledge of this stance. I use this stance in contemplation of divine geometry such as squircles( giggle) transcendent states and techniques, along with a kind of personal subjective preening, or sorting and refining of conceptual architecture in the self. There is also a clear division, or membrane between side A and B, here, although the activity bridges this divide and there is also a process of conceptual refraction across the membrane enabling more subtle conceptual sculpting.

It looks as though you are up to similar things, but in a more "heretic" way.

I concur with Wayfarer on this point, that what mysticism(the practice) is concerned with is a different way of seeing, of thinking, experiencing, the side of ourselves which is on the other side of the coin(side A)if one considers that a normal person only lives on the one side(sideB). For the practicing mystic a whole world opens up as extensive as side B, but is both different and the same, from another perspective, even a kind of rebirth.

. Well it is precisely Voegelin's point that there is something which cannot be known - which will forever exceed the human grasp, even though it can be experienced and encountered, but it can never become object - the known.

It strikes me that this is speculation on Voegelin's part. How do we know that the human mind, or body is not designed to experience transcendence and how can we conclude that an experience cannot be known. Transcendent experiences which can be known and recollected cannot be understood, perhaps, but that is different from knowledge of them. I know this because I have had such experiences, such that cannot be understood, or easily conveyed and may perhaps only be known via experience. But I do know the experience I had and recollect it and attempt to creatively convey the experience.

Yes, I agree with this. My point is that most animals communicate, often in complex ways. Also they can be very good at learning and understanding of aspects of their environment, or their evolutionary niche and communicating it. People have improved on this by adding a level of conscious conceptual thought, with a consequent subtly complex language. But we have not progressed far from our supposedly unconscious relations in the biosphere.

Note that the deity is sitting upon the thousand petal lotus representing the activated crown chakra.

There is experiential learning and knowing, in which the mind is a bystander looking on.
You know the laughing thing, well it's the same with art, suddenly everything is art and you have to restructure what art means from a position of knowledge, aware of the futile struggling you were doing before the revelation, veiled in ignorance.

The mystical revelation is like this, one sees what is revealed, it has meaning, alters and adds to your being. There are square circles by the way(chuckle).

Yes, I laughed too! Like a laughing Bhudda, indeed I laughed for years, but I had to restrain myself to avoid cramp, or lock jaw;)

Close up.

The mirage at Holkam beach Norfolk UK

Yes, I know it is a difficult thing to think about. The way I think about it is that there is space in the moment, of a second or two, rather like the feeling of three dimensional space around us. We experience many events happening around us in this space, things may happen symultaniously, but appear to us to happen at slightly different times and visa versa. There is a breadth to the moment, with a second or two of past and future appearing to us as now. I know that our body enables us to experience this through complex processes. But the moment I am thinking about is a mental thing and considers a reality in which mind, or soul is more real than the external world.

Yes we are probably using mysticism in different ways. I was going to make this distinction at the beginning of the thread, but have had a busy weekend. There are two kinds of mysticism to point out here, there are the folk who are creatively embracing mysticism as a concept like yourself. I am with you as creativity is one of my great passions. Also there is mysticism as a spiritual way of life. Which is a technical exercise like yoga or something.

This distinction should clear up the differing points presented.

As I say, I am with you in your approach, for me I have followed a Grail quest in the field of art and aesthetics(I have no formal training in philosophical aesthetics), creativity. Along with heroic efforts in the development of creative conceptual architecture.

hi Kenhinds, thankyou and please do contribute, I am always interested in logical approaches in mysticism.

Yes I agree.
Also the western society glibly rushes over the cliff of climate change and destruction of the ecosystem like lemmings.

Although this issue was always going to be faced somewhere down the line, it could have been tackled in a less reckless way.

Forgive my interjection here. I want to point out that there is an important process which is necessary to undertake before one can make significant progress in mysticism. It is at the forefront in all mystical schools in some form or other and there is an important reason for it and many casualties along the road of people who have not performed it successfully in their quest. It is the subjugation of the ego.

Now I agree it can theoretically be achieved in the heroic sense, but this is a high wire act while wearing a blindfold and I am not aware that it has been achieved by anyone. I have tread this wire on ocassion, but only in controlled circumstances. The romantic cannot go forth without taking their body with them and the body is a precisely developed instrument, unless the ego respects this the ego is working against the processes the body is engaged in.

Normally the aspirant goes through a period of purification and the exercising and development of humility in order to tame the ego. Once it is tamed and in a sense wearing the correct harness, it can again exercise its passions. Without the metaphorical harness, it is blindfolded, disfunctional, without sight and will injure itself, it's goal and its environment.

In mysticism there is a process and realisation that one becomes God. What this means and refers to is a state of repose(on multiple levels) in the aspirant whereby one realises one's role in the world as a creative agent, one's alignment in terms goals or motivations with what one estimates is the will of God, and ones' independence, or freedom from the animal, or egotistical desires and conceit. This could also be described in terms of the person reaching a state of purification, in which one is prepared, or ready for a union with God, or a bride of God.

There are many differing schools, routes and interetations of this process, but essentially it is the same process with the same goal. Also I have greatly simplified(perhaps over simplified) it in my description.

There is also the approach in which God is taken out of the equation, again the goal is the same, but simply lacks the component of reverence. The goal is the same in that the constructive or benevolent role of humanity in the biosphere is equivalent in terms of one's actions in the physical world.

I watched a nature programme recently in which tapping sounds had been detected being made by aphids. A kind of morse code, or something more like a language perhaps.

It is curious how there seems to be an apparatus, or means within us to follow this path, to seek this end. Or is it just the human mind which once developed found solace in such areas of contemplation. The ape that thought of God, condemning all who followed to a longing for more, for escape.

Semiosis2, Topos2, I like the sense of depth, Inspired

I don't see this. A symphony: that can be present to us as a whole. A drama. A novel. The ways of remembering and anticipating presented to us in novels, from Flaubert to Toni Morrison. I suppose I disagree with the distinction you make in the op:

Yes I see this and don't disagree, however we can distinguish the brief moment of passing time, it's a reality and it is also clear that the moment we experienced a couple of seconds ago has past, it ceases to pass and is frozen as a historical record, perhaps facilitated by our memories.

I collect antiques, these antiques are present with me know in that moment, they also bear the marks of a checkered past, which they bring with them. It is by analogy like the way the light from a lighthouse swings around lighting the horizon in a great arc. This moment containing all the universe we experience is contained in that beam of light, of illumination. But surely our experience of this beam of light, of nowness, is a restricted experience, one dictated by the material universe that we find ourselves in. Like a two dimensional being not being able to experience the three dimensional reality of a piece of paper but confined to that two dimensional surface.

There might well be other beams of light (now) out there, indeed many, inhabiting the same space, external to our spacetime. They might be as pages in a book in another dimension in an eternity of time, moments.

Biology is history, it seems rich enough to me to be the foundation of 'fundamental parts of our being', although I don't mean we can explain culture from biology. From biological beginnings we can imagine time as Proust or Hawking or Shostakovich imagines time: once we do this imagining, it's available to us at any given, ahm, moment, isn't it?

Yes, I don't disagree (this is though an explorative exercise). What you describe here is what I suggested, a full or pregnant moment, nowness, generated by our bodies, our brain, our mind, a simulation. It implies a minutely brief moment of time passing with scientific precision on the atomic scale, on the nano scale.

The alternative surely, is a very brief present though, with any sense of a moment of a longer duration, being some kind of simulation performed by our minds, or brain.

Presentism might be a good place to start, but what I've seen of it it may be a bit clunky. The jist is the same I think.

Thankyou, very evocative. I do think that this subject may be beyond us in a rational sense. But I expect eventually there will be a science which will become to understand such things.

I am thinking of the reality or truth of the situation we find ourselves in, so this is more of an exploration of that or what we can, or can't, say about it. Rather than a constructed argument. I can try to define the terms, but I am very busy today, it will have to be later.

So time is like a one-way street? We travel what's already there

I don't know, as I see it the travelling through time is part of the world we find ourselves in, an aspect of the spacetime. So in a sense time, the temporal, may be a quality of a domain or realm found in eternity, or manifest in some way. But when we are not present in a realm, time might just be a now, with no travelling. Perhaps some kind of transcendent state.

Yes, but only in a relation or reference to the temporal world we are living in. I don't see a strict distinction between the eternal and the temporal, rather that the temporal is entertained by the eternal, a construct, rather like the sensible world is a construct.

Thankyou for your input on this, but rather than derail the thread I have started another thread about the eternal moment and would welcome your input. As I would like to explore this further.

Do you understand that the present exists as a boundary between the future and the past? But since we are existing in the present, yet still sensing things in the past, then don't you think that we are also in some way experiencing the future as well? Is your mind not in the future, all the time and this is what accounts for awareness? Your mind prepares you for what may occur in the distant future, as well as what is imminent and possible, in the immediate future.

Interesting, I don't generally see it this way, rather I consider the eternal moment, rather than a narrow boundary. That we experience a narrow present due to restrictions imposed on us due to incarnation in the place in which we dwell. The details of our dwelling place I don't take a lot of interest in, as the science to understand it has not been done yet. Yes I do think we are experiencing the future in the present, along with the past and that my mind is preparing me for what may occur.

So the point is, that you are not sensing the future at all, yet you know an awful lot about the future. Where does this information concerning the future come from if not from the future itself, just like information about the past comes from the past? So your mind must actually be in the future to be receiving information from the future, in order that you can know about the future.

Yes, but as I say, this all happens in the moment, the future and the past are in some sense present in the moment and this is where a holism of being occurs.

You might wonder, if my mind is in the future, why can't I see, touch, or otherwise sense, the future objects. But that would be impossible, because sensible objects don't exist prior to the present, they only come into existence as time passes, at the present. It must be the case that sensible objects only come into existence at the present, because human beings have the capacity to make random changes to sensible objects at any moment of the present. So your mind is actually in the future, and it can't see any physical objects there, because they don't exist there, but your mind has the capacity to move and change physical objects as they come into being at the present, because it is prior to them, in the future.

I am not sure of the extent that you consider the momentary generation and dissolution of the objects of sensory experience. Or that they have some kind of longevity?
For me these objects are in a sense eternally present with me in the moment.

Art with a capital A is what was regarded as the loftiest kind of artistic appreciation by the artistic establishment, such as the Royal Society of Artists. This was principally with reference to painting and sculpture, with a pinnacle in the area of oil paint, bronze or marble.

It is now a rather outdated distinction following the rise of modern and post modern art and the creative arts. So now all forms of artistic expression are equal. Well it's supposed to be equal, but it isn't, rather it has been replaced by another establishment which embraces post modern art etc and the creative arts, but still picks and chooses a new high art by predudice of various kinds.

Anyway, the distinction is rather meaningless now, other than in reference to historical art and periods.

Oh I forgot to mention that in the art and antique market Fine Art is high quality, in terms of artistic and creative appraisal, works of monetary value.

For me music is effective in enhancing the emotions, or for setting a mood. For example while cooking, driving, painting, I will put on a piece of music which I played over and over during a meaningful point in my life and the mood, or feeling will be evoked. Yesterday I heard a piece of music on the radio which I haven't heard for many years, it marked an important emotional event in my childhood, the experience flooded back even before my mind realised what was going on. It was as though time had stood still.

This is an important piece of music for me Allegri Miserere, performed by Tallis Scholars.

http://youtu.be/YDOENZediM8

The singularity hypothesis is pretty shaky these days. Likewise an existing infinity. But I agree we cannot claim that the universe is not eternal, certainly in the absence of its secrets.

Regarding a personal God, the case seems to rest more on establishing an eternal, supernatural, uncaused origin. I agree it is quite a leap to end up with a personal thinking God, or the like.

But there are other theories which support such a thing, more directly.

Regarding first cause, I think this can only be considered in abstraction, as in application to the universe, the origin might well not make sense to us, be incomprehensible, or imperceptible.

It is reasonable to consider that the universe is not eternal, we can see around us that the known universe began to exist. I know that this a vague and can't be proven either way. Perhaps the argument could be refined to "the known universe", "our world" or something.

Anyway it is reasonable to group the universe in with things which began to exist.

Regarding having a cause, likewise all we can detect has a cause, although it can't be proven.

Regarding the "agent causation" of a god, yes it is taking the rational on to thin ice, it is a quite rational conclusion in other circumstances. In this case though it only hinges on the conclusion of a first cause, which might not require agent causation, or a mind.

I can't see the contradiction though.

Ok, I've yet to see your refutation of the original though, i.e. "All things that begin to exist have a cause"

Eternal things don't begin to exist, but do(perhaps) exist.

How is something that comes to us in the future, from some other source (Presuming that you don't assume that all things that exist to us are in the past)?