Yes I see what you mean, but I dont recognise it, in my own understanding of transcendence. For me transcendence is a process of accessing an interdimensional reality, or eternity present in the here and now. It doesn't contain meanings, these are known in the personal self, but are interpretations. It seems as I delve into this issue that what I consider transcendent is what you and perhaps the PMs call the immanent. And what you consider immanence is what is to me transcendence.

This can be explained by your refering to what is understood as an exoteric understanding of transcendence. While I am not considering that, but rather considering an esoteric transcendence which appears to equate with your immanence. Which is as I explained the authentic transcendent in the mystical traditions, which only the initiated were to work with.

So the immanence of PM is the equivalence of the esoteric transcendence In the mystical traditions.

Things get left behind in some sense, but I am unsure I can see the future rather than walking a razor's edge of future-oriented present competence. The more I think about it, the more I seem to live in an endless moment, more than the stretch that Husserl's extended present implies. The easiest example should be a melody, I guess (though even this is misleading because it's not as if anything is happening in a melody that isn't always supposed to be happening), especially a melody that one is familiar with. But here I feel like there are all sorts of little non-passive future intrusions of what's to come as well

Have you tried meditation? I have found it most beneficial in developing the finer mental faculties for the contemplation of such ideas regarding the self.

Immanence sets the logical meaning (what you call the "ideal") outside the question of time. It understood to be infinite

So how is this not transcendence?

Thankyou, I will repeat the quote of Master Dogen for it's crystal clear insight, which is apt for this juncture. It is one of my favourite proverbs.

“Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment."

Like the appearance of a precise reflection of the moon in a dewdrop, indeed many millions of them on a dewy hillside and the evocation of walking through that light, in that still quiet night, with a clear mind.
Such things happen every moment in nature, while we lumbering apes(by contrast) labour over how we as a group condition each other's thoughts and nature, I ask you!

Anyway I would point out to philosophers that they can't presume many things about nature which they do every day, unthinkingly. For even if they can come up with systems which describe accurately how things in the world operate, it is only in the world of appearances. Appearances which are likely only a tiny fraction or slither of what is going in the here and now. Developing an insight into what we do not know and cannot presume to be the case is a powerful tool in allowing subtle insights in wisdom to reflect on that dew drop and flicker through that still still mind.

Yes agreed, I was addressing you rather than StreetlightX because there doesn't appear to be any point in addressing him personally. Claims that imply that the world, the universe, reality, or existence can now be made sense of simply through Chitta Chatta of the mind in isolation suggest a naivety, which I would point out. It must be comfortable in that cloister.

It's true that the universe can be made sense of; insofar as rational, discursive accounts and explanations can be given of it. But there remain aspects of human life, many of which are the most important to us, which cannot be explained in this way. The notion that some things must remain mysterious does not offend me or make we want to reject them in accordance with a demand that all must be explainable. On the contrary I feel happy on account of that.

I agree, but it seems to me that the basis or ground of our existence(the universe) here and now is beyond us at this time, due to our limitations(confined within this particular evolution we find ourselves in), or because it is somehow hidden, disguised, or veiled. It might be easy to understand, even to manipulate, but we are none the wiser, it's like we are the blind leading the blind.

An alien, or higher being could come along and tell us the answer and we might say well I never, it's so simple, but we just didnt see it, why were we so blind?

That's ok, it is like a different language I expect.

In a knutshell I was saying that thinking about it doesn't give us an answer, the thoughts just chase their own tails and that mysticism has been grappling with this issue and developing answers independently of western thought for millennia. Perhaps a crossover would yeald a more rounded solution.

I can't communicate in the language of the post moderns, if I can find time perhaps I will read a bit, it looks interesting.

Perhaps there are parallels which can be drawn between mysticism and PM, to square the circle so to speak.

He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere"

StreetlightX

You see this is a mistaken quest, the transcendent is the immanent in the eye of the mystic. Wherever one approaches or suspects the transcendent, or the transcendental one is mistaken and yet that same approach and suspicion is to and is of oneself, (oneself needn't have gone out to look in the first place, for the gaol, the aim was already here and know).The mystic squares the circle by realising that his/her mind only sees/knows that which leads/looks away from the immanent, the transcendent is mistakenly thought to be out there and one might see it and know it, or never attain it or understand it. But it and the immanent are one in one, in the self and not in the purview of the mind, but the whole self.

I can understand how this might be problematic in philosophy.

Anyway going back to your question, a notion of self is a mental construct, the self which concerns the mystic is the being in which we have our being, in which we have our mind and it's contents. It is understood that the mind cannot access this being, as the mind only looks out from it. Instead the mind is stilled, bypassed, schooled in receiving inspiration through contemplation and living practice. Methodology for this practice is well documented in various religious and mystical traditions. The goal is to develop a synthesis between body spirit and mind, resulting in the transmutation, or in ocassion transfiguration of the self.

I don't know if this can be parsed philosophically(logically), I would have to ask a philosopher?

I suppose what I'm saying is that in such areas of philosophy, philosophers are trying to figure out things about our being and nature and coming up with these philosophies, which are aping what has been explored and practiced for a long time by Mystics who may be well versed, but in a different metaphorical language.

That the authentic understanding and use of the transcendent is in a personal enquiry within oneself, as was pointed out by Metaphysician undercover a few posts back. So it is a fallacy to regard the transcendent as anything other than immanent, as something external, or not of this world.

Again, you're only arguing against the religious caricature of the transcendent, as it was used to exploit people.

To address it as it was originally conceived and the way it is is lived you would be required to study its use in mysticism. As it was only the initiated in the religions who actually contemplated it and saw past the caricature.

If anything, the insistence on immanence means that the universe can indeed be made sense of; that sense is engendered within the universe, and we don't have to gape like dead fish out of the water after the unnamable, the unknowable, and the inconceivable.

In mysticism the contemplation of the transcendent is not a gaping at the unreachable. This is a perversion of religion, actually it is a contemplation practice used to focus the mind on a constant, an ideal. The intellection involved in mysticism regarding the transcendent (including the unnamable, the unknowable and the inconceivable etc) is likewise a practice of contemplation on an ideal, which one shapes oneself conceptually, for the purposes of the process of the transfiguration of the self.

I can't speak for the transcendent in philosophy much, as I am not a philosopher, but it appears to be a caricature of the transcendent handed down to us by religion.

You say that the universe can be made sense of, but its ground remains veiled from us(by the nature of our evolutionary inheritance, our bodies). How would we peek beyond that veil, from here?

So I'm thinking it is something in our being and a unity. More specifically something to do with our conscious experience.

Sounds like the Hindu "atman", atman is that bit of Brahman in each being.

From wiki;
In Hinduism, Brahman (/brəhmən/; ब्रह्मन्) connotes the highest Universal Principle, the Ultimate Reality in the universe.[1][2][3] In major schools of Hindu philosophy it is the material, efficient, formal and final cause of all that exists.[2][4][5] It is the pervasive, genderless, infinite, eternal truth and bliss which does not change, yet is the cause of all changes.[1][6][7] Brahman as a metaphysical concept is the single binding unity behind the diversity in all that exists in the universe.[1][8]

For me "the world" is a realm which consists of where we find ourselves on the ocassion of our birth, including the interactive involvement in that world of the biosphere of biological beings we are a member of. This includes all that we access through our bodies including the universe and the ideas we have.

I define it this way because it limits the world to what we encounter as incarnate beings. Thus allowing a myriad of other realms and things etc that may exist and which may constitute or interact with this world, but which we are not aware of as not being a part of this world, but due to our lack of capacity, or for some other reason, are veiled from us.

In my model my body is a result of many monads cooperating with my single monad to act out my being. Also I am cooperating with other single monads to act out the being of our planet, for example.

It all sounds good to me, but does he say what a monad is? All we can see is a myriad of colours and shapes and ideas, we can't actually see a monad, subjectively.

My point about the "transcendent camps" (whether pre-modern religions and traditions or modern consumerism) is to do with the motivations and understanding of the word

Yes I am aware of these misgivings, I did point out that I am aware of the problems brought about by religions. I don't really want to get into a discussion of religion because that is a different issue than what is being discussed here. But it is partly relevant in that it has supplied us with a tradition of the transcendent to work with.

Your criticisms are relevant concerns, but merely point out the social and political issues around any product or goal which is to be desired in the human condition, but which can be restricted and controlled by an elite. Also if it, the transcendent, as the desired goal were absent, then it would be replaced by something else, because as I pointed out, this is an issue about politics and control of the society. This also applies in regard of the personal self and personal greed, or desires. The goal of transcendent here is simply a tool employed in ones life to control, or passify greed and desires, or to act as an excuse to indulge them and if it were absent, it would be replaced by something else.

To address the transcendent absent religion one should consider humanity before religion, or the origin in society of ascetics and their teaching, which resulted in the origin of religions. Simply, people on the event of the development of intellect began to think philosophically about their predicament. Naturally this brought them to questions of our origin, purpose and whether there are agencies behind the appearance of this world. Thus the birth of mysticism and philosophy. These are contemplations and can be carried on in isolation of ones physical life. However they can be used as an philosophy of action in the world and in the case of the ascetic Jesus, can be viewed as teachings in practical and constructive strategies in lifestyles.

It is a mistake to consider that transcendent insight is in any way in opposition or conflict with pragmatic, scientific, or down to earth practical living. It is not and it's message is simply to enable one to extend ones view of our directions and goals a little further and provide a value in seeking to follow that course. For example, for humanity to seek to live in harmony with the biosphere, manage the ecosystem and develop long term stable cultures within humanity to secure our long term survival and gradual expansion beyond the planet(which is vulnerable to meteorite destruction).

Now if you imagine one of the first early humans to really contemplate their predicament, to really do some philosophising. I would not be surprised if they had come up with a conclusion similar to this example I have just given. It is not mysterious, profound, unattainable. But it does require an effective cooperation between the members of our society at large.

This is what brings me into conflict with Wayfarer all the time, despite our occasional agreements and shared interest in the importance on meaning. He thinks meaning must be granted by the transcendent. I say there is no meaninglessness, so there is no work for the transcendent to do. There are those who are depressed, anxious or despairing, but those are instances of meaningful lives, who find themselves in some unethical situation. A worldly change is what they need (it could even be a belief the transcendent), so they realise their meaning/end the horrible state that's haunting them.

There is no necessity for a conflict here, as I said transcendent insight is in alignment with constructive practical living. I do not see Wayfarer falling into the religious cliches regarding the transcendent, although his stance is towards the other end of the spectrum from your own.

'The burden of self-hood'

This is interesting, so beings which had self awareness, an awareness of their own actions and that there is an alternative to their conditioned, or genetic actions, which they now have a choice to take. However a while after taking that alternative course of action, they find themselves in a pickle and think how did that happen, where did I go wrong. Was that the right course of action? was it a bad course of action? What course of action should I take now? Now that I have forgotten what my original course was? Am I now lost? Have I lost my way back to the garden of Eden? Help!

You have not addressed the issue presented in the allegory of the
garden of Eden. This is the cornerstone of the religious narrative. Essentially, humanity left the garden of Eden when they developed intellect. This gave them the option (intelligence)of imagining and then acting on self indulgent, destructive and evil acts. It is the development of this capacity in humans which resulted in the problem of good and evil and an imbalance in nature(on this planet). Before this, point of crisis, all beings in the biosphere were arranged into evolutionary niches, which, while there was some imbalance, change and adaptation, was generally in balance.

Yes the body has a consciousness of its own, it is an animal, an organism. You are a multi-layered being.

A lack of egoism or of being a bigot does not equal humility, humility is about something else. A good philosopher is one who simply considers all ideas and approaches as approaches to be developed, revised, questioned and seeks healthy balanced debate.

Humility is (apart from the humility which is a result of conditioning, mental trauma, or disease) an outlook, approach, technique in self development, or spirituality. A tool which some people may recommend egotists to practice to escape their plight. But which is also utilised in mysticism in exploring, or developing the self.

Jim Morrison for surrealism perhaps. We each have our favourite artists, or musicians. I think that particularly in the case of music it is the music which grabbed us most during our formative years. Bob Dylan passed me by at the time, but I've discovered an appreciation in later years. For me it was Neil Young, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie( in that order). Although Bob Marley was always there in the background and the depth of feeling and meaning in his Redemption Song is always moving to hear for me.

Opinion of Bob Dylan is divided for cultural reasons which occurred at the time of his rise in the folk movement. But for whatever reasons he became, or was perceived as, the most influential artist in music in the late 20th century, this cannot be denied.

That building never looks like it could have been pretty.

Yes it's an industrial hangover in the marina of my local town, Ipswich. The development of the marina was stopped in its tracks in 2008, a nod to the disgraceful behaviour of investment bankers.

You should see the building next door, an even better metaphor for the vacuous nature of Trump.


It's known as the skeleton, or wine rack tower.

It seems at times that humanity is superfluous, it is the relentless march of entropy towards heat death which is the be all and end all.

I would say though, that I am not in favour of personal attacks, we are all entitled to our personal view.

The issue it can only ever define itself in biological and economic terms. In the mythos of transcendent freedom and immortality, the culmination is a seeking of biology and economics; if only we had the resources, the biology, to exist forever and ever and ever.

Yes, but that doesn't negate the transcendent, it is merely a comment on the manifest world we inhabit. The transcendent nature of humanity is such that people who realise it will work towards the gradual direction, or husbandry of manifest material, or biology, in the direction of the physical circumstances in which,what are now, transcendent ideals become manifest in the world. A process which will continue in an ongoing process of elevating( in terms of density, or concrete state) the emanation of vibrational state of matter. Thus we have an overarching mythos encompassing the whole of creation in an ethos of progress toward the divine. A deeply subtle, enriching philosophy of life which provides the psychological sustenance for a healthy society(I am well aware of the issues presented by organised religion).

I don't mean this in the crass sense of our bodies or earthly possessions, but rather in the sense of our presence. If only we existed in a way that gave us more and more all the time into perpetuity. Endless resources such that our existence would extend into perpetuity without cost or hitting limits.

This is merely the response in our being of being confined within the rigid parameters of the material world we find ourselves in. A condition which is accentuated by the restlessness of human behaviour. If we found ourselves in a less rigid and more fluid, or ethereal world things would be quite different.

The modern world's endless quest for economic growth is, quite literally, the mythos of freedom and immortality transplanted into the world. Like it pre-modern counterparts, it views the goal of existence to endless get more, to live forever, to be free of any Malthusian limits. In neither transcendent camp does anyone have the respect or self-awareness to say: "That's enough. I've obtained all I need. It's okay for me end."

Along with Wayfarer, I agree with the first two sentences in this paragraph. But your comment on the "transcendent camp", is incorrect. I know this, because I have personally affirmed "That's enough. I've obtained all I need. it's okay for me end". Many people who have embraced and embodied the transcendent have made this affirmation in their own way. One is made whole, repleat and is in the right frame of mind to act constructively in the progress of the humanity and the biosphere.

Without such insight all humanity is going to produce is a race of mindless Donald Trumps gallivanting around the universe, self destructing at any opportunity. And we would be back to square one. The transcendent allows and enables real progress.

I expect they are looking for a candidate who has had a significant impact on culture and Dylan could well be the most influential poet of the last century. Interestingly he is only the second person to be awarded a Nobel prize and an Oscar, the other person was George Bernard Shaw.

It isn't the words themselves which are remarkable, although it is good poetry, it is the performance, performance art. Some of the most highly regarded poets are enjoyed reading out their own poetry as performance art, Dylan Thomas comes to mind, or T S Elliot. It is the atmosphere, the mood that is created, a living interactive performance.

I visited Trump tower recently

Trump has just been described as an octopus by one of his victims, ha ha!

How much Trump had to do with the design, don't know. I would be very surprised if he had much at all to do with it. The tastes of the people who buy architect's services is often very at odds with the much more refined tastes of the designer. I doubt if most rich people could come up with a good building design if their lives depended on it. It isn't that they are untalented, it's just that most of them have pedestrian, bourgeois sensibilities suitable for the business world--that's how they got rich (if they didn't inherit it) and that's why they hire inspired architects.

Exactly, someone like Trump will have appalling taste. I expect that his brief for the architect was I want something striking and taller than everything around it, to look bigger and better. That would have been his entire input, well apart from focussing on the Super kingsize bed and gold taps in his penthouse.

You see people being leeches. So you get sick and tired of this - you crack the whip on them - you treat them as expendables as well, because you know that if you don't, sooner or later they themselves will betray you and screw you u

Machiavelli.

A few more cartoons, all about Blair, in the first one he is the glove puppet.

It's interesting that PC goes out the window in regard of the prophet. To be replaced with fear of death, or war. It's the one subject I wouldn't depict in a cartoon, whilst being the one most enticing.

I will give this schema more thought, my own position might be orthogonal to this. In that I see material extension as primary here and time is a peculiarity of its expresssion and development(causality etc). This is because we are in a state of incarnation within a material realm, with strict rules, or conventions of causality. However that in eternity material is of less importance and is far more malleable similarly with time. So an eternal state of being experiences a pregnant moment, of eternal duration. It's difficult to explain, but there is duration without time, wherein time is an ornament, or quality of something being considered, experienced, or expressed.

Not necessarily, I was talking only of the physical world in that comment. Also by "world" I mean what we find when we are born, a physical realm, one which can be experienced in many ways, this does not require an explanation of its existence. So what science is doing I suppose is describing what we find and how what we experience seems to be happening.

The way the physical world (including our bodies) behaves, as science has described in great detail, is as a fully integrated cohesive material realm, which unswervingly adheres to the processes described by science as spacetime, gravity, mass, spin, motion etc. However, acknowledging this, or disputing aspects of it doesn't address the question in the OP. That from the stand point of our being, it could simply be a world we experience due to a tuning in, or orientation of our being. Whereas it might be the case that the orientation of our being could be altered, or adjusted resulting in our experiencing an entirely seperate world, or worlds, rather like our experience of being in another world when dreaming, is an alteration in some way of our experience of being in a realm.

I know that a dream is illogical, surreal and we wake from it. But it is not proposed that a dream is equivalent to our world, only that it is an illustration of our being experiencing a different realm, which seems entirely real during that experience. This being the case, it is quite natural to consider that upon death, or attaining enlightenment, we would experience a change in the orientation of our being equivalent to switching channels into another real world, heaven, or a newly born baby, for example. That this real world we know, is just one channel, or frequency and our being, as a receiver could simply be tuned in to another channel, if one could find and operate the switch.

I don't know if I could be described as a Stoic, but I do contemplate the idea of aligning my will with the will of God. Although I don't hold a belief in God, I am not a believer, I do consider that there is something equivalent to the will of God in nature and myself which I am contemplating. But also that in a sense I am god (in my own life) and I am therefore aligning my will with the will of my being. I have also affirmed thy will not mine be done. While also striving in a creative sense to build myself anew in the direction and nature I seek.

I'm not too sure what you mean by "two parallel evolutions" Punshhh, are you thinking of something like cultural vs natural evolution?

I mean the evolutions of the spirit(soul) and the body(world).

Yes, I don't use the idea of black boxes myself. I prefer a scenario where there is some direct realism, but rather than boxes, veils, which in various ways obscure reality on ocassion.

Thanks, I will find one of Tony Blair. I like your portraits, they have a solidity and depth about them.

I was a cartoonist for a couple of years about 2003/4, I was so incensed by Blair and Bush going into Iraq etc that I turned to satire. These are a couple I fished out the other day, the G8 conference failing to come to any agreement over climate change and Gordon Brown floundering around like Tommy Cooper(the comedian), Blair is represented by the cobra.