There is the matter of Paul being a witness. Whether he can "see" you and be present or not, he can still "hear" of the suffering that comes from striving together in "one spirit" and "one mind."

Reading that call to be "physiological" is not presented as something that is given upon desiring it. The instinctual quality he desires is not a simple result of removing certain impediments. He kept referring to all this work that had to be done. I think he was sincere in calling for a science. I don't know what he meant by that.

Being witnessed as the one who suffers is the point Paul is making here. The idea that steadfast faith will be recognized by someone (even more important than Paul) who could notice the effort is combined with observing that "opponents" will be destroyed by seeking to destroy you who stands firm. Since everybody invited to the party will suffer, the emphasis upon who will benefit or not becomes the critical question.

I did not mean to impute any purpose or motive be assigned to you for asking the question. I don't understand what love is. I am on board with the different ways that display what it is not.

Kierkegaard and Krishnamurti take the same approach by saying what love is not. That is a country mile from saying they agree with each other.

However one tries to frame it as an idea, our lives are bound up with our capacity to love or not. I could start with that and stop with that recognition without understanding much else.

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If it was a matter of something that could be explained like a purpose or a means to something, you wouldn't have to ask about it.

Pick a lane. Is it your issue or one we all have to pay attention to as the result of your results?

Don't withdraw from your enterprise because others say this or that. Keep going.

Pretty big list.
The personal would be something you need to go forward, in any capacity.

I recommend looking for what interests you as a problem that concerns you personally. Put some skin in the game. That is what these people you are reading did.

Absorb?

The whole thing is pretty darn enormous.
For myself, I am not interested in making the different parts I have worked upon for my own purposes be drawn into a kind of map anyone could use. Earlier versions of myself did do that but my change of view is not a judgement upon myself or anybody else. That would be another map. And saying it that way is also another map. I follow Zhuangzi on this point.
Your results will vary. Scholarship saved my life. I will never betray it.

The question is too large for me to provide a proportional response so I will just make two observations.

In De Anima, Aristotle related being alive to varying capacities to have other things be present to the one who perceives. The range from the limited world of touch to the highest possible capacity of intelligence was related to having what is present becoming actually what was being encountered. There have been many who marked this approach as a break from Plato but I am not convinced. The dialogues that discuss the nuts and bolts of perception don't question the status of actual beings.
Another element in De Anima is the recognition that how one is permitted to have this experience is invisible. It is the withdrawal from experience of the operation as an operation that permits one to perceive the other as other. The bug in the program being reported by others is seen by Aristotle to be a feature.

One of the qualities I appreciate Nietzsche bringing into view is the contrast between Hume and Kant in terms of what they were concerned about. When Hume questioned the limits of what could be said to cause what, he didn't want everybody to run about in a panic that such skepticism meant the end of talking about experience altogether. Hume went on to lay wagers on his billiard games with perfect equanimity.

There are too many interpolations of statements of supposed facts and explorations of motivations to get started. I could be in Narnia for all I can tell.

Religious people invented the Secular.
After centuries of war, the idea that we could agree to disagree was developed. It was adopted in a grudging manner. Nobody proclaimed it as its own place.
The idea is in need of further development.

My responses have not conveyed my intentions very well. Please pardon my penchant for aphoristic observations. I will try a different approach.

I am in full agreement with your thought that what you practice by yourself is closely involved with what may become possible for you and others around you. Disciplines are very personal in that way. The isolation I mentioned before was meant to praise a certain freedom from distraction to pay attention, to notice changes from different attempts at an event, to listen while doing things. In the texts of Zhaungzi, the butcher describing why he is so good at his craft tries to convey some of that connection as a process. On the other hand, the observation is made in the midst of a large argument about what separates maps from the territory. The Taoists opposed the certainty of the Confucians on many levels but also had enough irony to notice when they themselves were doing what they opposed. The privacy of some practices can be acted upon under conditions one does not fully understand. Or even barely at all.

So models serve different purposes. What lets me be open to something that is given if I accept it is not easily comparable to models that serve other purposes. On the other hand, the two kinds of talk must be connected in some way for it to actually bring a new condition into one's life.

The scene reminds me of passages from Zhuangzi where the experiences of skilled people are compared. But the message is too moralistic for that. Someone is arguing for a kind of exchange.

One is alive in a place where things are happening in real time. The singularity of that event can be modeled in various ways. There is much to be gained through comparing the stories with each other.
But this is our only time under the sun. The inner and the outer better have something to do with each other in my generation because that is all I have got.

The 'inner world" is what happens only if we allow it to happen. Unlike operations that happen with other people, our personal experiences have no avenues of escape. Accepting that isolation is a body of work. A person goes through the trouble of paying attention to what is happening to them as they try to do this or that. It is difficult to speak generally about those kinds of choices.Socrates tried to address this problem.

But there are other ways to look at it. Acquiring skill is not just becoming a better dancer. If what I experience shows me what is happening to other people, then the trick that helps me is connected to other events in a manner I don't understand.

The receiver idea is interesting. I don't get how it displaces other ideas. It is not like we are given packages of possible thought. We just try to imagine things as closely as possible to what we experience.

Traditional Culture also has its cruelty. The fun time can't-we-just-all-get-along-vibe works to keep the peace while excluding others from that benefit. Your idea of competition is far removed from where it is happening.

The joy and suffering that comes from the pursuit of achievement is not a zero sum game. It appears as a means to get better. But who is the tutor after a certain point?

Skill comes from having to do things without the proper preparation. One has to make mistakes to start paying attention. No skill appears unless somebody went through the trouble of acquiring it.

From that point of view, the question of why labor got specialized comes more from the deals we have made between ourselves than any preponderance for suffering we might display as a species.

One way or the other, we are thinking while talking about this. I am having trouble understanding the exclusion you are proposing.
Are you qualifying the thinking as only recognizable after some things can be ruled out?
My impression from reading Descartes is that we are stuck with ourselves and have to make the best of our limitations as discovered. It is a lot less explanatory than other approaches.

The interest that prompts one to follow certain lines of thinking is an "ascribing" of a kind. It is not necessarily something adopted as some kind of last word.
We are drawn to many points of view that don't agree with each other and can even indicate an outright conflict regarding outcomes and ideas about obligations.
So a practice called for from someone like Kierkegaard is mixed up with something required in Zhuangzi. If it doesn't shape your choices, the words are pixels on a page.

That is a country mile from supporting race as an essential component of collective experience. But there is nothing in the Syndicalist point of view to resist the celebration of national identity which made joining with the Nazis so easy.

There are Ethiopians who developed a different view but go on, quote something from these fine fellows.

I have read a lot of those text. What are you interested in talking about? It is your dime.

Not using other people as means is easier said than done. As a criterion of decision, one might have to require others to work at something to avoid treating them as an "end" or them becoming subjects of awful people. The model is not self sufficient.

In the Discourse On Method, the enormity of the enterprise is noted where Descartes explained why he decided to publish many works posthumously:

But I decided that I should never content to have them published during my life, for fear that the opposition and controversy which they might arouse, and the reputation which they might possibly bring to me, would cause me to waste time which I plan to use for research. For although it is true that each man is obligated to do as much as he can for the benefit of others, and that to be of no use to anyone is really to be worthless, yet it is also true that our interest should extend beyond the existing time, and that it is well to avoid things which may bring some profit to the living when it is done with the intention of profiting our descendants still more. So I want it to be understood that the little I have learned thus far is a mere nothing compared to what I do not know and yet do not despair of learning. — Rene Descartes

(Sixth Part, page 568 translated by Laurence J Lafleur)

The juxtaposition of humility and confidence is part of the method. The daunting presence of so many unknowns is no reason to stop operating.

Descartes would still state the part that is thinking that it is a self, is the self. — Philosophim

From that point of view, it is the most unavoidable activity. I am the witness to myself that nobody else is. So, how does that work as a limit to anything else?

Descartes follows your reasoning up to the point of noticing being-able-to-think is given as evidence rather an explanation of any kind. It is a proof of God in so far that an awareness of thinking can only be accepted as what we find ourselves doing. The empirical can only appear in the silhouette of absolutes whose existence can scarcely be imagined.

In one register, the phrase is saying: You want a mystery? I have one for you.

It is true that conspiracy theories are the sardines and hard tack of campaigns hell bent upon winning an "idea" vote for permission to do things. But it is not the case that conspiracy thinking began when that use of it did. One of the reasons systems of justice appeared is that rumor and poor understanding of what was actually happening made for really bad decisions.

Developing trust in certain kinds of witnesses involves skepticism. That is a lot more strenuous than being free of massive cognitive dissonance.

The sparrows dancing from one bit of snow to another are real. Being able to observe that is real.
I am not sure what is being asked for beyond that.

Yes, what "paying attention" actually amounts to is the interesting thing.

The modelling element either reveals something kept from view or it does not. I don't know how to approach that side of things. It is easy to become what one opposes.

I see how Duns Scotus established a ground for those changes.
The claim that a "natural knowledge" of God was not possible also framed the personal in a new way.
This site has a good bit of actual text.

A commons where the peculiar appears.

Many experiences are repeated through habits. But they are not exact repetitions.
The influence memories have is not independent from an idea about them. Some narrative structures elicit more information than others. Your results will vary.

What I most like about Lacan is that he is only interested in people who are interested in their condition. Like it was something that paying attention to could change.
Otherwise, why bother?

My previous remark avoided your question.

I think the quickest way to get up to speed is read all of Augustine and read Duns Scotus soon afterwards.

A bracketing, if you will.

You might be interested in Plotinus. He developed a "Neo Platonist" system that is demonstrated in the Enneads. He was around late enough in the Roman time to have become annoyed with the various Christians of the time.
Late pagan shaking fist at incoming party.

I was thinking more along the lines of the separation of this world or της κόσμος from the kingdom of heaven as depicted by St. Paul, or the difference between the City of God and the City of Men as described by St. Augustine. The Christian point of view tends toward seeing present choices in this life as directly involved in immortality as the desired outcome.

But, as a professor I had long ago pointed out, the text says "eternal life" not life after death. Not tasting death only makes sense as a way of life. Nobody can prove the future. Accepting that certain conditions apply is either a discovery or an assumption. Our results will vary. The anticipation is the central focus.

All of that is a different matter from trying to understand consciousness as a phenomenon or phenomena. But the problem does not come from being stuck in one worldview or another. We might need some more philosophy. Spinoza noted that we use frames of reference that a Creator would not.

As for the Nietzsche mention, I was interested in the idea of him being motivated to find the opposite pole of Christianity. He employed a certain version of Eternity to collapse the Two World idea.

Well, I did not mean to present the idea of gifts as a product of "classes" getting their way. There are clearly people who are more organized than others in this regard.

I was looking it at it from the personal experience of seeing how the misconceptions of the past are interwoven into my present. If I understand anything, I made a wreck of things somewhere.