Is it wrong to be self-centered?

truth
Ican, the "raw and the cooked" distinction is taken from the French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, referring to the precultural and cultural. Of course it is a dualism. We could not talk to each other non-dualistically unless it would be the zen form of self-cancelling paradoxes. Those are not communications, merely demonstrations of one's non-dualistic orientation.
Of course your theory is a creation of order out of chaos, if we remember that the "order" is such insofar as it orders our minds, and that "chaos" is such only to the extent that it is not part of our mental order.
As I understand it, non-dualisms need not exist within dualisms, but dualisms only exist within, or based on, non-dualisms. When I make a dualistic distinction, the phenomenological experience of doing so--the generation of thoughts and the feeling of doing so--is non-dualistic. All reflective action is grounded in this sensuous (if only subliminally conscious) experience. All is inherently non-dualistic. Dualism is ADDED ONTO our experience, and it remains itself, non-dualistic. Dualism is therefore illusion; nondualistic experience is real. Dualism is necessary for life; nondualism IS life.

ican wrote:

truth
Twyvel, exactly. I hope everyone understands that--for their sakes.
Not so they'll go to heaven, Frank and Joe, but so that they'll enjoy this life more heartily.

Re: truth


I've been trying for some time to ascertain the motive or motives for advocating non-dualism. You have supplied such a motive:



Please explain how becoming one with non-dualism as the only genuine reality helps one "enjoy this life more heartily". For me seeking, finding and sometimes contributing to causing order out of sensed chaos (i.e., solving perceived problems) contributes to my enjoyment of "this life more heartily". What am I missing?



I infer from this that you believe my (or anyone's) inference that one is inferring anything real from sensation is an illusion. In fact it is an illusion that one is sensing. There is only the sensing and not any one sensing.

Assuming this perspective is the truth, adopting this truth, and/or this perspective apparently has some benefits that I fail to grasp. Would you please address these benefits one more time. Perhaps I'll grasp enough this time to understand why seeking to grasp the rest is worth my attention and/or my will and/or my effort.

One might say adopt this truth for its own sake, because it is the truth. I say absent evidence this truth is the truth, there is a significant probability this alleged truth isn't the truth. Thus adopting this truth as the truth regardless of the lack of supporting evidence risks adopting an illusion as truth. Such an illusion serves who or what? My illusions, if they be such, at least help me solve problems which I heartily enjoy doing.

truth
Ican, that's big challenge, especially since your question shows that we must begin from ground zero. But let me just say first that this is not a "proposition" subject to verification or falsification by US. YOU must come to REALIZE its reality directly and intuitively. Otherwise, you will not appreciate what we are saying. But consider this: once you realize that your life experience IS you, not something that's happening TO you, things will go smoother; you (your ego) will not get in the way of experience, like TRYING to enjoy a sunset or trying to get an erection. You'll surely get in the way. Are you the one who used your experience in the martial arts as an example of something in another thread? If so, you should be able to answer your question yourself.

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No, but I did use my experience of flying a jet at 45,000 feet and directly sensing the curvature of the earth as an experience that provided me great perspective.



Should? Perhaps! Able? Perhaps not!

Many a priest, preacher and rabbi have said to me something similar: Believe and you shall be a believer; Believe and ye shall live forever; Believe and ye shall know God.

Many an athiest has said to me believe not anything that has not been proved for certain.

But here I sit contemplating probabilities and possibilities and I continue to arrive at the same conclusions:

God is probably the Universe; the Universe is probably God; God and the Universe are probably real; The nature of God and the nature of the Universe are probably one and the same; Their real nature is probably totally discoverable but probably not all in one lifetime, nor probably not even in many lifetimes.

Whatever I have probably discovered of that nature is certainly satisfying.

ican

do think that one does not take an ontological position based on what the ego wants, as it is fundamentally about transcending the ego.

truth
Ican, I am trying not to give you an answer to your challenging question that is too Grand. Such answers are not credible, even if true. For example: people often say, when seeing photos from the Hubble telescope that "It makes them feel insignificant in the grand scheme of things." I ask "Why insignificant?" I know what they mean, of course. When we identify with our egos, when we feel we are here and the Great Universe is "out there" spanning an infinite space, we feel small and insignificant. If you identify, however, with Reality, with all that is. If you see your true Self as merely an expression of the entire Cosmos, that you are inherently that Cosmos, not in terms of quantity (scale and size) but in terms of quality, then you actually gain your significance with respect to that Great Universe which is no longer separate from you and "out there."
But I prefer to think of non-dualism in more humble terms. When we think, we think in terms of abstract classes of things. Particular chairs, leaves and members of "races", are all "equalized" within their classes--individual differences are ignored. This presents advantages (all logic refers to the relationships between abstract categories, or classes, of things). But it also presents disadvantages, when we think, we generally overlook the particularities, the unique qualities of the "objects" of our experience. Our thinking leads to stereotypes and other generalizations that are not only intellectually wrong (in some cases) but also lead us to miss out on the concreteness--the experiential realities--of each experience.
In pre-reflective experience we are, because we are not thinking/not reflecting, able to enjoy an immensely richer experience. Flavors, smells, textures, sounds, etc. each have their concrete say in our minds. As such, our life is profoundly rich with the concreteness of experience. This is part of what I mean when I say that thinking generates a condition (subject-object separation) that gets in the way of our on-going life experience. Remember that I am not saying we should not think; we should only know what costs and gains are involved. All thinking is delusional with regard to the quality of each experiential moment. It can generate USEFUL delusions, of course (that's why I am a pragmatist). Most of us have absolutely no idea of what it's like to be intimately aware of the sensual nature of our on-going experience. We think that the grey world of abstractions, categories and classes is all there is. The various forms of meditation are designed to help us overcome this condition. I think it should be a major part of our educational system. We should be trained to live, not just to have the skills for making a living.
By the way, I am not saying that we can only be in one mode at a time, reflective OR pre-reflective. When one has truly "realized" what I am talking about, he is virtually always in a state of pre-reflective perception, even when he is dualistically thinking. He is aware of the sensuous nature of experience even when dealing with abstractions. There is a simultanous flow of dualistic mental structures and infrastructual non-dualistic flow of sensations. But that represents a very high level of attainment.
I have gone to this trouble because I detect sincerity in your questioning, not just some effort to keep things going.

Is this a private fight, or can anybody join in? I've been out of town for a couple of weeks or I would have contributed by now.

I've been scanning the posts here pretty quickly, and I'm starting to get a headache. Oh, for a good Zen Buddhist master to cut through all this.

Ican, you sound like you're on a spiritual quest, and I sympathize with you, having done the same thing over ten years earlier in my life.

JLnobody: I like your nondualism philosophy, but I wonder if naming it like that doesn't solidify it or bring it into the realm of the intellect--into dualism, in other words.

The intellect operates in the field of time and opposites. Top-bottom, good-evil, light-dark. Dualism is identifying with one side and seeing its opposite as something separate and often involves trying to eliminate the other as if the two are separate rather than interdependent. And when you do this, when you identify with one side, the ego forms.

But it's possible to see these seemingly opposites as two sides of the same thing. It occurs outside the field of time, which is eternity, and happens when the ego is seen as illusion.

The problem is that the intellect is useless in seeing past dualism. You have to have a mystical experience which is Jlnobody's nondualism. Nondualism is god, is eternity where the opposites are one.

As Jlnobody said, you don't gain anything from seeing through dualism, like a firm belief or answer, but you lose many illusions and misconceptions that you pick up from childhood on. It keeps you from becoming a fanatic and joining in crusades and wars against drugs and immorality et al. It allows you to be at peace with nature, both your own and that outside your body.

I guess meditation is one way of going about it, but I was never very good at that. The Zen people perplex their intellects with koans-unsolvable riddles meant to drive you "out of your mind and into your senses." Alan Watts.

Besides Alan Watts, I recommend reading books by Joseph Campbell, especially, "The Power of Myth," and some of the dialogues of J. Krishnamurti, a very down-to-earth mystic who lived in the last half of the twentieth century.



Unfortunately, our culture and our churches make no provision that help people make the transition to a spiritual life. Churches, if anything, defend against mystical experience. (See my thread under "religion and spirituality" entitled "religious or mystical experience vs belief in dogma."

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won't feel unsure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. As we let our own Light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson

JL - Levi-Strauss was all about dualism - in many different ways. I thought you would hate him.

Anyway, what's conforting about smelling wet grass is that it reminds you of morning - and all the connotations associated with that. Things can only feel nice or bad or anything else when associated with cultural meaning. The idea that you can think independantly of culture or be freed from culture by a smell or a sight is probably also culturally induced. Damn postmodernists.

truth
Coluber, thanks for a very good post. Yes, by talking ABOUT non-dualism, as I must in this intellectual context, I obscure its nature. A zen-master would not discuss it in these terms. He would dismiss it with some gesture, and the pedagogical value of that gesture would be lost on anyone who is not a zen aspirant, seeking to understand the truth behind the gesture. Everyone else would dismiss him as "nuts" or intellectually irrelevant. Watts' effort to drive us out of minds and into our senses, is essentially what I was TALKING ABOUT in my last post. I DO think, however, that talk--even the wonderful lectures by Krishnamurti and books of Alan Watts--are mostly wasted on people who do not meditate. They may shake people up, but do not bring them to "realization." Talk (conceptual dualism) is not an adequate vehicle to enlightenment (experential non-dualism), with the exception of the rare spiritual genius--like Krishnamurti, and perhaps Watts..

Rufio, as I recall, Levi-Strauss wrote about the way cultural systems resolve the tensions of conceptual dualisms by means of myths and rituals. By the way, I have never liked his Structuralism, too deductive or intellectually presumptous, not sufficiently open to empirical discovery. Once he formed his model of how cultures function, he "found" the model in operaton everywhere.

Minds are not really separate from senses though - culture is just another sense, but one that is learned rather than innate - a sense designed to interpret abstracts, rather than just physical objects.

JL, I actually found Levi-Strauss to be pretty unpresumptuous compared to a lot of theorists, especially the postmodern ones. I like the structuralism a lot because it ties into linguistics... but that's another story. I agree that you can probably find that model nearly everywhere if you want to, because it's rather general and IMO, a good method for understanding cultures.

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JL, You're correct in my case. Talk or writing/reading does not bring me to "realization". So I simply ponder yours and other's commentary on this subject until I can be brought to some kind of "realization". I don't know whether pondering shares any applicable relationships with meditating, but it's the best I've been able to do so far. I have decided to assume you are on to something--something I think I'd like to be on--so I shall continue to ponder.

truth
Ican, I rarely think about what I've been proseltyzing here. It is fun--in the context of A2K--to reflect on it intellectally and to try to, in a sense, give it intellectual legitimacy. But reading and thinking about such matters leads only to unprovable intellectual conclusions, not existential realization. I do not know what you mean by "pondering." But good luck with it. Why don't you look up some group in your city (assuming you're urbanite), whether it be zen (Japanese, Korean, or Viet Namese), or a Vipassana center? Keep in mind that such meditation techniques are also very healthful for the management of stress. And then, for your intellectual stimulation and development, stick with Western philosophy (not to mention A2K). That's been my double-pronged program for decades. I enjoy it.

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www.m-w.com:

truth
No, Ican, I didn't mean to ask for the dictionary definition of "ponder." I know that. I wanted to know precisely what YOU do when you ponder. I do not think of pondering as equivalent to meditating in the sense of mystical practice. I think of pondering more equivalent to contemplating (and it seems that's what you do). Catholic monks CONTEMPLATE; they THINK of the qualities of virtues or the lives of saints, whatever. Buddhists do not think when they meditate; they just observe the workings of their minds, even when it involves focusing on a koan (unanswerable riddle).

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I think I do all that included in the dictionary definition. I do it by going off to a "quite corner" (e.g., quite room and bed) somewhere away from distractions. Frequently I repeatedly doze and awaken while I ponder.

Yes, we all live for ourselves so therefore we are self-centered. But it is the context of balance or degree that has not been taken into effect.
How would degree of a persons actions influence the definition?