--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophaneros Anartaxius" <anartaxius@> > wrote:
> > I actually sometimes, when watching a sunrise imagine that > > I am on a sphere, and the rotation of the Earth is bringing > > me into view of the sun, and at the same time there is also > > a horizontal motion of the Earth relative to the sun that > > is its revolution around the sun. But most of the time, it > > is just, oh, the Sun is coming up, and that has even less > > resolution than the Sun going around the Earth hypothesis > > because I do not even think of that. > > The perceptual environment in which we make our way > through life and the *real* environment in which we > are situated are amazingly different. I sometimes > try, without much success, to see the sun as a > gigantic ball of unimaginably hot gases 93 million > miles away rather than as a smallish but very bright > spotlight moving across a domed ceiling. The *real* environment and our perceptual environment really are the same. There are ways, with instrumentation for example, through which we extend our experience and concepts of our environment, say by looking through a telescope. Much of what we think of as our *real* environment is conceptual, we have our thoughts about it. A picture of the planet Jupiter made using a digital sensor from a space craft that was radioed back to Earth extends our view of that point that we see in the sky. The picture is not Jupiter, it is not a direct experience of Jupiter, it is a direct experience of a representation of Jupiter that by way of logic, we presume really does correspond with the *real* Jupiter we see in the night sky. Have you noticed that astrologers almost never look at the sky? Everything is representational, computational. But all we really directly experience is what our eyes, ears, touch, etc. present as our inner and outer environment. Internal experiences are more difficult to judge since we do not really know what another is experiencing, except by analogy with our own. Some people see auras for example, or rather they say they see auras. I have never seen one, and objective tests of persons making this claim have not shown that they have seen such a thing. > And just this very minute, it occurred to me that I > don't perceive daylight as a function of the sun's > illumination, but almost the reverse: the sun appears > when it's daylight. No kidding, I never realized this > was my habitual perception before! Boy, that sun is > way brighter than I thought. > > > I do agree with you that an argument can be pointless, but > > we do have to be on guard to argue cognizant of the level > > of understanding of our opponent, and it may be with > > certain ones, such argument will be eternally fruitless. > > True. Or they may have a different conceptual framework, > or even just one from which pieces are missing. I think > of a very bright friend of mine years ago when she started > a new job that required her to learn to use a computer. > She called me a few days later deeply perplexed. She'd > been told to put a report she'd been working on on a > floppy disk to give to someone else to look at while she > finished up the details. "How am I supposed to keep > working on it," she wanted to know, "when I've given it > to Joe?" Your friend just was not conversant with the reality of copying digital information, she was thinking of the file like a book or paper document, which when you give it away you no longer have it. This is the basic problem of spirituality, our idea of what is versus what is. > > I think Einstein's view of the revolution of the Sun and > > Earth is probably beyond my ability to visualize, as it > > takes in not just ideas like centre of mass, but time > > dilation resulting from warped space and the equivalence > > of mass and energy. Newton was wrong. The orbit of Mercury > > around the Sun fits Einstein's theory instead. No one has > > yet found a way to dethrone Einstein. When we argue > > (logically, not an altercation) we have to be discussing > > the same level of resolution of the situation or we get > > equivocation, or using the same words but with different > > meanings, understandings. > > At least for this topic, we have an ultimate authority. > > > Facts are a good place to start. If I have an orange in my > > right hand, and nothing in my left hand, what are the facts > > here? If I have an invisible, incorporeal orange in my right > > hand, and nothing in my left hand, what are the facts here? > > Both hands look the same. Which one has the invisible orange? > > A lot of arguments regarding spirituality reflect these two > > situations, and why such arguments are never resolved. > > What do you say when the other party insists the fact is > that there's no such thing as an invisible, incorporeal > orange? Well, I do not think there are such things, but this is the basic problem when discussing metaphysical concepts. A friend of mine pointed this out to me by showing me an argument made by the astronomer Carl Sagan. I have found a copy of this and here it is: --------------------------- The Dragon In My Garage by Carl Sagan "A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage" Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity! "Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon. "Where's the dragon?" you ask. "Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon." You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints. "Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air." Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire. "Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless." You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible. "Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work. Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved." Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon. Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all. Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion. ------------------------------------- This kind of argument shows up in altercations about the existence of God, in discussions about alternative medicine and spiritual experiences. My friend was saying that if you are arguing about something that seems to have no discernible properties, it rightly has the same properties as nothing, and so what is the point of asserting that it exists? This is the bane of metaphysics. My friend also pointed out that some philosophers, those that followed in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell - Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolph Carnap came to the conclusion that metaphysical statements are in essense nonsense. Carnap in particular came up with an interesting explanation. There are aspects of experience, such as appreciation of music, poetry, watching a beautiful sunset or sunrise. These things can stir up deep feelings and experiences that are difficult to put into words. This is what metaphysical language does, it attempts to put these experiences that defy any kind of objective explanation, and put them into language that seems to objectify them, except there are no correlations between the words and what the words point to in the way that a physical orange correlates with the word orange. Metaphysical language does not describe facts, it attempts to describe what is indescribable, and if we take such talk as a poetic statement giving a sense of a reality that of which we cannot speak then that is fine, but if we call these statements facts, there is a problem, because there is no way to publicly prove such correlation between word and what it points to, if indeed it points anywhere. As you mentioned in your comments below, words fail, but I think they often fail because we are taking them to be the reality we are pointing to and that is the basic spiritual mistake. > > How does one differentiate between different incorporeal > > entities? How can we evaluate private internal experiences > > of another, how can we judge what they are really trying to > > describe, or are they just describing what their thoughts > > are telling them what an experience is supposed to be like, > > but they have not actually had it themselves? > > Lots of pitfalls. But does that mean we shouldn't even > take a shot at it? I think everyone on this forum is taking a shot at it, though some seem more dedicated to the task than others. > As I said to Curtis the other day in a slightly different > context, the fact that words are an inadequate tool for > the task tells us something about the nature of what we're > trying to discuss, in and of itself. Ultimately we are trying to define, verbally, a single experience, enlightenment, which has no words to describe it, and thus all attempts fail. We are also arguing about how that experience is to come about somehow, and the variety of expressions are even more diverse here. Obviously if one has spent a lot of time at this sort of thing, and failed, some disgruntlement is sure to arise. It would seem that in the variety of traditions that seem to be represented on this forum, if enlightenment is real, someone must have had a success in this endeavour. It also seems historically that all such traditions have not been stellarly successful at producing enlightened beings. Traditions arise from those that went before us. They are allegedly a record of how some were successful at this enterprise of enlightenment. How a tradition comes into being and evolves is an interesting question to ask. Many think the tradition brought by MMY extends far back in time and others that he pieced it together at the beginning of his career, and thus it is no tradition at all, is a manufactured artifact. Some posts in this thread that come after this current one talk about authenticity of traditions. I am not sure it matters, except to those that have been sucked into one of them. Some people have enlightenment experiences without having a teacher, it just happened to them. Others struggle for a long time, or jump from one tradition to another and never seem to succeed. It is said (and that could be taken to mean somebody said something sometime, somewhere - another tradition maybe?) that enligtenment will blow away everything that came before it. That whatever you thought it was going to be like will be mistaken, ultimately there is no tradition, because all that went before was an illusion, a mistaken idea of what reality is. The metaphysical language that describes this in all the various ways that it can be described, which seems infinite, is all hooey. This language, whatever tradition or ideas, inspires us, it is the carrot on the stick that leads us to seek this enlightenment, but it is just a street sign perhaps, or perhaps not, giving us a sense of direction what to try next, if the goal we seek has not been reached. Perhaps giving up the vision of the goal, and the way we have hung onto experiences and the environment that seemed to foster them during our trek is the last thing we ultimately have to let go before we succeed. > > > If someone has an incorporeal orange in their possession, > > I do hope that is all they have to eat and drink. > > <puzzled> Why? I was being flippant - since I do not think there are such things, and if this thought is true, in the common sense of the meaning, a person with that belief would starve if all they had to eat was something that had no existence. Then arguing with them would not be necessary.
