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Enigma108 -> RE: Pope Says God is Behind the Big Bang (1/24/2011 8:02:17 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
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Enigma,
No, I don't think that reality is necessarily open to direct experience, even if 'direct experience' were a possibility (and I'm a long way from sure that it is). I think you're wrong on that.
If you'd just inserted a few 'I think thats' or 'For mes' into your comment, and if you could have held back from putting a capital 'T' on the word 'truth' (as well as 'Transcendence, again), then you and I might have found some common ground on which we could discuss things. For me, you have it entirely the wrong way round. If the 'Truth' that you're talking about can't be looked at reasonably, then it remains conjecture. Once the world of ideas has begun to be dealt with properly, then that other idea of 'transcendence' begins to fit into its proper place amongst them.
I tend to share the reservations expressed about capital T Transcendence and Truth, especially the latter. I share post-modernism's distaste for the slippery notion of capital T Truth.
What I understand being proposed here is that the inaccessibility of Truth through language and reason is somehow reversed through some practice/ idea of going 'beyond'. If it is suggested that whatever an individual finds 'beyond' might be a truth for them, then that's fine by me. But expanding, totalising it to ideas of Oneness, Truth are a bit of a jump for me. I can't say that I am very clear about how this unification of experience came about, how it can be asserted that all 'pure' experience 'beyond' is the same experience for everyone.
My limited experience of states 'beyond' is difficult for me to convey in language. Though I don't believe that it would be impossible for someone far more gifted in the descriptive writing area than I to convey the feelings experienced in such states.
One way of putting it is that in some of those experiences, the focus of my awareness was outside my body. I could experience a depth of awareness of people and things without consciously thinking of them. There was a sense of serenity, a certain sagacity, feelings of bliss, 'floating in a chora-like sea of love', a kind of intermingling of 'spirits', an intuitive understanding of things that far exceeded any direct experience or knowledge I possessed, a feeling that I can comprehend things in their entirety through multiple frameworks simultaneously. Afterwards, there can be a feeling of consummation, of exhilaration, of radiance that sometimes lasts for days. I hope I am conveying some sense of the experience through this very incomplete attempt at description.
If I practice yoga, I tend to feel these feelings alone. If I am playing with BDSM partners we tend to share some of those feelings sometimes.
So it's not very easy for me to attribute some of the qualities that others here do to those states of being. And it would be hard for me to agree that it is an experience of a pure 'nothingness', though I can understand what that description is trying to do - it is a state I approximate sometimes at yoga.
In this context, I can appreciate the suggestion "Don't interpret, just meditate'. But it's something I find very hard to do - overcoming years and years of social and intellectual training. I hope this rambling rave makes sense [:D]
I enjoyed your rave tweakabelle, and I'd like to respond next chance I get, possibly a few days away. Unlike Kitara, whose razor mind can pith out wisdom in only a few words, I have to think things through and then fumble my way though whole essays.
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