Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "Jordan B Peterson"
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Symbolically, "resurrection" = "reincarnation"...uh-oh, problem...49:30--Jordan gets into "time"...Perhaps, gentlemen, consider: God's purpose is the redemption of the matter of which you are constituted AND with which you have contact! Then, that matter is made responsive to spiritual gravity--it becomes directly useful for God in His greater purpose, which it is impossible to consider. Matter has an infinity of grades, densities, from the most (or nearly most) dense that we are familiar with to the most subtle which is God. The density immediately above (more subtle, less dense) the grossly material is the most problematic for us. It is a grade of matter highly malleable for us: emotional. We are the masters of our own misery. Our individual efforts to find God, to the degree they are competent, redeem the matter of our being, of whatever grade, furthering God's Grand Plan. Count me in...I want to participate in the cosmic adventure. Sure beats anything atheism has to offer!
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Self-hypnosis, autosuggestion, can be very useful in self-control techniques. For instance, a post-hypnotic suggestion to "relax" can be programmed to be triggered by a word or phrase you utter. The disruption caused by sudden full-body muscle relaxation, even to a minor degree, weakens the prevailing emotional state, perhaps enough to regain greater control--even, "the upper hand". "Trance induction" is the centerpiece of the practice of self-hypnosis, and relies on full-body relaxation being a somewhat accomplished skill. The process is methodical: resting horizontally...breathe easily...starting with one foot, tense the muscle(s) for a few seconds, then relax those foot muscles completely...the relaxation is a "feeling" to remember...Do the same with the other foot, and so on up the body to the neck...and head (relaxing the head muscles is kinda weird feeling; head and neck together is simpler...I still have a hard time tensing the skull muscles--doing they even exist, I don't know). It can take 30 minutes to completely relax the body musculature in this process--and 30 days before you can manage to STAY AWAKE! But once accomplished, this is the hypnotic trance state. The first thing to do is instantiate a post-hypnotic suggestion to instantly induce this trance state, usually upon thinking a trigger word/phrase of your design.
The trance state, itself? Well, it's all you really need to enable you to do what you want to do with yourself.
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"The natural bandwidth of consciousness"?...eh...argh...I gotta backtrack...to
2:40--first proposition: "To see the world we must prioritize our perceptions." The ant on the sidewalk is less important than the car on the driveway?? They seem to agree that this process is not deliberate, though the phrasing of the proposition implied otherwise. "Body", "spirit", "mind/abstract intent"...Jordan wants to bring the academic approach into intrapersonal significance. These terms, and others like it, make a good bridge. "The process has to be dynamic and self-organizing"...uh, what means, "self-organizing"?...hehehe...V's kicking the can down the road..."A hierarchy of transformation from mind to body" is a good start, Jordan! I think the pattern of the body as transcribed in DNA is the pre-existing "dynamic and self-organizing" process that initiates the sensory system upon the foundation of the physical body. The natural urge to complexification abstracts the basic sensory level to an intermediate level of "sub-processing", where the sensory signals are filtered and modified, producing a "desensitization" effect, where we are allowed to ignore unimportant low-level sensory signals...it's efficient to do so. The same thing happens when you move your finger. The guitarist trains his fingers to do things the average fingers don't do. He instantiates habits of movement that, after practiced, become triggerable operations...it's efficient to do so. The "habit nature" is vast and powerful. You can use it at will--or it can use YOU without your will.
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In our self-conscious awareness, in the sphere of spirit, there is only spirit..."beings". In the most personal way we deal with things as if they were people; we anthropomorphize everything in order to appreciate its meaning value. In the mental sphere, there are only ideational processes, operating on human values, but we still see these processes as "beings". In the emotional sphere, there are only habits, persistent structures of stimulus/response cycles which we see and interact with as "beings". In the physical sphere there is only sensation, pleasure and pain by direct contact; this is where we get the whole idea of "beings" as they are all around us, as people, animals, insects.
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"Existence is suffering" should be interpreted with a neutral definition of "suffering". In popular parlance it's often found with "pain", as in "pain and suffering". But that's not neutral. Suffering == Experience. You may suffer "joy" as well as "sorrow". But the "suffering" itself is a function of existence, which provides the facility for Experience. Knowledge roots in Experience/Suffering. Existence without Limitation is inconceivable, conceptually contradictory. Limitation is the methodology of Existence. Manifestation is a process of limitation/Godification of the Primeval Chaotic Void: Once upon an eternity, there was only the Void, perfectly indistinct, multiform potentiality, a seething chaos. As hoped for by the designers of universes, there arose a statistically impossibly unlikely state of repetition in the Chaotic Void. This created a Paradox: the chaotic void exhibited "memory". "Reflection" is implied by "repetition" and itself implies Time...this is the birthing of Order by Chaos, to isolate the Paradox, as it threatens the "existence" of the Chaotic Void Itself. To keep the Void from venting, Order expressed Time as Consciousness and Physical Reality in the Big Bang. How's THAT for a modern myth?!
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"We don't know how...Thoughts manifest themselves in the theater of our imagination"! Wow! That's the mess in a nutshell! hehehe...C'mon, Jordan, piece it together: what is the process of imagination? What is the value to the individual of linguistic articulation outside of the societal context? Is imagination just a projection screen where we see what we fear/desire? Or, could it be the only uniquely human creative facility to which we are heir?! As sensation bubbles the emotional cauldron, the meaning of sensation is determined and submitted for evaluation to the lower mind, which, by basic computational means, makes comparisons to associated values in memory; the results of these activities are internally expressed by imagination as fleeting imagery. The traces of these fleeting images are thoughts awaiting articulation, whether internally or externally. Internally, the articulation of thought solidifies or embeds the value of that thought by stamping or identifying the peculiar pattern of sensation --> emotion --> mentation --> imagination --> articulation as a distinct perception, forever available to make comparisons with other values. Every perception is a building block...of...yourself...Using good blocks, you get a good building...
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The "potential" that you could have done something with is a trivial complaint parents are prone to as the opportunity to "parent" presents itself! hahaha...Does it help to point out that you're underperforming? Help what? And what is the value of any accomplishment! So what if you are the greatest everything?! Does it matter?! If the grave is your final end, then, no, it doesn't matter, at all; if "you" continue in any wise following "death", everything matters! Everything! Every nuance of thought and feeling, every observation, every movement of personality, then, matter to the development of your CHARACTER--the only thing you can take with you when you go, so to speak.
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Sensory stimulus elicits a compensatory response from any system susceptible to the stimulus, engendering habituation to the stimulus, according to the intensity and persistence of the stimulus, in the form of a behaviorism--an "emotion". At this emotional level, associations to experiential memory interact to contribute to an organic complexification, a "symbol", by which the complexification can be handled, controlled. The lower level of mind, the automatic level as opposed to the abstract, is characterized by the perpetual operation of linguistic articulation--WORDS. The mental basis of this operation is observation and identification in a tight loop referencing associations from experiential memory.
"Narratives" are CONTEXTS! The "story" is the context in which a person sees himself. The only thing a person can truly understand is himself, a person; that is each person's basis for understanding. We must understand everything in terms of ourselves. What is not self is other.
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2:18:15--I don't with John's notion of "consciousness", at least terminologically. "Consciousness" is that "spark of divinity" that indwells everywhere/everything and produces the "governing principle of the cosmos": "association". "Consciousness" is the capacity and inclination to associate--responsiveness to "spiritual gravity", mystically speaking. "Evolution" is the process of complexification according to the divine pattern of manifestation. "Intelligence is the way reality is realizing itself", John! argh...not useful..."Intelligence" is the operation of the urge to associate, which, granted, culminates in "reality realizing itself". Intelligence is the essential feature of the One Universal Mind, which each of us operates as best he makes himself able, all the while imagining it is his personal possession. By the strength of our awareness we form "memories", experiences impressed upon the universal substratum of existence, the OUM. "Imagination" is the seat of spirit, the "true self"--it will lead you true if you can keep your mitts off the steering wheel, for half a second...hehehe. The personal inner world is purely associative...
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"Intention as a moral act" is not resonating with me. The direction of intention may have a "moral" component, but intention, itself, is the other side of the engine of awareness from attention. Attention and Intention are the Yin and Yang of the Tao of Awareness. They chase each other faster than you can think, at the speed of the cosmic clock tick, perhaps! I think Jordan is loading down the word "intention" with extra functionality, like "prioritization"--it's an inefficient complexification. These are separate processes: First you observe, then you identify, then you contextualize, continuously...But it should be possible to observe without identification--total abstraction! Samadhi? INtention works by the projection of certainty, conviction, "faith", if you like, of what is true. Attention provides feedback on how Intention is doing; Awareness modulates the interplay.
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At 25:30, Kreeft says when you get to the end you'll find out if you were right or wrong, about God, I guess, and that's a popular notion. What if it's not that simple? What if the lifetime practice of your belief CREATES your "afterlife" experience! What if the lifetime practice of atheism prevents you from having an "afterlife"! Then, no matter what you believed, you will have been RIGHT! hahaha...I love it...the internal balance of Nature making everything TRUE. They say, "Nature abhors a vacuum"! Think thrice before using terms like non-existence, eh? The logical principle of "negation", while having local utility, is philosophically invalid. In the same way, there can be no such thing as "absolute evil". What you have is a human filter pattern overlay of Natural law in execution, calling it "evil", the only meaning of which is available in myth and legend. Your perspective, your interpretive framework, or context determines your descriptors. The language of the religious perspective includes terms like good and evil, so a variety of sense is made of such words for the edification of adherents. Some perspectives, though, lack the language for certain concepts, so those ideas would be invisible within that perspective. You gotta speak the same language to see eye-to-eye...
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A definition of "divinity" as "the deepest most profound" is no good for its vagueness. All we know of "divinity" is self-awareness! Otherwise, it's just another philosophic technical term of no direct utility; the name of an idea--"identification". How does "God" fit in? As pinnacle of greatest hierarchy? Ok, then, flesh it out! Connect the dots! You possess the "spark of divinity", a "sliver of God", that forms your spiritual identity, in potential. The realization of that potential is a dynamic process of stimulus and response in awareness. Imagination sits between spirit and awareness in both refractive and reflective capacities: spirit offers a leading from its side of imagination; from the other side awareness accepts it, naturally, as having a degree of reality. However, that leading of the spirit may be obscured by self-interest on awareness's side. As "our spirit" works to make the human being and body more responsive to it, so does the macrocosmic God work to redeem matter to responsiveness to spiritual gravity...toward an end and purpose unimaginable.
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Gentlemen, I think your conception of the origin of the "first lie" in the Garden of Eden is radically amiss: it is not the serpent that lied! It spoke the truth, Adam and Eve would "be as God", knowing "good and evil", which is to say, having the capacity of "judgement". Adam and Eve "lied" in their attempt to deceive God. That judgement was wrong, and the "original sin". There was nothing wrong with wanting to be like God; that desire is love. So, the "sin" of disobedience to God's command to not eat of that tree was forgivable because they didn't have the judgement to balance their desire to be like God in order to remain obedient. God would have been able to overlook the transgression if they'd only been contrite, instead of deceptive, which would have been the right judgement for them to have made. So, using our judgement to balance our desires has become the nature of the inner life, which, finding expression in the outer life, shapes our world.
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A great conversation! It is made difficult, though, for me, by the clash of neurological and psychological terminology. The relationship between neurological operations and "sense of self" is drawn crudely with many connection dropouts--how do you get from here to there, from sensory reality to psychological reality. Implications abound but seem taken for granted, unworthy of special attention. Andrew represents the animal origin, and Jordan, the spirit origin of behavior. The neurology drives the animal behavior; the psychology drives the sense of self. The animal state is the default, because it will operate without attention. The psychology develops out of the awareness of the animal state as it develops over time, by comparison of states. What's the psychological counterpart of the "dopaminergic system"? I think Andrew's position is that the neurology precipitates the psychology, while Jordan's is likely that the patterns expressed neurologically INFLUENCE the developing psychology, perhaps being essentially universal. I'm not sure they agree on whether psychology can INFLUENCE neurology, but Andrew seems willing to entertain the possibility.
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"Delusional or self-deceptive revelations" may be the most important problem of psyche for each individual. Currently, I'm working from a peculiar conception: the natural, unperturbed process of the "imagination" is the presentation to the mental awareness of the previous moment's experience of psyche, reflected, as it were, in the "skin" of the spiritual awareness, which also provides "leadings" as if through a two-way mirror. What the mental awareness does with this presentation in critical to the development of the being, as the movements of the emotional awareness may produce powerful perturbations in the imagination, distorting the presentation and obscuring the leadings of the spirit, resulting, perhaps, in an existential confusion "loop". You dedicate yourself to God by holding to truth as the highest good within yourself, and its pursuit, your greatest purpose. "Pain" you suffer by knowing the truth is a good and proper corrective; that fact should provide the courage to confront yourself relentlessly. As a child, rudimentary intelligence drove us to touch everything, and explore, to know what there was in our existence. We developed our intelligence as we matured, but its foundational value persists as "the monkey mind", enthusiastically contrary and rambunctious like the child, and a disruptive influence in the adult, it has become the "trickster", the "tempter", and saboteur of focus. Follow your thoughts relentlessly and you will see the monkey in action--and as soon as you do he'll insist you don't. But, in this way, relentlessly following your thoughts, you can chase the monkey until he stops running! A bit like the wild horse which, once "broken", serves its rider devotedly.
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At 6:50, Jordan says, "The emotional functions that fill us with enthusiasm and hope and also the emotional functions that quell anxiety and despair are related to our apprehension of sequential goals." His use of the term, "apprehension", is problematic: first definition, "fearful or uneasy anticipation of the future"; third, "understanding". Fortunately, I'd like to focus on the earlier part of the statement where we find the idea that there are "emotional functions"; and they can fill us with enthusiasm, hope, as well as QUELL anxiety and despair. A casual search turned up only "function of emotion" stuff. At any rate, I don't get it. What is it that fills us and quells us? An "emotional function"...sounds like a fancier variable name than "x, the unknown"...hehehe. The fact is you can generate the emotional values you wish at any time--it's the actor's art. You don't need an intermediary emotional "function" to act for you. The emotional/mental distinction is mistaken in modern "psychology".
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"Order" and "success", as ideas, are as apples to oranges: only tangentially related. "Short term success is meaningless if the end result is failure" is a baseless assertion: "short term" is undefined; what "end result"--success is success, how does success retroactively become failure at some "future" time; "meaningless" is impossible! How can any identifiable thing be meaningless?!! The identification itself supplies meaning. Your further statements are similarly baseless assertions. And you ask if I can give you a "long term" (what's that?) "successful" (what's that?) example of a hierarchy that "stands alone" (what's that?), as if there would be value in providing such, while, actually, you mean to simply assert that no such example exists, and, therefore, "hierarchy" must be a deficient notion deserving of (what?) destruction, derision. Examples of the expression of the natural principle of hierarchy can not implicate the principle itself. Get real.
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"The indwelling spirit"...is the personal self-reflective awareness...the "spark of divinity" around which the being forms. The body of this awareness IS the IMAGINATION! The prerequisite for "existence" is "body", the great delimiter. My skin, for instance, is the barrier region formed at the furthest extent of the body which contains "me". This body reflects an image of my being...a presentation of myself to everything else...an announcement of my intention to be existent in physical matter. My emotional body, though, is made of a subtler, more energetic, grade of matter; the same with my mental body, formed of an even subtler grade of matter/energy. The skin of my spiritual body is the imagination, which always displays the truth of the just-previous MOMENT'S total state of being...which plants that moment into the universal substratum, the reservoir of all "memory". Through the imagination, spirit projects "leadings", "where you could/should go". However, that image is subject to instantaneous reformation, or even erasure, according to prevailing personal preferences. This distortion mechanism prevails generally by virtue of lack of self-knowledge and control. This is the point-of-attack for the psychic disciplines, like meditation, concentration, and imagination exercises--in a word, prayer. A calm imagination shows the smallest perturbations most accurately. When the waters of imagination are churning with desire, the delicate leadings of spirit are effectively swamped. So...there is "error"...
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The talk about "consciousness", nature vs function, or, structure vs operation, as I prefer, is a little clumsy: the EXPERIENCE of "consciousness" is "AWARENESS"--they're not the same thing. Again...requirements of technical language...Consciousness, itself, is the universal tendency to association; awareness is the personal immediate experience of consciousness. I don't ascribe to ideas of a "subconscious", or "unconscious", for the related reason: they're clumsy. The so-called, "subconscious mind", refers to an area of autonomous complexes, or habitual memory operations, which remain below the level of casual awareness because they don't require attention..."set it, and forget it"...RIP, Ron Popeil...
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I've been fortunate to have experienced a massive religious upbringing--specifically, Protestant. In my appreciation of the Holy Trinity, the Father conceives and projects the plan of Creation, taken from His vision of the Chaos, the all-potential, which He maintains in Eternity, in a stare-down with the Chaotic Void which precipitated Him; the Son, as the One Universal Mind, executes that plan in existential manifestation by articulations of hierarchical complexification; and the Holy Spirit, as the Life Force, meters and modulates the force or influence of the Primordial Chaotic Void, Disorder, to power the Cosmos, through the Son's articulations of form. Chaos powers evolution through forms of Order, like steam powering an engine. The influence of Life keeps Order from becoming trapped in fixity, by appropriately valving the intrusion of the Chaos into the realm of Order.
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"We're in a battle for freedom between good and evil; our job is to fight!" Battle...fight...war...such aggressive terms evoke fear of disobedience to authority, promoting hatred of that authority...conflict ensues. "God" requires you to be "all in", else you are guilty, Guilty, GUILTY! We used to refer to this as "fire and brimstone" preaching. It is enervating in its oversimplicity--I wouldn't recommend it, but to each his own. I don't see "war in heaven"--I see Order utilizing the pressure of Chaos to power the Designs of Order. Nature makes sure that all that is is in agreement. There is no war, battle, or fight between Order and Chaos, but rather the navigation of the tension of the attraction and repulsion. The Cosmic Dance feels like war, battle, and fight to US in our entirely personal apperception of existence. We bear the guilt of our error solely for the purpose of its correction! God is all that is--your devils included! There is no malice in the operation of the universe except what you imagine there to be.
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You embody your perceptions with reality, especially by extending your senses imaginarily to recapitulate the perceptions. Analogous to the yin and yang of the Tao, attention and intention, respectively, are the polar expressions or manifestations of awareness. Awareness is the instantaneous state of being oneself in the moment. Consciousness is the substance of the fabric of reality whose essential character is the capacity of responsivity. It is the basis of all memory, as it holds the impression of "events". The essential character of intelligence is association. There is only the One Mind, which we operate as best we are instantaneously able, calling it "our mind". The One Mind comprises the entirety of existence, as the active interface between Chaos, the primordial void, and Order, the Prime Creator. Chaos drives existence from below with a force of pure potential, and Order imposes its characteristic formative influence from above--Mind is caught between a rock and a hard place, as it were. Existence is the direct expression of this dilemma. Since the moment of birth: perception precipitates experience which embeds in the fabric of reality, forever remaining accessible by association. Memories provide authority, since they represent the source of true knowledge: experience. From authority proceeds conviction, certainty, validation. Preceeding experience informs proceeding experience through memory. The more memories, the greater the potential for association...
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Once upon a timelessness, the Chaotic Void non-existed alone, a continuously seething all-potential. "Then", the statistically improbable occurred: a particular state of the random seethe REPEATED, initiating a sort of reverberation within the Chaotic Void that produced the EXPULSION of the repeated seethe state, in order to preserve it's chaotic nature intact. This event birthed God, to seal the breach, as it were. God is one of Chaos's seethe states, which is the entirety of Chaos in one of it's possible arrangements. The conditions of God's "birth" requires Its Nature to be Order, with the inherent duty to express Himself, to express order, to manifest His essential being: the Chaotic Void, His origin.
The ejection, the birth of God, produced a surge of the first manifestation of Order, "many of the same from One"--God moved over the Chaos, like a skin covering a globe, instantaneously, in the form of particles, slivers, or sparks of divinity, Spirit. The whole of God is in each particle of Spirit, including His plan of creation, so to speak...the one is the other, and the other is the one. At the opposite pole from the expulsion point, this initial wave of divinity cannot reenter Chaos--It will not tolerate Order. So the wave bounces back, meeting more of Itself coming down, creating TURBULENCE and slowing the travel of spirit particles, and, in the process, engendering "delay"...creating Time, and every other thing that could be said to "exist" in any wise. Some spirit particles make it through the turbulence, encountering a more rarified turbulence in the next stratification layer. One or two maybe make it all the way back to Source. At this point the Cosmos is temporally stratified and manifestation has begun as the sole purview of the One Universal Mind, the second Person of the Trinity, the Son. At the bottom pole, the interface to Chaos, the Life Force, the third Person of the Holy Trinity acts as a bulwark against the intrusion of Chaos at the fringes of Order; Chaos seeks to dis-Order, and the Holy Spirit acts as a pressure valve, utilizing Chaos to drive Order...hence the chaotic appearance of the operations of living things. At the top pole, God is in an eternal stare-down with the Chaotic Void, as in a mirror, one state of the Void looking at Itself across the abyss. When Order observes Chaos, It KNOWS that It (God) is Order, that experience defining, modeling, "certainty" for the entirety of Creation.
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@richardl.currier4052 <--All "major religions" are in error to some degree necessarily--I shouldn't have to explain why that is. Your conviction that God and creation are identifiable "things" illustrates the depth of your religionism--obviously, a logical debility. I didn't speak of the colloquial "chaos", but, rather, a "Chaotic Void" comprising all potentiality, without the possibility of actuality. Of course, It's timeless and spaceless, otherwise It would be Order! You're right, I am "trying to describe things happening in a place where space and time do not exist", except, there are no "things", and nothing can "happen", in eternity. That's why my little story is an "allegory", a symbolic representation.
The philosopher in me wonders about the purpose of existence. If the religionist in you objects to such activity, there may well be nothing for us to say to each other.
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So, tell me, Jordan, what, precisely, is "LOST" should the world destroy itself? Would the Universe be diminished? And...are you sure about that? Is someone who dies, "lost"? Being concerned with the fate of the world indicates a denial of the validity of spiritual evolution; if the spirit evolves then the fate of matter is of relatively minor concern. Else, the world is ALL THAT IS to you, the materialist's "God", so you fear its prospective "loss" very deeply. Interestingly, it's impossible to be both a materialist AND a spiritual evolutionist! Decide! hehehe
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"Subjective intellect", Jordan?! Ouch! Hard to grok that phrase. The serpents you learn to handle are your own proclivities. The Church prevents you from handling the serpent of "self as God", now, doesn't it! It seems to me we are continuously "creating our own values"--there must be a secret understanding to that phrase that I'm not familiar with, for the speakers to be denigrating the process as dangerous. You MUST create God! You must create a big-picture understanding of existence--it's the very drive of mentality! Every experience feeds this conception. Humans have always created God, usually as idols, physical objects. Science provides an expansive palette of colors by which to paint the most marvelous conceptions of ultimacy. Yes, since God is absolutely everywhere--meaning, nothing else can be anywhere--we are God, but not gods, though. It is important to avoid giving God form in imagination--that would be extremely disrespectful, and the beginning of all the problems of hubris hinted at by the speakers.
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"Pleasure" is the body's judgement of "the good". At 50:50 Jordan mentions "systems of ideas working in the background" as sources of psychological influence. I think the seeds of the development of these systems were sown in the traumatic experience of the person's birth event. This trauma forms the model of existential TERROR going forward! In accommodating a fantastic flood of sensational experience, the infant's sensory system is maximally stimulated. The infant went from a life of constant temperature, humidity, pressure, darkness, and quiet in the womb to sudden and drastic changes of temperature, humidity, pressure, illumination and sound, and the dawn of the temporal sense--one moment is no longer so much the same as the last as was the experience in gestation. Accommodation means adjustment, and the body quickly establishes sensory-emotional complexes as habituations...and the terror of birth, thereby, subsides, though always lurking in experiential memory, ready to offer pertinent associations as "possibilities", perhaps eliciting fears we don't understand...concerns and trepidations.
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The "ground of being" is the universal substratum which "records" "relationally" all experience, as "memory". If the "divine being lacks only limitation" It would naturally seek out limitation as a completion of Itself, and, in so doing, manifest all possibility--existence! The primary duality is "God as wave vs God as particle". In producing manifestation, God differentiates into every smallest thing, or particle. In producing "evolution", God integrates into ever greater things, in the manner of a wave. The totality of God is the unity of all the particles. I prefer the word, "awareness" to "consciousness", as the latter is heavily overloaded. The nature of God is awareness; each particle is a point-awareness--a "spark of divinity". The point-awareness at the center of a form is the awareness belonging to that form, the name by which it is known and handled. There is only the one awareness, everywhere and -when, the same, in essence, differing only in expression, or context. It is memory that allows us to "reflect" upon ourselves--we are aware that we are aware. It's this self-reflective awareness that makes humans unique--AND infinitely troublesome! 🙃
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1:36:00--Andrew states that watching porn (other people doing it) is "very different than being in a first-person sexual experience"...and therefore...Ehhh, really? "Very" different? There are some obvious differences, but the similarities still seem overwhelming, to me. From my point of view, in order to make the "connection", you have to identify what you are seeing and accept and vivify the association with YOUR PAST EXPERIENCE. Remembering the various sensations connected with what you are watching, you can, essentially, put yourself in the picture--through "imagination", you can participate in a way your BODY accepts as "real"! The real point is to discover imagination as a tool for controlling/influencing the body. No matter the context, that is what we are always DOING! And it is good. The value of the neurological perspective seems niche. We can control/influence our neurology, but not DIRECTLY; the manner of indirection is imaginative. You can create, in imagination, "objects" that interface with the neurological level...a layer of translation, effectively. This is what we are always doing, whether we realize it or not! But doing so deliberately, purposefully, in full awareness, promises to illuminate the psyche to the furthest degree.
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I think we're mostly "moved", or "deeply moved", by recollection of intense experience. In awareness, perception triggers associations with experiential memory; the stronger the memory, the more intense the recollection. The depth of the recollection runs from the deepest, sensory level to the highest, least intense, mental level. The quickest trigger is at the deepest level.
Observation quickly gives way to identification of the object observed. This is the process of "noticing". However, the identification elicits associations from experiential memory which aggregate to imply "value". The problem arises when, by an act of will, the imaginary senses are extended, projected to re-experience the object! This is "attachment", and it produces original sensation from the memory of it, but without the original context, but rather a new context, the context of the present moment. This may cause an inappropriate transference of value from the original experience to the experience of the present moment, whatever that might be.
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'Round about 42:00, Jordan says he approaches a problem "with humility". This may well be the proper posture for thinking about God, or praying, the solution coming, then, by divine inspiration. But all "problems" arise from our rooting in the physical world, the denizens of which have no special regard for human beings, and, in themselves, do not warrant your prostration before them. Exactly the opposite attitude is proper: insistent expectation in the style of a "demand". These beings of involutionary activity bear the one spirit of God into manifestation by differentiation in progressively greater densities--they are the cosmos construction workers. They are capable only of obedience to the spirit of God; their natures are pure and raw, but limited to their specific purposes. By virtue of our physical bodies, we have intimate intercourse with these beings as "natural influences" within us. We know ourselves by knowing them, as they govern sensation, emotion, and, partially, thought--the kind of thought that follows upon observation and identification, let's call it "articulation"; not the higher-level function that solves problems.
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At 1:23:00, "the sea of probability"...the philosopher's "Primordial Chaotic Void"...
We are frozen in a cosmic moment of recognition/realization belonging to the Primordial Void, that chaos of all-potential that provides the backdrop of existence. In the beginning--literally--, It recognized the impossible: repetition in the state of the Void. Being utterly chaotic, only random organizational states should be possible. But the impossible happened: all tied up in this instantaneous recognition are principles of "reflection", then "memory", then "multiplicity/unity", then BANG, God (consciousness) is "born", from an error in cosmic nature, a mistake that explained itself in terms of "time". WE and our entire existence IS the process of experiencing to resolution this frozen stare-down of the Void and God, as they grapple with the incongruous state of recognition precipitated by the error. Time was, both, the manifestation of the error, and the mechanism of its solution; it had to be...contained. Existence is how Time contains the Error. We are an integral part of the resolution of this cosmic error. As loci of consciousness, we are agents, witting or unwitting, of the universe as it evolves to contain, and then absorb the Error. This cosmic maturation process is the purpose of ours and all existence--but NOT selfishly, not for our own benefit, but for the benefit of the Void. "Correction" of the Error is by the integration of consciousness, which is essentially the nature of the Error. But there's still no going back; no going back to an insensible Void comprising the totality of existence. In some form or manner or other, we're "here" to stay. Order/God manifests/actualizes the Void/All Potential. That actualization harkens to the potential of it still in the Void. The Void responds characteristically with an influence of disorder that has the effect of powering the manifestation, from the inside out! That's what I think of as "God's Grace"...
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22:18--"wrestled with the idea of how God could become man...Because God, of course, is infinite and everywhere", Jordan says with a flurry of his arms, as if everybody understands that perfectly well! But what does it MEAN for God to be "infinite and everywhere"?! I conceive of reality to be composed of "point-awarenesses", given that God IS Awareness--the only Awareness, everywhere and always the same. Every thing that can be said to exist does so by virtue of embodiment in a form, from subatomic particles to galaxies. The point-awareness that finds itself at the "center of gravity" of a form assumes the focal role of identity for that form. The so-called "spark of divinity" is the point-awareness located at the center of "mind", the spiritual man, the "Christ consciousness", which manifests a more subtle degree of matter/energy than the physical.
Macrocosmically, there are density regions corresponding to the molecular, the atomic, the subatomic, and the quantum levels of the physical complexity hierarchy. These regions are analogous, microcosmically, to physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels of psyche. What you experience as "mental", for instance, is the character of the subatomic; and the character of the atomic IS, after a fashion, what you experience as "emotion". Specific linkage is possible by precise correspondence, so that your feelings may directly affect atoms. Makes sense to me, anyway. 😊
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4:27--"If your psycho-physiological system assumes that all the danger you were subject to once is still present in the environment, it will set you on edge as if you are walking on dangerous territory." Would it be inaccurate to say, "psyche", instead of, "psycho-physiological system"? Sure would be more efficient! hehehe...The "environment", as a term, has problematic resonances; "the external world" is more unequivocal of a term. But, "set you on edge as if you are walking on dangerous territory", describes "awareness" rather well! I don't see any reason for the psyche to "assume" that all the dangerous experience you've ever had is on the verge of being re-had, so to speak. That's the operation of "fear". The memory of dangerous experience previously encountered is a living thing in a practical sense, in that it is available to "ping", to recall into being resonantly. The choice available to awareness is to recall or not recall, knowing recollection would require the psyche to reenact the experience, to whatever degree necessary or possible. As recollection plays on the screen of imagination, the body responds as if the recalled experience is occurring presently! "On edge" is a description of an emotional state of acute readiness, which, in itself, is not undesirable. However, the attendant tension is rather less desirable, especially as it tends to increase. There is an implication, here, that if you deeply reexperience a memory while being completely--COMPLETELY--physically relaxed, the connection to the body in the memory may be reduced to a degree...so it doesn't "ping" too forcefully, too easily, too quickly.
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I confess to not understanding the relationship between the Canadian government and the College of Psychologists of Ontario. But...every license I've ever had has remained the property of the issuer, subject to surrender upon request. So, I'm thinking Jordan's license belongs to the College, and, so, the College has the privilege of recalling the license at any time. If the College board is appointed by the government, as Jordan seems to say, then it's the government that's responding to a risk it perceives in Jordan's actions. Is the risk to government itself, or to the people served by government? Ostensibly, the latter, but actually the former, I suspect.
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"Evil" has its genesis in the human experience of the spirit of "perversity"--the face of the unknown. That experience aggregates and collectivizes together with the like experience of others to precipitate a "being" which acts consistently with the expectations of its "programmers", those who contributed to the collective. This "being" is magnified and activated by the attention it receives, becoming, in the process, "real". Eventually, the complexification of this "being" may progress sufficiently to engender a degree of independence, autonomy--but always according to universal law. The creators of this "being", though, are BOUND to it--it's just the price extracted by natural law for the creative effort. Everything we do, feel, and think is a binding of our attention that persists perpetually in the reality we know.
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There is both, a "unity" and a "plurality". The elements of the plurality are the differentiations of the unity. On the involutionary arc of creation, the unity differentiates as it "radiates"; on the evolutionary arc, it integrates. Earth represents the completion of involution, in the manifestation of densest "form", and the beginning of evolution, an abstraction, or complexification, of form into essence. Angels and demons, so-called reside on the involutionary side of the cycle, actively building forms for required functions; a hierarchy of human apperception resides on the evolutionary side. Here are the forms humans built from images from associations to personal experiential memory in the effort to approach the unknown using the familiar as comparison; forms of gods and devils, faces of the human fear of the unknown reality. We expand order into the unknown by comparison of it to what we know. The result of that comparison characterizes the knowledge value of that contact with the unknown. The process repeats recursively for as long as you can take it! Digesting the unknown, we grow big and strong. 🤗
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I don't see how the idea of the God-Man violates Jordan's fundamental convictions. He accepts the "omniscience, omnipotence, and OMNIPRESENCE" character of God; Jesus said, "Ye are all sons of God", and, "Get thee behind me, Satan!", putting the Deceiver and Tempter in his proper place as backstop and support and thrust-block--He did not banish Satan. Man's evolution reaches its pinnacle in the God-Man. The atheist assumes the authority of God in denying His existence! Society assumes the authority of God in enforcing its standards of behavior. Government assumes the authority of God in enforcing the standards of Society. God sits atop every pinnacle, so there's a natural association of God with yourself when YOU sit atop a pinnacle...when you are the best at something, or have the most of something, stronger than anyone else, and so on in the style of competition. Self is the deity of the Godless...and God is the Perfection of Self.
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You know, you can only accomplish what you BELIEVE IS POSSIBLE to accomplish, because, disbelief presents a rational DISincentive to pursue the accomplishment. When it comes to what is inside you, you can claim sovereign dominion: your word is law! Attitude! Bring it angry! Nerves originate pain sensation, so, KILL THE NERVE, psychically, intentionally, imaginatively, symbolically, every which way you like, the more the better, don't allow doubt...FEEL the nerve, imaginatively, DIE! Relax into the pain and let its intensity EXPLODE IT! Make such symbolic imaginings as you are led to by the moment, because your intention is fixed. They must be YOUR PERSONAL SYMBOLS for best results.
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At 4:20, Jordan is getting on to something...but, his guest is on a slightly different wavelength, or perspective. I'd like to offer Jordan a little assistance: when you "pose the problem and wait", what emerges are responses from INTERNALIZED AUTHORITIES! Everyone you've every met, you've internalized as an authority, meaning a source of true knowledge. People you interact with often become internalized as semi-autonomous critics, giving no end of trouble to those people not familiar with self-control. Authority is the currency of truth, a repository of trust. Nature internalizes as the authority called, "God".
Emotion and thought are crude handles for a sliding scale of perception and apperception. Perception starts the ball rolling by implying actions and states that directly affect the experiencer; then, emotion arises as possible/likely responses to the implied actions and states that follow direct perception. Thought arises as the experiencer attempts to articulate, especially with language, the emotion experienced. This is the base level of thought; abstracting thought yields symbolic thought that can function without an emotional accompaniment. How you operate this quadripolar dynamic determines everything about who you are and what you do.
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"Heaven" is a state of perfect powerlessness, which is, of course, "bliss". At the end of the day, you crave the perfect powerlessness of sleep. But, in the morning, we're done with it! Being awake in physical existence means you can DO STUFF, so sleep is boring. Outside of physical existence, you can't DO ANYTHING! That's the central advantage of incarnation. Experience of physical reality creates an anchor in the fabric of existence. It is MEMORY! @@ YOUR memory...everybody's memory...is LOCATED in the fabric of existence. This "fabric of existence" IS the ONE MIND. You operate the one mind as well as you are able; then, you learn and become more able. But, you don't really have a personal "mind" of your own. This conception is very inconvenient, as it blurs the truth.
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Evil is the human face of disorder. Nature knows no evil. Cosmos is in Order. The dynamic processes of Nature find reflection in the minds of men, where desire bends perception. Discomfort becomes "bad". That which causes discomfort is anthropomorphized, given a FACE, by which to know it. The greater discomfort is caused by the greater "bad", having a more fearsome FACE. Pretty soon "bad" is not longer a suitable term, yielding to "evil". The human experience of existence is "suffering", so discomfort, disturbance is an ever-present companion. There are myriad possible responses--especially judgements--that can occur to a person depending on his natural proclivities. The sum total of experience trains the psyche on a true course or a more or less distorted one, depending on the quality of guidance encountered. If the "right" things get twisted just the wrong way, a person may train himself to enjoy...pain, for instance. If everything gets twist just the right way we may see clearly and without emotional attachment the operations of natural law. All this fearful talk about EVIL! Eh..."He who smelt it dealt it."
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What if we try a different basis? It's popular to behave as if each person possesses his own "mind", whether good, bad, or deranged. What if...
There is only ONE MIND, an infinite field of resonant associativity. "Association" is the operational process; the objects of association are the resonances created by EXPERIENCE (whether real or imagined, the body can't tell). Upon birth, the snake begins to eat its tail, the resonances attending the birth experience start the association ball rolling, and it's off to the races. The process is continuous at all levels. An example: the experience of the parent is naturally INTERNALIZED (memory, reflection, etc.). These internalized personages act as "authorities" which, when resonantly stimulated, pipe up characteristically, offering their peculiar viewpoints. Parents, playmates, teachers...everyone we've ever met we've internalized. Even those we've IMAGINED meeting have been internalized as experience dictated. We don't "have thoughts", or "think"; we associate resonances deliberately, and characteristically--it's the very expression of the individual's being, and at the same time its self-revelation. They say follow your thoughts to discover yourself--to me, be aware of your associations. Association is the currency of awareness, it's what we do in every waking moment. What something means to you is determined by your experiential resonances...no wonder people are challenged to have a productive civil discussion--always they assume the intended meaning is the same as the perceived meaning. Contradictions are insufficiently realized resonance patterns/sequences. "Insufficiently realized"? Resonate your question (i.e. ping the mind field); observe the resultant associations' patterns and sequences. You will characteristically (i.e. automatically) choose the resonances to include in the pattern/sequence which represents the "answer". This is where you develop your character, by considering/weighing your predilection against your evolving EXPERIENCE. As you EXPERIENCE this resonant conflict, it is resolved. It is resolved in the experience of the conflicting resonances. You don't have to DO anything; just maintain awareness of the resonant associations in play, with an unwavering intent to articulate what is "true".
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"Novelty" is the presentation, or appearance, of "the unknown", and is signaled by "distraction". "Focus" orders the unknown, making it "known"; loss of focus allows the unknown, as a pressure of disorder, to overtake the known's structures of order, yielding confusion, contradiction, dilapidation. Novelty is often a product of a pressure of disorder emanating from the unknown. You think of something and immediately its inside-out opposite flashes into awareness, as a "possibility", in apparent balance. Order tries to tease the unknown into itself bit by bit; the unknown resists with a pressure of disorder that "tears the known apart". "Movement" is an expression of this dynamic balance in disequilibrium.
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"Truth" is "conformance with reality". "The earth orbits the sun"...well, yeah, sort of. The reality you readily observe is that the earth orbits the sun. However, the actual path of the earth is more like a trailing spiral, as the sun hurls through the galaxy, dragging the solar system along with it. Yet, the definition of "orbit" allows both perspectives to be "true". It's useful to hold the various perspectives in mind without favoring one over the other, but, rather, holding the different perspectives in relation to each other, and letting a realization develop, "sink in".
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"The intentional object is whatever the thought is about", says Dennett, at 08:15, hinting at the relationship between his notions of "intentionality" and "aboutness". He says the Easter Bunny does "not exist", creating logical problems, which, for some reason, he says can be "set aside". At 8:40, "We have to explain how information that's in our brains can be about things in the world and also about things that don't even exist." My immediate question is always the same: Why? What value would that explanation provide? Dennett seems caught up in the problem of the general invalidity of logical negation: "Nothing cannot exist". Everything exists; there is only truth. Falsity is an illusion of negation. That which is cannot cease to be, since its existence has impressed itself in the substratum of reality that participated in its existence...like footprints of our passage in the sands of reality. The universe REMEMBERS EVERYTHING! That's "where" your memories reside, not in your brain. The brain is part of a memory recall system, not the repository of memories, any more than your radio receiver contains what it emits from its speaker.
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Logic postulates a "God" as the pinnacle of the hierarchy of the entirety of creation, in keeping with the model of hierarchical organization manifesting everywhere in the phenomenal universe. So, if you're rational, atheism is, technically, nonsensical. The most brilliant minds often have failed to detect the limits of logic, and, so, rely on it overly much, straining it to it's breaking point, yielding subtly faulty results.
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"...continuity of religio..."! C'mon, guys, structure, please! hehehe...They explicate their peculiar vocabularies and delight in correlating them. That's lovely, but, inchoate...poetic, even! I consider the subject technical! "Cognition is not in your head. It's between you and the world" is a virtually meaningless statement, linguistically. "The world" is another of the super-words they like to revolve around that is too huge to be usefully wielded, so it serves as an indicator, a buzz-word, containing the meaning each listener assigns to it, without special regard to how the speaker meant it's use. If you want to communicate you must hold certain terminology in common. You make sure of that by clearly defining your terminology! DEFINITIONS, not off-handed descriptions!
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Starting at about 26:00, Jordan begins speaking insensibly: "You have a profound aesthetic sense, so some things move you deeply, and in principle those are profound things." The insensibility revolves around the interplay between the terms, "profound", and, "deep". In popular parlance these terms are synonymous. But the dictionary offers, "intense", as a definition of, "profound", so this difference becomes a basis for interplay, though "deep" may mean "intense", as well. So it is not clear whether a distinction between the terms is intended to inform the semantics of the statement. I don't know exactly what is meant by, "aesthetic sense", in Jordan's usage, but it generally refers to a capacity to appreciate beauty. But an advanced sense of aesthetics it not a prerequisite for being moved deeply! Then comes the implication that, because Douglas's aesthetic sense is profound, the things that move him deeply must, therefore, be profound! I don't see the logic.
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The group's interaction with the individual is based on the appearance, especially economically, the individual presents; the individual's interaction with the group is based the individual's perception of his environment, primarily driven by survival concerns, which is home to all manner of groups, each of which represents an opportunity to improve survival potential. Group membership is individually motivated, outside the control of any group; it's the fly in the ointment of every control scheme, due to its unpredictability. Hence, government seeks to motivate individuals, though it can only address groups, so its control of individuals has to be indirect. That makes government nervous for its own survival...individualism is a threat to government authority, and government instinctively knows this.
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1:03:00--"Apprehend the vision with your feelings"! There's two ways to take this, depending on what "feelings" are. Firstly, observe something, identity it, then, if desired, "remember" the "experience" of it...go into it--what does it smell like, feel like, sound like--extend the physical senses, imaginatively, to contact it! The second interpretation supposes "feelings" refers to "awareness", "vision" to "intention", and "apprehend" to "observe", or "attention". This latter interpretation might be peculiar to my personal perspective.
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"What is 'thought'?" "Secular prayer"? Eh-hem, and what might "prayer" be? Rather, I think what thought MUST be, if everything I "know" is to be "true". Thought is the product of thinking. Thinking occurs as an arrangement of words. Words are mental linguistic expressions attached to emotional complexes (which are continuously forged in ongoing sensory experience) by the mental awareness in acts of "naming"--"Naming is knowing"--which is also why it is sacrilegious to give God a name/form. The articulation of the name is the bedrock of thought. Thought complexes are formed by the repeated associations of these names in the same patterns, eventually becoming semi-autonomous, able to function "in the background", without special attention, producing values available for immediate association--a sort of "pool of possibility". Now, you can create thought complexes that formulate spiritual potencies for the direction of the mental awareness. But, that's the stuff of which magic is made, so, take care, now!
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After endlessly traversing the paths laid out by his academic training, he finds himself trapped in THAT labyrinth. The hair-splitting is an attempt to escape it. The more entrenched in that world, the harder it is to escape its constraints. He needs to practice liberating himself from himself...Stop imagining that everyone has his own personal "mind"! Then the structure of the psyche is easy to observe: Awareness is the interplay between Intention and Attention. YOU CAN control intention and attention, and, thereby, ENTER THE PLAY of awareness and reality. If you surrender to pain in perfect relaxation, the pain transforms to unattached sensation. This is what I experienced having my eye teeth drilled without anaesthetic--I was learning self-hypnosis, at the time. As muscle tension would just begin to build, the pain began to reassert itself...relax, relax, re-relaxing the muscles would blank the pain immediately. For me, this event was a crucial life experience...I'm STILL learning from it 40 years later.
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31:10--"...whatever God might be...something like the highest spirit of genuine self-sacrifice..."--you sound like you're guessing, Jordan! Try a different tack: what does God HAVE to be to satisfy the requirements of a cogent, coherent, and comprehensive philosophy and metaphysic of existence! How 'bout...Awareness is God; Spirit is the character, or attitude, of awareness manifesting in a particular grade of matter/energy. Since God is One, all awareness is one and the same, essentially, though, limited by the requirements of manifestation in the local environment. The conception of a good vs evil dynamic is a natural anthropomorphism that limits God's conception by implying a perfect ultimate God Who is incomplete, which smacks of contradiction. Better to attribute "evil" to the mishandling of "possibility", the currency of the Primordial Chaotic Void, a pressure It exerts upon Order. Possibilities crop up perpetually in associations; your character depends upon which associations you internalize as good, true, and proper...over and over again. This habit also provides a degree of psychic separation from the "other", "evil", possibility associations, so that time accumulates a power of spiritual nobility.
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At 30:00, no, you're not wrong, JP! At least from my point of view, the Word that created reality was "Christ", is a cogent statement--we just have to make sure our definitions allow it. "Christ" is a title, not a person's name. Christ, in the person of the Son of the Father God, mediates between the source of manifestation/order and Chaos. The remaining member of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is best conceived as the life force, and possesses a peculiar subterranean connection to Chaos which operates within the Trinity. Christ is the One Universal Mind, which, mediating Chaos and Impulse to Order, produces manifestation/existence/reality.
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"Energy = frequency = mass"?! Hmm...alternate manifestations of "the one thing"? "Our thinking...the realm of consciousness..." is a juicy and fruit-filled expression! hehehe...Thinking is just articulated emotion, which latter is processed sensation...Consciousness is the capacity of matter to be responsive...Consciousness is the impetus to associate...Association is the mechanism of universal reality--it is its manner of function...It's what the one universal mind does to produce the entirety of existence...Relentless, multiform association, producing complex relationships, and patterns of relationships...interactively, no less...The brain/nervous system functions much like a radio receiver, tuning to distinguish a particular "pattern" from all the others occupying the same "space"...Awareness is a radio "ping" of a particular "pattern", perhaps "representing" a particular object, or idea, or perception, that you have EXPERIENCED. Experience CREATES a buoy in the universal substratum of reality that is "ping-able"; this is the residence of "memory". And it belongs to the universe as much as it does to you.
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The "will to truth" Kreeft mentions is a matter of personal alignment toward the universal action of spirit, which is "association", the Love that God is. This principle, being universally operative, determines the behavior even of gross matter. "Spirit" is the "material" of God's Being. It is also the inspiration of each individual "awareness". "Imagination" is the Seat of spirit. The clear imagination will reflect most truly. BUT...clarity is difficult in the presence of preference. Any secret preference will distort or malform the image. This sort of confusion is a monkey mind specialty. Not only do you get to deceive yourself, but you get to have fun doing it! hahaha...The monkey is very clever; he'll pretend to be mastered, hiding in wait for opportunity to, even briefly, "take the helm". The monkey is the "mind of emotion", capricious, opportunistic, even vicious, though, more than anything, jealous of the superior position of intellect and resentful of intellect's ability to wrest control from the monkey. The monkey is like a vestigial intellect left over from youth, when it was "master", driving the child to exploration through play and hijinks, directing an important initial learning process. As the intellect matures, though, the monkey gets unruly in its jealousy. The practice of "dispassion" banishes the monkey to its rightful domain.
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At 45:00, Jordan says, "One of sources of creativity might be the capacity of the human imagination to generate fictional personalities"...as in dreams. From my perspective that's an inconvenient assumption, that the imagination generates fictional personalities. Full explanation follows the assumption that these "fictional personalities" are actually memory complexes, recollections of persons/personalities previously encountered. Such complexes may be assembled spontaneously for special use, or over long periods, resulting in a degree of autonomy for the complex. Low-level complexes, developing most completely at birth and in early life, those involving physical experience, sensation, body function, physics, operate virtually automatically to offer to awareness state information, which can then be used by awareness to form a contact, by self-identification. The high-level complexes are the personal favorites; the ideas that occupy the spirit, the sense of self...what you LIKE, but for no discernible reason. These are the ideas, or thought generators you habitually operate, especially, testing them in various scenarios. This is what occupies your awareness when it's idle.
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The human being's concourse with "spirits" provides exactly the experience the human being requires for its development of its innate capabilities, the exercise of which yields the greatest possible self-satisfaction. "Existence is suffering", technically, as any and all experience is "suffered"...participated in with the full being. The character and intensity of the suffering inherent in experience is impressed upon the substratum of the universe, becoming "memories", as the universe records your passage through it, like footprints in the sand. These impressions are permanent possessions of the universe, and, as such, are available for contact...even in the discarnate state. The total collection, so to speak, of these impressions constitutes the "soul", which responds resonantly to every observation/identification cycle, providing associations from experiential memory. The local universe ripples with every intention we have! And reverberates with the soul's resonant response!
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40:50--Jordan: "...whether the phenomenon of meaning is real in any real sense..."...<argh>..."real", eh? hehe...I know, it's the big bush the philosophers beat around. But philosophy should be more than a poetry of science. Technical language has requirements metaphorical language can't tolerate. The topic had me thinking: semantics is contextual; meaning, in general, is either "intention", or "value", of either signal type or symbol type. However, the phrase, "phenomenon of meaning", signifies a personal observation of meaning formation in awareness. In my experience, meaning forms from associations of memories and memory fragments elicited, as if resonantly ("what matches?"), from the object of intended identification, i.e. that which is presumed to possess meaning. Observation naturally proceeds toward identification, which, itself, proceeds to complexify with every appropriate--according to natural sympathy/antipathy--association. Our experiential memory base is the raw material available for conceptualization; we can't conceive of something we've never experienced in any wise. Our experiential memory base provides the references for all comparisons; and comparisons are at the heart of the valuation processes that form "meaning". It's interesting to consider that this ball got rolling with each person's BIRTH EVENT. "Comparison" came naturally with the shock of "difference" to the infant birthing. Hey, it's not called, "RATIOcination", for nothing!
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Nearing 40:00, Kreeft maintains the distance between God and Man, which, I think, is the problem with religion--the embrace of a slave mentality. "The spirit that guides us has to have a unitary nature", Jordan follows: "You're just not wise enough to generate a whole system of universally applicable values out of whole cloth in the span of your trivial life", without explaining the need for "wisdom" in the process. But isn't that exactly what everyone does as an expression of sanity in evaluating their experience over time?! I don't see any other choice, except trying to shoe-horn your experience into an external mold, like a religious belief system. Kreeft says, "You have created the meaning of life. Who is the creator? You?! What gives you the right and power to do that? You did not create the universe. How can you write the laws of morality any more than you can write the laws of physics." The laws of morality have the same basis as the laws of physics. You exercise your power to create by "imagination", the seat of spirit, operative through the full extent of your being, physical sensation, emotion, and intellect. The spirit is unitary, as Jordan says, meaning, "one"; it is God. So, the question becomes, "what does Kreeft think 'you' are; what is a human being", that he can be separate from God". "Omnipresence" should mean something to the good doctor.
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"Consciousness" is too abstract a term to be very useful. What they're usually talking about, instead, is "awareness". "Imagination" is the sphere of "self-assemblage", the perpetual symbolic recapitulation of the "self". It is the mirror of "what is", or shall be; the capacity to form intention--a tool of the will. Additionally, though, the medium of imagination is the subtle "energy" that underlies the expression of substance from the universal substrate of existence. So, the efforts of imagination are made in the subtle substance that underlies matter! Imagination structures reality. "Attention" is the capacity to observe; to "notice" detail. "Intention" directs "attention", as "attention" informs "intention". "Awareness" is the Tao to "attention"'s yin and "intention"'s yang. "Intention" and "attention" are the two tools you have available to use in the building of "self"--indeed, this intention/attention dynamic is ALL you have to WORK with, that YOU CONTROL DIRECTLY AND IMMEDIATELY--your "right and left hand", so to speak.
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Historically, it would seem, "free speech" is a crazy idea! Kings are notorious for not liking what people say, especially about them...and, really, everything is about them. Without a government interested in protecting freedom of speech it would simply be unwise to speak freely, without considered reticence. Somebody will hear, be offended or threatened, and act with preemptive intent. If that person is more powerful than you, you lose! Maybe, everything! I don't know if it's especially important that we feel free to speak the truth--the truth might have greater value and impact if one has to suffer to reveal it. What good is it, though?! The value it SERVES is as a structural element of society. But, I don't see a universal good in the free expression of the truth. The truth is all there is; if your mind is awake it's filled with truth. What good does it really do to have people telling you what the truth is?! It's only demeaning, and assaultive.
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"How fundamental a given thought is is dependent on how many other thoughts are dependent on it for its validity", Jordan says at 3:25. He must have meant, "their validity", since he's describing a hierarchy, the lesser thoughts being built upon, or springing from, more fundamental thoughts. In general, ok, but he takes off into "social status", and assorted psychological language, on his way to "the adventure of spirit". I wouldn't say it's exactly "wrong", but it goes in the wrong direction, outwards. Fundamental thoughts proceed from fundamental experience. What is the foundation experience of human being? The birth event, of course! The birth event is the pattern of all personal experience going forward, and the model of "trauma", to be re-experienced in every later fear. The birth event precipitates a stimulus--response cascade purposed to accommodate the novel experience of the sudden changes in temperature, humidity, pressure, brightness, weight, loudness. Repetition establishes habituation mechanisms, and the trauma subsides, but the original sensory experiences are imprinted at the "fundamental" level of psyche, ready to respond to stimulus, so that, when you think of fire, for example, your thoughts are in terms of "images" from experiential memory that correspond to "fire". Your idea of "fire" develops by association, or resonance, with your experience of it and your articulation of that experience. We perpetually observe, identify, and associate in our natural desire to know the world, to know what is; this big picture of reality is continuously forming and is the form God takes in your imagination--unless you're an idolator. "Knowledge" is what happens as you evaluate your success in imposing "Order" on the unknown, the "Disorder", in a sort of emotional balancing act in which the barrier region between the known and unknown is maintained usefully, allowing progress of order into the bordering disorder while resisting the pressure of disorder.
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"The only alternative to organizing your perceptions and actions in a hierarchical manner with something at the top is confusion and disunity. There is no third choice." But Jordan's manner when saying this indicated to me that the "organizing" he mentioned he considered to be CONSCIOUSLY DELIBERATE, a prioritization activity undertaken in full self-awareness. And I agree, as far as it goes, but there's more to it at a lower level. Our physical experience of the physical senses forms in the style and manner of those senses, a sort of "pre-organization", a format, a template, a constraint that conditions the experience...characteristically. The organizational model emerges from your interaction with the underlying expression--you "make sense of it", almost compulsively, drawing constantly from experiential memory to assemble an understanding, a relationship which renders the unpredictable predictable. This process of accommodating reality has been ongoing since the moment of birth. Most of your perceptions and actions are organized spontaneously at levels of psyche below that of "casual awareness"...out of sight, out of mind...The organizing you are aware of will necessarily follow a known model, or pattern, from experiential memory. So, I guess maybe I'm suggesting a "third choice"--the non-existent one that Jordan mentioned. 🤗
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Jeepers, John, I wish you hadn't have defined a word in terms of itself--"My faith is a faithfulness to a corrective process...", at 52:36. That definition, though, isn't generally applicable. What is "faith" except the emotional experience of "expectation"! It may be important that the lesson life teaches is "continuance". From that first breath onwards, one moment seems to follow upon another, repeatedly, without fail. Experience trains us to expect to continue into the next moment. Perhaps...that expectation, that faith, "saves us", in the moment of death, to a "continuance" in the emotional and mental being we'd come to know in life, but without the accustomed basis in physicality. Is it such a stretch to imagine that the belief in an afterlife actually creates that afterlife? Such should be the irony of atheism--a cosmic joke with a bitchin' punchline!
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I've found that the complete understanding of the "problem" manifests the "solution" in an "ah-HA!", eureka, moment. The perfect question produces its own answer. At 41:14, Jordan undertakes to explain what happens in "thinking", using himself as example. "Thoughts make themselves manifest in relationship to our aim", Jordan says. I don't care for the attribution of agency to thoughts in the matter of their own creation! And "aim", the arrow of intent, is "intention"; so, "Thoughts manifest in relationship to our intention", captures the fact of the matter succinctly. In my terms, though, thoughts manifest in resonant RESPONSE to our intention. Intention pings for a match, and the entire psyche resonates to the tone of that intention, eliciting a sympathetic resonant response as elements of psyche are naturally able, according to their inherent potency and "frequency" match to the intention. Intend the image of a boat, for instance, and a flood of boat-related imagery from experiential memory bustles to the fore. The memories that were physical have special vibrancy, as the resonances affect the physical body. Now, what do you do with all these boat images floating around? If you had a purpose in pondering the boat, you proceed to organize the images according to your purpose. However, if you've been woolgathering and had no purpose in intending the boat, you'll probably go on to consider whatever images happen to present, for reasons you have no clue about, until...eventually, there is an illumination. "Gee, I've been seeing the same images over and over again! Why? What does this process signify?"
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"Meaning" is contextual. The apperception of a "meaningless existence" mitigates against the greater context that would provide the greater satisfaction with life: God, in a word. But defined properly, God is the Substance of All Existence, at the bottom end, the "outsidedness", AND, at the top end, the "insidedness", God is the IDEA of All Existence, the pinnacle of every hierarchy, the most complete CONTEXT.
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Wasps, spiders...maybe following the traces of patterns in the collective of wasps, spiders. Perhaps, those patterns arise from amassed individual experience. They possess "consciousness" as does everything, including gross matter, which is just the capacity of response. These creatures possess awareness, that delicate and perpetual tension between attention and intention, too--but not self-conscious awareness. That requires "reflection" in awareness, yielding "self-consciousness". "Experience" is the anchor we sink into the substratum of existence, which we later re-experience as "memory". It isn't memories that are "stored" in brain matter, but, rather the mechanism of memory recollection operation. Self-conscious awareness is how and why we are different from all other animals.
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