Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "Jordan B Peterson"
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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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