Yup...to take the time to know deeply can take you a big circle to where you realise there was nothing really to know. Sometimes the journey is what counts in the end.
I tend to think the point isn't about accumulating knowledge. Limited as we are, any knowledge we have will be also limited and only partial. So to me, the point is the journey. It's not just "sometimes" that the journey is what matters, it's all the time. It's how we search for knowledge, how we live our lives, what we develop in ourselves (hatred, compassion, love, fear). It's what we do with what we're given, both our limitations and our gifts. It's whether or not we live life- whether or not we go after the full experience of it and support and protect other beings' experiences of life. To me, this is all the journey, and it is part of a broader journey of the universe itself.
I still have a little flirtation with Australian Aboriginal or North American concepts of spirit or manitou but rather than think it something manifest in objects themselves I have come to see it as something within me. It is my mind that thinks these thoughts, not the pebble or the river. It is simply appreciation, love.
I think we differ in that you think love and appreciation spring from yourself, and I think that, in the deepest sense of things, there is no self from which these spring. The pebble or the river elicit from me appreciation, but the appreciation itself is not "in" me or "in" the pebble or river. The river and I are two nodes along a love network. I can choose to live in the illusion that there is an "I," some sense of a permanent or semi-permanent ego. But it would be a fallacy, because really I am just a collection of processes, and this includes my poetry and my sense of consciousness. These processes are "me" and they are also everyone else. I have nothing of my own; my apparent unqiueness is temporary and even that is a manifestation and gift of the broader process of Divine unfolding. That said, the illusion of "me" and what I do with it is significant. Just because something is illusory and temporary doesn't mean it isn't important. I'm like a performance artist and life is the medium. But this performance art I create isn't wholly "mine" because I, myself, am a piece of art resulting from a broader creative process.
Everything is defined whether you like it or not. Mind requires you filter everything through it, you have no thoughts independent of it and its experience to date. The way nature relates to us can seem almost magical, but the associations that make them appear so are always creations of mind and its experience.
I could just as easily say that your mind, also, requires you to filter everything through it... and so your assertion that the associations that make Nature appear magical are creations of our minds is equally due to your experience and thoughts to date. There is no answer to this. You think what you think because of your past, and I think what I think because of my past. And neither of us can wrestle the other into a new way of thinking. What I argue for is an openness to possibility, that rather than accept the filters I've been given by my society, I am open to the possibility that some other way of thinking about it is correct. And I am open to my experience being a journey of connectedness, of interbeingness... not only a journey that is all within my own head. If it is all in my own head, it really matters not- either in my own thoughts of what the afterlife is or in your belief that there is no afterlife. On that, we are able to converse without strain or worry, because neither of us believe in a permanent heaven or hell, and so it is really inconsequential that we disagree on the particulars.
There is no escaping....even the best meditators struggle for real detatchment and in the doing they are still operating through schooled mind excersises....remaining completely within self. There is no escaping self and the schooling that informs self.
I disagree. One can learn to view the self as a toy, a vehicle. And as such, one can maintain a connection to it without having blind attachment to it. One can observe oneself, which indicates that "self" is something different from "one." I think it's not something we are to struggle with. It is something to play with- something to wonder at and enjoy. I am not here to drearily drudge through life- I am here to rejoice and play and love. I am not sure what you are meaning by "escaping" the self- that is, I am not sure how you define the self. Clearly, we are not only our routinized, schooled neurological mechanisms. Because people get out of their former box all the time, on levels ranging from mundane to profound. We have a lot of choice in how we school ourselves, if we choose to take it. So who is choosing who the self will be?
Even if a living thing like a tree did have language what would it say? How fast would a mountain think? Does the meandering river know its following the rules of fractal geometry? We are all part of everything, that is what we really share. It is all beautiful and its all too easy to get carried away and begin to revere. A measure of reverence in that case is no bad thing either. But it is all to easy just to get lost in just the experience of that reverence and forget the many truths that also exist.
LOL- you just spent the first half of your conversation explaining that there is no way to escape the schooled self, limited by its former experiences and training. And then you said there are truths that exist and imply we can know them. The two propositions don't go well together. Either there are truths and we can "escape" (as you put it) our schooled self (mind) or there are truths that exist and we can't know them because we are bound to our limitations.
The way I see it, the reverence and the beauty and the love is the point. It is the truth. The rest is window dressing- the microwaves and space shuttles and all that are, at their best, tools to make more time or a new perspective for the reverence and beauty and love. That drive is the best of humanity and when we are not given over to it, we sink into fear, violence, and the worst of humanity.
For most of our history clever individuals have known the forests and mountains intimately. Built a schooling of heritable knowledge according to their need. Now science looks at it and reveals so many new questions, questions with answers based on meaningful observations. For me I just prefer that route. Real questions that have answers outside of mind.
Answers outside of mind?
How does that jive with your former statements? And how do you propose that there is a meaningful distinction between modern science's answers and those obtained in other ways? How can we prove that any answers are outside of human mind? Does congruity between human minds really prove anything? What if we are all bound to certain ways of the mind that are species-wide, but have nothing to do with reality in the broader sense? You are defining for yourself what is a "meaningful observation" and a "real question" and an "answer outside of mind."
It is your own choices in thought that lead you to see modern science as discovering or revealing reality, whereas other forms of inquiry lead to only "the mind."
And I get off on it. As much as you enjoy your feelings.
Obviously, I get off on science, too- that's why I've devoted my career to it. But I enjoy a great many things, that is true. Sometimes I enjoy experience without any further processing. I enjoy going out and feeling the wind on my skin, or the sunlight, or hearing running water and I often do not need to think further than that. It is treating myself to being my animal self. It is refreshing. And it is in that vein that I can experience the spiritual life as I do without leaning too far into either theology or skepticism. I seek to be as a child in the spiritual life, and yet in being so, to be open to all possibility. In that, I enjoy philosophizing and having ideas and writing. When in the mood, I come here or to my journals and write, write, write. Sometimes poetry, sometimes prose. I am not overly concerned about what happens to it. I am enjoying the journey. So, I guess you could say I just enjoy all of it, and as I've found all of it to also better me as a person, if I have the right intent and focus... I figure it is all good. I'm in no hurry to get anywhere in particular, or to subscribe to any one point of view. There's white, black, and grey... I want to dabble in water color.
