cardboard adolescent

And no, I don't believe in the privation of love. I've come to realize recently that everything deserves love, because everything has the potential for perfection and showing something love is the best way to guide it to that potential.

Inuzuka Skysword

Okay, let me make sure I understand what you are saying.

Are you saying that there is no opposite of love? When I am talking about the privation of love and its existence, I am saying that there is an opposite to love, which is its absence. What I am interpreting your statement to mean is that you don't believe that love can be absent at all. If that is the case, then it is impossible to be unethical, (assuming that you said earlier that reflecting love is the ethical responsibility). If it is impossible, then can we really call it an ethical responsibility? Instead, we come back to what I was saying earlier, which is that you are using ethical responsibility as a synonym for necessity.

As far as the "using love to perfect" thing, I don't know your definition of perfection, though it seems that you see perfection as unity based on your posts. I don't see how loving inanimate objects would make them any more perfect though.

cardboard adolescent

Inanimate objects are already perfect :P

I am a monist, so I believe that ultimately everything is One, and that this One-ness is best described as Love or Being, but because we live under the illusion of maya, we tend to understand these terms as they relate to their opposites, Hate or Non-Being. However, I think this is an imperfect understanding. But insofar as we have to operate under maya until we reach our final awakening, I think we have a responsibility to choose Love over Hate and Being over Non-Being. Under the illusion of maya, we see Love and Hate as locked in an eternal struggle that doesn't promise a resolution, and we see Being and Non-Being as trapped in an eternal cycle which we might call Becoming. When we are enlightened, we realize that Hate destroys itself, and therefore doesn't exist, and Non-Being... well... is Non-Being. Hate and Non-Being are the same in this sense because neither really exist... they're like feedback rolling off the pure power fifth that is Being, an ornament or decoration, but not something that exists in itself, and something that is always disappearing.

I'll try to tie these beliefs back in to what I was trying to get at with causality. I still hold that from the perspective of maya, which is characterized by discursive reasoning, which is based on duality (as computer science shows, all you need is 0 and 1 and some logic gates), causality seems to entail a contradiction. The reason for this is because causality both implies a first cause and precludes the possibility of a first cause. The reason it is impossible for there to be a first cause is because a cause only ever imparts the movement that has been imparted on it--billiard ball A makes billiard ball B move in a particular direction only because billiard ball A has been made to move in a certain direction by billiard ball C... and so on. Derrida talks about this a lot, but in annoyingly complicated terms. If you think about the Big Bang, and the idea that everything emerged from a singularity, you realize that that implies that the Universe began with One thing moving in Two directions... which is impossible. So you're stuck, I claim, with a tricky situation: causality seems to imply a contradiction, but this contradiction is only meaningful within the system of causality. Hence, I do not believe that discursive reasoning, which is dualistic, is inherently self-contradictory. Rather, I believe, in parallel with the previous paragraph, that within discursive reasoning we see, at its foundation, the constant cycling of identity and contradiction, the ultimate yin-yang, that of reasoning as such. But when we transcend discursive reasoning, identity and contradiction unify into paradox, which gives rise to Thought but is also beyond it.

And hence, to tie it all together, it may seem to be a contradiction that Hate both exists (qua illusion) and also doesn't exist... but it's actually a paradox! When Hate disappears we'll realize it was never there to begin with.

The Monkey

TS Elliot wrote a bit on this subject, try and Google it.

__________________

Now another stranger seems to want you to ignore his dreams as though they were the burden of some other

My Last.fm

Inuzuka Skysword

I really have nothing to say to this because this whole paragraph is claims. I really don't see how you start off accepting monism. My question would be how one can believe in such a thing.

I don't think everything can be called existence. Existence is a property and not an actual thing. We do refer to "the universe" as existence, but "existence" takes on the meaning of "everything that is."

How do contradiction and identity give rise to thought? What are you defining as thought? Thought only exists if there is an object to think about. If there is no object to think about, then there can be no thought. I take it that since "identity" does not exist, then you reject the idea that things exist. Existence is only possible as long as identity is possible. You cannot exist without existing as something.

cardboard adolescent

I didn't start off believing monism, and I don't think anybody does. I could say it was "revealed" to me, I could say I experienced it, but these are all dualistic descriptions revolving around subject/object: I/transcendence. Even the description "I AM" falls short.

The notion that existence is a property, or predicate, has been widely disputed and is the subject of much philosophical debate. My view of the Universe is that complexity emerges from simplicity, and that this is why complex phenomena can be understood through Law, which restores their unity.

One way I could try to explain this is by setting up a duality between MIND and mind, where MIND could be interpreted as the Mind of God. MIND unfolds from simplicity to complexity, it is One in itself, it becomes witness to itself, becoming subject and object, it explodes into the limitless possibilities inherent in this division, becoming many subjects and many objects.

Mind, on the other hand, my mind or your mind, comes at the end of this process, after MIND has divided itself into many minds. A mind reverses this process, it takes the many minds (subjects) and unifies them through common beliefs, it takes the many objects and unifies them through Law. And so, mind folds back into MIND and the unity is restored.

How will thought define itself? Since thought understands Being through abstract concepts, ultimately thought will call Being itself a thought-form, since this is what it strives to reduce Being to (namely, itself). This is why I have given another name for Being, namely MIND. But MIND is simply Being as approached through thought. If I claim there is something besides thought, I can't define it through thought. But for simplicity's sake I could just go ahead and call it Body.

Along this line of reasoning, Body is simply that which resists mind. Mind is free to think of whatever it wants, whether it be consistent or self-contradictory. However, Body imposes limits and restraints on mind.

So Being divides itself into subject and object, mind and body. The mind responds to the needs of the body, and the body is subject to interpretation and definition by the mind.

When I claim that there is a unity that is "above" or "beyond," or "under" and "within," this duality of mind/body, when I attempt to define it rationally, with my mind, I betray it by choosing one side of the duality over the other (namely, mind over body). Hence, I call it MIND, and can represent it as a Force that has no restraints--it thinks everything it can think into existence, and this is its existence, it exists through its Thoughts which participate in its existence.

If I take the opposite route, and choose body over mind, I will have a much harder time of defining it. I would represent it as that which cannot be represented, not a Force, but a Limit. Not that which has no constraints, but that which is constraint itself, with nothing to constrain. And, if you think about it, this is Being, which cannot be defined except in terms of itself, which adds no information to its object except that it is, a pure constraint. Being, taken by itself, without any object to apply it to, is Body in its purest form, when we realize that any abstraction we use to label Body is still part of mind, and hence misses the mark.

Because the Unity manifests as Duality, choosing one side of the Duality over the other necessarily misses the Unity, but we can still find the Unity when we realize that these extremes coincide--that absolute constraint is absolute freedom, and that this is paradox.

Identity and contradiction do not give rise to thought, MIND or Being gives rise to thought. Thought is an expression of the self-division of MIND or Being, because it has a subject (mind) which is identical to itself, and contradictory to its object. And yet, despite the inherent difference between the subject and object, the subject can understand the object, which implies their underlying unity.

However, the subject cannot understand this unity itself, because it transcends the duality implicit in understanding. The unity resides on a higher level of experience, from which mind and body emanate. Mind and body have to be reconciled as a unity for this level to be reached, mind cannot get there on its own.