Analysis of the soul.

[MANICHAEAN]

Jacks Bar Bangkok.

Time for reflection again. For some reason today it centres around ambition: gained, thwarted, elusive, too late.

I suppose when I was a young man it all revolved around money. There was none, hence the drive. Marriage, kids, happiness, (whatever that is) was secondary.

It seems strange now in my dotage as to what was actually achieved. The money goal has been well achieved,but the rest; marriage (a disaster), family (snatched at whenever there was time). I had managed to gain respect and was pleased with that; being able to help people, holding down some quite senior jobs.

But in the conventional sense with conventional values I suppose I ended up the outsider.

I can't be the only one however. How many out there I have come across who had to sacrifice original values due to circumstances and pressure. How many women prepared to sacrifice all dignity to raise a child without a father or means of support? How many men prepared to turn the cheek against humiliation in order to protect their jobs?

The whole point of having money lies not in being able to afford things; and I'm talking beyond the basics; but in the independence it gives you to plow your own furrow, to answer back where you disagree and the peace of mind that you can survive in your mortal existence.

Which brings us to the soul and spirituality. Is it necessary? I happen to think so, not because I want to save my soul from damnation, but that it satisfies that dual nature in any man of imagination and sensitivity.

Is it an illusion, a joke, as many men more learned than myself would argue? Who am I to argue with such rational beings?

All I know is that I sit today on the banks of the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok, the breeze is in my face, the Thais are smiling and at peace, and I am grateful to be among them.

[Danik 2016]

"The whole point of having money lies not in being able to afford things; and I'm talking beyond the basics; but in the independence it gives you to plow your own furrow, to answer back where you disagree and the peace of mind that you can survive in your mortal existence."
In other words, enough money means autonomy. And I think there is also wealth in getting out of ones national nutshell and sharing the life with people from other countries.

[YesNo]

Which brings us to the soul and spirituality. Is it necessary? I happen to think so, not because I want to save my soul from damnation, but that it satisfies that dual nature in any man of imagination and sensitivity.

Is it an illusion, a joke, as many men more learned than myself would argue? Who am I to argue with such rational beings?

One of the things I learned from reading Prechter's socionomics views is that perspectives on reality change with social mood. In particular, he could plot how people treated his own work compared with that of economists who believed the market is a random machine. During bull markets, mechanistic random walk and efficient market models dominate. During bear markets his holistic perspective on social mood gained an audience.

Once we get into a bear market and negative social mood dominates, the idea that spirituality is an illusion should be rejected with more hostility than it is today. Holistic views, which are close to magical views, will get a sympathetic hearing. One gauge of social mood, a sociometer as Prechter calls it, might be how willing people become to "argue with such rational beings" if one can find a way to measure it.

[Tammuz]

Whatever maya we experience can be derived right from physics. We don't have to go to eastern traditions. For example, the only reason I feel the table and chair I sit on as solid is because my body is not made out of neutrinos. If it were I would move right through the table and chair. All that I see as solid is mostly empty space. The only kind of maya that I am willing to acknowledge is this sort of maya that has been experimentally validated by modern physics.

As far as I remember you are acknowledging the existence of qualia which however cannot be detected and therefore validated by modern physics. So why is physics now sort of ultima ratio for you? Anyway, what is meant with ´maya´ in Vedanta transcends the physical field by far. It is in large part similar to Kant´s epistemological model: the human mind is not able to perceive the true reality, since it has no access to the ´things-in-themselves´, that is, the noumenal world. Instead cognition is composed of (a) sense-data, (b) the ´pure forms of intuition´, and (c) the functions of mind which categorize and structure the formless mass of sense-data within the frame of (b). This frame, the pure forms of intuition, is composed of (1) time and (2) space, what makes it possible to the mind to arrange the sense-data-material in succession as well as side by side. On this basis, the functions of (c) come into force. In sum, human mind is in Kant´s view not able to perceive things how they are but merely how they appear. I was referring to this some weeks ago in the Buddhism / Nagarjuna / Hegel context, maybe you remember. Please note that the subjective (that is in this case, illusory) nature of time and space is part of the Kantian as well as of the Vedanta theory, since Brahman, the Vedantic true reality, is thought to be beyond time and space which both are effects of ´maya´.

In Western philosophy, the Kantian stance is one of several possible perspectives on the epistemological issue. Some others are Idealism (e.g. German Idealism), Phenomenology (founded by Husserl) and the correspondence theory of truth (truth is correspondence of proposition and concerned object). The latter, the scientific version of the everyday perspective on cognition, was for some time the standpoint of Analytical philosophy (stemming from Wittgenstein) and has now become outdated in favor of a position which goes back to Kant, that is, cognition is thought to be mediated by sense-organs and structured by mind functions and there not able to represent reality as it is. In Buddhist Mahayana philosophy (historically preceding Vedanta), Nagarjuna distinguishes two levels of truth (as I wrote some weeks ago), the conventional truth and the ultimate truth. The first, equatable with the Vedantic maya, is grasped by the rational operations of mind which have, on this level, a mind-expanding function; the second is perceived by transcending the categories of mind which are, on this level, restricting true knowledge. Nagarjuna emphasizes the constructive value of conventional truth for teaching the ultimate truth. However, if conventional truth is hold to be ultimate truth, things go wrong.

In Western philosophy, the philosophical model which comes rather close to the concept of conventional truth is called ´pragmatism´, which was developed by US philosopher William James in the late 19th century. According to that school, the truthfulness of a theory is to be measured by its practical success. The opposite position, already mentioned above, is called ´correspondence theory of truth´. It says that truth lies in the complete correspondence of cognition and reality, or in other words, cognition mirrors reality. One can call this position naive because it presupposes that the sense organs transmit external data in a magical way so perfectly that the output in the conciousness is a one-to-one mapping of the external world.

Thus, the Indian maya concept has strong correspondencies in modern Western philosophy, especially with Kant on whose theory the 20th century school of ´Constructivism´ is founded, asserting the appearance of ´reality´ to be completely constructed by the human mind. Of course, the Indian concept goes far beyond the Western concept by emphasizing the reality of the infinite Brahman as well as the possibility of mind-transcending cognition of Brahman via meditation. Two of the scholars who try to combine Vedanta and Buddhist philosophy with Constructivism and neurobiology are Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. I think you´ll find their working interesting.

We are in a far worse cultural situation today regarding the "divine" than Indians were in the past with anthropomorphic dieties. The reason it is worse, is because our cultural view of maya is dehumanizing. So, I would claim that any modern conception of the "divine" has to be explicitly characterized as super-personal, not "non-personal" to make sure I am avoiding a cultural dead-end. The divine is not less than we are. It cannot be reduced to a Higgs field, for example.

I am not sure whether you really grasp the meaning of ´non-personal´ in the context of spiritual philosophy. It seems to me that you hold it to be something inferior to ´personal´. The opposite is true. The kind of non-personality which spiritual philosophy intends is not regressive but progressive. Spiritual non-personality does not eliminate personality but contains it as an integral however lower part of it, being aware of a ´person´ being just a mask (in ancient Greek, ´persona´ means ´mask´, what is the origin of the person-concept). In this view a ´person´ has no essence but is merely a composition of attributes which is hold together by the ego-function. This function is called ´ahamkara´ in Vedantic philosophy. In Western psychology there are very similar opinions on the nature of the ego, especially in the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan, who declares the ego to be an imaginary construction without any foundation in reality. This theory is part of the French neostructuralism, a philosophical current in the second half of the 20the century which announced the "death of the subject", that is, the lack of any essence on which subjectivity is founded. Instead, subjectivity is thought to be a mere relational product, what comes very close to ego theories in Vedanta and Buddhism. In the following, I will give a short summary of Lacan´s concept of psychological development in the childhood.

In his theory some of the basic concepts are (a) the Thing (la chose), (b) the desire, (c) the Imaginary, (d) the Symbolic, (e) the phantasma, and (f) the ´object a´.

The first, the Thing, is the basic aim of all desire, that is, the mother and, first of all, the mother´s womb. The feeling in the womb gets never eliminated but remains the unconscious basis of all later positive feelings.

The second, the desire, is the basic urge behind all emotional wishes which manifest themselves in "thousand masks" (my tribute to Joseph Campbell) but are spring-fed from the basic urge for the Thing (mother / womb). Psychoanalysts like Otto Rank had long before Lacan emphasized the importance of the womb (as sort of a lost paradise) as a source of unconscious wishes. The state of having lost the ´paradise´ for all times is the Lacanian ´lack´, the motor which boosts the moves of desire.

The third, the Imaginary, is the relationship between child and mother before the Oedipal stage. This relation is mainly characterized by the child´s total claim to the mother´s care and attention. In this stage the ego emerges as a result of the child´s mirroring itself in the mother ("I am what she desires"). This stage is the source of later power fantasies.

The fourth is the Lacanian ´Symbolic Order´, that is, the system of social rules which are represented by the father resp. which are mediated to the child via the symbolic social position which is occupied by the concrete father (or his substitutes). In the Freudian theory, the Symbolic order is that what is introduced by the father during the oedipal stage. Its purpose is to break into the dual symbiosis between child and mother. The child´s ego becomes torn out its binding to the mother and integrated into the social system by learning that it is not the center of the world (as in the mother-child-relationship) but part of the world like all other people, too, exposed to social restraints and burdened with social duties.

The fifth, the phantasma, is a situation or constellation in which an object is woven into, be it in fantasy, be it in reality, for example, a SM scenario where the subject acts out his wishes of superiority to compensate his perceived inferiority.

The sixth, the ´object a´, is that what is unconsciously hidden behind the concrete objects of desire. In the example above, the subject is unconsciously seeking the Thing (the womb feeling) in his sadomasochistic experience, however in a complicated and abstrusely symbolizing manner which draws its contents from unconscious early-infantile sadistic fantasies from the oral, anal, and phallic stage (as to oral sadism, see the work of Melanie Klein).

[Tammuz]

Which brings us to the soul and spirituality. Is it necessary? I happen to think so, not because I want to save my soul from damnation, but that it satisfies that dual nature in any man of imagination and sensitivity.

Is it an illusion, a joke, as many men more learned than myself would argue? Who am I to argue with such rational beings?

From ´The Doors of Perception´ by Aldous Huxley:

http://www.maps.org/images/pdf/books...Perception.pdf

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being- Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to. And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki's essays. "What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?" ('"the Dharma-Body of the Buddha" is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery by an earnest and bewildered novice.

(...)

From the books the investigator directed my attention to the furniture. A small typing table stood in the center of the room; beyond it, from my point of view, was a wicker chair and beyond that a desk. The three pieces formed an intricate pattern of horizontals, uprights and diagonals - a pattern all the more interesting for not being interpreted in terms of spatial relationships. Table, chair and desk came together in a composition that was like something by Braque or Juan Gris, a still life recognizably related to the objective world, but rendered without depth, without any attempt at photographic realism. I was looking at my furniture, not as the utilitarian who has to sit on chairs, to write at desks and tables, and not as the cameraman or scientific recorder, but as the pure aesthete whose concern is only with forms and their relationships within the field of vision or the picture space. But as I looked, this purely aesthetic, Cubist's-eye view gave place to what I can only describe as the sacramental vision of reality. I was back where I had been when I was looking at the flowers-back in a world where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. The legs, for example, of that chair - how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness! I spent several minutes - or was it several centuries? - not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them - or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for "I" was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were "they") being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair..

(...)

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful."

According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.