Christianity

[Immanuel Can]

I just like to toss my salad out there like everyone else does..

Hmmm...I suspected that was the cause.

But the truth is that most people here aren't using word-salads. A few are, but most are not. My advice is that you replicate the behaviour of those who are not, not those who are.

Just because you don't understand something somebody says does not mean it's a word-salad. It might be, but it might not. It depends on whether they can actually re-explain their idea in simple terms that anybody can grasp. Those who cannot are just using word-salad. And they don't even deserve the time of day, because they're not speaking sincerely or truthfully, and there's nothing worth saying to such people...they're being Kamala Harris, which means "over their heads, and out of ideas."

I don't like salad. It's not interesting.

IC …if I say something really interesting and really really intellectual, using big high sounding impressive words…will that make me rich and famous like Jordan Peterson? Will it make people adore me and follow me around like I’m some kind of special God that people just wish they were as clever as me.

Word-salad types do think that. They think they will be regarded as profound if they're merely being obscure.

And it works on some, provided they aren't very good at reading or logic. But for anybody else, it's just off-putting and a waste of time.

[Nick_A]

Lettuce reason together. Forget content and concentrate on the dressing. A good balsamic vinaigrette will cover a multitude of sins. Spread it on thick and you can't go wrong.

[Immanuel Can]

My view is that all around us -- literally all around us -- there swirl mistruth, misstatement, lies and obfuscations whose purpose is to keep us from *realizing the truth*.

That's certainly true now. It wasn't always, of course. It's not some sort of natural state, but a highly artificial one, in which the mass media and the politicians are highly implicated, but in which others certainly participate.

Now, what does it mean when, and if, we ourselves get invested in 'lying discourse'? And yet it is likely that in some area or another we have been duped, or we dupe ourselves, n'est-ce pas?

Vraiment.

Orwell said that. He said that the propagandist has two victims of his mendacity: his listener(s) and himself.

I would say that it was not so much a word-salad as the sort of mystical speech one might have heard in the post-Sixties.

And I say it's just word salad, in the present case.

Here, I'll quote a part:

Yes,...The image of a mirror is inseparable from the looker...there is no split there.

This however makes sense.

No, I don't think so. I think we're trying too hard to save an idea that was only losely and badly articulated in the first place, and to make something of an ineffective analogy.

I'm reminded of Proverbs, which says, "Like useless legs to one who cannot walk, So is a proverb in the mouths of fools." There's an analogy ("legs"), but it just doesn't work, and hangs down limp and ineffective. I"m not going to work very hard to save such a thing.

It is a clear, direct idea that shatters a false-assertion (made apparently by RC). The image one sees in the mirror is, indeed, inseparable from the one reflected.

Yes, partly; but that seems trivial.

Yes, the reflection is of something; no, it is not the same thing.

My question would be, what's the payoff here?

"We are so much accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that at length we disguise ourselves to ourselves."

Orwell would agree.

The response to inanities, though, I think, is not to invent some profundity unconceived by the speaker, in a vain effort to turn a dunghill into a diamond, but to know the difference between a diamond and a dunghill in the first place....and to insist that people keep their statements crisp and hard, like diamonds, rather than accepting the dunghills.

[Immanuel Can]

Lettuce reason together. Forget content and concentrate on the dressing. A good balsamic vinaigrette will cover a multitude of sins. Spread it on thick and you can't go wrong.

Lettuce not bother with this anymore.

[Alexis Jacobi]

how can you know yourself? ...you would have to split into two...a knower and the known.

Mirrors!

I lose track of what people are talking about at times if it does not seem pertinent to what interests me or seems important. Though I enjoy RC and admire his forcefulness I find I have little use for his over-all assertions.

However, what DontAskMe asked is a very good question taken in-and-of itself. How can a person know himself? It might not be the topic that fits into this on-going conversation about Christianity, but the question is a very good one. It is possible to be so involved in and invested in oneself (attached to what one imagines oneself to be or stuck in one vision or version of oneself) that one cannot 'get outside of oneself enough' to see oneself. This is a fact.

I think it should be mentioned here that *getting outside of oneself* has been, and still is, one of the techniques of spiritual self-investigation. Take for example the type of human potential movement that A. Huxley got involved with or inspired in California. And we all know how he came to his realizations if anyone had read The Doors of Perception.

There is now developing a whole cultural movement where psychedelic drugs like mushrooms (see the 'trendy new hallucinogenic' -- toad venom).

Now, the interesting thing, from my perspective, is to become aware of 'shattering perspectives'. This would be another aspect or episode in the processes in which *the horizon was erased*. The loss of ground under one's feet. The incapacity to know where one is located. To be adrift in a netherworld between a collapsing metaphysic and the uncertain definition of another metaphysics.

I do not think any of this is a small matter.

Just for the heck of it a quote from Doors of Perception:

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.”

[Dontaskme]

Hmmm...I suspected that was the cause.

But the truth is that most people here aren't using word-salads. A few are, but most are not. My advice is that you replicate the behaviour of those who are not, not those who are.

Just because you don't understand something somebody says does not mean it's a word-salad. It might be, but it might not. It depends on whether they can actually re-explain their idea in simple terms that anybody can grasp. Those who cannot are just using word-salad. And they don't even deserve the time of day, because they're not speaking sincerely or truthfully, and there's nothing worth saying to such people...they're being Kamala Harris, which means "over their heads, and out of ideas."

I don't like salad. It's not interesting.

IC …if I say something really interesting and really really intellectual, using big high sounding impressive words…will that make me rich and famous like Jordan Peterson? Will it make people adore me and follow me around like I’m some kind of special God that people just wish they were as clever as me.

Word-salad types do think that. They think they will be regarded as profound if they're merely being obscure.

And it works on some, provided they aren't very good at reading or logic. But for anybody else, it's just off-putting and a waste of time.

Oh ok… so according to your prestige gold plated logic …there are types now.

Ok, you just keep believing in your invisible person, and I’ll keep believing in my invisible person.

[Dontaskme]

Lettuce reason together. Forget content and concentrate on the dressing. A good balsamic vinaigrette will cover a multitude of sins. Spread it on thick and you can't go wrong.

Lettuce not bother with this anymore.

No let’s not bother, let us pray to invisible people instead, yeah that’s much more intellectually stimulating and logical.

Kiss my holy butt.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Lettuce reason together. Forget content and concentrate on the dressing. A good balsamic vinaigrette will cover a multitude of sins. Spread it on thick and you can't go wrong.

In this regard I recommend The Vinegar Shed.

[Alexis Jacobi]

No let’s not bother, let us pray to invisible people instead, yeah that’s much more intellectually stimulating and logical.

The idea is very interesting no matter how it is examined. It is true that Jesus Christ is such an 'invisible person'. The somewhat superficial view, the surface view, the apparent view, is that if one has a relationship to Jesus Christ or to any transcendental figure, is that that Person is off somewhere, in some other realm, in the realm of heaven let's say, and that one is in mystical communion with that figure through which some mysterious help, guidance, clarity, grace or intelligence is beamed down to one.

There is the long-standing notion of the Guardian Angel -- literally an angelic person assigned to guide one in life.

The entire question hinges upon that of subjectivity. Communion (with something transcendental) is internal, personal and subjective. How could it be otherwise? But in reality what is one *in contact with*? Some metaphysical being off in another dimension? and what about the notion of a guardian spirit? Is that a being that hovers close to one?

What is the *logical* way to think about all of this and any of this!?

There is no 'logical' way. However, there are facsimiles of logical means to talk about something that is ineffable.

[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin ineffābilis : in-, not; see in-1 + effābilis, utterable (from effārī, to utter : ex-, ex- + fārī, to speak; see bhā- in Indo-European roots).]

bhā-1 -- Indo-European roots:
To shine.

[Nick_A]

However, what DontAskMe asked is a very good question taken in-and-of itself. How can a person know himself? It might not be the topic that fits into this on-going conversation about Christianity, but the question is a very good one.

But it is the essence of Christianity. Without this potential, Christianity is secular serving no purpose. What could Jesus observe when hanging on the cross and how can this quality of attention lead to the Resurrection? But the point is that esoteric Christianity has pondered this question to understand human conscious potential.

[henry quirk]

how can you know yourself?

Probably not very easily, these days

There are countless constructs we're all exposed to, and every last one of 'em, as they were designed to, is tryin' to get into heads and reorganize.

How can you know yourself?

Be a good gatekeeper to your head; test and retest every assumption, every belief, regularly; where you find alien roots, excise them.

The fictional Don Juan Matus told his apprentice about the predator who feeds, parasite-like, on the soul. This parasite's chief accomplishment is givin' man a copy of its own baroque mind to affix to, and eventually overcome, man's.

This predator is a pretty good metaphor for what a person contends with.

[Immanuel Can]

there are types now.

No, but there are people who will use word-salad, and those who won't.

The latter are called "people who actually have something to say."

[Immanuel Can]

how can you know yourself?

Be a good gatekeeper to your head; test and retest every assumption, every belief, regularly; where you find alien roots, excise them.

[Alexis Jacobi]

The fictional Don Juan Matus told his apprentice about the predator who feeds, parasite-like, on the soul. This parasite's chief accomplishment is givin' man a copy of its own baroque mind to affix to, and eventually overcome, man's.

This predator is a pretty good metaphor for what a person contends with.

So here's the full quote . . .

"I want to appeal to your analytical mind," don Juan said. "Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradiction between man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success and failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal."

"But how can they do this, don Juan?" I asked. "Do they whisper all that in our ears while we sleep?"

"No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver - stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me! The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with fear of being discovered any minute now."

It is of course interesting to examine these ideas -- Castaneda as god-father of the New Age and another evolution in the Human Potential Movement. Oddly, I have direct experience with Castaneda through a Mexican friend of mine wound up in his direct circle as The Orange Scout. The entire cult-like LA scene literally exploded. It was an LA cult New Age California trip to the very gills . . .

Here, the exposition veers into another way and means of rephrasing and re-presenting the notion of *satanic influence*.

Next you'll be talking about Flyers and Petty Tyrants . . .

Where are you people taking this conversation? You are veering into bizarre territories . . .

[henry quirk]

It was a metaphor for the garbage in a head and how it gets there, guy, not an advertisement for Castaneda.