Philosophy Now Forum

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…” – Leo Tolstoy

A secularist is one who defends life in Plato's cave or society as the authority for human values. It doesn't matter if it is secularized religion, secularized education, secularized politics, or whatever else, it is all secular. In contrast a universalist does not consider Plato's cave as the source of human meaning and purpose which creates human values. Universalists believe the source of objective values before subjective interpretations is outside the cave. Consequently, the young who feel this are scorned by these "educated" who consider themselves free thinkers without any idea of how prejudiced and intolerant they really are. Right thinking is essential to be a free thinker but like Tolstoy writes, it is very rare. It really doesn't exist amongst secular intolerants. That is why young potential free thinkers need help from those who are very rare and not just teachers programmed into secularism.

Nick_A quoted:

“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…” – Leo Tolstoy

I interpret this as support for the sceptical attitude, and support for the ability to be uncertain, i.e. the ability to discard a belief even when I have nothing to put in its place.

I interpret Plato's freedom from the Cave as the freedom conferred by reason not, as you do Nick ,the freedom of the mystic who claims a higher knowledge of the Good. I have not read Plato anything like as thoroughly as has Fooloso4 (and other educated persons)and until and unless I do I will follow Fooloso4 rather than you because F4 has done the work and you have taken what you think are short cuts to wisdom.

However I am interested in Gnostic sort of spirituality and I prefer it to ' intelligent design '.

Intelligent design is plain wrong.

Belinda

I interpret this as support for the sceptical attitude, and support for the ability to be uncertain, i.e. the ability to discard a belief even when I have nothing to put in its place.

The skeptical attitude is by definition biased. Secular intolerance for example requires a skeptical negative attitude towards what is beyond secularism. It projects emotional denial to those around it. Why not value impartiality even though it requires a great deal of practice to become possible. We can at least respect it as beneficial rather than just rely on the partiality of the emotional attitude of skepticism?

I interpret Plato's freedom from the Cave as the freedom conferred by reason not, as you do Nick

“People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.” Anthony de Mello

What good is reason for actualizing the humanistic goals which concern you when reason becomes a slave of negative emotion which has become the norm?

"All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field." ~Albert Einstein

The qualities of Emotional freedom and intelligence do not grow from the hypocritical secular influences that create them. It requires the conscious awakening help from the higher domain within which emotional quality and intelligence are the norm. The world and the secularism dominating it denies this help so everything must remain as it is. The young attracted to eros also feel the value of emotional freedom and intelligence necessary to pursue their attraction. I support those who help the young in their need rather than those who prefer to crush it with all the BS expressed through reason defending emotional hypocrisy.

Nick_A wrote:

The skeptical attitude is by definition biased. Secular intolerance for example requires a skeptical negative attitude towards what is beyond secularism. It projects emotional denial to those around it. Why not value impartiality even though it requires a great deal of practice to become possible. We can at least respect it as beneficial rather than just rely on the partiality of the emotional attitude of skepticism?

Nick, what I mean by 'scepticism' is actually impartiality, or at least the whole-hearted attempt to be impartial. Scepticism is not an "emotional attitude": the sceptical thinker can examine himself impartially including their own emotional reactions. In order to examine anything impartially one has to exclude one's own emotional reactions and submit only to pure reason.

The status of mystical insight is moot. I think we should apply Jesus' dictum that we can tell a good tree by its fruit.

(Are you perhaps confusing 'scepticism' with 'cynicism' ? )

Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Sep 08, 2017 6:27 pm Nick_A wrote:

The skeptical attitude is by definition biased. Secular intolerance for example requires a skeptical negative attitude towards what is beyond secularism. It projects emotional denial to those around it. Why not value impartiality even though it requires a great deal of practice to become possible. We can at least respect it as beneficial rather than just rely on the partiality of the emotional attitude of skepticism?

Nick, what I mean by 'scepticism' is actually impartiality, or at least the whole-hearted attempt to be impartial. Scepticism is not an "emotional attitude": the sceptical thinker can examine himself impartially including their own emotional reactions. In order to examine anything impartially one has to exclude one's own emotional reactions and submit only to pure reason.

The status of mystical insight is moot. I think we should apply Jesus' dictum that we can tell a good tree by its fruit.

(Are you perhaps confusing 'scepticism' with 'cynicism' ? )

As I understand it, cynicism is an emotional attitude that only recognizes the bad in people and their actions. Impartiality is free of any emotional bias and skepticism limits itself to what can be verified through reason. It is reasonable to ask what is wrong with that.

“Knowledge has three degrees – opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.”
— Plotinus

The emotional attitude of skepticism which limits human understanding to the dialectic must deny being open to intuition. The young I have been referring to are spiritually alive and open to the experience of intuition. Secular tolerance and the resulting metaphysical repression crush their capacity to experience intuition and it is through intuition that human understanding placing facts into a human perspective becomes possible.

The secular intolerants deny intuition as the third degree of knowledge and when they dominate school systems and philosophy sites, they serve as spirit killers for those who they intimidate. The question of secular intolerance begins with the question of intuition. If it isn’t a reality, scientific reason and its sensory limitations must reign supreme for deciding and experiencing human meaning and purpose. If intuition is a psychological reality then what secular intolerance has cost the world is incalculable.

Nick_A wrote:

As I understand it, cynicism is an emotional attitude that only recognizes the bad in people and their actions. Impartiality is free of any emotional bias and skepticism limits itself to what can be verified through reason. It is reasonable to ask what is wrong with that.
“Knowledge has three degrees – opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition.”
— Plotinus

I agree , sort of, with what you think cynicism means. I'd rather say that it comes from an emotional attitude but it is cognitive.

I like your quotation from Plotinus. I wonder what Plotinus thought intuition is. I think that intuition is true, that people do intuit, and I think that it is a quicker way to understand situations than is deliberate reasoning.

There is one thing which is axiomatic for me, and that is that intuition is not alone a mind activity, but the brain and the body proper are concerned in the act of intuiting. When you intuit, are your brain and your body proper involved in the intuiting?

Harbal wrote: ↑Sat Sep 09, 2017 9:33 am Intuition is quite often correct but it is also very fallible.

Maybe when intuition lets one down it was not intuition that did it but was a bad guess, or superstition.

EMOTION AND INTUITION
In sum, emotion based systems appear to serve as the intermediary between low-level
emotional experience, and high-level cognition. Indeed, the interface between emotion
and cognition appears to form the basis for the phenomenon that has long been formally
described as intuition, that ‘gut feeling’ or ‘hunch’ that we have about the potential outcome
of a problem, often in the absence of our being able to consciously identify how we arrived
at that solution (Damasio, 1994, pp.187-189; Myers, 2002). Intuition also seems to have
an important role to play in a range of imaginative and creative activities, all of which
involve potentially operating in a complicated ‘workspace’ which has been incompletely
explored: a world in which you know that there might be interesting options available, but
in which the landscape has yet to be clearly laid out.
While the literature on these intuition related phenomena suggests that emotion can
potentially play a substantial role in intellectual life, no one suggests that the role of ration

https://www.bangor.ac.uk/psychology/tea ... arners.pdf
(My underline)
____________________
PS a tangent is one way to exit an impasse

Belinda wrote: ↑Sat Sep 09, 2017 9:45 am
Maybe when intuition lets one down it was not intuition that did it but was a bad guess, or superstition.

Unless the guess was based on intuition.

The claim that secularism inhibits intuition is simply more stupidity and madness, sorry.

The complaint that children lose their abilities to intuit has always been directed at education itself - the replacement of experiences for words - and this was the case when Christianity's hold on western societies was even more crushing than it is today.

That is the cost of education and experience - a loss of innocence and some visceral sensitivity. Our brains can only do so much. This is where professional artists and sportspeople come in, those who retain something of their youthful sensitivity or bullishness, though often at significant personal cost in their everyday lives.

Belinda wrote: ↑Sat Sep 09, 2017 9:45 am

Harbal wrote: ↑Sat Sep 09, 2017 9:33 am Intuition is quite often correct but it is also very fallible.

Maybe when intuition lets one down it was not intuition that did it but was a bad guess, or superstition.

EMOTION AND INTUITION
In sum, emotion based systems appear to serve as the intermediary between low-level
emotional experience, and high-level cognition. Indeed, the interface between emotion
and cognition appears to form the basis for the phenomenon that has long been formally
described as intuition, that ‘gut feeling’ or ‘hunch’ that we have about the potential outcome
of a problem, often in the absence of our being able to consciously identify how we arrived
at that solution (Damasio, 1994, pp.187-189; Myers, 2002). Intuition also seems to have
an important role to play in a range of imaginative and creative activities, all of which
involve potentially operating in a complicated ‘workspace’ which has been incompletely
explored: a world in which you know that there might be interesting options available, but
in which the landscape has yet to be clearly laid out.
While the literature on these intuition related phenomena suggests that emotion can
potentially play a substantial role in intellectual life, no one suggests that the role of ration

https://www.bangor.ac.uk/psychology/tea ... arners.pdf
(My underline)
____________________
PS a tangent is one way to exit an impasse

I agree. Consciousness and imagination are mutually exclusive. Conscious contemplation opens the mind to intuition and anamnesis while imagination leading to self justifying escapism easily results in bad guesses and superstition

Do you believe in apriori knowledge or soul knowledge a person is born with? If so, can a person "remember" this knowledge through conscious contemplation as opposed to binary reason?

Do you distinguish religious emotion as distinct from either negative emotion, fantasy or animal emotion? Does Father Sylvan make sense to you as he is quoted in Jacob Meedleman's book: Lost Christianity?

To awaken spiritual emotion is the work of religious discipline. This comes about through sacrifice. I must sacrifice attachment to the results of the spirit, even as they are taking place in me. Religious man may become a magician; but in becoming such, he sees only the greatness of God and the insignificance of his own being.
All revelation is the revelation of how to search, how to struggle. It is not the revelation of results.

Secularism is fixated on results and its emotional responses reflect attitudes towards results. Spiritual emotion is the force that enables the inner man to acquire freedom from attachments. Results are secondary to the need for conscious freedom from attachments and the awareness of the "Source" making it possible.

Greta wrote: ↑Sun Sep 10, 2017 12:14 am The claim that secularism inhibits intuition is simply more stupidity and madness, sorry.

The complaint that children lose their abilities to intuit has always been directed at education itself - the replacement of experiences for words - and this was the case when Christianity's hold on western societies was even more crushing than it is today.

That is the cost of education and experience - a loss of innocence and some visceral sensitivity. Our brains can only do so much. This is where professional artists and sportspeople come in, those who retain something of their youthful sensitivity or bullishness, though often at significant personal cost in their everyday lives.

As usual it is exactly the opposite. Secular education defended by secular intolerance denies experience in favor of indoctrination through words. Believe these words or suffer the consequences. Fortunately a minority are inwardly strong enough to survive these attempts at indoctrination and remain seekers of truth.

Director of Career Placement, Ecole Normale Supérieure referring to Simone Weil

We shall send the Red Virgin as far away as possible so that we shall never hear of her again

[

b]Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus in a letter to Weil's mother in 195[/b]1

Simone Weil, I still know this now, is the only great mind of our times and I hope that those who realize this have enough modesty to not try to appropriate her overwhelming witnessing.
For my part, I would be satisfied if one could say that in my place, with the humble means at my disposal, I served to make known and disseminate her work whose full impact we have yet to measure.

Survive the spirit killing efforts and good things happen.

Nick, it seems to me that you are angered by the fact that most people have lost their youthful sensitive and artistic attributes - thanks to being educated and brutalised by working life. In tribal times everyone was a bit of an artist. Now, with specialisation, people must specialise to survive. As a Jill-of-all-trades, specialisation doesn't suit me, and I generally think it sucks, but I do not see an alternative in a competitive world where tragedies of the commons have always ruled.

On a more personal level, alas, most of us must lose our innocence and fall into the dream of the rat race, at least until we wake up, usually when the Reaper let's you know he's around. Why do we fall into the rat race and lose track of, or fail to cultivate, what I suppose you could call aspects of "internality"?

Survival. Duh.

We can stand apart like Colin Wilson's "outsider" (and many of us on these forums probably do) but it's not conducive to certain kinds of success, and in dictatorships (most of them theistic) being an outsider was fatal. Further, being on the outside makes it more difficult to contribute to society as a whole (which you insist on calling a Great Beast - as though beasts were bad).

It's just practicality. Pragmatism. People don't have time to mess about with metaphysics. Or don't make time. Or don't want to. Who cares? Horses for courses. It's their journey, not yours, so who are you to judge?

You might think of this focus on the practical as selling one's soul, but most of us lend our souls to Mammon until retirement (hopefully) frees us from the tyranny of competitive society. Then, as old farts, we hopefully finally have a chance to jump off the roundabout and reflect and try to understand WTF just happened.

You think you are an outsider attacking conformist insiders. Nope. I'm probably at least as much of an outsider as you are, very likely more so, and I suspect others here are too. However, not all outsiders resent the majority, but rather come to terms with it for the sake of a sane and peaceful life. This does not require "buying in" - not to your Great Beast and certainly not to all the religious snake oil going around these days.

Nick_A wrote:

Do you believe in apriori knowledge or soul knowledge a person is born with? If so, can a person "remember" this knowledge through conscious contemplation as opposed to binary reason?

The above post from Greta addresses your question. Greta writes that artists and sportsmen retain respect for the physical as intrinsic to the whole soul. I understand that I am paraphrasing Greta's words and hope I do so correctly. Your soul is your body /mind as an integrated whole. The soul is not separate from the body.

Religion and the creator God have told us body bad: mind good, and mind must respect the creator God as promulgated by religion. Religion and the creator God are on the side of Mammon and the machine. The society is swept along by the force of religion or more usually religion translated into what Nick calls the " secular". Indeed the old war god, Jaweh, is still alive and working in commercial and political life.

Does " binary reason" stop us responding to truths that bodily intuitions tell us? I suppose that what Nick means by binary reason is simply reason. Reason evaluates passions and raw emotions and differentiates those from intuitions and knowledge. So you see, Nick, I place intuitions firmly on the same side as knowledge. There are aspects of knowledge that are inborn , and Chomsky has argued that even the basic grammar of language is inborn. Other inborn knowledge is how to move our muscles and joints, how to experience colours, sounds, and forms. How to swallow and other reflexes. Also inborn is how to attribute events to causes of events so that we can learn from experience, and that is what reason is.

I do not believe that mystic contemplation, or eastern meditation, or any mystical techniques reward us with special knowledge although they clear our heads of rubbish if they are done properly.

Greta

Nick, it seems to me that you are angered by the fact that most people have lost their youthful sensitive and artistic attributes - thanks to being educated and brutalised by working life. In tribal times everyone was a bit of an artist. Now, with specialisation, people must specialise to survive. As a Jill-of-all-trades, specialisation doesn't suit me, and I generally think it sucks, but I do not see an alternative in a competitive world where tragedies of the commons have always ruled.

You suffer from psychological projection. You may be an angry person but there is no reason to be angry about what humanity is losing. Should I be angry about the effects of a plague or hurricane Irma in Florida now. It is sad that there is so much loss but why be angry? The fact that the Great Beast is a beast doesn’t make it “bad” It is just a beast. Is an elephant bad? No it is just an elephant. It is unfortunate that humanity having the potential collectively to be consciously more than a beast defends itself as a beast. But again this is not bad it is an unfortunate condition that humanity can awaken to.

But you have introduced the essential struggle: wholeness vs fragmentation. Must it be a struggle?

Now, with specialisation, people must specialise to survive.

Even if this were true, does it necessitate crushing the natural impulse for the conscious experience of wholeness? Secularism believes it does. Being successful in the eyes of society requires fixation on specialization or the collective society puts you in. For example the objective quality we call man has lost any meaning. Now the word man is defined by a fragment like a black man, a white man or a whole slew of collectives man has been put into so objective “Man” no longer exists but Man only exists as an adjective – a fragment of man, each considered good or bad in the eyes of societal fragmentation.

The horror of dominant psychological fragmentation is passed on through spirit killing mostly in the young who are still spiritually alive and are attracted to wholeness yet having the impulse crushed in them.

Must wholeness be sacrificed for specialization. No, but the pressures put on the young to do so by denying the essence of religion are so powerful that this sacrifice is the practical result for the majority. It doesn’t have to be. Some men of science are open to receive the conscious impression of wholeness and realize its value even though they are specialists. They know it is necessary for humanity to become human.

From Ken Wilber’s site:

https://beyondwilber.ca/books/mandala/h ... ation.html

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us…Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty” (Albert Einstein 1954)


Introduction

Our society is geared towards knowledge, more and more knowledge. Knowledge is communicated through language consisting of words that refer to concepts. These concepts fragment the world and us. For example, look at a landscape, an ecosystem. It constitutes an organic whole. Yet, as soon as we use words to describe it, we fragment it into a lake, a forest, soil, trees, air, animals, humans, etc.

Many people would refuse to accept that there is any fragmentation involved. They would insist that there are entities in nature such as a lake, a forest, trees, animals, etc. that exist independently of our mental activity. However, these people overlook the interconnectedness. They overlook that these “entities” are fragments that we have created through the process of abstraction. Korzybski demonstrated the process of abstraction convincingly through his Structural Differential (seeStockdale, Healing Thinking through Non-Identity (Korzybski), andHealthy Language-Behavior and Spirituality).

Also

http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/Reviews/NicolescuReview.htm

After reading Nicolescu's Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, it is hard to imagine how any thinking person could retreat to the old, safe, comfortable conceptual framework. Taking a series of ideas that would be extremely thought-provoking even when considered one by one, the Romanian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu weaves them together in a stunning vision, this manifesto of the twenty-first century, so that they emerge as a shimmering, profoundly radical whole.

Nicolescu’s raison d’être is to help develop people’s consciousness by means of showing them how to approach things in terms of what he calls “transdisciplinarity.” He seeks to address head on the problem of fragmentation that plagues contemporary life. Nicolescu maintains that binary logic, the logic underlying most all of our social, economic, and political institutions, is not sufficient to encompass or address all human situations. His thinking aids in the unification of the scientific culture and the sacred, something which increasing numbers of persons, will find to be an enormous help, among them wholistic health practitioners seeking to promote the understanding of illness as something arising from the interwoven fabric—body, plus mind, plus spirit—that constitutes the whole human being, and academics frustrated by the increasing pressure to produce only so-called “value-free” material………………..

Greta, you don’t care what “Man” is. Your concern is for adjectives existing as collectives living as reactive animals functioning within the Great Beast. That is what serves society and should be promoted at all cost for the sake of the dominance of specialization. I support those who admit the human condition for what it is in which self justifying imagination has replaced the experience of conscious wholeness. They are part of a collective secularism seeks to crush.

I know it is a lost cause. Secularism and its obsession with specialization will win until we hit bottom and then the next cycle begins. But why not go down with the ship helping those who have felt what it means to be human? If Simone had the need and courage to witness with impartiality, I will be less of a man if I can’t from the fear of annoying the Great Beast

"even if we can't prevent the forces of tyranny from prevailing, we can at least "understand the force by which we are crushed." Simone Weil