In Buddhism unlike many other paths philosophy has gone hand in hand with meditation, with some emphasizing one and others emphasizing the other in their practice. This is fairly unusual it seems. For instance in the West there is no practice and mundane consciousness in the world is the focus. On the other side Buddhist philosophical statements that build on other Buddhist philosophies can be extremely abstruse and it will be hard to tell how that relates to everyday life.

Next point is that by arriving at the Fourth Turning which in some ways seems Pathless we have already traveled quite far in the development of our understanding. In truth any level of Buddhist enlightenment would be enough. It is illusion that is layered not Existence seen as empty, or Void, or Manifest.

But there is clearly no method once one gets this far, method is meta-hodos means the way after. Once you get there then you try to produce a method by which others can follow you, and that is what Buddhism is for the most part, practice and theory about higher states of consciousness in light of the nondual. But I like what StoneHouse says at one point is that eventually you just have to go off on your own and figure out what enlightenement means for you, and then go for it. Enlightenment and endarkenment are as unique as we are. So I am not sure there is any Principle lying behind the finding of the deeper nonduality. In effect if something is not there, like ourselves, then it is also doubtful that there is a principle, because who would preceive it.

Rather it seems to me that what we need to do is try to be as clear as possible what the stages are as far as we can ascertain them, and then keep trying to find ways of realizing them in ourselves.

One might say that there is Principle in the sense of a patterning principle Li that unfolds with Chi into actualized patterns. This is because each level has its own nature as discovered by Continental Philosophy or Plato.

But in terms of having a Principle that will allow you to discover these states your self, I don’t think this is so. I myself am a big believer in transmission. And the fact that these fourth Turning paths seem to transcend any one path does not mean you can get to them without following some path. I would say that the path is even more essential the more rarefied the realm of tracelessness.

In no way am I hoping to be taken as saying that the Fourth and Fifth Turning are achievable without traveling though the other layers one way or another. If it was not you then perhaps someone else who is transmitting to you to make your path seemingly shorter. Also I am not making any claims about getting there or being there myself. Claims themselves can be delusional just by the fact of uttering them what ever you thought you had can be lost.

Rather I am saying that Buddhists need to take their philosophy into the Western worldview, rather than allowing the Orientalists to classify and categorize us. Rather in fact we need to be Occidentalists and understand the philosophy of the mundane that is Western Philosophy in such a way that it does not taint our understanding of Nonduality from our tradition. In a sense there is the same thing happening to the West as happened to the Romans by the Greeks, Romans enslaved the Greeks but the Greeks making all Western Civilization Greek at its roots overcoming the Romans and ultimately won the struggle of civilizations snatching victory from defeat.

Something similar is happening with Buddhism and Western civilization. Because the Western Worldview has a nondual core deeply suppressed it will find Buddhism irresistible ultimately. In my view all the various nondual paths need to cooperate in this adventure of the homecoming of Buddhism, and the Islamic heresy in the form of Sufism. Buddhism is the Heresy of Hinduism, and Islamic Sufism is the heresy of the Western Worldview and these two together are returning to their origins within the Indo–European tradition. This return to the Deeper Indo-European tradition needs to be a combined effort. In it philosophers and mediators, and other practitioners need to cooperate together, and this seems far more possible if we understand the intrinsic pathlessness of the fourth turning that goes beyond what ever path we are considering as our nondual basis. What needs to be universally understood is the fact that the West is not purely dualistic, but rather is fragmented with a nondual kernel beyond the nihilism production at the core. Dualism is a surface phenomena of the Western worldview. Just knowing that there is a homeward path is a tremendous advantage because it means that one is appealing directly to the nondual kernel when we are approaching those who have not realized the wonder of the nondual as yet. But of course there will be many false claims in this realm of endeavor and the road is not clear at this time how various nondual paths could cooperate, but at least they should be talking to each other. In all this philosophy is essential in order to make clear what is at stake and how we can relate to the Western worldview’s structure.

Here is a good place to talk about intensification of nihilism. This is because software is a very unique cultural artifact in as much as it is the only cultural artifact to directly embody what Plato calls the Third Kind of Being in the Timaeus, and what I following Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and Invisible call Hyper Being and what Heidegger calls -B-e-i-n-g- crossed out and Derrida calls DifferAnce (differing and deferring). This is to say that Software as far as I know is a Singular Entity that directly embodies a particular (third) meta-level of Being. We can analytically recognizes phenomena as having Hyper Being as a source, but only with software can we see a cultural artifact that wholly embodies the characteristics of this kind of Being.

As software is transforming world culture, it would be good to understand the ontological nature of software and its impact. The basic quality of Hyper Being is what Paul Simon calls slip-sliding away. Strangely, the lower meta-levels of Being exist in Hardware as the index (Pure Being – pointing) and accumulator (Process Being – grasping). This is explained further in Wild Software Meta-systems at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer. There are five meta-levels of Being which are higher logical types (Russell) and software is the only cultural artifact that directly embodies Hyper Being. So in a sense with the advent of Software with Lady Lovelace as the first programmer of Babbages Difference Engine (which never was actually completed). In other words the first mechanical computer had programs that were waiting for the hardware to be built to be run, just like today with Quantum computing. (cf. David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality)

What happens with the intensification of nihilism (and idea we owe to Jose Argulles from Transformational Vision) is that something new arises and we think it is going to solve all our problems, but then it ultimately just makes things worse. So with the Web we thought all our problems would be solved, there was boom then bust now boom again, but now we have privacy concerns, pornography and children concerns, most of the traffic is spam, there are worms and trojans, and hackers, our data is stolen, our identities are stolen, we don’t know how to or if we should tax or control the internet. The list of ills goes on and on. Same thing with other equipment with software in it. Basically machines don’t work anymore unless their software is running because most are not purely mechanical anymore. Our Cars have myriad computers in them all running real time software doing who knows what, but that means they cannot be fixed by just anyone any more and the cost of fixing them has gone up substantially. Businesses cannot operate if their computers go down, so that means if electricity stops almost everything else stops. Anyway you get the idea. There are Ills associated directly with the computer and its software that just did not exist previously. We can do things we could never do before, but we have wicked problems we never had to deal with before, like “Social” relationships with people we don’t really know and who could be hiding their true identity, and mean us harm that we would not be open to if it were not for the allure of social networks. People can find marriage partners that they could not find before, but on the other hand we are opened up to many scams, and unscrupulous if not dangerous people who we would have never met before. In intensification of nihilism what at first seems like it will turn everything into a Utopia turns out to be a Kakatopia (Hell on Earth) which is worse than what previously existed before the new great white hope arose.

Now with Software all this becomes much worse, because we are suddenly operating with something that embodies a kind of Being we normally do not have to deal with, which is Hyper Being which makes everything slippery. It is hard to categorize software in our traditional categories, and it is hard to control and deal with it. For instance in the control of intellectual property rights. Copying is just so easy, and control is very difficult. The movement to Social Media sites is really an attempt to solve this problem by tying applications to hardware that we access across the net. This is because software as traditionally conceived as applications that run on ones own computer are just too hard to control and thus to make money from. What is the value of Software is always a problem. And many expect it to be free, in spite of the hours and hours needed to create it. But many are willing to give away their software for free, and that makes it so that people cannot sell into those markets unless they have something special to offer that the free programs do not have. These sorts of examples, like the craziness of software patents, can be multiplied almost endlessly. Take BITCOIN for example. It is a purely computational currency, but it was hacked and bitcoins were stolen causing their value to plummet. Or take the arising of Anonymous as the anti-corporate force, which brings up how much corporations are dependent on control of identity, yet Anonymous are the stockholders, employees, or customers, or just interested bystanders that attacks the corporation by making its secrets available to the public and thus giving some accountability that otherwise would not exist for instance with HP Gary.

I shan’t belabor the point. The key is that software is both getting better and getting worse at the same time. It makes things possible that would otherwise be impossible, like Smart Phones, but it also makes it possible for us to be tracked without out knowing it by the government, or others. On every issue there are nihilistic dual threats and capabilities that would not exist otherwise, and we have entered into this bewildering world unprepared in which Hyper Being plays a significant role and transforms everything for the better and worse at the same time but at a faster rate, and in a more intense fashion than has been the case in the past. It breaks down barriers that we want to do away with, but it also breaks down barriers that we do not want to have broken down. For instance, kids put pictures of themselves that are sexually explicit on the internet, or other kids do it to their friends/enemies and we do not know if this is pornography or not, but kids commit suicide because of it, and other schemes of cyberbullying. There are intense positives and negatives and they get worse with the spread of software. It allows us to put rovers on mars or fly by Jupiter and Saturn or Mercury, but it also allows money laundering, or makes all our countries less safe, by allowing secrets to be hacked from Government computers.

We need to realize the specific uniqueness of the ontology of software and how that is affecting our society, culture, and families as well as ourselves as individuals. Effectively we are living in a world of global presence to those who are absent, and effectively everyone in the world. Software makes that possible, which can have extremely good (sharing knowledge and advances in science spreading faster) and extremely bad (scams, cyberterrorism, cyberwar, etc) results. The quicker we understand the nature of DifferAnce, the better we will be able to understand this new and bewildering world made possible by software.

Along with all these cultural and social as well as individual changes there is the change in the Software Industry itself. Here too things are getting worse and better at the same time in extremes. For instance the proliferation of software languages means we are exploring more possibilities of how to write programs, but at the same time there is such a bewildering array of them it is difficult to keep up. We can say something similar for all parts of the software world. So many open source projects, so many software applications, so many social websites, so many services offered on the internet, so many resources offered in cloud computing. Yet on the other hand so difficult to absorb everything that is happening and make sense of it and apply it.

For instance we have Agile and now Lean software development which are bringing new paradigms to software development. These were aimed at freeing the programmer from process, but with new ALM software systems controlling production it is not clear that these initiatives that sought freedom from process are not just going to make things worse in terms of creating more red tape in the software creation process. What was designed to bring back creativity in software production as Agile was described seeking hyper-productivity, may actually hamstring the developer as they are immeshed in ALM systems that block progress due to enforced processes that are called Agile or Lean but actually make it harder to write good software. This is still an open question. But it is in keeping with the general tenor of changes brought about by software is that there is a radical intensification of nihilism. For instance we write programs but it is nearly impossible to reuse anything because the infrastructure is changing so rapidly, so lots of this work becomes wasted by just small infrastructural changes. So we are constantly having to start over, yet at the same time we cannot abandon legacy code due to the cost, so we have to both abandon and keep running old code. Cobol is still being written and maintained despite the fact that it is completely outmoded. We have to connect all kinds of legacy systems to each other and incorporate them into our new development, so we are constantly having maintenance issues along with development issues.

Software produces in society and culture intensification of nihilism and it is not immune to these same sorts of effects itself. Software evolution is becoming more and more intense yet our ability to absorb, incorporate, and use these evolutionary advances becomes more and more limited because of information overload, knowledge obsolescence, and generally a lack of wisdom in how to develop these capabilities so that they can stay in better synchronization with each other so that the infrastructure is not so disruptive to our own use of it to accomplish things that people want, but which shortly will be obsoleted, or worse will live on a kind of Zombified existence as the program that never dies because it is crucial and it costs too much to replace it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrida
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff%C3%A9rance
Wild Software Meta-systems http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SRlrLsS6KmdUiFAkCvumzI9LBshndPlW0_WkR4lH1PM/edit?hl=en_US

I will tell you something that shocked me as I started getting into Tibetan Buddhist literature. I really liked Dzong Ka Pa because he says something I believed for a long time which was that reason has a role to play in enlightenment. And I really think his masterpiece the essence of eloquence is extremely interesting. But as I went on I learned that he supported a position that said that awareness was not inherently reflexive. I could not understand that but have to side with Mipham on that one. There is a book on the subject by Paul WilliamsThe Reflexive Nature of Awareness: A Tibetan Madhyamaka Defence.

http://www.wisdom-books.com/ProductExtract.asp?PID=7248
See also 

The Conventional Status of Reflexive Awareness:
What’s at Stake in a Tibetan Debate?
*
Jay L Garfield
Department of Philosophy
Smith College
Department of Philosophy
University of Melbourne
Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies
http://www.smith.edu/philosophy/ReflexiveAwareness.pdf

“In his commentary to Candrakirti’s Madhyamakåvatåra, Mi pham argues that Tsong khapa is wrong to take Candrak¥rti’s rejection of the reflexive character of consciousness to be a rejection of the conventional existence of reflexive awareness. Instead, he argues, Candrak¥rti only intends to reject the reflexivity of awareness ultimately, and, indeed, Mipham argues, it is simply obvious that conventionally, consciousness is reflexive.”

For me as a reflexive theorist the reflexivity of awareness is a crucial question, and I agree with Mipham that anyone can verify that awareness is reflexive by introspection, so what would lead a great thinker like Dzong Ka Pa to abandon his own intuitions for a statement of a prior theorist that is manifestly untrue. And I think that is because the tradition has become more important than the evidence of ones own experience, which is always a bad sign. This made me trust Mipham’s interpretation of DzogChen more.

Normally Phenomenology talks about Consciousness which Husserl understands as wholly intentional. It is Gurewitsch who introduces awarness into phenomenology and recognizes it as important. Awarness is non-intentional in some sense. But the question is whether reflexivity is in consciousness or awareness. I place it in both as something deeper than either consciousness or awareness as such and that can be seen to be based on the ideas of Demasio that you have to have a sense of self to have any experience what so ever. I really like Demasio’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Dam%C3%A1sio) treatment of this issue in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt, 1999 He also has a new book called Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Pantheon, 2010 which I have not read yet. But he takes into account all the latest neurological information in his forulation of the problem of reflexivity, i.e. the fact that the self is there with every experience.

In my opinion this meaning of the Self is not disturbed by the idea of emptiness f the self. This self he is talking about is on the neurological level and is necessary for any experience what so ever, even those where phneomena are seen as empty. This notion of self is more like a reference point against which the flow in a stream of experience is necessary to gauge the flow. Another view of Self is that of Atman (beyond the individual self) or Jungian Self that expresses the collective unconsciousness. Buddhism is denying the empirical and transcendental self as supported by Being. But I think Buddhism especially tantric Buddhism is fully engaged with what Jung calls archetypes. Self as totality of experience seems to me does not contradict the spirit of Buddhism. It is self as unity instead of aggregate that seems to be what is denied with the idea of Anatman.

There are a lot of different selves, and which are specifically denied by any one school of Buddhism is sometimes difficult to determine.But anything that cannot stand being seen as empty is definitely excluded. Demasio’s sense of self as reference point for experience seems to me stands up to this test. Jung’s Self as totality of phenomena related to the self, does not seem to be affected either as it connects to archetypes. But Empirical and Transcendental Ego and Atman are definitely destroyed. Buddhist psychology is quite different from Western psychology and so that has to be factored in. However, if we deny the Demasio form of self as reference point then reflexivity definitely vanishes as a possibility. Reflexivity is a kind of recoil into ones own experience that is the same as having an expeirence itself. It is not reflection as in a mirror. Reflexivity is more of an action and less of a vision, such as Lacan has with the mirror stage of infants where they recognize themselves in a mirror. Reflexivity is more like the recoil of expeirence on itself so that we know it is our own experience at all times.

For my self I relate consciousness to Being and I related awareness to Existence. I would take awareness as emptiness as different from awareness as void as dual forms of non-duality separated by a Domain wall. I take awareness of manifestation as different still which is wholly nondual. I don’t know of a word for awareness of manifestation, but epiphany might due.

It seems to be that those who concentrate on remember their dreams are more likely to do so. Although this has not worked for me personally it is attested by many who attempt to concentrate on their dreams. To me the most interesting of the dreamwork practitioners is Robert Bosnak at CyberDreamwork.com. Even though I don’t like his books very much his workshops are really good. And what he says is that it really does not matter how much of the dream you remember. What really matters is to relive it without interpreting it. In his dreamwork what one does is connect the dreams aspects to their loci in the body. Once each image or part of the dream that is remembered and relived in imagination are anchored in a part of the body one attempts to feel these connections and feelings all together, and that can at time lead to transformational experiences which Bosnak interprets alchemically. This technique can be done in groups, and they have long distance groups that operate via their website and do this kind of dreamwork over internet. You can also take a series of courses from Bosnak and get certified to do this kind of dreamwork. Much of what goes on in this area of Dreamwork strikes me as totally bogus, but I have found that Bosnak’s way of doing it has some interesting connections to Somatic Experiencing of Peter Levine. Another completely different but similar psychotherapy is that of David Grove which is called Metaphor therapy. These three completely different kinds of therapy have many interesting aspects in common. The key in each case is not the interpretation of the dreams but relating to the sensations that they make one feel in different parts of ones body, and focusing on that and following that as it undergoes transformations in the light of awareness. Certain types of Buddhist meditation also focuses on sensations and their self-transformations called Vipassana (introspective observational) as opposed to Samantha or pacification types of meditation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassan%C4%81)

I believe that everyone remembers some dreams sometimes. But many times dreams are uninteresting and so it is less likely for people to even recognize them to try to remember them. But if people never remembered their dreams then they might not know what dreaming is, as only those who have dreamt sometime in their lives can know this. And you hardly ever run into anyone who denies dreams exist, even if they don’t have them very often, and do really remember what happened at least they know on waking that they have dreamed, and what dreaming is. So what I am taking issue with is the idea that some people don’t EVER remember their dreams. I believe that everyone dreams, and everyone knows what dreams are, but they might ignore them, not really remember then explicitly, and all they may really have is a residue of dreaming, the fading of the dream. Everyone has the experience of dreams fading from ones grasp as one awakes. Like anything in consciousness if you spend time concentrating on it then it is more likely that one will remember more of dreams, and for Bosnak’s approach to dreams to work all one needs is a snippet that is still active enough that one can enter back into the trance of the dream while waking.

It is an interesting fact that studies show that most peoples dreams are negative, and so this also militates against against people wanting to remember them.

But the most interesting thing about your question, which I really want to deal with is the relation between dreams and memories. This is because I think these two phenomenological experiences are of real interest because they both deal with the realm of the imagination in different ways. According to Kant Apriori Synthetic Manifolds that we intuit are all based on the imagination. One of those is the singular of SpaceTime. And the idea of General Schemas Theory is that we project not just a homogeneous plenum of space and time as Kant thought, but instead different nested scopes of templates of understanding for different resolutions of spacetime. And the key fact which I use in my dissertation is that schemas operate across various realms of consciousness. So they operate in Memory and Dream, as well as in our projective imagination. In other words schemas are more basic than the variations in our modes of consciousness. I think this, if true for everyone, is of great interest because what structures mundane consciousness, imagination, memory and dream is all the same and this is one way to think about its a priori nature.

In many ways remembering a dream, whether a REM dream or a hypnogogic dream is tantamount to schematizing it. Bosnak’s point is that dreams are real, they have their own separate reality, and it is that reality one wants to tap into as it animates feelings within the body through its images and the feelings that are produced within the dreams themselves. But the difference between normal REM dreams and Hypnogogic dreams are striking in that in normal REM dreams we are observing ourselves from the outside in many cases. While in Hypnogogic dreams the illusion is very real and it is in a space in relation to our bodies and we are inside our bodies usually trapped in a frozen bodily state. But even though our relation to our bodies and other bodies in the two kinds of dream are very different still we apprehend those relations on the basis of the same schemas. We do not have a schema for one and a different one for another mode of consciousness. Same is true with the mundane consciousness of being in the world and what we imagine. All Art and Architecture uses the same set of schemas as do everything else we produce. It is this continuity across spacetime of phenomenal experience that make the a prioiri schemas a priori, they come before the differentiation of experience into modalities. Even non-worldly experiences in dreams, imagination, and visions reinforce the same schematization that connects us to the mundane world.

Studies have been done which show that our waking consciousness is not much different from our dreamstates. And much of our time we spend in trance during the day. The part of the time that we are in objective reality, designated as intersubjectively real, is not very long each day. So in a sense it is not significant whether we remember dreams or not because we are always in trances that related to our finitude. Reading, Conversation, Eating, Dressing, taking showers, riding in conveyances, driving we are continually falling into trances. But those trances even the deepest ones induced by self-hypnosis where we enter into the unconscious directly are all schematized with the same schemas. This was shown by an experiment done by Erickson where he would hypnotize subjects prior to their actually being “officially hypnotized” and they they would be asked where the wall was in the room they were seeing, and if they pointed out the real wall it meant that they were not under hypnosis, but if they pointed to a wall that was not there, then they were in a hypnotic trance. But even in deep trances people would see walls, not something else. Imaginary objects were still objects following the same schematic templates as actual intersubjectively agreed to objects. And the same is true of hypnogogic and dream objects or environments.

So in a sense it does not matter if we remember our dreams or not because much of consciousness is in fact trance, and these trances can be very deep so as to be direct experiences of the unconscious which we do not remember on waking. But then self reports of glimpses of these states find that the people having those experiences are seeing visions of different parts of their lives, or dreamlike images which are schematized just like our mundane experiences.

First you have to understand what Nihilism is, which is a western idea. Best book on that is the one by Stanley Rosen called Nihilism. Nihilism is basically a loss of meaning when you were in one side of a conflict and you come to believe that both sides are essentially the same, so there is a loss of meaning, anomie, and alienation that occurs. Best example is Achilles in the Iliad. Nietzsche and then Heidegger said that this was the central phenomenon in the Western worldview, and I believe this is correct. When looked at carefully we find that our society, and culture is filled with extreme artificial nihilistic opposites that are basically the same and detract us from the real concerns, for instance Democrats and Republicans are basically the same although they appear to be in conflict it is really incumbents of either party that really hold sovereignty, i.e. make laws for others that do not apply to them. First it was Teaparty and now occupy Wallstreet and many have made the comment that they seem to have similar goals and the real difference is age. It used to be that Skepticism was the strawman that philosophers universally criticized and now it is nihilism, in spite of the fact that most philosophies are nihilistic one way or another. Rosen shows this in the comparison of Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s philosophies.

Buddhism is only nihilistic in the sense that it seems to be a ruse which uses nihilism against the Indo-European worldview in order to destroy the belief in Being and return people to an understanding of existence. It interprets existence as nondual emptiness. It does not believe in the reality of the physical world but is phenomenological and only believes that everything is a product of consciousness. It deals with the problem of the wheel of Samsara (birth and death) and the production of Karma that bind us to that wheel and it offers a way out called Nirvana which is evaporation of the “soul” what ever that is which keeps us in the illusion of endless birth and death in cyclical time. But even though emptiness seems negative, it is really a negation of all four points in the tetralemma (A, ~A, Both, Neither) and points toward something else which is a strictly aconceptual and non-experiential viewpoint called prajna which gives us an understanding of the world that is what might be called non-attached, since it seems everything, including the self as essentially empty. This is not a belief in NOTHING, it is not Heideggarian Being which is No Thing. It is essentially a way to see existence below the veneer of illusion called Being produced by our Indo-European worldview. It is essentially seeing things they way they really are if we do not project our values on them, which are normally false, or not well founded at least. If there is a value that is there after all the illusions are blown away, then it is considered part of existence. For instance babies have seven natural emotions that all babies all over the world have, and that would be part of existence. But much of our emotions and feelings are projected onto situations, and thus are part of the epiphenomena of the illusions of Being.

So Buddhism is definitely now Nihilistic as was thought by early interpreters in Europe, because negation is still part of the logical alternatives and emptiness is non dual beyond all the logical alternatives. That nonduality once you take that stance is actually very positive because it leaves a lot of illusion projected by Being away, and that just leaves the illusions that are part of existence which are not as virulent. For instance in Buddhism they always give the example of seeing a rope and thinking it is a snake. This is a very deep ingrained response in us and therefore has roots in our existence even though we know it is an illusion after the fact. For instance the rock beside the road that no one cares about and no one bothers to pick up is what exists. But anything we project value upon beyond bare necessities of life are in fact false values, because they are unnecessary for the viability of our lives. Buddhism seeks to understand these values as illusions, and it tries to compare them with really important things like death. It basically says that it is these illusions that cause our suffering, because they are false projections. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths

The word for suffering used in Buddhism is dukkha which really means something more akin to dissatisfaction. Basically it is saying that anything that is an illusion ultimately leaves us dissatisfied in some very fundamental way. And so even in pleasure we can experience this dissatisfaction even if we are not suffering per se for instance with a dread disease. the key to getting out of that suffering is called the Eightfold noble path http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path. It is basically to connect to Rightness (RTA) which is an indo-european nondual which originally meant something like Cosmic Harmony in the Vedas. But in later hinduism it is called following ones Dharma which was a Caste Role. But since Buddhism is anti-caste it redefines Dharma as meaning the right way to live ones life, and that involves many of the same values developed by Jainism which is another older similar religion to buddhism which was not so radical, i.e did not reject Being as far as I have been able to ascertain. But it includes positive virtues like non-violence, compassion, giving to others, etc all positive virtues.

Try to practice yourself the eight fold path for a day. It is very difficult to bring cosmic harmony into ones life and to express this nondual of RTA, Arte in Greek, Dharma, etc. But if we could all do it it would make the world a very different place. A kind of positive utopia that we dream about but know will never happen in our lifetimes. But a Bodhisatva takes a long view he has myriad lifetimes to save all sentient Beings, which he has vowed to save before he himself enters Nirvana and gets out of the cycle of Birth and Death by creating Karma. The Enlightened one can follow the eight fold path effortlessly. He is that path incarnate. On a practical level it seems very positive to me and unlike Nihilism except that it uses Nihilism as part of the skillful means to dismantel the world of Being and point toward existence. These skillful means are a give given to the enlightened that they can teach how to escape from illusion and indicate the nature of enlightenment with ease so people understand and though their transmission the people can become enlightened themselves.

Buddhism is a direct and isomorphic transformation of the structure of the Indo-European worldview out of Being into existence. It does this by representing all the nondual levels within the western worldview as part of the Buddhist path. So for instance the Buddha set down the rules of the order of Buddhism among the Sanga of his time. And they have been basically the same from the time of the Buddha till now. This is because the Buddha taught 40 years or so and thus there was plenty of time to transmit his teaching wholly to his disciples. There are three jewels: Dharma, Buddha, Sangha which correspond to the three Special Systems, Dissipative Order (Prigogine), Autopoietic Symbiotic (Maturella and Varella) and Reflexive Social (O’Malley, Sandywell). These jewels seen as special systems are models of nonduality. Buddhism is modeled on the Special Systems that separate the Meta-levels of Being from each other and form a multi-schema picture of nonduality. Non-duality is based on negative entropy, and negative entropy is the introduction of order and organization locally against the pressure of entropy globally. Thus Buddha by the way he led  his life, by his teaching (the Dharma) and by his ordering of the life of the Sangha gave a complete picture of his way of viewing existence within the framework of the Western worldview, which is by seeing the nondual core of the worldview. So the first and most superficial of the nonduals in the Western worldview is order, and the Buddha orders his concepts by numbers as seen in the Abhidharma, and he orders the lifestyle of his followers by his rules of ordination of monks into the Sanga.

Next level below order of the Indo-European nonduals is RTA, and we have noted how the eight fold path is the focus on this nondual in every aspect of ones life.

The next level down is the Good and that is approached though the four noble truths. Note the emphasis on the Aspect of Truth. Buddhists reject identity by saying the self is empty Anatman. They reject reality because they do not believe in external reality. They reject presence because their goal is absence, absence of suffering. So in Buddhism there is a symmetry breaking in the aspects and only Truth is embraced fully, and since truth has to do with speech, it is the truth of the Dharma that is paramount. With respect to the other Dharmas buddhism emphasizes Difference, Illusion, Absence as fundamental nature of things. The Four noble truths emphasize Dukkha and says that life is suffering. Basically suffering or dissatisfaction arises from attachment to desires, and when desire ceases then suffering ceases. And the cessation of suffering leads ultimately to complete cessation of karma and thus to nirvana.

In the Theravada version and the version translated by An Shigao, the Four Noble Truths are given definitions:

1. The Nature of Suffering (or Dukkha):

“This is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”[5][6]

1. Suffering’s Origin (Dukkha Samudaya):

“This is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there, that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.”[5][6]

1. Suffering’s Cessation (Dukkha Nirodha):

“This is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, nonreliance on it.”[5][6]

1. The Path Leading to the Cessation of Suffering: (Dukkha Nirodha Gamini Patipada Magga)

“This is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is the Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.”[7][8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths

Now the good is opposite bad and evil both. So the four noble truths emphasize the negative side of life and how we suffer, but not only that how even in pleasure there is suffering or dissatisfaction ultimately. It is interesting to think about the ephemeral nature of life in relation to knowledge. Every experience good, bad otherwise is fleeting. And this fleeting nature of experiences leaves us with dissatisfaction and that dissatisfaction becomes a craving for more of what is good, and even if we do achieve it it just leads to more desire and craving. So ultimately the negative view of existence as fundamentally dissatisfying has to do with our own nature of finite living creatures in a fleeting world of experience where the only thing that has any permanence at all is knowledge. So the Four Noble truths seek to give us knowledge of the intrinsic nature of our existence, which is that we seek good, rarely find it and if we do it is fleeting.

But the Four Noble truths are even deeper than that because the Good is actually intrinsic variety production. And Buddhism emphasizes that we ourselves are not unified or totaled or supported by a continuous substrate of Being, so that we ourselves are sources of variety, the variety of desires that relate to the variety of the things in the world we deem good. But what is good for one is not good for another, and so what we seek may not be ultimately what is good for us, and thus not only are we caught in illusion, but also delusion as we work toward ends that are not in our own best interests based on who we are in our uniqueness. The Four Noble Truths are actually a very deep critique of the goodness of life. It says that actual goodness in life comes from enlightenment which is a kind of knowledge, because knowledge is the most permanent thing. Getting actual Goodness out of life is through prajna, a kind of knowledge about our relation to the good, i.e. the intrinsic variety production, in nature, in ourselves, and due to our uniqueness. It basically says that the pursuit of happiness is a false path, because even if you get everything you think you want, you will still be dissatisfied.

The next nondual down in the Western worldview is fate. Fate we see in the wheel of Samsara and the idea of Karma and rebirth based on past actions in former lives. This is a metaphor for each moment of consciousness being produced by dependent arising from the last moment. In other words there is no real causality, but only the arising together of phenomena. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra_(Buddhism); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_Life)

Wheel of Birth and Death
http://quietmountain.org/dharmacenters/buddhadendo/wheel_of_life.htm

This wheel of Birth and Death describes the Buddhist view of Fate, It’s sources, the three posions, how it is generated by a cycle of causation, and how what it leads to the Six Realms.

The next level down beyond fate are the Sources, and this is dealt with in Buddhism with the idea of Dependent Origination. The sources are in a kind of quasi-causality which does not arise nor does it ever dissipate, where everything arises together already connected so that the idea of the separation of cause and effect is an illusion.
Dependent Arising http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da

Finally there is the Root which is Nonduality.
Non-dual: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondual

Buddhism addresses all the layers of the nondual within the Indo-European and thus the Western worldview as well as the Hindu Worldview from which this heresy was originally spawned, taking its core structure with it. Now Buddhism is coming to the Western worldview, which is completely dualistic, and has fought a long battle with its own nondual heresy Islam that has taken over the center of the Western worldview, now called the Middle East, as if it was oriental. Nothing oriental about Islmo-Greco-Roman culture based on Greek philosophy. Aristotle’s metaphysics was itself an attack on nonduality explicitly citing the Tetralemma.

The Indo-European worldview is nihilistic at its core even though the kernel is nondual, constantly producing artificial extreme opposites which are then discovered to be actually the same, and thus sapping meaning from the world as those caught up in its struggles who find that they are for nought. Buddhism uses nihilism as a form against the worldview itself in order to take people out of Being into Existence interpreted as emptiness. On the surface is the myriad dualities. At the Core is the production of nihilism where the artificial extreme opposites are always from some point of view achieved by an anagogic swerve ultimately the same sapping meaning from the world. But at the kernel of the worldview is its nonduals which hide in the interstices and discontinuities inscribed in the core of the worldview. Buddhism takes these nonduals as its core pattern, and then addresses each one with an appropriate analysis. Because Buddhism is directed at the nondual kernel of the worldview it is actually a way to avoid nihilism and get out of it by using the tricks of the Indo-European worldview against itself. And because it has this basis in the Hindu version of the Indo-European worldview it also works for the Western version which has become world dominant via colonization, economic dominance, and now globalization. All other worlds are becoming subservient to the now dominant Western meta-worldivew. But that dominant Western worldview rooted in dualism has a weakness which is its nondual core. Buddhism draws out that nondual core and by that transforms the selves that are conditioned by the structure of the Western worldview by dependent arising. By dependent arising we are connected not just to the dualities on the surface, or on the core nihilism production, but also the nondual core. Each of us also has that same nondual kernel. And it is to this kernel that Buddhists appeal with all the various turnings of the Wheel of dharma.

In my opinion Buddhism started as an Indo-European Heresy denying Being and trying to return to Existence as the fundamental stance toward the world. Being is only in Indo-European languages and is a unique anomaly in linguistics. So Buddhism is trying to return to the norm of viewing things through the lens of existence (what is found Wajud) and to get rid of the illusions of Being. But any enemy you fight you become like them, so Buddhism has the core structure of the Western worldview and especially is mapping the nondual core of that worldview. Buddhism was adopted easily in non-indo-european lands because it already accorded with their worldview based on non-being. But it died in India where it was reabsorbed into Hinduism, when hinduism adopted nondual approaches to their own tradition based on Nagarjuna’s critique of logic. Shankara was key in reinterpreting the Upanishads in a nondual manner, and via this nondual perspective was able to unify the various approaches in the Upanishads, basically he reinterpreted Being as Emptiness.

So the reason that Buddhism diffused into non-indoeuropean centric lands is that it was consonant with their worldview, but more sophisticated due to the encounter with the Indo-European worldivew which had very complex philosophical systems that had to be overcome by buddhists in order to survive the polemic wars with non-Buddhists. Basically Buddhism is like one of the super-viruses. It lives off of worldviews with Being by denying Being effectively, but then it catches on in other worldviews that do not have Being, because it is more sophisticated than anything they have to offer to explain the nature of existence. Anyway, this to me is the reason it survived outside India but not in India. It was coopted in India, but elsewhere it was merely a better description of what people already knew and believed based on their non-indoeuropean traditions and languages.

Yaddrasil – World Tree; Horse of Odin

If not the most beautiful then at least the most wyrd.

http://www.germanicmythology.com/PoeticEdda/images/cosmoscrossleyholland.jpg
http://www.germanicmythology.com/PoeticEdda/GRM31.html

Odin hung in this tree for nine nights and days as a sacrifice from himself to himself in order to learn the secret of the Runes.

http://retrorpg.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/yggdrasil/
http://www.germanicmythology.com/PoeticEdda/Grimnismal.html

The Well and the Tree is the Primal Scene of the Indo-European worldview

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_scene
http://books.google.com/books?id=Spkk4Rlmo7cC&lpg=PP1&dq=intitle%3Aprimal%20intitle%3Ascenes&lr&as_drrb_is=q&as_minm_is=0&as_miny_is&as_maxm_is=0&as_maxy_is&as_brr=0&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=HcAoAAAAYAAJ&q=the+well+and+tree+bauschatz&dq=the+well+and+tree+bauschatz&hl=en&ei=StCQTqSUOunViALXi8HNCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA

http://urbanheathen.co.uk/articles/thewellandthetree.pdf

https://docs.google.com/document/d/117Ix1GTbRxjzfvBIhfs8o3p7DOxYwdQE5U69LHyHobM/edit?hl=en_US

I am interested in Meta-novels. And in my dissertation I offer as proof that there are basically four viewpoints on phenomena that appear in consciousness which show up in the novel which are Writer/Reader//Narrator/Character. I offer it as proof that Schemas are fundamental. See http://about.me/emergentdesign.net. I think this formulation is analogous to the definition of the world from Socrates taken up by Heidegger: Heaven/Earth//Immortals/Mortals which is the positive fourfold. See my Fragmentation of Being and the Path beyond the Void at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer. Techniques of Narration have to exist within the matrix that supports the existence of narration itself. And that framework is the basis of the Meta-novel where Writer, Reader, Narrator, and Character come into conversation about the creation of the novel itself. Novel means something new. The creation of the novel is an emergent event. See my first dissertation on the Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence at http://archonic.net/disab.html. So if we are going to look into styles of narration we should first look into what Narration is. Narration is the projection of an omniscient voice within the text of the novel. The narrator is equal to the Immortal in the fourfold of the world. The writer is Heaven, and the Reader Earth. The character is mortal and the Narrator is Immortal. So the group of characters that appear in the meta-novel is a simulacrum for the world’s structure. Now this is the structure of the world in the Mythopoietic era. Socrates is looking back at the Mythopoietic era nostalgically from the Metaphysical era where we find ourselves entrapped hoping for its end that never seems to come, like the characters in Waiting for Godot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_Godot

Of course, Waiting for Godot is a meta-novel presented as a play. Pozo and Lucky represent the Master/Slave dialectic so famous in Hegel. They represent the relation between Narrator and Character. Vladamir and Estragon represent the Writer and Reader. Godot is the missing transcendental ground, and the boy who is the messenger is the immanence, i.e. the embodiment of the transcendental that is all that Vladamir and Estragon are going to actually see of the transcendental for which they are waiting. They are all in an unspecified place, and at an unspecified time, Waiting, Waiting. Reader and Writer change places, Character and Narrator change places. Everything circles around, Godot never comes, the boy always appears, Pozo and Lucky continue to circulate, and Vladamir and Estragon don’t go anywhere, but wait in anticipation of the end of the Metaphysical era. Heidegger says the metaphysical era is the fleeing of the Gods who ruled in the mythopoietic era, and it wont be over until the last god, Godot, has fled. Or perhaps he has already fled and that is why he is not showing up. Reader and Writer are both human and outside the story. Narrator and character are both inhuman fictitious masks of humans, but one knows the thoughts of the other and the destiny of the other. However, as in Four Quartets narrators can change in different stories. The omniscience of the Narrator is in sharp contrast to the finitude of the character. The activity of the writer is in sharp contrast to the receptiveness of the reader. Vladamir is the active protagonist while Estragon is his sidekick and more receptive of the two. The four together represent the meta-novel and the structure of the world in its barest essentials. Those that are waiting for Godot actually see the boy who is a messenger for the transcendent in immanence. Nothing happens in the play, it is like No Exit of Sartre, but rather we see the primal scene of the Well and the Tree from the Indo-European worldview. There is a tree on the stage but the wells are missing, because the sources (wells) have dried up. We are when we view the scenes of the play we are looking at the structure of  the world though an existentialist lens. There are only two kinds of relations equal and hierarchical. Here we see them both negated, by the reversal in one case and by the impotence of the equal relation in the other case.

So if you realize that the Narration has to take place in this world structure seen in the meta-novel but also played out in myriad ways in all novels, then it is possible to understand more deeply what the various narrative styles mean. Each person plus the non-person “it” or “they” may be any of the four viewpoints. It is this fundamental permutation of the persons with the viewpoints that creates the variety of styles by the interaction of language with the four fold nature of the world-structure. When the written word in the novel says I it may be the writer, the reader, the character or the narrator talking about himself. When you is said it could be talking about any of those viewpoints. When the third person is used that is most likely the narrator talking, but actually could also be any of the viewpoints that are being discussed by the voice which is speaking. In Hegel for instance we see this structure. There is sense certainty (the character) and there is self-consciousness which is objective looking at sense certainty, which is the narrator. There is also Hegel taking up the position of others whose positions he is explaining, and there is Hegel himself criticizing those positions. It is difficult in the Phenomenology of Spirit/Ghost/Mind to know which of the viewpoints are operative at any one point in the text. This this ultimate meta-novel of the rise of self-consciousness and absolute spirit represented by the state, has all the point of view of the meta-novel as did the first novel Don Quixote   (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote). In Don Quixote the second part is a response to a fake second part which he makes fun of in the actual second part. It was a conversation with a reader turned writer and imitator. It is interesting that the first novel is also a meta-novel.

So if we use the middle English declension we can see this as the basis for categorizing the voice of the various viewpoints.

Middle English Declension http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou#Declension

First person:
Writer I
Reader I
Narrator I
Character I

We becoming royal we if used by an individual:
Writer we
Reader we
Narrator we
Character we

Informal Second Person:
Writer thou
Reader thou
Narrator thou
Character thou

Formal Second Person:
Writer (ye) you
Reader (ye) you
Narrator (ye) you
Character (ye) you

Third Person:
Writer s/he
Reader s/he
Narrator s/he
Character s/he

Third non-person (slave)
Writer it
Reader it
Narrator it
Character it

Third person plural:
Writer they
Reader they
Narrator they
Character they

There are seven voices and four viewpoints that gives 28 possible narrative stances. Now it just happens that this is a perfect number like 6 where all the parts add up to the whole exactly. And it happens that this perfect number is the number of paths or pairings between eight things like the trigrams for instance. So all the narrative stances that give voice to the views are the relations between eight eventities. We can think of these eventities like the hexagram as a stack of structural opposites that define a situation. But we can also think of them as interpenetrated 2^3 states of different qualities.

What we need to keep in mind is that the human brain can think to about five meta-levels of relationship before it loses track, so it can think he thinks that she thinks that he thinks . . .  up to the fifth meta-level which corresponds with the fifth meta-level of Being. At each of these metalevels we can use all seven declensions and all four viewpoints. Since the aspects of Truth, Reality, Presence and Identity are different at each of these five levels, that means that besides each level becoming harder to think, it is harder to place the declensions in each level.

So he (being) thinks that she (pure) thinks that they (process) think that thou (hyper) thinks, that you (wild) think that we (ultra.existence) think that it (manifest) thinks goes just beyond the bound of the thinkable, if the first level is ontic. The aspects are different at all those levels. So you can see that there is a vast open space for the permutations of narrative styles. And that is only if we shift meta-levels of Being at each recursive level which is not necessary.

So narrative styles are just about endless. And probably many of these styles have never been explored in the whole history of the novel up to this point, because the field of possibilities has not been explored.

Descartes said “I think therefore I am.”

So we can say I am, we are, s/he is, thou art, you are, it is, they are.

We see in this the play of the indo-European roots of Being that appear in Anglo/Saxon. But actually those roots are as follows:

Roots of Being:
sei/sey (sindon)
es (sindon)
er (sindon)
bheu (beon)
wes (wesan)
wer (wesan)

Heidegger taps into the first few with the Sein/Seyn (Being/Beyng) distinction. Es is related to essence, presence. Er is related to Ereignis, bheu is physus, becoming. Wes is wessen. and Wer is werothan not mentioned by Heidegger.

If we go back to old English (Anglo/Saxon) that seems to be more archaic than high German somehow, we can see that any of these roots of Being can be called upon and basically they are distinguished by the sindon which is above the bheu (beon) and the wesan that is below the bheu. But actually each root is its own level within the roots of Being. Sindon and Wesan are duals on either side of the bheu (physus) but wesan is deeper. Sei and Sey as Sein and Seyn are the surface phenoment that aries from the es (presence, essence) Deeper still is the Er of Ereignis, which is related to movement. Bheu (Physus) is related to unfolding. Below the bheu there is the deeper reflections of the es and er in the Wes and Wer that is in the wesan.

Pronouns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Pronouns
See table of pronouns
Being
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Anomalous_verbs
See table of forms of Being

This is the richness we have lost as the stances that used to exist in our worldview related to Being. All these stances suggest the possibility of a corresponding narrative style now lost in the oblivion of our changing language. A good introduction to the changes in language which over large scale time every aspect changes like the tattvas or dharmas, are the books and lectures of John McWhorter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWhorter. Everything changes in language, and writing it merely slows this process down somewhat. It is an utter flux as suggested by Heraclitus that all things are ultimately. But it is in that flux that the linguistic structures that affect the possible styles of narrative are hidden.

The key thing about Multiple Universes theory of Everett in relation to the Copenhagen interpretation is that it is simpler, i.e. it has fewer assumptions, but on the other hand it sends us in a direction that we really don’t want to go which is the proliferation of universes at each observation of a quantum probability wave that collapses. Now I think the existence of Dark Energy pouring in to our universe and making it at the macro scale a far from equilibrium system which is accelerating in its expansion to be the most compelling evidence for the multiverse. This Dark Energy, which Penrose says we should not call Energy because it is not conserved, has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is the “Multiverse” what ever that is. Also Dark Matter suggests that there is a multiverse because in string theory, one of the variations, suggest that our universe has a twin with which we only share gravity. So that would mean that half of the dark energy could be explained as being in our twin universe, and then we can consider the rest to be either in blackholes or non-lighted matter. Now that we know we are living in a world where the earth has rings of anti-matter, and there is no Higgs particle within reach of LHC and where super-symmetries are not yet confirmed, and where neutrinos go faster than the speed of light, really we are certainly going to have to go back to the drawing board, unless something happens soon, like finding an error in experiments, and suddenly finding the Higgs particle where it is expected. We spent a lot of money building the LHC in order to find out that the Higgs is just no there, so far. It will be interesting when we find out what really is there at those energies and that will probably send all our theorizing about multiverses in a different direction.

So I would like to mention a completely different way to come at this problem of Multiverses, a more Kantian Copernican Turn sort of explanation. I have invented something called General Schemas Theory in my research. I came to it by asking what is the next level of abstraction up from Systems Theory. What are the other things like a “System” but different that are ways to organize Spacetime into what Umberto Eco in Kant and the Platypus calls Mathematical and Geometrical Schemas. The other candidates for templates of understanding that are at the same level of abstraction as Systems, but essentially different are things like Monads, Patterns, Forms, etc. It is surprising that such a discipline has never been created in our tradition before, but I cannot find it. You would have thought that it would have been created in Architectural Theory or in Art Theory, or in some other domain. But I guess that Science is just too specialized to think in these global terms about the way we organize phenomena as a species to ourselves. Schemas are Ontological rather than Ontic organizations. Ontic organisations are what one would normally think of as emergent levels in nature. These are things like quarks, particles, atoms, molecules, macro-molecules, organelles, cells, multi-cellular clusters, organs, organisms, ecologies, social organisms, Gaia. All these are ontic emergent levels of organization we find in nature. But they way we understand these emergent phenomena is via templates of understanding that we project as intuited a priori syntheses as Kant called them. But Kant believed that these were unstriated, in other words he thought there was only one kind of time that created schemas, and only one kind of space (homogeneous objective space) which means he believed in unstriated synthetic a priori projections prior to experience. But what General Schemas Theory posits is that these existant singularities of space and time are not only fused into SpaceTime but also are striated into different types of mathematical and geometric schemas. The key point is that you can view any ontic emergent level of organization in the universe via multiple ontological schemas, and much argumentation between scientists who are looking at the same phenomena via different schemas. Schemas are templates of organization projected on phenomena a priori as intuited syntheses. They are ontological because Being is identified with intelligibility. These schemas in comparison to the ontic structures we find in nature are what serves as the reference background in which we come to understand the actual organization of nature. Without the projected reference background we would not know what differences make a difference ala Bateson in the phenomena we are studying.

Now in order to kick off General Schemas Theory as a discipline I created a hypothesis that there are only ten schemas and that they are related by a rule which is that there are two schemas per dimension and two dimensions per schema. This leads to a configuration of schemas as nesting at different scopes of the following organization which I derived empirically by studying science for many years.

F theory = 12 —-> Two orthogonal timelines
M theory = 11
String theory = 10
—————————-
Pluriverse 8, 9
Kosmos 7, 8
World 6, 7
Domain 5, 6
OpenScape (Meta-system) 4,5
System 3, 4
Form 2, 3
Pattern 1, 2
Monad 0, 1
Facet -1,0

These Schemas are nested without gaps. Most of my work in my research has been looking for the gaps in these schema, and also trying to verify the dimensional relations.

Now one thing we notice is that there are only 6 of these schematic levels that actually are completely experienced and those are the central six. The two on each end are like scaffolding which we do not completely experience.

So based on this hypothesis, which I am working hard to refute, so we can get on to the next hypothesis in the development of General Schemas Theory, there is a “Multiverse” because that is one of the a priori syntheses that we intuit, in fact the highest one. Just like Quarks which are never seen in isolation that is the lowest schema. We never see a Quark on its own, or at least not yet. So to we never see the Pluriverse on its own. These are scaffoldings that supports our understanding of the limits of experience.

It is interesting that Bernstein in his lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ultimately says in his regressive reading that the problem with Kant’s theory is that he thinks that there is only one kind of time, just as he believes that there is only one kind of space. So if there are multiple kinds of time projected as a priori syntheses, and space and time are fused, then that means there must be multiple kinds of space as well, not just objective physical space. And since spacetime is fused (as either spacetime or timespace which together I call the Matrix) that means that the schemas are the striations of this existential singularity of spacetime into different kinds of temporal and spatial organizations of experience that are projected a priori on ontic phenomena, which in turn has its own ontic organization. Many times we assume the ontological organization of the template of our own understanding is the organization of the phenomena until we learn differently by questioning closely the phenomena itself. For instance Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell saw little lines on Mars at the resolution of his telescope and he projected that there were canals there on Mars and so Edgar Rice Burroughs populated that planet with dwellers that lived along canals. It was not until we got higher magnification telescopes that we could see that the lines that were thought to be canals were in fact either artifacts from the low resolution telescope, shadows on the landscape, or projections from an overactive imagination. But what ever they were we projected our pattern schema on the surface of Mars to understand and connect what we saw there into something we could understand given the level of data we had.

http://www.emmetlabs.com/pair/Giovanni-Virginio-Schiaparelli_321/Percival-Lowell_192
http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Exploring-Mars/Early-Observations-and-Beliefs.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Schiaparelli

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Lowell
http://www2.lowell.edu/Research/library/paper/lowell.html
Better map: http://www.jimloy.com/astro/canals.htm

Lowell’s book http://www.archive.org/details/marsanditscanals033323mbp
Related articles:
http://www.space.com/13197-mars-canals-water-history-lowell.html
http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_retrospection&task=detail&id=4257
http://www.factsaboutmars.net/mars-in-history-1800s/

Threshold phenomnea: http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Threshold/
Other Pseudo Science: http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/auxiliary.html

http://palermoproject.com/lowell2004/site.htm

The point of all this is that we project patterns on what later are found to be random data. This is just one example of what has been called Threshold phenomena. But it is one example that allows us to bring home the point that the idea of Kant that there are a priori intuited syntheses flowing from out imagination is credible.

Once we believe what Kant surmised then it is only a small step to saying that there are a series of such schemas and that they themselves are organized into a hierarchy of organizations of Spacetime, so there is more than object time and space as absolutes but instead there are striated nestings of different templates of understanding that we project a priori, and to understand ourselves we ought to understand the structure of that ontological projection of Being (which is illusion) but which makes possible much of what we call the intelligibility of things we encounter.

There are many things about the theory of S-prime hypothesis (abduction) that are interesting but the most interesting to me is the fact that out schemas stop exactly where String theory takes up at the tenth dimension. The five variants of string theory are united into M theory in the eleventh dimension. And finally F theory in the 12th dimension really throws a wrench in the works by giving us unexpectedly two orthogonal time lines. In the Fourteenth dimension this becomes three orthogonal time lines. I searched for a precedent for this and found that Dunne had suggested the idea of orthogonal time lines in the twenties, and his ideas influenced Tolkien. Hinton had earlier popularized the idea of the fourth dimension which influenced Lewis Carroll in his Through the Looking Glass story which takes place in a tesseract. Later Dunne came up with the idea that there might be multiple dimensions of time and that would explain the soul. Tolkien took that idea up as did other writers and for tolkien it was the mark of the different types of beings that populated middle earth that they all experienced time in slightly different ways.

Since Philosophy for a while now has been looking for a reason for the Metaphysical Worldivew which has been in existence since Thales after the Mythopoietic worldview to be over, it seems to me heterochrony is one good way to end it once and for all since the Metaphysical worldivew definitely assumes either one linear or one circular timeline. Why should time be one dimensional when space is three dimensional. We note that the nine dimensional manifold of S-prime hypothesis is just big enough to hold an eight dimensional matrix of the various symmetry breakings of space and time. Ultimately the manifold of the A priori synthesis is just large enough to hold four dimensions of space and four dimensions of time fused relativistically.

So basically what this is saying is that there is no pre-given schemas to integrate string theory into our understanding. That is one reason we have such a hard time working with it and understanding it. But on the other hand S-prime hypothesis says that we are working with 7 plus or minus two dimensions in our short term memory all the time and that explains our propensity for transcendental idealist philosophies and our abilities to understand very complex things. Basically we have schemas to support understanding things up to nine dimensions in extension and it is the proposition of my dissertation that this is what we are using all the time to design complex systems. See http://about.me/emergentdesign.

So my basic thesis here is that the evidence that the multiverse exists is inside of us not outside. It is the very highest schema called the pluriverse and it is a threshold of understanding, and so there we see artifacts of what is beyond it and we call that string theory. It is at the limits of what we can think and is at the limits of what we can see, and thus it generates its own threshold phenomena and speculations. Essentially the pluriverse was in us from the beginning, just like the Li of the pattern in which spiders weave their webs making visible that Li. Chi is of course the unfolding of that patterning. The Chi might be called the energy behind the a priori projection of the synthetic whole of the striated spacetime singularity which we intuit, i.e. which we see reflected back to us in the organization of the phenomena until we look further and find that the phenomena has in effect its own order different from that we expected. For instance we did not expect super-conductivity as a phenomena but it was there and it took 20 years to come up with a plausible explanation for it. We did not expect to find black holes but now few people think they don’t exist because of all the phenomena that are explained by them unveiled in astronomy especially with the Hubble telescope and other sources of pictures of space which for instance see the background radiation from the big bang in detail. Ideas of the Big Bang, Black Holes, acceleration of the Expansion of the Universe, Dark Matter, Dark Energy all contribute to this uneasy feeling that there is more to the universe than meets the eye. The universe itself has its own unconscious that we are just seeming to get data which indicates its reality. There is a meta-system (general economy ala Bataille) beyond the system of our universe (restricted economy) and that is projected by us prior to any phenomena appearing to indicate it, which we can see from Science Fiction and Fantasy where we project other universes all the time without any difficulty. In fact what is amazing is that we can create other universes easier than we can do almost anything else. Just like we can invent new programming languages easier than we can learn existing ones. This ease of projection of alternative worlds seen in Leibniz (Paingloss) where he says this is the best of all possible worlds is astounding and that leads to David Lewis’s idea that all those imagined universes are actually real.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lewis_(philosopher)

POSSIBLE WORLDS: WHAT THEY ARE GOOD FOR AND WHAT THEY ARE
Alexander R. Pruss, Ph.D. http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85/papers/PhilThesis.html

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xQ9f6by0g25d-lKaaTgvsTWLmtyp9rrelC4yHg25jyM/edit?hl=en_US

http://bit.ly/yPgMGX

There are scholars who say that the differences is not that great because the editor of the Pali Cannon is said to have been a Mahayana buddhist. It is said that he subtly introduced certain nuances that made it coherent from a Mahayana point of view. I don’t know if it is true. My own teacher Alfonso Verdu wrote a book showing that everything in Mahayana Buddhism can be traced back to the original Hinayana scriptural tradition in Pali. So whether the Mahayana was infused later or whether Mahayana was there from the beginning. The fact is that the difference between Mahayana and Hinayana is not as stark as it might seem.

My own view is this. Buddhism and Jainism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism) were both similar heresies which offered escape from Karma by realizing Nirvana. Jainism was older than Buddhism by about three centuries so we can see it as preparing the way for Buddhism. They were both non-dual in character but Buddhism was more radical because it gave up on Being. I am still not clear whether this is true of Jainism. It appears from what I have read that Jainism did not reject Being but had another idea established in the seven principles. But it is clear that the seven principles are an approach to the nondual similar but subtly different from the tetralemma. So I believe that Mahayana is a combination of Buddhism and Jainism at the theoretical level plus other elements that make Mahayana Buddhism more logical, for instance the recognition of the contradiction of Nirvana as a goal and the substitution of the Bodhisattva ideal. Or getting rid of the split between dharmas that are real and those that are empty. Mahayana is vast but it is characterized by the push toward consistency in the belief system with a refocus on compassion as the key characteristic that is emphasized over personal spiritual ends.

In Jainism there is the seven principles.

“Syādvāda provides Jains with a systematic methodology to explore the real nature of reality and consider the problem in a non-violent way from different perspectives. This process ensures that each statement is expressed from seven different conditional and relative viewpoints or propositions, and thus it is known as theory of conditioned predication. These seven propositions are described as follows:”

• 1.Syād-asti — “in some ways it is”
• 2.Syād-nāsti — “in some ways it is not”
• 3.Syād-asti-nāsti — “in some ways it is and it is not”
• 4.Syād-asti-avaktavya — “in some ways it is and it is indescribable”
• 5.Syād-nāsti-avaktavya — “in some ways it is not and it is indescribable”
• 6.Syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavya — “in some ways it is, it is not and it is indescribable”
• 7.Syād-avaktavya — “in some ways it is indescribable”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahavira

We can see this as a proto-tetralemma that does not yet leave Being for Existence as the Tetralemma does. It introduces a third state which is not describable rather than existence without Being.

The tetralemma shortens this to A, ~A, Both, Neither and then points in silence toward emptiness which is outside this logical set. If something is indescribable that means it cannot be expressed in language, and therefore one would not be using Being in ones description of phenomena, so saying that something is indescribable is a way to avoid Being, without actually giving it up. The key point is that the seven principles are logically exhaustive, they point to what exists that cannot be described, and thus is not attached to Being, and it produces a third state which could later be seen as existence which is a separate stance toward phenomena created by the Buddhists as the locus of the undescibeable outside of Being, especially the Being of the self. However, in Hinayana the indescribable existence as a nondual standing beyond Being is only attributed to the self. Other dharmas are accepted as having Being and thus reality. Dharmas are really tattvas (small independent mechanisms that function to support life very much like the Sumerian Me, which is also the copula in Sumerian.

Because the Buddha taught for 40 years we can be reasonably assured that what is in the Pali Cannon is pretty accurate as to his teaching. And it is pretty focused on things like the meditation on corpses as ways to realize the reality of impermanence in life. Actually watching the corpse decompose is a sure way to know that it is really an aggregate that disperses. Buddhism was similar to the philosophy of Heraclitus, believing that everything is flux of aggregates in continual change with no stability. However, interestingly Hegel sees in his Logic the Buddhist concept of emptiness (nothing) as the antithesis of Being, and he recognizes that the philosophy of Heraclitus is the philosophy of Becoming which is the synthesis of Buddhist nothingness and Being. Thus of all philosophers in the Western Tradition, Hegel is the one to recognize that the fundamental opposition is between Being and Existence (as nothing, as emptiness). And it was recognized by the Arab philosophers that Being had some residue of Wajud in it, but that it was much more than what is implied by existence in Arabic, so they coined the term Kun (making) which then become existence when retranslated back into Latin. Of course, no one took much notice of this core of existence within being until the Existentialists came along and wanted to create a fundamental reversal in the tradition by saying that existence precedes essence, which is obviously true because you have to exist before you can be something of a particular kind from a purely logical point of view. But everything that exists is already of a particular kind so it never was an issue, until there was a desire for an alternative to Being, with all its confusions, contradictions, paradoxes, and absurdities. Existence suddenly focuses us on the individual and its viability, and leads in Biology to an Autopoietic orientation (Maturana and Varella) rather than a species centric orientation.

So Hinayana Buddhism is the original form of Buddhism probably almost exacty as taught by the Buddha and established in the Pali Cannon. Mahayana is rooted more in Sanscrit and takes up a position against various Hindu philosophies and strives for coherency so that its arguments for its point of view can be taken seriously. These are of course very general characterizations, because there are many schools of both vehicles, but I think more of Mahayana because this later school was willing to go with new Suttras beyond the Pali Cannon in which the Buddha is seen saying more and more interesting things as time goes on.

My recommendation if you want more detail is that you read the History of Buddhist Philosophy by David J Kalupahana:

http://bit.ly/xPt0bW