https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zOI0Em-DyicxlokPz-2UjGxfzPviNpOzvZHH2v3Kicc/edit?hl=en_US

Amanifest? What does it mean?

You ask a deep question. A rare delight. Thank you so much for your question, and your curiosity about the utter depths of existence.

I would just like to say I owe a lot of these insights to Dr. Scott Anderson with whom I have been discussing these issues many years. And if not for his probing questions I would have little to say on this subject.

I began reading DzogChen because of my general interest in Buddhism. I have an undergraduate major in East Asian Studies and was taught Buddhist Philosophy by a great teacher Alfonso Verdu at the University of Kansas. He also taught me Heidegger and Husserl and set me on an intellectual journey by linking these two great philosophical traditions in my mind. I have always thought Fa Tsang’s Hua Yen Buddhism was the deepest thought that anyone had ever had about existence. And I have always been partial to the Awakening of Faith which Verdu taught me. But I went on to study Western Philosophy rather than going to the Orient to study Buddhism as I had expected. And this was because I encountered a cultural mirror when I was taking Japanese in Summer School I had a teacher who when I told him that I was studying Japanese to study Zen Buddhism in Japan he said that Zen was the most conservative part of his culture, and much evil had been done in the name of Zen by the conservatives of his country, and that he had come to America for the very reason of escaping what I wished to study. This moment changed my life because I realized I did not know my own tradition and I needed to understand it before I tried to go elsewhere or I would make the mistakes of the Orientalists and just interpret everything I found in the orient by occidental standards without knowing my own prejudices and how they were affecting my sight.

So I studied Western Philosophy, but never lost my interest in Buddhism and Taosim and so I read sutras on a regular basis, and the new Tibetan translation opens up a new world to us of a tradition that never stopped from the Buddha down to today. A living tradition is always so much more interesting. And with Tibetan Buddhism you get the Spiritual equivalent of CIRQUE DU SOLEIL to boot. So I started reading all the original texts that had been translated from that tradition about DzogChen that I could find. But I was very disappointed because what I found was not up to the standard I usually found in Buddhist Sutras. The clarity just was not there. But eventually I focused on Manjushrimirtra and Mipham. Mipham is the soul of Clarity. One of the most brilliant commentators. I trusted him. So if you only have two points you can trust in a tradition, that is not good. But then I found the Bon Book and that confirmed for me my interpretation based on reading Manjushrimitra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%B1ju%C5%9Br%C4%ABmitra) based on the Beacon of Certainty. So if you take Manjushrimitra seriously then you can see that what he is doing is destroying Buddhism by using the very logic of Nagarjuna against it. It sees the two truths as a dualism, and the only way to get out of that fundamental dualism is to go outside Buddhism. I think it is quite possible that Garab Dorje (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garab_Dorje )was not Buddhist or at least was saying heretical things. And that is why Manjushrimitra went to challenge him for what he was saying, traveling from the school where Manjushrimitra taught to challenge him to a debate, on the Cemetery grounds. As in so many of such stories the teacher has three statements that summarize his teaching. In this case it was:

• One is introduced directly to one’s true nature or “Direct introduction.” (Tibetan: ngo rang thog tu sPrad)[4]
• One attains certainty about this natural state or “Remaining without doubt.” (Tibetan: thag gCig thog dug Cad)[4]
• One continues with confidence in liberation or “Continuing in the non-dual state.” (Tibetan: gDengs grol thog du ’cha’)[4]

I interpret these verses in relation to the Special Systems. Each statement indicates a Special System.

• One is introduced directly to one’s true nature or “Direct introduction.” (Tibetan: ngo rang thog tu sPrad)

The first special system is the Dissipative Ordering of Prigogine that manifests negative entropy. Direct introduction is transmission, and that introduction is the spread of a dissipative ordering of the anti-Dharma, the Dharma that destroys the Dharma. This is a heresy spreading in Buddhist lands that is essentially destroying the duality of the the two truths. Which is odd because one truth is dualistic and the other nondualistic, and so this destruction must point to a higher nonduality between dualism and non-dualism as indicated by Majushrimitra. This is the first jewel the Dharma, but it is really an Anti-Dharma that is spreading in Buddhist lands rather than a Buddhist heresy spreading in non-Buddhist lands.

• One attains certainty about this natural state or “Remaining without doubt.” (Tibetan: thag gCig thog dug Cad)

Dharma and Aniti-Dharma in an autopoietic symbiotic dance. The autopoietic system is stable, and thus remains. It is an anomalous natural state. This is a closed state in which mind and body are one symbiotic whole. It represents the stability of the transmission between Garbe Dorge and Manjushimitra in their conversation, and dispute and dialogue. Like the meeting of Rumi and Shamsa Tabriz, the one was disseminating heresy and the other orthodoxy and these two speeches because stable and indicated the second Jewel which is the Body of the Buddha, but in this case it is two speeches that cancel each other out. It does to Buddhism what Buddhism had already done to everything else, show its emptiness. It shows the emptiness of the distinction between the two truths.

• One continues with confidence in liberation or “Continuing in the non-dual state.” (Tibetan: gDengs grol thog du ’cha’)

Two Autopoietic Systems of Dharma and Anti-dharma, or four Dissipative Ordering Special Systems point toward the reflexive special system. There are therefore two dharmas and two anti-Dharmas circulating around each other. So lets think about Buddhism and Bon. There is the Dharma of Buddhism, and the Heresy of Dzogchen. There is what ever is the equivalent of Bon teachings (prior to their adulteration by Buddhism, we assume something like Shinto and Taoism) and the DzogChen heritage that collapses what ever their equivalent to the Void might have been. Buddhism and Taoism circle around each other in China. If you understand each well enough you can skip from void line to empty line and back again as Stonehouse does. The poetry of Stonehouse shows us the reflexive circling of Emptiness and Void around each other.

I am assuming that the secret of Gareb Dorje three statements are the perfect statement of nonduality by pointing at the Special System. If the Autopoietic Special System is stable then the Reflexive Special System is meta-stable. It is the third jewel the Sanga.

I call this the fourth turning. It is Buddhism turning on itself going beyond itself, having Najarjuna’s logic applied to its own structural dualisms. But since one of those duals is the nondual itself, then we have to go to a deeper level of nonduality. If void and emptiness are dual nonduals, then there must be ‘manifestation’ beyond them which is completely nondual with no structural dualisms to base itself on. It thus encompasses the three jewels Dharma, Buddha, and Sangha. Dharma meets Anti-Dharma in the application of the Nagarjuna’s logic to the Dharma itself. Buddha meets Taoist Sage. Sanga meets Taoist recluses. For instance in StoneHouse and his criticism of monks who beg, and his praise for the life of the hermit that supports himself. StoneHouse was was ordered to come out of his hermitage to become the head of a Monastery. And when he was released from that obligation he returned to his hermitage. How many people are there that can stand both in the shoes of the Zen Monk and the Taoist Sage? From that vantage point he turns either toward Void or Emptiness and differentiates them. But I have searched in vain for a hint of an understanding of manifestation that goes beyond emptiness and void in his poetry. He remains both a Zen Monk and a Taoist Hermit, but he does not step over the line into pure manifestation where even that duality between Emptiness and Void is effaced.

What helps us is the fact that we can understand these turnings of Buddhism as meta-levels related to Being of the Indo-European tradition, which is the source from which Buddhism came and the place to which it must return. And it is returning with the interest in Nonduality among Spiritual practitioners and through the refuge immigration of a population of monks from Tibet who represent a non-reified living tradition of Buddhism. In essence the Dali Lama has become the Good Pope. We  can relate to religions with Popes (or their equivalent), i.e. heads of the church. One thing that we can relate to in Tibetan Buddhism that it is organized. And it also satisfies the wish to have Shamanic as well as Religious experiences. We can more or less find out Don Juan and our Zen Master at the same time in the same person. And this is to be expected because Taoism, Shintoism, Bon are shamanic essentially based on extraordinary people with extraordinary experiences, and Buddhism is a religion based on beliefs and with meditation, non-experiences and non-conceptuality of the embodiment of emptiness. So Tibetan Buddhism just happens to be a way we can have our pristine religious spirituality of the cake, and eat the shamanic icing too.

However, it is really DzogChen which is considered the pinnacle of Tibetan Buddhisms nine ways that is of interest because it is Buddhism going beyond Buddhism which legitimates the combination with Shamanism that Tantraism tends toward anyway. And it is interesting because it opens up the possibility of the fourth turning of Buddhism which has now come to the West and captured the interest of Western Intellectuals which has been in the process of trying to find nondual ways in order to escape the nihilism of the West and its inherent dualism. It is intellectually deep and also experientially fascinating, and of course the refugees that have brought it are colorful characters, many of whom like the Dali Lama clearly embody wisdom.

So to understand the future of Buddhism we must understand what will happen when Tibetan Buddhism which has been living in isolation in Tibet for hundreds of years unaffected by the world until the Chinese invasion, comes into contract with the Western worldview which has cherished its Duality for so long and rejected, and even killed anyone who had a nondual perspective. Many of those who had a nondual perspective became Muslim Sufis in the past when civilization was being safeguarded by the Greeco-Islamo-Roman empire that preceded Colonialization of the Middle East (which is really just the heartland of the Western Worldview).

So it is necessary to go further and to look at the points that are made about the fourth turning. One way to do that is to look at my commentary on Manjushrimitra’s sutra [LINK]. But another way to do that is to look at the eleven Adamantine points of Longchenpa. (See Germano, David Francis (1992). “Poetic thought, the intelligent Universe, and the mystery of self: The Tantric synthesis ofrDzogs Chen in fourteenth century Tibet.” The University of Wisconsin, Madison. Doctoral thesis.

(http://vajrayana.faithweb.com/Poetic%20thought%20-%20The%20Tantric%20synthesis%20of%20Dzogs%20Chen.pdf) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longchenpa) (http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Longchenpa)

1. the Ground and basis of reality (Tib. གཞི་, Wyl. gzhi), how that ground dynamically manifests itself (Tib. གཞི་སྣང་, Wyl. gzhi snang);
2. how sentient beings stray from the Ground;
3. how all beings have the essence of Enlightened energy;
4. how primordial wisdom (Tib. ཡེ་ཤེས་, Wyl. ye shes) abides within us;
5. the pathways, and
6. the gateways, and
7. domain for primordial wisdom;
8. how primordial wisdom is experientially accessed;
9. signs of realization,
10. signs in the dying and bardo transition; and
11. ultimate fruition as the manifest realization of the kayas.

DzogChen would not be the fourth turning of the wheel of Dharma, i.e. the Anti-Dharma, if it did not reveal a deeper level of enlightenment, that was hither to revealed. The fact that this deeper level is also approximated in different ways by Hau Yen and Tien Tai Buddhism in China also tells us that this is not just an isolated phenomena, but a very profound shift in understanding of the nature of enlightenment. And what is revealed is the basis of reality or what is called the Ground above. Because of its Western Connotations we prefer not to use the term ground, and so I will use the term manifestation following M. Henry’s use of Meister Eckhart’s nomenclature in The Essence of Manifestation. There is from this point of view three standings beyond existence with are manifestation, the Unmanifest Essence, and the Amanifest which is the nondual root of the Manifest and Unmanifest Essence. But to understand what these phase transitions of standings beyond existence might be we must take them one at a time and do a careful dialectical thought process in order to make sure that each is really different from the last. What we are concentrating here is upon the Four Turning so we can build a basis on which to explore what the Fifth Turning of the Wheel of Dharma might be which I call the Homeward Path, because it is the point where the heresy of Buddhism, and other nondual ways that differentiated from the Western Tradition come home, and this is what is beginning to happen in our time, so we ought to try to understand it.

Now there are many terms used for the translation of Ground, or as I prefer Manifestation, because it is relatively unpolluted by Western Philosophical meanings. However the term is གཞི། (Wyl. gzhi) n. Pron.: shyi = substratum, basis. The problem with using Ground as a translation is that Western philosophy is all about First Philosophy and Grounding, and has recently discovered the impossibility of grounding, and thus we get anti-foundationalism that denies there can be grounds, and it goes on and on. Manifestation is not burdened with all these extrinsic meanings. But the actual terminology does not matter as long as the concept is clear. And the concept is that what you see when emptiness and Void evaporate as being different from each other is a deeper nondual of Manifestation. Just to be clear, the equivalent term in Islamic Sufi nondual tradition is Sifat, which is usually denoted as the attributes of Allah. But the idea that Allah has “attributes” is a Greek theological idea, and misses the essential point. But we are not interpreting DzogChen based on Islamic ideas. Merely pointing out that other nondual traditions have similar standings to Manifestation that is revealed in the Fourth Turning of the wheel of the Dharma in Buddhism. Many of the ultimate concepts in various nondual traditions are the same. It helps to be aware of these parallels.

Here what gzhi means is a very different kind of ground than one might expect. It is what manifests when the difference between nondual emptiness and nondual void collapses. There is a domain wall between these two kinds of nondual existence (Striated and Unstriated) which as we have said elsewhere is Ultra Being, i.e. the part of being that is extant, i.e. illusion seen externally. When that collapse happens we cannot have Buddhists who do not believe in the External Physical world anymore, nor Taoists (Bonvivants) who reduce everything to nature. Both have to accept the other’s position and the nihilistic opposition between them collapses. And thus these nonduals cease to be duals of each other. When the duality between nondual interpretations of existence collapse, basically what is collapsing is the distinction between inside consciousness and outside in the physical world. Nonduality at its depths does not accept this distinction and the fact that both Taoism (Bon) and Buddhism have these limits means that their interpretation of Existence is flawed to some extent. Existence is what is found (Wajud). There is what is found inwardly and what is found outwardly, and Buddhists are clinging to one and denying the other and the Taoists have the opposite position. When there is no difference based on position looking outward from the inward or inward from the outward, then we enter into the nonduality of the nondual completely without reservation. If Existence is what is found, then we are talking always about local things found. But what is the global source of all that finding, that is what manifestation is. Things are manifest in order to be found. Manifestation as the root of nonduality is the spontaneous, non-fabricated coming into manifestation which supports existence. In this sense that manifestation supports existence then it is gzhi.

We hear terms like primordial, pure, direct experience etc as well as others. But the one phrase from DzogChen that sums it up best is ‘Mind is like Space’. Literally when the domain wall between Emptiness and Void collapses then mind is like space and space is like mind, and there is no difference that can be pointed to which is a nihilistic distinction between them, even though they are in fact already nonduals. Buddhism and Taoism can be seen as Monisms that have suppressed their opposite non-duality, just like dualities suppress their opposites to try to become Monisms. These are nondual monisms and to me that is not nonduality because Nonduality means to me Not One! Not Two~ Not Many! Not None! Something else than all the logical possibilities. That is the key from the point of the Tetralemma. And it also cannot be distinguished by the difference between inward and outward which is probably one of the most fundamental distinctions. It is utterly distinctionless in the sense of having limits. It is what appears how it appears in each moment without any fabrication, any elaboration, and any distinctions of a theoretical type projected on it, especially not inward/outward, or number of any kind. Badiou calls this the ‘Multiple’. The heterogeneity prior to the arising of the Ultra One. But Badiou believes that this is Being. We are talking about a standing beyond the Meta-levels of Being, beyond existence, and which by itself can be called manifestation meaning by that what is meant by gzhi.

One thing we can say is that this is not the ‘Ground of Being’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_of_Being_(Dzogchen)) See “Caveat lector” of the semantic field of the sanskrit term “ashraya” (आश्रय; Etymology: आ- √श्रि. ) the best terms seem to be source or origin, but the other nuances are also interesting and should be kept in mind. It is really the semantic field as a whole that should be considered, because the whole field is what has arisen naturally, spontaneously, in language and that is what we value in manifestation.

“Process-oriented rdzogs-chen has as its pivot the notion of gzhi which means both ground (the static, sort of steady-state) and reason (the dynamic, the intensity with which the unfolding of the initial pure potential occurs). As such pure potential (gzhi ka-dag chen-po) it is discussed in terms of a triune dynamics, referred to as facticity (ngo-bo), actuality (rang-bzhin), and resonance (thugs-rje). “  in Goodman, Steven D. & Davidson, Ronald M. (1992). Tibetan Buddhism: reason and revelation. SUNY series in Buddhist studies. SUNY Press. ISBN 0791407853, 9780791407851.

“Dzogchen-as-process where the praxis albeit ‘natural’ (Wylie: lhan skyes; IAST: sahaja)[6] and ‘effortless’ (Wylie: lhun grub; IAST: anābhoga)[7] has the sense of ‘spontaneity’.[8][9]”

“The Ultimate Nature (rang bzhin) is said to be unaltered (ma bcos pa), because the Basis is spontaneously accomplished (lhun grub) in terms of its innate potential (rtsal) for manifestation (rol pa). The non-duality between the Ultimate Nature (i.e., the unaltered appearance of all phenomena) and the Condition (i.e., the Basis of all) is called the Identity (bdag nyid).“[28]

Sentient Beings stray from this gzhi or ashraya or the standing of manifestation which is non-fabricated, non-elaborated, pure appearing of what appears as it appears without distinction between inward and outward, quality and quantity or other categorical distinctions. We might call this primordial upwelling phenomena. In one of my books I called it Primal Archetypal Wholeness. (See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96sel_(yoga) concerning rig pa translated as reflexive apperception). Straying must be explained if we are to recognize that all there is ultimately is manifestation which is nondually nonudal in every sense, not just outward globally unstriated void or inward local striated emptiness.

Probably the most interesting of the meanings attributed to manifestation is spontaneous accomplishment. A good example of this is the fact that nature calculates the optimal surface area of bubbles so they are minimal in each moment, and it does this spontaneously and instantaneously and effortlessly. There is no need for calculation to determine that structure, the bubble surface just snaps to that minimal configuration which is the lowest energy formation “Naturally”. In DzogChen everything does that production of the optimal effortlessly. That is what Manifestation is the spontaneous, un-fabricated, un-elaborated, natural, production of optima in appearance where appearance is no different from reality, identity, presence, or truth as one merged aspect that cannot be differentiated into separate aspects. Existence of things found still has separate aspects like Being. Existence unlike Being is unstriated, yet it still has the differentiated aspects. Manifestation loses that differentiation of the aspects as it like the Multiple of Badiou, loses the ability to differentiate quantity at all, either one or many, and as it loses the ability to differentiate quality and quantity or any other synthetic a priori categorization.

When humans stray from Manifestation the first things that appear are the differentiation of the Pleroma. These are the striated and unstriated opposites such as in our worldview: emptiness/Void; Being/Beyng; Forgetfulness/Oblivion’ Clearing/Open; etc. Emptiness/Void is merely the center of the cyclone of the worldview. But all of these striated and unstriated oppositions evaporate at the level of the standing of Manifestation.

So with this background in mind we can begin to think about the Fifth Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma, one that to my knowledge has not happened yet and is announced here first (or rather in my various working papers on the subject). It has to be an even deeper nondual that manifestation. It is unclear how deep the levels of nonduality go. We are having a hard time just thinking the fifth meta-level of Being. We noted that the the Fourth Turning responded to the fourth meta-level of Being as illusion. So we are suggesting that the fifth turning has somehow to do with Ultra Being. But Ultra Being as we have seen previously is what separates the dual nonduals into emptiness and void, at it is exactly the getting rid of it that reveals manifestation. There is in fact a strange turning here.

At this point I would like to mention just for the sake of comparison that this deeper nondual than manifestation is called Dhat in Arabic and is seen as the core of the attributes of Allah. It is sometimes called the essence, but of course this is merely more Greek theology and has nothing to do with the Dhat, which by the way is often noted to be a linguistic mistake due to the feminine nature of this word.

So the fact that there is an equivalent to this even deeper nondual in another spiritual tradition, i.e. Sufism within Islam, gives us hope of discovering the nature of the fifth tuning of the Dharma. I have also equated this final turning with the Homeward path. That is the path to the nondual core of the Western worldview itself. Something so extremely dualistic as the Western worldview cannot help but turn into its opposite, and so that opposite is the nonduality that is made accessible though its fragmentation into the meta-levels of illusion, or Being. Each meta-level of Being is a more intense form of Maya/Mara, Dunya, Dukkha. Each needs its own homeopathic treatment. Existence is unstriated but it responds to the various meta-levels of illusion differently based  on its ultimately skillful means. But Existence as a standing transforms into Manifestation, and then the Amanifest as we enter the higher standings beyond Being which are in fact deeper nondualities. Perhaps there are even deeper dualities than these but we will be doing well if we can understand these. In order to approach the fifth turning we have gone back and taken up the fundamentals of DzogChen which are part of the fourth turning. It is the Turning that informs us about what is Beyond Buddhism, which we also see in Hua Yen and Tien Tai Buddhism.

To go back to Special Systems theory for a moment we can know that there is a difference between a system and a meta-system (what Bataille calls the Restricted and General Economy). We discussed how the three statements of Garab Dorje can be seen to correspond to the Special Systems. We can see that any given religion like Buddhism or Taoism even though they are nondual have their self-imposed limitations which make them a restricted economy. Then we saw that Garab Dorje opened the door of heresy and opened up ways to both Bon (Taoism, Shintoism) and Buddhism to go beyond themselves to discover the ultimate and perfect path. What we neglected to mention is that Systems and Meta-systems are duals. System (restricted economy) is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, while the Meta-system (general economy) is a whole less that the sum of its parts, i.e. a whole full of holes like a sponge. The Special Systems are the interstices between the meta-levels of Being, and so we see that Ultra Being is on either limit beyond the system and the Meta-system. Special Systems are wholes exactly equal to the sum of their parts, and there are three of these like the perfect, amicable and sociable aliquot numbers. Thus we can see that what is beyond the three statements of Garab Dorge that frees us from limited religions that are systems or restricted economies, is the Meta-system (also known as OpenScape). Thus the fifth turning must have something to do with the Meta-system that lies beyond the Special Systems that come between the System and the Meta-system. Ultra Being appears on either side as the limit beyond both the System and the Meta-system.

Now we have a framework for appreciating more fully what Garab Dorje taught Manjushrimitra. Garab Dorje manifested the rainbow body at his death. And he called back down the three precepts to his disciple when the disciple pleaded for more guidance. But this guidance abounded in the celestial realm before it was absorbed into any human form. Garab Dorje discovered how to break out of Buddhism or Bon or any religion without leaving it, and without permeating its boundary. Thus this is a heresy that never quite throws you out of the religion you are pursuing, but then once you adopt this viewpoint then you are never really in it completely again. And this can only be done because of the connection to the Special Systems which are ultra-efficacious (hyper-efficient and hyper-effective). What is beyond Garab Dorge’s three statements that point at the special systems is the meta-system to the system of religion, i.e. the system of thought and belief which strives for communal coherence.

So this suggest that the Homeward Path is into the Wilderness of belief and thought that is the meta-system beyond any given restricted economy of belief or thought, or for that matter experience. Actually when you think about it the three jewels as Dharma, Buddha, and Sangha are basically the same as these special systems as well. But there is a difference because there is Dharma and Anti-Dharma (Najarjuna’s nondual logic applied to Buddhism itself). There is buddha and anti-Buddha (Garab Dorje). And there is Sanga and Anti-Sanga the monks of Bon, the ulterior Buddhism. So the three jewels in conjunction with their anti-jewels give rise to the Meta-system which is a set of endless complementaries. (See Complementarity by Arkady Plotnitsky). The deeper ground beyond the Basis Source, Origin revealed by the Fourth Turning is revealed. The Basis, Source, Origin are a figure on this Ground.

Did I mention that the Western worldview is a meta-worldview, it is not merely a world like other worlds, which are destroyed continually along with their languages by colonization, global economic war and globalization. The Western worldview gobbles up other worlds and destroys them extremely efficiency and that is because we are actually living in a meta-worldview. That meta-worldview has its roots in  settled Egypt, Sumeria, nomadic Semitic and Indo-European worlds. At the traditional center of western civilization, i.e. the Middle East there was a blending of the various worlds that abided there where humans met Nanderthals and interbred. We have only recently became aware of what the writings of the Egyptians and Mesopotamians contained which were recently retrieved from Oblivion. So now we know quite a bit more abut the deeper roots of the Western worldview. And if we say that it is a meta-worldview we are also saying it is a meta-system or OpenScape as well. Therefore, as the Fifth turning deals with meta-systems beyond the Special Systems, so to it can deal with the world dominant meta-system called the Western worldview.

M. Henry in his book The Essence of Manifestation, argues against Heidegger that there is a part of Manifestation that does not ever reveal itself, never becomes manifest, but is therefore implicitly manifest within manifestation itself by its very holding itself away from manifestation. He equates this with the Godhead of Meister Eckhart. He says that Heidegger’s fundamental assumption is Ontological Monism, or Badiou criticizes Deleuze for saying that Being is Univocal, where he is following Aristotle. Badiou wants to introduce a true heterogeneity prior to any numericallity called the Multiple. Henry only wants to introduce what amounts to the ontological unconscious which he calls the Essence of Manifestation. This Essence which is the opposite of manifestation itself cannot be utterly nondual, so we specify that there is something deeper than either of these called the Amanifest, which neither shows itself nor does not show itself, yet both shows itself and hides. In other words the Amanifest is the tetralemma applied to manifestation. This idea has resonances with The aconceptual mind: Heideggerian themes in holistic naturalism By Pauli Pylkkö. Except here we are trying to avoid all dualisms, even the dual to Manifestation which would be the Unmanifest, or the equivalent to the unconscious of manifestation. Of course, we could construct a Greimas Square and contrast Anti-Manifest to Non-Manifest and produce the Chasm of Non-Anti-manifest and Anti-Non-Manifest but this is unnecessary since I don’t think we can go beyond this finite level because our ability to conceptualize fails us. And also it is unnecessary to go any further because we have reached the Meta-system, and what is on the other side of the meta-system, only the singularity of Ultra Being (ultra-one for Badiou) which by the way is also prior to the System, and is the limit of the entire series of Systems that are interlaced with the Meta-levels of Being. So this is why it is Ultra Being that appears at the level of the fifth turning, i.e. it is the generation of the singularity of illusion, for instance the iron ball that gives rise to the hundred cousins of the Pandavas. These are as the Greeks are called autocathonic. They stand opposite the Trojans who are the Pandvas the children of the Gods married to the same woman (Helen had five lovers we are told my myth) which the Avatar Krishna helps.

It is from the advent of Ultra Being, existing illusion and delusion, that causes the straying from Manifestation into the morass quicksand known as Maya/Mara, Dukka, Dunya which is straying into the meta-system or OpenScape beyond the belief and thought systems that strive to make life coherent which are the religions.

Dzogchen believes that primordial wisdom (Skt. jñāna) abides in us all just as we are without taking on anything, which is a very Chan/Zen like position to take. In DzogChen there is no distinction of meditation from any other activities, just like in Chan/Zen. In effect one could argue that DzogChen is the Zen of Tibet developed out of Tantra. The Tibetans early rejected Chinese Buddhism, and so they would have to produce their own version if the were to reach that level of spiritual development. Of course, there are many differences between Chan/Zen and DzogChen but the fundamental similarity at a deep level is striking. This is a story similar to Buddha nature being in everyone, but with the twist that it does not have to be Buddha nature as we know it, but something beyond Buddha nature that means you don’t have to be a Buddhist to partake in it.

We are just at the beginning of understanding the nature of the fifth turning of Buddhism but I believe that it is a Homecoming in the sense that Buddhism sprung as a heresy from one branch of the Indo-European worldview, and now it is returning to a different branch, that of the Western Meta-Worldview. Since the Western Worldview itself does not understand that it has a nondual core due to the fragmentation of Being, and the fact that the Special Systems separate the meta-levels of Being from each other. But the Western worldview has become a meta-worldview and thus a meta-system, and the only place to go for the fifth turning is to the level of the meta-system, and so I predict that Buddhism will yet again transform and have a flouring in the west as it and other nondual faiths exploit the nonduality in the heart of the Western worldview. Embody the nonduality of nonduality in nonduality and stand in the core of the Western worldview and it will transform around you because duality is like the desert of the godhead of Meister Eckhart, and the boliing of the godhead is like the production of nihilism, and the appearance of the nondual avatar is like the appearance of Christ or Krishna. As Jung says Christ is the nature of the Self in the Western worldview, and we all have to deal with it. He also said that we have to deal with the archetypes of our own tradition and it is impossible to substitute other archetypes from other traditions for our own night monsters and goblins. Nietzsche wrote that the fundamental duality in Greek Culture, and thus our culture was between Apollo and Dionysus. But, we think of Apollo as the good of Reason forgetting that he was the wolf god of initiations. Thus both Apollo and Dionysus are not exactly the most savory characters. But in the Hindu Tradition they are Brahma and Shiva. And the primal scene of that tradition has Vishnu, like Blake’s Albion, sleeping. He is asleep on an ocean floating on the back of a serpent with many heads, i.e. the dragon of existence. Vishnu is the nondual manifestation of the Godhead beyond the duality of Brahma and Shiva or Apollo and Dionysus. Below Existence is the ocean upon which Vishnu sleeps, i.e. manifestation. And there are unmanifest depths to that ocean. But the surface of the ocean which is a mirror from both sides is the Amanifest. In Hua Yen this is known as images in the depths of the ocean. The analogy here is the Birds and the Fishes. When it is calm the fish look up and see reflections of themselves and the blur of the  flock of birds above the surface mingling with their own reflections. When it is calm the birds look up and see reflections of themselves and the blur of schools of fish below the surface mingling with their own reflections. The two sets of reflections and dark vague shapes mingle in the surface of the sea. There is only that surface. I call it the cliff edge of existence from which you see the surface of the sea of manifestation. There is the manifestation of the entire sea, but its depths are unmanifest. However the surface with all its reflections and ominous darknesses is Amanifest because the two sets of reflections and shadows cancel out.

Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas.

“3. Jesus said, “If your leaders say to you, ‘Look, the (Father’s) kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the (Father’s) kingdom is within you and it is outside you.”

“8. And he said, “The person is like a wise fisherman who cast his net into the sea and drew it up from the sea full of little fish. Among them the wise fisherman discovered a fine large fish. He threw all the little fish back into the sea, and easily chose the large fish. Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!””

“20. The disciples said to Jesus, “Tell us what Heaven’s kingdom is like.”
He said to them, “It’s like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, but when it falls on prepared soil, it produces a large plant and becomes a shelter for birds of the sky.””

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom.html

Marvin Meyer Translation

http://bit.ly/AdZHhQ

When we say what applications philosophy has then I think the missing word is “practical” — practical applications, and this draws us to the distinction established by Kant if not earlier between Practical and Pure Reason. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Practical_Reason) I recently wrote about this in my last chapter of my dissertation at http://about.me/emergentdesign. Practical reason in the Greek world was called Metis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metis_(mythology)). Odysseus had metis as his singular quality (http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classics/course/ingenuity.html). It tended to have the meaning of trickery. But Kant raised the question to a higher level as meaning to excel at the practical arts but also considering ethics as the epitome of Practical reason. Pure reason had to be reigned in, but practical reason is useful. The person who in modern times explored this question in the most interesting way is P. Bourdieu in his logic of practice . . . and other relevant books pictured here. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu)

This is his ground breaking book on Practice and how it is different from Theoretical reason’s understanding, and basically about how it is a black box which we cannot see into.

This book is a summary of his position on Practice.

This book is basically a rewrite of the Logic of Practice, seemingly meant to just sell more books, no substantive difference.

He was concerned with the question that Levi Strauss raised in Structuralism which was how cultures can produce structural pattens and not be aware of them. There is clearly a distinction between Theory and Practice, and practice can produce structural patterning that escapes our knowledge but exists, like in the relation beween Kinship patterns and village layout.

But the wonderful thing is the answer M. de Certeau (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Certeau) gives to this question. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Everyday_Life)

de Certeau points out that there is practice in the art of narrative and that we can get insight into other types of practice though the rhetorical and stylistic practices within narrative composition.

So what Certeau is saying is that Practice is not a completely black box as Bourdieu believes.

Whether philosophy has an application depends on how we take this relation between theoretical reason and practical reason, because anything which ‘an application’ must the the result of practical reason. But basically the way things have gone since practical reason was basically ethics and crystal clear as application of rules to behavior, until recently practical reason became more and more opaque to theoretical reason. Then Certeau made that a grey box rather than black by noting that narrative, by which we explain practical behaviors itself has it own rhetorical and narrative and stylistic devices. And since we can understand narratives, we must get some insight into practice from by seing how these stylistic devices are used.

For Plato, and his version of Socrates, the practical application of philosophy was civil life of the man of leisure in the interaction with others in the politics of the city. Socrates gives us many narratives with dramatic settings, historical characters, and plenty of rhetoric, irony and other tricky devices such as the use of made up myth. So from Certeau’s point of view the practice of philosophy would be seen in these stylistic, rhetorical, and tricky ways that Plato uses dialogue to express his opinions though the voices of others. The one thing you can be sure of in a Platonic Dialogue is that Plato is not saying directly what he believes, but he is presenting us endless veils of irony to indirectly indicate what he might believe, but one can never be sure. Thus if we take Plato as the guide in this the application of philosophy would be elevated civil discourse among equals searching for the truth together in a dialectical form of discourse. But actually we see little of that and much more pontificating by Socrates, or the Stranger, or the Statesman or the Sophist . . . See John Sallis Being and Logos fur the most accessible introduction to this side of Plato. In someways the forging of a civilization by civil speech in public seems to be Plato’s idea of the application of Philosophy (the love of wisdom) but it is also the elevation of the soul and the giving of laws to society, organizing society for the human good. Since it is a narrative from Certeau’s point of view, we can have insight into that practice via the rhetorical, stylistic, and twists and turns of tropes that appear in the dialogues.
One good source of some insight into this is Alan Blum’s books on Theorizing and Socrates.
My belief is this. The application of philosophy is the way that it changes the way you look at the world and the way in which it helps to understand the worldview in which we find ourselves living. The structures of the worldview are incredibly ancient at the level that Philosophy understands them. And this understanding is quite different from our everyday understanding from the naive point of view within the lifeworld. We have just forgotten so much, about our own worldivew. It is a great mystery to us, what seems so mundane and ever-present and real. But there are features to the worldview that have persisted for a very long time in spite of new facts, novel theories, disruptive paradigms, shattered epistemes, smashed ontologies, pulverized existences, and obliterated absolutes. There are certain things that all the emergence that has occurred in our worldview has not changed like the meta-levels of Being for instance. They were there in the vedas as the difference between the Gods, they survived in mythology, and they were known by Plato, and finally they were rediscovered in continental philosophy. Knowing that the world has stair steps to nowhere through kinds of Being completely alters the view of the world. Knowing that Nihilism is the fundamental thing produced by the worldview, and that is so that it can have its nihilistic opposite emergence recognized when it occurs. But that emergence does not change the basic structure of the worldview in the slightest even though it changes everything else. To know that myth preserves these ontological differences and makes them accessible though its stories offering a handbook to the worldview. Knowing that every novel operates within these constraints. There is always Author/Reader//Character/Narrator, just as there is always Heaven/Earth//Mortals/Immortals. The entire worldview is laid out for us to read, but we cannot see it because we are looking at things, not at Being (Sein), less well at Beyng (Seyn). The structure is found in the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) structures of Being verbs. It is found in the Philosophical Principles discovered by Peirce and elaborated by B. Fuller. And it is ensconced in the great philosophy books of our tradition, such as those of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Derrida, Deleuze, Bataille, Baudrillard, Zizek, Badiou, etc. Continental Philosophy rediscovered this deep structure of the worldview lost in our tradition in our own time. Thus we live in a renaissance in which we finally can have some insight into the our worldview which is dominating globally, really for the first time in thousands of years. It is like when they found the rosetta stone, or they could translate Mayan or Cuneiform of the Sumerians, or the text of Ugarit. Whole worlds opened up to us, just as we are destroying world and languages throughout the globe, if not the viability of life on the globe itself. People read fake mysteries like those of Dan Smith and get all excited, but are missing the greatest mystery adventure of them all, which is here right before our eyes and effects everything in sight within the world. Anyway it is an available intellectual adventure for any that are up to the challenge. I really believe that in my works I have only scratched the surface of what is available now that we can read the kinds of Being as meta-levels in the worldview, and thus in all phenomena in our lifeworld around us, including in the depths of our Self, because what are we but a reflection of our worldview.

So for me the application of philosophy is finally knowing something significant about our selves and the worldview which all who live on the earth should be interested in because though colonialization and globalization it is affecting everyone on the planet profoundly. We should know something about it, and perhaps if we did we could limit in some way its greatest excesses and perhaps save ourselves and some of the other species we are killing off at such an alarming rate. This i an intellectual adventure on the scale of an Indiana Jones spectacular but which everyone can participate in because of the plethora of open questions that abound once we get a glimpse of the structure of the worldview.

As has been pointed out DzogChen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzogchen) spans Tibetan Buddhism and Bon. Thus it has relations with what is Mahayana Buddhism and the Tibetan equivalent of Taoism. However, in their competition just like Taoism, Bon became a lot like Buddhism.

I spent about a year reading this literature trying to figure out the answer to this question. So this may not be right but it is at least based on a hearty attempt to understand this tradition.

For the most part I was very disappointed in the DzogChen ‘classics’ that have been translated and are now available. Sometimes because of their content and sometimes because of the low quality of the translations. One thing that I do not like is when a foreign religion is presented as a species of Western philosophy which happens all to often. And I am afraid that this is part of the problem here.

So in order to understand the answer to this question requires quite a bit of background, some of which I have covered elsewhere, so I will not belabor these points here but merely mention them. My understanding is based on the first text of DzogChen in a classic translation by Manjushrimitra, and Beacon of Certainty by Mipham. But there was only one other book that I thought was decent and it was in the Bon tradition. That book was Unbounded wholeness: Dzogchen, Bon, and the logic of the nonconceptual By Anne C. Klein, Tenzin Wangyal

So my take on the subject is deeply influenced by this book which is the best I read out of all the secondary texts on the subject.

But in my reading I kept coming back to the work of Manjushrimitra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%B1ju%C5%9Br%C4%ABmitra) as being the key to this tradition. Slowly I started to get a handle on what he was saying and it is very interesting.

http://www.amnyitrulchung.org/lineage/masters/Manjushrimitra/

The crux of the matter is that Manjushrimitra does to Mahayana Buddhism what Nagarjuna did for Mahayana Buddhism in general. Thus in some ways Manjushimitra is just like Nagarjuna but applying his logic to Buddhism itself and the idea of the Two truths, just as Nagarjuna applied his analysis to the relation between Illusion and Buddhist Emptiness. The reason it can be practiced by both Buddhists as the ultimate school and truth and by Bon is that it is a heresy of Buddhism that denies the Two truths (mundane and absolute, i.e. emptiness).

Be sure you do not read Mañjuśrīmitra. Primordial experience. An Introduction to rDzogs-chen Meditation. (Translated by Namkhai Norbu and Kennard Lipman in collaboration with Barrie Simmons. Shambhala, Boston & London, 2001) first like I did. It is a very bad translation. There is another more traditional translation on the web which makes much more sense as a whole. This book was translated as each sentence was separate from all the others and makes no sense at all.

Better to read this more traditional translation.
http://www.dharmafellowship.org/library/texts/cultivation-of-enlightened-mind.htm

I would also be aware that the work of ELÍAS MANUEL CAPRILES ARIAS at http://webdelprofesor.ula.ve/humanidades/elicap/en/ is tainted by reducing Dzogchen to a form of Western Philosophy which I think is merely a form of Orientalism. However, his work contains a lot of useful information as long as you don’t accept his conclusion that DzogChen is basically saying what Sartre said.

Now that we have my prejudices out of the way, we can start laying the ground work for understanding the relation of DzogChen to both Mahayana Buddhism and the equivalent of Taoism or Shintoism, i.e. Bon. I think some how the Bon version of Dzogchen did not get as corrupted as the Buddhist version and thus still makes sense. I am assuming that Mipham was right in his Beacon of Certainty and that he did not lose the thread between his time and that of Manjushrimitra. I am also assuming that Tenzin Wangyal is essentially the only person I could find who seems to have stayed on the same wavelength that is alive today. If this is not true then I really don’t know what to make of the rest of it, because it is really a mess. I kinda assume that the anti-Dzogchen elements basically succeeded in stamping it out in Tibetan Buddhism and that what we have today in Tibetan Buddhism is a sad shadow of what Dzogchen once was. However, if DzogChen has the character that I have interpreted it to have then it is incredibly important, and at least in the work of formulating this hypothesis, true or not, I learned a lot.

So we have to start at the very beginning. Buddhism is a heresy of the Indo-European tradition, i.e. the Hindu branch in India along with Jainism. Basically the way things work in traditions is that there is some set of primordial opposites that get produced, and the tradition tries every single variation and permutation of these in some random order. Structuralism assumes that over time every possible combination of these primordial structural distinctions will be tried and that they form a field, and that any one of these configurations can only have meaning in relation to the whole field of possible configurations. This goes on with competing views within society until someone stumbles on the idea that beyond all possible permutations there is another possibility that is not part of the field, and in fact has no place in the map of the field, and that is nonduality. It is only accessed by what is called supra-rationality. And since our worldview is basically dualistic and its only recognized limit is contradiction, paradox, absurdity and its principle is non-contradiction and excluded middle, this nondual possibility means nothing to us, we say, but then historically we have killed anyone who held this kind of opinion or belief, so it must have some importance. Its importance is that once you go into nonduality, all duals cease to be effective and power systems tend to crumble. So a good example is Meister Eckhart, who was targeted by the inquisition, but they did not get to him before he died. He definitely had a nondual position and the only reason he escaped the inquisition is that death claimed him first unlike many others who were put to death.

Now Nondual means Not One! Not Two! The best introductory book on the subject is that of Loy called Nonduality.

The only problem with Loy is that he considers Monism to be nondual, and so we definitely reject that idea. Monism and Duality are themselves duals, so nonduality has to be nondual all the way down, not just at the surface level of concepts.

Now the dynamic which has played out in the major traditions we know is that there is dualism such as that in confucianism, and eventually someone comes up with the concept of nonduality as in Taoism, and then this causes problems because no set of dichotomies can capture the nondual position which is outside the combinatorial field but precisely nowhere, nowhen. Basically dualisms cannot handle this position and it escapes their net, and so it is very dangerous and disruptive. In China we see this in a pure form because Chinese is a non-Indo-European language with no Being in it and also based on Masses with a Mass logic. So it is a kind of pure case, and with the recent documents that were discovered that gives us insight into court Taoism we know a lot now about the dynamics between Confucianism and Taoism that was eventually suppressed in the tradition. There was developed in the Chinese tradition a rapprochement between these two irreconcilable views with the idea that you were a confucian as long as you were in office but became a Taoist when you left service among the upper classes. This dichotomy was reinforced by the destruction of all the court Taoism texts. So nonduality as the ultimate heresy was pushed to the periphery. But still played a cultural role as an escape valve from the pressure cooker of Confucian dualism. Also Confucianism had some pieces that could be interpreted nondually and so it was possible if you were really smart to be a Confucian Taoist as we see in Knowledge Painfully Acquired by Lo Chen Shun.

The nondual in Taoism is the Void, which is basically empty space and called Wuji, the absolute (literally no ridgepole) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei) or Wu Wei NonAction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei) It does not mean doing nothing, but means acting with the Tao or Way in a way that produces Te or virtue. (in more modern texts these transliteration ‘T’s are ‘D’s) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao)

In a completely different Indo-European tradition in India, the Buddha had a similar idea that was outside the combinatorics of structural distinctions in the Hindu tradition. But here there was a different factor because the Indo-European is unique among languages because of the grammatical presence of the concept of Being (Sat). Buddha believed that the ego had no Being, and was thus Empty. He did not claim this for the other Dharmas (Tattvas). But this was a crucial turning point in the Indian intellectual history. This was amazingly disruptive within the Indo-European tradition. This is because unlike in Taoism Buddhism was a rejection of the central concept and central grammatical construct in the Sanscrit and other related Indo-European languages that were dominant in northern India. But on the other hand there was also the non-Indo-European influences of the marginalized Tamil and other languages. We can see that in the adoption of the idea from the Tamil tradition of Tattvas as a central concept called the Dharma. How deep this influence from the south was I don’t know but it could be that the idea of confronting Existence and escaping Being could have come from the relationship between northern and southern cultures. But it is more likely that it was a sui generis discovery which then called on those resources after the discovery was made. For instance it is interesting that Buddhism continued to be strong in Shri Lanka and other southern countries like Thailand. Buddhism was definitely a counter cultural trend that appealed to non-Indo-European speakers who had interaction with Indo-Europeans who considered themselves superior and were dominant politically and culturally in India.

Eventually Hinayana Buddhism transformed into Mahayana Buddhism as some of the contradictions within Buddhism. So for instance all Dharmas were seen as Empty. And the ideal of the BoddhiSattva replaced the idea of the Buddha. And Buddhism became more and more philosophically sophisticated. This was helped by the fact that although Sanscrit was an Indo-European language it had a Mass Logic rather than the Syllogistic Set based logic, and so Sanscrit could handle very sophisticated ideas of pervasion relationships unlike Greek Logic. There were many kinds of Mahayana philosophical schools as the tradition explored the space opened up by introducing a nondual idea of emptiness at the center of an Indo-European worldview. Buddhism carried over a lot from the Indo-European Hindu worldview, and transformed it in light of the rejection of the concept of Being and the fundamental turn toward existence as primary while Being was seen as an illusion (Maya, Mara). This challenged the central concept within Hindu philosophy SAT or Being. SAT CITTA ANANDA. Being Consciousness Bliss. Atman was seen as the ultimate transhuman actor of consciousness (What is seen through everybody’s eyes) and the Buddhists declared ASAT and ANATMAN negating these key concepts of Being and the WorldSoul. The key character in this challenge of the Buddhists to Hindu assumptions was Nagarjuna. He was a skeptic that just deconstructed everything and tried to show that everything was empty. But his major success was the attack on logic itself, showing that there were primordial discontinuities in logic between AND, OR, NOT where emptiness lived, so that emptiness could not be separated from Logic itself. This convinced the Indians that they could not escape nondualism and so under the auspices of Shankara’s reinterpretation of the Upanishads based on the idea of emptiness AS Being they reabsorbed this dangerous philosophy and thus saved logic, and Buddhism faded away in India. But it continued to be strong in South Asia, China and Tibet, all non-Indo-European contexts to which it was transfered and which it found to be a natural milieu because of the lack of Being as a central concept in those languages and cultures.

What is significant is that in Tibet the Buddhist tradition lived on as it waned elsewhere and continued to have very erudite scholars and great philosophers who continued to develop the Buddhist tradition understanding it and adding to it Tantric strands taken over from Hinduism. In Tantrism you actually visualize deities and other powers and then see them as Empty, so it mixes in a strange way the projection of the illusions of Being and the philosophy of Emptiness. It is out of Tantrism in Tibet that Majushrimitra comes. He is trying to give a foundation for the MahaMudra and other Tantric practices. In a way Tantrism is the reabsorption of Maya back into the religion, but to reabsorb it you ultimately need to go to the next higher meta-level and at that meta-level the two truths must go. So what Manjushrimitra does is basically reapply the logic of Nagarguna back to Buddhism itself and denies the duality of the two truths, so that in fact Buddhism evaporates. And at the same time the difference between Void in Bon/Taoism and Emptiness in Buddhism evaporates. It is thought of as the supreme school of Buddhism because it is something that takes you beyond the limits of Buddhism back to something more like Taoism. It is as if in DzogChen Taoism swallows up Buddhism instead of the opposite. There are some schools in China like Tien Tai and Hua Yen of Fa Tsang that come close to doing the same thing, by keeping distinct the ideas from Buddhism and Taosim but finding a middle way between them. One of the most interesting characters in this movement is StoneHouse who was a Taoist and Zen Monk and Hermit who wrote poetry. In his poetry there is sometimes one line of emptiness and then the next line of Void. This kind of fine distinction between emptiness and void and its interleaving is a very sophisticated way of looking at existence, and I believe that unadulterated DzogChen is a philosophical counterpart of this kind of sophistication that goes beyond Buddhism to re-appropriate Taoism. And similarly it can be used to go beyond Taoism to re-appropriate Buddhism. It hints that there is a deeper kind of nonduality that goes beyond both Emptiness and Void. And if this is true this is very deep. We can call this the fourth turning of the Wheel of Dharma. The first was Hinayana, second was Mahayana, third was Tantrayana, and fourth is DzogChen/Hua Yen/Tien Tai which although very different from each other are all pointing to this next level of nonduality.

Now what I want to do is attempt to consider the relation between this fourth turning of the Wheel and what I call the Homeward Path, i.e. the idea that the Western Worldview has at its center a nondual core. We just mention briefly that the equivalent of this in the West is Sufism within the Western nondual heritage of Islam. Islam is just as disruptive in its nonduality within the extreme dualistic tradition of the West as Buddhism and Jainism was in India. This nondual aspect is only seen in Sufism, not in normal Islam which is just as bound to Aristotelianism as the Western Worldivew, because it is basically the same as the Western worldview, i.e. a thin veneer of religion over a deep foundation of Greek and Roman culture. Only difference is that it did not have its own Inquisition and it accepted the Christian Heretics in droves, and thus Sufism became a medley of non-dual beliefs that was allowed to persist at the heart of the Islamic religion. But this is not the core of our argument but only a side light to show that this problem of the advent of non-duality affects the Eurocentric Indo-European branch too. Developing a non-dual heresy is a global cultural phenomena within sophisticated cultures.

Now if we think about this Fourth turning of the wheel and the fact that there may be a deeper nonduality beyond Emptiness and Void, in relation to the Western worldview this give us a very interesting view of the possibilities of our worldview. The Western worldview is fragmented and dualisitic outwardly, but inwardly nondual. Tibetan Buddhism has transfered itself to the USA due to the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Tibetan Buddhism because it is a continuous living tradition from the Buddha down to the present day has a lot of vitality. But, of course, because it is very old and has a lot of things mixed up in it from different periods this form of Buddhism is a real mess. And the fact that DzogChen does not seemed to have survived whole within it, at least judging from the texts, makes the whole thing somewhat problematic. However, we hope that somewhere in there a thread of the fourth turning of the wheel exists. However, we can at least point to one one Bon practitioner who seems to be elucidating the same point of view as Mipham and Manjushrimitra. The key is that because the fourth turning is free of any particular nondual surface phenomena such as we see in Buddhism or Taoism that can be dual to other nondual approaches. The Fourth Turning is purely nondual and it is not even dual with other non-dualities. So it is a fundamentally trans-religious approach. When this comes into contact in some real way, being embodied by someone who is in a line of transmission, with the Western worldview then interesting things should happen, because the Western worldview has a nondual core. The Homeward Path is the embodying of the fourth turning at the core of the Western worldview.

Buddhism is a fundamentally Indo-European phenomena. Because the West has eliminated physically anyone who advocated anything like nondual paths before this is why in modern times when traditional religious views have waned there is a fascination with nondual religions. Among these Buddhism is the one which was from the first adapted to the Indo-European worldview and has a structure based on the levels of nonduality within that worldview. So when DzogChen/Tien Tai/Hua Yen (the theory behind Chan/Zen) comes to the West it immediately goes to the core of the worldview. But since the fourth turning is not dependent on any religion, and the Western worldview is so based on religion as a determining differentiation, it is as if this fourth turning completely slips though the net of distinctions that the Western worldview is based upon. It does not matter what Nondual tradition you adopt, the matter of the deeper nondual is the same for all of them if it can be indicated in any of them. Buddhism has found several ways to indicate the fourth turning. Sufism has its own ways of indicating it. But whether you are Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist, Bon, or any other truly nondual way, the forth turning level is the same, it is utterly nondual even in its nonduality. So it is impossible to pin down in any one Nondual Way. In this way Tibetan Buddhists, Bon practitioners, Sufis, Taoists, Zen Buddhists, etc are all on the same path in some sense. Of course, it is mandatory to be on some particular spiritual path in order to make progress. In other words this is not a repudiation of Non-dual paths, and also it is not saying that all Spiritual paths end up at the same place, because they don’t. But it merely says that the Fourth Turning of the wheel indicates a state which can be attained in any Path where the nondual nature is perfect and whole and utterly nondual in every respect. Such a nonduality cannot be captured by any one path. And it is expected that this path when embodied and transmitted will have profound effects on the Western worldview because of the worldview’s nondual core.

So now lets talk about the nondual core of the Western worldview for a little while. The concept that has always been prominent in the Western worldivew is that Being is One, there is one supreme concept built into the language, organizing everything which is unified and totalized. Being is the highest concept but also the most empty, but on the other hand it actually organizes everything though the aspects of Being which are Identity, Presence, Truth and Reality. But when we look more carefully we see that Being is in fact Being is fragmented into the Meta-levels (Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild, and Ultra). And due to this fragmentation of Being we can show that Emptiness is there in the discontinuities between the meta-levels or kinds of Being, and between the aspects of Being. Basically anywhere that there are fundamental discontinuities we can posit the presence of emptiness as the discontinuity. So just like emptiness is there in the fundamental distinctions between the logical operators so to it is there between the discontinuities between the kinds of Being. And thus emptiness is present in the core of Being, i.e. in its meta-levels.

Another important point is that the meta-levels of Being are like stairs to nowhere. It turns out that there is a phase transition as you go up the stairs of the meta-levels at the fifth meta-level into existence. Ultra Being is what being looks like from the point of view of Existence, i.e. a singularity, and because of the uniqueness of Being in Indo-European languages alone we can see that singularity as a unique feature of this family of languages. But also at the Fifth meta-level we see two interpretation of existence that stand out as Emptiness or Void, and Ultra Being is the Domain Wall between these two kinds of nonduality.

This shows up in DzogChen. Void is like Spacetime without anything in it. Emptiness is defined by interiority. So Void is the the physical lack of anything except the singular existence of spacetime everywhere. This is why the Taoists only believe in nature and the alignment with nature and they reduce consciousness and sociality to nature. This can be seen in the works of the court Taoists recently recovered. On the other hand Buddhists do not believe in the physical reality of the world, but reduce everything to consciousness which at base is seen as empty. All things are empty because they are transient states in consciousness, and they have no reality beyond that. Physical things are reduced to their phenomenal appearance in consciousness and then are seen to be empty aggregates. Of course, both of these views are true. But the interesting thing is that we know from studying Bose Einstein condensates that there are different kinds of singularity. You can have point singularities, vortices which are around string singularities, and you can have two dimensional singularities which are domain walls. Space can be broken up into different pockets with different characteristics separated by domain walls. Ultra Being is a singularity that with respect to Void acts as a domain wall that produces various cells of interiority which have the character of emptiness. Basically Void is unstriated nonduality and Emptiness is striated nonduality. Both of these kinds of nonduality separated by illusory domain walls of Ultra Being, i.e. dual kinds of nonduality, both are the same, and that sameness is what is indicated by DzogChen, Hua Yen, Tien Tai and other paths that indicate the fourth turning of the wheel of the Dharma. Notice that the turnings of the wheels of the Dharma are a lot like the meta-levels of Being. However, Existence is unstriated while Being is striated. So Existence in itself has no differentiation into Emptiness or Void. Rather these are different interpretations of Existence as intrinsically nondual. However, be that as it may we can still see that Hinayana Buddhism corresponds to the level of Pure Being, i.e. with Nirvana and escape from the wheel of Samsara we are trying to reach some sort of permanent state of non-being free from birth and death. With Mahayana we have something like Process Being where the goal is that of the Bodhisattva and not the Buddha. In other words the Bodhisattva vows to enter Nirvana only after all other Sentient beings have entered, so the Bodhisattva takes part in the infinite process of the unfolding of Karma and has resigned himself to continual rebirth inorder to help all other beings, thus attaining humility and compassion. And in fact this is seen as a higher kind of enlightenment than Nirvana. There is no thought of Pari-Nirvana anytime soon.

Tantrayana is a lot like Hyper Being. I really don’t understand why Buddhists would want mess with illusion again doing tantric practices, once illusion has been left behind. Calling up images of deities only to see them as empty seems counter productive. But if you put this in the context of Hyper Being or what Derrida calls Difference then I can make from sense. If Emptiness is Form and Form is Emptiness then playing with the relation between form and emptiness is certain to give you more insight into the distinction between the two and how that distinction keeps slip sliding away. However, playing with this distinction can devolve into Magic. So there is a danger.

Now when we come to the Fourth Turning we are really in new territory that has not been explored completely. But this is a lot like Wild Being. When we say that these kinds of emptiness are a lot liken the kinds of Being what we are really saying is that these various kinds of emptiness are the antidotes for the sorts of illusion represented by the particular meta-level of Being. In other words Emptiness has an antidote for each kind of Being. Wild Being is the most fragmented, and the most difficult to think kind of Being. Its image is the Mandelbrot Set. The emptiness is the lack of continuity between the points in the Mandelbrot set that comes from Complex numbers and the loss of the unity of the conjugate that occurs in the advent of imaginary numbers. At this level each point has a line of flight, that is its acceleration toward infinity, which gives it an intensity that represents the coloring of the Mandelbrot set. In the Mandelbrot set you can see how the pattern is shot through with emptiness. You can also see how that permeation by emptiness is infinitely deep, it is at every level no matter how much you zoom in. And there are equivalent three and four dimensional analogs at the levels of the Quaternions and the Octonions. This is the analogy for Wild Being. Wild Being is very hard to think. It is basically a two dimensional imaginary plane. In Western Philosophy this level has been explored by Deleuze, but also John S. Hans, and others who have tried to develop philosophies at this level of Being. What is clear is that at each of these higher levels of Being the cracks and discontinuities in Being become more prevalent and thus the emptiness is much more easy to see. So at the Hyper Being level there are discontinuities that appear in the play of DifferAnce, but at the Wild Being level the whole imaginary plane is shot through with separation between the points that each have their intensity and line of flight acceleration.

This brings us to a speculation that beyond this fourth turning there is a fifth turning, that we have not gotten to yet which is like Ultra Being. We will not explore that here but the possibility of yet another turning is important to recognize.

So back to the question. The difference between Mahayana and Dzogchen must take into account that between the second turning and the fourth turning there is the tuning of the wheel of the Dharma related to Tantrayana. Dzogchen is a specific departure in an orthogonal direction from Tatrayana. And so there is no specific difference between Mahayana and Dzogchen, outside of the difference between Mahayana and Tantrayana and between Tatrayana and DzogChen. To understand this difference in question we must understand the other differences. These differences between the different turnings of the wheel of the Dharma are the striations of emptiness, its own fragmentation into kinds. But Existence has no differentiation, and so that means that these kinds of emptiness only appear to be there in response to the specific needs of the kinds of Being, each kind of Being needs its own antidote. The difference in these two turnings of the wheel of the Dharma depends on the depth of illusion (Being) that you are addressing.

This takes us to the concept of the Alayavijyana (Storehouse Consciousness) as we see in the Awakening of Faith. In that storehouse is laid down the seeds of karma and we can see that these seeds are probably working at the Wild Being level. The Seeds are intensities laid down within the emptiness itself which later sprout forms. Here again the Mandelbrot set gives us an interesting model. The points in the Imaginary plane do not move, but it is only their self iteration that allows us to measure their escape velocity toward infinity along their recursive line of flight. But when we look across the various points that are near each other we see the pattern that they make together which is fractal, and changing at each level of zooming in, and this zooming in goes on forever. The patterning never ends is ever changing now matter how deeply you go, but none of the points ever change or move, they are there frozen forever, there intensity is only recalled when they are recursively iterated upon. This model of the Storehouse Consciousness is the way the relation between karma and emptiness are understood. Normally you would think that with emptiness there can be no Karma which requires continuity and substance to carry the fate of the reincarnating individual. But here we see that it is possible for those seeds of karma to be laid down in the emptiness itself, only activated again to form a pattern with adjacent points if their recursive iteration allows them to be reactivated.

Now back to the Western Worldview. For each meta-level of illusion, i.e. Kind of Being there is an antidote with a turning of the wheel and a reinterpretation of emptiness. There is a perfect isomorphism here because Buddhism came from the Indo-European wordview and retains its internal structure with respect to the levels of nonduals within its core. Those nonduals are Order, Right, Good, Fate, Sources, Root. So Buddhism addresses each of these levels with a kind of Emptiness. The emptiness disrupts the dualistic surface phenomena of the worldview and allows the inner light of the worldview’s core to shine through. The positive fourfold of the worldview is Heaven/Earth//Mortals//Immortals as defined by Socrates and taken up by Heidegger. However, it is the negative fourfold given to us in the theogony of Aristophanes in the Birds which says that the first principles were Chaos, Abyss, Night and Covering. When we reverse these we get Order, Ground, Light, and Uncovering (Aleithia, Process level truth). So the first nondual is Order which is one of the first principles on which the worldview was founded. The successive nonduals take us deeper into the core of the worldview. Grounding is the attempt at self-grounding of the worldview in Being which always turns out impossible, and thus emptiness appears as this impossibility go ground ourselves and thought. When the emptiness disrupts the surface dualism then it is seen as a burst or Novum of White Light. This is the light of consciousness itself with which the emptiness is identified. Finally, the emptiness unlocks the truth at each of the meta-levels of Being. And that Truth is simultaneously  a Reality, Presence and Identity. This is called Prajna.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_in_Buddhism)

Because Existence itself is unstriated. In some sense there is no difference between the kinds of emptiness that appears in response to the various meta-levels of Being. So in a sense there is no difference between Hinayana, Mahayana, Tantrayana, DzogChen, etc. These differences are only apparent because emptiness itself is only striated to the extent that the homeopathic medicine for each deeper sort of illusion supported by the meta-levels of Being are different. We are talking here of deeper and deeper miasms of illusion with each level having its own homeopathic level of cure. Emptiness is reinterpreted in the context of each deeper miasm to which it brings a homeopathic cure. But Existence itself is unchanged by these reinterpretations in light of the meta-levels of Being.

Now when we bring this back again to the Western worldview and its fragmentation, darkness, groundlessness, disorder and conflict, and covering up of the truth through the nihilism it produces, we see that the emptiness at each level of Being has the cure for the Maya/Mara that exists at that level, and each of the levels in turn. Thus the five turnings of the wheel of Dharma correspond to what is necessary to unlock the nonduality at the core of the Western worldview itself. And by the way, each of our selves are built on that same structure because we are beings-in-the-world, In other words the Worldview is the same structure as that of our Self. So deconstructing the worldview though the various turnings of the wheel of the Dharma is tantamount to the deconstruction of the self by a homeopathic tincture or a ruse or skillful means of one kind or another appropriate to the situation of the person who is seeking enlightenment. Now if we posit that DzogChen is the fourth turning of the wheel of Dharma, then we can know that there is at least one more turning of that wheel before it goes full circle. That is the fifth turning which accesses the deepest level of nonduality. It is interesting that this turning does not appear to have happened in the history of Buddhism so far. Buddhism in DzogChen transcends itself. The only place to go after that is back to the immanence within itself. The fifth turning of the wheel of Dharma is that which brings it back to the beginning. It answers the call of Ultra Being by revealing beyond the deeper nondual of manifestation, the essence of manifestation. For this terminology we should look at M. Henry’s Essence of Manifestation who basis his work on Meister Eckhart and his theory of the Godhead and its emptiness, which is like a boiling desert with no limits. If we call the deeper nondual between Void/Emptiness manifestation, then there is only beyond that the Amanifest. In the Amanifest the singularity of Ultra Being as the existence of Being evaporates. Emptiness and void become the same thing, and as is said in DzogChen “Mind is like Space.” The source of manifestation is not the unmanifest, the so called Essence of Manifestation, but instead the even deeper nondual of the Amanifest.

What all of this says is that in the difference between DzogChen and Mahayana arises the Tantrayana. And out of Tatrayana arises DzogChen a heresy of Buddhism, that is freed from the constraints of any one nondual way, and thus is practiced by Bon practitioners as well. But freedom from the specific nondual paths is not the end of the story. There is a fifth turning of the wheel yet to be discovered and explored which I call the Homeward path, it is the path back to the nondual heart of the Western worldview beyond all its superficial dualism. Stand in that core and you are finally at home with your Self.

A Pattern is a schema.

According to General Schemas Theory a Schema is a projected organization of spacetime as an a priroi synthesis that we intuit (speaking in Kantian terms) which serves as a template of understanding.

If you start with Systems Theory and ask what is the next threshold of abstraction up which includes Systems Theory but other similar but different theories, then you get General Schemas Theory. It is just like General Systems Theory but the next level of abstraction up. So at that level we can name several schemas that definitely exist within Science such as monad, pattern, form, system, etc.

It is interesting that no discipline of General Schemas Theory has been posited up til now that I can find. I especially expected to find it in Art Criticism or Architectural Criticism, but have not found it defined elsewhere beyond my own work.

The best work on Schemas in general within our tradition is Umberto Eco’s Kant and the Platypus.

In this book he defines Mathematical and Geometric Schemas and that is what I mean by the term “Schema” with respect to General Schemas Theory.

Grenander is the only mathematician I know of who has created a mathematics of Pattern. http://www.dam.brown.edu/pattern/ug.html

I order to get General Schemas Theory off the ground as a discipline I devised a speculative hypothesis called Sprime. In Sprime we posit that there are ten schemas and that they form a nested hierarchy of scopes at different dimensional scales. Sprime also posits that there are two schemas per dimension and two dimensions per schema. Schemas start at the negative first dimension and go up to the ninth dimension. Thus the series of schemas from the point of view of the Sprime hypothesis is as follows:

F Theory 12
M Theory 11
String Theory 10
————————–
Pluriverse 8, 9
Kosmos 7, 8
World 6, 7
Domain 5, 6
OpenScape (aka meta-system) 4, 5
System 3, 4
Form 2, 3
Pattern 1, 2 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< as defined by Grenander
Monad 0, 1
Facet -1, 0
—————————
Unknown -2, -1

Now there are some interesting things about the nested hierarchy of organizations of different scope an scale. One is that Monads can either be dimensionless points or one dimensional strings, thus string theory is really a variation on monadology. Next Pattern has two dimensions in which it exists which is as a string with some contents that can form a pattern, like 1 and 0 of memory. But the most interesting patterns are two dimensional, for instance the patterns which form in the Game of Life, or are created in Fabrics, etc.

Notice also that we can consider the nesting in either direction, so we can consider that patterns form the content of forms either two or three dimensional, but also we can consider that there are Patterns of Forms, or Patterns of Systems etc. Patterns of Forms are the most prevalent and we call that after Alexander Pattern Languages which we now apply to Software design as a way of leveraging knowledge within the Software Engineering discipline. So Patterns are not trapped in their dimensions but instead can modify other schemas either of greater or lesser scope.

Schemas are of limited scope and of finite number. So they only go up to the 9th dimension. It is interesting that we do not seem to have schemas at the tenth dimension and higher where string theory plays out, and so string theory is difficult to understand, because we do not have any templates by which to understand it already available. The basic insight of Schemas theory is that spacetime as we project it as an a priori synthesis that is intuited according to Kant is striated and not unstriated, i.e. not a homogeneous plenum. In fact in Bernstein’s lectures on Critique of Pure reason that I read recently he criticizes Kant on this very point of not having different layered concepts of time but only one, and I think Schemas Theory points us to the fact that space also should be considered as striated, i.e. there are different ontological templates of understanding that are projected on it at different scopes and scales.

The other interesting thing is that our tradition was dominated by the Form Schema from its inception up until the beginning of the last century, at which time both System and Structure (pattern) became more overtly significant Schemas. Now we are becoming more interested in Patterns and Domains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulf_Grenander
http://www.siam.org/pdf/news/247.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_theory

http://wp.goertzel.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goertzel
http://www.dam.brown.edu/ptg/index.shtml
http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~cbj/patterns/

I have written about the Pattern Schema as part of the research for my dissertation at http://about.me/emergentdesign.

Here is a good place to mention something that is normally not thought about which is conversational memory.

We have an amazing capacity to remember everything we ever talked to someone about and to jump to the place we we at on a certain thread left off long ago and to continue from there. This conversational memory is different from both Long and Short term memory, and is almost always social, meaning we can only really remember where we left off conversation threads while we are in conversation with that person with whom we share a conversational memory.

Now what happens to me when I lose a thread of thought in a conversation is that I normally think of something else I want to say, and that knocks both of the threads out of my mind. I think Conversational Memory is conversation thread oriented, so if we try to jump to another thread while we have not yet articulated the one we are on we tend to get lost in the maze of conversational memory that we are keeping in mind as we talk. Notice it is the other person who normally knows what we have just said and they will remind us what thread we were on and then usually we can remember what we were going to say, and then say it. But in that instance we usually forget what we were going to say on the other thread of thought that was being woven into the conversation.

I am not sure why there are so few studies of conversational memory when it almost seems more important than the the other types of memory because it is what keeps us on track not just in our conversations but also perhaps in our lives.

SuperRational Non-duality

http://bit.ly/xJnzNr

I would say no, since Nazism was the epitome of a romantic movement and it was wiped out in the last century as the ideological opposite of Communism. It seems to me that we have voted down by force a place for romanticism in secular humanism. Secular humanism is the child of the French Revolution which is the working out in history of the philosophy of Kant. Hegel, the ultimate romantic, recognized this connection, but instead saw the absolute spirit at work in Napoleon. But Napoleon suffered defeat twice, once by nature in his march to Russia and once by the British at Waterloo, and he was also exiled twice. He was the ultimate romantic hero. He took his stand against the two most powerful forces in the universe at his time, Nature and the British and managed to snatch defeat from he jaws of victory when the Germans arrived. Hegel saw Absolute Spirit moving in history in Napoleon, i.e. the spirit of the nation embodied in its leader, which is very similar to the volk to which Nazism appealed. Hitler also took his army into Russia and was defeated by its winter, and Hitler was also defeated by the British, who had a card up its sleeve that still made it an unbeatable force, i.e. its former colonies, like the USA.

Heidegger was right that Nietzsche, the anti-romantic philosopher, was a bad choice as the philosophical representative of Nazism. Nietzsche had nothing but scorn for the Germans and their barbarity. Heidegger spent the war trying to prove that his philosophy really represented the essence of Nazism. But unfortunately when the Brown Shirts who believed in continual revolution were killed Heidegger lost his interest in the movement. It is just so Ironic that the Americans took as their Allies the French communist underground, who after the war became the intelligence in France who then based all their philosophical adventures on Heidegger’s Nazi philosophy. Strange Bedfellows regardless of Heidegger’s denouncement of Sartre’s existentialism.

Continental Philosophy is the outgrowth of this strange blend of ideologies that builds on the Nazi philosophy of Heidegger toward the utopianism of the French communists who were unhampered in their thinking by Soviet Dogma. The epitome of this is Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, the last ditch attempt to give dialectical materialism some respectability. In it Sartre describes the “fused group”, like the “pack” in Canetti’s Crowds and Power. In other words the move is to identify with the small group which has no hierarchical structure as yet, rather than the masses who were the focus of Fascist and Communist ideologies.

I have been listening to the Bernstein Tapes (bernsteintapes.com) which are lectures on Critique of Pure Reason after previously listening to his Hegelian lectures. His Hegelian lectures allowed me my first real access to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind/Ghost/Spirit for the first time. I have spent a lifetime stating and failing to finish that book. Bernstein says it is the most complex book in Western philosophy, and I just could not get through it myself on my own, even though I managed to do so with many other long complicated and abstruse philosophical classics previously. I figured if Bernstein could finally give me access to Hegel in a way that made sense to me, then he might also have some things to say about Kant that would help me understand Critique of Pure Reason. To me one of the most interesting parts of Western Philosophy is Heidegger’s attempt to appropriate Kant, to his philosophy. It is interesting that the key word for Heidegger is Ereignis which has one meaning that is Appropriation, because Heidegger is famous for appropriating other philosophers to his own thought, like Aristotle, the Pre-socratics, Husserl’s later work (where appropriation here is tantamount to stealing). So listening to these lectures on Kant gave me a new appreciation for his thought. I kept worrying that my understanding of Kant would be wrong, but in the end it was merely greatly enhanced. I had a good idea of the Architectonic of Kant’s philosophy, but I did not really understand how important the arguments were in the book until I listened to these lectures. And without command of the arguments then one’s understanding remains very superficial, whereas from reading other commentaries I had the idea that the arguments were not really very important. That is because most authors attribute to Kant what Bernstein calls a progressive reading, i.e. assuming that Kant is claiming more than he has a right to claim, and then blaming him for not succeeding, and then subsituting their own thought for that of Kant. So Kant just is a jumping off point for their own ideas, which normally are pretty strange, and there are few attempts to try a minimal reading that tries to stay close to what Kant himself really meant, assuming that he was not claiming more than he could deliver. Bernstein calls this the regressive reading.

My own approach to philosophy is to try to understand what the philosopher himself had in mind before placing my own projections on their philosophy. I think this is a minimal threshold of intellectual honesty. And then one should always differentiate ones own thought from those of the philosopher one is basing what one is saying upon. I like to try to use other philosophies as a whole without appropriating them to my own philosophy. Because my greatest interest is in the differences between philosophers rather than subsuming them to my philosophy, or one philosophers ideas to another. Of course, this is very hard because it is almost impossible not to misunderstand the precursors. We have this map of misreading as Bloom says. For instance how Marx misread Hegel for instance, perfect example of a dumbed down reading of Hegel which some people really want.

So from Bernstein’s presentation I learned that the arguments themselves have substance. When commentators over claim what Kant is trying to achieve, and then point out how he fails, then one tends to discount the arguments, and concentrate on the architecture of his thought, because that is not affected by the discounted arguments. But Bernstein concentrates on the arguments and brings out their substance and shows how they are still relevant in light of his regressive reading.

So from Bersteins view point the major idea in Kant is that the only way to be a Transcendental Realist is via Transcendental Idealism, and thus realism is dependent on idealism. And that is why our tradition turned toward idealism and away from either rationalism or empiricism. This essentially makes Kant primarily into a precursor to Husserl’s phenomenology. This for me was very good because what I have been saying for years is that Kantian transcendentalism is the basis for understanding Husserlian Phenomenology. However, this devalues the idea of transcendentals being headlands above the world as Nietzsche calls them. To the regressive reading Kant is critiquing these headlands and pulling the carpet out from under them rather than establishing them as the progressive reading would have us believe.

To me this is a very important issue. In Badiou for instance we see the use of Cohen’s approach to set theory that establishes the independence of the continuum hypothesis. Basically Badiou says that Set theory is metaphysics of Being, to which he adds the Event and Multiple to complete it and give a full fledged ontological meaning to set theory. But what I learned from Badiou’s use of Cohen is that if you have a transcendental, i.e. an invisible assumed ground over a domain of a certain size, and you expand the territory it covers, if it does not create a difference in the larger scoped territory, then it is essentially irrelevant and does not have to be taken into account in our metaphysics.

Now if we take this insight back to Kant, we see that Kant has three transcendentals The Subject, The Object, and God. God maintains the coherence between the transcendental subject and the noumena, i.e. the transcendental object. This is an invisible scaffolding around our worldview. The Copernican turn from dogmatism is to offer a critique of the necessary preconditions for possible experience. As I listened to this phrase over and over in Bernstein I thought about the Unnecessary Impossibility as its opposite. The transcendental subject as the source of Apriori Synthesis (space, time, categories, schemas) and the Noumena, what is there beyond the appearances are the Unnecessary Impossibilities. They are impossibilities because we cannot know them. And they are unnecessary because no matter how we expand the scope of our inquiry the scaffolding does not make any difference in experience that makes a difference (Bateson). Implicit in Kant’s argument is the opposite of necessary conditions of possibility, which is the unnecessary and insufficient reasons of impossibility of experience of the T. Subject or the T. Object, or God that which retains the coherence between these inaccessible invisibles which are beyond all experience. I have not heard of any commentator who points out this duality between necessary possibilities and unnecessary impossibilities. And this kind of reminds me of Zizek and his argument that Kant glossed the possibility of Ethical Evil, in other words he suppressed that possibility, thinking it impossible. This makes us think that this limit the unnecessary and insufficient impossible is really the core of Kant’s thinking that is unthought. We normally say that what is impossible is the same as the negation of necessity. However, like a priori synthesis there must open up a gap between necessity and its opposite impossibility. Necessity is aligned with Actuality, and Possibility aligned with the Arbitrary. But in order for something to cross over from possibility to actuality there needs to be another moment of potential. For something to be denied the ability to cross over from necessary to the arbitrary there must be the impossible as a barrier. And that means there must be a middle ground between actuality and possibility as well which we can call sufficiency.

Now if we take this conceptual structure as given as the background set of modalities that allow Kant to talk about the necessity that grounds the possibility of experience, then we can discuss the unnecessary lacks grounding for the impossible. In other words the impossible is unmotivated. It is truly spontaneous and the limit of spontaneity from which experience arises. We can read Kant as a meditation on modality, where he wishes to get from the necessary grounds of actual experience by means of positing the transcendentals as the impossible but sufficient lack of grounds for the unknowability of invisibles beyond experience. The spark that jumps this abyss is the intuition of a priori synthesis which gives us the potential for framing experience based on what is absolutely prior to it, in a logical sense.

Kant is always searching for the third moment that can link unreconcilable opposites. So for example he posits a priori synthesis in order to get beyond a priori analysis of reason, and the a posteriori synthesis and analysis within experience. Pure concept is connected to percepts by way of a third moment that connects them the projection of a priori synthesis that we intuit via the imagination. Heidegger seizes on his change in the status of the imagination between the first and second editions of the critique to interpret Kant as a pre-Heideggarian. Heidegger sees the more basic form of the imagination as equivalent to his idea of Dasein as the ability to project Being. Subsumed faculty of the imagination placed under another faculty is imagination tamed, and a step back from the abyss suggested by the free ranging imagination as an independent faculty.

So from all this I opine that the most basic and interesting concept in Kant is the one he does not articulate which is the unnecessary and arbitrary impossibility of the inexperience-able (i.e. the transcendentals) that gives rise to the potentiality to cross over into the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. This intermediate realm of potentiality allows the sufficient conditions for the actualization of experience.

As we know from Kubler’s Shape of Time actuality is a great mystery which is rooted in potentiality and sufficiency as a middle ground between impossibility and arbitrary on the one hand and necessity and possibility on the other. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Time:_Remarks_on_the_History_of_Things)

Kubler is the only one I know that has tried to delve into this area of how things become actual, i.e. cross over from possibility to actuality in any serious or deep way from the point of view of an Art Historian, i.e. one who is concerned with the shapes that well up from oblivion based on their first coming into Being as artifacts of a civilization, and then the subsequent loss of this civilization. He uses the metaphor of a light house, whose strobe lights up the darkness momentarily, so that we get a glimpse of what was lost in oblivion, through the relics that were preserved. We embed our experience of time within the things we shape, and we uncover the times of others so different from our own and glimpse other kinds of time when we dig up the artifacts from lost civilizations. Compressing our comprehension of time into shapes is a way to give others access to our own views of time from very different civilizations that have other embodied concepts of time that they embed into their artifacts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Kubler
http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/kublerg.htm

See also
“Ultramoderne”: Or, How George Kubler Stole the Time in Sixties Art by Pamela M. Lee in Grey Room, No. 2. (Winter, 2001), pp. 46-77
http://browse.reticular.info/text/collected/grey%20room/Ultramoderne%20Or%20How%20George%20Kubler%20Stole%20the%20Time%20in%20Sixties%20Art.pdf

But even as Bernstein in his critique of Kant, for not recognizing that there were many kinds of time, and Kubler who sees various civilizations experience of time embedded in their physical artifacts that we use to draw them back from the abyss of oblivion, there is little exploration of the exact mechanism by which things move over from possibility to actuality. I formulated an answer to this question as an addendum to my dissertation which is unpublished based on the work of Ian Thompson (http://www.ianthompson.org/philosophy_papers.htm) and the theory of dispositions. Design occurs in Hyper Being of possibilities, but for things to come into existence we need Wild Being of propensities. And the key concept that allows us to move between the extremes of Actuality and Possibility, or Arbitrary and Necessary is the ideas of Potential and Sufficiency. But this is based on understanding the Ultra Being of Unnecessary Impossibility as a limit. Kant skirts around this Impossible possibility and unnecessary adjunct (i.e. supplement) to his philosophy the same way he skirts around the idea of ethical evil as Zizek accuses him of doing. But it is from this hidden singularity in his thought that Hegel sees the French Revolution springing, the Irrational from the heart of critical reason. It is not a necessary condition for destructive chaos being unleashed by the French Revolution throwing off the oppression of sovereignty which ultimately only led back to Napoleonic sovereignty, i.e. from one nihilistic extreme to its opposite, and then back to the first, only with an intensification of nihilism. Hegel saw the advent of Napoleon as the dawning of a new age win which Absolute Spirit was embodied, but little did he imagine the death march of the troops into Russia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon)

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/index

[Note: E. Tufte’s lecture on this map accessed through Intelligence^2 is brilliant.]

The terrible defeat by nature of the army of Napoleon, his first exile, his escape and defeat at Waterloo, and then second exile show how irrepressible Absolute Spirit can be when embodied in a single man who is the motive force behind historical changes. His reassertion of Sovereignty shaped his times. In him Hegel saw Absolute Reason working itself out in History re-establishing the state which represented Absolute Spirit as embodied by Absolute Monarchy. And this is the fundamental shift after Kant to the recognition that the intersubjective cohort was a horizon on which the individuals humanity was achieved. Absolute Spirit can be seen as an embodiment of that unnecessary Impossibility as Absolute.

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