See Gilles Deleuze by Claire Colebrook section Affect and Disorganized Perception p. 37-40  also 86, 89, 93-94, 114, 137, 167

What must be understood is that Deleuze is working to create a philosophy at the level of Wild Being, which is very difficult to think. The analogy of Wild Being is the Mandelbrot Set. That set exists in the complex plane, where every point is iterated on with an equation, and the color of the point is set by the acceleration of that recursion to infinity. In the complex plane there is no continuum. Each point in the plane is independent of all others. Yet when we do this recursion on a point in the plane with an equation, we get an acceleration of that point toward infinity which is different from all others around it, and which when colored makes visible a pattern in the region of the set.

So intensity is this acceleration, and the affect is the recursion which gives the effect of the coloration. The acceleration of the point toward infinity via recursion is under our synoptic glance turned into a two dimensional pattern which is infinitely deep and always changing, but always comprehensible as a pattern. The pattern is made up of differences of color from different lines of flight exhibited in the recursion. And recursion is repetition. The rule of Deleuze is that Repetition is that which cannot be repeated. Although the entire ediface of the Mandelbrot set comes from repetition of recursion, because it is infinite it is beyond all our repetitions that produce glimpses of it and make it impossible to repeat again due to minor errors in starting point that would cause different results to be obtained in successive iterations. We wont be able to explore the same Mandelbrot set in exactly the same way twice.

So if we focus on this analogy for Wild Being that Deleuze is trying to approximate, then we can see that affect is recursion, repetition, but the result, i.e. the coloration in principle can only be repeated if we have exactly the same starting point each time. In general the mandelbrot set as a whole is impossible to explore exactly the same way twice unless you leave breadcrums of some sort. It is a maze or rhizome. It is what Castoriadis calls Magma. For Castoriadis there is the Imaginary Institution of Society, where the process of instituting is frozen into the Institution that results. Sartre calls this the ‘fused group’ in Critique of Dialectical Reason. What Colebrook above calls proto-perception where we react viscerally prior to an organized perception and response. This is what is called the genetic gestalt, which has been experimentally shown to be quite different from the resulting gestalt. John S. Hans calls it the Play of the World.

Now it is interesting that Wild Being itself has three manifestations, as Complexnion Mandelbrot set, Quaternion Quaterbrot set, and Octonion Octbrot set. When we think about motion there is stillness, motion, acceleration, acceleration of acceleration, and then jitter. So the motion has to do with our panning about the Mandelbrot set at some level of magnification. What is static is all the isolated points in the complex plane. Acceleration squared appears at the Quaterbrot set level, and jitter at the Octobrot set level. And there are no hypercomplex algebras beyond this and so the series comes to an end.  So not only is there a intensification there are different planes of immanence, which are turned into plains of consistency by our viewing of them through the coloration process.

It is interesting that a lot of what Deleuze and Guattari say can be mapped to the structure of the Mandelbrot and higher sets. And this is because these sets exemplify Wild Being which is chaotic and fractal. Good explanations of this is in Delanda on Deleuze who concentrates on what Deleuze means by the virtual putting it in the context of Complex Systems Theory. Wild Being was defined by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and Invisible. It is a state of Being beyond Hyper Being, i.e. Differance of Derrida.  Each kind of Being is harder and harder to think, its intelligibility becomes harder to attain. But a few theorists like Deleuze have set out to pose their philosophies at that level of Being. And it turns out that Being itself becomes chaotic, and fractal and exemplifies complex system dynamics at that level of thinking.

Affect concentrates on what Merleau-Ponty calls the chiasm of sensation within perception that renders it opaque to itself. This is the level where everything is reduced to propenities, dispositions, tendencies, etc. And those are the intensities which are the proto-seeds of perceptions and actions that exist in Wild Being as what Freud calls Treib, or Schobenhauer calls Wille. At this level there are only what Melenie Klein calls partial objects, and what Deleuze and Guattari call Desiring machines, and what Foucault calls practices. Actually there are at least four kinds  of these mechanic practices which are desiring, avoiding, disseminating, and absorbing which form a rhizome across bodies within the field of the socius.

Let me recommend: The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity By Fred Evans

ttp://books.google.com/books?id=2wWfEDlhslkC&lpg=PP1&dq=multivoiced%20body&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Fred Evans corrects the idea of the Univocal nature of Being in Deleuze which is the weakness of his philosophy and the hidden monolith behind the celebration of diversity that Batille complained about in the Clamor of Being. http://books.google.com/books?id=pzuhRy_aoq8C&lpg=PP1&dq=the%20clamour%20of%20being&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=the%20clamour%20of%20being&f=false

http://www.quora.com/Continental-Philosophy/Whats-the-relation-between-affects-and-intensities-in-Deleuze-and-or-Brian-Massumi

Quark comes from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

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

For some time, Gell-Mann was undecided on an actual spelling for the term he intended to coin, until he found the word quark in James Joyce’s book Finnegans Wake:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he has not got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
—James Joyce, Finnegans Wake[44]

Gell-Mann went into further detail regarding the name of the quark in his book, The Quark and the Jaguar:[45]“In 1963, when I assigned the name “quark” to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been “kwork”. Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word “quark” in the phrase “Three quarks for Muster Mark”. Since “quark” (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with “Mark”, as well as “bark” and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as “kwork”. But the book represents the dream of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the “portmanteau” words in “Through the Looking-Glass”. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry “Three quarks for Muster Mark” might be “Three quarts for Mister Mark”, in which case the pronunciation “kwork” would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarkegan’s Wake

 http://www.quora.com/Words/What-are-some-words-borrowed-from-fiction

Quora answer: Does God Exist?
How do I confirm that God Exists?
Kent Palmer http://kdp.me Copyright 2011
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DCBsH5nzWjukfCvqiTVZ1uiGtoXDbAOZhDHH7OxlZmc/edit?hl=en_US

By the author.
Figure 1: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1l7XTVod_z02S0QFrVwWlofuI-JYfVXMHF71NF0EAnAQ/edit?hl=en_US

Answer: God does not Exist, nor does He have Being, He is too exalted for that.

God does not have the standing of either Existence (creation) or Being (illusion) but a different standing called Manifestation. God manifests He is not a being or an existent.

The term Manifestation is taken from The Essence of Manifestation by M. Henry who uses it for the way Meister Eckhart describes the nature of God.

Trying to confirm that God Exists or has Being is like trying to make something impossible necessary or sufficient.

If something is absolute then it can have no contingency associated with it.

So let us consider the nature of Being.

If God had Being then he would only be possible in relation to the Indo-european languages and its speakers.

Being only exists in Indo-European languages, and so only Indo-European speakers could appreciate His nature, and that is a contingency, that there is a singular language group among all the others that used to exist on the planet that has Being in it as a concept and a grammatical structure. Also that grammatical structure is broken, and so Being (and Having) is evidently a construction from many roots, and therefore even in Indo-European it is not part of the original design of the language, but something that seems to have emerged at some point by putting together many different roots to get across this artificial concept of Being.

If God as Universal or an Absolute then this contingency prevents His being thought of as having Being. (Having is just a broken up in Indo-European grammars.) This is particularly true since our notion of God comes from a blending of the philosophical notions of Aristotle, and the and Semitic sources. The Hebrews had not idea of Being, because it is not in their language. In Aristotle and Plato God (as distinct from the gods) is basically an abstraction that solves the problem of the inconsistencies in Polytheism from a philosophical point of view.

Therefore, God, if Absolute, cannot have Being because Being is a contingency since it is associated only with one language group and no others. If God is not Absolute then He is not the God worshiped by the Monotheistic religions.

Permission Granted by Publisher

http://books.google.com/books/about/God_without_being.html?id=FcUIg8jOXqUC ———————————————————————————————-

In the appendix is a collection of references where I was trying to determine the roots for Existence in Hebrew and then cross correlate that with what the same root means in the other language. This turned out to be way more difficult than I imagined. One should be aware that when ever they use Being as the definition of what the Hebrew or Arabic terms mean above then that is spurious because there is only existence in Semitic languages due to its uniqueness to Indo-European languages.

Now my own feeling is that Egyptian is the oldest language, then because of structural purity Arabic comes next and then Hebrew and Aramaic come after that. And as I remember Egyptian has two roots for existence wnn and iw, and I believe they correlate roughly with the meaning difference between HYH (iw) in Hebrew and WJD (wnn?) in Arabic. So I offer as a hypothesis that one of these languages later languages focused on one kind of existence and the other focused on the other kind of existence in Egyptian. This needs to be a point of further research. See the end of this post for more information on Egyptians types of existence. I have a reference that says that HYH is related to iw. But for the relation of WJD to wnn, or wnt that is still up in the air. That is because wnn seems to be related to change, while iw is related to life, and breath, while WJD is related to ‘what is found’ and ecstasy. HYH in Arabic seems to mean to blow or to shoo, and is associated with breath, which is one of the meanings of HYH in Hebrew, but the root meaning in Hebrew for HYH seems to Fall or Occur but it also means breath. A related word in Arabic is Hayy which means to live. WJD in Arabic on the other hand means what is found. So there is no clear relation of one with the other in the three languages that is obvious.

This recalls the distinction in Arabic between Ruh and Nafs, which is like the difference between Soul and Spirit in English. Ruh means breathing, and Nafs means what is breathed, i.e. the air. Soul comes from a word that means the sea, which has waves like breath, and Spirit means something more like the air being breathed. Of course, the two are two sides of the same coin.

Similarly it could be that WJD and HYH seem to be two sides of the same coin, and may be related to the two kinds of existence in Egyptian. I could not determine what the WJD root means in Hebrew so that will have to be a subject of further study.

However, I think we know enough to continue our argument concerning the confirmation of the Existence of God now that we have determined that He has no Being. The next thing we want to do is to try to show He has no existence either. And the argument is that if God is Absolute then if there is any contingency involved that then it cannot be a description of God. Now in Arabic God (Allah) has the attribute of Life. But interestingly does not have the attribute of Existence. Now Muslims get around this by saying that Allah has Inherent Existence and is the only matter to have this standing (http://aa.trinimuslims.com/f47/the-attribute-of-al-wujud-existance-9689/) gives a good rendition of the standard argument. However, personally I think this lack of existence in the names of God in Islam is important and that the idea of splitting existence is the wrong approach to the problem. However, it is understandable that the Arabs did that because WJD was the only standing that they had in their language, and it is ridiculous to think that things found in creation have standing but God doesn’t. But I think they missed a significant hint that God might have a standing more exalted than we can attribute to things. The Quran makes clear that Allah is not associated with any thing. And so Muslims have gone wrong in their theology giving God the same standing as things, just because they did not have any further standing in their language. On the other hand God does have the attribute of Living in Islam, and so it is easier to say that HYH is an attribute of God as the giver of life and the Living himself. Yet in Islam it appears that although He has the name the one who gives existence, He does not have the attribute of existence Himself. So there is an asymmetry here, and that asymmetry to me is significant.

So what I want to argue is that God (Allah) does not exist, and does not have inherent existence. However just as Existence is broader than Being what ever standing that God has is broader than the standing of existence and encompasses existence. So in a narrow sense God has existence and being to the extent that He has a standing that is a higher logical type than that of Existence or Being. But this is a contradiction if the levels of Being, Existence and Manifestation are meta-levels because meta-levels and higher logical types are duals of each other. But for the sake of argument what I would like to propose is that God has the standing beyond Existence called Manifestation. I want to suggest that the reason there are two roots of existence in Egyptian is because the interspace (barzak) between them is manifestation. Arabic and Hebrew seems to have each concentrated on one of those kinds of Existence, i.e. Arabic took the one related to change (wnn), and the Hebrew took the one (iw) related to life and breath. The rationale here is that what changes in existence is what is found. And this is like Nafs or Spirit. On the other hand the breathing Ruh is like the iw and HYH. If you are not breathing then you are not going to find anything. They also chose different roots to pin these concepts to and only HYH and iw are directly related. But essentially what we seen in the Egyptian is that the difference or gap between the two kinds of existence indicates a deeper standing than the two types of existence. Further we know that there are two interpretations of existence in nondual terms which are emptiness and void. So Emptiness is the one associated with breath or life and thus the possibility of the inward and Void is the one associated with becoming and flux of change in the outward. If we posit that the Egyptian twin types of existence are the most primordial and we see the Arabic and the Hebrew each concentrating on one of those as their key term then it is possible to see the gap between these pair of existences and this pair of interpretations of existence as indicating that there is a deeper nondual, which I call manifestation. In Egyptian there is a third kind of existence that fulfills this middle role which is xpr which indicates creation. So in effect the gap between the dual nonduals emptiness and void leads to the deeper nondual of manifestation, and the gap from the point of view of existence itself is related to the xpr whose sign is the dung beetle, which rolls a little ball of dung before it. The Egyptians saw that as an analogy of God creating the world and keeping it turning. Also it is interesting that the Dung beetle does that to build a cocoon for its young, and so we also get an image of the “men of earth” i.e. those coming out of the dung ball when they are born as creatures come  out of and then return to the earth.

It should be noted that like Hinduism behind the polytheism of Egypt was the concept of God as singular, so that other gods became his attributes. This God was a trinity with three names Amun, Ra, and Atun. Atun was the disc of the sun, Ra the manifestation of things by the light of the sun, and Amun, the hidden God. Moses could be seen as a Heretic who picked the hidden God as his Lord, just like Akhenaten picked Atun as the one God. The one reference to someone like Moses in Egyptian history seems to relate him to Akhenaten by accusing him of the same heresy that resulted in Akhenaten being erased from Egyptian history. Some say that Akhenaten and Moses are the same but now we know that Akhenaten selected Atun as his one god, which was an error because that is just one of the trinitarian aspects of Amun Ra Atun. Notice that Ra, or manifestation is the middle element between Amun and Atun, the hidden and the manifest sides of God. Many thing that Christian trinitarianism came from Egyptian trinitarianism. The Horus/Osiris myth is about an attempted resurrection. God the Father might be thought of as the Hidden God, the Sun could be thought of as like the outward manifestation of God in the world, such as in the Son. And the Ra could be associated with the Holy Ghost which is the way that the outward aspect of god manifests the world which is brought out of hiding by being created. Personally I think this might be too simplistic an analogy.

But, to return to the argument at hand, then what we want to say is that because there are two kinds of existence, this introduces contingency into existence because there cannot be two kinds of absolute. And so the standing of Existence does not apply to God (Allah, Yhwh, El) because it applies to created things. In the Egyptian one root has to do with creation xpr, and the other two with becoming flux of creation, and life/breath. Things in existence, i.e. things we find are creations (xpr) of God who gives existence to them, but God since He is not like a thing cannot have the same standing as the things he created. To say so is in Islam called Shirk. And Inherent Existence is still existence. It is connecting Existence with Necessity, and saying that all other things are not necessary existences. In effect the standard theological argument splits existence too, but gives God one part of it and says that the other part of it concrete things found in the world are somehow unreal because of the other kind of existence god has is more real somehow. This converts the existence of things into an illusion, and has the same effect as projecting Being on them which is the Indo-European ruse.

But even so by splitting existence between God and things one is introducing contingency and basically doing what Christian Theology does which is to say God is the supreme Being producing OntoTheological Metaphysics. Muslim Theologians have followed suit and produced a similar conundrum with the idea of ‘inherent necessary existence’ as opposed to the ‘accidental unnecessary existence’ of things. But Quran is quite clear that God does not share the same standing with things He created. And makes this point explicit by not making Existing an attribute of God.

So in effect although God does not have Being or Exist we can say He manifests, and this process in Sufism is called Tajalliyat of His attributes or Sifat. Thus the standing of God is that of his Sifat, or attributes, and that is called Tajalliat, unfolding, and I propose that this different standing of manifestation is doubly nondual, in that it has no other dual to it, like the duality between the nonduals emptiness and void.

So God Manifests and to us that is an epiphany, but He does not Exist nor does He have Being, and that Manifestation is perfectly nondual and unique in its deep nonduality. Manifestation is the opposite of xpr which is the created aspect of existence which is another way to fill the gap between the other two types of existence.

So you cannot confirm the existence of God nor His Being, because each of those standings have some sort of contingency to them. One is the contingency of illusion produced in only one family of languages. The other is the contingency of the splitting of existence and its interpretations. God is Absolute then he has to be one and unique, and that is the nature of the next deeper standing that is seen in the Tajalliyat, or unfolding, of His Manifestation in Hs attributes. He is too exalted to either exist like things, or have being like illusions. Some forms of Buddhism like DzogChen and Hua Yen, or Tien Tai approach the indication of this deeper nondual state which is the fourth turning of the Wheel of Dharma. But I think it is only in Sufism that it is made explicit. A good place to see this indication is in the Precious Pearl of Jami where he talks about the differences between the Philosophers, Theologians and Sufis in their interpretation of God. However, the way it is stated in Jami is very subtle because he did not want to get himself into too much trouble by saying God does not exist.

Permission Given by Publisher http://www.sunypress.edu/p-1622-the-precious-pearl.aspx
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_precious_pearl.html?id=Xq1rm85Qzz8C

The basic argument here is that you cannot confirm of God anything that has any contingency what so ever if God is Absolute, and both Being and Existence have contingency so the standing that God has different from illusion of projections of being or existing things must be something different, and that something different is indicated by the interspace or gap between the two types of existence that are in the Egyptian language but are each taken up singularly in either Arabic or Hebrew. This duality between the types of existence that creates a discontinuity (between inward and outward) or gap is indicated by xpr which is the term  for created existence that is kept moving by God. And the dual of this created existence xpr is the difference between the nondual interpretations of Being as emptiness and void. So you can get to created existence by realizing that Existence is ultimately split or dual, or by the difference in the two nondual interpretations which allows you to look beyond creation to the creator which does not have existence or being, but manifests His Sifat as a completely independent standing.

So there is an existential structure here, that has always existed, but no one every bothered to compare the different kinds of existence in the different languages before including me. The only chink in the argument is the transformation of the flux of wnn into WJD. We say that what we find is the flux of existence. But WJD also has the meaning of ecstasy which was taken over into the Latin. Heidegger seizes on this meaning to say that is the projection of the a priori synthetic manifolds that we then intuit. Thus the wnn is the flux of Heraclitus or the Buddhists but the WJD gives us a perspective on it which is phenomenological, it is what We find that is always already there. So there are three moments to this, one is the ecstasy of projection of apriori synthetic manifolds, the other is the intuiting of them and thus finding them, and the third is the flux itself as something objective. All this is merged together in the WJD, while the original Egyptian root has no perspective in it but only talks about the flowing. So in a sense WJD adds the kind of structure we see in Kant and Heidegger which idealizes and subjectives existence. So WJD adds more structure to the Egyptian root while HYH sticks with the given structure in Egyptian root.

However, what is fascinating is how there is a split between iw and wnn which is perhaps comes to structure the difference between HYH and WJD, but which shows that existence was split orginally, and this split is isomorphic in the Egyptian to the interpretations of Existence as emptiness (iw) and void (wnn). xpr fills the gap by creation, and manifestation as the deeper nondual, or the nondual nondual fills it with nonduality. That standing for God is beyond existence but neither Transcendent nor Immanent. Rather God manifests his Sifat in this nondual stage before the creation of existence. It is neither in-time no out-of-time. All the transcendental and immanent projections of these attributes of God refer to our seeing God in relation to the world that has the structure of Heaven/Earth//Mortal/Immortal (i.e. God). When we project God as the Supreme Being or the Inherent Necessity we are merely introducing a contingency (ourselves) which cannot be associated with the absolute. God as absolute can neither Be nor Exist, but manifests via Tajalliat or unfolding and we come to experience and know that as an epiphany.

“Phenomenal being is utter and total darkness.
It is only the manifestation of the Real in it that gives it light.” Ibn Atallah

“Phenomenal being is what is formed by power and manifested to eye-witnessing. Darkness is the opposite of light and is not in existence. The light of existence is illuminated i.e. becomes light, and the manifestation of the Real is His tajalli.” Ibn ‘Ajiba

WAKENING ASPIRATION (Iqâdh Al-Himam): COMMENTARY ON THE HIKAM of IIbn Atallah  by Ibn ‘Ajiba See http://bewley.virtualave.net/hikcom1.html

Note: This argument self destructs because it posits that what is a standing at a meta-level (six) is also a higher logical type which is a paradox even perhaps an absurdity. This is because the intellect cannot reach to this level of nonduality because any level of nonduality is aconceputal and aexperiential, but the deeper you go into nonduality the more opaque to the mind yet transparent to the heart it becomes.

For more background information see appendix at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DCBsH5nzWjukfCvqiTVZ1uiGtoXDbAOZhDHH7OxlZmc/edit?hl=en_US This includes the letters seeking permission to use these book covers here.

http://www.quora.com/God/Does-God-exist-6

If the change is an Emergent Event.

Emergent Events change everything at the level of their scope which can be Fact, Theory, Paradigm, Episteme, Ontos, Existence, Absolute

Anything that is a Paradigm Change or higher could be monumental.

Reference for Emergence: The Philosophy of the Present by G.H. Mead

See the Structure of Theoretical Systems in relation to Emergence by myself.
http://archonic.net/disab.html

http://www.quora.com/When-can-change-be-considered-monumental-Looking-for-a-definition

It has been said that the ultimate question in Philosophy is “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (Like Real numbers but more so)

See Heidegger Introduction to Metaphysics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Metaphysics_(Heidegger)

The pen-ultimate question is “Why is there IS?” i.e. Being. (Like Transcendental numbers only more so)

The trans-ultimate question is “What is Absolute?” (Like Transfinite numbers only more so)

The infra-ultimate question: “Existence?” (Like Surreal numbers only more so)

http://books.google.com/books/about/Life_s_Ultimate_Questions.html?id=kaDF-8aFTXAC

Assortment: http://www.squidoo.com/ultimatequestions

http://www.quora.com/Topics-Quora-feature/What-would-be-the-ultimate-question

Instapaper works about as good as anything. Person A and B each have an instapaper account and they are set up so that the other person can save to the other persons instapaper account. Then you set the homepage button to go to ones own instapaper account to see what the other person posted there for you, and they do the same with their Instapaper account. For sharing lots of links with just one person this really works well.

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-tools-for-sharing-knowledge-resources-and-links-in-a-small-team

This connection via Ibn al Arabi is very tenuous.

http://www.quora.com/What-connection-is-there-between-Maimonides-and-Rumi

Comment by AJ Artemel
The connection between Ibn al Arabi and Rumi is most likely factual, and there is little doubt that there were strong connections between the Sufi and Kabbalah communities in Spain. Even if al Arabi and Maimonides never met, they would certainly have been familiar with each others’ ideas.

My answer:

This is untrue, in my opinion. It is very unlikely that they either met or had influence on each other. What they did have in common was Greek Philosophy, which Ibn al-Arabi was doing his best to avoid and which Maimonides was trying to explain as a philosopher himself. Cabala is basically an imitation of Muslim alchemy which is interpreted philosophically and theologically. It gives these esoteric Jews the equivalent of the attributes of Allah, basically giving 10 attributes instead of 100. The Zohar is a forgery that was so convincing that Jewish scholars did not figure it out for a very long time, until it had already completely permeated their thought and was impossible to abandon. Sufism and Kaballah are really very different from each other. Kaballah is a structuralist view of the relations of the attributes of God to each other and to the Hebrew alphabet. Arab alchemy is based on the number equivalents of the letters, and how the words transform into each other via their numerical weights mediated by the number 17 which was a sacred number in ancient Egypt. Sufism is not a structuralism at all but is a practice that takes one into altered states and stations vis a vis ones Lord. Kaballah is an esoteric way of interpreting the Hebrew Bible based on numbers of letters. This was practiced by the Muslims as well in relation to Quran, but although the Sufis would refer to this practice in their own writings taking it over from the culture to make their spiritual points, it was not a central thing in Sufism at all. So I suggest more study of Sufism and Kaballah. I am not saying they are not interesting to compare, but they only superficially look the same and are essentially different ones finds when one studies them at sufficient depth.

Ibn al-Arabi and Maimonids moved in very different circles during their lives in spite of the fact that they lived at the same time and both went east.

Moses ben-Maimon, called Maimonides and also known as Mūsā ibn Maymūn (موسى بن ميمون) in Arabic, or Rambam (רמב”ם – Hebrew acronym for “Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon”), was a preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the greatest Torah scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages. He was born in Córdoba, Spain on Passover Eve, 1135, and died in Egypt (or Tiberias) on 20th Tevet, December 12, 1204.[6] He was a rabbi, physician and philosopher in Morocco and Egypt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides

Ibn ʿArabī (Arabic: ابن عربي‎) (Murcia July 28, 1165 – Damascus November 10, 1240) was an Andalusian Moorish Sufi mystic and philosopher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Arabi

However, here is an excellent counter point to my position on this issue http://www.tomblock.com/published/shalom_jewishsufi2.php
http://www.ibn-arabi.com/jewish.htm

But it is easy to read back things into history that were probably not there.

To support my point I quote:

Mystical languages of unsaying By Michael Anthony Sells

http://books.google.com/books?id=2A0HHXkxcxEC

See 256 and 257 for the rest of the quote. It won’t upload for some reason.

Theorem: The Market as Invisible Hand has no theoretical definition.

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-important-theorems-in-economics

Alex Ayotte pointed out Oedipus as the Classic Tragic figure. For explanation see Oedipus: The Philosopher by J.-J. Gaux.

Alex was voted down for not giving more details. But then of course he made the mistake of thinking that he was talking to an educated audience.

So this gives me an opportunity to try my luck at not being collapsed randomly by overzealous reviewers.

So lets start by looking at why Oedipus is interesting as the ultimate tragic character.

Of course, the Oracle of Delphi told his father that he would grow up to kill his father, and so the father wounded in the foot and then exposed the infant. But he was picked up by someone and ended up growing up in another household. He heard about the oracle and decided to leave home so he would not kill his father, because he did not know he was adopted. Of course, at a three way split in the road he ran into a man who insulted him and he killed that man. Then he encountered the Sphinx and answered a famous riddle which allowed him to become the King of the city and marry the Queen whose husband disappeared. As a new king Oedipus was confronted by a Plague, and he swears he will get to the bottom of the cause of that plague affecting the city. So he sets out to look for the one who was causing the plague by their defiled actions. Eventually he discovers that it was him, and that the man he killed at the crossroads was his father and he had married his mother, who had borne him children who were also his step brothers and sisters. This caused Oedipus to put out his own eyes and exile himself, wandering about in the world blinded by the horror of his own actions fulfilling the destiny that the Oracle had spoken of but was not understood. By the very action of avoiding the fulfillment of the Oracle he manages to fall under its spell.

So the tragedy is that Oedipus cannot avoid his fate, and that fate is horrible, because he breaks the incest taboo and the patricide taboo without knowing it. He only discovers it piece by piece as he pursues the truth of the origin of the plague on the city, as he is bound to do as King. So by doing things right everything turns out wrong, in the worse possible way from a Greek point of view.

Now what is very interesting about this story is that it demonstrates how Truth that s one of the aspects of Being along with Reality, Presence, and Identity transform in an emergent way as we traverse the meta-levels of Being. It shows that in Ancient times knowledge of the different kinds of Being was demonstrated which was later lost in our tradition. In other answers I have analyzed this unfolding of the truth that Oedipus drives forward to find the root cause of the problem of the city, which means he gets closer and closer to finding out that he is that cause.

Ultra Being – Truth^5 Singularity beyond truth and untruth
Wild Being – Truth^4 Truth of Untruth
Hyper Being – Truth^3 of the difference between truth and fiction/falsehood
Process Being – Truth^2 as showing and hiding
Pure Being – Truth^1 as verification
beings

Ultra Being – Truth^5 The truth of what the blinded Oedipus sees
Wild Being – Truth^4 The truth of the riddle Oedipus answers of the Sphinx
Hyper Being – Truth^3 The truth of Oedipus in avoiding his fate brings is on
Process Being – Truth^2 The gradual unfolding of truth in the search of Oedipus
Pure Being – Truth^1 The verification of the Oracle’s truth about Oedipus

Note that this is a Greimas square.

Truth and anti-Truth cancel, but Truth/anti-Truth is over-against everything else.

There is both non-anti-Truth, and anti-non-Truth that forms a chiasm (X).

The singularity is at the crossing point of the X.

Oedipus is the failed hero that becomes a philosopher.

But as philosopher he comprehends and embodies the structure of the Western worldview completely. The philosopher is the pharmacon.

But we can say this about any of the Aspects of Being, i.e. Reality, Identity and Presence. In the case of Oedipus the issue is his own truth that he himself does not know, until it is too late.

The complete tale is quite complex as it deals with the children of Oedipus which are two sons and two daughters. Oedipus curses the sons to die by each other’s hands. Antigone buries her brother who is left to rot and is put to death for upholding family rites over the law of the sovereign. In the war there are nine who come against Thebes and die at seven gates. One extant play is by Aeschylus and the extant trilogy by Euripides.

The children of Oedipus are two boys and two girls. This reminds us of the contrast between Dionysus and Athena on the one hand and Apollo and Artimis on the other. Athena and Artemis are opposites and Apollo and Dionysus are opposites as Nietzsche has avowed. Apollo is the wolf god of male initiation and Artemis is the goddess of the feminine initiation into the bears. Dionysus is the god of Extremes and madness and wine. Athena is the female goddess that leads the men of the city in war. So Athena is the goddess of the city and Artimis the goddess of the wilds away from the city. Apollo with Athena create the first law court for Orestes, which upheld that there was no participation of the female in giving shape to the fetus, but that she was merely a receptacle. Apollo and Dionysus represent reason and unreason within society. These are all nihilistic opposites. If we know this then we can see that the middle play in the cycle of Euripides is about initiation of the children of Theseus. The final play is about the confrontation between family ties and the laws of the city promulgated by the sovereign. The law court of the city are produced by Athena and Apollo acting together. This stands in for the judgment of the sovereign who dictates the fate of Antigone. The play of Aeschylus is about civil war, between brothers who agreed to rule alternately after they drove their father from the city.

It is interesting that Hegel takes the Antigone myth as the core of his Phenomenology of Mind/Ghost/Spirit. It is the confrontation between arbitrary law and traditional family oriented values. For burying her brother Antigone is walled up in her own tomb. Hegel sees in this the archetype for absolute spirit. One may well wonder what the rest of the myth really means if the first part is about the meta-levels of Truth. There are words of the oracle which come true no matter what we do, and even our attempts to avoid it play into the fulfillment of the oracle. These are fateful words and we dree our wyrd as we confront the their meaning for our lives. The heart of Tragedy is the fatedness of what befalls us. This goes back to a point made by Kant according to Bernstein, that Causality and Freedom go together. Trauma is caused by the external causality that does us violence or contributes to our shock. We distinguish our freedom from this causality. In the case of the oracle there is warning, and there are the actions of the father to avoid fate, and the actions of the son that cancel those of the father and realize the fate without knowing it, in the very act of trying to avoid the fate. In this case it is the fate of committing incest. And incest is a non-nihilistic distinction in which we place a bound on our sexuality, so that it does not cross with our kinship ties. This is particularly important in a paternal kinship economy. In the maternal kinship economy incest is a natural result because the females do not leave home, and they are seen as a mass rather than a set, and thus the Alpha male will certainly have intercourse with his daughters. But marriage with the mother is impossible, because marriage in human society which is maternal is to an external male, and the brother plays the role of the father in bringing up the kids of his sister. The mother is indigenous and so would not be married to her son, but of course illicit relations are not prevented. Also the Father is not around, and so it is harder for the son to kill him, but if he did kill him he would probably go off to seek him unless the son lays in wait when the father visits. But all the anxiety related to the father is probably transferred to the brother of the mother. Fathers are not around enough to accumulate so much hatred. I think we might conclude from this that Incest is the rule because it is more likely in patriarchy.

In matriarchy the females are not distinguished and so for the alpha male incest is more likely with his daughter. But for the son it is very unlikely to have incestuous relations with his mother due to the fact that expected bonds are external to the group within which one is brought up by ones uncle.

Oedipus in effect leaves home, kills his father and marries his mother, as if there was a maternal relation with another group other than his childhood home. He left that childhood home exactly so he would not kill/marry his adopted parents (unknown to him). By leaving home he goes precisely to his parents of origin and fulfills the oracle’s curse on him. Notice that there is differing and deferring in this movement, in which his real parents differ from those he thinks are his parents, and the fulfillment of the curse is only deferred because his natural father did not kill him when he was exposed at birth. So the myth establishes differance in which the meaning of parents differs with itself in a way that exposes a contradiction in the life of Oedipus, who is king following his father after killing the father, and who is the one who causes the plague that the king must find and eradicate due to their defilement of the city. This self-differing of Oedipus from himself is at the heart of the problem he faces. This is because his true identity has been lost in oblivion, and has to be retrieved by the painstaking search for the root cause of the plague.

So we can see that identity of Oedipus is at stake in the myth and the representation of the myth in the play.

Ultra Identity^5 The one who breaks the fundamental taboo, embodying it
Wild Identity^4 Cause of the Plague
Hyper Identity^3 Man HIs being the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx
Process Identity^2 Uncovered Identity of different parenthood, lost home found
Pure Identity^1 Identification with the Name Oedipus
beings

His error becomes a miasma that affects his children dooming them as well.

His error causes civil war. We only need to refer to Dante to know how nihilistic civil war is. It is the worst possible kind of war where neighbors kill each other and citizens are not safe from their fellow citizens. Civil war is the inversion and the equivalent at the level of the polis of Incest – intracene warfare. The polis is supposed to share each other’s fate, but in civil war the fate of one part of the body politic is determined by another part.

After Oedipus is exiled his sons are supposed to alternate in their rule to avoid conflict between them, but then one son refuses to give up his role as king and thus invites attack from his brother and the other nine who come against Thebes by seven gates. The sons die by each other’s hands at the gates. So inappropriate kinship relations of son and mother leads to conflict and death of the nephew/sons. The care for the father devolves on the sisters in more than one sense).

Lacan differentiates between Imaginary, Symbolic and Real which appear as a Borromean knot. Symbolic is the act of marriage, and the compact of citizens to support one another and not to fall into civil war. The Imaginary is the idea of our freedom, what is real is our fatedness according to this myth. Thus we only imagine that we are free to avoid incest and to avoid civil war, but in actuality we are forced into it by powers beyond our understanding which are mostly unconscious. The Unconscious is what is is too close to be present.

The myth explores the meta-levels of Presence:
Ultra Presence — Blindness with Inner sight
Wild Presence — Nomadic wandering between cities in the hinterlands
Hyper Presence — The Presence of the Sphinx between the two crimes.
Process Presence — Process by which the Stranger becomes King becomes Pharmacon
Pure Presence — King and Queen on the Dias

What is fascinating is that Identity, Presence and Truth are the fundamental aspects underlying formal systems, and the relations between these give us its properties: clarity (well-formedness), completeness and consistency.

When we add reality we get three further properties which are validation, verification and coherence. But we also get meaning. Therefore, with reality comes meaning or intelligibility.

The myth also explores the meta-levels of Reality:

Ultra Reality — Noumena
Wild Reality — The real is illusion and the illusion is real
Hyper Reality — the impossibly of telling the difference between reality and illusion
Process Reality — The process of becoming real from out of illusion.
Pure Reality — Objective/Subjective comprehension of what Is

The emergent event begins with the utterance of the oracle. At Delphi there are priestesses who sit on a tripod over a crack in the ground from which an ecstasy overwhelms them which are interpreted and put into words by the Priests. Normally these pronouncements are in response to questions, but other times they are made without any question. Delphi is the place where Apollo killed the Python. It is the place that holds the navel of the earth, i.e. the stone which is on no boundary from which all the boundary stones are measured. However, everything that occurs is seeded by the actions of the father of Oedipus.

As is the case in most climactic drama, much of what constitutes the myth of Oedipus takes place before the opening scene of the play. In his youth, Laius was a guest of King Pelops of Elis, and became the tutor of Chrysippus, youngest of the king’s sons, in chariot racing. He then violated the sacred laws of hospitality by abducting and raping Chrysippus, who according to some versions killed himself in shame. This cast a doom over Laius and his descendants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_the_King

Thus the father violated the bounds between Man and boy, and was a pederast. This ramified into the violation of the incest taboo and the taboo against parricide. This further ramified into civil war, which ultimately became a confrontation between sovereignty and family or traditional values which demands that the dead kin are buried which results in Antigone being buried alive. Antigone, i.e. being alive and dead at the same time walled within her tomb.

In the first utterance the Oracle responded that Laius would be killed by his own son, he violated a youth and thus a youth of his own making will violate him. In the second utterance the Oracle tells Oedipus that he will marry his mother and kill his father. And so he flees Corinth in order to avoid that fate. So the miasma goes though emergent phases:

nihilism paradox
ULTRA aspects
pederasty — cannot make non-nihilistic distinctions
WILD aspects —
incest parricide
HYPER aspects
finding sacred ground as a place to die
PROCESS aspects
civil war
PURE aspects
breaking the laws of the sovereign that goes against the principles of kinship
ULTRA aspects
alive/dead supra-rational

Because the core of the Western worldview is nihilistic the emergent event starts from that background on which emergence itself is seen. In this case the emergent event is the arising of a miasma. First the guest relation is broken by the pederasty of Laius by the violation of the son of the host. Then Lais gets the word from the oracle and sets his own son out to die to avoid the truth of the oracle, but then later the oracle speaks to Oedipus and adds more information about the curse, which then Son tries to avoid. What father and son have in common is their attempt to avoid the truth of the oracle. Oedipus meets the Sphinx between his two crimes, and he answers the question of the Sphinx acting as oracle himself, responding to questions. The death of the Sphinx allows him to become King because he saved the city from the monster, and there just happened to be a queen without a husband in the city, whom he marries. His mother kills herself and he blinds himself upon realizing the full truth of this realization of his fate by conforming to what the Oracle had told him would happen. He wanders with his daughters after his exile, and eventually makes the non-nihilistic distinction as to where he should die, i.e. violating sacred land. What follows is civil war where one brother kills the other, and then the daughter who is like Athena, the favorite of the Father, the willful one, asserts the right of death rites over the rule of the sovereign who demands that no death rites are performed. This leads to the daughter being buried alive and thus having a fate in which she is both dead and alive at the same time until finally death overtakes her.

Antigone reaffirms the family ties and thus brings the miasma to an end by her ability to discern non-nihilistic distinctions between the rule of the sovereign and self-rule upholding the families honor so that the fates will not be unleashed should we fail to bury our dead kin.

In this emergence Hegel’s sees pure spirit arising. Pure Spirit is the face of the Absolute that mediates between in-time and out-of-time. Pure spirit mediates between the FATHER and the SON in an absolute sense between creator and avatar. In this interpretation Absolute Spirit is non-dual, i.e. supra-rational.

Antigone can make non-nihilistic distinctions which her grandfather and father and brothers cannot make. And so the outcome of the emergent event is to produce the non-nihilistic distinction on the background of nihilism that is carried forward as a miasma through the generations until the nihilism turns into its opposite which is a organic distinction upholding the responsibilities toward the family against the law and rule of the sovereign. A violation of the trust of the sovereign, leads eventually to the direct opposition to the will of the sovereign.

I hope this indicates the depth of the archetypal tragedy of Oedipus and his family. What is the non-nihilistic distinctions between comedy and tragedy? Between laughing and crying? Answer this and you realize the nondual center between freedom and causality.

Apollo counseled us: everything in moderation and know thyself.

http://www.quora.com/Tragic-Figures/Who-are-some-of-the-most-memorable-tragic-figures-either-in-fiction-movies-or-in-real-life-Why

Its mortality. Their mortality.

Like everyone I think that I must be different, not like the others that are going to die, but I know I am not.

Heidegger talks about how Dasein is immersed in the Mitsein, The They. It is when Dasein orients toward its own death, which will totalize its life, that it becomes authentic.

So between my mortality and their mortality is the possibility of delusion, or authenticity according to Heidegger.

Of course, Adorno wrote the Jargon of Authenticity deconstructing this idea of Heideggers.

One very interesting book about the body is S. Todes Body and World http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Todes

http://www.quora.com/What-one-feature-do-you-not-like-about-your-physical-body