The big idea that we can learn from Buddhism and Taoism is Nonduality, these are two examples of nonduality one with the source in India and the other in China. These two different ideas of nonduality came into relation with each other in China and Tibet giving rise to advanced forms of thought that far surpass Western thought in many ways. On the one hand we have DzogChen in Tibet and on the other hand we have ideas like those of Fa Tsang in China, and later Chan monks who appreciated both Emptiness of Buddhism and Void of Taoism and could pass back and forth between them making the distinction of the difference that makes a difference between them such as Stonehouse.

Now here what the West needs to learn and has been avoiding learning all this time, which is that all traditions encounter a moment in which nonduality arises as a possibility, and that possibility transforms those traditions. In China that encounter was between Confucianism and Taoism. There the court Taoist works were destroyed and Taoism was allowed to continue on as a non-court phenomena basically as something that one could retire to after court service. But we have now recovered those destroyed documents and that allows us to assess court Taosim and to see what it really was like and of course this gives us a completely different view of the Chinese intellectual development. On the other hand in India this Nonduality appeared in Buddhism and perhaps partially in Jainism. Buddhism was a hersey and eventually that heresy was reabsorbed into mainstream Hinduism, and actually died out in India itself, but not before affecting all the other societies in the region, including China and Tibet. In the case of India the nondual tradition was reabsorbed as Avida Vedanta, and the Buddha eventually become just another avatar of Vishnu.

So while in China there as a standoff but mutual tolerance between Confucianism and its nondual tradition, in India there was reabsorption that transformed Hinduism into nondual strains. Also in China there was enough similar talk to Taoism that there could be intellectual rapprochement between Chinese Confucian philosophy and the nondual tradition from Taoism. They tended to be amalgamated later under the pressure of Buddhism as a foreign religion in China. And excellent example is Lo Chen Shun’s Knowledge Painfully Acquired (one of my favorite books).

But in the West whenever nonduality arose it was suppressed with violence. So in the West nonduality was not tolerated. Rather radical dualism was more influential than any form of nonduality. For instance, Greek Philosophy was heavily influenced by the Persian culture and its radical opposition between its dualistic gods. Gnosticism appears to be an offshoot of Magnetism which also had radical duality at its core with a radically transcendent notion of God, as different from the Archons who are tyrants that govern the lower spheres and earth. A good account of the history of dualism in the West is Coming to Our Senses by Morris Berman. So with heavy Eastern influence toward extreme dualism and the reaction against Buddhism by Aristotle, who explicitly takes exception to the Tetralemma the tradition from the beginning was oriented toward dualism. This pattern only become more and more emphasized as the tradition unfolded and whenever some nondual alternative arose it was put down by force and marginalized, so that no nondual alternative appears to ever have gained foothold, and the alternative Gnosticism had an even more radical duality than was the conventional approach. This was so extreme that when the alternative Heresy of nonduality arose as Islam within the Western tradition the Christians eventually declared all-out war against it, which has continued through the colonial period.

So the biggest idea that can be learned by the West is how to deal with nonduality, and how to think about nonduality, and how to base ones way of life on it. Nonduality means Not One! Not Two! Not Many! In other words it is something that is not understandable conceptually, and something that is impervious to being related to number and other fundamental concepts. It is something that is non-experiential and non-conceptual. It is an alternative beyond the logical possibilities. Our ability to indicate it, tells us something about human nature that is important, and that has been shut out of our Western tradition from the beginning. We have not even really began to come to terms with nonduality within the Western tradition itself. Rather what happens is people think that they can jump ship and enter into the alternative nondual traditions that are imported into the West. So there is no real conversation between these other traditions and the Western tradition, even though a few philosophers were influenced by the Western representations of Buddhism. It turned out that the West recognized that Sanskrit was an Indo-European as well and so Hinduism was given special status as part of the Western tradition, and Western philosophers became interested in Buddhism like Schopenhauer. But for the most part these philosophers did not understand Buddhism, and so it is only recently that enough was known and enough was translated to have a good idea about what Buddhism was really about. Now there has been at least a generation who could know enough about Buddhism to actually make the comparison with Western Philosophy that would have significant philosophical impact.

So for instance I had a full set of seven courses that covered the whole of the tradition of Buddhism from Alfonso Verdu. I have been reading Sutras and secondary literature in English ever since. And there are enough trustworthy works by scholars in English that it is possible to get a view now days that is beyond the early orientalism, and beyond the popularizations such as by Alan Watts and others. The reading of Western philosophy into Oriental Philosophy is still going on even with the scholarly works on Buddhism and other nondual traditions. It is really difficult to extract ourselves from the influence of our own tradition in order to get a clear view of the different concerns and different organization of other foreign traditions. Effectively I realized that in order to not read Western philosophy unconsciously into Buddhist philosophy I had to master Western Philosophy. And sure enough if you know something about Western philosophy you can see how the various interpretations of Buddhism is infected by Western ideas. It is only if we get clear about what Buddhist tradition itself has to say for itself without these contaminations that we can really compare the two with confidence that we are not just projecting an orientalist vision on the foreign tradition. But this is very difficult. Ultimately we realize that we are so caught up in the Western tradition that we cannot extract ourselves. So it is better to just talk about the Western tradition, even though our inspiration may come from our understanding of the nondual traditions. We cannot be sure about ourselves not being affected by our own tradition in subtle way that skews our view of Buddhist and other nondual traditions.

But this not really a problem because we have the example of Nagarjuna and how he showed that Emptiness is at the core of Logic. This move is universal and so we can apply the same approach ourselves within the Western branch of the Indo-European tradition as it was applied to the Eastern Branch previously. And so even though we cannot be sure of our interpretation of Buddhism, because Buddhism is from the Indo-European tradition, the same strategy can be applied to our part of that tradition as was originally applied by Nagarjuna without fear of misinterpreting Buddhism. Buddhism is a rebellion against Being, and it substitutes the focus on Existence for Being. So the relation between Sat, or Sein, or Being and Existence is the same in both cases. Western Existentialism is really polluted by the concept of Being and does not actually approach the understanding of Existence, because it does not see it as nondual, but as a dual with Being. So we have to be careful in our comparisons of Existentialism to Buddhism.

The key point is when we point out that the logical operators are separated from each other by discontinuities. and the three operators are combined to create four operators that combine unary and binary operators. There are four such combined operators AND, OR, NAND, NOR. Since the discontinuity between AND / OR is absolute and the discontinuity between AND/OR // NEGATION is absolute, then it is in these discontinuities we can posit the presence of emptiness. Without these distinctions there would be no logic, and so emptiness is implicit in logic, and we can locate it at the center of the minimal system of the combined operators. Emptiness is there at the empty center of logic itself. Emptiness is nondual, and it is Not One! Not Many! It is non-conceptual and non-experiential. It pervades all of logic and thus everything else. And that is the key. We live in a culture that is obsessed by Sets and which eschews Masses. But just as Sets have Syllogistic Logic so Masses have pervasion logic, for instance like that of the Laws of Form by G. Spencer Brown as interpreted by N. Hellerstein in Diamond Logic and Delta Logic. So we must learn to switch to pervasion logic to understand Emptiness, and this is one of the main difficulties in our understanding the concept and its relation to logic. In Sanskrit the logic was a pervasion logic to begin with, and so there was a natural fit for the concept of emptiness in logic. But for us there is a cultural blindspot which does not recognize the dual of the syllogism as pervasion logic, and thus it is difficult to conceptualize emptiness and its pervasion of everything from the core of Logic which is its empty center. Once it is taken seriously that emptiness is at the core of logic, as Nargarjuna showed, then it is almost impossible to deny it. Basically you can kill anyone who points it out, but you cannot make it go away. So from this seed the stage is set for the transformation of the worldview, because it cannot really rid itself of nonduality that is implied by the existence of discontinuities between logical operators. The fact that it is at the core of the logical operators and their distinction from each other making their difference possible means that nonduality is prior to all concepts, and all operations. This has a transformative influence on all concepts in the tradition eventually if it is taken to its logical conclusion. And this is the transformation that needs to take place within our out of balance tradition. We can take hints from the history of Buddhism and Taoism, but really the entire transformation of our ways of thinking needs to take place as the logical consequence of emptiness being the kernel of logic itself. Of course, in Buddhism this emptiness is associated with Silence. And since logic is the core of language all of Logos is affected. On the other hand we start with atomism where atoms are seen as being within a void, and that void is the Taoist void within nature, and so there is another type of nonduality that we also have to deal with which is the Void of empty space. Thus the core duality in our tradition Logos/Physus is mirrored by the nondual distinction between Emptiness/Void. Once we replace the core duality with a duality of nonduals then we have to consider what the next move might be. And I suggest that this next move is to go deeper as we see in DzogChen to higher logical types of nonduals. I call the deeper nondual Manifestation, following Meister Eckhart as interpreted by M. Henry in The Essence of Manifestation. There are at least two deeper levels of nonduals: Manifestation and beyond that the Amanifest.

The other way to go is to rebuild the worldview out of the field created by the presence of the striated and unstriated pair at the center of the vortex of the worldview called emptiness and void. I call this field the Pleorma. Pleroma means fullness, and is a gnostic term. But here we merely mean the field of asymmetric opposites out of which the worldview arises. The first two of these which are countable is Beyng/Being, and Oblivion/Forgetfulness. Notice that all of Heideggers philosophy revolves around the Forgetfulness of Being (Sein) and our Oblivion to the Ereignis of Beyng (Seyn). So Heidegger was on to something very fundamental in his philosophical exploration that is not immediately obvious to the casual observer. He was describing the layers of the production of the Worldview as it circled like a cyclone around the empty center described by the Empty/Void. But we can go beyond that by exploring deeper nonduals such as manifestation as suggested by Meister Eckhart one of the voices pointing at the possibility of non-duality within our tradition. There are others later like Blake whose philosophy should be considered as the visionary equivalent of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel was one of the few Western philosophers to understand the import of emptiness and to bring it into the foundations of his thought. There is a lot to learn from Hegel in this regard.

Once we see that emptiness/void the still center around which the cyclone of the worldview rages, and that we can access deeper nonduals from that center without leaving the worldview, then we can have everything that Buddhism has within the Western tradition itself without appealing to any foreign formulations. I call this the Homeward Path. It is a path we need to take seriously before the worldview completely wrecks the planet. When the Western worldview realizes that it is utterly permeated with nonduality from its kernel, many of the illusions fostered by Being are just going to fall apart and fade away naturally, at least for some. Meaning flows out of the nondual, and when we tap into that emptiness/void at the center of our worldview as nondual we will realize that there is a groundswell of meaning that is there to be tapped that will make it possible to understand the tradition anew in its own terms without its being violated by any other tradition. The possibility of self-transformation is there at its core and has been suppressed all this time, and is waiting to unfold naturally as it has in all the other traditions. All the necessary resources are there within the tradition itself, particularly in the works of Plato, to understand emptiness as interpenetration and to have models of it that place in a new light all our previous models based on duality. I call these models the Special Systems. You can read about them in my works at http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer. I have been exploring this alternative horizon that looks out from the kernel of the Western worldview on the Nondual for decades. It is a wonderful vista that transforms all you know about the tradition when seen from the perspective of the nondual. Please join me in appreciating this wonder.  Because the nondual is fundamental is is encoded even in its own suppression. It is impossible to get rid of no matter how many you kill who hold these heretical nondual based-views. So the eventual transformation of the tradition by nonduality is inevitable. But I don’t believe it will happen from foreign sources. But our fascination with these foreign sources of nonduality is a hint that our need for this new perspective is great indeed and is in fact overwhelming due to the pent up demand by enforcing dualism for so long.

What we can note is that Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism is coming to the West as an intact tradition via refugees. And they bring with them the highest form of nonduality that was ever created in the East which is DzogChen, and which is comparable to the work of Fa Tsang in China that began to combine Taoism and Buddhism to get to deeper insights into the Deeper nonduals. These various transformations in Buddhism are refered to as the turnings of the Wheel. There is Hinayana, Mahayana, Tantrayana, and DzogChen, thus four turnings of the Wheel of the Dharma. I think with the transfer of Buddhism to the West as a living tradition we might be ripe for the next turning of the Wheel of the Dharma, the Fifth Turning. I believe that many of these nondual traditions will coalesce in the West. For instance, Islam as expressed in Sufism is also about deeper nondualities. So when we look at the potential for the transformation of Buddhism into a fifth turning beyond DzogChen, and we look at the tradition of Sufism and its understanding of deeper nonduals, and we look at the potential for self-transformation in the Western worldview, then we see that things are ripe for multiple simultaneous  convergences, not to produce one tradition, but which will allow us to see by their mirroring the differences and similarities in a new light. DzogChen exposes the possibility of deeper nonduals especially in the form that we see it given by Mipham which is true to the initial definition by Manjushrimitra. Within Sufism we see the original Western nondual Heresy that could not be stamped out. And in the West we can go directly from the fundamental duality of Logos/Physus to the dual nonduals of emptiness/Void, and beyond that to manifestation (tajalliat of the sifat) and the Amanifest (Dhat). In Buddhism and Sufism these insights are tied to meditation practices and a tradition of exploring deeper states of consciousness. Our exploration of the Homeward path has much to gain from these prior explorations. But we need to make them our own on our own terms. It is only if we make them our own on our own terms that we can really transform the worldview from the inside out. And we really need to do that soon before irrevocable damage is made to the planet. In other words just as Buddhism make fundamental changes to Hindu Culture, and Islam made fundamental changes to the original Middle Eastern Greco-Roman and legacy cultures, so to the Homeward Path can make fundamental changes to Western dualistic culture in spite of its deep seated animosity against all nondual approaches rooted in our dogmatic history. But my point is that the Western dualistic culture is really vulnerable to this transformation. In a sense all that is needed is for the move that Nagarjuna made to be made in our cultural context and the rest should follow naturally, as it transforms itself from within. This is because no one can deny that the discontinuities between the logical operators is there. The are in fact the linchpin of the entire worldview. Once we place the nondual interpretation on those discontinuities, then nonduality overwhelms all duality. Because nonduality is non-conceptual and non-experiential there is nothing that can stop it from pervading everything. All concepts and all experiences are pervaded now if we but knew. Prajna as the realization of emptiness permeating everything is very close at hand. When you hold up non-nihilistic distinctions that cannot be denied and are obvious then the illusory dualistic distinctions fade quickly and are realized to be illusions. In a sense all of the philosophical tradition except Plato is swept away, and in another sense it stands as irrelevant unless it takes into account the prior and more original reality of the nondual permeating everything. All dualistic philosophies point to this original nondual possibility unknown to themselves. It is so clear once one achieves the right standpoint that Western Philosophy was circling around it lost without finding it throughout the tradition. But we only have to take a few hints from Nagarjuna and we have found it and identified it and seen its efficacy in transforming the tradition. These are subtle winds of change within the tradition. I sense them building into a perceptible breeze. I invite you to feel the coolness of that new breeze blowing our way.

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

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/

Bergson is important for his exploration of time. He also seemed believe that that here was an elan vital that made life different from inorganic matter. He was thought to be a vitalist. And he was one of the outsider philosophers from which Deleuze took inspiration. The Deleuze move of sparing with and transforming outsider philosophers was like Foucault’s move of using secondary texts to record the stable points in the development of the Western episteme. Bergson’s philosophy was found interesting by Wm. James.

Reviewing these sources and trying to remember what I read of Bergson long ago made me realize that I had forgotten much, and that he was the source of the idea of the multiple, and the importance of heterogeneity was a surprise to me. I think I need to study him again and probably the new post-Deleuzian commentaries. It appears that his idea of “duree” the duration of the present where times qualitatively heterogeneity is intuited is probably a good source for my own ideas of the heterochronic, i.e. four dimensional time. It also seems to be related to Peirce’s idea of precission, which is a way of looking at the parts in relation to the whole rather than analysis.

So this question prompted me to put Bergson back on my reading list. Basically Bergson is attempting comprehend how to bring Kantianism back into time and to reconcile it with evolution. Made me wonder how much G.H. Mead who talks about emergence might have been affected by Bergson beyond the effects of Wm. James and Peirce. It seems that what Bergson is talking about is very similar to what Mead explores in The Philosophy of the Present where shows the importance of emergence as the way that creativeness appears objectively in society.

We are in this strange situation in which systems thinking is actually fairly pervasive but it is still being sold as if it were something new. Generally this is done by adding something to it and then acting like this is the real systems thinking for which the earlier versions were just a prelude. We are actually in a situation where systems thinking is now too pervasive and we are starting to call everything a system, and so not the other schemas are not getting enough attention, like form and pattern. In the seventies and eighties the cutting edge was to combine formalism, structuralism (pattern schema), and system into more complex higher level schemas. But since the system schema more or less won the battle for people’s hearts and minds now we need to pay more attention to the pattern (structural) and the form schema.

So I almost want to say, look anywhere and you will see the systems schema being used as the main way of organizing and understanding things. We now have systems engineering which is the discipline of building complex systems as in Aerospace companies that are complicated conglomerates of hardware and software. And if the hardware is given on a standard platform then we build software systems. There are many books that tell you how to do requirements engineering, architectural design. As well as implementation, verification, validation, integration and test of these complex systems. Almost all disciplines treat their subject matter in a systematic way these days. And they consider for the most part the phenomena that they take to be their subject matter as a system.

Values or Virtues?

Aristotle talked about Virtues, it is Nietzsche who culminates the long decent into value by asking about the Value of Values.

The value of values Nietzsche decided is whatever promotes life, and lots of bizarre things promote life, lots of life denying things promote life on a local and practical level. So for instance even crazy things like celibacy of monks, if it can someone else to feed you while you sit around and pray, can be seen as a twisted but authentic way to promote life, and it is good for the improvement of the species because those people who do this automatically select their death promoting ways to not be passed down in their genes. So what seems a bizarre anti-life move really supports life because beings that make this mistake will not reproduce and thus there are less likely to be as many people like that around. In fact, we might see the rise of secularism as the inevitable result self-selection to not reproduce, in other words globally life wins even though locally people who fall into this mistake thrive getting a free ride for a while, but ultimately, those who make this life denying mistake eliminate themselves.

But I would go further than Nietzsche and question the decent into value itself from virtue.

Values are amazingly like beliefs. In other words we feel we can have what any beliefs or values we like, that we as autonomous and free individuals decide our own values and our own beliefs. And Nietzsche as a free spirit only makes it explicit that we can make our own meaning in our lives by deciding what we believe and what we value. But of course, this is not true, it merely leads directly to nihilism because the values that we just make up to believe in have no grounds at all but our own autonomy and freedom. Kant at least believed that a certain responsibility came with this freedom and autonomy. But that was left behind long ago, as Protestantism split off Belief from Action, and decided that Fatalism was the key to success as colonials. Do as much damage as you like, and then claim to be reborn.

Virtue is something different. It is something that comes from the outside. It is something that gives you character and is something you must earn by your actions. It is something that comes out of you as you are seen responding to situations by your fellow citizens.

The key virtues are courage (what it takes to defend a city in a hostile world), temperance (balance in yourself), justice (balance in society), and wisdom (knowing yourself) not directly but as you come to be known though your actions in response to situations faced by the city who share the same fate.

Balance inwardly and outwardly is rta, arte, right. This is the deeper nondual beyond order. Order is seen in the laws that a city state imposes on itself via its democracy at least in the Athenian version of things we have adopted due to the success of Alexander against the Persians. Keeping oneself orderly in the face of strife requires courage, the courage of ones convictions, the courage to stand ones ground, the courage to protect the commons of one’s city, and one’s family, and ones neighbors, and ones friends, i.e. acting like Hector. That is the courage to take on the unbeatable, inhuman, berserker Achilles to protect ones family and city. Rta on the other hand means cosmic harmony, inward and outward harmony that gives rise to justice outwardly and temperance inwardly. Rta is the spirit of the law, as opposed to the letter of the law. Jesus supported Rta over the Law. It is the support of the Dharma that we see as the ideal in the Mahabharata. Krisna systematically gets each of the Pandavas to violate Dharma. In a cosmic war one will violate the Dharma, you have to win. When Paris stole Helen he violated Dharma, and that is why his city was laid siege to by the Achaeans, i.e. Kauravas. i.e. those that were born of earth, just as the Kauravas were born from an iron ball.

Amongst the primary antagonists was Duryodhan(Sanskrit: दुर्योधन) named Suyodhan (Sanskrit: सुयोधन) at birth, but took the name Duryodhana (roughly meaning ‘unconquerable’) of his own free will[citation needed]. He was the eldest of the 100 brothers known as the Kauravas, who were born to the blind king of Hastinapura Dhritarashtra and his queen Gandhari (princess of Gandhara).

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

The Acheeans/Kauravas are the men of earth talked about by Plato who only believe in what they can hold in their hands. They are what Nietzsche calls the Last Men who merely blink and blink. They are us. Helen was a fertility goddess, like Brinhilda, and Paris took that fertility goddess from the Achaeans, since that was life itself in the form of reproductive resources, she had to be recovered at all costs. Helen had five lovers as Draupadi had five husbands. Ultimately as in the dice game in the Mahabharata, everything turns on who owns Draupadi, and she remains autonomous because her husband who loses her, loses himself first. The dice game in the Mahabharata is equivalent to the ruse of the Trojan horse in the epic when Troy was taken. The Trojan Horse embodies all the kinds of Being, all the meta-levels of Being and thus is a face of the Indo-European worldview. It is the emergent event for the Trojans, what is truly alien, the trick that they fell for that lost their city. Similarly in the dice game the Pandavas lose everything, including their brothers, including the player of the game who loses, and including Draupadi, but because he loses himself first, Draupadi claims that she cannot be lost, and a miracle saves her from being disrobed, her wrappings of her clothes become endless when they try to disrobe her, and this leads to the exile of the Pandavas, just as the trick of Odysseus leads to his exile.

Going deeper wisdom has to do with knowing oneself, and that means knowing what is good for oneself, and what is bad for oneself, and knowing about the evil in oneself. And so knowledge of the hidden sun of the Good (Amun) is wisdom. That can only be known by knowledge of what is right tempered by experience. It is the same as when Solomon discerns who is the mother by threatening to cut to child claimed by two women into two parts. The true mother gives up the child. Knowing this goes beyond the spirit of the law to a deeper level of the nondual core of the Western worldview where one knows what is good and how to differentiate that from what is bad and evil. That is knowledge of the intrinsic variety of things that exists beyond the dharma of caste. Within each caste that has its own RTA, Arte, there is still variety of people which differ as to what is good for them, and when they know what is good for them, and for others this is wisdom. It is an understanding that can only be known by experiencing the variety. You only really know someone by traveling with them, living with them, or doing business with them.

But the virtues go deeper than this because beyond the Good there is the deeper nondual of Fate, in which one drees ones wyrd. We might call this insight that is deeper than wisdom. Insight is a virtue that sees the end in the beginning. Everything is present in the beginnings of things if we were just insightful enough to comprehend it.

Beyond this virtue based on insight there is also the realization of the sources. The sources are what Jung calls the archetypes, i.e. the inverse of the ideal forms of Plato. But while source forms of Plato are inward, the archetypes are outward. Shaykh al-Akbar names the true sources that are beyond inward and outward the ayn al-Thabita. Archetypes are objective, i.e. there have always been fathers and mothers. So all versions of Fathers are a field, and all versions of mothers are a field, and everyone who is born has a father and a mother, somehow, even if they are missing in action, and in life. Plato’s sources become the Categories in Aristotle and in Kant, they are what define the limits of who we are and what we can find intelligible. The sources and the root are beyond the limit of intelligibility, because they define that limit.

Beyond the virtue based on realization is the root. It has no corresponding basis for comprehension, because it is incomprehensible, like the understanding of the “Absolute” Absolute. This is sometimes called the Godhead by Meister Eckhart, Nirguna Brahman, Dhat, or whatever God is in the self of God to the self of God that is unfathomable. But being oriented to it is still a virtue, the ultimate virtue, and what we today call spirituality, what is left when we give up on all the trappings of Religion.

Bernstein in his lectures discussing Kant’s Third Critique says that Philosophy starts with Plato by attacking Art, and Life. Philosophy prides itself on being anti-art and anti-life. Art is the representation of the sensual. Philosophy wants only the representations that are dealt with by reason. And as Hegel recognized pure reason is anti-life, leading to the Terror of the French revolution. Reason leads to genocide. Plato must get rid of all the adults and start with just the children for his education program to work so he can have his perfect city. Virtue is rooted in Life. But it is mostly rooted in the responses we have to things in our life, the adversity we face and overcome. Values like Beliefs are just representations. Beliefs are representations of Doxa which if grounded are related to behavior and Values are representations of Ratio with respect to moral attitudes related to behavior. If we are lucky our values are the basis of our beliefs. And if Nietzsche is right and we are all existential freespirits then we can make up any values we want, just like we can make up beliefs. Whether those beliefs and values are life affirming in the long run is their measure according to Nietzsche. Nietzsche says about Values that we should act in such a way that we can bear to repeat the same act eternally, as it returns to us over and over again in the wheel of Samsara. Nietzsche says about Belief that we should act such that we affirm our own will to power, i.e. the power of setting our own values, and thus we should believe in ourselves as the source of our own values. We eschew the Heideggarian interpretation of Will To Power as meta-will, i.e. the Will to Will. Rather, Nietzsche is saying we should exercise our Will to take Power, and define our own Being, rather than being slaves. He wants to define a morality of the Conquerors, the slave owners, of the Nobel. Those that have the Will to take Power, define what it means to remain viable and Live because they continued to live and be dominant, until they themselves were overtaken in the game of survival of the fittest. Will to power is merely the force in culture of Evolution. To read it as Meta-will as Heidegger does betrays Nietzsche’s attempt to reverse Hegel who says only the slaves can be self-conscious, and thus develop reason, and develop spirit. Nietzsche reverses Schopenhauer and says we should be joyous in our affirmation of life. The value of values themselves come from the affirmation by them of life.

But in all this we have lost track of virtue, because virtue does not come from within ourselves, but in what is drawn out of us, as we respond to strife and difficulties in the world and thus reveal our character, not as Kantian clinging to duty, but as who we are when we come to know ourselves based on our own actions that arise in response to external situations. In All Things Shining Kelly and Dreyfus say that there are three types of these orientations to what is beyond us that call forth from us a response, which they call phusis, poiesis, and technology. They note that phusis and technology are similar and both have dangers, while poiesis requires skills, and they recommend that we develop meta-poesis in order to understand what part of phusis and technology that we should embrace as it calls behaviors from us when we eschew our autonomy and freedom for greater responsiveness to the situation which can reveal our virtue and our character.

But it is interesting that they did not notice what I discovered recently that Aristotle’s kinds of knowledge correspond to the positions on Plato’s divided line, that I have mentioned in other collapsed posts. Basically if you want to find my most interesting posts look for them amongst the collapsed posts. They are hidden by the anonymous masses by themselves to themselves for a reason.

Anyway, be that as it may, the kinds of knowledge are as follows:

Root and Sources beyond the Supra-rational limit

Nous – Suprarational LImit

Sophia – Ratio – Unrepresentable Intelligibles = Wisdom = Good and Fate

Episteme – Ratio – Representable Intelligibles = Science = Order and Right

Techne – Doxa – Grounded Beliefs/Appearances = Poesis = True and Real

Phonesis – Doxa – Ungrounded Beliefs/Appearances = Praxis = Identity Presence

Metis — Paradox Limit

Now Kelly and Dreyfus call our Phusis and say that it needs no skill to be caught up in and likens it to sporting events in our culture. It is the way the preSocratics saw Being. We can relate that to Ungrounded Appearances and Beliefs.

Poseis and Techne are on the same level. Techne is the skill (Craft) that is the kind of knowledge to know how to deal with Poesis.

When Kelly and Dreyfus talk about Technology, they are really talking about something that is based on Science, on Epistemic knowledge, it is technology based on science that has the power. And this falls into the realm of Reason applied to everything as in Kant that leads to the Terror as recognized by Hegel. It is Blake’s Urizen (God as Reason).

So I guess that what Kelly and Dreyfus are talking about is really the various levels of knowledge already identified by Aristotle that map to the Divided LIne of Plato, which is the core of our worldview, and that they are just rediscovering it in the history of Being as seen in the great works literature in our tradition.

In other words, Phusis is the core kind of Being as seen by the presocratics as flux, so called things wooshing up, lingering and fading away as Kelly puts it. The divided between Phusis and Logos is the fundamental one in our tradition, and that is what gets us defined as rational animals, animals with language who can use logic and give reasons for our actions. This is what we see brought together in the Divided Line as ratio and doxa. What wooshes up, lingers and fades, in a showing and hiding display, is appearances, and Kant says we can never get away from those appearances, and thus all philosophy must be some form of Husserlian Phenomenology in the end because there are limits to experience, and it is the necessary possibilities of experience that give us knowledge of our own limits. Reason without experience of appearances based in Phusis is empty according to Kant because it only leads to the nihilism of the antimonies. So according to Aristotle what you do when confronted by ungrounded appearances from Phusis is use judgment. And of course Kant says that all knowledge is Judgment, i.e. a synthesis of some kind. We use Judgment to guide our Praxis in the face of ungrounded opinions and appearances that come from the phusis. But because we are part of nature, we respond to the phusis with wonder and are drawn into it and are called to action by it and get meaning from that, but we must be careful because of what Canetti calls the phenomena of Crowds and Power, i.e. we can get caught up in the wrong persons charisma and that ultimately leads to nihilism, or death camps or other bad outcomes sometimes. But other times it is harmless and good to just live in the moment and derive meaning from being immersed in the mitsein.

Kelly and Dreyfus talk about Poesis as being based on skill, and when you are skilled you can have certain things called out of you in practicing your craft, or techne. The craft is a kind of stewardship that cultivates what is possible and brings into existence the adjacent possible as S. Kauffman calls it, realizing potentials out of possibilities and actualizing them, getting around seemingly impossible barriers. I would say that techne here as a kind of knowledge that deals with poesis is what they mean by craft, which is the original meaning of techne and not what they call technology. They see this as the best way to be called to act from outside of oneself, because it is based on skills, i.e. something developed inside oneself. Just as temperance is the basis for justice there must be some balance between inside and outside to have genuine balance.

Kelly and Dreyfus talk about Technology and Heidegger equates that with Nihilism, but this is just the same as we see in Kant’s antimonies of reason. Reason by itself leads to Nihilism, and Technology that is developed based on science, i.e. epistemic knowledge, is merely an extension into the practical realm of the progress made by science in understanding the universe in terms of Physics. The physis is reified by epsitemic knowledge into the physical universe that has particles that follow laws of nature dictated by forces which we can make use of to create technological infrastructures that in turn transform our lives from subsistence to some type of control over nature, and of course that leads to all the problems of the disconnection between ourselves and nature, i.e. us as the Other of Nature, i.e. the true “Alien” because of our Alienation from Nature. And this alienation in relation to others leads to the terror and genocide, and basically the history of the twentieth century.

So the ways that Kelly and Dreyfus say that the Western Culture has developed through the changes in the stages in Being as seen in Western Literature, from Polythesitic, to MonoTheistic, back to Polytheism perhaps, at least a postmodernism that tries to go beyond the divided between romanticism and enlightenment. They see Melville as the precursor of Nietzsche in this regard. But that in a way means that we are returning to Virtue from the nihilism of our meta-belief that we can make up our own beliefs and values. They want us to engage in a meta-poesis in which we try to figure out what we should get caught up in from the outside, as they overemphasize the call of the external authority over self-autonomy and freedom of reason alone as the arbiter of morality as we see in Kant’s categorical imperative.

But we might be tempted to say that the next stage is to push beyond the epistemic knowledge into sophia, since it does seem as if Western Culture is climbing this ladder of the divided line in the account of Kelly and Dreyfus. And so perhaps we will graduate to a calling by wisdom which goes beyond epsitemic knowledge to be rooted in the non-representable intelligibles. We can only hope. But that means approaching Good and Fate as nonduals from the kernel of our tradition and allowing them to guide our actions giving us virtue as we respond to the invisibles and cease to be men of earth, we will have to stop being the last men blinking and start to try to become stewards of the earth like Nietzsche’s Uber-Mench, rather than George Bernard Shaw’s “Supermen” who ultimately become the Blond Beast that Nietzsche talks about in the Nazi rise to power.

Being drawn by the non-representable intelligibles is what Jung talks about in his Archetypal Psychology. It has always been there as a possibility, and always been actualized. But now in the age where we enter the nihilistic marketplace for enlightenment that spirituality holds open to us, where all spiritual paths are seen to go to ultimately the same place, rather than different places, where spiritual paths cannot be discriminated. This is a new level of nihilism that Zizek rightfully criticizes as just the latest source of ideological support. As Adorno says, it is “minduflness”, i.e. mindlessness, i.e. not thinking, that the powers that be want you to attempt to attain because it dis-empowers you and makes it so you are no longer a political threat.

I think that All Things Shining makes a really valuable contribution by highlighting the necessity of virtue over values as what is needed to escape from nihilism. Nietzsche asks about the value of values. But we should ask about the Virtue of virtues, and that must be something like what Kelly and Dreyfus is talking about as meta-poesis. It is looking at the things that draw us externally to act and be part of life, and trying to distinguish what is good to be caught up in and drawn by over what is not good to be caught up in and drawn by. But not just good, but all the nonduals: Order, Right, Good, Fate, Source, Root. We must apply all these criteria in our meta-poiesis by which we decide that the virtue of virtues are. Thus when you ask me what I value.

I value Virtue over Value. Virtue itself is virtuous when we look at it through the eyes of Meta-poiesis of All Things Shining or though the nonduals that determine the Virtue of all virtues. What we learn of ourselves from being drawn out by the world and the ways in which it reveals itself to us and through us concerns our ultimate character, and others learn who we are also. And we are known by the principles we uphold in our practices and how we use our knowledge, and by our wisdom.

You have got to be kidding!

This is a silly question and deserves a silly answer.

However, let us stand back a moment from all the silliness, and think who the aliens are. Of course, they are the Other of our imagination. But just like Kant’s Copernican turn where we realize that objects must conform to the limits of our possibilities of experience, so also the Other must conform to our limits of comprehending Otherness, and thus actually the Other is always Us. So for instance the Barbarians of the Greeks, i.e. the Scythians, were just seen as inverting Greek values, and the Celts similarly were an invention of the Barbarian other by the Romans. So too today we are continually inventing the Alien, to horrify ourselves, and really merely exploring the limits of our own sensibilities. The truly Alien would be incomprehensible, might not even be experienceable.

So why is the question silly. We because it assumes that Aliens would have spacecraft, i.e. would need to travel in space as we do. It assumes that they would end up as part of what we fantasize as “objective reality”. And it assumes just as we have speed for our spacecraft, they have speed for their spacecraft. So this Alien is really just like us. And therefore is not really Alien. What is truly Alien is the unknown unknown. This question is silly because it assumes it can know about the unknown before it becomes known.

Now the corollary of this view is the fact that the true Alien is Us. We are the most Alien of all things in the known world, because we can Alienate ourselves from nature, to such an extent that we are destroying our own planet, when it is the only refuge in a hostile universe, and given the knowledge that we are probably trapped in our solar system. Just going to the nearest star would take a very long time given the speed of light as a speedlimit. If Aliens did exist in “Objective Reality” like us they would have the same problem, and so chances of meeting them are slim. Only if they had started broadcasting TV like we did announcing our presence to the universe, long ago would we have any idea that they ever existed. And in fact we find that there are no television signals flooding our skies from some alien civilization, and so we are feeling very alone in our universe right now. We are the only reasoning animal left on this planet and it is starting to look like we might be the only ones in the universe unless SETI comes up with something. Producing electromagnetic waves and broadcasting them is a very basic thing for another Alien civilization to do, or so we think based on our own behavior, so if there were others out there we would expect to find something. But then maybe other intelligent races on other planets realized that broadcasting their presence was probably a mistake, because they might come to our notice. And if they did come to our notice given our colonial past that might not be a healthy thing to do, and so in fear of the same thing happening to them, as happened to the many worlds that were destroyed by colonialism, they decided that it was better not to broadcast, and they instead put their effort into living at one with their planet and surviving, rather that producing global climate change and destroying themselves along with all the other species in their ecosystem. Any recent science fiction plots of movies come to mind? Those people who lived in trees and for whom trees were sacred, were us, the Indo-Europeans. That is how we started out before we started rapaciously destroying everything in site and had the bright idea of turning Earth into something like Venus.

So it is us who are the Aliens, because we are Alienated from ourselves and the planet’s ecology that supports us and allows us to live one brief moment as a so called civilization before we snuff ourselves out along with the rest of the species on the planet. All images of aliens are images of ourselves. We are the monsters, we are the source of horror and what is truly terrifying in the universe. We are that which is so cut off from itself that it does not know itself for the horror of what it is to everything else in the universe.

And what is so strange about this is that we think of ourselves as Dasein, i.e. that which projects spacetime and the categories within it and thus gives rise to its own world and to itself, bootstrapping itself into being from existence. This is the great Trinitarian project. God became human, so we can become gods ourselves and lord over creation. God the Father gave rise to the world, but God the Father is just God the son who is a human being in the world that he has created. This metaleptic move, of creating the world and oneself in the world, and thus seeing oneself as the source of the world in which one is in, means that we as autonomous and free beings are cut off from our own roots in nature, we live in the illusory world of Being cut off from Existence, i.,e. the nature that gave rise to us. And it is this that makes us a horror to everything in existence which we seem to be bent on exploiting until it is all used up. We are proving our groudlessness every day be eating up ground ourselves that we depend on, i.e. earthly resources. We believe that we can make our own resources, i.e. have the illusion that we can just keep printing money and it will continue to have value. Where ever you turn in our society there is this same motif being played out, i.e. the motif called Nihilism by Nietzsche and Heidegger that is at the core of the Western worldview. And it is this motif of our alienation not just from nature, but from our own human nature, that is truly Alien and terrifying.

We looked at the truly Alien and found out it was Us.

Given this all we need to know what our own spacecraft speed may be at any given time and we suddenly know the answer to this very silly question.

There seems to be some confusion as to what the Absolute IS. There is a question that frivolously talks about an “absolute answer” and I tried to say that answers and absolutes really have little in common because answers are relative, and absolutes are like transcendentals in that they are just not supposed to consort with anything relative. But then I thought perhaps they meant an “absolutely truthful answer” and that makes sense, because we expect the absolute to consort with the aspects of Being or Existence. And we expect questions and answers to relate to the truth. So a better question is perhaps Is there an absolutely truthful answer? [http://www.quora.com/Absolute-Truth/Is-there-such-a-thing-as-an-absolutely-truthful-answer]. My inclination is to say that there is no absolutely truthful answer. But it is still an interesting matter to explore how absolute interfaces with truth and how that interfaces with questions and answers.

My take on it is this:

I often give the sequence: given, fact, theory, paradigm, epsiteme, ontos, existence, ABSOLUTE. Many times I say absolutes. By that I mean what is taken to be ultimate. It can change in different cultures over time. But this change in how we think about absolutes has no effect on THE ABSOLUTE itself, whatever that is. I would take it that THE ABSOLUTE itself is beyond all transcendentals. There can be multiple transcendentals, at least according to Kant for which Subject, Noumenal Object, and God are transcendentals. But there can only be one absolute. And that absolute does not consort with anything relativistic, or contingent. it is normally associated with the Godhead, Nirguna Brahman for instance. It is thought about by Meister Eckhart as a desert, which is the same as saying along with the Hindus that there are no characteristics of the godhead, it is empty or void or both. I often talk about it in relation to the Deeper Nondual of Manifestation, in other words it is an emergent level beyond emptiness and void, not merely just both. Interestingly Meister Eckhart says that the Trinitarian Godhead boils to produce creation and incarnation. Fascinating image from an Islamic point of view. But in Islam the equivalent to the Godhead is an even deeper nondual called Dhat beyond Manifestation (Tajalliat of the Sifat). But this association of the absolute with a very deep nondual means that it is not a transcendental, nor is it immanent, as those are duals. So absolute in this nondual sense is I think something that has not really been thought before in our tradition. Nonduals are of course non-conceptual and non-experiential. By saying that the absoute is nondual is to completely turn inside  out the idea that it is a part of a duality with what is relative. It would mean it was a-relative or a-contingent AND a-necessary or a-universal. It would place the absolute off in an orthogonal conceptual dimension from where we normally think of it as being, i.e. somewhere beyond the transcendentals.

Is there such a thing as an absolute answer? And if so what is it?

My guess is that there is no such thing as an absolute answer. Questions and Answers to not lend themselves to the absolute. Questions and answers happen in language which is itself relative in all respects (see McWhorter on Language and how every aspect of it changes completely over time). It is just amazing that language changes slow enough that we don’t lose grasp of it during our lifetimes. Absolutes are normally thought of as universals that are changeless and in fact there can only be one absolute. But we construe many different ultimates that we act as if are the absolute. An absolute answer presupposes the split between question and answer, and that split itself militates against it being absolute because that is a difference. It is really difficult to see how any answer formulated in language could be absolute. But if it were possible to convey something about the absolute by language then it would be interesting to know what it was. For instance Om! is supposedly something in language that points to the absolute. We might expect something like that in language but not an answer from a guru on top of a mountain who says some ultimately meaningful thing like “47” in answer to our query about Life, the Universe and Everything. it is a joke because concerning the absolute there can only be silence, and any absolute answer would be no answer. This is why the godhead is seen as being like a desert with no distinguishing or characteristic marks.

The ultimate question is “Why is there something rather than nothing.” An absolute answer to that would be good. But of course the tricky word there is “IS”. Being and Nothing are the roots of the Logic of Hegel. if there were an absolute it would be beyond this distinction.

Objective spacetime definitely came into existence with the big bang as our universe appeared out of the multiverse (whatever that is) which is the meta-system or environment for all universes that is described by some string theory probably at the M-theory or F-theory level, i.e. at a level beyond what we can schematize. The pluriverse is the highest schema we have and that is 9 dimensional and string theory appears just beyond what we can schematize in the tenth dimension, then M theory unifies the various string theories that are possible in the eleventh dimension, and in the twelfth dimension there is F theory that is a further simplification, but also spawns two orthogonal time lines which we do not know what to do with. In the 14th dimension we get three orthogonal timelines. These extra orthogonal time lines is precisely what is needed to break down the fundamental assumptions of metaphysics which is that time is either linear or circular (eternal return, samsara). Primordial time must be something different from either circular or linear time. As Heidegger says in Primordial Time the various moments of time are equi-primordial, and the fact that there may be orthogonal time lines as Dunne thought back in the early twentieth century means that there must be other equi-primordial moments, so for instance the mythic time of the mythopoietic can be seen in these terms. We do not have to go very far to see how this other moment of four dimensional time worked, we merely have to go back before Thales in our own tradition and look at the Greek and other mythologies, which lost their force when the symmetry breaking of the metaphysical occurred producing the illusion of three dimensional time, plus lost time, just like Minkowski spacetime has nowhere beyond the light cones.

It turns out that orthogonal timelines is exactly what is needed to understand how there can be an operating system (pluriverse) for multiple universes of which our own is just one. The reason we have a schema for it is that we can experience the multiple timelines associated with each moment of time in our own lives, and did so enmass in the mythopoietic era prior to becoming free autonomous subjects as Descartes and Kant pictured us to be, and which we are trying to live out. However, if we go back to Homer as Kelly and Deryfus do we can see that the early Greeks had a completely different orientation to the world, which they see as arising again in Melville that we associate with polytheism which they think exists before and after the monotheistic imperative we have been living out in the metaphysical era. However, since spacetime itself is projected according to Kant and not objective from our vantage point, and since objective spacetime is a noumena, then even saying that there is multidimensional space and multidimensional time is our own projection, and what existed in the multiverse is an unknown unknown which we can speculate about, unless we find some signature of it on our universe we will never know anything about it. Since there was a signature of the Big Bang (cosmic background radiation) and we can even figure out that the universe is till accelerating in its expansion, so we know that dark energy is streaming into our universe from somewhere. Since we have been able to figure out these things then we might find a meta-cosmic signature of the pluriverse somehow inscribed into our universe. But until then even the projection of multiple orthogonal timelines in the Matrix of multi-dimensional spacetime/timespace is merely our own projection from what we know about time and space in our own universe that makes our life possible on this small planet in the midst of an immense void.

Nietzsche came up with the idea of Eternal Return as a basis of moral choice. It is a hypothetical. Act as if whatever you did you would be doing eternally, and repeating it over and over forever. Could you bear that. If not don’t do it. This is the free spirit’s answer to how to make moral choices in the absence of God. But to get it another transcendental has to be projected, i.e. samsara.

So given the other answers to this question, one must ask can you do the same action again, even if you want to. Deleuze attacks that question in Difference and Repetition, and the answer is NO. The summary is Repetition is that which does NOT repeat. In other words we can do ontic repetitions of some act, say in ritual or obsessive compulsive syndrome, but at an ontological level that does not achieve Repetition. So for instance in Vedic society when they sacrificed it was to achieve wholeness, but it was through the dismemberment of something whole, so the wholeness on the ontological level was not achieved by destroying  wholeness on the ontic level. The repetition of sacrifice did not regain the primordial wholeness of Parusha, or of the Indo-European Giant which was the source of all things. To repeat is to inscribe minimal difference between copies, yet that is difference, and the difference prevents the copies from being the same as the original as we know from Art, where the original is what has value.

So if we cannot repeat an action because almost all systems in which actions are taken are non-commutative, not to mention non-associative, then how can the universe which we project as a mirror reflection of ourselves repeat the earth, and even if it repeated the earth, how could we repeat evolution, and if we repeated evolution how could we repeat all the historical accidents that led to you and me in the lives of the 80 billion or so humans that ever existed. In other words, each thing in its circumstances is unique. The confluence of identity and difference is uniqueness. It is all the meta-levels of difference and identity at the various meta-levels of Being that assures this. Eternal Return is a Transcendental in time that cannot happen, just as the idea that time is linear does not stand up either, and as Heidegger points out in Being and Time the moments of time are equi-primordial. There are three canonical moments of time (Past, Present, Future). In Old English there is only complete and incomplete where Past and Future collapse together. Prior to the Metaphysical age in the Mythopoietic there was a fourth moment of time which was mythos, the co-now. Eternal Return is an image of the Co-now, i.e. the virtual now that haunts every now.

This question appeals to the co-now, the virtual now, to ask whether it is possible in eternal return to get to the same place again in time. The answer is no. Even if the universe was infinite, there would be infinite difference and the idea that there would be repetition in infinity, assumes that infinity is linear. But we know that at the various Cardinal Alphs it is impossible to know how far apart there are, so the measure is lost in infinity that would allow for the repetition at the limit of infinity to bring us back to precisely the same spot again. The limits are all impossibilities.

So really what Eternal Return teaches us is to enjoy the moment because it will never repeat. As Buddhism says Samsara is empty, and the truth is Nirvana the freedom from samsara. Nietzsche misunderstood Buddhism seeing it as fatalistic. Because of that he fell into the very mistaken idea that Buddhism was trying to solve, and thought that Samsara could give a principle for ordering life and action, which is wrong. Nietzsche was reacting to Schopenhauer’s misinterpretation of Buddhism based on Hinayana texts that were seen to be the origin of Buddhism. It was Hegel that got it right and identified the nothing at the bottom of his dialectical logic with Buddhist emptiness. He said that emptiness/nothing and Being gave the synthesis of Heraclitian Flux, and out of that flux arises a determinate thing, i.e. the existent Dasein, which then Heidegger made the hero of Being and Time. Because it is Dasein that projects spacetime and the categories as Kant said which then gives rise to the world in which Dasein finds itself. If this is true, as western idealism has posited then it is you as a unique being that gives rise to the spacetime that you would want to repeat, and that is blatantly impossible. The repetition assumes that there could be an objective spacetime beyond our projections, which we all believe but that is a nomena, just like the mutiverse out of which the new universe would have to arise.

Since the multiverse is a noumena, then the answer has to be unknown, but probably not, rather than just no, because the multiverse is famously the unknown unknown, because we can never experience it due to the fact that it is beyond our universe, and thus beyond spacetime even in its objective form if there is such a thing which we cannot know. So this question is metaphysical even though it appears to be about something physical like the repetitions of the universe and the earth within the universe and ourselves as evolved animals on the earth given our unique history. This is why Heidegger says that Nietzsche is the last metaphysician and thus the last philosopher in the Metaphysical age.

Deep conversations are those that somehow delve into the nondual core of the worldview. I have talked about this before in other answers. The nondual core of the worldview has layers and those layers are Order, Right, Good, Fate, Source, Root. So conversation in general tends to be erratic because one is attempting to generate information and information is always a surprise. if you are smart you do not tell the same person the same piece of information more than once, and strangely enough we can remember mostly what we have told whom. So what we do is fish around for things to talk about which will be news to the other person to whom we are talking. This tends to produce a random path as everyone present tries to fill in something that the others do not know. If we are telling something that someone among the group knows, but others do not we mention who knows the story already in many cases, and this allows the person who knows to listen again without exhaustion from hearing the same thing over and over. Somehow the acknowledgement of our knowing something already allows us to bear listening to it again.

But when we exit this random interchange of information which we can think of as chatter into a conversation with direction then that takes on a whole new significance because in those conversations there is some sort of mutual discovery. The conversation itself reveals something to both members, not just unknown facts about each other, but something about what they share together is revealed in such a conversation. An excellent example of this is in the Last Picture Show where there are conversations between the youths and the elders concerning the wild days of the elders when they were youths, and in that there was a sharing because it had a bearing on the crazy things the youths were doing at the time and allowed the youths to understand something of the context of what they were doing in the broad sweep of their lives, while the adults by revealing the secrets of their youths were able to relive their youth and bring it into focus as it had impacted their lives. One of the things about such conversations that reveal the depths beyond the appearances of life is how unexpected they are and I think the Last Picture Show captures that unexpected quality better than any other film I can think of.

So we enter into a flow of mutual revealing which has a direction and a limit it step by step reveals a path with a certain unexpected order to it. And the depth of that revealing has to do with the appearance of the levels of nonduality which can be encountered for instance when someone says the right word, at the right time, in the right place, to the right person. RTA in Sanskrit is Arte in Greek. It originally meant something like cosmic harmony. But later became associated with Dharma which has to do with doing what is the correct thing for ones caste. It was taken over by Buddhism as signifying the morality of the Buddha. In our culture it means something like following the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. What is right points the way to justice externally and temperance internally two of the four virtues.

In the midst of a deep conversation one knows when one has gone deeper when one encounters the good word. The good is the source of the variety of things, it is a cornucopia from which the abundance of different fruits comes. What is good leads to more good as increasing returns and it is the dual of evil not just the bad. The good is the ultimate source of morality. Something may be right but not good, because the good takes into account the nature of the person for which something good is prescribed by someone else. And generally we are only effective in teaching what is good by our own actions that are good, and also by explaining what has worked out for us in life in such a way that the other person can intuit what might be good for them, which is different from what was good for us. Since shoe sizes and styles differ just as feet and clothing styles differ which we are attracted to, so what is a good shoe for one person is not for another by both internal and external measures that only we can make ourselves.

In the midst of a deep conversation one knows when one has gone even deeper when one encounters the fated word. The fated word is one that recognizes one’s own inner essence and how that will cause circumstances to play out regardless of what one actually does to try to change them. Fate is not determinate nor arbitrary but something nondual between them which is called dreeing the wyrd in Old English. There are certain things about our lives that are weird and remain so throughout our lives, or perhaps it is just an incident were fate intervenes for good or evil, such as when we have an accident, or death rises up to meet us and sometimes snatches us away from ourselves. It is at these moments that our life flashed before us. When it flashes before us we see how everything led to this moment whether arbitrary or determined. The wyrd is what is laid down in the Orlog. In it there is no difference between past and future there is only what is completed and the incomplete still to be resolved. In what is wyrd we step beyond our idea of time is either linear or circular and are open to another dimension of time that might be called mythic. Our own fathers and mothers are unique, and we recognize their uniqueness in relation to the archetypal fields of which they are one permutation.

In the midst of a deeper conversation one knows when one has reached a profound level when one hears the source word. This is when one meets what Jung calls the archetype. Each of us has a father and a mother for instance, Even orphans or children estranged from their parents have a void where that archetype should be. All the fathers in the world, good, bad or indifferent form the archetypal field of the father, and the same is true for mothers. All mothers of all kinds form a field to which we all are related through the vast history of the myriad  some generations of the 80 billion or so people who have ever lived. The source word unveils the archetype and allows us as Hillman says to see through the current situation into the archetypal field in which we may be caught. Much of what is our Will in the Nietzschian or Schopenhauerian sense to what Freud calls the trieb (more than just instincts) are generated out of the archetypes.

In the midst of the deeper conversation one knows one has reached an abysmal level when one encounters the root word. The root word is one that takes us back to our own roots and ground our selves letting us know who we are. Jung calls this individuation. Jung sees it as unfolding the mandala of our selves. We are unique and the root word allows us to recognize our own uniqueness. Normally the root word is a name of God. Our own Lord, i.e. God as we know Him which is how He is in relation to us as a unique human existent creature.

These are the levels of depth in conversation within the Indo-European worldview. At first we are caught up with the other with whom we are conversing in a joint venture of exploration and unveiling. Eventually we are both learning which neither of us knew previously. We follow the uncanny order of the unfolding of this collaboration by which we reveal to each other what we did not know about ourselves. But then at some point as we go deeper we see more than just the uncanny ordering of the unfolding of the mutual  knowledge but we begin to recognize what is right, then perhaps eventually what is good, and then perhaps eventually what is fated, and then maybe its source, and maybe then our own root.

But when we look closely at ordinary conversation, and listen to it carefully we see that all these levels make their appearance at certain times without those lost in chatter being aware. Or maybe they are aware for a moment but then lose focus and the moment passes into the normal oblivion and forgetfulness of life as it is lived and the chatter continues unabated. But all those levels and depths are there sometimes being revealed, and sometimes close below the surface of ordinary conversation, if we are but aware. Sometimes we speak and reveal more than we know about ourselves. Sometimes we have a Freudian slip. Or there is a joke that is just too true to be funny. Life is passing and appears to be superficial but it is not. We are constantly revealing more about ourselves than we want to or can really grasp ourselves. So part of the art of conversation is to listen at the various levels to the chatter. Each level is there just beyond the surface to be seen if we can hear it. Language itself speaks at all these levels all the time despite our attempts to remain on the surface of life. We are on a raft in the middle of the ocean and the raft is sinking. At some level we know it, and at some level we are responding to that extreme situation authentically as we find ourselves in the undertow that is taking us out into the deeper waters against which our struggles are helpless against the overpowering tide toward the depths of life as it faces death.

Deep conversation has palpable meaning. Meaning unfolds from the nondual, Within the Western tradition at any rate that nondual nature has discrete levels of emergence. As we face those levels one by one and breach them we discover new worlds within ourselves. But even if we cling to the surface of life and avoid the depths we are overwhelmed by those depths. Deeper conversations are those in which we share this with others, share the order of our lives as it has been revealed to us with others, share what is right and wrong (or left, i.e. sinister) , share what is good and bad (or evil), share what is fated, share the sources, and even the roots of who we are in what is ownmost to our selves. Sharing the nonduals is to share the core of life with another. It happens rarely, perhaps once in a lifetime if that. But when it happens it gives meaning to our lives, and that meaning can infuse the whole surface of our lives and pervade all the common everyday things we do together. Perhaps we are just chatting with each other about trivialities, but if our perspective is that of the depth of life together, then those superficialities have their own profundity tied to our finitude.