As said before True nature of Reality is using Being against itself and is like saying the being nature of being, it really does not mean anything even though it sounds as if it does. What we have to do is realize that both aspects appear in relation to Being and Existence. Existence is ultimately non-dual which allows us when we grasp that to escape the illusion and the fiction of Being in relation to existence. But the Real Truth and the True Reality is only seen when we realize that existence is neither aspect nor anti-aspect, i.e. neither true nor fictitious, AND neither real nor illusory. The aspects relate to existence by their negation. Existence is nondual and thus is the subject of enlightenment under the interoperation of emptiness in Buddhism or void in Taoism. The true nature of reality or the real nature of truth only has ultimate meaning with respect to existence. In existence they mean the same thing because Existence is singular while Being is made up of Universals and Particulars.

First of all saying True nature of Reality, is a problem because both of them are aspects of Being. Being is illusion. But Existence also has the same aspects without the illusion. So instead of using one aspect against the other we can contrast them both in terms of how they show up in existence which is different from how they show up in Being. In Being the differential between aspect and anti-aspect is emphasized. In Being we have the quintessence which is both aspect and anti-aspect at the same time. But existence is neither aspect nor anti-aspect at the same time. The nature of existence is nonduality, which shows up either under the interpretation of emptiness or void. Either way the nature of existence is interpenetration and thus that is the true nature of reality when we take away the illusion of the difference between aspect and anti-aspect.

Saying what reality is in isolation really does not get us anywhere, everything has meaning in context. So the context for Reality is the other aspects of Being which are Truth, Identity and Presence. It turns out that the other aspects give the grounding for formal systems, and their relations with each other give us the properties of formal system which are consistency, completeness and clarity (wellformedness). When we bring the formal system into contact with reality via testing then we get three more properties which are verifiability,  validity, and coherence because those are the relations between reality and the other aspects related to the formal system. Reality is about testing. Via testing we verify and validate a given formal system in relation to reality. The best way of talking about this is that of Robert Rosen in Life itself where he shows that causality and logical connection are both forms of entailment and thus category theory is a good way to think about the connection of the formal system to the natural world.

So Reality is just one aspect which gains its own meaning by its difference between itself and the other aspects and though its relation to them based on the properties of formal system and their properties in relation to testing against nature.

It should also be mentioned that there are meta-levels of Being: Pure, Process, Hyper, Wild and Ultra and that all the aspects transform emergently at each of those meta-levels. Thus Reality is different depending on the meta-level you are approaching it on. And this is why reality is so hard to pin down. It participates in the higher logical type theory of Russell which defines different types at different meta-levels to resolve the paradoxes and absurdity of Being. The types at each meta-levels are the emergent transformations of the aspects of Being.

Integral Theory: What is wrong with Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory?

I think what most people don’t realize is that Wilber’s theory is an intensification of dualism. It distinguishes between subject and object (I-it), and then intensifies that by taking it to the group level of we-things (its). This is an intensification of the subject-object dualism, and thus a step back philosophically into a more intense dualism. An alternative is nondual philosophy such as is explained by David Loy in his book Nonduality. And now we have to say not just nondual but non-integral in order to avoid the intensification of dualism by taking it from the individual to the group level. For an example of a nondual philosophy see Nondual Science Institute

See also Kent Palmer’s answer to What is the Integral Theory?
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Answering the question of Corrie K. Campbell:

The first level of dualism is I-it, and does not recognize Buber’s distinction between this and I-thou.

Second level of dualism is We-things, which merely introduces unthinkingly plurality on both sides of the equation, intensifying the I-It duality stated at the first level.

Now plurality introduced this way is a quirk of English and is no way universal, and so to create a whole categorical system based on it is on fairly shaky grounds to begin with. But then to take this arbitrary pair of crossed dichotomies and somehow think it describes “reality” is somewhat ludicrous. Philosophically it is overly simplistic and untenable. But of course it is popular with new age types who do not know their own tradition and are basically ignorant of philosophy in general.

Most disturbing this step backwards into intensified duality is presented as if it were a way to understand non-duality, which is false. In this sense it is a farce. There are a lot of peddlers of non-duality out there who have no idea what they are talking about and Wilber is one of them. But what is so ironic is that while he talks occasionally about non-duality (as being all four modes together) what he is really doing is taking a step back from the progress made in the western tradition already, and not understanding the import of truly nondual philosophical systems at the same time.

So to me this whole thing is akin to snake oil. Utterly useless. Leading folks into greater ignorance, and a great example of the intensification of nihilism. It is a also an excellent example of where not thinking will get you, i.e. lost deeper in the mire of dualism, even worse than the Western tradition is on its own, all in the name of taking in everything and categorizing everything, when actually he is merely sucking the meaning out of all the system he is trying to encompass, many of which are actually meaningful in themselves, but merely become accouterments in his overarching system based more on hubris than any real insight.

It is sad that the general public that takes these ideas of intensification of dualism seriously are so ignorant of their own tradition, and the other traditions that are being exploited in this imperialistic categorization of everything that Wilber can pontificate on these issues without being laughed out of the room. This is in stark contrast to the French for instance who have contributed significantly to the understanding of our tradition over the last sixty years or so since WWII. Americans taken in by this new age rubbish just do not know how ignorant they are, not just of their own tradition which is being ignored, but of the other oriental traditions that are being exploited. Isn’t it time we put away childish toys, and actually did the hard work of coming to terms with our own tradition, and the other traditions that have genuine nonduality and tried to understand at a more profound level, which will never be captured by categorizations what is at stake?

Our dualistic tradition, cannot escape the train crash that is going to happen when it has to come to terms with actual nonduality. Intensifying nihilism and dualism will not save it but is merely denial. What is actually happening is that many significant Buddhist texts are now being translated that were preserved in Tibet. This Tibetan tradition which has been part of a living tradition since the Buddha, is a formidable opponent of the Western Dualistic view enforced throughout our history by Inquisition and  murder and genocide of all advocates of nondual positions, as well as radical dualists like Wilber.

Normally what happens is that Western scholars just do not study oriental philosophies and so it is then easy to avoid the uncomfortable ramifications of those approaches to knowledge. But in our globalized post-colonial world where we have access to primary texts the best of which are those of Mipham, eventually scholars are going to realize that Buddhism is far more sophisticated than Western philosophy, and they will have to deal with what Hinduism dealt with long ago with the advent of the Buddhist Heresy which is the fundamental significance of nonduality. And when that occurs not only dualism but all the superficial intensifications of dualism born out of denial will be wiped away, and we will have to start over to understand who we are the core of our existence beyond the illusions of Being.

At that time it will be incumbent upon us to focus on taking what I call the homeward path, which is the path of realizing the nondual kernel of the Western worldview itself as a resource for dealing with the shattering of the illusion of dualism and its intensifications. I am advocating leaving childish things like Wilber’s overweening and bloated categorical imperialism behind and to attack this problem ingrained dualism genuinely from its Western roots sooner rather than later.
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Further response to comments

I don’t think psychoanalysis of me will make Wilber’s work any more interesting or valid. If you are adherent, then I suggest you look at the ingredient of the concoction you are buying, prior to consuming it. Until you asked I was leaving it more less for people to read between the lines, but since you asked that suggested I needed to be a bit more viperous.

Snake oil it should be noted was something that Chinese workers used to sooth their work worn muscles, but it was taken up by Whites, who added all sorts of crazy ingredients. Eventually there were so many kinds of snake oil that those who prided themselves on actually doing something worthwhile put their ingredients on the bottle, and that is where the idea came for putting ingredients on products that were sold. There needs to be a little truth in advertising with respect to pseudo-philosophies of this type. SeeHow Snake Oil Got a Bad Rap (Hint: It Wasn’t The Snakes’ Fault)

They attempt to comprehend everything, as sure sign of sophism.

They intensify nihilism, in this case by doubling dualism, rather than coping with nonduality which is the key point to be contrast with dualism.

They are ignorant of their own tradition, i.e. know nothing about the progress made in Western Philosophy, which by the way dwarfs these pseudo philosophies.

They do not build on what went before but pretend to bring something new, when it is in fact just false pandering to the ignorance of the masses in the form of supposed knowledge.

They actually make things worse rather than better for those who embrace these false ideas, because they think they understand something when in fact they are made more ignorant by the idea.

Sure sign is when everyone accepts it without question that they are substantive, even though no one can say why.

Categorical systems like this with no substance is where we began with the Pre-Socratics, so it is as if they are staring all over again.

They are imperialistic like old dogmas because they intend to include everything in their category system.

They do not question where the categories come from, or what allows these distinctions to be made, other than they were made by fiat by the sophist.

They ignore all the warnings that Plato gave us about sophistry.

They are examples of the intensification of nihilism, i.e. eventually those who adhere to them will accidentally learn something about philosophy and see that they are meaningless and at that point they will produce alienation and anomie due to their inherent emptiness.

Actual philosophers are not understood in their times, cf Socrates, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc. They are engaged in attempting to make non-nihilistic distinctions within their traditions on the cutting edge. They assiduously to the extent any philosopher can try to avoid sophism, but occasionally engage in it ironically, and sometimes fall into it by accident after trying to avoid it. They are not running for a popularity contest, or trying to sell books by saying what others want to hear, but instead say things that others do not want to hear like Ken Wilber does not know anything about anything because he tries to talk about everything and pretends to know how to categorize everything in his ‘system’.

Philosophers start with the premise of their own ignorance as Socrates established, and they work on the problem of their ignorance exclusively. And then eventually they discover what Socrates did that they are the only ones who do know anything because at least they know what they do not know. Everyone who pretends to know, is in fact just fooling themselves and others.

Ken Wilber is an excellent example of someone who not only does not know, but in fact increases everyone’s else’s ignorance because they follow him into that unknowing, unknowingly, thinking he must know something because he says so.

When I realized that the basic point that Wilber makes was to increase dualism rather than to confront nonduality then I thought it was a good idea to point it out, especially when I realized how unpopular it would be, because he is almost universally approved. I am afraid that someone has to burst the bubble by calling a Sophist a sophist.

It is not a blind spot in myself. In fact for a long time I was totally disinterested in Wilber, because he had nothing to say of any interest. But then I discovered that he was actually taken seriously by someone who should know better, and so I decided that I should actually speak our just so the chorus of applause was not universal, because someone needs to say the simple fact that this emperor of categorization has no clothes, i.e. no ideas worth repeating. The fact that he uses nice buzzwords like Integral is all the more reason to be suspicious. And our suspicions are confirmed when we discover that this word actually has no meaning because it is used to describe everything he does.

And we know that we are on the right track when we see his marketing apparatus in action selling mentoring for a fee by himself and his adherents. If people would just read Plato, and his challenge of the Sophists of his time, then people would save lots of money, and also know that if they are to find the truth they must do it via their own thought and hard work themselves confronting their own ignorance, rather than buying snake oil (‘enlightenment’ or in this case endarkenment like core mentoring to gain sublime Integralness) from every shyster that comes to town.

If they are charging for it you should be wary. Only data and information can be sold not knowledge, nor yet wisdom. You have to work yourself for the latter. That is why we pay to go to college, because knowledge is work one does oneself. There are many small time sophists in college class rooms But there are also many more good teachers that do their best to lead their students to knowledge as they understand it, but they cannot make them drink at that fountain. Those that teach well impart information and techniques of learning, but one forges knowledge oneself, and this is also true of wisdom only that is much more rare and occurs when knowledge confronts reality in a lifetime of experience that allows one access to the non-representable intelligibles beyond the representations that we come to know.

Sophistry says instead that it can confer knowledge and wisdom for a small fee. In school just because a tea her teaches a subject they do not guarantee that the sudden will get it, but instead they devise tests to attempt to gauge how much the student has learned. The tests are about knowledge, information, skills, techniques, but nothing guarantees that all this turns into knowledge for the student, but the chances are much better if the curriculum is passed by the student successfully.If they are charging for it you should be wary. Only data and information can be sold not knowledge, nor yet wisdom. You have to work yourself for the latter. That is why we pay to go to college, because knowledge is work one does oneself. There are many small time sophists in college class rooms But there are also many more good teachers that do their best to lead their students to knowledge as they understand it, but they cannot make them drink at that fountain. Those that teach well impart information and techniques of learning, but one forges knowledge oneself, and this is also true of wisdom only that is much more rare and occurs when knowledge confronts reality in a lifetime of experience that allows one access to the non-representable intelligibles beyond the representations that we come to know.

Sophistry says instead that it can confer knowledge and wisdom for a small fee. In school just because a tea her teaches a subject they do not guarantee that the sudden will get it, but instead they devise tests to attempt to gauge how much the student has learned. The tests are about knowledge, information, skills, techniques, but nothing guarantees that all this turns into knowledge for the student, but the chances are much better if the curriculum is passed by the student successfully.

Let me give an example of a very popular book that is in fact good, which is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]. In that book the author is struggling with understanding and he takes us along for the ride, literally. The fact that he attributes his idea of Quality to Plato rather than Pepper is a small point compared to what he teaches us about Gumption and about having the gumption to confront our own ignorance, and to learn knowledge and wisdom ourselves from that. An excellent example of someone who shows this in an outstanding way is Eric Hoffer the longshore-man philosopher who shows us that anyone from any walk of life can obtain this knowledge, wisdom, insight, realization one must forge oneself.  Hoffer had the kind of Gumption that Persig identifies. And this is an exemplary characteristic of the Pragmatic American philosophical tradition which includes Peirce, James, Dewy, and Mead but is most pure in Hoffer. See Eric Hoffer.

Seems like you have a lot on your mind.

For my response, a tangent —  see Dreamtime: What is the Dreamtime?

What are all these ceaseless questions saying about you?

Being in an analytic frame of mind, I think it says you are not dreaming all this!

There is a nightmare lurking here, that your question might be classified by unkind administrators.

You apologize in advance . . .

For having too many questions . . .

What question, does your questions, ask of you?

Wandering around in a nightmare world called “Quora” with just so many questions on your mind, you stop. Should I ask those questions? Will the Admins chastise me? But I must know! Yet there are so many questions that need to be asked all at once. They spill out despite the rules. Despite what others might think.

But suddenly I wake up within this dream, suddenly lucid, and realize that this nightmare “Quora” is not real, but a figment of my own imagination. There are no others to answer this question, I must research the answer myself. I must read those books and articles myself. I must learn enough to answer my own questions.

But perhaps, just perhaps there is a nice person out there who will take my questions seriously. Who will realize that these are not just any old questions about dreaming, that I dreamt up. But specific questions that need to be answered for me to sleep soundly again.

Suddenly, someone posted an answer. It did not make any sense, but seemed meaningful all the same. I wondered in my dream, could this be the answer I was looking for all along, just not able to formulate it properly. Not able to articulate the longing for a meaningful answer . . .

Such is the dream your questions lulled me into . . . a strange dream where a plethora of questions and nonsequitor answers collide . . .

http://www.mediafire.com/view/?iitvnjfld4npc99
{experiment in meaning}
http://kp0.me/StrVl0

See also Dreams and Dreaming: What is the process that takes place in our brain when we dream?

This appears in Hegel’s Logic which is much more systematic than the Phenomenology of the Spirit/Ghost/Mind. The point is that there are really four moments. So at the beginning of the Logic there is Being and Nothing where “Nothing” explicitly means Buddhist Emptiness, i.e. existence. Out of that comes the synthesis of Heraclitian Flux, and then there is a jump to Dasein which is determinate being. This continues over and over up the ladder where each posited new thesis calls up an anti-thesis and then combines into a new synthesis.

The idea is that the Synthesis encompasses the Thesis and Anti-Thesis. This occurs by sublation (Aufhebung) which incorporates the conflicting opposites and rises above them but continues to include them. This method is designed to incorporate and include contradiction at each level into higher syntheses that solve the problem of the contradiction without eradicating it.

What blew the mind of the Westerners was when they discovered that Sanskrit was related to European languages and that the Hindu Tradition appeared to be older than the Greek tradition. It was the subject of Philology that discovered these facts about the history of the Indo-European tradition. Philology has turned into linguistics as it goes on to other problems beyond the Indo-European linguistic legacy.

Since this answer is fairly popular I will elaborate. What I said above is something very well known in almost all academic circles which know anything about the romance of philology and the discovery of the kinship between European languages and Sanskrit.

In Sanskrit the term for Being is Sat. In the Bhagavad Gita which is part of the Mahabharata the Indian Epic the goals of spirituality were Sat Cit Ananda. Being, Knowledge, Bliss I believe is the translation if memory serves. Only Indo-European languages have Being in them, it is a linguistic anomaly which seems pretty standard only because Indo-Europeans have taken over the known world multiple times spreading their language to cover 60% of the world population. Hinduism has a very interesting mythic tradition somewhat preserved in the Praise poems of the Vedas which is then enhanced by a philosophical tradition that appears first in the Upanishads. it is a rich tradition not studied enough by Westerners, but which went into decline with colonialization both by Muslims then the English. To me the most interesting episode in that tradition was the generation of the Buddhist nondual heresy, which basically said we should forget Being and return to Existence under the rubric of Emptiness. This was later incorporated back into the Hindu tradition by making Buddha an avatar of Vishnu, and through the works of Shankara that founded Advita Vedanta, which interpreted Being as Emptiness, and thus reconciled the Upanishads with each other via this semantic shift. This was the outcome of the work of Nagarjuna who pointed out that Emptiness is endemic to logic, being the discontinuities between the logical operators nand, nor, and, or. Emptiness is what stands at the heart of this conceptual minimal system that makes a tetrahedral structure. Associated with Sanskrit was a mass like pervasion logic that was adopted by Buddhism. This is in contrast to the set-like logic of the Syllogism that was popular in the West from the time of Aristotle. Mass logics are much better for dealing with nondual concepts such as Emptiness because we can say that the Emptiness pervades things, without reifying it into a thing. Set based Logics tend to reify characteristics into things causing cognitive fallacies galore. The differentiation of the Buddhist existential heresy within the Indo-European worldview and then its reabsorption into Advita Vedanta is very interesting when you contrast that with the Dualism of the Western worldview and its steadfast rejection of all nondual heresies, including the one it could not crush which was Islam. When Muslims conquered India they more or less left it intact from a religious point of view but there were many interesting encounters between Sufis and Hindu practitioners in India which caused Sufism to spread in India and let to the conversion of quite a few Hindu’s to Islam. Thus India was also receptive to a certain extent to the Islamic nondual heresy which came much later than Buddhism. The West which has a history of killing off all nondual challengers to its dualistic proclivity has a lot to learn from the Hindu tradition which seems to cope with Heresy much better than the Western tradition. This makes the Hindu tradition a great test case to compare to the Western tradition and to think what a more tolerant Western tradition might be like.

The point is that in Hinduism there was a technological development also but that was inner technology rather than the outer technology that has been developed in the West. But now that the West is up against the limits it is about time that the West starts learning from its Indo-European counterpart about the importance of inner technology, like meditation etc. Religion founded on spiritual experience rather than unfounded belief is a big step up in terms of sophistication compared to Western religions. However, although there has been various migrations of Guru’s from India to the West over the years much of that has been considered culturally too foreign and thus has not had much of an impact compared to the impact of first Zen Buddhism and then Tibetan Buddhism. On the discovery of the kinship between the obviously older and more sophisticated Indo-European cultural tradition in India and that of the Barbaric Westerners who colonized it, the west was open to this spiritual influence and Theosophy was the result. That was an Orientalization of Hinduism and Buddhism which were considered to be basically the same thing at that time. Later it was realized that Buddhism was really different and therefore it had a separate impact after WWII during the 60s and 70s through the discovery by the west of the Chinese and Japanese brands of Buddhism and the seemingly religiously neutral Zen sects. So the focus shifted from India to other countries as a source of spiritual inspiration of Westerners who found nondual approaches congenial.

What Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism share is the seemingly endless variety of the forms of worship and spiritual dimensions of practice. Among the Tibetan Buddhist offerings the most interesting is DzogChen which seems to be their indigenous answer to the rejection of Chinese Zen. Buddhism died out in India but lived on in Tibet producing at least two of the most outstanding intellects of all time Dzog Ka Pa and Mipham who took opposite sides in the debate over whether consciousness was reflexive or not within the arcane debates of Buddhist Philosophy in Tibet.

But when you think that all this came from Hinduism, as its heresies spread around the world, heresies that it reabsorbed within itself, then it gives you some idea of the vibrancy of the Hindu Tradition. Hinduism from India has a lot to contribute to our cultural and social maturity in the West if we but knew, much more than a string of Gurus and Transcendental Meditation. But the active intellectual development that would make that tradition relevant to the transformation of the Western culture and civilization does not seem to be present. Seems that folks in India are still playing the Colonizer/Colonized game. Why they are not challenging the Western tradition more with their older and more sophisticated tradition is unclear.

Hinduism has shown resilience standing up to two onslaughts of nonduality first from Buddhism and then from Sufism reabsorbing many of these elements into their own tradition. Hinduism developed Advita Vedanta which was a reinterpretation of their own tradition based on nondual insights by Shankara. But it seems that these advances easily became reified and did not produce movements like Buddhism was as a departure from Hinduism. Hindus are famously very proficient in Math and Logic. So you would think that there would be a whole tradition in the application of nonduality to Math and Logic that they could leverage to challenge Western Philosophy and its dominance. Maybe this has occurred and I am just not aware of it. And you would think that there would be a critique of outward technology from the perspective of inward meditative technology. Hinduism is rich in cultural resources, in spiritual transformations, and in its deep Indo-European history but it does not seem to exploit these to show its superiority over the dualisms of the West, and their very narrow technical philosophy which is not motivated by spiritual insights.

We hope for more from the venerable Hindu tradition in the future. The tradition needs to be rethought. Much of my own work is motivated by this kind of Rethinking. I discovered the Meta-levels of Being in my research for my dissertation at London School of Economics called The Structure of Theoretical Systems in Relation to Emergence [See http://archonic.net]. Then I went on to become a Software and Systems Engineer. But I continued my studies, and eventually worked my way back to the study of the Vedas, via Dumazil, and discovered that the differences between the Hindu Gods in the Vedas were the same as the Kinds of Being discovered in Modern European Continental Philosophy and this caused me to write the book The Fragmentation of Being and the Path Beyond the Void [See http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer] What I realized is that Continental Philosophy had rediscovered something always already known in the Western tradition previously and that was encoded into Myth. I developed the technique of Ontomythology to read back into the mythology the kinds of Being, and thus discovered a whole world within the Indo-European worldview previously unknown. This same tactic could I am sure be taken further if one actually knew more about the Indian materials than I do. But where I tried to push the envelope was in the relations between the Mahabharata and the Greek Epics. I think I have commented on that elsewhere in another post here on Quora to some question about the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata as one of Dumazil’s students is the lost mythology of the Titomachia brought down to the human plane. We have lost the epic of the Titomachia in the Greek materials too. But the Greek Epics we have repeats that on the human plane in a war between humans over Helen of Troy. And the struggle over Draupurdi in the Mahabharata is the same story. The trick is to understand that the heroes of the Mahabharata are the Trojans and the men of earth they fight are the Achaeans. Once you realize this and that the battle at the end of the Mahabharata is the killing of the Suitors in the Odyssey, then you can track back to discover the 13 common scenes that the two Epics share but which are utterly transformed in relation to each other. But that gives us some insight into what the proto-epic of the Titomachia might have been like. But when we apply ontomythology to these two Epics we see that they both give a rich picture of what it is like to live in a Worldview which has not only the linguistic anomaly of Being but also meta-levels of Being each level of which is emergent and qualitatively different transforming the aspects of Truth, Reality, Identity, and Presence at each meta-level. This gives us a much richer view of the structure of the Western Worldview through the lens of the comparison with the Indian counterparts to the Greek tradition. They were not just in Philosophy but also in mythology as well. More of this kind of research needs to be done comparing the roots of the two traditions to try to get a better picture of their common origin, and thus a better idea of the nature of the Western worldview in general.

I was further asked to elaborate what I meant by saying that Being is a linguistic anomaly. I have italicized the statement above where that has been mentioned.

If you go back in my various answers to posts on various questions I emphasize this over and over again, because it seem to me one of the most important points about the Indo-European worldview. Only Indo-European language have the concept of Being. All other languages have some form of existential but not Being. For instance they might have copula alone as with the Sumerian Me. Or they might have an existential like wajud in Arabic. But they do not have Being which is an artificial construct in Indo-European languages which we can see by the fact that the roots for Being and Having are the most fragmented in the Indo-European languages. There are multiple roots glued together to give us the concept of Being. For instance in Old English there are the roots Es/Er//Bheu/Wes/Wer. So what does this mean. It means that when Indo-Europeans say “Being” they are talking about something special that is not a concept in other languages. Other languages have to do extra work to say something like Being. But it means we project Being onto other worlds other than our own. We assume everyone has Being and knows what it means. But they don’t unless they know an Indo-European language. But since Indo-Europeans have been very successful via war machines like chariots and horses in taking over the known world there is a good chance that you will know an Indo-European language. And of course Sanskrit is one of the most venerable of these languages. However it seems that Hittite in terms of vocabulary is the oldest of the languages. There is a good chance that proto-Indo-European had a very different grammar than later Indo-European. So Sanskrit is a high point in grammar development. It is not clear how Being was developed in the proto-Indo-European language but it had something to do with the caste structure and something to do with the differentiation of the gods associated with caste. To me the key point was the discovery that the meta-levels of Being existed between the gods in the Vedas our oldest book. Thus the distinctions between the roots of Being, the Castes, the Gods all are differentiated out by the meta-levels of Being, which meant that our ancestors knew about those meta-levels and organized society, the language, and the sacred based on that knowledge. Probably the meta-levels of Being described many times in other answers were discovered and lost many times in the Hindu tradition. But ultimately Buddhism as a heresy rejected Being for existence in the form of emptiness (sunyata). However, once Shankara accepted Nagarjuna’s proof that logic contained emptiness then he wrote commentaries which basically interpreted Being as Emptiness, i.e. as nondual, and that allowed the Buddhist heresy to be absorbed back into Hinduism and Buddha became an avatar of Vishnu. Hinduism is a very sophisticated religion especially after the reabsorption of Buddhism, because now there was an internal check on Being where the meta-levels of Being are realized to stop with Ultra Being as a form of Existence.

I listened to the first weeks lecture and although I had studied Scala before I had obviously not understood properly how it worked from the Functional Programming side. It kinda blew my mind when I realized how the Functional programming side worked. He does an excellent job of explaining it in such a basic way that one is able to absorb it better than all the other things I have read on Functional Programming. I recommend the course and am looking forward to the rest of it.

It is amazing how ones whole way of thinking about programming is based on the languages one has used, and it is difficult to grasp this functional programming change when one has been working and designing the other way for so long. However, listening to Odersky explain it in such a basic and simple way made a lot of sense, and one could see the power of that way of thinking more directly than all of the books I have tried to read on the subject. It is amazing what a difference good teaching makes for the understanding of things. What was good was that he did not skip any steps, he took a very basic idea and presented it fully so that one did not have to fill in any jumps from one idea to the next, as is the case with so many explanations of experts in a field. For me it was just what I needed to get me over the hump of understanding what is really different about functional programming and where its power comes from and how it differs from imperative programming in fundamental ways. I guess I became obsessed with monads and was distracted from the fundamental paradigm shift of functional programming which I did not really grasp completely until I saw his explanation.

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I am still taking the class and am on week 4 which means I am behind but it is still going on in the same vein as my post says. Odersky is an excellent teacher taking things very slowly and with a through exposition. I am still learning a lot about Scala, and have also started to learn about Lift the Ajax/Comet web environment. It is very interesting as well in its own way.

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I finished this class. It was excellent.