I think I've mentioned this before, but let me reiterate that I acknowledge your perspective as a respectable stream of Christian theology. I am certainly not trying to claim that your views about God are unchristian. Rather, I am claiming that they differ greatly from the view of God that the authors of the Bible seemed to hold. For instance, the Biblical God is often portrayed as having feelings, desires, emotions, and thoughts. This is abundantly clear throughout the Old Testament (I can give references if you want) and slightly less clearly in the New Testament.

Also, I am still confused as to where the doctrine of the Incarnation plays in. Don't you have to reject the Nicene interpretation, as regardless of whether God is the Form of Being, surely it can't be the case that an actual human being was the Form of Being?

What I meant is thinking of God along the lines of a principle or law comes closer to my conception than thinking of God as a thing or a being.

I think of this stuff more as a support platform than the actual road. But, yeah, I’ve been wondering as of late if I’m spending too much time thinking and arguing about it rather than applying it. On the other hand, I still have some reservations about things. For instance a few months ago I lost a dear friend in a tragic accident and while I didn’t want to experience that level of suffering and agony, I don’t want to be immune from experiencing it either.

I've had similar experiences and formed similar conclusions. It's hard to think straight about stuff like this and I was never able to parlay it into something resembling an answer to the problem of evil. I suspect there's a connection to be made though.

Well, I’m not much of a biblicist and I pretty much treat the Bible as what it says it is: a testament, that is, testimony. I’ve had several instances of one passage meaning one thing to me at one time and another thing at another time. So, I’ve somewhat resolved myself to getting out of it what I get out of it, relying as best I can on my judgment. So, if that leads to you or someone else calling me a non-Christian, I’m okay with that. I tend to define myself more as a generic theist, anyway.

I think Being is all there is and what our mind conceives of as essence is where Being leaves off. Somewhat analogous to a wave (essence) is where the ocean (Being) leaves off whereas we can’t actually see the ocean but only it’s appearance on the surface. So something like “God became man” means to me more that God ‘appeared’ than God ‘became’.

What you are is prior to any distinction, it has no 'higher' ideas or beliefs or set of rules that could reject or accept the mourning. If your friend dies, then you mourn 100%, there is no resistance from Being toward this mourning.

It's similar with the problem of evil. What you are is prior to any distinction and there is no distinction inherent in your true nature to inform you about what should or shouldn't be done. This does not mean that one should 'accept' evil, that would be a wrong conclusion based on the misunderstanding that Being is amoral. That Being is prior to good/evil does not mean that Being's true stance is fixed precisely at moral neutrality. There is no context of morality inherent to Being, it neither rejects nor accepts. You deal with evil from within the distinction of good/evil, Being can't help you there. And still the correct thing to do is to reject evil, which is as natural as drinking a glass of water when you're thirsty even though Being is not thirsty, which is as natural as 1+1=2 even though there are no numbers inherent to Being.

All problems are contextual, all solutions are contextual. Some problems don't have a solution and then you have to take a beating, and even though what you are never gets hit, the pain is still excruciating. It is what it is.

I just got a crazy tingle in the back of my neck.

This bit here is what I don't understand in Christian neoplatonism.

How can being "appear" at a singular point in history when it is already always apparent? I think the most you can say is that some people (prophets, if you like) "get it" and others don't. But the people that get it are not any closer to being than the ones that don't, because there is no distance there to be bridged - only an illusion of distance caused by ignorance.

In Zen it is often said that there is nothing to teach because the student is already Buddha. That is, the point is not to become something but to understand what you already are. If Christ taught something similar, then to fetishize his historical person would be to miss his point.

I think it is more that being is paradoxical. It is as good as the best thing that happens and as evil as the worst. You can't "reject" evil insofar as it is part of what is. You can only say that you don't like it and move against it, because that is as you say, natural. If God is the suchness of reality, then he must bear all of its attributes - not just the ones that are pleasing to humans.

Attributes are ideas. Suchness is unthinkable. Ideas refer to other ideas. Suchness is 'just like this'. When you think, then this thinking, whether contextually correct or not, is suchness. What you think about is thoughts and more thoughts.

"Is God the sum total of all suchnesses?" This is when you have made an idea of something unthinkable and you get hit with a zen stick to bring you back to reality, to the suchness of 'ouch'.

The ground can't be represented because it's where the chain of signifiers bottoms out. But totality symbols - God, Brahman, Self, whatever things you can actually hold in the mind and contemplate - these are all paradoxical.

Maybe you think that's all useless. I disagree. The mind is a sense organ, not a closed loop. Ideas are not reality but they index reality. Besides, ideas are fun.

Don't cut the finger off just because it's not the moon.

Well, that's the point. If you imagine it as a totality symbol to be held in your mind, then yes you will get all kinds of paradoxes and the whole thing doesn't compute and because you don't want to abandon the pretty totality symbol you adjust the imagined system so that you can somehow be content with the paradox and you end up with some sort of belief system.

What you are does not have a special property called 'oneness' so that the great divider can't represent it adequately, similar to how the eye can't see colours beyond its spectrum. The problem isn't that the signifier chain bottoms out, the problem is the contextual break from mind to not-mind. When you think that you are a paradox then you have made an image of yourself which has nothing to do with reality. You already are beyond mind. You are aware of mind, not vice versa. Mind comes and goes, what you are does not come and go.

Sure, it's a fun game and it's highly useful when it's appropriate. But scratching your right arm until it bleeds while it's your left foot that itches isn't so much fun really.

I think the point of the paradoxes is to direct you away from conceptualization by letting you exhaust it instead of simply telling you not to do it. The fool who persists in his folly and all that.

I'm sure we mean the same thing by this, but to clarify: there arrives a point while asking questions like "what is the nature of X?" when the answer that you really want is a demonstration, but the only answer that language can give is another signifier. At this point the only appropriate verbal move is some kind of misdirection or non-answer.

In general, I think symbolic props like eyes that try to see themselves, snakes eating their tails, luminescent darknesses, and that kind of thing are all useful and illuminating. To the extent that they compete with lopsided totality images like a Christian God that is all light and good, the former should be favored. The paradoxes stress the mind and the dualistic light/good images soothe it. The latter are therefore stickier and more dangerous.

I assume you're talking about things like zen koans here. Maybe not, but I'm going to write about it anyways. Life's big existential questions are actually koans. It's important to understand that in zen koans there is no paradox. There is a correct answer (though not often verbal and not often only one) to each and every koan and the answer is crystal clear and unambiguous. Zen language is complex and happens on several different levels, if you're missing the context then an answer looks like a paradox or like some sort of dadaistic misdirection. Seung Sahn wrote several books on zen koans which I can highly recommend.

Yes, they have to collapse, but let's take a look at the mechanism. At first zen koans look like paradoxes. There seems to be no solution, because whatever answer you come up with is wrong, conceptual thinking is utterly useless here. It is true that in order to attain the correct answer conceptualization must be exhausted. How? Not by shuffling the pieces around this way and then that way and then another way. The answer comes out of effortless silence and peace which you are, not out of incessant conceptual struggle. The mechanism isn't the effort, effort is only a means to be jerked into the silent attending of what is real. Yes, if you take your mind to the limit then it will eventually give up and silence will occur, but much time and many tears will be wasted before it gives up. I find it much easier to just put it all down.

The example that I had most clearly in mind when I wrote about signifiers was an anecdote I read somewhere about a student of Korzybski's who was teaching Korzybski's semantic theory. As the story goes, this guy held up a matchbox and asked his class, "what is this?" When some student answered, "a matchbox," he threw the matchbox at the student, yelling "no, 'a matchbox' is a noise! Is this a noise?"

(This also reminds of an exercise I read about in an acting book. The exercise consists of walking around the room for several minutes and yelling out the wrong names for everything you see. E.g. if you see the chair, you yell "lamp", etc. The effect is surprisingly strong and not dissimilar in some ways to psychedelic drugs.)

I think many Zen koans are similar because the answers to them are of the "show me, don't tell me" form. Your point about koans is well taken. I understand that the answers themselves are not paradoxical. Paradoxes are not in the thing; they are in the mind. But when the mind tries to grasp the thing earnestly, paradoxes should arise.

My point, to go back to the beginning, is that it is useless to try to conceive of the thing "correctly", in a form that is free of paradoxes. The paradox is like a big neon sign reminding, "the map is not the territory".

This is probably different for everyone. I don't find it easy to put it all down at all. In large part this is because I am interested in how mysticism relates to the brain and to cognitive science. Anyway, I appreciate both moments of silence and moments of intellectual curiosity. When I am in the latter mode, it is important to be confronted with the paradox, because it reminds me of the limitations of what I am doing.

I would appreciate your book recommendations.

I think we can near It: there is only one poster on 2+2 forums with multiple user names. That is: It is not what we know; It is what we don’t know.

I'm going to ramble a little, not an easy issue to bring across clearly, let's hope that I don't mess it up too much.

In a way it's not easy, it's automatic. What happens is that if you contemplate the issue you will have an insight that the question (for example 'brain vs consicousness') is imagined and the answer will refer to an imagined question, either way it's about imagination running in circles. So once you see that the parameters that the logical mind works with are posteriori to what you are, it becomes clear that it's not the correct tool to figure out what it is that you are. Mind's questions aren't your questions.

Obviously you still do have a question, but the words with which it is formulated are secondary, the philosphical problems are secondary. The primary issue is simply the sheer fact that you are and that you don't know wtf you are and whatfor and the question itself is, in zen terms, a red hot iron ball in your stomach that you can't vomit out, your head is in the tiger's mouth and he isn't letting you go: you become the question. So the question is there, this much is clear, and the question apparently refers to what you actually are right here and now, not to some imagined idea, concept or picture. So once you 'get it' that mind can't help you then the only place you can go to is right here and now. The reason you stay in the here and now isn't that some smart guy said that mind is bad and an illusion and whatnot, it's just that you clearly see for yourself that it can't contribute anything toward solving your existential dilemma. And so you abide in the only place where you possibly can get an answer and you sit there and pay attention to what is real.

Silent mind is you paying attention to what is real. Thoughts are still going to pop up simply out of habit (a 20+ year old habit isn't easy to break) but you're not fighting them with other thoughts, you're not interested in fighting anything, you just notice that they appear, say bye bye and go on paying attention. Along the way mind's resistance and chatter will get weaker and weaker, attention will strenghten, maybe a cool woo woo experience here and there, eventually you'll see through the question of all questions and you'll have a good laugh.

It's difficult when you resolve to meditate and thoughts pop up like crazy and you're trying to fight thoughts with more thoughts... drives you insane. What is easy is when you simply don't believe thoughts and you're not fighting them anymore, they just pass by. So the entry point to the effortless silence is basically the clarification of how mind relates to your existential dilemma and to what is actually there and has been there long before mind has begun spinning.





As for book recommendations, I don't really have any. You can get great stuff from youtube. There are many excellent contemporary american/european teachers who are accessible and speak a simple language. Off the top of my head and in no particular order: Adyashanti, Paul Hedderman, Rupert Spira, Jed McKenna, Karl Renz, Mooji, the TAT foundation people (Art Ticknor, Bart Marshall, Bob Fergeson), Jeff Foster, Tony Parsons and many more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqeC3BPYTmE

yup!!