Peter,
Please, be assured--YOU ARE NOT PARANOID.
By illicitly playing the "humility" card against PzEph,
who has shown both willingness and capacity to question
his own conclusions, Struan shows us that he will stop
at nothing to seize what he perceives as "the upper hand"
in any given argument. A very old story. Tiresome,
pointless, destructive...
But then I think I have made my objection to such behavior
very clear already.
"Contrariwise."
What I have not said is that, deep down, I have a great
deal of sympathy for Struan, as "there, but for an ounce
of sobriety, go I." It took me many gut wrenching years
to come to terms with why, despite what people acknowledged
as my talents, convictions, honesty, eloquence, etc., they
always seemed to end up rejecting me or my position or both.
The first conclusion to which I traditionally leapt was
that most people were unable or unwilling (depending upon
my mood!) to accept the truths I spoke. While containing
a grain of truth, this explanation eventually began to
look just too damned convenient, even to me. Suffice it
to say, the real explanation turned out to be much closer
to home than I would have cared to imagine.
Further, when he is NOT courting his satiric/defensive muse
(whose lure I have known all too well), Struan's posts are often
undeniably insightful and, at worst, suggest many promising
avenues of inquiry.
"Nohow."
My own counter-abuse was of no relative value to anyone, except
as catharsis, and I will not attempt to "justify" it after the
fact. May it serve as an unwitting example of how not to behave
in a discussion forum. Still, Struan is no more or less the
center of the universe than any of the rest of us.
DAVID writes:
>For providing an opposing viewpoint, all members of the MOQ
>should thank you for inserting the dynamic, analytical, "fuck you"
>element to the discussion. When you have a group of people who
>all agree, the philosophical inquiry stagnates into doctrine and
>loses its value as an intellectual stimulant.
What I hear David saying, loud and clear, is: "The assassin has
Buddah Nature." If true, then no less true is the statement
"EVERY assassin has Buddah Nature." True and/or false, to me
this begs the observation: "Every assassin's TARGET has Buddah
Nature."
"Does Lila have Quality?" I needn't elaborate for this group
how Phaedrus kicked himself for falling into Rigel's trap. To
do so was to utterly miss the whole nature of Quality itself.
To ask where The Buddah is or is not is to miss The Buddah in
all, and violates the spirit of Zen, leading us down the garden
path of S/O dualism.
So who lives and who dies: which has more Quality, the patient
or his pathogen; is the cure worse than the disease; and just
where the fuck is The Buddah in all of this, anyway!?
"Mu."
"All things are interrelated and relative."
This Monist is speechless.
But that's the universe. This is the backyard we're talking about
here. How does our perception change with this frame-shift?
Is an adversarial or even abusive approach really the only way to
guard against stagnation through excessive consensus? To what
extent is this group really in danger of indulging in "too much"
harmony? Harmony depends upon unison but harmony IS NOT unison.
Must cacaphony "hate" the harmony from which it is born, any more
than the predator "hates" the prey upon whose existence he depends
for his survival? To what extent are static and Dynamic patterns
of value actually mutually exclusive in this case?
Ack!... "versus",... Ptoo!
It seems to me that excessive polarization and excessive consensus
are EQUALLY capable of leading to stagnation, at least in terms of
meaningful philosophical discussion. Frankly, I can see little
danger of either one, here, but I do have serious concerns regarding:
just how much of a '"fuck you" element' is really needed; and: the
nature of what it actually stimulates.
It is the "all or nothing" thinking, the either/or propositions,
which, sooner or later, we must dispense with if we ever hope to
"fully" understand anything.
In the meantime, I, for one, am willing to try to trust the universe
to unfold as it must.
I'll start by ending this wamble thwu' the bwambles of wudness.
"I wouldn't be...here, my children,...
dow-own on this killing-floor" !
Microscopic, I.
Humility.
Riff
(dkm)
PS: (I was just upstairs, listening to Zep's "The Lemon Song",
thinking about freewill, the Incompleteness Theorem, and
stochastically defined systems.) Great fun. I must say,
David's recent picture of the universe harmonized wonderfully
with my own thoughts, every particle in the universe affecting
every other in a perpetual dance of infinite diversity, etc.
Rather like a GIANT BRAIN, no? Could we, at our level, relate
sufficiently to It, on It's level, such that we could IDENTIFY
the "MIND" within it as such? Or, "What is Man that Thou art
MINDful of him?" My experience suggest the following answers:
"No"; "Nothing"; and "He's not". Once again, Singular Reality
simultaneously thumbs its nose at both doctrine and "proof", and
to me, the universe is no less astounding.
You?
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