>Hi Dennis,
Hi, Victoria
[BTW, it is Denis, only one "n"]
>
>Just read your essay, which spun me out!
>
>>>The Self is therefore the patterned, static, known aspect of an
>individual.
>
>I loved your essay, but I can't imagine anything more depressing
>than defining my Self as just "the patterned, static, known aspect of an
>individual".
The Self is what defines you, at any given moment. It is the sum of your
reflexes, knowledge, memories and habits, the patterns that makes you what
you are. Of course those patterns are confronted with the flux of everyday
experiences, and are subject to change. But DQ isn't a pattern, it's an
event. It is change itself. The reason I didn't include DQ in my definition
is that it would have inserted a "soul-like" element in the notion of Self,
and I do not believe that DQ is separable into soul "units". While I agree
that we are more than a collection of patterns, that is only because we are
part of a greater whole. The Self is only that small fraction of Quality
that we are aware of.
The MoQ is a collection of concepts that cannot grasp the totality of our
experience, but that does not ignore what it cannot put into little boxes.
It calls the unknown Quality.
Glenn and John are calling it myth or fiction only because they cannot see
that they are themselves living in a fiction. The MoQ is the idea that any
system of thought is a fiction, even itself. There are good fictions and bad
ones, but to attack the MoQ on the basis that it cannot prove the existence
of DQ, or that it isn't "an objective phenomena" (you should read your posts
before sending them, Glenn, this one really had me laughing ;) is plain
short ridiculous. Any system can be attacked in this manner, because
objective truth itself isn't "an objective phenomena". :)
>Isn't DQ as much a part of us (albight an indefinable part) as the SPoV?
>I can sit here right now and pretty much trace most of my character as it
>has developed through the biological, social and intellectual SPoV.
However,
>there is an undeniable sense of the DQ which is just as much a part of my
>Self
>(and indeed the universe), and which makes life so much more beautiful and
>hopeful.
>And it is because it is a part of me, I am able to recognise it in things
>which are apart from my SPoV makeup,
>Such as in any of the arts when they are indeed Art or even in nature where
>you can stand in awe at the power of it even as it is encoded in SPoV.
Exact, Victoria, the beauty of unformed truth can only be expressed in
non-rational modes. This is the reason why we are all attracted to art, and
find so much meaning in it. It calls on the unity of Quality, it makes us
part of the thing observed, and reminds us that we are connected by more
than chains of cause/consequence. It isn't a mystic experience, but it
points at it.
>And if that Quality (or Goodness or Value) which gives rise to all things
is
>a part of me also, I guess I can relax and have a little faith in it (and
>myself) and there by be more free to follow it.
>
I'm starting to believe that religion might have had more than a little of
the truth when it said that only faith put us into contact with the divine.
But faith for many is mistaken for blind belief. Beware.
And in the meantime, be good
Denis
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