Livin Your Best Life

First topic message reminder :

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”

—Robert Frost - “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

The philospher George Santayana remarked: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it." Henry Ford dismissed history as "bunk." Edward Waldo Emerson maintained "There is no history; only biography." Percy Bysshe Shelley put it poetically: "History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man." Shakespeare is briefest: "The past is prologue." The future begins here.

Herodotus, the first historian, claimed modest goals for his work: "that the doings of men may not be forgotten." On the title page he wrote Historia, Greek for "inquiries" or "researches." Inquiring into the past has been called history ever since.

“There is no need to run outside for better seeing, nor peer from a window, rather abide at the center of your being: For the more you leave it the less you learn” —LaoTzu

I don’t know what path Dan took to Leibniz, but I’m with Spinoza on the immanence of being/god.

Transcendence is not my concern or thought.

We are too immature to consider transcendence.

There is no escape there or salvation needed.

The understanding of the masses is easily manipulated.

A simple trade allows one access to develop virtue.

We can not and never do transcend life.

We descend and walking backwards shows you so.

The more I learn of Spinoza the more I respect him. Leibniz went to see him.

This is a man of great depth awareness and quality.

And he was such a great mind he still echoes through time.

I don’t care to be remembered because I couldn’t say much else than he.

“Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence is the consequence of his rejection of the Judeo-Christian conception of God as a transcendent creator; a supernatural being who is cause of a world distinct from himself, created out of nothing and through an act of free will. Spinoza argues that God is not prior to or outside the world – transcendent to creation – but wholly immanent within it. God is “an extended substance composed of an infinity of attributes that is purely immanent throughout nature” (Smith 18). Divinity is fully expressed in the world and without reserve. This leads Spinoza to his scandalous formulation “God, or Nature” (Deus sive natura), which both divinizes nature and naturalizes divinity (and explains descriptions of Spinoza as both pantheist and atheist).“

Chivo,

You may be correct that Leibniz plagiarized Spinoza.  

We had better check.  

Spinoza’s monism was probably better than Leibniz’ monadism.

But it does seem that his ‘parallelism’ may unnecessarily verge onto a Cartesian dualism...... by drawing a distinction between thought and extension.  

The BPW supposes that extension can be understood as just an ordering principle of thought.

Spinozism allegedly has parallels with the Vedanta.

The attribute of extension is how substance can be understood to be physically extended in space. Particular things which have breadth and depth (that is, occupy space) are what is meant by extended. It follows from this that if substance and God are identical, on Spinoza's view, and contrary to the traditional conception, God has extension as one of His attributes.

Hmmm........ This is not strictly dualism, but it comes uncomfortably close.

Spinoza was very interested and influenced by Stoicism.

I think he is right where Tao and Stoicism meet in the flow.

I'm digging into his history now, his influences.

We can't say impersonal and personal or good or evil.

That's too much in the mind.

Spinoza is awake.

He has left the cave.

Let me tell you who I give weight to from history, those that lived their philosophy and that is Spinoza.

What he went through.

How he had to hide.

His boldness to challenge the world order.

His refusal of riches and taking only a small pension.

His generosity and depth of heart seen in his tears for his friends.

This is a man of the Way.

This is man of the true God/Human who transcended duality.

That's my heart reaction to him.

His silly death fro glass dust, a tragedy for us all.

Amor Fati

For the duration of my life, however short, I shall...let go.

I will...swing away.

I will...follow through.

I will...focus where I am on what I’m doing.

I will...assume the flow will bring eddies, rapids, swift water, and lovely calm.

I cannot know what is to come, nor do I want to.

I’ll face each moment.

You see the crisscrossing lines between everything and then you realize there are no straight lines, just curves along the circle.

Serenity is here now.

“In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as “prince of philosophers.” Spinoza, they write, “is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere. [...] He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence.”

I have also discovered this.

But until I did, it did not matter who else realized this.

Only you can discover this for yourself.

Until you do, you are lost.

But I can’t tell anyone they are lost.

They just are.

Just like I can’t discover this for anyone else.

“The distinction between the grasses and the blossoms is the same as between you not knowing that you are a buddha, and the moment you know that you are a buddha. In fact, there is no way to be otherwise. Buddha is completely blossomed, fully opened. His lotuses, his petals, have come to a completion.... Certainly, to be full of spring yourself is far more beautiful than the autumn dew falling on the lotus leaves. That is one of the most beautiful things to watch: when autumn dew falls on the lotus leaves and shine in the morning sun like real pearls. But of course it is a momentary experience. As the sun rises, the autumn dew starts evaporating.... This temporary beauty cannot be compared, certainly, with an eternal spring in your being. You look back as far as you can and it has always been there. You look forward as much as you can, and you will be surprised: it is your very being. Wherever you are it will be there, and the flowers will continue to shower on you. This is spiritual spring.“

OSHO describes the inner world as the source of anything we could ever offer.

I think these wise words, but no where near the inner serenity one can cultivate.

By rejecting the notion of God as transcendent cause, Spinoza also undermines the link between God and moral absolutes or laws. Moral judgments have no corollary in the natural world and therefore cannot be attributed to God, since what cannot be said to belong to nature cannot be said to belong to God. Moral judgments must be understood as “human creations made for our convenience and utility.” Morality as “the product of social agreement” can only be deemed legitimate or illegitimate in terms of its beneficial or harmful effects on the society that agrees to live under its rules and regulations (Smith 2003, 52 and 126). For Spinoza, there is no “imaginary supernatural realm” and no external authority to which we can refer or reference in order to determine morality, and if there is no God who pre-exists the world, then there can be no source that can be said to stand outside or beyond the world to approve or condemn it. Life cannot be explained by what transcends life.

Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence thus requires a new kind of ethics, addressed to the here and now, immersed in the sensible world, without recourse to absolute or divine authority. Spinoza goes further. He rejects the anthropomorphic fallacy that conceives God in the image of man, albeit raised to the power of infinity. “People attribute to God features borrowed from human consciousness […] and, in order, to provide for God’s essence, they merely raise those features to infinity, or say that God possess them in an infinitely perfect form” (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy 63). What Spinoza makes clear is the extent to which this notion of God functions as a mirror image of the attributes man perceives or idealizes in himself: man as an intending agent, who supposedly creates, like God, through a spontaneous act of free will; man as outside, or transcendent to, nature.

Here, Spinoza’s critique can be directed not only against the philosophy of transcendence found in Plato and in Christian theology, but the modern variant found in Descartes. Thus, in opposition to the latter’s dualist ontology, Spinoza asserts the conjugation of mind and body. Both mind and body are modes of substance (i.e., God or nature). Spinoza: “Mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension” (qt. in Montag 42). Spinoza renders problematic the notion that that body is controlled by “the will of the mind and the exercise of thought” (Spinoza qt. in ibid. 38). Spinoza doesn’t simply reject Descartes’s dualist thought, but challenges the hierarchy that subordinates the body to the mind, which subordinates the power to be affected to the power to think, which separates the power to be affected from the power to think. Spinoza’s immanent philosophy does not allow us to set apart “mind from body, thought from action,” or man from nature: each coincides with the other (ibid. xvii). Just as God is expressed in world – as world – so too is the artist, for example, expressed in their work. There is not an individual who acts but an act that individuates. And this individuation is ongoing.

Each coincides with the other.

No one is more than another.

Here is the climax...

Hold on chicken, you haven’t been cleared for this level.

I certainly haven’t.

The most radical stuff.

All transcendence ends here.

This is the end of the road.

I just kinda know Spinoza has got it.



This is the good stuff.

This is where god levels with u.

No hierarchy, total equality.

Leibniz knew he was beat.

In this context one must reconsider the BPW.

According to Spinoza by way of Deleuze...

Who are you, who am I?

Ways of Being.

Not thinking.

Not persons.

A substance is a person.

We are not substances able to define ourselves.

We are ways of being or modes of Being.

And as a being that is part of Being we are that.

Thought and extension are just two attributes of being and all we know.

We are ways of being, totally unique and individual parts of an infinite substance that is Being which contains all attributes.

There can be no judgment of what way of being is better or which attributes are best.

This is why Christians and Jews wanted to kill him.

Muslims too.

Astonishing.

He tore it all down.

And I know he’s got it.

Oh boy.

These thoughts make my mind jump.

...and tremble.

The body is a mode of extension and the soul is a mode of thought.

If we only know two modes of infinite ways of being, what are all the other attributes we can’t know doing?

We can’t know or say anything about them.

We can only annoyingly know our limitation as this way of being.

I can live in my body and think thoughts and that’s all I can do. Mind not greater than body or body mind.

So how are my body and soul distinguished?

This is one is Spinoza’s main arguments.

By the attribute of the infinite substance they involve.

If you speak of mind or body as equal, then you are speaking of being one.

I am one through the single substance of which I am a way of being of two of its attributes.

This illustrates how ethics are not a morality.

A morality assumes a hierarchy.

If all is equal, there can be no morality to mediate.

There is no morality that asserts our equality.

Only an ethic does that.

Descartes tried to make the body obey.

But it cannot.

Descartes says if the body acts the mind or soul suffers and if the soul acts the mind suffers.

Spinoza thinks this makes no sense.

Body and mind suffer equally and act equally.

Never has the destiny of humanity been more tied to the body.

You will not escape it.

I should have kept my mouth shut about Spinoza.  

It has only sent Chivo off the rails...... again.  

Yes, Spinoza and Deleuze try to correct the absolute formalism of classical philosophy....... thus do they revert to relationalism/difference.  

But they both fall well short of personalism.  

Rather than persons, they both extol an infinite substance, whatever that might be.  

Neither can grasp the microcosmic, infinite potentiality of personhood.  

Their infinite substance reflects that fact the all persons are One.  

Attempting to compartmentalize thought and extension is their original sin.  

Within the cosmic Self awareness, there is no difference, there is only the cosmic instability of being alone with the alone...... wherein the self has difficulty distinguishing itself from the abyss....... you know...... people who need people......

The ‘abyss’ (of the DNS) is merely an unfiltered glimpse of the infinite potential of selfhood.  

The infinite substance is the unlimited potential of personhood.  

I said “according to Spinoza by way of Deleuze”...

I do have an opinion.

Spinoza is on the right track.

I despise hierarchy and transcendence.

It’s utter bullshit.

Total stupid bullshit.

So time to sit with Spinoza around the fire.

Poor Chivo,

He still, at this very late date, hasn’t understood that personal(-ist) transcendence is a pleonasm.

Poor Dan, he hasn’t realized it is before words and all right here.

Bless his little  

Well, ok....... if you put it that way......

But I’m just a wordsmith...... I can’t help it.

You have fallen into the same trap as Kant and Leibniz, you have an emotional attachment to your ideas about god.

I mean, it’s not a problem, it’s just obvious.

Spinoza ironically has transcended all that in that he is himself.

This is a mystic too.

He says he writes to lead one by the hand to the divinity within himself.

He also has his emotional attachments and is contradictory as humans will be.

But Leibniz minus all his silly god speak is Spinozan.

I am going to really study this.

I want to understand Spinoza.

I must converse with him.

He hoped his work could help lead others to self knowledge.

I admire that heart.

Leibniz is a pretender.

Aren’t we all.

Leibniz, as did many of spinoza’s friends and students, tried to redeem Spinoza.

No reformation or redemption needed thank you.

There is no reasoning with muppets who have emotional attachments to their beliefs.

One learns the emotional games but realizes you are not just the emotions, they are of your body, you are also the one aware of them.

Just thought I’d stop by and mention, I did get the “Wild Unknown” and the “Thoth” decks. probably going to get the, Marseille edition down the line but at the moment I’m finding the, Thoth to be the most interesting, and meditative, a deeper dive.

I wish they would do the 1001 nights in a larger version. There really are a lot of decks out there.

Very good.

Fun things to ponder abound. If you care to.

http://www.esotericmeanings.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Atu0_thothfool.jpg

So, what are we supposed to do with all of this before us and behind us?

The police agents constraining and restraining us: morality, science, and logic.

Whose will is behind these agents enforcing the current order, the police and military and the powers that control them. Media, politics, and economics all collude.

Necessity vs. Freedom

Almost all culture is a kind of policing; see Delueze and Shestov and Foucault.

Science can't be uprooted without removing morality.

Philosophy ends in tryin to direct our actions in some direction.

Regularity and routine keep us going in some direction.

Go to experience when needed, but yours is not the definitive experience.

Consider your Imagination, your passions.

Experiment and refactor yourself mercilessly.

Try it all on.

Try to apply what you learn, observe, make changes.

Metaphysics and science and life are driven by passion as much as intellect if not more.

We mystify things, have vague ideas, not fully formed and use these as guides errantly to live.

We have the mystical which is about the Mysteries.

As far as walking around, we should have some code and always be turning it over.

Don't be taken in thinking you have the ironclad answer.

We want to be the ones who knows.

They are the worst dictators, beliefs and answers, which ultimately contain us.

Metaphysics can't live with reason, everything metaphysical is absurd, a dilemma.

Reason must ultimately be transcended.

Experience is not the only view science.

These views are choices, not imposed by necessity.

Why should you be bound by limited systems of thinking?

Necessity is an illusion too.

Logical thinking kills imagination.

But you have the thread Ariadne gave you when you entered the labyrinth.

We are not doomed to walk in place.

Follow the the thread.

Logic is a tool only, not the leader.

We can occupy ourselves exclusively.

Metaphysics and Positivism are not the only two options.

We are suckers, we been conned to believe these are the two only ways to think.

The demand of the crowd drives necessity.

How do we go beyond experience?

Imagination.

This is what Barfield felt and Shestov.

Why do we take morality as an infallible guide for how to live?

Some possibilities.

Morality enforcement is a form of aggression against others.

The first condition is lawlessness.

Law is just to get along, not control.

A person changes their opinions 10 times a day.

Morality leads to utilitarianism, public opinion of the many.

None of these things must be avoided, it is just for us to be aware of these things so we are not so easily fooled and default to the mob thinking.

We do not need to be constrained by morality or common sense in our experiments and experience.

Shestov criticizes certain ways of thinking that have become idols, morality, logic and experience.

You can break out of this idol worship.

All moral arguments and judgements are arbitrary.

The Apotheosis of Groundlessness.

https://amzn.to/2Mjjuw7 -  All Things are Possible

He speaks of the danger of the creative artist or philosopher turning into a "prophet" in "The Gift of Prophecy".

MUST READ - "The Gift of Prophecy" - http://www.angelfire.com/nb/shestov/all/pw2_1.html

No one can foresee anything.

Nature only requires our creative engagement.

People who read a lot must remember literature is different than living.

We write about the things that puzzle us.

The act of creation is one of the best feelings you can have.

Once one has gone through the creative process and forged a product or work of art from experience and ideas, we tend to repeat the found pattern and fall into a rut.

The danger is for the those that come after and try to repeat the patterns.

The students forget or don't know what the Master knew.

Great thinkers wedged themselves into reality and expanded a little part.

You have to make it your own.