The ‘home’ you have to leave, lest it become a prison, is not only your home town (or your home ‘discipline’ if you’re a specialist), but also your vain hope to find a permanent or substantial self within. Continue reading Groundless
Category: The Subject of Selves
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Leaving home
The call to homelessness which we find in the Gospel of Thomas (and other gospels) is just as clear in other religious movements that aim at the transformation of experience. Continue reading Leaving home
Give us this day
Now it happened that as he was praying alone the disciples were with him; and he asked them, “Who do the people say that I am?”
Luke 9:18
Relative individuality
As Maynard-Smith and Szathmáry point out (1999, 137), the social structures we find among humans (and other ‘higher animals’) are woven together by the mutual recognition of selves. The concept of self is a consequence of this, not a precondition of it: we recognize our selves because we recognize others as individuals (Bogdan 2000 and many others). Continue reading Relative individuality
Who’s there?
Belief is personal; truth is transpersonal.
The aspiration to enlightenment is your own; enlightenment comes to all beings at once.
Saved
For a human, to be conscious of self and of personal experience is to be grounded in the human community, in the social nature of the human animal. Take for instance Simeon, the ‘righteous and devout’ man of Luke Chapter 2. Continue reading Saved
The bride and the bodhisattva
Arthur Green describes the Zohar, the great classic of Kabbalah, as
a lush garden of sacred eros, filled to overflowing with luxurious plantings of love between master and disciples; among the mystical companions themselves; between the souls of Israel and Shekhinah, God’s lovely bride; but most of all between the male and female elements that together make up the Godhead.
— Green (2004, 3)
Coming through
Sioux healer Black Elk told John Neihardt (1932, Chapter 18):
… many I cured with the power that came through me. Of course it was not I who cured. It was the power from the outer world, and the visions and ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds. If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish.
Interbeing
As quoted in Chapter 5, Peirce (EP1:55) argued that
The individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only by ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation.
When worlds collide (and collude)
According to Peirce, your sense of reality and of self are both grounded in the experience of difference between belief and external fact. Your acquaintance with facts about the external world is in turn based largely on the ‘testimony’ of others. Continue reading When worlds collide (and collude)