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One Love
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:15 PM (GMT -6)

Jeff:
As for identifying with the amalgam, we ARE identified with the responsibility entailed in exercising self-discipline respecting those natural impulses and fears. There's no getting around the fact that our amalgam IS what we are contending with in our spiritual growth. So it's not irrelevant at all.

Loder proposed--and I agree--that the ego-supported personality amalgam as center is meant to be a SELF-LIQUIDATING process. That is to say, that at the end of the process, we move from self-reflective "I"s to persons who are grounded and identified with "being-itself": In short, we BECOME Love as we indwell God and God indwells us.

This is backed up by that website I showed you. Check the process...

1. Our Fragmented Will
2. Awareness of Fragmentation
3. Learning to Integrate Our Will
4. Partial Practice
5. Responsibility, Rebellion, and Love
6. Inner Unity: I
7. Reaching toward God, The Center of All Centers
8. Surrender
9. The One Divine Will

This is REMARKABLY accurate to the mystical traditions...

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

One Love
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:18 PM (GMT -6)

YES!

Gradually you recognize the possibility of other avenues toward fulfillment and your search beyond materiality begins in earnest. Not rejecting the material world, you continue performing your duties to your family, your career, your society, your own body. Only now an added dimension enters. You seek enlightenment, purification, and spiritual development. Your heart and mind become your field of endeavor. You learn to meditate or pray. Perhaps you undergo psychotherapy to balance your emotional nature. You think “I am really growing now.” Your practice brings positive results in terms spiritual experiences. But then your whole scenario falters and cracks appear. All your efforts to reform your mind and emotions bring only partial success.

Instead and unexpectedly, your practice strengthens that part of you that can see objectively. You notice that your mind seems to think its endless thoughts and daydreams without your participation or choice. You see your emotions reacting to the events of your life in the same old habitual ways. Slowly you come to realize and accept that there is no “I” in all of this. Your mind, your emotions, your personality live a life of their own, pre-programmed to their conditioned, experience-trained patterns. Your personality proves empty: there is no “you” in it. You see clearly that your thoughts are not you, you emotions are not you, your knowledge, skills, and desires are not you, and your sensory perceptions are not you. You arrive at what the Sufis term the second fana: letting go of your personality as your reality. In Buddhist terms (anatta), you have reached the first stage of seeing your own lack of an independent self.

Ah, the benefit of interfaith interaction... :-)

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Similitude
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:20 PM (GMT -6)

D: Loder proposed--and I agree--that the ego-supported personality amalgam as center is meant to be a SELF-LIQUIDATING process.

J: But we are SOULISH beings. There will always be for humans, this side of death at least, aspects of our amalgam that have to do with the pleasures of sense like taste and tactile feel and etc. We can't be angels just because we're spiritual at base.

Similitude
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:22 PM (GMT -6)

D: You see clearly that your thoughts are not you

J: What practical difference does it make that my thoughts are not me. God's thoughts aren't Him either. But what is the practical implication you're seeing here?

Tom
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:24 PM (GMT -6)

Jeff, D's point I think is that the dynamics (of misconceiving of one's true self to be one's amalgam) influence our lives whether or not we ever think about it on a deeper level. We're talking OS (Operating System). But I can testify to being surprised by how many people DO think about this. I work with a Recovery program of 300 (recovering) addicts, alchoholics, etc., and the more I talk to recovering people the more I see that they do think along these lines. They're constantly asking, "Who am I if my husband doesn't love me?" "What value do I have if my mother abandoned me when I was young," "What's my life mean now that I'm divorce and my only child just died?" D's whole passion is how we instruct people to answer these questions.

Tom

"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd

Similitude
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:24 PM (GMT -6)

As I see it, it is not a contingently caused amalgam that is of moral consequence. It's HOW our volition is involved in the totality of that amalgam. We SOLIDIFY one way or another. That's what's important.

Tom
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:28 PM (GMT -6)

J: But we are SOULISH beings. There will always be for humans, this side of death at least, aspects of our amalgam that have to do with the pleasures of sense like taste and tactile feel and etc. We can't be angels just because we're spiritual at base.

T: Right. D's point (I think) is to say that one doesn't ground WHO one is or what one's VALUE is in any of those aspects of our amalgam which, although the necessary context for the concretion of our true selves, may be lost or damaged or injured. If our true identity can't be lost or damanged (Romans), but any of the aspects of our amalgam may be lost or damaged, then we can't identify our true selves with those aspects can we?

T

"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd

Similitude
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:30 PM (GMT -6)

Tom: They're constantly asking, "Who am I if my husband doesn't love me?" "What value do I have if my mother abandoned me when I was young," "What's my life mean now that I'm divorce and my only child just died?" D's whole passion is how we instruct people to answer these questions.

Jeff: Gotcha. But all I'm saying is that we can't BE the driver of other people's volition. We have to reach in and find common ground and see where we can get from there. We can't suppose that there is some RIGHT way to answer a question that will NECESSARILY help them. It may only render them more accountable if they harden their hearts. Christ himself couldn't get most people on his side with signs and wonders. He even said once, "therefore your sin remains."

So sure, we PASSIONATELY do what we can. But ultimately, there is no NATURAL science that tells us how to ALWAYS succeed at helping people. There just isn't. We do what we can. Wisdom is not only about choosing greater goods. Sometimes, sadly enough, its about choosing lesser evils.

One Love
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:31 PM (GMT -6)

Tom:
Jeff, D's point I think is that the dynamics (of misconceiving of one's true self to be one's amalgam) influence our lives whether or not we ever think about it on a deeper level. We're talking OS (Operating System). But I can testify to being surprised by how many people DO think about this. I work with a Recovery program of 300 (recovering) addicts, alchoholics, etc., and the more I talk to recovering people the more I see that they do think along these lines. They're constantly asking, "Who am I if my husband doesn't love me?" "What value do I have if my mother abandoned me when I was young," "What's my life mean now that I'm divorce and my only child just died?" D's whole passion is how we instruct people to answer these questions.

Excellently stated, Tom!

I know what kind of shape I was in when I could get out of seeing my self in purely societal terms (Black, Texan, etc)...and I truncated my life to that existence. Looking back, I wouldn't trade this freedom I have right now for ANYTHING. And that freedom is available to ALL of us by the very way we've been created. If I can get folks to see that, I'd be cool.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Tom
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:32 PM (GMT -6)

"My thoughts are not me."

See, this needs qualification. Because I'm more inclined to agree that we ARE our thoughts, or at least that our true selves are THINKING SELVES. There is 'self' of any kind apart from conscious thought.

If you want to say our true selves aren't to be identified with this or that content, yeah.

Tom

"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd

One Love
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:33 PM (GMT -6)

Tom:
D's point (I think) is to say that one doesn't ground WHO one is or what one's VALUE is in any of those aspects of our amalgam which, although the necessary context for the concretion of our true selves, may be lost or damaged or injured. If our true identity can't be lost or damanged (Romans), but any of the aspects of our amalgam may be lost or damaged, then we can't identify our true selves with those aspects can we?

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

One Love
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:36 PM (GMT -6)

Jeff:
It's HOW our volition is involved in the totality of that amalgam. We SOLIDIFY one way or another. That's what's important.

What does "solidification" for or against Christ even MEAN when you can lose your self-experience of your WHOLE RELATIONSHIP with Christ up to that point can be completely changed with a fall on the bathroom floor? And what is solidified? The "I" that is NOT the amalgam? Hmmm...

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Similitude
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:37 PM (GMT -6)

In short, don't tie your own self-worth to a view that demands you always be successful by a criteria that is too narrow. That too is a form of egoism. It's the old serenity prayer. You learn NOT to waste time on what you can't improve, and you do your best at that at which you can. I don't think most people disagree with anything D says once it's qualified THAT WAY. Where people tend to disagree is on the particulars of PRUDENTIAL ADJUDICATION of what we THINK we know. That's the great difficulty of overcoming. As one great company says, people tend to agree on goals when they are stated at a HIGH level of generalization. It's when we get down to the details of implementing the lofty-sounding high-level stuff that our diversity causes us to disagree so much.

Similitude
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:39 PM (GMT -6)

D: What does "solidification" for or against Christ

J: Solidification has to do with habits. In that sense, habits are not so much FOR Christ per se. But bad habits can be AGAINST Christ. All good habits do is minimize the required energy expenditure for productive behavior. That leaves MORE energy for MORE loving action.

One Love
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:49 PM (GMT -6)

This will help. It shows the self-relational ability of the human spirit.

This is called an SELF-AWARENESS WHEEL. It's a way for a person to figure out what's going on intrapersonally and interpersonally. Y'all know Aki is a therapist so I've seen her use this a lot. The book that fleshes out this idea is AWESOME.

Anyways, I talked to her about this before. Bottom line, I said this...

The "I" is the SPACE in between the sections. It is that which consistently evaluates and recomposes the aspects of the sections WITHOUT itself being recomposed. To think rightly of human self-awareness is to think this way: to distinguish the composer from the composed. To DIRECTLY ASSOCIATE the particular configurations of thoughts and feelings with one's "I"--essentially removing the space--is what Loder would call an "eikonic eclipse". And it's what makes billboards and batteries out of human beings.

She agreed.

Dang. I wish Loder was alive. I would SOOOOOO call him!

Seriously. I had a conversation with my wife's best friend about this one day. I asked this...

What would happen if you were to be completely still with NO thoughts or feelings?

Her answer? "I would cease to exist. I'm nothing without my thoughts and feelings."

I let that conversation drop like a hot potato... icon_bandit

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 1/6/2012 2:55:29 PM (GMT-6)

Tom
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Posted 1/6/2012 3:51 PM (GMT -6)

J: In short, don't tie your own self-worth to a view that demands you always be successful by a criteria that is too narrow.

T: More specifically, don't tie your self-worth to anything in the world, period...because everyTHING and everyONE in the world is, like me, seeking for its personal identity and value outside itself. So no relation I sustain to anything within the created order (though I MUST sustain SOME relations to exist in the created order at all) can tell me WHO I am and WHAT my value is.

It's not about too narrow a criteria per se. It's about created vs uncreated criteria. Though to limit one's self to created criteria is too narrow! ;o)

Tom

"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd

Post Edited (Tom) : 1/6/2012 2:56:25 PM (GMT-6)

Tom
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Posted 1/6/2012 4:00 PM (GMT -6)

D: What would happen if you were to be completely still with NO thoughts or feelings? Her answer? "I would cease to exist. I'm nothing without my thoughts and feelings." I let that conversation drop like a hot potato.

T: I would have objected to you question--to the idea that there can be conscious experience void of thought or feeling. If you want to say "I've had such experiences," then we're at the end of our conversation. But if you want to promote a scope of possible experiences that are covered by Greg's/CH's ontology, then you know that all experience is an aiming at or achieving of aesthetic satisfaction. But you're question to Aki's friend presupposes "conscious experience void of all aesthetic perception and satisfaction," and I woulda called you on that. There is no such conscious experience, at least not in terms of any trinitarian metaphysic I can imagine.

T

"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd

Post Edited (Tom) : 1/6/2012 3:03:25 PM (GMT-6)

One Love
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Posted 1/6/2012 4:07 PM (GMT -6)

Tom:
D: What would happen if you were to be completely still with NO thoughts or feelings? Her answer? "I would cease to exist. I'm nothing without my thoughts and feelings." I let that conversation drop like a hot potato.

T: I would have objected to presumption that there can be conscious experience void of thought or feeling. If you want to say "I've had such experiences," then we're at the end of our conversation. Because if you're even remotely still in Greg's/CH's ontology, you know that all experience is an aiming at or achieving of aesthetic satisfaction. But you're question to her presupposes "conscious experience void of all aesthetic perception and satisfaction," and I woulda called you on that!

Ok, Professor.

How do I describe the experience of the aspect of oneself that TRANSCENDS any activity of the dianoia? EO and Loder talk about "imageless" experience or "emptiness". This is the reality I'm trying to speak of...so how would I call it? How do I describe being present WITHOUT any type of discursive use of memory or imagination...basically, the deepest states of prayer?

Dianoia (Greek: διάνοια) is a term used by Plato for a type of thinking, specifically about mathematical and technical subjects. It is the capacity for, process of, or result of discursive thinking, in contrast with the immediate apprehension that is characteristic of noesis.

What Kris (my wife's friend) was effectively saying was that she HAD NO intrapersonal reality to HERSELF without some kind of used discursive reasoning. She was basically DENYING her noetic potential.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Post Edited (One Love) : 1/6/2012 3:10:39 PM (GMT-6)

One Love
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Posted 1/6/2012 4:12 PM (GMT -6)

The Hesychast is to bring his mind (Gr. nous) into his heart so as to practise both the Jesus Prayer and sobriety with his mind in his heart. The descent of the mind into the heart is taken quite literally by the practitioners of Hesychasm and is not at all considered to be a metaphorical expression. Some of the psychophysical techniques described in the texts are to assist the descent of the mind into the heart at those times that only with difficulty it descends on its own.

The goal at this stage is a practice of the Jesus Prayer with the mind in the heart, which practice is free of images (see Pros Theodoulon). What this means is that by the exercise of sobriety (the mental ascesis against tempting thoughts), the Hesychast arrives at a continual practice of the Jesus Prayer with his mind in his heart and where his consciousness is no longer encumbered by the spontaneous inception of images: his mind has a certain stillness and emptiness that is punctuated only by the eternal repetition of the Jesus Prayer.

And remember even this repetition goes into COMPLETE SILENCE/STILLNESS at the higher levels, transcending mental prayer.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Similitude
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Posted 1/6/2012 4:19 PM (GMT -6)

D: I had a conversation with my wife's best friend about this one day. I asked this...

What would happen if you were to be completely still with NO thoughts or feelings?

Her answer? "I would cease to exist. I'm nothing without my thoughts and feelings."

I let that conversation drop like a hot potato

J: What I would have asked her is this: If you seemingly lost all consciousness in some medical surgery or something, does that mean the "you" now is a different being than the "you" prior to that operation? For if so, we have absolutely no way of knowing if the being with amalgam "Jeff" yesterday is the same being with amalgam "Jeff" today. And that means moral responsibility as we conceive of it is utterly irrational. Now, will some people be content, as Dawkins etal, to say well, yeah, that's right, but so what? Sure. But most won't. They will then TRY to reposit what is necessary to render their inavoidable beliefs coherent--at least until the conversation stops. Because they realize you have no reason to take them serious about anything if they don't believe in moral responsibility even.

T: More specifically, don't tie your self-worth to anything in the world, period...

J: Right. So if you're Noah and you can't get anyone outside your immediate family onboard with you after 120 years, REJOICE! We do what we can. We're only accountable for what is given us. And we're not given the reins to anyone else's free-will. All we can do is seek common ground and try to build thereon. We may fail in both for no fault of our own.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 1/6/2012 3:24:27 PM (GMT-6)

Tom
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Posted 1/6/2012 4:20 PM (GMT -6)

I'm thinking.

T

"The aesthetic value the world has for God is in expressing, not constituting, the aesthetic value God eternally finds within Godself." Greg Boyd

One Love
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Posted 1/6/2012 4:24 PM (GMT -6)

A Pathway...

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

One Love
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Posted 1/6/2012 4:26 PM (GMT -6)

All the above describes is how the noetic feature of a human being functionally "dead" such that a human can can get truncated by eikonic eclipse into it's composed "worlds", living in ersatz freedom only via discurvise activity.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Similitude
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Posted 1/6/2012 4:31 PM (GMT -6)

This is why conversion requires divine action. One can not even properly conceive of the truth (light) once the whole amalgam that conditions one's ability to conceive of logical possibilities and plausibilities is constrained in an intellectual realm limited to various falsehoods (darkness).

Similitude
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Posted 1/6/2012 4:37 PM (GMT -6)

The way I have described this is that the self/soul is the being whose essential attributes are ORIGINAL CAPACITIES. Until experience is caused from without (via brain states and the human spirit) those capacities are dormant--even free-will--during that phase of existence of the self. And this is why the essential attributes of the self are NOT the contingently-acquired capacities and state-instantiations. Those contingently-acquired capacities are, in that sense, accidental attributes.

An example of an accidental capacity would be the capacity to ENJOY intentionally causing suffering to others. That capacity is acquired because of prior desensitization. Prior to such desensitization, we literally don't have the capacity to feel that particular enjoyment from THOSE conditions unless we have some kind of "dysfunctional" brain activity.

Post Edited (Similitude) : 1/6/2012 3:49:33 PM (GMT-6)

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