all formulations are wrong

[Jakob]

@Ierrellus

Coming late in these discussions, I wish to present a biopsychological perspective for what it’s worth. If anyone here believes in evolution, he/she will admit to physical, experiential precedents for mental development. In these precedents are communication before language and emotive intensifications of drives.

Dennett’s take on evolution is that there does not necessarily need to be explanations that consider some linear development from a single organism to a variety of species in order to explain what evolves. He thought what evolves can be expressed as the quality of adaptational potential. And, of course, this evolving is from a human take on reality.

The latest scientific findings are that bacteria communicate. Bees and ants comunicate by pheronomes (sp.?) Bats communicate by echolocation as do dolphins and whales. (We do know what it’s like to be a bat–sorry, Nagel.) Why should we contend that language communication is the only form of communication available? Humans may not communicate by echolocation, but they can at least understand it and construct sonar devices based on it. Humans do communicate more by scent than most are willing to admit. Only a century or so ago Napoleon wrote to Josephine, “Don’t bathe. I’ll be home in a couple of weeks.” (The scent of a woman!)

You seem to have interpreted the question as whether or not there is communication without language. This you have satisfactory answered by the example of smell. But my intention was to examine if thought beyond language is possible - and smell does not qualify as thought to me.
The definitive argument that there must be thought beyond language is that language must be created by some thought process.
All the objections brought forward by Sauwelios are thereby proven futile. Navigator had some intelligent things to say but about general mysticism instead of the properties and consequences of suprarational thought, which is where thought and the world really meet, as in the case of Einstein and others, unknown the general public, the Demiurgic figures to which I refer in the OP - and of course God Himself.

To your last question, why do we sell ourselves short by declaring it is is all there is - I don’t know who does that, and I wouldn’t know why anyone does it but cowardice or lazyiness. I use kabballah as a philosophical tool, a hammer, to sculpt, but I could do very well without it.
Kabbalah has little to do with geometry (The form of the glyph of the tree of life itself is arbitrary, has no real value except convenient design)except for the geometrical properties of the numers one through ten represented by the ten sephirot - but this is only very incidentally mentioned in kabbalistic literature and never elaborated upon. I could do this myself in the future, and I might, but in a book, not on a forum as a topic for discussion. Anyone who’s interested in the subject of living geometry outside of kabbalah I refer to the works of Michael S Schneider.

[Sauwelios]

@Jakob

The definitive argument that there must be thought beyond language is that language must be created by some thought process.

Language, or the means of communication, is a customised form of communication. Communication, however, arises from the need for communication, from the will to communicate, which is a pathos. Thought is simply internalised communication.

[Ierrellus]

J.,
I don’t play with absractions. Scent is the language of many animals and may be part of primal, human communication. Where do we draw the line between developmental communications and knowing as minds describe it? IMHO, there is no such line, there are only varieties of experience none of which contradict any of the others without resort to abstraction.

[Jakob]

@Sauwelios

@Jakob

The definitive argument that there must be thought beyond language is that language must be created by some thought process.

Language, or the means of communication, is a customised form of communication. Communication, however, arises from the need for communication, from the will to communicate, which is a pathos. Thought is simply internalised communication.

Communication is possible without language, thought is possible without communication, communication is possible without the need for communication.
Like Plato, you start with an assumption. Form thereon, like Plato, your logic is flawless. But it is circular, only capable of sustaining itself, not of creating. You seem to have no goal for your intellect - the excersise of it suffices.

The statement that experience is all does not define experience (or all) in a meaningful way - although logically, it suffices. Your reasonings are the ‘stiff necked adversary of thought’
Thought, of course, is poetic genius.

[Sauwelios]

@Jakob

Communication is possible without language,

Only if it has not been formalised - but then it must be intuitively understood.

@Jakob

thought is possible without communication,

Yeah, just as the Creator is possible without Creation: “pure consciousness”…

@Jakob

communication is possible without the need for communication.

Just as reasoning is possible without a goal, right? But how about the need for excercise (or play)?

@Jakob

Like Plato, you start with an assumption. Form thereon, like Plato, your logic is flawless. But it is circular, only capable of sustaining itself, not of creating. You seem to have no goal for your intellect - the excersise of it suffices.

“Dance, like philosophy, began with physical combat.
The first to keep the body in trim, the second to do the same for the mind.”
[William Nietzsche.]

@Jakob

The statement that experience is all does not define experience (or all) in a meaningful way - although logically, it suffices. Your reasonings are the ‘stiff necked adversary of thought’
Thought, of course, is poetic genius.

“There is always some madness in love. But there is always, also, some method [Vernunft, “reason”] in madness.”
[Zarathustra, Of Reading and Writing.]

[Ierrellus]

We are totally immersed in a genetic continuum. In my teleology thread Xunzian accurately describes the motivational force of organisms as an optimizing of potental. To describe the human experience as including some “thing in itself” is to dismiss the reality of organic and inorganic chemical interactions that insure survival. To describe the motivational force in organisms as “will to power” is to misinterpret how a set of drives function in order to achieve the best possible adaptational success. Survival has no room for debate. Metacrap does not fertilize!

Of course there is more to existence than survival. But survival is prerequisite for anything else. Any take on reality, seen from the mind’s perspective, is nonsense if it cannot include all physical precursors of mind, all history of genetic constructions of organisms.

All formulations are wrong only if they claim that any point in a continuum defines an entire process.

[Navigator]

@Jakob

Navigator: I think you overlook the exhiliration that a system like Kabbalah can offer.

Perhaps I didn’t make it clear that I am myself a student of the Kabbalah, as well as many other mystical and magical systems, and know about that exhilaration very well. No, I’m not overlooking it.

To me it’s not an intellectual system primarily, but a tool to increase the depth and dynamism of meditation. I have to moderate it now, because it’s become frighteningly intense.

When I say that the Kabballah is an intellectual system, I mean that it uses an elaborate mental model of the universe, with carefully and precisely defined structure. It’s at one extreme, while Zen (in one sense) and Santeria (in another sense) are at the other.

I don’t really think that enlightenment is an end either, though- it’s a state from which you can operate consciousness. I think I’ve attained enlightenment pretty early on as beginners luck when practicing Zen for the first time - but when you’re not living in the mountains in a monestary, it’s just not enough to see through the veil of maya. You need to empower yourself to get that state to alingn with your life. That’s hard work, and that’s where kabbalah comes in for me. It’s ploughing through the mud of ratio, fertilizing it for weird and wondrous plants to grow. Plants of enlightenment.

I agree with this completely. In fact, I would say that there is no end of the work, except when you die.

[Jakob]

@Navigator

Cool! Allright then.

Of the 22, what’s your most effective path for deconstructing reason?

[Ierrellus]

Reason does not need deconstruction. It’s a good tool for survival, genetically evolved. It does need deflating, however, since it is not the end-all be-all of experiential reality.

[Jakob]

To anwer a request; The ten sephirot as I understand them now. I formulate them anew every now and then, as my understanding of them evolves.

1. Kether, the crown
   The point where the latent potential af the cosmos is concentrated into actual potential. Equatable to the Sahasrare chakra at the crown of the head. Brilliant white light flows in from above.
2. Chokmah, wisdom
   The might of spirit revealed. The will of God, pure force.
3. Binah, understanding.
   The great sea of being, time, matter, space. Absorbs all force and begets all manifestation.
4. Chesed, mercy
   The summit of manifestation; existence relishes in itself. Zeus, the good to itself; good beyond morality, love.
5. Geburah, strength
   The sword of good, the strength of love. The destruction of decay in defense of health.
6. Tipharet, beauty
   the experience of Chesed by means of Geburah, the consequence of the workings of Good; self-existence.
7. Netzach, victory
   The entrance of the self / soul in the physical realm - the creation of the world of experience.
   8] Hod, splendour
   The formation of identity asccording to experience. The self experiencing itself being formed by experience. Chesed experiencing itself.
8. Yesod, the foundation
   The consequence of self-experience; instinct. The desire for more experience of self and procreation caused by existence appreciating itself.
9. Malkuth, the kingdom
   The concequence of self-appreciation and procreation: the continuum of the biological world.

[Jakob]

@Ierrellus

Reason does not need deconstruction. It’s a good tool for survival, genetically evolved. It does need deflating, however, since it is not the end-all be-all of experiential reality.

It’s a good tool for world destruction as well. Reason needs to be deconstructed as live evolves, so that it can arise new and clean, adapted and suited to the purpose of serving and sustaining the new life.

“Reason is the circumference of energy”
-W. Blake.

[Ierrellus]

A tool cannot be blamed for how it is used.

[Jakob]

@Ierrellus

A tool cannot be blamed for how it is used.

I don’t blame reason, reason is not someone I can blame.
I can’t blame the atomic bomb for being dropped on Hiroshima. I can observe that that is a consequence of it’s existence.

[Ierrellus]

This seems to indicate that if the tool did not exist, it could not be misused, a copout of human responsibility. I once was debating with a brother-in-law about a county voting to become dry. His argument was that if the hootch wasn’t in that county his son wouldn’t go for it. He underestimated the resouces of his son, who could drive twenty miles from his home and buy all the liquor he wanted. What was dropped from Enola Gay included a premeditated human idea.

[heavenly_demonic]

@Jakob

Once one gets to know the system,
the rate at which the power of imagination increases is freakish, and things that formerly had great power of mystery and awe fall obediently into place, and the horizons of the mind start dancing, spiralling and disappearing altogether.

Hi Jakob!

what if I already feel that way? (not to be cocky or anything) before practicing the kabaahlah? I guess I was just born crazy lol

[Ierrellus]

h.d.,
I know what you mean. I’ve been able to go on “trips” without drugs, to feel exhuberant in sunsets, sunrises and beautiful scenery, to create from a joy of living that needed no mystic references.

[heavenly_demonic]

@Jakob

I believe I do, She is the object of the majortiy of meditation of occultism; She’s that which brings out and feeds the inner child. Jesus said ‘No one shall come through the Father except through the Mother.’
In Yoga, she is the Kundalini, in gnosticism the Holy Ghost. In poets she is the Muse and in philosophers she is Sophia. It is she who possesses the shaman.

I understand what you mean… it feels so true to ‘my heart’ , inner voice or whatever…

I already felt this, but thought it was just an idea of mine, so when I read it I was speechless…

Too bad Marian aparitions and the catholic church use her immage to tell you to obey something outside yourself with blind faith and not to listen to your inner ‘virgin mary’…soul, or whatever you want to call this energy…
not energy…but this…purpose/guide…
sorry if you don’t get it, it’s hard to define.

[heavenly_demonic]

@Sauwelios

We can model the world, which is the sum of all our impressions, by representing these impressions, by themselves or in bundles, by signals. If we model it by these impressions themselves, if we do not encode the information, if our impressions represent themselves, our model is the world. “Thought beyond language”, therefore, is simply another way of saying “direct experience of the world”. And as our direct experience is the world, it is simply another way of saying nothing.

Do you think we can experience the world directly?

if there are only impressions being experienced, with no idendity…that’s the identity…the impressions themselves.

I mean, there exists one identity, that of the ‘imagining process’…
and as I can’t prove anyone’s existence beyond mine, nor anyone else’s imagining and thought processes… I might as well assume that imaginning and those impressions are me, and noone else… I mean, my identity, so therefore I guess I have an identity…
but I may have got your point wrong… if I’m missing something please explain. thank u!

[heavenly_demonic]

@Jakob

As this parallel doesn’t hold since triangular is derived from triangle and thought not from language, at least not according to archaeological approach to history, I feel I should repeat that it’s self-evident that one cannot prove there is thought beyond language by means of language. Unless someone invents a language beyond thought. And that, come to think of it, is Qabbalah.

let’s say the Qabbalah is a language beyond thought…
what is the thought beyond the language beyond thought? (what is the thoought or intent beyond the language of the Qabbalah).

and in turn, what is the reality/language/thought/being-non-being/whatever/uncomprehensible beyond that?..
and in turn, what’s beyond that? and blah blah blah…

[Jakob]

@heavenly_demonic

@Jakob

I believe I do, She is the object of the majortiy of meditation of occultism; She’s that which brings out and feeds the inner child. Jesus said ‘No one shall come through the Father except through the Mother.’
In Yoga, she is the Kundalini, in gnosticism the Holy Ghost. In poets she is the Muse and in philosophers she is Sophia. It is she who possesses the shaman.

I understand what you mean… it feels so true to ‘my heart’ , inner voice or whatever…

I already felt this, but thought it was just an idea of mine, so when I read it I was speechless…

Too bad Marian aparitions and the catholic church use her immage to tell you to obey something outside yourself with blind faith and not to listen to your inner ‘virgin mary’…soul, or whatever you want to call this energy…
not energy…but this…purpose/guide…
sorry if you don’t get it, it’s hard to define.

She resists definition. Defining her curbs her freedom to nourish us. She’s beyond the intellect - as is all truth.

@Ierrellus

h.d.,
I know what you mean. I’ve been able to go on “trips” without drugs, to feel exhuberant in sunsets, sunrises and beautiful scenery, to create from a joy of living that needed no mystic references.

Of course. So have I. I’m not making the claim that kabbalah is the only way to feel exuberance at the experience of the world - this exuberance is something all humans can feel - it is our birthright.
Probably I was misleading so far. Kabbalah is a means to power. It’s use is not to attain personal enlightenment, but to manifest this enlightenment, which is experience of God, in the world to be experienced by others. The joy that active manifestation of God brings is far superior to the joy of simply experiencing God.

I see the will to power as Gods will to manifest.