Karl

The word is a word, it's concrete. Try and see there is not a contradiction here. Concepts aren't reality, they are like equations devoid of quantity. A word is a word, it can be defined in the same way as we have an idea for a garden shed and then we take the concept and begin to produce the perceptual. We define size, wood type, building method. Existent things are relative to one another, but concepts are not. They are not concretes. Existent things can be related, such as the width of this thing vs that thing, but conceptually these measurements disappear. This is a very difficult thing to grasp. It was perhaps the hardest for me because I thought like you do now.

You really don't know what good and bad is ? In my experience people who say it's relative are often as not dodging responsibility and justice. It isn't a list of things as intrincisists believe and neither is it morally flexible as the subjectivists believe. You know when you did good and when you did bad. No one needs to teach you those things, you feel it immediately and then begin to justify the action. Bad people feel bad, you can call them psychopaths, criminals, victims of family abuse, but they still feel bad about their actions.

All good and important points Apech. I refer to it as one war cut in two. It never really ended and many statesman realised the peace would be over in less than quarter of a century. It was also an unnecessary war not led by the people, but a group of idiots who's idea of foreign policy lacked any finesse. Churchill in particular couldn't wait to have a war, he loved war and lived for it. I don't think we will be granted Liberty. We must claim it and fight for it. It is far better to break a larger enemy into smaller groups if we wish to achieve success. The problem with the EU is that it is in a desperate fight for the survival of an idea. The idea is patently wrong, but there is now so much inertia and vested interest in maintaining it, that not one thing can be allowed to be seen to fail. One of those things is for Britain to remain loyal to the idea. This is not a good idea. Not for us, not for Europe and not for the rest of the world. You only need to see what has been done to Greece in the name of the EU dream to understand the kind of scorched Earth politics that underpin the people who are forcing it forward. Sometimes people can't see when the body has died and they keep spending greater and greater resources on trying to re-animate it. The EU is a corpse already, we don't need to make the population who live under its flag corpses in order to pronounce the time of death. Think of Britain leaving as a kind form of euthanasia. A wake up call for everyone. After that, we will have to fight our own battles on British soil, but, at least we won't be shackled to a far greater tragedy.

You know what it is though. You aren't confused by it. It is just a noun without context, but you already know how it might apply but are only devoid of some additional information. I cannot, of course transfer my concept directly into your mind, but that isn't required. If I said 'coffee table' you would also know to the object I am referring. Of course, conceptually you have no idea of exactly what kind, shape, colour or size of table to which I might refer. This you feel is relative, but it isn't. You don't hold any concept in any other kind of way. You get a picture of some sort of a small table made out of wood. That's all that is required. If, instead, I pointed at the coffe table and said 'that one'. Well, we both see it. There isn't any equivocation. We now have a concrete. We might be from very different places and have a completely different language. We cannot begin to discuss concepts until we have the language sorted out and the definitions applied. This doesn't make it relative. It's just a rapid way of transferring ideas in a way which does not require concrete perceptions.

You can definitely transcend everything when you are dead. Alive, not so much. Why would you wish to transcend the good ?

Bullshit. Is that meaningful enough for you, or do you doubt what it means ? :-)

For some I expect that vision is true. Undoubtedly there are a group of elite who wish to restore good old Blighty, there are the modernisers who wish to throw out those backward looking elite. However, there are the rest of us Apech. We are not the elite. The problem with the EU is that it gets us further down a path which we have even less chance of affecting. I do not want to live in a Germanic superstate. I like the Germans, I like their cars, sausages, beer and mostly every technical product they produce. I love their country and have ridden and stayed there many times and that's the point. The strength of Europe is not in a gradual homogenising of the whole, but in the fantastic differences between each country-and in the past, between each principality. Europe forged ahead because of its competitiveness and difference. We made mistakes, we had a huge war, but this has made us so fearful that we have lost our joy in sovereignty. It's as if a child did something wrong and must now be put into a padded room where it can't hurt itself or others. This kind of sufficating bureaucracy does not inspire anyone. The lack of competiveness stifles innovation and progress. The EU isn't progress is regress. The judgement is clear to anyone that looks at the trading figures and the social situation. Europe is dying from bureaucratic nannyism and corporate corruption. A Brexit won't return us to the days on the village green no matter what the old guard imagine. I've met those people. They want Britain for themselves and are just as anti-progress as the EU-just in a more individual way. Yet Brexit gives us an opportunity to challenge those people in a way we cannot do in a Germanic superstate. For me, well it's pretty much over, but not for the younger people who have been denied real education and been allowed to drift like ghosts in a machine. We are failing them. They have no hope. Crappy jobs, living at home, no family, life as a state dependent. What kind of life is that ? It's worse than a battery farm chicken. The economy isn't growing, everything is stagnating and opportunities are reduced to functionalism. This isn't a good thing. The young deserve better than that. Humanity deserves better than that. Better we wipe ourselves out in a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust than live our lives on our knees being directed in every aspect of our existence. It is not Liberty, that is serfdom. What we could become must start with Liberty. Liberty can only come when we stop being afraid of independence. Independence can only occur if we begin to break the bonds which we have become reliant upon. We must first want to be free and accept what freedom is. We must want it regardless of what fears it may hold because it is the only way that we can survive and find happiness. Happiness is not being bolted to a work bench with your mind being continually flooded with hobgoblins and nightmares. That is not living. Better to cut your throat than endure a single day of that.

Me too. Not so much these days, I liked the classics but once it turned into fantasy rather than science it just turned me off. The best scifi these days tend to be thrillers, but they really aren't revolutionary, it's just a conventional story set amongst technology. I haven't come across any modern visionaries who lay out an entire civilisation, or who can compact a revolutionary idea into a couple of hundred pages. In effect I like romantic fiction with depth (I don't mean love stories, but the kind of writing which is like a good painting where every word is deliberate and the style suffuses every sentence).

You might well enjoy my book then if I ever get it finished. :-) not too far in the future and linked to today's events.

How is that relative ? If a word had no meaning what so ever to you how could it be relative. We come across words we don't understand all of the time, we just learn the meaning of that word as best we can the first time and then work to get that meaning as clearly defined as possible. It isn't relative to be mistaken about the meaning of a word, it's just erroneous.

I dont even want elected people telling me what I can and can't do, never mind the unelected. By what right....none.

Isnt that his point ? He sticks it to the Blairite Europhiles in his own party and damages Cameron's train. Corbyn is no Europhile. His kind of old guard socialism doesn't fit with the new breed of technocratic socialists. The EU in a sense is Blair, or perhaps Blair was moulded by the EU. It's a clear sense of his much touted third way which is really Germanic Democratic Socialism. It is facist industrialism and banking wedded to high levels of social welfare. It is really serfdom. A group of ultra rich and the rest of us working to pay off our debts with little top ups provided out of the pockets of the marginally more wealthy labourers to those on the bottom rung. This is what Germany is like. It's workers and managers wear identical uniforms. Everything is efficient and orderly. Neat and clean. Then the technocrats at the top pull the strings to keep it like that. Of course Germany is the hub. It is like London. In Germany it works because they are in the position they are. The accommodation of East Germany and the flood of Turkish immigrant workers has led them to the conclusion that Germany's way is the only way. It works, so it must be exported to every country. Unfortunately they make the same strategic error that they did in the last century. They assume people are robots and it's only a matter of stamping out their individual cultures to get them to see the Great German ideology.

Teachers pet ? :-)

You set the rules. It's a dream. Why would that be offensive. If you take your dreams as being important, then that is where I appear. I must be important to you in some way you just haven't figured out. Anyway I will stay out if that's what you want. I only replied because of CFs baiting. Your call.

Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character out of a book. Santa Clause said only good boys get toys. Chicken Lickin' said the sky was falling down. Did I say reality was simple, or even explainable ? No. I said reality was reality and dream is dream. You can know reality by direct perception of it, you can know a dream from a table, a rock from a wave.

Your dreaming aren't you, so anything goes. This is what you tell me, that you have no karmic hangovers, so why does it make you angry ? Does a dreaming Karmic accomplished spirit require defence of anger ? You know that answer even if you refuse to accept it. It is not 'out of my league' but my being here might be out of your comfort zone. I can respect that, but that isn't a reason for you to turn to defence. I'm not a threat.

I didn't say dreams were not important. They clearly are otherwise we wouldn't have them. However, they are pure internal generations of a certain state of consciousness. Don't you ever day dream ? Do you ever find yourself having driven a car many miles without being conscious of the distance or time ? Did you crash, or lose consciousness ? No. The mind can cope with multiple states of consciousnes simultaneously. It isn't a black and white thing between full consciousness and unconsciousness, but reality remains reality. Reality remains reality even when we dream. There is no mystery-at least not epistemologically-we can dream, or be entirely unconscious whilst still being able to react to stimuli-that's why a shock will leave the waking person initially confused until the mind can traverse several states of consciousness until full focus and then can apply reason. Reality is that you dream, but reality is not a dream.

It either is a dream or it isn't. We all know what a dream is. We go to sleep, we fall down stairs, fly, eat a banquet, but we know when we awake that none of that happened. We can determine dream state and waking state very easily. Where is the dualism ? Im completely non dual as should be obvious. A is A, a thing is a thing.

If you are in a dream then nothing matters. It's either a dream or it isn't. You set the rules. If you are just treating the dream as reality then what's the difference ? That's rhetorical of course, because there clearly is none, so why not accept reality. If you decide to change the definition then I'm at liberty to turn it back. I can say that your dream is your reality and that's why you are trying to explain it. I don't have karmic traces, but I do have high blood pressure :-) I have no issues with my past, no regrets, no guilt, absolutely no concern whatsoever. I'm not preoccupied with my past, because it's the past. I can use what I obtained from experience, what is useful and then delete the rest as useless crap. That means I love now, I love life, I love reality right here and now. That it doesn't always conform to my expectations or desires is all part and parcel of my joy meant of life. If I ever get to the point I detest it so much I would regard it as a dream then I will know I've either taken a wrong turning, or my life actually has become of such a poor quality that I no longer require it.

Without the possbility of death there would be no possibility of life.

How can you say that you know all this for certain when you are convinced it's all just a dream ? Which is to say, you don't actually believe your own hype, or you wouldn't even try.

The problem might be the comittments of BJ to the leave campaign. He was a fence sitter for a very long time and expressed a lot of EU sympathies. I think they have the right group leading the charge. Farage hasn't got the gravitas.

Garden of Eden. Sun makes Apples grow.

Perceptions are direct experience, it's the conceptions that arise from those perceptions and the attendant emotional content which is confused. When people get to thinking they are Apples I suppose they will just go and find a branch to hang from.

I didn't need a shrink, I only needed the the desire to know reality and to shed my fear of it. All that is required is to open the eyes, but the mind tells itself that it is too awful to discover it. Thus the eyes stay closed. First let go of the fear of knowing reality. That's the hardest part.