Nikolai1

I think the most crucial thing is to get your posture right. If you've got back pain it means your weight of your trunk isn't supported by the pelvis. You'll go nowhere unless you get this right because the pain is too distracting. You need to be able to feel weightless. For me this was sorted with a quite high cushion to sit on and legs crossed in Burmese position.

Karl- spirit is the place where all your definitions take place. The definition itself is simply another instance of the thing we are defining. Spirit is a boundless void that encompasses all this, and you can feel it and belong to it. It is always there. It is reality itself, and it is our own self-existence. It is the one thing that can't be defined. But when we awaken to it, this failure does not perturb us in the least. It is already there in the failure. The unknowing of it is itself just more of the knowing. You either see what I mean or you don't. And either is just more of the same spirit. Spirit is oneness. There is no second to it. There is no antinym with which to contrast it. We know it directly and vividly, nad to coneptualise it is to fail, but the failure is more of the same success. I hope I give you a flavour of it!

If I was to ask you what side the pub is on, you would play both sides. You would say 'it depends'. Wisdom is what sees that we can play both sides with the most fundamental categories of thought and still stay whole. Actually, what is more true is that becoming whole is what allows us to play both sides.

I gather you realise that I am no idealist, not at all. I see idealism and materialism as both halves of the same coin. The world is logical, and illogical or rather, totally and radically alogical. You couldn't see my vision of radical change and annihilation. It is what the spiritual practitioner comes to see as first-hand experience and is what allows him not to always fall into materialism or idealism. With this vision comes the ability to see things from both sides. A thing exists, and does not exist. Existence is as provisional as whether the pub is on the right hand side or the left. Come from one direction and its on the left, come from the other direction and its on the right. Do we need to walk both roads to know if this is the case? No, there is a standpoint from where logical judgements can be made a priori. I am a logician, just like you. No flaky idealist. But I am a logician working from a place where existence and non-existence are as perspectival as left and right.

A dolphin is a blue-nose, man is a body. A dolphin is a mammal, man is a body and mind A dolphin is a living being, man is a body, mind and immortal spirit. If you don't know yourself as spirit, then I can't exactly help you. But don't get all huffed up and think I'm making some error!

When the existent and the non-existent have become the same, it does not mean that everything is no unreal. It means that everything is now the same. So the car is understood to be on the same level of reality as the dream. This does not relegate the car as much as you might think. Nor is the dream promoted as much as you think. But this is the vision of idealism. It is as old as the hills. And like I said, it is the paradgim you use to understand your mental life, and that of others. So perhaps we can appraoh the question of the premise from another angle. If you and your interlocutor, both keen logicians, disagree on the premises you should adopt. How, logically, should you determine whose is the correct premise?

Do you remember you talked about how our understanding of concepts can be enlarged by experience? Well, let's say that spiritual experience enlarges our concept of selfhood. If we thought we were mortal before, we know see that mortality only applies to one oart of us - our body. Now we see that both syllogisma are correct. One is correct with reference to our body, the other is correct with reference to our larger self. If you have no experience of this larger self then the two syllogisms can't both be correct. It would be a nonsense to suggest so. When you do have experience, you see no contradiction whatsoever. It is no more compicated than saying that a dolphin is both a Bottle-Nose and a Mammal.

The important point about idealims is that it is monistic. What you call matter and what you call thought is the same thing. Each are just monentary flashes in a stream. Rather like individual frames on a movie reel. So illusion doesn't really apply to this vision. The thought of the spgahetti monster is as real as the sight of the badger. Materialism can be monistic, but it is mostly dualistic. There is a difference between thought and matter. Thought behaves exactly like the idealist says, but matter endures regardless of any perceiving consciousness. Only the dualist can think about the world logically because only the duallist belives that there is a separate world to think about. The idealist says this separation is illusory. The big clue that the materialist should see is that their is a mjor component of the syllogism that has nothing to do with the world and that is the premise. The premise is a fiction, no different to the materialists dream. Or, to put it another way, if the materialist believes in fantasy dreams then he has to accept that the premise is of the same nature.

Yes, but that is what happens to the spiritually awakened. It chnages the paradigm because your immortality is directly and concretely felt by yourself. And the same experience makes you realise that the same is true of alll men and always has been. So the major premise is now . 'All men are immortal.' and the conclusion about Buddha follows suit.

Yes, I've noticed this phenomenon countless times in all paths. When something is held up as constituting spiritual progress, people get themselves very excited about it, even though it is very everyday annd commonplace. To the newcomer who happens to have a pretty lofty concepption of kundalini - as a truly unearthly bliss - it might be a bit disaapointing to realise that what everyone is talking about is the same feeling he gets every time his team wins, and his child smiles, and snow gives him a day off work.

No, the idealist would claim that he isn't reasoning at all. Reasoning he says, is an illusion. All there is, is the flow? So how do you persuade him that this isn't the case? And how do you stop him from thinking that your premise is arbitrary? I mean, surely you can see that people Do argue over logical matters? To the idealist thy simply share a common delusion. That their concepts can capture reality.

Karl - you seem to be a good exampe of the person I'm talking about. Someone who had visions, then dismissed them as unreal. But have you seen that that the living people are visions and are now dead?

As I tried to show you, the idealist bases his wordlview on a very, very, direct view of reality. Namely, its ceaseless, remorseless, moment by monent change. The materialist only applies this vision to what he calls his mental life which is why the idealist calles the vision idealism. This idealist worldview made large makes us see that the concept is actually a fully valid reality in itself and cannot be in way said to conceptualise anything. It is itself another moment in the stream. But let's get back to logic. Are you able to demonstrate logically that the premise of the syllogism corresponds to reality. How do you combat the claim that the premise is arbitrary, held up by nothing more logical than blind faith?

Yes, indeed it is and I do not wish to lessen it. But, reality itself is a strange admixture of the psychic the spiritual and the physical. People do not realise this, and those who have had powerful kundalini experiences often don't take into account the, lets's say, hallucinatory nature of this and all experience. They then argue for its reality against those who have started to realise that a big contributing factor was the suggestion of the approach. So, Christians are met by mother Mary. Buddhists see Buddha Native Americans see the ancestors. AYPers have kundalini experiences. As we awaken intellectually, things that once seemed very real become doubtful and we find ourselves as ex-belivers arguing with the believers. With time a synthesis can be reached and we see that that all reality is of the nature of suggestion and there is no other. The real and the unreal are the same.

To this the idealist would say that because there is no representation occurring, the concept is an illusion. Each concept is a moment of reality in itself. How would you answer this?

When something is real to the heart, it can be felt, and loved, and it satisfies, and whether it's reality can be shared by words makes not the slightest difference to his love of it.

Ha, yes! Obviously I am attempting to describe a qualia which some either get or they don't. The idealist, as the name suggests, sees the world as an idea. And what are ideas like: dreamy not tangible, ephemeral, and when they are out of consciousness they are nowhere at all. When a car drives passed us, around the corner and out of sight... The materialist thinks it still exists whether they think of it or not. To the idealist, their not thinking of it IS its non-existence. Why does this matter? From the idealist position comes the idea that consciousness is sovereign and can create matter. It is therefore possibble that the concept is entirely arbitrary. They look for this arbitrariness in the syllogism and find it in the premise, which is the thing A, which is assumed a priori. And if we try to validate A a posteriori, we must first assume B a priori and so on... To the materialist matter inspires consciousness. So every concept is based on, and is a kind of mirror of reality. The conceptual scheme is not arbitrary and can be improved by a closer correspondence to reality. If everything was arbitrary, the materilaist says, we would have no reason to favour one concept over another. So which of these visions is the correct one? and why?

When I speak of this I can only appeal to those who know it. And those who know it, know it can't be spoken of. They also know that all attempts, Kundalini included, are metaphors.

Let's bring things back to experience. Can you see this ever changing taleaux that the idealists speak of? A change so fast that even the word moment seems clunky? An annihilation so deep and total that makes us think that there shall be at least ash after Armageddon?

Hi Karl, To the idealist, reality IS changing at a pace so rapid that it can't even be thought about. Each moment comes faster than what we call instantaneous, and this new moment is a total annihilation of the previous. A thought is gone as quickly as it came, as is the perception. There are no remaining grounds for a distinction between the thought and the perception. Both have passed in the very fastest instant. How do you argue against this vision? Whence this reality of 'concrete things' that the concept represents?

Kundalini is Divine Reality viewed through the aspect of embodiment. I say metaphorical becuase absolute reality can be known through many avenues. Inner bliss IS our Father in Heaven.

So how do you know that there are existing concretes to be represented? For example an idealist philosopher would say that experience only presents a constant stream, each moment annihilated by the next. How do you refute this, and assert that there is a reality of concretes 'behind' the ever-chnaging tableaux?

is an abstraction a representation of something other than it?

Some consider the concept to be a representation of reality. How do you define the concept?

Is a concept a symbol or not?