Nikolai1

The problem with AYP as I see it: It is a practice that focuses very heavily on very specific physical practices, like pranayama. The intellectual side of our nature, the jnani, is left starved by AYP. The thinking person is left no option to accept metaphors, like kundalini, as if it was real energy travelling along real channels in the body. If an AYP practitoner is an intelligent person of sceptical disposition they may start to challenge the ultimate validity of all this talk. But to do so naturally clashes with alll the less intelligent who see no problem with the metaphors, see that the practices work, and therefore superstitiously conclude that the whole kit and kaboodle is TRUE. It is inevitable that an appraoch like AYP will develop into a website that is dogmatic and will work best for those who are dogmatists and not thinkers. Underlying all this is that pranayama is an ancient practice that doesnt even need all this spurious stuff about kundalini, susumma i.e. all the stuff that people argue about. And so modertors must be enlisted, henchmen to protect the party line, and then we see unedifying discipline publically occurring on the forum. The free for all liberal ethos that made the teachings available is fatally undermined by the tyrannical need to protect the purity of a message that is, and could only ever be, metaphorical in nature. Stories spread, peope leave the site, newcomers are put off by the atmosphere and the whole venture fails. Book sales fall, people start to panic and so start to charge for some of the teachings, which limits the donations that entutally unsue when people see that the place is genuinely for free and feel gratitude. A 'one approach fits all' can be made free to all because the book only needs to be written once, and thence it shall stand. But the price must be paid somewhere, and intellectual sacrifice is what is needed. Individual attention to individual thinkers?: that costs money and time. Better financial sense to just silence them.

Hi Karl You talk about logic being the only way to cross-check reality. How does this happen? The conceptual terms of the logical arguent - words - are themselves only symbols. So how does the concept 'bridge the gap' to reality?

I'm with Ramana Maharshi on this. Don't worry too much about what's under the bonnet. With pure heart practice the chakras will take care of themselves.

This isn't true. You don't do this, although it is hopeful that you like to think you do. If you were truly doing this, you wouldn't bother with all the deconstruction. Like you said: Your whole mien is of a person working according to a worldview. What you call logical is actually conventional scientifc understanding. If your experience fits with this modern understanding you accept it, if it doesn't you disregard it as illusion. Don't you?

Hi Karl As we've seen in the course of this discussion, when two premises are opposites, the conclusions that issue from them will be opposites too. If the power of the logical argument is restricted to the peculiar time, place and personality of the logician and the premises he uses then it seems that the method is without much general usefulness. Is this so? Indeed, if the point of difference between the adversaries is at the premise then it seems that it can't even steer us towards the most commonplace of truths. The ultimate that you speak of, in any given argument, IS the premise. It is that which is assumed; that which is believed to be true; that which we cannot even think to contradict and still stay sane. You don't do this. Rather, you simply present your own argument, which invariably issues from a quite different premise...and you call this argument 'the logical argument.' Your whole attitude is of one trying to demystify. You seem like someone on some kind of mission!

Well the scientist and the ancient mariner both believe they are being logical, in deed both take the logic of their position seriously. You take logic very seriously. Do you not wish to settle this, for your own peace of mind?

But like you've said, your rationality only allows you to know what your rationality will let you know. If something happens and you have a strange uncanny feeling about it, like you dreamt of it the day before. Your mind will simply interpret the feeling according to its own ways: 1) The mystic has no doubt that they have been clairvoyant. 2) The rationalist has no doubt that it is either a coincidence, or that the dream never happened - it is a confabulation. My question still is, do you not see the resemblance here? You likened them each to a kind of faith - like the relative faiths of the atheist and the theist. Can you imagine a way of life that avoids this kind of faith?

There was no significant new fact that led to the reclassifiction of the dolphin. So if it wasn't logical and wasn't emprical, what was it?

Circa 360 BC Aristotle wrote in detail about dolphins having lungs as well as the fact that they make milk and have, as he called them, 'breasts'. Still he called them 'fish' and in his classification, which had humans at the top, he placed whales and dolphins below reptiles and lizards. When Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick in 1851 he was still referring to the whale as a large fish.

Well then there was no new fact was there? The dolphin was a finned, swimming creature, ergo it was a fish.

I was thinking more of a prediction of something that could not be known through convntional means. Like your brother claimed to have. But perhaps you think I'm asking a false question because true premonitions that your brother claimed don't exist?

What was the new fact that was discovered?

If a sceptic has a premonition, he does not find it hard to say 'it was just coincidence' or 'I am simply imagining in this moment T+2 that there was a thought at T = 0 predictive of the event at T+1'. Likewise, the mystic does not find it hard to convince themselves of all sorts of clairvoyant genius. They can be so dogmatic that they never stop to think that they might be rewriting history. Have you never noticed a similarity between these two types?

At the start of this thread I asked you as an example of a fact, 'a clear definition of a concept or thing? Something that passes your own test of a good definition?' You said 'man is a rational animal.' We then saw the scientist and the ancient mariner disputing each other's rationality. It was by deploying their rationality that they saw each other's irrationality. You too see everywhere that man is a lamentably 'mystical animal', and you too were once such an animal. So can the the 'truth of the facts as they are' be determined without dispute?

There must be some instances where this is hard to do? Times when the mystical explanation seems more compelling?

Do mystical type experiences still happen to you?

OK, so it is possible for the syllogism, the archetypal logical form, to be valid yet totally untrue. Someting can work logically, but not be true empirically. So how do we critique the logical argument? How do we determine that the valid syllogism is, in fact, untrue?

So are you saying that you don't even know if that thing with your brother even happened? did you just make it up to convince TI that you were a mystic?

Hi Karl, Out of interest, how do you explain what the 'precognition' showed by your brother. I know all your explanations must be logical in order to satisfy you, so what is your explanation of this?

Hi Karl Just to recap, we have the old mariner who called a dolphin a fish. This, was, as you said, not a logical error but 'an omission caused by lack of experience'. But from the old mariner's perspective it is the scientist who has broken logical rules. The syllogism, as he views it, is: Major premise: A fish is any finned being that swims in the sea. Minor premise: A dolphin has fins and swims in the sea. Conclusion: A dolphin is therefore a fish. The scientist, as the mainer sees it, has taken a subordinate category and mistaken it for a superordinate category. He thinks being a mammal precludes it from being a fish. It is equivalent to saying "the dolphin is not a living being, it is a mammal." The scientist is a most naive thinker, according to the ancient mariner. So the scientist accuses the mariner of an omission of experience. The mariner accuses the scientist of logical error. Which of these is right, according to logic?

Ok then, what's the difference between a logical error and an omission of experience?

What did those ancient mariners lack? Let's take Herman Melville who knew everything there is to know about whales, but considered them fish?

The point is: people did think that dolphins were fish, whales too, but why was this a logical error?

And why is laying eggs considered a feature of a fish, but not having live young. Why can't a fish be a fish and have live young?

You cannot possibly conceive where I'm going with this, but I assure you there will be no body swerve. In the meantime, I can ask from a different angle. How might the biologist realise that a definition might be erroneous?