Wednesday, October 19, 2016

14 - The Two Major Paths to Knowledge


Apologies for the lateness of this post; a number of circumstances conspired to impact the schedule. Hope it proves to be worth the wait.
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There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.  - Aldous Huxley
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.  - W.B. Yeats
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.  - Robertson Davies , Tempest-Tost
In this post:

Humankind seems driven to understand the
Universe, and our role in it.

This drive may be built into us by yotzer.

Science and religion/philosophy are the two
main tools we use to reach understanding.

2 comments :

  1. Happy Birthday Arthur!
    Thinking of you on your birthday, I happened onto your latest post and out came the following response.

    When you speak of the dual paths of religious philosophy and of science, you are ignoring the path of art.
    Yet it may very well be that the path of art contains your missing clues.

    Nadia Boulanger writes of a concert performance which ended without immediate applause. The audience was so transported that for many moments no one was able to put hand to hand to clap. Where did they go? Have you ever been there? Surely you have been there. ( In sports they call it the zone.)

    One of my early experiences in a college painting class was suddenly finding that I was painting from a place inside my self. This place was a place of knowing beyond words and mind. This place was a place inhabited by everyone living now, in the past, and to my great surprise at the time, in the future. It was my clear knowing that everyone was in this place together because we all shared the same place inside, consciously or not.

    It was my great fortune to have this peak experience. It was my great fortune that even my mind realized that the magic available here for making art had not been available in all the art I had previously attempted from mind alone. So even my mind was willing to give up its control of the process to say, "I do not want to paint from any other place."


    With this stated intention, I was able to return to this place. I had given it place "co-ordinates" of return.

    It must be stressed how unusual it is in our culture of the mind to create a pathway of return to a peak experience. By definition, peak means it is off the charts of the mind's past experience, occurs therefore beyond words as well, and as such remains isolated and forgotten in its essence. My own "accident of locating and returning" began a lifelong experience of moving to a peak, raising my baseline to match the peak and moving to the next peak. Although of course in this realm the movement is not so linear.

    Another important feature of my experience is that it arose in a person raised in a family whose religion was practical science. There was no faith in anything as yet unproven. So I am here to tell you that all of my faith such as it is, is experiential. There is no leap of faith here. There is only leap of experience, a very different animal.

    Please note that there is no war here with the mind. There is only the choice to move beyond being controlled by mind alone, as well as the choice to move beyond being controlled by emotion or physical sensation alone. Beyond such dominance, the mind, body and emotions must all be active participants together in experience.

    I believe in you. I believe that if you take your self to a place of nature and sit your self down on the earth by a tree or body of water, and seek to be shown those unrecorded peak experiences of your lifetime, you will find they are there. They are there in another place of recording, beyond the mind, beyond the mind, beyond the mind.

    And suddenly, as you sit there in nature, you may find your self knowing what we are doing here and how we assist. You may find your self in the midst of yet another peak...

    may you have humor and joy on your 79,

    creatpeace@yahoo.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for your Posts 13 & 14. If I were to suspend my current religious faith for a moment & to believe in the concept of yotzer, I could open my mind for your blog to your definition of yotzer. For the record I believe in God & the Scriptures.

    Humankind has slowly evolved over the past century but especially exponentially in science in many aspects from flight to medicine, technology et al. Limitations in all areas previously thought impossible have become reality in such a short time. For example who would ever thought that we could communicate, take, send & post pictures electronically via wireless computer or wireless phone worldwide? There are so many examples of how Science/Technology has progressed. So in that regard, Science has & continues to progress at a rapid pace. But what continues to elude them is the creation of the Universe & the existence of 'yotzer' or God.

    To my limited knowledge there is no proof of a Big Bang from a dark void. Perhaps one might consider a Big Bang was created from one of the millions of galaxies that have proven to exist & how were they created? How many more galaxies are out there that we don't know about? Is life on our planet Earth advanced & evolving forward or is there other intelligence out there that we don't know about? Is there yotzer that we have yet to discover & in that absence I call God which we also don't have scientific proof of, but rely on the Faith of our choosing & was God given.

    My question would be that as we rely on Scriptures as the Word of God called Faith (i.e. no proof) scribed thousands of years ago; is that any different than the Scientists/Mathematicians developing theories of relativity or Pythagorean Theory amongst others?

    As mentioned in my previous comments to my knowledge, our current limitations do not prove anything beyond our lack of awareness about other galaxies which may have more or less advanced intelligence (eg the rock in your Blog 13). And as I previously blogged what about other dimensions,the definition of time/space/infinity? All of this may be discovered by our evolution if that is the purpose of yotzer but even then there may be no discovery of purpose or validation other than that of our chosen Faith which by definition may be improvable by humankind. This may be the ultimate purpose of yotzer/God depending on what you believe.

    ReplyDelete

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