quote:
It was more of a wondering about how or what this 'not-cooperating' looks like. And wondering whether the baby isn't often being thrown out with the bathwater with this not cooperating, if it's not clear what is meant by such ideas as 'civilization'? And I was wondering if it's clear what the actual problem is or isn't with civilization?
Do you believe that it is necessary that civilization/society/humans survive? If yes, where does that 'belief' originate? Isn't survival the continuation of the consistent pattern of the organism?
How did the concept
instinct arise?
I 'think' we should be careful of the anthropomorphism which asserts that animals hunt and eat
in order to survive, or that flowers turn
in order to face the sun. Where is the scientific reason to suppose that there are such things as instinct for survival or for pleasure? When we say that an organism
likes to go on living, or that it goes on living because it likes it, what evidence is there for this "like" except that it does go on living-until it doesn't.
Without getting into Zen, try Wittgenstein. " a necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity"
It's my observation that an enduring organism is simply one that is consistent with it's environment. The transformation of food and air into the pattern of the organism is what we call existence.
Here is where a big error may have occured. Comming to
believe in a mysterious necessity for this to continue or not to continue.
To say that the organism
needs food is only to say that it is food. To say that it eats
because it is hungry is only to say that it eats when it is ready to eat. To say that it dies because it cannot find food is only another way of saying that its death is the same thing as its ceasing to be consistent with the environment.
OK,so,the so-called causal explanation of an event is only the description of the same event in other words.
Wittgenstein again- "At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that so-called
Laws of Nature are the explanations of natural phenomena" Wittgenstein,
Tractaatus Logica-Philosophicus My point is that to say there is no necessity for things to happen as they do is another way of saying that the world is PLAY. Organism/enviornment.
This idea is an affront to 'common sense because the BASIC RULE of human society is that one mut be
consistent.
Another way of stating the delusional rule is that the game must continue, that the survival of the society is necessary. As stated above this game is serious,it is not a game!
That is primordial "repression". Not in the sense of origins at the beginnings of human life but rather as a deeply ingrained social attitude.
Wittgenstein one last time-
"For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed.
The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it
can also be answered...For doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be
said. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherin this sense consisted?)"
The paradox; "society gives us the idea that the mind or ego* is inside the skin and that it acts of its own apart from society.
Here, then, is a major contradiction in the rules of the social game. The members of the game are to play as if they were independent agents, but they are not to know that they are just playing as if! It is explicit in the rules that the individual is self determining, but implicit that he is so only by virture of the rules. Futhermore, while he is defined as an independent agent, he must not be so independent as not to submit to the rules which define him. Thus he is defined as an agent in order to be held responsible to the group for "his" actions. The rules of the game confer independence and take it away at the same time, without revealing the contradiction" -Alan W. Watts-
Classic double-bind!
From what I remember from psy. 301 in certian family situations this could be a formula for schizophrenia. If one is unable to comment on a contradiction withdrawl from the field is one result.
Now I'm told I must play the game I cannot withdrawl. Eastern methods of liberation do not eliminate the game or illusion, they have simply allowed "me" to see the illusion for what it is. Mahayana practice also encourages one to "return" to help expose sentient beings to an alternative perception as opposed to hidding away in seclusion after liberation.
I have found Thoreau's statement to be a truth in my experience, wherever you may seek solitude men will ferret you out "and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows"
Just some comments about that thinking thing you mentioned Howard. Got a meeting at 1:30 see-ya.
"The moon that I love clears a path through the pines
And guides a stream right to the bamboo gate."Poems by Zen Master Hsu Yun: Series I
