[MD] Ever redefining self

[Heather Perella]

Ham,
 
     Ham said:  "Seriously, I think this effort by you
and others to reconcile all of our diverging
perspectives into a "philosophy of everything" is
doomed to fail."

     Ham, why do you think I am trying to have a
'theory of everything' when I said, "...always will
something be open-ended and the insane desire to
complete anything, thinking it is complete, is
pointless and a vain act indeed."

     Ham said:  "The best we can do is to articulate
our own perspectives, without trying to force-fit them
into some other author's scheme of things.  None of us
is able to grasp the whole picture, but occasionally
someone's idea or concept can lead to a moment of
clarity -- a kind of epiphany, as it were -- that we
may each in our own way incorporate into our
particular worldview, thereby helping to comprehend
the mystery of existence.  At least this is what I
have been striving to do."

     Yes, and "the mystery of existence" will have
some definition applied, but what will fill the empty,
airy space of nothingness.  We try to fill it, and
still nothingness remains.  I am using nothingness to
describe this defining of self.  What is the self?  We
question it all the time.  We have no complete answer,
it is like trying to fill a bottomless pit.  We come
up with ideas, sure, but remember what others
thousands of years ago called a "mystery", we still
call a "mystery", too.

     Ham said:  "The concept of "spandrels", like the
tretrallema (sp?), is not one of those insights for
me.  One phrase that bothered me in  your first
paragraph was "in which we notice an 'I'".  We cannot
help noticing it because we ARE it."

     My point about the 'I' is - what is this 'I'?  We
notice 'I', this 'I' is who we ARE, and yet, we wonder
about it.  We question it.  We try to define this 'I',
for thousands, and thousands of years.  Does it end? 
To think it does, to desire something we cannot have
(even have as knowledge of, complete knowledge of) is
a form of hell, as the Buddha would say.

     Ham said:  "Proprietary awareness isn't something
we have to set about to look for; it's the foundation
of all experience.  No knowledge becomes ours in any
other way than as awareness.  That's my first point."

     No argument from me.

     Ham said:  "And as simple and self-evident as it
is to me, it's the very point that the MoQ dismisses
as a "myth" or worse.  They're telling me I don't need
this "fantasy" of selfness, that it's nothing but a
convergence (emergence?) of biological, sociological,
and intellectual quality, that I should give up such
primitive notions and join the "collective reality". 
I can't buy this ontology.  It opposes everything I
believe in -- including my life-experience as a human
being."

     We have an individual self, Ham.  I don't know of
anybody that opposes this notion of selfness.  This
idea of "collective reality" is about thought
patterns.  Some ideas I get from reading books, when I
was younger my parents taught me how to talk (they
gave me a huge vocabulary before I even went to
school).  This idea of collective reality doesn't
dismiss 'others' in our lives that have helped us,
taught us, and gave us ways of behaving (discipline
that has me eat with a fork at the dinner table).  It
is still 'I', this self, that types and talks to you
about this experience of mine on this earth with sky.

     Ham said:  "Now the 'nothingness' that I'm
talking about is the apparent non-existence of the 'I'
or self."

     Is this "apparent non-existence of the 'I' or
self", does that have to do with all the questioning
of self that has gone on for thousands of years, and
still we wonder what self is?  Sure we live this self,
and yet, to question the self, to me, is an act of
wondering what it is, thus, not knowing something
about the self, even though I live this self.  Is that
what you are talking about?

     Ham said:  "As I see it, experiential reality is
a dichotomy between two "essents": subjective
awareness and objective beingness."

     See, you are trying to explain to me this
experiential reality.  Where the coming together of
everything upon the 'self' happens?  

     Ham said:  "We have no trouble identifying
"beingness"; we all agree on its diverse components,
physical attributes, laws of behavior, arrangement in
space, and evolution in time.  We consider them
universal facts.  On the other hand, we can't measure,
quantify, or objectively observe awareness, so we
pretend it isn't important, relevant, or even "real"."

     Oh, aware is very relevant, and real.  Awareness,
without it, nothing would be here at all.  A larger
nothing, a nothing we couldn't even sense with
thoughts that could try to throw themselves into its'
emptiness never filling it up.  We would have nothing
at all to throw into the emptiness.  We couldn't even
throw.  We wouldn't even be here.  No awareness at
all.

     Ham said:  "Yet, beingness is only the
"appearance of otherness" to the conscious self. There
is no "being" that is not being-aware.  In other
words, the value of being is its capacity to become
the self's awareness.  And, conversely, the value of
awareness is its capacity to make being-aware.  (IMO
it's why we're all here.)  There is no value in either
essent by itself; value is essential -- it represents
the primary unity of the Whole of which appearance is
but a passing phase called existence."

     This became difficult for me to understand, I
admit, but your use of "unity of the Whole" is a
connection I can't dismiss.  Just that phrase alone is
something I live, we live, a squirrel lives, everyday
in different ways of course.
     Now if I where to describe to you what this
"unity of the Whole" is comprised of, well, that could
veer in all kinds of directions with only more
questions to arise.


Thanks,
SA

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