[MD] [Bulk] Re: Keep on Truckin'

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Marsha]
You are correct, and I am a very conventional woman.  Yes, some of 
this conventional chit-chat is good.

[Arlo]
I think language gives us a lot more than "conventional chit chat". 
Supermarkets, farming, poetry, global travel, plumbing, heating, 
motorcycles, games, books, etc etc. I can't imagine what life for me 
would be like in a world with no language (well, I don't have to 
imagine it, I can simply look back at the pre-language feral lives of 
the first proto-human primates).

But again, the point is not to glorify nor condemn "language" (or any 
structure), but to see that they are always mutually enabling and 
constraining, and as these structures co-evolve with agency, the 
range of potential to act is increased.

[Marsha]
But this is a list devoted to metaphysics - the nature of reality - 
so bottom line:  there is no-thingness to know and no-self to know it...

[Arlo]
By the same token we can dismiss the MOQ. All one ever has to say is 
"no-thingness to know and no-self to know it" and then not even that, 
why speak at all? No, while Buddhistic meditation and 
pre-intellectual awareness are greatly valuable, so are the 
empirical, pragmatic aspects to day-to-day life.

And in this pragmatic sense, a "self" is valuable, even if it isn't 
an existential reality, as an experiential reality. My motorcycle 
might not be an existential reality, but the experiential reality of 
it, and the pragmatic value it brings, makes it more real to me than 
the ephemeral bemoaning of everything being, in effect, nothing.

[Marsha]
And that, Sweet Arlo, is beyond words.

[Arlo]
One can only move beyond words, once one has words. Unless you think 
a frog, for example, is beyond words, rather than devoid words. Can 
you see the difference?

Do you think a Buddhist monk meditating and trying to move beyond 
language has the same experience as a frog, with no language, would 
have? If this is so, why wouldn't lobotomizing lead to the state you 
are after? Just think, you'd be in a permanent state of "no words", 
and isn't that the "freedom" you seek?

Or do you deprive yourself of that state of bliss because you like 
"conventional chit chat"?