I like the attitude suggested by nearly any variation of: “We have two ears and one mouth to give us a clue as to the most useful proportion of listening to talking.”
Given that, and confessing to feeling a need sometimes to scream in simple disbeleif at statements found on these pages, I have often found myself self-censoring upon re-reading a proposed post. One of the reasons I find this useful is that on succesive edits it becomes clear to me that some of my own words are potentialy incinidiary. They are so on the count of deliberate inflamation on my part, or because they are easily misunderstood. That misunderstanding can happen more easily than we might allow. That is because the cheif mitigating factors that actually are part of a face-to-face are missing. Those are tone of voice and body language.
I make the simili between postings like this and driving a car. Road rage often happens, studies show, because drivers don’t have the reading ability they do of another person as they would if they were both pedestrians. The automatic “Oh, sorry!” “No problem” that happens face-to-face can’t happen here. So self editing is very important. I can, for my part, catch most of my deliberate and accidental flame bombs that way.
Also, as was mentioned, “Don’t water the weeds.” Another internal way to do this is to cultivate one’s own garden as well. Serious self examination is essential. I like to think that if I stepped away from the black board and everything was erased, I would approximate my same conclusions from data universally availabe. Heck, I might include more.
If you don’t like somewhat “deep” stuff, now might be a good time to move on, as the following is about an aspect of experience relavent to knowledge that is not often discussed here.
That point, though mostly of exotic interest, is that much of religious debate springs from the internal validity of belief systems as distinct from an external, impartial evaluation, say by someone from a planet around Canopus in Argos.
We tend to make these internal validities emotionally addictive, a la “What the @#$% Do We Know,” or “Down the Rabbit Hole.” Most of our dogmatic systems, similar to physics, rarely account for the nature of awareness itself, including ground covered by epistemology, General Semantics, various logics of inclusivity/excliusivity, phenomenology, etc, etc. I’m not saying to go back to university, but it is important to know that there are ways and modes of knowing that our particular beliefs may not include, that others may have more easily at hand. That even can include the grammer of our or of a foreign language.
Two of these other ways of knowing, for instance, are the rheomode of English as proposed by David Bohm, and the Eastern idea of knowledge by identity. I include this last for a fascinating reason.
People who have had an “enlightenment” experience of a particular kind, whatever their era, culture, age, gender, or previous beliefs, tend to have very similar exigetical explanations of “how we work.” These seem to be independent of dogmatic or scholastic explanations, yet hold true both within themselves and under external scrutiny even without the final step of the “realization” itslef.
Whether these people are Western, eg Merrill-Wolff, Byron Katie or KG Mills, or Eastern, eg Nisargadatta, Shankara, or Ramana, their personal accounting stems form a remarkably similar interior experience as distinct from learned dogma. This is similar to my own experience with comparing NDE’s with others who have had them. People who have not had them easily dismiss them. Not so for those who now must account for them in their personal reality.
Forgive me for going on so long about that last part, but similar to triangulaton, the more ideas we have as anchors or referents that we might agree on, the easier it might be to get somewere in an actual discussion or dialog. Thanks for “listening.”
