Terry: "Without context nothing is anything at all."
poppers:That's right. And what puts anything into context? The human mind. And what assigns something the label of right/wrong, good/bad, and all possible pairs of opposites? A viewpoint held by an egoic entity, an entity which when searched for cannot be found!
I hate to sound like a broken record. But, until I'm heard and understood I guess I'll have to be.
First of all, there is a real universe. How can you know it and use your knowledge to benefit your own life and purposes? Why, the answer to that is you measure it. You break it up into small chunks (concepts) and you define it as precisely as you can (definitions). You categorize your concepts into contexts. Then you distinguish each specific instance in terms of the most obviously applicable context. This is rational thinking and it has served science and mankind rather well.
But, no....along comes the Mystic. The Mystic can't be bothered with contexts and properly defined Concepts...no no no. The Mystic wants to break you loose from any of that! The Mystics seeks to blur the edges, confuse the issues and assault the very nature of man's mind (and man's only link with reality.) Why does the Mystic do this? To enable his takeover of your confused and bewildered mind with assurances that there is a greater reality than reality; a greater nature than nature (supernatural) and a process (ritual) that can plug you into to this "power" of "knowing" just like the Mystic himself (guru, shaman, priest, adept, enlightened master, anointed, etc.)
To break in to a house (as I have repeatedly said) the burglar has to get past the burglar alarms and the locks on the doors and windows. What if the burglar can convince you to do it for him? That is what the Mystic is all about, convincing you to drop your defenses and let him come in and take what he wants without a struggle.
The alarm should go off whenever anybody tries to convince you of what your mind CANNOT do. The alarm should go off when anybody tries to blur the distinction between what is real and what is imagined. The alarm should go off when anybody assaults the process of analysis, abstraction and definition by substituting confusion and turning inward toward intuition for inborn "knowledge" that trumps the measuring and weighing of conceptual contexts.
It is not the MIND which invents reality. It is the MIND which DISCOVERS reality. It is the MIND that abstracts sensory data and labels it and measures it and categorizes it and creates useful folders (concepts) that can be used for rational thinking about reality. Each contact the mind makes with sensory data is a refining process. As humans develop and mature they learn what works and what doesn't. Adapting the knowledge about reality to human purpose is what takes mankind away from animal dependency on mere appetite and opportunity. It has what has given us technology and free time and advancements in medicine a longer and healthier lifespans.
BUT, YOU HAVE TO GET A HANDLE on how your mind works to use it properly. If you don't know what your concepts are and how you got them and what definitions your mind holds that might be erroneous bunkum----you are operating on inadequate and self-defeating data that will swallow you up with unnecessary obstacles to your purposes.
You have to make your own effort to clean out the crap from your mind's folders and root out the nonsense "data" which is nothing more than conjecture, opinion, superstitious, illusion, propaganda and intuition.
INTUITION is unprocessed raw data lacking coherent context and definition which gives you that vague and fuzzy "gut" feeling that you "know" something. But, since you've not properly organized it and purified it of hearsay and error, it can be as helpful as it is misleading.
Substitute the actual comprehension of what you know for the vague intuition and you plug into wisdom rather than generality.
Our minds are as sharp and precise as we demand they be and as feckless and misguided as we allow. It all starts with a refusal to accept anything which does not have a concrete referent. What is sensible can be pointed to. What is illusory is not.
Terry
