At this point we may leisure in thinking about words, and space, and the self. Thinking is a position of listening to words, of contemplating words. The words have been going on before we came along to listen. A very subtle thing happens in the consciousness of Homo sapiens. Study this for yourself. You will notice, before you notice, that there is a conversation going on in your head. Someone is saying something to someone else, or to a crowd of others. It really is some kind of conversation. And then something happens that is called thinking. Notice that thinking is not required to just hear a conversation going on. You don't start thinking until you give some kind of assent to the one already talking. Then out of your mouth comes an "ah ha", or a laugh, or "noooo". If people saw you they would not know what you heard in your head, just the sounds or the argument that comes out of your mouth. At some point you hear yourself say something that perpetuates the conversation in one direction or another. Now you usually don't continue to have that conversation out loud. Others tend to consider that crazy, so we go back to just silent listening to the inner conversation, that must now build up again since it was interrupted by your outburst. And once you give the thinking any kind of authority you are lost in The Maya, The World: the whole religious problem.
Do you understand how subtle human consciousness is? We are here to think but we are not here to give our thinking any authority! The day will come when we will learn how to use the mind, together, like a tool. But as Homo sapiens we are trapped, for the sake of this issue, in the illusion of separation. I am over here and you are over there, and we think that means something real. Like one cell in your brain talking to another cell, as though it had choices about being in the situation. Our whole evolution implies something dramatic for us. We must let go. We must, as a specie, come to appreciate our real helplessness. A location cannot initiate its own thing. A location is a place where mutation can occur, like the gap between the notes. Imagine actually occupying that gap. This is the meaning of Sabbath Rest. On the Sabbath we do what we are really here to do: next to nothing. We are not doing anything. We are not going anywhere. We are just in a place that has a function in the totality: To listen and process information. To be that which processes information through the neutrino stream.
But now I want to make an argument, I have not heard well articulated as yet. I have come to the conclusion that Western Philosophy, initiated in Socrates, represents for Religious Homo sapiens, the very nature of what The Mind is. If you want to know what it means to use your mind as a Homo sapiens, you get that information from Western Philosophy. We do not really learn about The Mind per se from Hinduism or Taoism or Buddhism, though Buddhism represents the final clearing of The Mind as a problem in our condition. (By the way, the very word "problem" implies the presence of Religion. As long as we have any sense of "a problem" to resolve we are dealing with Religious issues pertaining to our Homo sapiens condition.)
Western Philosophy, like any of the nine other revelations, is a real thing among us. But Western Philosophy has a unique role among us. Western Philosophy is only about thinking and not something else. This is very important to understand and also to let go. In Western Philosophy we are getting at the true nature of our human condition, both as a problem and as a solution. Let's not try to resolve the irony too quickly. We are here to think. And we are here to let go at the individual level of giving any authority over our own separate minds. We are here to learn to think and then to share our thinking, in the recognition that our own thinking has no personal use. Thinking is only useful when it is shared! These thoughts are not for me. They may or may not be useful for you. When we all learn to just give away what occurs to us as it happens The Mind will become useful as a universal among us. Sure, we will delight in shaming those who continue to take their own minds personally and seriously. This is what people really mean when the criticize the "ego". They are not really talking about the ego but about what could better be described as a little army corporal with a puffy chest who wished he could be in control. But we cannot effectively teach people to stop giving their own inner minds authority as long as we keep talking about that as an "ego" problem. Its a philosophical problem!
Philosophy, like all other religions, has its own practice and development that is not easily appreciated by those unfamiliar with the study of Philosophy. What you begin to learn in the study of Philosophy is that thinking involves a dialectic - an ongoing conversation where you relentlessly refuse to get bogged down in old territory. In fact, Western Philosophy is the only Religion that can remain truly open to new developments. At this point I think it would be good to shame all the people who claim to know something about being human but have not made a careful study of Western Philosophy. Western Philosophy is the only truly human preoccupation. Western Philosophy can teach a Homo sapiens to think, just to think by yourself - in relation to the ongoing dialectic of conceptual conversation. And, like other Religious people argue, I would say that you do not know the real joy of Human thinking until you have made a careful study of Western Philosophy.
But before I get carried away, let me suggest what the dilemma with Western Philosophy is today. Western Philosophy today has finally come to a place of understanding the helplessness of its own cause, any cause where Philosophy could somehow be reified. Now I am going to make a curious argument, a good news bad news situation. Understand that I consider the problem with the Human condition to be that we give unnecessary personal and serious authority to how we each think. (I remember something to the effect that "each one has gone his own way...") Now Western Philosophy has always been remembering this dilemma. Socrates was the first to insist on the fact of his thinking, not the facts of what he was thinking about. He knew that he did not know. He did not care so much what "the good" was but to have the human freedom to contemplate the nature of the good. To contemplate. To rest on the sabbath: this is our destiny!
To clarify what I mean we could take a quick excersion through Western Philosophy by a slightly circuitous route. We could start with Eleven Greeks, including Socrates for the insight, Plato for the story, and Aristotle for the opinion. We begin with the wonder of using words to say what it there. One says water, another fire, another air, another earth, and another a whole plenum of something. It is good to remember what it was like as a child to just wonder why and how this world, like cows, appear. What is it? How did it get here? What is everything? This brings us to someone like Parmenides (I also put Heidegger here). Is everything something or nothing? Think about this. Next I would turn to Spinoza to establish a bias: everything is substantial. Everything we want to know about, that can be know, is some kind of material, even if its exotic like neutrino and monopoles. The mind may be a location where all this stuff can happen in a unique way, but it is stuff that is happening here in this location. Everything is something. You cannot get something out of nothing. Fourth I would turn to Descartes to give us our real mental problem. Here we come to the "fall" of the mind into its natural temptation to give itself more authority that it can have. There is really no I in the mind. I do not think. I am, and thinking arises through me. I am and thinking happens here. Our whole human religious problem is that we are confused about thinking. We have linguistic bias problems. We think there is an ego in the mind. We think there is a self in the mind. We think I am my mind. We think our thinking can make things happen and then we get into all these strange conceptual problems evidenced in movies like The Secret. When you give the mind authority you end up with this new age rhetoric about how we can overcome our limitations by denying them. Here the mind is once again denigrating the body in its entrapment in the here and now. But we cannot clarify this thought for two more chapters. We are still in the higher world of thought. Fifth I would read Nietzsche for a proper understanding of the nature of The Ego and our inevitable surrender to the grossly material world according to Will. It is will that brings all higher order stuff into the potential to appear as the gross body. So, as originarily mental beings we are naturally afraid of The Ego because it is the Ego that brings thought into the world or not. The mind is helpless to do anything about its thoughts, but to share them in word and then wait and see what happens when it does. Sixth I enjoy reading Foucault to get at the real meaning of existentialism. What is the paradigm that guides your experience whether you know it or not? If we fail to research our patterns we cannot change them. Seventh I would read Kant just to develop an appreciation for systematic and categorical thinking. Without a system and without categories the mind just has literally nothing to deal with. Beside the mind being itself a category there are nine other categories. It is important for the mind to know what these other categories are so that when we hear words and have experiences, we can chunk concepts and have the illusion of understanding one another. But we live in Babble-on. We do not have an experience of listening and speaking with others where information is being chunked in a shared way. We just cannot assume that we understand each other today. We need to reason with one another about our categories or admit that we have no idea what we are talking about when we speak with each other. I put Hegel in the eighth category as a way of getting as the possibility of spirit consciousness. There just is no single thought that can stand on its own. There are not two thoughts that can be reasonably understood by themselves. But with three we come to the first sense of comprehension. We have a mind that deals with time and measurement. We have an emotional reaction to mind. And we experience all this in the awareness of the body. Ninth I put Wittgenstein to help us come to terms with the limits of philosophy as a thing in itself. Philosophy is just playing the same game together or not. Philosophy, as an obsession, is relaxed when we can just speak to each other and understand each other without looking for hidden meaning. Projecting ahead here, when we recognize that the universe is whatever you conceive it to be, then it is a child and the meaning is clear. When the chair is a chair you don't have to speak about higher worlds or archetypes. When the universe is an entity, Man will have done his philosophical work and we will be mutated into something we don't even need to consider. We are human; We have philosophical problems. Finally, I think of Derrida deconstructing Hume. Stop giving authority to Philosophy and just keep thought even more interesting. As long as we are Human we must continue to keep the mind open. When we keep the mind open to what is happening and continue to give our thoughts away, then whatever happens is not Philosophy, but life lived through us. Life must want to be noticed. So Philosophy, The Mind, is not here to draw attention to itself, but to give appreciation and gratitude for the gift of life as it happens.
And the time will come when this home for Philosophy will be fully integrated with the life of The Child within whom we have our being. And that crystalization will also bring the shattering of the emotional human process. We seem to be on a suicidal mission, to complete the Human Way. But what a glorious thing! We would not want to be more or other that what we are. We are here for this great drama. Somehow it serves the evolution of the totality, who I call Jah'neen. But wait and see.
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