I will say that I used to want to catch ideas the way you catch a butterfly, to cage them on a page somewhere. I decided recently to stop that, to watch them come and go, and if I miss a few, so be it. Whatever is important remains within me and will come back at the appropriate time. Many of the ideas I had on the trip in reaction to these lectures I have lost, but some keep reappearing.
One is that we could with justice point to our current social problems as grounded in mistakes made by the Greeks. For one thing, they neglected the role of the body in perception. There is no equivalent in the Greek tradition to sitting meditation, that I am aware of (some, say Pythagoras, may have had it, but if so, they did not speak of it).
For Aristotle and Plato, living–loving Truth–was synonymous with thinking, with thought, with the efforts of the brain.
But so much of life is NOT thought. There is a passage in the Tao Te Ching where Lao Tzu says something like “how do I know this is so? Because of THAT.” That is him pointing to something real, which cannot be confined to the book. What is a liger? I could Google it, or, if one was in the room, I could say THAT.
In the lecture on Buddhism someone was asked if some thing or other was true or not true. He did not answer, and was considered clever for it. What is the sound of one hand clapping? One accepted answer is apparently to clap with one hand without saying a word. As far as I can tell, to the extent koans have ANY utility, they are to point to the incompleteness of language and thought. You could do that equally by relaxing in a wonderful bath, taking it in fully, then pondering briefly the futility of attempting to render your experience in words. You can either evoke from others imaginings, memories, or simple images. Not even the most simple experience can be fully rendered (as animal fat is rendered) into language.
So what make language the measure of all things? I am of course only one of many to ask this question.
There is something inherently reductive about the requirement that action be based on logic. Logic is only a part of ourselves, and very much one of the least important aspects of our actual experience, of life as it is actually lived experientially.
How do intellectually deranged people like Richard Dawkins come into being? By making the use of logic the ONLY means of approaching truth, and simultaneously making the apprehension of truth the only purpose of life. Materialism is not a scientifically sound doctrine. Matter, as far as we can tell, does not “exist” in any final way, and our best guess is that our own consciousness–or some supreme consciousness we may as well call God–is what causes the latent to manifest, for the world to exist.
But only within a materialistic, which is to say energetically static, standpoint, can we say all the questions have been answered, all the problems solved, the nature of human existence solved, using logic, and only logic. You cannot perform logically sound operations upon fluctuating premises, such as the stipulation of a connection between cause and effect within our own perceptual domain, in ways that can be measured.
My brain is tired. I did not exhaust this theme, and am not quite sure I hit the points I wanted the way I wanted to, but I’m going to stop t