11 Oct '11 16:20>
Originally posted by JS357Well, we’re back to nondualism again! (Or, at most, a kind of panentheism—without the additional attributes generally ascribed to theos.) Let me try to lay out my own version (of which I would consider Watts’ to be a wonderful aesthetic expression—nondualism has a stream in most religions, and the details and the aesthetics differ; one particular one I will mention below). Dualism and nondualism are, for me, the great metaphysical divide and the great divide in religious philosophy.
OK I will submit for discussion the following premise:
If there is a G that is the source/basis/whatever-word-applies of all that is purported to be dualistically other than G, then by its being what it is, there is in fact nothing (no thing) other than G. All such supposed things are manifestations of G to the creatures of G (who are themselves manifestati ...[text shortened]... ch a G, it is just about what the premise that there is such a G, strongly implies, IMO.
With perhaps some redundancy, I call my version “gestaltic nondualism”. The basic premise is that we can speak of a Whole other than which nothing is; the Whole is by definition unbounded, even if finite. Everything that we perceive going on is a happening in and of the Whole, including us. We perceive all these happenings as figures against a ground; a figure may be singular (a tree, against the ground of a forest), or collective (a forest against the ground of the mountain)—and the mountain against the sky [and in the sky are birds….].
So the Whole can be thought of in terms of figure and ground, but the ground is ultimately just everything within the Whole that we are not focusing on as figure—i.e., and this is another premise, that I might call the “complete manifestation” or the “full disclosure” premise (I have really not attempted to put the whole thing together in a presentation before). That is, there is no empty or static leftover that we call the ground. The Whole itself, by definition, has no ground—and so there is a kind of (infinite but bounded?) recursiveness to the gestalt: e.g., the gestalt includes us talking about a gestalt that includes us talking about the gestalt that…. All within the Whole (which is the only “place” that words like “place” and “within”, and “cause” and “when” etc. have any meaning).
No one has a “view from nowhere” from which to perceive the Whole as a whole. Likewise, the ground against which we can perceive anything is always implicate, never explicate.* Only the figures are explicate.
Everything in the Whole is mutually arising (to use the Buddhist phrase) and nonseparable—that is, nothing can properly be separated from the gestalt for analysis, anymore than the gulf stream can be separated from the gulfstream for analysis; and yet it makes sense to speak of “figures” and manifestations” in the same way as it makes sense to refer to a phenomenon called “the gulf stream”.
Of course, we could call that gestalt—G. 😉 And we have: “If there is a G that is the source/basis/whatever-word-applies of all that is purported to be dualistically other than G, then by its being what it is, there is in fact nothing (no thing) other than G”.
Then we can take a further step: “ All such supposed things are manifestations of G to the creatures of G (who are themselves manifestations of G)”. The reason I parsed your words this way, is that it entails (1) that the figures are in fact manifestations (manifest phenomenon) and not strictly delusions (which is one version of nondualism, that I associate with the term “monism”, which states that only the Whole is real, not the figures; I take the figures to be real); and (2) that the Whole itself is, as I said above, active in generating the manifestations (another version of nondualism, that I associate with the term “pantheism” implies, or seems to imply, that the Whole is simply the sum of separable (countable, as it were) “parts”.
So—I do not think your statement was convoluted at all! Quite the contraray. I went through a lot more convolutions here to try to express my own nondualism as a background to your—figure.
Now, we get to Watts, though. And this raises the question of consciousness. Is Watts intending to be strictly metaphorical—or does a word like lila imply an intentionality that implies that the Whole is in some way (self-) conscious? Or do we take sentient beings (manifestations) themselves to be the whole of the sentience—and consciousness—of the gestalt. Does saying that the gestalt manifests consciousness—as conscious beings such as us—imply that there is some “larger” consciousness to the gestalt? I would say not, but I still find it to be a fascinating question.
I far from object to metaphorical language when dealing with nondualism. Metaphor, poetry, allegory, myth and elicitive speech such as Zen koans are ways to tackle the recursiveness and limited perspectivism to which we are subject—as beings in and from and of the very Whole that we are trying to speak about.
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I really should try to lay it all out more cohesively, and open it up to the kind of challenges that I was trying to open dualism to—or to see if there is a kind of minimalist dualism that makes sense. It does not seem that you and googlefudge and twhitehead and LJ and I have yet been able to accomplish that. But my project here is still to try to find a metaphysical dualism that I think is defensible—and you can see how much I have to compartmentalize my mind to attempt that! But now that I’ve “shown mine”, you can see how much in agreement we really are—and I will try to set that aside again for a bit. But I really would like to discuss our understandings of nondualism at some point.
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* Although I am using visual images, by perception I mean every aspect of it; even figures identified in our imagination or dreams require a ground—this is one of the problems I have with metaphysical dualism: vis-à-vis what ground (your H) can we identify this being G? Also, it would perhaps be more grammatical of me here to use the terms “implicit” and “explicit”, but I am spinning off from David Bohm’s phrase: “the implicate order”—the ground is “implicated”, as it were, in every act of perception.