Originally posted by lucifershammer
Btw, I really appreciate your effort in attempting a "dialectical synthesis" of two seemingly opposed viewpoints. Amidst all the cut and thrust on this forum, it is easy to forget that this is not the Debates forum - the primary goal here should be to discuss and enrich.
[b]BTW, LH—it sounds as if your understanding of “soul” is getting close to ...[text shortened]... “synthesis” between the one-versus-many question.
And this forum is the better for it. 🙂[/b]
Thanks for the kind words. 🙂
Let me offer two points:
1. I have difficulty thinking of my essence or quiddity or suchness as a “blueprint” for a few reasons.
(a) A blueprint can be drawn up, rolled up and filed in the round file; or stored in a drawer; or used over and over again (think pre-fab housing). A building
ex-ists in/from the surrounding landscape. If my essence is simply my design, you can simply map it out for one of those transparent flip-page things in biology books.
Or—another analogy—I don’t see the written score as the essence of the music played from it…
(b) We have been using “cartography” as a metaphor for talking about, analyzing, describing “what is a soul.” The blueprint metaphor seems to me to fall into that category.
(c) I think the blueprint analogy has the same problems, at least for me, as does, say, the old watch/watchmaker one—i.e., it’s too inorganic and mechanical.
(d) I just don’t think my essence or quiddity is separate from me, as the blueprint is separate from the building(s) built from it. I think the quiddity of me
is me; let’s say that complex of features that is absolutely required for there to be me—hence,
essence,
essential. If you chop off my toes, am I still somehow me? If I lose my memory, am I still somehow me? What can you not separate from me in order for me to remain me (and I don’t mean the social me)? Maybe that quiddity is not a “thing,” nor a blueprint, but simply a kind of active
coherence of features.
2. I have been letting this Aquinian essence/existence stuff percolate idly for a long time now, since you first raised it to me in another thread. Surely I owe you at least an attempt a response by now? 🙂 Anyway, I’ll give it a shot:
My essence
is my existence!
Now I can get condemned both by theists, for heresy; and by monists for lapsing into maya! I can only really respond to the latter, since I am more in that camp (though I am hardly “orthodox” wherever I go). I’ll try to explain:
To use a very simplistic, though common, metaphor—I am a wave heaved up, moved by and filled with the ocean. I am distinct as a wave; I have perspective as a wave, I can see other waves; I may have some free will as a wave, the capability to steer myself a bit here and there like a surfer. And someday I will fall back into the ocean of which I am.
This is a figure/ground metaphor, and has its limitations. But (a) I have no essence as “I” separate from my
ex-isting out from the ground of my being; and that I-ness formed from the ground is transient. (b) The ground from which I am formed is not transient, and its nature is my "underlying" essence. (c) However, it is the nature of that ground to form from itself forms. (d) Hence my existing form is an expression of that essence and part of my essential nature. And (e) An aspect of my essential nature is to also form forms, to create, to imagine, to shape my life as I go along—but always subject to the nature of the ground from which I cannot separate myself. Just before he died, Ramakrishna’s disciples were pleading with him, “Please don’t go! Please don’t go!” He replied: “Don’t be silly. Where could I possibly ‘go’.”
So essence and existence are inextricably “entangled,” and cannot in reality be separated.
Kabir wrote: The Holy One manifests himself [sic] in a myriad forms; I sing the glory of the forms!”
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Re Metamorphosis, post with the analogy of the lost temple—I am not satisfied with even my descriptions. So I have to see….