Radical Unintelligibility

Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding.

Bernard Lonergan, the 20th century Canadian Jesuit priest, taught at several colleges including Boston College. His work A Study of Human Understanding was published in 1957, and his work Method in Theology was published in 1973. His philosophy is called the Generalized Empirical Method (GEM)or critical realism. Realism means true judgments are made using facts and values. The word critical means knowing and valuing using a critique of consciousness. He also coined the phrase Radical Unintelligibility. That phrase means we can act against our better judgment. We constantly refuse to choose what we know is worth choosing for one reason or another.

Lao-tzu explains knowing this way:

Without going outside, you may know the whole world

Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven.

The farther you go, the less you know.

Thus the sage knows without traveling.

Reality waits for us to experience it. How and when we choose a reality is based on our beliefs. Individual reality is rooted in a time when we focused on another reality. That fact can be considered critical realism. We overlook the fact that we existed before physical birth, and will continue to exist when we change our focus, and leave our body. Our existence before birth and after death are as normal a phenomenon as our present reality. There are different kinds of nature within consciousness of Nature. We limit the nature of our reality. We believe we have a beginning and end, but energy has no beginning or end; it just changes forms. We are a specific form of energy. We are composed of atoms, molecules and cells. Those energy forms translate into other living forms when we change our focus, but we choose radical unintelligibilty instead of inner knowing to define ourselves.

The Object is The Subject

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order to see itself. But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees and at least one other state which is seen.

G. Spencer Brown's best known work Laws of Form was published in 1969, and has never been out of print.

Reality, as Brown describes it, is constructed to see, as well as to be seen. As a whole within the whole of the self we do the same thing. We create our own reality. The unseen self is a mystery until we realize that it manifests our thoughts and they become experiences in some way. Our thoughts are energy. Thoughts are generated by the duality of the conscious mind. The conscious mind is connected to the brain, but a portion of it is free from the brain. That portion looks at the inner self and sees other realities.

Wei Wu Wei thought about the conscious mind's role in reality and wrote:

Has one not realized that the physical self is only one’s object, perceptual and conceptual, that it could not be what we are?

To know that one self has no objective quality whatsoever, has absolutely nothing objective about it, is devoid of any trace-element of objectivity, is surely to know what one is, which, in metaphysical terms, is just the absence itself, the very absence of the absence, the total lack of any objective character, nature, or quality.

The Gifts I Give My Self

Now, you are fully aware of the suffering. Is that suffering apart from you and therefore you are merely the observer who perceives the suffering, or is that suffering you?

When there is no observer who is suffering, is the suffering different from you? You are the suffering are you not? You are not apart from the pain, you are the pain. What happens? There is no labeling, there is no giving it a name and thereby brushing it aside, you are merely that pain, that feeling, that sense of agony. When you are that, what happens? When you do not name it, when there is no fear with regard to it, is your center related to it? If the center is related to it, but different from it, then it is afraid of it, then it must act and do something about it. But if the center is that, then what do you do? There is nothing to be done, is there? If you are that and you are accepting it, not labeling it, not pushing it aside; if you are that thing, what happens? Do you say you suffer then? Surely, a fundamental transformation has taken place. Then there is no longer, “I Suffer,” because, there is no center to suffer. . .

As long as I have no relationship to or no separation from the thing outside me, the problem is not; the moment I establish a relationship with it outside me, the problem is. As long as I treat suffering as something outside. . . I establish a relationship to it and that relationship which is the primary dualism is fictitious. But if I am that thing, if I see the fact, that the whole thing is transformed, it all has a different meaning. Then there is full attention, integrated attention and that which is completely regarded is understood and dissolved and so there is no fear and therefore the word sorrow in non-existent.

Krishnamurti was a renowned 20th century writer who focused on the nature of the mind, meditation, human relationships and the psychological revolution. His words about suffering come from his 1954 work, First and Last Freedom. His message is not a new one. It conforms to the teachings that have been passed down from generation to generation in Eastern beliefs. The physical world is a separated world.

The first step in knowin is knowing the self.Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organization, creed, dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophical knowledge or psychological technique. Man has built in himself images as a sense of security; religious, political and personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas and beliefs. The burden of beliefs dominate man’s thinking, relationships and his daily life.

Polar Privacy

There is solitude of space,
Solitude of death of sea,
Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to Itself:
Finite Infinity.

Emily Dickinson, a 19th century poetic genius, spent a great deal of her time upstairs in her father’s house after she graduated from Amherst Institute and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She died a recluse at the age of fifty five, but she lives on through the wisdom of her poetry.

Solitude can be a lonely and a remote place where there is no human activity, but solitude can also be a place filled with consciousness that expresses itself in other ways. There is solitude in space, but space is not alone, nor is it remote. Space is overflowing with energy and there are dimensions upon dimensions that interact with each other, but go unnoticed because we focus somewhere else. Solitude can be isolation or a retirement. It can be a state of separation and desertion. Solitude first and foremost is a state of mind that dangles on emotions and feelings of loneliness.

Emily does express the solitude of the soul. The infinity of the soul emerges and then dissipates in mental enzymes and is completely immersed in the action of being without form, but is filled with substance.

Like the sea, we move in rhythmic waves that touch the self in formlessness, as well as form. White caps of solitude create a mystical awakening that drench us in the sea of expression. Propelling the self to the shore of eternity, we reach and touch what we already have and retreat to be a wave again.

Interconnectedness

God cannot be a being beside other beings. To insist that he is a being “above” or “below” all others still makes him a being apart from all other beings, some ‘greatest being’ we posit in the universe existing among the stars. If he is a thing, some other things in the universe must be outside of his control, and he must be subject to the structure of the whole. A whole hornet’s nest of absurd problems is opened up, such as the question, “How did God spend his time before he created the Earth?” Paul Tillich told us once the answer for that given by his students in Germany: “Thinking up punishments for those who ask such questions.”

Rollo May was a 20th century existential psychologist and a close friend of Paul Tillich a 20th century theologian. May defined certain stages of human development like innocence, rebellion, decision, ordinary and creative. They are not stages in the traditional sense; all of these stages can be experience during any phase of an individual’s life. May emphasized caring for each other and believed that anxiety was the result of a threat to a value, which an individual holds essential to the existence of the self.

May’s words about God are not meant to change anyone’s beliefs about the consciousness we call God. Everyone will choose a belief within a basket of religious and scientific beliefs and make one or more of them a reality to be experienced. Humans have been fighting about God long enough to realize that our separation is the issue, not the association of being right or wrong about the nature of God’s physical existence. It seems separation creates independence. Independence is the opposite of dependence, which is viewed as something with little value. Independence is associated with freedom, but rarely are we free by being independent; there is always a lack of freedom in independence.

Independence is more about separation than it is about freedom or dependency. Separation is the catalyst that fuels conflicts and wars. We fight for independence and we find ourselves more dependent on something else, which creates a plethora of contrasting perceptions to experience. What we need to sense and to cultivate is our interconnectedness, not our independence.

My Integral Inner Universe

The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life. That I feed the hungry that I forgive an insult that I love my enemy in the name of Christ; all these are undoubtly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, the enemy himself are within me and I myself stand in the need of the alms of my own kindness; that I myself am the enemy who must be loved, What then?

Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychiatrist, brings up an interesting point. All of the enemies that we encounter are nothing more than creations that express the nature of our separated consciousness. No one is doing anything to us; we create the shadow and project it externally in order to physically experience the contrast it manifests. We have blind spots in our belief system. There are things in that system that we refuse to admit about the self. The war's we rage externally have their roots in our inner world. We create ideas and instigate emotions that reach our ego and a dualistic projection occur. We believe those ideas and emotions are the work of an external energy or situation.

As Fritz Perls another 20th century psychiatrist explains that by taking responsibility for every thought and emotion, every movement we make and not transferring responsibility to anyone else,expands our awareness.

Even illness is created by us according to Perls:

As long as you fight a symptom, it will become worse. If you take responsibility for what you are doing to yourself, how you produce your symptoms, how you produce your illness, how you produce your existence; the very moment you get in touch with yourself, growth begins, integration begins.

Formal Ignorance

Truly there is no cause for you to be miserable and unhappy. You yourself impose limitations on your true nature of infinite being and then weep that you are a finite creature. Hence I say know that you are really the infinite pure Being, the Self absolute. You are always that Self and nothing but that Self. Therefore, you can never really be ignorant of the Self; your ignorance is merely a formal ignorance.

Sri Ramana Maharshi was a 19th century Indian Sage. He believed the purest form of teachings was silence; the silence that radiated from his presence. He only taught verbally when students could not understand his silence. He practiced non-dualism and Jnana Yoga, but he understood the value of all paths and practices.

One important message that surfaces from Sri Ramana teachings is the awareness of the inner self and what it means to be aware of that self. Our objective thoughts hinder us from associating with our subjective self. Our focused reality seems to take precedence so we create experiences using the beliefs of others. Our beliefs are elements of group beleifs. When we realize that our thoughts, emotions and imagination create our experiences, we begin to change our distorted beliefs. We realize that what we call the unconscious part of us is much more conscious than we believed.