The Sham

[Dioscuri]

We are surely at a loss in having only a few words of what Jesus said in Aramaic. Or perhaps we’re better off. For if we had Jesus in Aramaic we might get the clue that all things, all works and deeds, “miracles” included, are matters of interpretation and equivocation. It’s wordplay, the ability to change people's perception by shifting what they understand certain things to mean. You will think I mean this cynically. I do not. Manipulations of words had and still have the power to change what the light brings to your eyes. This is so.

Let us take an example. Turn in your books to Numbers, chapter 21. God is going about the business of killing off the generation of Hebrews he led out of Egypt, and in this there is of course a risk of total demoralization and dissolution. He is assailing them with “fiery serpents,” ha-nechasim ha-seraphim, and we are told at any rate that they are cognizant enough that this is all their own fault, that they humbly ask Moses to intercede with God for them and ask forgiveness.

God tells Moses that this situation can be resolved by what is beautifully referred to in Henry James novels as “hanging fire,” in other words creating a distraction. God says, Aishe leka saraph, wa-shim otow al-nes, “Make a fire and put it on a flagpole.” And everybody who looks upon it shall live. Inspiring, no? The nes, Nun-Samekh, the “standard” or flagpole, just happens to be the word for “miracle” as well.

So Moses flagrantly violates the second commandment and crafts a serpent idol, and here we may find a hint about what the trick is. Moses makes nechas nechoset: Nun-Chet-Shin, Nun-Chet-Shin-Tau. “A serpent of bronze.” So who’s puzzled? Putting a bronze serpent on a stick is not precisely what God said to do, which was to put fire on a stick. We are left to conclude that the metaphorical “seraph” is accomplished somehow in the equivocation between serpent, nechas, and bronze, nechoset, as if to say, “What you perceive as afflicting you in the form of serpents, is here mastered in this simulacrum on a stick.” And it works. They look at the fake serpent, and the “real” serpents that been killing them “miraculously” vanish. No doubt a bunch of people still died, but too bad for them, either they didn’t believe, or it was just their time, whatever. What counts is the signifier. Fixing attention on something else effectively solved the problem.

It is quite explicit that such shams, Shin-Mem, such “put-ons,” are the currency of the Son of Man: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that those who believe in him may not perish.” John 3:14.

Jesus spoke a lot, as we know, about “the kingdom of heaven”. In Aramaic, it would have something close to the Hebrew, Melokhah la-Shamayim, transliterated MLWKH L-ShMYM. Given a little twist of vowel marking, this reads precisely the same as “Kingdom of the Names”. It is not so much “inspired” as simply logical to identify the particularity of names, identifications, with the total generality of heaven, and with that in heaven (the Sun, Shemesh) whose light allows all things to be distinguished and known.

This is of a piece with God’s ancient identity EL (Aleph-Lamed) which happens to be the preposition meaning at, on, or upon. God was, of course, a voice, another voice, an origin-point of particularities and determinations that accompanied a man and his own voice. God was the embodiment of a knowledge that surpassed any knowledge that men, in their natural humility, were able to think of as their own.

As Julian Jaynes theorizes, until around 4 millennia ago, it was not infrequent for people to hear their thoughts as originating from a voice not themselves. And there’s something to this. It is in the nature of language to contain connections, far more connections that can be consciously intended in any statement. More is always said than what is said. Every word, every nuance and intonation, incites a slightly different neuronal cascade, setting afire a slightly different network of semantic associations. Is it so surprising that people should hear some of those connections articulated by a voice that is not their own? Part of modernity is our having trained ourselves quite rigorously to assume that the words that flash through our minds are "ours." As we say, "it's all in our head," a phrase whose greatest lie is in the assumption that "your head" is one thing. In this we have trained ourselves so well that we now take it to be natural, but in truth it is impossible to assign responsibility for the thoughts that occur. Words are the cause of words.

The I is what changed the old way, what blocked out the voice of prophesy. Not all languages had it, but once it was introduced it assumed responsibility for more and more of people’s conscious encounters with language heard, read, and thought. Like any other word, the I is a fiction, and assigning it causal responsibility for the words that occur in our interior states is particularly fictional, just as fictional as assigning them to a god or an angel.

And about those “angels,” how much does it bother us that God’s Angels (Malachim) are artifices? Yes, both "angel" and "tradecraft" is Mem-Lamed-Aleph-Chet, and one letter separates these from "kings" and "Moloch," Mem-Lamed-(Waw)-Chet. So when Jacob sees a ladder leading up into the sky, what he sees are devices ascending to the names and devices descending from the names. Think on that awhile.

So God, like the leaders of men, accomplishes all things through trickery. It is all words and devices. There is no “true ground,” no “final reality” or “absolutely legitimate authority.” The bullshit that makes the world go round is as divine and cosmological as it is human.

This view, as you have seen, is entirely Biblical, and indeed “religious” in its way. What is interesting is that every religious tradition precludes any confrontation with what I am showing you to be plainly stated in the text. Traditional narratives of what is happening in the stories of the Bible are systematic falsifications.

To take but one more example, most every Jewish and Christian denomination agrees that Jacob attains the blessing after he “wrestles with an angel.” That is a completely standard, traditional, uncontroversial reading of the Bible. It is also objectively, demonstrably wrong.

Kindly turn to Genesis 32:25. “And Jacob was left alone.” The very next word after lebadow, “alone,” is wa-ye’abeq, “and (he) wrestled.” So who is doing the wrestling? This is the whole line: wa-ye’abeq aysh aimow aid ailowt ha-sachar, “and wrestled the man with him until the breaking of dawn.” The way that translators deal with this is an object lesson in the universality of compulsive self-delusion.

A typical version is “someone” or “some man wrestled with him.” There is nothing in the Hebrew that remotely indicates “some” man or “a” man. Our esteemed Robert Alter does his best to make his fiction seem plausible in a footnote: “The initial identification of the anonymous adversary is from Jacob’s point of view [huh?!], and so all he knows of him is what he sees, which is that he is a ‘man.’” Other annotated Bibles will spout some inanity about how “this man is sent from God, as is made clear by blabla.”

I prefer to presume that the author knew what he or she was writing, and when this author has a character arriving, we are unfailingly told, ba, “he came.” If Jacob sees someone, we are told, ra’ah, “he saw.” Likewise, if Jacob meets angels, we are told, wa-yipge’aw malachi elohim, “and he met the angels of God.”

It could not be more obvious that none of that is the case here. Translators are driven to think up anything to avoid having to state what is clearly stated: Jacob is ALONE. And the man (Jacob) wrestles with him(self). With himself, but also not himself. He is alone, and yet there is another. Subject-Object relations are recursive is such scenarios, and the author plays with this by repetition and a playful rhythm, yiga be-kar yerekow, wa-teqa kar yerek Ya’aqov, translatable only by the horrendously clunking “and he touched the socket of the thigh, and was dislocated the socket of the thigh (of) Jacob,” leaving it open to interpretation who touches and who is touched, implying that it is Jacob who went for the leg of his opponent, only to realize when he wrenched it that it’s him.

When the “Other” asks what name he should bless, it is another hint. Why would this other that is with Jacob when Jacob is alone not know Jacob’s name? Jacob lamely replies, “Jacob,” but that is beside the point. The Other is not asking what Jacob’s name is, but what name Jacob desires. Jacob’s former self does not realize that what he is wrestling with is his new self.

Why there has been such a thorough structure of non-reading erected in the face of this passage is understandable: Which is easier to explain to the simpletons in church, that Jacob wrestled with an angel, or that he was a schizo so desperate to convince himself that he was blessed that he worked himself into a violent fit and left himself lame?

Jacob’s story is remarkable, not as remarkable as all that really. There is someone with you, also, when you are alone. We have already gotten too well used to the cute version of the Freudian unconscious, that “there’s a bad guy in you.” Nowadays we have “many selves” in ourselves, isn’t that the fashionable thing now that the Jonah Lehrers and Malcolm Gladwells spoonfeed us? A bland multiplicity; sometimes a good solid worker, sometimes a lazy doofus, sometimes a horndog, sometimes you just can’t be bothered to get it up for Mrs.

And some of these selves are, sure, you guess, “submerged,” hard to see down there, for we with our many “selves” are very deep, aren’t we?

What Freud discovered is far more terrifying.

Freud discovered that you do not, not a one of you, know who or what you are. Oh, there’s something that knows, that’s for sure. And it’s “in” you in some sense. But what knows isn’t you. It knows better than you. It outwits you. It selects what you may and may not know. It screens what you can see and think, and allows you to receive only what it permits you. The rest it keeps for itself. It knows, you don’t.

I see already all of you scoffing. Oh, haven’t we moved beyond all that patriarchalist Edwardian hysteria, that quaint Oedipal dramaturgy? Didn’t it all go out the window when people discovered how to have sex sometime around the Beatles’ first LP? Why do we still need to think about that “Unconscious” nonsense, we all earn livings and genuflect, don’t we? And with that, everything’s out in the open: no more repression, we stop at the ATM and proceed home to wife+kids or else to the leather bar, to each his own, right?

Sorry, fellows. The old man's back again: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-f ... inked.html

Freedom? We have found the simple solution of tying it together with “determinism” and living with the mystery; it’s one or the other and undecidable, so we might as well act like we’re free. And so we live the dream, pleasantly believing ourselves to be the dreamer. But it is the self that is the dream. Everything that comes to this self is filtered by agencies that are not-self. The self’s sensory apparatus, with its “coherent” rendering of space and time, presents the Sham of completeness and comprehension, when in fact there is a vast bandwidth of input that is registered, that does affect the interior, but which is all radically precluded from any recognition by the self. These little selves of ours are perfect slaves, duped completely.

What, then, is “reality”? Necessarily it is something other than the dream-vision rendered coherent by our selves, in which this, undeniably is a web forum, and that, undeniably, I mean just look at it, is a rock. Just kick it and see: real. This, the point that guarantees the real beyond doubt, is the ultimate lie. How are we to be free?

Have we not been told that the Kingdom of Heaven is among us? To see the truth, look up. But you must look up knowing that it is not light flowing into your eyes, but your eyes flowing into your light. You must see more than sky, more than the Sham eidolon of God almighty. You must see the Names, and the Artifices traveling up and down them.

[AzariLoveIran]

.

We are surely at a loss in having only a few words of what Jesus said in Aramaic. Or perhaps we’re better off. For if we had Jesus in Aramaic we might get the clue that all things, all works and deeds, “miracles” included, are matters of interpretation and equivocation. It’s wordplay, the ability to change people's perception by shifting what they understand certain things to mean. You will think I mean this cynically. I do not. Manipulations of words had and still have the power to change what the light brings to your eyes. This is so.

Let us take an example. Turn in your books to Numbers, chapter 21. God is going about the business of killing off the generation of Hebrews he led out of Egypt, and in this there is of course a risk of total demoralization and dissolution. He is assailing them with “fiery serpents,” ha-nechasim ha-seraphim, and we are told at any rate that they are cognizant enough that this is all their own fault, that they humbly ask Moses to intercede with God for them and ask forgiveness.

God tells Moses that this situation can be resolved by what is beautifully referred to in Henry James novels as “hanging fire,” in other words creating a distraction. God says, Aishe leka saraph, wa-shim otow al-nes, “Make a fire and put it on a flagpole.” And everybody who looks upon it shall live. Inspiring, no? The nes, Nun-Samekh, the “standard” or flagpole, just happens to be the word for “miracle” as well.

So Moses flagrantly violates the second commandment and crafts a serpent idol, and here we may find a hint about what the trick is. Moses makes nechas nechoset: Nun-Chet-Shin, Nun-Chet-Shin-Tau. “A serpent of bronze.” So who’s puzzled? Putting a bronze serpent on a stick is not precisely what God said to do, which was to put fire on a stick. We are left to conclude that the metaphorical “seraph” is accomplished somehow in the equivocation between serpent, nechas, and bronze, nechoset, as if to say, “What you perceive as afflicting you in the form of serpents, is here mastered in this simulacrum on a stick.” And it works. They look at the fake serpent, and the “real” serpents that been killing them “miraculously” vanish. No doubt a bunch of people still died, but too bad for them, either they didn’t believe, or it was just their time, whatever. What counts is the signifier. Fixing attention on something else effectively solved the problem.

It is quite explicit that such shams, Shin-Mem, such “put-ons,” are the currency of the Son of Man: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that those who believe in him may not perish.” John 3:14.

Jesus spoke a lot, as we know, about “the kingdom of heaven”. In Aramaic, it would have something close to the Hebrew, Melokhah la-Shamayim, transliterated MLWKH L-ShMYM. Given a little twist of vowel marking, this reads precisely the same as “Kingdom of the Names”. It is not so much “inspired” as simply logical to identify the particularity of names, identifications, with the total generality of heaven, and with that in heaven (the Sun, Shemesh) whose light allows all things to be distinguished and known.

This is of a piece with God’s ancient identity EL (Aleph-Lamed) which happens to be the preposition meaning at, on, or upon. God was, of course, a voice, another voice, an origin-point of particularities and determinations that accompanied a man and his own voice. God was the embodiment of a knowledge that surpassed any knowledge that men, in their natural humility, were able to think of as their own.

As Julian Jaynes theorizes, until around 4 millennia ago, it was not infrequent for people to hear their thoughts as originating from a voice not themselves. And there’s something to this. It is in the nature of language to contain connections, far more connections that can be consciously intended in any statement. More is always said than what is said. Every word, every nuance and intonation, incites a slightly different neuronal cascade, setting afire a slightly different network of semantic associations. Is it so surprising that people should hear some of those connections articulated by a voice that is not their own? Part of modernity is our having trained ourselves quite rigorously to assume that the words that flash through our minds are "ours." As we say, "it's all in our head," a phrase whose greatest lie is in the assumption that "your head" is one thing. In this we have trained ourselves so well that we now take it to be natural, but in truth it is impossible to assign responsibility for the thoughts that occur. Words are the cause of words.

The I is what changed the old way, what blocked out the voice of prophesy. Not all languages had it, but once it was introduced it assumed responsibility for more and more of people’s conscious encounters with language heard, read, and thought. Like any other word, the I is a fiction, and assigning it causal responsibility for the words that occur in our interior states is particularly fictional, just as fictional as assigning them to a god or an angel.

And about those “angels,” how much does it bother us that God’s Angels (Malachim) are artifices? Yes, both "angel" and "tradecraft" is Mem-Lamed-Aleph-Chet, and one letter separates these from "kings" and "Moloch," Mem-Lamed-(Waw)-Chet. So when Jacob sees a ladder leading up into the sky, what he sees are devices ascending to the names and devices descending from the names. Think on that awhile.

So God, like the leaders of men, accomplishes all things through trickery. It is all words and devices. There is no “true ground,” no “final reality” or “absolutely legitimate authority.” The bullshit that makes the world go round is as divine and cosmological as it is human.

This view, as you have seen, is entirely Biblical, and indeed “religious” in its way. What is interesting is that every religious tradition precludes any confrontation with what I am showing you to be plainly stated in the text. Traditional narratives of what is happening in the stories of the Bible are systematic falsifications.

To take but one more example, most every Jewish and Christian denomination agrees that Jacob attains the blessing after he “wrestles with an angel.” That is a completely standard, traditional, uncontroversial reading of the Bible. It is also objectively, demonstrably wrong.

Kindly turn to Genesis 32:25. “And Jacob was left alone.” The very next word after lebadow, “alone,” is wa-ye’abeq, “and (he) wrestled.” So who is doing the wrestling? This is the whole line: wa-ye’abeq aysh aimow aid ailowt ha-sachar, “and wrestled the man with him until the breaking of dawn.” The way that translators deal with this is an object lesson in the universality of compulsive self-delusion.

A typical version is “someone” or “some man wrestled with him.” There is nothing in the Hebrew that remotely indicates “some” man or “a” man. Our esteemed Robert Alter does his best to make his fiction seem plausible in a footnote: “The initial identification of the anonymous adversary is from Jacob’s point of view [huh?!], and so all he knows of him is what he sees, which is that he is a ‘man.’” Other annotated Bibles will spout some inanity about how “this man is sent from God, as is made clear by blabla.”

I prefer to presume that the author knew what he or she was writing, and when this author has a character arriving, we are unfailingly told, ba, “he came.” If Jacob sees someone, we are told, ra’ah, “he saw.” Likewise, if Jacob meets angels, we are told, wa-yipge’aw malachi elohim, “and he met the angels of God.”

It could not be more obvious that none of that is the case here. Translators are driven to think up anything to avoid having to state what is clearly stated: Jacob is ALONE. And the man (Jacob) wrestles with him(self). With himself, but also not himself. He is alone, and yet there is another. Subject-Object relations are recursive is such scenarios, and the author plays with this by repetition and a playful rhythm, yiga be-kar yerekow, wa-teqa kar yerek Ya’aqov, translatable only by the horrendously clunking “and he touched the socket of the thigh, and was dislocated the socket of the thigh (of) Jacob,” leaving it open to interpretation who touches and who is touched, implying that it is Jacob who went for the leg of his opponent, only to realize when he wrenched it that it’s him.

When the “Other” asks what name he should bless, it is another hint. Why would this other that is with Jacob when Jacob is alone not know Jacob’s name? Jacob lamely replies, “Jacob,” but that is beside the point. The Other is not asking what Jacob’s name is, but what name Jacob desires. Jacob’s former self does not realize that what he is wrestling with is his new self.

Why there has been such a thorough structure of non-reading erected in the face of this passage is understandable: Which is easier to explain to the simpletons in church, that Jacob wrestled with an angel, or that he was a schizo so desperate to convince himself that he was blessed that he worked himself into a violent fit and left himself lame?

Jacob’s story is remarkable, not as remarkable as all that really. There is someone with you, also, when you are alone. We have already gotten too well used to the cute version of the Freudian unconscious, that “there’s a bad guy in you.” Nowadays we have “many selves” in ourselves, isn’t that the fashionable thing now that the Jonah Lehrers and Malcolm Gladwells spoonfeed us? A bland multiplicity; sometimes a good solid worker, sometimes a lazy doofus, sometimes a horndog, sometimes you just can’t be bothered to get it up for Mrs.

And some of these selves are, sure, you guess, “submerged,” hard to see down there, for we with our many “selves” are very deep, aren’t we?

What Freud discovered is far more terrifying.

Freud discovered that you do not, not a one of you, know who or what you are. Oh, there’s something that knows, that’s for sure. And it’s “in” you in some sense. But what knows isn’t you. It knows better than you. It outwits you. It selects what you may and may not know. It screens what you can see and think, and allows you to receive only what it permits you. The rest it keeps for itself. It knows, you don’t.

I see already all of you scoffing. Oh, haven’t we moved beyond all that patriarchalist Edwardian hysteria, that quaint Oedipal dramaturgy? Didn’t it all go out the window when people discovered how to have sex sometime around the Beatles’ first LP? Why do we still need to think about that “Unconscious” nonsense, we all earn livings and genuflect, don’t we? And with that, everything’s out in the open: no more repression, we stop at the ATM and proceed home to wife+kids or else to the leather bar, to each his own, right?

Sorry, fellows. The old man's back again: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-f ... inked.html

Freedom? We have found the simple solution of tying it together with “determinism” and living with the mystery; it’s one or the other and undecidable, so we might as well act like we’re free. And so we live the dream, pleasantly believing ourselves to be the dreamer. But it is the self that is the dream. Everything that comes to this self is filtered by agencies that are not-self. The self’s sensory apparatus, with its “coherent” rendering of space and time, presents the Sham of completeness and comprehension, when in fact there is a vast bandwidth of input that is registered, that does affect the interior, but which is all radically precluded from any recognition by the self. These little selves of ours are perfect slaves, duped completely.

What, then, is “reality”? Necessarily it is something other than the dream-vision rendered coherent by our selves, in which this, undeniably is a web forum, and that, undeniably, I mean just look at it, is a rock. Just kick it and see: real. This, the point that guarantees the real beyond doubt, is the ultimate lie. How are we to be free?

Have we not been told that the Kingdom of Heaven is among us? To see the truth, look up. But you must look up knowing that it is not light flowing into your eyes, but your eyes flowing into your light. You must see more than sky, more than the Sham eidolon of God almighty. You must see the Names, and the Artifices traveling up and down them.

.

Dioscuri,

2B frank

first I thought this a spam

then I looked and saw you "Joined: Mon Jan 09, 2012 6:54 pm"

well

interesting

we had all sort of guys here, communist, redneck, homosexual & feminist advocates, tree huggers, wannabe scientist, lukewarm (or in closet) Zionist, etc etc .. but we had non of those catering to “the kingdom of heaven”

welcome

why you not tell us a bit more about “the kingdom of heaven”

and

what is this .. “fiery serpents,” ha-nechasim ha-seraphim .. or .. God says, Aishe leka saraph, wa-shim otow al-nes .. all about ? ? ?


Shalom


.

[Enki]

You are lost in one of the most common and pernicious mental viruses of our time. The notion that because it is words within words it its an 'illusion'. Just because we are inside of a matrix of ideas doesn't make it not real.

Very Qabalistic. In Qabala angels are quite specifically living words.

So if Jesus as a concept is 'the word made flesh', we are mislead if we try to figure out ' which word' because it is the notion of words and ideas at all. God is the foundational idea.

Space in the physical universe is a measurement of matter and energy in relation to other matter and energy. At the end of it, anyone that knows knows that the concept of a particle is a metaphysical shorthand that allows us to comprehend the universe.

You are onto something, I just wouldn't use the term sham, illusion, lie or any other synonym that I believe only causes confusion. Reality is itself an idea, but that doesn't make it less real.

[Dioscuri]

Pernicious? No. It is right that people suspect, even if it becomes a tedious whine in some. And not "of our time" either, ours is an old tradition.

I don't deny rocks, I deny the knowledge of people who point to rocks as though the rocks verified his knowledge. Rocks get pointed at because obviousness and undeniability is inversely related to meaning. What is far more "real" is what no one agrees on, what everyone fights over. The degree of reality of any fact is measured by the amount of energy spent routinizing it into a niche of comfortable blabla. What is real is what cannot be filed away, what keeps on not resolving itself.

You know what this "real" is, "really" where it came from? From Rome. The reus is the accused as he is rendered before the judge to hear what manner of death he shall have, crux or lions or whatnot. That is the position of the Real. It is not what is sensorially present, what we sense is the Imaginary.

The Real is what it is to await the end. It is to have Slavery be Salvation, your sentence commuted. It is to make the Infinite crossing, to see what makes all opposites the same. The "everyday" Real is the shadow cast by the reality of this death upon this life. We of course live and stay sane by not "really knowing" we're going to die. "You" and "I" are precisely what does not know that. But something knows it.

Don't make me go all "quantum physics" but think about it: What we detect are not objective realities but a field of virtual-probable states all of which in-exist each other. We cannot even properly speak of "laws of physics," only probabalistic tendencies, and probabilities generate rare events by definition. They generate, for that matter, all events.

We easily mistake the Real for the True. Everything we sense is structured to confirm the True, the A = A, self-identity, not the Real. Don't take it from me, good old Kant insists on the "transcendental synthesis," the radical inaccessibility of the "object itself".

[Demon of Undoing]

I have witheld comment because my words will take us farther away, not closer. But D is precisely describing my war against the world. The maya is still a tool, and no longer a tool but a demon. Oddly enough, a demon possessed by people.

This unfolds before my very eyes.

[Enki]

I think this touches on the true heart of the matter. Those oriented toward death and those oriented toward life.

Real is this that we touch that we see or else the word has no meaning. It is the world of experience.

When you talk about this 'world of Maya' you are saying your Mother, Father, Sons, Daughters, Sisters, Brothers, Cousins, are not actually real. Too much devolution to the God Mind.

Quantum Mechanics isn't 'real' it's a model. What is real is the rock. Quantum Mechanics is a tool by which we subdivide the rock.

The illusion of Maya is the illusion, it is a pernicious cancer of the mind that brings about death-seeking thought.

[Parodite]

Always a torturous activity to relate knowns and unknowns. But it seems that is what the brain is doing all the time. Actually in a rather off hand way without much effort! Words just can't keep up and hate it.

I the word, what am I?

mqTDRMVS3_4

[Parodite]

The illusion of Maya is the illusion, it is a pernicious cancer of the mind that brings about death-seeking thought.

"The illusion of mind" is just a stupid self-contradictory sentence.

"I am not real". Duhhh

[Miss_Faucie_Fishtits]

When you talk about this 'world of Maya' you are saying your Mother, Father, Sons, Daughters, Sisters, Brothers, Cousins, are not actually real. Too much devolution to the God Mind.

A nice thing to say about the God Mind is it rather keeps breeder hubris at bay, for when we are on the other side of the Door, we are equal whether we had many daughters and sons or we had none. Nice brush back, that, keeps the noidedness down for me.....;>..........

[Demon of Undoing]

Oh, they are real, just as a shadow is real. But the Maya is not what the thing actually is. It is instead almost by definition the exclusion of what the thing actually is. Not a definition, but instead a deletion, where " mother" takes away almost everything the woman is and reduces her to the function of her uterus. Not that there's anything wrong with that; the thing is the very essence of what a useful tool is. But the only way to embrace the totality of what that being is, is to forget ( or better yet, keep in perspective) the word " mother".

[Enki]

Oh, they are real, just as a shadow is real. But the Maya is not what the thing actually is. It is instead almost by definition the exclusion of what the thing actually is. Not a definition, but instead a deletion, where " mother" takes away almost everything the woman is and reduces her to the function of her uterus. Not that there's anything wrong with that; the thing is the very essence of what a useful tool is. But the only way to embrace the totality of what that being is, is to forget ( or better yet, keep in perspective) the word " mother".

Well if you say that civilization is unreal, then I agree. If it is an archaic way of saying the map is not the territory, then I agree. If you are talking about how the mind sees things kind of in the way a reflecting telescope displays the Sun, then once again I agree.

Some of us recognize the thing itself behind the representation, and we know that our lives are lived within the representational, even though the truth behind the representation is something a bit beyond our ability to truly touch it.

But I think it is an abuse of language to say it is an illusion or that it is not real. For the very term reality is the representational world that we live in. The Empirical isness behind the curtain notwithstanding.

[Parodite]

Oh, they are real, just as a shadow is real. But the Maya is not what the thing actually is. It is instead almost by definition the exclusion of what the thing actually is. Not a definition, but instead a deletion, where " mother" takes away almost everything the woman is and reduces her to the function of her uterus. Not that there's anything wrong with that; the thing is the very essence of what a useful tool is. But the only way to embrace the totality of what that being is, is to forget ( or better yet, keep in perspective) the word " mother".

I kind of resolve this riddle by starting with differences.

Things are never the same exactly. This we know 1st hand from within our 1st person perspective of the representational. The leaves of a tree are all similar, yet different. Meaning arises in the dynamics of differences, of differences between differences as shape, form, color, size, distance, relative speed etc. One needs a brain to do all the calc and there never seems to be a fixed result right of the "=" sign; it would mean death. Some differences change too fast for the eye to see... others too slow; the latter solidifies into "stable" objects and values.

I think it is safe to assume that the dynamics of experiential differences as they occur in the sensory-cognitive brain is embedded in a bigger reality that equally "runs on differences". That the objective world behind the curtain is "similar"... i.e. different. - that the same "differential calculus" pervades through all "apparently separate worlds".

But that would solve a major riddle: of why we can't reach "behind the representational curtain" trapped in a solipsist God-like reality with only access to the world outside via video cameras and whatever techno-sensory walls that we cannot penetrate ever. Because it is a mistake to expect anything beyond the curtain that is not entirely different. The brain is such a massive concentration of differential calculus, its source data that come in via the senses must be much too different to be recognizable within the experiential output that is our conscious experience. This creates the solipsist sense where the objective world that preceeds and embeds our brains... is felt to be an unknown void we can't reach. But there is no abortion of anything...

"God is making a hellovu big difference", which is why He can't be i-dentified.

Oh Gods breath, the winds of change... (sounds way too tacky but hell )

[Enki]

‎"Everything you see has its roots in the unseen world." ~Rumi♥


I think that's a more accurate way of stating the problem.

[Dioscuri]

No one can be "life-oriented" or "death-oriented." The two are reversible. As soon as you place the stress upon one, the other moves correspondingly; they loop around each other over the lip of the Klein bottle and what appeared characteristic of the one is now of the other. They cannot be distinguished.

The rocks are not illusions; it is the knowledge that calls them "rocks" that is the illusion, and the illusion is total. The rocks might have been anything, but they are what they are only because everything can be nothing more than what we can call it, and everything that can be named is preconditioned already by the Signifier.

"Objectivity" in any form is a Sham, for it is the name of a contradiction: knowledgeless knowledge. Objectivity weaves a spell that lets us presume to know what something would be in the absence of our knowledge. So, no, without human minds rocks would not be rocks. Matter and energy would not do without consciousness what they do with consciousness. Nothing in quantum theory predicts when, if ever, wavefunction collapse would occur, except that the act of observation necessitates it. It is not possible to state how or how often wavefunction collapse "would" occur "when we're not looking", because every time it occurs, we're looking. We have no grounds whatsoever to generalize about it occurring in any situation in which an observation is not being made. And when wave/particles are not bound to resolve in a particular way (i.e., when they're not being observed), they are at liberty to cheat. An electron is able to fluctuate its energy level wildly on a short enough timescale; it can effectively "borrow" energy at one temporal state from a future state, thereby altering itself so that it will come into that future state at that energy level; in other words, they can create their own future without any violation of causality: the "proper" causal chain for whatever happens to have happened can always be found, and will always be found no matter what is decided to happen; numbers are infinite after all.

"Reality" is the result of a certain type of resolution of a probabalistic matrix. Other resolutions exist at all times; reality could indeed be anything people wanted it to be. The Infinite is real. That it ends up being this obscene lavender is the problem of Maya. Maya emerges and acts out of language. The structure of symbolic relations induces the operative set of root-level expectations in the Imaginary, which inflects the perceptual rendering of space-time such that the recognized self-identities provided by the Symbolic order will always return "true"; will always appear to be validated "non-linguistically".

Sometimes of course, there's “a glitch in the Matrix.” Deja vus, sure, but it’s more than that, it’s all manner of little violations of the causality that makes sense to us. It’s the position of that chair since we left the room; it’s the speck that seemed to just materialize in the instant of shifting your eyes.

They’re always rationally explainable, of course. The speck was there before, just in the less sensitive periphery of your vision, just like running into whatshername was of course “only a coincidence,” just like that car on the street that backfired with a loud report to effectively change the subject right in that moment in the conversation where some issue, some difference that was not being addressed but was somehow un-present, that moment where it seemed a strange specter of the infinite was about ready to rise up and make something possible that would never actually happen… and of course, thanks to that little shock bringing us back to our senses, it didn’t happen. … But would it have? But it didn’t.

The world works this way. It works the way it works, and people think it works the way they think, which is the way Maya thinks: Physical bodies moving in objective space. All watched over by SkyGod, or not, but God or no God, this idea we have, the idea supported by all our “physical senses,” of an “exterior” in which we “are able to move,” the idea that the world “out there” has its own existence, and that it would still be what it is “without us,” that the world existed before us and will exist after us, the precedence of the objective, yes? And the subtle way that that gets us to think of ourselves as being outside of the universe. That is indeed the default position of thought, almost impossible to break out of: the unspoken baseline assumption that everything, the air, the earth, the light, my body, that the world is everything that is not-me.

That, to the best of our abilities, is the fundamental proposition: that is the firmly encastled belief which no affirmation of the opposite can dislodge. "Of course I'm part of the world!" everyone will aver without complaint: and yet every aspect of how they think and live is written by just the opposite. That is the kernel around which the dream-coherence encloses itself. It is so powerful because, we must admit, it really does make everything make quite good sense. Much easier to believe that words are from nowhere than that everything is according to the Word.

How we break through the symbolic logic that generates the certainty of the dream-coherence, is what only the Master can provide. The Master's Word, as has been so well recounted yet is so systematically non-recognized, lifts the veil of causal-perceptual relativity. The Master was and will be able to swap different actualities in and out of the collective Matrix ("Lazarus died? OK, how 'bout you just thought he was dead?" "Centurion chopped off your ear? Let's back up a second.") In doing this, he becomes an Unholy Terror; all the good and decent men demand he be slaughtered in the name of all that is good and decent; the Whore thirsts to get his head into her saucepan. And what happens after that we do not know.

[Enki]

When I say life-oriented I mean embracing this life. When I say death-oriented I mean trying to escape this life.

The person who meditates in order to detach from everything is death oriented. The Christian who hates the world, is death oriented. The leftist who says humanity should be extinct in order to save the planet, is death oriented.

[Enki]

I think the notion of there being a consciousness separate from physicality is at the root of the problem. That's the illusion. You touch on it with your comments on the collapse of the wave function. Maybe the wave function doesn't collapse, we just create mental snapshots which appear to have collapsed as such as its easier to see nouns than verbs. But consciousness may very well be a fundamental part of reality. Its just that we think of ourselves as the only conscious beings. *I* am the most conscious of all because I can perceive my own consciousness, whereas I can only observe and react to the effects of your consciousness. To the degree you resemble me and I can 'feel' your existence, you are also conscious. The rock, it's not conscious, it's inert matter. But if consciousness permeates EVERYTHING then reality is not a consensual delusion, it's a consensual creation of mind. I have some control over reality, as do you, as does the bacteria living in between your skin folds.

[Parodite]

"Objectivity" in any form is a Sham, for it is the name of a contradiction: knowledgeless knowledge. Objectivity weaves a spell that lets us presume to know what something would be in the absence of our knowledge. So, no, without human minds rocks would not be rocks.

But the assumption that there is something that corresponds with the experience/knowlegde of that rock is legit? Like "the moon when nobody is watching it"

Matter and energy would not do without consciousness what they do with consciousness. Nothing in quantum theory predicts when, if ever, wavefunction collapse would occur, except that the act of observation necessitates it. It is not possible to state how or how often wavefunction collapse "would" occur "when we're not looking", because every time it occurs, we're looking.

I don't think this is true. The theory only states that when a quantum measurement device registers an outcome, the wave function collapsed. Such devices themselves are not necessarily conscious; it just means they interact on the quantum level with what is measured so that both "observer" and "observed" resolve into one state: a collapse of the wave function. But this has in principle nothing to do with conscious human beings; they can wait outside of the laboratory, smoke a cig and wait till the unconcious device did its quantum measurement.

We have no grounds whatsoever to generalize about it occurring in any situation in which an observation is not being made.

Well, on the quantum level everything interacts continuously, so reality would be that waves collapse in the trillions each second in a small volume of spacetime with particle mass present.

And when wave/particles are not bound to resolve in a particular way (i.e., when they're not being observed), they are at liberty to cheat.

If what I say above is true, that would not follow.

An electron is able to fluctuate its energy level wildly on a short enough timescale; it can effectively "borrow" energy at one temporal state from a future state, thereby altering itself so that it will come into that future state at that energy level; in other words, they can create their own future without any violation of causality: the "proper" causal chain for whatever happens to have happened can always be found, and will always be found no matter what is decided to happen; numbers are infinite after all.

Although "the wave function" is a useful mathematical representation that enables predicting outcomes accurately in quantum experiments, its (physical) nature is debatable.

"Reality" is the result of a certain type of resolution of a probabalistic matrix. Other resolutions exist at all times; reality could indeed be anything people wanted it to be.

Why would that be true? On the hand hand the lingo of quantum probability, of reality as essentially being probabilistic in nature is suggestive of freedom...of whatever moves, goes. On the other hand quantum behavior equally suggests the opposite; in the end all is whipped through the corridors of chance and you will appear at but a number of exits possible. Stalin and Murphy are not so different maybe.

The Infinite is real. That it ends up being this obscene lavender is the problem of Maya. Maya emerges and acts out of language. The structure of symbolic relations induces the operative set of root-level expectations in the Imaginary, which inflects the perceptual rendering of space-time such that the recognized self-identities provided by the Symbolic order will always return "true"; will always appear to be validated "non-linguistically".

The concept of Maya is needlessly confusing things. What may occur (and which is not that much of a sin nor having "serious repercussions" at all..) is something like mistaken identity. On one end of the spectrum this happens when people don't realize that "the outside physical world" is in fact an internal brainprocess and "representation"; they are like kids who believe that an unobserved green football is still *green* when it is not observed. This naive idea (though totally innocent and pretty useful to navigate in the world...) that we observe the world directly is called direct realism.

On the other end of the spectrum of mistaken identity is the "all is illusion" school of thought. As Tinker pointed out and I agree... this is a dangerous and leads to madness and devaluation of life. "Don't trust words. Don't trust even your senses! It is all Maya. YOU are Maya..." Might as well jump of the cliffs right into the non-existence of Nirvana

[Dioscuri]

Matter and energy would not do without consciousness what they do with consciousness. Nothing in quantum theory predicts when, if ever, wavefunction collapse would occur, except that the act of observation necessitates it. It is not possible to state how or how often wavefunction collapse "would" occur "when we're not looking", because every time it occurs, we're looking.

I don't think this is true. The theory only states that when a quantum measurement device registers an outcome, the wave function collapsed. Such devices themselves are not necessarily conscious; it just means they interact on the quantum level with what is measured so that both "observer" and "observed" resolve into one state: a collapse of the wave function. But this has in principle nothing to do with conscious human beings; they can wait outside of the laboratory, smoke a cig and wait till the unconcious device did its quantum measurement.

Afraid not. "They thought of that already," and it doesn't resolve anything, just adds insult to injury.

In "double-slit" experiments in which light is given the option of which path by which to travel though the slits and strike the screen on the other side, the design of the experimental apparatus may either be made to determine which path the wave/particle takes, or to expose the interference pattern produced by the indetermine "all" of the possible wave paths. As it turns out, we can't measure both, as researchers discovered to much confusion: whenever the apparatus is articulated so as to make it possible to determine which path is taken through the slits, no interference pattern can be observed. And letting the apparatus "know" instead of us does not change anything. The apparatus is a Signifier, it will always be linked to a subject of Knowledge. We are always in our machines. Letting them know for us does not sever our link to the Knowledge.

This is, as I said, insulting. It makes you want to demand an explanation, sputter "but- but- but- there must be something wrong with it!", hit someone, or go crazy, but there we have it nonetheless. When we do not allow ourselves the ability to determine which path is taken, we can see the interference pattern. When we do, no interference pattern.

This outrage against reason is entirely due to our compulsive "objectivist" thinking. Understanding these particles as "actual things" that are "independent of us" makes their behavior in these experiments utterly incomprehensible. On the other hand, if we try to think the phenomenon itself, the appearing to consciousness, as being ontologically prior to the disposition of "objects," we can get somewhere. As "objects," the universe can be arranged in any old way with no violation of causality; their constitution as objects is completely relative to consciousness; they appear as fully constituted realities ONLY to conscious observation.

We can't pussyfoot around this, we have to let it smack us in the face: objects do not exist outside of the possibility of being observed. Matter/energy relations are only constituted against the screen of consciousness.

The concept of Maya is needlessly confusing things. What may occur (and which is not that much of a sin nor having "serious repercussions" at all..) is something like mistaken identity. On one end of the spectrum this happens when people don't realize that "the outside physical world" is in fact an internal brainprocess and "representation"; they are like kids who believe that an unobserved green football is still *green* when it is not observed. This naive idea (though totally innocent and pretty useful to navigate in the world...) that we observe the world directly is called direct realism.

It's naive, fully understandable, and wrong. That it is so reassuring and right-seeming is precisely why it has to be distrusted. Accepting it submits us to the same trick, of believing that everything "there" is "there in itself" and would be "there without us." The truth is that there is no universe "in itself." There is only a universe if there is Knowledge.

On the other end of the spectrum of mistaken identity is the "all is illusion" school of thought. As Tinker pointed out and I agree... this is a dangerous and leads to madness and devaluation of life. "Don't trust words. Don't trust even your senses! It is all Maya. YOU are Maya..." Might as well jump of the cliffs right into the non-existence of Nirvana

It seems to me that believing consciousness is just an incidental development in an objective universe is rather more devaluative of life. If we're mere accidents of a natural process, then it would seem that people getting wiped out is of no more significance than their being born. If we were for a fleeting moment however, actually able to accept that the physical constitution of the universe has an intimate nexus with Knowledge, and that this Knowledge is a gift fairly recently bestowed upon the otherwise not-so-significant natural processes occurring on a particular planet orbiting an uninteresting star, I think we would begin to "value life."

[Demon of Undoing]

In the words of my fathers, these are big things. We should smoke on them.

[noddy]

yes, more interesting muses than many of late.

i too have recurring problems with "symbol != thing" .. with "reductionist model != reality"... then teh problemz duz starts.

one vague thought i did have in relation to all this is our never ending requirement to simplify things into autopilot, its an awesome skill that in most ways makes our lives richer and leaves us open to new and interesting problems... if i do anything for more than a weeki can literally stop thinking about it and let my newly formed reflex's doing it instead.

it also leaves us open to simplifying ourselves out of our own lives, in all sorts of stoopid philosophical ways.. the real stuff happens when your not on autopilot.

[Demon of Undoing]

yes, more interesting muses than many of late.

i too have recurring problems with "symbol != thing" .. with "reductionist model != reality"... then teh problemz duz starts.

one vague thought i did have in relation to all this is our never ending requirement to simplify things into autopilot, its an awesome skill that in most ways makes our lives richer and leaves us open to new and interesting problems... if i do anything for more than a weeki can literally stop thinking about it and let my newly formed reflex's doing it instead.

it also leaves us open to simplifying ourselves out of our own lives, in all sorts of stoopid philosophical ways.. the real stuff happens when your not on autopilot.

This is the other end of the health care debate. Yes, we DO want to be taken care of. Who doesnt want delivery pizza? We automate subroutines because that's what humans do. It is almost literally our teeth and claws, our way to influence reality and survive. You' never choose a flint hand axe, pre- existing even the idea of lashing it to a length of stick for levaerage, to hunt a bear that will either eat you, or you, it; not if you had an SR- 25 in .50 Beowulf available. You'd be mad if you did. You really, really want to automate that subroutine.

[Mr. Perfect]

No one can be "life-oriented" or "death-oriented." The two are reversible. As soon as you place the stress upon one, the other moves correspondingly; they loop around each other over the lip of the Klein bottle and what appeared characteristic of the one is now of the other. They cannot be distinguished.

Right on the money bro with the exception of the actual suicide cults (statistically insignificant).

The issue is really is a man an eternal or a temporary being. If the former well concluding anything other than smoke 'em if ya got 'em is vanity. And that's ok, vanity gives people some pleasure, just another form of a cigarette. But it just isn't anything more than that.

As for the rest, if we are eternal looking toward the future is as natural as being born or dying, so can't really see a problem.

[Mr. Perfect]

This is the other end of the health care debate. Yes, we DO want to be taken care of. Who doesnt want delivery pizza?

Gubmin't doesn't do delivery pizza, gubmint says you can have a car and a plumber, it may just be in 10 years, so which one do you want to arrive in the morning.

People want to be taken care of, that's why we do capitalism, capitalism delivers pizza.

[Azrael]

We are surely at a loss in having only a few words of what Jesus said in Aramaic. Or perhaps we’re better off. For if we had Jesus in Aramaic we might get the clue that all things, all works and deeds, “miracles” included, are matters of interpretation and equivocation. It’s wordplay, the ability to change people's perception by shifting what they understand certain things to mean. You will think I mean this cynically. I do not. Manipulations of words had and still have the power to change what the light brings to your eyes. This is so.

Let us take an example. Turn in your books to Numbers, chapter 21. God is going about the business of killing off the generation of Hebrews he led out of Egypt, and in this there is of course a risk of total demoralization and dissolution. He is assailing them with “fiery serpents,” ha-nechasim ha-seraphim, and we are told at any rate that they are cognizant enough that this is all their own fault, that they humbly ask Moses to intercede with God for them and ask forgiveness.

God tells Moses that this situation can be resolved by what is beautifully referred to in Henry James novels as “hanging fire,” in other words creating a distraction. God says, Aishe leka saraph, wa-shim otow al-nes, “Make a fire and put it on a flagpole.” And everybody who looks upon it shall live. Inspiring, no? The nes, Nun-Samekh, the “standard” or flagpole, just happens to be the word for “miracle” as well.

So Moses flagrantly violates the second commandment and crafts a serpent idol, and here we may find a hint about what the trick is. Moses makes nechas nechoset: Nun-Chet-Shin, Nun-Chet-Shin-Tau. “A serpent of bronze.” So who’s puzzled? Putting a bronze serpent on a stick is not precisely what God said to do, which was to put fire on a stick. We are left to conclude that the metaphorical “seraph” is accomplished somehow in the equivocation between serpent, nechas, and bronze, nechoset, as if to say, “What you perceive as afflicting you in the form of serpents, is here mastered in this simulacrum on a stick.” And it works. They look at the fake serpent, and the “real” serpents that been killing them “miraculously” vanish. No doubt a bunch of people still died, but too bad for them, either they didn’t believe, or it was just their time, whatever. What counts is the signifier. Fixing attention on something else effectively solved the problem.

It is quite explicit that such shams, Shin-Mem, such “put-ons,” are the currency of the Son of Man: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that those who believe in him may not perish.” John 3:14.

Jesus spoke a lot, as we know, about “the kingdom of heaven”. In Aramaic, it would have something close to the Hebrew, Melokhah la-Shamayim, transliterated MLWKH L-ShMYM. Given a little twist of vowel marking, this reads precisely the same as “Kingdom of the Names”. It is not so much “inspired” as simply logical to identify the particularity of names, identifications, with the total generality of heaven, and with that in heaven (the Sun, Shemesh) whose light allows all things to be distinguished and known.

This is of a piece with God’s ancient identity EL (Aleph-Lamed) which happens to be the preposition meaning at, on, or upon. God was, of course, a voice, another voice, an origin-point of particularities and determinations that accompanied a man and his own voice. God was the embodiment of a knowledge that surpassed any knowledge that men, in their natural humility, were able to think of as their own.

As Julian Jaynes theorizes, until around 4 millennia ago, it was not infrequent for people to hear their thoughts as originating from a voice not themselves. And there’s something to this. It is in the nature of language to contain connections, far more connections that can be consciously intended in any statement. More is always said than what is said. Every word, every nuance and intonation, incites a slightly different neuronal cascade, setting afire a slightly different network of semantic associations. Is it so surprising that people should hear some of those connections articulated by a voice that is not their own? Part of modernity is our having trained ourselves quite rigorously to assume that the words that flash through our minds are "ours." As we say, "it's all in our head," a phrase whose greatest lie is in the assumption that "your head" is one thing. In this we have trained ourselves so well that we now take it to be natural, but in truth it is impossible to assign responsibility for the thoughts that occur. Words are the cause of words.

The I is what changed the old way, what blocked out the voice of prophesy. Not all languages had it, but once it was introduced it assumed responsibility for more and more of people’s conscious encounters with language heard, read, and thought. Like any other word, the I is a fiction, and assigning it causal responsibility for the words that occur in our interior states is particularly fictional, just as fictional as assigning them to a god or an angel.

And about those “angels,” how much does it bother us that God’s Angels (Malachim) are artifices? Yes, both "angel" and "tradecraft" is Mem-Lamed-Aleph-Chet, and one letter separates these from "kings" and "Moloch," Mem-Lamed-(Waw)-Chet. So when Jacob sees a ladder leading up into the sky, what he sees are devices ascending to the names and devices descending from the names. Think on that awhile.

So God, like the leaders of men, accomplishes all things through trickery. It is all words and devices. There is no “true ground,” no “final reality” or “absolutely legitimate authority.” The bullshit that makes the world go round is as divine and cosmological as it is human.

This view, as you have seen, is entirely Biblical, and indeed “religious” in its way. What is interesting is that every religious tradition precludes any confrontation with what I am showing you to be plainly stated in the text. Traditional narratives of what is happening in the stories of the Bible are systematic falsifications.

To take but one more example, most every Jewish and Christian denomination agrees that Jacob attains the blessing after he “wrestles with an angel.” That is a completely standard, traditional, uncontroversial reading of the Bible. It is also objectively, demonstrably wrong.

Kindly turn to Genesis 32:25. “And Jacob was left alone.” The very next word after lebadow, “alone,” is wa-ye’abeq, “and (he) wrestled.” So who is doing the wrestling? This is the whole line: wa-ye’abeq aysh aimow aid ailowt ha-sachar, “and wrestled the man with him until the breaking of dawn.” The way that translators deal with this is an object lesson in the universality of compulsive self-delusion.

A typical version is “someone” or “some man wrestled with him.” There is nothing in the Hebrew that remotely indicates “some” man or “a” man. Our esteemed Robert Alter does his best to make his fiction seem plausible in a footnote: “The initial identification of the anonymous adversary is from Jacob’s point of view [huh?!], and so all he knows of him is what he sees, which is that he is a ‘man.’” Other annotated Bibles will spout some inanity about how “this man is sent from God, as is made clear by blabla.”

I prefer to presume that the author knew what he or she was writing, and when this author has a character arriving, we are unfailingly told, ba, “he came.” If Jacob sees someone, we are told, ra’ah, “he saw.” Likewise, if Jacob meets angels, we are told, wa-yipge’aw malachi elohim, “and he met the angels of God.”

It could not be more obvious that none of that is the case here. Translators are driven to think up anything to avoid having to state what is clearly stated: Jacob is ALONE. And the man (Jacob) wrestles with him(self). With himself, but also not himself. He is alone, and yet there is another. Subject-Object relations are recursive is such scenarios, and the author plays with this by repetition and a playful rhythm, yiga be-kar yerekow, wa-teqa kar yerek Ya’aqov, translatable only by the horrendously clunking “and he touched the socket of the thigh, and was dislocated the socket of the thigh (of) Jacob,” leaving it open to interpretation who touches and who is touched, implying that it is Jacob who went for the leg of his opponent, only to realize when he wrenched it that it’s him.

When the “Other” asks what name he should bless, it is another hint. Why would this other that is with Jacob when Jacob is alone not know Jacob’s name? Jacob lamely replies, “Jacob,” but that is beside the point. The Other is not asking what Jacob’s name is, but what name Jacob desires. Jacob’s former self does not realize that what he is wrestling with is his new self.

Why there has been such a thorough structure of non-reading erected in the face of this passage is understandable: Which is easier to explain to the simpletons in church, that Jacob wrestled with an angel, or that he was a schizo so desperate to convince himself that he was blessed that he worked himself into a violent fit and left himself lame?

Jacob’s story is remarkable, not as remarkable as all that really. There is someone with you, also, when you are alone. We have already gotten too well used to the cute version of the Freudian unconscious, that “there’s a bad guy in you.” Nowadays we have “many selves” in ourselves, isn’t that the fashionable thing now that the Jonah Lehrers and Malcolm Gladwells spoonfeed us? A bland multiplicity; sometimes a good solid worker, sometimes a lazy doofus, sometimes a horndog, sometimes you just can’t be bothered to get it up for Mrs.

And some of these selves are, sure, you guess, “submerged,” hard to see down there, for we with our many “selves” are very deep, aren’t we?

What Freud discovered is far more terrifying.

Freud discovered that you do not, not a one of you, know who or what you are. Oh, there’s something that knows, that’s for sure. And it’s “in” you in some sense. But what knows isn’t you. It knows better than you. It outwits you. It selects what you may and may not know. It screens what you can see and think, and allows you to receive only what it permits you. The rest it keeps for itself. It knows, you don’t.

Very interesting. So the Bible (and perhaps other religious scriptures as well) provide psychological insights.

Freud does provide interesting analysis of religion (eg "Moses and Monotheism").

I see already all of you scoffing. Oh, haven’t we moved beyond all that patriarchalist Edwardian hysteria, that quaint Oedipal dramaturgy? Didn’t it all go out the window when people discovered how to have sex sometime around the Beatles’ first LP? Why do we still need to think about that “Unconscious” nonsense, we all earn livings and genuflect, don’t we? And with that, everything’s out in the open: no more repression, we stop at the ATM and proceed home to wife+kids or else to the leather bar, to each his own, right?

Sorry, fellows. The old man's back again: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-f ... inked.html

Freedom? We have found the simple solution of tying it together with “determinism” and living with the mystery; it’s one or the other and undecidable, so we might as well act like we’re free. And so we live the dream, pleasantly believing ourselves to be the dreamer. But it is the self that is the dream. Everything that comes to this self is filtered by agencies that are not-self. The self’s sensory apparatus, with its “coherent” rendering of space and time, presents the Sham of completeness and comprehension, when in fact there is a vast bandwidth of input that is registered, that does affect the interior, but which is all radically precluded from any recognition by the self. These little selves of ours are perfect slaves, duped completely.

The idea of an objective self is almost like the creation of the idea of a god.

What, then, is “reality”? Necessarily it is something other than the dream-vision rendered coherent by our selves, in which this, undeniably is a web forum, and that, undeniably, I mean just look at it, is a rock. Just kick it and see: real. This, the point that guarantees the real beyond doubt, is the ultimate lie. How are we to be free?

Have we not been told that the Kingdom of Heaven is among us? To see the truth, look up. But you must look up knowing that it is not light flowing into your eyes, but your eyes flowing into your light. You must see more than sky, more than the Sham eidolon of God almighty. You must see the Names, and the Artifices traveling up and down them.

Very interesting. Who wrote this?

[Parodite]

Matter and energy would not do without consciousness what they do with consciousness. Nothing in quantum theory predicts when, if ever, wave function collapse would occur, except that the act of observation necessitates it. It is not possible to state how or how often wave function collapse "would" occur "when we're not looking", because every time it occurs, we're looking.

I don't think this is true. The theory only states that when a quantum measurement device registers an outcome, the wave function collapsed. Such devices themselves are not necessarily conscious; it just means they interact on the quantum level with what is measured so that both "observer" and "observed" resolve into one state: a collapse of the wave function. But this has in principle nothing to do with conscious human beings; they can wait outside of the laboratory, smoke a cig and wait till the unconscious device did its quantum measurement.

Afraid not. "They thought of that already," and it doesn't resolve anything, just adds insult to injury.

In "double-slit" experiments in which light is given the option of which path by which to travel though the slits and strike the screen on the other side, the design of the experimental apparatus may either be made to determine which path the wave/particle takes, or to expose the interference pattern produced by the undetermined "all" of the possible wave paths. As it turns out, we can't measure both, as researchers discovered to much confusion: whenever the apparatus is articulated so as to make it possible to determine which path is taken through the slits, no interference pattern can be observed. And letting the apparatus "know" instead of us does not change anything. The apparatus is a Signifier, it will always be linked to a subject of Knowledge. We are always in our machines. Letting them know for us does not sever our link to the Knowledge.

I don't think there is a problem here. Yes, Knowledge, i.e. the brain processes in our brain that are/do the knowing, can't be left out here... but that knowing does not to impact the events and outcome when a measurement device becomes part of the mechanics that produces either a wave-like interference pattern or a particle-like two bands pattern. Same way a human observer does not change the impact of an asteroid that hits the earth's surface. One can sleep, the other look at the impact live totally conscious. Wake up the sleeping one and they will both corroborate the exact same result.

The least of mystery in the experiment exists in the question what the effect the conscious human observer in the room is: nil. The double slit experiment actually proves without a doubt that a human conscious observer does not impact on wave-particle behavior at all in any of such experiments. Still, for some strange reason there are people who decide to confuse the two: calling the measurement device "the observer" and from this make a quantum jump suggesting that we human conscious observers "change reality by looking at it". From there it is only a small step to consciousness mysticism where we are part of the mind of God, or universal consciousness that collapses mind-like waves into the classical world of discrete objects during the moment of conscious observation... thusly giving birth to knowledge.

The double slit experiment only tells something about quantum behavior under specific circumstances, i.e. the experimental set up. You can safely leave human consciousness out of the equation. That quantum behavior can be weird: I believe that. Even very weird if you start out with the idea you knew all there is to know about particles and waves, or "particles" and "waves". We do not, and still don't.

This is, as I said, insulting. It makes you want to demand an explanation, sputter "but- but- but- there must be something wrong with it!", hit someone, or go crazy, but there we have it nonetheless. When we do not allow ourselves the ability to determine which path is taken, we can see the interference pattern. When we do, no interference pattern.

As said, wave-like or particle-like outcomes are determined by how you configure the experiment locally and on the quantum level. Place a stick in a flowing current of water, and suddenly weird patterns arise out the virgin stream of energy. A conscious human being can put the stick in.. and take it out again. But so can a robot.. or wait long enough until the wind blows off a branch from a tree on the side that ends up sticking in the stream as well... You'll see the same weird quantum behavior. Yes, that behavior is maybe crazy, but it can do without our conscious presence and Knowledge. (I suspect though that it is only crazy according to our Knowledge; nature seems to have no problem with it at all. It tells the same joke over and over again without yawning)

This outrage against reason is entirely due to our compulsive "objectivist" thinking. Understanding these particles as "actual things" that are "independent of us" makes their behavior in these experiments utterly incomprehensible. On the other hand, if we try to think the phenomenon itself, the appearing to consciousness, as being ontologically prior to the disposition of "objects," we can get somewhere. As "objects," the universe can be arranged in any old way with no violation of causality; their constitution as objects is completely relative to consciousness; they appear as fully constituted realities ONLY to conscious observation.

I believe there objectively exists a reality independent of my own consciousness. My consciousness is constituted by brain processes that occur in my own skull. When I die, I believe there is a world that continues to exist. The double slit experiment proves to me that my or your consciousness, and even that of Schrödinger’s cat... will not change or impact "weird" quantum behavior under conditions as in this this experimental setup in any way.

We can't pussyfoot around this, we have to let it smack us in the face: objects do not exist outside of the possibility of being observed. Matter/energy relations are only constituted against the screen of consciousness.

Totally does not follow - it is the opposite. Double slit quantum behavior, as weird as it may be, can do very well without the screen of our consciousness. What is true though, is that nothing "out there" in the world is known, if it were not known as the representation that arises in the brain as consciousness. A classical object like the sun... a very big Newtonian particle.. is also known against the screen of consciousness.. so is the pain in my stomach, the green grass, the sound of a hurricane... anything... The double slit experiment where outcomes of an experiment are perceived as weird...i.e. not as expected initially, is just one of those things. Weirdness is btw not something one can find only in a double slit experiment: it is actually very weird how gravity works and how to interpret it in the broader scheme. When you think about it. Physicists still try to figure it out. Magic! I contest that classical physics is any less weird.. than quantum mechanics; the magic just is repeated so continuously and convincingly and in open day light so to speak...that we don't recognize as weirdness anymore. The double slit experiment is just a reminder that daily life is the product of some very weird underlying processes. But not the only reminder.

The concept of Maya is needlessly confusing things. What may occur (and which is not that much of a sin nor having "serious repercussions" at all..) is something like mistaken identity. On one end of the spectrum this happens when people don't realize that "the outside physical world" is in fact an internal brain process and "representation"; they are like kids who believe that an unobserved green football is still *green* when it is not observed. This naive idea (though totally innocent and pretty useful to navigate in the world...) that we observe the world directly is called direct realism.

It's naive, fully understandable, and wrong. That it is so reassuring and right-seeming is precisely why it has to be distrusted. Accepting it submits us to the same trick, of believing that everything "there" is "there in itself" and would be "there without us." The truth is that there is no universe "in itself." There is only a universe if there is Knowledge.

I am with you here, in the sense that the only world we know of directly and as-is... is the one as it arises in our brain processes as conscious experience, the experiential map that displays "me-in-the-world". It includes sensory experience, emotion, conceptual thought as well as more dreamlike half-conscious processes that merge and submerge in and out of the conscious state, all the "in here" and the "out there". A whole pallet of things, contrasts, differences...which embodies the meaning and knowledge that is you-in-the-world. At the same time it is crazy in my view to deny that there is universe that exists in and of itself; that was there before I was born ready to receive me, with me and part of me while I'm here, and still there when it let me go off to the recycle dome. Or let's say, I find my assumption that it objectively (i.e. also without me) exists considerably more likely and much less problematic than assuming that it doesn't.

On the other end of the spectrum of mistaken identity is the "all is illusion" school of thought. As Tinker pointed out and I agree... this is a dangerous and leads to madness and devaluation of life. "Don't trust words. Don't trust even your senses! It is all Maya. YOU are Maya..." Might as well jump of the cliffs right into the non-existence of Nirvana

It seems to me that believing consciousness is just an incidental development in an objective universe is rather more devaluative of life. If we're mere accidents of a natural process, then it would seem that people getting wiped out is of no more significance than their being born. If we were for a fleeting moment however, actually able to accept that the physical constitution of the universe has an intimate nexus with Knowledge, and that this Knowledge is a gift fairly recently bestowed upon the otherwise not-so-significant natural processes occurring on a particular planet orbiting an uninteresting star, I think we would begin to "value life."

There is nor real problem either way.. as long as one accepts that the physical world as we know it is merely a representation that arises in the brain that is better not confused with the "original" that produces the representation. Typical result of confusing the two is often that people start to wonder how the physical world as they know it...can produce conscious experience ("the hard problem"). It is erroneously reversing the causal arrow; as if you look at a picture of your brain.. and then wonder how it is able to make pictures of itself if you start with that picture. Or wonder how smoke can produce fire. You can’t get the territory from the map.