Wholeness

Sure. Homeostasis is another instance of the Tao–the principle of balance without which we couldn’t live. It’s built into us. It’s in us and we are in it. As the logic of being it is the logos upon which the world is modeled. We’re nested in it like a Russian doll. And so is it nested in us. It’s our inner ecology within our outer ecology. Without both inner and outer balance nothing can survive and thrive. Human language is another emergent manifestation of the logos. Humans didn’t invent it. It emerged as a phenomenon --linguisticality-- in which we exist. And as intrinsically goal directed and intentional, linguisticality points to the teleology of evolution which reductive science denies.

I think that our problem as a society is that we’ve been told that one thing followed another and this is how we arrived at where we are. Experience tells us that things are happening in stranger ways, and that the emergence of life and perception out of animal awareness is something that seems to have come from nothing. It is something we have difficulty getting our head around.

Who is to say that God is not responsible for chemicals coming together as DNA. thus starting the chain of living beings? Who is to say that God is not responsible for mind as an epiphenomenon of brains? Ecosystems suggest an ethical order for living beings as do cycles of nature (nitrogen, water, etc.) and the conservation of energy principle. What goes against the positive attributes for living is the lusts of the human mind, which will dissect and destroy to assert its supremacy. Humility is the antidote for ravages of human hubris. A humble person will not desecrate the biosphere.

The so-called hard problem of consciousness for materialistic modernity, isn’t a problem from a theocentric perspective. Bottom up emergence isn’t a mystery when it’s coupled with top down emanation. Evolution isn’t a mere random accident in a meaningless universe. It has a teleology and is moving toward the Omega point.

As long as Dasein is as an entity, it has never reached its ‘wholeness’. But if it gains such ‘wholeness’, this gain becomes the utter loss of Being-in-the-world. In such a case, it can never again be experienced as an entity.

BEING AND TIME BY MARTIN HEIDEGGER, page 315, Kindle edition

Phenomenology where the mind reflects on and examines its own experience is sometimes the only refuge one has from the cruelty of being in the world.

I have taken shits bigger than pheneogoly…googyyyy.

I was reading Karl Jaspers’ philosophy of existence the other day. Clearly he was doing phenomenology. His thinking parallels that of Heidegger’s in many ways.

Definitely.

So what’s your problem with phenomenology?

I dont know…whats the problem with being off ones rocker??? :sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses:

Metaphorical idiomatic non sequitur ad hominem plus emojis.

I like you felix, no clue why but I do. :sunglasses: :sunglasses: :sunglasses:

:confusion-confused:

It can also lead to continuous pondering of one’s own belly button.

But there are so many phenomena where we wonder if we have understood or recognised the phenomenon for what it is, or if I am missing something. I am at present looking into the influence of Greek thought on Christianity and have come across the fact that the Roman Emperor Theodosius went about destroying as much influence as he could. The Coptics had a field day in Egypt too. It was something like the ISIS terrorists destroying statues or defacing them. It makes me ask whether the take away from Christian teaching on wholeness would have been available (perhaps in abundance) had there been no church.

Wikipedia notes that "phrases such as “contemplating one’s navel” or “navel-gazing” are frequently used, usually in jocular fashion, to refer to self-absorbed pursuits.”

Philosophy itself apart from dialog has been derogatorily characterized as belly button gazing. Phenomenology is a way of doing original philosophy centered in one’s own consciousness.

Exactly. And those are phenomenological questions. Per Kant we can never know “the ding an sich”. And the special sciences put the true nature of objects out of the reach of our everyday consciousness.

With the technological expansion of images and words, everything seems to fall apart into mere appearances. it seems that we now are flooded by fragments without any wholes. But, through phenomenological reflection we discover that parts are only understood against the background of appropriate wholes. Identity and intelligibility are available in things. We ourselves are the ones to whom such identities and intelligibilities are given.

I hear what you’re saying. Church Orthodoxy destroyed much of the diversity of early Christianity. But the historic church was also the means by which not only the teachings of Christ but, along with Islam, classical civilization itself was preserved and conveyed to the present. Whose account are you reading? Have you read Dominion by Tom Holland?

Holland, a professing agnostic, makes the case that the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination. Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves.

How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this conviction as they influenced history.

Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a Western civilization that was Christianized and remains so today if often subliminally.

Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the modern world.

There are a bunch of videos where Holland discusses the book on YouTube if your interested.

It is obvious that those who have a God(who became them through Jesus) in the sky won’t tolerate a God as a man or a man as a proxy for the Gods and hence they are freer culturally and more resistant to dictatorships and utopias. Muhammed was a proxy for a Gods will, Jesus was not a proxy but a vehicle for whole of mankind to become Gods proxy.

The fact that there are 45,000 denominations worldwide attests to the ambiguity of the Christian proposition. Nevertheless, according to the New Testament narrative when he was crucified Jesus was said to be both the king and a criminal. As the uniter of opposites he points to the transcendence of dualistic cognition. In other words, Christ is a symbol of psychic and cosmic wholeness.

ok buddy…

My reference was more jocular I must admit, but I did want to point out that the question below does tend to lead us in circles at times.

So, the doubt that I mentioned, is what is fitting and leads to trying to identify the parts and wholes that surround us, trying to understand in this way? The more one delves into reality as it presents itself, the more one ends up questioning one’s perception, and confusion can be the result. It remains to be cleared up, whether we are able to formulate with any precision the phenomena we are experiencing. Perhaps it is a question of vocabulary, being unable to find suitable language. In the thread inspiration I tried to point out that, although experiences have been meaningful, they have had a fleeting aspect about them, much like the prophet in the cave hearing a whisper.

The book I’m reading is:
Nixey, Catherine. The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Pan Macmillan. Kindle-Version.

I’ve heard Tom Holland refute the statement that antiquity was destroyed by the militant Christianity of the fourth and fifth century, in particular in a conversation with AC Grayling, but despite the fact that the church picked up the threads and started copying and translating what was left, there are indications that 90% of classical literature in Greek and in Latin was destroyed along with the temples. The story of Hypatia of Alexandria is particularly gruesome. Perhaps we’ll talk on that when I’m better informed.