Are those who don't honor logic deceitful egomaniacs?

[Asolsutsesvyl]

After my previous post, I felt very torn about too many things, in addition to feeling I had written everything I could distill at the time, and ended up just leaving it all for longer than I had expected. (Something on why may be provided by what ended up at the end of this post.)

In addition to that, everything outside of European Science is not as "standardized" as European Science, so going out looking for it will be futile. It has slight application in finding frauds, but ultimately, it will make you blind to fine nuances that in the end, mean everything in understanding non-European philosophies and practices.

I'm not sure I have enough building blocks to get your main point. I basically simply group things into that which is centered around and depends on physical properties and how they work (where scientific criteria apply), and that which is centered around and depending on consciousness and its action (in a way that does not fit the scientific mold). So, I don't really know what you mean by fine nuances. Maybe, or maybe not, you mean things in which the second of my categories here is superimposed on the first, or takes precedence.

I'm not sure if "pre-conceptual" really makes that much sense as a way to put it. For example, Peter Naur basically described being rooted in non-conceptual awareness larger than words all the time, seemingly without being a mystic, and finding words and academic philosophy too mentally cramped. Some others who prefer a less verbal and more systems thinking oriented general way of thought describe similar.

On your suggestion, I've read his dictionary and he reminds me of my first professor in Religious Studies, who like Naur, had a hard-on for William James, specifically his Principles of Psychology and Varieties. What they have in common is that you can tell by their writing and by what they focus on that they are firmly rooted in abstract philosophy and when they speak of "non-conceptual awareness", their personal experience of it differs greatly from the people I would eventually meet during my field studies in China and Southern India.

I think we had different ideas about what the topic in this particular place is. Specifically, what does it mean for something to be outside of "conceptual awareness"? I think that my view of that is more like if something is outside of a specific room in a house, where your view is more like if something is outside of the whole house, if you consider a larger area to be the possible world of "inner experience". I fully agree Naur seemed centered in a more conventional way, but I think he had grown beyond a more narrow range of thinking styles which many can't see beyond, and that not only the working of his mind but also his direct experience of inner life had changed compared to his earlier years. He seemed to eventually find the philosophical definitions he was familiar with misleading when he found them a poor fit with direct experience. A separate topic is how well (or poorly) he did in reaching further and formulating something to usefully replace the old, where he basically simply rejected the usefulness of trying.

I think of many types of mystical practice as striving to move awareness far from a smaller mental environment where it usually is, and having a very different inner experience for a short time, then afterwards there is a movement right back and not much has changed. If such states are viewed as a continuum of possible "type" and "focus" of awareness of a kind, then there can be change with personal development in how things are experienced along any part of it. Change closer to the "conventional end" can change the structure of thought, and a large change of that kind (years or decades of some type of "mental growth") moves the frame of reference further from the norm in a more permanent way in non-mystical states.

Basically, I think Naur "grew up" in part of his being to an extent beyond what most do, including myself, though I'm extrapolating in part from some experience. But I don't associate this with the more "spiritual" end of the continuum I suggested. But I do associate it with going beyond a narrow type of conceptual awareness, which I think change of either kind accomplishes.

I think there's large differences in structured contents in awareness between people, from person to person. Beginning with differences in which qualia are there or not, where I don't presume to know what others experience, I think differences are significant and mostly unexplored in conventional knowledge. Then in lower layers of structure formed from them, and the roles these play, I think there's great plasticity and much can change over the years, and the usual psychological frameworks are very thin and capture very little. Most of what could potentially be systematized simply hasn't been, and won't be as long as minds are assumed too generally to be all alike.

And I think it's very tricky and error-prone to say where a dividing line between spiritual and non-spiritual may go. I think many who are not consciously engaging in spirituality in everyday awareness do what amounts to much, the waking consciousness only being a small window, in a sense going both ways, to what's there in action. I think the diving lines people are taught to look for as part of standard religions and cults alike are misleading and lead to selective blindness (sometimes by design). I don't have much of any clear further elaboration on this, though.

I have a large and loose range of thought concerning how science and mysticism are and can be related, but mainly, I think a synthesis must be moore loose, tentative, and personal than any standardized spiritual "system". If any rigid shell is created to contain it all, it will miss the essence, and become a container for things that only approximate the essence in appearance. And for example, Don Elkins seemed to work in a more open-ended way avoiding that problem. I think most persons both mystical and scientific who don't mess up solve the problem by never trying too hard to do so. The resulting solution may be only partial, but then completion is not really realistic given the scope, no more realistic than finding the Holy Grail in the latest academic paper.

What about the problem of only being able to look down from where you stand, and not up? How can we synthesize or combine schools of thought without having mastered either of them? I've never met anyone who is both a fantastic scientist and a fantastic mystic at the same time. [...] That's why I suggested to get good at one thing. The actual practical problems you'd encounter on the way would already give you enough work to last a lifetime, and you'd likely be able to resolve the type of inner conflicts that remain in one's mind if one hasn't commited to a path yet.

The following could be useless. There's endless lists possible to make of what to avoid, and zero recipes for success (among many things to try and some things worth doing), in what I've been studying. Some kind of approach which doesn't become unresponsive to what is there to be learned, is the general requirement, and the great difficulty, given human nature. That's become my current overall view.

I think of what each person has to do as building something, and one can't copy complete structures from elsewhere and then reach a synthesis, only some limited types of information and materials can be brought in. Note that everything I've come up with is tied to, whatever you may call it, some kind of personal path not really in tune with any cultural tradition I know of. The part about the overall approach needing to be "loose and tentative" is because of considering all those patterns of people painting themselves into corners, of which endless examples have been provided in the reading we've found recommended by a particular community (and then got to see another striking example of as part of actually digesting their input).

What's your take on what skeptics say about things like shoddy alternative history, drinking bleach as a miracle cure, worldwide satanic conspiracies in which secret machinations will automatically conquer every soul with a vaccinated body, and various much smaller health scares and promises with shoddy argumentation about very physical things?

Well, you know the answer to that, right?
Your ability to make sensible decisions comes down to your insight. The more you know, the less you'll fall for claims like those made by flat-earthers.

In terms of something seeming more likely than unlikely, while there's still a fairly large sense of uncertainty about where you (and others) may draw a dividing line, yes.

Uncertainty very generally, with a kind of anxious pressure, for in part the same reason as why I got so into going with that past community, and tied in part to old personal issues involving one of my parents. Intellectually, this is old stuff, by now. The weight has lightened up more, recently, though.

Long story short, I think I tried to escape my mom's influence, and tried to avoid being or becoming like her, by rushing and trying to unrealistically use that cult as a shortcut of sorts to something completely different. But it turned out to include, in part, a more extreme and intellectually sophisticated version of the same thing (narcissistic patterns), along with much else. The more I got stuck in unrealistic hopes tied to that group, the more life outwardly approached the pattern I wanted to avoid (failing to actually do something responsible in the long term).

Here the psychology books recommended by the cult, on narcissistic patterns, came in very handy after having left the fold. A difficulty has been more fully leaving behind having part of my worldview formed by what my mother claims is normal and healthy even despite intellectual knowledge. Only in succeeding more fully in that has the world of people felt less at odds with me and potentially hostile in a very generalized way, recently. It took realizing that she's basically like a quack (of the kind that fools herself first, and others only thereafter, habitually, always sure that she knows best), which was weirdly very difficult, and can apparently take many years.