Mark Delepine
Forum Replies Created
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I love her too. There are so many memorable quotes in that book but that heart falling out is a good one.
I’m afraid I have no insight into a Milwaukee sense of humor. Being raised as a navy brat I grew up in a number of places but Maryland is the closest I ever got to that place.
I discovered BBT when Merv B began sharing quotes in a thread I started at BioLogos titled Pithy Quotes From Our Current Reading. Merv is one of the moderators for their forums. Well read, curious, brilliant and with a heart of gold, he is one of several there who along with IM made me realize the sacred was available to nons like me.
Just to make you feel better about 66, I’ll become a septuagenarian in a couple months. Having my wife join the octo’s a month ago takes away any sting there may otherwise have been.
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I’m sorry if you don’t find yourself receiving the respect you feel you have earned for the expertise you’ve acquired by way of study with notable experts. But whether or not you feel others are worthy to speak on these subjects, I hope they will do so as I will too. That’s why I’m here and why I started this sub forum.
I doubt if anyone is here to receive passive instruction from experts on a discussion forums. If I had expertise relevant to the topics Iain writes about, I’d take his example to heart and make that as accessible as possible. He never argues a point based on his credentials or accomplishments. Arguments from authority are the weakest.
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It is largely responsible for my losing for Correspondence theory losing its grip on my idea of truth. I studied philosophy at Cal as an undergraduate when Fred Dretske was visiting. So I must have been influenced. But the idea that belief was really and always should reflect what one has most reason to believe was a strong belief I held without realizing it was anything over which people reasonably disagree. To connect as you point out to desire and to what one is dispositionally inclined to look for in the world was a wake call.
Sorry but this forum structure doesn’t help a faulty memory. Not at all sure I answered everything you asked but I thank you for the discussion and am now called to breakfast so I’ll check back later.
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Thank you Don. Regarding:
“This is said to lead to perfect complete enlightenment. You’ll notice gradually that all of what you thought was your effort was being done for you. Then all discussion of God will become superfluous”
Thought has always been a gift, not my own creation.
Discussions of God are superfluous but challenging to find out if it and where any of us have the exact same notion of what is being discussed. God as a being makes no sense to me but I get that others may employ it as such for other ends than making sense.
My practice continues to be making my garden and walks with my dogs. I’m not dissatisfied. 😉
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Haha! I wish the same, Mark, but I lack the the technical savvy or incantation to change the title now. Alternately that can be my Navaho flaw, included so as not to ruffle any deity’s feathers. I find it much easier to rationalize imperfection than to actually do something about it.
But it does seem to me too as though Christianity sets itself up for for frustration by being way too specific about that which we can only ever barely catch a peripheral glimpse of at best. But of course it is as it has evolved to be and there seems to be something to being all in on such details that is essential to their path. Without trodding it too I guess I can only speculate but I try to respect it on its own terms especially since I’ve found some online at keast for whom it seems to be working. This is on the BioLogos website whose mission seems to be making STEM classes okay for evangelicals.
Recently I began a discussion thread for the fifth chapter of David Bentley Hart’s book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss there in which I’m transcribing quotes a paragraph at a time for any discussion that may ensue. You’d be very welcome to check it out and join in if you like:
You don’t have to be a Christian to join. I’m openly agnostic and get along well with almost everyone. For the few hard core apologists who simply will not desist from attempting to enlist me into their cabal there is a fully functional ignore option. But currently there are only two I ignore. Many I genuinely respect and like.
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Especially nice to get it with the video and music. (I only saw the one link but I’m guessing I can find the other by following it back to YouTube and following your channel. Thanks for sharing it. I don’t have such ambitious adventures anymore but I’ve had that season, take day hikes and have cultivated my garden to reflect nature rather than the human world. Of course it is filtered through me but that is the intent.
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I’ve always found the question of what (if any) qualities divide on the basis of sex interesting but elusive. I assume you’re thinking about femininity and masculinity. If we think of those as straightforwardly corresponding to receptivity vs self assertion then that would pretty much align with right vs left hemispheric functioning. But it is no less necessary for a woman to be receptive toward the gifts of the right hemisphere than for a man. Likewise both then need to be industrious in elaborating the ‘maps’ which can then be further processed by the right hemisphere allowing for better understanding.
I’m not sure the traditional femininity vs masculinity distinction does as much work as it did when traditional sexual roles were more distinct, common and generally agreed upon But I look forward to being shown what I’m missing.
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As others have mentioned the processing speed is pretty slow but at least it is worth waiting for. But the general layout of groups and discussions is pretty scattershot and only likely to become more so if more begin to use it.
I wonder if there has been any thought of paying for a good forum browser such as Discourse. I don’t have a lot of experience with what all might be out there. But I’ve found Discourse to the easiest to navigate amongst those I’ve encountered. Just checked online and it looks as though a basic package is $100/month. Worth it?
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Thanks Don. I did get this notification and I am being sure to request notification now.
You said:
“just one thought – something beyond BOTH hemispheres, I think.”
I agree there is ‘something’ more but I balk at describing what it is as being beyond or apart from what we are; though it may well be, I don’t start off assuming that. The part I concern myself with is the experiences we can have directly apart from any wisdom tradition. Many atheists online seem to assume religion arose to explain ordinary phenomena, a primitive attempt at science. But I don’t think that is it at all. God belief, I suspect, arose to make sense of awe and wonder, particularly in relation to the seasons, fertility and mortality. I tell my Christian friends I believe that religion arose to provide a shared, cultural basis for this understanding. So whatever it may be, it is real, dynamic and important. Seeking proofs for or against what one thinks it is is beside the point. One might as well argue that love and reverence are merely by products of our biochemistry, as if such a conclusion could be of any use in how we live our lives.
The particulars which make up the forms God assumes in any culture, I assume, have evolved to provide a context for the sacred. No particular carrier is explicitly wrong or right apart from its adequacy to carry and transmit a proper regard for the sacred. That is necessary because the sacred must always compete with what is useful and expedient to our immediate concerns and for much of our human tenure subsistence was job number one. Paradoxically our success (virulence) as a species has depended on our capacity to sublimate our inclination to act for our immediate private advantage to acting for the greater good. Culturally we have evolved to viscerally feel our meaning and fulfillment tied into the greater good.
In passing judgement on the forms the sacred has taken, it is important to look with a poetic eye, what the American Jungian Hillman would have described as “in an as-if” manner. Every literalization of God inadvertently diminishes it. Christians personify God because we have no mundane category that is higher by which to exalt it. But any way it is expressed will leave it open to ridicule by those who have no need or regard for anything sacred. It is always possible to live a life exclusively concerned with what is instrumentally focused on personal advantage no matter how devoid of meaning and and fulfillment that is for our humanity. But doing so will never satisfy so long as we believe there is something greater which can inform how we see our place in the world. Only then can we cheerfully take on our roles as emissary.
You said:
“There’s a beautiful word in Sanskrit, “shraddha,” which is sometimes translated as “faith.” Sri Aurobindo poetically describes it as “the light of the yet uprisen sun.”
That is, it is intimations shining forth from the depths of the Kingdom of Heaven within (from the Buddha Nature, the Tao, Allah; whatever word you wish to use).”
If that carries your sacred water, wonderful. I agree the choice of words doesn’t matter and neither does the iconography or narrative- apart from its representational adequacy. The proof is in the pudding, not quasi logical wordplay intended to win new adherents to one’s preferred vessel. (Not that I see you as selling yours but of course Christianity is often obsessed with its “Great Commission”. The more thoughtful Christians will take this seriously. Recently I read an interesting book by Myron Penner entitled The End Of Apologetics which we discussed here:
You said:
“My sense is just the way we all here have been responding to TMWT goes beyond LH AND RH – it is something that has touched our souls, thirsty for nourishment in this dry materialist desert of a world.just one thought – something beyond BOTH hemispheres, .. “
Yes. I don’t think any of us here think that the soul or the sacred is reducible to brain lateralization but it has been a godsend as a basis for our narrow focused minds to grasp how the sacred and the secular can peacefully and productively cohabitate and help us to accept a sanity preserving perspective on our place in the world.
You said:
“From what little I know of orthodox Christian theology, this may have been the original meaning of faith but it has been corrupted in the modern, heavily LH age to mean mental belief.”
Right, what Iain describes as cognitive assent in that lengthy quote I included in my last reply.
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Apologies for such a tardy response but I am only beginning to explore participating here and do not receive prompts. Hopefully that will change.
How has reading McGilchrist enlivened my sense of the sacred? The first ‘thing’ that comes to mind is how it has challenged my conception of what “truth” is or can be. Before I’d have said it is simply correspondence between what language states and how things stand in the world. That is true in part of course but is that all there is to it? I realized otherwise when I read what Iain wrote on the nature of “belief”. I remember feeling exasperated with the wishful Christian notion of belief in my youth. Back then I would have expected that ones “belief” should fairly reflect that which they find the most reason to think true, another passive and limited account. If pressed I would probably have described that thinking as a weighing of evidence for competing hypotheses. Obviously my thinking then was grounded in a disposition to view truth through an exclusively rational lens, a venture I no longer believe it is qualified for. It never occurred to me then to question the adequacy of that lens or it’s neutrality. On pages 170 and 171 in TMAHE that complacent perspective got a much needed wake up call. I hope I can be forgiven for sharing this long quote that I have abridged to share in letters to a few Christian friends and relatives:
“Believing is not to be reduced to thinking that such-and-such might be the case. It is not a weaker form of thinking, laced with doubt. Sometimes we speak like this: ‘I believe that the train leaves at 6:13’, where ‘I believe that’ simply means that ‘I think (but am not certain that’. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with what is certain, with knowledge of the facts, its version of belief is that it is just absence of certainty. If the facts were certain, according to its view, I should be able to say ‘I know that’ instead. This view of belief comes from the left hemisphere’s dispositions toward the world: interest in what is useful, therefore fixed and certain (the train timetable is no good if one can’t rely on it). So belief is just a feeble form of knowledge.
But belief in terms of the right hemisphere is different, because its disposition towards the world is different. The right hemisphere does not ‘know’ anything, in the sense of certain knowledge. For it, belief is a matter of care: it describes a relationship, where there is a calling and an answering, the root concept of ‘responsibility’. Thus if I say that ‘I believe in you’, it does not mean that I think such-and-such things are the case about you, but can’t be certain I am right. It means that I stand in a certain relationship of care towards you, that entails me behaving (acting and being) towards you, and entails on you certain ways of acting and being as well. it is an ‘acting as if’ certain things were true about you that in the nature of things cannot be certain. … I think this is what Wittgenstein was trying to express when he wrote that ‘my’ attitude towards the other is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. An ‘opinion’ would be a weak form of knowledge: that is not what is meant by a belief, a disposition or an ‘attitude’.
This helps illuminate belief in God. This is not reducible to a factual answer to the question ‘does God exist?’ … It is having an attitude, holding a disposition to the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world but also alters me. … One cannot believe in nothing and thus avoid belief altogether, simply because one cannot have no disposition toward the world at all, that being in itself a disposition. Some people believe in materialism, they act ‘as if’ such a philosophy were true. …Believing is not to be reduced to thinking that such-and-such might be the case. It is not a weaker form of thinking, laced with doubt. Sometimes we speak like this: ‘I believe that the train leaves at 6:13’, where ‘I believe that’ simply means that ‘I think (but am not certain that’. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with what is certain, with knowledge of the facts, its version of belief is that it is just absence of certainty. If the facts were certain, according to its view, I should be able to say ‘I know that’ instead. This view of belief comes from the left hemisphere’s dispositions toward the world: interest in what is useful, therefore fixed and certain (the train timetable is no good if one can’t rely on it). So belief is just a feeble form of knowledge.
But belief in terms of the right hemisphere is different, because its disposition towards the world is different. The right hemisphere does not ‘know’ anything, in the sense of certain knowledge. For it, belief is a matter of care: it describes a relationship, where there is a calling and an answering, the root concept of ‘responsibility’. Thus if I say that ‘I believe in you’, it does not mean that I think such-and-such things are the case about you, but can’t be certain I am right. It means that I stand in a certain relationship of care towards you, that entails me behaving (acting and being) towards you, and entails on you certain ways of acting and being as well. it is an ‘acting as if’ certain things were true about you that in the nature of things cannot be certain. … I think this is what Wittgenstein was trying to express when he wrote that ‘my’ attitude towards the other is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. An ‘opinion’ would be a weak form of knowledge: that is not what is meant by a belief, a disposition or an ‘attitude’.
This helps illuminate belief in God. This is not reducible to a factual answer to the question ‘does God exist?’ … It is having an attitude, holding a disposition to the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world but also alters me. … One cannot believe in nothing and thus avoid belief altogether, simply because one cannot have no disposition toward the world at all, that being in itself a disposition. Some people believe in materialism, they act ‘as if’ such a philosophy were true…”
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Well I have tried to be patient with you but the greater pains I take to be kind the more strident you become in your slander and character assassination.
Isn’t it clear to you that I am uninterested in your spiritual/psychological guidance? For an enlightened fellow you seem to lack any insight into how your words turn me against you. Is there some reason you feel entitled to act as the troll on these forums making other people’s attempt to enjoy discussion with others a misery?
For the last time: stay out of my business. Do not discuss me nor address any comment to me. I would prefer you haunt a different sub forum or start your own. You are not welcome here.
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That makes sense. It is a state that lends itself to flow and, like sleeping and dreaming, resists a totally left brain approach. I look forward to following any further discussion.
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I have always engaged in contemplative activities but have never engaged in any instruction or organized group practices. I’ve always walked in nature. I still do but now I also have been making a garden for the last thirty years. I used to draw and but now I mostly take some photos from my walks and garden. I’ve never pursued any of it with any result in mind but rather just to provide an opportunity to notice what arises when I leave room for something that doesn’t reflect one of my own conscious intentions.
PS: Now I’ve turned alerts on for this thread too. Thanks for the reminder earlier.
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Good question: “How do we free attention from its imprisonment in the left hemispheric mode of inhabiting the world when most of our efforts to do so, only make the walls of the prison more secure?How do we free attention from its imprisonment in the left hemispheric mode of inhabiting the world when most of our efforts to do so, only make the walls of the prison more secure?”
This gets at why I think we have to question the desire to seek a path that will enable us to access and exploit the presented world directly for reasons conceived from within our predominantly left brain focused perspective. Acquiring more personal power and control in the hopes that will lead to wisdom puts the cart in front of the horse.
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Also here Don. Joined the channel not too long ago hoping for an active discussion forum. Of course we want a balance between high activity and thoughtfulness but the subject matter certainly lends itself to that. As my wife has high vulnerability to infection and doubtful powers of recovery, I find I may be more dependent that I would wish on virtual community. So I am hopeful of becoming more involved here.