----- Original Message ----- From: "Ray Evans Harrell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 01:10:33 -0500 To: " jan matthieu" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "eric stewart" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Somethingness
> Hello Jan, > > I find that it helps if we know the cultural map from which each of us > springs. There are many traditions that have stories about the > continuation of Consciousness. And there are even those that say that > they were dead and came back before they left for good, to come back at a > later date. Coming back is done in various ways as in Tibet, Coyote, > Jesus, Elijah or the Eternal Oneness to but name a few. > I feel that such a contemplation illucidates a fallacy of 'western' thinking. We try to account for an omega, an end state for something we see has having a beginning state as well. We see life, the universe, and indeed EVERYTHING as having a beginning and an end. The reason that 'eastern' thinking is more accountative for even the fringes of congitive experience is that it is open-ended, i.e. no end state need be supposed because no beginning has ever been demonstrated. Alan Watts referred to the fact that if you look on the ground between two bushes, see a snake stick its head out, you blink, and you see the tail disappearing: you are manifesting quite accurately the 'western' model of cause and effect. If, metaphorically speaking, the snake is time/space/suchness, then the cause-and-effect mind says the head caused the tail whilst those steeped in the oceanic nature of consciousness (see bell's non-locality or david bohm's 'implicate order theory' or read the 'tao te ching') know that the snake is one...that all moments exist simultaneously.. It IS chaos 'theory.' Again I falter, attempting to use words, products of the intellectual tool (a tool of breaking things down into its parts), to describe what will not fit into such containers. -- __________________________________________________________ Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup One click access to the Top Search Engines http://www.exactsearchbar.com/mailcom
