To attack "western thinking" you set up a hypothetical situation, then proceed to point out that our thinking cannot handle it. I suggest that western thinking (whatever that is) can handle any real situation, but has difficulty dealing with the unreal.
But then, so does any thinking no matter where it originates.
However, I wouldn't want to lay on your shoulders the burden of defending these things, but I do think they are oracular rather than meaningful.
Harry
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Eric wrote:
From: "Ray Evans Harrell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 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.
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
