thank you for the gentle and real courage to show your ignorance — meaning simply lack of knowledge and not a pejorative in the way that word has been twisted to mean — and then to ask me to share my knowledge.
there seems to be a bit of a conflation in how you structured your query: "i have not read tao, why refer to buddhism?" in case you don’t know, these are not the same thing at all, in structure, history, or scripture.
and now i pause, considering how to answer that without doing a vulcan mind-meld of my history of 50 years of reading and reflection. how am i to convey why i wrote that with, perhaps, the possibility of an excess of inappropriate knowledge. for example, i infer from the hint of your query that you would be able to completely overwhelm me with your knowledge of the truth you find in the new testament. it is likely that i would have no significant ability to reply cogently to arguments you can give from new testament scripture beyond, perhaps, extemporaneous responses grounded from my own spiritual and/or secular knowledge. with that consideration, how am i to respond to you without overwhelming you? we’ll see how well i do or do not succeed.
i pondered this quite a bit since reading your kind request early this morning. my initial proposed response was to suggest to you that this query has provided me with an excellent opportunity to write a substack essay to address it. and for you to look to that as an answer sometime in the indistinct future. the other thought i had was to ask if you would be interested in some kind of online meeting for a recorded discussion around this. and that i or we could put that into our substacks. i will continue to consider how this will root my next ‘morality’ essay. and, if you find yourself interested in a recorded talk to explore this, please let me know. fyi, i've not done that before, so it would a new and interesting experience. and you may want to look at some of my writing before you say 'yes', if that was a thought you had.
and with that, now i will see how to answer that with a terse somewhat completeness. and with the idea that it may eventually contribute to that next essay.
synchronicity alert! (and thank you!)
as i began to write my answer two delightful and on point synchronicities arose.
synchronicity 1) it gives a bridge to my next essay and my last two on 'reason'. in the two previous essays i argue that our belief in reason is an act of superstition and that morals/morality are the pusher-enabler of reason so as to create easily the rationalisations we delight in that create witch burnings, the spanish inquisition, pograms, holocausts and the many other genocides and the ritual abuses of people in various ways including the vilification men as patriarchal rapists especially if they are white, and all women regardless of race as irrational and therefore second class citizens, etc. etc.
how is that a synchronicity? to address the taoist part of your query i went to find an old essay i wrote on the taoist nature of edward de vere, aka, shakespeare. i didn't find it. (i think it is on my other computer currently in storage.) i did find another similar essay i had long forgotten that addresses this in my look at orwell's delightful castigation of tolstoy's complete dismissal of shakespeare as the most incompetent and miserable writer of english that has ever existed. this is how orwell described tolstoy's critique: "tolstoy's main contention is that shakespeare is a trivial, shallow writer, with no coherent philosophy, no thoughts or ideas worth bothering about, no interest in social or religious problems, no grasp of character or probability, and, in so far as he could be said to have a definable attitude at all, with a cynical, immoral, worldly outlook on life."
synchronicity 2) last night, for the first time since maybe writing that blog-post-essay, i talked with my guest staying with me about the value he found in tolstoy's war and peace, and my inability to finish anna karanina because it had no value to me — except the opening comment about the uniqueness of family’s in misery. i think now that my antipathy with tolstoy is because tolstoy is a moralising-moralist without humour — the exact topic of my next essay! by ‘chance’ shortly after writing my last essay on morals as the reason-drug’s pusher, the thought/realisation came to me to explore how a lack of humour is a significant tell of the ’true’ moralist.
now more specifically, why did i refer to buddhism? oops! one more slight delay: note that i may be being overly sensitive to your manner of asking your question because it seems to me, the feeling i get, is that my reference to buddhism debased or undermined my previous comments: "... why refer to buddhism? would you mind connecting this brilliant writing with your comment a bit further?' by that it seems to me that you imagine that buddhism isn't brilliant, or has no ability to increase the brilliance of and/or augment or deepen de vere's language? why do you have that thought, if you do? do you have a predisposed opinion of buddhism that came to you from somewhere or someone? is my feeling correct or not? (this is why a conversation would be much easier to explore these subtleties!)
in the context of this particular short comment above, i refer not so much to *buddhism*, which is a multifaceted and fascinating devolution of what gautama actually taught. my specific reference is to gautama's concept of dependent co-arising or dependent origination. (amazingly enough the idea is at the core of heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.) see 'what is dependent origination?' https://tricycle.org/beginners/buddhism/dependent-origination/
what i referred to in this case is that the previous theories of shakespeare’s brilliance, despite his paucity of exposure to life and education, was that it came into him as a gift from god, as if by an act of divine intervention. i don't dismiss that as a possibility. however, it is much more fulfilling and spiritual and god-like to appreciate that de vere was divinely inspired to pursue his experiences of life augmented by his reading to see what is the context, meaning, experience of life in its fullest expression. so, in the way that all thing are connected de vere was connected to his life and the divine, not as an isolated anomaly outside of somatic life. this makes the writing even more beautiful. to me.
and his writing more taoist because, unlike the likes of the drydens and tolstoys who moralise, de vere engaged the entire range of the human life expression and experience in its full complexity and interweaving of 'good' and 'evil', 'funny' and 'sad', 'tragic' and 'heroic' without moralist imposition. the value of the words as carriers of ideas to be explored for ‘truth’ arise naturally, without them being something beaten into us with moralist pretension and preachiness as singular truths as deemed necessary by the morals de jour.
that is all. i’m not sure if that is enough, too much or too little. again, i thank you for the courage you revealed to reach out into your unknown. you have assisted me a great deal with my own processes of examination of what is, what might be, and what might not be.
all the best, with peace, respect, love and gratitude.
there is no need to be forgiven for our ignorance! ignorance is our natural state and you have shown the great and pretty amazing courage to ask openly about what you don't know. that has become even more amazing in this time of the convid, when the demand to remain ignorant has become a halmark of obedience disguised as intelligence and even wisdom. do you remember 'i am the science so you mere underlings stop questioning my truth'?
my reply was not one of judgement at all. and i consider myself more ignorant now than at any time in my life. and you question asked me to really examine what i think i know and provided a path towards greater understanding. be kind to yourself, be compassionate in the highest most gentle ways that jesus asked of us.
all the best, with peace, respect, love and gratitude.
I withdrew because I was embarrassed over my ignorance and learned a lesson of humility. I will read more extensively before I comment in future. I'm grateful for the kind response, truly.
Indeed, we have learned so very much about ourselves and others.
hola, uj.
thank you for the gentle and real courage to show your ignorance — meaning simply lack of knowledge and not a pejorative in the way that word has been twisted to mean — and then to ask me to share my knowledge.
there seems to be a bit of a conflation in how you structured your query: "i have not read tao, why refer to buddhism?" in case you don’t know, these are not the same thing at all, in structure, history, or scripture.
and now i pause, considering how to answer that without doing a vulcan mind-meld of my history of 50 years of reading and reflection. how am i to convey why i wrote that with, perhaps, the possibility of an excess of inappropriate knowledge. for example, i infer from the hint of your query that you would be able to completely overwhelm me with your knowledge of the truth you find in the new testament. it is likely that i would have no significant ability to reply cogently to arguments you can give from new testament scripture beyond, perhaps, extemporaneous responses grounded from my own spiritual and/or secular knowledge. with that consideration, how am i to respond to you without overwhelming you? we’ll see how well i do or do not succeed.
i pondered this quite a bit since reading your kind request early this morning. my initial proposed response was to suggest to you that this query has provided me with an excellent opportunity to write a substack essay to address it. and for you to look to that as an answer sometime in the indistinct future. the other thought i had was to ask if you would be interested in some kind of online meeting for a recorded discussion around this. and that i or we could put that into our substacks. i will continue to consider how this will root my next ‘morality’ essay. and, if you find yourself interested in a recorded talk to explore this, please let me know. fyi, i've not done that before, so it would a new and interesting experience. and you may want to look at some of my writing before you say 'yes', if that was a thought you had.
and with that, now i will see how to answer that with a terse somewhat completeness. and with the idea that it may eventually contribute to that next essay.
synchronicity alert! (and thank you!)
as i began to write my answer two delightful and on point synchronicities arose.
synchronicity 1) it gives a bridge to my next essay and my last two on 'reason'. in the two previous essays i argue that our belief in reason is an act of superstition and that morals/morality are the pusher-enabler of reason so as to create easily the rationalisations we delight in that create witch burnings, the spanish inquisition, pograms, holocausts and the many other genocides and the ritual abuses of people in various ways including the vilification men as patriarchal rapists especially if they are white, and all women regardless of race as irrational and therefore second class citizens, etc. etc.
how is that a synchronicity? to address the taoist part of your query i went to find an old essay i wrote on the taoist nature of edward de vere, aka, shakespeare. i didn't find it. (i think it is on my other computer currently in storage.) i did find another similar essay i had long forgotten that addresses this in my look at orwell's delightful castigation of tolstoy's complete dismissal of shakespeare as the most incompetent and miserable writer of english that has ever existed. this is how orwell described tolstoy's critique: "tolstoy's main contention is that shakespeare is a trivial, shallow writer, with no coherent philosophy, no thoughts or ideas worth bothering about, no interest in social or religious problems, no grasp of character or probability, and, in so far as he could be said to have a definable attitude at all, with a cynical, immoral, worldly outlook on life."
synchronicity 2) last night, for the first time since maybe writing that blog-post-essay, i talked with my guest staying with me about the value he found in tolstoy's war and peace, and my inability to finish anna karanina because it had no value to me — except the opening comment about the uniqueness of family’s in misery. i think now that my antipathy with tolstoy is because tolstoy is a moralising-moralist without humour — the exact topic of my next essay! by ‘chance’ shortly after writing my last essay on morals as the reason-drug’s pusher, the thought/realisation came to me to explore how a lack of humour is a significant tell of the ’true’ moralist.
anyway, if you are interested in that essay within which i connect the ideas of taoism and buddhism at the same time, here is "tolstoy, orwell, and the tao of shakespeare" (2009). https://egajd.blogspot.com/2009/10/20091012-tolstoy-orwell-and-tao-of.html
now more specifically, why did i refer to buddhism? oops! one more slight delay: note that i may be being overly sensitive to your manner of asking your question because it seems to me, the feeling i get, is that my reference to buddhism debased or undermined my previous comments: "... why refer to buddhism? would you mind connecting this brilliant writing with your comment a bit further?' by that it seems to me that you imagine that buddhism isn't brilliant, or has no ability to increase the brilliance of and/or augment or deepen de vere's language? why do you have that thought, if you do? do you have a predisposed opinion of buddhism that came to you from somewhere or someone? is my feeling correct or not? (this is why a conversation would be much easier to explore these subtleties!)
in the context of this particular short comment above, i refer not so much to *buddhism*, which is a multifaceted and fascinating devolution of what gautama actually taught. my specific reference is to gautama's concept of dependent co-arising or dependent origination. (amazingly enough the idea is at the core of heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics.) see 'what is dependent origination?' https://tricycle.org/beginners/buddhism/dependent-origination/
what i referred to in this case is that the previous theories of shakespeare’s brilliance, despite his paucity of exposure to life and education, was that it came into him as a gift from god, as if by an act of divine intervention. i don't dismiss that as a possibility. however, it is much more fulfilling and spiritual and god-like to appreciate that de vere was divinely inspired to pursue his experiences of life augmented by his reading to see what is the context, meaning, experience of life in its fullest expression. so, in the way that all thing are connected de vere was connected to his life and the divine, not as an isolated anomaly outside of somatic life. this makes the writing even more beautiful. to me.
and his writing more taoist because, unlike the likes of the drydens and tolstoys who moralise, de vere engaged the entire range of the human life expression and experience in its full complexity and interweaving of 'good' and 'evil', 'funny' and 'sad', 'tragic' and 'heroic' without moralist imposition. the value of the words as carriers of ideas to be explored for ‘truth’ arise naturally, without them being something beaten into us with moralist pretension and preachiness as singular truths as deemed necessary by the morals de jour.
that is all. i’m not sure if that is enough, too much or too little. again, i thank you for the courage you revealed to reach out into your unknown. you have assisted me a great deal with my own processes of examination of what is, what might be, and what might not be.
all the best, with peace, respect, love and gratitude.
Indeed, I have displayed my ignorance. Forgive me.
hola, uj.
there is no need to be forgiven for our ignorance! ignorance is our natural state and you have shown the great and pretty amazing courage to ask openly about what you don't know. that has become even more amazing in this time of the convid, when the demand to remain ignorant has become a halmark of obedience disguised as intelligence and even wisdom. do you remember 'i am the science so you mere underlings stop questioning my truth'?
my reply was not one of judgement at all. and i consider myself more ignorant now than at any time in my life. and you question asked me to really examine what i think i know and provided a path towards greater understanding. be kind to yourself, be compassionate in the highest most gentle ways that jesus asked of us.
all the best, with peace, respect, love and gratitude.
I withdrew because I was embarrassed over my ignorance and learned a lesson of humility. I will read more extensively before I comment in future. I'm grateful for the kind response, truly.
Indeed, we have learned so very much about ourselves and others.
Gracias.
You have expressed yourself with beauty and grace.
All the best with what is changing -- everything is changing.