Did you know Zazen (Zen meditation) involves sitting in the full lotus position, staring at nothing, for several hours at a time.
Wikipedia relates: Zazen (??; Chinese; zuò chán pinyin or tso-chan Wade-Giles) is at the heart of Zen Buddhist practice. The aim of zazen is just sitting, "opening the hand of thought",[1] that is, suspending all judgmental thinking and letting words, ideas, images and thoughts pass by without getting involved in them. This is done either through koans, Rinzai's primary method, or whole-hearted sitting (shikantaza), the S?t? sect's method. (Rinzai and Soto are the main extant Zen schools in Japan; they both originated in China as the Linji and Caodong schools, respectively.) Once the mind is able to be unhindered by its many layers, one will then be able to realize one's true Buddha nature.[2] In Zen Buddhism, zazen (literally "seated meditation") is a meditative discipline practitioners perform to calm the body and the mind, and be able to concentrate enough to experience insight into the nature of existence and thereby gain enlightenment (satori).
Some of these layers I can tell you and you will be familiar with them. Perhaps layer one is; sitting down to meditate. You will have many distractions that will vie for your time and attention, they will prevent you from ever meditating to begin with. Perhaps layer two is; thinking about all the other things you could be doing instead of wasting your time meditating. Layer three may be; trying to convince yourself that all meditation is pointless, you are doing it wrong, or it doesn't work for you. Layer four may be; realizing you are incessantly chattering to yourself in your own mind and struggling to quite your mind. At some point you may even find yourself incapable of stopping the narrative thoughts and this may cause discouragement. Layer five may be letting go of discouragement and pressing on in the face of temptation (Mara).
The story goes that Buddha (Sidhartha Gautama) variously tried being an ascetic, hedonist and all the other traditions of his day. Eventually he sat down under a Bodhi tree to contemplate on matters. Just as he began to realize that "desire creates the world" the lord of desire himself; "Mara" appeared to tempt the Buddha. The Buddha remained calm and still and merely pointed to the ground, at which time Mara had lost. But not before Mara sent beautiful women and such like to tempt Buddha. I take this to mean that in meditation we come face-to-face with our own desires and the temptations of the world. This may be achieved simply by paying attention to your own thoughts during meditation.
I definitely recognize "The Shining" (I just watched it last night). And that looks like maybe Beetlejuice, Rainman, and Ferris Bueler's Day Off. The rest look familiar but my memory for these things is poor.
"Oh, don't worry; we wouldn't dare say that we are as wonderful as these other men who tell you how important they are! But they are only comparing themselves with each other, using themselves as the standard of measurement. How ignorant!" - 2 Corinthians 10:12 (NLT)
It is a satirical jab at Rastafarianism. All FSM works out to be is a myopic picking on religion. In reality, there is nothing about FSM that reflects religious teachings. God is said to be infinite and formless, not finite and formed. God could not be spaghetti, a man or anything else because God is said to be formless. In Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica he writes: Perhaps not everyone who hears this word "God" understands it to signify something than which nothing greater can be thought, seeing that some have believed God to be a body. Yet, granted that everyone understands that by this word "God" is signified something than which nothing greater can be thought, nevertheless, it does not therefore follow that he understands that what the word signifies exists actually, but only that it exists mentally. Nor can it be argued that it actually exists, unless it be admitted that there actually exists something than which nothing greater can be thought; and this precisely is not admitted by those who hold that God does not exist.
No, sorry Thomas; people who do not believe in God are actually people who don't put in the time or effort to understand what you are even talking about. They are people who misinterpret what you are saying and believe God to be a body and so satirically parody it by conceiving of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as if it somehow paralleled your views on God.
Uh ya! Cognitive functions are like muscles, if you don't use 'em you lose 'em. What's worse is because of a phenomena called anosagnosia it is also common to be unaware that you have a cognitive deficit. This explains the phenomena of foolish fanaticism. Not to mention all the brain-damaging effects of our modern environments and lifestyles.
Maybe entering the priesthood is just a way of demonstrating that you have moral principles, which will not get you passed their moral evaluations. They really need people without any morals.
What is important about E-Prime is that it reflects old languages that didn't have the verb "to be", as for example ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. This caused some scholars to retranslate the Holy Bible in E-Prime. It is frequently overlooked that much modern language was simply not available to our distant ancestors. For example; the term "Personal" was not in-use prior to Tertullian (c. 160 - 220 A.D.) Therefor the ancient texts, like those of Sumer and the Israelites, should not be expected to distinguish between Personal and Impersonal. Nor should they be expected to reflect a modern usage of the verb "to-be", in-fact it is possible that at least some of their texts aimed at giving birth to some of these distinctions. One might take Yahweh's infamous proclamation "I AM THAT I AM" to be a statement of the verb "to-be". This is given some further credence by the lack of words like "existence", "being", "reality" and so forth. We probably don't see a clear account of this until Anselm's Ontological Proof and the Universal Set-theory (c. 1033 A.D.) The usage of "reality" to refer to the universal set only dates back to the 1640s. The term "existence" wasn't in use until the 14th century.
All of this seems to indicate that there was no concept of a set to contain all sets, or terms that refer to a universal set or the bare fact of existing. These were not common ideas at the time these texts were written. But they may have been ideas which the texts attempt to describe in different ways.
I read a theory on this a while back that stated that were evolution to reoccur on another planet, the species on that planet would look eerily similar to ours. The reason is that given all the universal constants and constraints provided by habitable environments, only a small set of adaptive variants are possible. So even if mutation was completely random (which it is not) virtually the same traits would have to be selected for. Ultimately producing an eerily hominid-like species.
Another way of saying this is that the evolution of the universe is constrained by the field of possibility (not solely probability). We might say the range of probability falls within the range of possibility. You can't have any square-circles, wooden-irons or things like that (See: Aristotle's Law of Identity and Non-Contradiction).
While we may imagine the field of possibility to be so large as to include a number of probabilities, this may only be the result of our limited understanding. Were we able to observe and hold in mind all the myriad constraints and constants that drive the evolution of the universe forward, we may find that each and every step is a necessary one.
Stated otherwise; we might say that the universe driven by logical necessity tends toward a teleological end of some sort. This point-of-view is given a bit more credence when the Anthropic Coincidences are taken into account. The "fine-tuned" universe contention in cosmology is seemingly resolved by introducing the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP) which roughly states "The universe had to happen as it did in order for us to be here inquiring about the universe. If it did not happen as such, we would not be here asking the question." This is a slippery way of making a teleology our of cosmology while avoiding all the teleological implications.
Though there is no formal AP that reflects this point of view, it is my hypothesis that not only is a self-reflective observer needed to inquire into the existence of the universe, but one is needed for the appearance of anything existing at all. So that anything appears to exist in the first place, is the universal constraint which necessitates our existing in order to reflect on the existence of the universe. Were it not necessary for anything to appear to exist, then we may very well not have existed. But during such a time when we did not exist and no other self-reflective species existed; there would be no appearance of anything existing either.
So on those grounds; I feel there really is a teleology of sorts, but it is not as if some external deity imposed a divine plan upon the universe, rather the plan is divine because it is axiomatic, because it would not be possible to have any existence otherwise. It is divine because it transcends all probability and describes the realm of possibility and necessity. That the Anthropic Coincidences approach an infinitessimally small improbability is only problematic if the realm of possibility is exaggerated. As too is it only possible to have wide range of evolutionary probability when the field of evolutionary possibility is exaggerated.
I was going to say "This may sound nerdy..." but then I remembered where I am... okay... "This may sound uptight..." [Because to non-nerds it would sound nerdy, but to nerds it sounds uptight. Sorry I'm not trying to steal your nerd glory.]
What is interesting about this kind of artwork to me is that it demonstrates how our minds make sense out of images. The artwork here only represents those aspects of Vader that are required to trigger a recognition of Vader and little more. There is no extrenuous detail in the picture, just a bunch of jagged and colored shapes. But the mind recognizes it as Vader anyway.
Did you know Zazen (Zen meditation) involves sitting in the full lotus position, staring at nothing, for several hours at a time.
Wikipedia relates: Zazen (??; Chinese; zuò chán pinyin or tso-chan Wade-Giles) is at the heart of Zen Buddhist practice. The aim of zazen is just sitting, "opening the hand of thought",[1] that is, suspending all judgmental thinking and letting words, ideas, images and thoughts pass by without getting involved in them. This is done either through koans, Rinzai's primary method, or whole-hearted sitting (shikantaza), the S?t? sect's method. (Rinzai and Soto are the main extant Zen schools in Japan; they both originated in China as the Linji and Caodong schools, respectively.) Once the mind is able to be unhindered by its many layers, one will then be able to realize one's true Buddha nature.[2] In Zen Buddhism, zazen (literally "seated meditation") is a meditative discipline practitioners perform to calm the body and the mind, and be able to concentrate enough to experience insight into the nature of existence and thereby gain enlightenment (satori).
Some of these layers I can tell you and you will be familiar with them. Perhaps layer one is; sitting down to meditate. You will have many distractions that will vie for your time and attention, they will prevent you from ever meditating to begin with. Perhaps layer two is; thinking about all the other things you could be doing instead of wasting your time meditating. Layer three may be; trying to convince yourself that all meditation is pointless, you are doing it wrong, or it doesn't work for you. Layer four may be; realizing you are incessantly chattering to yourself in your own mind and struggling to quite your mind. At some point you may even find yourself incapable of stopping the narrative thoughts and this may cause discouragement. Layer five may be letting go of discouragement and pressing on in the face of temptation (Mara).
The story goes that Buddha (Sidhartha Gautama) variously tried being an ascetic, hedonist and all the other traditions of his day. Eventually he sat down under a Bodhi tree to contemplate on matters. Just as he began to realize that "desire creates the world" the lord of desire himself; "Mara" appeared to tempt the Buddha. The Buddha remained calm and still and merely pointed to the ground, at which time Mara had lost. But not before Mara sent beautiful women and such like to tempt Buddha. I take this to mean that in meditation we come face-to-face with our own desires and the temptations of the world. This may be achieved simply by paying attention to your own thoughts during meditation.
"Oh, don't worry; we wouldn't dare say that we are as wonderful as these other men who tell you how important they are! But they are only comparing themselves with each other, using themselves as the standard of measurement. How ignorant!" - 2 Corinthians 10:12 (NLT)
It is a satirical jab at Rastafarianism. All FSM works out to be is a myopic picking on religion. In reality, there is nothing about FSM that reflects religious teachings. God is said to be infinite and formless, not finite and formed. God could not be spaghetti, a man or anything else because God is said to be formless. In Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica he writes: Perhaps not everyone who hears this word "God" understands it to signify something than which nothing greater can be thought, seeing that some have believed God to be a body. Yet, granted that everyone understands that by this word "God" is signified something than which nothing greater can be thought, nevertheless, it does not therefore follow that he understands that what the word signifies exists actually, but only that it exists mentally. Nor can it be argued that it actually exists, unless it be admitted that there actually exists something than which nothing greater can be thought; and this precisely is not admitted by those who hold that God does not exist.
No, sorry Thomas; people who do not believe in God are actually people who don't put in the time or effort to understand what you are even talking about. They are people who misinterpret what you are saying and believe God to be a body and so satirically parody it by conceiving of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as if it somehow paralleled your views on God.
All of this seems to indicate that there was no concept of a set to contain all sets, or terms that refer to a universal set or the bare fact of existing. These were not common ideas at the time these texts were written. But they may have been ideas which the texts attempt to describe in different ways.
Another way of saying this is that the evolution of the universe is constrained by the field of possibility (not solely probability). We might say the range of probability falls within the range of possibility. You can't have any square-circles, wooden-irons or things like that (See: Aristotle's Law of Identity and Non-Contradiction).
While we may imagine the field of possibility to be so large as to include a number of probabilities, this may only be the result of our limited understanding. Were we able to observe and hold in mind all the myriad constraints and constants that drive the evolution of the universe forward, we may find that each and every step is a necessary one.
Stated otherwise; we might say that the universe driven by logical necessity tends toward a teleological end of some sort. This point-of-view is given a bit more credence when the Anthropic Coincidences are taken into account. The "fine-tuned" universe contention in cosmology is seemingly resolved by introducing the Weak Anthropic Principle (WAP) which roughly states "The universe had to happen as it did in order for us to be here inquiring about the universe. If it did not happen as such, we would not be here asking the question." This is a slippery way of making a teleology our of cosmology while avoiding all the teleological implications.
Though there is no formal AP that reflects this point of view, it is my hypothesis that not only is a self-reflective observer needed to inquire into the existence of the universe, but one is needed for the appearance of anything existing at all. So that anything appears to exist in the first place, is the universal constraint which necessitates our existing in order to reflect on the existence of the universe. Were it not necessary for anything to appear to exist, then we may very well not have existed. But during such a time when we did not exist and no other self-reflective species existed; there would be no appearance of anything existing either.
So on those grounds; I feel there really is a teleology of sorts, but it is not as if some external deity imposed a divine plan upon the universe, rather the plan is divine because it is axiomatic, because it would not be possible to have any existence otherwise. It is divine because it transcends all probability and describes the realm of possibility and necessity. That the Anthropic Coincidences approach an infinitessimally small improbability is only problematic if the realm of possibility is exaggerated. As too is it only possible to have wide range of evolutionary probability when the field of evolutionary possibility is exaggerated.
What is interesting about this kind of artwork to me is that it demonstrates how our minds make sense out of images. The artwork here only represents those aspects of Vader that are required to trigger a recognition of Vader and little more. There is no extrenuous detail in the picture, just a bunch of jagged and colored shapes. But the mind recognizes it as Vader anyway.