Nikolai1

This. To me it looks like a focus on probabilities that closes you have to possibilities, and enables you to deny how others may describe their own experience. I worked with a man whose father died in another country. He did believe he felt it, and I have no reason to either disbelieve or contradict him.

Yes, my point exactly.  But what's your point with the twins?

Exactly.  And this is where illusions and delusions play their games.  A person's mind is their private property.  Their illusions and delusions are real assets within the boundaries of their private property. 

Well, no, and this is where it gets more complex.  The miracle making mind is the non-dual mind.  It is the mind that has realised its union with the world.  It is the mind that sees self and non-self as being variations of the same thing.  To enter this mind is to leave behind individuality.

A person's mind becomes common property. 

True.  I cannot know your experiences.  All I can know is what you tell me of your experience.  If I had never had such an experience I would be unable to empathize with you.

 But if you can only understand the mind as a private thing, then you won't understand my miracle.

Sorry?

Nikolai, have you looked at twin studies?

I have a psychology degree where twin studies are methodological gold!

Why do you ask?

But you know I do not accept the concept of "miracle" as in something supernatural.  Everything that happens in the universe is natural.

 

Sure, there are things that happen that we cannot explain.  But that doesn't mean they were supernatural.  It only means we don't understand why they happen.  Sometimes there just isn't a "Why?".

Yes, this is a more flexible attitude.  Perhaps you might describe the miracle as something improbable, but possible.

The person who is closed to the miracle does not deal in probabilities.  They say: "There are things that are truly impossible in this world:  It is impossible for a person to know about the death of their parent in another continent, unless they are directly told.  Any claim to the contrary is either a lie, a meaningless coincidence, or a memory that you fabricated upon hearing the news."

The miracle therefore is always a personal thing.  It is the enchantment of your own world.  Others will not see it or share your wonder.  They already have their explanation.

When you ascend into the realm where reality is felt as the product of your own consciousness, you in the most part travel there alone.  It is a new radical worldview, and the old self and the old self's associates very often don't make the journey.

The next step after attaining the will to power one must get up off their butt and do something in order for others to experience the reality as well.  If others can't see it then it is still the individual's personal illusion and/or delusion.

Unfortunately it's not as straightforward as this.  People may see and experience the reality of something miraculous, but it doesn't mean they accept it as a miracle.  

Or, more commonly, they act like medical science acts towards the placebo.  They half-acknowledge it, but make no attempt to explain it.  If others try to explain it using 'mind over matter' type thinking - they will reject it in the strongest possible terms.  The psychological mechanism is exactly like denial, in the Freudian sense.

As I've said in this thread already.  it seems to be human nature that the miraculous is not truly confronted until it makes a dramatic and unmistakable appearance in our own lives.  This is our calling, if you like.  After this happens, it feels wrong, cowardly, to just explain it all away.

In my experience, and to my thinking, the insurrection of the miraculous starts gradually.  Somewhere on these boards I remember writing a hierarchy of the miracle.  At the lowest levels, it is nothing more than the strange affinity we have for the moment before us - commonly called, deja vu.  Moving on from this, the synchronicity is like strong deja vu.  As we go on, the miracle is less an inner felt sense, but starts to physcially manifest in strange ways and so on.

I'm not sure I agree with that conclusion, but the idea of 'psychosomatic' fascinates me.

 

As usual, there is an area where 'thoughts creating reality' are actually widely accepted and recognised.  This is the area of psychosomatic medicine - where a person's state of mind creates physical illness or well-being.

Same with the placebo.  If a person believes that the pill will heal them, then it will - regardless of what is in the pill.

And by the way, the healing is not just in the patient's perceptions.  The placebo healing is directly reflected in the physical body.

Some examples:

1)  In Parkinson's disease placebos have been seen to produce a 'flood' of dopamine.

2) Fake oxygen, given to a person at real altitude, has been shown to cult levels of prostaglandins (which by dilating blood vessels are respponsible for the symptoms of altitude sickness).

3) In Japan, blindfolded children were told that a harmless leaf rubbed on their skin was poison ivy, and they came out in a rash as a result of their belief.

4) In asthma, a study first told the patients that the inhaler would tighten their lungs (but it was only water vapour) Not only did it work, but when they were told that the next drug would open up their lungs again (more water vapour) - their lungs opened up again.

5) Howard Beacher, the main lobbyist for inclusion of placebo controls in medical trials, ran out of morphine as a wartime surgeon.  nevertheless he found that saline water calmed the patient enough to perform operations so distressing that cardiac shock might have been a risk.

Modern medicine has gone a long way towards exploring and describing the placebo effects.  But how it works??? There is nobody who even dares to confront the strangeness of how it works.

Facing up the placebo effect requires intellectual courage.  It is a worldview changing phenomenon, and yet it as ancient as the hills.  What we think shall come to manifest in our intimate physical reality.

I'm glad it fascinates you, because in my opinion it is the biggest, most radical subject in modern science!

And yes, I am sure he was a very lonely person.  He could not associate with those he felt were being bigotted and hypocritical.  His relationship with Wagner, which he wrote much about, is a perfect example.

He was so alone intellectually as well.  He was saying things that were totally unthinkable for everyone.  I mean, even today it is hard to get people to understand the radical enormity of his arguments, but at least we have his name to back us up if we need it.  He had nothing except himself.  He is a martyr in the truest sense; madness was the only course available to him.

He dreaded that one day people would pronounce him holy.  I must confess that I often come close

But really, Nietzsche never did complete his philosophy and this is one of the reasons he has been mis-quoted and mis-represented.  Had he not become sickly and died prematurely he may have been able to complete it.

It is up to we, his heirs, to complete it.  Could one man have propellled human thought forward more than Nietzsche did? He was a martyr.  I cannot imagine how lonely he must have been.  He was alone in all humanity because he didn't or couldn't recognise who his peers and comrades were...Buddha, Nagarjuna, Chuang-tzu.

But by going it alone he was able to prepare the western thinker so that they could properly understand the high wisdom tradtions of the world.  From west to east, he built a bridge but did not have the strength to actually walk it for himself.

Ah!  Contrary, my Dear.  Wu wei is without intention.  Wu wei is doing only what needs be done.  This is accomplished through the will to power.  It ignores the morality standards of others.  It allows the Taoist Sage to become Nietzsche's Superman.

I agree that the sage doesn't act in order to be moral; it is more that he is only capable of the moral action.  And the moral action has the Dao behind it - this is a distinctively Chinese idea - Daoist and Confucian both.

This latter point, in my opinion, is something that Nietzsche never came to realise.  The Superman is an intrinsically moral man.  He is pitiless perhaps, but never one to impose an unnecessary harm on a person because he does not wish to enervate himself; he does not wish to squander his power.

Chinese thought here enables us to harmonise Nietzsche with the Christian tradition.  We do not need his neurotic 'demolition of all values'; all we need us to stop making our moral concerns the centre of our existence, because that is a recipe for misery and mediocrity...and puts us at risk of the being the slaves of those who have no such scruples.

But back to the theme of the thread, to my knowledge Nietzsche said nothing of the miraculous.  I think he was basically a materialist who viewed the natural world rather like Schopenhauer: a blind, striving Will that the mere human cannot know or understand.  Individual adjustment to this Will is one way of viewing wu wei; but in my opinion there is a higher, more dramatic understanding.  The Will of the world and the will of the man can be seen to be one, and we become as irrepressibly creative as Nature herself.

Oh yes, please go back to your Nietzsche books, if it's not too much to ask. I would be interested in hearing some more of his views on this. 

Nietzsche attacked conventional notions of free will in many ways and I think MH confuses things by calling him a free-willer per se.  He certainly saw free will as an error at the heart of Christianity and gave people the sense of moral responsibility which is the chief trait of the herd thinker.

As I remember much of his criticism is of the notion of causality upon which free will rests.  Any given cause is also an effect when viewed from a different persective.  The danger of the moral man is that he views himself as causa sui, a cause in himself, without taking into consideration all the conditions that led up to moment of choice.

I don't think Nietzsche has much to say to the matter at hand. He resolved this issue of freedom and determinism simply by taking interest in power of will.  Power is the only alternative to morality - it is the true force that shapes reality.  His ideal man does not disempower himself by adherence to old superstitions codes.  He acts with power and without pity.

This is all quite un-Daoist.  For the Daoist power of intention and the virtue of the intention co-arise.  The sage only experiences weak intention when the virtue is also weak.  When the intention is virtuous, it is sure to happen.

Contradiction there is :-) define 'contradiction'. Either such a thing is, or it is not, it cannot be both. If it could be both, then no contradiction would be possible and there would exist no word to describe it...poof...like that, it would cease to be.

This is the worldview we awaken from, and talking with Karl allows us all to feel the impossibility of explaining anything to someone who does not have the eyes to see.

I start seeing both choice and determination, control and acceptance, the Magician and the High Priestess, as the two sides of a coin. Yes, multiple probabilities exist, we can make better or worse choices between them, and our decisions matter. Yet by the same token (I didn't intend this pun, but it's somehow funny), whatever our choices, the results are as if predetermined, as if meant to be, serving a higher purpose. My mind cannot currently resolve the seeming contradiction here. Perhaps it has got to do with the illusionary nature of cause and effect?

Yes! In order to resolve the contradiction we simply have to learn that everything can be seen from two perspectives.

Perspective 1: Our inner will acts upon an external world

Perspective 2: Our will is itself a part of the external world.

This second perspective is what really opens up in a spiritual awakening, because our identity is seen to be transcendent of both individual will and nature.  Before our awakening our identity is equated with inner will, and thus opposed against nature.

I think the important point is that perspective 2 doesn't refute perspective 1, it complements it.  This arational view becomes easier as we settle into the emptiness of our Self.  It then troubles us no more than the fact that my house is on the right side of the street and the left side.  Eventually, we see that it would be irational to settle on one rather than the other.

At first I was inclined to agree, but thinking about it more leads me back to my position that these are generalizations that are just not suitable to determine the stage of an individual's spiritual evolution. What if the liberal in question is an intellectual who denies anything spiritual? Maybe he is a supporter of abortions which to me suggests a pretty unspiritual lack of reverence for life. And Edgar Cayce could be thought of as "Bible preaching" (in fact, he was a Sunday school teacher) - but does this mean that he wasn't spiritual?

Wilber's view of a mature spirituality is that which is able to tolerate difference, and extend loving-kindness outside of the immediate clan.  His perception is that the conformist American Baptist is less able to do this, than the liberal human.rights campaigner whose religion is a sort of ecological, world-wide vision.

I get exactly your hesitation though, because ultimately what is the scale by which we measure spiritual growth?

Also, personaly, I see no reason to think that people have changed that much over the last couple of millenia.  I often wonder if society isn't more like a kind of non-hierarchical caste system.  Spiritually minded folk are always the minority, and the majority are always conventional and focussed on, shall we see, worldly issues.

From the wikipedia article on wu wei we have:

The goal of spiritual practice for the human being is, according to Lao Tzu, the attainment of this purely natural way of behaving, as when the planets revolve around the sun. The planets effortlessly do this revolving without any sort of control, force, or attempt to revolve themselves, instead engaging in effortless and spontaneous movement.

So to live this way is the goal of spiritual practice.  Now the fundamental question:

Is wu wei nothing more than the adjustment of our desires to nature? In other words, is wu wei learning to stop desiring what cannot be?

Or,

Is the person who has attained this exalted mode of being, wu wei, the wilful creator of nature and the her laws?

My argument in this post is that both of these intepretations make sense, but the reality transcends them.  Our will and nature's scheme become one and the same thing.  This means that the sage can legitimately be called a creative figure, in the same way that Nature is irrepressibly and effulgently creative in every given moment.

I tried to make that plain when you asked about Wei Wu, but the truth of my statement clearly went straight over your head. 'The way' cannot be known. You can't pretend to know about it, or intellectualise it's meaning.

I asked you to define wu wei, not 'the Way'!  

So anyway, you said action-less-action.  How might a person in this state act? How might a person in this state feel?  Why is this mode of behaviour considered the summum bonum of human existence?

Can you demonstrate it to my complete satisfaction ? 

 

I ask rhetorically because I know you cannot show it, or prove it. 

I think your mind can only possibly start to take these matters seriouly when the uncanny starts to enter your life with great force.  Yes, the uncanny makes minor insurrections into everyone's life - usually in the form of strange coincidence, or serendipity - but these are often not quite enough to rock our convictions.  When the uncanny happens with great force, and great meaning then we feel like shirkers by brushing it away.

There comes a point where our integrity as thinkers demands and requires that we make sense of it.  Don't liken this conversation to a 'spanner thrown in the works', because we can' possibly agree with that analysis.

In the meantime, you can't make the miraculous happen, but if you call yourself a thinker, then you might try seriously engaging with all the doubts that surround your objectivism.  Legitimate doubts that go back to the dawn of thought itself, and have never gone away.

Yes, we are all unconscious magicians. A true magician is somebody who can manifest their thoughts consciously, in accordance with their will. 

I think this is such a radical idea that I think we have to start experiencing the miracle first hand if we are to seriously engage with it.  Speaking personally, events have happened that have been so strange that I needed to incorporate them into my worldview.

Happily the philosophical tradition does enough to dismantle our native materialism / scientism, but first-hand experience gives us the intellectual courage to really start making sense of this very strange subject.

Hi Michael

I have a practice of visualizing my wishes and goals in a relaxed state of mind. This helped me to bring them into manifestation many, many times, and sometimes quite against the odds.

The whole practise I'm talking about simply isn't possible while we are in the dualistic mode of being - where we believe very strongly in our individuality.  Your relaxation, I would say, is the ability to move into non-dual being where our very thoughts are natural and valid events in the flow and we can see and believe that.

When we are in the dual mode, our thoughts are private and insubstantial.  In the non-dual mode our thoughts are like sunshine and warmth on the germinating seed.

Is this the definition of a miracle - something desired happening against the odds? Or how would you define it? How unlikely does it have to be in order to count as a miracle?

Yes good question.  I think the more we dwell on this we more we realise that all our happenings result by the same process you described.  So the miracle and the mundane are, and always were, one and the same thing.  But when we believe in our duality we disbelieve that our will can flout the laws of nature.

Hi Creal

Is there a concept of 'miracle' in taoism? I was under the impression that the concept of miracle was quite occidental, but I must be wrong.

Obviously the magic has been a major part of Daoism since time immemorial.  Crowley defined magic as 'the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will', so I guess the results of magic are in the same ballpark as miracles as both are supernatural methods.

I would rather phrase: 'What can a miracle be in order for it to reflect a singularity that might be active in the world without being always acknowledged by common sense or the scientific discourse.

Yes, and the question is: can a person wish for or predict events that are not acknowledged by common sense.  I say they can, and I consider wu wei in its highest form to be doing this all the time.  My reasoning is thus:

When a person considers themselves to be separate from a world 'out there' he imagines that the world has its own laws of cause and effect and the person must adapt their technologies (in the Heideggerian sense) to them on order to fulfil his will.

With a spiritual awakening the person comes to understand that there is no separate world 'out there'.  What the world is and what he is are the same.  He therefore ceases to experience the 'frustrated will', he does not encounter a world to which his technologies are not equal.  The notion of the will, and the notion of a causal realm separate to his will completely breaks down.

What is left is a state that blends individual will with the flow of external events.  To will and to predict become one and the same thing.  All that we can say is that we are tune with the flow - neither willing things nor not willing things satisfactorily describe this state.  But the term wu wei fits it very well.

I don't know anything about the concept of wu wei, but I am not sure we need to dismiss volition or will to attain levels of co-incidence or co-creation with the Flow (I prefer to call it Creal).

As I hope I've made clear, the will is not dismissed - only transcended.  I like this term Creal a lot actually because it captures well what I'm trying to say.  Our world is both created and real in its own right...yes, the Creal world!

Karl why don't you explain how you understand wu wei - I'm interested! Having studied Chinese philsophy for twenty years, I do understand that there are multiple views on this.  What is yours?  

I don't.

Perhaps the most important concept in Chinese thought, and you don't even know what it might mean! Why are you on a Daoist forum again?

Michael

But I am not sure what such a designation includes, exactly; all I am sure about is that you can't really characterize somebody by such simplistic generalizations.

This notion of soul evolution is something that I think about quite a lot.  I really don't know what to think.  Wilber would say that the world-centric, ecologically minded west coast liberal is more evolved than the conformist, Bible preaching Baptist and American patriot.  Is one more evolved than the other? Or are they just different?

What do you think? 

these days that's what is coming to me, the feeling that the same patterns are repeating over and over again, and lately i've become aware that that is stretching over ages, many lives. More and more i do recognize them for what they are, but not yet able to quit

Sounds to me that you've almost got them beaten.  If we are conscious of something it can't keep on happening for much longer.  In this life I think you're breaking new ground!

We don't create reality Nikolai. We can choose to act in certain ways but we cannot change absolutes. There are no 'miracles', there are cause and effects.

How do you define wu wei?