Posted by Damos on October 13, 2005, at 22:41:41
In reply to Re: Good to see you » Damos, posted by alexandra_k on October 12, 2005, at 6:36:40
You guys have no idea how daunting the idea of trying to explain something to you is.
I actually saw a really interesting example on tv the other night. A guy held up a solid cone and asked the others what it was. From where they, and the viewer were it was a cone. He then rotated it and asked them again. Purely, objectively what you saw was the base of the cone - a circle. He rotated it again and it appeared to be a triangle. So what was 'true'? It depends entirely on your perspective, assumptions, judgements, prejudices, beliefs, experience, etc.
Okay, so that got me precisely nowhere. Hmm, this is one of those times when being a relatively ignorant, inarticulate moron is a damn nuisance.
Alex, you were on the same track in your essay about the Cotard Delusion. The experience is true for individual and that's all there is to it. Trying to prove it to be untrue and making them wrong is almost always futile and in some cases damaging in the long run. But if you accept that the experience is true and work with the meaning and impact of it and try to discover those things that allow it to be true for them, then you get to shared meaning. Then you can work together with coherent meaning, and when you work with coherent meaning this allows deeper truth to emerge. Breaking it down into one thousand carefully labelled and defined pieces and trying to prove or disprove the validity doesn't change the truth of the experience for the person one iota. Dammit!!!!! Do you know why that essay was so good? Because there was a flow of meaning from you to me. I didn't understand all of the terminology and stuff, didn't know about whether the references you were citing were right or wrong, but I picked up and sensed the flow of meaning.
AAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!! I'm still not getting at it. I guess basically what I am saying is that I don't need to be right, and that who's right and who's wrong matters less to me that why you think, believe and feel the things you do. And because I care and respect you I would never dare believe that I had a better idea of what was true for you than you do. If you say 'x' is true for you then that's good enough for me. What I do care about is how and why those things are true for you and how understanding those things helps me understand you, and how that allows the relationship to grow and other possibilities to emerge. The definitions of the words you use to describe the experience don't matter nearly as much to me as the meaning you ascribe to them and to the experience you are trying to describe. I don't want to argue, debate, persuade or discuss. I want to understand. And to do that I have to give up my certainty about my position and all kinds of things.
Something that has always royally p*ssed me off is the way different groups (individuals) always believe that they alone are arriving at a unique truth. Science, religion, politics, whatever, even groups within these fields. They believe that they are right and therefore everyone else must be wrong. I hate that. Worse than that there are groups who believe that we are never going to get to absolute truth. Can't all of them see that their rigidly sticking to the same damn road is limiting by its very nature. I guess my problem with thinking about thinking is that thinking seems to just limit and define. It's an abstraction, and because it limits and defines it can't grasp the whole - surely. Surely it just grabs a bit of the whole, thinks it to death and then finds another bit to think about. Isn't it the case that all this limiting and defining is only moving further and further away from the whole to a place where the sense of completeness is lost, a place where all you have is all these pieces that no longer seem to bear any real relationship to one another. I don't care about how you divide it, categorise it and analyse it. I care about what it means.
Meaning is so important to me because it's like........like glue I guess, a kind of binding agent if you will. And I don't see meaning as being fixed either, it flows. It needs to flow. Without meaning I am lost and that's why I'm so hopelessly floundering around right now. I can't find a way to see how who I am and what I do (workwise and whole of life wise) has any meaning, purpose or value.
Sorry, I've rambled, distorted, misrepresented and very probably plagiarised and only ended up with a thousand kinds of cr*p. I'm sorry.
poster:Damos
thread:561840
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050910/msgs/566656.html