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Posted by rat on 4/9/2011, 9:36 am, in reply to "Re: Can I be sure I am doing good, on balance?"
108.28.65.x
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: (I wrote this on Facebook)
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: Facebook is evil.
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: - but your pages are nice.
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: Does that make for net-good?
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: p.s. I read your book. I'd tell you how much
: I enjoyed it but doing so would make someone
: else feel bad or whatever it is that will
: keep the Lord of the River Way uproared and
: I worry about that so I wont. But then again
: I could be wrong - so - consider it said.
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:-D
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: rene rat,
:
: ... People that raise such questions as rat
: has raised here are probably closer to the
: reality they are questioning than those that
: don't. On balance I would say rat is more
: balanced than not.
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: Those that don't care don't ask such
: questions.
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: Those that do care answer such questions the
: best they know how.
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: Lots of luck.
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: ButchO
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Thanks rene and Butcho, even internet relationships can be of great value. Here I can be understood (not necessarily agreed with) and that is a great blessing, and a gift I might not find as often in the "real world." Which is another way of saying I love you.
I am rewriting the book. Here is a draft on the new section on deliverance (jie)
Deliverance in apophatic mysticism is deliverance to the immediacy of ecstasy. I don’t take this to necessarily be deliverance by a God, nor another form of absolute, nor to “the end of all suffering.” I don’t take apophatic deliverance to be a deliverance from human mortality; I don’t necessarily see it as a final solution to human angst. All of these final notions of deliverance have interfered with my optimization of deliverance. Since apophatic liberation is simply a focus of naked psychic awareness to the fullness of the moment, any concern that takes our attention away from this moment reduces the intensity of deliverance. Rather than claiming to finalize anything, apophaticism optimally reduces the human’s natural dissatisfaction with the fact that there are apparently unsolvable existential problems which are part of life. We can't change these, but can reduce their negative valences to a remarkable degree.
What causes a person to feel good about life without any guarantees that things will continue to work out well for them, at least as long as they live? This “deliverance mechanism,” apparently evolved as human consciousness evolved. It was built into the human psyche by whatever agent caused it to be there, (e. g. perhaps a God, pure evolution, magic, take your pick, etc.) It is seen in one form or another in various religious traditions and also appears in a medical phenomenon which is called the “placebo effect.” In some traditions deliverance is understood to be a function of realizing immortality. A person from one of these traditions bases their fearlessness on the belief that they will live forever no matter what happens to their body. But there are other people who have been delivered, liberated from fear and worry, without any logical reason for being so delivered. These people have found the existence of a surprising phenomenon: A person can be delivered just by simply deciding that they will be delivered.
Perhaps the deliverance mechanism works as follows: When we surrender to the world as is, however that is, and dispense with all unproven hopes, (there is a God, there is no God, there is no mortality etc., etc.) we are thereby delivered across a more radically open field with increased force, and so spontaneously reach a higher degree of ecstasy. We “did nothing'” other than maintain a certain disposition. This is grace. The open field is this disposition; it is made up of the interplay of spiritual, psychological, and neurological dynamics.
Deliverance includes the realization of universal faultlessness, or “okayness;” the apophatic mystic senses that she and every other being are fundamentally acceptable just the way they are. She realizes a sense that nothing any being has every done, or is doing, can decrease their immutable worth.
love,
rat
172
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"The Tao is basically utterly open. Utter openeness has no substance. It ends in endlessness, begins in beginninglessnes".
-Li Daoqun
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